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It’s not like she’s doing anything wrong.
Even if she had no idea who Finnick even was anymore, there’s no denying that he’s the only person on the planet who lets her have any fun. Her friends are great, but going on a late-night skinny dipping adventure on a public beach wasn’t the safest plan for a group of fifteen-year-old girls.
Annie nearly falls down the stairs, cheeks ablaze. She and Finnick were not gonna go skinny dipping together. His body probably looked all different, anyway, with all those fingerprints of the entire Capitol population etched across all the places Annie used to touch him.
Guilt tugs at her belly. She shouldn’t think like that. And she normally never does, when she’s with him, but it gets really hard to remember that everyone up there expects him to have sex with them because he’s a victor—and Finnick has always had a really hard time saying no to grownups, had never wanted to disappoint them—when she’s not actually with him.
But she is with him, and now his hickeys look a lot more like bruises. She told her mom that she was going to the Victor’s Village to hang out with Mags, which wasn’t a complete lie. She and Mags may only know each other because she was Finnick’s mentor and Annie is Finnick’s (ex) girlfriend, but they talk about heaps of non-Finnick related stuff. Like baking and gardening and knitting, all of which are things Finnick isn’t particularly interested in.
Besides, times have been tough, and Annie’s family quite literally couldn’t afford to get tougher. She might not like getting treated like a charity case, but her mom explained to her that mooching off of victors was different, because it wasn’t really mooching. She was just helping them use their wealth to its fullest extent, so it was kinda like she was doing them a favor.
(Mags also insists that it doesn’t count as mooching because Annie is part of her family, and Annie has to excuse herself from the dinner table to get all teary-eyed in the bathroom. She can’t believe how nice Mags is to her, even with all the egg throwing and curfew breaking and detentions she has under her belt.)
Speaking of Mags, Annie watches as she huffs out the biggest, fakest yawn ever.
“I’m beat,” she declares, even though it was a Knitting Day. She usually has an impromptu nap on the days they spend gardening, but Annie has a feeling that this strange behavior has more to do with her ever changing relationship with Finnick. “Honestly, I don’t think I can even go to the beach today. But there’s some fruit in the fridge, if you two wanna take any.”
And there it is. Annie’s been particularly friendly with Finnick these days, and Mags has been particularly adamant about leaving them alone. Probably because she doesn’t have to worry about them sneaking into each other’s rooms and sleeping together in any sense of the word anymore.
It’s not like Annie doesn’t think about it. Sometimes she makes him laugh or he makes her laugh and she’s wondering what it’d be like to lean in for a kiss, but she never gets farther than that, because that thought is almost immediately followed up by images of Capitol women clawing at his skin. She doesn’t want him to think that she wants to claw at his skin, too, because that’s never what their relationship was about. Not even when they were actually dating.
But then their fingers brush together as they load up the picnic basket, and a blush so awful creeps along his face that Annie thinks he’s gonna spontaneously combust.
“Sorry,” he mutters, and Annie feels really disgusted with herself that she only notices all the bruising and the flinching when he’s right there in front of her. Her memory just gets a little shaky when he’s away and she hears the boys in her class talk about how lucky he is that he gets to fuck some of the girls they have in the Capitol, but he can’t be very lucky if he always looks like he’s on the verge of caving in on himself whenever he comes back home.
“Don’t be sorry,” she tells him, because she finds that this has a better effect on him than it’s okay. “Do you have any sunscreen?”
He does. She’s too shy to ask him to do her back, and he’s too shy (and jittery, probably) to ask her to do his, so she can feel her skin sizzling by the time they sprawl out on their picnic blanket and watch the waves roll over the shore.
She no longer regards him with scathing confusion, or even cautious curiosity—there’s still a lot to be confused about (why do all these people want Finnick, even though he doesn’t seem to properly want them back?), but she shouldn’t be scathing about it.
That’s the way she sees it, anyway. Her friends won’t tell her outright, because they know there’d be no way to say this without undermining her sense of independence, but Annie knows that they think she shouldn’t be hanging out with Mags at all. That she’s only doing it because there’s a vague connection to Finnick, who is her whore ex-boyfriend that practically cheated on her with the entirety of the Capitol in one night. That she just needs to rip the band aid off and move on, even if it’ll be really hard.
She glances at him. He doesn’t seem like a whore. Or look like a whore. He doesn’t even act like a whore, either.
Sure, he acted a bit different in the Capitol when he was a tribute, and he acted even more different when he was a victor, but even Annie could tell that he was just choosing to suppress different parts of his personality that the Capitol didn’t like (being scared, being disagreeable) and amplify the ones that they did (being funny, being obedient). This whole whore side of him seemed more like pretending than it did performing.
He’s still a bit cautious with her, though. He catches her eye and gives her a small smile, bits of strawberry stuck in his teeth, and Annie giggles. He giggles back, cheeks heating right back up, and the ice is officially broken.
If anyone’s acting a bit like a whore, it’s Annie. Which is something she shouldn’t think, because just because she has a body count of four doesn’t mean that she’s a slut slut slut slut slut she’s so easy all you gotta do is tell her you love her, but she’s not exactly using the sunscreen to draw a flower on the back of Finnick’s hand because she wants to showcase her art skills. She’s doing it because, even though he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t love him (she really doesn’t, okay?), touching him so gently and casually still makes butterflies erupt in her stomach.
And maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but she thinks he feels the same way. He’s recently stopped looking so guilty and apologetic whenever they touch on purpose (now, he only looks that way whenever it’s an accident), which is why he draws a smiley face onto her palm.
Now all that’s left to do is wait for the sun to bake their creations onto their skin. Annie’s never been very good at that, but it’s easy to sit for hours on end when she’s having an intellectually stimulating conversation. With all her potential suitors accusing her of acting like too much of a bitch (when she really wasn’t just gonna let them boss her around), she had started to suspect that every single boy on the planet was completely insufferable.
“And that’s the real reason why I think Oedipus loved his mom so much.”
Finnick is a boy, but he’s not completely insufferable, so could you blame Annie for wanting to hang out with him? There is one thing, though, that he didn’t get quite right…
“Oedipus didn’t love his mom. He had sex with her.”
His face floods with heat for the third time within the last hour. He picks at an imaginary strand on the blanket, apparently very uncomfortable with discussing sex so openly. Even if it’s with her.
Her gut wrenches. What is the Capitol doing to him?
“Anyway,” she says, hoping it’s not too obvious she’s changing the subject, “I’m thinking about cutting my hair.”
He turns to face her, making a sound that sounds suspiciously like ooh, and Annie can’t help but smile again. And maybe it’s a little too easy for him to get her to smile, but it’s hard not to when he reacts to everything she says with effortless, wide-eyed interest.
“How short? Like a mullet?”
“I would if my hair was straighter, but my dad said—well, he said it’d look like a literal bird’s nest.”
Finnick frowns, fingers twitching like he’s going to take her hand. He ends up just tucking them under his chin. “That’s pretty mean, I think.”
“Not really, but only ‘cause his hair is like mine. My mom said he only knows it won’t look good ‘cause he got a mullet, you know, when they were younger. Can you believe that? I’ll have to show you the picture.”
“Did he look cool?”
Annie laughs so hard that she has to clap her hands together to filter out some of the excess joy. Finnick doesn’t tell her to calm the fuck down—he just laughs along with her. “Not at all!”
“Well, I bet you will.” He actually does reach over for her this time, his fingers hovering over her hair. She leans forward a bit—not close enough to bridge the gap, but enough to assure him that he can (gently, playfully) tug at one of her curls if he wants to.
He doesn’t. Instead of recoiling back, he rolls over until he’s laying in the hot and scratchy sand, scrambling to his feet.
“Race you to the water!”
“Ugh!” What a cheater. At least he has the decency to not (cheekily, playfully) ask for a victory kiss.
Ugh. Yeah, he obviously wouldn’t do that. Because they’re not dating.
“C’mon—throw me a bone? We both know you’re gonna beat me in a seashell finding contest. And a sandcrab contest. And a race out to the buoy and back.”
“And the race back home,” she adds.
“Oh, as if.”
Ooh. Annie likes this part of him—the playful competitiveness, the fire that the Capitol always extinguishes. It balances out her borderline obsessive competitiveness, and it makes victory that much sweeter.
And, wow, is victory sweet. Annie finds the prettiest seashells and the biggest sandcrabs, and watching Finnick haul himself up on shore is just icing on the ever-growing layers of her victory cake.
“At least the daisy I have on my hand is pretty,” he remarks, his tan interrupted by the sunscreen Annie slathered onto his skin just hours before. Annie smiles back at the smiley face on her hand.
“How about this?” she proposes, effectively making him perk up. “We have a sudden death round. Winner takes all.”
By all, she means that she makes Finnick a new (friendship) bracelet. Nonetheless, he doesn’t try to get a cheeky head start back home—he takes her very seriously, which is good. This was no laughing matter—Annie had a whole box of donuts on the line.
They tie.
Okay. That’s fine. They decide to bake cookies instead, because they couldn’t really be seen out in public with each other. For one, how (outwardly) embarrassing for Annie. For another, Finnick could barely talk about fictional sex with her—she doesn’t think he’d be able to bear it if boys from school started talking about actual sex.
They don’t bother to be quiet, though, because they both know Mags isn’t really sleeping. But they are particularly careful when they go upstairs. She’s never gone into his room before, but she forgot to pack pajamas and the clothes she had on over her bathing suit got all gross and sandy, so they walk while they talk and don’t realize that they’re alone until Finnick hands her a spare set of his clothes.
Sparks fly. Literally, because his laundry was really static-y for some reason, and that makes Annie’s brain short circuit.
“I’m gonna go change, then,” she says, but she walks toward the wrong door and she’s in too deep to turn back now so she just shuts his bathroom door and carefully steps into his clothes.
She tells the butterflies in her tummy to shut the fuck up.
They manage to switch back to normal after that, where Finnick fetches a stack of cards and teaches her how to play all these new games. One of them relies on how fast you are at slapping your hand down on the carpet, and they do have to suppress several excited yelps and a few passionate arguments (Annie so slapped her hand down first, or else her pinkie finger wouldn’t be on top of his index finger) to keep a low profile with Mags.
In between all the knitting and swimming and card games, Annie really was starting to feel the exhaustion set in, and so was he. They nod off as they talk, both valiantly fighting against heavy fatigue (because that would mean they’d have to go their separate ways), so they get creative.
Finnick takes the floor and Annie takes the bed (he hates beds, even if they’re his), so that way they’re not really sleeping together. They’re just talking. Laughing. Tired.
Annie asks a question that Finnick doesn’t answer, but she’s too sleepy to remember what it was. So, instead of repeating herself, her head falls onto his pillow and she doesn’t even bother to jerk herself awake.
Honestly, so what if Mags finds them like this? She has sleepovers with her friends all the time, so it’s not like this is a super big deal. In fact, it’s actually the opposite of a big deal.
The butterflies in her belly agree with her.