Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Nothing’s worth trying to understand if she won't remember it in the morning anyways.

Perhaps it was something in the air, but Jackie’s resolving to ignore it. Nothing makes sense when she’s this drunk. Maybe it has less to do with the way to room starts spinning and more to do with her not wanting to work out the problems in front of her. She couldn’t feign care, investment, which is why it’s so striking to feel this kind of jealousy on a Friday night (post win, no less,) a jealousy which she could feel building inside of her, but not aim at something. She could feel the way her senses deteriorated under the delicate touch of rum and Diet Coke. The room has started spinning, and oddly enough, Jackie can sort of feel a phantom touch of the way Shauna’s fingers would grip her chin, soft enough for Jackie to ignore how the touch was anything but delicate. The truth remains that nothing can pull Jackie down to earth, and nothing can truly pull her away from Shauna.

Nothing except the party. The party, which Jackie is kind of regretting dragging Shauna to in the first place. Normally, these nights don’t really go like this.

While sweat beads upon her brow, while a faint sheen of some teenage anxiety builds itself upon her, dripping in the pheromones that insisted on puddling inside of her, she dreams of a different situation from this one. A situation far removed from the bottom two stories of the Matthews’ McMansion. All Jackie could feel around her hand in her mind is this: that Shauna was always there. She had never been more than a touch away, even when Nat managed to drag her away from a smoke session where Shauna would swear all she did was inhale it through barely willing nostrils. Jackie wants her close, wants her within her line of sight.

Jackie trusts her.

Jackie trusts her with the way her body rocks (always rocks) into Shauna’s unwittingly, swaying with the sound of amazing and awful party setlists alike. Jackie would smile at the way Shauna would nod her head to the music, dipping it down and raising it slowly in time with some tide of teenage inebriation, as if Wiskayak took a page out Boston’s far thicker book and was flooded with stale beer instead of molasses. Hell, Wiskayak is probably so frequently tided over with somebody’s dad’s gross beer that they don’t even bother writing it down in the history books, if there’s even history worth recording in this town besides the girls’ soccer team that they don’t want to talk about.

Regardless of that:

Jackie trusts her because she chooses Shauna in all the ways that matter. She’s chosen her.

The fact that Jackie trusts Shauna in spite of her bad music tastes makes it all the more fucked up that Jackie has no idea where Shauna is. She knows she’s here. She’s sure she’s here. She can’t really figure out why she feels so far away.

It’s on Lottie’s leather couch that Jackie runs her free hand through her hair, drunk beyond caring that she’s probably ruining it after spending so long trying to get it to sit right after the game. She hasn’t seen a mirror all night, and she thinks she’s lost her compact, so it’s official: she’s hopeless. She’s beside Nat, who’s beside Laura Lee, who’s beside Lottie, and between them there’s some kind of weird eye tag game they’re playing where one person looks at Jackie, then pings someone else to look at her, eyebrows wagging while Jackie moves her hand from her hair to claw at the leather in frustration, pretending not to notice being stared at. She tries to think about where Shauna is, but it doesn’t work. She can only remember where Shauna has been in the past when Jackie’s lost her.

She pictures memories at the beer pong table where Taissa would wrap her arms around Shauna’s waist, making her squeal and fumble shot after shot. Jackie has always hated just watching. It makes her feel like some sort of perv, a kind of voyeur. When Shauna plays pong, she tries her best not to stare at her mouth when she giggles and wipes foam from it. Jackie has to almost hold her hand back to keep from wiping the foam off herself. She not to think about how Shauna acts like Jackie drags her away or weighs her down when it’s time for them to go home. Jackie just doesn’t like it when Shauna plays pong without her. Jackie’d wrap her arms around Shauna and whisper in her ear that she thought she was going to be sick, and Shauna couldn’t stay away from an opportunity like that, Jackie found. She couldn’t say no to her, not really. Not in a way that mattered much.

Jackie squeezes her eyes shut and remembers another moment, one where she had caught Shauna with her arms wrapped around Natalie’s neck while she waited for her in the car. Jackie figured Natalie must have just dropped acid or had a fresh high to boast like it was a new pair of cleats or a nice new dress. The way Natalie pretends to be a normal girl is by frying her brain on some new drug the others would act like she isn’t on. This time, Jackie watched from the inside of Shauna’s car as the two of them giggled about something she wished she had been able to hear. Natalie had smiled and looked really pretty in the glow of Shauna’s headlights, sincerely pretty, a genuine beautiful girl, like a sadder Marilyn or something, and Shauna’s big brown eyes blew up in her face like chocolate almonds Jackie wanted to suck the sweet off of, and Jackie, annoyed as ever, watched as Natalie leaned in. She could almost smell the alcohol on her breath through Shauna’s nose, but Shauna didn’t wince, just stayed within Natalie’s grip as she brushed her lips against Shauna’s ear, whispering some stupid secret Jackie thought she deserved to know. Jackie frequently comes back to that memory and lords it over Shauna’s head in her mind, like “at least I have the dignity to say I’m yours and mean it,” but she’d never say it out loud, because what the fuck does that even mean? When Jackie saw Shauna’s eyes go all soft and bovine while a coy smile overcame her lips, she slammed the horn while imagining Natalie’s stupidly pretty blissed-out face was where the Ford logo was, and she quickly split them apart by miming her “I’m gonna be past curfew” gestures to Shauna. And it worked. Jackie thinks she loves that it worked.

Really, as the room begins to spin the other way, making Jackie feel light and floaty and only distantly angry, she starts to feel as though she might have transported herself somewhere new just by sheer force of will of the rum she has droplets of left in on the white inner coating of her Solo cup. Jackie didn’t care so much about the remembered game of pong or her role in interrupting a ‘might-have-been’ moment as she did sitting down upon the rim of her cup like those same droplets, letting herself be absorbed in something created. She wishes she was staring hard at the sky with Shauna like they did in those dreams Jackie could hardly remember, ones where something stuck within her that made her feel like less of a girl and more of a an object, like less of a person and more a piece of meat to be gnawed on, something that was made to fit in the backs of Shauna’s molars to be chewed on to soothe the itching ache of growth beneath the gum line. Jackie feels like she belongs to Shauna, and now, in this moment, Shauna is shaming her in the most public of ways, by subjecting her to the cruel glares of Natalie, Lottie, and Laura Lee because they know that a Jackie Taylor without a Shauna Shipman is exactly that: a Jackie without, a Jackie in need, and Jackie half of what she is meant to be.

So, in a fit of pure desperation, Jackie turns to the enemy.

“Where’s Shauna?” she asks, whipping her head around to look straight at Natalie, who sends a smug look over to Laura Lee before she takes a lazy drag of a cigarette, which she passes to Lottie, whose eyes are locked on the side of Natalie’s head for now.

“Hi, Jackie,” she says slowly, eyes twinkling nicely in the dim light of Lottie’s huge living room. Jackie groans.

“Hi, Natalie. Where is she?”

Nat smirks while she looks at her. “You seriously look like you’re about to shit a diamond. Calm down.”

The face Jackie makes at her is enough to make Nat cackle. “Ew! Just tell me where Shauna is.”

Nat shrugs. “Maybe she’s looking for you,” she offers, totally intentionally helpless, just to piss Jackie off. If both Jackie and Shauna were looking for each other, they would have found each other. It’s so obvious that Jackie gives up on Nat and moves on to Lottie, who’s sharing in that dumb grin Nat has.

“Do you know where she is?” Jackie asks, desperate.

“Who, Six? Isn’t she usually by Nine?” Lottie asks back, giggling like she isn’t being effortlessly infuriating. She takes a nice, long drag from the cigarette Jackie has only just realized isn’t a cigarette. Lottie blows the smoke out of her nose.

Nat points to Lottie with her thumb. “That’s what you look like right now, FYI.” Lottie just laughs confusedly.

“That doesn’t make sense. That’s not how the expression goes. I think it’s like… ‘there’s smoke coming out of your ears’ or something.”

“Can you blow smoke out of your ears?”

Jackie feels her eye twitch neurotically while she looks between the two of them, Lottie’s smile sweet and condescending, Nat’s brow furrowed in stupid, stoned confusion, before landing right in the middle of them on Laura Lee, who’s sitting straight and still like she doesn’t want to be called on next. , Jackie thinks, before shaking her head and telling herself she’s been spending too much time around Van and Nat if she’s having those kinds of thoughts.

“Help me,” she urges, and Laura Lee’s eyes are all wide and conflicted; she looks like she almost wants to help, but-

“I’m sorry, Jackie. I don’t think she wants to talk right now.”

That’s not exactly helpful, and Jackie doesn’t really want to hear it.

“What does that mean? Did she tell you that?”

Nat’s smirk turns deepens into something more like a sneer while Lottie’s grin flickers with something Jackie doesn’t quite recognize. Laura Lee keeps staring at her with this blank sort of pity. But no one responds to her, so Jackie asks again:

“Where is she? Did she tell you she doesn’t want to talk to me?”

Laura Lee’s fingers play with the summer-y linen dress she’s wearing. She cranes her neck, turning it to look beyond Lottie, to the backyard where it’s probably cooler than it is inside. Jackie looks towards the sliding glass door which remains open. She watches the steady trickle of people in and out for a moment, observes the regulation of pressure. The house pulses with music, but also this steady beat of ‘in and out’. A boy goes out, a girl comes in. Two best friends dive in, a couple comes out.

“Umm,” Laura Lee begins measuredly, “Last time I saw her she was going outside. But that was…” she trails off.

“Like, twenty minutes ago,” Nat finishes for her, smoke pouring out from her lips again.

Jackie huffs again, looking around, and the responding snort Nat lets out makes her feel like she’s becoming less and less threatening as their high builds. She’s losing daylight, too, she realizes.

“What do you need her for?” Lottie asks, eyeing the joint Natalie holds with a certain pointed desire. Her question is definitely aimed at Jackie, but she doesn’t look at her, this annoying habit Lottie has. She says what she means, but she doesn’t do it in a way where anyone knows what the fuck she means. It’s beginning to wear on Jackie’s frayed nerves, like these girls are forming a three-headed beast breathing fire on Jackie’s dripping glacier of patience, a glacier which has now become more like an ice cube, because after the game they played today, Jackie’s sick of their shit and she’s doesn’t really care who knows it. At the same time, she doesn’t really know what to say, doesn’t quite know how to answer Lottie’s question because she’s not totally sure what she thinks she needs Shauna for. Something doesn’t seem right at the moment. There’s a part of her absent, and no cotton there to clog up the wound of the loss, nothing dry and bland to make her forget that she needs something in the space inside of her heart. Something fragile inside of her wobbles a bit, and she thinks she feels something shifting in the way the three girls in front of her are looking at her.

When Jackie doesn’t respond, Laura Lee sighs in that resigned sort of way she does when the girls give her too much guff for believing in something besides teenage thrill, but it might just be because she sees Jackie’s looking for something in Shauna that Shauna probably won’t be able to give her. Lottie’s eyes get watery and her lip finds its way between her pointy teeth, but maybe it’s the weed giving her some sort of hunger she hasn’t realized yet. It’s Natalie’s look Jackie doesn’t know how to justify. Her face hardens while she stares at Jackie, and she can never really tell if Nat’s on her side or her own side, but now Natalie’s taking one last hit off the joint before she puts it in Laura Lee’s porcelain hands. Her eyes go icy and beautiful, glossy and all oil-on-canvas, and she wipes her hands on her skirt as she sighs deeply.

Natalie stands up and stretches her legs, which prompts Lottie to hop off of the arm of the couch and move to the now available cushion Nat had left. Nat wraps an arm around Jackie’s shoulders and speaks roughly in her ear when she says, “Alright, Captain. Let’s go find your girl.”

“Don’t hurt, ‘em, Jackie,” Lottie calls out, grinning with her shiny white teeth and smoke dripping off of her lips. “Shauna’s softer than she looks,” she says, as if Jackie doesn’t already fucking know that, as if that’s something Lottie should know at all.

Jackie clenches her jaw and lets Nat walk the two of them out that sliding glass door, and she thanks God that at least she’s going out in a pair instead of on her own.

Like clockwork, a couple of whooping varsity baseball teammates of Jeff’s trip and tumble their way back inside Lottie’s.

Jackie may be imagining it (it seems ridiculous long after it happened to consider the fact,) but she could have sworn she felt Natalie’s arm tighten around her for a brief moment at the noise. She might have been willing to stake something valuable on the phantom sound of a worn leather jacket creaking around her neck, with her ears as close to the sleeves as they were. But if she were given even a millisecond to rethink her bet, she’d withdraw.

Nat leads them outside, and a joint chill overwhelms them, and Jackie thinks it drips right down to her bones. Something sobering seizes her, and she feels her patience freeze over again with the chill of a tipsy March night. There’s warmth waiting for her, she knows it. It’s not under Nat’s arm though, so she steps out from under the wing of her falcon and rips off the thread sewn into her waterline (she learned that one from Shauna’s millionth read of Purgatorio, so thanks, Shipman (and Dante)). She looks for Shauna again, eyes blank, mind like TV static.

She looks around the yard, steps across some stones which dig into the thin soles of her shoes. She whips her head around back and forth the same way Shauna showed her back a couple summers ago when Shauna was training to be a lifeguard. She scans the yard for all it’s worth, Natalie trailing closely behind, really more as company than acting as anything else.

And just like flipping through channels, at first, she goes past the one she’s looking for.

Her eyes ping around the backyard and catch on the back of Shauna’s head. Her hair is all seamlessly brushed, and it sits in beautiful waves which rest effortlessly upon her shoulders. It’s like the drip of fudge syrup, Jackie thinks, and she must be hungry because every time she thinks about Shauna she starts craving chocolate.

Her stomach floats in this dizzying, desperately hungry place for a moment until she notices who’s standing in front of Shauna, beneath this weeping willow that the Matthews just have in their backyard for some reason as if they’re some fancy southern family from Georgia or something instead of new money from New Jersey. Jackie nearly snorts with her inherited Taylor presumption before she realizes that she’s distracting herself, letting herself be distracted from the view in front of her.

It’s Melissa, from second string. It’s Melissa, whose hair Jackie braided for her in the locker room before the game earlier today. It’s Melissa, who scored the winning penalty kick against Rosehill when half the team was still getting over mono. It’s Melissa, who does the best throw-ins, right to the inside of the foot, and she jumps back in-bounds immediately after to receive the pass-back. It’s Melissa, who swings her feet up and down when she’s benched and tells you “Good job!” when she’s subbed in for you, despite the fact that if you were doing a good job, she wouldn’t need to be subbed in. It’s Melissa, who wears her oldest brother’s baseball hats to school nearly every day, even when Mari makes fun of her for it, especially when Mari makes fun of her for it, and in spite of the mean things guys like Randy Walsh lob at her. It’s Melissa, who smiles all the time, and is only ever kind of mean to Misty Quigley, who doesn’t even count as a human being to like, half of Wiskayak High School. It’s Melissa, who makes sure the team gets the employee discount from Pizza Hut when they order because she’s worked there for no less than three years at this point. It’s Melissa who stands in front of Shauna in this moment. And they’re both smiling, but Jackie can definitely see Melissa’s blushing face, and in another life it might just be that she’s a bit pink because of the radiant sun at the game earlier, but it’s Melissa here, who asks nicely to use Laura Lee’s Banana Boat Sport SPF 50 during every game because last year’s tournament had her peeling for two weeks. And yeah, Jackie remembers. She remembers because she’s supposed to, because she’s captain, but it doesn’t really make it any less of a surprise to see her and Shauna talking, because something about this already feels like something she’s not supposed to know, something that has existed in a way she cannot place, in a way she’s not sure she deserves to know.

Nat’s rough voice picks up an almost chipper tone. “Hey, there she is,” she says, poking her bony elbow into Jackie’s ribs, but Jackie’s already looking at her, looking past her, actually, to see Melissa, who’s smiling with Shauna like she knows something no one else knows, something Jackie doesn’t know. It feels targeted, pointed, even though Melissa doesn’t even know that Jackie and Nat are watching her. Jackie doesn’t know why watching them talk feels that way.

Melissa is laughing, and Jackie can see that Shauna’s shaking her head a bit at her laughs, waving her hands around almost frantically, in the midst of telling a story Jackie’s probably heard a million times. Even then, Jackie’d hear it again because Shauna’s always had a way with her words if you caught her in the right mood, if you were someone she felt like she wasn’t wasting her breath with.

Melissa likes this story. Jackie watches her realize it. She’s been smiling this entire time, but she smiles harder at what Shauna tells her, giggles in between Shauna’s sentences, and her grin is certifiably going from ear-to-ear by the climax of whatever overdramatic tale Shauna’s spinning for her.

“Why didn’t she want to talk to me?” Jackie asks, without turning to Natalie.

“Weren’t you off galavanting earlier?” Nat counters, eyes shifting off of Shauna and Melissa to stare at the side of Jackie’s face. “You got here, had a couple drinks and talked to like, Shannon Nowak for half an hour in the kitchen, then fucked off without telling anyone where you went.”

“‘G-galavanting’? No-What? I just went upstairs.” Jackie frowns and shakes her head. “I told Shauna,” she says.

Nat huffs in disbelief and rears back like she’s been burned. “Lottie says we can’t go upstairs,” she says, but Jackie barely hears it.

She keeps watching the two of them talk, almost entranced, feeling as though she’s watching a conversation she should be having instead. It feels like what you imagine happens when you miss a day at school, when you see the clock and cannot help but think, “Oh, it’s third period now,” or “It’s passing period. I wonder who’s running up the stairs now”.

“She was mad when you left,” Natalie mumbles, kicking up some perfectly trimmed grass with the toe of her boot. “She didn’t say it, but she didn’t have to.”

“I don’t understand why she was mad, though. Why won’t anyone tell me why?” Jackie nearly begs, eyes growing in size as she wonders again.

Nat scoffs and Jackie finally turns to look at her. “You can’t be serious. Would it kill both of you to have, like, an actual conversation with each other without dragging five other people in? When you two are fighting, it’s like the whole world stops spinning. It’s ridiculous, Jackie.”

Jackie clenches her jaw and stares at Nat. She resists the urge to tell her that they aren’t fighting right now, at least she’s pretty sure they aren’t. Usually it’s a pretty joint decision. She bites her tongue while she thinks, “Nat, what would you know? The world does stop spinning when we fight. It’s all different and I don’t feel the same and when I tuck myself in at night, I look at the pictures on my wall and it’s like half of me is gone while the rest has to sit here and wish things were different. Every time we fight it’s like throwing rocks at a window and pretending that you don’t know that things will shatter sooner rather than later, like we can only pretend it’s okay when we make up. I don’t know how much more is left to withstand all that we have left to throw at ourselves. I don’t know whether she really thinks we’re worth saving. But I think I’d die if she decided she was okay to leave me on my own. I think I’d die if she decided she didn’t need to save me. I think I’m more alone now than I’ve ever been.” She just stares at Natalie.

“Go on,” Natalie says, “Interrupt them. It wouldn’t be the first time you did it because you ‘needed something’ from her. Don’t kid yourself, Jackie.”

Jackie almost feels like she understands, can remember the nights where Shauna gave in, the nights where 'what ifs' and “\'would have beens' became just that. Natalie’s cheeks are a little pink and she looks almost pissed, but resigned, nearly forgiving. She looks like she’s beginning to see something in Jackie, something she can understand that holds her back from being as angry as she wants to be. That is, until her eyes flicker past Jackie for a moment, just past Jackie’s head, and grow huge. She shifts her weight between her feet, and almost looks like she wants to run off, but she keeps her feet planted in the ground.

“What?” Jackie asks. She watches Nat’s face, the way she can see her jaw clench through the thin skin of her cheeks. She watches her eyes, the ones Natalie so often drowns in a pool of eyeshadow, narrow so close to Jackie. She sees them catch on something so still, hone in near her, and the gaze she sends feels like a laser-beam made of snow and icy winds. Natalie’s eyes are cool and scared, like a cat’s, Jackie notices, then feels her own face drain of its color.

“Oh my God, is there a bug on me?”

Natalie stills for a moment, faltering. She blinks, refocuses, and then breathes very slowly. “…Y-yes. Don’t move.”

Jackie stands stiff as a board. “Get. It. Off,” she grits out with all the authority she can muster.

Nat slowly brings a hand up near her face and waves it around quickly. She frantically swings her hand around Jackie’s head, and Jackie squeals, flinching.

“Don’t move!” Nat says, but it’s too late, and Jackie’s moves her head to the side, which allows for Nat to accidentally smack her with the back of her hand, one of her rings scraping roughly across Jackie’s cheek.

“Ow! What the fuck, Nat?” she asks, turning away from Nat, dropping her long-empty cup to the ground, and holding her cheek. Here’s where she encounters what really made Nat’s eyes go big, because she’s turned back around. And she can see Shauna and Melissa again.

“Jackie! Aw, shit,” Nat says, and Jackie can hear the way her teeth are clenched together, can almost picture the way her hands twitching at her sides, the way she’s sure Natalie’s eyes are bouncing from Jackie and the other two.

In Jackie’s eyes, it doesn’t not make sense.

Jackie’s had this problem for a while. She doesn’t really understand what she sees sometimes. It’s why she crashed the Jeep during Christmas break last year. She can remember still. The roads were slippery, and she was changing lanes. She can still see the image in her mind now, while she looks upon a new one. She remembers seeing the other car in the rear mirror, remembers knowing that it was there. But she didn’t really understand what it meant, what it meant for her. She moved too fast (no blinker), and hit the other car, who swerved and spun off, landed in a ditch. Jackie slammed the breaks and changed gears so quickly she broke a nail, and her hands trembled as she took the keys out of the ignition. She waited what must have been thirty seconds, but felt like it could have been hours before she stepped out of the car and checked on the other driver. He was okay. She wasn’t allowed behind the wheel anymore. Shauna came to pick up the pieces.

Shauna’s got her arms around Melissa’s neck, and Melissa’s gripping Shauna’s waist, fingers twitching around the fabric of the dress Jackie had told her to wear tonight. Seeing them kiss, it’s not like Jackie regrets telling her to wear the dress. Jackie’s not sure the difference it makes. She drops her hand from her cheek and looks at her fingers, where they’re stained bright red. It matches Shauna’s dress, complements Melissa’s pale pink hat. Jackie’s not sure where she fits into this equation. She’s not sure if this one really involves her. She wipes the blood on her skirt unconsciously. She feels a whine bubble up in the back of her throat, but still, she cannot help but watch. Nat grabs her arm, spins her around to face her.

“Jackie,” she says. Her mouth continues to move as if she knows what to say, but she doesn’t. Whatever she thinks to say, she doesn’t put into words, at the very least. Jackie just stares at her. Natalie brings up her free hand and wipes some blood off of Jackie’s cheek. Jackie just stares at her.

Nat’s eyes, so icy, cloud over, and she just can’t fight the fact that Jackie can see the way they dart back to Shauna and Melissa. She’s blushing, and her brows are furrowing together, and now her lips are curling up to bear her teeth like a dog that’s asking to be put down. Jackie doesn’t know why she looks so angry, so embarrassed, when she’s not even raising a hand to her. She’s not doing anything wrong.

“Jackie, don’t you fucking dare. Not a word. Not to fucking… Kiffy Schumacher or Randy Walsh or God forbid Jeff Sadecki or I swear I’ll-“

“Jeff?” Jackie asks, blinking at Nat, eyes darting to the blood Nat’s got dripping off the tip of her fingers. Nat’s brows knit closer together.

“Yeah, Jeff. It’s not his-“

“-We broke up. Today. Today we broke up,” Jackie says, head shaking. She can feel the way Nat falls away from her a bit, the way she falters and waits for a beat before she starts talking again.

“Doesn’t fucking matter. It doesn’t matter. Shauna didn’t do that to you, she doesn’t deserve it.”

Jackie frowns, “Nat, what? I-“

Nat shakes her head, and Jackie closes her mouth. “I know she didn’t want you to see this. I don’t know anything else. It’s not my business. Not yours, either,” she says, and Jackie looks at the ground and feels her bottom lip quiver. She wipes at the cut on her cheek and looks at her fingers when she pulls them away, and they still drip with her bright red blood.

“I’m sorry about your face,” Natalie says, wiping the dried blood from her fingertips on her skirt. Her eyes flit over Jackie’s face, and they linger on her cheek where the cut is. She looks at Jackie for a second longer than Jackie wishes she would. Her eyes shift to Shauna again before she looks back at Jackie.

“Go inside, Jackie.”

Jackie looks at her for a moment. She sees the way Nat wants to scowl at her, and takes a step back. Her mind is filled with images of the Shauna she knows. She doesn’t want to turn around and see her girl like that again. She can’t even pretend not to be shocked, doesn’t even really know if she’s disgusted, though she can tell Nat is repulsed by whatever she thinks Jackie’s feeling simply by the look on her face; her fuzzy caterpillar-shaped eyebrows furrowing tells Jackie as much. Jackie can’t fault her for her anger. She finds that she can’t really fault anyone right now. She just nods at Nat’s word and begins to walk toward the sliding glass door.

As Jackie tries to pass her, Nat reaches out and grabs her wrist. Jackie only turns her head, only halfway around; she doesn’t want to have to see Shauna again.

“The hydrogen peroxide is under the kitchen sink. Ask Lottie if you want Neosporin,” Nat says.

Jackie nods absently and finishes her walk inside, nearly tripping on her way in. As she walks inside, Randy is moving to go outside, but she lays a hand on his shoulder to stop him.

“Randy, do you think you could help me find Lottie?”

He frowns for a moment, thinking. “She’s in the kitchen, I think.”

Jackie nods. “Thank you.”

She goes to keep moving, but he calls out after her. “What happened to your face?”

She just waves him off. “Don’t worry about it. Hey, um, Shauna’s looking for you, by the way. Out front.”

His eyes widen a bit and he redirects towards the front door.

When Jackie steps inside of the kitchen, she finds Lottie sitting up on the island, an actual cigarette between her fingers this time. Her legs are crossed and she’s still talking with Laura Lee, who’s flushed and biting the rim of her Solo cup.

“You really don’t know how to braid hair?” Jackie hears her ask Lottie, who just nods and taps the ash off the tip of her cigarette onto the granite countertop.

“My mom never taught me. And I don’t have any sisters, so, you know.”

“Let me teach you,” Laura Lee says.

Lottie’s taking a drag of her cigarette when Jackie taps her softly on her shoulder. Lottie slowly turns her head to look at her, her eyes widening when she seeks Jackie’s cut.

“Yikes, Jackie. You and Shauna get in a catfight again?” she asks.

Jackie shakes her head. “I just need some Neosporin. Maybe a Bandaid?”

Lottie nods. “Yeah. They’re gonna be in the counter above the sink in the bathroom.”

“Which one?”

“The one closest to the study,” she tells her. “Sorry about your face.”

Lottie turns back to Laura Lee, who watches Jackie as she leaves.

When Jackie’s finally alone in the bathroom, she feels like she’s not really by herself.

There’s a lingering sensation that she cannot quite shake. There’s this feeling she’s got, a buzzing one underneath her skin. It’s like she’s being watched. Or someone’s looking for her, or someone’s talking about her. She’s not sure.

She opens the cupboard and sees a tube of Neosporin. She sees it’s expired when she turns the tube around in her hands. It’s probably better than nothing, though, so she puts a tiny bit on the tip of her finger after she wipes some dried blood off of her face. She dabs the ointment gently on the cut while she looks at herself in the mirror. Once finished, she washes her hands off in the sink and dries them off.

Afterwards, she just stares in the mirror.

The room is spinning around her, and she’s too tipsy for this, but not quite drunk enough to be okay, since Nat was only mean because she felt like she had to be. She can close her eyes and feel the cut of her glare, feel the way it felt cold and harsh. It had seemed like a knife being run across her skin in the moment, and she’s just cleaned the wound without really knowing whether she deserved the chance to walk away and feel shame. She doesn’t know why she feels so ashamed in this moment, doesn’t know why looking at herself feels weird and wrong. She doesn’t know what she saw, doesn’t know what it means, how to keep moving on from it. She doesn’t know whether Shauna saw her looking, whether Shauna would care. She doesn’t know if Melissa would care, either, but figures she probably doesn’t, because she’s friends with Van because their brothers are friends, too. Jackie knows that when you’re a certain kind of girl, you get to be a certain kind of way, and when you’re just a little different, then things aren’t so easy.

She just wonders where Shauna falls in to place. She wonders what box Shauna checks for herself. She wonders the way Shauna thinks she looks standing next to everyone else in their lines, in their positions on the field. She wonders what Shauna thinks Melissa liked so much. She wants to have been sitting inside Shauna’s head in that moment, wishes she could have had a different seat to the event than the one that was slapped onto her face like a shameful brand. It had hurt to look. Still, it stings to remember.

It’s the Shauna who’s been her best friend since Jackie’s needed someone to turn to. It’s the Shauna who she’s adored. It’s Shauna, and that’s all she can think about, that’s all that consumes her mind and takes up her vision like a cloud moves to cover the sun, like an eclipse or the rising tide moving to swallow Jackie whole or carry her out to the sea. Jackie doesn’t know what to make of it, but her love for Shauna pounds her body, shakes her, as her heart slams against the inside of her ribcage and she wraps her arms around herself to feel her hands on someone else’s frame, feel the weight of her command and control on a being. Still, despite it all, she feels like she owns nothing, she feels like even what she thought she could sink her fingernails into will always be something that has to live out the rest of its days with a fiery brand stamped upon it that says it was ‘loved by Jackie Taylor,’ as if that’s such a crime, such a curse, such a heavy burden to have to bury.

The pounding grows, swells, beneath her skin, heavy and swollen with the weight of running into all those familiar faces, which burn and blur and soak into one another. They have become this group which seeks to haunt her, to mock her, to try to show her what her love means, all that it is worth for, all that it strips away. She sees flashes of it which appear and disappear with the thumping of her heart. She sees Randy standing up straighter after she’s told him he’s wanted, this insecurity and pride wafting off of him like his cologne. She sees Nat’s sharp teeth, which she’s never been sure are meant to defend or offend. She sees Lottie’s ash smeared onto her counter, left there without regard or consideration that it will certainly end up filthying someone’s palm later that night. She sees Laura Lee’s brows furrow in concern, and she feels exposed thinking about the fact that Laura Lee was looking at her and seeing her for what she is, what she must be. She sees Melissa in Shauna’s arms. Melissa laughing at the jokes Shauna tells her, Melissa through her own eyes for once, Melissa not so pathetic, Melissa not so able to make Jackie as furious as she thought she could have been, and Jackie wishes she were mad, but Melissa’s just seventeen, and what’s there to be mad at when Jackie’s seen how bad she is at lacing up her cleats. She sees Jeff, sees his watery eyes clouding up with tears when she tells him she doesn’t think he’s the right one, and she cannot express why she feels so sordid and covered in muck when he’s got his eyes on her, but it’s true and she cannot help it, cannot erase the image of her hand on his chest from her mind, cannot undo what was done, cannot change that she gave him everything but her virginity, gave him all that mattered, her time, which she felt like she had to extract from herself like a loose tooth wrapped in string tied around a doorknob.

She sees Shauna, in her mind, she thinks. That is, until the doorknob turns and someone opens the door and stares at Jackie, and that someone is Shauna. She looks normal. She looks the same as she did before her and Jackie had lost each other earlier that night. Jackie might just be looking for a difference that doesn’t exist.

Shauna frowns and closes the door behind her without taking her eyes off of Jackie. She takes a step towards Jackie, and the step looks second-nature. Like they’re drawing each other in again, like all is well and they’re tuned into one another, and Jackie can almost forget what she saw.

“Hey,” Shauna says.

“Hi.”Jackie feels a smile twitch its way onto her face, flickering there for a moment like a nearly broken lightbulb before it’s gone, like lines erased from the chalkboard.

“Your face... What happened?” Shauna asks, squinting at Jackie. Jackie swallows.

“I don’t know,” she says, turning to the mirror to look at herself again. The cut looks wet with the Neosporin on it.

Shauna shakes her head and steps closer. “What do you mean you ‘don’t know’? Tell me what happened.”

Instead of answering, Jackie just says, “How’d you know I was in here?”

“Lottie told me I might find you here.. I heard you missed me.” There’s a moment of silence between them. Distantly, there’s some hollering from deeper inside the house of ‘Ran-dy, Ran-dy, Ran-dy,’ and Shauna face drains of any pleasantries. A frown darkens her features like a ballpoint pen just exploded over college ruled paper. Jackie feels her heart flutter.

Shauna closes the cabinet, grabs the tube of Neosporin from off the counter, and dots a little bit on her finger. She gently goes to rub it on Jackie’s cut, softly caressing the cut with the paste, then screws the cap back on.

“Can you tell me how this happened?” she asks.

Jackie sighs. “Nat and I were outside and I, um, I had a bug on me, I think. And she was trying to like, wave it off me. And I moved and she accidentally,” Jackie gestures to her face, “with one of those chunky rings she wears, you know?”

Shauna nods and looks at her with that blank look she reserves for making Jackie feel like an idiot. It still warms her up.

“Nat never takes those rings off. She’d probably wear them to games if the refs would let her,” Shauna says.

“I’d probably encourage her if I knew she had hands like that.”

They stare at each other in silence for a moment. It’s insulated. The world outside the bathroom is loud and overwhelming. In here, it’s too much in a different way, by being not enough. It’s a little too earnest, little too sincere and Jackie thinks it’s her fault.

“I wanna go home,” Jackie blurts. Shauna’s face doesn’t change much, but she stiffens a bit and crosses her arms.

“It’s kinda early. I don’t even think the sun’s gone all the way down yet.”

“I’m not having a good time,” Jackie says, throwing her hands up a bit. She sighs, “And-and I think I pulled a muscle or something at the game. My.. uh.. tibia is killing me.” Jackie rubs at her shin to drive home the point, but she’s not stupid and she knows that Shauna knows she’s not being totally honest.

Shauna’s frown cracks into a smile, and Jackie can feel her own face drain of its wince. Shauna laughs a bit. “That’s a bone, Jackie.

“Whatever is attached to the tibia. It hurts,” Jackie replies, smiling a bit.

Shauna nods again. “I think I’m gonna stay a bit longer. Do you need to go right now?”

“Please, can’t we just leave? What’re you gonna miss, getting hit on by Randy Walsh?” Jackie says, trying to huff out a laugh at her words to persuade Shauna. She just frowns in response.

“Let’s go,” Jackie says, trying to make it sound like she found a compromise with the tone of her voice. She weakly reaches for Shauna’s hands, but Shauna’s arms are still crossed, so Jackie really only ends up putting her hands on Shauna’s forearms for a brief moment before they fall back to her sides. She realizes now she’s made it awkward, but it’s always a little awkward before Shauna says yes to her.

She watches as Shauna clenches her jaw, then unclenches, parts her lips to say something, then shuts them and thinks for a little bit longer. “Can Jeff give you a ride back home? I want to stay here.”

Jackie chews on the inside of her cheek, eyes darting to look at their mirror image for a moment. “Um.. no.”

“’No’? ’No’ he can’t give you a ride?” Shauna asks.

Jackie nods, says, “Yes.”

Shauna’s brows twitch into a brief frown before she can smooth it over. “‘Yes,’ meaning he can drive you home?”

“Jeff cannot drive me home,” Jackie clarifies, blushing a bit.

Shauna stares at her. “I don’t understand. You were all over him earlier.”

Jackie frowns. She doesn’t think that’s true. If anything, Shauna was the one all over someone else that night. Jackie doesn’t know why she doesn’t want to bring it up. She knows that she should wait to mention it, if she decides to mention it at all. Her eyes flick to Shauna’s lips to look for… evidence? She doesn’t see anything, and she’s beginning to feel a little crazy.

“I was not ‘all over him’,” she tells Shauna, indignant but still blushing.

“You went upstairs with him. Lottie says we can’t go upstairs.”

“Who gives a shit what Lottie says?” Jackie tries to joke, smiling a bit (albeit falsely,) but she quickly drops it when she sees Shauna’s not even faking a smile.

“What are you doing?” Shauna asks, shaking her head in exasperation.

Jackie scoffs. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, and it’s her turn to cross her arms now. Shauna squints at her.

Jackie feels Shauna’s stare really heavy on her. It almost hurts, she thinks. Shauna’s scrutinizing her and Jackie wishes she wanted to shake her eyes off, but there’s something about it that feels good. There’s something about how smart Shauna is that makes Jackie want to scream until her throat is raw. Shauna’s trying to figure her out like Jackie is a trig equation, and she’s almost got the answer, Jackie can feel it in the way Shauna’s lips begin to curl up into a sneer that Jackie pretends isn’t as disdainful as it looks. Shauna knows Jackie’s keeping something from her (though she doesn’t know what,) and so she says:

“Why’d you go upstairs with him, Jackie?”

Here, Jackie is ambivalent, like that stupid Robert Frost poem they read to death when they were sophomores, back when they were in all the same classes. Looking at Shauna like this, a Shauna obviously on the cusp of anger (if she hasn’t gotten there yet,) Jackie gets the urge to poke the bear, the urge to hold something just outside of Shauna’s reach, make her sweat for something just to prove she really wants it. She thinks she wants Shauna to bear her teeth, shove her around a little, prove that she’s not going to just bend-knee. It’s all this game. Jackie wants Shauna to play with her. She shrugs and shakes her head at Shauna, who huffs.

“This is bullshit. The whole time I was driving us back after the game you were… coddling me or something. We get home and you can’t take your hands off me, force me into this,” Shauna gestures down at herself, wrinkling her nose at the dress Jackie told her to wear. There’s a small smudge of dirt on Shauna’s shin, and Jackie’s heart aches with fondness as she remembers the beautiful slide tackle she brought out at the game earlier. She’s distracting herself. Jackie tunes back into Shauna’s words, hearing, “-and when we get here, it’s like I’m here alone. You’re hanging off of Jeff and then tell me you’re going upstairs without telling me why. And you just expect me to do what? Be standing by the keg with Randy when you come out? You just want me to wait for you?”

Jackie flinches, surprised. “What are you talking about? I never told you to wait up for me. I didn’t expect you to just be there when I was done with him-“

“Done with him’? What were you doing, Jackie? Why can’t you give me a straight answer tonight?”

Jackie sighs.

Shauna sucks a deep breath in and holds it in her lungs for a moment. Jackie’s eyes are on her falling chest when Shauna speaks again. “What’s going on?”

As she chews on the inside of her cheek, Jackie feels like she has to tell Shauna she broke up with Jeff again. She knows what her face will look like. She knows her countenance when these things happen, because they’ve happened so many times before. Shauna pretends that her eyes get watery and she pulls Jackie in for a hug and talks shit about the entire Sadecki blood line, past, present, and future, and she makes Jackie feel good as she rubs circles between her shoulders. Jackie opens her mouth, maybe to confess, but her bottom lip is trapped between her teeth before any words can actually come out. Her eyes linger on the floor for a moment, before they meet Shauna’s disappointed ones, which actually look a little teary, though it may just be a trick of the fluorescent light.

“Jackie? What did you do with him?”

Jackie looks away as something toothy and violent and excited gnaws at the lining of her stomach.

“Did you…?” Shauna can’t finish her sentence and she cuts herself off with a frustrated groan.

Jackie’s stomach sinks as she meets Shauna’s eyes. “Did I what?”

“Jackie...”

Jackie frowns for a moment, then her eyes widen. “No!” she shakes her head almost violently. “I-I didn’t sleep with him, if that’s what you’re thinking. I wouldn’t-…” she clicks her tongue, thinking. “I, um, we… we broke up.”

There’s another handful of quiet seconds where Shauna’s eyes take in Jackie’s face, try to see the worst in her expression, try to pick up on the sour notes and the ones with resentment concealed by embarrassment.

“When were you going to tell me?”

“I don’t know. Tonight. Tomorrow. Does it matter? Why is he all you want to talk about all of the sudden?”

“It’s not about him. It’s about you, Jackie. I just-“ she groans again, looking up at the ceiling.

Shauna’s teeth shine like seashells sticking out of sand on the beach when she opens her mouth to spit her anger at Jackie, and she offers Jackie a pearl to squeeze in her palm when she says, “I tell you everything. You know everything, and even the things you don’t know, you think you already know. Why do you want to keep me in the dark? Why do you run off and push me away and then refuse to fill me in? We’re not five anymore. I don’t wanna play telephone with Natalie and Lottie about how you’re tearing your hair out looking for me when you were the one pushing me away in the first place.” They both know Shauna is lying about being honest, and Jackie holds back a laugh thinking about how much of a liar Shauna has to be if she can’t even tell the truth about her dishonesty. Her head is spinning, and she knows Shauna’s trying to hurt her.

Jackie doesn’t even hear the end of it. “‘Everything’? Seriously, ‘everything’? What a fucking joke. Are we just not gonna talk about your book of secrets? Are you not gonna fill me on whatever it was that you were doing while I was trying to find you. It’s a two way street, Shipman. If we were both looking for each other, we would have found each other. I mean, where were you?”

“Where were you?” Shauna counters, and it doesn't make any sense, not really, but Jackie still feels like she’s been punched in the gut. “You love to do this, to play this game of hide and seek with me. I’m so over it. Find someone else to play with, Jackie. Why did you even break up with Jeff? He’s perfect for you, too stupid to realize he’s a part of whatever this is.”

Jackie runs her hand over her face before she has the chance to think twice about doing it. She’s wincing before she knows it, and the cut on her cheek is split open again. “Ugh! Fuck!”

Shauna stands and watches her for a moment before she quickly grabs a hand towel and wets it, pressing it to Jackie’s cut. They’re standing a little too close now, and Jackie’s a little too close to tears. She hates fighting with Shauna, because when Shauna thinks she’s right, Jackie usually finds herself agreeing, and now she just really wants to go home.

When Shauna moves her free hand to hold Jackie’s face so that it’s pointed towards her, Jackie can’t help but look at her lips. It still feels like she’s swallowed glass. It still feels like something is shredding up her insides when she thinks about Shauna and Melissa, and she’s trying so badly not to think about it, to pretend she never even saw it in the first place. The way Shauna looks at her is like if fondness and repugnance were swirled together, and Jackie’s head starts to spin all over again. She feels so unbelievably sorry, and there’s this growing void in her stomach because she knows for certain that nothing was fixed, nothing was mended, nothing was even stuck back together with that runny white Elmer’s school glue. She can know that she’s ruined it by seeing something she wasn’t supposed to, saying something she didn’t really mean, but when Shauna flashes a reluctant smile at her, it’s as though Jackie is none the wiser to the truth.

“Um…” Jackie begins, “Laura Lee told me something while I was looking for you…”

“What’d she say?”

“She told me you were upset. After I left, I guess.” Jackie trails off. Shauna pulls the towel away from her face and rubs some wetness off with her thumb. She grabs the tube of Neosporin again.

She stares at Jackie like she’s expecting a question, but Jackie’s not sure how to ask it, what to even ask. Jackie just blinks at her. Again, Shauna applies some Neosporin to the wound. Jackie feels like Shauna’s being dramatic about the cut, but she knows she’d be the same way if Shauna was sporting one half as bad. Nat got her good.

“Were you?”

Shauna looks at her for a moment. She puts the tube of Neosporin in the cabinet and turns back to face Jackie.

Jackie wants her to say yes. Well, she wants Shauna to tell the truth. At the very least, Jackie thinks she wants Shauna to tell the truth, and that’s nearly the same thing, isn’t it? Shauna looks sweet and like Jackie should be holding her. She’s thinking, though her thinking-face is stunningly blank, so serene and beautiful, and it looks like a memory, fuzzy around the edges and something Jackie knows she cannot hold onto forever, because it will dance in the dark underneath her eyelids, with flashes of light that make no sense, though the flavor of Shauna will remain true to reality. She cannot imagine Shauna as anything but sweet, she cannot think of Shauna as anything other than this warm candy feel, this dripping chocolate. She waits for Shauna to say something. Jackie thinks she sees her jaw clench for a brief moment, though any movement is certainly hidden under her cheeks, where Jackie had dabbed blush earlier that evening.

Jackie opens her mouth. To say what, she’s not sure. Melissa is in her mind, but her name is not shaped on her tongue. Jackie wants to ask Shauna why she did it. She wants to ask Shauna why it feels like a betrayal, why she doesn’t want to tell Jackie. She wants to ask Shauna if she seriously thinks she could love her any less, if Shauna thinks that’s a possibility in any life, especially in the one which they are living today, tonight. Jackie wants to ask if it felt good. She wants to ask if Shauna liked it, Melissa’s hands on her. She wants to ask her if when Melissa’s touching her, it feels the way she dreamed it would when kissing like that was an abstraction only actualized by a scandalous movie or a film kept in the adult section of the video store Van works at. She wants to ask Shauna if she pretends it’s someone else, if that’s normal, if Jackie isn’t the only girl in the world to do it. That question feels like too much. She closes her mouth.

“No,” Shauna says, finally, simply, and Jackie wants more, but she doesn’t want to push it anymore tonight.

Jackie chews on the inside of her cheek and looks away. She remembers she trusts Shauna.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“I can have a good time without you, you know,” Shauna grumbles, blushing just a little bit at how Jackie’s looking at her.

“Sure,” Jackie says. “Just not as good of a time, right?”

Jackie smiles while Shauna turns away, looking in the mirror, shielding her face from Jackie's.

“How’d Jeff take it?” Shauna asks, maybe just to make Jackie feel guilty again.

Jackie wipes her palms on her skirt and shakes her head. “I don’t know where he is. I think he left…after?”

His eyes lit up so bright when Jackie took him upstairs. It was blinding, like when they turn the lights in the theater on at the end of the movie. Jackie needed somewhere quiet, somewhere lonely just to see. She needed to look at him in the dark, just the two of them, just to see if maybe… well, she’s not so sure what she was looking for. When he kissed her as he sat beside her on the bed, Jackie knew it wasn’t this time, knew maybe there was another time and another place to try something like this. She tried to bury thoughts about someone else. Was she the only one who ever thought about someone else? The only one who was full without more? It was funny, because nothing they ever did filled her up, but she was so intoxicated when the were together, so stuffed with a feeling she doesn’t understand, that she always felt like she couldn’t handle any more.

“Why’d you… again?” Shauna asks, and it’s cute that she tries to beat around the bush, tries to convince Jackie she cares with efforts so weak.

“It’s not right, I think. Us.”

Shauna turns her head and looks at Jackie fully again.

“Sometimes I feel crazy. He makes me feel crazy sometimes,” Jackie sighs.

“I wonder how it’s supposed to feel,” she says, as though she’s asking a question, looking up into Shauna’s eyes, which could make her blind to the rest of the world, like seeing a car wreck on the freeway.

Jackie keeps going, feeling like she has to, not exactly feeling like herself anymore. “Do you, um…”

“…know how it’s supposed to feel?” Shauna supplies. Jackie nods, biting her lip.

Shauna looks down at the tile for a moment. “I, uh, think maybe? …Or.. sometimes? I-I don’t-“ Shauna cuts herself off with a huff. “It’s hard to talk about with you.”

Jackie doesn’t know why that makes her stomach do backflips. She doesn’t ask Shauna why. She just stays silent as she looks at her. Jackie cannot help the way her mind goes back to Shauna and Melissa. She cannot help feeling like it warms her up a bit to think about it. She thinks she has to be blushing now, because Shauna’s gone red, too, and Jackie remembers how they’d held each other, how Jackie and Shauna have been close to that, in their own way, but they’ve never quite been like that. Not all the way. When Jackie thinks of closeness, she thinks of Shauna. She feels like Melissa’s stolen something from her. Jackie takes Shauna’s hand and intertwines their fingers.

It’s gentle, and Shauna’s hand is a little damp with the water from the sink, a little slippery with the Neosporin on her fingers.

It’s very, very quiet in the bathroom for a moment, until Jackie’s voice crackles against the silence.

“I saw you,” Jackie says quietly, and it tumbles out of her mouth without her even trying to form the words. 

Shauna’s eyes themselves don’t change, but her brows furrow together a bit. Her lips part, but not to speak.

Jackie has a chance to withdraw her words, but she doesn’t. “Outside. With, uh, with-“

Shauna’s eyes widen and her hand grows more wet, still intwined with Jackie’s. She flinches and then squeezes Jackie’s hand, and Jackie can actually feel her pulse quicken because their palms are pressed against one another.

“Melissa,” Shauna says, like a whisper, like she’s seen a ghost. 

Jackie goes to nod but Shauna’s eyes grow a little watery, a little like they’ve been laminated. They’re shiny, and she looks like a rabbit with its leg caught in something, like she’s beating against the earth and herself to escape, but she just can’t move. Her lip wobbles. There are unshed tears rallying like armies to jump off of her waterline. Jackie tries to squeeze her hand, but the grip they share is already so tight.

“Is that what you mean? You know how it feels? Is she-“

Shauna rears back and shakes her head violently. “Jackie, I’m drunk, I-“

Jackie frowns and reaches for her. “No, you’re not. You were supposed to take us home.”

Shauna bites her lip and closes her eyes hard, opening them quickly after. Her tears move to dampen her bottom lashes.

“Shauna, it’s okay. It’s you. It’s okay. You’re my best friend. It’s okay, please-“

Shauna shakes her head and wraps her arms around herself.

“Did it feel, you know, right? Was it how it was supposed to be?”

Shauna scoffs and wipes her tears off her face. She focuses her eyes on Jackie, draws her into this shaky, wet storm. “No, Jackie. It wasn’t… like a movie or whatever. Obviously it wasn’t like you and Jeff. We-I didn’t do it because…” she stops talking abruptly and sucks in a big gulp of air.

Jackie grabs at her again, holds her hands on Shauna’s hips. She squirms a bit, but she doesn’t fight to shake Jackie off like how Jackie expected her to.

They just stare at each other. For a moment, they’re reduced to two pairs of eyes, which look and beg to be looked into, which dually want to look away and hope in vain that they cannot be seen.

“Shauna,” Jackie sighs. “I love you. Please just tell me-“

Shauna groans loudly, then whines as a couple more tears fall. “Jackie, I can’t!”

“Why not?” Jackie asks, not even really sure what she wants from Shauna anymore.

Shauna just frowns at her and shakes her head for the millionth time that night. Her expression loses its severity as her eyes flit over Jackie’s face. Jackie can see them wander around her features, going from her eyes, to her nose, to the stupid fucking cut on her cheek, to her wobbly lip. Shauna’s lips part briefly, to mouth something, Jackie thinks it might just be her own name, but she doesn’t get the chance to really analyze Shauna because Shauna’s hands are flying up.

Her hands are flying up and they’re grabbing Jackie’s face, holding her. Shauna’s thumb presses hard on Jackie’s cut, and Jackie’s eyes flutter shut as a whimper falls from her open lips before Shauna pulls her in to kiss her, and fuck.

Jackie’s hands squeeze harder on Shauna’s hips, and Shauna is now squealing in her mouth too, and if Jackie opened her eyes, she’d get the chance to see the way they both fit together, Shauna’s hands cupping Jackie’s face while Jackie’s own are white knuckling Shauna’s hips roughly and so tight, as if they’re in for a ride.

Shauna’s tongue pokes out of her mouth for a quick moment, licking against Jackie’s lip. It’s so polite that Jackie has to oblige, has to part her lips just to feel the way Shauna’s tongue will gently run against her teeth, will tease her like Jackie had been begging for this all night. Shauna bites Jackie’s lip when they part, and as Jackie turns to look at their reflection in the mirror, she can almost understand the answer to her earlier question.

It’s her realization of that, and nothing else, that makes her say, “Oh, shit.”

Chapter Text

Jackie stares at their mirror image for longer than she should, probably, observing the lines they make melt together into one, their separate figures blending into something that is definitively combined, certainly intimate.

The image she sees is one she’ll come back to in thousands of different ways for the remaining portion of her life, for whatever is left for her to change. This sight becomes a small scar, one seared into the inside of her eyelids, one she’ll see every time she tries to sleep, one she’ll return to when she’s cold and lifeless, when she’s still and brittle, when there’s nothing left of her but her bones and whoever will remember her. Their embrace will last lifetimes in all the ways it manifests itself, in the way that it’ll change everything, if she lets it.

Jackie whines. She can feel Shauna twitch in her arms. She feels herself almost try to burst out of Shauna’s.

The moment is icy. There’s this impulse which pounds beneath her skin, telling her to just move. There is also this force surrounding her. Shauna’s hands are still on her face. She still feels the twinge of pain on her cheek, wonders fleetingly if Shauna is deliberately pressing her thumb into her wound.

Shauna turns Jackie’s head so that she looks at her. A lead weight is dropped into the pit of Jackie’s stomach, and her jaw twitches. They’re looking at each other now. A blush has crept up on Shauna’s cheeks, and her lips are coated with a gloss that isn’t translucent factory-made wax. It’s their spit, mixed and dabbed carelessly upon her lips, which look fuller like this, fuller when she’s been kissed. Jackie thinks about Melissa for a second, though she wishes she wouldn’t.

She wants to say something, she needs to say something, she needs to ask something. She needs to squirm her way out of Shauna’s arms and pretend with her that this didn’t happen, that this could have panned out any other way. Her lips part, and she feels absence in the action, feels a lack, a want. Shauna’s all that she can think of, but there’s a thick film over this moment, something blank that begs to be forgotten, something desperate and willing.

They can’t talk about it. Or can they? Jackie’s unsure, so unsure. She lets Shauna pull her back in for a couple more messy kisses. She’s still got her thumb digging into Jackie’s cut. She’s still making her hurt, and her lips against Jackie’s do not feel anything like an apology. It feels like so much between them, but certainly not an apology. It feels like Shauna is determined to take something, determined to make Jackie hear her in a way Jackie’d refused to in the past, been blind to.

It’s a joint flicker of their memory for a moment, a pulse between them which prompts them to see the not-so-distant past, to see tongues down throats and hands gripping hips and the electric jolt of an unbridled, raw, ineffable jealousy. Jackie’s big eyes consume so much, and draw in with a desperation, with a keen neediness which only knows its object, has no true knowledge of itself, and Shauna’s eyes, dark and sweetly bitter, will absorb and are this quiet monument to endurance, to loyalty and the dregs of misery that are left in the wake of dedication as whole as the kind the two of them share. Shauna’s kisses are hard and wet, sloppy and angry, like she’s mad Jackie just had to see something she thought she could keep to herself, even madder that Jackie had to bring it up, had to pull it into herself as if she’s the pit of a sinkhole, though from Jackie’s mind, she’d realized that she’ll never be able to feel the lack of Shauna in anything she does. She’ll never truly be alone. She’s haunted by everything which dares to exist around her, and in a room full of people, she’s realized she only will ever be concerned with one singular soul. She pours regret into her kisses, whines penance into Shauna’s hungry mouth when Shauna’s teeth dig into her lip.

Jackie feels air between them before she realizes they’ve stopped kissing, and she opens her mouth without thinking she’s holding a hammer and nail to the coffin they’re going to share, but Shauna can see it all, can imagine the worst things Jackie could drag out of her mind and verbalize with the blessing of her throat and lips and tongue, all things Shauna wants so desperately to lay claim to, and so she does.

Jackie begins speaking, “You-“

But Shauna cuts her off, nearly growling as she kisses her again, harder, needier, all in a way that makes Jackie realize the hunger inside of herself, all in a way that makes Jackie’s body light up with a buzzing beneath her skin. She turns her inside out, she fleshes her out, draws attention to the beast within both of them, the sickening part which dares to be sated by flesh and has those deep carnal desires imbued inside of it not from the stars but from the soil, the kinds of desire Jackie had spent her whole life trying to beat down and say she was better than, simply because no one had made her realize she’d ever been human like them, no one except Shauna, who is determined to drag her to something that feels as low and earthly as the ground she’d been standing on her whole life.

Their arousal is not hot. It does not boil over. It does not burn them, and they will not have blisters from this. It is freezing cold. It is sharp and icy. It is a cool breeze and a jolt up the spine. It is the rustle of leaves in the trees, the noise it makes does not cause them to jump away from one another, like touching an iron. It pulls them closer and closer to one another, as if the only thing that can protect them is that shivering embrace they share.

The slotting of their lips together feels nothing short of the 777 Jackie’s dad dreams of while he fantasizes ways to blow their money away. Shauna has always said that rich-person poor was really very different from poor-person poor, but in this moment, where Jackie’s tongue is prodding gently at the synapse between their two mouths (meeting so quickly in the air that Jackie almost doesn’t believe the coolness that settles itself against her tongue so briefly before it falls into Shauna’s mouth) she wants to tell her that she thinks it’s all the same. She slides her tongue politely along Shauna’s bottom lip, thinking it’s all the same, except that if you have something to lose, you have something to gain, and you could buy Dom Perignon instead of bad peach schnapps and pretend in between the bubbles that the taste matters at all to you while you try to forget that you’re up to your ears in debt. You could buy the good taste and shoulder the pain of knowing you’ll lose it. Jackie’s fingers flit to Shauna’s shoulders, while their mouths make angry abode against one another, Shauna tries to shrug her hands off of her, but her heart’s not in it, like she must like the taste of Jackie’s imaginary Dom Perignon too much. Lottie doesn’t bring the good shit out for these kinds of parties, the kinds of parties where Randy Walsh’s attendance isn’t a question. Shauna must like something imbedded on Jackie’s tongue, the way she’s delving to slip hers against Jackie’s. It sure as hell isn’t the rum that Jackie mixed with Diet Coke. Shauna likes it sweet, sweeter. Jackie’s always too heavy handed with her pours anyways. She’s never been one for ratios. She’s half scared, thinking about it now, that she’ll be pulled aside and quizzed by Mr. McGivern about what percent of Shauna’s tongue was now in her mouth, about the probability that things would escalate beyond this.

They part for a brief moment, where lips wet with spit make coolness press upon her for but a mere second, a facsimile of a longer brief of time, but a shitty copy, the kind Jackie did of Shauna’s English homework when Shauna didn’t even have to say the words “don’t make it exact” because Jackie has always known better than to try to beat the best at her own game, known far better than to try to be Shauna Shipman when it felt so much better to have that same girl moan underneath her tongue (even though the truth is that Shauna’s is the one that’s excitedly learning the inside of Jackie’s gaping, needy mouth.) Jackie’s not above lying to protect her dignity. The lies just never seem to reach the one person she cares about thinking highly enough of her. Shauna sees through it all the time. She sees through her all the time, it seems. Jackie could never quite force Shauna to do what she wanted her to do. She could try to corral her in just the right way, but Shauna, for all she was worth, could be trusted to be disobedient if it meant that she’d withhold something Jackie wanted. It put a sour feeling in both of their stomachs to think about it. Jackie doesn’t know why she tries to fight against Shauna, why they both pretend that Shauna’s going to do anything but give into Jackie in a way that will make them both sick to their stomachs by the end of it all.

Something within Jackie’s skin thrashes around violently, willingly, to penetrate between the space that separated thoughts and action. Jackie wants desperately to place her hand so softly upon Shauna’s frame, but she doesn’t know whether it’s really worth it to do something like that, whether there’s a point in trying to tame the wild parts of Shauna or to just let her be what she needs to be if it means she’ll give this part of herself to Jackie. Jackie needs this part of her, needs to have it in her hands, hold it in her grasp, she needs to have what she’s seen someone else own. It was different in the past, when the image of Shauna with someone else was just that, an image, a simple phantasm with no real aftertaste to accompany it. Now Jackie needs something, and she needs it because Shauna lit that match. She needs it the same way she needs to bathe the both of them in her perfume, the same way that she needs both of them to have each other’s sweat soak through in one another’s pores. She doesn’t know where Shauna ends and she begins.

The secret (which feels more and more like a secret they’ve only been keeping from each other instead of the whole world,) is that it didn’t matter whether Jackie had Jeff or whether Shauna had whoever she lied about having, whoever she pretended to have. The secret is something else. The secret they both held onto and passed between each other’s mouths was that they could never really be close enough to each other. When Shauna fought Jackie (like how they’re fighting in this moment, how Shauna’s hands roughly grasp at Jackie so Shauna can squeeze Jackie where it counts, Shauna grasping at Jackie’s chest and groaning about how she can’t pretend Jackie’s so bad when she’s just this soft in her hands,) it is a game, one only the two of them can play with one another. It’s a game of the inevitable, a game of how long they could delay what was, for all intents and purposes, something that was indeed going to happen. They are, especially in this moment, pawing at one another like the way a kitten attempts to unravel a ball of yarn. It’s licking at a jawbreaker. It’s prying and prying to try to get at the center, to see what’s inside. The secret is the game, the secret is that they both want to win against each other so bad, they both want to be good enough, to be more than good enough, to earn through tears and lies and things they pretend they never saw, the right to one another. They both want to hold the leash, they both want to score the goal, they both want the assist, they both want everything, and they want it to so bad. Shauna squeezes Jackie harder, runs her fingers over the hardening bud concealed beneath Jackie’s top and bra. It’s chicken, it’s soccer, it’s this aching desire that says, “I’ll suck the venom out of your wound. Do you love me enough to do the same, even if you put it there? How badly can we fuck it up if we intend of making it right again? How sweet can we make it taste if we just pretend a little more?”

Later when Jackie would reflect on it, she’d breathe her best friend’s name into her pillow when she was coming onto her fingers, the hazy memory of the night enough to get her toughing herself. Her thighs would clench around nothing but her bony wrist. She would hate nothing more in that moment than her memory, which could not help but print every image of the evening upon her mind, a burn, a scar, indelible and irreplaceable, she couldn’t stop herself once she starts (half convinced that Shauna would want her to finish, told herself that Shauna’s a completion-ist if nothing else, though that’s not even necessarily true,) Jackie could not remove that tattoo of Shauna off of herself, as if it weren’t some phantasm or projection printed upon her skin than bled so deep that removing the image became as close to removing herself as it got.

When Shauna slots her teeth (dull by all the venom she spit at Jackie that night, but for some reason, still feeling just as sharp as Jackie guessed they would) gnaw roughly against her bottom lip, she feels a groan being pulled out of her, one hoping to rival the sound of the thumping bass of the party.

Here’s something she’d never been able to control: Jackie Taylor is loud. She’s loud on the field, voice reaching volumes it has to reach to drown out the thrum of her pulse in her ears. She’s loud everywhere else too, and she has one of those voices that you can pick out of a line up of whisperers (“It’s vocal fry, Jax. It’s not raspiness,” Shauna’s told her with brows knitted together in a way that showed everything but concern, more of the way Shauna’s in pure disbelief that Jackie would think anything else, and Jackie knows Shauna’s wrong, so much so that she skipped being pissed off over it, skipped correcting her over it). Jackie was loud during library visits, which had been mandatory when they were in middle school, but all Jackie and Shauna knew how to do was find some rarely traversed corner in the library slotted between two cases of (probably) erotic novels for middle aged house wives and Misty Quigleys and braid each other’s hair (Shauna would brush her fingers over the spines of the thicker books longingly while Jackie’s fingers were busy rubbing gently at her scalp, when Jackie’s own fingers would flip through kiddie books while Shauna’s threaded between honey-blonde locks). Shauna would have given Jackie a dirty look if she knew the mean thoughts she was thinking. But another thing that Jackie had leather bound and Dewey-Decimal-ed (she is, if nothing else, a woman after the heart of Shauna Shipman) is the knowledge that though Shauna thinks she’s so much better, she isn’t. And she wouldn’t be, even if Jackie was quiet as a mouse.

She groans against Shauna’s mouth and pretends she doesn’t hear Shauna tell her to ‘be quiet’. Jackie just pulls her closer, with those same arms she used to shove her back in so many different ways before, fingers gripping hard onto Shauna’s hipbones.

Jackie just has to touch. She’s one of those kids who’s always being told ‘no’. Frequently, the ‘no’s’ come from Shauna, who just had it in her to dampen Jackie’s mood like her life depended on it, like it’s fun for her. But Jackie has heard it all before, from the lips of the brooding and desperate girl who’s squirming in her arms, or not. And really, as of late, she’s gotten quite sick of it all, realized she has said more than her fair share of ‘no’s,’ too. She doesn’t deny Shauna’s teeth on her lip again, wanting to tell her to go fuck herself, but the words don’t come out like anything except a moan, so maybe Jackie’s drunker than she thought, or maybe she’s enjoying it more than she wishes she is.

Shauna pulls back with something swirling in her eyes (it might be Malibu and milk, Jackie can’t be perfectly sure unless she gets another taste of Shauna’s tongue). She looks right at Jackie, and the look is impossible to place. Jackie is bad at reading, fine enough at talking, but Shauna is printed in a language Jackie was 99% sure she qualifies as bilingual in, even if she can’t put it on her college applications to fluff them up (Rutgers doesn’t care, she reminds herself. The future is a promise, she thinks.) But she can’t read Shauna’s stare, even though it’s pounding at her and trying to force her away like magnets with the same polarity as Jackie whines and presses closer to Shauna’s mouth, laying a couple more desperate kisses against her lips before Shauna grabs her by the shoulders and shoves her off, none too soft, but the remnant of the feeling on Jackie’s shoulders reads one thing: hunger.

“How does he do it?” Shauna asks in a way that sounds like a question. But Shauna Shipman doesn’t ask questions that are open ended, if she asks questions at all. She answers them.

“What?” Jackie asks back, in a way that sounds the way a question ought to sound, not that it mattered much. Semantics, or whatever.

“Jeff. How does he touch you? How does he try to fuck you?”

Jackie feels her eyes bulge out of her skull, her face. She feels her cheeks heat up from more than just alcohol, and something bubbles behind her naval, something that could be red hot arousal or a shrieking threat (like the fire alarm that Nat Scatorccio pulled sophomore year to dodge Geometry, a fact that everyone knew but thought was too funny to complain about) that promises her that she won’t have to pull trig later to feel better.

Jackie mumbles, embarrassed, “Jesus, Shauna, stop.” You’re being mean, Jackie wants to say, not that anyone cares, certainly not Shauna, as she frowns at Jackie, impatient like she deserves an answer, the answer.

Between the impatient clench of Shauna’s jaw, between the unsteady breaths Jackie takes to calm herself before Shauna gives up on the question or presses harder, Jackie pictures something that isn’t quite sex, isn’t quite

sex. Far enough past second base to be dangerous, without the security of having her foot on third base. Fuck it, Jackie doesn’t pay attention to Jeff talking about baseball. It’s easier to just watch it and cheer when she sees a blue and yellow uniform than to commit to having more of her memory taken up than she’s willing to consent to. He’d… touch her, Shauna knows this. And he’d ask that he’d be touched back. Well, the asking was never exactly as polite as it could have been, and his big hands pawing at her chest, warming her thighs with the callouses that collect at the base of his fingers from swinging around a big bat that was only as good as the person using it, shows that while it’s a choice for her, saying a partial yes is easier than saying a full no to him, and much more comforting than telling him a full yes. Yeah, it was something she could blush about when she sat in church on the days her mom was awake enough to want to get the Taylors to plant their asses in seats that were molded to host a different congregation, one maybe more like the Sadeckies (Jeff was Catholic, though, so they didn’t go to church together. It wasn’t worth talking about. They had the same God anyways, the same man in the sky that pokes Jackie with disinterest aimed towards her guilt as she balled her hand into a fist before she acquiesces her mouth.) She can’t ever seem to give up her brain, even in a ‘lie back and think of England’ sort of way, unless the England she thought of was full of Bombay Sapphire or Beefeater (Jackie hates gin with a lackluster passion, though when it gets late enough that the novelty of Malibu (and milk) and drinks-you-care-about-the-taste-of wore off, Shauna pours both of them a gin and tonic, with the ample bullshit, fake ass soda surely left over in favor of better drinks for young and delicate palates. But gin and tonic tastes like water when you’re drunk enough to forget that alcohol is what dried your mouth out in the first place). Jackie would drink hers, knowing the taste that’s on the inside of Shauna’s mouth is the same as the one that coats the her tongue like a fucked up laminate. She’d spit it all out at the end of the night anyways, and she’d pinch her nose as it burned down her throat if she’d have to swallow.

“Fuck off, Shauna,” Jackie mumbles, refusing to meet her eyes, finding solace in staring instead at the front of Shauna’s dress where the fabric is stretched taught across her chest, a little rustled and bunched, somehow looking tighter, maybe because something brushed upon by the earlier dances, earlier shitty party games that tried to convince them they were having more fun than they actually were. She blushes when she realizes she’s leering.

Shauna’s glare grows icy, in a way so mean Jackie almost wishes she could taste it. (She wishes she knew that the look is an angry show that Shauna put on for their eyes only, but with girls like Shauna Shipman, who only pour their hearts out in journals bound so tight with anger, filled to the point of bursting with secrets Jackie didn’t know she had, Jackie doesn’t know what’s real and what’s for show. Jackie doesn’t know that the anger inside of Shauna’s mouth, beneath her teeth that scrape so pleasantly upon Jackie’s bottom lip that their flat edges may have begun to wear her raw, is made with a silver edge that bleeds them both dry when their tongues rub up against each other). But right, Shauna wants to talk about fucking Jeff. Jackie doesn’t know how Jeff fucks, though she knows how he tries to, she knows that what they did together might count as sex (she thinks it can’t, she knows it can’t, she wishes it was enough for him, enough for her.) Her fingers rub up against themselves in her palms while she wishes she was gripping the front of Shauna’s dress, feeling fabric so sheer that her fingers were more feeling than unfeeling.

Shauna blushes angrily, and Jackie almost understands why. “He does try to fuck you, doesn’t he? I mean, that’s why you broke up with him, right?” she sneers. Jackie’s got half a mind to realize it’s fucked up that Shauna’s words go straight down her spine to her core, sending arousal as bright and obvious as the fucking sun between her legs. It’s mean, that Shauna’s being smart and using it to put a sharp stinger in Jackie. But they’re Yellowjackets, aren’t they? It’s her nature. Everything with teeth bites, right?

It reminds Jackie of their game again. She accepts it because of that, because she’s sure that in the end, Shauna will be the one to kiss her wounds, only after spitting on them. (But really, what’s the difference there?)

“Shauna, stop,” she says, so halfhearted that it’s more like a quarter of her heart is in it, maybe even less. Jackie takes a step away from her while Shauna takes two closer to Jackie, pressing herself flushed up against her.

Shauna gathers Jackie’s wrists in her hands, soft fingers wrapping around them, pressing hard against Jackie’s pulse point, which she can feel the throb of shake her whole body against Shauna. Jackie’s scared Shauna can taste it, is scared that she isn’t much more than something with long, thumping legs thumping, beating against the brush, trying to get away from a trap so hard she’d ensnare herself in another. Is she actually the prey here? Maybe she’s only ever been doomed to become a meal for Shauna Shipman. Maybe all she could do is make herself one good enough for Shauna to wish she could have again. She whines against the air when Shauna tightens her grip around her wrists.

Shauna’s lips part in surprise at the sound, and the flame behind her eyes, fueled no doubt by the warm flush on her cheeks, flickers. Jackie surges up and plants her lips on Shauna’s like it can answer the question she knows wasn’t a real question, but rather one that there’s no real answer to. Two wrongs don’t make a right, or whatever. Her lips tingle against Shauna’s own, sliding against her mouth, slick with spit and warm with a blushing face. Shauna’s grasp on Jackie’s wrists grows more taut as she kisses her back. Jackie cannot tell who’s winning, only that she’s definitely losing something right now.

Shauna’s fingers let up as Jackie continues an assault against both of their lips, a desperate attempt to try to make up for the fact that they had both forgotten lipgloss that night. She let her hands grip Jackie’s hips tightly, rams her against the door like they were both part of a heist, except Jackie is truly an accessory, just something to hang out in Shauna’s sidecar, to be pulled out for pure novelty, played with and shoved away in a garage, or a drawer, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Jackie groans at the jolt, her body twitching against Shauna’s like her lips are salt and Jackie is some sluggish snail, dying under the burning sensation of being touched like that. It’s cruel, her is mind clear enough to understand that much. She feels Shauna’s wicked grin beneath the flicking of her tongue, and whines into Shauna’s mouth, hoping to turn the vitriol it holds inside it into something just sweet enough that they can both swallow.

Shauna’s lips pull away from hers while her hands made a point to trace roughly up Jackie’s frame. Jackie’s lower lip wobbles while Shauna’s fingers trace so gently over the thin fabric that’s about rests several inches above her knee.

“Remember the Ridgewood game?” Shauna mumbles against Jackie’s lips, nipping her bottom lip softly while Jackie’s breath shudders under the feel of it.

“W-Which one?” Jackie breathes out against the air. She feels like she barely uses her voice in saying it. Shauna knows what she was saying anyways.

“Number Twelve slide tackled and cleated you. Your legs were so bony then. Still are,” Shauna says against Jackie’s lips, moving her mouth down. She presses kisses softly against Jackie’s jaw. It feels like the gentle type of prodding that you get from a friend during class when you fall asleep. Or the way your mom goes to wake you up when you fall asleep on the couch instead of in bed. But it feels wrong coming from Shauna’s lips. It feels like a lie, maybe, like Shauna had all the right parts for being soft to Jackie, but it could only come out distorted. Jackie grabs Shauna’s wrist with her hand, squeezing around her pulse point while placing her hand firmly on her thigh.

“Did it scar?” Jackie asks Shauna, care distant in her voice. But the tremble is tender and needy, and she feels like every one of the book characters she didn’t care enough about to read on. Frankenstein, Hamlet, Gatsby, fuck it, fuck them, all of them. Tears sting behind her eyes but she squeezes the sensation down like she did the pangs of hunger that met her with a dull throb on the days where she knew better than to have more than her share. She fights the feeling, leaning harder into Shauna’s touch.

Shauna nods, nipping the skin along the column of Jackie’s neck, teeth sharp. Her fingers squeeze greedily beneath Jackie’s dress, one of many they picked out together that stays shoved in Shauna’s closet for when they’d get ready together for parties. She runs her thumb up and down, circling the skin like she was a metal detector looking for something more than Jackie could offer. There’s no gold in her bloodstream, even if her dad might contest that. Her blood is clogged, running still right now and keeping her from breathing. Or maybe it’s rushing so fast, like the rapids of the rivers by the Taylor lake house she’d drag Shauna to over their summers as kids, before Daddy sold it without telling anyone why (or maybe it was just Jackie). Shauna’s thumb digs so hard into a smooth ridge along Jackie’s thigh, hard enough that when she’d look at it the following morning, it will have left a green-purple mark and scream at her when it rubs against anything. Jackie whines. Shauna moans as she bites harder on Jackie’s neck.

Her hips move of their own accord, twitching up into Shauna’s touch. A dark laugh bubbles out from behind Shauna’s lips, something that comes from deep within her. She swipes her thumb up and down the scar, petting the skin which had begged to form a waxy seal over her flesh. Jackie wants to scream, nearly wants to kiss Number 12 for doing what she did that day, letting the jagged edges tear into soft tissue just so Shauna could bare her fangs and pull the skin apart again (pain never feels quite as good from anyone other than Shauna, but Jackie pockets that thought and refuses to think about it. There’s this endless cycle in her head which pairs itself with the looks they exchange, a paradox in itself: Shauna’s not supposed to hurt her, but the feeling of it is so much better than anything anyone else has ever given her. It’s so good. She feels so good).

Shauna withdraws her hand, gripping Jackie’s hip tight as she spins her around. She then takes her hand and uses it to find Jackie’s; she laces their fingers together and for a brief moment, everything feels like that flicker of girlhood that Jackie had felt like she had lost so very long ago. The illusion gets shattered as Shauna begins to lead them out of the bathroom and upstairs to one of the many guest bedrooms. Jackie blinks away the warm shock she has. She feels her eyes get bigger than they must already be, and blushes something fierce and humiliating as Shauna just drags her, stumbling feet beneath the both of them. 

“Lottie says we can’t go upstairs,” she says to Shauna. If she closes her eyes, the spots of light that flicker from behind her eyelids might just dart around in the right patterns to form the image of Shauna rolling her eyes; there’s almost a noise to it, the snark and ‘I know better’ of it all.

Shauna doesn’t respond with anything but a scoff, because they both have agreed that they like Lottie, and respect her as much as you have to respect a girl of her calibre, a girl of her talent and skill and beauty. But things evidently aren’t about Lottie right now. Things aren’t about anyone but the two of them as Shauna tries the first door she sees and pulls the two of them into an empty room (because everyone else knows better than to disrespect Lottie’s wishes).

Shauna pushes Jackie onto the bed. It’s so bouncy and flowery and soft and Jackie’s drunk enough to wish to roll around in it. She squeezes the silk sheets, and they form something picturesque and throbbing between her fingers. But Shauna eclipses the light on the ceiling fan when she straddles Jackie’s waist, the horse(wo?)man of some horrible decision they both want to make together (nothing could be any more special than doing something awful with someone else, nothing makes this better than them both choosing to haunt themselves with each other.)

Shauna looks dark, and Jackie meets that molasses hair with her shaky hand, running fingers through the same hair she brushed out a few hours ago, feeling a slight tangle in it. It’s gentle and it’s tender, and it’s to cover up and purify that steady ache that pulses from between her legs, something that’s been dripping its way into forming the overflowing river of desire she’d been ignoring for all her adolescence (to pretend is to indulge in a special way, she thinks.) Her hand moves to cup Shauna’s face, and she turns her head to press a hot, wet, open-mouthed kiss to Jackie’s palm. They both hold back gasps at the action.

Shauna’s hips are now rolling something nearly venomous onto Jackie’s pelvis, and it hurts because of how much she wants this, how with every thrust it all feels like those pangs of longing that she shoves down like a monster trying to burst out from under the bed, or a gasp at something she shouldn’t find quite as shocking as she does. Jackie wants to cry, but instead, she puts a heavy hand on Shauna’s hip and helps her roll them against her. Shauna groans.

“God, please,” Jackie says under her breath, watching the way Shauna’s face has gone tight and clenched up. Her breath is hitching, and she pants with each slow and dangerous roll of her hips against Jackie. It’s so unsatisfying, it’s such a vague and empty threat at a delivery of pleasure that it goes back around again and it feels so good, her own skirt rubbing up against Shauna. Jackie bucks her hips up once, then twice when Shauna’s eyes open up all big and that bovine chocolate look comes out again.

Jackie wants her so badly that the words beg to leave her mouth. She pulls Shauna down by the hand still threading its way with fingers on the nape of her neck, and kisses her with tongue and teeth and all of it clacking together in a wet mess, and she hopes to God a dual wish that is fruitless and hopeless in equal measures, that Shauna cannot know what it means, that Shauna must know what it means.

Shauna sucks on her tongue as her body becomes a vacuum, just sucking every bit of Jackie’s vision up into one point, some gorgeous and beautiful focal point, and Jackie moves the hand on her hips to sit heavy on Shauna’s porcelain thigh. She rubs her fingers, gentle and callused, over some razor bumps, and she whines into the kiss, wanting so much more of Shauna to feel beneath her fingertips, something to love and to hate, something to drool over and something to hurl over. The hand on Shauna’s thigh moves up, up, beyond the hem of her dress, and it gets absorbed by the tide of the moving fabric upon Shauna’s hips. The ebb and flow consumes Jackie’s hand, and Shauna is so desperate for the touch, she speaks for the first time in Jackie doesn’t know how long.

“Please, Jackie, yes. Please,” she moans, hips still canting against the nothing of it all.

Who is Jackie to deny it? She’s human now in the way she was human when she fucked up that corner kick in bi-districts all those years ago. She’s human still now. The difference is she won’t fail here. She’s going to win.

Her hand moves up further, her fingertips getting to feel damp cotton. She gasps, “Shauna, you’re-holy shit.”

It’s wet and hot, the feeling of Shauna in all her hungry glory. Jackie hadn’t expected it, but now that she has it, she wonders what else she thought it could have been. Shauna is drooling for her, she’s desperate and hungry and so fucking needy, and her body itself, every cell that makes her Shauna, it all needs Jackie. She rubs her thumb over Shauna’s clit, steady as ever a woman could be, and watches Shauna’s face like she’ll need to write an essay on this later. Her lips are parted, her cheeks flushed, and she looks like she’s about to cry, she looks like she needs it.

Jackie keeps rubbing, almost impulsively, like using a dime to scratch off a lottery ticket you think you just might have a chance of winning. She keeps going and going, and she presses down just for the hell of it, wishing for a moment she had a camera so she could have a picture of this she could lick when she got hungry for anything again. What a way to sate a desire. Shauna starts to talk, gasps and breaths and her voice still does not quiver, measured in everything she does.

“Jackie,” she says (asks?). Jackie Taylor, for a moment, becomes Samuel of the Old Testament, and she hears a voice so clear that she doesn’t know where to look anymore, so bright it’s blinding, and Shauna would appreciate the reference in a way that makes Jackie think Shauna must think she’s a moron. She keeps her eyes on Shauna, the moving column of her throat as she swallows thickly.

“Yeah?” She rubs quicker against Shauna, still through the soaked fabric of her underwear, still through the last layer of plausible deniability, the last refute she has against probable cause. Where’s her dignity in this moment, her public defender? Her damnation is served to her in gold jewelry (her small hoop earrings) and a tiny tight red dress with deadly curves and a flat plane of the stomach. She’s sentencing herself to death, and she wants to kiss her executioner.

“Can you just fuck me? Please. I need-” Jackie presses harder so she doesn’t have to hear the last part, Shauna’s eyes shut reflexively, and Jackie braves dipping her fingers below the waistband of Shauna’s underwear. She strokes over her, gently, and Shauna lets out an almost contented sigh as she relaxes and lowers herself, chest against Jackie’s chest, lips against Jackie’s neck. She kisses her with teeth, so maybe it’s not so much a kiss and more of an attempt to kill her. Jackie’d take it either way.

“I can do it. I can do it. You’ll like it. I-“ she cuts herself off too now, prodding at the entrance like she’s stoking a fire. (Who’s she trying to convince?)

When it happens, it feels like nothing else in the world. And it happens like this:

Shauna bites her on the neck, near her jugular. Jackie slips inside. She’s so warm. She’s so wet. Her finger twitches and so does Shauna, her body pulsing up. Jackie gasps against the air and Shauna’s incisors slice at her neck. Her hips jolt, and Jackie is lodged deeper than she’s ever let herself dream of being.

And it feels-

“Shipman-Shauna, fuck,” Jackie moans, a sound cracking into the air. Her hips jump up again, and Shauna lets out a whine, teeth rubbing against Jackie’s neck. “It feels so,” she pants against nothing when Shauna bites her again and starts moving and now everything about Jackie’s spilling over like a freshman getting a drink for the first time.

“You feel so good,” she says, and it’s so quiet and more likely than not that Shauna didn’t hear her. Jackie adds another finger and neither of them can hear anything except Shauna, neither of them can feel anything except for each other.

With her free hand, Jackie grips Shauna’s hip tight, digging fingers into her skin. It’s a touch firm and grounding, a feeling which would surely, if anything, meld them into one.

“Jackie,” Shauna starts against the skin of Jackie’s neck. Between kisses, between the tumbling moans they let out, she keeps going. “Jackie, Jackie, Jackie.”

Jackie pushes harder up into her, rougher than she anticipated, but Shauna loves it, moves harder against Jackie’s hand while Jackie guides her hips; if Shauna is the horseman, Jackie is the horse she rides into their joint doom. Shauna grips Jackie’s bicep and squeezes so hard that there will be imprints from her fingers the next day. It’s no one’s business but their own, and still somehow, it isn’t any of their business either. Shauna whines with her teeth gripping the gossamer skin of Jackie’s neck, and it feels like the thrill of some impending battle that they both know they’ll lose. But Jackie’s a winner, she tells herself. Even her losses have to feel like wins. She has to win, even if she doesn’t know what winning looks like here, even if she feels like she’s going to lose so much inside of this, inside of Shauna.

Shauna moves to kiss her, and with every pant she lets out into Jackie’s desperate mouth, something sweet and tautly held grows thinner and thinner. Shauna’s probing tongue in Jackie’s mouth, her hand trekking the lonely path up to grip Jackie’s hair like she’s climbing Everest and the honey-blonde sun-bleached highlights in her tresses are some rocky pieces of ice that promise to keep her suspended far away from the spikes at the bottom of the mountain which promise death. Still, Jackie’s not sure what she offers isn’t death, with how Shauna screams at it all.

The air is thinner up here, and Shauna’s gasps are shallow as she holds onto the girl beneath her. They’re breathy, and Jackie’s fingers curl like Shauna’s whining in her ear to do, and suddenly her volume grows louder, and there’s a rumbling in the back of Jackie’s throat that feels bestial and base, and Shauna must like it because she’s upright again, Shauna must like it because she grows tighter in all the ways that matter, and she takes Jackie like she’s never been taken before, and she never felt so much like she’s given something away as she has in this moment.

“Shauna,” she whispers, mouth dry except for the spit and soul Shauna had left in her. Her fingers keep curling like they’re begging to take something out of Shauna, and she just might be getting there, Jackie realizes with eyes as wide as the moon as Shauna rides her, hips canting rough and needy. Shauna’s swearing beneath her breath. and Jackie has half a mind to listen, but she just can’t understand her. And Jackie’s calling her beautiful beneath whatever haze has clouded her mind. She’s just not sure if she’s saying it out loud. All that she’s sure she’s doing is watching Shauna fuck herself on her fingers. All she’s sure of is that she’s pretty much fucked herself under the same actions.

“Jackie, come on,” Shauna’s whining, bucking her hips up at a speed that nearly reminds Jackie of the Rosehill game before she shakes the thought out of her mind and realizes that she’s got a lot more on her hand than she realized. Shauna’s begging without begging, but who’ll that do any good for? Who can that help besides Shauna’s ego, which stretches as far as Jackie’s willing to stretch her. Someone’s pride is going to be hurt tonight. Better Shauna’s than Jackie’s. She’ll always take the blame for the both of them. And so Shauna does.

She does as she begs Jackie with thrusting hips and desperate sighs, kisses that trace her way down the neck to the collar, leaving marks that Jackie has to hide from her oblivious parents tomorrow. Shauna takes all the blame as her body squeezes upon Jackie like she’s trying to choke something out of her, some meaning from her body being used as a fuck-toy. Jackie watches the girl upon her and wonders whether the hope in some greater purpose was some stupid pipe dream, until Shauna’s whispering something to her she doesn’t quite catch. And suddenly, a lot differently than anyone had really expected it, Shauna’s begging Jackie for something beyond making her come.

She’s begging her to tell her she loves her. And it would be sweet a million years ago, between berry bitten kisses (black ones on Jackie’s lips and red one’s on Shauna’s, who knew such tastes would accommodate themselves to be so complimentary). It would be sweet a couple years ago (something akin to sweetness sits in between their gums and their teeth, an orange and banana making home among their mouths as some proud mother parades herself as something other than bored, but Jackie and Shauna would be anything other than themselves if they cared at all). It would be sweet hours ago (as Shauna keeps herself from coming for some reason Jackie pretends to be aware of, her mind flits to other kisses, so many sweet drinks embedded on their lips and tongues, and the exchange of it all would only be a dare, would only be something they could hold in their fists as some last-minute denial of a truth they weren’t willing to pretend they were even alright with acknowledging.) Jackie hears this:

“Oh, shit- I love you, Jackie. Tell me you love me, too. Please.” Fuck, Fuck, Fuck!

She lets out a shuddery breath. She opens her mouth, a whispery sort of groan comes out. But she can’t really speak. She doesn’t even really know if she wants to. And nothing can really reach her lips because her hips keep jumping up and she’s fucking herself into Shauna and it feels a whole lot dirtier than she anticipated, and somehow it’s the most pure thing she’s ever had, and she holds it around her middle and ring finger for a lot shorter of a time than she anticipated.

“I love you,” Jackie moans out as Shauna comes, having hesitated a moment too long. And maybe it’s the best thing Jackie’s ever done while also being the worst thing she’s ever done, because she comes too and it’s really a different situation when they’ve both exchanged something that can’t be lost.

Maybe it’s more worth it than it’s ever been worth; a risk and a reward promised back. Or maybe they’ve tarnished it. Jackie feels something inside of her body shock her, and suddenly she’s a lot colder than she’s ever really felt. Something bright, something white as snow flashes behind her eyelids for a moment.

Maybe she’s remembering bus rides she’d rather forget, rides where she wished Shauna didn’t give herself such short hair so she could braid it. She remembers, as she pulls out and away from Shauna, sitting in quiet on the rides back, streetlights illuminating the porcelain curve of Shauna’s cheeks, her dirt stained knees. She remembers their bodies being pressed together just so, just so slight, just poised perfectly to reveal something about the two of them that no one could really put their finger on. She would watch Shauna the same way she does now, a very museum countenance, fingers itching to have and hold, wearing a heart she wants to put in the soft palm of Shauna’s open hand. Shauna looks Renaissance, ravished and devastated and tragically beautiful while Jackie looks on, feeling like her head is a fishbowl filled with murky water, slow draining, and though she can look and pretend she’s really touching the girl next to her, she doesn’t quite know whether she is or not, whether anything is true to what it looks to be. 

Jackie remembers rides where she wished she didn’t have a waiting something back home so she could squeeze her like there was no hope left in letting go once the ride ended. The ride has ended. Shauna’s hips twitching tiny movements as her eyes blink open in some sort of weird serenity. Jackie wishes she knew what Shauna was thinking. She wishes she was inside her head, seated next to her as they watched the world through Shauna’s eyes.

Maybe one day there’d be use in melding their souls together

Maybe that day is not yet today.

Shauna rolls off of her in relative distress. She fixes her underwear in relative fear of a 5’10” dark haired teammate storming upstairs and begging for them to clean the sheets the next morning.

Nothing much seems to matter when Shauna rolls off of her, anyways. Not to Jackie

With a desperate, aching, cloying, useless fear, Jackie wishes nothing would ever matter again.

She holds her hand out against the air, feels her slightly sticky fingers. She thinks about pressing them to her lips and then thinks Shauna would never forgive her if she did that tonight, thinks she’d never forgive herself, either, maybe. She thinks about poking her tongue out of her mouth and pressing a soft and stupid kiss to her fingertips. She smears the feel of some of it her onto her stomach where her top has ridden up.

Shauna lay beside her, staring at the side of Jackie’s head, eyes darting around her face, to her hand while it rests comfortably on her stomach. She watches Jackie’s chest rock up and down with the sound of her breath, watches the way Jackie just chooses to lay there and shut her eyes. The air in the room feels like it’s all been sucked out, and it feels so strangely familiar Jackie wants to ask whether they’d done all that before. Of course she doesn’t, though. Who would ever ask that? She knows within herself that she’d remember. But this moment only feels degrees different from the way things felt before.

Then again, a degree makes a difference. She remembers pressing the back of her hand to Shauna’s forehead on days where they both pretended they’d ever get sick of each other. She remembers lying to Shauna and telling her she was a little warm, if only to watch the flush on her face bloom, if only to embarrass her because Jackie had just wanted to kiss the shame off her cheeks and hold her close. She’d pull her tight against her and shove away the thought of Shauna squirming and that gnawing part of her brain that wished Shauna would just let herself be comfortable in Jackie’s arms. What was the use in trying to be happy anywhere else?

She still feels Shauna’s eyes on her. For once, she doesn’t know whether she wants to look or touch. 

Weight makes up the space between them on the bed, and for some reason, Jackie is still so sure the ball is in her court.

“You smell different,” Jackie mumbles, her face shoved into the only pillow remaining on the bed. She can almost feel the panic wash over Shauna at her words.

“I haven’t been smoking. I swear, I don’t even like it, I just-“

Jackie shakes her head in the pillow, feeling the silk hug her face. “Not like that. I can’t smell my perfume on you. It’s… you smell like.. lavender or something. Something floral. Not as sweet.”

Shauna’s quiet. Jackie rolls around in the sheets until she’s blinking up at the ceiling. Shauna’s too quiet as Jackie squeezes the comforter between her fingers.

“Shauna,” Jackie sighs into the air, so breathlessly, so hushed. She closes her eyes, but she cannot shake the swirling that takes place behind her eyelids, cannot fight the distance that swells between them.

“I looked for you,” Jackie whispers into the air, shifting her body to face the wall.

Shauna rolls over, her front facing Jackie’s back. “I know you did.”

Her hands reaches up and she finds Jackie’s waist. Her thumb draws small circles into the skin there, and it doesn’t burn. It just lights up something beneath Jackie’s skin, something equal parts miserable and equal parts elated.

“And I waited and I just-“ she cuts herself off with a whine, and brings a hand up to shield her eyes from the big light above them. She feels a tear drip onto her hand.

Shauna pulls her closer and wraps an arm around her waist. “I’m here now,” she says. And it feels too late. Why does it feel too late?

Jackie curls up smaller into herself and shivers a bit. “I’ve got you, Jackie,” Shauna says, and it’s a good thing she says it, it’s a good thing she might just mean it. Jackie needs it, needs her.

Jackie doesn’t know why she can’t look at Shauna.

“Are you okay?” She feels the words tumble from her mouth, slurred against herself.

She hears Shauna move against the sheets. “I’m okay.”

Jackie reaches for Shauna’s hand. When their fingers tangle together, Jackie feels herself smear Shauna’s barely-there, drying slick against her palm. It really did happen.

“I’m-,” Jackie huffs against the sheets, feeling her bottom lip quiver beneath her teeth. Her body is spent. An apology sits, barely developed, half-formed, behind her teeth. She nearly says it out loud.

Shauna is too quiet as she holds Jackie’s hand.

“Can it be okay… that we did that? Should we have done that?”

They’re such a stupid questions that Jackie imagines Shauna scoffing and rolling her eyes. But she doesn’t. It’s well and truly quiet now. The silence settles over them like a blanket of snow. In another life, Jackie thinks fleetingly, it ends here, and that is all; nothing more tumbles out of them, nothing less. In that world, they die trying to justify themselves. In this one, Jackie wonders if such a thing as justification exists. Shauna may be wondering, too, but it’s so quiet and heavy in the room, Jackie nearly feels alone.

What happened between them is a dormant betrayal to many, many things. It is calm right now, the betrayal, sleeping, but it may soon wake up with pointed fangs and bloodlust. This beast is hungry for the love they have for each other. This beast is hungry for every bit of love Jackie holds in her heart, especially the love she doesn’t know how to place. She feels a miserable guilt in this moment, like she took something that wasn’t hers and broke it, like she held something sweet in the palm of her hand and lost it all too soon. She feels the spines of broken promises poke at her, and she feels, for some horrible, perhaps justified reason, Jeff’s watery, devastated eyes, when Jackie realized that she couldn’t give him something that ought to have come naturally to her. The beast inside of her growls and reminds Jackie that her fault is in what comes naturally to her, that this thing between her and Shauna slipped between their palms, pressed together, all too easily. The problem is in her, in her nature, in that the image of the girl she’d known as herself crumbles under minimal scrutiny and minimal pressure, crumbles with a few hungry kisses and the assurance of love. Her resolve is flimsy and paper-thin, and for all this time she’d spent being concerned with herself, she was never really able to realize two things about herself: what it was like to look upon herself with someone else’s eyes, and what it was like to consider what she really wants. Her wrist aches from taking what she wants. Her whole body aches from winning. She wonders whether she’ll always win by taking what she wants, or if her desire, like all forms of hunger, will catch up to her with its open maw and prying eyes and all its haunting uncertainty.

Shauna squeezes her hand gently. “It’ll be okay,” she says, a halfhearted attempt to assuage their fluttering worries which are just beginning to break from their cocoons. It’s a hollow feeling, the sensation they press against one another, something which keeps them both unsure and desperate to comfort one another, but they cannot find a calmness here or now.

Sometimes only time can grant the kinds of comforts or punishments Jackie and Shauna both need.

Shauna moves in closer to Jackie. Jackie can feel her near, feel her behind, feel Shauna’s breath near her ear when Shauna kisses her gently, timidly, as though she regretted the action before even doing it. “I love you,” she says, and it does not sound like the echo of their earlier passion. It sounds more like breath lost on the confession, if it can even be deemed that, if it’s not an admission or permission or a dream deferred.

With the gentle heat from Shauna pressing from behind her, with Jackie’s tears drying against Lottie’s sheets, with the shy growth of marrow-deep ambivalence bubbling up inside the both them, bursting from their tissues and sieging the hearts, with her exhausted body, with a new kind of satisfaction falling over her, Jackie is soothed and relaxed into something familiar.

She doesn’t mean to fall asleep.

It just happens to her.

Jackie wakes up in quiet. Shauna is still sleeping behind her, a hand on Jackie’s hip, her index finger looped under the waistband of Jackie’s skirt. It’s an easy feeling for her to pretend she’s not used to. What’s unsettling is that the big light on the ceiling fan is still on, and there’s some noise coming from downstairs that is decidedly not Van’s party mix.

Jackie squeezes the sheets between her fingers once before she reaches an arm to place Shauna’s hand on the bed. She quietly rolls out of the bed. She approaches the room’s bathroom slowly, carefully, though this house is not old enough, not loved enough for the floors to creak.

Jackie wipes the mess from between her legs in the bathroom to clean up. She washes her hands and fixes her hair. When she looks at herself, she has enough sense to realize that it won’t take five minutes to forget what had happened a few hours before. She’s not sure how long she’d have to sleep to forget that. She figures that even if death is not a transitory thing, even if it weren’t a rite of passage into bliss or misery, she’d hold onto that feeling she had felt for whatever void makes up eternity. What happened between them, those moments, they belong to her. They belong to Shauna, too, but they also belong to her. Distantly, in the recesses of Jackie’s mind, it happens that she finds herself, unconsciously, wanting to remember what they shared forever.

She quietly trods her way out of the room, turning the light off before she shuts the door behind her.

She can hear random notes being played on the grand piano the Matthews keep in the room next to their dining room (the drawing room? Jackie can’t be sure. Shauna’s read enough Jane Austen to know, Jackie thinks, without herself being sure of knowing whether or not reading Austen would supply the answer.) Lottie usually keeps it locked during the parties. Jackie uses her trusty deductive reasoning to assume that the party must be more or less over by now.

The sound is quiet and soft. The remaining remnant at the end of Lottie’s parties usually consists exclusively of the Yellowjackets: the few, the proud, the only ones who actually help her clean up (though really, it’s only Lottie, Laura Lee, and the JV team who does any of the cleaning, if JV is even there and/or isn’t collectively regurgitating their overconsumption into a toilet bowl).

Jackie treads the stairs softly, and follows the sound of the piano as she quietly slips into the room with the Yellowjackets. She’d have gotten in unnoticed if she didn’t catch herself a confused (and definitely irritated) frown from Natalie, who’s sitting on the floor near the piano, running her fingers though the soft carpet.

“I thought you would have left by now,” she says, loud enough to make everyone else look over to her, all of them: Laura Lee, sitting between Tai and Van on the piano bench, Mari, Akilah, Gen, and Melissa (barely awake and lounging all together on a couch, leaning on each other in a way that they’d be embarrassed by if they weren’t so wasted,) and Lottie, who’s laying on the floor and stretching her hamstrings with the help of the coffee table (though her legs really are far too long for the task she’s attempting).

Jackie tries not to blush at Natalie’s words. She doesn’t respond, but Lottie stands up and walks over to her, pulling her into a loose side-hug.

“Sorry about her,” she says lowly in Jackie’s ear, which she has to bend down to reach. “She’s just mad I’m making Van wait another hour before leaving to take her home.”

Jackie nods and leans into Lottie’s touch. She looks up into her soft brown eyes, so different from Shauna’s, but almost similar enough that Jackie can’t shake some of her nerves. She opens her mouth and confesses softly to Lottie before she can think to stop herself, “I’m really sorry we went upstairs.”

Lottie just shrugs, pulling Jackie’s shoulder up with the motion. “I had a feeling you would. Did you guys make up?”

“We’re not fighting,” Jackie says quickly, without thinking, then adds, “I think we’re okay right now, though.”

Lottie nods as Van starts playing her…. Inspired rendition of the opening theme of The Simpsons before JV all groans and Taissa shoos her hands away from the keys. Van snickers but withdraws her hands.

“Is that the only song you know?” Mari asks, lifting her head off of Akilah’s shoulder.

“Obviously it is,” Nat says from her spot on the floor. “If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be the only thing she’s played all night.”

Van huffs, “Everybody’s a fucking critic,” she says dramatically as she hops off the bench and collapses on the carpet on her stomach next to Natalie.

Natalie tells her to shut up and passes her a water bottle. In the process of opening it, a good amount of the water is spilled on the floor.

“Shit,” Van whispers loudly, dabbing up the water with her sleeves. “Don’t tell Lottie,” she tells Nat, who smacks the back of her head. Van takes a couple gulps and screws the lid back on.

Taissa and Laura Lee softly launch themselves into trying to remember some piano-kid essential song while Van undoes Natalie’s laces and Natalie pretends not to notice.

“Ask them if they take requests,” Lottie whispers in Jackie’s ear.

“Do you guys take requests?” she says, feeling herself smile a bit.

Nat snorts, “Not from you.”

“Who are you, their manager?” Lottie asks, rolling her eyes as she pulls away from Jackie to lean against the piano and watch Tai’s and Laura Lee’s fingers twitch over the keys.

Mari scoffs. “Nat would probably be a shit manager. Tai can manage the fuck out of them on her own,” she says, burping at the end. Jackie swears she can hear Akilah say ‘excuse me’ for her. She sees Taissa hide her smile and smiles herself.

“I think Nat would be a good manager,” Jackie hears someone say, before she realizes it’s herself. She continues without really thinking about her words, “You really like music, right?” she asks Nat, pointedly ignoring Nat’s blush.

“Just because you like something doesn’t mean you’re good at it,” Van slurs from the floor, pulling her hands away from Natalie’s boots after she’s successfully tied them together by the laces.

Tai stifles a laugh from the piano, saying “And just because you’re good at something doesn’t meant mean you like it,” before mouthing something indecipherable to Van, who giggles and smacks Taissa’s knee for it.

Jackie catches Laura Lee shrugging while she presses gently on the ivory. “I think you have more of a choice. Like, if you really like something, you don’t really have an excuse for being bad at it. If you actually like it, you have to be good at it.”

“So Allie must be lying about liking soccer, then,” Gen says, and everyone giggles, except Nat and Jackie, who frown.

“That’s not fair, though,” Nat says. “Some things are harder for some people.”Several of the girls nod at this.

“Hard doesn’t mean impossible,” Lottie hums as she meanders to stand behind Laura Lee and place her hands on her shoulders.

Van nods like she’s understanding something. “And it feels really good when you work super hard for something and you get it.”

“But what about when you don’t?” Jackie asks. “When you want to make something work but it’s just not right? When you try really, really hard to get something and it doesn’t work out?”

There’s a pause for a moment. “Can you live without it?” Laura Lee asks.

“Sure,” Jackie answers, brows furrowed.

“Then did you even really love it in the first place?” Lottie says, turning to look at Jackie for just a second too long.

Jackie hears Mari hiccup and then Melissa shush her. She sees Natalie squeezes the carpet between her fingers. They make brief eye contact.

Nat speaks. “I don’t understand. Loving something doesn’t always mean you’ll die without it. If you love soccer and don’t get to play in college that doesn’t mean you just, like, keel over.”

“Not that kind of love,” Lottie says. “Not like, loving a thing, I guess. More like a person. Or like an actual passion.”

“Love can’t all be a choice,” Melissa says softly, almost inaudibly. Jackie blinks and is taken out of the moment for a second.

“But what you do with it is,” Tai mumbles, pressing her fingers harder against the keys while Laura Lee responds with her own couple notes.

“Of course it is. That’s literally the fucking definition of a choice,” Natalie says, rolling her eyes now, looking nearly over it.

“…Not literally-“ Mari begins to say, before Gen tells her to ‘shut the fuck up’.

Lottie speaks softly and slowly when she says, “I think the question is more like ‘would you let something get away from you if you really loved it?’”

It’s quiet again for a moment. Jackie can hear herself breathe, and her eyes dart over to Nat, who’s now looking at her palms. Van rolls over onto her back and lets her eyes flutter shut. Tai softens her touches on the keys and dips confidently into the chorus of Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’. Jackie can hear Lottie’s grin as she sings along softly while she looks down at Laura Lee’s smiling face.

Van opens her eyes and stares at the back of Taissa’s head. Everyone pretends not to hear Melissa’s sniffles until Mari’s giggles and off-key singing joins Lottie’s with enough volume and enthusiasm to make Jackie think that her and Misty aren’t so different after all.

Tai finishes loudly and with a flourish. She stands up and bows as Mari drunkenly cheers and claps way louder than everyone else. She sits back down and Laura Lee takes over, softly playing something Jackie can’t quite recognize. She sees Van and Lottie exchange a glance at the sound of it, but she just slowly moves to sit against the wall on the floor, almost near Natalie.

She feels the sudden urge to apologize to Natalie as she looks at her. Her face looks soft and the tip of her nose is a little pink. It just makes her look paler, but a healthy pale, an untouchably youthful color, like the painted skin of a porcelain doll that Jackie feels like she’d break if she spent too much time with it, the kind of doll with a head that should be cradled and placed upon a pillow.

Nat’s eyes meet Jackies, and it feels like a strong gale has pressed itself up against Jackie. But it’s just Nat, she reminds herself. It’s just Natalie looking at her like she can really see her, like she almost feels bad for snapping at Jackie earlier, like she almost thinks she didn’t deserve it. They’re both so different, Jackie thinks, knowing it to be true, but sitting across from Natalie, in this moment, Jackie thinks they are a lot more of the same than they want to believe, both of them, with something embedded inside of themselves which they want to ignore, both of them with this desire that they want to stifle down in different ways, both of them with different clouds to keep their heads inside of, because it’s easy that way, to ignore something when you’re always moving.

Jackie feels the impulse to speak so strongly, but she just doesn’t know what to say. She watches the way Nat twiddles her thumbs and twists her rings around her fingers to ignore how aware she is of Jackie’s presence.

“You played really well today,” she blurts, feeling stupid immediately after, even though it’s true.

Nat smiles that way she does where she shows a lot of teeth. It almost looks like a grimace in the wrong light, but this is the right light, and Jackie can see it’s a smile, maybe a disbelieving one, maybe a mocking one, but it’s a smile regardless. Jackie smiles too, unable to help herself. She chooses to believe that it’s an earnest smile.

“You make good calls,” Jackie says before Natalie can interject with her skepticism. Jackie knows Nat made good calls, but all she can think about in this moment is how Nat spoke to her earlier, so steady and worried, so fearless and fearful, disgusted only with the idea of Jackie’s tolerance being brittle and unkind.

Natalie shrugs and runs a hand through her hair. “I’m sorry I cut you,” she says for the second time that night.

“It’s okay.”

Natalie goes to say something else, but suddenly, Taissa and Lottie are speaking up, sounding surprised at something. Jackie whips her head around and sees Shauna where she was earlier, standing in the doorway.

“You’re still here, too?” Tai asks.

“There she is,” Lottie says as she grins at Shauna. “You good to drive? I think I’m gonna shut things down now that Van’s good to go.”

Van is not good to go. She’s napping on the floor, but Lottie probably just wants to go to sleep sooner rather than later, and there’s definitely not many drivers on the road by now.

Shauna nods and her eyes catch on Jackie’s for a second. Jackie gets up and extends a hand to Natalie to pull her up. Natalie accepts.

Once they’re both standing, Jackie gives her a soft smile. “Goodnight.”

Nat’s eyes are pointed and nearly knowing, nearly believing in Jackie’s sincerity, nearly incredulous. It sobers Jackie a bit.

“Night.”

Jackie moves to stand next to Shauna while she says her goodbyes.

A couple minutes later, the two of them are walking out the front door.

Jackie climbs in Shauna’s passenger seat and looks out the window while Shauna drives off until the house disappears into the surrounding wealthy suburbia, until wealthy suburbia blends into regular suburbia, until regular suburbia becomes the image of Shauna’s house appearing in front of Jackie’s eyes.

One of those early spring gusts of wind pushes the two of them closer together when they step out of Shauna’s car.

Deb’s working another one of her late night shifts, so Shauna doesn’t bother trying to twist the key quietly when she unlocks her front door.

And when she steps inside the house, Jackie is right behind her.