Chapter Text
They’ve been together for four months. Four months, one week, and two days. Not that Erin is counting, of course. It’s just that she’s always found a certain sort of comfort in numbers.
It’s a Sunday morning. She first wakes up around seven, covered in blankets and Holtz’s warm body. What begins as spooning almost always turns into this -- Erin, on her back, pushed to the very edge of the bed, Holtz sprawled out, taking up the entire rest of the bed, limbs flung over Erin’s body, face usually smooshed against Erin’s shoulder, drool and hair sticking to Erin’s skin.
It’s not comfortable. It’s a little gross -- the drool, anyways. But it’s Holtz. And Erin loves her.
But it’s too hot. Erin is sweating. Holtz is sweating. Holtz is sweating and she’s practically on top of Erin, who is also sweating, and they’re both covered in a heavy blanket, and it’s too hot. It’s October. It shouldn’t be this hot. But it’s too, too hot.
“Babe,” Erin grumbles, moving her shoulder, jostling Holtz’s head. But she doesn’t move. “Babe. Holtz. Move. Please. Hot.”
“Mm, yeah, so hot,” Holtz mumbles out, her lips barely moving, and she doesn’t move at all.
“No. Babe, seriously, get off.”
“Y’want m’to get y’off?”
“Not get me off. Get off of me,” Erin clarifies. Holtz grunts, but doesn’t move. Erin sighs. She’s at the very edge of the bed. She can’t slip out from under her. She’s stuck. She brings a hand -- the one that isn’t trapped between the mattress and Holtz’s body -- up towards Holtz, pushing gently at first, and then harder. Finally, Holtz lets out another grunt, and rolls off of Erin, freeing her. Erin throws the blanket off of her, rolling onto her stomach, further away from the edge of the bed, and falls back to sleep.
She wakes up again a little more than an hour later. The blanket has been pushed to the foot of the bed. Holtz is sprawled out on her own side of the bed, with just one arm flung across, her hand resting on Erin’s hip. Her face is pressed into the pillow. Her hair is a mess. Her mouth is wide open, a wet mark on the pillowcase beneath her. Erin smiles. She really is a fantastically unattractive sleeper. It makes Erin so happy. She was beginning to think that Holtz didn’t have a real flaw, but then she saw her when she was asleep. Except, she finds her ugly sleeping so endearing, that it almost isn’t a real flaw at all.
She grabs her cell phone from the nightstand, taking a picture of Holtz and immediately sending it to Patty and Abby. She does this often. Abby will occasionally print them out, hanging them in various places around the firehouse. Holtz usually burns them once she’s found them.
She sets her phone back on the nightstand, turning to face her sleeping girlfriend again. Except her girlfriend isn’t sleeping anymore. Her eyes are open, narrowed, looking at Erin suspiciously.
“You just took a picture of me, didn’t you?” she asks.
“Mm, nope,” Erin shakes her head. “No idea what you’re talking about.”
“Fuck you,” Holtz grumbles, lifting her head from the pillow, pushing hair off of her face, wiping at the side of her mouth. Erin just smiles sweetly, moving in closer to her, pressing a kiss to her lips, which Holtz returns.
“You have terrible morning breath,” Holtz tells her.
“Yeah, you too,” Erin says.
“Cool. Kiss me again.”
She does.
They both rest against their pillows again, looking at each other, and Erin reaches out, playing with a long strand of Holtz’s hair. It’s a Sunday and they have nowhere to be -- assuming that there are no emergency ghost calls -- and there’s no rush or reason to leave the bed any time soon. The morning sun floods in through the window, everything is bright, Holtz’s blonde hair is practically glowing, and Erin would be perfectly content to just stay right there all day long.
She lazily runs her fingers up and down Holtz’s arm, just beneath the sleeve of her t-shirt, down to her elbow, and back up again. Holtz closes her eyes again, her lips pulled up into a small smile, and she sighs contentedly. Erin smiles, too. She loves this.
Her eyes trail down as her fingers move to Holtz’s elbow again, but her gaze lingers below that. Holtz has the knee of one leg bent and pushed out, resting against the mattress between them, and at first, Erin’s eyes fixate on the familiar blue rose tattoo on the side of her thigh, but then something else catches her attention. The bright light of the sun lands on her skin just right, and Erin notices several white lines -- horizontal and diagonal, crisscrossing, close together -- from her upper thigh down to just above her knee. She tilts her head, wondering how she’s never noticed that before, given the amount of times that she’s seen Holtz’s bare thighs.
They look like scars. She’s sure that they’re scars. Holtz has scars littered all over her body. It’s not surprising that there are more that Erin hasn’t discovered yet, but there seem to be so many of them. Right there.
She touches them. She doesn’t realize she’s doing it until she’s already done it. Her fingers glide over them, and she can see Holtz opening her eyes again. She looks up at her.
“I’ve never noticed this before,” she says softly. Holtz doesn’t respond right away. She glances down at her leg, at Erin’s fingers, and then back up.
“Oh. Those,” Holtz says, and it’s in that voice that Erin has come to recognize as fake-casual. When Holtz is attempting to be nonchalant about something that’s actually important to her. She’s heard her use it a few times. Enough for her to know it. She pulls her fingers away. She wants to know. She wants to know because they don’t look like the usual work-related scars. She wants to know, but only if Holtz wants her to know.
“It’s okay. You don’t… have to…,” Erin says. Holtz looks at her, staring straight into her eyes, doesn’t even blink for several seconds. Finally, she sighs, shifting onto her back, looking up at the ceiling, and she speaks.
“It was after my mom died,” she says softly, in that soft, soft voice that Erin has come to know from their most private moments, the ones where they rip off their skins, exposing themselves to one another. The moments that Erin would never share with another being. She knows that soft, soft voice. She knows it.
“What happened?” she asks just as softly, not pushing, just encouraging.
“I wasn’t there. When she died. I went… before it happened. And, uh, I got scared. I was scared… I was trying to avoid it, I think. So I left… and um, I wasn’t there when she died. And I should have been. That’s probably the only thing in my life that I really regret. And uh, I can live with it now… But… after it happened, I… was really angry. With myself.”
Erin watches her, watches the way her lips move, the way she pauses, presses her lips together for a moment, runs her tongue along her bottom lip, pulls it between her teeth.
“Anyways. I went a little crazy one night. Fucked myself up pretty bad. I didn’t really know what I was doing…. It was like I blacked out for a little bit, and then...I came back and there was blood everywhere. Not my greatest moment,” she says, her voice returning to her normal volume towards the end, looking at Erin again. “Anyways. Yep. That’s that.”
But Erin is looking down at Holtz’s leg again, and she’s on her back now, Erin has to lift her head slightly in order to see, and the light doesn’t hit her skin just right anymore, they’re less noticeable, she knows they’re there now, so she still sees them, sees them on her other leg, too, and her chest feels constricted, her throat is tight, and she absolutely can’t stand the thought of Holtz being in so much emotional pain that she would cause herself physical pain, and she knew that something had happened when Holtz’s mom died, something that would make Holtz’s sister worry about her, something… She didn’t know it was this.
She looks up at Holtz again, whose blue eyes are searching her, and a hand cups her cheek, and Holtz smiles, small and sad.
“Hey, don’t cry,” she nearly whispers. And Erin didn’t even realize that she was crying, but she feels it now, feels the tear rolling down her cheek.
“I love you,” is the only thing that she can manage to say. And then she’s practically throwing herself on top of Holtz, wrapping her arms around, burying her face in her neck. “I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.”
“I-- I love you, too,” Holtz says, and Erin knows that she hasn’t imagined the small break in Holtz’s voice. It only makes her hold on even tighter.
“You’re so--” Erin begins, her voice muffled by Holtz’s neck. “So. So beautiful and, and wonderful, you -- you. You don’t deserve to hurt. Ever. I don’t want you to ever hurt like that. Never again. I love you.”
Holtz doesn’t say anything. She simply wraps her arms around Erin’s waist, holding her there, and they stay like that for a while, and there are so many things that Erin wants to say, to tell her how much she matters to her, how she would do anything in the world for her to be happy, how she will never, ever let her feel that way again. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t say those things. Because she doesn’t know how. Because she doesn’t need to. Because the strength of her emotions nearly scares her.
“I’m okay now,” Holtz finally assures her in a whisper. “It was a long time ago. But I’m okay now.”
“Abby was there, wasn’t she? You knew her then, right?”
“Yeah. Abby was there. She… she’s the one I called when it happened. She took me to the hospital. Stayed with me. Called my sister -- kind of a huge factor in my current relationship with my sister, now that I think about it. Yeah…. Abby… kind of took care of me for a while.”
“Good,” Erin nods. “Good. Abby’s good at that.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Erin says, finally lifting her head, looking at Holtz, and she kisses her, kisses her lips, her cheeks, her forehead, her lips again. “The idea of you not being in my life is…. god, it’s utter shit.”
“I agree,” Holtz smiles. “Utter shit, indeed.”
Erin laughs, and Holtz kisses her.
“I love you so much,” Erin tells her yet again.
“Damn, Erin,” Holtz laughs. “If I knew that this is the response I’d get, I’d have told you this story a year ago.”
“Shut up,” she says, but she’s smiling.
“I love you so much, too, Erin.”
Erin finally pulls herself away from her, settling down beside her once more. But her eyes gravitate down, and then she sits up. She touches Holtz’s leg, her head tilted to the side as she traces over a line, and then another line, and she can feel Holtz’s eyes on her, and she looks at her.
“I know, they’re… ugly,” Holtz says quietly, eyes quickly avoiding Erin’s. Erin shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “Nothing about you is ugly.”
“Well, except when I sleep,” she comments, and Erin laughs, nodding.
“That’s true. You’re so ugly when you sleep.”
They’re both laughing, Erin still resting her hand on Holtz’s thigh, Holtz still lying on her back. Erin continues to trace over the scars on Holtz’s legs, absentmindedly for a while, but when their laughter dies down, she pays attention. And then she leans down, pressing her lips to the warm skin. Does it again, just above the first spot. Again, a new spot.
She presses a kiss against every scar. It takes her a while, but she does it. Every single one.
When she’s finally kissed the last one, she looks up to find tears steadily falling from Holtz’s face, but she’s smiling, too. She’s crying and she’s smiling, and she pulls Erin up to her, kisses her, and Erin holds her as close as she can, tells her that she loves her.
Erin’s phone vibrates on the nightstand. She breaks away from Holtz for a moment to grab it, leaning into her again as she opens the text message from Abby.
GOD THAT’S THE WORST ONE YET. IT’S INCREDIBLE. I’M PRINTING IT OUT RIGHT NOW.
She laughs loudly, and she knows that Holtz is looking over her shoulder, seeing it all, and she looks at her and she is shaking her head.
“I fucking hate you,” she mumbles. But Erin just laughs, tossing her phone aside as she nuzzles into Holtz once more, who begrudgingly accepts her cuddles.
They’ve been together for four months, one week, and two days.
Not that Erin is counting, of course.