Chapter Text
i. Laura's white button-down
It’s been a long time since she’s done something like this—take someone home and fuck them in the middle of the day. There’s something deliciously subversive about the way she and Bradley fritter away the afternoon. Laura knows she’s going to be pushing down the image of how Bradley looks when she comes—looking so much the same in the winter afternoon sunlight that slices sharp across Laura’s bedsheets as Bradley had during their interview, but so different like this, somehow—when she and Gordon sit together to approve the cut of their Iowa footage.
When she’d stepped off the UBA jet, when she’d slid into the back of the town car in the hangar before Bradley had, she’d had plans for her afternoon: the State of the Union is tomorrow, the final vote on Trump’s impeachment coming on Wednesday. She has work to do tonight. But Laura isn’t sure how to extricate herself from this unexpected thrall, isn’t sure she wants to.
So Laura doubles down on the unusual and she asks “Are you hungry?”
She can’t remember the last time she made someone breakfast after sex. It’s not quite her style. But this isn’t breakfast. It would be, she supposes, dinner. And Bradley is nothing like the women she normally sleeps with. So perhaps unusual is okay.
And perhaps she shouldn’t be surprised when there’s something crass and mischievous in her lover’s eyes, and Bradley’s response is “Are you asking me to eat you out again or are you asking me if I want actual food?”
And perhaps this is where Laura admits to herself that she feels a pull, that she wants to do this all over again with Bradley. She wants to learn how to get a straight answer to difficult questions out of Bradley without the other woman kissing her, but she also wants Bradley to kiss her again and again. And yes, she absolutely wants to feel Bradley’s tongue wet and warm against her clit again, not right now but soon, if the way she has to press her thighs together at Bradley’s audacious question is any indication of how she feels.
Laura chuckles. “Real food for now, but I wouldn’t be opposed to going for round two after we refuel,” she offers.
“Then yes, I’m hungry,” Bradley affirms, and Laura is glad that she’s already stood and turned to pull something she can wear in the kitchen out of the closet, so that Bradley can’t tell that Laura preens, just the tiniest bit, at the small confirmation that Bradley doesn’t want this to be over yet either.
By the time Laura has slipped into a pair of joggers and a t-shirt, Bradley has fished her underwear out of the crumpled heap of her jeans on the floor and is sitting on the edge of her bed.
Almost without thinking, Laura ducks back into her closet and plucks the first thing she sees, a plain white button-down, off the end of the rack, handing it to Bradley.
“Here,” she says, “can’t have you sitting in my kitchen like that while I make us some food,” Laura gives Bradley’s naked torso an exaggerated up and down. “Too distracting.”
And Bradley’s grin as she takes the shirt from Laura is equal parts wolfish and fond. It’s not until Laura is halfway to the kitchen, Bradley padding after her on bare feet, that Laura realizes that this might have been the first time she’s given Bradley any verbal indication that this attraction that has been simmering between them all week has been mutual, that this isn’t just something Bradley has dragged her into because she kissed her.
“I obviously haven’t had time to go to the grocery store since I got back from out of town, so nothing’s fresh,” Laura starts, opening a cupboard and pulling out a box of pasta, “but I’ve got pasta and red sauce and frozen vegetables. Sound okay?”
“Sure, sounds great,” Bradley says, and she’s rolling up the sleeves of Laura’s button down and pushing the cuffs up over her elbows, Laura’s wingspan longer than her own. “Anything I can do to help?”
Laura shakes her head, half at Bradley’s question and half at how good Bradley looks in her clothing, her shirt hanging a little lopsided on Bradley’s narrower shoulders, Bradley’s black underwear showing tantalizingly through the not-perfectly opaque fabric.
Bradley’s reputation—Two-Fucks Jackson—precedes her, so Laura isn’t surprised by the profanity when Bradley hisses "Fuck, sorry,” when she spills a splotch of red sauce on Laura’s white shirt.
“You can make it up to me,” Laura says, a little too immediately, and from the way Bradley looks up from wiping the sauce off of her shirt with a smirk, Laura knows they both understand that this won’t be the last time Bradley rolls out of her bed wearing her clothes.
ii. Laura's sweatpants
Neither of them expect to stay in Montana as long as they do—even though Bradley arrives in Montana when it’s already become clear that this COVID thing isn’t going away in ‘a couple of weeks’ as they’d all naively thought in March.
Neither of them expect that Bradley will stay long enough to start saying things like “Let’s go home,” to Laura when they’re out on a hike together and to mean it, to mean that she thinks of Laura’s ranch as her home.
But that’s later.
Bradley arrives in Montana with her UBA-branded suitcase crammed to the gills with the clothes she needs to wear on-air. It leaves little room for everything else she needs to pack, so she only arrives with a few weeks’ worth of outfits that she would wear when she’s not sitting in front of a camera. And Laura has warned her that spring (even late spring) in Montana can be fairly frigid, so there are certainly chunky sweaters sucking up some of the remaining room in her suitcase.
Laura doesn’t mind seeing Bradley in the same things over and over again. It feels like a minor miracle that she gets to have her here at all, that they’ve made it through this protracted separation, that they get to go on (and Laura hopes, now, and on, and on, and on…).
She hadn’t wanted to jinx it when Bradley had finally agreed to come out to Montana. She hadn’t wanted to insist that Bradley bring summer clothes as well, hadn’t wanted to tell her to bring a second suitcase and that Laura had plenty of room for her, hadn’t wanted to put any more pressure on their relationship before they knew how well they’d do in these circumstances.
But now spring is giving way to summer and Bradley is no longer padding around her ranch in fuzzy socks, and many of the sweaters she brought with her are too warm to keep on all day.
And it’s becoming clearer and clearer that Bradley is going to stay, that this togetherness has been good for them, that Bradley wants to be where Laura is. Bradley has started saying that she’s going to do some online shopping, order some summer outfits.
But in the interim, before Laura leans over her shoulder and always suggests that Bradley should put the gaudiest, least Bradley-like item of clothing possible in her cart and Bradley rolls her eyes, before any of her packages arrive at the bottom of the driveway at the ranch, Bradley starts coming downstairs after work in Laura’s things.
And it’s…distracting, to put it mildly. Bradley is shorter than she is, and Laura never notices their height difference more than when Bradley’s wearing a pair of her joggers with the waist rolled down on itself twice to shorten the inseam. The way Bradley does it always makes her shirts bunch up, and Laura jokes low in Bradley’s ear that she can’t be held liable for what she does when she can see Bradley’s hipbones peeking out from her pants.
And Laura thinks that Bradley must love driving her wild like this, because she keeps delaying buying an appropriate amount of pairs of pants of her own. So it’s Laura who ends up ordering Bradley a few pairs of sweatpants, appropriately-sized for her, and makes a big show of giving them to her, laying them all out on their bed for her.
“Now you can quit driving me nuts,” Laura grouses good-naturedly.
“Oh, really?” Bradley challenges, and Laura finds she enjoys taking Bradley’s new sweatpants off of her just as much as she enjoys getting Bradley out of her own.
iii. Laura's cream button-down (from 2x06)
It’s a while—summer in earnest—before Laura agrees that they can send some clothes out for dry cleaning.
It’s their jobs as journalists that keep them connected to the realities of COVID—the death toll in the US has reached 100,000 by the end of May, Bradley reads out one morning on her broadcast. It’s a horrifying, incomprehensible number to both of them—not their circumstances in Montana. Laura’s ranch just outside of Bozeman feels almost preposterously safe. They’re still being careful; Bradley is still insisting on being the one to do the grocery shopping; by the time the summer solstice rolls around, the 7-day average in case numbers for Gallatin County is still only 4 cases per week.
It’s not that Laura thinks that she’s going to condemn some worker into getting COVID if she sends a whole schwack of hers and Bradley’s clothes into the dry cleaner in town (or at least that likely wouldn’t be their fate here, at least), but she hates being an enabler in a system that seems to think that kickstarting the economy is more important than eradicating this virus. She’s spoken to too many public health experts on special editions of UBA 365 recently to not feel guilty about doing anything truly non-essential.
But the fact of the matter is that Bradley is at the point where she needs to have some dry cleaning done. They’d really tried to baby her on-air clothes she’d brought with her to Montana, had even hauled a rolling rack into the studio in the guesthouse so that Bradley’s dresses and blazers could get immediately hung up and steamed after her early morning broadcasts. But the other day, Bradley had gotten a swipe of deodorant down the side of one of her dresses, and when they’d ignored the Dry Clean Only label to try and hand-wash it delicately in Laura’s laundry room, they’d both watched in horror as the garment had shrunk up in the basin of the sink.
So, with Bradley now down a dress, Laura had gathered up her smaller crop of dirty on-air clothes and had packed them all into a suitcase with Bradley’s wardrobe, sending Bradley to drop them off at the cleaners on a grocery run mid-week.
The only problem is that none of the dry cleaners in Bozeman are presently open on the weekends—so Bradley has to surrender most of her clothes in the middle of her work week. And Bradley had shrugged, had said she’d figure it out when Laura asked her what she was going to wear on air the next day.
“You can wear something of mine,” Laura had offered.
“I know,” Bradley had said, and there had been a look in her eye that had made Laura think she already knew exactly what she was going to wear.
Laura won’t deny that Bradley Jackson has turned her into a morning person again, making sure she’s up every morning by 4:00 Mountain to flick on the TV for the top of The Morning Show. But even so, Laura seldom watches Bradley get dressed for her broadcasts. She’s a heavy sleeper, and it’s just so early when Bradley has to get up; Laura only really just stirs when Bradley untangles their legs to slide out of bed, and then a little again when Bradley leans over to press a kiss to her temple on her way out of the room, on the way to the studio.
So Laura sees Bradley in her cream-coloured button-down shirt with the oversized collar at the same time America does. It’s tucked under Bradley’s own dark green blazer (which hadn’t been too worse for wear, so it had evaded the dry cleaner for now), but Laura recognizes it right away.
It looks sharp on her, Laura thinks, so distracted by the way Bradley looks that she wouldn’t be able to tell you any of the morning’s headlines.
There’s something heady and intoxicating about seeing Bradley look as self-assured as Laura feels when she wears that shirt herself. But there’s something, too, about seeing Bradley’s confidence and swagger that seems to animate her clothes in a brand new way.
Laura wonders, watching Bradley, if she herself also looks brand new under Bradley’s thrall—re-shaped, wonderfully thrown off her axis by this woman. It’s certainly how it feels to be around her, to be sharing—building, now—a life together unexpectedly like this.
Normally, she and Bradley cross paths in the kitchen once she’s done with her broadcast, and Bradley heads up to their bedroom to quickly change clothes while Laura makes them both a cup of coffee.
But this morning, Laura wants more than just a glimpse of Bradley in her shirt as she passes through the kitchen.
“Laura?” Bradley calls when Laura isn’t at her spot at the kitchen table as usual.
“Upstairs,” Laura answers, her voice drifting down from their bedroom.
Laura tries to be casual when Bradley makes her way into the room, but she knows Bradley sees right through her when Laura reaches for her waist, rucks up the fabric of her own shirt beneath her fingertips.
“You looked good this morning, on the show,” Laura starts, her voice cooler and more removed than she really feels as she pulls Bradley closer to her.
“Did I? Was there something in particular that made me look good?”
And Laura rolls her eyes, but her answer is honest, she lets some of the warmth back into her tone of voice. “That shirt looks good on you.”
“Interesting,” Bradley hums, measured for a moment, but then a lascivious grin breaks across her face. “Thanks, it’s yours.”
And Laura laughs, her hands sliding back because she wants to slip her fingers under the back of Bradley’s—her—shirt, until she meets a little knot of fabric at the small of Bradley’s back.
“What’s this?” Laura asks, and she’d assumed, of course, that Bradley would have had to tuck her shirt in pretty tightly to go on air with it, but she hadn’t expected that Bradley would have gathered the loose fabric up with a little hair tie into a ridiculous, puffy little tail of fabric sticking out above the waistband of her pants.
“You had a little tail the whole show?” Laura laughs, tugging on it, and Bradley turns her face into her shoulder. “Were you almost sitting on this the whole time?”
“I had to make it fit!” Bradley insists, scoffing at the way Laura teases her. “Besides, it’s not like anyone could tell, it’s not like I ever really stand up or turn around on air these days anymore.”
“You’re ridiculous,” Laura laughs, pulling the hair tie loose from the back of her shirt. “And sexy—even with a tail,” she adds, and her hands finally slide up Bradley’s back. “And I love you,” she finishes, and at this, she pulls Bradley in for a kiss.
“I love you too,” Bradley says after they pull apart, one of her hands still cradling the back of Laura’s head. And that, Bradley saying that she loves her back, is still new enough to thrill her.
iv. Laura's fuzzy sweater (from 2x03)
It’s strange for Bradley, Laura can tell, the two of them moving back (well, Bradley moving in, Laura moving back) into her brownstone in New York after a year together in Montana. The ranch feels alive with them. Laura can scarcely remember what the mudroom there looks like without Bradley’s riding boots tucked next to her own on the mat. By comparison, Laura’s brownstone feels like a museum dedicated to her and her alone—she can feel it as soon as they ease their suitcases over the threshold.
And Bradley knows how much Laura loves her, Laura is certain of that now. Bradley stopped shying away from her love months ago. Bradley meets her now with a heart so open and full that it’s almost startling. But Laura has also had enough time with Bradley in the past year, learning her tells, to be able to notice when Bradley is uncomfortable even when she won’t say a word.
Bradley won’t say it, but if Laura had to guess, she’d assume that Bradley is feeling like there’s no space for her here, among Laura’s things, among all these memories of Laura’s life before her. Laura had never lived at the ranch in Montana for longer than a season at a time, so it had felt like a more flexible space. There had been more room for them to both put down roots. And if Bradley would talk about it, Laura would tell her not to worry, that all these things here in New York—covered in a thick layer of dust from the past year left almost undisturbed, save for the times she had Gordon check in on her place and the times that Bradley had crashed here for a few nights at a time when UBA had needed her in-studio—feel foreign and far away to her now. They mean less to her than the life she and Bradley had built together at the ranch.
Laura could almost gag with how trite it sounds to even think this, but this pandemic actually has taught her what means most to her—and it’s not any of the art that she collected in her years corresponding abroad. It’s her, it’s this woman.
She’d meant what she’d said, back at the beginning of her relationship with Bradley, back before the pandemic and when telling Bradley that she should move some stuff into her place had felt fast, but like something she absolutely couldn’t stop herself from offering up. She does have plenty of closet space. So she knows she doesn’t have to do this, that there’s room enough in her home for Bradley’s things, but Laura also knows what it will mean to Bradley to watch her make space for her.
So after they’ve dusted, vacuumed, and washed the floors, the house feeling a little less stale, Laura pulls out her Rubbermaid containers with the clothes she keeps in storage out of a hall closet, drags them into her—their—bedroom.
Bradley had volunteered to clean the bathrooms, so it’s a little while before she makes her way into the bedroom, giving a curious glance to the clothes Laura has piled on the bed.
“Whatcha up to?” she asks.
“This closet has pretty much been glorified storage for the past year,” Laura explains. She’d enlisted Gordon to send her a box of warm-weather clothes once it had become clear that she’d be in Montana into the summer, and then she’d had Bradley bring back some things here and there when she’d travelled back to New York in the late summer and early fall, but this closet feels like a time capsule, full of things she hasn’t touched or even thought about since early 2020, late 2019. “So I figured I’d put some stuff in real storage so that you have more room in there. I think I’ve pretty much cleared out all of the stuff I don’t think I’ll wear again anytime soon. Do you want to help me fold and get these in a bin?”
And Laura doesn’t miss the way Bradley softens a little at her gesture.
“Sure,” Bradley says, and Laura can’t help but squeeze her shoulder as she crosses behind her to start taking sweaters off of their hangers at the head of their bed.
Even as they fold, Laura can tell that Bradley seems a little more settled now than she has in the past two days since they got back to New York.
They work in relative silence, but after a while, Bradley reaches out to grab her wrist.
“Wait,” she says, “I don’t want you to put that one away.”
And it’s a sweater she hasn’t worn in ages—Laura can’t even remember the last time she had it on. It’s finicky and hard to take care of, a black, feathery knit with graphic stripes that start in beige across her chest, then give way to vibrant slashes of blue and pink towards the hem.
“Why not?”
And Bradley raises her eyebrows at her like she’s scandalized that Laura doesn’t remember, but when she speaks, her voice is a little shy, which is so unlike her.
“It was what you were wearing that day we got back from Iowa. The first time I kissed you. I thought you looked really…soft when we were in the car together.” Bradley shakes her head, flushing a little, but she goes on. “I wanted to touch your sweater, and I wanted to touch your skin under it, too.”
And this Laura remembers. She remembers being surprised by Bradley’s initiative when they’d finally made it here, into her bedroom, by the way Bradley had pressed her firmly against the wall they’re standing in front of and had slid her hands under Laura’s sweater, under her camisole, Bradley’s fingertips skimming just under her breasts until Laura had urged her to “go ahead, take it all off.”
“Fine,” Laura agrees, unfolding the sweater and passing it back to Bradley, who’s already plucked a hanger from the pile of them on the bed to return the sweater to their closet. “But I can’t promise I’ll wear it again this year, it’s getting too warm.” Montana is chillier than New York City in the spring; she and Bradley have returned to the city to an April that’s warmer than Laura, a lifelong Northeasterner, can remember.
“That’s fine,” Bradley says, hanging the sweater back up. “I just want it around.”
And there’s something delightful and charming about the way Bradley hangs some of her own on-air dresses around that sweater in their closet—Gucci, Laura, Diane von Furstenberg.
It’s the end of their first week back in town when Bradley asks if Laura wants to turn on the heat lamps on the patio and sit outside. And they’d spent so many evenings cuddled up together by the fire pit in Montana that Laura doesn’t hesitate to agree, even if it means she has to figure out how to hook up the gas line again after more than a year away. She knows that until the brownstone feels the way the ranch had grown to become—that is, theirs—that this is something they can do to preserve that feeling of being at home.
So she sends Bradley to get sweaters for the both of them (the afternoons are more springlike than they have any right to be, and there’s no snow on the ground, but the evenings are still frigid and damp) while she figures out how to get the heat lamps working.
And Bradley finds her outside, drapes her own WVU sweater over Laura’s shoulders that Laura quickly buries into in earnest, so it’s not until Laura settles on the couch and Bradley lifts up the blanket for her that Laura notices that Bradley is in her sweater, the one she’d begged her not to put away.
Bradley catches the bemused look on Laura’s face.
“It reminds me of you,” she says, shrugging, smiling.
“I’m right here,” Laura reminds her, brushing her thumb across Bradley’s knuckles under the blanket, though the irony of her own comment isn’t lost on her while she’s wearing Bradley’s sweater, too.
“I know,” Bradley says. “But I like it like this. Having you close.”
And Laura finds she can’t argue with that at all.
v. Laura's cross
“Baby, stop for a second,” Bradley says, and then Bradley is scooting back from Laura’s mouth, pulling her knees in towards herself from where her legs had been gently draped over Laura’s shoulders.
“Too much?” Laura asks, pulling herself up to her hands and knees and re-situating herself on their bed, watching as Bradley runs a hand over the bottom of her thigh.
“No, you’re perfect—” and Laura grins at how easily Bradley offers that up, still a little breathless despite herself, “and I want your mouth back right there in just a second, but your necklace is fucking killing me.”
And Laura reaches up for her cross at her sternum, but it’s not hanging where she would expect it to be. It takes a moment for her to find it, the little gold charm sticking to her sweaty skin at one of her collarbones at an odd angle. Laura pulls it down, straightens the chain.
“Was digging into my thigh,” Bradley explains, moving her hand, and now Laura can see two small red marks where one of the arms of the cross had pressed into her skin between their bodies.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, just felt a little sharp. Wasn’t expecting it.” Bradley’s eyes glitter with a hint of mirth at Laura, because they both know very well that under slightly different circumstances, when Bradley is expecting it, Bradley doesn’t object to a little bit of pain in bed at all.
“Come here,” Bradley continues, sitting up and reaching for Laura’s arm to urge her forward, almost pulling Laura to sit in her lap.
“I thought you wanted my mouth right there?” Laura teases, affecting a little of Bradley’s earlier breathless cadence.
Bradley rolls her eyes and skims her hands across Laura’s shoulders, pushing her dark hair over to one side. “I do. But pull your hair up, you’re taking this off first,” she says, jerking her chin at Laura’s cross. “I don’t want it sticking to me again right when you’re about to make me come.”
And there’s something thrilling, still—no matter how long they’ve been together, no matter how many times they’ve fallen into bed together—about hearing Bradley admit to how well Laura knows her body, how Laura drives her wild.
So with a warm smile, Laura pulls up her hair as Bradley reaches behind her neck to undo the clasp on her necklace. Laura expects Bradley to pass the necklace back to her, or to let it slide out of her palm onto the nightstand, which is within an arm’s length, but instead, Bradley puts the cross on herself.
“It’s mine now,” Bradley quips, as if everything that is Laura’s doesn’t belong to her already in all the ways that matter. ”I’ll keep it safe while you’re otherwise occupied,” as if Bradley has to promise Laura safety, as if that isn’t exactly why their relationship survived a fucking global pandemic.
And Laura hasn’t believed in God in twenty years at least—and even before then, her belief had been tenuous, the cross around her neck more a symbol of the parents she’d lost than of any belief system she held dear. But there is something about Bradley Jackson wearing her necklace and nothing else, the cross settled in the dip between her clavicles where Laura has run her tongue so many times, that has Laura wanting to get on her knees and thank a higher power for bringing her this maddening, incredible woman.
“God, baby,” Laura whispers as she eases her way back down between Bradley’s legs, and it’s certainly blasphemous, but it feels like praying.