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It happens for the first time after a particularly touchy nighttime Forensics tournament leaves them with results too similar to the last time April and Sterling tried working together.
Sterling let’s out a self-deprecating sigh and rolls her eyes as she takes second place and witnesses April’s face burn bright red.
As she’s slumping out of the building, the red head chases her down and reprimands the blonde to seemingly no end.
After the last few months Sterling has gone through, she’s in no position to take it this time, or even bottle up what she’s feeling for a later self exploration. This time, Sterling takes a deep breath and gives back to April exactly what she dishes out.
While initially taken aback, it doesn’t take long for the two to be reaming each other out unapologetically on the Willingham lawns, under an all too familiar lamplight, next to an all too familiar bench.
When Ellen exits the main building and begins to approach the two, they both groan and split up, huffing to their cars to avoid the lecture.
It’s that stupid ability for them to read each other’s smallest of glances that makes both their faces heat and their heart beats pick up. Without a word spoken, Sterling follows April’s car for 20 minutes to a carpark in the middle of nowhere.
Two doors slam shut and the raised voices and pointing fingers pick up right where they left off.
Points become prods and prods become swatting hands which calls for defensive arm grabbing which then leads to shoving and finally April pressing Sterling against her car with her full body, kissing her hungrily.
And soon, without another word, they’re in the back of April’s car, kissing, biting, groaning, sighing.
Put simply, April quenches her desire to ravage Sterling.
When the heavy breathing dies down and April quietly begins to sob on top of her, Sterling doesn’t flinch. She wraps April up in her arms and nods knowingly, her chin resting on the smaller girl’s shoulder.
She sees the beautiful contradiction.
There is a freedom of being together like this, physicalizing their feelings towards each other, and there is an awfully claustrophobic isolation from hiding off in some carpark no one goes near anymore, crammed in the backseat of a car with the interior light switched to off.
Sterling knows how it should have been; rolling in one of their beds, lamplight washing over them, watching each other sigh and smile, whispering their desires and feelings into one another.
She doesn’t say anything. She holds April and strokes her hair. Holds her hand. Draws circles on her shoulder blade with her fingertips until both of them have gotten themselves under control.
They let the contradiction wash over them. They kiss once more. They part. Returning to their separate cars, their separate homes, their separate lives which they can’t share, there are no words needed.
The events soon repeat. It becomes a cycle. And each time they reach the final wedge on the wheel, it hurts more. The blade cuts deeper.
One presents in class or stumbles in the hallway, the other torments them, they press until the other is furious, then suddenly they’re storming out to their respective cars, knowing exactly where they’re going, knowing exactly what they’re doing, knowing why.
They become used to the wave of emotions; frustration, want, excitement, lust, satisfaction, deflation, misery, separation.
They don’t talk for a few days.
The cycle repeats.
Neither know how to break it. Neither are ready to risk the smallest slither of a civil, spoken interaction with the other to start the conversation and even try.
So they don’t.
The cycle repeats.