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She’s taller than Jackie, for one. Just about Shauna’s height, but she seems taller; she doesn't have that tellatale slump Shauna’s taken on since the crash, the hunched shoulders of someone bent over their wood-and-meat desk, of someone weighed down.
“Down,” Shauna whispers in her ear, and Melissa slides down, shirt scraping against the tree. Later she will find a scrap of it caught there and tuck it away in her pocket for later.
How long have they been doing this? Time extends and contracts here. It’s spring, it’s been spring for ages. Everyone’s pretending everything’s great. Some perverse part of her wants it to be winter again – for them to confront that they’ve all gone fucking crazy, that all of this is fucking crazy, again. That even if a helicopter or an angel came out of the sky right this second, they’d still have five less people than they started with.
The rest of them can play summer camp as much as they want. She's not buying it.
“Wow,” Melissa breathes. It’s close enough to wowza. Just one syllable missing. Shauna squeezes her eyes closed tighter. Everyone smells the same now, that same mix of earth and lake water, and it’s something that’s been consistent basically since they crashed, or at least since they ran out of shampoo about a month in.
They don’t talk much, if at all. Most of them don’t need to. Melissa has to know what this is – and if she does, she doesn’t care, because she’s still here. And Shauna won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Shauna pushes her hands under Melissa’s shirt. Jackie was always softer and then, later, bony, never putting on the hard sinewy muscle the rest of them developed from building their shelters, from making it through the winter. Shauna kisses her neck. Melissa’s hair is long, and it flips out a little from where she’s taken off her hat.
She nips her ear, and it’s warm, it’s connected to the rest of her, Melissa shudders at the sensation.
Shauna indulges.
***
Melissa isn’t stupid. She gets that this is probably more of a power thing for Shauna than anything. It’s also probably something else.
(She talked to Jackie, like, once. She lent her a water bottle during an away game. She was nice, if a little distant.)
But she likes Shauna, genuinely. She’s all the things Melissa called her with a knife to her throat, and more than that, too. She'll gladly take on her baggage, if only Shauna would let her.
“How long was it until people started guessing something was going on between you and Natalie?” she asks Travis, because he has enough of his own stuff going on that she doesn’t think he’d tell, and also he calls her Melanie half the time so she’s pretty sure she barely registers on his radar.
“Didn’t take a genius to figure it out,” he says, holding out a hand full of crushed-up acorns for Mortimer to peck at. Melissa crouches next to him so she’s eye level with boy and duck both. “We hunted just the two of us all the time. Why do you care?”
“Just wondering.”
“Okay.”
“‘Cause I just…wonder what that’d look like. More of us pairing off.”
“Probably pretty bad?” Travis shakes the last of the acorn off his hand, gives Mortimer a few firm strokes like he’s a cat.
“Hey,” Shauna stands at the crest of a hill, beckons Melissa over with one hand. She doesn’t even need to say her name. “We have to…forage. For…herbs.”
One kind of cute thing she’s learned about Shauna, in the time since they started doing this (there’s no name for it yet and she sort of doubts there ever will be), is that she’s really bad at lying.
“Yeah, foraging.” Melissa stands up and makes a show of cracking her back. “Somebody’s gotta pick up the slack here.”
Travis rolls his eyes and walks off. Melissa gladly bounds over, bumps Shauna’s side with her hip.
“You know you’re uh, kind of a bad liar,” she says. “Foraging?”
“Shut up,” Shauna growls. Melissa gives her a scout’s salute, to say, sure thing, captain. “And we do need herbs. Last night's stew’s tasted like shit.”
“I know, right? Like, we’re not in belt soup territory anymore. One star, Mari.”
Shauna surges ahead. Melissa keeps pace the best she can, follows her to their tree, because they have a tree now, a place that’s theirs.
(Technically they have two places that are theirs, since Shauna’s let Melissa into her hut, only late at night after everyone’s gone to bed and night-watch Natalie is busy away from camp, where they sleep next to each other and pretend they weren't cuddling)
“How long ‘til they stop watching us leave?” she asks.
“Too long,” Shauna mutters.
Melissa has taken to tying her shirts with a little knot around her waist, the way she half-remembers Jackie doing once she was out of Wiskayok’s purview. She, Melissa, didn’t pack as much stuff as some of the others; the JV team wasn’t invited to the fancy dinner afterwards so she didn’t pack a dress or anything like the seniors did.
She has her shirts, she has her hat. There’s little ceremony in any of this. She does entertain taking Shauna as her date to a second Doomcoming, in a deer-hide vest and jeans, more as a fun little fantasy than something she’d say out loud. Shauna would probably be weird about it, skittish the way she only is when Jackie comes up in conversation on the other side of camp, closed-off the way she always is.
Also, they’re probably too far gone to do anything that (relatively) normal now. Instead of “Kiss From a Rose” they’d probably all howl at the moon or something.
But it’d still be fun, she thinks.
They haven’t gone to the lake together - too out in the open, too few spaces to hide - but there’s a creek leading to the tree. It starts burbling now, skipping over rocks.
“Come on,” Shauna says, and pulls her along, rough, “we’re almost there.”
***
“So had you ever like…” Melissa picks at a plant and starts wrapping it around her own wrist. “Done it? With another girl before?”
“No,” Shauna says, without looking at her. Easier to focus on the plant, which she’s gotten wrapped twice now, still with a fair amount to go. They’ve been here for hours and nobody’s tried to track them down.
She tries to tuck her shirt into her pants and realizes that she’d buttoned her flannel wrong, one button off, and groans and starts re-un-buttoning it. If they were more romantic - intimate - lovey-dovey people she’d ask Melissa to do it. She probably would, too, she'd be reverent and weird about it, slide her calloused fingers through each button with that quiet deftness she has.
It’d be too much. It’d be a gold necklace cold against her collarbone.
“Okay. Cool.” A pause. “You know. I thought there’d be more gay girls on the team.”
“That so,” Shauna says, arch. She doesn’t hate talking with Melissa - she’s kind of funny, sometimes, not in Van’s practiced-easy way, something else. But it’s not something she wants to make a habit either.
“I mean, yeah.” Melissa pulls the plant tighter, enough that the skin around it starts pulsing red. Shauna wants to take it from her. Pull it until…what, exactly? She pushes the thought away. “Like, it’s such a stereotype, but it’s also true, you know? Or it’s supposed to be true.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not even that good at soccer, I was just getting so sick of the volleyball girls and their boyfriends.”
“You played volleyball?” Shauna hates this for a reason she can’t identify in the moment. Later, she’ll realize that it’s because Jackie never played volleyball. She’d tried out, but she’d cried when they had to play the starfish game, prone on the gym floor, where the point was to hit your team members, to aim better or something.
“Yeah. ‘Til I started high school.”
“Huh.”
“I sucked at it though. Never even served a ball over the net. Not once.”
“You’re tall, though.”
“Doesn’t make up for everything.” Melissa lets go of the plant, and it unwinds and then goes back to standing in a sort of cowed loop.
She lies down, like a dog offering its belly, like a prey animal. Shauna can’t quite bring herself to lie down next to her.
“I should’ve stuck to volleyball,” Melissa continues, distant-sounding, bemused at herself. “Wouldn’t have ended up here.”
“Probably, yeah.”
Then Shauna leans down, Shauna kisses her hard, and Melissa returns in kind.
She lets Melissa pull off her flannel again, and she doesn’t bother with the buttons at all. She yanks it over Shauna’s torso, throws it across the forest floor and lets it land on a bush.
They don’t stop.
***
“Do you believe in it?” They’re out setting traps. Or, “setting traps,” in big air quotes, because Shauna’s usually exempt from chores like that, busy as she is with her butchering, with what Melissa’s taken, jokingly, to calling her memoirs.
(She tried to read one once, and Shauna had snatched it away from her and stared at her with such hurt, such fury, that they didn’t talk for three days and didn’t fuck for two.)
But it’s a good excuse. Melissa doesn't really mind being her dirty secret; there’s something kind of exciting and cool about it. Plus they’d get wrapped up in a bunch of team politics if they ever got found out and Melissa doesn’t want that either.
“Hm?”
“Lottie’s…wilderness bullshit.”
Shauna doesn’t ask her questions a lot. Melissa knows she has to choose her answer carefully.
“I think…there’s definitely something out here, you know?” She looks up at the trees, the sun poking through them. It’s been a hazy spring, pollen-full, yellow-tinted. “Makes sense to make peace with it. But I don’t know if I see it the way they do.”
It’s romantic, honestly, to think of the two of them as a sort of Thelma and Louise, except without driving over a cliff at the end. Lovers making their last stand. It’s you and me against the world, Shauna had whispered, when Melissa found her. It sounded like something she’d said to someone else, before the baby, before they nosedived into the Canadian wilderness and became…this.
“Hm.” Shauna crouches, checks for deer tracks. There’s nothing, but for an errant footprint from when Gen got her boot stuck in the mud during a rainstorm a few weeks ago and the imprint had stayed.
“Like, I think it helps to want some control over all this.”
“There’s no control. She made it all up.”
“Y-yeah, I totally get that, totally,” Melissa backs away just slightly, sees Shauna lift her flannel for the knife tucked into her waistband, like an old-school TV gangster, “it’s just more like, the idea of it. Fake security maybe? Like my lucky hat.”
“Your lucky hat,” Shauna echoes. Drops her hand.
“Yeah, I was wearing it when I scored my first goal in ninth grade so I started thinking, hey, Melissa, what if there’s something to this? So I kept wearing it and I kept scoring, so I figured, you know, I’m good as long as I wear this. And it’s worked this long, right? ‘Cause I didn’t get- picked for the hunt or anything.”
Shauna blinks at her. God, her eyes are so dark and so pretty, Melissa could look at them for hours and frankly wishes she was allowed, but Shauna closes her eyes when they’re making out, when they’re having sex, and she usually leads the way when they’re walking like this. This is rare.
“You’re so weird,” she says, without anger in her voice, without much of anything at all.
Melissa takes her hat off and squishes it on Shauna’s head, pushing the brim all the way down so she can’t see those big, sad eyes.
"There you go. See if this is a better religion for you."
And Shauna, of all the miracles forced and imagined in these woods, cracks a smile.
The hat bumps Melissa’s forehead when they kiss. It feels like something that’s hers.
She lets herself, just for a few seconds, imagine that it is.