Smoking a cigarette on my porch before heading to my car for our first interview, I get a text: "Would you like coffee? I'm making myself an iced lavender latte with oat milk and would love to make you something if you want!”

That is what they feel like, and their home feels like: lavender, gentle and lush, soft and considerate words punctuated by bursts of genuine laughter. The world inside of their home is decorated with hanging plants and antique signs and radios, a boho chair in one spot and cozy couch in front of a large window.

They sit comfortably on the couch, with cute glass jars of iced coffee. I sit in the adjacent arm chair with my notebook and we talk.

Heartbeats and magic

When it comes to the details, for Laura, sex has never been her priority and she has always been less likely to initiate, she says is probably related to shame and her religious upbringing. Whereas until a couple of years ago Sam initiated sex often, things have shifted since. A couple of years ago, Sam had a period that lasted for two months, bleeding through the tampons and pads worn at the same time, eventually in so much pain that she went to the emergency room. They found out they have PCOS and although it’s been two years since and it’s managed with meds, the pain is not completely gone. It shifted the focal point of pleasure for them. That, along with becoming parents to a young teen this past spring, opportunities have definitely narrowed as they share a home together.

For them, intimacy is physical, but it doesn’t need to be sexual. “When we cuddle, I can feel her little heartbeat,” Laura says, and calls it magic. Sam’s love language is physical touch, and they move around their house almost always physically connected in some way, large or small. When they’re not Sam will find Laura to say, “will you touch me?” It has a tingling quality to it, the gentleness of physical touch that isn’t a precursor; it is the ends itself, not a means to a more orgasmic place. 

It moves like the tide

Sam and Laura invited me into their average Saturday morning: they wake up around eight and eight thirty. Their kiddo is off doing what he does on a Saturday - be a young teen with his own schedule and priorities - while Laura and Sam spend this pocket of time meditating, talking, and snuggling in bed.

Their bedroom is loving, gold, warm, kind, and sentimental; a forest green bedspread, wicker headboard, with an antique tin breakfast tray where a galette sits atop the its rose design.

Laura fusses over the fact that she doesn’t feel it’s her best, then takes a bite and says, “Wait, this slaps.” They sit close in bed, taking bites as Sam jokingly complains about how loudly Laura snored last night and she bursts into laughter. 

Sam’s dry and deadpan sentences match their even keel facial expressions; paired with Laura’s bright laughter, bang-bang bangs and ribbon-like curls, they have such balance. That balance is not only in well-fitting differences, but in what you can tell is an effort of loving one another as they are; a kind of intentional love that has brought out the best in each other. It’s an energy that is comforting and playful.

They spend their time under covers, moving between half sleep, nibbling at the since redeemed galette, looking at their phones (updates and gossip about friends and family), stretches of gazing at one another silently, whispering, pressing their faces together, tangling hands, and sweeping one another up in their arms then settling again. It all moves like a tide - shifting bodies momentarily apart and then back to one another.

The straight RA at Bethel College

Laura and Sam have been together for six years, first meeting scandalously when Laura was Sam’s RA at Bethel College. Sam tells me this bit, before Laura cuts in and says, “I wasn’t your RA for that long!” and explains with eyes on Sam that they didn’t start spending a lot of time together until afterward. 

Texting one another constantly even while traveling and some serious flirting and touching while together. Hanging around the lacrosse team Sam plays in. The winter break while at Sam’s parents house where “it all went down, “Sam says and Laura giggles, “literally.” They have sex in Sam’s room while their whole family is home (who assume they’re “special friends”). They start making out in their cars on the side streets of the Bethel campus. 

While part of the story is the cute side of a lesbian relationship that starts with a confused straight girl falling for a lesbian, there’s an undercurrent of pain; Laura looks back on how confused she felt even though now it seems obvious. The tone gets a little more serious and the story weaves in and out of clear timeframes; I struggle to assign dates to events, but eventually it doesn’t matter. The story has a pacing that is more about feeling than chronology.

There are times together, then apart, moments of choosing friendship over a relationship, coming back to school after traveling and fucking in cars and not so sneakily in rooms (once even breaking a door panel), Laura’s confusion about her identity and struggle in coming out to her family, a broken engagement in 2018. 

“I was still holding onto an identity of being straight - I just liked Sam,” she says.

As I hear this story, I ask Sam how they felt. 

“Sick. Ruined. But this is my person, I didn’t care if we were engaged or not.”

A great love

Laura has a sentimental, but serious face as she describes a conversation about Sam around this time that she had with a friend, “They asked me if we were together, and I said no. They asked why and I was just like, I don’t know, I don’t know. She said, What if you miss out on a great love because it wasn’t what you thought it would look like?” 

November 2019, they get engaged for the second - and final - time. Six years later they share this story and their space with me: Laura half lounging under the covers, Sam sitting up with one leg hanging from the edge of the bed, as I sit in a corner on the wood floor, leaning back with my legs crossed and my small moleskine notebook. I ask what their love feels like now, after all of that, after all this time.

Sam looks at Laura. “I’m living in love for you,” and the room shares a stillness the length of a single heartbeat, then Sam’s face blooms red and they begin to cry. Laura reaches forward and folds Sam into her. “Baby, are you crying?” she says more than asks, with a smile and comforting, soft laugh.

They stay like that for a long time.