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i.
Noora and Eva get married when they’re six.
It’s back when Noora’s teeth still have a wide gap down the middle, when Eva has those god-awful uneven bangs, when neither of them care as long as they can share peanut-butter banana sandwiches and hold hands here, on this playground, under the slide.
Eva gives her a honeysuckle flower.
“That’s not right,” Noora frowns.
“Why not?”
“Because it -” Noora pauses, searching for an explanation before it dawns on her. “It has to be a ring,” she says. She offers the flower back to Eva.
Eva takes it with her left hand, her right one still wrapped up in Noora’s. She’s silent for a moment.
“Why?” she asks, her eyelashes blinking slow back at Noora, tangling through her bangs.
Noora huffs out a breath. “Because that’s how weddings work, Eva,” she says.
“You’ve never been to one,” Eva points out petulantly. “And I want to give you a flower.”
“Fine.”
“Okay. We’re married now?” Eva asks, grinning wide and her breath smells like peanut butter.
“We’re married now,” Noora says back.
It’s a beautiful ceremony.
ii.
Noora’s ten and Eva’s nine and she’s hanging upside down off of Noora’s bed, hair almost touching the floor and trying to keep her eyes on the book they’re supposed to be reading for school.
“Hello!” Noora says. “Pay attention.”
Eva tosses both hands over her eyes and groans. “I can’t . It’s too boring and the words don’t even make sense.”
“Fine,” Noora says, snatching the book from its resting place on Eva’s stomach. Eva peers up at her. “I’ll read it out loud. Is that better?”
Eva nods a couple times, as best she can with gravity still pulling her head down.
“Okay. Chapter one.”
“No, no, I was way past that,” Eva says.
She can feel Noora’s dramatic sigh in her bones. “Yeah, Eva, but did you understand any of it?”
Eva’s silent for a beat. “...No.”
Sometimes, Eva thinks, it sucks to have a best friend that knows her this well, because she can never get away with lying to her.
But it’s okay, because Eva falls asleep with Noora’s voice low and sweet in her ears.
When she wakes up, Noora’s kicking her calf obnoxiously. “I’m making dinner,” she says, “What do you want?”
“Can you use the stove?” Eva blinks up at the ceiling.
Noora looks at her like it’s a stupid question, and Eva flushes in response, avoiding her gaze. “Yeah, Eva? I’m ten now.”
“Okay, pasta, then,” Eva says.
“Okay,” Noora mimics, and she tugs at the hem of Eva’s jeans under she kicks her off and follows her out to the kitchen, still waking up.
iii.
They’re twelve when it starts. Twelve when they both start to realize that maybe their parents aren’t really the best people in the world, don’t have all the answers, aren’t necessarily people to look up to.
Eva starts sleeping over at Noora’s almost every night because she prefers the silence to the screaming.
Twelve when school gets tougher, when suddenly Eva doesn’t know what the hell is going on and Noora doesn’t know how to help her, but Eva’s crying because nothing makes sense.
Noora brushes her hair out of her face, because she’s helpless otherwise.
Twelve when Eva gets into a fight with some girls about something that Noora can’t quite figure out, and she starts to retreat into herself, silent watching reality TV on Noora’s bed, eyes on the screen dully and Noora doesn’t know what to do about that either.
So she always makes sure there’s ice cream in the fridge and Eva’s cinnamon scented shampoo in the shower and tells Eva where the key is hidden in case she ever needs to get in when Noora’s not home.
She doesn’t.
Noora’s always home.
iv.
Noora turns thirteen and drags Eva to some shitty art museum. There’s classical music drifting over the speakers and Eva likes the way the art makes her feel, even if she doesn’t pay attention to Noora telling her about the juxtaposition, Eva!
They eat in the cafe next to the museum. Noora’s frowning unhappily at her phone, so Eva throws little pieces of bread at her.
“What are you, like, twelve?” Noora says, wrinkling up her nose, and Eva just knows that she’s going to be hearing that joke until her own thirteenth birthday.
“Very funny.”
Noora smiles at her and then returns to her phone.
“Hey, Noora,” Eva starts.
“Yeah?” Noora’s eyes flutter up from the phone and meet Eva’s, blonde hair drifting onto her cheekbones, spring light coming in through the windows that surround the cafe.
Eva smiles back at her. “Happy birthday,” she says, and Noora’s face lights up with that same subtle glow as the windows.
It’s not what she was planning to say, or at least not the idea she had when she said Noora’s name.That one was more along the lines of you’re my best friend in the world .
She doesn’t know why she didn’t say it, except that best friend, as a word, doesn’t really begin to describe Noora. Best friend isn’t close. Eva thinks that even if she was good at writing and had a whole library of thesauruses and dictionaries and access to every language, she’d never really have a word to describe Noora, and certainly not one to describe their relationship.
v.
Fifteen and Eva is on her bed, pulling her hair up into a messy bun.
It’s something she’s done hundreds of times, with these hands and this hair in this bed, but something’s changed. Noora can’t quite put her finger on it. It’s just that gradually, slowly, Eva’s started taking up more and more space in Noora’s life. In her mind. Eva, at age fifteen, chattering about her science class, is the most important thing in Noora’s life.
She’s not quite sure how it happened, but she’s not complaining.
“Hey,” Eva says, tucking in another strand of hair before pulling a few out, “what’s your favorite color?
Noora shoots her a weird look. “What?”
“Your favorite color. I don’t know it.”
“Oh,” Noora says. She doesn’t elaborate because she can feel it on the tip of her tongue, something lame and cheesy like, your hair or your eyes or the color of the tip of your nose when you get too cold and you’re laughing at me for falling on my ass in the snow for the third time. Instead, she makes it simple.
“Red,” Noora grins easily, gesturing to her lipstick.
Eva tilts her head to the side and something about the motion reminds Noora of snickerdoodle cookies. “Of course,” she says. She smiles back.
Of course.
+i
When they finally kiss, it’s not as big of a deal as it should be. They just kind of fall into it. Eva feels like it’s something that they’ve been doing their entire lives without even knowing it.
And now she’s seventeen and still laying in Noora’s bed, and Noora’s fingers paint patterns on her thighs while she tries to reach Eva’s heart from between her legs.
It’s home and vanilla bean ice cream and shampoo that makes her hair glow and Noora’s there, everywhere, red and yellow and blue, the base of every color she can see, and it’s comfortable. It’s where she belongs. Actually, it’s where she’s always been.
The day they kiss for the first time is nothing special. Eva’s perched up on the counter in the kollectiv, feet in socks bouncing against the cabinets, as Noora makes them tea and plays acoustic love songs from her phone.
It’s raining. Eva flings herself back into Noora’s bed. She bounces a little and lets the duvet flutter over her, halfway laughing about something she forgets all about when Noora lays down beside her with a look on her face that Eva’s never seen before. Her eyes are calmer than they’ve ever been, her face wide open, relaxed, and a tiny smile graces over her lips.
“Hi,” Eva breathes. With Noora so close, her breath just dusting over Eva’s mouth, Eva would expect her mind to be scrambling for purchase, full of thoughts that she can’t control, but it isn’t. It’s delightfully quiet. It’s the most stable she’s ever felt. She knows what’s about to happen, knows Noora will kiss her, or she’ll kiss Noora, and her heart beats steady in her chest. Noora’s hand ghosts up the side of her face.
When asked about it later, Eva will insist that they both leaned in at the same time. Noora’s lips are just there, present, warm, sending a shiver down her spine because there’s one part that’s just barely chapped enough to catch and pull. Eva revels in the feeling for barely half of a second before she’s rising up to meet Noora.
It feels like coming home.
It feels like her whole body says, oh, there you are , and that’s it.
It’s just them, but even more so, Noora and Eva, the way it’s always been.