#ellydash

“Um—” Grace still doesn’t know what to say, wishes Frankie would keep giving her something to listen to. She’s holding the phone with her left hand, the hand with the stronger wrist. It’s easy to run the fingers of her right hand down her neck, to graze the collar of her pajamas, to streak a bit lower until she’s touching one of her breasts through her shirt. She’s never done this while they’re still on the phone, but she can’t wait. Even the light pressure slams her with two entwined sensations: a sharp pulse of arousal between her legs, the pain of missing Frankie knotting her stomach. She feels a little guilty that Frankie doesn’t know she’s touching herself, but the guilt would be worse if Frankie did know, if she put Frankie back in the position of being asked to even think about cheating on Jacob. Frankie would shut that down in a heartbeat. She’d tried to articulate herself before Frankie left, and it hadn’t worked.

“Grace,” Frankie says softly. “What are you doing?”

She pulls her hand away, swallows hard. “Nothing. I’m doing nothing. I’m sitting on my bed wearing your favorite pajamas.”

“I wish you were doing something more interesting than that.”

“No,” says Grace. “I’m staying out of your way.”

“Doesn’t change what I wish.”

Grace makes room for a silence. She goes beneath the hem of her top this time, past her belly, lingers against her ribs. She holds the phone between her shoulder and ear for a moment so she can undo a couple of buttons, make it easier to move. “Wait, where are you?” She’s been picturing Frankie wandering the house, making funny faces at Jacob every time they cross paths, impressing him secondhand with her encyclopedic knowledge of tubers.

“There’s a tire swing in the backyard.”

“I miss you.” Grace touches her fingertips to the spot just below her nipple, right where she likes to be stroked—right where any number of people in any number of past years might have spent more time touching her if she’d ever told anyone other than herself what she wanted.

“And I miss you.” Frankie sighs. “What are you doing?”

“I’m, um, don’t make me tell you—”

“I wish I was there.”

“Me too.” For a few seconds, there’s nothing but their breathing. Surely Frankie knows exactly what she’s up to, but she turns her breaths into little pants so there’s no ambiguity. She looks down at herself, at her fingers moving beneath her pajamas, her nipple pressing against the silk. She imagines Frankie watching her from the side of the bed, a hand on Grace’s leg. Maybe Frankie would lean forward, hold Grace’s fingers still so she could press her tongue against the fabric. “You could watch,” Grace says. “Or help.” The words are hardly X-rated, but by Grace Hanson standards, she’s basically in a porno right now.

“Oh god.” Frankie takes a shuddery breath. “Grace, I think I should go.”

By this point in the story, which is in the first chapter of the third installment, it’s well established that Grace is a lesbian who’s in love with Frankie and knows she’s a lesbian who’s in love with Frankie. How Frankie feels is a little less established, especially now that she’s living in Santa Fe with Jacob, but it’s an emotional situation that–so far–Grace and Frankie have both dealt with in their usual stilted ways, falling back on old habits. Frankie refuses to hurt anyone and ends up hurting everyone; Frankie runs away; Frankie uses jokes and flirtation to express how she really feels, but under the safe mask of humor. Grace compartmentalizes everything; Grace drinks too much; instead of asking for what she needs, she tries to take care of it herself.

The implication that Grace often touches herself after a phone call with Frankie comes from my headcanon about that final bad-but-not-terrible habit of Grace’s, that self-reliance that makes her life livable. Grace loves Frankie, and has told herself she’s going to be Frankie’s girlfriend before her 74th birthday but has not actually managed to get out of her own head enough to plan out how this might happen. She’s been more emotionally open than she’s ever been before, but it’s still not “enough.” But! Grace Hanson is canonically a masturbation enthusiast for whom self-love is a major life improver. So, when she and Frankie talk on the phone, and it leaves her feeling miserable and pine-y and turned on every single time, her routine is to touch herself after the phone call is over. It’s a way to wallow and comfort herself at the same time, and to create some kind of sexual experience from a relationship that isn’t (actively, openly) sexual enough for her.

But all that’s just backstory. 

DWTC, DWTC is fundamentally about the breaking of habits and patterns. It’s about having something that, in theory, “works” (spoiler alert: if you’re miserable and pine-y and turned on all the time, something’s not working) but being brave enough to reach past the boundary of yourself to ask someone else to meet you there, to give you what you need. And to be brave enough to listen to what the other person needs, to make the changes that get you closer to what you truly want.

The most obvious broken pattern is Grace’s alcohol use. A big turning point in the story happens once Frankie is back home and they’re pursuing an actual partnership with each other, and Frankie asks Grace to stay sober for sex. This makes Grace nervous, but she agrees, and she takes the steps she needs to take (online research, tapering the amount she consumes) to make this happen. While she wouldn’t have come up with this plan on her own, it was really important to me that Grace isn’t only reducing her alcohol intake because Frankie wants her to. And so, even before this chapter opens, Grace has made the decision to stay sober for this phone call with Frankie. (She has one glass of wine earlier in the evening, but let’s face it, that’s a drop in the bucket.) Entirely of her own accord, Grace craves a clear-headed connection with Frankie more–at least in this moment–than she craves alcohol. 

The clear-headed sobriety does two things: it gives her a little preview of the bigger, scarier, more powerful sharp awareness she feels when they have sex for the first time, and, because she’s altered a pattern of her own behavior, it gives her the space to break the pattern of how she responds to Frankie’s flirtation. 

As you put it, Ellydash, Frankie urges Grace to “voice her need” in a manner that’s a little more intense than usual, but Frankie’s initial dialogue isn’t entirely out of the ordinary for them. In canon and in earlier segments of my series, Frankie uses suggestive language to broach intimate topics with Grace, then dials it back to the safe zone when Grace doesn’t entirely rise to the occasion. But here, we’ve got a version of Grace who’s trying to take care of herself in Frankie’s absence: trying to eat enough even if Frankie isn’t around to notice, trying to make conscious decisions about whether or not to have a drink, trying not to get entangled with men, trying to use masturbation to survive her Frankie-induced loneliness and sexual tension. She’s set those broken patterns in motion already, and when Frankie brings suggestiveness into the conversation, she makes the ill-advised, boundary-transgressing, inappropriate decision to touch herself while on the phone with someone in a committed relationship with someone else. Oops.

And of course, the elusive but intuitive Frankie notices. Grace is a little embarrassed and very sad at the end of their call, but doesn’t think this incident will ultimately make a difference. What she doesn’t know is that Frankie’s broken some of her own patterns, too. She doesn’t know that Frankie’s finally been able to admit to herself how unhappy she is. She doesn’t know that when they get off the phone, Frankie will force every ounce of her attention span into thinking about Grace in the serious, intimate ways she literally crossed state lines to get away from. Frankie doesn’t run away from the intensity of what she’s feeling; in fact, she does quite the opposite, going so far as to hurt Jacob in order to finally be honest about what she wants.

Grace ends chapter 1 craving alcohol, craving sex, and above all craving the intimacy she believes is out of her reach. When the final chapter ends, she’s in much the same place–while she’s proved she can change her relationship to alcohol and will continue to do so in the future, there’s a drink on the way, and, while she’s been sated by great sex, her sexual desires have only opened. But the major difference is intimacy. It’s what she and Frankie need most, and they’ve secured it. If Grace hadn’t stayed sober for their phone call, and if they hadn’t engaged in almost phone sex, and if Frankie hadn’t treated what happened with seriousness and honesty, they might not have gotten to that scary-but-safe intimate place. 

i think of grace at this point in time - this is set in my timeline around 2003 and their sixtieth birthdays, about ten years into robert and sol’s affair, probably the first year both girls are away at college - as very, very isolated and touch-starved in a way she absolutely does not let herself think about.  she probably was never particularly touchy-feely with robert or the girls, but even the casual parenting-type touches are gone for her now, and robert’s touch is never going to be warm and meaningful (another thing she doesn’t think about).  

the intro about grace in the empty house comes from the s2 ep where she says she used to go to the bar after work to avoid going home.  which is, of course, also where she met up with phil.  in the timeline i put together last summer, i pegged grace-and-phil as somewhere between 1999 and 2001 (i do not remember why, now).  so this is set between two and four years later.  ish.  long enough that grace has probably done a pretty good job avoiding those memories.  recent enough that the details are probably not too far away from her subconscious.  because that bit you’ve quoted is definitely a callback to grace saying, about phil, that he put his hand on her back and she felt something she’d never felt with robert.

so, okay, in this story where grace is obviously queer, how does she feel about babe?  and why does she react to babe so differently than she does with frankie?

i actually see phil, frankie, and babe as along a continuum of very similar types of people.  while phil is just not as intense as either of the women, he’s also willing both to ignore convention in favour of his own desires and to be silly, at least in concert with grace.  (they laugh, he teases her, but i’m thinking particularly of the way he goes along with her declaration to the room service guy that she’s renting him by the hour.  can you imagine robert’s response to something like that?)  so grace has a type.  but in 2003 she’d never even consider the possibility of being queer.  so why does she touch babe this way?

the fic begins with sensory details that emphasise solitude and space - echoes, immobile air, silence - and the first things that touch grace are the beach air and the blanket, both comforts she has to find for herself.  and then when babe arrives, grace has to be invited to touch.  or, rather, there’s a progression: babe asks grace to touch (“Six months of chemo and forget a hug, I don’t even get a hello?”), grace and babe mirror each other (“How are you, lady?” Grace demands, stepping back a little to get a good look at Babe but keeping firm hold of her shoulders, clinging to their solidity. / “I’m all right!” Babe laughs, gripping Grace’s arms in return.), and grace makes an overture and then waits for permission to complete it (Grace reaches out, waiting for Babe’s nod, and rubs her hand over the soft bristles.).  all of this while they’re still embracing, and sensory details are becoming more vivid and intimate, if not always positive (The wig still smells plasticky, memories of vomit and disinfectant clinging to it, but Babe’s own scent is there again under it all, vanilla and baby powder and one of the obscure expensive perfumes she had to leave off every day she had a hospital visit. Grace breathes it all in.).

that little dance of invitation and mirroring is really central to my thoughts about babe versus frankie.  because babe, for all she lives large and unapologetically, doesn’t demand that grace change to accommodate her.  this is only part of what i think about babe-versus-frankie, but it’s an important part.  we know that grace is actually rather more willing to be silly and daring than she seems - think of the bowling alley and sock-full-of-cocaine stories - as long as she has some backup.  so when babe does meet grace’s boundaries, she tests them, checks them, but doesn’t force them, and that makes grace more likely to bend to accommodate her.  frankie, though, doesn’t understand the concept of boundaries, bless her.  her excitement overcomes pretty much anyone else’s interests: ‘do these things look right to you,’ the way she is with pregnant mallory, looking phil up online, and so on.  babe, on the other hand, is willing to let grace be grace even to the point of missing a final goodbye.  so grace is able to reach out and ask babe for permission to touch, and then she’s emboldened to take it further.  

phil’s touch to grace’s back.  to someone who is rarely touched, it’s seismic.  it’s ‘something she’d never felt with robert.’  what does that mean?  what, exactly, does she feel?  there are a lot of possibilities.  desired is only one of them.  but i think grace is probably quite used to being the object of desire.  that’s a very surface-level type of desire, though.  (think of the way she knows how to react to nick.)  so to me, the touch is an acknowledgement of mutuality.  it’s about being wanted for herself.  it’s about feeling precious.  

grace is definitely not thinking about this in any conscious fashion.  but she is thinking about how wonderful it is to have babe safe.  saved.  and she wants babe to know how happy grace is about that, and how important babe is to grace.  so grace’s hand on babe’s back is protective, intimate.

if touch is connection, then what babe is asking - for grace to get a tattoo that connects them, on her skin - is a deeper, more lasting kind of touch.  and the last exchange reflects that, and babe’s ability to encourage grace to shift her boundaries (rather than trampling them as frankie might): Babe wiggles her fingers, and Grace reaches out slowly. Babe's hand is warm in hers, firm and comforting and there. Grace tightens her grip. Babe holds fast. And after a drawn-out pause, Grace stands up.

babe asks, offers: grace accepts, extends herself.  

touch comes back again in the coda to the story, when grace is with frankie.  frankie discovers grace’s tattoo via physical exploration of her body, and their intimacy is enhanced by the normalisation of touching each other: But Frankie's touch stops on her hip, tracing a circle. / Her fingers run gently up and down Grace's hip. / She reaches down to touch the tattoo, brushing Frankie's fingers, even though there's no difference between it and the surrounding skin any more.  touch conveys information, but also, they get to be sweaty and sticky, naked and exposed, share reassuring kisses and sleepy cuddles, and it’s all very, very healing for grace.