Chapter Text
“You know we don’t have to do this, Shaw.”
“No, I do, I want to, I need to-”
“I just don’t want you getting in over your head-”
“I’m not in over my head, I know what I want.”
“You know it’s not a matter of like – like you’re no less queer just because you haven’t-”
“Look, I trust you, okay? I wouldn’t go to just anybody, I’m here because I want this.”
“You just seem pretty nervous-”
“I think just the noise of it freaked me out a little.”
“Well sure, the vibration’s pretty intense. But are you sure that’s all it was, because-”
“I’m sure, Jess, I’m sure, okay? Now please, just-”
Lupe, previously frozen to the doormat in horror with her keys halfway into the lock where she had paused to try and make out the muffled conversation from the other side of the door, not particularly in the mood to walk in on her roommate going down on some girl on their couch, somehow finds this the moment to go bursting into the apartment.
She’s got a whole slew of frantic arguments ready on her tongue as to why Shaw absolutely does not need to be experimenting with Jess to affirm her newfound gayness – Lupe can get her set up on Bumble no problem or hell, she’s pretty sure she’s seen Greta making eyes across the bar the past couple weeks and listen, Jess is her best friend, her brother-in-arms, but she is not a starter lesbian, Jess is a masterclass lesbian and Shaw really needs to learn to dog paddle before she starts like, diving –
Not that Lupe actually cares who Shaw sleeps with, not even if it’s Jess (why would it matter more if it’s Jess? It doesn’t, whatever), she just thinks they’re both making a hasty decision and they could really use some cool collected outside perspective here to make sure they don’t do something they’ll regret, it’ll – it’ll fuck up the friend group, right? Lupe waited years for her sprawling overly-complex network of queers, she doesn’t need her two favourites of the bunch to start something and make it weird for everybody –
Not that it’d be weird if they started sleeping together or dating or even if they got married someday and went to live on a goat farm in Oregon with five dogs and a gaggle of adopted children, Lupe would be fine with that, why can she feel her heartbeat in her mouth? Doesn’t matter, she just needs to get in there and stop her friends from making the worst mistake of their –
“Hey Lu,” Jess chirps, fully dressed in the middle of the living room and decidedly not in the throes of some fumbly, stuttery Shaw lovin’. She’s also holding a set of clippers. “Carson’s getting an undercut, wanna help me talk her out of it?”
“Hi, Lupe!” Shaw’s perched on one of the barstools Jess and Fern stole from the sidewalk outside a short-lived vegan steakhouse in Westwood two years ago, holding half her hair up with a towel around her shoulders. “Tell Jess I’m a grown woman who can do whatever she wants with her own hair, okay?”
Jess huffs. “You say that now, you’re not the one holding the clippers, this is a lot of pressure you’re putting on me-”
Lupe leans back against the door and tries to get her brain to realign with reality. Shaw is listing off all the reasons why, as a newly-minted queer, she should absolutely have an undercut. Jess is shaking her head with that look of exasperated fondness she always gets around her friends, shooting Lupe that look they always share of silent, “can you believe this shit?”, the one that makes Lupe’s chest feel like it’s glowing from the inside out but isn’t a big deal or anything.
Then she squints a little bit. “Hey García, you good? Why’re you out of breath?”
“Humm, I ran. Up the stairs,” Lupe manages. “Tryna get my steps in, you know.”
Jess cocks her head. “I thought you stopped wearing your fitbit because you didn’t want Bezos knowing your whereabouts at all times.”
“Sure, but I can still get my steps in.”
“How do you know how many-?”
“Do I need an exact number here? I’m getting ‘em in, that’s what matters-”
Shaw’s laughing at them. “Anytime you two wanna stop acting like an old married couple and help me out here…”
“Pah! Hah!” Lupe says, which. Is luckily covered up by the noise of Jess clicking the clippers on and off like a warning shot.
“Show some respect to the guy about to shave half your head,” she warns.
“So you’ll do it?!”
“I didn’t say that.”
Shaw huffs. “Listen, I promise I know what I’m doing. I need this, okay? My folks are coming to town on Sunday and I know they’re gonna try and get me to move back, because my sister told me they ran into Charlie at Costco last week and they’re both convinced he’s still in love with me – I just need to show them this isn’t temporary, right? I’m different now, I’m not going back to the way things were.”
“You know that doing shit to piss off your parents isn’t a more valid reason than like, social trends,” Lupe advises her, finally getting back in the swing of acting regular, kicking off her shoes and dumping her backpack by the door so she can wander over and observe the chaos. “Speaking from experience. You’ve gotta be sure you’re gonna like the way it looks.”
Shaw seems to take that on board, pausing to think for a minute.
“Wait, you’re actually listening to her?” Jess demands.
“I actually made a valid argument,” Lupe points out.
Jess buzzes the clippers in her direction and Lupe skitters back with her hands up, laughing. “Hey, I’m just telling it like it is!”
Shaw ignores both of them and scurries over to the mirror they’ve got hanging next to Lupe’s signed Julio Urías poster, picking up sections of hair and pinning them back with her fingers, making a lot of humming and hawing noises. Lupe shakes her head and goes to get a beer from the fridge, automatically grabbing one for Jess and tossing it over without really thinking about it; Jess catches it easily and grins at her.
“How’s your day?” she asks, cracking the top on the edge of the coffee table and taking a long swig.
Lupe’s gaze catches on the bob of her throat as she swallows, and she shakes herself internally. “The usual,” she says. “Some dude way overdid it on the salmon ladder, but he was pretty chill about it when I told him off so he’s probably not gonna try and sue. Porter’s still an ass but he’s manageable. Chapman broke up with her girlfriend so she was pretty much useless all day.”
“Aw shit, Esther? I liked her.”
“No, they were only ever friends with benefits or something? This was the Zumba instructor.”
“Why would she date a Zumba instructor, she’s gotta know better than that.”
“Couldn’t tell you, man. Either way, she wants a night out at the bar to drown her sorrows, so you’d better finish up Shaw’s hair in the next hour or something, I’m not dealing with all that on my own.”
“For sure, this’ll take like ten minutes tops.”
Shaw whips around from the mirror, holding the top of her hair bunched up in one hand and the left side flat along her skull with the other. “Ten minutes? Jess! I’m trusting you with my whole head of hair and you’re only gonna spend ten minutes-”
“Well I’m glad you’re finally grasping the gravity of the situation,” Jess drawls. Then, “That looks good, by the way. Lu, whaddaya think?”
Lupe tilts her head, examining Shaw from a few different angles, mostly just for the dramatic effect. “Seems okay. Is the rest of your hair gonna fall the way it needs to, though?”
“What do you mean?” Shaw asks, which leads to a lot of exasperated groaning from the other two, followed by Jess ordering her back into the stool with Lupe getting dragged in to hold the mirror up so they can do this properly, with a lot of arguing and combing until they’ve settled on some lines Carson seems happy with.
“Alright, Shaw,” Jess grunts through a mouthful of hairgrips, setting one foot on the coffee table and starting up the clippers looking all focused and professional, why is everything she does so fucking hot, Lupe hates her life – “Just say ‘when’.”
“You’re sure it looks okay?” Shaw’s asking, fussing awkwardly with the freshly-shorn side of her head until Jess leans over the table to bat her hands away.
“Stop fucking up my handiwork, you look hot as shit.”
“I do?” Shaw beams at that, goes all shy and a little pink in the cheeks.
Lupe coughs and takes a drink. Across from her, Max is giving her some kind of look – she widens her eyes back like what?, to which Max just twitches an eyebrow and glances over at Jess.
Lupe does not glance over at Jess. Lupe glares at Max.
“So how’re you, Chapman?” she asks loudly. “Breakups are rough, you doing okay?”
Max glares back. “I’m fine,” she says. “You know, dealing.”
“Uh huh.”
“You sure, Max?” Shaw asks, nudging her shoulder. “It’s okay to be upset, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.” Max blows out a breath. “I feel like kind of an ass for saying this but I’m not too upset about her. More just that this is the third breakup in a year and I’m starting to feel like maybe I’m the problem?”
“How so?” Lupe asks, wanting to prod her a bit so she’ll talk herself out of her own bullshit, and maybe stop with the whole Jess thing for ten minutes while she’s at it.
Max screws up her face and shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m maybe putting too much pressure on it? It’s probably leftover from shit with my mom, like I need to have a person to prove I’m doing okay and I don’t need to move home.”
“She say that?”
“Not out loud, but it’s sort of… like she’s gotta be using my Uncle Bert as her frame of reference here, right? And even when they all weren’t speaking, she knew he was good because he always had Gracie. But she’s always worried about me, and I keep ending up alone, it’s like I’m…”
“A fucking baby?” Jess suggests. “You’re twenty-six, Max, cool your jets. You’ve got plenty of time for this.”
“Okay, you are barely five years older than me-”
“It’s an important five years-”
“Mmmmm not that important-”
“Okay, my mom then, she didn’t meet her person ‘til she was well into her forties with five kids and a divorce under her belt. Sometimes you’ve gotta just chill and let it happen when it happens.”
“Wise words coming from the fuckboy-est fuckboy to ever set foot in Southern California-”
“Hey, I’ve got a certain lifestyle, it doesn’t mean I don’t have wisdom to disperse-”
“Ew-”
“And I’m not a fuckboy, I’m a fucking gentleman.”
Shaw and Max both burst out laughing, leaving Jess to look highly affronted and Lupe to chuckle into her drink.
“Jess, you own a tank top that says ‘big dyke energy’,” Shaw cackles. “I’ve seen you wear it in public.”
“It was a present from Lu! And it’s fucking comfortable, listen-”
“You’re literally wearing basketball shorts in this bar right now,” says Max.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you not vaping,” Shaw adds.
“You told me once you moved to the US because you ran out of girls to fuck in Canada.”
“Okay, since when are you two even friends?” Jess demands. “I don’t need this confrontational energy in my space.”
“How many fights have you been in this year?”
“I play hockey, you know that’s not – Lu, back me up here!” Jess turns her wide, wounded eyes to Lupe, who keeps snickering even as something in her chest melts a little bit, she’s so fucking fond.
“Oh no, we’re coming for her next, she’s almost as bad as you.”
“The fuck, Chapman?”
“Why are people yelling in my most sacred bar on this most sacred Friday night,” comes Jo’s voice, closely followed by Jo, with Greta bringing up the rear.
“We’re reading Jess and Lupe for their slutty, slutty ways.”
“Sweet, lemme get in on this-”
“Nice hair, Shaw,” Greta says, ignoring the rest of them completely.
Shaw grins so wide Lupe thinks she might pull something, gaze darting around from the floor to the walls and back like she can’t handle looking directly at Greta while she’s getting complimented, self-consciously grazing her fingers along the edge of the shaved part. “Oh! Thanks, you, uh, you like it?”
“Uh huh. Suits you.” Greta tosses her own hair over her shoulder and gives one of her smiles. Shaw looks like she swoons a little bit.
Lupe glances between them, thinks she can practically see the cartoon love hearts popping up around their heads, and rolls her eyes.
“-know they keep an actual chart for when they can each have someone over? Like, trading off days of the week. I saw it in their kitchen,” Jo’s informing Max with glee.
Max looks a mix of fascination and genuine horror. “A chart?”
“Okay no, that was one time and it was during the 2019 women’s soccer world cup, nobody can be judged for their actions that summer.” Jess is fully leaned over the table pointing a finger in each of their faces.
“So you guys definitely don’t have an established system for one night stands anymore?” Jo asks sceptically.
Jess pauses because she’s a shitty liar, and glances at Lupe, who shrugs because she figures it’s better to be known as someone who’s committed to not dragging her partners into an awkward situation. “I guess we’ve got some unspoken rules,” she admits.
Jess throws her hands up and gets up from the table as Jo and Max start crowing again. “I’m getting another drink.”
“Get me one?” Lupe asks, even though she already knows Jess will, holding up her almost-empty bottle like she needs proof.
“’Course.” Jess shoots her an eyeroll and a smile and ambles off towards the bar, all wiry muscle and easy grace.
Lupe maybe watches her cross the room for a second or two, just to make sure she… gets over there okay. Doesn’t run into any problems. Shut the fuck up.
“Shut the fuck up,” she says when she turns back to Jo and Max to find them both grinning at her like a couple of Cheshire cats.
“How bad has it gotten?” Jo asks, delighted and incredulous all in one.
“So bad, you don’t even wanna know,” Max tells her like Lupe isn’t even there. “All day at work I’m dealing with these hopeless pining puppy eyes, it’s fucking with my constitution.”
“I’m not pining.”
Max makes an exasperated noise. “Can we not with the denial, it’s boring.” She turns back to Jo. “The other day Clance stopped by on my lunch break with some leftovers from Guy, had one conversation with this sadsack and now every time I mention work she’s asking me when the hell Jess and Lupe are gonna get their shit together.”
“I barely even know Clance!”
“Exactly,” Max tells her severely.
“Sounds bad, Lu,” Jo agrees, apologetic.
Lupe groans and drags her hands down her face. “It doesn’t even matter,” she says. “Can we please just talk about something else? Like how weird it is that Max has a whole separate group of friends that she barely lets us interact with?”
“Of course I don’t, Clance is my girl, I’m not subjecting her to this mess,” Max says, unmoved. “And Guy couldn’t handle y’all, he’s a marshmallow.”
“Are you kidding me, I fucking love that dude, he’s hilarious.”
“Yeah, maybe tell him that next time you see him instead of grilling him about where he got his glasses.”
“I thought he had good style!”
“He thought you were about to shove his head in a toilet, you fucking jock.”
“Pfft.”
Lupe looks away with a shake of her head and pauses when her eyes land on Jess, still up at the bar. She’s got two bottles in one hand; the other arm is occupied by the girl hanging off it, playing with Jess’ fingers, stroking up Jess’ bicep, smiling all wide and pretty and Jess is smiling back and –
Lupe is fine.
“Oh Jesus, it’s worse than I thought,” Jo says somewhere to the left.
She shakes herself and forces her gaze away, turning back to the table where even Shaw and Greta have pulled themselves out of their little romance whirlpool to make concerned eyes at her.
“Don’t,” she tells them, and gets up. “Gotta piss.”
Lupe finishes washing her hands and braces them on the sides of the sink, staring herself down in the mirror.
Like, okay, fine. She’s in love with her best friend. Classic dyke shit, everybody saw that coming, this is the stuff 90s soft rock girl bands are made of. What was she supposed to do, not fall in love with Jess? Kind, strong, happy Jess with her clever hands and constant snark and her inability to sit still for more than ten minutes at a time? Just the funniest, most competitive yet most easy-going person she’s ever met in her life? Just the person that knows her better than anybody else, the person that’s seen Lupe at her absolute worst and still hasn’t left? Fuck off.
It's whatever, she’s handling it. She can handle it. She just needs to pull her shit together like, even a second.
She’s gonna be fine.
When she gets back to the table Jess is still at the bar talking to that girl, Greta and Shaw have disappeared and Max is confiding something to her cocktail while Jo sits in convenient listening distance, all stoic nods and grim understanding.
“…kept wanting to say something to her but the moment never felt right. And then she had this whole thing about how maybe it’s better to just go back to being regular friends, which like, if that’s what had happened then I think I’d be okay but it’s all weird now, we barely talk anymore and I don’t know how to get it back.”
“This why you ended up with the Zumba instructor?”
“Maybe a little. I did actually like her too, she’s a lot of fun, but Esther…”
Lupe frowns. “I thought you were okay about Esther?”
Max makes a face. Lupe raises an incredulous eyebrow.
“Hey, is this why you won’t leave me alone about – my thing?” She glances over her shoulder hurriedly, but Jess is still talking to that girl, is she the most interesting person on earth or something? Whatever – “Are you projecting or something?”
Max kicks her under the table. “No, I’m calling attention to the obvious reality of you being in love with your roommate, which has nothing to do with me having some tiny, insignificant, unresolved feelings about Esther-”
“You started a whole other relationship with someone you weren’t even into because of some tiny, insignificant unresolved feelings?”
“I started a whole relationship with someone because of her nice ass and a mutual hatred of kale smoothies, don’t tell me you haven’t gone off of less-”
“Okay, but if Esther’s who you’re really in-”
“It doesn’t matter how I feel about Esther, she doesn’t feel the same way.”
“Okay, so we are in the same situation-”
“I don’t even know where to start with that-”
Jo buries her face in her hands. “I’m gonna kill both you guys.”
Lupe snorts. “Yeah? How’s Maybelle doing?”
“Maybelle is parenting two children, working full time and by her own account just barely bi-curious, Maybelle doesn’t factor into any discussions like this.”
Max sits back, craning her neck to look around the bar. “Where’d Shaw go, she’d back me up on this.”
“She and Greta have been sucking face by the dartboard for the past ten minutes,” Jo grumbles, dropping her hands and shooting a tired look at the corner.
Lupe and Max both whip around, and sure enough.
“Goddamn, that was fast,” Lupe mutters.
“Greta’s gonna have the worst neck pain tomorrow,” Max observes. “Should we get Shaw some platforms for her birthday? She’s gotta be better prepared if she’s going after the tall ones.”
“What’re we talking about?” Jess comes moseying back over, sans the girl, and hands Lupe her beer. “Sorry that took a while, Lu, ran into someone from the league.”
Lupe tries not to look too relieved, just takes a swig and motions with her chin at Shaw and Greta’s corner. “Guess the undercut’s working out for her.”
“It’s a skill I’ve honed over the years,” Jess says with a sage nod.
Jo scoffs. “What, magic haircuts that get people laid?”
Jess grins and points at her. “Just be glad I use my powers for good. It’s a heavy cross to bear.”
“Man, fuck off,” Jo says, but she’s laughing.
“Jess!” someone calls. “You coming?”
Lupe looks to see the girl Jess was talking to waiting by the door, smiling and impatient.
“Be right there!” Jess waves to here, and turns back to the group with a little salute. “Duty calls, fellas. Lu, see you at home. Feel better Max!”
Then she’s gone. Lupe clenches her jaw, hard, and doesn’t look at Max or Jo. By some miracle, neither of them give her any shit. Jo just sighs while Max nudges her beer towards her.
“Alright, let’s get drunk.”
(They met at the gym, because of course they did. Lupe had just been moved on to evening shifts, bored out of her skull while she waited to hear whether she was gonna get the personal trainer job or not. Jess was new to the area, between contracts and stopping in every other night to burn off all her extra energy. Lupe still laughs in hindsight at how immediately they’d sniffed each other out.
“I swear, I spent my whole early twenties driving to the next town over for a gay bar and I still feel like more of an outsider out here sometimes,” Jess had half-joked one evening, keeping up a light jog on the treadmill next to the glitchy one Lupe was running a maintenance check on. “Someone came up to me in the street the other day and asked if I was interested in being on an episode of Queer Eye. I’m like certain that’s not how that show recruits, I have no idea who that guy thought he worked for. Kept offering to get me some makeup like I just hadn’t ever heard of it.”
Lupe had laughed, prodding at the treadmill buttons and flipping through the manual, allegedly trying to remember how to reset the system but mostly just fucking around so she could keep chatting with Jess. “Legit,” she agreed. “I went on a date a couple weeks ago with this chick who swore all over her profile she was into butches, and then she freaked out and left when she realised I don’t shave my legs.”
“What?” Jess snorted. “That’s insane, how do you…?”
“I have no idea. LA, I guess.”
Jess shook her head. “What a fuckin’ trip.” Then she chuckled. “I used to try and use the cold as an excuse whenever I got into it with my aunts about shit like that. Like, natural insulation, right? They never bought it.”
“You’re from up north, then?”
“Ayup, Canada. Moose Jaw?”
Lupe stopped working to stare at her. “No way there’s actually a place in Canada called Moose Jaw.”
“Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.”
“No no no, that’s way too Canadian, that’s gonna cause some kind of singularity event-”
Jess had laughed so hard she lost her footing and went flailing off the treadmill with a yelp.
“Oh shit-!”
Which had led to them just sitting on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, because the gym was pretty much empty anyway and Lupe’s manager had a habit of falling asleep at his desk; Jess chuckling at her own clumsiness, Lupe examining the friction burn on the heel of Jess’ palm where she’d caught herself.
“What I mean is, it’s nice to meet someone who gets it,” Jess had said at length, her gaze heavy on the side of Lupe’s face as she searched around for one of the handywipes she liked to carry at work to stave off having to touch too much sweaty equipment.
“Yeah, it is.” Lupe had turned a little to smile at her, and then clicked her tongue triumphantly when she found what she was looking for. “Okay here, lemme clean that, god knows what’s been tracked into that floor…”
Jess had let her dab at the graze, unusually quiet. “You ever wanna hang out outside the gym?” she asked after a moment. “Grab a drink or something?”
“Totally,” Lupe found herself agreeing with more enthusiasm than she could ever remember mustering for a drink in a bar. “Maybe we can wingman each other, find some not-crazy people to sleep with. There’s this bar in my neighborhood…”
She’d gone off on a tangent about Vi and Edie and their insane dedication to a 1920s speakeasy aesthetic, even when it meant wearing three-piece suits in ninety degree heat. Jess had listened, smiling softly every time Lupe looked at her, something deep and searching in her eyes that Lupe didn’t know how to name but never wanted to stop).
Jess is home by the next morning. Lupe wakes to the sound of her singing in the kitchen, underscored by a whole lot of crashing pots and pans. She allows herself exactly one minute to lay in bed with her eyes closed and pretend. Then the fire alarm starts blasting and she hauls herself up to stop Jess burning down the whole apartment.
“Okay, when I say leave the cooking to me, this is the kind of shit I’m talking about,” she pants once they’ve thrown open all the windows and can more or less breathe again.
Jess twists and untwists the dishtowel she was flapping under the smoke detector. “Sorry,” she says, sheepish. “Jo drunk-texted me a bunch of Little Mermaid gifs at like four am so I figured you guys went pretty hard, thought you might want a good breakfast.”
Lupe shakes her head, knowing she’s failing to hide her smile but finding it hard to care. “Nah, I tapped out around midnight.”
“Why’s that?” Jess asks, turning to the sink so she can start trying to chisel bits of charred bacon off the bottom of the frying pan.
Lupe briefly considers getting into the whole thing with Jo going Super Italian mode and making everybody try a shot of tuaca; and then the subsequent whole thing with Lupe belatedly remembering she can’t drink brandy without getting crushingly sad, which resulted in Max calling up an extremely irritated Shirley to come scrape Lupe up off the bar, drive her home and literally tuck her into bed (it was weirdly comforting, Lupe’s not gonna confront it). Then she decides that’d be way too much effort for a Saturday morning and shrugs instead.
“Just was tired.”
Jess looks up from the frying pan, eyebrow cocked. “You okay?”
“Yeah! Yeah. ‘Course.”
Christ, she doesn’t even believe herself. Jess frowns and puts down the pan, flicking soap off her hand so she can rest it on Lupe’s shoulder.
“You’d tell me if something was up, right?”
Lupe blinks at her, the concern in her eyes, her sudden closeness, the warmth of her hand, and whatever words she was gonna come up with stall in her throat. She nods instead. Jess gives her a worried smile, squeezes her shoulder, goes back to the dishes. Lupe mumbles something about taking a shower and flees.
Jess’ rec hockey league starts ramping up practices as late summer slides into autumn, so Lupe finds herself with a lot more free time and hates how much she struggles to fill it.
“You could always take up hockey as well,” Max suggests one afternoon, tossing a ball back and forth in the gym parking lot after work because they’re antsy and don’t want to deal with the world at large.
“I suck at skating, Jess made me try it one time and I ate shit. We should start a winter baseball league or something.”
“Too much work. Red’s been trying to show me the ropes for running shit, I think I get why he’s like that now. Just join our team next season, we could’ve used you this summer.”
“The fuck are you talking about, what team with you two on it needs a third pitcher?”
“Then join a different one, Ess and I need the competition. You ever play against Teri? It’s embarrassing, man, I’m starting to feel bad for her.”
Lupe blows out her cheeks and shakes her head. “I don’t know, maybe. I’ll think about it.”
Max catches the ball off her, frowns, and throws it back a little harder. “Are you still letting that shit Porter said get to you?”
“Are you still calling her Ess after she broke your heart?”
“She did not break my heart.”
“That’s not what you said the other night-”
“How do you even remember the other night, you spent half of it openly weeping-”
“I was not weeping-”
“Like a goddamn war-widow-”
“I’m stoic! I’m so fucking stoic!”
They’re probably launching the ball at each other a little too hard to be safe for a public space at this point, but they’re saved from descending even further by Clance appearing out of pretty much fucking nowhere.
“Max! I’ve been waiting out on the street for like twenty minutes, what the hell are you doing?”
“Fuuuuuuuck,” Max groans with an extended wince. “Sorry, Clance, I forgot. We were, um. Busy.”
“Uh huh.” Clance shoots an unimpressed look between them. “Playing catch?”
“Letting off some steam?”
“After you begged me yesterday to ditch Guy and come hang out with you-”
“Alright alright, I’m flaky and I’m sorry!”
Clance just waves her off, clearly used to this. Lupe tosses the baseball in her palm and gives her an awkward smile.
“Fun plans?” she asks stiltedly.
“Not especially,” Clance says with a haughty look while Max rolls her eyes. “My darling husband was going to cook us a delicious dinner, but now I guess I’m spending another evening stopping this one texting she-who-shall-not-be-named.”
“You can say her name, Clance, I’m not gonna break down. Lupe talks shit about Esther all the time, it’s healing.”
“Huh.” Clance glances at Lupe again as if re-evaluating. “What’re you doing tonight, Lupe?”
“Uh. Jess has a game, so. Probably that.”
Max makes an incredulous noise. “You are not going to watch her play.”
“Of course I am, she’s my best friend and it’s the first game of the season.”
“You’re a goddamn mess.”
Lupe huffs because she’s aware, thank you. Fucking Max. “Hey Clance, you and Guy wanna come watch some hockey?” she asks abruptly.
This is a thing people do, right, try and make new friends when they’re in a weird space? Widen their social circle? She’s pretty sure she’s heard that’s a thing.
Max’s eyes are very wide and she’s frantically shaking her head ‘no’ at Lupe. Clance is observing this with a shit-eating grin. “You know what, that sounds like fun. Max, you gonna come with?”
“Aw hell, you know I would, but I promised Uncle Bert I’d go and help him with his, uh. Clocks.”
“His clocks?” Lupe repeats, highly entertained.
“Yeah, they’re all – broken?”
“And you’re gonna fix them?”
“I could fix clocks!”
“Sure, but do you?”
“Didn’t you say Bert and Gracie were in Illinois visiting your folks right now?” Clance cuts in.
Lupe smirks while Max tries to mouth ‘I’m gonna kill you’ at her without moving her lips.
“This is gonna be fun,” she lies.
It’s sort of a loose tradition for everybody to show up to Jess’ first game of the season, since nobody can ever get their shit together to make it to many more all together once the holidays kick into gear (they do the same for Max in the summer when baseball’s starting up, used to do the same for Lupe back before – whatever). Lupe knows Jess gets it, that life’s messy and everyone’s busy, but she also knows that seeing all their friends there rooting for her the first night out on the ice makes Jess grin like the fucking sunshine every single time.
She also knows that it’s probably good the whole bunch of them can never make it collectively to more than one game a year, because it’s consistently a shitshow.
“GET ‘EM! FUCKING GET ‘EM!”
“HIGH-STICKING! THAT WAS HIGH-STICKING! GET YOUR HEAD OUTTA YOUR ASS, REF!”
“LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
“Can you all fucking chill?” Max asks the group at large, to no avail, while Clance laughs her ass off.
“Wooooo! Go number six!” Guy whoops, double fists in the air. “I’m cheering the right team, right?” he adds after a minute, glancing at Lupe warily.
She can’t help but chuckle – she’s obsessed with this dude – and points out Jess putting up a wall in front of the other team’s forward long enough for Esti to grab the puck. “Yup, that’s Jess. And that’s Esti, number fifteen.”
“She’s kind of everybody’s little sister,” Maybelle supplies from behind, leaning forward to prop her elbows on Lupe’s shoulders just in time to start bellowing in her ear. “GO ESTI, GO!”
Guy nods, looking about as hype as Lupe guesses he gets, and sits forward as Esti goes zipping up center ice on the attack, Ana hooking around the side for the assist.
Esti shoots; the opposing goalie blocks it, but the collective groan that goes up around the room is pretty gratifying in and of itself. Shaw and Greta both start hissing like cats and then giggling helplessly where they’re practically sitting on top of each other across the seat in front of Lupe, with Jo pressed up to the plexiglass next to them, calling out supposed fouls every five seconds.
Lupe leans down and shoves the back of her head. “Just apply to be a linesman, you’re exhausting.”
Jo bats her away without turning around. “They couldn’t handle me.”
“Um, exactly? It’d be like, beautiful carnage. Greta, back me up.”
Greta disentangles herself from Shaw’s dreamy gaze long enough to smirk. “For sure,” she agrees. “Return of the Bazooka, the girls would go wild.”
“Nobody goes wild for the officials, not in those stupid shirts, black and white stripes are ass on my complexion-”
“Did you used to play or something?” Guy asks her.
“Here and there,” Jo agrees absently, eyes fixed on the game.
“She used to have the best slapshot in the league before she busted her knee,” Lupe explains. “Now she just sits here and watches from afar like a poor little Victorian street urchin.”
“I swear to god if you don’t stop fucking calling me that-”
“Pale little face pressed against the window-”
“I will end you-”
“Oh you wanna go? You wanna fucking go?”
“Don’t front with me García, I’ll break you in half like a matchstick-”
Max is rubbing her eyes, exhausted. “It’s shit like this is why I don’t let you hang out with my other friends.”
“Are you embarrassed of us, Max?” Greta gasps with mock-affront, hand splayed across her chest dramatically. “How could that be?”
“I’m actually super relieved it’s not the other way around, I was getting worried, no offence,” Clance interjects.
“None taken, that’s fair,” Shaw assures her.
“I’ll fight you too, Shaw, don’t think I won’t-”
Maybelle’s hands come down on Lupe’s shoulders and she launches to her feet. “They’re going for it!”
“Oh shit-”
“KILL ‘EM, JESS!” Shirley screeches somewhere behind.
Lupe’s whole body tenses up as Jess sprints up the left side – passes to Esti, who passes to Ana who whacks it back to Jess, just barely misses a check into the boards and –
“GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAL!”
The buzzer blares and Jess comes swooping around the back of the net with a big dumb fist-pump. Lupe can make out her cocky grin from here, is aware on some level that she’s on her feet cheering and yelling the same as the rest of them, but maybe leaves her body a little bit when Jess seems to make direct eye contact with her from the ice as she sails past and points at her –
Like, that’s for you –
-before her teammates drag her into a celly and if Lupe’s a little weak at the knees, at least she can blame it on the way Maybelle’s practically climbing over her shoulders at this point.
“So are we gonna talk about it?” Jo asks later in the bar, watching from a quiet spot while the team goes a little bit hog-wild celebrating their win.
Lupe takes a long pull of her beer. “Talk about what?”
“Jess dedicated her goal to you.”
“Did she? I thought she was pointing at all of us.”
Jo just shakes her head. “C’mon, man.”
Lupe shuts her eyes and passes a hand over her face. “What, Jo? What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say you’re gonna stop wallowing in your misery and do something about this.”
“Do what? Come clean? Admit I’m the fucking idiot who caught feelings for her best friend?” Lupe swallows hard past the sudden tightness in her throat. “It won’t matter.”
“How do you know?”
Lupe lets her eyes track over to where Jess is caught up in her maelstrom of drunken hockey players, smiling that crazy smile of hers while Esti chats her ear off and some girl in a Kings jersey makes eyes across the table. She feels Jo follow her gaze and knows she doesn’t need to say anything.
But Jo just scoffs. “Come on. You think she’d go home with that rando if she knew you were an option?”
Lupe takes another drink. “She can already go home with me,” she says, voice entirely flat. “We live together, we do everything together except this. Unless you think sex is the only thing that matters-”
“Tchach,” mutters Jo.
“Uh huh. But no sure, lemme go proposition some friends-with-benefits situation, that classically ends super well for everybody involved.” She points her drink at Max, who’s dancing with Clance and Guy, finally looking like she’s having some actual goddamn fun. “If she wanted to go home with me, she would. But what she wants is to go get her rocks off with a hot girl, so that’s what she’s gonna do. Putting sex on the table with us, it – it wouldn’t change anything. It’d just make it worse.”
Jo stares at her. “No, sorry, what? You’re comparing your feelings of genuine romantic love to a one night stand like those are in any way the same thing, what are you talking about.”
Lupe sighs. She’s too drunk for this, she can’t get her words to match up with what she knows in her head. “I’m saying – I’m saying what we already have, it’s enough for me. I don’t need to keep, keep looking for people the way she does. If I could just go home with her right now and fall asleep watching X-Files, that’s what I’d do. If that’s what she wanted, that’s what she’d do, but instead she’s gonna go back to that hot Kings fan’s apartment and fuck her ‘til she can’t walk straight, because that’s what she actually wants to do.”
Jo just keeps looking at her, baffled. “There’s so much in there, I don’t even know where to start,” she says after a minute. “How the fuck does your brain work, García?”
Lupe finds herself abruptly exhausted. She can’t keep trying to explain this, she can’t keep thinking about it. “I don’t fucking know, De Luca, okay? Just leave me alone. Please.”
“Hmm.” Jo’s frowning, looks troubled, but she sits back in her chair and lets the matter drop.
“Je-sus, look at this pair of brooding hunks,” Greta drawls, dropping into the chair across from Lupe. “What’s got you two lookin’ so down?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be u-hauling with Shaw right about now?” Lupe grumbles, so far past being in the mood for any more prodding.
Something incredibly fragile flashes across Greta’s face and she looks away with a swish of curly hair, her nonchalant affect coming over her like a cloak. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Ah shit, Bird, what happened?” Jo sighs, drawing Greta in and flicking a look over her shoulder that Lupe doesn’t need words to understand.
She hauls herself up, leaves Jo to pry Greta out of whatever new spiral she’s gotten herself into and goes to hunt down Shaw. She’s not hard to find, standing up at the bar with an alarmed-looking Shirley, poorly concealing the way she’s dabbing at her eyes with a napkin. Jess catches her on the way past, her hand sudden and warm on Lupe’s forearm.
“Hey, everything good?” she asks, a furrow in her brow. “You disappeared.”
Lupe gives her a strained smile. “All good,” she promises. “Keep celebrating. Proud of you.”
The way Jess beams at her almost makes up for all the snot and tears Shaw smears on her good shirt while she shepherds her home.
She doesn’t get any sleep that night. She could blame it on how loud Shaw’s snoring from where she’s passed out on the couch, but she finds that she’s past the point of being too proud to admit she’s waiting for Jess to come in. Every little noise has her jolting out of half-sleep, like maybe this time it’ll turn into a jangle of keys, the creaky floorboard out in the hallway. It never does.