Chapter Text
“Lord, I am so glad to be home. Not to say the forest wasn’t an... interestin’ escape, but I’d much rather be here with you.”
Shelby’s eyes flicker from where her hand is interlaced with Toni’s to Toni’s own gaze. They’re tucked into each other - Shelby’s head on Toni’s collarbone, with Toni’s leg slotted between hers - focusing their time into each other in their last few days of Winter Break, before the grueling process of classes, extracurriculars, and homework envelope them entirely.
“I’m happy you’re home,” Toni mumbles, running her fingers through Shelby’s hair with her spare hand. “Shit kinda got boring after a while. Martha made me play Yahtzee four hundred million times.”
“It couldn’t have been that bad.”
“Every time I rolled a Large Straight she’d whisper ‘that’s ironic.’”
Shelby’s laugh tickles her neck, even the snort she lets out at the end.
When they quiet down, Toni really takes in Shelby. She missed her over break, but she misses her whenever she’s gone, for however long. She’s a total sight for sore eyes, for sure, but that’s not what’s so hypnotizing about her. It’s more about how looking at Shelby brings her inner peace, in a strange way, because her heart is still pounding at the idea of having this insanely gorgeous girl in her bed, but she’s also in some sort of nirvana.
“Was it hard?” Toni asks, scratching her fingernails lightly against Shelby’s scalp in a way that has Shelby almost purring. “Your family isn’t the greatest about everything, so, you know, was it hard? The twenty four seven surveillance?”
“It wasn’t all bad.”
Shelby snuggles in closer as she thinks, so close Toni can hear their hearts beat against each other in sync. Cold, nimble fingers begin tracing patterns on the sliver of skin between Toni’s sweats and where her tank top has risen up.
“I love my family, and I love bein’ around them - fishin’, huntin’, board games after dinner. But sometimes, my daddy asks me about what I’m always doin’ out.”
“Doesn’t he like the Reid’s?”
Shelby shrugs. “We go to the same church.”
“But?”
Shelby inhales through her nose and holds it for a moment, before sharply releasing the air, shaking her head. “I wanna be able to tell them I’m with you , and my real friends, and we’re not talkin’ about boys or the Bible. That we’re playin’ games like Spencer does, and I’m eatin’ garbage food straight from the bag, and I’m real happy doin’ it.”
Toni waits until Shelby’s breathing slows. “But you can’t.”
“No,” Shelby closes her eyes, taking in the air they share. “I can’t. So it wasn’t all bad, but it wasn’t all great, either.” She shifts again, turning her head so her lips graze against Toni’s jaw. “But you kept me sane, in the few hours we had.”
“Yeah, at least we had that,” Toni breathes out, without really thinking about what she’s saying. Shelby’s breath on her skin always drives her mad, but she shakes herself out of Shelby’s hypnotizing presence, pushing herself up on her elbows.
She feels Shelby’s gaze stay on her as she shuffles out of the bed, moving towards her closet to dig through the bottom. “Here, I- I got you something.”
“Toni…”
Shelby’s voice trails from behind her, but Toni shakes her head, waving her hand behind her. “Nah, let me treat you.”
She turns around, but the box stays behind her back as she approaches the bed. Shelby swings her legs over the side, but stays sitting, tipping her head back to maintain eye contact. Toni kind of likes being taller than Shelby for a moment, she likes how Shelby’s neck tenses and how her jawline comes out when Shelby looks up at her.
Toni taps her foot a few times, before suddenly maneuvering the box around her back, thrusting it towards Shelby. “Here. Happy late Christmas.”
“Happy Christmas?” Shelby giggles, delicately removing the tape from the cardboard box Toni haphazardly put together. Her smile fades, though, as she uncovers the gift beneath, a rose gold pendant with the initials TS engraved. “Toni…”
“I know, it’s um, a little obvious, right? But,” Toni scratches the back of her neck. “I mean, you know the font. That’s a Taylor Swift necklace.” She drags her own finger along the small pendant, tapping the initials in the center. “So you can wear it and your dad’s not gonna know. I don’t know how fashionable wearing two necklaces is…”
Her fingers fidget against each other behind her back as she rambles, keeping her eyes on the pendant.
“I love it,” Shelby whispers, fingering the pendant, turning it around and running her fingers along the chain. She shifts on the bed so her back is facing Toni, before asking “Can you put it on me?”
Toni only nods and moves to gently pinch the chain between her fingers, brushing the hair away from Shelby’s neck with her other hand. Without a thought, she leans down and kisses below under Shelby’s ear, not even realizing what she’s done until Shelby shudders and exhales shakily.
“All done,” Toni murmurs.
She runs her fingers through Shelby’s wavy hair, admiring the contrast between her own olive skin and Shelby’s blonde locks.
Then, suddenly, she pops up. Her spine straightens as she whips around to her desk, remembering the object that took up the entirety of her winter break. “Oh, and uh…” She hops over, hearing Shelby scoot around to watch her fumble with her computer. “Here’s your laptop back.”
Shelby furrows her brows at the way Toni’s presenting it to her, with the top opened and the monitor on, but she pulls it onto her lap regardless, scanning her desktop. “Did you try to play Minecraft on this?” She asks, pointing to the Minecraft Launcher on her Taskbar. “You know my laptop’s prehistoric.”
“I just wanted to check. Maybe check it yourself?”
She slides back into bed, settling into Shelby’s side. Shelby’s still raising an eyebrow, her eyes darting between Toni and the screen, so Toni takes matters into her own hands - literally - by placing her hand on the trackpad and bringing the cursor over to the launcher.
Minecraft loads.
For Shelby, this is monumental, as her computer usually fizzles and explodes when she opens more than two Google Chrome tabs. Her eyes grow shiny as she notices the various other applications scattered around her screen, which Toni points out with a shaky finger. Emulators, upgrades, Minecraft mods Shelby’s never even heard of before.
“Now you don’t have to borrow your brother’s laptop,” Toni explains. “You can play whatever you want, whenever.”
Shelby clicks a few times on the Minecraft home screen, until she enters one of her favorite Minecraft PvP servers and sees GreaseLightning joined the game.
A giggle bursts from her, as she lolls her head back onto Toni’s shoulder. “You can change it, if you want,” Toni says with a smile, watching as Shelby jumps around a lobby parkour. “I just needed something, and that was a good night.”
Shelby sniffles like she’s about to cry, which Toni can’t believe until she flickers her gaze from the screen and sees the glossy sheen over her eyes. “This must’ve cost a fortune.”
“Nah,” Toni shrugs, tapping the side of the laptop. “It was just a few upgrades. The hard drive got replaced, but Nora had a spare from the computer lab. I paid her in manual labor.”
“What sort of manual labor is Nora avoiding?”
Toni snorts. “I had to shovel her driveway for like, a month.”
Shelby laughs in surprise, dragging her eyes down to Toni’s arm, before her hand follows the same path, squeezing Toni’s bicep. “That explains this new development.”
Toni rolls her eyes and blushes, but still lifts her arm to properly flex it, just to bask in Shelby’s gaze, who’s still staring at the barely-there peak of Toni’s bicep.
“Thank you,” Shelby breathes out, leaning in to steal a kiss from Toni (and another, and another ) before she pulls back, tucking her head into Toni’s neck. “No one’s ever done somethin’ like this for me.”
Toni swallows. “Yeah, of course.”
There’s a comfortable silence. At least, Toni assumes it’s comfortable for Shelby, who’s just letting out content sighs every few seconds. It’s not for Toni, who’s metaphorically sweating bullets about what she’s about to say next. She fidgets with her glasses, letting the bridge nudge against the side of her nose, because she’s not sure what else to do with her shaking hand.
“Um.” One sound is all she can muster.
“Yeah?”
There Shelby is again, always so soft, always so loving, always there. Shelby moves her head away to try and look at her, but Toni quickly uses her free hand to keep Shelby against her neck. There’s no way she’s doing this while making eye contact.
“You just… deserve it. You deserve the best shit, the best games, and the best computer, and to play what you want because it makes you happy. And you shouldn’t care what your dad thinks, or what anyone wants to think about you, because you’re just… Fuck, there’s no one more beautiful than you when you smile.”
Shelby’s hot breath is ragged against her skin, but she presses on, because this is important.
“And I think my life was good before you were there, but it was always about waiting. Waiting for something good to finally happen. Waiting for good news, for the universe to finally pay me back for the shit it’s taken. Not with you. With you, it’s like I’m trying to stay in every moment as long as possible, just in case we don’t have the next one.”
Finally, she closes her eyes, leans her head back against the headboard, and says:
“That was a lot of shit about me. But it’s really about you, because you make me feel all of that. Before we actually started talking I had you up on this pedestal, because you know, you were just so fucking beautiful, and so kind, and I just couldn’t believe someone like you would choose me. But you did, you do, and you’re just, you’re even better. You’re better than all the shit I made up in my head about you. And everything about you- I just, I-”
Shelby cuts her off with a hand to her cheek. She pushes herself off of Toni, and Toni lets her, so Shelby can look her in the eye, rub her thumb across her cheek, and ease the tension out of her throat.
“I love you.”
Fucking finally .
“Oh Toni.” Shelby cocks her head, and she actually is crying now, a few tears dribbling down her cheeks. “I love you, too. So much, so freakin’ much.”
She leans in and captures Toni’s lips between hers.
And Toni loves her. And Shelby knows it, and Shelby loves her, too.
Maybe the drive there wasn’t easy. Maybe there were some unprecedented twists and turns, and pain, and terrible shit Toni knows had to happen to teach them life lessons or whatever.
The drive there wasn’t easy, but love is. She knows it, when she looks into Shelby’s eyes. Loving Shelby is the easiest thing she’s ever had to do.
Toni knows all the feelings besides love are a lot to deal with sometimes. No couple is perfect, obviously, and no couple is without their arguments. After all, if Toni’s life had a Spotify Wrapped, “Anger” would be her top genre.
“You cheated.”
“ How is that cheatin’?”
“I can’t believe you’re fucking justifying this!”
“What’s next, Toni?” Shelby’s eyebrows lower in frustration, but she never takes her eyes away from the screen. “Are Totems of Undying cheatin’? Are Mending books cheatin’?”
Toni growls and slams her mouse against her bedding. “You enderpearled through the roof of the Nether, destroyed the bedrock floor with a piston glitch, and AFK’d at a Zombified Piglin mob farm for two hours! You’re up to level a hundred and six! How is that not cheating?”
“I’m not defyin’ any game limitations! Are you forgettin’ someone built a sextuplet Iron Golem farm at spawn with a chunk loader attached that crashed the damn server!”
“Nora apologized and turned it into a quadruple one! You’re the one that tried to build a mob switch!”
“I’m sick of creepers blowin’ up my auto-crop farm!”
“Yeah, still not sure about how ethical that is, with the twelve Villagers you’ve got working around the clock.”
“I’m real sorry, Toni, have you been fightin’ for the proletariat? Pushing for those regulation laws? Didn’t think so!’
“Just stop abusing the crappy Pigmen farm.”
“ Crappy ? I’ll have you know that damn contraption took me six hours to build.”
“You mined out every block of magma from the Nether! What if I needed that?”
“Go sit at the Magma Cube farm, it’s a hundred blocks from the Piglins.”
“Okay.” Toni pinches the bridge of her nose, reaching forward to slam her laptop lid closed. “Enough Minecraft for today.”
Somewhere under “Most Played” would be the sound of her own laughter, because she’s still a little shit.
“Lol.”
“You did not just say ‘L-O-L’ out loud.”
“Uh…”
“ How is this funny?”
“Dude, I lost my virginity to Shelby fucking Goodkind. You’re telling me that’s not funny?”
“Yes, Toni, it was funny, two months ago , at Fatin’s party , when it happened .”
“I just got reminded of it.”
“Hm, I wonder why?”
“Maybe it’s because of the-”
“The sex, Toni. It’s because of the sex.”
“Lol.”
“Are you tryna make sure this never happens again?”
And if that Wrapped counter somehow kept track of her heart palpitations, she’d probably be in the thousands. When she’s with Shelby, though, the fear’s all worth it.
“This is Toni, my lab partner.”
Jobeth nods as she continues dabbing at a clean glass. “Will you be staying for dinner, Toni?”
“Uh,” Toni turns to Shelby, who nods, so she starts nodding, too, because she guesses there’s like, a nodding-thing going on. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll stay.”
Dave stares at her from his leather recliner, rocking slowly back and forth as his gaze burns holes in the side of her head. “And you’ll be comfortable with joining us in Grace?”
Toni knows she doesn’t exactly give off “Godly” vibes, but she’s not a total asshole. She knows faith and all that is still really important to Shelby, so she says, “Yeah, of course. Namaste and all that.”
“That’s a greeting,” Shelby murmurs.
“Oh. Uh. I just- um. Yeah, Grace is fine. All good.”
But under her favorite artists would be Shelby. Always. Martha’s probably pissed she got dropped down a peg, though.
Who is she fucking kidding, her friends love Shelby more than they love her.
“Toni! It’s my turn to play with Shelby!”
“Bump off, I’m like, two Cups off of kicking her ass.”
Martha pounces on her, right in the middle of Choco Mountain, tearing the controller from her hand and rolling off her to finish the map.
“What the fuck, Marty?”
Martha never takes her eyes off the screen, managing to barely scrape sixth place, after coming back from Toni’s embarrassing twelfth. “You already lost five times.”
Toni scoffs and crosses her arms, watching as the scoreboard appears, with her measly twelve points accumulated over all of the maps.
“It’s alright, baby.” While the next match loads, Shelby leans over to peck Toni on the cheek. “I’m not with you for your Mario Kart skills.”
“Obviously not,” Fatin says, having strolled into the Reid’s living room unannounced. “I can barely hold the controller with these claws, and I still kicked her ass.”
“Fuck off.”
Eight people lounge around the couches and recliners set up in front of the television. It’s hard to imagine a time before this, when it would only be five, throwing cheese puffs and Sorry! pieces at each other from across the room like Nerf darts.
Sometimes, she scrolls back on Marty’s Instagram profile, and takes in the photos of them from years prior, with braces and taped glasses and ill fitting clothes. Dot’s Walmart-brand hair dye, Leah’s penchant for knee high socks, Nora’s unkempt hair, Martha’s sweaters that hung past her hands like Mabel from Gravity Falls. Then, she looks at herself. The same thick rimmed glasses, her oversized graphic tees, but that same smirk, and same eyes.
The same girl who thought she never deserved a chance with someone like Shelby Goodkind.
Her eyes flicker over to Shelby, who’s still immersed in the game, swaying back and forth in time with her character.
Shelby Goodkind: A total fucking nerd. Just like her.
She looks to Rachel, who’s deathly concentrated on the book Leah’s got in her hand, as Leah delves into the lore and world building of The Inheritance Cycle .
Rachel Reid: Master Class Simp™. Just like her.
Then, there’s Fatin, hanging off of Dot’s shoulder and shoving her phone into Dot’s face, trying to, as Fatin puts it, “show her the light” (or, more accurately, introduce her to social media). Dot’s not interested in the slightest, but Toni can see her barely contained laughter as Fatin explains the ins and outs of influencers and pyramid schemes.
Fatin Jadmani: Obsessed and hyper-fixated. Just like her.
It makes her wonder how many other people fit the same molds as she does, just with different words. How many people she’ll never see again after graduation, who could’ve been one of her best friends. After all, she just barely caught these three before it was too late.
She wonders if “too late” is subjective, because it’s not like they have a lot of time left, anyway.
In seven months, Fatin’ll be fucking off to California, and Dot’s gonna follow her, since she’s got nothing left in Hopewell. Rachel has seventeen billion offers to choose from, with all the diving scouts that came to watch her, while Leah’s got options on both coasts. Nora’s acceptance into Princeton was all she gave a shit about, so she’s been collecting hoodies since she committed in October. Martha’s staying close by, because family comes first. It’s gonna fucking suck when they all scatter across the continent, but, fuck, if she isn’t proud of how far they’ve all come.
Shelby applied Early Admissions back in October to six schools and was accepted into all of them. Despite the fact they both applied without consulting the other, three of Shelby’s schools wound up being in the same cities as Toni’s own choices.
Toni’s guidance counselor said all three were excellent choices for her major, but that ultimately, the decision was hers. The University of Chicago gave her more than half her tuition in scholarships, while MIT would get her a list of connections longer than Shelby’s transcript (which had, like, seventeen thousand extra curriculars).
She knows they’re young, and that choosing a school based on a girl you’ve been dating for four months is stupid.
But she wanted to choose Shelby, and, deep down, she wanted Shelby to choose her.
So they did.
In Shelby’s Instagram bio lies LUC ‘25. Toni’s own page, despite being untouched for almost two years, now reads UC 2025.
There's that girl in Toni's head again, a fourteen year old Toni Shalifoe who never thought anyone would choose her, let alone Shelby Goodkind. Because girls like Shelby Goodkind didn't choose girls like Toni Shalifoe.
Except, they do.
Toni and Shelby signed their deposit checks, together, a week prior, and the only thought Toni had on her mind was how easy it was to choose Shelby.
After all, love is easy.
“Shalifoe! You got Taki dust all over the fucking rug!”
Cleaning Taki dust out of a rug is not.
Toni grabs a dish rag and some of that cleaning shit the Reid’s always use, that's basically chemical bleach, and gets down to work. She’s so focused, she doesn’t even notice that Shelby’s given her controller to Nora, and snagged a dish rag of her own.
“You were in first,” Toni murmurs, watching Shelby delicately dab at the mess Toni somehow made worse.
Shelby lifts her head up, her green eyes perfectly aglow in the light of the television screen. “I wanted to help. Some things are more important.”
Toni blinks. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Shelby responds kindly. “Now, for the love of all things holy, Toni, please use a frickin’ bowl next time.”
[FoesToLovers]: does anyone kno when shelbys getting on
[DotDotGoose]: she said soon
[FoesToLovers]: were gonna build a mansion w 1 bedroom lol
[MartyMoo]: Gross
BehindYourBack [Formerly known as GreaseLightning] joined the server.
[FoesToLovers]: wtf willow ?
[BehindYourBack]: Surprise!
[FoesToLovers]: wait a fucking minute
toni @foestolovers: @behindyourback ur username is a little on the fucking nose huh
willow @behindmyback: @foestolovers To quote my beautiful girlfriend: lol
fatin @foffjadmani: @foestolovers told you. dumbass
nora @birdswithhats: @foestolovers her name means willow tree, toni.
leah @rainermyparade: @foestolovers And the foreshadowing was like, painfully obvious.
toni @foestolovers: @rainermyparade @foffjadmani @birdswithhats shut tf up
martha @funnybunnies02: @foestolovers wait you guys have been on twitter this whole time??
fatin @foffjadmani: @funnybunnies02 the only people still on facebook are you and your mom
martha @funnybunnies02: @foffjadmani i like my mom
toni @foestolovers: can we go back to my gf being an actual betrayer
willow @behindmyback: @foestolovers Love you <3
toni @foestolovers: @behindmyback luv u too 🏀
fatin @foffjadmani: ew they put each others @ in their bios