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They have a thing.
It’s the sort of thing Lottie’s come to expect. Nat begrudgingly partakes in her ritual, the drink coursing its way through her veins for the rest of the day, then she comes back. The shorter girl grumbles about it—how she doesn’t think it works, how it’s just bullshit that makes Lottie feel better.
“You keep coming back alive, don’t you?” is always Lottie’s reply.
An eye roll, followed by her stomping away, is the end of the conversation each time. It’s a cycle, one that Lottie just can’t seem to break—but neither can Nat.
So, to reiterate, they have a thing. An unending cycle that has Lottie’s heart fumbling and blood roaring in her ears. She’d think it was a one-sided infatuation if not for the way Nat flushes when she gets too close, or the way she leans into Lottie’s space instinctually.
She believes Nat feels something. The depth of it, however, is unknown to her.
They didn’t talk about the kiss. They never talked about the kiss, even though it lingers in Lottie’s mind like that one Shakespeare sonnet she was forced to memorize in English Lit—107, if she recalls correctly—albeit less poetic and more like a hyper awareness that keeps her up at night.
It feels silly to call it a crush. Crushes are something you tell your friends about over the phone, giggling and gossiping because it’s a brief, momentary collision you’ll forget about.
This—this is a slow ache, roasting over a fire, keeping you awake at night because the person you’re obsessing over is only a few feet away and you kissed her a month ago, and you can’t stop thinking about it because she’s so, unbearably memorable, and sometimes it looks like the branches are closing in on her when she’s leaving their clearing, as if they want to eat her.
(The wilderness speaks to her, is gentle with her, but soon enough it will demand something from her in return. She just prays it isn’t Nat’s body buried underneath the snow this time.)
Soon enough, Lottie drifts off to sleep, the shorter girl not too far from her mind.
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul…
━━━━━━━━
The next morning, something shifts. Lottie prepares the drink, warm in her cold hands. The dagger finds home in her grip, long accustomed to this arrangement. She pricks her finger—another habit, another routine—and finds she no longer flinches at the pain. Her eyes follow the small stream of blood as it travels down her finger, but she quickly stirs it in before anything is wasted.
“God, Lottie—can’t you just leave it alone? For one day?”
She turns around, a pissed off Nat greeting her. As always, she’s bundled up, layers upon layers packing in whatever warmth her body manages to produce.
Lottie still doesn’t think it’s enough.
“It’s either this or I come with you,” Lottie replies, holding out the mug. The ultimatum isn’t part of their usual routine, but it somehow fits.
Almost comically, Nat’s face drops at the mere idea of it, and before Lottie can say anything more she’s chugging her portion.
“It’s bullshit,” Nat murmurs as she pushes past the taller girl. Except this time there’s no heat to her words, only thinly veiled worry.
━━━━━━━━
It’s the creaking that wakes Nat.
It’s dark outside in that winter-y sort of way, where it’s never really dark, but you know it’s late. Soft, desaturated blues flood her vision, leaving her to feel like she’s floating. The blurriness makes it feel as though she’s not fully here, instead lost somewhere in time and space. Left in between planes of existence—or whatever bullshit Lottie has put into her head. She’s sick of the cryptic atmosphere that hangs heavy around this place. Nat just really, really wants to go back to bed.
God. It’s late, and she’s thinking about Lottie.
Nat tosses and turns for a while, attempting to ground herself by using the soft snoring that surrounds her. It doesn’t work, and the light creaking continues.
It goes on for longer than it would normally take for Van and Taissa to settle down. Her brows furrow, and before she knows it she’s kicking off her blanket and climbing quietly up the ladder.
The two girls are asleep, much to her relief, but instead there’s someone else—someone sitting in the corner, legs tucked into her chest.
Nat wants to be unsettled by it, but the otherwise tall girl looks so small, she can’t be bothered. She pushes herself up onto the creaky floorboards and tentatively walks closer to Lottie. As if broken from a trance, Lottie’s eyes snap to Nat, the alarm fading from her face once she realizes who it is.
“Hey,” Nat whispers, crouching down next to her. “Are you okay? It’s fucking freezing up here.”
Lottie shrugs, mechanically inching closer to Nat. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Ah. Me neither,” Nat lies. She makes herself comfortable next to the other girl—as comfortable as sitting on cold wood panels can be—and sits there in silence, swaying slightly back and forth in an attempt to create some form of body heat.
Time passes, the sky never faltering in its shades of blue. Bright enough to see Lottie, but not to make out any details. She keeps a steady distance between them; it feels right in the moment, for her to keep to herself. Doesn’t it?
Out of the corner of her eye she sees Lottie, still in her trance-like state. She doesn’t like it, but she doesn’t know how to help either.
“They all look at you like you’re going to sprout wings and fly away,” Nat remarks, fingers fiddling with the loose threads on her t-shirt. The words come out of nowhere, her mind on autopilot.
“Is that your convoluted way of calling me an angel?” Lottie teases, her growing smile small and private, as though it’s meant solely for Nat.
Nat breathes a quiet laugh, settling to neither confirm nor deny her question. It gets quiet again after that, with Nat’s eyes cast downwards and Lottie’s gaze burning a hole through her head. Taissa and Van are only a few feet away, but the steady rise and fall of their bodies is successful in calming her nerves. It makes her feel a little better, too, knowing they can sleep soundly.
She looks everywhere but Lottie. The chipping wood panels, the still-half-broken window, the chair sat in the corner, ominous in its energy. Maybe because of the skeleton. Maybe because everything here creeps Nat the fuck out.
Nat would like to believe she’s equipped to handle anything—insane visions, exploding machinery, the god awful things that constantly happen to them out here—but she hasn’t, and she doesn’t know if she ever will.
She endures, she protects, and that’s all she can really do.
“I miss the really mundane things,” is what Nat finally says, her words pushing away the silence of the winter wood.
Lottie tilts her head, her eyes still looking through into Nat’s soul, thirsty for something. Something Nat can’t discern.
“Like what?”
Her shoulders tense up, already moving to shrug again, ready to cop out of talking about anything real—it’s easier this way with Lottie. There’s nothing for her to sink her teeth into, nothing for them to wish or hope for. No ideas or plans for the future—it’s just here and now, in their bubble.
But Nat has already breached that one-sided agreement. She opened her mouth, talked about how much she missed something, as if it’ll do them any good to reminisce.
And when she looks up to meet Lottie’s gaze, the dam breaks.
“You know,” she gestures vaguely, and something in the unimpressed look that Lottie gives her only eggs her on further. “Like going to the gas station and getting Fun Dip.”
Lottie snorts, bringing a hand to her mouth. “Fun Dip?”
Nat rolls her eyes, a grin creeping its way onto her face.
“Yeah, asshole. Cherry Fun Dip,” she softly elbows Lottie’s side—which makes her dissolve even further into giggles—and throws her hands up in surrender.
“So? What do you miss, then? Fuckin’ Milk Duds?”
Lottie’s face scrunches up in disgust. “Hell no. Chocolate pudding is the only way.”
“Fancy.”
Lottie hums in response, her smile lingering.
She looks pretty in the winter light, Nat thinks to herself. With the moonlight shining through the window like a spotlight, casting its cold glow across the floorboards of the attic and encasing Lottie’s form, she looks like a ghost. Nat prefers Lottie like this, there’s something tranquil about her underneath the moon. Firelight has never ended with anything good, not in their case, but moons and stars seem peaceful when they’re far away.
“I miss warm-ups,” Lottie says quietly. “Side shuffles, reverse skipping. All of it.”
“Really?” Nat soaks in the confession. It makes everything feel human again, like normalcy hasn’t completely vanished.
“Yeah,” she smiles wistfully. “Drills are something that’s automatic to me. I don’t have to think about doing it, I just—do it.”
“You can fall into it and then leave it on the field.”
Lottie nods sheepishly. “Basically.”
Nat knows it all too well—getting out all the pent up feelings and leaving them there.
Lottie is one of those things for her; something to approach cautiously.
It’s hard to avoid here, though, when they’re left alone together—hard to ignore the truth when it’s staring you right in the face. Literally.
It began during one of the team sleepovers, if she recalls correctly. Some of them were… Less than sober, all scattered around Jackie’s house. She remembers leaning up against a doorframe, high out of her mind as she attempted to keep herself upright; and then there was Lottie, singing some upbeat karaoke song with Shauna, her hair bouncing with every movement and yet still falling perfectly into place around her shoulders.
Whenever Lottie drew nearer, Nat's heart stuttered. Her neck grew hot, and everything burned. She assumed she was having some sort of weird side effects from her high—so that’s what exactly she convinced herself of. For the rest of the weekend, it had just been her bodily functions being messed around with.
Then, on Monday, it was the locker room. Nat was talking to someone—Taissa, she thinks—then in came Lottie, brushing past her.
Thump—thump-thump—her tell-tale heart mumbled, unsure whether it was accusing or merely informing her of this new development.
She left it alone, hoping it would go away; then the crash happened, and she had no time to think about it.
Now though, in the dead of winter, she’s sitting in a dead man’s attic with Lottie fucking Matthews, giggling like they’re not on the verge of starvation, and it’s all she can think about. Here she is, comparing Lottie to the fucking moon, and there’s nothing—no one—to distract her. There’s always been someone else in the corner of it. They never just exist, left unbothered and uninterrupted. Their bubbles of time will always end, will always pop.
But it doesn’t, it hasn’t, and Nat is suffocating in her one-sided unease.
“Do you?” Lottie asks suddenly, voice small.
Nat’s head turns to Lottie’s face, snapped out of her daze. “What?”
There’s an indecipherable expression on her face, one Nat doesn’t like the look of. It reminds her too much of the seance. “Think I'm an angel.”
Nat senses a hidden meaning behind the question she can’t fully understand. All she knows for sure is that it’s important for Lottie to be brought back down to earth once and awhile, all things aside.
“No,” Nat says quickly. “But you’re here, and that’s good enough for me.”
Something flickers in Lottie’s eyes, quick and unreadable. There’s always a look of urgency in them, as if things will go wrong if she isn’t always on alert. Before the crash—and god, Nat doesn’t even know if she can think about before without bile coming up her throat—Lottie was always… Lottie. A rich girl who didn’t talk shit, but didn’t take it either. Gorgeous, bad at French, straight A’s in biology.
Here it’s like—it’s like they’ve all shapeshifted into something feral. At times, Nat feels like the only one who isn’t losing it every second of every fucking day.
(And it’s hard to feel like everything—everyone—else is crumbling around you, while you’re the only pillar left of the colosseum. Tourists will gawk at you, like you’re not just a column of fucking limestone spectating in the middle of bloodshed.)
“You just fade away sometimes, you know.” Lottie mumbles, the words thick and strained, like the way your throat feels when you’re on the verge of tears. You’re suffocating—choking—on them, but they need to get out, otherwise it feels like you’ll never speak again.
“You’re here, but you’re gone. It’s like—” she scoots closer, Nat sucks in a breath “—like I can see through you.”
She doesn’t know how to respond to that.
She really doesn’t know how to respond to that.
Lottie says things, that’s just a fact of life. Lottie Matthews will just say things, nothing that’s coherent, cryptic things that will never make sense until maybe something close to coincidence occurs.
“What do you mean?” Nat asks, because what else can she say?
“It’s in your eyes,” Lottie says, moving closer, somehow, to her face. “You keep moving, but it’s…”
She trails off, and Nat knows she won’t get anything else out of the girl.
Tentatively, Nat touches Lottie’s hand and nearly hisses.
“Jesus, Lot, you’re fucking freezing.”
“Don’t leave this time. Please,” Lottie murmurs, sudden and without fully meeting Nat’s eyes. “Don’t avoid me. Let me stay.”
And how can she say no when Lottie has interlaced Nat’s fingers with hers, warmth meeting cold in the land of the depraved.
“Okay,” Nat decides, her voice coming out hoarse, and the room can breathe again. “But you have to come back down to the fire.”
She nods, and Nat lifts her up gently, supporting half of her body weight as they fumble their way down the ladder and back to Nat’s nest by the hearth.
They collapse in a heap, Nat’s breathing heavy from the ordeal. Lottie tries inching closer to the heat source, but Nat pulls her back gently, instead draping her thick quilt over both of them. There’s nothing but the rising and falling of chests; bones and muscles relaxing and pulling themselves apart.
With the back of Lottie’s head framed against the flames like a halo, Nat notices how easily she could be misportrayed as a saint.
“Don’t—don’t do that again, okay?” Nat murmurs in her ear, unsure whether or not she’s even conscious. “If you’re feeling weird…”
She trails off, and time seems to stretch itself out, beckoning for her to continue, begging her to continue. Her fingers tread lightly on Lottie’s waist, unsure whether or not to rest themselves there.
“Come to me, okay? Don’t try freezing yourself to death.” Time pulls itself back like a slinky, bobbing and swaying before simply settling there, nothing else to be seen.
A few minutes pass before she gets a response, a quiet “okay” barely heard over the crackling of burning wood.
At the end of it all, Lottie falls asleep against her chest, and in the morning Nat prays she never heard how fast her heart was beating.