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“Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people?” - Tennessee Williams
Adora woke up, the sun streaming in directly on her face through the slants of the blinds. She could register the sound of a few voices rising up from the kitchen below her, but she ignored it and squeezed her eyes shut. She was T-minus twenty four hours until she could find even just a fraction of freedom from her anxiety, and she was going to milk every moment away from its source.
The house, Castaspella’s if she was remembering correctly, was three stories with a beautiful dock leading right out to a gorgeous lake. It was idyllic. It was perfect. It was sickening. She had every reason in the world to be soaking it up with glee before returning back to the FZ and to the office of her hellacious internship, but again, she had a problem.
When Glimmer first proposed the idea, it seemed fun. Everyone under one roof for just a little mid-summer reunion. Classes wouldn’t be starting back for another month, and Adora had only been able to see Catra since their break began. They both had gotten jobs back in their hometown, a crisp two-hour trip away from campus where the majority were living. They were each other's life-preservers, keeping themselves afloat in the midst of being in a place they were both more than happy to leave. Catra was the one good thing to come out of the whole experience- which led her directly into the crux of said issue.
Adora knew what crushes felt like; she wasn’t stupid. She could remember the silly way her heart would pound over a cute senior in high school or a particularly nice girl that would give her the time of day in one of her classes. She was gay. She had eyes. She knew that sensation. But this was different. She was so used to the space Catra filled in her head, that she never took the time to figure out what it was. It was a blankly labeled occupation of her thoughts that she couldn’t pinpoint the origin of if she tried.
There was a certain moment when she nearly put two and two together, but stopped herself short of it. She spent a lot of time rationalizing that it was normal to feel the way that she did about Catra, the want to be around her, to talk to her, the way she made her feel. Hell, Glimmer even validated her in those feelings, which means Glimmer’s own denial of Bow was partially to blame for the entire mess, but that was another story. At the end of the day, when she watched two people that felt the same way she did about Catra finally pull their heads out of their asses and do something about it, she should have looked inward. She should have pondered, but damn, regression was a hell of a drug.
Adora had been doing a stellar job in the beginning. Everyone but the two of them were paired off into their perfect little couples at every moment possible. Inner Tubing? Pair off. Kayaking? Pair off. Sharing a clothes hanger for roasting marshmallows over their bonfire? Fuck it, pair off. She could handle that. Catra was her best friend above anything else, feelings aside, she would have been Adora’s first choice anyways. Adora had repression and cheap beer on her side, she was golden.
The cracks started forming unreasonably quickly. Day three of seven. Marco Polo . Adora was in the water with Catra, Sea Hawk, Bow, and Scorpia, trying to work their way through every childhood pool game they could remember. That afternoon, the day drinking started early. It began with shoddy mimosas and worked its way through the lowest tier bottles of vodka money could buy. The day was doomed from the moment Sea Hawk stood on the railing of the balcony, bottle in his hand, shanty in his heart.
On Scorpia’s turn, Adora ducked her head under the water gently and made her way underneath the corner of the dock in-between the floats. Her responding Polo’s echoed as she shouted at them, but she stayed in her spot waiting to be crowned champ. That was until Catra stole her idea. She was so focused on Scorpia slowly inching her way closer and closer to her hiding spot to notice Catra appearing behind her from the opposite side. She felt a tap on her shoulder, and a quick hand clasped over her mouth to keep her from screaming in surprise. Catra shushed her and lowered her back down to help herself tread water, laughing softly at Adora’s still remaining look of surprise.
Adora couldn’t stop staring. Catra’s hair was slicked back, and the sun cut through the slits between the boards of the dock covering them in a green hue. The only sounds were the water splashing against the plastic and an occasional Marco slipping through. They were close, squeezed into the small space, basically chest to chest. Adora had luckily found a small hand hold on a plank early into hiding underneath, but Catra was left treading.
“Here,” She whispered, slipping her arm around Catra’s waist, holding her up. They were stuck face to face, and Adora could only look at her lips. Thinking back, she didn’t know when she started leaning.
“Goddamnit, you got me,” Sea Hawk called out, cutting her out of her reverie. Adora released her arm instantly, like she had been shocked. She swam back out, avoiding the look that Bow gave her when he noticed Catra following behind her. They thankfully switched games after that, and Adora was almost able to forget. She spent the rest of the night creating a healthy amount of distance, but still found herself waking up in a cold sweat at 3am after she dreamed of a world where she didn’t stop leaning.
After that, Adora tried hiding in the house, but her excuses were dwindling. She attempted to blame it on her leg acting up, but forgot about that the next morning when Bow invited her to an early morning run. She tried blaming it on her period, completely forgetting that she had already complained to Glimmer about having it the previous week on the drive down.
Everyone was gathered around the kitchen, save for a few stragglers. Bow was stationed by the stove, spatula in hand, donning today’s designated crop top. It had all started as a joke for their friend group to bestow upon Bow the most hideous T-shirts they could manage to get their grubby hands on. It reached a tipping point when people started leaving them on the stoop anonymously. What had started a quest to find the limitations of his willingness to crop each top had turned into a rightful route of public shaming. He had packed only his worst of the worst for the trips, the ones left in a panicked game of ding-dong-ditch for fear of ever being associated with it. He had started out strong at the beginning of the trip with a Nintendo Jesus proclaiming Hii saved me . When he turned, Adora could only make out a few of the words underneath what looked to be a skeleton with a machine gun. She stopped trying after recognizing TITS not once but twice.
Adora grabbed a pancake from the table, eating it with her hands without sitting down. She wanted to make a break for it before anyone could question her. She had a game plan this time. No one could complain that she wasn’t on the water if she beat them to it. She made it one foot out the sliding glass door before being stopped, nearly slamming into the chest of someone in front of her.
“Woah, where are you headed so fast?” Scorpia said, recovering slightly from the near collision.
Adora laughed nervously, stretching out her arms and pointing over her shoulder with her thumb towards the lake. “I’m going to just go for a quick kayak ride. Get the day started right.”
“You know we only have two seaters, right?” Mermista asked, mouth half-full with pancake, either completely oblivious or fully aware of her intent. Adora couldn’t tell. Both were dangerous.
Adora opened her mouth, excuse already half formed, but Catra cut her off. “I’ll join you.”
They were silent carrying the two person kayak down to the dock on their shoulders, and Adora contemplated dropping it on herself three times if it meant getting to go back to hiding in the house. She had bruised her ribs before and survived. It was by no means fatal. The water splashed against her shins as they dropped it off the side of the dock into the lake. The thought of getting in made Adora borderline queasy, and her grip on the paddle was turning her knuckles white.
After an embarrassingly long moment of staring holes into the plastic seat of the kayak, Catra cleared her throat and gestured for Adora to step in. It was a smart move on her part. To be quite honest, if Catra had gotten in before her, she probably would have kicked the vessel out to sea, thrown her paddle down, and sprinted up the hill to the next town over. Adora gulped. The front seat gave Catra direct access to the prime smacking real estate of the back of Adora’s head, but the back seat meant that her voice could travel and that every word she said from there on out would be completely audible. (In the back of her mind, she remembered Charon's ferry to hell. It seemed fitting that hers was bright red and smelled cobwebs and general must.) She took the front seat.
They rowed away in loaded silence. For a second, Adora let herself be lulled into a sense of calm. The air was clear, and the sounds of the paddles methodically hitting the water was meditative. Maybe it was the slight way her shoulders relaxed or the general aura of her body unclenching. Maybe it was because they were far enough from the shore that Catra could catch up with Adora even if she bailed ship and made a break for it. Whatever it was, Catra took it as her perfect cue to strike with all the subtlety Adora had grown to value and expect, “So, are you going to tell me why you’ve been acting so fucking weird?”
Adora’s arms paused mid row, the end of the paddle cutting through the water as Catra kept propelling them like she hadn’t opened a well closed can of worms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Catra hummed in response. The sirens that had been playing in the back of Adora’s mind from the moment she had woken up that morning grew in volume. “Hmm. You don’t?”
“Nope,” Adora replied, eyes staying locked on the dock. If she could just keep paddling in tense silence. If she could just make it through the rest of this godforsaken trip. If she could just make it to the end of summer with her lips shut tight, maybe she wouldn’t lose her best friend. They could make friendship bracelets into an eternal sunset with Adora’s stupid feelings tucked away in her back pocket forever.
“Fuck this,” Catra said, and before Adora could sense what was happening, she grabbed the handles on either side of them and heaved her entire body to the side with a grunt. The kayak dutifully tipped, dumping them both into the water. Adora broke the surface of the water gasping in shock.
“Catra, what the fuck?” Adora wiped the fallen poof of hair out of her face and grabbed the handle of the kayak, kicking her legs to keep herself above the surface. She tried to hoist it back over, but Catra slammed her hand down hard on the plastic, her eyes angry.
“I can’t do this,” Catra replied, her voice loud and frustrated. It made Adora’s stomach sink further, and the sensation of needing to hurl rose again and tickled the back of her throat. “You can’t just avoid me like this without telling me what it is that I did wrong.”
They kept treading, and Adora said quietly, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Then why? If I crossed some boundary, just tell me,” Catra pleaded. Adora knew the look before Catra started crying, the way her eyebrows came together, and her jaw went hard as her teeth ground together. Adora would kill ten men to see Catra’s face, but she could live happily never seeing that one ever again. “Talk to me.”
“What could you have possibly done?”
Catra scoffed. “C’mon, you don’t have to do this. I’ve been pretty obvious, have I not?”
“Obvious?” Adora asked, attempting to piece things together but failing to do so. Her head was too clouded. “About what?”
“Oh my god,” Catra muttered and subsequently sank back down into the water, bubbles popping up over her head as she presumably tried to drown herself instead of admitting whatever it is she wasn’t saying. Adora couldn’t tell if her curiosity or fear was weighing out at that moment, but she briefly considered whether she would be charged with homicide if Catra never came back up. When Catra resurfaced, she kept her eyes closed, refusing to look at Adora as she said, “I like you. A lot. I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on, but I obviously made you uncomfortable. So we can just pretend none of this ever happened and go back to you not ignoring me.”
Adora’s hand found Catra’s waist again in the water in a familiar motion that made her heart feel like it would beat its way right through her chest, and this time, she didn’t stop herself from leaning. Kissing Catra was everything she knew it would be if she ever got the chance to do it. Her shirt might have been rubbing uncomfortably as it moved underneath the water, and their knees definitely knocked together more than their fair share of times while keeping themselves high enough to not go under, and maybe their teeth hit a little too much from smiling, but it didn’t matter to her. Catra’s lips were warm, and when she kissed Adora back, nothing else could ever fucking matter.
When Catra pulled away, Adora kept her eyes closed, soaking it all in like the lovesick idiot she was. She registered the hand gripping her shoulder approximately two seconds after she had been dunked, hard.
Adora sputtered and shook her head like a wet dog, not caring if her ponytail managed to smack Catra in the process. She called out over the sound of cackling, “And what was that for?”
“For being such a shit about this when you could have just talked to me.” Adora rolled her eyes and flipped the kayak over. She hoisted herself over the edge, momentarily beaching her body like a seal. She rolled over, planting her ass in the backseat with a waterlogged squish, and held her hand out for Catra. They nearly tipped again in the process, but eventually they found themselves floating in the water, upright and giggly. The paddles were probably somewhere nearby, but that was a later them problem. Catra spun around, throwing her legs over Adora’s, keeping herself perfectly situated between Adora’s thighs. She tapped her fingers against Adora’s cheek and asked, “Why didn’t you just say something?”
“Do you know how hard that is? You’re my best friend?” Adora replied. It was still early enough in the morning for the sun to sit low in the sky behind Catra’s back. If Adora hadn’t been in love before, seeing Catra with her hair sticking to every inch of her forehead possible, light shining around her like a halo, Adora knew she would have fallen then.
Catra grinned, “Yeah, I think I know a thing or two about that.”
They walked back to the house three hours later, soaking wet, hand-in-hand. They never did find the paddles.