Chapter Text
Ellie has never doubted that Dina is the most beautiful girl she’s ever seen. She’s painfully gorgeous, but there’s something particularly breathtaking about her right now. Caught beneath the sunlight flooding through Ellie’s clouded, weather-beaten bedroom window, her naturally dark irises seem luminous, glowing like translucent amber, and the smile on her lips is achingly genuine, bright enough to make Ellie’s heart stutter in aching fits.
She gestures to the guitar balanced on Ellie’s thigh and shifts a bit closer in the chair she’s drawn up next to Ellie’s bed. “Play something for me?”
This isn’t the first time she’s been in Ellie’s bedroom, so it isn’t the first time she’s seen the guitar in question, but it’s the first time Ellie has stupidly, foolishly decided to pick it up in her presence, which she’d only done out of the desperate need to keep her fidgeting hands busy.
She fiddles with the strings. “I’m… not much of a singer,” she mumbles, uncomfortably aware of the heat rising in her cheeks. “That’s Joel’s thing.”
“Really?” Dina accepts that unexpected teaspoon of truth with the most adorable tilt of her head. “Joel sings?”
Ellie grimaces. Even after all this time in Jackson, Joel still plays things pretty close to the vest. He doesn’t really advertise his youthful aspirations to be a musician. She hadn’t meant to let that slip, but she has a habit of saying things she doesn’t mean to say around Dina. Or, more accurately, Dina simply manages to fluster her with such incredible skill and finesse that she has no choice but to deflect the intensity of her attentions with the first thing that comes to mind, which often means that she ends up getting herself into more trouble than she was originally in.
“Don’t bother asking him,” she says finally. “He’ll just deny it.”
“That’s fine with me, since he’s not the one I want to hear.” Dina holds her gaze, lowers her voice until it’s coy and lilting. “Please, Ellie?”
Ellie has no hope of denying her, not now. Something in the pit of her stomach, something thick and feverish, heavy with the weight of possibility, is knotting up at the tone of her voice, and she shakes her head, tries to cover the tremor in her own words with a sigh. “Promise you won’t laugh?”
“Only a little,” Dina teases, nudging Ellie’s foot with her own.
Ellie scoffs and rolls her eyes toward the window. “Awesome.”
Dina’s hand falls to settle on her knee. Her touch is gentle, but it’s a little too hot to be comfortable. Physical contact between them always is, as far as Ellie’s concerned. When that alone doesn’t have the desired effect, she tugs plaintively at it, jostling Ellie’s leg until she regains her attention.
“Ellie, come on, I’m kidding. Gosh, you’re so sensitive.” The softness of her eyes soothes the bite of her teasing as she squeezes Ellie’s knee. “I won’t laugh, I promise.” She smiles again, gently this time, almost hopefully. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be serenaded.”
It doesn’t seem to matter that Dina would probably be perfectly happy being serenaded by anyone else; Ellie’s heart hears, ‘By you.’
She heaves a wary sigh, wiping both of her sweaty palms on her jeans, careful not to dislodge Dina’s lingering hand.
“Okay, just…” She hesitates as she grasps the neck of the guitar to place her fingers, then exhales harshly. “Fuck it.”
If she’s going to do this, she might as well go all the way. To the edge of the universe and back, right?
“Oh, my love,” she begins slowly, “my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch a long, lonely time…”
She wavers on a few of the notes, which makes her wince. Dina just squeezes her knee, smiling so gently that her embarrassment all but dissipates.
“And time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much. Are you still mine?” Though she struggles on the emotional swell that accompanies that line, her sheepish grimace only serves to make Dina smile again. Ellie drops her eyes. “I need your love… I need your love. Godspeed your love to me.”
Miraculously, she makes it through the rest of the song without any further mistakes, growing more comfortable when she moves into the rhythmic chord progression of the second verse. She even makes it through the final chorus, which is higher than her usual register, without breaking pitch.
When the last echoes of the strings finally give way to silence, Dina’s still smiling, her eyes soft and bright. The touch of color in her cheeks could be nothing more than a reaction to the heat, because it’s the middle of summer and Ellie’s room doesn’t have much in the way of air conditioning, but she wants to believe more than anything that it’s something more, even if it was just the magic of the song, indiscriminate of who was singing it.
“I thought you said you don’t sing.”
Ellie’s face goes hot again. “I don’t.”
Dina doesn’t even bother to dignify that superbly lackluster refutation with its own response. “Why that song?” she asks with a smile, a secret little thing that Ellie can’t quite decipher now that she’s been put on the spot. “A favorite of yours?”
“I, uh – it –” Ellie falters, clears her throat self-consciously. “Joel made me learn how to play it.”
Though her smile persists, Dina regards Ellie with a fine arch in her brow and playfully narrowed eyes. “That doesn’t seem like Joel’s kind of music.”
“He said it was a classic,” Ellie counters, less awkwardly this time, forcing a shrug for good measure. “Which means it was everyone’s kind of music.”
While it’s true that Joel had told her ‘Unchained Melody’ was an extremely popular song at one point in time, that’s not why she chose to play it.
Dina sees right through her, as she always does, but she chooses to let it go. Whether it’s out of the goodness of her heart or simply to capitalize on the opportunity to tease her about it later, Ellie doesn’t know. Her only response is a soft hum of assent that gradually fades into silence. She traces her fingertips over the surface of Ellie’s knee in random shapes and swirling, dizzying patterns, then glances up at her from beneath her lashes.
“Too bad,” she murmurs. “I was kind of hoping you had chosen something romantic on purpose.”
There is some truth in that, but Ellie deflects on instinct before it can be exposed. “Like the fact that I was serenading you wasn’t romantic enough.”
Dina shrugs, finally withdrawing her too-hot, too-close, too-intimate hand. “All things considered,” she begins loftily, “I give you a seven out of ten.”
“What?” Ellie gapes at her, the incredulity plain on her face. “Only a seven, after all that? You’re fucking with me.”
Dina smirks, no doubt satisfied to have gotten a rise out of her so easily. “Nope. Sorry, it’s a hard seven from me.”
“Okay, well, any notes on how to improve from the Official Adjudicator of Romantic Serenades?” she bites back sarcastically.
Dina’s brow jumps in the most unfairly attractive way. “Adjudicator? That’s a mighty big word, Ellie, especially around here.”
Ellie flushes, because she actually looks kind of impressed. “I… I read a lot. Look, don’t change the subject. That’s a bullshit score and you know it.”
“You wanna know how you can improve?” Dina replies, her voice lowered with the weight of some sudden significance.
Ellie has half a second to panic before Dina leans closer, so close that she tests Ellie’s basest instinct to shy away, and lifts both of her hands to Ellie’s face, cradling her jaw between them like she’s something to be cherished, something precious. Ellie forces herself to be still, to endure the intimate touch without flinching or deflecting with some stupid, smartass comment, even though her blood is screaming for her to move. She’s learned over the past two years that she’s known Dina to expect some sort of joke, but she can’t find any signs of mischief in her still strangely luminous irises.
In fact, she seems excruciatingly sincere as she strokes the corner of Ellie’s jaw gently with her thumb. “Look me in the eyes when you sing to me.”
Ellie swallows, a thousand words she can’t bring herself to say piling up on her tongue, her cheeks growing hotter and hotter beneath Dina’s hands, until she’s lightheaded, until she’s sure Dina can feel her burning up – until Dina finally breaks into a grin and turns her face away with a gentle push.
“Now give me that,” she teases, plucking Ellie’s guitar right out of her listless hands.
Recovering proves to be a unique endeavor, since the homeostatic mechanisms Ellie usually counts on to sustain her body seem to have shut down. Her heart hammers against her ribs like a nervous first-time percussionist, and she has to teach herself how to breathe all over again just to ease its fitful kicking. All that hard-won oxygen is stolen from her lungs when she glimpses Dina out of the corner of her eye. She’s got the guitar in her own lap now, where she’s bowed over it with a little smile, taking a moment to feel the different textures of the strings beneath her fingertips.
It seems somehow cosmically hysterical to Ellie that there should be something exciting about watching Dina feel up her guitar, and yet…
Dina catches her looking, countering it with a grin. “Since I’m feeling generous, I’ll give you another point if you teach me a thing or two.”
Ellie’s still absurdly out of breath, but she tries to cover it with an unspecified sound of annoyance. “Two points,” she insists, “or no deal.”
“Two?” Dina echoes. Her brow jumps in challenge as her voice drops an octave. “You’ll have to work a little harder if you want two.”
She doesn’t seem intent to elaborate on whatever that means, just plucks the strings beneath her fingers idly, getting a feel for the tension in them. Ellie thinks she probably learned how to play her the same way, with a delicate caution that gives way to confidence as she discovers just how easily such an instrument can be manipulated, memorizing the parameters of its resilience until she’s comfortable enough to strum a tuneless melody.
The whole time, Ellie burns with curiosity. She knows better than to ask, sure that it’s only going to get her in more trouble, but she has to know.
“Fine,” she huffs, which earns her the barest glance from carefully indifferent brown eyes. They still make her melt. “What do I have to do for two?”
Dina’s mask of disinterest dissolves. Her lips curve into a pleased grin, one so brilliant and suspiciously broad that Ellie immediately regrets asking.
While she’s considering what new kind of torment she might’ve brought upon herself, Dina rises from her chair. She takes a single, smooth step and pivots to settle herself on Ellie’s lap, making room for herself there like it’s second nature. Something hot and persistent twists in Ellie’s gut as Dina’s warmth sinks into her, but she freezes beneath the slight weight of her body, her own body stiffening with the effort it takes to prevent herself from reacting. She keeps her face neutral despite the blood surging up to sear it hot and pink, and hardly dares to breathe, lest her shuddering gasps give away the extent of her suffering, both of her hands fisted in the thin sheet thrown over her bed to keep them from grasping Dina’s hips.
Dina glances back at her, bright eyes and the barest curl of her lips visible over her shoulder. “Still want those points?”
Ellie calls upon every ounce of strength and stubbornness she possesses to steel herself. She can do this.
More to the point, if she wants to survive this encounter with even a shred of dignity, she has to do this.
“Yeah, you’re gonna fuckin’ give me those points,” she grumbles, ignoring the suggestive undertones that only occur to her after she’s spoken.
She permits one last breath to steady herself and then leans further into the delicate arch of Dina’s back, close enough that her chin grazes over the slope of her shoulder, which is warm and perfumed with a lingering trace of rose oil and incense. Though she’s only a few inches taller on foot, Dina is petite, and Ellie’s lanky enough now at eighteen that she can circle her with her arms and reach her hands to place them correctly on the guitar.
She tries to focus on the details, the basic principles that Joel had taught her, like he’d promised, when they first got to Jackson.
All of her unspeakable truths, like how incredible it feels to have Dina in her arms, are pushed far, far into the back of her mind.
“Okay, so, this is the neck,” she mumbles, her voice low so close to Dina’s ear. “The spaces between these little gold bars are called frets. The sound each string makes gets higher in pitch the further down you go, see?” She demonstrates that principle by thumbing a few notes in succession as her index finger travels down the fretboard. When Dina hums in agreement, the vibration echoes back into Ellie’s chest, and it rattles her for a moment. “I, uh, I play with standard tuning, so the strings go like this.” She indicates each one of them individually, starting at the bottom. “E, B, G, D, A, E.”
Dina shifts to glance back at her. “Wait, there are two E’s?”
“Yeah.” She points both of them out again. “Low E, high E.”
Dina hums again, contemplating that, then asks very seriously, “Where’s the Ell-E?”
Ellie fails at fighting a smile, forced to roll her eyes out of propriety. “Ha ha. Clever.”
Dina giggles and rocks back into her, like this moment is real. “Keep going.”
“Okay, put your first finger here, and press down.” Ellie thumbs the string for her once. “That’s a G.”
“Two seconds ago, you said it was an E,” Dina sasses back, but plucks it obligingly without being asked.
Ellie can’t even bring herself to roll her eyes. “The string is an E, but now the pitch makes the note a G.”
“Right,” Dina drawls. “That totally makes sense to a person who has no idea what these letters mean.”
The audible impudence in her voice makes Ellie grin. “Just wait until I tell you about chords.”
Dina sinks back against her with a groan. “Do I even want to know?”
“You asked me to teach you,” Ellie counters. “It’s not as complicated as it seems. So, that single string is a note, right? When you play it open, it’s an E, which is why it’s called the E string. Each string is named after the note it produces when you’re not touching it. When your finger is there, on the third fret, the string is still an E, but the note you play becomes a G.” She waits until Dina nods to continue. “A chord is made up of multiple notes at once.” She eases Dina’s hand slightly lower so that her index finger hovers over the first fret of the G string. “So, you would put your first finger here and your third finger here, and your middle finger right above it, like that. If you play every string at once, that would be a chord. That one’s an E.”
Dina huffs, deflating in Ellie’s arms like she’s just told a particularly unfunny joke. “Seriously?”
“What?” Ellie laughs. Her voice is surprisingly steady, even though she’s gradually drowning in how good it feels each time Dina melts back into her.
“You’re telling me that the E chord doesn’t involve either of the two supposed E strings? That’s really what you’re telling me right now?” she asks, a dubious scowl building in the crease of her brow. Her righteous indignation makes Ellie laugh again, because it’s more adorable than it has any right to be, and her eyes narrow in suspicion moments before she’s shifting in Ellie’s lap to glare at her directly. “You’re messing with me, aren’t you?”
Ellie shakes her head, still smiling. “No. This is completely legit. Guitars are just weird.”
“Don’t worry, I see it now,” Dina shoots back, as though she’s already made up her mind about something Ellie hasn’t even considered. She shifts to face forward once more, just to speak flippantly over her shoulder. “You’re making all this stuff up, trying to confuse me so you can draw this out.”
“I’m… not,” Ellie protests rather lamely, her cheeks burning with the heat that rushes into them at the accusation, even as some low, unidentifiable thing in Dina’s voice makes her warm in other places. “The prehistoric idiots who discovered music picked a shitty way to describe it. Not my fault.”
“Sure, blame it on them,” Dina drawls back, clearly unconvinced, but Ellie can tell by the curve of her cheek that she’s smiling.
“You’re such a dick,” she mumbles, nudging her shoulder gently into Dina’s back, which earns her the most perfect little giggle in return. It’s enough to make her stomach twist at the realization that this moment isn’t going to last forever. She struggles to get things back on topic. “The terminology sucks, but it’s easy to remember once you get comfortable with it.” She nods back to the guitar in Dina’s lap. “Try playing that chord a few times.”
Though Dina complies without further resistance, the strings rattle and waver under her uncertain fingers.
“Well, that doesn’t sound right,” she chuckles.
Ellie helps her adjust her fingers. “Try it now.”
Again, there’s a strange twang, but Ellie’s limited field of view keeps her from being able to tell exactly why.
“It takes a lot of practice to play chords correctly,” she explains. “You have to learn how to distribute the pressure evenly between your fingers.”
“I have an alternative theory,” Dina counters, her voice high and lofty. She shrugs. “I simply wasn’t meant to be a musician. It’s not in my blood.”
Ellie rolls her eyes at that laughable excuse for logic, but her incivility only serves to provoke Dina’s lips into a smile, enigmatic and spellbinding. She reaches down to take both of Ellie’s hands in her own and gently urges them back to their rightful places on either side of her guitar.
“Which means,” she continues pointedly, “you’ll just have to keep playing for me.”
Ellie blinks. “What, now?” She pales when Dina hums her assent. “Like… this? I can hardly reach it. There’s not much I could play.”
“So pick one of the songs you can play,” Dina murmurs back, low but with just enough hint of attitude to make Ellie’s knees tremble.
She’s grateful that Dina has decided not to look back at her, certain that her face would give away her every last secret in an instant.
“This seems like a lot of work for a measly two points,” she mutters.
“Hey, you’re the one who wasn’t satisfied with your score,” Dina reminds her, and she doesn’t seem particularly compassionate about it. She’s quiet after that, allowing Ellie a moment to flounder in search of words and possible excuses alike until she breaks the silence with a gentle murmur. “You asked my opinion on how you could improve.” When she shrugs again, the movement is delicate, almost vulnerable. “This is my perfect ten.”
Ellie’s not exactly sure what to make of that at first. She can’t tell whether Dina’s confession is meant to encourage her, or if she’s just decided to be honest because the intimacy of the moment allows her to be. Whatever her intentions, her words have something of a miraculous effect. Suddenly, Ellie cares less about earning herself a better score and more about giving Dina her perfect ten – and doing that hardly requires any bravery at all.
“Okay, uh…” She takes a breath as she runs through the admittedly short list of simple, romantic songs she knows how to play, and then settles her fingers on the strings. The tips of them are damp with perspiration, which she chases away by scrubbing them on her jeans. “This one might work.”
Dina folds her hands together on top of the body of the guitar, where she won’t interfere with the song. The fact that she doesn’t have some smart, teasing comment prepared for Ellie’s inevitable surrender only seems to make this moment between them feel all the more significant.
The rhythm starts out a little shaky, since Ellie can’t reach very well, but it picks up as she goes along.
“I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day. When it’s cold outside, I’ve got the month of May. Well, I guess you’d say, what can make me feel this way? My girl. Talkin’ ‘bout my girl, my girl. I’ve got so much honey, the bees envy me. I’ve got a sweeter song than the birds from the trees…”
The weight of it all, the heart-heaviness which had been lingering in the back of Ellie’s mind, where it was vague and painless, seems to crush her all at once as she transitions into the second chorus. It hurts, how easy it all is. Easy to forget that this – the two of them pressed together, Dina’s body against her own, solid and real and smelling faintly of the fragrant olibanum incense her mother burns in their home – isn’t real. Easy to pretend that the words she’s singing are true; easy to convince herself that Dina really is hers. Easy, because, in this moment, when she’s relaxing into Ellie’s embrace and rocking gently with her to the rhythm of the song, it feels like she is, even though Ellie knows it’s nothing more than a waking dream.
“Ooh, my girl. Talkin’ ‘bout my girl…”
Dina is surprisingly quiet as the final chords fade out. Ellie’s waiting for everything to come crashing down, waiting for reality to march in and punch her in the throat while aggressively reminding her that Dina is very much not her girl, but there’s only silence, the kind that’s still and lingering.
As the moment stretches on, Ellie wonders if she’s made the kind of mistake that there’s no coming back from, if she has made Dina uncomfortable or crossed a line somewhere in this mystifying game they’re playing. She speaks quietly, hoping to conceal the panic in her voice. “How was that?”
“It was sweet,” Dina murmurs back, her voice unexpectedly gentle as she tilts her head to lay it against Ellie’s. “Another song Joel made you learn?”
“No,” Ellie whispers. She can’t see Dina’s face, but she sounds almost disappointed by that prospect. “I taught myself how to play that one.”
Dina turns her head a little further until their eyes meet. She’s so close that there’s hardly an inch left between them, miniscule and stifling with the damp heat of their shared breath. They’re practically there already, kissing without kissing. Ellie feels it like a steel blade in her belly. She wishes she were as brave as the heroes in those comic books Joel used to collect for her, that she could lean in just that last little bit, but she’s frozen with fear.
Fear and something deeper, something darker, some cold insidious thing telling her she doesn’t deserve this, or Dina… after everything she’s done.
Dina’s eyes dip away from her own, down, towards her lips, but she must be imagining it, because –
There’s a knock on the door.
“Mind if I come in, kiddo?”
Ellie winces, and she has to fight against every bodily instinct demanding her to squirm out from under Dina before Joel can see them together. Not that it would help much, because he pokes his head around the partially open door without waiting for her permission, and catching them trying to scramble apart mid-motion would just make things even more awkward. Dina, on the other hand, seems completely unbothered by his company.
“Sure, yeah,” Ellie mumbles, then clears her throat to rid her voice of the involuntary softness it so often takes on in Dina’s presence. “What’s up?”
A hint of a smile plays around Joel’s mouth as he takes in their situation, though the silvering tufts of his beard do a decent job to keep it concealed. “Was wonderin’ if Dina was still around,” he says in his ambling southern drawl. “Heard you singin’, figured she might’a left, but lo and behold.”
Dina just smiles at him, remaining firmly planted in Ellie’s lap. “I roped her into showing me how this impossible thing works.”
He nods, less careful to hide his mirth as he gestures to their predicament. “That’s the best place to see how it’s really done.”
Ellie flushes pink when he meets her eyes with a smirk that isn’t ambiguous in the slightest. “Why did you want to know if she was still here?”
“Hm? Oh.” His eyes shift to Dina again. “Ran into your mother near the refinery. She wanted me to ask you, politely, if you wouldn’t mind comin’ on back home to help with, uh… some sort’a food thing? Can’t recall exactly what she said, but I figured you’d know what she was talkin’ ‘bout.”
Dina nods, shifting further upright like she’s finally preparing to stand, and Ellie hastily sets the guitar aside.
“I better get going then,” Dina says once she’s back on her feet. “All those rumors about her throwing knives when she’s stressed? Not rumors.” She brushes her hands off on the seat of her jeans, then turns back to Ellie with a wink. “Thanks for the lesson.”
Ellie’s stomach knots up like a pretzel at the look that follows. Dina’s umber irises have regained their natural depth and richness now that she’s not in direct sunlight, familiar and immediate in their teasing. Ellie knows that some part of her will miss the fleeting luminance that had shone in them while they were so close together, but they’re no less effective now than they always have been, deep and opaque and absolutely enthralling.
She’s still aware of Joel’s eyes on her, careful to keep her face neutral under his scrutiny. She feels like she needs to make it clear that this wasn’t her idea or she’ll never hear the end of it. “So, what’s the verdict?” she asks, without any particular concern. “Did I earn those extra points or not?”
Dina smiles as she backs away. It’s a real one this time, not teasing or playful, but genuine. “Yeah, you did,” she says gently. “Perfect ten.” When she pauses near the door, some of that mischief from earlier returns. “But I hope you know this only means my standards will be higher in the future.”
Although Ellie has no idea what that’s supposed to mean, she can’t afford the luxury of decoding the message hidden within Dina’s words. She’s too busy trying not to melt under the heat of her gaze as she happily chirps farewell at Joel without sparing him a glance, her eyes locked on Ellie’s until she’s vanished around the corner. Ellie’s not entirely sure she’s managed it, since most of her feels warm and liquid even in Dina’s absence.
“Bye, Dina,” Joel calls back, his thick accent carrying after her down the hall.
The aging walls give a faint quiver as the front door swings shut, which signals Dina’s departure. Joel smirks in that distinctly Joel way of his, crosses his arms over his chest and leans against the doorjamb, undoubtedly delighted to have caught her in the midst of something so intimate with Dina.
Ellie wills herself not to react to his complacence, but the heat continues to rise beneath her skin. “What, Joel?”
“Nothin’,” he mutters, shrugging. His eyes are locked on the boots Ellie had traded fifteen rabbits and a deer to get for him last Christmas. “Just…”
The excruciatingly long pause he takes is just for dramatic effect, she’s sure, which only riles her up. “Just what?”
He chuckles. “Just funny to me how you actually think you got any shot at handlin’ a girl like Dina.”
Then he’s gone, pushing away from the door and wandering down the hall before Ellie has a chance to defend herself.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she yells after him, long after the fact. “And – and I can totally handle her!”
Even though things are relatively peaceful in Jackson, Joel doesn’t laugh very often. She thinks there’s still too much of a lifetime of darkness in him. All the time in the world couldn’t heal that much pain, and yet her pitiful attempt at exonerating herself earns a long, solid guffaw that echoes back to her all the way from the living room. If it weren’t aimed directly at her, she would treasure that sound, rare as it is.
“Kiddo, you handle her ‘bout as well as you tune that guitar by ear,” he calls back. “Those strings were flatter’n a pancake in a hydraulic press.”
The fact that the extent of such a hyperbole hardly makes sense doesn’t seem to matter. Still, Ellie flounders, struggling to think of a comeback, any kind of excuse. After several seconds, she eventually just flops onto her back with a groan, throwing both arms up to cover her face, trapping all the heat of her embarrassment in her skin where it burns and burns. At least there’s no one around to see her go up in flames.
He’s right, of course. Dina’s out of her league, has been from the first moment they met. As much as she likes to try to tell herself that she’s building up some sort of resistance to those gorgeous brown eyes and the sweet, breathtaking smiles and all of her endless teasing, Dina always thinks of an untested alternative, something new to up the ante even further – something like the mess Joel had found them in earlier. It has been proven, time and time again, that Ellie just can’t keep up with her, and she still walks into the same trap every time, a rabbit loping willingly into a visible snare.
Worst of all, now Ellie knows exactly what it’s like to have Dina in her arms, to breathe in the spices trapped in her clothes, to bask in the warmth of her skin, to feel the weight of her breath on her lips, and she knows that it will continue to torment her every day until it eventually drives her mad.
If she’d only kept her stupid mouth shut, she could’ve avoided this whole thing. It all could have ended after one slightly embarrassing song, but no.
“Should’ve taken the seven,” she mumbles. She thumps her fist against her forehead and then lets both arms fall back to the bed with a heavy sigh, her gut tightening as Dina’s words catch up with her. “And now her ‘standards’ are going to be higher in the future? What does that even mean?”
The ceiling stares down upon her, blank and impassive, indifferent to her suffering and providing no answers, so she assumes that it means the only thing it can mean: that she’s just gotten herself into more trouble, as usual.