1, lenny/chorby, i know nothing about blaseball but your writing is so PRETTY jaz!!
sara this made me 🥺🥺 thank you... here are the girls
1. things you said at 1am
“You’re not sleeping,” Lenny mumbles. Her face is pressed against Chorby’s collarbone at an angle just shy of comfortable. “You’re thinking too loud, cut it out.”
“I’m not thinking too loud,” Chorby says, but it sounds a little hollow. She sighs. “It’s just... you know.”
Lenny hums. “That time I left in the middle of the night like an asshole?”
There are a lot of things Chorby normally says to that: quit calling yourself an asshole, you were doing the best you could, you were a kid. There are also a lot of terribly unkind things she wants to say: yes, of course I’m still hurt over that, yes, there are still nights when I don’t want to sleep because I don’t want to wake up alone, my favorite blanket is in a box in my closet because it smells like that cologne and if you leave I don’t want to forget again.
(She thinks, sometimes, that she’s being too harsh, that she should just get over it. But all those sleepless nights trying to wrap her brain around the shape of someone else in the bed, all that time telling Annie and Eizabeth about the missing piece - no, she’s not being too harsh. She’s being careful. Lenny is rarely careful, so Chorby has to be.)
“It’s not your fault,” Chorby says, which is the most diplomatic thing she can think to say.
“Ugh,” Lenny says, and then flails a sleepy hand out behind her, aiming for the nightstand. “Hold on, lemme-” there’s a jingle as her fingers close around something, then she’s sliding something heavy into the pocket of Chorby’s sweatpants. “There.”
“Lenny,” Chorby says. “What on earth are you doing?”
“Those are the keys to my apartment. And the keychain also has, like, my library card and a cool bottle opener on there, so I’m not leaving without it.”
“But why-”
“You wake up when I move,” Lenny says, which... is true. Lenny normally sleeps like a stone, but when she gets up Chorby always notices. “There’s no way I can get my hand in your pocket without waking you up. So that’s me, promising you that I’m going to stay the night. Because I have no other choice.”
Chorby swallows, throat thick. Carefully, she fishes the keychain out of her pocket and places it in Lenny’s palm, feels Lenny curl her fingers around it. “I’d rather you chose,” she says quietly.
Lenny nods, bumping her chin against Chorby’s collarbone, and then drops the keychain on the nightstand with a loud noise. “You trust me?”
Chorby wants to say of course or always, but she thinks Lenny would know better than to believe that. So instead she says, “Yeah,” and feels Lenny drop an absent kiss against the base of her neck.
She closes her eyes and forces herself not to cling too tightly to Lenny. This is the first step of trust: holding on just tightly enough.
