Written between 2013 - March - 21 and 2013 - October - 10.

Jessica's first lover is a jeweler who calls her Jess and thinks she's worth more than any diamond.

They meet in London. Jessica has lived in this place all her life and still feels it around her like a universe, like immensity, an awe she saves for when she's alone and can pretend that sleep is addling her mind. The jeweler, on the other hand, is Thai, born and bred, and where she spent her infancy she was always a tiny being in a giant, seething mass of personhood, but here in London she feels control.

Jessica is wearing sensible shoes, and the other woman is in fanciful high heels whose colors seep into each other. They chat, Jessica standing very, very straight while the other woman leans against the counter in a spill of dark skin and darker hair, fixing a pair of Jessica's earrings.

When Jessica leaves the shop, there's a phone number on the back of the receipt she's holding.

They go out and watch a movie together. Jess doesn't much care for the cinema, cramped and crowded and dark as it is, but that seems to matter less when there's an arm wrapped warm around her shoulders and carefully painted lips whispering sweetnesses in her ear. Paying no attention at all to the film, she closes her eyes and lets herself feel in a way she hasn't had time to unlearn just yet.

They go back to Jess's apartment and they don't bother with the bed. Jess swears fluently and her lover's silence says more than any words could, and Jess doesn't know to wonder if she'll ever feel this completely free again even as she is tangled, so, so tangled, into the other woman's limbs. They sleep curled into each other.

While her lover dreams of Bangkok and the pelt of a beast she could never have envisioned and the last time she felt this safe, Jess wakes up in the middle of the night and stares at the ceiling and wonders if this means it's worth telling her parents that gender doesn't matter to her. It's been on the tip of the tongue every time she's seen them since she was twelve, every time they've asked after her life. Like jumping off a high place, it's seemed at once the most and least attainable thing possible, and definitely one of the most dangerous.

They would not be pleased. That's an understatement, of course, but her family's all about understatement. To the woman wrapped around her, safety is a goal, but to Jessica, it's chains, and has been all her life. Jess hums, high in her throat, and casts the thought out of her mind, because this here, this now, doesn't feel remotely like chains.

It's the weekend, so there's only peace when they wake up, the sound of each other's breath, and the softness of the couch. Light streams in like sympathy, and this is a moment Jessica's going to remember whether she likes it or not.

One day she'll have forgotten her lover's name (first, last and middle, and they shall be as vacuums in the universe of her mind, gaping voids she will try and fail time and again to fill) and she'll have forgotten the first time they fucked-the tension in the taxicab, the fumbling of her fingers as she groped in her handbag for her keys, kicking off her shoes quick and careless and full of nerves-and she'll forget, in short, everything of her first lover that could let her prove that she ever existed.

There are things she'll hold onto, though, the feeling of skin against hers where she's used to emptiness, and being cradled close like the precious thing she's never felt she is, the image of those shoes so high and colorful next to her own, and despite it all, Jessica will never forget the woman she fell in love with.

One day not long after a boy with a smooth face and messy hair becomes the second person she has lost to the shadows, Jessica Bartram will be in Bangkok on business. She will try her level best not to walk into the narrow little shop that somehow calls out to her, with the strange fur hanging visible just behind the cracked and filthy glass of the door.

The impulse will get the best of her on the night before she is due to go back to London. She will open the door, hands shaking like she swore she'd never let her body betray her again, at once knowing and not knowing what she expects to find behind it.

She will find a woman, and she will not mind when the woman calls her Jess. She will not be shocked by the way the memories rush to click back into place in the mechanisms of her mind, only gladdened and lighter at heart than she has been for a while.

She will miss her flight back to London, find herself instead wrapped up in the feeling of something she hasn't ever quite known how to miss. She'll wonder, staring up at the ceiling and finding it looking more like home than a place she never knew until just hours previous has any business being, if she ever will make it back to her flat in Kensington.

She will, a while later, if only for the few days it takes to sort out the life she's leaving behind, the days it takes to lay Jessica Bartram neatly to rest. That done, Jess will London for the last time.

She'll never be quite sure where she'll end up, from then on, and somehow she won't mind. She'll have her lover's hand to hold like a promise, like a trust she's been training all her years to be able to give, and she could never miss the order and structure of the world Above as much as she has craved this feeling of freedom her whole life.