Chapter Text
Someone new moves into the Valley just at the turn of Spring, into the old weird cottage in the forest. Lewis tells everyone the moment the lease is signed, naturally. A young woman around Emily’s age, he says, from Zuzu City.
Emily has to work early in the Saloon that day, so she asks Haley to deliver a welcome basket for them. Haley hates this time of the year, an awkward, cold, ugly stage between the beauties of winter and spring, but she’s trying to be less, well, bitchy to her sister, so she agrees with minimal griping.
The old weird cottage looks a little better than the last time Haley saw it. The cobblestone walkway has been weeded and scraped clean; the roof washed of moss; the wood siding even scrubbed and brighter. Haley wonders if it was Lewis’ idea, trying to make a good impression and keep new, young blood in the town. Or maybe Marnie, the neighbor, got tired of looking at it and made him freshen it up. Surely the poor woman must have a couple favors saved up. Haley rolls her eyes at that thought.
Anyway, Haley uses the newly-shined brass knocker to rap twice. She shifts the basket in her arms and artfully pulls back a corner of the kitchen towel, showing off Emily’s zucchini bread and her own poppyseed muffins. She hears a muffled ‘Just a second, please’, then a door latch being opened. A city person indeed, locking her door in the daytime.
The old door creaks open and Haley is taken aback by how beautiful the woman behind it is.
She’s a redhead with fine features. Haley’s eyes trace the long, glossy braid over her shoulder down and back up again, taking in her body with it: a little shorter than Haley and slim underneath a reasonably fashionable chunky sweater and loose jeans. Haley meets bright, intelligent eyes, so deep-blue and rich that they nearly look purple. They’re raw around the edges and rimmed with slight dark circles— exhaustion, Haley assumes, from moving and probably meeting the early-riser neighbors. Regardless— she’s extremely pretty. Haley doesn’t hear herself say her own name, but she hears the woman say hers. Leah.
Haley accepts the offered handshake. Leah’s hand is strong and callused, curiously out of sync with the rest of her more elegant appearance. The firm handshake, sustained eye contact, and overall vibe thrills Haley, a flicker of curiosity, then recognition passing between deep-blues and baby-blues. A grin tugs at one corner of Leah’s full lips. Haley is suddenly very glad she put on her makeup and did her hair for this excursion.
Cognizant that they had passed the socially acceptable handshake duration, Haley drops Leah’s hand but doesn’t look away. Instead, she flashes a winning smile and offers Leah the basket. Leah accepts it with both hands and breaks the eye contact first, pulling the kitchen towel further aside to praise the goods, as one does. Haley notes Leah’s good manners and short, unpainted fingernails and takes credit for both recipes (sorry, Emily) and Leah promises to share her secret to her ‘special’ scones when she gets better settled.
Taking the cue, Haley wishes Leah good luck in the rest of her unpacking. Somewhere in the basket is a small card with 2 Willow Lane’s landline number and Emily’s cell number. Haley balked at giving out her personal number to a total stranger, but she’s kicking herself now.
Leah leans back against her doorjamb, cradling the basket on her hip. “It’s really nice to meet you, Haley.”
It sounds sincere, but the tiredness doesn’t leave her eyes and Haley doesn’t know what to make of it.
Haley doesn’t make her frequent trips to the city just for shopping and pink cake. Not that she wouldn’t— they’re totally worth it— but the city has other things she can’t find in Pelican Town, too.
She never gave redheads any special consideration before, but when she opens FernDate, she finds herself rapid swiping seeking one out. When she finds one, it’s strangely disappointing. She’s too direct for ghosting, so she tells her existing matches that she’s working on a big photography project and doesn’t have much time to chat.
The Flower Dance comes and goes, and she wins Flower Queen, as always. She swaps out her old profile pic with a new one, glowing in her flower crown and white dress. She blurs Alex's face and captions the photo with ‘don’t worry - he’s gay too ;)’, an Alex-approved white lie since Haley, sadly, doesn’t need help scaring women away. She promptly gets a new like. It’s from an attractive redhead with clear green eyes. Underwhelmed, Haley closes the app.
Haley has been on and off FernDate a while, plus she’s been out and about in Zuzu pretty regularly, at the gay bars and ladies nights, for the last couple of years. She can’t help but wonder why she’s never seen Leah around.
Haley doesn’t see Leah again in the couple weeks after their introduction, either. She hears from Emily that Leah comes to the Saloon sometimes to blow off steam from ‘settling her affairs from the city.’ Emily never elaborates on what that means and Haley doesn’t ask. Haley considers making an appearance at the Saloon, but she doesn’t ordinarily do that and she doesn’t want to change her whole life over a… crush? Hm. But at any rate, she decides against seeking Leah out. She infers Leah moved from the city to an old weird cottage in bumfuck nowhere for some privacy, and it’s not like the town is big enough that they won’t see each other again soon, anyway.
So, it’s later in Spring when Haley sees Leah again. It’s a gorgeous, warm day and Haley is heading to the forest to take some photos. She’s excited— the forest is at its liveliest, bright and beautiful. It’s her favorite time of year to photograph.
She’s just finished setting up her tripod in her favorite spot west of the river when she’s surprised to hear her own name, crystal clear but shouted from a ways away. When she looks up, Leah is on the other side of the bank, hands still cupped around her grinning lips.
Haley’s heart skips a beat. On autopilot, she swivels her camera toward Leah and snaps a photo. She’s too far away to hear the shutter over the running water, but Leah must see her do it because she laughs and dramatically covers her face, striking an exaggerated shy pose. Haley clicks the shutter again just to make Leah laugh again. Haley wishes she could hear it, instead of just seeing it. She hopes the pictures turn out cute.
Leah flashes a ‘one minute’ signal and makes her way to the river crossing nearby. Haley doesn’t know what to do with her hands. She has a good two minutes before Leah is within speaking distance, but there’s no tree cover or whatever so they’re fully within each other’s view. She busies herself with her camera and feels warm.
Leah finally makes it to Haley’s side of the river. Leah waves as she approaches, and Haley’s eyes trace the toned lines of Leah’s hand, wrist, forearm, bicep, shoulder, fully on display outside a cutoff grey tee. Leah’s leggings hug her hips and legs so tight, Haley can see her muscles working underneath. She cuts a more athletic figure than Haley originally imagined, feminine but strong. Haley peels her eyes off Leah’s thighs and catches a glimpse of a dusky purple bra sticking out through the arm holes in her cutoff. Haley’s mouth feels a little dry.
Haley learns that Leah is an artist working mainly in sculpture, but is currently in the woods foraging and sketching. Haley asks to see the sketches, but Leah poo-poos that they’re just doodles today but promises to show her next time. Then Leah points to Haley’s camera bag. Haley shows Leah her camera, explaining her lenses and the shots she was looking for. Leah’s attention is intoxicating. Haley usually flexes her photography on her dates (Not that this is a date, she reminds herself) but it’s much different talking to a fellow artist. Leah works in totally different media, but sometimes art is just art and so she gets the broad strokes of Haley’s explanation, and comments intelligently on the details.
Haley hands her camera to Leah, who holds it so gingerly that it makes Haley laugh, which makes Leah laugh. Haley encourages Leah to take some snaps, so Leah peers through the viewfinder, still holding the camera like it may blow up, spinning slowly in place and clicking the shutter a few times. Haley grants herself another healthy glance at Leah’s legs and ass as she spins and notices she’s wearing hiking boots with the little thick socks pulled up over the ankles of her leggings. Haley always liked outdoorsy girls and their little outdoorsy girl outfits.
“Guessing you’re more comfortable with caveman tools, then?” Haley asks, reveling in how easy the interaction seemed to flow.
Leah laughs again, her eyes twinkling with mischief as she lowers the camera. “If you hear any banging from inside my hut, it’s probably just me working on one of my sculptures.”
Pardon? Haley just blinks in response.
Leah carefully hands the camera back with a crooked smile. She thanks Haley for the artistic discussion, and excuses herself— she needs to get her dandelion greens washed and stored before they wilt. She heads toward her cabin, again fully in Haley’s view, so this time Haley has to try not to stare at her ass and exposed shoulders. Haley watches her go, perplexed. Does she always walk like that?
“Let me know how they turn out!” Leah calls over her shoulder once she’s just far enough away that Haley can barely see her wink.
What was that smug look? Was that really a wink?
Banging. Her… hut? Probably??
That was flirting.
Haley makes a beeline for her darkroom. Usually, she takes her time and savors in the process, but this time she rushes straight to the photos she snapped of Leah.
They’re disappointing and she should have known. She wasn’t set up for the distance or lighting, so Leah looks small and shadowed, the details seared into Haley’s brain— the radiant smile, the light in deep blue eyes, the sunlight making red hair glimmer, the graceful lines of toned arms and long legs— unaccounted for.
She moves on to developing Leah’s photos. Leah used them to leave her an opening for their next conversation, after all.
Leah took four photos. A tall pine tree, a bend of the river as it met the shore, a fallen log on the bank, and Haley. In the photo, Haley is partly facing away from Leah but her eyes are cast down on Leah’s lower body—caught blatantly mid-ogle. Haley’s wandering eyes are wide and hot, her nose and cheeks are pink and she grins shyly, her hair tousled from the wind and hike to the pond, her sweater neck slipped to show one side of her collarbone and the strap of her own purple bra. Maybe she and Leah have the same one. Haley would like to find out.
It’s not a technically good photo, but she looks hot in it and she strongly suspects Leah thinks so too. Clearly, Leah noticed that Haley thinks she’s hot. She hangs the photos to finish developing and formulates a plan.
Haley isn’t nosy and she’s not really a gossip. Frankly, these townies are mostly just not interesting enough for her effort.
Mostly. Leah isn’t a townie and she’s very interesting, which is why Haley finds herself with her ear pressed to Leah’s door, two evenings after their impromptu photoshoot, trying to make out the details of a very heated argument. She cups one hand over her ear, trying to hear better, while the other clutches her tote bag, containing the envelope of Leah’s photos from the pond and a bottle of wine.
Leah is upset. Leah says she isn’t going back to the city. Leah says she does not want to hear from that person. Leah slams the phone onto the hook. (Leah has a landline? Does she not have a cell phone?) Leah takes a couple long, shuddering breaths, the kind Haley takes when she occasionally becomes overwhelmed and cries. Haley feels a pang of guilt for eavesdropping. So, this must be one of the affairs Leah had to settle from the city.
Before she can talk herself out of it, Haley knocks. She can hear Leah startle, and a strained “Just a second!” that makes Haley’s heart ache.
Haley shifts guiltily on the doorstep. She fiddles with her bag, remembering that she came to hit on Leah. She knows she couldn’t have predicted Leah having a bad day, but it makes her feel greedy anyway, like she failed to consider that Leah exists outside of her own horniness. She takes a furtive look around for a hiding place, but it’s too late.
When Leah opens the door, Haley has a deja vu moment of their introduction: Leah, raw-eyed and tense, herself on the doorstep clutching some dumb shit, thrown for a loop.
Haley blurts, “I’m so sorry, not to be a creep but I did hear some of that. Are you okay?”
Some of the tension in Leah’s face breaks and she looks like she might cry again. Haley feels a sharp pang of sympathy.
“Leah, who was that? Someone from the city?”
Leah sighs and bows back inside her cabin, beckoning Haley to follow, which she does gingerly, as if walking on glass. Leah crumples into the lone chair in her small kitchen, so Haley stands awkwardly in the middle of the room, shifting her bag to her shoulder, hoping Leah doesn’t notice it.
After a few moments, Leah speaks. “That was my ex, Kel. We just split up a couple months ago after being together almost five years. We lived together and everything. She—“ and Haley listens closely to the whole story, interjecting appropriately, but a part of her brain hangs onto those details as information relevant to her interests. She mentally kicks herself, again, for being selfish.
Leah seems to relax a bit as she talks, reaffirming her own decisions to leave Kel and the bloodsucking rat race of the city, to start anew in a lush, beautiful, peaceful area, to live off the land and find inspiration in it. Haley does her best to be supportive. She’d recently gone through a breakup too, but they’d only been dating a couple of months and it ended on fine terms. She can’t say she’s ever experienced anything like what Leah seems to be going through. She pulls on her experience helping Alex through his family troubles instead. Sometimes, people just need sympathy and validation, not advice.
“Honestly, she sounds like kind of a bitch and you’re better off without her,” she musters and Leah laughs. Haley hadn't meant to be funny, but she'll take any positive response. “It sounds like it’d have killed you to stay. I’m sorry, I really wish I had something more meaningful to say than that. But you did the right thing even though it was hard.”
“No, no, that’s just what I need to hear, honestly. Kel sucked. The city sucked. That’s it.” Leah punctuates her points with a slap on her knees. She’s dressed simply today, in grey terry joggers and a green tee shirt. Leah stands and heads for her tea kettle and Haley notices, way too late, that the tee is cropped.
“I like the city. There’s… good shopping. Great bakeries,” Haley says, looking anywhere but the exposed sliver of the small of Leah’s back as Leah starts some hot water on the stove. ‘Anywhere’ turns out to be Leah’s cozy, loosely-made double bed in the other corner, plenty of space for two smallish people— a worse choice.
“That’s a good point. The city is a alright, sometimes,” Leah’s mood has shifted. Did Haley actually succeed in making her feel better? “What’s in the bag?”
Shit. Haley had planned to present Leah with the photos; to direct Leah’s attention to the one of herself; to ask Leah why she looked so smug afterward, if she likes catching women checking her out, if that happens often, and what she does about it when it does; to produce the wine if the vibes were right; and, if the vibes were really right, inquire on the ‘banging’ that goes on in this ‘hut’.
Instead, she just hands over the whole bag and explains, “Just, uh, your first foray into photography. From the forest the other day. Um, and some wine. I thought it was lame that Emily and I didn’t include any in the other basket. From last time?”
Leah perks up and smiles widely as she unpacks the goods. “Let’s see the damage! And I think we both deserve some wine after all that, right? Pour you a glass?”
Haley nods quickly, despite also mentally kicking herself for giving Leah all the photos. Still, although her plans had been foiled, she isn’t opposed to spending the time with Leah anyway.
Leah spends a couple of minutes busying herself in her small kitchen, chattering. She opens the wine and leaves it to breathe a few minutes (“They say that’s important but who really knows.”). She produces a camp-style stool from behind a cabinet and scoots the chair she was sitting in to Haley, who sits down gratefully. Before she knows it, Leah’s whipped up a light spread of goat cheese, crackers, and tea. Leah pours the wine and seats herself and Haley tries to turn off the part of her brain that screams how datelike this setup looks—how inappropriately datelike this setup looks, considering how wildly different the mood was just five minutes ago.
Finally, Leah reaches for the photos and Haley’s heart rate picks up. Leah regards the first photo carefully, but there’s not much to see. She sets it aside and moves on to the photo of the shore. There’s a little more going on, so she takes her time and Haley nervously crunches on a cracker. Leah shuffles to the third photo and seems to dislike it immediately, her brow furrowing slightly. She flips it over, putting it away from the other two, abruptly revealing the photo of Haley. Leah raises her eyebrows and picks the photo up to look at it closely.
Haley finishes her wine in one gulp and flushes, pinker than in the photo. She suddenly thinks how weird this all is for her to do, to show up to a virtual stranger’s house with a hot photo of herself and bottle of wine—even if it was said virtual stranger who took the photo, who looked like the cat that ate the canary right after, who dropped suggestive closing lines and a wink. Maybe Haley misread the entire thing and Leah was just being nice. Maybe she’s a huge creep and Leah will never talk to her again. The room is unbearably silent and she regrets basically her entire life.
Across the table, Leah finally moves again, picking up her wine for a sip. Her lips are a little red, a drop of wine having escaped to stain them. Haley isn’t sure if it’s the suggestion of the color from the wine, or if a red flush creeps up Leah’s neck. Leah’s eyes flick up, taking in Haley’s flushed face and empty glass. Leah reaches for the wine bottle and tops them both off distractedly.
Leah meets Haley’s eyes. She looks a million miles away, and Haley feels as transparent as glass.
“Well,” Leah finally ventures, holding up the photo facing its subject, fanning herself with it lightly. Her neck is most certainly flushed and Haley wants to implode. “Looks like I’m not giving up sculpture any time soon, but I like this one.”
Leah regards the photo again, appearing conflicted. Without looking at Haley, she adds, “Would you mind if I kept it? It’d be nice to have a photo around of a friend.”
Their eyes meet again. Leah sounds and looks apologetic but Haley is relieved— she knows an olive branch when she sees one. Haley wracks her brain for anything rational to say and coughs up, “Of course, it’s your work after all. You’ll just have to get me a drawing or sculpture sometime soon in exchange.”
Leah smiles, relaxing. “Deal. And thank you again for your support earlier. It hasn’t been easy, but it gets easier.”
Both women stand simultaneously and Haley makes a polite effort to help Leah straighten up her kitchen. Haley excuses herself as soon as it feels relatively inconspicuous, like she actually has someplace else to be and isn’t just trying to run away and hide.
To her surprise, Leah lightly grabs her arm before she reaches the door and pulls her into a quick hug. Haley hugs back, dazed.