Still Waters Rising

Still Waters Rising

The rain had not stopped for four days.

It arrived the morning they did — a soft, grey curtain drawn across the mountains as Jade's SUV turned off the main road and onto the gravel track that wound down to Lake Merrow. By the time they'd hauled their bags onto the porch of the cabin, it had thickened into something steady and purposeful, the kind of rain that doesn't apologise and doesn't explain itself.

"It'll clear by tomorrow," Priya had said, cheerfully, on that first evening.

It did not clear by tomorrow.

It rained through Tuesday, when they'd planned to hike the ridge trail and instead played cards and drank too much wine and talked until two in the morning about things they never had time to talk about in their ordinary lives — promotions and heartbreaks and the strange grief of turning thirty and realising you still didn't know what you were doing. It rained through Wednesday, when the lake rose visibly, a slow grey creep up the dock posts, and they watched from the window with mugs of tea pressed warm against their palms. It rained through Thursday, their last full day, when the road into town had become more river than road and Jade had to call ahead to confirm the route out would still be passable in the morning.

"Still fine," she'd reported, hanging up. "As long as we leave by eight."

They'd set their alarms.

Ally was already awake when hers went off.

She'd been lying in the dark of her room listening to the rain for an hour, which was either a sign of deep personal peace or the particular restlessness that had been living behind her sternum for the last four days. She suspected the latter.

She silenced her alarm, stretched until her spine cracked — a full six feet of it, which her chiropractor had opinions about — and pulled herself out of bed. Her red hair was a catastrophe. She didn't bother with it. She found her hoodie on the floor, pulled it on, and padded out to the kitchen to start the coffee.

The cabin was all one warm, low-ceilinged space at the front: the kitchen and the lounge open to each other, big windows now showing nothing but grey rain and the blurred suggestion of the lake below. Ally moved quietly, muscle memory taking over — the coffee tin, the press, the kettle. She'd been doing this every morning of the trip, the first one up. It wasn't insomnia exactly. More like she'd always needed more time alone with herself in the mornings than everyone else seemed to.

The kettle was just beginning to mutter when she heard bare feet on the floorboards.

She already knew who it was before she turned around.

There were only four of them, and she'd learned, years ago, the precise sound of each of them in this cabin. Jade walked like she was late for something. Priya shuffled. But this step was soft and slightly reluctant, the step of someone who had not fully committed to being awake yet, and it belonged to Carina.

Ally turned.

Carina stood at the edge of the kitchen in an oversized sleep shirt, brown hair loose around her shoulders, hazel eyes still carrying the bruised softness of recent sleep. She had a cardigan clutched around her that was barely doing its job — one sleeve already sliding off her shoulder — and she was regarding the world with an expression of exhausted wariness that Ally had always found, privately and helplessly, to be one of the most endearing things she'd ever seen on another human being.

"Coffee?" Ally said.

"Desperately," Carina said.

Ally turned back to the kettle. She was aware, with that low-frequency awareness she'd grown so practised at managing, of Carina crossing the kitchen and coming to lean against the counter beside her — not far, the way she always did, comfortable in Ally's space in a way that other people weren't.

They'd been doing this for years. The morning quiet together while the others slept. It had started at university, their first year, when they'd both ended up in the kitchen of their shared house at six in the morning and discovered they were both the kind of people who needed the first cup of coffee to be silent and unobserved. It had become, without either of them deciding it, a ritual. One of Ally's favourite things, and also one of the most reliably torturous, given everything she was very carefully not thinking about.

"It's still raining," Carina said.

"It is."

"I had a dream it wasn't."

"That sounds like something that would happen to you."

Carina made a soft sound that was half-laugh, half-sigh. "We're still okay for eight, right? Jade checked?"

"Should be fine." Ally pressed the coffee, poured two mugs, passed one across. Their fingers didn't touch. She was fairly good at that. "Long as the lower road hasn't gotten worse overnight."

Carina wrapped both hands around her mug and looked out the window. The lake was invisible now, swallowed by the weather. In the pale grey light her profile was quiet and lovely and Ally looked at it for approximately one second before directing her attention firmly out the window herself.

Twenty-eight years old. She had known Carina since they were eight. She should, by any reasonable measure, have gotten a handle on this by now.

The handle had never arrived.

That was the honest truth of it, which Ally turned over sometimes in the small hours the way you turn over a smooth stone — not urgently, just checking it was still there. It had started in the straightforward, catastrophic way these things did: she was nineteen, it was spring, and Carina had laughed at something Ally said — really laughed, tipping her head back, delighted — and something in Ally's chest had rearranged itself in a way that didn't rearrange back.

She'd spent the better part of that year quietly certain it would pass. It didn't pass. She'd spent the year after that attempting to date other people with moderate success and discovering it didn't change anything. She'd spent the year after that in a philosophy-of-love spiral that she never discussed with anyone and was mildly embarrassed about in retrospect. And then she'd arrived, somewhere around twenty-three, at a kind of resigned equilibrium: she loved Carina the way she was apparently always going to love Carina, and Carina was her closest friend, and that was that.

It was fine. It really mostly was. The only times it became not-fine were the times — and there were more of these than she liked — when she caught Carina looking at her in a way she couldn't quite read, or when they ended up accidentally close in a way that made her hyperaware of every point where they almost touched, or when Carina said something small and fond that landed somewhere in Ally's chest like a stone into still water, concentric rings spreading long after.

Those times she dealt with by excusing herself, or changing the subject, or — when those weren't options — by being very focused on the middle distance.

It was a functional system.

Jade came out at seven fifteen, assessed the rain situation, and called the road authority.

The conversation that followed was not long, but it was the kind of not-long conversation that contains a significant amount of information nonetheless. By the time Jade hung up, all four of them were standing in the kitchen watching her face.

"So," Jade said.

"So," Priya said.

"The lower road is flooded. Flash flooding overnight. They're saying —" She paused. "They're saying it could be six to twelve hours before it's passable. Possibly longer."

Silence.

"We're stuck," Carina said.

"We are a little bit stuck, yes."

A beat passed. Ally looked at the window. The rain came down and down and down, indifferent to their plans, and somewhere below the cabin the lake was doing things a lake shouldn't really be doing.

"Well," Priya said, with the serenity of someone who had done a lot of meditation, "I suppose we need more coffee."

By midday the cabin had taken on the particular atmosphere of a place that knows it is not being left. They'd rearranged themselves from the posture of people-about-to-depart into the posture of people-accepting-a-situation: bags pushed back against walls, shoes abandoned, the throw blankets retrieved from their folded positions and deployed across laps and shoulders.

Jade and Priya were at the table, deep in a jigsaw of approximately one thousand pieces depicting a lighthouse, which they'd found in a cupboard and embarked on with a shared intensity that Ally found both baffling and admirable.

Ally was on the couch with a book she wasn't reading.

Carina was at the kitchen counter with her laptop, attempting to reroute a work situation that had apparently erupted in her absence, which she'd been doing with increasing frustration for two hours. Ally had watched from the corner of her eye as Carina went through the full sequence: competent focus, then concentration-frown, then the small exhale of irritation, then the pressing of two fingers to the bridge of her nose that meant she was close to snapping at her screen.

At twelve forty-seven, Carina pressed both hands flat to the counter, looked at the ceiling, and said, quietly but distinctly, "Oh, for the love of —"

"Close the laptop," Ally said.

Carina looked over. "I can't, I have to —"

"Whatever it is, it was happening before you opened the laptop, and it'll still be happening in two hours. Close it."

There was a pause. Carina's expression moved through about four things. Then, with the specific capitulation of someone who knows they've been correctly read, she closed the laptop.

"Thank you," she said, and it came out somewhere between sarcasm and genuine relief.

"Mmhm."

Carina came around the counter and dropped onto the other end of the couch, pulling her knees up, tucking herself into the corner of it. The couch was not enormous. The not-enormous-ness of it placed her closer to Ally than was strictly comfortable, in the way all of Carina's natural proximity was uncomfortable — not unpleasant, just loaded.

"What are you reading?" Carina asked.

"Not sure. The words keep turning into rain sounds."

Carina laughed, low and quiet, the kind of laugh she reserved for things that weren't quite funny enough for anything louder. "Same. I read the same email about eight times. I still don't know what it says."

Ally set the book down. "What do you want to do?"

"I want to be home with a bath and a glass of wine and my cat judging me from the radiator."

"I'll write that down for when the flood clears."

Carina looked at her sideways, the corner of her mouth lifted. "What do you want to do?"

Ally considered. "Honestly? This is fine. The rain is fine. Being stuck is fine." She paused. "I like it here."

Something shifted in Carina's expression — soft, unguarded, gone in a moment. "Yeah," she said. "Me too."

"I need a word," Jade said.

She materialised at Ally's shoulder around two in the afternoon, during a window when Carina had gone to make tea and Priya was occupied with the lighthouse's difficult upper section.

Ally looked up. "That's an ominous opening."

"It's not ominous. It's practical." Jade sat down in the armchair, which she did with the air of someone conducting a meeting. "Have you spoken to Carina yet?"

Ally looked at her steadily. "We've spoken constantly for four days."

"You know what I mean."

"I don't, actually."

"Ally."

"Jade."

Jade pressed her lips together. She was a small woman with a very direct quality, like a compass needle — she pointed at the thing she was pointing at and did not deviate. It was one of the things Ally loved about her and found most exhausting about her, often simultaneously.

"You've been like this for years," Jade said.

"Like what."

"Like —" She gestured. "Like someone standing outside a house they own but are too polite to go into."

Ally said nothing.

"We're stuck here," Jade continued. "We're going to be here for hours yet. And I'm telling you, as your friend, as someone who has watched both of you orbit each other for the better part of a decade —"

"Jade —"

"She brought your favourite tea. She bought it specifically at the supermarket before we left because she looked up what kind you liked now because apparently you'd mentioned changing brands six months ago in a conversation she remembered."

Ally stopped.

"And," Jade said, with emphasis, "when you fell asleep on the couch last night she took your book out of your hand and put a blanket over you and then sat back down very carefully so she didn't wake you, and I watched all of this from the hallway, and I need you to receive that information."

Ally was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the rain ran down the glass in silver threads.

"It doesn't mean what you think it means," she said, and was aware of how thin the argument sounded.

"Okay," Jade said, pleasantly. "You keep telling yourself that."

The afternoon moved slowly, the way afternoons do when there's nowhere to be.

They ate lunch. They played a card game that devolved into an argument about the rules that was mostly theatrical. Priya fell asleep on the armchair for an hour in a way that seemed utterly intentional. The rain maintained its steady conversation with the roof.

At some point Ally and Carina ended up at the window together, the way they kept ending up places together — through no plan, just gravity, the same low pull that had been operating for so many years it barely registered any more. The lake was visible now through breaks in the rain, higher than it should be, brown at the edges where it had crept up through the soil.

"It's strange, isn't it," Carina said. "The water. It looks like it's been here forever. Like the lake has always been this size and we just forgot."

Ally considered this. "Nature correcting the record."

"Mmm." Carina's reflection in the glass was soft and unfocused, layered over the grey-green of the trees. "Ally."

"Yeah."

A pause. The kind of pause that has weight.

"Do you ever —" She stopped.

"What?"

Carina's reflection looked at Ally's reflection for a moment. "Nothing. Never mind."

Ally turned to look at her directly. Carina was still facing the window, a faint tension in her jaw.

"What were you going to say?"

"It's nothing. Forget it."

"Carina."

Something happened in Carina's expression — a quick flash of something raw, immediately contained. She turned, and offered the kind of small smile that Ally had, over the years, learned to recognise as occupying a completely different space from Carina's real smiles. "I was just going to say I'm glad we still do this. The trip. Even when it goes completely sideways."

Ally held her gaze for a beat too long. "Yeah," she said, carefully. "Me too."

The road authority called at four thirty.

They now expected the lower road to be passable by mid-morning the next day, weather depending. The alternative route through Hartley Pass was currently closed due to a separate incident. They would be staying another night.

There was a collective pause. Then Priya said "right, well, we have pasta and wine and no excuses, so I'm making dinner," and the cabin reorganised itself again around this new fact of their extended existence here.

Ally helped with the sauce. Carina set the table and found candles from somewhere, which she lit with a certain quiet competence that Ally watched out of the corner of her eye while doing things with onions. Jade opened wine with ceremony.

Dinner was easy and warm, the way dinners in this cabin always were — years of ease between them, the accumulated fluency of people who knew each other's histories and didn't need to perform. They talked about their first year of university, dredging up memories that had improved with distance. They talked about people from school they'd lost track of. Priya told the story about the time she accidentally got on the wrong train in Milan, which got better with every retelling.

Ally laughed more than she had in months. That was always the way with this trip — it scraped something loose, something that silted up in ordinary life. She felt lighter and more herself than she had in a while, sitting here in the candlelight with the rain on the roof and her best friends around her.

She caught Carina watching her at one point, across the candle flame, with an expression she couldn't name. When Carina realised she'd been caught she looked away quickly, reached for her wine.

Ally's heart did the thing it did. She let it.

Jade and Priya went to bed at ten thirty, claiming exhaustion — which was technically true and also, Ally suspected, somewhat tactical. Jade had given her a look on the way past that communicated, wordlessly but clearly: we are giving you the room, please do something with it.

Ally sat with her wine on the couch. Carina sat at the other end of it. The candles had burned down to stubs and the lights were low, the cabin reduced to a small warm circle against the enormous dark outside.

"How long do you think we've been doing this?" Carina said.

"This specifically?" Ally gestured vaguely between them.

"This trip. This particular trip."

"Seven years. Since Priya's twenty-first."

Carina turned her wine glass slowly. "Seven years."

"Mm."

"Feels like longer." A pause. "Feels like I've known you longer than I've known myself, some days."

Ally looked at her. Carina was looking at the candle, the guttering flame moving small shadows across her face. She looked, in this light, as she always did when her guard was fully down — like someone Ally had known in another life, recognisable in a way that had no rational explanation.

She should say something mild. She should say something comfortable and friend-shaped. She'd been doing it for nine years; she was very good at it.

"Carina," she said, instead.

The quality of Carina's stillness changed.

"What were you going to say?" Ally said. "Before. At the window."

A beat. Two.

"I told you it was nothing."

"It wasn't nothing."

Carina's hand tightened slightly around her wine glass. "Ally, don't —"

"Why not?"

"Because." She stopped. Started again. "Because some things are —" Another stop. Something in her face, barely visible in the low light, some long-held arrangement starting to come loose. "Because I have been very carefully not saying it for a very long time, and I'm — it works. The way things are. I don't want to wreck it."

The space between them was very quiet.

Ally set her wine glass down on the coffee table with a small, deliberate click.

"What if," she said, carefully, "it doesn't wreck it."

Carina looked at her then — really looked, the wine glass still in her hands, some complex calculation running behind her hazel eyes. "What are you saying."

"I'm saying —" Ally breathed out. Breathed in. The rain talked quietly against the windows. "I'm saying I have been in this exact position for nine years. Sitting next to you. Not saying it. And we're stuck here, and it's dark, and I'm tired of not saying it."

Carina's lips parted slightly.

"You came back for me," Ally said. "Every year. You called when the bad stuff happened and when the good stuff happened and when there was nothing in particular to say. You remembered I changed tea brands six months ago." A pause. "And every time you smile at me I feel it somewhere I don't know how to explain."

The silence after this was the kind that changes the air.

Carina put her wine glass down. Her hands, freed, went into her lap, and she was looking at Ally with an expression that was almost painful in its openness — as if something had been carefully maintained for a long time and had, quietly and suddenly, stopped being maintained.

"Ally," she said, and her voice was low and not quite steady. "I've been in love with you since I was twenty-two."

The words landed in Ally's chest like something coming home.

"Twenty-two," Ally said, quiet.

"The night of Jade's housewarming. You fixed the shelf she'd been complaining about for three months and you did it in about seven minutes and I thought —" She laughed, barely, the way you laugh at yourself. "I thought, there she is. Which makes no sense, you'd been my best friend for years —"

"No," Ally said. "No, it makes complete sense."

She moved — not far, just closed the remaining distance on the couch, enough that she could reach out. Enough to take Carina's hand, which was cool and still and closed around hers immediately, like it had been waiting.

The contact was quiet. Enormous.

"I'm sorry it took a flood," Ally said.

Carina laughed — real this time, broken open and beautiful. "It took four days of solid rain and a flooded road and Jade making pointed eye contact at me all afternoon."

"She did that to me too."

"Obviously. She's been absolutely desperate about this for years."

They were close now, the space reduced to something that hummed between them. Ally could see the candlelight in Carina's eyes, the warmth there, all the things she'd been reading for years and then deliberately misreading.

"I should have said something," Ally said. "A long time ago. I kept thinking —"

"That I wouldn't —"

"That you couldn't possibly."

Carina's hand tightened in hers. "I kept thinking the same thing. That you were — I mean, look at you."

Ally laughed a little despite herself. "What does that mean."

"You know what it means." Carina's free hand came up and her fingers — tentative, asking — touched Ally's jaw, and Ally went very still, the way you go still when you understand that something is actually, finally happening. "You're — you. You're clever and you're funny and you're the most present person I've ever known, you make everyone feel like the most important thing in the room — and I thought —"

"Carina."

"—I thought there must be someone better suited, someone more —"

"Carina." Ally brought her free hand up, covered Carina's where it rested against her face. "There isn't."

The silence that followed was different from the silences before it — not held breath, not careful maintenance, but something like rest. Like setting something heavy down.

Carina was the one who moved first, slowly, tilting her face up, and Ally met her the rest of the way.

The kiss was unhurried. That was the thing that Ally hadn't expected — the quality of unhurriedness to it, as if they had, between them, all the time that had ever been. It was soft at first and then not soft, the way any kiss is when it's been years in the making, when it carries the weight of every occasion it should have happened and didn't. Carina's hand curved around the back of Ally's neck. Ally's fingers found the fabric of her cardigan, her waist, the warm certainty of her.

When they finally broke apart they were still close, foreheads almost touching, the rain outside unremarkable and steady and perfectly right.

"Hi," Carina said.

"Hi," Ally said.

Carina's laugh was quiet, a shiver of it against Ally's mouth. "Nine years."

"Don't."

"No, I know. I'm not —" She pulled back just enough to look at her, and her eyes in the near-dark were bright and soft and perfectly familiar. "I'm not sad about it. I'm just —" She seemed to search for the word. "I'm glad we're here."

Ally looked at her. This face she'd been carrying around in her chest for nine years, now looking back at her with everything out in the open, nothing hidden. It was almost too much.

"I love you," Ally said. Not I think or I might. Just the plain true sentence of it.

Carina's breath went out in something that wasn't quite a sound. Then: "I love you. I have loved you for so long that I can't find where I put the version of myself that didn't."

They sat together in the dying candlelight while the rain came steadily down. At some point Ally drew Carina against her and Carina settled into the curve of her, her head against Ally's shoulder, and they stayed like that while the candles guttered out one by one. The lake outside was invisible, the night total, the world reduced to this warm room and this impossible arrived thing.

"Are you going to be weird about it in the morning?" Carina said, eventually, into the dark.

Ally pressed her lips to the top of Carina's head. "Are you?"

"Absolutely not. I've waited nine years, I'm not being weird about it."

"Then neither am I."

A comfortable pause.

"Jade is going to be insufferable," Carina said.

"Jade is going to be thrilled."

"Those aren't different things."

Ally laughed, and it moved through them both.

In the morning the rain stopped.

It did it quietly, somewhere before six — a final diminishment, a last conversation, and then the silence of a world that had been washed clean. Ally became aware of it slowly, the change in sound, the different quality of light at the edge of the curtains.

She was aware, also, that Carina was still asleep against her shoulder, and had been for several hours, and that her arm had gone to sleep somewhere around midnight and she had chosen not to move.

She watched the light change in the thin strip between the curtains. She felt, somewhere underneath the peacefulness, the quiet residue of years of carrying something alone — and the immense simplicity of no longer having to.

Carina stirred.

"Still here?" she said, muzzy with sleep.

"Still here."

Carina moved, just enough to look up at her, confirming — something. Then she settled back. "Good."

Outside, the lake would be receding. The roads would be clearing. By mid-morning they'd be gone from here, back to their ordinary lives and the strange new territory of whatever came next.

Ally found she wasn't worried about whatever came next.

She pressed her lips to Carina's hair and felt Carina's hand close over hers. The room was very quiet. The light came in, and came in, and came in.

They were still on the couch when Jade came out at eight.

She stopped in the kitchen doorway. Looked at them. Looked at Ally.

Ally held her gaze with dignified serenity.

Jade said nothing. She turned, went back down the hall, and said, very clearly, through Priya's closed door: "Priya. Get up. You owe me twenty dollars."

"Jade," Carina said.

"We had a bet!" Jade called back, wholly unrepentant. "I said this trip! Priya said next year! I have been waiting—"

"Oh my god—"

"—years, Carina, I have been patient for years—"

Ally started laughing, quietly, and Carina turned to look at her with an expression that was exasperated and delighted and just slightly rueful, and Ally thought: yes, this, exactly this, this is what I've been carrying around for nine years and I would do it all again, I would carry it for nine more if that was what it took.

Priya emerged looking sleep-rumpled and resigned and handed Jade a crumpled twenty dollar note with great ceremony. Then she looked at Ally and Carina and smiled the smile of someone who has been waiting patiently for a happy ending to arrive.

"Finally," she said, simply.

They had the road back by eleven. The day was washed bright, the sky a clean-swept blue, the world gleaming in the aftermath of all that weather. They loaded the car with the particular competence of people who've done it enough times not to think about it, and Jade drove them up off the valley floor and onto the high road, the lake falling away below them, full and still and glittering.

Carina was in the back seat with Ally. At some point on the long road home, without discussion, her hand found Ally's. Ally turned it palm-up and held on.

Jade kept her eyes on the road. Priya looked out the window.

The trees blurred past, still dripping with the remnants of all that rain, and the road stretched out ahead, and the world was bright, and it was, in every way that mattered, the morning after.

End