Rising Shards

Stella stared at the pan as it cooked, intently watching to make sure the onions and peppers inside cooked. She hadn’t had the time to make a big meal in a long while, but something had possessed her to do so this night. She figured she’d need about half an hour more before she finished, but she wasn’t fully used to the finicky stove in Evy’s apartment so she realized her estimates may be off.

It had been a week since Stella had started to move in. She hadn’t made a whole lot of progress actually moving stuff over outside of the essentials, but the fun she was having with Evy made up for that.

The most surreal thing for Stella was how not-drama-filled things had been so far, especially given how abruptly their living situation had come together. The most dramatic thing was something Stella did on her own, something that was maybe a bit risky; she put her two weeks’ notice in for her old job at a college in LE, a job she'd had since she was actually attending said college. She hadn’t officially heard about the Rising Shards job yet.

“Oh crap,” Stella said as she heard the door start to unlock behind her. She didn’t think Evy would be home for another hour at least and was hoping to have the whole dinner ready before she got back. “Hi there.”

“Hey,” Evy said with a sigh as she entered carrying a big paper bag. She set it on the table, and glass bottles clanked inside.

“Long day?” Stella asked as Evy sat down at the kitchen table to take her shoes off.

“Very. Very. I’m catching up on papers and I’m having to check up on some newly fanged Cani who might be headed for Rising Shards soon. So today was busy. Is it bad my arms and shoulders are sore just from carrying papers around, because that makes me feel super wimpy—” Evy froze. She sniffed at the air then turned to see Stella’s in-progress cooking. “That smells delicious.”

“It’s not done yet,” Stella said. “I thought I’d make dinner while you were gone.”

“Probably for the best, I’d interrupt too much, yeah?” Evy said.

Stella blushed, thinking of the first time she tried to make a meal with Evy home a few days earlier. “Well, that and I wanted to surprise you.”

“Here I was thinking I’d just be happy if you ordered out,” Evy said. “That’s…” She trailed off, staring into space.

Stella of course worried she’d done something to upset her. “I can order out if you want? Did you just get a craving for something?”

“No, no!” Evy said, snapping out of her trance. “I’m not used to this. Oh my god, I’m really not used to this. My last long term. You know, partner, the best I’d get from her is if she even remembered to order carryout when she wanted to treat me. And I was too focused with class to even really reciprocate that. This is. It’s really nice, Stel.”

Stella smiled. “If I do it all right, the main attraction will eventually be chicken skewers, but I also have some of those little hot dog things wrapped in bacon dipped in brown sugar in the oven.”

Evy was practically drooling just at the description. “I got us, well, I mainly just got drinks so,” Evy said, pulling a box of bottles out of the bag. “If you wanna drink, that’s cool. We haven’t talked about drinking much, so I don’t want to push you if it’s not your thing, but I really just want to blow off some steam today.”

“Oh no, that’d be great!” Stella said, taking a peek inside the paper bag. “I don’t have anywhere to be tomorrow, so I’m definitely down. I’m more of a wine girl, but I’m not going to complain about some Out Gear Brewery.”

“Sweet,” Evy said.

“But you should scoot from the kitchen til I finish!” Stella said.

“Fiiiine,” Evy said. “I gotta shower anyways. I’m nasty, and not like the fun kind of nasty, just the—” She lifted the collar of her jumpsuit for a second and nearly heaved at the smell. “Yeah. I’ll be back when I’m sanitary.”

After a near catastrophe that would have resulted in the entire meal being burnt and ruined, Stella got everything together on a big plate, hoping Evy would appreciate her attempt at a fancy-ish presentation of her food. She brought the plate to the living room and set it on the small table there (once a pile of TV and game cartridges were cleared out of the way). After a few anxious minutes of waiting and a few awkward trips back and forth to grab a few bottles of the drinks Evy had bought to avoid further awkward trips back and forth, followed by some internal debate over whether to keep her hair tied up (she decided on hair down to give her scalp a break after having her hair tied up all day), Evy returned from the shower in her casual sleep wear. She sat down by Stella on the couch.

“The food needs a minute to cool off still, so,” Stella picked up two of the bottles. “Shall we, doctor?”

Evy took her bottle and clanked it against Stella’s. “To…I dunno. To you, really.”

Stella felt warm at the compliment. “To you too, Evy.”

Evy was blushing as well. For someone who came across as so confident and self-assured, Stella loved making her speechless, even for a moment.

“Wait, check this, I have a trick,” Evy said. She held up two fingers and flicked them upwards. The metal bottlecaps curled up and popped neatly off the bottles.

“Wow, impressive.” Stella said.

“My Cani gift’s gotta be good for some regular life stuff, right?” Evy asked. "I can pry a bottlecap off with my fangs too, but that hurts after I do it like once."

After about a bottle and a half each alongside some small talk, mostly Evy venting about her horrible day, the smell of the food was too much for Evy to wait any longer. “Alright, is this food good yet?”

“I think so,” Stella said.

Evy let out a devilish laugh before diving into the food, taking a few bites off a skewer then grabbing a few of the bacon wraps, freezing in place after biting them off the toothpicks poked into them.

“Oh my god,” Evy said, sounding like she was close to tears.

“What? Is it bad? I thought I caught it before it burned, but—”

“It’s amazing, Stella! It’s even better than I thought it would be from the smell!”

While she claimed she was doing her best to keep it even, Evy did eat a good chunk more of the bacon wraps, which Stella took as a compliment.

A few more drinks, and Stella was starting to get a better idea of what a tipsy Dr. Evy Diast was like. Stella usually took the “mom friend” role with her friend circles, and that applied to her when drinking as well. But Evy was a bit more chaotic. Not like “go run out into the street and start breaking stuff and screaming” chaotic, but her already low filter of speaking whatever was on her mind was further lowered, making conversation much more unpredictable, and much more hilarious as Evy was apparently in the mood to make Stella laugh that night.

“And after all that, this adult man looks me dead in the eyes, and in the most genuine, serious voice I’ve ever heard, says ‘Oh, I’m catching a right spanking on this pair of buttocks tonight for this,’” Evy said as Stella was doubled up laughing. “And I never even got the shoelaces back! That’s why that was probably the second weirdest on the spot Cani doctoring I had to do on the streets.”

“You had to have made some of that up,” Stella said.

“Nope,” Evy said. “I’ll tell you a secret. Only for you, Stel.” Evy looked incredibly serious, but her tipsiness might have made her be more dramatic about things than she normally would be. “If I make up parts of a story, I always end up putting in a part about a vending machine. I don’t know why, that’s my tell.”

Stella giggled as Evy sat back down, as she was standing on the couch cushions to add emphasis to her story.

“No but like, but like, Stella,” Evy said. “You’re just.” She buried her face in her hands. “You’re so great, but this night’s been all me. Can I do something for you? I feel very pampered, but I also don’t wanna just get pampered, you know?”

“You bought the drinks,” Stella said, strumming her fingertips on the amber bottle she held that was almost empty. “And you liked the food. That’s good for me.”

“Come on, Stella.” Evy said. “Nothing?”

Stella thought about it for a second. “Can we…” She sighed. “I don’t know if it’s something you’d want.”

“You can ask, if it’s like, ‘let’s go rob a bank,’ like for you? Like maybe? I’d consider it. But our careers would be pretty rightly screwed for it, you know?”

Stella laughed. “No, I just…can we cuddle tonight?”

She knew it was a potentially sore subject. It wasn’t something Evy seemed like she’d be opposed to, but given their entanglements over the last week, cuddling wasn’t high on the list. And even in her tipsy stupor, Evy still bowed her head at the idea.

“I’m not much of a cuddler,” Evy said quietly.

“It’s OK if you don’t want to,” Stella said.

“Oh, Stella,” Evy said, smiling softly. “Nah, let me…c’mere. It’s a baggage thing. We can go slow.”

Evy held her arms out, and Stella couldn’t help but hug her and nuzzle into her neck. Stella felt their magnetic urge to start kissing and go further like they usually did, but Evy stopped before they could.

“Sorry, that’s not cuddling,” Evy chuckled. “I mean, we can do that, and I’m happy to do that, but I want you to be satisfied first. Satisfied the way you asked for, not...you know what I mean.” She looked pensive for a second. “This may sound very stupid from a doctor and from a person who you’ve had like a lot of sex with in the last week but. Can you show me how to do this whole cuddling thing?”

“Yeah,” Stella said, biting her lip. “You have to be big spoon, though. You have a good half foot on me, so it’d feel weird if I did. Probably.”

“Should we maybe head to bed then?” Evy asked.

“I think, maybe, yeah.” Stella said.

Evy tried to get up, and practically stumbled face first into the plate with only skewers and toothpicks remaining on it. Stella caught her, but similarly was wobbly on her feet as the two laughed their way to Evy’s bedroom.

“Alright, more space here,” Evy said. She took a deep breath as she climbed into bed. “Is it weird this is scarier than sex for me?”

“If you have baggage from it, it’s not that weird,” Stella said, climbing onto the bed as well. She usually had the left side of the bed so far, but cuddling was new enough that it felt like she was climbing into Evy’s bed for the first time. It looked like Evy felt the same as she shuffled a bit to get into position.

“Because yeah,” Evy said. “Because it’s hard to think of cuddling as even a thing when the person you were with longest pretty much wanted to just leave the room when. Er. The deed was done, so to speak? Even the whole house, and that's not even counting times when the deed was not done and cuddling was not had and—ugh.” She sighed. “Sorry, baggage. I don’t want to bug you with all this past crap when you’ve been so sweet tonight.”

“No baby, let it out.” Stella said. She blinked, realizing what she just said. It took Evy a second to realize it as well. Stella turned her back to Evy and tried to gently guide her arms into a proper cuddle position.

“I like when you call me baby,” Evy said, sighing as she wrapped her arms around Stella as well.

Stella immediately sighed into the cuddle, relishing in the feeling of Evy’s warm breath on her neck.

“And I really…am I talking too much?” Evy asked.

“Never,” Stella said.

“Good,” Evy said. “I really am glad you’re here, you know?”

“Me too,” Stella said. “You’re even better than the you I spent the last three months daydreaming about.”

Stella smiled as she didn’t get a verbal response to that, just a tighter grip around her waist.

“So the arm that’s under me may go numb here,” Stella said. “But that’s a part of the cuddle.”

“A sacrifice that must be given for the cuddle,” Evy said.

“Kinda, but like move if it gets really bad, I won’t be mad.”

“It’s fine right now,” Evy said, holding Stella tighter.

“You’re a good cuddler, you know?” Stella said. “Thank you, too, I know it’s hard with baggage. You really didn’t have to.”

Her head was spinning a bit, partially from the drinks and partially from the rush of the past week. But it was a good kind of spinning. Even though she was fairly tipsy, she never felt safer than she did in Dr. Evy Diast’s arms.

“Maybe I just needed the right person to cuddle with.” Evy said.