Bel Pierce
April 19, 2021 8:49 AM
Learning to Live Together by Bel Pierce
Bel watched the wagon pull away, taking Mab and Alexander with it, and leaving Bel, Deidre, and Reilly to watch it disappear into the clouds. And as quickly as that, her family was split apart. Without the teens around to witness if they were acting married, Deidre shifted further away.Bel frowned slightly but said nothing. Instead she checked her watch and said, “We should head back before Reilly misses his nap.” The new apartment wasn’t far, and they walked. Reilly had passed out in his stroller on the way back and it was touch and go for a moment but they got him installed into his own bed without waking him.
Closing the door and whispering a charm to keep noises from the rest of the apartment from disturbing him, Bel was about to head for the pile of moving boxes that still needed to be sorted out and put away, when Deidre asked, “Should I set up the guest room as mine?”
It was a five bedroom apartment. All three of the kids had their own room, and Bel and Deidre shared the large master bedroom. The last room, Bel had planned to make into her training room, though right now it just had a ton of boxes and Bel’s old bed that had been replaced by a new king sized one shortly after the move. (Mab had given both her moms a very dubious and suspicious look when that had been delivered and installed.)
Even in the bigger bed (which, in direct contrast to Mab’s suspicions, had been purchased in the hopes of reducing personal contact), Bel tended to wake up with Deidre in close proximity. Deidre had warned Bel that she was a sleep snuggler and she hadn’t been lying. Bel was getting better about not jumping out of bed and pointing her wand at her wife when it happened. By the time she got vertical and armed, she was awake and aware enough to realize she was overreacting, thankfully before any violence could be visited upon Deidre, and Bel would climb back in under the sheets, with just a bit of a shove at the other woman to make more space on Bel’s side of the bed.
‘Better’ meant it only happened once or twice a night instead of four or five times like she had after the wedding, when they started regularly sharing a bed. Prior to that point, she had transfigured her old queen bed into two twin beds. After the wedding though . . . Well, they were married. She figured they ought to get used to sharing their lives together. Including their sleep.
And now, with the teens out of the house, Deidre wanted to move into a different room. Bel supposed it was something that she wasn’t suggesting moving back in with Two, at least.
“You want your own room?” Bel asked, and wished she’d made it sound more casual, like it didn’t matter, like it wasn’t the person who was supposed to be the other half of her tearing away all over again.
Deidre looked at her, sharp and surprised. “You want me to stay?” she asked with such incredulity that Bel must have be doing the wife thing all wrong.
“We’re married,” Bel said, like that explained everything.
“Yeah, but that was kind of a sham, wasn’t it?”
She really had been doing a bad job of the wife thing. Bel shook her head in denial. “We had a wedding, Deidre. I gave you vows. I meant them. You’re my wife, and I’m yours. Stay.”
Deidre blinked. “Oh.” She frowned slightly in thought. “But you leap out of bed like you’re being attacked every time I touch you. You haven’t had a good night’s sleep all summer. I thought...” she trailed off, not verbalizing whatever it was she thought, but the implication was pretty clear why she might have believed Bel wanted them in different rooms at least.
“I’m working on it,” Bel huffed, annoyed more with herself than Deidre that it was taking this long to adjust. “I’m fifty one years old today-“
“IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY??” Deidre interrupted her at a shout. Bel flinched. “AND YOU DIDN’T TELL ANY OF US?”
Bel blinked, startled. Hadn’t she? September first was always so busy with getting the kids back to school, that it had always been a bit overshadowed. “I’m sure I mentioned Amelia and the Derries are coming over tonight,” she prevaricated. She was less sure she had mentioned why.
Deidre threw her hands into the air and made sound of extreme exasperation. “You,” she stated with a hard finger-point at Bel, “need to learn to communicate better.” She moved toward the closet and got her purse. “Watch Reilly. I apparently need to get my wife something for her birthday!” And with a loud slam of the door, Bel was alone.
She was glad she had put that charm on Reilly’s door.
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Bel Pierce
Learning to Live Together
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Bel Pierce
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Deidre Beales
May 02, 2021 3:46 PM
She’s got whozits and whatzits galore by Deidre Beales
Deidre stormed out of the apartment. Bel’s birthday! And not one mention of it in the last few weeks! And now she needed to buy a present for a woman with enough disposable income that she just bought whatever she wanted it when she needed it! And not just any woman. Her wife! Whose birthday she hadn’t known it was! She felt this was some kind of spousal failure, and probably required a nicer than normal gift.But it was Bel. She’d barely tolerated flowers at their wedding so that was out. The only jewelry she’d ever seen Bel wear was the silver B necklace that she knew Bel had worn since she was a child. (Amelia had said that started to help everyone tell the twins apart and Deidre had been utterly appalled to learn there were two Bels in the world. The twin had not turned up for the wedding though, so Deidre guessed she wouldn’t be called upon to try to tell them apart too often. Though she was kind of angry on Bel’s behalf that her twin sister didn’t even come to that. Even Deidre’s parents came and she hadn’t spoken with them since Mallory was tiny.)
The things she knew Bel liked were deadly weapons (there were quite enough of those in the apartment already), video games (she couldn’t guess which specific ones Bel might like), DVDs (again Deidre didn’t yet have a good sense of her taste or what she had already), and books (ditto).
For a fifty-one year old woman, Bel was incredibly fit and active (far more than Deidre was herself), so she found herself walking into a sporting goods store to see if anything there shouted Bel’s name. (Figuratively. Deidre was starting to become accustomed to the idea that she had married into a family where that needed to be specified. Bel would not like anything that actually shouted her name unless it was something she could beat up.)
“Can I help you?” a salesperson asked.
“My wife needs a birthday present,” Deidre said, hoping that expressed how entirely clueless she was about what she was specifically looking for.
He was momentarily taken aback by Deidre’s casual self-outing, but he recovered quickly. “She a more butch than you?” Deidre nodded emphatically. This was a true statement. The only person in her new family that she was nearly as butch as was maybe Reilly. “She roller blade?” he asked.
Surprised he had guessed that on the strength of ‘butch woman with a not-butch wife’, Deidre nodded again. He grinned at her. “I gotcha covered. This way.” He brought her to a rack of helmets and pads in every color of the rainbow and many different designs. “Elbow and knee pads wear out and get lost all the time. She probably needs new ones,” he suggested. “Even if she’s got good ones, having spares in a variety of colors and themes is fun. You could even get a matching helmet.” He grinned. “Means you love her and don’t want her to smash her brains on the pavement.”
Oh gosh. She’d thought roller blading was Bel’s non-dangerous hobby.
“Yeah, let’s do that,” she agreed faintly.
She looked through the options, immediately eliminating anything too cutesy or with the word ‘peace’ on it as inappropriate. She eventually brought a set of elbow and knee pads, and a matching helmet, with a flaming skull trailing rainbow smoke to the checkout counter.
The girl at the register raised an eyebrow at her, and Deidre felt compelled to explain, “It’s a gift.”
“Ah,” she said, and printed out a gift receipt without being asked to do so.
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Deidre Beales
She’s got whozits and whatzits galore
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Deidre Beales
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