sapphic lit

“I’m not going to be it,” she said at last. Gently. Definitively. “I want to be clear before you start building something in your head, because I can hear you starting. I’m not the thing you come home to when the city stops working. I had that. I had eleven years of being the thing somebody settled for, near enough, and I’m not doing it again, and I’m especially not doing it with the one person who already proved she’d choose the wrong life over me if it was easier.” She said it without heat. That was the worst of it; she’d made her peace with it long enough ago that it didn’t even cost her anything to say. “Tonight was real. I don’t take it back. But tonight isn’t a down payment.”