“I should have chosen us the first time around,” Bette finished.

Tina responded by laying her head on Bette’s shoulder causing Bette to sigh as she allowed the air she had been holding inside of her lungs to escape.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she looked into Bette’s eyes. “For all of it.”

“Shhh. Me too, me too,” Bette whispered as she pulled Tina closer as they comforted each other.

“I lost you twice. I can’t lose you again.”

“You never lost me.”

They stood like that for a long time; ensconced in the safeness of each other, drawing the strength from the embrace they knew they were going to need to have the discussion that would determine their fate.

With a renewed energy, they hesitantly pulled away, each looking to the nightstand that held the envelopes that Jodi had left. Despite the lack of physical connection, the connection they shared still mingled in the space between them.

Bette went to the nightstand and picked up the two envelopes, handing one to Tina.

Bette turned the envelope over in her hands a couple of times, running her finger over the edges of the envelope. The fact that she and Jodi had parted ways amicably did nothing to ease the guilt she felt.

She knew that she was in love with Tina when Jodi came into her life. She had been exactly what she needed at the time. A distraction; a distraction from a purgatory of her own creation. What kind of person could do what she did to two people that she loved?

Though she had loved Jodi, she had never been in love with her, and though she had never been in love with her, she had been changed for the better because of her.

She loved her because she lived her life without boundaries.  Instead of centering her life around what was expected of her, she focused on what she expected of herself and refused to let anyone or anything dictate the person that she would become.  

She loved her because she saw in Jodi what she wished she could have seen in herself.

Although Jodi had had hoped that Bette would somehow find the strength to overcome the conformity that ruled her life, she knew Bette could never live her life with the same sense of freedom that she enjoyed because freedom meant something different to her.