Archive of Our Own

1

Taissa Turner and Van Palmer should meet playing soccer. At a camp, or at school, in gym class or in rec league. They should meet playing soccer. It would only make sense.

They don’t.

Rain is buckling her window, pounding like it wants to break in. Taissa—thirteen, just starting to sprout like a video of a tree punched into fast-forward—hunches over her Social Studies book. She’s frowning, her attention skating back to the rain over and over again, no matter how hard she tries to keep focused.

Concentrate, her mother insists in her head. She forces her attention back to her work. For a minute or two. And then, slowly, slowly, her eyes creep back to the window.

It isn’t her fault. She watched a movie last night, one of her dad’s favorites. Rear Window. “Hitchcock at his best!” Dad had announced, with his usual trademark overzealousness. She’d rolled her eyes, because she’s not a little kid anymore, and someone has to mock his goofy-ass habits—but he’d been right. It was good. Really good.

And now, no matter what she does, she can’t look away from her own bedroom window. The storm raging outside. The clatter of tree branches from the enormous oak just beyond the glass. It all binds together too easily, like something out of one of her dad’s movies. All she’s missing is—

A hand.

A white hand, slamming palm-first against the glass.

Taissa—thirteen, confident that she is mature for her age—almost shrieks bloody murder. Almost, almost, almost. She clamps both hands over her mouth, stifling the sound just in time, her eyes darting to the closet. The bed. Where should she hide? Should she hide?

This is my room, she thinks with a stab of instinctive fury.

The window is coming up, that hand scrabbling out of the dark. The window is coming up, and a shape is coming through, and this will not stand.

Taissa Turner leaps from her chair, grabs up a baseball bat from the corner, and gets ready to knock this loser into next week.

“No!” shouts a voice. “No, no, shit, I got the wrong fucking house!”

Tai alters her swing just in time, unable to stall the momentum so much as redirect it. She slams into the wall, wincing as the plaster audibly cracks. Thank god her parents are out tonight, hostage to a fancy dinner with her mother’s boss. Maybe she can tack a poster up over the damage or something, keep them from ever noticing.

After she deals with this.

“What,” she hisses, shifting the bat so it rests against the sodden chest of the intruder, “are you doing in my room?”

The stranger is about her own age, though—perhaps because she’s soaking wet and blatantly miserable—she looks much smaller. Sopping red hair streaks out from beneath a black baseball cap. Big blue eyes are fixed firmly on Taissa’s bat, panic-stricken.

There’s a purple bruise under one of those eyes, a good deal of mud on the girl’s torn jeans, and she’s clutching one wrist against the front of her over-sized sweatshirt.

Tai lowers the bat.

“This is my room,” she repeats, calming somewhat. Rain is sluicing through the open window; she strides over and slams it shut, if only to keep her muddy carpet from getting any soggier.

“I see that,” the girl mutters. She scuffs the heel of one hand against her nose and winces. “Fuck. Ow.”

Tai frowns. “What happened to you, anyway?”

“Aliens tried to abduct me. Only just got away.” Pressing her fingers gingerly beneath her nose, the girl inspects them for blood. She seems satisfied with only finding a little, which she rubs carelessly on her ruined jeans.

Taissa rolls her eyes. “Look, you broke into my room—”

“On accident,” the girl says thickly. “Didn’t know it was yours.”

“—so you have to tell me the truth,” Tai finishes as if she hasn’t spoken. The girl’s eyes narrow.

“Or what? You’ll kick me out?” She shrugs, looking at the bat in Tai’s hand with guarded interest. “You’re gonna do that anyway.”

Yeah, Tai understands that is what she should do. Her own age or not, beaten to a pulp or otherwise, this girl’s totally random. And totally snuck up the Turners’ tree, through the Turners’ second-story window. Tai should definitely get her to leave, if only because it’s rude to invite yourself into a stranger’s home.

The girl takes a step back the way she’d come, her red Chuck Taylors squelching. “It’s cool, I’ll just—”

“Someone was chasing you,” Taissa blurts. A total guess, but from the seizure of the girl’s spine, it seems to be the right one.

“So?”

Tai blinks. “What do you mean, so?”

The girl shrugs again. There’s something loosely familiar about her, though Tai can’t quite place where they might have met. She doesn’t think they go to the same middle school. She thinks she would have noticed. There aren’t many unfamiliar faces in her class.

“Do you, like, not care?” Tai presses when the girl says nothing. “That someone kicked your scrawny ass?”

Blue eyes flash. The girl makes another move toward the window, this time pressing her nose against the glass. If she can see anything beyond the dark and the driving rain, Taissa will eat this baseball bat herself.

As if reading her mind, the girl’s shoulders slump. “Fuck,” she mutters again. A thrill runs up Taissa’s spine. Dripping wet and dropping F-bombs; this girl is something else, all right.

“I’m Taissa.” Her name unspools recklessly all by itself. The strange girl darts a glance her way. There’s a smudge on the window, Tai can see, rendered in browning blood. She grimaces. “And you’re bleeding all over my room.”

“Not all over,” the girl protests. She scrubs at the glass with her sleeve, looking irritated when the smudge only spreads.

“Stop that.” Tai reaches out, grasping the girl by the back of the shirt. She’s all twig limbs and hunched shoulders, but when Tai touches her, she flails away with surprising speed. Tai raises both hands in surrender—a gesture that likely would be less threatening, if not for the bat.

Carefully, she leans its length against the wall. The girl follows her with hunted eyes, not entirely trusting that Tai isn’t going to slam a homer right into her kneecaps.

“What’s your name?” Tai presses, trying to gentle her voice the way her dad does when trying to help a wounded animal he’s found in the yard.

“Van.”

It doesn’t sound like a name at all, the way the girl grunts it. Tai turns it over in her head before letting it into her mouth, feeling the shape of it grow sturdier.

“Okay, Van. Who beat your ass?”

Van shrugs again, like it’s nothing. “Some guys. Didn’t stop to get their names.”

“What the—” She wants to spit out that deliciously-illicit word with Van’s ease. She can’t quite find it, has to settle for the next best thing. “—hell did they want?”

It’s not often Taissa feels young these days. She’s practically grown, though her body has yet to hammer out its coltish angles and youthful contours. She’s pretty sure she’s smarter than most grown-ups, certain she has a better handle on the world than her peers.

But here’s Van, mouth crooked in a smirk, making her feel silly just for asking. No, not even silly; naïve.

“They wanted to catch me,” Van says, like it’s obvious.

“Looks like they did,” Tai retorts acidly. She regrets it in the space between heartbeats, watching Van’s brows furrow and her chin lower stubbornly to her collar.

“Not for long.”

This, Van is saying silently, is nothing. This—black eye, bloody nose, muddy clothes torn all to shit—is nothing compared to what it could have been. Tai imagines her sprinting pell-mell, sneakers skidding out from under her in a hairpin turn, elbows punching backward to ward off grasping hands.

“This happens to you a lot, huh?” she asks quietly. She wants to reach for the strange girl again, wants to touch her shoulder with the soothing grace she sees in her father. It feels—like the tone of his skin and his snap-kick sense of humor—like a piece of his genetic makeup she’s never going to inherit.

Van hugs herself, grimacing. “Define a lot.”

“Often enough,” Taissa drawls, “to need an escape plan.”

She gestures around her room. Van, to her surprise, grins. With such a small adjustment of the muscles in her face, she goes from small and forlorn to absolutely perfect.

“It went like clockwork, right?”

Taissa blinks, dazzled. She can’t quite place the twinge in her chest, but suddenly, she knows where she’s seen this kid before.

“County carnival,” she blurts. “You stole a hot pretzel from that sweaty guy’s cart.”

Are you always, she doesn’t add, running for your life?

Van caws with laughter. Her whole body gets into the act: head flung back, body bracing against the wall. Her wet clothes leave a dark outline, no more tragic than the crack Taissa left with her Babe Ruth routine. Tai rolls her eyes, unable to keep from smiling.

“C’mon.”

Van’s smile drops away so quickly, it could have been cleared with a slap. “Where?”

Now Taissa does grab her sleeve, as gentle as she knows how to be. “Downstairs. My mom keeps first aid stuff in the bathroom.”

She sets off at a brisk trot, pleased when Van falls into squelchy step behind her.

“Where were you trying to go, anyway?” she calls over her shoulder. Van seems to be trying to levitate right off the carpet, her every step tiptoe-ginger. Even so, muddy prints form a trail down the hall, down the pristine white staircase. Taissa tries not to wince. She has no idea how she’ll explain this later, only hopes her parents will rate her Good Samaritan behavior over their soiled second floor.

“There’s an empty house,” Van says. “Think it’s the next street over. I got turned around with all the friggin’ rain.”

Tai thumbs through a mental map of her neighborhood. There was a house for sale, but it’s been off the market for weeks.

“I don’t think you can use that one anymore,” she says, pushing the bathroom door wide. Van hesitates, only sliding past her onto the tile when Taissa makes a go go pinwheel with one hand. “There are, like, six kids living in it. And I think their dad might be a cop.”

Van’s face falls. “Oh. That’s not great. Uh, do you want me to take my shoes off?”

They stare together at her threadbare Chucks, now smearing mud on the immaculate bathroom floor. Taissa sighs.

“Seems a little late for that now. Sit on the tub and stick some Kleenex up your nose.”

Van snaps off a snarky salute, her face collapsing in on itself before the joke has landed. Tai, already scrounging under the sink for her mom’s kit, freezes.

“What was that?”

“I might,” Van says through gritted teeth, “have landed funny on my wrist when I was getting away.”

“Did you climb my tree with a broken wrist?” Taissa plants both hands on her hips, staring at this strange gremlin child in her bathroom in bewilderment. Van flattens her lips into a thin line.  

“It’s not broken. See, I can do this—” She rotates her hand in a semi-circle, hissing breath through her teeth the whole time.

“Yeah, you’re not supposed to make that sound while you’re doing it. Gimme.”

Van hesitantly stretches toward her. Tai grasps her forearm in her gentlest grip, turning it back and forth the way her mom did the time she fell off the monkey bars. Van’s chest rises sharply and holds suspended.

“It hurts that bad?” Tai asks uneasily. She’s pretty well-equipped for patching scrapes and icing bruises, but if it’s really broken, they’re going to have to call someone. She’s going to have to explain to her parents what Van was doing climbing her tree. Van’s going to get in trouble.

She really, inexplicably, hates that idea. It’s a relief when Van gives a violent shake of her head, though she doesn’t release the breath she’s holding. Taissa squints at her.

“Tell me,” she warns, “if it hurts when I move it.”

She returns to tilting Van’s wrist, smoothing her thumb lightly down the side. It doesn’t feel terribly swollen to her unpracticed hand; even so, she can see Van’s freckles being eaten up by a sickly greenish-yellow color. She darts her gaze back to Van’s face only to find her sitting bolt upright, eyes wide, mouth shut.

“I think,” Taissa says in her most professional voice, “it’s just bruised.”

“Cool.” Van’s voice comes out all squeaky. “Thanks.”

Tai lets her go. “Seriously. Put the Kleenex up your nose, it’ll stop the bleeding.”

“It’s already stopping,” Van lies; fresh blemishes speckle her shirt. Tai watches another drip fall and raises her eyebrows.

“If we’re going to be friends, you’re gonna have to cool it on the bullshit. I don’t hang out with liars.”

Grumbling, Van obediently stuffs one tissue up each nostril. Tai grabs her head and tips it back.

“There. Sit still.”

“You’re good at this,” Van says with reluctant admiration. Then, almost too softly: “You really want to be friends?”

“Well.” She’s found the Band-Aids and a wealth of cotton swabs to go with her rubbing alcohol. She kneels beside Van’s knobby knees, lays her supplies along the tub’s edge, and bends to see what they’re working with. “Way I see it, if this does happen to you all the time—”

“Attempted alien abductions,” Van interjects sardonically. Tai blinks up at her.

“Right. If the…aliens are always trying to abduct you, you’re going to need a safe haven. And you already know where my tree is.”

Van makes an unidentifiable noise, either because of what Tai just said, or because Tai just pressed a cotton ball laden with alcohol directly into the flap where her knee is supposed to be. For a few minutes, the only sounds are her abrupt inhalations and Tai’s muttered apologies.

Then, without any preamble at all, Van says, “I don’t know why they hate me so much.”

Taissa doesn’t look at her. “Because they’re fuckheads.”

It just swirls out of her. No weighing the shape of it, no testing it against her teeth. The word just blooms from her mouth, leaving her feeling insurmountably enormous in its wake.

She’s never been so certain of anything in her life.

“How do you know?” Van asks, like her eyes aren’t gleaming with something very close to awe. Tai sticks a Band-Aid into place, moving on to the next wound with brisk efficiency.

“Fuckheads,” she repeats with another little shiver of pleasure. She stands up. Sticks out a hand. Van looks her over once, appraising, and clasps it with her good hand like a promise. Taissa hauls her upright.

“You should borrow some of my clothes. You look like someone shoved you off a cliff.”

Van swallows convulsively. She clearly wants to argue, but when Tai cocks her head, all she says is, “You don’t want me to take your clothes. Might never see ‘em again.”

“Oh, you’re not going anywhere.” Taissa starts to usher her from the bathroom, then—thinking better of it at the sight of Van’s filthy shoe once again breaching her mother’s pristine carpet—plants a hand squarely against her chest. “On second thought, don’t move. I’ll bring you some stuff. You can change in here, and we’ll toss in a load of laundry.”

“You have a washer?” Van blinks. “We always use the Laundromat down on Hudson.”

“Washer. Dryer. Fabric softener.” Tai tips her a wink, feeling way cooler than the word laundry should necessitate. “We’ve got it all at Chez Turner.”

She jogs upstairs, feeling oddly detached from her own body. Her feet might as well be wings; her hands, wind. She rushes around her room, snatching up sweatpants and a baggy Nets jersey like wasting even one second might give Van a chance to vanish back into the storm.

When she returns, Van is still in the bathroom, inspecting the contents of the medicine cabinet. Her baseball cap rests on the counter, and she looks as though she’s tried to squeegee the rainwater out of her hair to middling effect. She looks, more than anything, like a lost puppy.

Mom, can we keep her?

“Here.” She shoves the clean clothes in Van’s direction, ignoring the stuttering leap of her heart when pink fingers brush hers. “You like hot chocolate?”

“Um,” Van says, deadpan. “I’ve got a pulse, don’t I?”

Taissa pushes her shoulder, careful not to jostle her badly. She’s grinning. “I didn’t know, maybe you’re allergic, doofus.”

“Allergic,” Van muses. “Hm. Do you make your hot chocolate with tomatoes?”

“Obviously not. …are you allergic to tomatoes?”

“Nope,” says Van. She gives Taissa a brilliantly sunny smile and swings the bathroom door shut in her face. Tai thumps the frame with a loose fist, giggling.

This is how they meet. No should, no neat-and-clean. It simply is. By high school, they know each other to degrees it never occurs to them to question. By high school, Van’s made an art out of scaling that oak tree. Taissa hasn’t locked her bedroom window in months. The Turners pretend not to notice the thump, the giggles, the hurried hushing sounds drifting down from their daughter’s room—and there is always, always an extra place set at the breakfast table the next morning.

But this first night, Taissa’s homework remains unfinished upstairs. The crack in the plaster is concealed behind a Lauryn Hill poster her parents will never think to move. The stairs are still caked with mud, and there are two empty mugs resting on the coffee table when the front door opens.

Taissa would hold a finger to her lips, would shush them over the static on the TV, would unfold the very grown-up speech she’s got all planned out—

Except, of course, by the time the Turners arrive home, it is to find their daughter and a patched Van Palmer tangled on the couch, very much asleep.

2

Van Palmer and Taissa Turner should survive the Wilderness hand in hand. Holding one another close, the pair of them against the world. They should hold firm against the little dramas and petty insecurities that assail a teenage relationship. It would only make sense.

They don’t.

Van’s lost track of how long they’ve been “broken up”. She thinks of it, always, with scare quotes. Thinks of it, always, like something that’s happened to someone else, in a story she isn’t quite living. It’s her first breakup. She’s beyond certain they aren’t supposed to go this way.

Beyond certain they’re not supposed to happen over blood and bile. Over the roasted meat of teenage girls. Over bone necklaces and ritual sacrifice.

Her teenage wasteland is, she must admit, not like most. Why should her breakup be any different?

“You should just let her be,” Mari tells her. Stiff upper lip, that’s been Mari lately. She’s shivering like crazy, can’t blot out the sounds of blood skating down tree trunks and over river rocks, but she’s trying to hold firm. They all are—all of Lottie’s acolytes. Misty, Mari, Travis, Van.

She doesn’t like it. The divide. It can’t possibly last, can it? They can’t possibly last. The five of them against the others, against Shauna, and Nat, and Akilah.

And Taissa.

Natalie may be queen of the rebels, but it was Taissa who lit the match. Van knows this. Van has known she would even before the fracture took.

Her or me, Van. Her or me. Taissa hadn’t had the balls to say it, but it had been all over the divide. Has been splashed all over her skin, dripping from her bared teeth, since this began. Since Taissa decided she could out-think reality.

Van hadn’t chosen. Van hadn’t been able to choose. Taissa did it for her the night she looked Van dead in the eye and walked out of camp.

It would be funny—downright silly, even—in a situation even slightly different. The others haven’t exactly gone far. They can’t, not if they want the lake, the relative security of familiar terrain. It leaves Team Yellowjackets in a truly ridiculous state: half in the cavern, half in the husked-out plane. Living like tenuous sitcom neighbors, the ultimate odd couple.

“Let them go,” Lottie advises, and Van knows who she means. Let Tai go. She doesn’t believe in what they’re doing, who they’ve become—she never did. It’s better to accept that. Some things just can’t be changed. Some people just aren’t willing to do what needs to be done.

Let them go.

Let her go.

She should. She knows it. She knows it in the pit of her stomach, which aches with the dread of an oncoming storm. She knows it in the bones of her jaw, her teeth clenched tightly enough to invoke migraines.

Let her go. Let her pretend. Let her be.

She just can’t fucking do it.

She tells herself it’s pragmatic. It’s protective. She tells herself it’s essential, because the whole point out here—the point of all of it, especially the worst they’ve become—is survival. It’s keeping as many of them going as is humanly possible. It’s making sure they live, goddamn it all.

It’s making sure they live, and Taissa won’t. Not if she’s trying to go it alone. Without Van’s hand in hers. Without Van’s chest against her back, Van’s heartbeat radiating stubborn life along every ridge of Tai’s brittling skeleton.

“Let them be,” her friends—her teammates—tell her, but letting them be means letting the thing inside Taissa have full reign. It means letting whatever part of Taissa understands this story write the next series of chapters. She isn’t sure Tai can survive that. Knows Tai isn’t going to let Nat or Shauna hold her hand through it.

So Van is still here. Still watching. Can’t help it.

“What,” Taissa asks in the dark, “the fuck are you doing?”

Van meets her gaze, steady. The fire between them kicks up restless sparks. Tai sits on a log, arms around her knees, weary and irritable.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she says when Van doesn’t answer. “Go back, Van.”

It’s not a threat. They won’t hurt her for encroaching on the territory of the non-believers. That isn’t their style, any of them, except maybe Shauna—and Shauna’s too shuttered now to lash out in a way that matters. Natalie wouldn’t let her. Taissa wouldn’t let her.

They’re a team, even bisected neatly down the middle this way, the way they were always a team while playing one another in after-school scrimmages.

“You’re still sleepwalking?” Van asks. She poses it carefully, a question lilting the end of the sentence. Tai’s nose wrinkles.

“I’m fine.”

Van waits. She can wait forever, if she needs to. She’s always been patient, a skill that has only sculpted itself into her more completely with time.

“I can handle it,” Taissa says after a few moments of uncomfortable silence. She tosses a scrap of wood into the fire, watching as it spits and sputters. Van raises her eyebrows.

“She’s bringing you to them again. The trees. The symbols.”

Taissa makes a noise deep in her chest. It’s the closest to hate Van’s ever felt from her. The closest to loathing she’s ever seen on Tai’s face, curling her lip into a snarl. Her own chest constricts, and she is—however temporarily—a scrawny kid with a tweaked wrist, staring down the end of a baseball bat.

She didn’t run then, though she probably should have.

She won’t run now, though she probably—

“Get out of here,” Taissa says, her voice a rough whisper. Her eyes gleam, firelight reflecting back and back and back.

Van plants her feet, arms crossed over her chest. “Make me.”

Taissa glowers at her, jaw working. She doesn’t get up. She doesn’t seem to have the energy, and Van wonders if she’s been avoiding the sleepwalking—the other—by avoiding sleep altogether. It would explain the bags under her eyes, the unhealthy gray tinge to her skin.

Then again, Van likely doesn’t look any better. Sleep can only patch so many of the holes the wild has torn open.

“Whatever,” Tai says, looking away. “Do what you want.”

They don’t speak. Every night, Van rocks up to the plane, waiting just far enough from the others to keep from notice. Every night, she watches. Sometimes, Taissa sits watch over the fire. Sometimes, Taissa doesn’t come out at all.

“It’s dangerous,” Lottie tells her.

“It’s stupid,” Mari corrects sharply.

“What if—” Misty, eyes darting, her voice lowering conspiratorially. “What if the wolves come back?”

There are no wolves, not now. If there were, they’d be on the spit, hung by their tails from the bleed-tree. There’s nothing out here Van can’t handle, nothing but Taissa and the puppeteer hunkered down in the depths of her subconscious.

“You don’t owe her anything,” Mari tells her.

Lottie, all sorrowful dark eyes and twitching mouth, says nothing more. Van’s relieved. Van wouldn’t be able to believe her, not on this topic. This religion is Van’s own, the kind of faith she’d wrapped around herself at thirteen and can’t fathom unlearning now.

Taissa’s hands on her bruised wrist. Taissa’s hands bandaging her scrapes. Taissa’s smile when she’d accidentally invited herself home. They’re arcane, these memories. They’re everything.

She lets Lottie anoint her at brow and cheek with daubs of blood. Lets Lottie push tea into her hands before she goes. She lets Lottie protect her, bone necklace and whispered ritual, and she stands in the dark, keeping watch. Most nights, Tai doesn’t appear. Most nights, there’s a wall between that plane and Van Palmer. Just how it should be, she tells herself, and doesn’t believe it for a moment.

She lets Lottie anoint her, and she goes to Taissa, and every so often—every once in a while—

A rustle, a thump, a graceful arc of limbs. It’s sickening, but this is when Taissa looks the most like herself these days. This, when the thing inside her operates according to its own rules, its own map. It’s the closest to steady, to articulate, to planned out Taissa gets anymore.

It isn’t the girl Van loves, and it’s so the girl Van needs, and the two are so jumbled in her head, she can’t breathe.

She knows it isn’t Tai, not really—because those dark eyes seek her out without missing a beat. That chin lifts. A silent acknowledgement, a silent invitation.

Van falls into step.

The other doesn’t run. She moves with precision through the trees, heedless of the dark. She makes it easy to follow her, the way she never did when this all started—as if she wants Van with her. As if she needs Van with her.

Sometimes, she reaches out without looking, her fingers tangling in Van’s. Sometimes, they don’t touch at all, the heat spreading between their bodies like the electric urgency before a storm. Either way, they walk together, and the trees rise up out of the dark, and the world feels just a little bit smaller. A little more contained.

The other leans against marked trunks, and she pulls Van to her. Tangles her hands in Van’s hair until her scalp cries out in protest. Jerks her in by the collar of her shirt and holds her—a breath away—staring into her eyes.

Van doesn’t lean in. Van can’t bring herself to bridge that horrible gap, even as the blood rushes in her ears and her whole body turns to firelight. It’s not that she remembers teeth in her lip. It’s not that she remembers blood on her shirt. It’s not even that she remembers the animal unease of being pinned to the ground by a girl who was not in her own mind, was not in her own body, who skinned her lips back in an expression of feral violence.

It's that this isn’t Taissa. It is—in body—and it isn’t—in actuality—and it makes her chest ache. They aren’t together. This thing inside Taissa needs them to be, but they aren’t. Van knows it, and it’s Van’s responsibility to keep on the other side of that paper-fine line.

“Go on,” the other breathes. “This is where we’re supposed to be.”

Van shakes her head mutely. Her knees are trembling. Her skin is too hot. She feels dirty, unkempt nails bite into the back of her neck. She feels a calloused palm shove its way under the collar of her shirt, leaving scalding prints between her shoulder blades.

“This is where we’re supposed to be,” the other insists, almost plaintive. Van shakes her head again.

“You’re not her.”

“She wants it,” the other croons. “She wants you.”

“Then she can tell me herself,” says Van, as coolly as possible. Taissa’s body pulls her in tight, all hands, all nails, all teeth. She cranes her head back, shaking it hard enough to blur her vision.

The other releases her. Her eyes are dead, her chin tilted down. Van represses a shudder, a sigh of relief.

And then it’s Taissa looking at her, blinking. Taissa, reaching an instinctive hand for Van’s shoulder before remembering they don’t really do that anymore. Don’t do anything anymore.

“What does she want?” she demands, sounding sick and weary and broken. Van wants to reach for her. Van, blood rushing in her ears, body hungry to tilt in and press Taissa to that tree.

“I don’t know,” Van says, because it’s better than the real answer. Better than telling Taissa what that shadowy part of her wants so badly is Van. Van’s hand in hers. Van’s body pressing firm and hot. Van’s acceptance of this thing, this unnamable, unconquerable thing Taissa has become.

Van could give it, but Taissa—the real Taissa—wouldn’t accept. Not like this.

They hover in the dark, magnetic. For a moment, Van can feel the ozone of that storm wrapping around them. For a moment, she can feel the tension drawing itself taut, can feel Taissa’s pulse in her own wrists, can feel Taissa’s hunger in the glint of dark eyes.

Taissa breaks first. It’s the kind of victory that smacks of loss. Van watches her go, shakes her head, tries not to be undone by the ghostly caress of the right hands under the wrong circumstances.

It goes on like this. Every time, the same song. Every time. The other, leading her out into the dark. The other, purring in her ear, against her skin. The other, telling her she is wanted, she is needed, she belongs.

The worst part isn’t even the way Taissa looks at her after—when she’s woken yet again to find them alone against a tree, bundled in the privacy of midnight. The worst part isn’t even the way Taissa almost, almost leans into her after, fingers curling as if just barely held at bay.

The worst of it is that Tai knows. She knows it’s true. She knows, deep down, that the other part of her is not a lie—is not so alien—is, in fact, right much of the time. Van knows it. Tai knows it.

But they’re not what they were all those months ago, when the plane went down. They aren’t who they were, those helpless children finding solace only in one another, in dance parties, in laughter. Whatever Taissa gives, it won’t be enough—not unless she lets the Wilderness in. The Wilderness is all they are, and so long as Tai is fighting that…

“She needs you,” the other whispers. Fingers coiled under Van’s layers. Iron wrapped around her hips. “She needs you.”

“Then she can tell me,” Van hisses, “herself.”

The other looks at her, head cocked, unimpressed. She angles herself in, mouth lingering against the stutter of Van’s throat. Van grimaces.

“Let her tell me herself,” she repeats, just shy of a growl. “I want to hear it from her.”

“Hear what?” Taissa asks. Van waits for her to peel back, to shove Van off her. Instead, she feels Tai’s head rest lightly against her shoulder. Feels Tai’s breath linger against her skin as she says, “What are we doing out here, Van?”

She sounds so tired. So fucking tired. As if Van’s doing this on purpose—leading her out, away from the plane, away from her own choices. As if Van’s ever had that kind of power.

“I don’t know,” she lies. “I don’t know what we’re doing. What she’s—”

Taissa makes a thin sound of disgust. “What are you doing, then? I didn’t ask you to follow me around every night.”

Van snorts. “Really? You’re gonna pull that with me?”

“Pull what?” Tai raises her head. She’s swaying, too tired for posturing. Van shakes her head.

“I’m not some fucking freshman you can trick into thinking you’re a bitch, Tai. And you’re not stupid.”

“We’re not together,” Taissa snaps. “I didn’t ask you to fucking take care of me.”

“Like I didn’t ask you to patch me up when I got your stupid window by mistake. When have we ever asked each other for what we needed?”

Tai stares at her, shoulders hunched. Her fists press against her sides. Van meets her scowl head-on, not caring what she looks like. Not caring what Taissa sees in the smudges of blood on her skin, the bone ever-present against her heart.

“You picked them,” Tai says, accusatory. “You picked her.”

“I picked,” Van snarls, “survival. Like I have from the start. Like you do every day.”

The fight rising in her feels good. Feels like settling into the net, squaring up against players who might be faster, stronger, more clever. This fight has been brewing between them for months—and now, now, it’s finally landing. Tai’s clenched fists, Tai’s gritted teeth. Tai’s body so close to her own.

Violence, murmurs Lottie at the back of her mind. Violence is what feeds us all.

She wants Taissa to understand. That nature is brutality. That the very fact of their existence is violent. That there can be no tomorrow without spilling blood today. It’s ugly, and it’s nasty, and it’s fact. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten.

She needs Taissa to understand. That there is no shame in survival. That there is no shame in belief. You can’t trick your leg out of a bear trap. The metal teeth have already bitten in. You’re already bleeding. Make it work for you, or give up.

She needs Taissa to get it. To see it. To be in it.

She loves Tai, but she can’t teach her to live through this. She needs Tai to see it for herself.

“We’re not together,” Tai says again, like that’s the point. Like that matters. “You’re on her side. So what the fuck are you doing out here, Van?”

Not her side, Van thinks. Our side. There’s only one side. Why can’t she see that?

She can’t. She can’t until she wants to, and Van can’t bring her there. Van can only shrug, mouth canting up at the corners. Van can only shrug, watching her in the dark.

“Who else is gonna make sure you don’t go over a cliff?”

Tai looks at her like she’s out of her mind. “That isn’t your job,” she says weakly. Tired. So tired. Her hand stretches out, narrowly avoiding Van’s arm. Van feels it pass like a bullet.

“It’s not a job. It’s survival.”

Taissa chews on this. “You chose,” she says again. “You’re on her side. Her crazy fucking side, Van.”

Fight, thinks Van, feeling herself lean in. Feeling herself smile. Fight. Blood’s the only way we’ll see sunrise.

She believes it.

She doesn’t want to believe it.

She misses the way they were, before—when Tai’s kiss tasted like laughter, when Tai traced words into the skin of her back. When they were bloodless. When they were safe. When everything about them felt like a game they couldn’t lose.

She misses them. The kids they were. The people they had a hope of becoming.

They aren’t those people now.

“If I’m on her side,” she says, “then why am I spending every night with you?”

Taissa looks like she wants to step back in time and pick up that Louisville Slugger. For the first time, Van feels a measure of gratitude for the woods extending endlessly in every direction. If that bat were within reach, she has no doubt she’d find herself needling Tai’s hand toward it. She wouldn’t be able to help herself.

And it would feel safer than this, somehow.

She wants this. She needs you.

“I’m not leaving you alone with this,” she says softly. “It’s still happening to us.”

“There is no us,” Taissa says. Flat. Hollow. If Van didn’t know better, if Van couldn’t see the light in her miserable eyes, she’d think the other had risen again. “You—”

“I,” Van agrees. “I’m here. Right here, Tai.”

The electricity is everywhere. Threaded through the bones of her jaw, the bones of her fingers, the bones of a love she can’t bring herself to bury. Her body aches with the tension, the ferocity of holding her instincts at bay. They protect each other. They have always protected each other.

“We’re not us,” Tai repeats helplessly. Van smiles.

“We’re always us. When were we not?”

Always. Since a skinny girl shimmied up an oak tree in a storm. Since gentle hands bandaged broken skin. Since hot chocolate and a warm blanket, Taissa’s body familiar against her own from the very first.

They stare at one another, neither quite willing to back down. Neither quite capable of surging forward. Van wavers, watching Taissa’s face for any sign. Any sign at all that she feels it—the interminable it, the magnetic draw of blue eyes to brown, of hands that have always fit just right.

Tai draws a shaky breath. “I don’t like this,” she says quietly. “Any of it.”

“It sucks,” Van agrees. She wants Tai to smile, to laugh; it sucks can’t begin to cover all the ground they’ve mapped, all the blood they’ve spilled. It sucks doesn’t reach even a fraction of the hell they’re living.

Taissa doesn’t crack. Her eyes dip to Van’s mouth. She’s trembling. Not out of fear, Van understands. Out of sheer exhaustion. The sheer weight of trying to carry her burdens alone.

She doesn’t say a word, but she doesn’t tell Van to leave, either. Not tonight, and not the next, or the next.

Every night, Van’s feet carry her to that plane, to Taissa and her sleepwalking. Every night, Taissa wakes with her arms like iron around Van’s frame. Every night, they stand, entangled, breathing hard—weary, and wanton, and wordless.

Van had thought she understood every kind of hunger imaginable. Understood it on the basest level, understood what it could do to a body, to a soul. She thought she knew.

She was wrong.

Every night is the same. Together, and apart. Together, and fractured. If she squints, she can make out the scattershot lines in the glass, the webbing stretching out in all directions. One solid kick would bring it crashing down around them. One solid kick would bring them home.

The nights go on, two people too stubborn to fold. And then, one day, Taissa is there. Just there, standing in the sun, arms crossed firmly over her chest. Just there, eyes narrowed, watching Lottie hold court.

She doesn’t speak. She looks to Van, eyes meeting, blue to brown. She looks to Van, and nods so slightly, Van half-believes she’s imagining it. Not her girlfriend; nothing so easy as that. Just the girl who, a lifetime ago, said, Because they’re fuckheads, and let Van fall asleep on her living room couch like it was the only thing in the world to do.

She protected Van then, when she had no cause to do so, and she’s protecting Van now. From what, Van can’t say. She trusts Lottie. She trusts the rhythm of the Wilderness.

But Taissa doesn’t, and Van understands: to Tai’s mind, this is no different than a pack of boys chasing a middle schooler in the rain. This is the very same. To Tai’s mind, she is the only thing standing between Van and a beating she might not survive.

This is how they are. No should, no neat-and-clean. It simply is. Taissa appearing as if by magic, taking in Lottie’s camp with calculating eyes. Van stomping the brush flat by moonlight, following the instinct driving Taissa’s body deeper into the trees. In the absence of a relationship, they hold fast to the only thing left. The impulse to shield one another from the worst of the blast. The impulse to keep tabs, to wrap wounds, to protect.

It isn’t the same, not for weeks and weeks, and it hurts. God, it hurts, knowing what they need from one another, what they can’t give without admitting surrender. It hurts, and still, they fashion this new routine around brief visits and silent wanderings.

“You can’t let her go,” Lottie says, almost wondering. “Can you?”

Van doesn’t answer. Can’t is such a tiny word. The longer they’re out here, the longer they spend refashioning the world, the less well language seems to fit around them. Language is not a beacon, not a clarifying tool. It’s reductive. It’s simplistic.

What she and Taissa are to one another is not worth description. What she and Taissa are to each other is the truth of hunger. The reality of starvation. The starkness of need.

You can’t let her go.

She wants this. Needs you.

Eventually, the world will crack open. Eventually, they’ll fall into one another again, and there they will remain. TaissaandVan, a single entity. A single soul. Eventually.

In the meantime, they stand against the shadows. Back to back, elbows linked. The proverbial window unlocked between them.

Some things, Van reasons, are so much bigger than words.

3

Taissa Turner and Van Palmer should be done with one another by the time they reach their forties. Never to see each another again, never to so much as speak one another’s name. They should stand strong against the gravity of their own old affections. It would only make sense.

They don’t.

The last time Taissa made this trip, she was hardly in her right mind. The last time, she was at the mercy of strangers, their kindness shrouded in curiosity. It had felt unclean, somehow, an out-of-body experience through which something piloted her on without her complete agreement.

This time, she knows exactly what she’s doing—though she is not certain it is the right move.

Not the right move. Just the only one left.

Christ, if every chess match went this way, no one would play the goddamn game.

Van opens her door like she already knows what she’ll find on the other side, and for a moment, she is that girl in the woods. The one who, during that brief period when they were not together, not falling asleep in a muddle of limbs and heartbeats, still took it upon herself to follow Tai out into the dark each night. The one whose face would be inches from Tai’s each time she slammed back into her own body, the whole of her pulsing with unspoken need.

“Tai,” she says now, brow furrowed. “Hey.”

Taissa looks at her a long time, speechless. There are confessions behind her teeth, mapped all over her tongue. Admissions of who she is, who she has been—who she needs to be, needs Van to be in return. She could say it all, a clumsy storm of words Van would probably need hours to decipher.

But here’s Van, looking at her with solemn intensity, and suddenly, she doesn’t have a single word in her. Just exhaustion. Just weary certainty.

She sees Van’s gaze flick to the bags at her sides, to the visible imprint of a ring she no longer wears on her left hand. She sees the understanding click into place, the way it did when they were seventeen and on the brink of their first kiss.

“You left her.”

If she’d said it with any kind of delight, Taissa would turn and walk back the way she’d come. But, of course, it’s Van. She isn’t joyful, isn’t leaping up and down with any kind of sunshine-speckled excitement. Not anymore. Not for a long fucking time now.

It’s Van, and the words are spoken with dry steadiness. A statement of fact.

“Technically,” Taissa croaks, “she kicked me out.”

The sentence is comedically brief, summing up exactly none of her anguish or guilt. She’d watched the death of her marriage as if through sleeping eyes, unable to argue Simone’s points. Unable to fight back against a litany of truths: Biscuit’s fate, the car crash, the hospital stay, Sammy’s safety. Simone’s eyes, liquid with horror and misery and not even a dash of indecision. Her steadiness has always been the core of her, of their relationship. It’s what Taissa fell in love with in the first place.

Van stands aside, ushering her in, and Taissa moves up the stairs with dreamlike anticipation. The last time she was here was worse, she tells herself. The last time she was here was—

“This was you,” Van says guardedly as they enter her apartment together. She’s got one of Tai’s bags. Tai didn’t even see her pick it up.

“What?”

“You,” Van repeats. “Decided to come here this time. Right?”

You weren’t puppeteered, she means. You chose this, she means.

Chose me.

“Yeah,” Taissa answers, the corner of her mouth jerking upward in a parody of her old smile. “Drove myself and everything. Ohio’s nothing to write home about it, is it?”

Van grunts, setting the bag down. She moves toward the kitchen, filling a kettle and setting it to boil. Taissa can almost hear her own voice bouncing back from three decades ago: you like hot chocolate?

“How’ve you, um. Been?” She cringes from the plasticine ease of her own voice. Like this is a campaign stop, strangers making small talk. Like she isn’t looking at the reluctant other half of her own heart.

Van casts an unimpressed glance over her shoulder. It’s so cold outside, but up here, the heat’s running full-blast. Van, in a shabby gray t-shirt with the sleeves rolled nearly to her shoulders, could have stepped out of some kind of lesbian magazine. Van, with holes in her jeans and her hair hanging halfway down her back, looks exactly like she did at twenty-one.

She held such power then, such sway. Van, the quickest of all of them to tuck the wild under the bed. Taissa still doesn’t know how she did it. Still doesn’t understand how it came so easily to her. Should have been Shauna. Should have been Taissa. They’d been a masterclass in repression, in boxing up the ugly shit and starting fresh.

But it had been Van, somehow, who turned her back on it first. Van, somehow, as if mortified by the person she’d let the woods craft around her bones.

Van, who hadn’t been ashamed of anything out there, who got home and just…decided to pivot. Like it was easy. Like setting down a script and writing something new.

And hadn’t that pissed her off so badly? Hadn’t that been the reason Taissa left in the first place? All that competition, all those little games between them, and this was what Tai lost. The battle for normalcy. The battle for sanity.

“I’m sorry,” she says, deflating against the counter. “I just didn’t know where else to go.”

Van’s eyebrows tilt up in disbelief. Could’ve gone anywhere, that face says. To Shauna. To your parents. To start over away from all this shit.

“Fine,” Tai says. “I wanted to see you. Okay?”

“Okay,” says Van mildly. She’s busying herself with mugs and four different kinds of tea. Van drinks tea now. That, of all things, seems the most unhinged detail.

“And I wanted to—”

“Make sure I hadn’t kicked it while your back was turned?”

Taissa grits her teeth. Leave it to Van to speak so casually of death. Of the disease systematically pounding down her door.

“It’s gone,” Van says. Tai straightens, eyes wide.

“Say again?”

“It’s gone.” Van shrugs. “Got a second opinion. Got a third. Scans all agree.”

“That…Van, that’s amazing. That’s—” But it can’t be right, can it? Science doesn’t work that way. Cancer doesn’t just up and vanish. It’s only been a couple of weeks since all the…shit went down at Lottie’s, a couple of weeks in a world without Natalie Scatorccio’s bourbon laughter. Taissa had returned to find her wife (ex-wife) awake and bearing fury just shy of a restraining order. And now…

That, something whispers. That was what you thought that night accomplished. Waking Simone. Saving Simone.

She can see in Van’s eyes a flash of fervor that says Van’s thought about it, too. Not Simone, but that night. That sacrifice.

“No,” Taissa says, like it’s never occurred to her. “No, Van. That’s not how that shit works.”

Van looks at her, grim light playing in blue eyes. “Isn’t it?”

“It was an accident,” Taissa insists.

“Yeah,” says Van. “Like Javi was an accident. Like Jackie was an accident. Like Laura Lee was an—”

“Stop!” She knew, didn’t she, that it would come to this. She just didn’t think it would be their first fucking conversation. “Stop it. What happened to wanting to drop me at the gates and stay out of the mess? What happened to putting it all away?”

Van doesn’t answer. The kettle produces its first shriek, and she yanks it off orange coils, pours barely-boiling water into mismatched mugs. They look like they were lifted from a local diner. She doesn’t ask what kind of tea Taissa would prefer, doesn’t even seem to see the boxes as she grabs a bag at random and thrusts the drink across the counter.

Tai breathes in the steam. Spearmint, she registers, as the tea begins to steep. Not her first choice, but an oddly comforting one. Van had a spearmint phase just after the rescue. She’d been unable to stop chewing the inside of her cheek, the tip of her tongue, a panic reflex even when the rest of her body had gone still. She’d settled into gum-chewing to ease the tension, and for months, when they kissed, all Tai could taste was spearmint.

“I’m sorry,” she says again. That word has been coming out of her more this week than in her whole life before. “I didn’t come here to fight.”

Van heaves a sigh. Her mug sits, untouched. “No. I know you didn’t. You came because…” Her smile crooks wearily. “My window’s always open.”

Always. We’re always us. When were we not?

“I’m cancer-free,” Van says when Taissa can’t bring herself to answer around the lump in her throat. “I’m cancer-free when I should be on my literal deathbed, and I don’t know what to do with that. I’d love to say nothing, but…I dunno, Tai. It feels too heavy to ignore.”

Taissa wants to tell her to knock it off, to stop playing childish games. They aren’t teenagers with a makeshift Ouija board anymore.

Instead, she says, “Simone. You. How many lives was Natalie’s worth?”

“Simone,” Van agrees hollowly. “Me. And what’s standing at the center of that diagram?”

Taissa swallows. “You—what, you think it’s about me?”

“When is it not?” Van grins. Without thinking, Taissa reaches out and swats her. The kitchen is miniscule. It’s too easy.

Too easy to just stare at one another, feeling that old electric heat sucking all the air from the room. Too easy, inhaling spearmint and remembering Van’s cool breath on her lips.

“I think,” Van says quietly, “you were always its favorite in ways we couldn’t figure out. Natalie and Lottie and even me—we gave into its love. But you…you never did.”

“What? You think the god of that fucking place is still after me because I played hard to get?” Taissa grimaces. “You know how that sounds. You know I don’t buy it.”

And yet, isn’t there something to the idea? To the altar in her basement, blood spilled for a winning campaign. To a car wreck, blood spilled to send Van back into her life. To a misaligned dose of fatality, blood spilled to—

“No,” she says, louder this time. “It’s bullshit, Van. It’s literally always been bullshit.”

She remembers Van hunched in the cold, her expression broken. Remembers her saying, Yeah…I’m not fuckin’ seeing it, Tai.

Van, looking for purpose. Van has always been looking for purpose.

“Okay,” Van says. Too simply. Taissa scowls.

“You’re just trying to get me to stop talking, aren’t you?”

Without breaking eye contact, Van reaches for her mug, takes a long draft. Grimaces. “Ah, fuck, did not mean to grab that one.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“And you need a place to stay,” Van counters. “Right?”

It’s a sitcom narrative. It’s almost too stupid to survive. Polished senator kicked out of her marriage bed, out of her marriage, and drives out of state to bunker down with her high school girlfriend. It’s asinine.

“Well,” Tai says. “It was here or Shauna’s, and I just do not think I can survive even a weekend sharing a bathroom with Jeff.”

Van snorts into her mug so hard, she dissolves into hacking coughs. Taissa sets her own drink aside in favor of slapping her on the back until her airway clears, until they’re both slaphappy-cackling in the middle of this barely-passable kitchen.

“Fuck,” Van wheezes. “The tumor in my head jumped ship. How did you make not having to share space with Jeff Sadecki sound like the biggest miracle of the week?”

“I’ve always had a gift,” Tai tells her, and Van’s laughter sheets across her psyche like a summer storm.

“You can stay,” Van says when she’s recovered herself. “Of course you can stay. Long as you fuckin’ need to.”

Taissa exhales more breath than she’d thought her lungs could hold. “Thank you. I owe you.”

“You don’t,” says Van. She’s still grinning, but there’s a shadow behind her eyes. “You don’t owe me a goddamn thing, Tai.”

Except, Tai knows, that isn’t true. Not since the woods. Not since Van’s chest against her back, Van’s arms around her, Van’s eyes following her through the dark. She’s owed Van for a long, long time—and she fears it’s a debt she simply does not have enough life left in her to repay.

You need her. You’ve needed her for longer than you’ve had her. Say so.

She can’t. She can’t, like she couldn’t bring herself to push a scrappy little redhead out into the rain. She can’t, and so she closes her hands around Van’s and squeezes tight.

“Thank you,” she repeats. “Seriously. You’re always…”

The words trail away. The air between them crackles.

“Yeah,” Van says. “I’m always.”

She sounds bitter. She sounds amused. She sounds, above all, certain.

Taissa doesn’t kiss her, though she could. She could press Van against the counter, ill-chosen tea be damned. She could press Van against the counter, could let Van wheel her back in response, a graceful dance that is as much fight as it is joy. Her hands could wrap around the freezer door and the counter top at the same time, and she could sway under Van’s hands, under Van’s mouth, and it could be so easy.

How many lives was Natalie’s worth?

She doesn’t give in. It feels so much like those broken days in the wild, when they’d tried surviving as factions instead of a single team. Hadn’t lasted, of course; it was never going to. Nat and Lot, Mari and Akilah—there were so many paths binding them back into one formidable force against the elements.

So many, but none as strong as them. As Tai—who hadn’t been able to stomach the idea of Van drinking Lottie’s Kool-Aid alone—and Van—who hadn’t even considered letting Taissa sleepwalk into the dark without a partner. Even apart, they couldn’t separate. Even broken, they couldn’t divide.

It feels now like it did then. Like it did every time she woke to find herself insinuated against Van’s bony body, Van leaning just enough back to let her know she didn’t want it like this. Van leaning back, panting with the effort of holding herself hostage.

Van’s looking at her now, that hunger blazing into an overwarm kitchen, and Taissa wants her so badly. Wants to let her in, like she did on instinct at thirteen. Wants to bind her wounds and fill her belly and keep her safe.

But Van isn’t the one climbing a tree. Van isn’t the one on the run. Not anymore.

My window’s always open.

She releases Van’s hands, and they go back to pretending. Van, giving the grand tour all over again, as if Taissa could forget an inch of this place. Van, gesturing at the poorly-stocked fridge, the messy laundry, apologetic for her lifestyle.

“Kinda thought I was on my way out,” she says, like Tai doesn’t know she’s always lived like this. “Didn’t see the point in doing a full Costco run.”

Taissa doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t want to think about how close Van got—again. How close they’d come to never seeing one another again.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks. “About the…” She gestures toward the side of her own head, realizing too late she’s just made the universal sign for crazy against her temple. Van very politely does not comment.

“Nah. Nothing to talk about. Just another in a long line of improbable birthday cakes in my future.” She hesitates. “Do…you want to talk about it?”

“My divorce?” Taissa clears her throat. “Not especially.”

“It…sucks,” Van says, cautious.

“Does it?”

Van squints. “I—why does this feel like a trap?”

Because we’ve been in one since 1996. We only ever thought we’d wriggled loose. “You’re right,” Taissa sighs. “You’re right, I’m sorry. It does suck. She’s…she’s gonna take everything, I think. House. Sammy.” Her throat threatens to close. She pummels her grief until it’s nearly unrecognizable. Blinks several times. “It’s not great.”

“You could fight her,” Van says, though something in her voice suggests she already knows it’d be a bad idea. Taissa grinds out a chuckle.

“No. Think the decapitation of my dog would look pretty bad on court record. Anyway, that…world doesn’t…fit right. She’ll sell the place, and move Sammy out closer to her mom, and I’ll…figure something out.”

She owes Simone a quiet victory. Owes her an unconditional surrender. It’s the least she can do, after everything.

“It sucks,” Van repeats. “Even if it’s the right thing, it can still suck.”

Taissa remembers, suddenly, Natalie’s father’s funeral. The whole team standing awkwardly around in black dress clothes. Natalie had said something very similar, hadn’t she? All of them passing a cigarette around like it was some kind of talisman against the shuddering sobs emanating from Mrs. Scatorccio. Hadn’t Natalie said something so like that, it’s almost eerie?

Natalie. Christ, Tai misses her. Didn’t know she could, not like this. Nat was always there, always just off-stage, ready to come plunging back into the narrative without warning.

How many lives was—

They talk around it for the rest of the evening. Make jokes. Make pointless conversation. Van’s eyes flick to her ring finger, but her mouth no longer forms the words to bring home Taissa’s failure. Tai gazes at Van across the room, warding off the ancient nuclear impulse to reach out.

She thinks of being thirteen. Of a bat pressed against a soggy t-shirt. Of defiant blue eyes, a crack in her plaster, a bruise-patterned wrist.

She thinks of being nineteen. Of a tree pressed against her back. Of weary blue eyes, a crack in her sternum, fingers curled around her wrist.

They talk around it, and they laugh, and it’s almost the way it ought to be. Almost. If she doesn’t think about her son. If she doesn’t remember Natalie’s sightless gaze. If she doesn’t remember, if she doesn’t think.

“I’ll take the couch,” she says when Van’s yawn threatens to unhinge her jaw. “Sleep on mine all the time anyway.”

Van shakes her head. “What kind of host do you think I am? Bed’s all yours, dude. Not like I’m dying of cancer…anymore.”

“Too soon,” Tai advises.

“Hey, comedy waits for no tumor.”

“Dude.” She’s laughing despite herself, trying to wedge her body onto the couch before Van can sprawl over its cushions. Van, who grabs her around the waist, grappling her aside with a vestige of her teenage energy.

“Fuck off! It’s my couch, I get to throw out my back on the fucker!”

It’s so stupid, some part of Taissa thinks, but the rest of her is elated to find she feels like a kid again. A kid who has never blown up her marriage, her family, her life. A kid who wrestles like she’s never fucked up her hip from too long a hike, like she doesn’t feel the rage of spring thunderstorms in her right kneecap.

It's so stupid, but Van’s arms are strong as ever, Van’s hands coasting up her back even as Taissa flips her onto the couch. The crackling heat spreads from the corners of Van’s smile, down the angle of her jaw, into the shoulders straining under Tai’s palms.

It’s stupid, but Van’s window was open, Van’s window has been open, and Taissa climbed right through it without hesitation. Because it never crossed her mind, not really, to even call Shauna. Because it never crossed her mind to do anything but drive across the states separating her from Van all this time.

You’ll need a safe haven, she said once, not knowing. Not beginning to have the first clue. She’d thought herself so smart at thirteen, so adult—and now, three decades later, she’s never felt more at sea.

Van’s gazing up at her, breathing in harsh gasps. Her hands are at Tai’s hips. The air is electric. The storm has been brewing too long.

“What if,” Taissa says, “no one takes the couch.”

Van’s hands are tentative, framed around Tai’s waistband. She’s looking at her own fingers notched through Taissa’s belt loops as she nods. “Yeah. Okay. Just ‘cuz I get the feeling that’s the only way to win this.”

“Right. Otherwise, it’ll just go on and on—”

“And we’re not as young as we used to be.” This, she punctuates with a wince, and Tai doesn’t think she’s making light. They’re in their forties, and—until very recently—a tumor had burrowed its way through the last of Van’s adult years.

No one should be sleeping on a couch. Not in that state.

Van’s bed isn’t big. Van’s life isn’t big. And yet, here she is: pulling back the covers. Inviting Taissa inside.

“Remember the first time you slept over?” Taissa asks into the dark. Her luggage is still in the living room, her own pajamas neatly folded out of sight. She’s wearing Van’s clothes. It only feels right, to be wearing Van’s clothes.

“Does it count,” Van wonders, “if it was an accident?”

“Yes.” Everything about that night counted. She would be someone else entirely, without that night.

Van makes a thoughtful sound. “You know what’s wild?”

“Hm?”

“I never thought you were lying.” Tai hears her shift, trying to get comfortable. “About keeping your window open. About wanting to protect me. I never, for a second, questioned it.”

“Well,” Taissa says. Her throat feels thick. Her eyes burn. “I wasn’t going to let the aliens abduct you, was I?”

A snort of laughter. A hand slides across the sheets, folding over Tai’s fingers. She doesn’t hesitate to grip Van back.

“I probably shouldn’t stay here long,” she says weakly. Her fingers, ignorant of her words, clutch Van’s until the bones grind.

“Probably not,” Van agrees, though she’s rolling toward Taissa’s side of the bed. Her arm slings over Tai’s belly, one leg tenting up over Tai’s hip. She burrows against Tai’s shoulder with a sigh.

“Just in case,” Tai says. “Since it seems like I set fire to everything I touch.”

Van hums. “Been there. Dodged that.” Her arm tightens across Taissa. Her breath is warm. Fireproof, Tai thinks with aching relief. She’s always been fucking fireproof.

“I can feel your heartbeat,” Taissa murmurs. It feels, she doesn’t add, like an open window. Like footsteps crunching along beside her through the brush. Like the space between thunder and lightning.

How many lives?

I think you were its favorite.

Maybe I had some kind of purpose in all this.

I’m just not fuckin’ seeing it, Tai.

“I need you,” she whispers into the dark, into the shallowing of Van’s breaths. “You and your stupid open window.”

Van breathes out against her skin. It isn’t a word. It isn’t. And still, Taissa could swear she’s heard one in a voice so like Van’s own.

Finally.

This is how they’ll be. No should, no neat-and-clean. It simply is. They tumble together into the next scene, terrified and unsteady and together. There are papers on Taissa’s horizon, and bill collectors on Van’s. Worse, there is a creeping sense of dread, of rituals gone unfinished and debts unpaid. There’s something out there, something so eager for blood, they can’t help feeding it.

But they come back here. To Van’s bed. To an open window, to the instinct that is protection. They shouldn’t, maybe; Taissa will always, on some level, wonder why should means so little.

It’s just a word, she reminds herself. Just a word. It can’t possibly contain everything they are.

Should implies a story that makes sense. A story with a concise little ending. A story without cracks. Not the story she set out to tell. Not the homework she set out to finish. It’s broken plaster. It’s muddy carpet. It’s blood on her shirt, on her teeth, under her nails.

Falling asleep in a jumble with Van Palmer is like falling through the cracks in the world’s most perfect script—

And god, god, she’s never been so grateful for failure.