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“So, how were your lectures?”
“They were fine.”
Dipper would have prefered it if they were actually fighting. Which was saying something, because whenever he and Mabel actually had an argument he always spent the day feeling like he was nursing an ulcer.
And fine? Nothing was fine.
He watched Mabel as she tossed her bag onto the floor, slipped off her shoes and headed straight into their kitchen.
Dipper had lived with Mabel long enough to know that if things were just fine, that meant nothing was actually fine at all.-
“So how long are you planning on ignoring me?”
“I’m not.”
“You’re not. Right.”
“I’m not ignoring you, Dip.”
Dipper stared at Mabel from his seat all the way on the other side of the couch. The space between them seemed like a gaping chasm. It felt larger than the Grand Canyon. It was vast and empty- like their refrigerator.
“And what do you call this?” Dipper gestured his arms at the two couch cushions that remained between them.
Okay, so the space was more like 3 feet.
“You haven’t looked me in the eye in days. This is dumb.”
Ever since Mabel had walked in on Jessica Saunders trying to stick her tongue down his throat at some party on Saturday she’d been acting weird. Weirder than weird. It was the kind of weird that if it was coming from another girl it would probably seem more normal and easy for him to understand.
The fact that it was coming from Mabel just confused him.
“Grow up, Dipper. I don’t need to hang all over you just for us to be fine. We’re not 12 anymore.”
Dipper muttered an audible “wow” in response. That was rich. Mabel was telling him to grow up? Mabel who was sitting on the other end of their couch wearing pink slippers that looked like pigs, with her hair pinned back with a headband that had a bow covered in rhinestones on it?
His sister who had taken to dying her hair every color of the rainbow since she hit 16?
“I’ll grow up when you commit to anything for more than five minutes.”
“What is that supposed to mean?!”
“It means exactly what you think it means. Look I’m sorry about Saturday but I can’t do anything about what happened. It’s not like anything actually happened anyway.”
“This has nothing to do with Saturday,” she huffed, and immediately she got up from the couch and walked over to the kitchen, busying herself with grabbing the last can of Diet Pitt from the fridge. “But if it hypothetically did have to do with Saturday, I mean, how dense are you that you didn’t even see the way she was flirting with you the whole time? Of course the second she got you alone she was going to try something with you!”
Mabel closed the fridge with a swing of her hip. “I mean really, Dip. You’re the smartest guy in all of your classes but… it’s like you can’t even tell when a girl actually likes you.”
“That’s not…”
Her curls bounced behind her and he watched her drink slowly, as if she were purposefully trying to keep her mouth occupied. From behind her baby pink bangs she was staring at the ugly countertop, there was a faint blush on her cheeks.
“…true.” Dipper’s reply had no luster whatsoever.
He had been actively ignoring his feelings for Mabel since before puberty. Their eyes locked for a few seconds and Dipper felt his chest constrict from the way she was looking at him.
It was like a hurricane of things flashing behind her eyes. Worry, confusion, panic, loneliness, longing, among others. He’d never seen her look at him like that before.
Had she ever? Had he missed it?
“Mabel I-”
“Anyways, like I said: I’m not ignoring you. See? We’re talking right now. Congratulations!” Mabel turned to leave the tiny kitchen they shared and started making a bee line towards her room, completely avoiding eye contact again. “This is what you wanted. Soooo…. I’m going to go to my room and hit the books since I’ve got a history midterm coming up and it’s-”
Dipper grabbed her free hand by the wrist and in one swift movement, tugged her so that she was facing him. Mabel’s brown eyes were wide and her lips were parted.
Which was kind of perfect since Dipper was pressing his mouth against hers in the single-most impulsive thing he’d ever done in his life because if he was wrong it was going to be worse than the end of the world.
It was going to mean the end of them, this thing they had that was like being best friends with someone who was all the things you could never be- someone you thought about all day long. Someone you loved but weren’t ever supposed to be able to have.
She tasted like Diet Pitt and vanilla lipgloss and her mouth was… actually moving against his. Dipper couldn’t believe it actually, and he kept his arms wrapped tightly around her even when he felt the soda spilling onto the sleeve of his shirt.
When he pulled back to give her breathing room, he looked down at her face. “You’re right, I am dense. But you should know, that this? This is what I really want.”
Her cheeks flushed and Dipper couldn’t remember the last time she looked so flustered and cute. Really cute.
“When did you get moves? I can’t believe you have moves and I didn’t know about them.”
“I don’t know. Probably right before you started getting jealous.” He mimicked her phrasing and tone. “I can’t believe you got jealous.”
“I was not!”
“You’re right, it was you being jealous and weird.”
“Shut up already,” she said with a grin as she pulled him by the collar so that his mouth fit firmly against hers once more.