In dreams, Marlo is always kind to her.

Most people have repetitive nightmares. Whatever Rome has are repetitive, but not nightmares, at least not in description. You don’t call dreams where you go out for brunch or walk a nudibranch you never owned or have the best afternoon of your boring mundane life with your old best friend nightmares. But Rome doesn’t know a different word for dreams that thrive off making a home under your skin.

Doesn’t know a different word for people that do that, either.

For a long time, it was only ever dreams. She could take solace in that. Hypothetical at worst, nonreal. She could wake up and get on with her life, leaving Marlo to vanish into the dim, grayish corners of her room where the dawn light didn’t reach. Memories of Marlo’s easy grin, her short crop of tentacles, her round face that so easily crumpled into anger and dismay. Rome didn’t even know to call her Marlo, then.

But Marlo is kind to her in the living world, also.

Marlo laughs, and apart from a little bit of acquired roughness, the sound hasn’t changed at all.

“What are you laughing at?” Rome jabs, grinning, with an incredulous, lilting inflection which did for her own form of laughter. Marlo’s laid alongside her on the bed, face bright with mirth, holding herself up with one arm. Rome’s flat on her back, hands behind her head, sunk into the soft cotton pillows and still in her worn-out tank top and athletic shorts.

“Nothing!” Marlo answers, her laughter unrepentant. “Nothing, just—you’re too clever. You always catch me off-guard.”

“You? Off-guard?” Rome answers back, mocking. It makes her chest hurt in a way she doesn’t belie; tied up with memories of Marlo jumping at Rome’s hand on her shoulder, her face in a snarl before she recognizes who’s behind her. “You haven’t come off-guard since your mum came home from the hospital.”

“Never did,” Marlo says, finally coming down off her bout of laughter and lapsing into simple contentment. “I mean, she—I didn’t get born in a hospital. I hatched at home.”

“Explains a lot,” Rome says, although it doesn’t. It’s just something to say.

“And what’s that supposed t’ mean?” Fair enough. Marlo matches her affected incredulity, and she matches Marlo’s stupid, playful little grin, tilting her chin up impishly.

Even in the faint warm glow of evening light filtering through their blinds, her old best friend’s eyes are bright, alert and searching her face. Her tentacles are longer now, spilling over broader shoulders, a fuller frame she’d grown into with great effect. Her eyes are dark as ever, though she’d lost one of them along the way. And that easy grin.

“I love you,” Marlo says, thick with adoration.

Rome holds her gaze, and says nothing.

It isn’t fair to tell her otherwise. Rome has a policy, a simple one. She lets people hear what they want and think what they want, and just doesn’t say anything to the contrary.

She offers up a little smile. Marlo gives her back a soft, smitten exhale and levers herself down to kiss her, a gentle pull at her top lip before Rome lifts her hand to Marlo’s chin and reciprocates. Marlo is slow, deliberate. Careful and soft. Her spare hand, braced on Rome’s other side, bores her weight into the covers.

“I do,” Marlo murmurs against Rome’s mouth. “I’m in love with you.”

Rome doesn’t say, You’ve loved me for a long time. Doesn’t say, You’ve never known a different word for it. She opens Marlo’s mouth.

She doesn’t call this waking. Doesn’t call it living. When the sun comes up and the dawn filters grayish and pale into her room, she can wake up and get on with her life, leave Marlo drowsing until the light comes in with real force. She will call it a dream until then.