October 12: Daria/Jane, How I Like My Coffee

[kinetic_elaboration]

More of my sweet D/J series, the rest on the tag “alternate esteemsters.” Most are prompts from YOTP 2025, like this one, for July: “I like my ___ how I like my coffee.”

This one follows directly from the last.

~ 660 words, 20 minutes

*

Daria wakes in Jane’s bed, to the sense that it’s morning, the knowledge she’s alone in the room. She’s still sleepy, and she immediately turns over and groans into the pillows. Memories come back hazy, warm, sweet: sneaking back here, Jane’s kisses, Jane’s fingers in her hair. Jane’s leg between her legs. Skimming her own palms up over Jane’s sides, under her shirt—

She lets the image, and the bit of sense memory, trail, and blearily looks up again. Still alone. If she’s quiet enough, she can hear, through the closed door, some signs of life in the house. More Lane siblings, maybe, unexpectedly returned in the middle of the night? Jane’s parents? The band?

Her own imagination?

Her mother coming to drag her back home by the ear?

 

Only this, the knowledge that she can’t stay here forever, forces her to sit up, then to grab for her glasses, which are very much not on Jane’s bedside table. They’re in Wind’s room, where she left them. She grumbles again, forces herself to stand up. The hall is empty and the sounds, she hears now, were coming from downstairs; she very luckily does not run into a soul before she’s able to put her glasses back on and at least run her fingers through the worst knots in her hair.

She finds Jane in the kitchen, the source of the noises: she’s opening drawers and cupboards, looking for breakfast. 

“You’re up early,” Daria notes, and Jane looks up abruptly, startled, almost falls from the stool she’s kneeling on to look at the top cupboard, and grins.

“You’re up!”

“Barely.”

Jane nods her head toward the counter, where the coffee pot is starting to bubble. “I can’t promise sustenance but I can promise caffeine.”

“That’ll do." 

She sits down at the island counter and watches as Jane climbs down again and then takes out two mugs from a lower shelf. Daria considers asking her if her mother has been by, but she obviously hasn’t. That’s small talk. To ask how Jane is, or how she slept. Even smaller. So she just watches. Jane’s small, even, practiced movements. The shine of her hair. The length of her legs, bare, and the shape of her hips.

What had she said last night? What confessions had she given? How much longing had she expressed? However much it was, she knows it was only half of what was true.

Eventually, Jane turns again, one mug in each hand, and brings them to the island. Then she slides over the sugar, which lives in some sort of knobbly, blue ceramic jar that was definitely made by Jane’s mother. Daria takes one spoonful, Jane two.

"I’ve been trying to think,” Jane says, after a moment, “of some good ‘I like my women like I like my coffee’ joke.”

Daria raises her eyebrows. “Like, 'I like my women like I like my coffee: hot and sweet’?”

Jane snaps her fingers. “Yeah. Something like that. That’s why you’re the writer.”

It was supposed to be mildly self-deprecating, some unspoken implication there that she herself was neither. But Jane doesn’t pick that up. She’s still looking thoughtfully into her mug, which is plain white and chipped at multiple places along the rim. Daria’s is also hand-thrown, like the sugar jar, probably by Amanda, wavy where she wraps her hands around it.

“What about this?” Jane says, so suddenly, and after so long a pause, that Daria had forgotten the topic. “I like my women like I like my coffee: bitter and first thing in the morning.”

Daria considers. “You don’t like your coffee bitter.”

“You’re really a stickler for detail, aren’t you? Too bad there isn’t any way to work that in.”

Daria mumbles something, hardly audible, about not being bitter—only words to fill an embarrassed silence, her sense of being seen. Jane moves closer to hear her. Then she smiles.

“But I do like you,” she adds. And then she leans in and very gently kisses Daria’s pink cheek.