Chapter Text
“Come on guys, guess the word!” Autumn sighed animatedly, tapping the whiteboard with the tip of a pink marker. “It’s not even that hard of a word. Kat would get it if she was here.” Her lips rounded out in an indignant frown.
The girls had commandeered the lazy, sterile hospital room and turned it into a temporary hangout spot. The itchy, coarse hospital blankets had been replaced with personal ones from Swann’s house, magazines filled the corners of the rooms like tiny deities overseeing the dust, and the once blank whiteboard had been scrawled over with drawings and word games instead of the prescription medicines both Kat and Swann were on. In the middle of it, a half-hearted game of Hangman was presented:
O S _ E _ _ _ _ _ E
It seemed, to Swann, that no matter where the four of them were taken, they’d find a way to leave their mark. An indelible brand on the town that had tried so hard to ignore them.
“It’s ten fucking letters, Autumn. And, fuck you, you’re stuck with just us until Kat gets back from her scans.” Nora said monotonously, her face furled in defiance. She looked to Swann at her right, lying next to the girl in bed. “Do you know what it is?”
Swann huffed lightly, blinking at the whiteboard at the center of the room. “Sorry, I can’t –” she cut herself off, pushing herself up on her elbows and extending her head forward. “I can’t tell how far away the whiteboard actually is.” She brought her bottom lip between her teeth, settling into a stupor. “Still trying to get used to my depth perception being off-kilter.”
Autumn shuffled away from the board, putting the cap on the marker. “No worries, take your time.”
“A ten letter word that starts with an O and ends with an E…” Swann muttered absently, straining to see the board. Her chest swelled with a breath, and deflated as she shook her head. “Not a clue, sorry Nor.”
Nora clicked her tongue, patting her on the arm. “Nah, it’s fine. We’re losing anyway. We’ve got four letters and half the fuckin’ alphabet wasted.”
“Maybe if you read more than just your Dad’s porn mags you’d know it,” Autumn snorted, throwing the marker at Nora’s head.
“Hey!” Nora shrieked, rolling on her side, up and over Swann. The marker hit the pillow behind Nora mutely.
“Ow, Nora–!” Swann groaned, flinching as the girl jostled her right arm where her IV was still poked firmly into the thin flesh. The tape was beginning to peel at the edges, Swann noted as she ran a delicate fingertip atop it. “Watch the IV before you rip it out of my skin.”
“Shit, sorry,” Nora murmured shortly, hissing through her teeth as she untangled herself from Swann. However, rather than moving completely off of the girl, she seized the opportunity and shimmied down the length of Swann’s torso, settling herself near her midsection, crossing her arms over the gowned skin and then resting her chin atop them. “Hey, you’re comfortable.”
Swann laughed airily, “Wow. I’m glad.”
“This doesn’t hurt, does it? Me laying on you like this?” Nora asked, a nervous edge to her tone. She was a reckless girl, but not unaware of what her recklessness could cause. It was a point of interest to Swann, how such a brash, uncouth girl could be so careful, so tender when presented with something fragile.
Beneath the illusory confidence and searingly dyed hair, Nora was still just a teenage girl with ribs that break and a heart that bleeds. It appears that both intertwine, and Swann saw it all on her face–her lips refraining from a deep frown though they still curled, the slanted creases at her hairline the physical garment of her worry.
Swann smiled honestly, running her fingers through the front of Nora’s hair, savoring how soft it was to the touch. “No it doesn’t. You can stay.”
“Ugh, you guys are lame,” Autumn bemused from behind them, her footsteps nearing as she relented and abandoned the game. “You give up, I take it?” She asked as she slotted herself into the space to Swann’s left, the bed dipping as she adjusted to her side.
Nora buried her face against Swann’s stomach. “Yes, we give up. I don’t know fuck all about vocabulary. That guy is getting hung.”
Swann smacked Nora on the back of the head. “That tickled–but,” she turned to Autumn, “what she means is that we can’t figure it out.”
“The word was ‘Ostensible’,” she spoke softly to Swann, hooking her chin over the girls’ shoulder. “You are comfortable, by the way.”
Nora’s shoulders began to shake as she giggled, lifting her head. “Right,” she breathed, “because we were going to know the word ostensible, what the fuck.” She leveled Autumn with a glance, but eventually her eyes, as they sort of always had, returned to the scintillating green of Swann’s eye. “Hey,” she began, lowly, as if she almost didn’t want to be heard, “how’s the eye?”
Startled, a meek flush rises to the hollow of Swann’s rounded cheeks. She ghosts over the gauze on her left eye with a fingertip, her other hand, like it was a separate entity, returned to the fine hairs of Nora’s head, tangling loosely in them. “It mostly itches now,” she replied gravelly. “Dr. Braun said that was normal as it starts to heal. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to dig it out just to make it stop.”
Instinctively–because Autumn had this innate drive to protect, to keep her beloved ones away from danger lest the ramifications be too large, that she knew it to be a second soul ribboned around her bones–she gently took Swann’s hand away from her face, holding it to her own chest.
“Let’s not do that.” Autumn rubbed her thumb over the back of Swann’s hand. It was vaguely rough, yet it had not once ceased to be warm. She considered that a mercy. “The doctor said you got lucky. The cut wasn’t deep enough to lose the eye.”
Swann hummed, shooting a private, grateful smile to her friend. She should be grateful, shouldn’t she? She was lucky. She got to breathe and speak and stand and that should be enough.
“You’re lucky,” the doctor had said. His eyes, his two working eyes, roved over her analytically. “The man who did this to you didn’t do enough damage for you to lose the eye.”
He spared a glance at Swann’s parents, but quickly reverted his gaze back to his clipboard. Swann wondered, hazily as the meds she was on wore down, how someone so professional could sound so irritating. “The angle with which the knife penetrated the eye was acute, and severed only her cornea. I predict, with proper examination and healing, that she will remain permanently blind in the eye, but it won’t cause further harm to her to keep it.”
Swann couldn’t hold back her scoff. Because that was a miracle, right? She’ll remain blind, but she can keep the eye? What is she to do with a defunct eye?
She did this to herself, she knows, yet it doesn’t make the consequences any less severe.
(Yet to the rest of them, the public, it had been Corey. That doesn’t make her crazy, right? That, as a byproduct, allows her to be forgiven, right?)
Her mother reacted, innately, holding her wrist, silencing her with a disapproving twist of her lips, but it withered before it reached its apex as her mother’s eyes, her green working eyes, fell upon the gauze plastered to her daughter’s maimed, forever maimed, face. Her father was harrowed. Disheveled. He didn’t look at Swann. Somehow, he knew better than to try.
“I’m blind, Autumn. It’s no use to me regardless.” Swann hadn’t meant to sound so sharp, say it with such conviction, but the result had Autumn squeezing her hand violently, yet impulsively. Nora whimpered, something high and cut off. Swann cringed at her tone, but had not refuted or rectified her statement.
Neither Autumn nor Nora had asked her to.
“You know,” Nora rasped, tracing Swann’s cheekbone, peering at Swann with something alight in her eyes, “I bet it’ll be a totally badass scar. You’ll have all the chicks fawning over you.” She wiggled her eye brows crudely, a grin subsequent.
“Right,” Autumn shot back blandly, “because Velvet Cove is overflowing with – queer – people.”
“Fine then, I’ll be fawning over you. Kat too,” she said easily, grinning widely up at Swann.
Swann coughed dramatically, palming Nora’s forehead. “You’re unbelievable,” she huffed. Her flush rose to her skin, creeping up the length of her neck.
Autumn cackled, pressing a kiss to Swann’s cheek. It was warm with her regular body heat, brimming with life. She swallowed down the thought. “We saw you two kiss, dummy.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Swann’s voice was pitchy. She busied her hands back into Nora’s hair, trying to spike it upward, “let’s not go there right now. You should get a mohawk, Nora.” She trapped Nora’s hair between her palms and molded it upward.
It did little more than ruffle it. Nora hummed in approval. “You think?” She scootched forward moderately, resting closer to the bottom of Swann’s ribs, her body atop Swann’s completely. “That feels nice, keep doing that.”
“Okay.” Swann ran her blunt fingernails wistfully across Nora’s scalp, back and forth, back and forth, oscillating movements that were equal parts soothing as they were hypnotizing. “Maybe you could dye the tips of the mohawk, like, red.”
“Or keep it purple, so it still matches mine,” Autumn throatily added from the junction of Swann’s collarbone.
“Or, or, better idea,” Nora’s eyes slipped closed, “I mix red and purple together. Boom. I'm a genius.”
“That’s just magenta, dipshit.” Autumn flicked her friend across the nose.
“Okay, asshole, well, then I’ll do magenta,” Nora mocked the girl, her voice warbling.
“I don’t sound like that, dickhead.” Autumn dug her foot into the side of Nora’s thigh in retaliation, giggling at the subsequent hiss the girl let out.
“Hey, come on, don’t use my body as a battleground,” Swann groaned.
“Sorry, Swann,” Autumn said immediately. A cold, sharp bite of guilt sank mercilessly into her gut. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
Autumn took care to examine her friend, her brown working eyes darting up and down with rapidity, compartmentalizing the workings of Swann’s extremities with swiftness. It lasted no longer than a second, but Swann caught it. Barely she’d caught it, having to tilt her head to see.
And brown eyes, two gleaming, functioning brown eyes, had met one green eye, one green, catatonically devastating eye; an understanding passing amid them.
“I’m not fragile, Autumn, you can touch me.”
Autumn didn’t respond right away. The words wouldn’t come, and her throat swelled, because the memory was still so fresh, and Swann’s body was right there, living and breathing and moving, but Autumn knew what it felt like when it wasn’t. Saw what it looked like when it wasn’t.
She knew intimately now what it had been like to carry the body of her friend while she was unconscious. It felt dead.
And she knew that now. That there was hardly a difference between a dead body and an unconscious one, and for too long did she have to wonder which one Swann would end up being. Which one Kat would end up being.
She couldn't forget that.
And even though Autumn saw that Swann was still looking at her–her sharp, emerald green eye piercing and disillusory–and understood that she knew what Autumn wasn’t saying, Autumn smiled in spite of it.
“I believe you,” she replied thinly, pressing another kiss to the side of Swann’s head. That felt like enough.
“Yeah, Swann,” Nora piped goodnaturedly, “you’re tough as hell.” She, too, was leaning up and pressing a kiss to the other side of Swann’s head, then settled back across her stomach.
A silence befell the three. The sun fettered through the drawn curtains, laying politely across the floor in bright, warmed slats that rose along the foot of the bed. Swann could feel the heat seeping down to her shins, and the different kind of warmth, the kind that feels like blood rushing through veins and oxygen forcing ribbed lungs to expand, at her sides, all around her, enveloping her greatly.
Swann was warm. She was so, so warm.
“I don’t regret it.” Came her voice suddenly, disturbing the calm waves of silence. She faced the ceiling. She couldn’t deal with the headache that resulted when her depth-perception tried to adjust, or the ache that came when she looked too long into the working eyes of her friends. “I know I think I should–that, for the past week, I’ve caused worry and pain, but I don’t regret any of it.”
“Swann…” Nora whimpered.
“That’s okay,” Autumn quickly interjected, burying her head further into the junction of Swann’s neck and collarbone. Her nose brushed Swann’s neck. She smelled like heat, like raw, human warmth. “I mean, you freaked all of us out, and I was pissed at you for a little bit, but… It’s gonna be okay. Nobody’s dead.”
“Nobody’s dead,” Swann echoed softly, raspily.
“Are you sure the Abyss didn’t, y’know, influence you?” Nora gazed upon Swann’s face. Her lips were curled into a contemplative half-purse, and her nose twitched.
Vehemently, Swann shook her head. “I made that decision. I knew what I was doing. Saving Kat was the easiest decision to make; I’d never need help making it.”
There was a pause, full and heavy, and Nora broke it with a sniffle. Instinctively, Swann’s gaze shot down to the girl, and her frown deepened as she took in the state of her. “Don’t cry, Nor!”
Nora sniffled, pawing roughly at her eyes. “Sorry, sorry. I was just… you really fuckin’ scared me, Swann.”
“I know, I know,” Swann murmured thickly, cupping either side of her friend’s face. “I’m sorry, okay?” She ran her thumbs featherlight under Nora’s cheekbones, right under her tear-glistening eyes. She couldn’t see Autumn–not without fully turning her head, and she didn’t want to jostle the girl lying in the crook of her neck–so she resolved herself to breathing deeply.
Deep enough to let Autumn know that she was still there.
“I’m sorry.” She breathed in deep again, unable to say all of the things sticking inside. “I’m really, really sorry.”
“You’re hurt,” Nora whispered against Swann’s blanketed stomach, hiding the flush of sorrow that spilled across her cheeks. “Like, forever.”
Nora spoke as if that thought had only just dawned on her, and perhaps it had, as the past week had been nothing but a blur of cops and interrogations and the sick smell of hospitalized sterilization, with the rare reprieve of just existing in their little vacuum sealed hideaway before a nurse would come in to wheel Kat away or administer Swann’s antibiotics.
The permanence of Swann’s decision had finally set in, and still, Swann, forced to stare reproachfully at her friend and bare the pain she’s caused, cannot find it in her to regret an inch of it.
“I’m sorry.” Swann knew she was repeating herself, but it was the only part of the truth they’d want to hear.
“What the hell are you sad-sacks crying about in here?” Kat’s brash, boisterous voice shattered the fragility of the room, and it felt like it had exhaled with them. “Missed me that much?” She faced them all with a cherubic grin, laid back in a wheelchair that had begun to lose some of its color.
Swann sort of startled, clearing her throat hastily. “Kat! You’re back.”
At Swann’s admission, both Nora and Autumn raised their heads, coarsely wiping at their faces. “Finally, Kat. How’d it go?” Autumn’s voice wavered at her attempt to keep it even.
Kat’s face contorted incrementally at her friend’s subdued dispositions, the glisten of tears swirling around their eyes, but she chose not to dwell on it presently. “Well I’m not dead, right Nurse Jenny?”
Kat craned her head backward to face a woman adorned in pink-floral scrubs. The woman, Nurse Jenny, sighed and wheeled Kat further into the room. “That does seem to be correct,” she mused.
“That’s a relief,” Nora remarked dryly, though it had half the bite it usually did.
Nurse Jenny continued to help Kat settle back in, checking her IV fluids and hovering nearby as Kat rose and laid herself back in bed, eventually tucking the wheelchair back at Kat’s bedside, bidding the girls with a promise of Kat’s test results in the coming hours.
“What test was that for again?” Swann craned her head to the left to face Kat.
Nora shifted to lie on her side, still content on Swann’s midsection. Autumn lifted her head from Swann’s shoulder. Kat kicked a leg out. “Oh, some blood tests. Getting my cell counts n’ shit. I think.”
“What’ll that do?” Autumn blinked lethargically.
Kat shrugged, already over the discussion of her maybe-cancer. It had been three days of nonstop tests and meds and examinations–she’d gotten ill over it quickly. But looking back at the three girls before her, at Swann’s hopeful features, she knew she could stomach a few more.
“It’ll tell the doctors what my red and white blood cell count is. If my white-blood cell count is too high and the red too low…well, that means more tests. That means danger.” And Kat knew danger well, knew emphatically what it could do to a person. She hoped this time she’d done enough to avoid it.
But she knew where hoping got her.
“But that’s done with.” She followed up swiftly, nodding to the whiteboard. “What did you guys play while I was out?”
“A terrible game of hang man. I felt like I was being held at gunpoint to guess the word,” Nora lamented, throwing a quick poke to Autumn’s side.
“Yeah, only because you don’t read. Ever. At all.” Autumn flicked Nora across the ear.
Kat giggled, titling her head up high. “Bet I could guess it.”
“I think you could.” Swann offered the girl a private, kind smile.
“It’s on then,” Autumn declared, fluttering out of Swann’s bed. She retrieved the pink marker that had rolled under a side-chair and stood largely at the front of the room. “Think you got it?”
Kat stared at the whiteboard, this intense intrigue settling upon her relaxed, kind features. Her tongue poked timidly from between her lips as she thought. “There a ‘T’ in there?”
“Yeah, right between the ‘S’ and ‘E’.” Autumn filled in the blank space.
“It’s ostensible,” Kat fired back without the pretense of unsurety.
Autumn jolted in surprise, whipping half around to level the girl with an askew mouth, before it boiled into smug satisfaction. “Yeah, Kat. You got that.” She filled in the remaining blank spaces, glancing at Nora with something akin to righteousness. “I knew she would.”
“How did you get that?” Nora planted her palms on either side of Swann, indignantly rising from her prone form. “Like, genuinely, what the fuck? You guessed that so quickly!”
“I’m homeschooled, not illiterate, dumbfuck.”
“I’m actually very unappreciative of all the names I’ve been called today.”
Swann patted the top of Nora’s head. “You’ll live.”
“I can’t sleep.” Kat’s gravelly voice emerged into the dark room. She exhaled, restlessly shifting to face Swann on the other bed. “Can you?”
“No.” Swann glanced at the clock above the door.
11:47 P.M.
Thirteen minutes to midnight.
“Are you ready to be discharged tomorrow?” Swann lilted her head to the side, facing Kat.
The darkness of the room spilled long shadows across Kat’s figure, painting her in softer angles and obscured fear. She looked every bit the child she was. Swann could imagine she appeared much the same, herself.
“I guess,” Kat said, frowning. “Won’t make much of a difference.”
“I think it will. Your blood test came back normal.” Swann was brimming with tentative hope, because even though she knew where hoping could get them, she found it a substance she couldn’t deny.
“Don’t do that.” Kat tilted her head, derisive.
“I’m not doing anything?”
“Yes, you are! You’re–” Kat sat up, sitting cross legged as she huffed. “You’re just being Swann.” She sagged forward.
“Is that… bad?” Swann sat up too, dangling her feet over the edge of her bed. Her voice was laced with reservations, because even after all this time, this whole summer of nothing but dreamlike bliss, Swann can’t believe that being herself is a quality people want. What Kat wants.
“No! No, Swann, not at all, dude.” Kat perked up in one rough movement.
She met Swann’s eye and hoped that everything she wasn’t saying was heard. Because Kat was a coward. Kathryn Mikaelsen was an irrefutable, undeniable coward, and she knew it. Kat didn’t have the strength to tell her friends she had cancer, and she barely had the courage to tell Swann all that she meant to her.
Swann was supposed to read it, years later, if Dylan kept her promise. The words, so much like the rawness of emotion, threatened her, ribboned around her ribs, and scraped the truth from her bones.
Yet she did not speak. She did not say what was truly engraved on the backs of her teeth because she did not want to be wrong. She has cancer–that is her truth. Or, it was, and she cannot conceive another outcome. She knows where her hope has gotten her.
But, staring at the swimming green of Swann’s eye, and the pristine white of the gauze that covered the real truth beneath, Kat wanted to cry.
It had been so, so long since she had wanted to cry.
“Come here?” Swann spoke, her voice the barest whisper, patting the top of her thigh.
“Why?” Kat laughed in spite of herself.
Swann answered her honestly. “I wanna be close to you?”
Kat lurched forward before, cognitively, she could catch up. She was jolted back into herself when her bare feet touched the ground, sending a wave of nerves crashing up her spine. They were alone, and conscious enough to remember it, and not so in pain that even the thought of moving would send them into a fit of violent aches.
Kat was unsure of what to do with that.
Swann seemed nauseous about it, too.
Kat pressed on, taking her time with crossing the three foot distance between their beds. Behind her, the clock read 11:51 PM.
Nine minutes to midnight.
Kat was riveted when her knees knocked against Swann’s. “Hi,” she said quietly.
Swann reached out and took the loose end of Kat’s gown between her fingers, rubbing idly. “Hello,” she echoed. “Sit down?”
“I’m – getting there,” Kat said lowly, fumbling her way onto the girl’s lap, folding her gown up so it bunched at her mid thigh. “There.”
“Perfect.” Swann wrapped her hands around Kat’s hips, more for the need of touch rather than support.
“You’re so weird, Swann.” The words weren’t spoken harshly, and Kat sort of sounded amused. “It’s great.”
“Sorry,” Swann didn’t sound even an ounce of it, “I just like being near you. It… it really makes me feel like I don’t have to regret anything.”
“Why would you regret anything?” Kat snaked her arms around Swann’s shoulders.
Swann twisted her lips, looking askance at the floor below them. “I freaked all of you guys out. I… I’m fucking blind, Kat. My mom can barely look at me, my dad won’t try, and I’ve seen what my face looks like under the gauze. It’s… bad. Ugly. But I–”
She broke off, rousing the courage to bring her gaze back up to the girl resting so weightlessly, so reverently, in her lap. She saw the rawness of blue, the expansiveness of round, open, unearthed shades that she was swimming in them.
It crashed over her, and she let it. It sparked a braveness in her that she could not find anywhere else. She did not want to find it anywhere else.
Because peering into Kat’s earnest blue eyes, so icy like glaciers, made her want to be brave. Made her want to be honest. She had always wanted to be honest.
“I can’t regret it because I did it for you. And, selfishly, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try everything to get you to just live. I had to hope. I had to believe in anything I could.” Swann’s grip tightened around Kat’s hips, not to bruise, not to hurt, but to remember what she could have lost.
“Swann…” Kat breathed. Swann watched the movement like a ritual; the slow expanding of Kat’s chest, and the sure way it deflated. “Every time I look at you I expect to find someone different. Something different. I never do.” She closed her knees around the sides of Swann’s thighs, settling in more assuredly.
“What do you find?” Swann asked. Not more than a whisper.
Kat put her forehead to Swann’s. She traced under Swann’s good eye with a thumb. “What I found, every time, was my soulmate. Because I saw you. I know you thought you could hide, that the eye of the camera was what people wanted to see more, but green was always my favorite color. So,” a pause, a lick of the lips, “I really need to know something.”
She could be brave. Kat could be brave. Swann was so unendingly brave every day that surely Kat could show her she didn’t have to be for just one night. Maybe she was a coward and couldn’t tell her everything, but she could show her. There was a comfort to be found in action, in the chaos it could cause, in the peace it may bring.
“Need to know what?” One of Swann’s hands slid down to the curve of Kat’s hip, resting there, encouraging.
“If I kissed you, would you regret that?”
“I think I’d regret letting you waste the opportunity more.”
So, Kat tipped forward, a relief of the body, pressing her lips to Swann’s, a correspondence met between two souls damned to entwine their hardships.
Swann made a little cut off noise in the back of her throat, tilting her head to pour all of her heart into the kiss. Kat’s hand traipsed amid the back of Swann’s neck, fingers curling at the base of her scalp.
When Swann let her hand smooth up the curve of Kat’s backside, Kat gasped this sort of involuntary noise, breaking away from Swann. She put a hand to Swann’s collar bone, letting the stuttering in her chest mellow out into an awkward breath.
“I don’t want to regret that.”
“I certainly don’t,” Swann muttered, palming the edge of Kat’s gown, skimming her fingertips along the rough fabric, wondering just how stark the contrast of Kat’s skin would be.
Kat kissed her again. As simply as that; requiring no further thought than the effortless one of want. Kat kissed her like she had something to prove. Kat kissed her like she knew she wouldn’t break her; her fragility was a pretense for weakness, and Swann had attested to be the strongest of them all.
Swann pulled Kat flush against her, hands groping, lips seeking. If she was asked where she started and Kat ended, she could not say. She was hot all over; kissing Kat the fuel for her internal inferno.
She ran her tongue along the seam of Kat’s lips, the action beyond her bodily comprehension, and Kat groaned, flexing her fingers at the nape of Swann’s neck, snaking up into the girls’ hair. The motion caused Swann to stutter, breath hitching high in her throat–she bit down on Kat’s bottom lip, in some sort of retaliation, or rather to garner the same reaction from the girl. It was quite addicting, Swann soon discovered, to have a pretty girl sat in her lap and kissing her and touching her.
The feeling roiled hotly in her gut, seeping lower, dangerously close to a territory its never reached. She drug her hands up Kat’s clothed back all blunt nails and calloused palms–Kat squeezed her knees tight around Swann’s thighs.
They’ve never done this.
Never felt so hot, or so beyond themselves, it was apparent in Swann’s clumsy hands, never staying in one spot too long, and in Kat’s hasty mouth, open and bitten.
Yet, it was revival.
A whirlwind of renewal, of entwined life mingling throughout the reeds of body heat and breathlessness and groping palms.
Kat pushed away with a gasp, one had palming rigidly at the neckline of Swann’s gown, the other still buried in the girl’s hair. “You’re not ugly,” she exhaled, a shaky admission to the quiet hum of a sleeping world. “Nothing about you ever could be, missing an eye or not.”
She kissed down Swann’s neck, tugging the fabric of the gown away, without letting the girl answer.
To Swann, that was mercy.
Kat led a trail down warm skin, listening, examining what worked. She sucked one spot, methodically, learning what made the girl below her tick and hum and choke–and Swann did choke, surprised, when Kat bit the sensitive junction right under her jaw, soothing it with a measured swipe of her tongue.
“Kat–” Swann held the girl at her hips, hands stilled momentarily.
“Too much?” Kat began to pull back, voice teetering on sheepish.
“Not enough,” Swann’s tone rang foreign in her ears, never having been so taken or hollowed. “You can keep going– I’m not going to break.”
As if to prove the statement, or for her own selfish need, Swann jerkily tugged Kat flush against her, chest to chest, thigh to thigh, the thin layers of their identical gowns ironical barriers barring them from the precipice of no return.
But as Kat held the curve of Swann’s jaw on either side, a mere inch separating them, saying, “I know, Swann.” As she surged forward to kiss her, renewing their blazing correspondence written by unexplored desire, Swann knew it wasn’t enough.
The point of no return was undecipherable, an existence of neither here nor there, and Swann didn’t feel here nor there regardless.
She felt hot, it burned low in her gut, down between her legs.
It was a feeling not so foreign, not so inexplicable–something like trying to remember a dream hours after waking–but not something she thought she could own like this, feel it so cosmically above herself, a rhythmic pulse in her heart.
Kat returned to kissing her jaw, slow, but intentional ministrations that told Swann more than words could. Confessions Kat was too cowardly to say with the radiance of her voice, but brave enough to sow into Swann’s livened skin with the confidence of her lips.
There was a similar burn in Kat, symbolic of an innocence she was glad to lose.
Losing it meant growing up.
With each new kiss, rewarded with a mewl or stutter from the swell of Swann’s chest, Kat was shedding a childhood she once was doomed to die in. Kat, in a timeline just out of reach, had once been ready to die.
She felt Swann’s hands slide under her gown, beneath where it bunched at her hips, and that was enough to live. Swann’s calloused hands glided over smoother skin, hotter skin, and held. It burned Kat alive, nearly.
It was sublime, to feel such heat from another person, from Swann.
Kat, earnest to the marrow of her soul, moaned something mortal, right below the shell of Swann’s ear where she’d been kissing her way back up.
Swann, instinctively, reactionarily, froze, her hands, resting as reverent soldiers on sacred land, tightened–Swann opened her mouth to speak, but found no words adequate. This was beyond words, beyond the preliminary, so Swann, set ablaze by the heart downward, set herself into action.
She shifted, lightning quick, until Kat was supine against the bed, sinking with a steadfastness born from teenage-desire to be known. Swann, above her, blinked, her eye scanning about her face with precision.
“You’re gorgeous,” Swann admitted. Guttural. “My depth-perception may be fucked, and I can’t see very far anymore, but I don’t need my sight to have your beauty immortalized within my heart.”
Kat huffed through her nose, wide eyed, arms placid by her head. “Yeah, right. Me and my botched buzzcut.”
Deflection was her armor, and even now, Kat utilized its bite. She was unused to such affection, even still, though her body hummed with wanton want.
“Hey, I already told you I love how you look,” Swann admonished, tangling her fingers with Kat’s, pinning it to the bed, her other meandering along the edge of Kat’s figure, down where her gown had ridden up to her waist. “I just love you, Kat.”
“You say that so easily.” Kat’s eyes were bleeding things, all round and lithe, as she swallowed that admission. Of all things, it didn’t feel like the cement of disbelief.
“Because it’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done.” Swann’s hand stops at the hem of the gown, dragging her eyes from plain boxers to blue, blue, blue eyes.
Kat crashed their lips together again, assured, wanting, hungry. Maybe she couldn’t say it, maybe she knew it so painfully that saying it would only further her anguish, but she could prove it. Kat could always prove the unexpected.
She used her free hand to grab Swann’s, hastily dragging it under her gown, placing it to her own hot skin where she needed it most. She moaned, high and real, as Swann’s hand settled firm atop the swell of her breast.
“I’m not fragile, either, Swann,” Kat groaned over the seam of Swann’s lips. A challenge. A truth.
Swann shifted between Kat’s legs, settling down, still holding Kat by the hand. She tore her lips down Kat’s jaw, mirroring Kat’s earlier action, all teeth and tongue and purpling skin. A problem for the morning, but a sight to behold for now.
“You never were,” Swann agreed, her voice coiling like a vice around Kat’s sane reasoning.
Kat let Swann’s hand travel lower, dipping beneath the waistband of her boxers, let her mouth paint across her skin with the ink of the soul, let her gown be discarded to the darkness around them–for they knew the light could not hold them as gently as the hidden oasis of their hospital room could, and had–and finally, finally, let herself feel alive.
Behind them, ticking mutely, for it was never allowed to ring or chime, its voice never having been bestowed, the clock struck a new hour.
12:02 A.M
Though neither girl took heed to the time, it still laid upon them as the woven tapestry of beginning.
Because beginning doesn’t start with the sun, but rather with the ones who were brave enough to live for it. Kat felt brave enough to live for it. Swann stayed brave enough to sacrifice for it. The sun would rise on their breathing bodies, entwined.
That was their own beginning.