Chapter Text
Lu has no idea what the fuck she’s doing here. She just knows that she could have thrown a hell of a better party.
Don’t get her wrong, the other people here seem to be enjoying themselves enough. It’s just… off-brand potato chips, really? A keg? She isn’t sure if this is just a standard of college parties or American ones in general, but she has certainly put together something way more worthwhile than what’s going on in this cramped apartment at sixteen years old, and with only a week’s notice, at that. Fuck, that Valentine’s party she threw her last year at Las Encinas was classier than this mess, and that was truly a disaster. At least she’s in a penthouse and not one of the dorms on campus. She could shudder at just the thought.
Still. You’d figure someone who lives in a top floor apartment in Manhattan could go for the brand name chips—or actual food, honestly. She’s fucking starving.
This brings her back to the question of “what the fuck am I doing here?” that she had asked herself two minutes ago. Because she could easily be sharing a veggie pizza with Nadia back in their own dorm, or maybe even splitting the leftovers from the meal Iman had made them when she, Yusuf, and Omar came to visit last week. But no. She’s here. At this random party she heard about from a girl in her Digital Marketing class, who heard about it from a frat boy she’s evidently fucking. And she doesn’t even have Nadia with her, because Nadia has a quiz on foreign policy on Monday that she needs to study for, or else the world is going to end, apparently.
It’s times like this where she misses Carla. Carla would’ve said fuck it, gone out with her tonight, and then probably would have gotten a passable grade, anyway. Not that she’s comparing the two of them or anything. She loves Nadia, of course, she just—fuck. She misses Carla a lot, alright?
Lu’s at least self-aware enough to not blame how she doesn’t know anybody here solely on Nadia, because even though Nadia was too busy, she decided to come anyway. She just needed a break from everything. From school, from the stupid fucking traumatic memories that still manage to creep in three years after the fact, from the occasional bout of missing her parents. So she decided to take a page out of her brother’s book. What’s a better way to forget than to drink her problems away?
Of course, the old Valerio would also add in drugs and sex to that cocktail. The new Valerio would still throw in the latter, but substitute the weed and cocaine for self-help books and whatever other Eat-Pray-Love bullshit he’s been on lately. Possibly energy crystals. And incense.
She isn’t interested in any of that, though; not even the sex. That leaves her leaning against a wall with a Solo cup—ugh, there’s really no accounting for class here—full of alcohol and sending intimidating glares to whatever men who have the audacity to approach her. The unimpressed, arched eyebrow and condescending curve to her red lips is practiced, and it works.
“Hey, what’s your name?”
For the most part.
He’s bland. That’s what she immediately notes about him. Next, his aftershave is way too overpowering, and the type that, in her experience, assholes tend to prefer—Guzmán used to wear a similar scent before she passive aggressively bought him something far better, and the fact that this man instantly reminds her of those days is already a warning sign. After that, he is very, very drunk, which is why her glare hadn’t properly deterred him.
Lu tries for blatant disregard. She gives him a little once over and scoffs. “I don’t think so.”
“That’s a long name,” he slurs with a grin. She rolls her eyes. He leans in closer, arm braced next to her head on the wall. Even though she’s in heels, he’s still taller than her, and she hates the caged-in feeling crawling up her spine.
She scowls and pushes him away with two fingers against his chest, beginning to step past him. “Excuse me.”
“No, no, hey, wait,” he says, catching her by the wrist. His fingers are clammy. Tight. Hurting. “Where are you going? Don’t leave.”
“Don’t fucking touch—”
As soon as she yanks her arm free from his grasp, a foreign one lands on her shoulders. Lu startles in indignation, but she’s also admittedly a bit panicked—and then the new person speaks.
“I’ve been looking all over for you, baby.”
It takes Lu a second to register that the sentence is directed towards her. And even though she knows exactly what’s going on, even though she’s more than a little—a lot—thankful for the save, she still instinctively bristles, because she has never once liked the way this girl standing so close to her now has called her baby.
Based on how Rebe crookedly smirks back when Lu narrows her eyes at her, the taller girl remembers.
“Who’s this guy?” She goes on, nodding her head in indication at him. It’s definitely a rhetorical question, because she glances him over and scoffs a mocking laugh. “Get lost, dude. She’s not interested.”
He sneers. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Her girlfriend,” Rebe answers without any hesitation. Lu doesn’t twitch, but she does feel the skin around her eyes go tight. “So like I said, beat it.”
“There’s no way a girl this hot is a—”
Lu knows from experience what Rebe looks like when she wants to hit someone.
But Lu is not a damsel in distress, thank you very much. And neither is she that brutish.
“If it hasn’t been obvious since the moment you walked up to me, I want nothing to do with your little shrimp dick,” she replies, tone even and unaffected where her smile is deep-cutting and mean. For added measure, she leans into Rebe’s side and grasps the hand that’s hanging over her shoulder, pulling the girl’s arm tighter around her. “Now, walk away unless you want to lose it.”
He’s drunk, and therefore, unpredictable. He could drop it and leave just as easily as he could get violent—which, considering he’s an intoxicated man who just had his penis insulted, is probably the more viable option. But before he can act, another man claps his hand on the guy’s shoulder hard enough to unmistakably be a warning, and then wedges his way between the three of them with a wide smile directed at both women.
“Hey, don’t mind him. He’s trashed.” The guy behind him opens his mouth, but the newcomer fixes him with a glare that clearly means shut up. Then he smiles at Rebe and Lu again. “Sorry. We’re all good here, yeah?”
Rebe looks to Lu for confirmation. When she nods, the taller girl nods too, and offers him a controlled smile of her own. “Yeah. We’re good.
Without another word, he manhandles his drunken idiot of a friend away.
“I’m not gonna lie, I was kind of looking forward to beating his face in,” Rebe says as they watch them disappear into the crowd.
The words are said almost directly into Lu’s ear, and it’s at that exact moment that she belatedly realizes how the other girl is still holding her. Lu makes a face before she can help it and sucks her teeth, shoving Rebe’s arm off of her and immediately putting space between them even though she was the one who had leaned further in. Which she did for show. Obviously.
She fights the urge to fix her dress. There’s nothing to fix, she’s just antsy. While it’s not a new feeling to her, it’s still an uncommon one, and she hates it every time it happens.
Rebe just looks her over in that amused way she does. Or did, because it’s been three years since Lu last saw her.
“Well, fuck, you’re welcome,” Rebe continues unaffectedly.
“What are you even doing here?”
The girl shrugs. “It’s a Friday night, this is a party…”
“You know what I mean,” Lu counters, annoyed. Rebe is supposed to be in Spain. Or, at least, not in New York.
“I’m taking a gap year.”
Lu half-squints at her. “You graduated two years ago.”
“So two gap years, whatever,” Rebe says dismissively. “I’ve been traveling on-and-off. I’d never been to America before. Los Angeles was first; kind of frilly. Vegas; fun for a night or two, then boring. New York’s my last stop before I head back home.”
Lu regards her for a moment. “Did Nadia send you here?”
If she did and didn’t even have the decency to tag along, Lu might have to reevaluate just how much she loves the other girl.
“Nadia doesn’t even know I’m in town yet. Some guy hit on me at a bar earlier and invited me here, but I don’t see him around anywhere. No big loss. He wasn’t really my type, I just didn’t have anything better to do tonight.”
It’s sort of driving Lu crazy how Rebe won’t stop eyeing her, even though she’s well-aware that looking at someone is typically what you do when you’re talking to them. But with Rebe, it’s always especially gotten under her skin.
She’s drawn out of her thoughts by Rebe’s voice. “Anyway. It was nice seeing you and all, Barbie.”
Rebe starts to turn away from her.
Before she even realizes it, Lu’s reaching out and touching her elbow. It’s bare on account of how Rebe isn’t wearing a proper shirt, but some cutoff football jersey-type thing that showcases her abs and the very edges of her neon pink bra. Lu’s eyes only catch on that detail for a millisecond in the upwards sweep they take to meet Rebe’s blue ones.
“Wait.” She hates how unsure she sounds, so she raises her chin a tad with her next words, even if they really don’t warrant the movement. “You’re the only person I know here.”
“And…?” Rebe prompts, raising an eyebrow.
“And,” Lu continues, tone begrudging, “from what I remember, you’re not the worst person to party with.”
Rebe stares. Then a slow smirk spreads across her purple-painted lips, and she resignedly shakes her head at herself.
“Fucking hell, I’m definitely going to regret this. But,” and she steps closer again, close enough to peer down into the cup still clutched in Lu’s hand, and Lu hopes to god that she doesn’t see how her fingers tighten around the plastic, just a little bit, “what are you drinking?”
*
Almost four rum and cokes later, Lu is nearly as wasted as the shrimp-dick had been. Under any other circumstances, this would mean that her plan to forget is going off without a hitch—except she’s with Rebe. And Rebe is a fixture from her past, and all that entails.
Meaning, it’s impossible to avoid talking about at least some of it.
“You keep in contact with anyone?” Rebe asks her. “You know, besides the obvious.”
They’re in some random person’s bedroom; the first vacant one they could find after drunkenly stumbling their way down the hall, legs shaky from a combination of laughter and dancing for the past hour. The door they had opened before this one led to another room occupied by two girls making out on the bed.
At Rebe’s question, Lu purses her lips at the ceiling.
“Carla, mostly. But through text or FaceTime, we haven’t really actually seen each other.”
“Ah. And how’s the little marchioness doing, these days?”
“Don’t you talk to Samu?”
“Do you ask Nadia about Guzmán?” Rebe shoots back pointedly.
It’s not like she and Guzmán are on bad terms, or that she’s bitter about him and her current best friend-slash-roommate tentatively being together. Definitely not. She just likes to forget the fact that she actually had dated him, hurt over him, and hurt others over him too. However—
“Fair point,” she concedes. “Carla’s fine. Busy in London. Do you actually care?”
“I don’t hold grudges, you know?” Rebe shrugs against the mattress. “That’s your thing, babe.”
The pet names. They haven’t stopped at all, even though there’s no drunken asshole here to keep up pretenses for. She blames the fact that they aren’t irritating her as much as they used to on the rum.
“If you think I haven’t changed at all over the years, you’re severely underestimating me.”
“Come on, I have never underestimated you,” Rebe scoffs. “Besides, you haven’t changed that much. You’re still fun—you know, in that bitchy sort of way.”
Lu resists the urge to playfully slap her on the shoulder. “You thought I was fun?”
“When you weren’t trying so hard to be stuck up, sure,” Rebe says. “You can’t be related to Valerio and be boring at the same time.”
“He could have gotten that from his mom’s side,” Lu comments neutrally, eyeing her.
“Nah. There’s something in you that’s a little wild. And no matter how much time you spend taming it, you like when it gets out.”
The thing about rum is that it has always made Lu extremely reckless, which is why she has, in turn, always stayed away from it.
The thing about Rebe is that she’s right.
Lu has no clue what’s going on in her head as she curls her fingers against Rebe’s jawline and pulls at the same time as she leans forward and eliminates the gap between them. Maybe she’s still thinking about those two girls just one room over, maybe she’s remembering all the times in school when she would find herself both pissed off and scarily turned on by her and Rebe’s little cat fights. Maybe she’s scratching an itch that part of her has known has always been there from the moment they met, buried beneath jealousy and so much fucking repression towards her own sexuality, it’s no wonder she never acted on it sooner.
The kiss is reminiscent of almost all of their previous interactions with one another. Aggressive, sly, vaguely mean. But there’s something different too. There’s the softness of Rebe’s skin, the spicy-sweet scent clinging to it, the taste of mint in her mouth even though she’s had just as much to drink as Lu has, the way she drags her hand down Lu’s side and flexes her fingers against the black sequins of her dress.
All of that sort of freaks her out for a little bit, and Lu has half a mind to put them back on normal ground by biting Rebe’s lip, but then the girl pulls back. She’s looking at her in that infuriating way again, that way that Lu doesn’t really hate as much as she pretends she does.
Lu realizes it’s a look full of equal parts calculation and consideration. In spite of her background, the friends—Samu—she likes to keep, and everything Lu has ever said about her, Rebe isn’t actually stupid.
Stupid has never been Lu’s type. She likes…
Well, she likes brutish. The push-and-pull. And she and Rebe have always been great at that.
“Shit, maybe you have changed, after all,” Rebe comments, smirking at her, and Lu has no idea why the fuck she sounds so smug.
She kisses her again instead of trying to figure it out.