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Ever since they’ve returned from finding El Dorado, the boys have been nothing but menaces with their newfound freedom. It’s almost like they were before it all, the Royal Merchant and the Cross and all the death. Almost.
Kie isn’t the same, though it's safe to say something in her changed a while ago, at the very beginning. The moment Sarah Cameron came back into her life, blonde hair and megawatt smile and her heart in John B’s clumsy hands. But then Kie found another blonde with a killer smile and placed her bruised heart in JJ’s sturdy ones. Full of fear, she was, when she made herself fall for him (or pretended to, or didn’t at all, Kie couldn’t figure it out). Whatever she did, Kie could never quite move on from that Kook year, that smile, that girl. That fucking girl.
Sarah’s stuck in the past, one foot glued firmly to the first time she and Kie ever hung out, saving baby turtles, and the other stuck to her sixteenth birthday, when she tore everything they had to shreds. It doesn’t matter that they’re friends again, it's something, even in its most basic, painful state, it is closeness. None of it matters, the boys or the gold or any of it, if she can’t be in this moment, because she’s so stuck in all the other ones, with Kie. Always with Kie.
“Guys, can we just decide on something,” Kie sighs.
JJ throws his hands up, “I’ve been saying… Burgers!”
Pope shakes his head, “Dude, nobody wants burgers. It’s, like, a billion degrees out.”
“I’m with Pope on this one,” Sarah joins, “It’s too hot for meat.”
Kie laughs under her breath, scrunching up her nose. It’s missed by everyone except Sarah, who’s sidled up next to her, leaning on the dock railing. They lean against each other a little bit more right now, their freckled shoulders brushing and skin hot from the summer sun.
John B pipes in, finally, “I could go for ice cream.”
The group cheers, someone has finally cracked the code for the perfect summer treat. Sarah and Kie lean against each other in support, in friendship, but really in love. In so much love.
As they walk to the ice cream shop, Sarah and Kie fall into step with each other. And they stay this way, even as the boys push and shove each other, bouncing every which way as if they were pinballs in a hyperactive machine. They watch their boyfriends fist bump and chortle, and they can’t help but look at the other and wonder about all of it. The lost time, the girlhood, the love of then and the love of now, and how it's only gotten bigger and more insurmountable over the years.
Kie looks down to their hands, her right and Sarah’s left, and how close they are. Just mere centimeters apart, and if she were to reach out and take hold, she’d feel the soft edges of her palms and the feathery bones of her fingers. She’d hold Sarah, and she thinks that's the only thing she wants now, wants ever. Needs now, needs ever.
Sarah can’t look at Kie. It’s too hard, too painful, though she’s thinking the exact same thing. Their hands, so close yet so far. But she’s in the past, still. Those times when Sarah wasn’t afraid, when she’d just reach over and grab Kie and pull the girl along behind her. And Kie would follow. She thinks about how it was reversed, too. She thinks about the time Kie blindfolded her and led her to a nest of baby birds in her backyard. She thinks about how she blindly followed the girl then, and how she’d still do it now, how she’d do it forever. How she’d do anything.
When they arrive, the girls are still silent, and the boys somehow even more rambunctious. They’re falling onto each other even as they order ice cream: John B getting a pile of cookies and cream in a cone, JJ s’mores in a cone, and Pope a smart single scoop of chocolate cherry in a cup. The worker turns to Kie and Sarah, asking what they’d like.
“You-,” Sarah starts, getting cut off by Kie going, “Sarah.”
They laugh at the kismet, the chivalry, the love.
So Sarah goes, “One scoop of strawberry, please. In a cup.” The minute the sentence leaves her lips, they both know its sharing time, customary to get a single scoop and split it between the lovers.
Kie smiles, looping her arm right through Sarah’s left, “We’ll share.”
Sarah’s worried her heart might explode right out of her chest in that ice cream shop. Instead, and thankfully, it just blooms and blossoms and flowers until it's three times too big for her body.
The group sits outside on perpendicular benches, the boys on one and Sarah and Kie on the other. The benches seem to designate different worlds, one of rowdiness and lighthearted hitting, the other of longing looks and an air of wistful yearning.
The strawberry ice cream is rapidly melting, Sarah and Kie desperately taking turns to finish it before the North Carolina sun turns it into soup. Kie’s watching Sarah take a careful bite, her eyes traveling from her sticky fingers at the handle of the spoon to her lips around the bowl. She thinks she might die from how much she wants to kiss the girl.
Even her boyfriend notices, “Stop making eyes and finish your ice cream so we can go swimming!”
Kie turns to see the three guys standing up and ready to go. She looks down at the scoop, only a quarter of it left, then to Sarah, whose eyes meet hers with warmth and hesitation. Niether of them want to go, not just yet, not while they’re together and this close. Kie buys them some time, “We’ve got a bit left, but you guys go ahead and we’ll meet you at the boat.”
John B and JJ give eachother a look. Their eyes see the touching knees and leaning closer and hands almost touching and looks at lips and shared laughs, but they don’t see it. They think nothing of it. Instead its, 'thank god they’re such good friends again, we can all be a group'. Pope seems somewhat oblivious to it all, but Kie knows that he, best of all, understands whats happening between her and Sarah.
The three turn to leave, but Pope turns at the last second and pauses as if he was about to say something, but instead gives them both a sympathetic look and jogs to catch up with the guys. Its enough to force Kie and Sarah to speak.
Kie’s brave, she jumps, “That was funny.”
Sarah plays dumb, “What was?”
“All of that, the making eyes thing and then just running away.”
“Yeah, they’ve been crazy since we got back. So giddy.”
“I think we all have, just a bit.”
Sarah pauses, calculating her next words so as to not implicate herself but to also reveal her underbelly, “I don’t know. I think it got kind of reflective for some of us. Made us think about our lives and how we really feel.”
Kie’s stomach flips and floats and spins, she wants to bite so bad, to spill it all to Sarah. But she can’t, at least not yet, “What do you mean?”
“You have a brush with death, a really real one, and it just makes you think.”
Kie can’t help it, “Makes you think, what if I did things differently.”
Sarah feels shy all of a sudden, and can’t meet Kie’s eyes. She’s scared but sees the light coming from the other girl and wants to run into it, “Oh my god, that’s all I ever think about.”
“When would you have done things differently?”
“When I was sixteen. When I ran away from the truth.”
Kie lets the hand in her lap move ever so slightly forward and touch Sarah’s thigh in slight confirmation, then whispers, “What truth?”
Sarah looks at Kie, finally, both of their eyes taking it all in, eachother and the angle of the sun and the melted pink ice cream and the moment where everything changes. Sarah thinks hard to try to find the right words, the right poetic line to declare or the anecdote or the grand statement, but she lands on something quite plain, something that can’t be misinterpreted or twisted, “That I liked you. I like-liked you.”
Kie lets a smile peek through, “I did, too. Jesus, Sarah, I was head over heels.”
“I never really stopped.”
“I didn’t either.”
The girls laugh about it for a minute, how silly it was to make such a drama when really it was right there all along, when they could’ve just said a few words and been happier than ever.
They’re leaning in and touching foreheads. Kie can see the sunscreen swiped on Sarah’s nose and all Sarah can smell is Kie’s coconut shampoo. Their lips are almost touching, just hovering millimeters apart. Neither can tell who kisses who first, but it happens nonetheless and both are more than pleased.
The taste of strawberry is deliciously overwhelming, and Kie has to stop herself from moaning. Sarah feels drunk on it all, Kie’s sugary lips hands and her hands in Sarah’s hair.
But its over almost as soon as it began, and silence falls over them as reality sets in.
Sarah speaks the words both are thinking, “John B and JJ. They’re our…” She trails off, unable to say the words. It feels like cheating on Kie.
“I know.”
“What should we do?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Kie sighs, “I don’t know either.”
Sarah thinks for a while about how bad she fucked up last time, how she ran away and rejected the truth and settled with Topper. She thinks about how much she doesn’t want to do that again. She thinks about Kiara and looks at Kiara and knows what she has to do.
“I’m gonna break up with him.”
“John B? But-”
“I’m not messing this up again. And I’m not gonna cheat.”
Kie knows what she has to do, “And I’ll break up with JJ.”
Sarah feels lighter than a cloud and so swallowed by the moment and the girl in front of her and the ice cream on her tongue. She wonders what it would’ve been like if they’d gotten seperate scoops or eaten faster or weren’t so brazen.
Sarah wonders what life would be like without Kiara, but decides she likes this reality better.
Kiara doesn’t even entertain the thought.