Like fellating the gardener who visits your house every two weeks to trim the shrubs and make sly peeks at the plentiful helpings of attractive young women walking through the lawn every ten minutes or so. He has hay colored hair and a pompous demeanor that more than makes up for the fact that you don’t even know his name.

You let the picture fill your mind, restlessly awaiting the lurch in your belly that notifies you you’re sufficiently turned on. But it never comes, so you knock the thought out of your head with a harsh shake.

Then, you imagine sucking the nipples of the TA from your previous semester’s philosophy course. She was a redhead with the cutest dimples you’d ever seen, and, if memory serves you right, the only interesting thing about that class. You are nearly certain this will be the thing to get you off (it surely did countless times last semester), but your body feels just as it did minutes before: frustrated, antsy, and so very sore.

If you were to put a mirror in front of your vagina and inspect it from above, you’d likely find it to look as though it had been flattened repeatedly under the wheel of an F-150. You rub a cautious finger over your clit only to find that the bud is almost numb and begging for you to give her a fucking break.

So, you do. You throw your vibrator toward the foot of the bed and yank your pants back over your hips in defeat, ignoring the sensation of your juices smearing over your inner thighs and leaking down the crack of your ass.

For a moment, you consider slamming your head against your headboard or letting your body roll off of your bed and onto the floor. Just to feel something, or maybe just because.

You’re asleep for maybe twenty five minutes before a quintet of knocks at your door wakes you. When you swing your legs over the edge of your bed, you have to kick your feet around for a second in search of your slippers.

The early morning sun is trying its damndest to peer through the thickness of your curtains. Though, just enough light shines through for you to take a glance at yourself in your floor length mirror and see the glaring wet spot staining the crotch of your pants. You grab a silk Victoria’s Secret robe and cover yourself in it just before opening the door.

It’s Kingston, the girl who lives just down the hall and has a penchant for making her early risings your problem. “I’m totally late for the gym, and I can’t find my deodorant. Do you have a spray on I can use? Pretty, pretty please?”

The words shoot out of her mouth so fast you hardly have time to process her request. You’re only nodding to make the noise stop.

You allow her in to get what she needs, and the vanilla scent tinging her skin spreads through your room like fungal spores. Her brown eyes are wholly alert, almost as if they’ve been surgically peeled back. It never fails to amaze you how awake someone can be before 6:30 in the morning.

She deodorizes her armpits before you can even make niceties and skips out of your room with a chirpy, “Thanks, see you at brunch later!” without shutting the door behind her.

A recently bought dress stares at you from the purchase of your closet door. You had completely forgotten your sorority’s brunch.

***

Your plate is covered in a hearty helping of french toast and apple slices, a dollop of yogurt, and one omelette. You’re surrounded by about seventy of your sisters, all dressed in white, all talking in place of eating.

An occasional cloud dots the sky, but other than that, the sun has a crystal clear view of Phi Mu’s All White Brunch. About thirtysomething small circular, white tables fill the sunny space of your backyard.

Your yogurt disappears after about two spoonfuls down your throat, and your apple slices don’t stand a chance for much longer. You skewer some elaborately on your fork before practically inhaling them.

Sitting to your left is a girl named Parker, whose entire vocabulary seems to be ripped straight from a social media comment section. “Ugh, I’m scared to even touch any of this,” She says at a volume that makes it unclear if she’s talking to herself or your entire table. “My back is gonna be soooo big later.”

You look down at her modest helping of potato wedges and egg salad. “I think you should just eat your food.” The small smile you lend her afterward is only to signal that you meant it in the kindest way.

To your right is Leila Hanamichi, your sorority’s president—a picture of grace as she demurely sips her grapefruit juice through a paper straw. She is having a rather animated conversation with the girl to her right, about plans for an upcoming party. Something about exchanging numbers and ‘making sure things go smoothly’. Whatever that means, you don't spend much time pondering it as you dig into your omelette.

Then, Leila turns to you.

Still stabbing into your food, you don’t notice her until she chirps, “Hi!” Your name rolls off her tongue, albeit unsurely. It doesn’t offend you. “Oooh, french toast! Delicious. I’ll have to grab some in a bit.” It’s clear she’s attempting to make friendly conversation, so you indulge.

“Oh, yeah, it is really good.” You say, despite not having had a single bite yet.

Her voice lowers to a soft whisper. “Do you think we could talk later? Before we all take pictures?” Almost as if she can hear the quickening of your heart, she follows up with, “Don’t worry, it isn’t anything bad. I just need a small favor from you.”

“Right,” you say, slowly processing her words. “okay.”

She gives you a brief squeeze on your hand. “Perfect.”

After brunch, just before you were all due to have your group photo taken, Leila led you into the empty living room of your sorority house.

“Now,” she says as she guides you into a pacing rhythm across the living room floor. “You know that Theta party that’s coming up?”

You nod with a soft hum.

“Well, it’s been a real hassle for the boys to plan, and they asked for my help. So, I’m—”

Offloading chores onto us to make their load lighter?

That’s not what she says, but it may as well be. At this point, you’d rather her be honest with her motives than sugarcoat it under the guise of purely being helpful.

“I need you to get weed for the party.”

Your poker face doesn’t kick in in enough time for Leila to miss the incredulity on your face. “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll Venmo you whatever I need to. And Tucker knows a guy who sells already, so it’ll be easy peasy!”

“If he already knows someone, then why can’t he just buy it himself?”

“Midterms, y’know? He’s been really slumped, and he had to pay for Steve Aoki all by himself, so I just offered and…”

You tune her out without even trying, annoyed that you and your sisters were having to play housemaid to those guys. For a moment, you wonder which one of the Theta boys Leila must be fucking.

***

Do you sell?

???

who’s asking

Me?

do i know you?

Tucker gave me your number.

He told me you did.

ahh, ok

yeah i do

whatu need?

A zip, I think.

I’ve got cash.

cool cool

i can meet u wednesday @ 5

corner of mckinley

behind the old pizza hut

That’s pretty out of the way for me.

Do you know anywhere closer?

u want the shit or not?

Fine. Wednesday at five.

That night, you clean your room as obsessively as ever. Just so you can have control over something.

You pluck every bit of dirty laundry off the floor and separate it into hampers, Windex both mirrors—floor length and vanity—, and clear the empty bottles of water from your nightstand. You clear the rugs and vacuum until the carpet is layered in sleep lines, clean your vibrator under warm water and antibacterial soap in the bathroom, and move any shoes you might’ve kicked off in the path to your bed.

Finally, you take a lysol wipe and polish the framed photo of you and your best friend until the fine covering of dust is gone. For a moment, you lose yourself and you can hear her laugh in your ear as if she’s right next to you. You still have that? she’d say, We look so young.

“I know,” you respond.

It’s the two of you at your high school graduation. Hands around each other’s waists, matching gowns and diplomas. Your smiles light up the photo, her’s especially. 

Her eyes carry the familiar, optimistic gleam of a high school graduate—eager to take the plunge into collegiate adulthood. Only, she doesn’t know she will be dead within a month and a half. Funny how that works. How can someone be here one moment and gone the next?

You finish wiping the photo without even giving it a final look, choosing to instead drown your sorrows in a vigorous workout tape and another round of failed masturbation.

***

The parking lot by McKinley is dimly lit by a couple of blinking lamp posts. Brilliant streaks of orange and pink smear the sky in what looks like a drunken watercolor image. Ellie arrives at 5:13 to find a car is already parked there.

Her primary customers are usually frat guys, nerds who use weed to relax, or nerds who swear weed gives them super-genius brain power. She came across the occasional dad that wanted to relive his teen years and was always stunned by her prices, always commenting, ‘this better be some good skunk for what I’m paying’.

So, she’s uncharacteristically intrigued by the figure stepping out of the white BMW before she can even fully park.

The two of you exit your respective cars at the same time. Ellie, wanting this to be quick, doesn’t even bother shutting off her engine.

She’s pretty

The thought eclipses Ellie’s better judgement, but she is wholly unable to help herself. It’s true. It’s all there in the deep furrow in your brows, the slight crinkle in the bridge of your nose. The anger visible in your eyes should give way to unease, but it only incites embers of newborn curiosity within Ellie. She wants to know how she can soften them.

The headlights of her car illuminate the delicate sheen of sweat on your collarbone and forehead. You look as though you have just worked out. A likely possibility, considering the athletic tank top, jacket, and leggings you’re wearing—all of which accentuate curves Ellie feels a guilty letting her gaze linger on.

Her eyes are just beginning to draw over the bow of your lips when they part to say:

“Do they not teach punctuality at drug dealer school?”

The words are so bluntly absurd that Ellie finds trouble being offended. “What?”

You heave a world weary sigh before rolling your eyes. “You’re, like, fifteen minutes late. I thought I was walking into a sting operation or something.”

She’s surprised at how forthcoming you’re being. Most patrons don't care that she turns up late. Usually, they’re nothing but elated that she showed up at all and are itching to get whatever she has off her hands.

However bizarre your statement may be, Ellie lets it roll off her back with a mirthless laugh. “You’re real prissy for someone buying a whole zip.”

“It’s not for me. It’s for—oh, who cares.” You cut yourself off with another eye roll. “It’s none of your business, anyway.”

You step closer to Ellie, fully bathing yourself in the warmth of her headlight. You’re even prettier when she can see you crystal clear.

She extends the package out to you and you take it, reaching into your pocket with your other to retrieve a modest wad of cash. When the exchange is made, your fingertips brush over the heel of her palm. It’s a familiar skin to skin that usually carries no weight, but now makes the hairs on her nape stand at attention.

Against her better judgement, she calls out, “I’m Ellie, by the way.” as you make your way back to your car.

You shoot her a, “Yeah, nice meeting you.” before you disappear behind the deep tint of your windows.

***

Theta parties suck ass—a fact you’re only just fully realizing as a clammy brother shoulders you in the back for probably the third time. You’re still somewhat tipsy from the shots you threw back at the pregame, but not enough to ignore the blatant discomfort of the atmosphere.

Frankly, you’re not even sure why you convinced yourself to come. Something about being a supportive sister and needing to get out of the place where orgasms went to die (your room).

Sufficiently annoyed, you venture from the backyard and into the house where the haze of marijuana smoke and perspiration has transformed the air into a murky abyss. It’s asphyxiating and pungent and it reminds you of Ellie.

It was unlike you to kick yourself for any reason, but you had been for two days over your interaction with her. She seemed nice for the most part, despite how viciously upset you were at her.

Truthfully, her presence intimidated you in an odd way. She was stupidly attractive, so much so that it almost made you angrier at her the moment she stepped out of her car.

A smattering of freckles covered her face. From the crown of her head to the column of her neck, right where the collar of her pitch black hoodie censored any further showings of skin. Her hair was tinged the sweetest flavor of auburn you had ever seen and framed her face perfectly.

And her eyes. You had never felt your body betray you on such a visceral level until you looked into her eyes. They were a bewitching shade of green that sent your heart lurching into your throat.

You could go on and on. Her lips that settled somewhere comfortably between a smirk and a pout. The half a second of contact you made with her hand—a barely there graze you were still reeling from a whole forty eight hours later.

Guilt swells in your chest.

You quickly weave your way through the sea of inebriated bodies until you were behind the door of nearest bathroom.

It’s not exactly the Ritz Carlton, but you’re not there to pee. You retrieve a shooter from your purse and down the thing in a few paced chugs. The guilt is promptly replaced with a delicious burn that your body is more than elated to host.

When you come out, the party’s a lot more bearable. Without even thinking, your hips sway to the rhythm of whatever song is playing, even if normally you’d find it a little repulsive. For a moment, you feel in with everyone else. Not like you’re tiptoeing along the outskirts, awaiting permission that will never be given to you.

That is, until an arm snakes along your shoulders. So confident and sure, as though it’s meant to be there. The touch is accompanied by the scent of cologne so sharp you can taste it.

You choke back a cough as you look up at the person. “This your first time at Theta?” he asks. He’s blond and confident enough in his approach that you can tell he’s been successful in it before.

“Excuse you?” You say, shrugging out from underneath him.

He’s offended as though he’s the one that’s just been unconsensually solicited by a strange drunk man. “Don’t be rude, baby.” He slurs, taking a closer step toward you. “I just wanted to show you around, that’s all.”

You push through the congregation of people until you’re outside. It shocks you how fast you moved in the span of only a second. But it isn't enough to just be outside with more people and music and possibilities of discomfort.

Your feet carry you what feels like miles down the street until you are completely alone on the sidewalk. You find a car parked against the curb park yourself atop the hood.

Occasionally, a gaggle of drunk girls will skip past you, moving from one party to the next. One of them will say, “You’re so pretty!” or “Ohhh, I just love your hair,” or “That’s such a cute dress. Where’s it from?”

While it does lift your spirits just a tad, you cannot help the feeling nagging at you within. The feeling that you don’t belong here, or anywhere at all. If you could shake that feeling at all, maybe you would have joined those girls at the next party.

You look down at your dress and fix its hem just a tad. It’s a white, strapless number that flows freely around the tops of your thighs. It’s a shame you had to waste it on a night like this.

A soft ahem cuts through the silence, and you snap your neck toward the noise. Behind you is Ellie, walking slowly toward the car you’re sitting on as if she’s approaching a wild tiger.

“Ellie?” It’s the first time her name has ever left your lips, and it feels wonderfully foreign rolling off the tongue. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, I was at the Theta party and—”

“You were at the Theta party?” You’re unable to stop yourself from interrupting her, try as you might. “Sorry, continue.”

Ellie chuckles. “Friend invited me.” She explains. “Anyway, I saw you running out and thought I’d check on you.”

“Oh,” Your lips quirk up in what’s sort of a smile. “Well, thank you, but I’m fine. Really, I am.”

At that, Ellie raises her hands in surrender before walking closer to you with a more relaxed gait than before. She sits next to you on the hood of the car at a more than respectable distance. You highlight that part because you count the inches you are apart (five) and feel the urge to scoot closer to her.

“I never got your name,” She says. You can smell her from here. A twisted mix of mahogany and vanilla. It’s deep and sweet at the same time. You look toward her, slow and cautious, trying not to drink too much of her in at once.

She’s wearing a shortsleeved black band T-shirt that showcases the subtle definitions in her freckled arms. As well as the vague, inky patterns of a tattoo that travels from her elbow to her wrist.

“Figured you could at least tell me that. Since we’re exchanging pleasantries on top of my car and stuff.”

Your sadness is quickly eclipsed by embarassment when you look down to ee that you are, in fact, siting atop the hood of Ellie’s black Chevy sedan.

“Oh, God. I’m so sorry.” You move to get up, but her hand reaches out to stop you.

Still, though, she isn’t touching you. Her fingertips only graze the fabric of your dress. “No need,”

“Why? Are you enjoying your time with me or something?”

“Oh, yeah,” She smiles, “Lot more fun than my time at drug dealer school.”

Your forehead falls into your palm. You’re not entirely shocked she would bring that up now, but that doesn't take away the embarrassment of having said it. “I’m—” You cut yourself off, feeling as though a plain sorry is insufficient.

“It’s okay.” Her voice drops to a lower register, like she’s trying to whisper it into the shared space between you. Even though the street is virtually deserted now. “Next time we meet, I’ll be perfectly on time.”

Hope tinges your voice. “Really?” You ask, even though Leila and Tucker will have to pay your remaining tuition balance before you buy drugs for them ever again.

You whisper your name and hope Ellie catches it before it disappears into the inky black night. She does. And she repeats it, trying it out on her tongue a couple of times. The sound sends waves of warmth rolling down your body.

Ellie moves her hand away from your dress and you feel cold without it there. She runs her palms over the denim of her jeans, and you begin to think she’s ridding herself of you bit by bit. That is, until she heaves a breath and asks, “Wanna go for a drive?”

***

Ellie’s car is a separate embodiment of her. When you slide into the passenger seat, you’re bombarded with the scent of her, multiplied by about fifty. She cranks the engine to life, and an Oasis song stirs from the radio. It’s one you recognize from an episode of The OC you watched ages ago.

You jam your seatbelt into place, pull down the passenger side visor to take a quick look at yourself. Your makeup doesn’t look horrible. A little smudged around the eyes, but it adds to the spontaneity you feel. You catch Ellie’s gaze through your peripheral vision. “Sorry,” You say, folding the visor back up. “Am I touching too many things?”

“No,” Ellie says, her tone light. She puts her seatbelt on and pulls the belt so it’s pressed under back instead of against her chest. “Touch whatever you want.”

You open her glove department and peek in before turning an overhead light on and off. Then, after a second of shallow deliberation, you poke your index finger gently into Ellie’s bicep. It’s a feeble attempt at humor that makes you immediately bury your face in your hands. “I’m sorry,” You say, even though Ellie’s giggling silently under her breath. “I was, like, trying to be funny, and I’m not very good at it. That’s my fault.”

Ellie heaves one more boisterous laugh as the car drives down the road. “I’m a little drunk, too,” You say, the speed of the car making your body feel light as a feather. “Sorry.”

“Stop that.” She replies.

“Stop what?”

“Apologizing for shit,” She’s a vision as she maneuvers a smooth turn with just one hand, the other finding purchase on the back of your headrest. The contact moves her just barely an inch closer to you, and you have to bite your lip to keep from making an unbecoming sound.

“It’s okay.” Ellie’s voice breaks through your reverie. “There’s a joke book in the console. If you ever wanna be as funny as me one day.”

“Really? You haven’t made me laugh yet.” Hesitantly, you pull the little book from her center console and flip to a random page. “Why do mushrooms get invited to all the parties?”

“Hm,” Ellie hums as she comes to a stop light. The blare of red does something to her beautifully concentrated face that is almost trance-like. “I don’t know. Tell me.”

“Because they’re such fungis.”

“Oh-ho!” She chortles, a full belly laugh, as if the joke was that funny. “I hadn’t heard that one before.”

“Looks like I’m the one that’s making you laugh.”

“Hey, don’t rush greatness.”

Silence purges the air for a moment, giving way to the guilt that still lingers in your chest. You glance at her focused face, your gaze drawing over the furrow in between her brows. It feels wrong to be enjoying her so much after how cruel you were.

Your voice is a squeak over the music. “I know you told me to stop apologizing for shit,”

“Then, why does it feel like you’re about to?” Ellie says, the sentence scored with a throaty chuckle.

Despite yourself, you smile. Somehow, she manages to make the hardest thing in the world (apologizing) just a little easier.

“Because, I really am sorry about the other day. I…” have been going through a hard time for the past two years. “…was having a bad day, and I took it out on you. I’m…” You want to finish with, not usually like that, but you are unsure if that’s completely true. Instead, you just say, “…sorry.”

“Can I be honest with you?” She inquires earnestly, whilst also seeming wholly unmoved by your apology.

Whatever she is about to say, you’re not sure you’re ready to hear it. Still you hum, “Mhm.”

“I think you take yourself way too seriously.” She says it lowly and a little fearfully, as if she’s trying to convey bad news in a soft way. “It’s okay to chill every now and then.”

“I am chill sometimes!” You erupt without meaning to, moving from the comfort of your seat and fully turning to face her. “I am,” you repeat in a softer register, only after proving her point.

“No, you’re not. I mean, even in your texts, you sound like a fed.” The statement is so jarringly and absurdly sincere that you can’t even bring yourself to be offended. Instead, you laugh so hard for so long that stitches cut up your sides. Ellie continues, “Who texts someone, do you sell? Like, okay. Good morning to you too, officer.”

She’s so right, you think. You are incredibly hard on yourself. You do think about yourself much more than any twenty year old girl ought to. It’s been an issue for so long that you’ve began to see it as a fact of life.

“It’s not intentional.” You say. Leftover giggles thread through your words. “I’m a very no-nonsense sort of person.”

“Life is all about balance. I think you can fit a little nonsense in.”

“Alright, o wise one.” God, this girl was all sorts of bad for you. You’re joking with the sole purpose of making her laugh and saying things like o wise one completely unironically. “Where do you suggest I start?”

There’s a mild timidness to her voice when she asks, “You ever smoke weed?” as if she’s heavily anticipating your response. Maybe, to her, you don’t look like the type to smoke. Hell, twenty four hours ago, you probably would have thought the same of yourself, too.

Your answer, though, is short and long. Yes and no. You had definitely hit a joint in an effort to impress some stoner boys in the ninth grade. And from what you could recall two years prior, you quite enjoyed the lack of inhibition that accompanied a fifty milligram edible.

“Not really,” you end up saying to Ellie. “Why?”

“‘Cause, you’re going to tonight. And you’re gonna like it.”

There’s something about the finality in her voice that makes you explode on the inside. Her telling you what you will do and what you will like without any room for dissent invokes a swell of warmth through your body. It spikes behind your ears, in your chest, right in between your thighs where you’re beginning to need her the most.

Still, you tease, “What makes you so sure?”

“I’m the o wise one, remember?” She parakeets your words from earlier, and you swat playfully in her direction. “Just trust me. Can you do that?”

Mhm, you ache to say, I can do whatever you want me to do.

You just say yes instead.

“Atta girl.”

***

Ellie drives to the old parking lot on McKinley, where the two of you met just days ago. You conclude to yourself that this spot holds some comfortability for her; whether it be for its vacant nature of vast amount of space.

It’s different from Wednesday, though. The place is blanketed in darkness, only dimly brightened by faraway amalgamations of stars and those same twinkling lamp posts.

Ellie rolls a blunt with all the finesse and care of someone performing surgery. After sprinkling and dispersing the weed over crisp rolling paper, she appraises it for a while. You stare at it too, though you’re not sure what it is you’re supposed to be looking for.

Then, Ellie darts her tongue out to wet along the hem of the paper.

It’s a methodical motion that feels like it lasts forever. You definitely want it to. You don’t even hide the way your eyes drink in the pink muscle. So full, so wet, you want to suck it into your mouth and caress it with your own, over and over again.

“Based on our first interaction, I wouldn’t have expected you to be much of a partying type.” She hypothesizes, pulling a lighter out of her jean’s front pocket and sparking the blunt to life. Graceful tendrils of smoke fill the air like tiny dancers.

“It’s on and off,” You say, watching the gentle purse of Ellie’s lips as hits it once. “Theta parties, not really. Phi Psi is usually fun, though.”

“Yeah?” She asks even though you’re positive half of what you’re saying sounds like gibberish by now.

“Yeah. They play good music, and they serve real alcohol. If I have to try and get drunk off another beer I might kill myself.”

Ellie hums a soft, throaty chuckle, and you feel as though you have hit the lottery. But, like any gambler, it isn’t good enough to win once. You want to do it again and again and again until you touch that ever elusive state of euphoria.

Dopamine rushes through your brain so turbulently that you don’t even feel nervous when she passes the blunt to you. You put it to your lips and suck for only a second. Just long enough to keep you from falling into a coughing fit.

When you breathe it in, it spreads throughout your body real slow and warm. Like you’re sinking into a bubble bath. You blow it out, and surprisingly only cough once.

“Anyway, yeah, they’re usually a good time.” You repeat the process, subconsciously uncrossing your legs. “You should come to their next one. It’s for St. Patrick’s Day.”

Stray light from a lamp post catches a portion of Ellie’s face perfectly. One of her eyes, the smooth valley of her cheekbone, that flash of auburn at her hairline.

“See, thing is, I’m not really much of the partying type.”

The sting of rejection feels unnatural to you. “It’ll be fun, though. The theme is Nothing but Green. You could, like, sell some of your weed there. I don’t know, is that allowed?”

You go to hit the blunt a third time, but are interrupted when Ellie deals a prompt pinch to your arm. It commands your attention without being altogether painful. You let yourself imagine how it would feel for her to pinch your nipples. Would she start off more gentle than that? Would she do it harder if you asked her to?

“Don’t do that shit,” She says, summoning the blunt from your hand.

“What?”

“Puff puff, pass.” She faux demonstrates. “All the time, every time. Golden rule.”

“Got it,” You nod. “Puff puff, pass.”

You are not sure if this teaching moment embarrasses you or turns you on. Perhaps it does both at once. Maybe, the fact that you’re embarrassed turns you on. Or the fact that you’re turned on embarrasses you.

“When will it start to kick in?” You mumble, entranced by the sight of smoke leaving Ellie’s lips and dispersing into the air.

“You said you don’t really smoke, right?” You nod. “Then, probably around now.”

Ellie hits the blunt again, a longer one this time. She lets the smoke come out of her mouth and nose in some entrancing trick of magic.

“Mmm,” She hums, brows furrowing in inquisition. “Your lip gloss is all over it.”

You’re so turned on you don’t even notice how you nearly grit your teeth to the point of stubs. “I’m sorry,” You whisper. It’s all you can say.

“Don’t be.” She reassures you, her voice taking on a more authoritative tone. It’s clear she’s the teacher to your pupil. “‘S just got a little bit of your taste on it now, that’s all.”

“What do I taste like?”

The words leave your mouth before you can even assess them properly. Strangely enough, you do not care to. It’s freeing to not have to think about anything.

Ellie licks her lips—slow and pensive, the way someone would if they were in deep thought. But she isn’t. She’s just trying to get an accurate appraisal of your flavor before it dissolves in her mouth.

She tasting me, you think. I’m all over her tongue right now.

“Peaches.” She decides after a moment. “Like the kind they make in Georgia, y’know. Fresh. Sweet.” Ellie softly smacks her tongue against the roof of her mouth a couple times. A slow, deep gulp from her follows. “Pure.”

You feel anything but. There’s nothing pure about the way you feel right now, or the things you want Ellie to do to you.

Your mind is mangled by desire, but the usual bashfulness around it completely disappears under the weed’s influence. If she asked you right now (What do you wanna do?) you would answer with full sincerity (I want to sit on your lap, and grind against your thigh until I cum. Then, I want to do it again and again and again and again and…)

Arousal begins to drip out of you at a sedated pace, rendering your panties a sticky mess.

“That’s really sweet of you, Ellie.” You smile. “You’re really sweet.”

“Yeah,” You know you aren't hesitating when you feel her gaze ride over you in a slow, long once over. Individual hairs on your body point up under her stare. It smooths up your calves but pays extra care to the buttery softness of your thighs.

When your four eyes meet, Ellie knows that you know she was just ogling you. But she doesn't care. She doesn’t even afford you the politeness of looking away, flustered at having been caught. She isn’t embarrassed of wanting you. You just wish she would take you already. Instead, she just says, “You’re not too bad yourself.”

When the blunt has been smoked down to basically nothing (a roach, Ellie calls it) your limbs feel like big hackysack bags, and your heart is beating maybe twenty times per minute.

You use an inordinate amount of strength turning your body towards Ellie. She’s began fiddling with the aux on her radio, flipping back and forth through songs in search of what she deems perfect.

Despite being a little out of your sound mind, you cannot fight the desire you have for her to fuck you anyway. You hope that by the time you get out of her car, the evidence of your want has soaked through your panties and into the suede passenger seat, leaving a little piece of you behind for her.

Ellie calls your name just as she’s picked what she deems the perfect song—Mac Miller’s Skin. She relaxes in her seat, narrowing her eyes on you and whispering, “You feelin’ alright?”

“Mmmhhmm,” You hum, soft and content. “Does it always feel this good?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” The low rumble of her voice softens your chest like hot tea. “Helps when you have someone to shoot the shit with.”

“Am I a good… shit shooter?” You ask, though not a hundred percent certain you’re even saying the right words.

“Not bad for your first time.”

Ellie drops you off in front of the Phi Mu house not too long after. You slink out of her car just as the clock strikes 2:53 in the morning. “Thank you, Ellie,” You say through open passenger side window. “I had fun.”

“So did I.” She says. Then, after a moment of tensed staring, “Will you text me whenever you get settled in? I don't want you bumping your head or anything.”

“Okay,” You grin. “Drive safe.”

You turn away and begin walking to the door, only looking back once you’re a few paces away from her car. Ellie watches you the whole way up.

***

You slump against your bedroom door, pushing it closed with a loud thud. The space is so dark you can’t even see your own palm in front of your face. You don’t care. You kick your boots and socks off before shoving your panties down to your ankles.

Your spine goes soft at the first brush of your fingertips against your pussy lips. You spread yourself open, exposing your clit to the stiff chill of your bedroom. A soft hiss escapes your lips as you take a finger and dip it into the cleft of your hole, collecting a gush of your slick, before lathering it over your cunt. Wetting the softness of your clit and labia minora.

“Ellie,” You whine as those first few embers of goose flesh prickle over your skin. If you focus just enough, you can still smell the deep scent of her lingering against your skin. If you close your eyes, you can imagine she’s right in front of you, egging you along.

You couldn’t even make it to the fucking bed, she’d murmur into your lips, her breath fanning over tongue. The thought of her seeing you so vulnerable makes you rub your clit in a steadier rhythm.

“No,” you mewl, “I couldn’t.” Already, you feel that pull behind your navel that tells you you’re gonna cum soon. You’ve never gotten so close so fast before and the shock of it has you whining.

Is this what you were thinking about the whole time? You nod so hard that you bump your head against the door. ‘Cause I could’ve given it to you. All you had to do was ask.

That sends you over the edge. You come apart with a sharp gasp that tears through your throat. Your teeth lock together in an attempt to stop any further sounds from escaping, but you can’t help the desperate sob that comes with the relief of your orgasm.

Don’t stop, you hear Ellie’s voice say again, and your hunger is back as though it never left. Your middle and ring fingers return to your clit like reunited lovers.

“Please,” You breathe out. You’re scared of the fire erupting inside you. You’re scared that you won’t be able to stop now that it’s started.

Answer me, Ellie says, is this what you wanted?

“Yes,” you confess in a short grunt. You didn’t care that you were too high to hold your head up straight. You didn’t care that you wouldn’t be able to fight her off even if you wanted to. You just needed her so bad it made everything else seem foolish. “I wanted it so bad.”

Yeah? Her voice is so taunting it almost feels humiliating. Wanted me to reach over and lift your dress up?

“Mhmhmhmhm,”

Wanted me to play with your pussy?

“I did, I did, I did,” You pant, moving your fingers off your clit and dipping them into your sopping hole. The stretch sates you, though you have to imagine your fingers as Ellie’s just to tame that fire burning in your gut. A prurient chorus of wet sounds fill the air.

While you fuck yourself, you grind your clit against the heel of your palm, hungry for as much stimulation as your pussy can take.

Look at how wet you are for me, Ellie taunts, and I’m not even fucking here.

Your orgasm sneaks up on you so quickly, you have to clamp down on your bottom lip to keep from screaming Ellie’s name into the pitch black air. Your cunt flutters around your fingers as you ride it out.

As you begin to come down, your knees buckle together and you tumble onto the floor. You’re totally spent by this point—toes crinkling in aftershock, legs completely liquefied, heart hammering through your ears.

The scent of carpet deodorizer makes you sneeze but keeps you from knocking out on the floor. You pat around the floor for your purse, hastily retrieving your phone to text Ellie.

All settled in :)

Your text is read, and about a minute later, telltale typing bubbles pop up on her end of the screen.

goodddd

take it easy tomorrow

***

The next couple of weeks are punctuated by texts. For days after your first rendezvous, you weren’t sure if you should be the one to text first or vice versa.

Then, you were heading to your car after the end of a midday class when your phone pinged twice.

there were peaches at the dining hall td

ate one and thought of u

You responded quickly after skipping the rest of the way to your car.

Wowww

How were they?

Five minutes pass, and your heart is on edge for all of them.

nice i guess

not as good as the real thing

From then, you don’t feel so apprehensive texting her first or at all. Coming up with the most perfectly cool-sounding thing to say does leave your stomach in knots the first couple of times, but you get over it soon enough when you read whatever she sends back.

While picking up a study book at Barnes & Noble, you convince yourself to get one of those joke books on the next aisle over. You purchase it quickly so that you have no time to regret it. When you make it to your car, you send a picture of it to Ellie.

Picked this up at the bookstore.

Gonna be just like you lols

oh yeah?

spit me smth

Why don’t melons get married?

mmmm

i don’t know

tell me

Because they cantaloupe.

lmaooo

that’s a good one

i’m proud of you

Better step your game up!

At night, when you’re in the midst of sleep, three pings would startle you awake, only to be promptly delighted when you process Ellie’s name attached to them.

u up?

sorry that sounded weird

couldn’t sleep thought i’d text u

Lol. Nothing better to do?

woahh ur awake

You woke me!

Are you alright?

yeahhh

just up thinking i guess

About what?

What you’re gonna wear to the NBG party?

very funny peach

The three words on your phone nearly burn your eyes. Your chest floods with a surge of ecstasy as you process the nickname she’s given you. You read the message about seven times over, your smile stretching bigger each time, imagining the words leaving Ellie’s mouth exactly as they’re written. You’re about to read it again when a new message springs forth.

you really want me to come?

You’re the only person I want there

***

Ellie sighs as she places her cards in the center of the coffee table.

It’s one of relief and anticipation—she can finally pick her phone back up and see what texts have materialized on your side of the screen.

“One three.” Jesse says, placing his cards down to the right of her.

Dina follows excitedly after. “Two fours.”

She can barely get the words out of her mouth before Jesse is declaring, “Bullshit,”

She scoffs and pulls the pile of cards at the table into her own deck.

While this is happening, Ellie is silently swooning over a photo you’ve just sent her—posed in front of your bedroom mirror, clad in a blush-pink athletic jacket and breathy white tennis skirt. Your eyes are just the tiniest bit softer, and Ellie swears she can see a kaleidoscope of emotion threatening to burst through your irises.

She’s not even sure if you’re trying to, but you look perfect. You always do. On the day the two of you met. On the night of the Theta party. On those Instagram stories Ellie isn’t sure if she’s supposed to heart or not (though, she always ends up doing so after an embarrassing amount of deliberation).

Fit check before my run later.

She’s about to respond when Dina’s voice sifts through the chaos of her thoughts. “Ellie,” She calls, “It’s your turn.”

Ellie diverts her attention back to her hand of cards. “One five.” She quickly lies, sliding it toward the center of the table, faced down.

She surveys the caption of words under your photo, swiftly and carefully preparing words of her own to send. love it peach, Ellie types. Then, once she’s gathered the confidence, lol run to my place.

Butterflies run fretful laps around her stomach as she awaits your response. Ellie presses her eyes closed for a moment, but only sees your smile twinkling behind the lids. She goes to worry her bottom lip between her teeth, hoping to find remnants of your taste still there, like some sort of perverted scratch and sniff.

“Three sixes.” Jesse announces, no doubt present in his voice.

“Bullshit,” says Dina, just as confident, “I’ve got all the sixes.” After a few moments of whispered counting, she offers, “Two sevens.”

When Ellie opens her eyes, three texts have appeared.

Haha, you wish

Come to the party tomorrow

Then I’ll consider.

Before she can think of a charming enough response, Dina nudges her leg under the coffee table. “Earth to Ellie!” She calls out. Ellie looks up—really looks—for the first time since before the game started to see Dina and Jesse staring back at her with annoyed albeit slightly amused faces. “Hey, we’re playing a game here.” Dina cajoles.

“Yeah, Ellie. Is it phone time or friend time?” Jesse joins, clearly equally motivated by curiosity and messing with her just for the sake of it.

Ellie breathes a soft laugh. “Sorry guys,”

“What’s got you all smiley, anyway?” Dina asks with a quirk of her brow.

“Nothing.”

“Bullllshit,” Jesse says, as confident as ever.

Ellie places her cards down, trying to conceal the lump passing through her throat. Despite being surrounded by her closest friends, she can’t help the spike in her heart rate.

“It’s just this girl I sold to a couple weeks back.” Ellie confesses.

“Oh,” Dina says, utterly delighted. Ellie doesn’t miss the look her and Jesse exchange across the table. “She nice?”

Just talking about you gets her going. A rush of heat blooms beneath her cheeks. “Yeah, she’s real sweet,” Ellie says before realizing that may not be completely true. So, she adds, “once you get to know her.”

Jesse pipes up from the other side of the table.“Is she cute?”

Dina reprimands him with a glare. “Don’t be such a pig, Jess.” Though it’s likely Jesse’s only said that to make her jealous. Her features soften as she turns her gaze back to Ellie. “But, I mean, is she?”

Ellie pulls a low whistle between her teeth, her own modest way of saying fuck yeah.

She pulls up your Instagram to show Dina and Jessie. Frankly, she couldn’t help the intimidation crawling up her back when she first looked at the page. One post, sixteen hundred followers, and a bio with only two characters—ΦM.

“Woah,” Dina blurts as she taps on the lone post. It’s a single photo of you outside a restaurant. The gown you’re wearing is a deep shade of scarlet, and your full, glossy lips are tilted upward in a coquettish sort of half smile.

Jesse claps a firm, proud hand over Ellie’s shoulder. “Sorority girl,” He says the two words as if they alone convey something much deeper. “Nice, man.”

“Yeah,” Dina chirps, “when can we meet her?”

“Woah,”

“Slow your roll, D.” Jesse says in the familiar mediating way that only he can. “You gotta let her come to us.”

“Yeah, you heard him, Mom,” Ellie smiles, though suddenly fighting the warmth that swirls in her chest at the prospect of you meeting her friends. “One eight,” She says, placing her last card on the table and revealing that she’s won the game.

“Bullshit!” Jesse and Dina exclaim together.

Ellie turns her card around to show that it is indeed an eight, and is met with a chorus of grunts. “I had a lot riding on that game.” Jesse says, gathering the deck and preparing to shuffle again.

“You bet two slices of your pizza.”

DIna rolls her eyes. “Clearly that was all he had.”

“Fuck it. New game! This time I’m betting the whole box.”

Later, after the pizza boxes and wine bottles and cards have all been cleaned away, Ellie shuffles into bed with excitement purring inside her chest as she opens your messages.

i’m back peach

Hi!

How was game night?

pretty fun

told my friends about you

Oh?

What did you say?

that i sold to a pretty girl a couple of weeks ago

& we hit it off

Lolll, I don’t remember it happening that way

uhh it happened eventually

also told them i’d go to your party tmrw

The screen goes still for a few moments after Ellie last message. Only alight with your speech bubble making disjointed appearances on the other side of the screen, fading in and out in the manner of a thready pulse.

YAY!!

I could just kiss you right now.

Ellie stares at the wall long after you’ve fallen asleep, trying fruitlessly to run the thought of you out of her mind. Still, no matter how many invisible constellations she draws with the popcorns in her ceiling, no matter how many sheep she counts or puffs she takes of her weed pen, she can’t calm her brain.

The only thing that sates her is the image of you.

Figuratively, because when Ellie finally allows herself to think of you, a slow warmth rushes over her body. It begins at the tips of her fingers and doesn’t stop until its peaked at her longest eyelash.

Literally, because she pulls up a photo of you to feed the fire burning in her heart. It’s the first picture you ever sent her—a selfie of you in a cream colored, off the shoulder sweater, your face only brightened by the glimmer of a nearby candle.

You look like a dream. Ellie’s concerned for a moment that the vision of your face may be the result of her own prolonged, feverish hallucinations.

Don’t mind my eyes. Just finished a study sesh lol. Ellie reads the texts you sent under the photo countless times. When she looks back at your eyes in the picture, they do seem to show the quaintest signs of sleepiness—soft and low and too relaxed to hold up your guard.

Ellie imagines your eyes to look that way after sex. The soft, sweet, romantic kind you have on Valentine’s Day or prom night. The kind you tell your girlfriends about a couple days later over salads. (“It was the most romantic night of my life!”) Love making.

What scares Ellie is that she doesn’t want to do that to you. At least not right now. Right now, she wants your back pressed flush against her chest as plows into you from the side. She wants to grip one hand at the junction under your knee, keeping you anchored open so that there’s nowhere to go but deeper.

Does it always feel this good?

Your previous words reverberate through her head. Ellie wonders if that’s the kind of thing you would say after sex. The kind of delirious, euphoria-drunk question you would ask after she’s coaxed a fourth or fifth orgasm out of you. Does it always feel this good, Ellie?

With a heavy sigh, Ellie closes her phone and her eyes, resolving not to think about you for the rest of the night, lest she unravel her remaining bit of sanity. She fails.

***

Ellie’s text comes just as you down your fifth green apple jell-o shot. Checking your phone, you chew and suck the thickness into a smooth dissolution until it’s melted completely in your mouth.

i’m outside peach

A smile splits your face before you even realize it. Excitement surges through you so quickly your body jolts as if you’ve gotten chills.

“Sorry,” You say after accidentally bumping into a guy wearing a simple but effective dollar sign costume. He murmurs a polite, you’re good, and continues flirting with a girl dressed as the green M&M.

The floorboards tremble under the bass of Lil Yachty’s Broccoli and the hundreds of feet moving along to the music. You make your way through the crowd, passing a huddle of girls dressed a leprechauns and one not so convincing Hulk before you make it outside.

You spot Ellie instantly. Firstly, because a few porch and string lights illuminate where she stands at the front of the house. Secondly, because she’s the only person not wearing any green.

Your eyes lock as you storm up to her, and you catch the subtle appraisal she does of your outfit. You’re wearing a green, sequined mini dress that’s hemmed just beneath the curve of your ass and strappy stilettos that curl up your calves. All your jewelry is gold—your big hooped earrings, jangling bracelets on both arms, and mess of thin chains around your neck. And though Ellie can’t see it, you swear her eyes focus in on the thong you’re wearing under your dress. It’s a soft, sheer material of pale green, trimmed with scalloped lace. Two words sit woven into the fabric over your soft mound—Lucky You.

“Now it’s my turn to pinch you,” Your voice comes out familiarly cheery, even if you are trying to reprimand her. “Where’s your green, loser?”

She’s wearing another band tee and straight-legged jeans, her hands shoved into the pockets. “Is it too late to tell you I don’t have any?”

Just the sound of her voice is enough to evaporate your frustrations. It doesn’t help that your eyes are following a trail of freckles down the bridge of her nose toward the soft bow of her upper lip. And her eyes are such a brilliant tinge of olive that you altogether stop caring just for a moment.

“No,” You clear your throat to keep the word from coming out as a whimper. “because we’re gonna get you some.”

You wrap your fingers around her wrist, gently pulling until her hand is out of her pocket and interlocked with yours. Surprisingly, you aren’t as unnerved by touching her as you thought you would be. It’s warm skin against warm skin. And while the softness of her palm encased around yours sends your pulse lurching, you don’t have it in you to be nervous at this moment.

“Where’re we going, Peach?” It’s the first time you’ve heard her say the nickname aloud, and you’re certain the feeling it gives you is akin to snorting a few lines.

“I’m gonna take you to get something green. Just stay close to me and try not to get pinched.”

You lead Ellie through the crush of people, tightening your grip on her hand as you pass through one particularly congested area of clammy, jittery bodies. You occasionally look back to survey her face, gauging her features for any signs of noticeable discomfort. However, you don’t find any. Only delight and a little bit of awe as she takes in everything around her.

One particularly rough wave of movement crushes the two of you together—your back against her front. Just as your balance begins to topple and your grip unfastens from Ellie’s hand, you feel it hitch on to your hip. Her breath is warm and smooth as she whispers into your skin, “Don’t worry,” The words run over the nape of your neck like water. “I got you.”

The two of you are so close, you can feel your ass slotting up and down over the hard steel of her belt buckle. For a second, you swear you feel Ellie tighten her hold on your hip so she can grind herself against you in turn. Just the thought that that could be happening makes you insane.

You turn back to her, nearly curling your body around hers, just so you let your lips brush against the shell of her ear. “Thank you, Ellie.”

You lock the storage closet door behind you. The sound of it is a soft, sharp click that you can’t be certain Ellie didn’t hear. Under the room’s singular lightbulb, she’s ruffling through a bin of beaded green necklaces and Party City shirts.

“Find anything?” You gently squeeze your thighs together before you make your way over to her.

“Just a bunch of shirts that say, I’m Single, Pinch Me Anyway.”

“Better than nothing,”

“True.”

You let yourself idly watch as she rifles through the bin. Her t-shirt rides just the tiniest bit up her back, so you can see the minuscule divots and twitches of muscle at the strong, svelte curve of her abdomen.

“I’m really glad you could come, Ellie.” Her head only slightly twitched toward the sound of your voice, but beside that, she doesn’t pull her eyes away from the bin. Almost as though she’s making a concerted effort not to. “For a minute, I wasn’t sure if you would.”

You stalk over to the other side of the spacious closet, sucking in a sharp breath as your back makes contact with the cold, dusty wall. You wonder if the sound of your heels clicking over the floor will arouse her curiosity, but she only manages a slight glance at you through her peripheral vision.

“C’mon, Peach, I was gonna pull through. Just had to tease you a little first.” Her voice comes out deep and smooth, a glass of whiskey you want to get drunk on any day of the week. Still, she doesn’t look your way. And that irritates you, because she’s been scraping the bottom of the bin for a good minute.

“Ellie,” you allow yourself to murmur once more. “Why won’t you look at me?”

She stops moving then, and you’re stricken with satisfaction. Her voice is a low, tortured sound. “You think I haven’t been looking at you?”

Finally, she stands up, turning her head your way. It pleases you, but only for a second. You outstretch your hand and curl your index finger in a come hither motion. So, she does. Ellie stalks toward you one careful step at a time until there are only two inches of free space between you. With your bodies so close, you’ve effectively trapped yourself against the wall.

“Do you… like my dress?” On the last three words, you voice slurs the tiniest bit. It comes out not at all how you intended. Vulnerable instead of sexy. You think that’s partly because you have to suppress a green apple flavored belch under you speech.

Ellie’s eyes travel over your dress in one steady motion, as if she’s counting the individual sequins. Your nipples stiffen under her gaze.

“Of course I do.” She says after a moment.

You nudge her leg with your foot, gently brushing over her shin a few times. “What about my shoes?”

She’s unfazed, though. She doesn’t take her eyes off yours. Her brows furrow interrogatively as she asks, “What are you doing, Peach?”

“I’m just trying to see if you like my outfit.” You lie, “I wore it for you, anyway.” Well, half lie.

Ellie entertains you for a moment, glancing down at your heeled foot as it pushes the hem of her jeans just the slightest bit over her inner ankle. “You’re beautiful,” she says, “but you know that already,” Blood rushes so furiously behind the shells of your ears that you feel you might vomit right at Ellie’s feet.

“What if I just wanted you to tell me?”

“Then I’ll tell you as many times as you want.” Ellie says, contented and resolved. You want her to tell you as many times as she can muster in one breath, between kisses, against the shell of your ear in the most intimate moments.

Want burns through you so rapidly your body feels as though it may dissolve into a heap of ash. With a shaky hand, you tug Ellie closer by the buckle of her belt and kiss her.

In those few seconds, it’s everything. Everything you’ve fantasized about, everything in this world you could ever want—it resides right here in the plushness of her mouth.

The skin of her lips is tinged with a decadent cocktail of flavors. Traces of mint, honey, and the sparsest bit of sweat. The taste sends a heady buzz down your spine that disorients your vertical. Luckily, Ellie stills you with warm, steady hands upon your hips.

Filled with a new mystical sense of exhilaration, you snake a hand around her waist, letting it sit comfortably at the slender small of her back. You pull her into you, and the movement of your lips grow sloppy as your body takes in this novel contact. Her chest pressed against yours, four legs moving as one at a messy interlock, her belt buckle’s chilled metal caressing your skin even through your dress.

It’s messy, but all the more electrifying. Just as the beginnings of a whimper are building in your throat, Ellie uses the same hands holding your hips to push you closer into the wall, away from her.

Your mouths are still so close that you can taste the warm fan of her breath. “I’m sorry,” Slowly, the pair of you untangle your limbs, Ellie initiating most of it. She lets her hands fall from your hips and puts a step of distance between you. It’s noticeable enough to make you shiver at the loss of contact, yet still small enough that just a single sufficient heave of either of your chests will push you back into the other’s orbit.

“You’re drunk,” She explains finally.

Years of premature alcohol consumption up to now had gifted you the ability of holding your liquor better than most of your peers, so you wonder what gives you away to Ellie. The strong and sickly, saccharine taste of green apple on your lips? Your less than perfect balance? The audacity you had to lock the two of you in a storage closet?

“It isn’t your fault, Ellie,” Your voice is so low it hardly forms any permeation in the atmosphere, a perfect antithesis to your shame that seems to swallow the room. “I kissed you.”

Ellie clutches her jaw, a pained expression shadowing her features, as if you’ve just socked her in it. “Still, I shouldn’t have… fuck,” A moment passes where you cannot tell what emotion Ellie is feeling. Frustration? Lust? Regret? A cornucopia of them swirl through the flecks of sepia in her eyes. “Let’s just get you home, okay?”

That word—home—doesn’t help your shot nerves. In fact, it only worsens them. The Phi Mu mansion a few blocks away feels less like home and more like a place where you live. A place with all your things, all the space, all the specially cooked meals you could ever want. And yet,

“I don’t want to go there.” Your own voice catches you off guard. No longer the still, controlled sotto voce of the past. You’re petulant. Teetering on the edge of an emotion you refuse to touch. You sound as though you are about to cry. Shit, maybe you are drunk. “Can I come to yours?” You ask so quickly that the words swallow your previous sentence entirely. Ellie’s face doesn’t even get a chance to express the initial sentiment of Where else are you gonna go?

“Okay,” She resolves, “let’s go.”

***

Ellie’s apartment is only a heap of shadows and abstract heaps of shape. She grabs you by the hand and leads you through the darkness. Even while drunk, you can feel the caution radiating off her in seismic waves.

“My room’s this way.” She pulls you along towards the right (you think), murmuring something about minding your step.

You only know that you’ve actually made it into Ellie’s room when your heels no longer click against the floor but instead putter clumsily through sumptuous carpet. She lets go of your hand and ventures deeper into the space, flicking on a lamp that floods the room with warm light.

Even while drunk, her room feels emblematic of everything cool, in the sense that it is wholly distinctive to her. While her bed is neatly made—a fluffy, tempting slate of onyx and navy blue linen—her desk seems homier, with a slew of artifacts littering the top of it. A notebook flipped open, pages tattooed in indecipherable, wiry scrawl, a laptop plastered in faded stickers, a mug of diverse pens.

An acoustic guitar sits in the corner of her room, staring at you through the gaping maw of its sound hole. “I didn’t know you played guitar.” You remarked, unstrapping your heels. When your feet are finally bare, you fight off a chill as they sink into the soft floor.

“Uh, here and there.” Ellie palms the back of her neck. Her flushed disregard piques your interest, but you just add it to the mental laundry list of things you’ll ponder on further when the sun comes up. “Bathroom’s right through there.” She points to an agape door parallel to another, which you assume is her closet. “I’ll be out here whenever you’re done.”

You aren’t shocked that Ellie is in the living room when you return from peeing. It’s a sobered, impregnable distance away that doesn’t stop you from wanting to kiss her no matter how many extra steps it will take to get there.

She left clothes for you at the foot of the bed. An old, shapeless Oasis tee that swallows your body in its fabric and a pair of boxers that are as comfortable as they are unflattering.

Ellie is setting up blankets and pillows when you join her in the newly illuminated living room. She’s gotten comfortable too, having bartered her jeans and tee for a wife-beater and flannel pajama pants. “Will your roommate be upset that I’m here?” You ask, tiptoeing further into the space.

“Nah, you’re good,” Ellie’s couch is compiled of two blankets. One, you presume, is to shield your skin from the glacial sofa leather. The other, from the air. “It’s about time I brought a girl home, anyways.”

What’s meant to be a joke only sours you for some reason you can’t put your finger on. “Right.” You sigh, feeling dejected by your own murky thoughts. You take to caressing the blankets you’ll be sleeping with tonight. Their fleecy hairs are as soft as plant soil. “Thank you for setting me up out here.”

Ellie chuckles. It’s a coquettish, nubile sound that fills your body with a fresh load of butterflies. “It’s for me, Peach.” She plops her butt onto the middle cushion and spreads her legs in the most territorial fashion, taking up as much space as possible, presumably to keep you from sitting near her. “Bed’s all yours.”

“Are you sure?” You protest, “I’m your guest. Shouldn’t I take the couch?”

“A princess like you, sleeping on a sofa? I don’t buy it.” Her tone is challenging, as though there’s some sliver of possibility she’ll let you take the couch, only if you want it badly enough.

Still, she’s right. Given the choice any other time, you would make a beeline to the nearest available bed. The only reason you can think of for feigning modesty is that it grants you an excuse to talk to her more.

“Yeah,” You relent, though still dipping your knee into the only bit of cushion unexplored by Ellie’s legs. “good point there. You like it though, right?”

The it is unspoken, though clear as day. It’s staring her in the face, kneeing her couch, wearing her clothes. It chewed her out within moments of meeting her, and not long ago, drunkenly kissed her as though their lives depended on it.

You watch her fingers inch their way toward your knee, dither slightly in their path, and then curl into her palm in an anguished fist. “Yeah, I do.” From where you stand, a slit in her eyebrow reveals itself to you. You are unable to tell if it was sliced there electively or acquired from injury. You’re about to reach out and touch it when Ellie speaks again. “You should get some rest, Peach.”

Too tired to fight it, you acquiesce, returning to Ellie’s room with a reserved, “Good night,”

After leaving her bedroom door open so that only a slice of outside light shines through, you pee once more before plopping into bed. You bury your face into a pillow, pleasantly surprised to find Ellie’s scent all over it. The living room light never dims or turns off, but you’re too tired to care.

***

The time on your phone reads 2:37 when you wake up. Nighttime is still in full swing, as evidenced by the sounds of drunk collegiates whooping about outside. Still, your heart hammers wildly in your chest and your bladder screams at you from beneath Ellie’s duvet, eager to be relieved of its green apple jell-o content.

When you finally do pee and get your pulse to calm, you notice the sound of television humming from the small crack in the bedroom door. The thought that Ellie could still be awake both bewilders and delights you. You know won’t be able to fall back asleep until you check.

You poke your head out the door to see that Ellie is still awake and watching a Spongebob rerun. While she’s blissfully unaware of your presence, you dedicate a few moments of your stealth to observing her.

Even the way she lazes makes you blush. Ellie’s head, a warm crush of velvety auburn, is sunken into a pillow, denting its center. Her chest is looped into an even rhythm of breathing, a hypnotic up-and-down that makes you jealous of the air she breathes. One of her hands swings idly off the edge of the couch while the other rests on her belly, fingering invisible patterns into the fabric of her tee.

“Ellie,” Try as you might (though, you did not bother trying) you cannot stop yourself from calling out to her. Her eyes flit from the television to you, and you see them come to life as they do.

“Peach,” Her tone betrays that she’s both delighted and scared to see you. “what are you doing up?”

You push the door open wider, making room for the rest of your body in that liminal space between here and there. “Couldn’t sleep,” Ellie sits up on the couch, and her shirt rides up, exposing that smooth canvass of skin just above the waist of her pants. “What’s your excuse?”

“Same,” she confesses, “bad dream.”

You aren’t sure what part of this minute interaction pushes you into your next train of thought. Maybe it’s the way her gaze pins you to the threshold of the door. Maybe it’s because all those feelings that stormed through you at the party never really evanesced in the way they should have, and you aren’t sure they ever will. Especially not now. I shouldn’t have asked to come here, you think, she should have told me no.

“Come to bed with me?”

It’s a tall order, and you know that. You know Ellie will probably roll her eyes and grumble something along the lines of, go back to sleep, Peach, but just like that night in her car, you lack too much inhibition to care.

You aren’t expecting her to rise from the couch and murmur something beneath her breath like, come on then.

“That didn’t take much convincing.” You quip, thoroughly surprised by your victory, as Ellie flits past you through the doorway.

“I’m in no position to fight it.”

“What, does that mean you don’t want to?” You inquire, “Or that you won’t?”

“Little bit of both, I guess.” Ellie pauses at the foot of the bed as she appraises it. You’ve already dipped one of your knees into the foam and picked up a pillow for fluffing. “You’re on my side of the bed, by the way.”

“Oh, I—” You dither some as you knead the pillow previously dimpled by the shape of your head.

“No, it’s okay. Looks like you slept on both sides, actually.”

Ellie smiles, gesturing to the identical concavities on both pillows, the messiness of the comforter that isn’t confined to one side of the mattress.

“Sorry, I’m—”

“Hey,” It’s a single, three-letter word with not even a second syllable afforded to it. So, why does the sound of it out of her mouth command your attention like that of clicker trained animal? “what’d I tell you about all that apologizing? It’s okay. Now my pillows’ll smell like you.”

She crawls over onto the mattress until she’s maybe a few inches across from you. You wonder if she’s even trying to control herself around you anymore. You certainly are not.

“Okay, but before we go to sleep, can I apologize for one more thing?”

“No, but I know you’re gonna do it anyway.”

“The kiss earlier.” You enunciate the three words as if they alone convey the entirety of your thoughts. “I’m sorry if I made anything weird, or crossed a line, or…” Embarassment and a lack of proper wording silences you. “anything like that.”

“You didn’t cross anything. It was… nice. I enjoyed it.”

The relief that fills your chest is almost immediately vanquished. “Nice? Just nice?”

A wolfish chuckle rumbles through her chest. “Yeah, I mean, we were in a closet, and I didn’t want us to get too carried away. And you were pretty drunk, so…”

“Sooo, you hated it?”

“I did not hate it. I just think we have the potential for better.”

“Well, we aren’t in a closet now. And I’m not drunk anymore.”

“What are you trying to say, Peach?”

Doing your best to keep the plush of the mattress from knocking you off kilter, you lean over until all of your weight is rested on your hands and knees, and you crawl to her. You slink her way until your noses are nearly sharing the same stream of oxygen.

Ellie’s eyes give way to every emotion that flickers through her, a tried and true window directly into her soul. Is she really doing this, you see her think. Fuck, she is.

Your lips connect for the second time that night, with less clumsiness and somehow even more apprehension than before—both purely motivated by the fact that you want to do it right this time.

The taste of her lips is even sweeter this time, fermented and rich and bursting with every flavor of her. When she opens her mouth a little wider, so that you can connect your lips more intimately, so that some of her saliva leaks onto your tongue, you mewl into her.

Your mouths move in communication with each other, a sort of interpretive dance. You creak yours open wider so that Ellie’s tongue can pass through and land exactly where you need it—tickling the roof of your mouth, massaging your own tongue.

It feels exactly as you imagined so many times before, better even. Wet and warm and soft and just so her. She begins to pull out of your mouth, but you just suck her back in, demanding and hungry. For a moment you think you’re being too expressive, too transparent with your desires, until Ellie cups the back of your head, pulling you deeper in and invigorating the want that pools in your belly.

After a couple more beats of heady, sedated sucking, you let Ellie’s tongue retract from your mouth, prepared to pull away. When you do, your bottom lip gets stuck—no, caught—between her teeth for half a second. Just long enough to push you closer and closer off the cliff of your sanity and into the hysteria filled waters below.

“Shit,” Ellie audibly gulps. A thin rosary of saliva connects your faces, and some smears the bow of her lips. You curl the tip of your tongue and lick up the mess.

She releases the back of your skull and you sink unceremoniously into the mattress, feet tucked underneath your butt. “Better?” You ask rhetorically.

“Kiss all your dealers like that?”

“Only my favorite ones.” You jest despite the puddle of need dampening Ellie’s boxers.

The two of you fall into silence, the space of the room post-kiss only soundtracked by whistling breaths and shuffling against the comforter. A minute of this passes before Ellie speaks up. “Can I tell you a secret?”

You hum affirmatively.

“I didn’t actually have a bad dream.” She divulges, “I just…” Her hands gesticulate aimlessly about, groping for the words. “couldn’t sleep knowing you were in the other room. It was driving me fucking crazy.”

“Were you just going to sit there and go crazy all night? Or were you going to come in here and do something about it?”

“I definitely thought about it.”

“What stopped you?”

“I guess I’m just a coward, or I would have done it sooner.”

Slowly and a little timidly, your mouth forms around a question that’s plagued the deepest recesses of your psyche for a long while. “Do you really want me, Ellie?”

Ellie answers your question with a kiss. She crawls over to you so slowly that, at any moment, you could have protested, asked, what are you doing? But you didn’t want to.

Once she’s on you, though, she doesn’t stop. She kisses you like she’s angry you would even ask the question, do you want me.

Her hands cup your face in a way that doesn’t even feign gentleness. You’ll pull away from her when she wants you to, and only then. “Lay back,” Ellie barely breaks away from you, practically spitting the words into your mouth.

Still, you recline your entire body until your head hits a pillow. It feels so good to have her like this—on top of you, kissing you, hands caging you in place, hips finding a welcome place in between your spread legs.

You ache for her, and you’re far past hiding it. Your hands find a steady hold on her hips, grinding your center into hers through your respective bottoms. Desperate whines travel out of your mouth into hers as your body drinks in the friction.

“I want you, Peach,” Ellie rasps over you. Her mouth connects to your ear, tongue drawing a precise curl around the shell. “Want you here,” she says, just before she lands on your neck and begins sucking tenderly at the skin above your jugular. “and here,” she manages to utter. Shuffling beneath your shirt, she slides her hands up your waist until they reach the pulsing expanse of your chest. “here, too. Can I touch you right here?” Ellie nearly pleads, even though she already is.

“You know you can.” You shudder, bunching the shirt up until it’s pushed completely over your head. The stiff air makes your nipples draw up and harden into sensitive peaks. It isn’t helped by the fact that you can feel Ellie’s breath fanning over them, humid and painstakingly close.

Ellie doesn’t take her eyes off you as she flattens her tongue over your nipple and licks. Slowly, up and down, over and over again. A whimper breaks from your gritted teeth when she rims your areola. “Do you like it when I do that?”

You nod hard enough to wrench your head off your shoulders. All the while, your shaky fingers are hooking under the hem of her shirt and pulling it up, up, up until it’s shuffled off the top of her head.

With both your shirts discarded to a distant corner of the room, Ellie’s mouth returns to yours, capturing it in a kiss so fervent it springs a tear behind your eye. She’s got you right where she wants you, you presume: ensnared within a hazy loop of wet kisses, heaving breasts pressed together, cunts still seeking each other out through the barriers of your pants.

If Ellie were to say to you, right now, Would you kill someone for me? Hm? I’ll make you cum if you say yes, you cannot guarantee your moral compass would even register killing someone to be wrong; not when the feeling of her rutting up against you is so incredibly right.

She doesn’t bother asking if she can stick her hand into your pants. The intrusion startles you a tad initially, makes you tense up, until she tightens her grip at the junction between your shoulder and neck, murmuring into your ear a soft, “‘S okay, baby, it’s just me,”

When Ellie does make contact with the desire that’s been dripping out of you, the edge of her lips curl into a wolfish grin. “You’re gonna kill me, I fucking swear.”

She pulls her hand out of your pants, and you can immediately tell which finger touched you. It’s wet and glistening beneath the moonlight as if bestowed with a halo. Ellie sucks it into her mouth, a slight moan falling from her lips as she does.

You hustle her boxers down to your ankles until you can comfortably kick them off. Ellie’s eyes darken over the picture of you, on her bed and naked as the day you were born. “Here,” She extends her middle and ring fingers out to your face. “get these wet for me.”

You imagine it’s intentional, the way she purposely keeps them about a hair’s breadth away from your lips. She wants to see you debase yourself a little bit, to shift your face smallest inch so that you can scoop her fingers into your mouth. So, you do.

Your lips wrap around her fingers in a sort of sweet surrender, sucking past the first knuckles, you taste remnants of yourself on her skin. Oral fixation, you presume, is why the act of doing this has felt more intimate than anything else so far. Your eyes bulge with naïveté as her fingertips press into your tongue, eliciting a teary gag.

You would think that the audible signal of discomfort would sway her to stop, but it seems only to invigorate her. Ellie’s eyes darken, and a strong, breathy hum vibrates off of her. “Yeah,” she goads, only removing her fingers once all your tears have spilled down your chin. She examines the wet canvass of your face with indeterminate emotion. You’re expecting concern. Are you okay, Peach? or something like, I’ll be gentle next time. Instead, she scoffs a condescending chuckle, remarking, “you look so fucking pretty when you cry.”

Without trying, your chest heaves against a broken sob. Like sweet prey at the mercy of a barbarous predator, you feel helpless. There’s nowhere you could go without her snatching you from the air with seizing paws. The feeling toes the line of being both petrifying and the most exhilarating thing you could ever imagine.

Ellie shifts until her weight is propped entirely on her right arm. From this angle, her warm breath sears the shell of your ear. You spread your legs without her even having to ask, pressing your knees as far back as you can, even as it starts to hurt.

Ellie brings her wet fingers to your cunt, caressing the swollen head of your clit with a thinly veiled hunger. The sensation makes every muscle in your body squeeze taut. Your toes curl and you have to fight the urge to shut your thighs together. “Ellie,” You whine, hiccuping a little as your asshole begins clenching in time with the movement of her fingers.

“I’ll give you anything you want. You know that?” Ellie coos into your ear, rubbing your clit a little faster, a little firmer. Your vision grows fuzzy at the edges. “All you need to do is ask. Use your words.”

“I want you inside.” Your voice is crossed between a whimper and grit. A satisfied purrr hums through Ellie’s body, but the confession embarrasses you a little nonetheless.

She dips her middle digit lower, letting her fingertip sit at the cleft of your hole. You whine a bit at the contact, squeezing desperately around nothing, trying to suck her in. “Atta girl,” Her first knuckle passes through with unsurprising ease, though only paltrily sates the appetence that’s tearing you asunder from the inside out.

Ellie affords you a few thrusts of her finger, curling it upward in a slow, come hither motion to test the waters. That feeling—that initial phalangeal push—gently coaxes a high pitched whimper out of your slacked mouth. She hums, satisfied, though only temporarily, as she pulls out a bit just so she can stretch you around a second finger.

“Oh, shit,” Your breathless cries fall on deaf ears as Ellie pushes her to fingers in, down to the very last knuckle. The feeling of being so full of her stirs a heap of emotions within you. It’s overwhelmingly and maddeningly perfect in a way you’re only able to communicate through broken moans. “Oh, my—” You hiccup, pressing your eyes shut as she pulls almost all the way out, only to push back in in a way that kind of hurts.

Ellie curls her fingers in tantalizing unison, her pace controlled, though, a tad feral. You can feel it in the melody of soft grunts that sneak through her gritted teeth and into your ears. It doesn’t take long before her fingertips are prodding at a spot that makes you gasp. The part of it that isn’t made up of sheer pleasure is genuine shock. You had no idea anything in this world could feel so good.

“Right there?” She asks, all too smug and casual, as if she isn’t literally fingering the pulse of your most sensitive spot. Every attempt you make to speak is thwarted by her feverish, determined pursuit of your orgasm.

“C’mon,” Ellie further riles when your whimpers start to synchronize in time with the steady plunges of her fingers. “show me how well you can take it.”

You don’t even notice the fledgling spring of tears that are dampening your cheeks until Ellie licks one clean with the curve tip of her tongue, and then sears the salty flavor into your mouth in a messy kiss.

Then, in the blink of an eye, you feel the pleasure intensifying in every part of your body, marching you toward an orgasm so intense that you actually do start to cry. Soft, tensed wails borne entirely from Ellie’s fingers. “W—Wait,” you nearly choke trying to say the word. “I need a minute. Can you just—”

“No.” She says. You don’t even think she considers the possibility of stopping. All that’s visible in the deep pools of her irises is stalwart resolution.

You make an attempt to squirm away, but she curls her fingers into that you again, adding pressure to where you’re already so tender. “Ellie,” you plead, her name falling clumsily out of your mouth.

Your desperation does little to stall her. In fact, it seems to be the thing pushing her forward. “You’re gonna cum so fucking hard like this,” Ellie promises, “just trust me.”

And you do.

It only takes a couple more nudges before your orgasm erupts from your body with all the intensity of an ocean bursting through a dam. In the heat of it, your voice reaches a screaming pitch. “Don’t stop,” you command, aching to ride it out for as long as possible. “please, please don’t stop.”

Thick, limpid rivulets of cum rush out of you in warm spurts, and Ellie fucks you through every second of it.

The next couple of minutes are spent trying to catch your breath. You flit your eyes over to Ellie’s face, repeatedly tracing your gaze over her eyes and lips. “You’re so fucking perfect.” She coos into your balmy skin whilst planting messy kisses into your temple. Then, she orders, “Come here.” Slowly, with small protesting mewls from you, Ellie pulls her fingers out of your cunt so that her hands can cup your cheeks and lock you into another passionate kiss.

***

When the two of you have wrangled into a position of post-coital cuddling—you curled into her side, face tucked into her neck, with her tattooed arm wrapped around you—Ellie asks, “Do you wanna hear a joke?”

Halfway lolled into slumber, you oblige her. “Lay it on me.”

“A weasel walks into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Interesting. I’ve never served a weasel before. What can I get you?’” The anticipatory gleam in Ellie’s eyes tells you that she’s really proud of this one, and that makes you smile.

You sigh, “I’m ready.”

“‘Pop’ goes the weasel.”

You go from sleepily smiling to rolling your eyes in record time. “Good, right?” Ellie jests, filling the room with raucous laughter that you’re sure would wake anyone, if anyone was here to hear it. “Come on, I worked really hard on that one.”

Not even a full five minutes later, Ellie has completely passed out before you. She is, for lack of a better phrase, a picture. Chest billowing steadily around slow, deep breaths, mouth slightly agape with a ribbon of drool staining its corner, a gentle snore singing from her nose.

With your pinky finger, you connect makeshift constellations in the freckles on her collarbone until your eyelids grow weary. Just before you surrender to tiredness, you let your gaze sweep over Ellie’s face a final time. Her eyes, her nose, her mouth that is now curled into a soft smile. You hope she’s dreaming of you.

Ellie didn’t like you, not even a bit. She doesn't even remember when she started to dislike you. Maybe it was a morning you shared a table, while you and Dina were talking about nothing, but were laughing so hard that Maria had to stop by and tell you to be quieter. Maybe it was when you were assigned to patrol with Cat, her girlfriend at the time, and both returned to the stables laughing about a clicker that got caught under a roof. The point is, she really didn’t feel comfortable around you, but she couldn’t place exactly why that was. 

Most people at Jackson seemed to like you: your charismatic personality drew everyone to you, eventually making them fall in love with you. You were someone everyone wanted to be around because you were so cool. And she didn’t like you because you weren’t precisely alike; on the contrary, you had so much in common, both with strong personalities and even a bit of a nerd. 

“Ellie, right?” You said when you were signing in for patrol on a Tuesday morning. She side-eyed you and nodded. “I really like your Converse,” she dropped her eyes to the floor, only to realize you were wearing a worn-out pair too, with a little higher platform. 

“Thanks,” she mumbled, and you just bounced away, too perky and happy for a 6 am patrol. She cringed so hard, maybe because she couldn’t stand your smile or because she wanted to say “same” and couldn’t bring it up to her mouth. 

That was the first time she saw you. You wore a leather jacket that was way too big for you for patrols and a pair of worn-out jeans. Your hair was pulled up in a messy ponytail, short at the time, with some loose strands sticking to your cheeks from the snow. She did remember your skin, the moles evident in the daylight, and how your smile formed a single dimple on the right side of your face. You had a scar on your neck, as if someone had stabbed you deeply. 

There were rumors about you, but the version you always gave away, which she learned from Dina, was that you were traveling with your sister and mom. Both were killed by some smugglers, and you managed to run away. But that was it; you never spoke about them anyway. 

You weren’t even close to her friends, yet somehow Dina and Jesse would bring you into the conversation when they were smoking weed at Dina’s. 

“She’s crazy; she turned down three clickers and still managed to laugh. She’s a freak,” Dina said, and Jesse nodded. 

“I’m not even surprised Eric has a crush on her.”

“Fuck, I even have a crush on her,” Dina agreed with Jesse. 

Of course, who wouldn’t like a girl who wore eyeliner every single day on patrol, even when she came back with it all smudged? You were a hot mess. Ellie was very aware of that. But she couldn’t take you seriously. 

She knew you were a little bit like Dina, constantly having fun, attracting attention without wanting to, because people were always expecting to see what your next move would be. That’s when you started dating around, hanging with a blonde girl and a tall boy. None of that was serious. She even saw you kissing the girl at a campfire party, and she hated the way it made her feel. That night, she couldn't eat, and she wrote about it in her journal. 

stupid. 

attention whore. 

unserious and annoying. 

even her voice is so fucking …

But she couldn’t place the words. She never ended the entry and just drew a campfire. 

Jackson was constantly evolving, receiving more and more people every month. And yet the ones on patrol were the same, that is, until you got yourself hurt, coming back, carried by Jesse. 

“It’s nothing; I just have to rest,” you said as you were placed on a wooden chair right outside the stables. 

“This doesn’t seem like anything,” said Dina as she drew up your jeans to discover a swollen foot. 

“Shit—“ you gasped. 

“I’ve got to tell Maria. Ellie, Dina, please be nice and take her to the clinic.” Jesse said, and Ellie turned around to roll her eyes, but still nodded and placed your left arm over her shoulders, while Dina did the same on the opposite side. 

“I mean, could’ve been worse; you can still walk,” said Dina, your eyes still glued to the floor as you watched your step. 

When you finally reached the clinic, Dina went in ahead to find someone to help you. Ellie was then very aware that she was holding you by the waist, fingers pressed way too strongly on your side. 

“Am I too heavy?” you asked and chuckled, a little embarrassed.

“No, not at all,” she answered faster than she could have. You nodded. 

“Thanks for walking with me.” 

“It’s nothing.” 

And the silence fell heavy over both of you. It was a little awkward; you knew Ellie wasn’t as chatty as Dina, but you still wanted to ask her about so much. 

“Have you always been friends with Dina?” 

Ellie furrowed her brows, a little taken aback, but still answered. “Yeah- since I arrived in Jackson, she’s been around.” 

“You seem… close.” You stepped slightly into the conversation. “But not as close as Cat—“ Ellie breathed out, a little annoyed. It seemed as if she were holding that breath for a long time. 

“What is this?” she asked. “What do you want?” she finally said. 

“Nothing—“ 

“Then stop it.” 

“‘Kay.” 

Your cheeks were flushed red, and she could tell, but she didn’t care. She even changed her body weight, so you relied on your bad foot. You hissed and glared at her. 

“What the fuck?” 

“What?” 

“You did that on purpose.” 

“Did what?” she asked innocently, as sarcastically as she could. 

“Get off!” you snapped and pushed her away, stumbling a little but quickly turning to get a grip on the railing of the stairs. 

“As you wish,” she said and turned around. She definitely didn’t like you. Screw you. Screw your fucking nosy manners, your velvety voice, and fuck your vanilla and flowers scent. It made her nose itch. 

·꙳⋆𖢔𖠰𖢔·꙳⋆

Ellie didn't come across you often because she avoided you. After that tense interaction outside the clinic, Dina secretly asked Maria to switch the roles and pair you with Ellie. 

“Oh, they seem to be getting along, you know.” Dina grazed her fingers on Maria’s paperwork, as if she were pretending to study it. Maria raised an eyebrow and pulled the papers away. 

“Really?” She asked skeptically. “I don’t think Ellie likes her at all.”

“I mean, I understand you get that impression, but it’s Ellie we are talking about. She’s usually wearing that though expression.” Dina said quickly, way too quickly. She was acting suspiciously, and Maria was definitely not buying it; she was like her family after all. She stared up at Dina, elbows resting on her desk. Dina sighed, giving up. “Look, Maria,” she sat down in the chair in front of her, “I think Ellie has a secret crush on her. And Jesse and I are trying to make them get to know each other.” 

“I don’t think she’s Ellie’s type.” She simply said with narrowed eyes. 

“Can you do this for me? Please?” Dina begged. 

“I had nothing to do with it. She asks? It was Jesse’s mess-up.” Maria said and signed the patrols Dina and Jesse wrote for her approval. 

“You are the best!” 

But that didn’t turn out well at all. 

The morning you entered the stables with your deep purple backpack filled with supplies, ammo, and enough water for the patrol, you felt a pair of eyes glaring in your direction. You shivered but ignored Ellie as you talked to Jesse to get your day's role. 

“Morning. You are in Alpine Valley today. It’s a little far; be sure to return by nightfall.” Jesse said, pointing to the assignment board, where your name and Ellie’s were paired. Your breath got caught in your mouth, but before you could protest, Jesse patted your back and walked away to talk to other people. 

You froze in place, not even wanting to turn around, knowing she was already standing behind you. You could hear her shoes crunching on the straw covering the floor. 

“You are late.” She said. 

“Yeah, sorry about that.” You said, a smile plastered on your face, as you turned your head to look at her. “And about the other thing, too.”

“Save it.” Se cut you and accepted the reins of Shimmer. She guided the horse outside, just as you accepted the reins from the guys at the stables. You mounted Ghost, your white horse, and doffed your head as you rode outside the stables. 

Ellie climbed Shimmer while outside and started galloping towards the already-open gate. You hurried behind them, Ghost, in contrast to your black clothing and your hair. 

For fifteen minutes straight, you just rode, trying to keep up with Shimmer, but she was fast; at times, the distance between you grew too great, and Ellie slowed down for a bit. She definitely didn’t want to be near you. You groaned and kept trailing her until you reached an old gas station. The old weed growing inside was burned by the cold weather, but something felt off. 

She curbed her horse and turned her around, the front legs up. You pulled at the reins of Ghost and stopped him as well. You panted heavily, about to protest, but she raised a hand and kept silent. Ellie’s eyes were glued to the gas station, looking and studying every inch. 

“There’s someone in there.” She whispered. 

“Someone or something?” 

“I don’t think that’s an infected.” She pointed to the trail of steps that looked like they were made by a person. “We should check it out.” She unmounted Shimmer and took her to a spot behind some trees, where she was out of sight. 

“What? Are you kidding? That could be a smuggler.” 

“Guess we’ll find out.” And she reached for her gun in the holster around her leg. You couldn’t help but stare when she pulled it out, the belt squeezing her skin. You gulped and unmounted as well, taking Ghost next to Shimmer. 

You ran after Ellie and reached for your revolver. She furrowed her brows when she saw it. 

“That reload is slow.” She said. 

“Mind your own business.” You shot back and walked past her, looking through the window. The panel was dirty, and you couldn’t see properly. 

Ellie bumped her shoulder against your back, and as you looked past your shoulder at her, she pointed with her head toward an entrance. The gas shutter was pulled midway up, showing a trail of blood. You nodded and walked silently behind her. She docked and entered, immediately turning on her light. 

The heavy silence was tense; you expected anything to jump out at you, startled at every noise. You weren’t strong enough in one-on-one combat, but you were fast; that’s why you liked to use a revolver. Ellie’s hunched back distracted you, and you noticed how attractive she was whenever she was focused and feral. 

She looked back at you with furrowed brows, mouthing “focus”; you rolled your eyes at her and split, rounding the store inside the gas station. The empty, dusty racks made you sneeze silently. When you opened your eyes, you caught the red ones of someone sitting under a counter, a pool of their own blood around. It seemed like a man reaching out to you. You froze and stepped back quickly. Ellie popped next to you, pointing her gun at the man. 

“No, wait!” He said. 

“Are you infected?” He shook his head, coughing blood. “Where are you from and what got you?” 

“A heavy fall, please help me. I’m from a town nearby.” 

“There are no towns nearby, and that blood does not seem to be from a fall.” 

“Ellie, maybe he is hurt.” You whispered next to her, but she stiffened and ignored you. 

Just then, a box fell behind you, and you turned, pointing the revolver in that direction. You caught a glimpse of torn clothes. 

“Hurt, my ass.” She shot the man in the head. You jumped, and your eyes widened. 

“We need to get out of here. That was a stalker.” You whispered. 

“We are not leaving until we kill it.” She said as she felt the body, looking for something to loot. 

You sighed, your body tensing up. Ellie walked past you, pocketing the ammo she found, and reloaded her gun. You trailed her, stepping carefully as she entered a darker room next to the gas station that could’ve been the storage. There was this heavy feeling of something moving around in the shadows that made you walk back-to-back with her. She chuckled and shook her head. 

“Shut up.” You whispered. 

She walked faster. You noticed her abilities; it was pretty obvious she was Joel Miller’s adoptive daughter. She moved around like him, squeezing her body through small entrances, crafting Molotovs swiftly, and running in silence. She moved away, inspecting the racks and barrels in the corner. 

Suddenly, behind you, something groaned, high-pitched as only a stalker could. As you were about to turn and shoot, a heavy, fungus-like handful hit you straight in the face, blinding you for a split second. The next thing you felt was your back hitting the floor and a heavy weight on you. You yelled and pushed away the body of the stalker. The feeling of its skin was disgusting. 

You pointed your revolver blindly and shot. Ellie growled as she ran full speed at the stalker and tackled it with her body. She reached for her knife, swiped it, and shoved it into its face. It shrieked, and you stood up, pushing her shoulder out of the way and shooting at its head. It stopped moving. 

“Fuck!” You groaned and rubbed your face where it hit you. 

“I had it!” Ellie protested, dropping her hands loudly on her lap with her body still sitting over the stalker. 

“I know, I lost my temper.” You blinked, noticing your cheekbone and eye swelling. 

“Let me see.” You could see Ellie’s hand through your blinking eyes. You felt a warm sensation on your face. 

Her hands were bloody. 

“Shit, you really hit it hard.” 

“This is yours.” She whispered as she touched your face, wiping the blood away. 

“Oh.” You simply said. 

She crouched, put her bag on the floor, and took a bottle of alcohol and a gauze. As she straightened her back to inspect and clean your wound, you couldn’t help but look at her lips; she was pouting, focused. 

Her smell resembled winter, a soft scent of pine shedding from her hair. You sniffled and switched your weight from one foot to the other. 

“Don’t move.” She said. 

“You don’t have to be so rude all the time.” You suggested with a raspy voice. 

She didn’t answer, still working with fast hands. 

You were losing sunlight at this point. You noticed and mumbled an “Ellie…”

“I know.” She hurried and packed the bottle. She walked quickly to get out of the gas station. “Can you ride?” She asked as you reached the horses. 

You analyzed Ghost’s saddle. The skin of your right eye was getting in the way. 

“Um- I mean, I can try.” 

She grabbed your shoulder and turned you, staring at your face. 

“Shit, that looks ugly.” She mumbled. 

“Shut up.” You pushed her and grabbed the reins from the tree. 

She stopped you and snatched them. 

“Forget that; I’m riding.” She pulled at your leather jacket, bringing you closer to Shimmer. She guided Ghost next to her and stared at you. “Go on, hop up.” 

“I hate this.” You mumbled and climbed onto Shimmer’s saddle. Ellie did the same, positioning herself in front of you. 

The ride back home was quiet; the only sound was her breathing and Shimmer and Ghost’s steps on the snow. You shifted in the saddle, accidentally rubbing your chest against Ellie’s back. She stiffened visibly. 

“Sorry.” 

She didn’t answer, and you sighed quietly, hating the tense atmosphere that grew between both of you. 

As you rode in the dark woods, a couple of minutes away from Jackson, she finally broke the silence. 

“She was my girlfriend.” 

“What?” You peeked at her profile from behind, your body brushing against hers again. She shifted her position, shaking her shoulders a little bit. 

“Cat.” She simply said, clearing her throat. 

“Huh? What are you talking about?” 

“You asked about her! Remember? Look forward.” Your name sounded so different in her voice. You obeyed and looked to the road, starting to seem more and more illuminated from the lights of Jackson. 

It suddenly hit you that she was talking about the time you tried to ask about Cat outside the clinic. You laughed, tilting your head backward. 

“What’s so funny?!” She pushed you with her back.  

“Are you coming out or something?” You asked her. 

“Don’t be stupid. I am not. I’m just answering your question.” She cut you. 

“Well, you didn’t have to. It was pretty obvious.” 

“Then why did you ask?” 

“Because.” You shrugged because you actually had no clue why you asked her. Maybe you liked to pull at her strings. “It’s pretty obvious you are a lesbian, though.” You said, looking at her again, your face close to hers, a smirk on your lips that she caught and flushed to her ears. 

“That’s-!” 

“Not true?” 

“Okay, enough.” She said, growing flustered and being painfully obvious, that she was dragging her body further from yours on the saddle. The curve of your legs around her was starting to make her very self-aware of her own body. 

“Aw, you don’t have to do that. I like you close.” You teased. 

She hurried Shimmer, galloping the last few feet toward the front doors that opened at the sight of you. Everything happened so fast that when she hopped down from the horse and left you there, you were still processing her attitude. 

Jesse and Dina were waiting for her at the entrance to the stables, Dina rubbing her hands as if she had been expecting this moment all day. You dropped to the ground, smiled, and waved at them. 

You heard Ellie hiss when she stopped next to them, “Don’t you ever fucking do that again.” And walked away. 

Dina smiled apologetically in your direction, and Jesse tried to catch up to her. 

You kicked a pebble stuck in your shoe. Maybe you pulled at her strings too much. 

⋆꙳•❅‧₊⋆‧❆₊⋆⋆꙳•❅‧₊⋆‧❆₊⋆

pictures from pinterest

a/n: hello i couldn't find a cliffhanger lol but i do promise that this is soooo far from ending here lol. i hope you're enjoying this. also, i'm working on my canon au and im so excited, it's gonna be just fluff, no angst, nothing but pure joy so expect it soon hehe

pictures from pinterest

a/n: idk what's about smaus but i find it so hard to write synopsis for each chapter lmao. also yeah, im sorry for making reader kinda an ass in this but after debating for a while i decided to cut ellie some slack lol. also thanks to @elleloquently for always putting up with me and hearing me out whenever i share my doubts and ideas. i love you so so much.

𝑻𝑨𝑮𝑳𝑰𝑺𝑻 — ⌞comment to be added <3⌝

That was the only way to make sense of it — the way the afternoon light came through the high windows at just the right angle, just the right moment, and found you like it had been searching. Like it had crossed ninety-three million miles of empty, freezing, indifferent space with one singular destination in mind, and that destination was you. It poured into your hair like liquid gold being tipped from a jug, pooled at your shoulders like it was reluctant to go any further, gilded the edges of you until you were less a girl eating lunch and more a Renaissance painting that had gotten up, gotten dressed, and decided to haunt a school cafeteria for reasons of its own.

The noise, the chaos, the aggressive institutional ugliness of the room itself — none of it touched you. It broke around you the way water broke around a stone. You had your own atmosphere. A separate, sovereign one, with a pressure system all its own and weather that Ellie had never once been able to predict.

You were talking to your friends, gesturing at something with one hand — laughing, maybe, it was hard to tell from here, which was a tragedy that Ellie felt in her actual ribcage — and even the gesture was a small catastrophe, a grenade with the pin pulled, because you moved like punctuation. Like every motion was a sentence that knew exactly where it was going. Even a wave of your hand was a complete thought.

"Ellie."

The rest of the room had become scenery, a painted backdrop, a film set that existed purely as context for you, and the light kept doing what it was doing and you kept being what you were, this impossible, incandescent, gravity-bending —

"Ellie."

— thing, this force, because that's what it was, that's the only word that fit, a force, the kind that couldn't be reasoned with or negotiated with or looked at directly for too long without something in Ellie's chest doing something embarrassing and structural, like a building developing cracks along its foundational walls, and she was aware, distantly, the way you're aware of weather through a closed window, that she was staring, that she had been staring, that staring was an understatement for what she was doing, which was closer to orbiting, helplessly, uselessly, like a satellite that had long since run out of fuel but kept going anyway because gravity didn't care about her situation —

"ELLIE."

The world detonated back into existence.

"What —" She startled so violently she nearly launched her lunch tray off the table like a trebuchet, one hand slamming down on it a half second before disaster, her elbow catching the edge of her drink hard enough to send it rocking, and a fork went skidding off the edge and clattered across the linoleum with the specific kind of loud that made three nearby tables look over at once. "Jesus — Greg —"

Greg was watching her with the serene, comfortable expression of a man sitting in a lawn chair watching someone else's house burn down. He had his chin propped in his palm, his lunch sitting half-eaten in front of him, and he radiated the energy of someone who had been attempting this intervention for a deeply unreasonable amount of time and had made his peace with the wait.

"You were gone," he said. Not accusatory. Almost impressed. "Like, not just checked out. Like, evacuated. I was one minute away from checking you for a pulse."

"I was thinking," Ellie said, and she said it with the dignity of a person who had not just nearly catapulted a fork across a public space.

"Yeah." Greg's gaze drifted, slow and inevitable as a tide going out, over Ellie's shoulder. She knew the trajectory. She watched it arrive at its destination. She watched his face conduct a rapid and unflattering series of calculations. "About her."

Ellie did not turn around. She retrieved her fork from the floor, set it back on the tray with surgical precision, and took a long, unhurried drink of water. Buying time. Building a wall out of nothing.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Ellie. I could trace your eyeline with a ruler."

"I was zoning out. It happens."

"In the exact direction —"

"Greg."

"— of the girl who is, conservatively, so far out of your league that the concept of a league is no longer a useful framework —"

"Greg."

"— like we're talking different sports, different continents, she is playing chess and you are, with an enormous heart and terrible odds, playing Go Fish —"

"I know," Ellie said.

And that was the end of it. The words landed flat and definitive, a period at the end of a sentence that had already been written and wasn't looking for edits. Not angry. Not wounded. Just the particular heaviness of something that had already been turned over so many times in her hands that all the sharp edges were worn smooth. She knew. She had always known. She kept the knowing in a locked box in the basement of herself and did not go down there on purpose, and on the occasions she found herself there anyway, she turned the light off and went back upstairs.

"I'm not doing anything," she said, quieter. "I'm not trying anything. I'm not an idiot."

Greg looked at her for a moment. The entertainment evaporated off his face and left something more honest behind.

"I know you're not," he said.

"Don't," she said.

He closed his mouth. He understood, which was why she kept him around.

She stood up and grabbed her tray. "Come on."

They wove through the thinning cafeteria toward the tray return, moving in the comfortable tandem of two people who had been navigating spaces together long enough to do it without thinking. Greg had pivoted to a detailed critique of the comic run Ellie had lent him last week — specifically, and incorrectly, the third act — and Ellie was in the process of constructing a rebuttal like a lawyer who had been waiting for this cross-examination, because the third act was a masterpiece and Greg's problem was not with the writing but with his own constitutional inability to sit still for a slow build, which was a character flaw she had been documenting for years and intended, eventually, to cite formally —

"Hey."

A beat.

"Loser."

Time did not stop. Ellie would not say time stopped, because that was dramatic and she was not dramatic. What she would say was that the word hit her nervous system like a match to a fuse, that her heartbeat went from baseline to a full sprint in the space between one syllable and the next, that her hands flooded with cold sweat against the lunch tray and her face became a furnace and every hair on the back of her neck stood at attention like soldiers who had been called into service and were extremely aware of it.

She didn't need to hear it twice. She didn't need context or confirmation. She knew that voice the way she knew her own name — better, maybe, in some humiliating biological sense, the way a compass needle knew north, not by choice, not by any conscious arrangement, but by something deep and structural and completely indifferent to her feelings on the matter.

She turned around.

There you were.

Three feet away, wearing an expression like a knife that had learned to look decorative. Your posse arranged behind you the way shadows arranged themselves around a light source: instinctive, inevitable, orbiting without meaning to. You were looking at Ellie with the lazy, half-lidded assessment of a cat watching something cross the floor — mildly curious, entirely unbothered, already certain of the outcome.

In your hand, held up with the casualness of someone displaying a particularly boring trophy, was a journal. Thick, soft-cornered from years of being shoved into backpacks, colonised by stickers from a collection that Ellie had been curating since she was eleven. Her name was written on the inside cover in her own handwriting.

Her brain, normally a loud and opinionated instrument, went briefly and completely silent.

"Forget something?" you asked, and your voice was warm the way a lit match was warm: pleasant right up until it wasn't.

"I —" Ellie started.

That was as far as she got.

"I," you repeated, tasting the word, turning it over in your mouth like you were deciding whether it was worth swallowing. The syllable became a scalpel in your hands. A small, precise, devastating one.

Ellie's face was a bonfire. Her brain came back online in fragments.

"Yes," she managed, and it exited her mouth at half the intended volume and twice the intended vulnerability, thin and breathless as a thread pulled too tight. "Can I — that's mine —"

She stepped forward. This was reasonable. This was rational. She was simply recovering her property; this was not a big deal; her heart was not trying to punch its way out of her chest cavity like something in an action movie.

Behind you, your friends had formed a small, murmuring parliament of cruelty. A sound drifted over — something about the jacket, probably, or the shoes, delivered in the specifically calibrated register of not-quite-quiet, the kind of cruelty that wore plausible deniability like a coat — accompanied by laughter as thin and sharp as paper and just as capable of leaving a cut.

Ellie's jaw locked. She kept her eyes on the journal.

"Sure," you said, and the word was a door being closed politely in someone's face. You pivoted the journal out of reach as naturally as breathing, as if your arm had always intended to be somewhere Ellie couldn't quite reach, and flipped it open with the air of someone settling into a very good armchair with a very good book. "Oh, this is — hm. This is interesting."

"Give it back," Ellie said, and the panic was a live wire dragged straight up her spine, white-hot and instantaneous, burning the last of the embarrassment off her clean. She stepped in with her hand out, reaching — "Now —"

You stepped back. Ellie followed. You turned, still reading, unhurried as a Sunday morning, and what unfolded next was not in any way a graceful sequence of events. It was not choreographed. It did not reflect well on anyone. It ended with Ellie's chest pressed to your back and her arms stretched forward, hands closing over yours where they held the journal, the two of you stacked together and frozen mid-reach like a sculpture depicting something its artist was still working out the title for.

The cafeteria became a distant concept.

The noise fell away like wallpaper peeling off a wall.

Ellie could feel the warmth radiating off you through two layers of fabric — could feel it the way you feel sunlight through a window, in the places it touched and the places it didn't, could feel the arrested stillness in your frame like a held breath, the sudden awareness of two bodies that had not consulted each other before arriving here, at this precise and inadvertent geography, pressed together like two notes accidentally played at the same time that turned out, improbably, to be a chord.

Her lungs had forgotten their job. Her ribs felt like they were made of glass.

And your face — she couldn't see your face, not from this angle, not with her chin nearly at your shoulder, but she could see the tip of your ear from here, and the tip of your ear was the deep, telling pink of something that had not been prepared for this either, a bloom of colour as involuntary as a confession, and Ellie filed it away in a compartment so far beneath her conscious mind that she could almost believe it didn't exist.

Almost.

"Hey."

The word fell into the moment like a stone into still water, and the ripples were immediate and violent. They jumped apart like they'd been defibrillated — Ellie backward, two full steps, landing unsteadily; you forward, spine snapping upright, shoulders squaring, the whole architecture of your expression rearranging itself in the half second it took for the situation to demand it.

Asher (your dickhead of a boyfriend) materialised like something the room had grown specifically to be inconvenient. He was leaning against the nearest table with his arms folded across his chest, a physical equation that was trying very hard to add up to something intimidating, all jaw and crossed arms and the specific energy of a person who considered his own arrival a statement. He was looking at Ellie the way you looked at something sticky on the bottom of a shoe.

"She got a problem?" he said, and the she was a dart aimed directly at Ellie's general existence, casual and contemptuous and entirely comfortable with itself.

"No," Ellie said.

It came out the way water came out of a tap. No temperature, no texture, no particular feeling about itself. She looked at him the way she looked at a blank wall — registered the surface, found it offered nothing of interest, moved on. It wasn't hostility. It was the total, undecorated absence of it: the specific brand of indifference she reserved for things and people who had not earned the dignity of her actual disdain. He blinked. He'd been expecting a different kind of reaction, the kind he could do something with, and she'd handed him a door that opened onto nothing.

She watched him recalibrate. It was not entertaining enough to be interesting.

You, meanwhile — you were not looking at him.

You were looking at Ellie, and your expression was doing something that Ellie's brain started reaching for and then abandoned, because it was shuttering closed too fast, the way curtains got drawn against the light, a smooth and practised motion that left no evidence of what had been there before it. Whatever it was, it was gone. You looked at Ellie the way you looked at a finished conversation. Then you held out the journal.

Quietly. No theatre. No ceremony.

Ellie reached out and took it.

Your fingers did not immediately let go.

One heartbeat. One single, suspended, airless beat where time seemed to hold its breath and fold itself in half — the journal floating between you in the space where both your hands met, your fingers against hers, a contact so small and accidental and fleeting it barely qualified as a thing that had technically happened.

It was the loudest thing in the room.

Then your fingers fell away like autumn, like something letting go on purpose. You turned, reached back, and looped your hand through Asher's arm with the brisk efficiency of someone closing a tab they'd had open too long. He said something; you didn't look like you were listening. You moved, and your constellation moved with you — a brief, ungainly scramble of heels and murmurs and people rearranging themselves like iron filings following a magnet — and then the cafeteria swallowed you whole, and you were gone, and the room left behind by your absence was a smaller, flatter, considerably less interesting place.

Greg appeared at Ellie's elbow like a dog who had been sitting at the door for a while.

"Hey." His voice had shed every last layer of amusement. He was watching the direction Asher had gone with an expression that had real structural integrity — the kind that was built out of something other than a passing feeling, something load-bearing. "You okay?"

Ellie looked down at the journal in her hands. Turned it over once. Pressed her thumb to the corner of the cover.

"Yeah," she said. "Fine."

She tucked it under her arm, and they walked out, and the noise of the cafeteria closed over them like water over a stone, and that was that.

Except.

Except that Ellie Williams, who was not an idiot, who had told Greg less than ten minutes ago that she knew better, who kept the box in the basement and did not open it —

— smiled.

Not a performance of a smile. Not the sarcastic, armoured, public-facing smile she used as a deflection tool. This was something that happened without her permission, small and private and stubborn, living only in the corners of her mouth and the interior of her chest, where it had no witnesses and she could maintain, in good conscience, the polite fiction that she was absolutely fine and none of this was happening to her.

Your fingers against hers had been a spark. A stupid, accidental, three-second spark.

It burned in her chest all the way to fourth period, faithful as a pilot light, small as a star seen from a very long way away.

It did not go out.

The parking lot in the middle of the school period was its own kind of quiet.

Not the quiet of absence — the school was still full, still breathing, still running through its daily machinery of bells and syllabi and thirty-something students staring at whiteboards and willing the clock to move faster by sheer collective force of misery. The noise of it bled through the brick in a low, institutional hum. But out here, between the rows of cars baking slowly in the afternoon heat, the air had a different quality. Looser. Unsupervised. The kind of quiet that belonged to people who had made an executive decision about how to spend their Tuesday and were at peace with the consequences.

Ellie was at peace with the consequences.

She was sitting on the concrete kerb at the far edge of the lot, the secluded corner where the English teacher's ancient Volvo created a natural wall against the sight lines from the main building's windows — a discovery she had made in ninth grade and guarded with the same devotion other people reserved for good parking spots. Her skateboard was on the ground beside her, one wheel spinning idly in the breeze like it was bored. Greg was next to her, both of them nursing vending machine drinks and the mutual, comfortable warmth of two people who had agreed wordlessly that whatever was happening in this period could happen without them.

"He reads off the slides," Ellie was saying, with the tone of someone delivering a verdict after a very long deliberation. "Like, verbatim. Word for word. He prints the PowerPoint, puts it on the projector, and then reads it back to us like we're not all sitting there looking at the exact same words in real time —"

"He does the thing," Greg said, pointing at her, nodding with the intensity of a man who had been waiting for permission to bring this up. "The thing where he pauses and looks at the class like he just said something profound —"

"Like he's waiting for applause —"

"Like he expects someone to weep —"

"I was there for thirty-five minutes last Thursday," Ellie said, with the dead-eyed sincerity of a trauma survivor recounting the incident, "and I learned nothing. Genuinely. I came in knowing nothing, I left knowing the same nothing, except I was also tired —"

"You were asleep for twenty of those minutes —"

"I was resting my eyes —"

"Ellie, you snored."

"I breathe loudly —"

Greg laughed, that full-body thing he did where it seemed to involve his entire skeleton, and Ellie let herself grin, let the afternoon settle around them like a blanket, let the tension of the cafeteria — the journal, the journal pressed between your hands, the pink tip of your ear — slide off her back for the first time in an hour. This was good. This was normal. This was the world as it should operate: just her and Greg and the sun on the asphalt and nothing that required her to feel anything complicated.

She picked up her skateboard and set it across her knees, running her thumb along the edge of the deck out of habit, the worn texture of it as familiar as a heartbeat.

"Mr. Peterson, though," Greg was saying, warming to the subject with the enthusiasm of a man who had been storing this grievance for weeks. "He talks about himself. He will segue from mitosis — mitosis, Ellie — to a story about his lake house, and no one has ever once questioned it, we all just sit there and let it happen like we've been hypnotised —"

"The lake house," Ellie echoed reverently. "We know more about that lake house than we know about anything on the curriculum. I could pass a test on that lake house. I could write a thesis —"

The doors of the school opened.

Not the way doors opened normally — with the casual, mundane swing of someone who had somewhere to be and was going there. These doors opened the way things opened when they were preceded by intention, flung wide with the particular momentum of a group of people who had decided on a direction and were not planning to be stopped by something as minor as a fire door. The bang of it carried across the parking lot like a starting pistol.

Ellie heard it. Her thumb stilled on the edge of the deck.

Four of them came through first — Asher's usual architecture of loyalty, the specific collection of broad shoulders and performative swagger that trailed in his wake the way debris trailed a comet. They came down the steps with their eyes already moving, already scanning, already locked onto the target with a speed that meant this had not been an accident, that someone had looked out a window, that the secluded corner had been found. They moved across the parking lot with the kind of coordinated, purposeful energy that turned a group of boys into something with a different name, something that rhymed with mob and felt like a weather front.

Ellie was on her feet before she knew she'd decided to stand.

"Greg," she said.

"Yeah," Greg said. He was already up. His voice had flattened out, gone careful. "I see them."

They came fast, spreading out as they approached, a net tightening around its catch, until they had formed a loose but deliberate ring around the corner — one on the left, two coming from the right, cutting off the gap between the Volvo and the kerb with the practised ease of people who had done this before, who knew the geometry of cornering someone and applied it without needing to think. Ellie assessed the exits in the half second available to her and found them all closed. Beside her, she felt Greg go very still, the way prey went still, the deep animal instinct of something that understood what was happening and was calculating on its feet.

Then Asher came through the doors.

He didn't rush. That was the thing about Asher — he never rushed. He had the kind of confidence that didn't need to hurry because it had already decided how things were going to go and was simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. He came down the steps with the unhurried, heavy-footed certainty of a man crossing a room he owned, hands relaxed at his sides, jaw set, eyes moving across the parking lot until they found Ellie and stopped.

He walked over. His friends parted for him without looking.

He stopped two feet in front of them.

He was tall in the way that had always seemed specifically designed to be used on someone — not incidental height, not just the result of genetics, but height that had been weaponised, deployed, stood up to its full advantage and pointed at the world like an argument. He stood in front of them and looked down, and his gaze did a slow, pendulous swing from Greg to Ellie and then settled there, on Ellie, with the weight and precision of a pin through a butterfly.

The silence stretched like taffy. Like something being pulled past the point it wanted to go.

"Cafeteria," he said finally. Just the word, dropped in front of them like a coin on a counter. His voice was low, conversational, the kind of low that was a performance of casualness, wearing it the way a fist wore a glove. "What was that."

Ellie's hands were steady. Her heartbeat was not. "Nothing," she said. "She had something of mine. I got it back. That's it."

"Hm." He tilted his head. Considered her the way you considered something you hadn't decided what to do with yet. "See, here's my thing. My thing is, she doesn't like you. She doesn't wanna be around you. And I've seen the way you look at her." He paused, and the pause was a shovel. "I know what that is."

"Then you know it wasn't a problem," Ellie said.

Something moved across his face. Not a flinch. More like a gear catching.

"Let me be clear about something," he said, and the conversational register dropped away entirely, shed like a coat, leaving something colder and more architectural underneath. He leaned forward, just fractionally, just enough to shrink the two feet between them into something that felt like inches. "You don't talk to her. You don't look at her. You don't exist near her if you can avoid it. Because girls like you —" and he dsaid girls like you the way people said things they had decided were self-explanatory, the way people said things they considered too obvious to require completion, and he left it there, in the air between them, to do its work. "She doesn't need that around her. You understand me? Keep your issues to yourself."

The words were rocks dropped into still water. Ellie felt the ripples move through her in a straight, cold line from her throat to her stomach to somewhere deeper than that, somewhere the words found the places she'd already worn thin and pressed down on them with deliberate, knowing weight. Her jaw tightened. Her hands found each other at her sides and she pressed her knuckles together and breathed through it, slow and even, the breathing of someone who had learned, through repeated occasions, to absorb this particular kind of hit and stay standing.

She was fine. She was fine. She had been called worse, implied worse, had the shape of herself outlined in uglier terms, and she was fine, she could take it.

Then Asher turned to Greg.

And said what he said.

It was quick. It was almost casual. It was the kind of comment that arrived with no fanfare, no escalation, dressed in the same tone as everything else — a flat, offhand, contemptible thing delivered the way you delivered trash, which was to say without ceremony, because it didn't require any. Just words. Just a sentence. Just Greg's most personal geography laid out and stepped on by someone who hadn't earned the right to know it, let alone flatten it.

And well, that’s all she could remember.

The thing that moved through Ellie was not anger, exactly — anger was something she had a relationship with, something she could negotiate with, something she could put on a leash and walk. This was different. This was the thing underneath the anger, the subterranean thing, the fault line going — and she thought about Greg's face, what was on Greg's face right now, and she didn't look, she couldn't look, because if she looked she would see it and then it would be worse and she couldn't afford for it to be worse —

Her fist connected with Asher's face with the full force of every last gram of it.

The sound was a single, sharp, declarative crack, as definitive as a full stop, as satisfying and as catastrophic as a window shattering from the inside. His head snapped back. He staggered — one step, two, genuinely staggered, not performed, not for effect, but rocked back on his heels by the geometry of a hit he had not, in his fundamental and structurally unsound confidence, seen coming. For one bright, blazing, fleeting second that Ellie would store in a separate compartment from everything else — the good compartment, the one without a lock — he looked genuinely surprised.

Then his hand went to his face.

Then the parking lot became a different place entirely.

It happened the way natural disasters happened: with a speed that outpaced comprehension, with a force that didn't wait for consent, with the kind of scale that reduced the individual to a small thing caught inside a much larger motion. Asher's friends moved like a single organism, a flock of something with no good intentions, and Ellie had time for one sharp, preparatory breath before the first hit landed, and then it was just sound and motion and the hard, specific language of a parking lot in the middle of the afternoon being used for something parking lots were not designed for.

She took three hits before she stopped counting. They came fast — face, shoulder, ribs — each one a blunt, percussive argument, each one the sound of knuckles meeting bone with the particular intimacy of violence, which was to say without any distance at all. Her face became a series of points of impact, her eye socket a lit fuse, her cheekbone a bruise still in the process of deciding its final shape. She did not go down. This was the thing about Ellie — and she was not proud of it, because she knew it said something about the kind of life that had made her — she did not go down easily. She was built for absorbing things. She was architecture designed for load-bearing.

She went down on one knee. Her palm hit the asphalt.

To her left, Greg was fighting a different battle — fighting to move, which was the more maddening one, two of them holding his arms back and behind him in a vice grip that was not about hurting him so much as making him watch, which was crueller, which was the point, and the bruises blooming up his arms from the grip of their fingers were the colour of storm clouds, deep and spreading and wrong against his skin in a way that made Ellie's vision go briefly, incandescently red even through her own pain.

"Greg —" she started.

"I'm fine," he said, tight and breathless. "Ellie, I'm fine —"

Asher crouched down to her level. His nose was a swelling event. There was a satisfaction lodged in Ellie's chest that not even the current circumstances could fully dislodge, stubborn as a splinter. He looked at her from six inches away with his jaw working and his eyes doing something flat and final, and he stayed there for a moment the way you stayed somewhere to make sure the point had been made.

Then he stood up.

"Stay away from her," he said, and it came out nasal and compressed and considerably less authoritative than it had been ten minutes ago, and that too went into the good compartment, filed under small victories, cherish these.

He walked away. His friends unpeeled themselves from Greg and followed, the whole assembly retreating across the parking lot with the energy of something that had said what it came to say and was ready to be done, and the sound of the doors closing behind them was an ending the same way a curtain dropping was an ending — definitive, institutional, this portion of the programme is now concluded.

The parking lot settled back into its Tuesday afternoon quiet.

Ellie stayed on one knee on the asphalt for a moment, breathing. Just breathing. Cataloguing. The side of her face was a symphony of wrongness, two or three distinct movements playing simultaneously in the key of this is going to look terrible tomorrow. Her ribs were filing a formal complaint. Her eye was beginning to swell in the unhurried, committed way of injuries that had decided to take this seriously.

Greg appeared in front of her, folding down to the ground, and she saw his arms — the dark thumbprint bruises already stamped into his skin like signatures — and her stomach turned over hard.

"Don't," he said, reading her face with the accuracy of four years of practice. "I'm fine. They were just holding me. I'm fine."

"Your arms —"

"Ellie."

She looked at him. He looked back at her, steady, with the quiet and deliberate fortitude of a person who had decided how they were going to hold themselves and was holding. She thought about what Asher had said. She thought about the look on Greg's face when he'd said it, which she had seen in the half second before she'd stopped thinking and started moving, and she pressed that image down and sealed it over.

"I'm sorry," she said. Flat. Sincere. The most genuine two words she owned.

"Don't be," Greg said. "The nose was worth it."

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

"It really was," he said.

She let out a breath that was almost, in some technical sense, a laugh.

They sat on the asphalt in the thin afternoon sunlight, two people held together by years and a shared disaster, bruised and slightly wrecked, and the parking lot sat around them in its middle-of-the-day quiet, and Ellie's skateboard lay on the ground a few feet away with one wheel still spinning, idly, faithfully, like it was waiting for her to come back.

She reached over and stopped it with her hand.

Then she sat back, pressed the heel of her palm gently against her swelling eye, looked up at the sky — wide and indifferent and enormous, stretched out over the whole unreasonable mess of her life like it had all the time in the world — and breathed.

The skate park at four-thirty in the afternoon was the closest thing Ellie had to a church.

Not in the quiet way — the park was never quiet, not really, always threaded through with the percussion of wheels on concrete and the occasional sharp crack of a board meeting the lip of a ramp at the wrong angle and the distant, overlapping noise of the city doing what cities did at the end of a school day. But church wasn't about quiet, not really. It was about the particular quality of being somewhere that received you. That didn't ask anything of you except your presence. The skate park took Ellie the same way it took everyone — bruised, badly, on a Tuesday with a swelling eye — and simply continued to exist around her, indifferent and solid and endlessly, reliably itself.

She pushed off and rolled, long and unhurried, from one end of the flat section to the other, the wheels humming their low, continuous note against the concrete. Then back. Then forward. Back and forth, back and forth, a metronome that had forgotten what it was counting.

Greg, sitting on the bench behind her with his skateboard upended across his knees and a rag and a small bottle of wheel oil in his hands, was in the middle of what could generously be called a monologue and less generously called a one-man theatre production about the subject of Asher and what Greg thought about Asher and where, specifically, Greg felt Asher could go and what he could do with himself when he got there. He had been in the middle of this monologue for approximately twenty-five minutes. He was, by any reasonable metric, nowhere near the end of it.

"— and the audacity," Greg was saying, working the oil into the bearing with the focused aggression of someone who was only technically performing maintenance and was mostly just doing something with his hands before his hands did something else. "The sheer, uncut, factory-grade audacity of him walking out there like he owns the — like we're the ones who —" He stopped. Regrouped. Swore, comprehensively, in the manner of someone who had run out of regular words and needed to reach for a different register entirely. "I'm telling you, Ellie, I'm telling you, the next time he comes within ten feet of either of us, I swear to every god that has ever been worshipped on this earth —"

Push. Roll. The wheels hummed.

"— and what he said — " Greg's voice tightened around the edges, briefly, before he pried it back open. "What he had the absolute nerve to say, I have been turning it over in my head for the past three hours and every time I do I want to —"

Push. Roll.

"— because it's not even the hitting, right, the hitting I can process, the hitting is a known quantity, but the words — "

Push.

"— Ellie. Ellie, I'm saying, are you even —"

"Do you think she really likes him?"

The monologue stopped.

The wheel oil paused mid-application.

Greg looked up from the undercarriage of his board with the slow, blinking expression of someone whose train of thought had just been derailed by something that had come from an entirely perpendicular direction. The silence stretched out between them, thin and slightly bewildered.

"...What?" he said.

Ellie rolled back toward him, one foot dragging lazily against the concrete to slow herself, and came to a stop a few feet from the bench. She was looking off to the left, at the middle distance, at nothing in particular — or more specifically at the particular kind of nothing that served as a screen for the something she was actually looking at, the interior movie reel that had been running on loop since approximately noon.

"Her," she said, with the self-evident tone of someone who felt the pronoun was sufficient context and didn't understand why clarification was being requested.

Greg stared at her. "Ellie. I need you to understand that I was in the middle of a very important —"

"Her," Ellie said again, and this time she turned her head and looked at Greg, and the look said everything the word wasn't bothering to.

Greg's expression completed its journey from confused to resigned with a brief layover at of course. He set the oil bottle down on the bench beside him with the measured care of a man putting down something that needed to be put down before he could fully engage with the situation at hand.

"Are you," he said, "telling me that I have been talking to you for —" he checked his phone "— twenty-seven minutes, and your brain has been —"

"Can you just answer the question."

"— has been entirely elsewhere, specifically at the address of —"

"Greg."

"— the girl who makes your eye twitch every time she's within fifty feet —"

"I will leave," Ellie said. "I will get on that board and I will physically remove myself from this conversation."

Greg held up a hand. A concession. He looked at the sky for a moment, the way people looked at the sky when they were deciding how to deliver information they already knew wasn't going to land well, and then he looked back at her.

"Fine," he said. "Fine. You want my honest opinion?"

"I wouldn't have asked if I didn't."

"She likes him enough," Greg said, picking the words with the care of someone navigating something that had sharp edges and didn't want to be held. "Or — she likes something about the situation. The stability of it, maybe, or the way it looks from the outside, or — I don't know, maybe she genuinely —" He made a gesture that was trying to be diplomatic and mostly just looked tired. "People stay in things for all kinds of reasons, and not all of them are because they're madly in love, and not all of them are because they aren't. She could like him. She could be in it for something else entirely. She could be doing the thing where you convince yourself you like something because the alternative is figuring out what you actually —"

He stopped.

The rag went still in his hands.

He looked at Ellie.

Something had crossed his face — quick, electric, the specific expression of a thought arriving at full speed from a direction he hadn't been watching. His eyes went slightly wider. His mouth opened a fraction. He had the look of a man who had been putting together a puzzle for a long time and had just found the piece that told him what the picture actually was.

"Oh," he said.

Ellie said nothing. She was studying the ground with the focused intensity of someone who had suddenly developed a profound interest in the specific texture of skate park concrete.

"Oh," Greg said again, louder, the vowel round and full and carrying all the weight of the realisation behind it. He sat up straight. He set the skateboard fully aside. He was now giving this conversation the entirety of his posture. "Ellie. Ellie. You're not — tell me you're not actually —" He pointed at her. She did not look at the pointing finger. "Are you planning something?"

The concrete was very interesting. Genuinely fascinating. A rich subject.

"Ellie Williams," Greg said.

"You're being dramatic —"

"Am I?" He leaned forward on the bench, elbows on his knees, and levelled a look at her that could have stripped paint. "Because from where I'm sitting, you just interrupted twenty-seven minutes of completely justified grievance to ask me whether your bully — your bully, Ellie, the girl who has made it her personal mission to —"

"She's not that bad —"

"She called you a loser in front of half the school this morning —"

"That's just how she —"

"She does it regularly, with consistency, like it's a hobby she's committed to —"

"Greg —"

"And not only is she your bully," Greg continued, steamrolling ahead with the unstoppable momentum of someone who had been handed a point and intended to arrive at it regardless of the terrain, "she is also the girlfriend of the guy who just rearranged your face —" he gestured broadly at Ellie's swelling eye, which was, admittedly, making its presence felt with increasing insistence — "in a school parking lot —"

"I'm aware —"

"In broad daylight —"

"I was there —"

"And despite all of that," Greg said, spreading his hands like a lawyer addressing a jury he had begun to lose faith in, "you are sitting here — you, specifically, Ellie, with your one functioning eye — thinking about whether she genuinely likes the guy who gave you the other one." He paused. Let it settle. "Does that sound like a person who is not planning something?"

Ellie pinched the bridge of her nose with two fingers. This did not help her eye. She did it anyway, because she needed to do something with her hands and it felt approximately right for the quality of this moment.

Greg was off the bench now, pacing the short strip of concrete in front of her with the energy of a man who had been handed more than he could hold still with. "She has a boyfriend, Ellie. A boyfriend who is a nightmare, yes, an absolute portrait of everything wrong with —yes, fine, terrible person, we are agreed — but he is still there, he is a real and present entity, and you are standing here — skating here, whatever — daydreaming about a girl who called you a loser this morning —"

"She gave me my journal back," Ellie said.

Greg stopped pacing.

He looked at her.

"Her fingers," Ellie said, and then immediately looked like she wished she hadn't said that.

There was a silence.

"Her fingers," Greg repeated. Slowly. As if handling it carefully.

"Forget I said that."

"Her fingers have convinced you —"

"I said forget it —"

"— to potentially pursue a girl with a boyfriend who employs muscle, " Greg said, resuming his pacing with renewed conviction, "because her fingers touched yours during what was, by any objective measure, a bullying incident —"

"It wasn't —"

"She was reading your journal out loud in front of her friends!"

"She stopped!"

"Why are you defending this!"

"I'm not defending anything," Ellie said, and she said it too quietly, too evenly, and that was the thing that was the most damning thing about it — not the volume or the heat but the flatness of it, the calm of someone saying something that had been sitting inside them for long enough to settle. "I'm not planning anything. I just — I was just asking."

Greg stopped pacing.

He looked at her for a long moment. The skate park moved around them, indifferent and continuous — a kid on a half-pipe in the distance, the sound of wheels, the long flat light of late afternoon falling sideways across the concrete and turning everything gold and slightly elegiac. Greg's expression had been cycling, rapid and expressive, through its range, but it landed now on something quieter. The specific quiet of someone who knew their friend better than their friend thought they did, and was choosing, carefully, how to carry that.

He sat back down on the bench.

"Ellie," he said. Gentler, now. Sanded down.

"Don't," she said.

"I'm just saying —"

"Greg. I know." She pushed off, one small, restless kick, and rolled a few feet and came back. "I know what I'm doing. Or I know what I'm not doing. I'm not doing anything. I'm just — I'm thinking." She dragged the heel of her shoe against the concrete, scuffing it, staring at the mark it left. "People are allowed to think."

Greg watched her. Said nothing. Let her have it.

"It's fine," she said.

It landed like a coin dropping into an empty jar: small, definitive, slightly hollow.

The wheel on her skateboard hummed beneath her, low and constant, rolling and rolling and going nowhere, and the afternoon light kept doing its gold, indiscriminate thing all across the park, and somewhere above them the sky stretched out in that enormous, unbroken way it had, and Ellie stood in the middle of all of it and looked at the horizon and thought about the pink tip of your ear and the ghost of your fingers and the specific gravity of a feeling she had decided, months ago, she was not going to do anything about.

She pushed off again.

Greg picked up his oil and his rag and went back to work.

Neither of them said anything else for a long time.

It was enough.

Ellie's room looked like the inside of a very specific kind of mind.

Which was to say: it looked like chaos, but the organised kind, the kind that had a logic to it that only made sense from the inside. The walls had long since surrendered to the occupation — band posters colonised every available surface from the baseboards to the ceiling, overlapping at the edges, layered in the geological way of something that had been accumulating for years, each one a timestamp, a mood, a particular Tuesday afternoon when she'd decided this mattered and put it up with tape that had since yellowed at the corners. The Misfits. Bikini Kill. Hole. A large, slightly lopsided poster of the solar system that she'd had since she was nine and refused to take down on principle, the planets faded now to softer versions of themselves, Jupiter a pale shadow of its former drama. Beside it, a hand-drawn map of a comic universe she'd been building in her head since middle school, tacked up in pieces, connected by lines of red string that had seemed less unhinged when she'd put it up and now looked, in certain lights, like a conspiracy board.

The desk in the corner was a civilisation unto itself. Stacks of comics, organised by a system that would have been incomprehensible to anyone else but was, to Ellie, as legible as a library catalogue. A half-finished drawing she'd abandoned two weeks ago. Three pens that worked and one that definitely didn't but kept getting picked up by mistake. A small potted cactus that she'd named Gerald and watered erratically and which had, against all reasonable odds, survived.

The guitar lived against the wall beside the window — an old acoustic with a crack along the body that had been there when it was given to her by her dad, Joel, at fifteen and which she'd never gotten around to fixing, partly because she didn't have the money and partly because she'd come to think of the crack as a feature, a mark of character, a thing that had a story. Its presence filled the room the way all instruments filled rooms, with a particular kind of potential energy, the sense of something that could become sound at any moment if asked.

On the floor, a skateboard she hadn't put away yet. On the ceiling, a cluster of glow-in-the-dark stars she'd put up in seventh grade, arranged not randomly but in the actual configuration of Orion's Belt, because she had been that kind of twelve-year-old and some things didn't change.

It was, in every way that mattered, entirely hers. The room of a person who had been filling space with the evidence of herself for years, who decorated like she was leaving proof.

Tonight, it felt like a very small place to contain a very large mood.

The journal was open across her knees, and the pen in her hand was moving with the furious velocity of something trying to outrun itself.

She was not writing neatly. Neat was not the register she was operating in. The words came out pressed hard into the page, the pen dragging with the specific pressure of a hand that was communicating with its whole body weight, the letters angular and fast and running slightly uphill the way her handwriting always did when she was past the point of caring about presentation. It was less like writing and more like an exorcism — dragging things out of the dark interior of herself and pinning them to the page before they could do any more damage in there, getting them outside where they could be looked at from a distance, filed and categorised and rendered slightly less enormous by the act of having been named.

Asher, she wrote, and what followed was a paragraph that would have made Greg applaud and her mother weep, a dense architectural construction of frustration and fury with its foundations in the parking lot and its towers reaching all the way up into the general, aching unfairness of how the world was organised, who it rewarded, what it permitted and what it quietly endorsed by its silence. She wrote about his face when he'd said what he'd said to Greg, the flat, casual cruelty of it, and felt the anger move through her again like a current — still live, still hot, still capable. She wrote about the parking lot and the hits she'd taken and the hits Greg had taken, and her pen pressed so hard into the paper at that part that she went through slightly, leaving a ghost of the letters on the page beneath.

She wrote: I don't regret it. And underlined it twice. And then a third time for structural integrity.

She wrote about the cafeteria, and the journal being held out to her at the end of everything, and she wrote her fingers and then went back and scribbled it out, several times, with the pen going back and forth until the ink was a solid dark bar, a redaction, a classified document. She was not writing about that. That was not the kind of thing she was writing about tonight.

She filled two more pages. She didn't time it. When she finally stopped, the pen hovering over the paper, there was nothing left to write that wouldn't be circling back to things she'd already been over twice, so she stopped.

She closed the journal.

She sat in the quiet of her room — the quiet that wasn't silence, that was the city outside the window and the hum of the light above the desk and the creak of the building settling into itself — and pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes.

Breathed.

Let the anger cool the way things cooled: slowly, unevenly, the heat still present in places.

She sighed — a long, full-body thing, the sigh of something deflating by degrees — and dropped her hands from her face, and her right hand caught the side of her cheekbone on the way down.

"—hss—"

The pain fired up sharp and immediate, a lit match dragged across the bruise, and she pulled her hand away and held it in the air as if apologising to it. She reached up gingerly, instead, and pressed two careful fingers to the ridge of her cheekbone, testing the topography of the damage like a geologist assessing unstable ground. 

The bruise had fully committed now, had moved from possibility to statement, a deep and spreading thing beneath her eye that she'd glimpsed in the bathroom mirror an hour ago and decided not to look at again until morning, when presumably she'd be better prepared to deal with the particular aesthetic of having been punched in the face by someone with more mass than personality.

She sat with her eyes closed.

The room was quiet. Gerald the cactus did not offer any comments.

And in the dark behind her eyelids, where there was nothing to look at and therefore nothing to choose not to look at, you arrived without invitation or preamble, the way you always arrived in the unguarded spaces — not dramatically, not with any of the fanfare you'd think something that caused this much structural damage would bring, but quietly, almost gently, settling in like a tide coming in, like a frequency she was already tuned to.

The afternoon light in your hair.

The pink at the tip of your ear.

The way your fingers hadn't immediately let go.

Ellie exhaled. Slow. Measured. The exhale of someone practising containment.

Her thumb, moving with its own agenda, was already tracing the edge of the journal in her lap. She noticed it doing this. She told it not to. It continued anyway, the way the body continued things the brain hadn't signed off on, operating on a different authority entirely — the authority of want, which didn't ask permission and didn't particularly care about consequences.

She opened the journal.

Not to the new pages. Her fingers moved backward through the book with the instinct of something that had made this trip before — back past the furious entry, back past the half-finished thoughts and the doodles in the margins, back through weeks of herself, until the pages changed quality. Until the writing gave way to something else.

She stopped.

There you were.

Spread across three pages in soft graphite, built out of the kind of careful, compulsive observation that Ellie could only justify to herself by the fact that she'd never intended to show these to anyone, ever, and therefore they existed in a separate category from things she needed to be accountable for. They were not portraits, exactly. They were studies. Fragments. The way a scientist filled a notebook with measurements of something they were trying to understand — not to possess it, but to comprehend it, to make it less mysterious by breaking it into its component parts and looking at each one.

Except the thing being studied was you. And Ellie was not, if she was being honest with herself, and she was not being honest with herself, approaching this scientifically.

There was the sketch of just your hands — the one she'd done from memory, which meant it was probably slightly wrong in the specifics and completely right in the feeling, your fingers curled loosely around a pen in third period, the particular way you held things, unhurried, like everything you touched could wait for you. Beside it, in her small cramped handwriting, a note: always looks like she's about to say something important. And below that, a bracket, and the word: doesn't. And then: or maybe she does and I'm not close enough to hear it. She'd written that last part in smaller letters, like she'd been trying to make it take up less space.

There was the sketch of your profile — just the outline, the particular architecture of your face seen from the side in the forty seconds she'd had in the lunch line two weeks ago before you'd moved and she'd had to stop looking before someone noticed. Annotated: the way her chin tilts up when she's talking to someone she thinks is boring. And then, at the bottom of the page, almost to herself, a note that she'd pressed lighter than the others, barely there, a whisper in graphite: tilted up at me once. in the corridor. didn't look bored.

There was a sketch of the back of your head. Of your hands again, different angle. Of the particular way you sat — spine straight, never fully relaxed, like you were always half-prepared for something, like rest was a performance you'd learned and not a thing that came naturally. She'd written next to that one: who taught her she had to sit like that?

And threading through all of it, the annotations of a person trying to decode a language they'd never been taught — small observations, careful and private and slightly devastating in their honesty, the handwriting of someone writing for an audience of one and still hedging.

Ellie looked at the pages spread across her knees and felt something move through her that was the internal equivalent of stepping off a curb you hadn't seen — that sudden, weightless, stomach-dropping moment of oh, this is happening.

You did ballet. She knew this the way she knew most things about you — involuntarily, through the osmosis of proximity, information that arrived without being asked for and then refused to leave. She'd seen you come out of the gym once in the early morning with your hair up and a bag over your shoulder and the specific, turned-out way you walked that she'd catalogued and filed and told herself was nothing. Ballet. Pink and precise and entirely incompatible with the girl sitting in her room right now with a bruised face and band posters and a cracked guitar and a cactus she'd named after a middle-aged man.

She was a punk. She owned three shirts in any colour other than black and wore two of them ironically. She had skated so many times she could feel the specific texture of the park's concrete in her sleep. She read comics by lamplight and knew the names of every star you could see from the roof of this building and had strong, extensive, practised opinions about guitar riffs.

And you — you were the opposite of all of it. You were the negative image of her. You moved through the world like it had been arranged for you ahead of time, like the lights came on as you walked and went off when you left, like everything that touched you either belonged there or briefly believed it did. You were held together at every seam. You were the popular girl with the popular boyfriend and the posse and the rich, perfect family.

You were so completely, utterly, structurally different from her that it should have been a closed case. A non-starter. A door that had never been open in the first place.

And yet.

And yet here were three pages of graphite evidence, pressed into the paper with varying degrees of pressure and annotated in small handwriting by the specific, traitorous hand of a girl who knew better.

"Oh, come on," Ellie said aloud, to no one. To the room. To Gerald.

She slammed the journal shut.

The sound was a verdict. Sharp and final and slightly embarrassing, muffled by the room's soft clutter, absorbed by the band posters and the solar system and the three-years-worth of herself layered on every surface. The journal sat in her lap with the smug, inanimate energy of something that knew exactly what it contained and had no feelings about it.

She pressed both palms down on the cover. Held them there.

You don't even like me, she thought, and the thought was directed at the journal, at the pages inside, at the graphite studies of someone who called her a loser in public and held her journal out of reach and looked at her with an expression that shuttered closed before Ellie could read it. You don't even — I shouldn't even — this is so —

She groaned. A full, low, ceiling-directed groan, the sound of a person losing an argument with themselves that they'd been winning for months and had now, clearly, decisively, completely lost.

She fell back onto her bed. The journal went with her, clutched to her chest. She stared at the glow-in-the-dark Orion's Belt on the ceiling, which had not yet charged enough to glow, just sat there in the dark in the plain and patient configuration of three stars that had been called a hunter for thousands of years by people who needed the sky to make sense.

She understood the impulse.

She closed her eyes.

You shouldn't like her, she told herself, with the firm, reasonable authority of someone delivering a memo to a department that had already stopped listening. She is your bully. She has a boyfriend. She is the opposite of everything you are. You are going to get nothing from this except an inventory of the ways it doesn't work out. You know this. You have known this for months. You have the knowledge. You have the evidence. You are an idiot for even thinking that you have a chance—

The tip of your ear. Pink as a secret.

"Shut up," Ellie whispered, to herself, to the ceiling, to the three stars she'd arranged up there at twelve years old because even then she'd been the kind of person who needed to put things in their right places and call them by their names.

Outside her window, the city moved through its evening, unhurried, enormous, deeply uninterested in her predicament. Gerald sat on the desk in his usual posture, which was the posture of a cactus and therefore involved no feelings about the situation. The guitar leaned against the wall, all that potential sound locked inside it, waiting.

The glow-in-the-dark stars, slowly, began to glow.

The morning had the particular quality of mornings that had not yet decided what they wanted to be.

Grey at the edges, the sky outside the school's narrow corridor windows the colour of a thought that hadn't finished forming yet, the light filtering through the glass in thin, uncommitted strips that fell across the linoleum and did nothing especially interesting with it. The hallway between second and third period was its usual organised catastrophe — a river of shoulders and backpacks and the overlapping percussion of lockers being opened and closed with varying degrees of emotional investment, conversations fragmenting and reconnecting like mercury, the whole thing operating on the specific frequency of two hundred teenagers who had been awake for two hours and were deeply unconvinced it had been worth it.

Ellie stood with her back against the locker beside Greg's open one, one foot propped against the metal, watching the hallway with the detached observational energy of someone standing on the bank of a river they had no intention of entering. Greg was elbow-deep in his locker, conducting what appeared to be an archaeological excavation of its contents, narrating the discovery of each item with the running commentary of a man to whom silence was a personal affront.

"— and I genuinely don't know when I started keeping a granola bar in here, but it's been here long enough that I'm emotionally attached to it —"

"Throw it away," Ellie said.

"I can't, it's like a roommate at this point —"

"It's a granola bar, Greg."

"But it's been here longer than some of my friendships —"

She was listening. She was mostly listening. Some percentage of her attention was on Greg and his emotional support granola bar, and the rest of it — the percentage she would not have been able to name without incriminating herself — was doing what it always did in crowded hallways, which was run a quiet, automatic, completely involuntary background process. A scan. A search function she hadn't installed and couldn't uninstall, running on a frequency she didn't choose, returning one specific result.

Her eyes moved across the hallway.

Found your friend group first — the constellation without its sun, gathered in the usual corner with the usual architecture of performance: someone doing the talking, someone doing the agreeing, phones out, hair touched, the elaborate social machinery running at full operational capacity.

Her eyes moved across the group.

Moved again.

Her brow furrowed.

You weren't there.

The group was complete in every other respect, the full roster present and performing, but you — the axis, the fixed point, the thing the whole arrangement orbited around — were absent. The constellation without its brightest star, still going through the motions of being a constellation, slightly less luminous for the gap at its centre.

Ellie's gaze swept the hallway with the efficiency of something that had done this before.

Then it snagged on the other absence.

Asher wasn't there either.

The realisation settled into her stomach the way something unwelcome settled — not loudly, not dramatically, but with a quiet, uninvited weight, a stone dropped into still water with no splash, just the rings spreading outward and the thing sitting at the bottom, heavy and unreasonable and not prepared to be reasoned with. It was jealousy, plain and ugly and domesticated, the kind that had been living inside her long enough to know its way around, and she hated it the way you hated something that knew too much about you — personally, and with a specific resentment reserved for things you couldn't evict.

She looked away.

Looked at the ceiling. Looked at Greg, who had located his textbook beneath what appeared to be three months of other people's futures and was now regarding it with the expression of a man encountering a distant relative he hadn't expected at a family gathering.

"There it is," he said. With feeling.

"Incredible," Ellie said. Flat. Meaning it.

The bell rang, cleaving the hallway noise in two.

Greg closed the locker with the definitive thud of a chapter ending and turned to her, already re-organising his bag. "You've got math," he said, with the tone of someone delivering a piece of information they already knew wasn't going to be well-received.

Ellie's expression underwent a brief, specific journey. "I have allegedly got math," she said.

"Ellie —"

"The keyword being allegedly."

"You've already missed it three times this —"

"Three is a coincidence," Ellie said, pushing off from the locker with her foot. "Four is a pattern. I'm not ready to be a pattern."

Greg looked at her with the resigned, sun-weathered expression of someone who had stopped fighting a tide a long time ago and was now simply observing it with documentary interest. "You're going to fail," he said.

"Not today though," she said. "And today is all I've got."

He opened his mouth.

"Go to class, Greg."

"I'm just —"

"I'll see you at lunch."

He pointed at her. The point said: we're going to talk about this. She pointed back. Her point said: no we aren't. They had an entire conversation in the space between their index fingers, and then Greg sighed the sigh of a man who had made his peace with a great many things and walked away, absorbed into the thinning river of the hallway.

Ellie walked.

The hallway was emptying out in the rapid, purposeful way it emptied when the bell had technically rung and the window between acceptable lateness and actual consequences was closing by the second. She moved against the current of the last stragglers, unhurried, hands in the front pocket of her hoodie, the bruise under her eye making its daily editorial comments about her life choices.

She passed your friend group on the way.

She didn't look at them. This was a practiced art — the deliberate, forward-facing non-look of someone who had learned that acknowledging a thing gave it power and had therefore developed an aggressive policy of visual neutrality. Eyes ahead. Jaw easy. The posture of someone who was simply a person moving through a hallway, which was all she was, which was absolutely and completely all she was.

"Nice jacket," said a voice from the group, in the particular register that made nice mean the opposite of nice, the word hollowed out and repacked with something else entirely.

Ellie did not break stride.

"Does she buy those at the men's section, or —"

She did not look. She did not slow down. She let the words move over her the way weather moved over a landscape — it happened, it passed, the landscape remained. She had built herself to be the landscape. It had taken a while, and there were still storms that found the cracks, but on a Wednesday morning in a school hallway about a jacket, she was fine.

She was fine.

She rounded the corner, and the voices dissolved back into the general noise of the school.

She was fine.

The plan was simple. The bathroom at the end of the east wing was the jurisdiction of no one, a neutral zone, tucked past the art rooms in a corridor that smelled like turpentine and ambition and where the traffic dropped to near-zero once the bell had rung. She'd skipped in worse places. She'd skipped in better places. The bathroom was comfortable. She'd read half a comic in there last Thursday and nobody had come in the whole time.

She heard it before she reached the door.

Soft. Barely there. The kind of sound that was trying very hard not to be a sound at all — compressed and controlled, held between the teeth, with all the effort of something that had been trained to take up as little space as possible. It was the specific acoustic signature of someone crying who had no interest in being caught crying, crying the way you cried when you'd gotten good at crying privately, when the architecture of your composure was still technically standing but the foundations were doing something structural and quiet and not visible from the outside.

Ellie stopped.

She stood outside the bathroom door with her hand not quite on the handle, and the sound came through the gap and she turned it over in her head for a moment, this small, compressed, trying-not-to-be thing.

Then she pushed the door open.

The sniffling stopped. Immediately. Like a tap turned off. Like a light switch. The silence that replaced it was the specific silence of someone going very still and performing the absence of themselves, the aggressive quiet of a person trying to convince the room they weren't there.

Ellie stepped in.

The bathroom was cold and fluorescent, the kind of lighting that did nobody any favours, the kind that turned everything it touched slightly greenish and exposed. Two sinks, the mirror above them running the full width of the wall, a paper towel dispenser with a broken lever that had been broken since September. The tiles on the floor were the colour of old cream.

At the far end of the mirror, you stood.

Not crying. The crying was gone — vanished, packed away, dismantled with a speed and thoroughness that was itself a kind of performance, the performance of a person who had long practice in making themselves presentable under any conditions. Your eyes were clear. Your chin was level. You had constructed the face you wore in the hallways and you were wearing it, complete and armoured and assembled with the precision of something that knew it might need to withstand scrutiny.

The only evidence was the slight, betraying pinkness at the rim of your eyes. The kind of pinkness that no amount of composure could fully recall. The kind that stayed after everything else had been packed up, small and stubborn, the last ember of something that had briefly been a fire.

Ellie looked at you.

You looked at her.

For one unguarded half-second, your eyes went wide — just slightly, just briefly, a crack in the composure, a hairline fracture that the camera would have missed but Ellie, standing four feet away in a fluorescent bathroom, did not. It was the expression of someone who had been expecting anyone else. Anyone in the world. Anyone but the specific person who had just walked through the door.

Then it was gone. Shuttered. The curtains drawn so fast the motion was almost theoretical.

Your gaze dropped.

And landed on her face.

Specifically: on the bruise that had made its full, committed entrance overnight, spreading beneath her eye in the deep, decided colours of something that had settled in for the long haul — purpled at the centre, fading outward through red into a yellowish green at the edges, the cartography of someone's knuckles mapped in pigment onto her cheekbone. She had looked at it in the mirror that morning and felt the way you felt about weather you'd predicted correctly: grimly vindicated.

Something moved along your jaw. Subtle. Quick. A tensing, barely visible, the muscle pulling tight the way things pulled tight when they were working against something. A reflex with a latch on it. Your eyes stayed on the bruise for a fraction of a second too long before your expression reassembled itself back into its default setting, which was impeccable and slightly arctic.

"Who did that to you?" you said.

You said it the way you said most things — with the bored, ambient cool of a person enquiring about something that was mildly interesting and completely beneath them. The question wrapped in the tone of someone who didn't particularly care about the answer and was asking purely as a formality, as a social gesture, as the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

Ellie blinked.

She realised, in the same moment she registered that she was staring at you, that she had been staring at you. She pulled her gaze sideways, looked at the broken paper towel dispenser, looked at the wall, rearranged her face into something approaching functional.

"Fell," she said.

Your eyebrows rose. A millimetre. Maybe two. In the language of your face, which operated on a scale of extraordinary subtlety, this was practically a standing ovation.

"You fell," you said.

"Down some stairs," Ellie said. "It was a whole thing."

The corner of your mouth moved. It was the smallest possible distance the corner of a mouth could travel and still technically qualify as movement, and it was weighted with the specific amusement of someone who had heard something they found contemptible but couldn't entirely suppress finding funny. It was not a kind expression. It was the expression of a scalpel that had been taught to smile.

"You fell," you said again, savouring the syllables like they were something to be tasted. "Down stairs."

"It happens to people," Ellie said.

"To you apparently." You turned back to the mirror, extracted a lip gloss from somewhere with the practiced ease of a magician producing something from their sleeve, and uncapped it. "Must have been quite the fall. Stairs do all that on their own, or did you trip over your —" your eyes moved, briefly, to the reflection of her, starting at the shoes, moving upward with the unhurried assessment of a customs officer looking for contraband, "— ensemble."

"The stairs had strong opinions about my hoodie," Ellie said. "Very aggressive. We had words."

You applied the lip gloss with the focused, deliberate attention of a painter adding a final detail, pressing your lips together after in the way that Ellie absolutely did not clock and was not filing anywhere. "You should watch where you're going," you said.

"Noted."

"Especially in buildings," you said. "Buildings with floors. Which you seem to have some difficulty navigating."

"Really valuable advice," Ellie said. "Transformative, even. I feel like a different person."

You made a sound. It was the sound of something that had started to be a laugh and been intercepted and redirected into something more architecturally appropriate, something that emerged as a breath through the nose with an undercurrent of something warmer that was gone almost before it arrived, like a radio signal passing through from a distance.

You put the lip gloss away. You turned to the mirror again, ran your fingers through your hair with the particular efficiency of someone re-assembling something that had briefly been in disarray, each movement precise and practised, the ritual of a person who understood that their appearance was armour and maintained it accordingly. Ellie watched the side of your face in the mirror and thought: who taught you to hold yourself like that, and the thought arrived in the same handwriting as the annotation in her journal and she told it firmly to leave.

"There's a party," you said.

It was casual. So casual it was practically horizontal — laid out flat in the sentence with all the deliberate nonchalance of something that had been dropped in very specifically and was pretending it had always been there. You said it to the mirror. To the reflection of your own hair. To the air approximately six inches to the left of anything that could be interpreted as intention.

Ellie's brain, which had been running at a manageable pace, briefly redlined.

"A party," she said.

"Friday," you said. "At Jake Brown's place. It's a whole thing apparently."

"Right," Ellie said.

"People are going," you said.

"People tend to," Ellie agreed.

A beat.

Another beat.

Ellie felt the thing that was happening in her chest doing what it was doing, which was building toward something she wasn't certain was a good idea, and she looked at you in the mirror and you were still looking at your own reflection, still straightening up your hair with the focused indifference of someone who had not said what they'd just said, who had not brought up a party in the middle of a school bathroom on a Wednesday morning to a girl they had allegedly no opinions about.

"Are you —" Ellie started, and she kept her voice flat, kept it level, kept it from doing the hopeful, cresting, idiotic thing it wanted to do, "— are you inviting me?"

The transformation was immediate.

Like a wall going up in real time, brick by visible brick — your spine straightened, your expression cooled, and something moved across your features that was not quite disgust and not quite discomfort and was instead the specific, hybrid product of both, the look of someone who had been caught doing something they'd decided they weren't doing and was now administering a correction.

"Inviting —" you said, and the word in your mouth was a thing you were holding at arm's length, something retrieved from a surface you wouldn't normally touch. You turned from the mirror to look at her directly, fully, the first time you'd done it since she'd walked in, and your eyes were winter. "I was making conversation. It's called small talk. People do it."

"Right," Ellie said.

"I wasn't inviting you," you said. The emphasis landed like a gavel. "Why would I invite you? You're —" your gaze moved over her again, brief and merciless, "— you."

"Me," Ellie said.

"You'd show up in that," you said, gesturing at the hoodie with a hand that conveyed an entire aesthetic philosophy in a single motion, "and stand in the corner reading a comic book about the solar system or whatever —"

"I don't read comics at parties —"

"— and bore everyone within a five-foot radius with facts about space —"

"I've been to parties," Ellie said, with great dignity.

"Have you," you said, in the tone of someone granting a point they did not grant.

"Multiple," Ellie said. "I've been to several parties."

You looked at her. Something moved at the very edge of your expression — that intercepted almost-laugh again, surfacing and being pushed back down, your mouth pressed into a line that was working harder than a line normally needed to. You held her gaze for a moment, and in that moment the cold of your expression had the thinnest possible layer of something else over it, something that was almost, from a distance, in poor lighting, with a significant number of caveats, almost warm.

Then you looked away.

You turned to the mirror one final time, checked your reflection with the swift, comprehensive, top-to-bottom assessment of a general reviewing troops before a deployment, found it satisfactory. You picked up your bag.

"It's a good thing you weren't invited then," you said, and your voice had recollected itself fully, was back in its regular register, smooth and cool and armoured at every seam. You moved toward the door, your heels a clean, deliberate percussion against the old cream tiles. At the door, you paused — not long, not dramatically, just a fraction of a moment, a held note — and said, without turning around, to the door, to the air, to no one specific:

"You'd never get in anyway, loser."

The door swung shut behind you.

The bathroom returned to its cold fluorescent quiet. The paper towel dispenser stood broken at the wall. The mirror showed Ellie her own reflection: bruised eye, worn hoodie, the expression of someone who had just been dropped into deep water and was still working out which direction was up.

She stood very still.

Then she turned to the mirror.

Looked at herself for a long moment — at the bruise, at the hoodie, at the face she had been born with and the expression currently living on it, which was confused and flustered and just fractionally, structurally annoyed — and she breathed.

She thought about the way you'd asked who did that to her.

She thought about your jaw, tightening at the sight of the bruise like it had done it without asking you first.

She thought about the party you hadn't invited her to.

She thought about the way the corner of your mouth had moved and the sound that had been a laugh before you'd stopped it and the way you'd said you'd never get in anyway to a door you were already walking out of, like it needed to be said quickly, like it needed to be said away from her, like the distance was load-bearing.

She straightened up.

She rolled her shoulders back.

She looked at her own reflection with the focused, calm, absolute certainty of a person who had just made a decision and felt good about it, who had identified a direction and was pointing herself at it, who had been told she couldn't and had heard, beneath the can't, in the register beneath language, underneath the cold of it all — something entirely different.

She was going to that party.

She was going to that party, and she was going to wear whatever she wanted, and she was not going to bring a comic book.

Probably.

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He huffs under his breath but allows you to come around the car anyway. The afternoon air is chilly enough to bite at your cheeks as you help him carefully out of the passenger seat, one arm steady around him while he grumbles out being treated like he’s ninety years old.

“Y’know,” you cut him mid-rant, “you complain a lot for someone who almost burst an appendix.”

“It was not bursting.”

“The doctor said—”

“He didn’t know shit.”

You laugh quietly under your breath as you guide him up the porch steps. The inside of the house smells exactly the same as always: coffee grounds, old wood, and laundry detergent. Your body moves instinctively, kicking the door shut behind you before helping Joel settle carefully onto the couch.

Joel eyes you as you grab the folded blanket from the armrest and toss it over him. “Have you always been this bossy?”

“Pff, I’m not bossy.”

“Uh-huh. Definitely got it from Ellie.”

The name lands heavier than either of you expect.

Ellie. The stubborn foul-mouthed girl he’d taken in years ago and somehow ended up loving like she’d always been his. And your ex-girlfriend, too.

It’s been almost eight months since the breakup. Eight months since life started pulling the two of you in ten different directions at once and every attempt to hold the relationship together somehow turned into another exhausting argument neither of you really knew how to fix.

Stress from school, work, the future— all of it seemed to twist into self-destruction eventually. Every conversation turned into tension, sharp words, or silence. And finally, a messy breakup neither of you handled well.

You tried distancing yourself after everything imploded between you two. But Joel still texted you every couple of weeks asking how work was going, still invited you out from breakfast some Saturdays, still called whenever he needed help setting up some new appliance because Ellie “explains shit like an asshole” (his words, not yours… but you agree).

And you kept answering and showing up because losing Ellie had already felt like grieving someone alive. Losing Joel too would have made it unbearable.

Your hands pause briefly against the blanket before you straighten up again, pretending it didn’t affect you at all.

“Speaking of,” you say carefully, “did she ever get back to you?”

Joel sighs, leaning his head back against the couch cushions.

“Nah. Left her a voicemail last night and a text like an hour ago,” he scratches at his beard tiredly. “Kid’s busy lately. Finals, class, whatever… and this happened pretty fast.”

Of course. Typical fucking Ellie, you think to yourself.

You bite the inside of your cheek hard enough to stop the thought from fully showing on your face, though something must still slip through because Joel gives you a look.

“She ain’t ignoring me on purpose.”

“I didn’t say she was.”

“Thought it real loud, though.”

You roll your eyes and move toward the kitchen before he can see the guilty twitch at the corner of your mouth.

“Well,” you open the fridge, a sad sigh leaving your mouth as you inspect the contents inside, “I’m glad you reached out. Someone’s gotta make sure you don’t live off saltines and beer while recovering… or ever.”

“Beer’s got grain in it.”

“Oh my God.”

Joel’s low chuckle follows you through the kitchen, warm despite everything.

Half an hour later, you’re halfway through making him tea when the front door suddenly swings open hard enough to rattle the frame.

“Joel?” her voice is breathless and rushed. “Shit, I’m sorry. I just got your text, my phone was dead and I had this stupid lab this morning and—”

The words cut off abruptly.

You look up and there she is. Ellie stands frozen near the doorway, grocery bags hanging from one hand and a pharmacy bag crushed tightly in the other. Her hair’s messier than you remember, auburn strands escaping the loose bun at the nape of her neck, dark circles sitting heavily beneath tired green eyes.

She stares at you, clearly not prepared for this possibility at all. Honestly, you weren’t either.

Joel clears his throat from the couch. “This is awkward as hell.”

His voice finally jolts Ellie back to life.

“What’re you doing here?” she asks immediately.

You lean casually against the kitchen counter despite the sudden tightness in your chest. “Nice to see you too.”

“I’m serious.”

“Joel needed help.”

“Yeah, and I’m here now.”

You glance pointedly at the grocery bags cutting into her fingers. “Little late for that.”

Ellie’s jaw tightens instantly. “I came as soon as I heard.”

“It’s been a minute and I’m not hearing any ‘thanks for sticking by my dad through his surgery, taking him back home and staying through his recovery’ yet.”

“Don’t start with— Wait.” Her eyebrows pinch together. “You’re doing what?”

Joel groans loudly from the couch. “M’too sober for this.”

Neither of you acknowledge him.

“I’m staying for a week,” you explain flatly. “Doctor said someone should keep an eye on him the first few days.”

Ellie lets out a short laugh, finding the idea ridiculous. “Okay. No need for that. I’m here now, so you can go.”

Your own eyebrows lift immediately. “Excuse me?”

“He’s my dad,” Ellie drops the pharmacy bag onto the counter with a sharp thud. “I can handle it.”

“I’m right here,” Joel grumbles out, but neither of you pay attention to it.

“He still needs help,” you gesture vaguely. “You just said you barely checked your phone because of class.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t take care of him.”

“You planning on teleporting back every three to four hours to give him meds? And what if he has an emergency?”

Ellie opens her mouth, then closes it again. Got her.

You cross your arms. “Exactly.”

Joel points vaguely between the two of you from the couch. “Y’know, normal people usually say hello first.”

“You stay out of this,” both of you snap in unison.

He sinks deeper into the cushions. “Jesus Christ.”

Ellie drags a hand down her face tiredly. She’s already overwhelmed enough as it is— finals week, barely sleeping, shifts at the tattoo shop, and now this. Guilt flashes briefly across her face because she hadn’t been there when Joel needed her most.

But you were. The thought alone scratches at every raw nerve she already has.

“My classes are mostly mornings and I got like one or two shifts at the shop this week,” she exhales sharply through her nose. “I’ll be here afternoons and pretty much most nights.”

You hesitate for half a second before answering. “Well… I work afternoons.”

Ellie glances up. “So?”

“So,” you continue reluctantly, “if we both take care of him, someone would always be around in case anything happens.”

The room falls quiet for a second.

The solution makes practical sense, and that’s the problem. Because now both of you are staring at the very real possibility of spending the next week under the same roof again— sharing space, routines, and pretending your breakup didn’t leave bruises neither of you ever properly dealt with.

Ellie looks about as thrilled as you feel. Her shoulders tense slightly, face turned away as she avoids your eyes altogether. You tap your fingers restlessly against the kitchen counter, dread clear in your expression.

Joel, however, looks deeply entertained now.

“Compromise,” he hums. “Very proud of you girls.”

“Shut up, Joel,” Ellie rolls her eyes before finally looking back at you, annoyance slipping out. “Fine, we’re doing this. But we’re not hanging out or anything, don’t get any weird ideas.”

“Ew, that’s not even a concern,” you deadpan.

She drags a hand down her face for the second time now, and you notice now. There’s a slight squint around her eyes, tension pulling between her brows.

Your body reacts before your pride can stop it. You grab the aspirin bottle from beside the sink and toss it toward her without warning.

Ellie catches it automatically midair and looks surprised once she read the label. “…what?”

“You do that thing with your eye when you’ve got a migraine,” you say simply, turning back toward the counter and pretending to focus on the tea instead of her.

“What thing?”

“The squinting.”

Ellie scoffs instantly. “I don’t squint.”

But she still takes the aspirin anyway.

Joel watches the entire exchange from the couch before lifting his hand tiredly. “Can I get my fuckin’ tea now?”

------------

You’re already up by seven-thirty, moving around the kitchen in an oversized shirt and sleep shorts while butter crackles softly in the pan. The doctor had been annoyingly specific about making sure Joel ate before taking his meds, which means you’re now forcing scrambled eggs onto a stubborn sixty-year-old man before eight in the morning.

“Can you at least add some ham and cheese?” he complains from the kitchen table.

“Should have said that before I finished cooking.”

“Shit.”

You snort quietly, sliding a plate in front of him before reaching automatically for the pill bottle beside the sink.

The coffee finishes brewing when the clock catches your attention. 8:04am.

No footsteps, no cabinet doors slamming, no sight of Ellie. Weird.

Joel notices too. “Didn’t Ellie say she had class today?”

“She did.”

“Mind checking on her?”

You sigh dramatically and set the mug down onto the counter. “Do I have to?”

Joel gives you a look.

The hallway feels oddly familiar in the morning light. You stop outside Ellie’s room —technically, the guest room now— and knock twice. There’s no response.

You knock louder this time. “Ellie?”

A muffled groan answers you. Then nothing again.

“The things I do for this old man,” you mutter under your breath before pushing the door open slightly.

The room’s dim, curtains still mostly closed. Ellie’s completely buried beneath the blankets, one arm hanging off the side of the bed while her phone sits on the floor, just out of her reach. She must have dropped it late at night when she fell asleep.

“Ellie,” there’s another groan in response, but she doesn’t move, so you try again. “Ellie, it’s after eight.”

Her eyes snap open and she bolts upright so fast she nearly tangles herself in the blankets.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck—”

You lean against the doorway, deeply unimpressed, while she scrambles around the bed looking for clothes and lets out five different curses every two seconds.

You watch her for a second before crossing your arms. “Most people use alarms, y’know?”

She frantically grabs her phone, squinting at the screen.

Then, without thinking, she blurts. “I turned the volume off cause you hate loud alarms.”

Oh. That’s old. Like, old old. It belonged to another version of you two entirely. Back when you used to stay over constantly, when she still lived at Joel’s. Sleepy mornings tangled together in her room while her six different alarms nearly gave you a heart attack until she eventually started muting them for your sake.

Ellie realizes what she said almost immediately and scowls, throwing the phone onto the bed.

“Not because of you,” she mutters quickly. “Wasn’t in the mood to hear bitching first thing in the morning.”

Ah. There it is.

“The only one bitching here is you.”

“Can you just leave so I can get changed, weirdo?”

You push yourself off the doorway. “God, relax. Nobody wants to see your morning goblin form anyway.”

“Nobody wants to show it to you,” Ellie mumbles while digging through the bag full of clothes she brought from her place.

“Little late for that.”

She flips you off without even looking. You head back toward the kitchen, hearing drawers slam and muffled cursing behind you the entire way down the hallway.

Joel looks up from the table the second you walk back in. “She alive?”

“Unfortunately.”

You drop into the chair across from him with a quiet sigh, finally grabbing your own plate now that this little moment of chaos has temporarily settled.

Joel eyes you over the rim of his mug. “For two exes that can’t stand each other, y’all sure bicker like an old married couple.”

You point your fork at him immediately. “Careful, old man. Your blood pressure can’t handle this.”

“I’m not even that fuckin’ old.”

The kitchen falls into a quieter rhythm soon after. The soft hum of the fridge, silverware clinking against plates, Joel occasionally grumbling every time he shifts wrong in his chair.

About five minutes later, Ellie storms into the kitchen with her backpack loosely slung over one shoulder, flannel half buttoned, hair still damp around the edges from splashing water on her face to look more awake.

She heads straight for the counter, pours the coffee onto a travel mug and, without even asking, steals a piece of toast directly off Joel’s plate.

“I was eating that.”

“You love me,” she shoots back before taking a bite.

She’s already halfway toward the front door before slowing slightly, eyes flicking toward you for the briefest second. She clears her throat awkwardly and points vaguely toward Joel, a piece of toast still hanging from her mouth.

“I’ll be back in a couple hours.”

“I leave around one-thirty,” you shrug, taking a sip of your own water bottle.

Ellie nods. “Got it. Bye.”

She’s gone before either of you can respond, the door shutting behind her with a soft thud. Off the corner of your eye, you can see Joel open up his mouth again.

“No,” you cut him off immediately, not even looking up from your plate. “Shut your cake hole. I don’t wanna hear a peep from you.”

He leans back in his chair slowly, deeply offended. “Maybe I was gonna ask you to pass the jam.”

“There’s no jam.”

Joel frowns for a second before muttering, “Maybe I wanted some.”

-------------------

A couple of minutes past one, the front door finally opens again.

You’re in the kitchen packing leftovers into containers by then, moving around with casual efficiency. Ellie walks in looking significantly more alive than she did earlier, though barely. She lets her backpack drop to the floor as she plops into a chair.

“Someone’s more alive,” you greet without looking up.

“Someone’s more annoying,” Ellie rolls her eyes automatically, already shrugging off her flannel when the smell of food properly hits her. “…did you cook?”

“No, Joel did. Right after he did a hundred push-ups.”

“Smartass.”

You snort softly and finally glance at her. There’s ink smudged faintly across the side of her hand, probably from class notes, and she looks exhausted. You push down any concern, and before she can say anything else, you start pointing toward the counter one thing at a time.

“Joel already took his noon meds,” you start. “Next dose is at four, but make sure he eats first or he’ll get nauseous again.”

Ellie’s brows furrow slightly. “Again?”

“He tried taking them on an empty stomach.”

She nods once, quieter now. She catches herself actually looking at you as you keep moving around the kitchen. At the way you tidy up as you speak, at the tiredness sitting beneath your eyes, even though you’re clearly trying not to show it.

There’s an awkward twist in her chest at the thought of how naturally you’ve slipped into taking care of Joel.

“He’s asleep right now,” you continue, not even noticing the way she’s staring at you now. “The meds knocked him out like twenty minutes ago. Food’s ready for whenever he feels hungry, but there’s some Jell-O in the fridge if he’s still nauseous and wants something light.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t let him try to bend down. He seems to think stitches are a suggestion.”

“I think I got this.”

“And I’ll be back around eight,” you keep going, grabbing your bag from the chair nearby. “I can bring dinner on the way home if he’s not vibing with the food I made. Remember he has to eat something before—”

“Yo,” Ellie cuts in finally, somewhere between amused and defensive now. “Chill. I can take care of him.”

You adjust the strap of your bag awkwardly now. “I know. I’m just saying.”

“You know I’m a competent human being, right?”

Something about the comment and the tone she uses instantly rubs you the wrong way.

“I never said you weren’t.”

“You kinda act like it.”

“Oh my God,” you shake your head. “You’re seriously getting defensive over me explaining your dad’s medications’ instructions?”

“My dad, Y/N, you just said it,” Ellie pushes herself upright and gestures vaguely at you. “You always do this shit. You swoop wanting to handle everything personally cause if you don’t, your world falls apart.”

The words hit harder than they should.

“That’s rich coming from you.”

Her expression tightens immediately. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You weren’t even there for his surgery,” you set your bag down harder than necessary.

“I got here as soon as I could.”

“Yeah, a day and a half later.”

“Fucking hell,” Ellie scoffs, hurt flashing briefly across her face before anger covers it back up. “You think I don’t already feel shitty enough about that?”

“You sure have a funny way of showing you care.”

The second the words leave your mouth, the kitchen goes dead quiet. Ellie just stares at you, and God, you know that look.

You’ve seen it before after arguments and bad days, after fights where Ellie acted angry because admitting she was hurt felt worse somehow. A past version of you would immediately stop and try to mend things, to take a step back and find a way to diffuse the situation.

But you’re angry too. Angry because she disappeared emotionally for months before the breakup. Angry because loving Ellie had sometimes felt like trying to hold onto smoke with your bare hands, hurting yourself only to find out it vanished anyways. Angry because part of you still cared enough for this to hurt after all this time.

“Don’t you even dare do that,” Ellie says finally, voice quieter but rougher now. “You know I do care.”

The kitchen feels too small, too warm. Your pulse thuds hard against your ribs.

“You tend to shut people out, Ellie.”

“Yeah? And you smother people until they can’t fucking breathe.”

Regret flickers across Ellie’s face right after.

She remembers it too. The suffocating months before the breakup, you trying to fix things every single time she spiraled, the constant talk to me, let me help, stop shutting me out. Ellie had always hated herself for needing help. That was the part you never fully understood.

How every worried look from you only made her feel more broken, every attempt to pull her closer only reminded her she was failing at being the kind of girlfriend you deserved.

She’d started avoiding conversations because she was exhausted, then avoiding your texts because she didn’t know what to say anymore, then avoiding you altogether because every time she looked at you, all she could see was disappointment slowly replacing love.

And well… you both know how that ended. A horrible final argument, too many cruel things said out of exhaustion and hurt. Ellie telling you maybe you’d both be happier if you stopped trying so hard to save something that clearly wasn’t working anymore.

Your eyes sting suddenly, and you hate it.

After eight months, after everything, she still knows exactly where to hurt you. And maybe you know where to hurt her too.

“I’m running late,” you grab your bag again, the words hollow as they leave your mouth. “Your plate’s in the microwave.”

Neither of you apologizes or takes it back.

The second the door shuts behind you, Ellie exhales shakily through her nose and drags both hands over her face. The kitchen still smells like the food you made, you even left her a plate and it’s still sitting warm inside the microwave, and for one stupid second all she can think about is how arguments between you never used to end like this before.

They used to end tangled together under blankets, voices quieter, one of you apologizing first while the other pretended to stay mad a little longer.

That feels like another lifetime now.

--------------

The house is quieter when you get back. Not silent, because Joel always has the TV on for background noise even when he’s barely paying attention to it, but quieter in a way it sends a chill down your body after your argument with Ellie.

You lock the front door behind you and immediately catch the smell of food lingering in the air.

“Hey,” Joel calls from the couch when he notices you walking in. “You’re late.”

You shrug off your jacket slowly. “Lots of traffic.”

It’s not entirely a lie. You had driven around the block twice before coming inside, though.

Your eyes flick briefly toward the kitchen. Ellie’s there, rinsing dishes at the sink with her back turned to you. Sleeves pushed up to her elbows, damp hair curling slightly at the nape of her neck from a shower she must’ve taken earlier. She doesn’t look over when she hears you come in.

You turn your attention back to Joel, not even wanting to greet her.

“Did you take your meds already?”

“Yeah,” he nods, gesturing vaguely toward the kitchen in a weak attempt to force normalcy back into the room. “She gave ‘em to me after we ate some pasta she made.”

“Cool,” you answer quietly.

Ellie dries her hands on a dish towel without turning around. “There’s some left if you want.”

Your chest tightens a little at her tone. It’s just so… normal. Like the argument never happened and neither of you said things designed to cut deep. After all, the two of you had always been good at pretending things were fine right until they completely fell apart.

“Thanks.”

You move toward the kitchen carefully and Ellie shifts sideways almost the exact same moment to make space for you, without either of you actually acknowledging each other.

There’s a plate waiting for you at the table, beneath the little plastic cover Joel insists on using. Your throat tightens unexpectedly, because of course Ellie would remember you usually come home starving after work.

The silence stretches while you pick absentmindedly at your food instead of eating properly. Ellie leans against the far end of the counter scrolling through her phone, though you can tell she’s not actually reading anything. Every few seconds her thumb stops moving completely.

Joel clears his throat, clearly seconds away from losing his mind over the tension sitting in every corner of the house.

“So,” he starts, volume louder than necessary over the TV. “How was work?”

You glance over your shoulder toward him. “Awful.”

“That bad?”

“Customer service is the hardest part of it,” you sigh, finally forcing yourself to eat a proper bite. A memory crosses your mind and a tiny smile tugs briefly at the corner of your mouth. “But this old lady gave me a chocolate cause she said I looked like I was ‘having a hard time’.”

Joel lets out a laugh at that. Before silence can settle again, Ellie speaks without lifting her eyes from her phone.

“That’s kinda nice.”

The words should feel harmless. But after this afternoon, they make a wave of annoyance twist sharply inside your chest.

“Don’t act like you care.”

Ellie’s thumb stops moving against her phone screen. Slowly, she looks up at you, irritation flashing across her face almost instantly.

“I was just responding to what you said.”

“Next time, keep to your usual brooding and sulking self, got it?”

“Jesus,” Joel mutters quietly, visibly sinking deeper into the couch cushions. Both of you ignore him, too caught up with your discussion now.

Ellie pushes herself off the counter. “What the fuck do you mean by that?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“No, actually, I don’t,” her voice sharpens immediately. “You want me to ignore you completely? Cause you get pissed when I do that too, remember?”

Your stomach twists. There she is again, picking at an open wound that never really had the chance to heal. She’s slipping the knife into the exact same space every time, knowing exactly where it hurts and turning it anyway.

You shake your head slowly. “Every conversation somehow turns into a fight with you.”

“With me?” Ellie scoffs, disbelief written all over her face now. “You’re the one turning me saying one nice thing into a fucking attack.”

“Because it feels fake!”

The words echo louder than you intended. Ellie just stares at you for a second, jaw tightening hard enough you can see the muscle jump beneath her skin.

“That’s not fair,” her voice almost cracks this time.

Good, you think bitterly. Maybe she should feel worse.

But then guilt immediately follows right after, hot and ugly in your chest.

Joel suddenly pushes himself upright with a pained grunt. “You girls are exhaustin’.”

He gives you two a disappointed look, and neither of you has the courage to respond.

“Doctor said stress is bad for recovery,” he mutters. “Pretty sure watchin’ my daughter and her ex, who is basically like another daughter at this point, verbally knife each other every time they interact counts as stress.”

Guilt twists heavily in your stomach at his words, throat tightening instantly. Ellie looks away, jaw tight.

Joel sighs heavily, grabbing the remote. “M’goin’ to bed before one of you says somethin’ even stupider.”

“Joel—” you start quietly.

“Nah,” he gestures vaguely without much energy behind it. “Figure your shit out or don’t. Just keep me out of it.”

The words land harder than either of you expect.

Underneath the irritation and the grumbling is something worse: exhaustion. Joel’s pale beneath the warm light of the living room, movements slower than usual as he presses a careful hand against his abdomen. And suddenly, the fight feels childish.

You move first automatically, stepping toward to help, but Ellie does too at the exact same time. The two of you awkwardly stop short beside each other.

Joel stares between you both flatly. “I got two hands-free nurses and still gotta walk myself to bed.”

“Sorry,” you mutter immediately.

Ellie rubs the back of her neck. “…yeah, sorry.”

Joel grunts, too tired to fully accept the apology, but he lets Ellie help him down the hallway while you trail behind carrying his water bottle and meds for later.

Once Joel’s settled into bed, you’re quick to finally give him some time alone to rest. The bedroom door clicks shut behind you both a moment later, leaving you and Ellie standing awkwardly in the hallway again.

Ellie exhales slowly through her nose.

“We should probably…” she starts, then grimaces like the words physically pain her as they leave her mouth. “Maybe not fight in front of him again.”

You cross your arms instinctively, ready to snap back, but Joel shifts loudly in his room and you freeze. There’s a long silence after that, and you let out a tired sigh.

“I’m serious,” Ellie says more quietly this time. “We don’t gotta suddenly become friends or whatever, but can we maybe not turn every conversation into a fight for like one week?”

Your shoulders loosen slightly with a long exhale. The look Joel had given you just minutes ago… yeah, no, you don’t want to end up losing him too just because you can’t get along with your ex-girlfriend.

“Fine,” you mutter reluctantly. “It’s a truce.”

She nods once. “Truce.”

A beat passes. Then, because neither of you knows how to exist in softness for too long anymore, Ellie gestures vaguely toward the living room.

“You drool in your sleep, by the way.”

“I absolutely do not,” you shake your head.

“You absolutely do.”

A tiny smirk tugs briefly at the corner of Ellie’s mouth before she looks away. For a second, it almost feels like one of those old nights again. The ones where arguments stretched long past midnight until both of you were too tired to keep fighting.

Except back then, both of you would eventually drift closer. Your knees would bump under the table, she’d steal your hoodie, one of you would apologize quietly into the dark because being apart felt worse than being angry.

You turn away toward the living room before you can keep spiraling any further. Ellie hesitates for a moment, wanting to add something, anything else, but she doesn’t.

It was right there, the character name typed in a bold font. Following it were three dots… and your name (first and last!) italicized. You were giddy. 

Your eyes darted over the words a few more times, just to be sure, as your heart pounded. After visually confirming it again, you quickly scanned the rest of the cast list to take in the students that would be filling the other roles. Excitement and satisfaction flooded throughout your being, a grin tugging on your lips as you relished in the fact that your final show would be a good one, just as all of your other ones had been. 

“Cecily Cardew,” you mumbled to yourself, testing the name that would now mean everything to you throughout the next couple of months. But, quite honestly, it already did mean something. It was just real now–something that you could actually take and claim instead of just daydreaming about and hoping for. You already knew the character work, had most of Cecily’s lines memorized, and knew exactly how you would wear your hair. None of that was absurd, though. With it being a classic play, every role was well known, and therefore an honor to step into. 

You hastily pulled your phone out of your back pocket, snapping a photo of the paper. You would, however, keep the excitement close to your chest until Monday. 

Despite the bustle that happened behind you, you were alone in the cast list revealing. It was a Friday, and aside from those with sport or club obligations after school, most people didn’t want to wait around for hours–especially considering the fact that sometimes the director took the entire weekend to decide on the cast list.  

But you had waited. Sat in the hallway with your bookbag, earbuds, a book, and a reusable container filled with apple slices. For three hours. 

And now, you had casting insight that would provide you with peace and complete happiness throughout the weekend. Still, yeah, you would be keeping it close to your chest for the brief time being, aside from– 

Your shoes were the ones to squeak against the floor next as you practically bolted–one hand gripping the strap of your bag that was over your shoulder in an attempt to prevent it from banging too harshly against your back. Skidding around a corner, you nearly ran right into a group of boys that were lingering from basketball practice. Your muttered sorry was covered by the echo of each lazy basketball dribble, their casual conversations and banter not even faltering as you weaved your way between them. 

Another corner, another hallway–though you didn’t have to slow your movements or cautiously poke your head inside of a classroom, because the person that you were looking for had just stepped out of it. 

“I got it,” you announced breathlessly, managing to stop your feet just before there was a physical collision. 

“Whoa–” 

Ellie’s arm outstretched, her hand momentarily hovering near your waist in case you needed steadying. Her gaze flickered over your face, her arm slowly lowering back down to her side as she watched you try to catch your breath. “Cecily?” 

You nodded, gulping once for air. It’s not like you had run particularly far, or even that fast, but the adrenaline of getting the part and rushing to Ellie had caught up with you at once. 

Ellie snorted. 

“You always do this,” she muttered, absently wiping her palms on her jeans. The denim had paint stains–some old, some new. She had been working away at some project in the art room, one that you wouldn’t be able to see until the project was finished and she felt content with it. 

Your eyes lingered on the movement, though your brows pulled together as you registered her observation. “Always do what?” you asked, your gaze shifting to Ellie’s face. Your voice had evened out, your chest rising and falling with each breath that you took. 

“Sound surprised,” Ellie replied. She halfheartedly waved a hand, using the other one to hoist her bag over her shoulder. “I mean, you know? It’s sort of a fuckin’ given that Victoria would–” 

“There’s nothing guaranteed about casting,” you interrupted. Your head tilted slightly to the side, watching as Ellie patted herself down, making sure that she didn’t forget any of her belongings inside of the art room. “Tori doesn’t owe me a role just because I’m a senior. Or because I–” 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Ellie shot you a look, one that signified that you both knew what she meant, and any of your potential defenses were unnecessary. “That’s not what I’m saying.” 

“Right,” you said. The two of you began walking, falling into step beside each other as you moved toward the school doors. “You just mean that I’m super talented, and I absolutely nail every audition, so getting the role that I want is the obvious outcome?” you joked, your tone casual with a mock understanding. 

Ellie shook her head in amusement, a slight smile tugging on her lips. “Man, you’re humble,” she replied dryly. She walked with an unhurried ease, her arms swinging at her sides. “Yeah, that’s… totally what I meant.” 

You rolled your eyes despite the grin that you still seemed to be sporting. You could never actually be annoyed with your friend, and she would never actually downplay your successes–no matter how big or small.

 Ellie simply didn’t get surprised by your casting news anymore, not after years of friendship in which she had witnessed your hard work and dedication land you the roles that you always tried to get. You were talented, it didn’t take a genius to figure that out. Sure, Ellie liked shitty action movies from the ‘80s, but she also believed that she had good taste, and could tell when things were actually of quality. She had watched you on stage countless times by this point in your friendship. You were good. Great, even. Incredible. Your stage presence itself was much bigger than the school’s auditorium, even bigger than the community theater that you often spent your free time at, too. 

You gently nudged your elbow against Ellie’s arm in a silent retaliation, to which she only smiled at you in return. 

“Good job,” Ellie muttered–quiet but sincerely. Her eyes lingered on your side profile as the two of you continued to walk. “Everyone else good?” 

Your nod was an automatic one, due to your enthusiasm. “Yeah, for real. Should be a really good show, honestly. And, if Tori lets me help a little with the blocking–” 

“Which she will,” Ellie interjected, a soft huff of amusement falling from her lips. 

Victoria–or, comfortably known by you as Tori–was the school’s theater teacher. She was younger, had been in her late twenties when you had first started high school. Her areas of expertise were acting and directing, and the stars had aligned when you had shown up to that very first drama club meeting with a passion for everything. You started to see more of her when you began doing community theater–in addition to school plays–because Tori often spent her summers working as a stage manager in the next town over. Your parents even knew her well by that point, grateful to have someone trustworthy looking out for you. 

The bond between the two of you was almost familial, though you never expected special treatment. You were a young professional, and Tori was seasoned. If someone else deserved the role, and would be a better fit, they would get it. 

You did always get the parts that you auditioned for–for a reason. 

Earned. It was always earned. 

“I’m just saying,” you continued, hands practically animated as you gestured while speaking, “it’s going to be a good show. Like, perfect to end high school. I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to do this one, honestly. That’s like… doing theater but never being in Annie. Everyone does Annie. At least once. Thank god I can finally just, like, add this to my resume.” 

You reached the doors at the same time. You used your hands to push one open, while Ellie angled her body to the side, shoving her shoulder against the other to push it open. 

“This another one where you’ll have to get on stage and kiss boys?” Ellie asked casually, shooting a brief, sidelong glance in your direction. 

Immediately, you scowled. “Why do you always go there?” Your head snapped to look at Ellie, but her gaze had already left you. 

“Uhh… ‘cause it’s gross?” Ellie offered, shrugging one shoulder. 

“You’re so goddamn immature, you know that?” you muttered in return, though your cheeks warmed. (Annoyingly, again, you still smiled. Ellie was so irritating. She was funny.)

For one, yeah, you often did have to share a lot of onstage kisses with guys. The roles that you played did frequently call for it within the script. Obviously, it wasn’t ideal. Having to just kiss someone for an audience–one that often included your parents and most of your peers–was generally just an awkward thing to have to do. Being a lesbian did… tend to make that aspect even worse. 

But still, you would not be difficult. Professionalism meant a lot to you, even as a high schooler. 

When you could get away with doing the thumb trick? Awesome. When you had to subject yourself to a few seconds in a kiss with a male peer? Whatever. The flowers in which you received–literally and verbally–after each performance made everything worth it. 

Ellie continued to give you shit about it, though. Very consistently. 

Sometimes it felt as though the transition from fourteen to seventeen had hit Ellie like a truck–at least much more than it had hit you. Other times? Not so much. 

“Just saying,” Ellie mumbled, lifting a hand to scratch at her nose. 

The sky was still relatively light, though there were traces of the impending nightfall in the air. The school parking lot was starting to thin out as people from different after school activities and clubs began to leave, too. Yourself and Ellie cut through the grass. 

“There are a few kisses between Cecily and Algernon, but it shouldn’t be anything crazy. Not like Proof.” 

Ellie gave the faintest nod, her gaze now drifting to any possible sight that wasn’t your face. “That’s good. I mean, uh, cool. Like, for you.” 

You hummed absently, still buzzing from the cast posting. You wondered what fabrics would get used for Cecily’s costumes. Hues of pinks, blues, yellows… colors to represent innocence and girlhood were to be expected. Surely you would have ribbons. The stage shoes that you wore when you had played the role of Amy in Little Women at the start of the year would surely suffice for this costume, too. You wondered if you should use pink or blue to highlight your lines once the scripts were given out. 

“Do you want to get ice cream?” you suggested suddenly, steering your form a little closer to Ellie’s side as you continued to walk. You didn’t exactly want to go home yet, as you didn’t want to part from your friend. Plus, you wanted to celebrate. Just a little. 

And at your words, Ellie was unable to hide her growing grin. “Hell yeah.” 

⋆｡✩

“I made a Pinterest board.” 

Your words were exhaled with a cloud of smoke, your gaze flickering to Ellie as you outstretched your arm to return the joint that the two of you had been sharing. With empty hands, you brought your knees up, wrapping your arms around your legs. 

The sky was dark, the air biting just enough to make you shiver. The two of you were resting on the curb of a long, empty road. Definitely not the smartest place to plop down for a smoke, but neither of you could muster up enough feeling to care. 

Once your statement registered in Ellie’s ears, her brows furrowed. 

“Pinterest board,” Ellie echoed, staring down at the joint she held between her fingers. “What’s… even the point of that, honestly?” 

You frowned, too caught off guard by her question to really focus on how pretty she looked–cheeks pink with strands of auburn falling away from her messy ponytail. 

“You know what the point is,” you muttered, momentarily raising one hand to rub at your eye. The action most likely smudged your mascara, but the thought didn’t cross your mind. “Like, mood boards. Organizing pictures and, like… creating aesthetics, and stuff.”  

Ellie huffed, awkwardly folding her legs before shifting to sit cross-legged. “With other people’s pictures, though? Like, random people you don’t even know?” She brought the joint to her lips, squinting as she did so. “Isn’t that kinda… fuckin’ creepy?” 

You immediately shook your head, despite the fact that Ellie might’ve had a point. “Shut up, it’s just how it works.” You ran your hands over your face, your eyes feeling heavy. The high had made you tired, after a long day of lounging in the sun and doing absolutely fuck all with Ellie. 

“I made one for the play. And for Cecily,” you continued, turning your head to squint back at her. 

One corner of Ellie’s mouth twitched upward, and you swayed your legs to the side, pulling them away from your chest and effectively bumping one of her knees with your own. 

“Yeah?” Ellie replied lazily, her voice quiet. 

You nodded, stretching your arms above your head before flopping them back down. “Like, a vibe for costumes, and hair, and makeup, and…” You shifted to also sit cross-legged, your movements feeling sluggish. “Tori’s having this girl she knows to come in and do costumes for us. She’s supposedly, like, really good.” 

You had only been rehearsing for a couple of weeks. Admittedly, no one was concerned about costumes just yet. All of the scenes hadn’t even finished getting blocked. But you were too excited, and you had ideas. 

“Everyone you talk about is really good,” Ellie mumbled, examining the joint just for something to do. 

“Because they are. You’re really good, too,” you murmured, unsure of what you were even actually trying to get at–but the words felt accurate, so they left your lips. 

“Tch.” Ellie shook her head in amusement, scuffing her Converse against the ground as she stretched out her legs. 

“I just… it’s my last one of high school, you know? I want it to be perfect. And to make the most of it. So I’m… Tori knows this guy–” 

“She knows a lot of people.” 

“Tori knows this guy, and he lives in New York City. They did shows together when they were younger, but now he, like, does all this professional shit. He’s writing his own script, like, for a play or a movie or something.” 

“Cool,” Ellie muttered. 

“Right? But, like, for real. He’s gonna come see the show. Like, my fucking show. Tori said, ‘cause he’s gonna come visit her.” 

“No shit?” 

You hummed, lightly drumming your fingers against your legs. “I just want to do good. I mean, I’m having so much fun playing Cecily, don’t get me wrong. I love it. I adore it. It’s lighthearted, so it’s a nice break after Proof, but–” 

“Thought I almost lost you to that one,” Ellie joked dryly, turning her head to exhale smoke away from your direction. 

It hadn’t been a school play, but one that you had done through community theater. It was about a woman in her twenties grappling with the loss of her father. The woman feared that she might be just like him. 

You played the role at the age of seventeen, which was a massive deal. Truthfully, it had caused you to fall in love with acting all over again. Your typical roles consisted of girlish ones, where you played young women with their heads in the clouds–Alice, in Alice in Wonderland… Wendy Darling, in Peter Pan… 

Proof had given you growth. It had proved your abilities. You had done so well, an article had been written about your performance in the local paper. 

You blinked, your gaze slowly drifting over Ellie’s side profile. “You did not,” you muttered softly. “Don’t exaggerate. We still hung out.” 

“Hung out and ran lines,” Ellie pointed out, running her free hand over her pants. “Think I memorized half the fucking play.” 

A huff of amusement fell from your lips, your gaze drifting to your shoes as you remembered the experience. You had roped Ellie into running lines with you quite often, but that show had been the most important one that you had ever done. 

There was, however, one particular memory that continued to cause your face to burn–one particular scene that had been a bit awkward to read through with Ellie. 

Typically, whenever there was a kissing part in the script, you and Ellie would verbally say skip the kiss, and continue on with the scene–Ellie reading off lines opposite your character to help you rehearse in any way that you might ask of her. 

But Proof had been different. More intense. More emotional. More grown-up and mature compared to your usual roles. 

You had gotten quite intense while rehearsing, even altered your style to suit what you figured your character might wear. 

There was a particular scene in which your character–Catherine– was outside with another during a party. The scene was filled with awkward tension, disagreements, emotional strain, flirting… and a few kisses. Long kisses. 

While rehearing that scene in particular, you had been on a roll. It had been in Ellie’s bedroom, the two of you on your stomachs–side by side–lounging on her bed with your script open for the both of you to see it. The first kiss of the scene was to happen while your character was rambling on and on, spouting off information that she had memorized, before she was interrupted with an impulsive kiss.  

You had been saying your lines–focused and entirely lost in the moment–until you realized that you had not been cut off. When your gaze drifted to Ellie, your breath had caught. Ellie had been staring at you, green eyes wide and expression slightly dazed. For some reason, it had caught you entirely off guard. That, plus the way in which your faces were so close, due to sharing your script. 

It would’ve been so incredibly easy to lean in. To bridge the tiny, barely existing gap. 

Instead, the two of you had just stared at each other, holding your breath. 

The moment broke after a few long, painful seconds… when you muttered skip the kiss in a strained voice. You fumbled your way through the rest of the scene, neither of you making eye contact during the sexual jokes that had to be read off. The moment had never been brought up again, either. 

You didn’t dare cross that line with Ellie. If you did, there was a chance that things wouldn’t work out. You couldn’t lose her as a friend, and couldn’t bear the potential awkwardness that might’ve come from her rejecting you as a lover. So… it got shoved down. Ignored. 

That scene consisted of six kisses in total, each one growing more lengthy. The following scene started with a few more. As awkward as it had been for your parents to watch you do that on stage, it had been a million times worse for Ellie. 

“It was important,” you mumbled softly, still staring down at your shoes. 

“Yeah. Yeah, I know it was,” Ellie replied quietly. 

“I just need to be my absolute best if he’s coming, you know? I need to make an impression. All the next steps are about, like, making connections, and–” 

“Kinda crazy,” Ellie muttered, leaning back on her free hand. “I mean, fucking… Four years ago you hated the idea of college. I remember you saying that you would refuse–” 

“I know, I know, I know,” you interrupted. 

College had never been in your original plans. You were going to work whatever jobs you had to work to make ends meet, and then focus solely on auditions. Auditions and acting. 

Things had changed. 

“Don’t act like you haven’t changed your tune, either,” you continued. 

If you would’ve asked Ellie–at the age of fourteen–what she wanted to be, she would’ve looked you straight in the eye and said an astronaut. Now? Ellie was less than sure. She struggled to think of a major career plan, and hesitated at the idea of turning her hobbies and interests into an actual job. 

Still, the two of you were going to college at the end of the summer. 

Not the same college. Different ones. 

“I’m not acting like anything. Just saying,” Ellie said. 

You hummed, your limbs feeling heavy. “You’re ruining this. Don’t stress me out.” 

Ellie chuckled at that, tilting her head back to look at the stars. 

“I’m just telling you. Just shut up and let me tell you,” you attempted, your train of thought starting to rapidly run away from you. “I just really need everything to work out,” you continued, covering your face with your hands. “I know I played Amy in Little Women, but, like… in real life? I’ve got to be Jo. I’ve got to be Jo. I’m going to do something. I’ve got– I have to great, or like, nothing–” 

“Sounds like Amy,” Ellie quipped dryly. 

By the time you dropped your hands away from your face to give Ellie a dirty look, you had seen that she was no longer holding the joint, apparently having decided that she was over it. 

“I’m gonna be in a movie,” you told her flatly, eyebrows raising. 

Ellie’s lips tugged upward, and she shifted on the curb to better face you. 

“I don’t need to be, like, famous. But I want to be in a movie. Just once. Just one movie.” You paused, your gaze lingering on Ellie’s face. “But if I ever do win a major award or something, I’ll shout you out in my acceptance speech.” 

Ellie snorted. “Lucky me,” she replied dryly. 

You ignored her comment, and ignored how intently she was looking at you. 

“I’m so serious,” you whispered, scrubbing your hands over your face, mascara be damned. “Like… there’s no fucking universe where I’m not acting. It’s what I have to do. Like breathing. If I’m ever not acting, I’m fucking dead.” 

“Don’t say that,” Ellie replied, rolling her eyes at your dramatics. 

But to you, it actually was everything. 

“I need this so bad,” you continued, your hands falling to your lap. Your body felt weighted from the high, but your mind was racing. Your heart hammered in your chest, though Ellie’s gaze remained steady. “I’m not gonna get greedy. I’ll never be greedy. Yeah, my goal is to be in a movie. But I don’t… I don’t need red carpets and stylists and fame. I just want to act.” Your voice cracked in an embarrassing way, your eyes welling up with tears due to the sheer amount of passion and want that you were attempting to convey. 

Ellie exhaled once she registered how emotional you were actually getting, her fingers twitching against her thighs. 

“Hey–” she breathed out softly, green eyes darting over your features. 

It was enough to momentarily stop you, your gaze locking with her own. For a moment, there was nothing else. The earth around you was quiet, aside from the sound of your breaths and Ellie’s. 

“I just want him to like me,” you admitted weakly. “It could open so many doors, and–” 

“He’d be a fucking idiot if he didn’t,” Ellie muttered, eyebrows knitted together. Her gaze flickered down to your lips–a quick glance that she immediately corrected–like a silent dare. 

You couldn’t take her up on it. 

“Curfew,” you managed, wiping your palms on your thighs as you tore your gaze away from her own. 

Ellie gave a quick nod, copying your motion of swiping her palms against her jeans as she moved to shakily stand up. 

⋆｡✩

The line was crossed on the night of Ellie’s eighteenth birthday. 

A party that Ellie had insisted that she didn’t need–multiple times–but relented anyway, because Joel never got to witness his first daughter turn eighteen. It wasn’t spoken about, just something that Ellie quietly acknowledged whenever Joel tried to suggest plans to her. 

She hated being the center of attention, but she let Joel throw her the party. 

It happened at the house. There had been cake and candles, a handmade banner–Happy 18th Birthday, Ellie!!!–and several rounds of different card games. Music drifted throughout the house, guitars had been played, and Joel had allowed one beer, which Ellie had generously shared with you. 

The two of you had escaped to the back porch, taking a break from the noise. 

You leaned against the railing, breathing in the nighttime air. Your face felt fuzzy from the last several hours of laughter. The weather was warm, high school was a chapter to be closed, and you were next to your favorite person in the world. 

“Can’t believe you’re eighteen,” you muttered with a soft grin, watching as Ellie leaned against the railing also. 

“Can’t believe you’re leaving in two days,” Ellie countered, to which you nearly dropped your head in defeat. 

“For two weeks,” you clarified, gently nudging your arm against her own. 

You were going to New York City. It was a trip organized for the drama students, and you were beyond thrilled to be going. You were going to see a Broadway show, and would get the opportunity to attend a real, professional acting seminar. 

Jonah–the one from New York that had come all the way to Wyoming to visit Victoria–actually had ended up attending your school’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Your introduction with the man had been brief, yet meaningful. He had described your portrayal of Cecily and your presence on stage as absolutely eye-catching. He was the one hosting the seminar in the city. 

Ellie had called him weird after a singular glance, wrinkling her nose after hearing his compliment. It’s not like his words were wrong, but she didn’t like the way that he had said it. She had later remarked that he dressed like a bitch, insulting his hipster ass outfit–insults from the girl that had dutifully clung to skinny jeans and a side part.  

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two fucking weeks,” Ellie mumbled under her breath. 

You scoffed, your eyes crinkling at the corners because you were unable to do away with your smile. “You act like I’m not coming home. I’m coming home. My return flight is already booked, you know. It's a round-trip. And… you know what you should do while I’m gone?” 

Ellie looked at you, her face scrunching in confusion. “What?” 

“You should submit one of your drawings or paintings to the art show that they’re having in town.” 

Immediately, Ellie turned her head away from you with a scoff. “Fuck that.” 

“No, no. Hear me out,” you scrambled, though your tone remained soft. You ducked your head slightly, attempting to meet her averted gaze. “You should. They’re really good, Ellie. You’re really good. Everyone that sees them agrees. Can you at least just think about it? It doesn’t have to be a whole thing, but… just think about it. Please?” 

Ellie went quiet for a moment as she stared out into the backyard. “You think you’re gonna love it there? New York?” 

Heart thumping, your teeth sank into your bottom lip. “Yeah,” you replied. “And I think it’s gonna, like, help everything click into place. I’m gonna get out of this town. Like, for real. Maybe I can even transfer somewhere else for college. Like, I don’t know. But I’ll be out of here.” 

“You just said you’re coming home,” Ellie muttered, idly picking at the wood of the railing. 

At her words, you deflated a little. “I am. After New York, I am. But eventually… leaving doesn’t mean leaving you behind, alright?” 

Ellie’s eyebrow twitched, and she gave a jerky nod. “Sure,” she breathed out. 

You huffed in response, angling your body to turn toward her. “Fuck, Ellie. I could never leave you behind. You’re my favorite goddamn person in the world. I’d rather you come with me, wherever I go, than just… like, go our separate ways and stop talking, or something.” 

“You just saying that ‘cause it’s my birthday?” Ellie questioned dryly, shifting to better face you, too. 

You wanted to give her a witty response, but you couldn’t. She looked fucking pretty, her freckles visible even in the dark. Laughter filtered outside from where people remained in the house, but it hardly removed you from the moment. One of your hands remained on the railing, and you gripped it tighter. 

“You’re so frustrating sometimes,” you muttered softly. You didn’t really have to speak quietly, but the two of you had kept the volume down anyway. “No, I’m not just saying that because it’s your birthday. I’m saying it because I mean it.” 

Ellie swallowed, one arm hanging limply at her side. Her other arm–like your own–was resting against the railing. “You always say a lot of things.” 

You tilted your head slightly to the side, eyebrows drawing together. “Things that I mean,” you insisted quietly. 

Ellie tilted her head opposite of you, her gaze flickering over your features. “Says the girl that literally fakes emotions for fun.” 

“That’s dumb.” Your fingers tentatively brushed against her own where they were resting, and Ellie didn’t pull away. In fact, she leaned a little closer, the ghost of a smile flickering on her lips. Still, you continued to speak. “And I’ll miss you for the entire two weeks that I’m in New York, if that makes you feel any better. Does it?” 

Ellie managed a slight shrug, both of your bodies leaning toward each other. “Dunno.” 

You grinned, unable to feign annoyance. “What do you want from me, huh? I’ll be back in two weeks. And I already gave you a really fucking cool birthday present, so–” 

The gap was a small one, so it didn’t take much effort to close it. So incredibly gently–and slowly, in case you wanted to pull away–Ellie’s lips pressed against your own. 

Chapped and lovely and warm, though she started to pull away before you could even register what had happened. It had barely even been an actual kiss, more like a simple pressing of lips. You decided, all at once, that wouldn’t do. 

Against the wooden railing, your fingers laced with her own. You squeezed her hand reassuringly, returning the kiss before you lost contact with her lips completely. 

Ellie squeezed your hand back, a soft huff barely escaping her as the kiss lingered. 

You barely broke apart after a few seconds, eyes meeting in a silent question. Your face was hot, and you assumed the same for Ellie based upon the redness of her cheeks–visible even though it was night.

When you smiled, so did Ellie. You were almost about to laugh, but her arm snaked around your waist to tug you closer. You kissed again. 

It was still slow, but more sure. More certain. It was sweet, like the traces of birthday cake icing that you could taste from Ellie’s mouth. Maybe it lasted a minute or so, but the sound of Joel’s voice calling for Ellie from inside of the house had caused the reluctant end–something about Tommy and Maria heading out soon, and Ellie needing to go say bye. 

Ellie squeezed your hand. You squeezed hers back. 

You pulled apart so that Ellie could do what she needed. You trailed after her, sporting a grin and trembling hands. 

You barely slept that night, your entire being flooded with relief and giddiness. The next morning, you had practically gotten up with the sun, because you wanted to kiss Ellie again. You also wanted to tell her again that your life’s dreams still included her, in whatever way she would have you. 

Admittedly, you felt stupid for shying away from your feelings for so long. If you could be more than friends with Ellie, you would. 

Powered by determination and a lightness within you that differed from the feeling you always got when performing on stage, you practically dashed down your street, heading to Ellie’s. 

Much to your surprise, Ellie had met you halfway. Your smile only grew, your breathing labored from rushing. 

“Hi,” you had said, clasping your hands in front of you as you slowed to approach her more calmly. “I was just coming to find you. I wanted to–” 

“Talk about last night?” Ellie managed, her voice hoarse. “Yeah, uh, same. Look–” 

“Yeah, yeah. I wanted to say that–” 

“It doesn’t have to be a thing,” Ellie said, her words coming out too casually. Her cheeks were pink, her gaze flickering around like she was unable to meet your own. 

You blinked, your heart plummeting. “Wait, what?” 

“I just… We don’t have to, like, talk about it or anything, you know?” Ellie continued, aimlessly waving her hands as she spoke. 

You stared at her, a nervous laugh spilling from your lips. “We can talk about it. I don’t–” 

“No, it’s cool. Like, don’t worry about it. It probably didn’t–Like, you probably… You don’t have to… like, do that. It’s fine, it’s not a big deal.” 

You clasped your hands tighter, gaze drifting downward as Ellie kicked at the road. “...right,” you croaked softly, forcing a slow nod. “Okay. Yeah. We’re… cool.” 

In hindsight, you probably should’ve just spoken up. Should’ve clarified, and then maybe Ellie would’ve had the guts to tell you what the kiss had meant to her, too. 

But you didn’t.

And the next day, you left for New York.

⋆｡✩

｡✩ notes : soooo i did not add tags to this because i'm honestly still trying to figure out whether or not i like this lmao :( but if i continue on with this, i will add tags to the next part! (as long as you are 18+!) next part would be a time jump to a few years later