An entirely unsuccessful guide, by Maena
I don’t remember the exact moment I realized I was attracted to Daisy.
That would have been convenient. A flash of lightning, a choir of doomed angels, perhaps a tasteful message from my subconscious saying: Congratulations, you are now in love with the blonde woman sitting beside you. Please remain calm while your emotional stability is quietly dismantled.
Instead, it happened slowly.
It began with details I had no business noticing. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was concentrating. The tiny pause before she laughed at something especially stupid. The warmth of her shoulder against mine. The particular shade of green her eyes became when the light caught them.
Perfectly normal observations to make about a friend, obviously.
Historians will confirm that friendships have always involved memorizing someone’s mouth.
For a while, I called it curiosity. Then affection. Then admiration. I kept changing the name as if my feelings were an unidentified corpse and I could postpone the autopsy by filling out the wrong paperwork.
The truth was embarrassingly simple: I wanted her.
Not only in the elegant, poetic sense. I wanted to hear every thought she was afraid to say aloud. I wanted to wake up beside her and discover what her face looked like before she remembered the rest of the world existed. I wanted her fingers tangled with mine beneath a café table.
And, yes, sometimes I wanted her against me, close enough that breathing became a shared and increasingly impractical activity.
I’m bisexual. This wasn’t a revelation about women. I already knew I liked them. The surprise was Daisy—this specific woman, with her freckles, her soft voice and her terrifying ability to make me feel emotionally alive.
I had experience with men. With a man, making the first move had always seemed relatively straightforward. You look at him a certain way. You move a little closer. If he possesses even the approximate emotional intelligence of a houseplant, he understands.
There was a familiar script. I knew when to touch his arm, when to hold his gaze, when to kiss him. Even rejection had recognizable architecture.
Women, however, completely derail me.
I adore them, but I have never known what the hell I’m doing around them. A woman can hold my hand, compliment my lips and tell me she wants to spend the night with me, and some cautious little bureaucrat inside my skull will still stamp the file:
PROBABLY JUST BEING FRIENDLY.
Women are affectionate with one another. They hug. They share beds. They fix each other’s hair. They say things that would constitute a marriage proposal if delivered by a man, then casually ask whether you want coffee.
So every time Daisy leaned into me, I wondered whether it meant something.
Every time her hand lingered on my waist, I wondered whether I had imagined the extra second.
Every time she looked at me, really looked at me, I felt hope rise inside my chest—and then immediately strangled it before it could damage the furniture.
Because wanting her was one thing. Telling her was another.
I could survive hearing that she didn’t feel the same. It would hurt, certainly, but I have survived worse things, including adolescence and several men who described themselves as “empaths.”
What frightened me was losing what we already had.
Daisy had become a place where I didn’t need armor. I could show her the uglier rooms inside me, and she never tried to redecorate them. The thought of making everything awkward—of watching her become careful around me—was unbearable.
So I said nothing.
This was an excellent strategy, provided the objective was to suffer beautifully and accomplish absolutely nothing.
I smiled when she touched me. I pretended not to notice when our knees met beneath the table. I lay awake replaying harmless conversations as if they were evidence in a criminal investigation.
Sometimes I nearly confessed.
Then she would smile, and courage would leave my body with the speed and dignity of a rat abandoning a sinking ship.
The first time Daisy kissed me, we were walking by the sea.
The weather was aggressively ordinary. No dramatic storm. No blood-red sunset. Just pale Nordic light, wind coming off the water and my hair trying to murder both of us.
We had stopped near the shore. I don’t remember why. Perhaps we were talking. Perhaps my brain simply stopped recording information once she moved closer.
She looked nervous.
That should have warned me, but Daisy looking nervous only made me want to protect her, not suspect that my entire emotional life was seconds away from being hit by a truck.
She reached for me and brushed a strand of hair from my face.
I stopped breathing.
Not metaphorically. My lungs apparently decided this was no longer their department.
Her fingers remained against my cheek. Her eyes moved down to my mouth, and every clever thought I had ever possessed quietly packed its bags.
Then she kissed me.
Softly at first, like a question she was afraid to ask aloud.
For one absurd second, I didn’t move. I had imagined kissing her so many times that reality felt less believable than fantasy. The softness of her lips startled me. They were warm and impossibly gentle, moving against mine with such care that the tenderness almost hurt.
Then my body caught up with the situation.
I pulled her closer.
The second kiss was deeper, but never hurried. Her hand slipped behind my neck, my fingers found her waist, and the space between us disappeared. When the tip of her tongue touched mine, it wasn’t demanding or clumsy. It was tentative, tender—a delicate question followed by my equally trembling answer.
Our tongues met again, slowly this time, and a shiver travelled through me so suddenly that I nearly laughed against her mouth. Apparently the infamous butterflies in the stomach were real. Mine felt less like butterflies and more like a colony of panicked bats performing emergency manoeuvres beneath my ribs.
Very romantic. Medically concerning.
I could taste the faint sweetness on her lips and feel her breath breaking softly against mine. Each gentle movement made the fluttering inside me spread lower, warm and dizzying, until standing upright became an act of unreasonable ambition.
There was nothing obscene about it, but it wasn’t innocent either.
Desire moved through me slowly, gathering beneath my skin. Every point where her body touched mine became suddenly, exquisitely precise: the curve of her waist beneath my hand, her chest rising against me, the slight tremble in her fingers and the softness of her mouth each time she returned to mine.
The sea, the wind and the entire disappointing human species ceased to be relevant.
When we finally drew apart, we stayed close enough that our noses touched. My lips still tingled from hers. The butterflies—or bats, or whatever emotionally unstable wildlife had taken possession of my internal organs—showed no intention of calming down.
I was attempting to reconstruct language from its basic components when Daisy whispered:
“I love you.”
There are sentences you wait years to hear.
Naturally, when I finally heard this one, my response was to stare at her like a recently exhumed Victorian child.
I had prepared for rejection. I had prepared for awkwardness, grief, exile and possibly moving to another country under an assumed name.
I had not prepared for happiness.
“You what?” I asked.
Not my finest line.
She laughed, but her eyes were wet. “I love you.”
Apparently she had loved me for some time. Apparently she had also been afraid. Apparently we had both spent months protecting a friendship from the exact thing it had already become.
Two intelligent adult women, each waiting for the other to solve a problem neither of us had admitted existed.
Romance is beautiful.
Romance is also two idiots standing beside the sea, discovering they could have been kissing much earlier.
I kissed her again because words had clearly failed me and I wanted to return to a medium in which I had at least some natural ability. This time I felt her smile against my mouth. Our lips met with less hesitation, and when her tongue gently found mine again, the tenderness of it made my chest ache more than desire ever could.
When I finally managed to speak, I told her I loved her too.
My voice shook. Hers did as well. The world remained offensively ordinary around us—the gray-blue water, the damp sand, the wind dragging our hair across our faces—but something inside me had shifted permanently.
I had been so afraid that loving Daisy would destroy what existed between us.
Instead, saying it aloud made everything make sense.
She had not been a dangerous addition to my life. She had already become part of its structure. Loving her wasn’t stepping off a cliff.
It was discovering I had been standing at the door of my own home, terrified to enter.
I still don’t entirely understand women. I doubt I ever will. Daisy can kiss me, fall asleep in my arms and say she loves me, and some defective corner of my brain will occasionally wonder whether she is merely being exceptionally polite.
But I’m learning.
Mostly, I’m learning that courage does not always look like certainty. Sometimes it looks like trembling hands, a nervous smile and one woman leaning toward another beside a cold Swedish sea.
Sometimes it tastes like salt, wind and Daisy’s lips.
And sometimes love arrives so quietly that you mistake it for fear—right until it kisses you and says its own name.
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