Chapter Text
THANKSGIVING DAY
November 28th, 1996
“Hello?”
“Uh—Deb, is that you? Hi! It’s… uh—well, it’s Jackie.”
“Jackie!” A familiar voice gasps in her ear through the mouthpiece of her bedroom phone. “Oh my goodness, it’s so good to hear from you.”
“I’m sorry that I haven’t called you in a while.”
“Oh, that’s alright. I know you’ve been busy at college. How are things at Rutgers? You’ve been on my mind so much these last few months!”
“It’s great to hear your voice, Deb.” Jackie’s words are speckled with bright spots of warm sincerity. Regardless of the nervous churning in her gut, she’s always happy to talk with Deb. “And, uh, Rutgers has been pretty good. Do you remember Van Palmer? From our soccer team? She’s the one with the red hair.”
Deb hums in acknowledgement. “I do.”
“She’s my roommate. We’ve become pretty good friends, actually. She convinced me to join the intramural soccer team on campus, so that’s been fun.”
“Is that so? Well, good for the two of you. I always liked her. This is wonderful to hear, honey. I’m so happy you’re doing well. I’ve missed you so much.”
There’s such a well of affection in Deb’s voice that it puts a lump in Jackie’s throat. She lifts a hand and touches her golden heart necklace, eyes fluttering closed for a moment.
“I miss you too.” She opens her eyes and stares at the empty picture frame on her bedside table—the one that used to hold a picture of her and Shauna. “Happy Thanksgiving. I hope that you—both of you—had a great day together.”
This is dangerous territory that she’s approaching, but Jackie had picked up the phone for a reason. (It’s time to be brave.)
“We did,” says Deb, with something like sadness ringing in her voice. Or… perhaps not sadness, but bittersweetness? Nostalgia? “But it just wasn’t the same without you stopping by for dessert.”
She can’t help but smile. “It wasn’t?”
“No, not at all.” Deb chuckles, and Jackie imagines her standing in the kitchen, shaking her head, post-dinner glass of red wine in her hand. “You know, if you still want to come by, we have leftover pie…”
The invitation, despite twisting her heart, doesn’t make her smile disappear. But it does, unfortunately, fall, sagging into the lines of her face and bringing with it the weight of a semester’s worth of longing. She’s glad that no one else is here to see her face.
“I really appreciate the offer, Deb.” Jackie responds, rejection ringing clear in her tone. “But I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”
“I understand.” There’s a quiet pause on the other end, followed by a sigh. “Happy Thanksgiving, Jackie. And—well—I hope you know you can still call me anytime you want.”
Her smile returns.
It isn’t nearly as bright as it was a moment ago, tinged still with bits and pieces of sadness, like meat stuck between her teeth. But it’s mostly happy. — Deb has a good point. Jackie really should call her more often. The urge struck her more times the last six months more times than she’d care to admit, and it took all of her self-control to resist.
“I know. And I will… it’s been too long.”
In fact, Jackie can tell you exactly how long it’s been. One hundred and eighty-nine days. 189. Over four thousand hours. Six months, and six days.
“It really has.” Jackie clears her throat and plows forward before she can cower away from her reason to call. Nervousness scratches against the walls of her esophagus. “So—as good as it is to talk with you, I uh—actually… I wanted to, to talk to Shauna. Is she there?”
“Yes, she’s here.” Deb says in a whispered rush, as if she’s trying not to sound overly excited, but cannot help herself. “She’s upstairs in her room, but I’ll tell her to pick up on the other line. Do you mind waiting just a few minutes?”
“Not at all,” she says, filled with false cheer. “I’ll be waiting right here.”
“Alright, sweetie, just a couple of minutes.” Deb sets down the phone, leaving Jackie to wait with her heart caught in her throat.
She stands up from her bed and crosses the room. The cord to her phone stretches out long, curly, and pink behind her. The minutes drag by endlessly, though looking at the clock tells her that the entire expanse only takes three minutes.
Each of those one hundred and eighty seconds tightens and stiffens her muscles until she’s wound up and flexed as if she’s preparing for a fight.
Is that what’s happening here? Will this be a fight?
No, no.
That’s not what she wants.
Calm down. Jackie takes a breath.
The oxygen in her chest is just beginning to settle when the phone crackles to life in the form of a muffled scuff and the distant sound of an achingly familiar voice.
“Hello?” the voice says, dripping with shock. “Jackie? Are you there?”
Blood fills her brain, draining thick and slow down her body, under her skin, blooming up a painted red heat over cheeks, neck, and chest.
She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. The moment gags her.
This is an overture. She prepares. It’s the calm before the storm. 189 days. Who can blame her for freezing? Jackie doesn’t know if she’d be good in a crisis, but she’s thinking… no, I probably wouldn’t be. Least of all her own. And what is speaking to Shauna again if not an emergency of the mind?
What on earth is she thinking?
(Shauna, if you could only just tell her why…)
“Jackie? Are you there?”
Each time she hears her name from Shauna’s lips, Jackie gets dizzier. There’s always been such a beautiful inflection to the way she says it. It makes Jackie feel powerful and safe and reckless all at once, and that has apparently not dulled with time. She takes another calming breath before responding.
“Yeah—hey… it’s me.”
“Wow.” Shauna says, as breathless as Jackie feels. “Hi. I, uh, wasn’t expecting you to call.”
“Honestly, me neither.”
They fall into the depths of what has always sat between them—thick, elusive, heavy—for a silent moment, lingering, until Shauna finally breaks the tension.
“My mom is going downstairs to hang up the other line. It should only take a minute. But then we can, uh, have… privacy, I guess.”
“Okay.” Jackie nods, even though Shauna can’t see it. “I can wait.”
More quiet. It’s like they’re standing on a tightrope—or on opposite sides of a rickety wooden bridge. They’re suspended above a deathly chasm, and will they make it across? Is the bridge going to crumble underneath their feet after the first step? Or will they never cross at all, doomed to stare at each other from their respective cliff sides?
“Hey, girls.” Deb’s voice cuts in, soft and soothing. She speaks like she’s taking great care not to spook either of them into hanging up. “Just letting you know that I’m hanging up the kitchen phone now. You two enjoy your conversation.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“Thanks, Deb.”
There’s a click, and then for the first time in so long, it’s just the two of them.
When Shauna speaks, it’s shy and quiet. “So… Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Yeah, uh, same to you. It was… weird, not coming here after dinner.”
“It was weird for me, too.” Shauna says, oblivious to how makes Jackie swell with bitter happiness. “I kept looking over at the front door while my mom was cutting up the pie. Like… I knew you weren’t, but I kept thinking you were going to walk in at any second.”
“Did you want me to?” Jackie can’t help herself. She pokes.
Shauna evades. “I don’t know.”
“Same here.” Jackie says, flat, but accepting of the answer.
“Well, uh—how was dinner with your parents?”
She snorts, trailing slowly across her room towards her bed. “Terrible, but like, what’s new, right? I think it’s got even worse now that I don’t live at home anymore. My mom must have saved up all of her bitching for this one meal.”
“Oh,” In her mind’s eye, Jackie sees the twist of Shauna’s lips, the way they slide down into a frown—the image is a smooth reel of film. “I’m sorry. For some reason—I don’t know… I hoped they would be better now that you’re out of high school.”
“I did too,” Jackie admits. She sits back down on her and flops onto her back, staring blankly at the ceiling. “But what can you do, you know? Anyway… I didn’t call to talk about my parents.”
“Why did you call?” Shauna blurts out. She rushes to continue before Jackie gets the chance to say anything. “I mean—like, uh, I don’t mind that you did. It’s—actually, well—it’s good. To hear from you. But you haven’t tried to reach out to me at all, since… since everything with—”
“You mean everything with Jeff?” Jackie offers, sickly sweet. “Like the time you fucked him?”
She’s met with silence. “Yeah. You haven’t tried to reach out to me since you found I fucked Jeff. So why now?”
It’s infuriating, how passive Shauna’s voice is. She almost hangs up right then and there, but she takes a deep breath instead, and follows a trail left only a second ago. It’s good. To hear from you.
“That’s what I’m calling about,” Jackie says, evening her voice out to signal she’s not trying to start another fight. “I wanted to ask you why.”
“What? What do you mean, why?”
“Why did you fuck my boyfriend, Shauna? That’s what I mean,” Jackie scoffs. “It’s a simple question.”
“No, Jackie.” Shauna says, sounding so suddenly sad. “It’s not.”
Please believe her when she says this really wasn’t supposed to be a fight. All Jackie wanted to do was have a conversation. Because she was sad and alone during her Thanksgiving holiday, and that left her with a lot of time to think. Which, of course, meant she thought about Shauna. It always comes down to her in the end, doesn’t it? Still does.
But intention rarely equals impact, a fact that Shauna herself ought to know very well. Nevertheless, doesn’t it count for anything that Jackie meant for her first talk with Shauna to go better? That she really wanted something good to come from this, in her heart of hearts?
(We’ll leave that up to you to decide.)
“Yes. It is. There has to be a reason. Because I still—like, I’ve tried—” Jackie huffs, clenching her eyes shut. “I’ve tried to understand why you did it. At first… I thought maybe you two were in love, but then you never… and—like, I read your journal. I know you didn’t like him. So why, Shauna? Why did you do it? Because you were my best friend, but I think you might be right. I don’t know if I ever knew you at all.”
“I—I don’t know—” Shauna’s voice cuts and quiets, fizzling like the air sputtering from a balloon. “I can’t—it doesn’t make sense, not even to me. My head, it’s so…”
“That’s not good enough.” She whines. “There has to be a reason. I don’t—I don’t even care if it’s a fucking a shitty one, but… fuck, anything would be great. Because seriously… Shauna, was it just because you hated me the entire time?”
She doesn’t know what she’ll do if Shauna says yes. Die, maybe, she thinks, with dark amusement.
“Jackie—no. No. But… I don’t know, also—maybe, yes? I told you, it doesn’t… it doesn’t make sense. My head is all messed up. I don’t know what I think.”
“That sounds like it’s a yes, but you just don’t want to say it straight to me.” Her eyes sting. She blinks, hard and fast.
“It’s not a yes. I’m—I’m not making any sense, I know that.”
“Yeah, you’re not.”
“Are you crying?” Shauna whispers.
Maybe she sniffs on purpose… maybe she doesn’t… but there’s concern in Shauna’s voice, and hell if that doesn’t feel like a drug. She wipes at her eyes with a clenched fist. “A little.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you?”
“I think so.”
Shauna frustrates her. She’s just a girl, same as Jackie, but she comprises so many inscrutable contradictions. Untouchable, yet indisputably wistful. Gentle and protective, but bladed with an anger sharp enough to cut, skin, and bleed.
Jackie whispers back. “Do you miss me at all, Shauna?”
What a tangled mess they had made of each other.
She slides down a rope of linked memory and recollects so many moments between the two of them: some are bright with color and vivid, comfortable obsession. Others sting and prickle with betrayal and hurt. Each of those memories soars with emotion and she grabs on tight, relishing in friction’s burn. Thread-burns sear marks on the palm of her hands and carve winding rope marks around the bends of her mind.
“I do, I really do.” And in the low trickle of Shauna’s voice, Jackie hears tears.
“Are you crying?”
“Yeah. I am.”
“I hate it when you cry.” Her voice is distant to her own ears, betraying her in its softness. “I wish you never did this to us.”
“Me too.”
When Shauna sniffles, Jackie’s eyes well with a fresh round of tears.
“Like, obviously… things weren’t good between us.” She speaks carefully. Her mouth is full of gritty tack and sticking peanut butter. “I get that now. I… took over your life. And—and I didn’t always hear you. You’re right, I could have been a better friend to you, but… why did you want to hurt me like that?”
“I don’t know.” Shauna says, half-whining, half-pleading.
“You—You keep saying that.” Jackie’s voice breaks, shooting up high-pitched and nasally. “But, like, you have to know. Because it was so… it was so fucking mean. And you’re not—you’re not just mean like that for no reason. I know that about you. So… what was it?”
“Because I resented you, because you—because you were always trying to push Randy off on me. Because, you never—or… you always looked at everybody else instead of me.”
“Bullshit!” Jackie cries, flinging her hand up into the empty air. It falls limply on her body. She splays her fingers open across her stomach, resisting the urge to twist them into her shirt. “I never looked at anyone except you.”
“Are you kidding me, Jackie? That isn’t true, and you know it! It was always Jeff, or what other people would think. Your parents, and—and—”
“Oh, give me a break, Shauna!” Jackie raises her voice, no longer worried about said parents overhearing. “You were my best friend. I wanted to—I wanted to spend fucking… forever with you.”
“But only under your terms, Jackie.” Shauna spits back at her in a voice full of vitriol. “You never asked me about what I wanted. You didn’t ask if I wanted to go to Rutgers, and you just—you assumed I would share a dorm with you, in pink and fucking green! It’s like… you wanted to pick everything for me. My clothes, who I should date, where I’d live… and I—I was tired of it, I guess.”
It hurts. For most of her life, Jackie’s never felt right in her own skin. The only times she ever was content with herself were on the soccer field, or spent with Shauna. It sings to know that it was all so false. That every bit of peace for Jackie was not felt by Shauna. That where she seethed, Jackie basked.
Jackie’s exhausted. “And… that’s why you slept with Jeff?” The fight leaves her. Hadn’t she said she wanted to know the reason, no matter what? She’d hoped that… Well, maybe that there was more to the story than the angry words scrawled in Shauna’s journal.
Shauna continues to stutter. “I—I don’t know. I told you… it’s all twisted up. I’m—I’m like… fucked in the head, I don’t know, because, well, it’s all so weird, and—”
While Shauna rambles, Jackie ponders. Maybe it’s time to do the right thing. If you love something, let it go, or whatever it is people say.
“I’m going to hang up.”
“Wait—” Shauna exclaims, panicked, still in tears. “Don’t go—Jackie, please.”
“Enjoy your night, Shipman.” And before she can hear any reply, she puts the phone back on the receiver.
One would think that she was prepared for this eventuality. That she might have expected to feel these particular emotions when she first picked up the phone: the hollow devastation, the gut-wrenching insecurity. But no, that’s not the case. She’s flattened by the impact.
Her life up to date has been a long list of composed decisions and strict direction. Inherited from her mother, but self-inflicted all the same. Her glass house has been so important to her, a foundational base of her existence, made manageable with Shauna at her side.
Jackie now realizes it was a rehearsed imagining. A solo production. A show with one star, and an unknowingly washed up one, at that.
She crawls underneath her blankets and turns off her bedside light.
When the darkness comes to claim the room, she lets herself go.
Jackie shatters into pitiful pieces all over her pillow; lip quivering, chest heaving, and snot running. It’s as if a thousand hopeful imaginings simultaneously burst all at once. The experience is profound with suffering. Who is Jackie Taylor without Shauna in her life? She hadn’t realized how much she was counting on Shauna returning to her. Some day, somehow.
A pathetic sob wracks her chest and leaves her shuddering into her sheets.
It continues like that for the rest of the night.
So, there you have it. After one hundred and eighty-nine days of No Contact, Jackie is the first to give in.
Is anybody surprised by that? Shauna, perhaps. But anyone else? Yeah… probably not.
There’s plenty more to this story. In fact, this is only the beginning! You see, it takes 189 days for them to speak to each other, but it’s even longer until they see each other in person. Don’t worry, not too much longer.
That doesn’t come until day two hundred and thirteen.
But before we get into that, it’s important that you know what Jackie’s been up to all semester. Don’t worry. It shouldn’t take us very long to cover it.
The gist of it comes down to ten important points.
- On May 21st, 1996, the day before they leave for Nationals, Jackie reads Shauna’s journal and steals the secrets written inside. They leave her shattered. She confronts Shauna at her house the night before the kegger.
- Obviously, everything goes to shit. Jackie finds out that she’s—apparently—an oblivious idiot that didn’t realize her friend hated her. (Oh… Jackie.) They scream a bunch of awful things at each other, and Jackie leaves Shauna’s house in a wreck of runny makeup and hot tears. To make matters worse, they lose at Nationals.
- Jackie spends the month of June making a series of poor decisions. Most of it is because of irresponsible choices while drinking. On two separate occasions, she embarrasses herself in public. You’ll learn more about that later. It’s not important right now. When she isn’t found humiliating herself at parties, she’s lounging at Mari’s house, poolside and day-drunk off of wine coolers.
- After one of the aforementioned public humiliations, Natalie Scatorccio arrives to pull Jackie out of the muck of her own pity party. She finds Jackie hiding on the porch, drunk and pathetically crying, and takes a seat on the step beside her. They spend the entire night talking over a shared pack of cigarettes and come to realize that they have more in common with each other than they previously thought.
- On a warm summer night a few days later, Natalie and Jackie get drunk and decide to fuck with Shauna. Under the cover of humid darkness, they smear peanut butter over every window of Shauna’s car, as well as the handles of each door, for good measure. The standard toilet-papering and front door egging were off limits. Jackie didn’t want their vandalism to impact Deb at all.
- Jackie and Natalie never quite leave each other alone after that. They become legitimate friends. To prove this point, Jackie hangs polaroids of Natalie along her wall, replacing the space left by Shauna. Not too much later, Natalie brings Van along, because apparently, she needs some new friends too, after a falling out with Taissa. The three of them spend July and August together.
- Jackie learns that Van and Taissa weren’t just friends, but something more. And no, she examines nothing about that. Not even when Natalie points out the similarities between Van and Jackie’s heartbreaks.
- Summer ends. Jackie’s functioning again. Not quite perfect, more of a patchwork prototype. Dented, prone to small fits and breaks, but put together all the same. She leaves for Rutgers. Van is her roommate, not Shauna. There is no color scheme, but Jackie’s bedding set is a mix of pink and green.
- She’s not thriving, but she does alright for herself. Van makes for an easy roommate. They become as close as her and Natalie, who visits them once a week. Mrs. Taylor, surprisingly, doesn’t kill her when she skips out on rush week in favor of intramural soccer. Her classes are interesting enough. She’s late for sign up, which gets her stuck in a welding course, of all things, but whatever. It satisfies a science credit, and she actually really enjoyed it.
- Jackie doesn’t visit home, not once, until it becomes unavoidable with the Thanksgiving holiday. For as long as she remembers, Jackie would escape to Shauna’s after dinner and share pie and laughter with her and Deb. This year, she stays alone in her room, missing the taste of cherry pie, and wondering if Shauna is thinking about her too. And, as you already know, this leads to her picking up the phone.
There we go. That should just about cover everything you need to know.
Now, Jackie isn’t the only one who’s suffered and pined over this endless stretch of time. (Six months feels like forever when you’re as young as they are.)
Shauna has her own story, too, but it can wait for longer.
Let’s get back to day 213.
It’s three days before Christmas, and once again, Jackie and Shauna have found themselves back home in Wiskayok. This time, Jackie does not call Shauna, even though she wants to. And, oddly enough, they make it a good chunk of the break without running into each other.
Unfortunately for them, but luckily for us, that luck doesn’t last.
Technically, Taissa and Van are to thank for this meeting. Not consciously, no. There’s a party, and yes, it’s because they want to see each other, and what makes for a better excuse than an event thrown by a random classmate? They aren’t thinking about Shauna and Jackie as a unit at all, nevertheless; the result is all the same. This is where it begins.
THE PARTY
December 22nd, 1996
“Have you seen her anywhere?” Taissa whispers from behind her as they push their way through the kitchen to make a drink. There is a scattering of liquor bottles and red solo cups littering the countertops. She’s got her eyes on a familiar white bottle near the sink.
“No,” she responds, for the third time in the last ten minutes. Then, also for the third time in the last ten minutes, she asks, “What about Jackie?”
“Nothing yet.”
Shauna reaches for the half-filled bottle of Malibu. On a drunken night at Brown, Shauna and one of her friends from the magazine drank six glasses of the coconut rum, mixed with, of course, milk. She spent the last half of that night, and the first half of the next morning, on her knees in front of her toilet bowl, her sweaty hair plastered flat to her forehead.
Since then, she’d stopped using the milk, opting for other chasers. Her favorite was pineapple juice, but if that wasn’t available, she would resort to any soda.
Lucky for her, there’s pineapple juice in the fridge. She pours it into her cup and swirls it around to blend it all together.
“Do you think they’ll show up?” Shauna asks, after swallowing her first sip.
Taissa curls her fingers around her vodka and sprite, nodding slowly. “Most likely… yes. I mean—like, everyone is here. Van will want to come. And then, I mean… there’s Jackie, and you know she wouldn’t miss something like this.”
She bites into her lip, terrified of that.
What she needs to do is get a fucking grip. No matter what animosity lay between them, Jackie isn’t a stranger, or a gunman, or some monster out of a horror story. Shouldn’t Shauna be able to face her? But no, it’s worse, because it’s just… Jackie.
A minute later, when her heart is still pounding with anxious anticipation, Shauna thinks perhaps yes, it is worse than any monster.
Because all Jackie has to do is be herself, and everything in Shauna flies into chaos—all haywire and rapid synapses shooting off in chaotic tandem through every connecting filament of her psyche.
“Ugh, I’m being so pathetic right now,” says Taissa, giving life to the exact thing Shauna was thinking. “Like—I was the one who broke up with Van. I should be confident, right? Why am I the nervous one?”
Shauna’s smile, though sympathetic, doesn’t reach her eyes. “I don’t think it works like that. There aren’t assigned roles in a breakup, as far as I know.”
Taissa groans, tilting her head back. “Why not? If there were winners and losers, it would make everything so much easier.”
“I don’t think so.” Shauna shakes her head, taking another drink. “It would suck really bad to be the loser.”
“That’s why I would make sure I won,” Taissa grumbles, drinking too.
“Everybody loses eventually.”
“Are you going to be all sad and broody tonight? Because that isn’t what I signed up for.”
Shauna laughs, shrugging. “Maybe. I haven’t decided yet.”
That gets a snort out of Taissa. They may be two pathetic people, but at least they can still laugh about it.
Sipping on their drinks, they lapse again into silence. The atmospheric noise of clattering ping-pong balls and thudding bass music fills the space between them. Every couple of minutes, Taissa does a full scan of the room, eyes lingering on each entrance
She knows this, because she’s looking too.
“Maybe we could… walk around?” Taissa suggests, raising an eyebrow at Shauna, a touch of pleading hidden between each breath.
Shauna nods. “Yeah, we can do that.”
Of all the people here, Shauna only recognizes maybe half of them. At least it provides anonymity. She follows Taissa through a crowd of people, glancing around as if Jackie is going to slide out of the crowd at any second, wondering how difficult it would be to dart away if that were to happen.
A downside of such a big party is that she doesn’t even know who’s hosting it, nor everyone invited.
She spots him in the hallway, and immediately her heart beats faster. There’s a high possibility that she will see Jackie in person for the first time tonight. The last thing she needs is for it to be ruined by Jeff Sadecki.
He’s leaning against the wall next to Randy, surrounded in a semicircle with a few other ex-baseball players. Seeing him brings a sudden rush of pattering rain, transporting her back to a night last year spent in his car. She remembers the way he looked while hovering above her.
His hands had been gentle when they squeezed her hips. (But not gentle enough.)
When he pressed his lips to the soft skin underneath her collarbone, they were remarkably smooth for a boy. (But not smooth enough.)
He smelled good. He smelled right. (He smelled like Jackie, Jackie, Jackie.) And when Jeff pushed himself inside of her to the percussive music of whatever tape was playing in his speakers, she couldn’t help but think that in another world, this could be passionate , if not downright romantic. The thought had immediately made her sick to her stomach.
After everything came out and Jackie knew what happened, Jeff showed up on her doorsteps. He came bearing a bouquet of roses and an earnest declaration of feeling.
She rejected him.
Sometimes, Shauna recalls the look in his eyes that summer evening. They were trimmed in gentle red as he faced her tall and strong on her front porch. It was an unexpected sight, and it made her chest tighten with surprise. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen a man cry before.
Jeff was hard-muscle and stupid, white-toothed and blonde, athletic and clumsy too. He was wrapped in skin as penetrable as her own, and shamefully, that day was the first time Shauna ever stopped to consider his feelings.
Oh well, she remembers thinking; I suppose I’ll just have to hurt him, then.
Does it say something terrible about her that his pain didn’t linger in her mind for long? It wasn’t personal, there just wasn’t enough free real estate at the time.
(Jackiejackiejackie.)
She tries to slip past him without being noticed. Curling her shoulders forward to seem smaller, she keeps her eyes trained on the ground to avoid the possibility of eye contact.
When they make it out to the front porch, Shauna allows herself a heavy sigh. Home free. But, it’s a moment too soon.
“Shauna?”
Ah, shit.
“Go away, Jeff,” she says, not unkindly, but unmistakably firm. “We have nothing to say to each other.”
He lingers behind her in the front door frame, a winter version of their last meeting, staring at her. “Shauna, please? It’s been months. I just—I want to know how you’ve been, that’s all. Could we talk for a minute?” He’s breathless, pleading.
Shauna exchanges a glance with Taissa, who’s standing right next to her. They sustain eye contact for a second, and then Taissa crosses her arms over chest, looking back at Jeff.
“Leave us alone, Sadecki. You know it’s for the best, so why don’t you go back inside?”
Those sad, puppy-dog eyes make an appearance. The sight of them irritates her. He opens his mouth to plead again, but Shauna doesn’t give him a chance. She grabs Taissa by the hand and tugs her right back inside, forcing Jeff to duck out of their way. Thankfully, he doesn’t follow.
“Thanks for the help.” Shauna murmurs, once they’re safely back in the heat of the party. “Fuck, I’m glad that we haven’t found Jackie and Van yet.”
“Not a problem.” Taissa laughs, downing the rest of her drink with a single practiced gulp. “You’re lucky for that. Jackie probably would have lost her shit if she saw the two of you talking.”
The smile on her face is practiced. Natural looking, easy even, but Shauna spots the lie hidden in the corner of Taissa’s brown eyes. She’s still anxious—still searching.
Yeah. Same here.
Taissa and Shauna make another drink and spend another twenty minutes gulping it down before pouring themselves a third.
They’re in that intoxicated sweet spot: just loose enough to feel at ease, but not yet so drunk that they’re out of control. Both of them are visibly more calm. The impending arrival of Jackie and Van is a guillotine hanging above their heads, but they do their best to power through. The helping hand of alcohol goes a long way, too.
“Tai! Shauna!” Lottie’s voice rises above the choppy-sea of their peers.
Everyone mindlessly parts for her—neither realizing that they’re doing it, nor noticing the girl herself. Shauna hasn’t seen Lottie since they said goodbye before college, and the sight of tall, pretty as ever, but most importantly happy to see her—puts a smile on her face.
Shauna lifts a hand and waves.
“Lottie,” Taissa says, leaning in for a one-armed hug. “It’s good to see you. How have you been? How’s Europe?”
“Pretentious and expensive.” She grins, flashing them a white set of teeth. “So… obviously, I love it. I mean, Paris is kinda overrated, but I really fell in love with Belgium last time I was there.”
Shauna sighs longingly, thinking of her own plans to study abroad for sophomore year. “That sounds like a dream.”
“It was.” Lottie gushes, somehow sounding grateful enough that it doesn’t come across like bragging. “But I missed all of you guys. You haven’t seen Laura Lee around anywhere, have you?”
Taissa smiles. “No sign of her, but if we see her, I’ll send her your way.”
“I tried to call her house earlier to see if she was coming, but I only got her voicemail. I hope that means she’s on the way.”
“How’s she doing?” Shauna asks, sipping from her cup. “I’ve been out of the loop.”
“Good, or at least she was the last time I talked to her.” Lottie pulls a flask from her purse and unscrews the cap. “Did you know she’s been thinking of becoming a pilot?”
“What, really?” She tries to picture Laura Lee in control of a plane, but her mind isn’t able to conjure anything. “Wow, I need to ask her about that.”
“That’s badass.” Taissa says, nodding.
A smile tugs at the edge of Lottie’s lips. “Yeah, it is, isn’t it?”
The clear affection in Lottie’s voice brings Shauna back to her own worry. Reflexively, her eyes dart around the room again.
“Have you, uh—seen Jackie here? Or do you know if she’s coming?” Shauna asks, unbothered by her own blatant nosiness. It’s not as if it’ll shock anyone, least of all Lottie. Clearing her throat, she spares a glance at Tai, tacking, “Or Van? We… we weren’t sure if they would be here or not.”
Lottie lifts an eyebrow, looking between the two of them with barely concealed amusement. Her lips twist into a grin, and she nods her head.
“Yeah, they just got here, actually.” Lottie smirks, lifting her flask up to her mouth. She takes a sip while Taissa and Shauna stiffen in front of her. “I saw them in the living room. Nat’s here too, in case you were wondering. I think they’ll be coming in here pretty soon to grab drinks.”
Shauna grimaces, both at the revelation and the mention of Nat.
She’ll never be able to prove—nor is she trying to—but she’s, like, ninety-nine percent sure that Nat and Jackie were the ones to smear the peanut butter all over her car windows. It took her nearly three hours under the scorching sun to scrub it all off.
“Why?” Lottie asks coyly. “Are you two nervous to see them or something?”
“Shut up, Lottie.” Taissa says, rolling her eyes and crossing her arms over her chest. “No, we’re not nervous. We just want to be prepared. That’s all.” She says it like a surly politician would, but again, Shauna knows better. Anticipation is written plain as day in the curve of Taissa’s smile. She’s preparing, alright. Waiting, too.
Lottie snorts. “Right.” Then, turning to Shauna, she tilts her head. “What about you?”
“What about me?” Shauna avoids eye contact, in favor of taking another sip of her drink.
“Are you nervous to see Jackie?”
“Yes.” She says. The answer comes out easily.
With a softened expression, Lottie reaches out and puts a gentle hand on Shauna’s shoulder. “Everything will be alright. I’ve got a good feeling.”
“Of course it will be fine,” says Taissa. “There’s no reason—”
She goes silent, eyes darting to a spot over Lottie’s shoulder. Shauna’s head turns.
A shadow catches the corner of her vision, a flash of carefully arranged hair and fabric, moving through the crowd. All at once, Shauna is hit, struck—not with fists, but with the intrusive sight of the girl who still occupies the center of her world.
Jackie.
Her mind is awash. She can’t help but stare, fervent, unsettled. Jackie is as brilliant as ever, lighting the room up with a grin that spreads across her face like a sunset, casting a glow on everyone lucky enough to notice.
Nat slides in right behind her, hair dark and unbleached, reminding Shauna of their early years in high school. She wraps her hand around Jackie’s wrist, sporting a wide grin and a cigarette tucked behind her ear. Shauna knows they’re friends now, but it’s another thing to see it. The sight of Natalie touching Jackie makes her jaw clench, frustrating her immediately. Jackie always gives away too much of herself—her thoughts, feelings, and right now… her laughter. Who is Natalie to deserve that? It makes Shauna ache with resentment.
Van is the next to come into view. Shauna’s thankful that Taissa can’t read her thoughts, because from what she can see, if anyone is winning the breakup, it’s Van. Shauna looks her over, noting that she looks stronger, broader in the shoulders—though that could be from an increased confidence more than anything else. Van’s always been a person to have a smile on her face, but this looks different. She looks breezy, like she’s the happiest person in the room. And she looks good with her hair tied in a low ponytail like that.
“Oh fuck, there they are.” Taissa says, scooting closer to Shauna until their shoulders are touching. “Have they noticed us yet?”
Whatever they’re talking about must be hilarious. Laughter ripples between them, bouncing from Van over Nat, and then finally to Jackie. The sound of it rings in Shauna’s ears like a siren sound. Her cup nearly falls from her fingers, but she catches it with a crunching curl.
Ignoring the sideways look that Taissa shoots at her, Shauna bites into her lip.
The exact moment that Jackie sees her makes her insides lurch, twisted by a sick pleasure at the way those wide eyes get even rounder. Jackie stops mid-step, mouth falling open in surprise. The sight is… something else. They stare.
It’s like a coming home, or the end of a circle. It’s the sheathing of a sword, or more accurately, the stab of one into her stomach.
Because Jackie froze in place, Natalie stumbles right into her back. And in a comical domino effect, Van does the same right into Natalie. Their combined momentum sends Jackie tilting forward, and for a moment, Shauna worries she might fall over.
But she forgot. Natalie always had the best reflexes of them all.
Like it’s the most natural action in the world, Natalie wraps an arm around Jackie’s waist and yanks her back upright. Jackie spins. Shauna can see her mouth move, watches as her hand comes to rest on Natalie’s shoulder to regain her balance.
Jackie pulls away, eyes flickering back in her direction. Shauna fights off the urge to look away and stares right back.
Her stupidly expressive eyes don’t blink as they stare at Shauna in… what? Shock? Bewilderment? Excitement, maybe? Even with all of her years of study and reading and knowledge of the many random things her brain had stored away over the years, she can’t tell. It all comes to nothing, because in that moment, Jackie Taylor is standing in the same room as she is, looking at her with an expression of a barely contained something.
I hate her, Shauna thinks with vicious clarity. No, no, I love her. I miss her so much.
Nat leans forward and whispers something in Jackie’s ear, breaking the connection between them. Resentment for Natalie flares up like hot acid when Jackie turns around to answer.
Van shuffles around the both of them, looking at Shauna for a flash second, and then turning to Taissa, who stiffens beside her.
“Jesus Christ, you two are ridiculous,” says Lottie, under her breath, shaking her head.
The three of them linger in a group across the kitchen, clearly deliberating amongst themselves on if they should approach. Shauna twitches forward, shuffling a step without thinking.
(Jackiejackiejackie.)
Jackie seems to be of a similar mind. She tugs away from Natalie and takes a step of her own. But before either of them can move more than a few paces, they’re interrupted by a voice in the hallway.
“Dude, Randy, where are you? The keg just arrived. I need you to help me bring it inside!”
Jeff fucking Sadecki—god, Shauna could kill him. Like, actually kill him. Her free hand twitches, fingers curling into the soft skin of her palm, as a flush of embarrassment rises from the ground to swallow Shauna whole. The shame of everything grabs at her feet and ankles. Reaching, yanking zombie hands come to drag her beneath the dirt. Monsters of her own creation.
His voice jolts Jackie back into Natalie, head twisting towards the sound. The look of surprise on her face disappears, replaced by a frown as she registers who that voice belongs to. When her eyes meet Shauna’s again, it’s with a shuttered, stony expression.
Jackie reaches out to grab Van, and then she tugs her out of sight, with Natalie following along behind them.
As you’d imagine, they split into two different groups.
Shauna and Taissa hide themselves away in the kitchen, trying not to act as if they’re hiding. Meanwhile, Jackie, Nat, and Van lay claim to the living room. Lottie flits between both groups intermittently, but when Laura Lee arrives with Mari, they disappear into the backyard together.
Honestly, she should have expected Jeff to be the wedge between them tonight. It’s how it’s always been. He’s like this untouchable malignant tumor, consuming the pieces of their friendship until there was nothing recognizable left.
It stings, but who does she have to blame but herself?
To soothe her increasing anxiety, Shauna continues to drink. Taissa does the same.
After not too long, they both end up rather drunk.
Shauna’s never been a heavyweight with alcohol. Her tolerance improved after a semester in college, but at the end of the day, she’ll never be someone who can hold her liquor.
That being said, after finishing that last drink, she’s feeling pretty good. Brave, even. But is she brave enough to approach Jackie? She considers this and fills up her cup again.
Despite her rising intoxication, Shauna still has a shred of forethought left in her. She’s clear-headed enough to know that approaching Jackie wouldn’t be a good idea. If she wanted to talk, then she wouldn’t have fled into another room. This will only end badly, right? The only possible result is Shauna and Jackie screaming at each other in front of an audience of their peers.
She knows she shouldn’t. But… screw it, right?
The Thanksgiving phone call hasn’t left her mind in the last two weeks. Jackie was the first to reach out and dial her number. Didn’t that count for something? Even if the conversation didn’t end well, it’s still important that she called, right?
Shauna takes a sip and pushes up from the counter.
It has to mean something. She can’t consider otherwise.
“I’m going to talk to Jackie.” Shauna says, speaking carefully to prevent slurring her voice.
Taissa raises an eyebrow. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Her eyes flicker up and down Shauna’s frame, lingering pointedly on the cup in her hand. “How drunk are you? Because if I’m getting there, then you must be already.”
“I’m only buzzed,” Shauna argues, shrugging. “And it’s probably not a good idea, but I’m going to do it, anyway. Are you going to stay here?”
“No, I’ll come with you.” Taissa grabs her drink. “I probably should talk to Van, too. Rip the bandaid off, you know? I mean—we were friends before we… before we were anything else. It’s ridiculous for us to hide from each other, right?”
“Yeah, totally.” Shauna’s already moving, pushing past a chattering group of boys.
“You’re barely listening.” Taissa grumbles, annoyed. Still, she follows all the same.
Shauna is unsettled. Her eyes flicker from face to face in search of Jackie, Nat, or Van. Her heart stutters, and her breath catches. The organs in her body feel as if they’ve been bottled up. They bubble with pressure.
What is this feeling? Need? Is that what it is?
Her mind tries to rationalize it away, but her heart still burns. Such is Shauna’s perpetual condition. Rationalize, burn, bury, repeat. The heat in her chest rises and rises, threatening to slide up and out of her mouth in a cloud of obsessive smoke. She wants to find Jackie. She wants to unravel in front of her the only way that she knows how: completely, destructively, and entirely.
“There’s Nat and Van,” Taissa says, poking Shauna in between her shoulder blades.
They’re by the ping-pong table, locked in a lazy match against Kevyn Tan and some pretty girl that she’s never met before.
Shauna stalks up like a predator. “Where’s Jackie?”
Van startles, dropping the ping-pong ball she was holding onto the floor. Taissa is there immediately, swooping to the ground in one swift descent and snatching it from the air after its second bounce.
“Here,” she says, holding it out to Van, eyes wide.
“Oh—thanks. Uh, that was a good catch.” Van takes it from her with slow, trembling fingers. “It’s good to see you, Tai.”
“You too. Seriously. You, uh—you look good.”
“Thanks.” Van scratches the back of her head. “So, uh, how are things? Are you liking D.C?”
“Yes, actually. It’s great. There’s so much happening all the time, and seriously, nothing beats having lunch on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.” Taissa’s smile brightens, encouraged by the white flag Van is offering. She steps around Shauna to get closer. “What about you? How’s life at Rutgers? You’re rooming with Jackie, right?”
Shauna leaves them to their conversation.
Unlike Van, Natalie isn’t surprised in the slightest to see Shauna. She gives Kevyn a pointed look and tells him they’re pausing the game for a minute. He doesn’t look bothered, grabbing the girl beside him by the hand and tugging her off to get another drink. When he’s gone, Nat turns back to Shauna, looking entirely unimpressed.
“Where’s Jackie?” Shauna asks again.
“Why do you care?”
“That’s a stupid question.”
“Oh, is it?” Nat crosses her arms over her chest and jerks her chin up. “Because last I heard, you two hated each other.”
“I don’t hate her.” Shauna’s protest tumbles from her lips immediately, and without thought.
Because—that’s not true, is it? She certainly had felt like she hated Jackie at times. (I don’t know. I don’t know.)
Nat rolls her eyes. “Sure seemed like you did when you fucked her boyfriend and then wrote a bunch of mean shit about her in your journal. But, hey, that’s just me.”
Her lips curl into a sneer. “Oh, shut up, would you? This is none of your business.”
“It’s one-hundred percent my business. Jackie is my friend. Not yours. And I would never do to her what you did.” Nat scoffs, waving a flippant hand. “Like, you even getting angry with me—that’s ridiculous! Don’t get mad at me because you don’t like what I have to say. I didn’t make you pull any of that shit.”
Shauna wants to slap her stupid hand out of the way.
Resisting, she says, “I didn’t come over here to fight with you, Natalie.” She’s being very mature.
“Really? Sure seems like it from where I’m standing.”
“Seriously, I didn’t.” Shauna takes a breath and switches tactics. She can’t let herself get distracted by Natalie, not while Jackie was off somewhere, walking around. “I just want to talk to her, that’s all.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Nat’s lips press into a thin line.
“Why don’t you let Jackie decide for herself?”
“Because she’s an idiot when it comes to you! And I can’t stand to see her cry over you for weeks when you inevitably fuckin’ upset her.” Nat’s glaring now, openly hostile.
It’s twisted, but that makes something flutter in Shauna’s chest. It’s not that she doesn’t know Jackie’s cried over her. Hadn’t she heard it for herself on Thanksgiving Day? But the reminder from a third party stirs a reckless longing in her heart. If Jackie’s crying over, she must still care. There’s still hope, yet.
Hope rises like a beacon. The pressure rises.
“I don’t want to make her cry,” Shauna says softly, insisting earnestly with round, blinking eyes. “I promise.”
Nat scoffs. “Like your promises mean anything to me, Shipman. Even if you don’t mean to, you will. You can’t help it.”
Whatever sweetness she felt a moment ago evaporates into sour shame. She rubs a hand against her forehead. “Where did she go, Nat?”
“I don’t know. Find her yourself.”
Shauna leaves without saying a word to Taissa. Whatever. Taissa can find her later.
It occurs to her she can’t find Jeff either.
She slows, looking around in search of either of them.
Jackie wouldn’t… would she?
Very little good came because of her affair with Jeff. But the one silver lining was that, at last, Jackie was freed of him. He was never good enough for her, though Jackie never quite saw it that way. Severing their relationship wasn’t exactly Shauna’s goal when she kissed him for the first time, but she would be a liar if she said she wasn’t happy with the consequences.
After checking the entire downstairs, Shauna goes up to the next floor. The stairs are littered with small groups of people talking. At the top is Randy Walsh, leaning in way too close to Amanda Munch and talking loudly in her ear. He doesn’t seem to notice how she looks around in search of an escape.
Shauna doesn’t provide her with one.
She stomps up and shoves past without a word. Behind her, in a high-pitched shout, Randy goes, “Oh—hey, Shauna! It’s good to see you!” She let it fade into the background and begins twisting at the doorknobs available to her.
The first attempt is a bedroom. Feeling relieved at seeing it empty, Shauna slams the door shut and tries for the next.
This one is locked.
Shauna wiggles the handle with one hand and knocks hard against the wood with the other.
“Who’s there—Geez, hold on, I’m nearly finished.”
That’s Jackie. There’s no mistaking it.
“Jackie, it’s me.” She presses close to the door so her voice can be better heard. “Will you let me in?”
It’s silent long enough for jealousy to creep up her throat again. Is she in there with Jeff? Why would she do that? Doesn’t she have any self-respect? Is that why Randy’s at the top of the stairs? Was he supposed to play the lookout, and—
The door swings open.
Jackie’s standing there with an irritated frown, but at least there isn’t anybody else in there with her. The relief of that knowledge is more staggering than it has any right to be, but Shauna doesn’t question it.
“Will you let me in?” She asks again, soft and imploring.
Hesitantly, Jackie looks out into the hallway, as if searching for someone to come and save her. But there’s nobody, save for Randy and Amanda, who aren’t paying them a single bit of attention. With a heavy sigh, she opens the door and steps out of the way. “Yeah. I guess it’s time we get this out of the way.”
Shauna doesn’t wait another second and slips quickly inside. Half of her is worried that if she isn’t fast enough, the opportunity will be lost. The other half is simply eager to be alone with Jackie for the first time in months.
The door shuts, and she’s left standing there, tracing the familiar panes and angles of Jackie’s face. She’s got a wrinkle in her brow, the one she gets when confused or upset. (Which one is it now?) And her lips are twisted just ever so slightly to the side, which Shauna knows means she’s nibbling on the inside of her mouth.
She looks as anxious as Shauna feels. Should that soothe her? It doesn’t. Their last conversation lingers stale and heavy in the air between them. Are they both equally worried that this will be as much of a failure as the first attempt? Or is it only Shauna?
“You ran away from me.” It’s the first thing Shauna says. She doesn’t even think before it tumbles from her lips.
Jackie tilts her head, peering up at Shauna with an expression she doesn’t know how to interpret. “You didn’t follow me.”
“What do you think I’m doing right now?”
“I dunno. Maybe you need to use the bathroom or something.”
“Yeah.” She snorts. “That’s definitely it.” Jackie presses a hand flat against the wall and sways on the spot. Hm, Shauna thinks, giving her a good long look. “Are you drunk?”
“Mhm.” Jackie hums, looking at her without shame, as if daring her to say something about it. “And so are you.”
“Yes.” Shauna agrees, nodding. “I am.” It’s easier to admit it to Jackie than it was to Taissa.
“Then it’s probably not a good idea to do this right now, huh?” Jackie asks, blinking at her with those wide eyes of hers. “Maybe we should wait until we’re more sober?”
“We were sober on Thanksgiving,” she can’t help but point out, “and look how that went.”
“And whose fault was that?” Jackie snaps, crossing her arms over her chest.
“What? Are you saying that it was mine?” Shauna asks, rolling her eyes, even though she agrees it was. If only she could put her stupid, incomprehensible thoughts into words that actually made sense.
“Well, it definitely wasn’t mine.”
Shit—hadn’t she missed this? Not so much the bickering, but the sweet proximity. The give and take between that always made her blood sing and boil. How long has it been since she smelled Jackie’s perfume—the scene of her crime? She inhales and takes a step closer.
“Fine. It can be my fault.”
Jackie blinks at the sudden closeness, but she doesn’t look displeased. If anything, she seems to come alive, eyes flashing as she takes two steps backwards until her shoulders press against the wall. The entire time, she stares at Shauna, who’s scrambling to keep up. Is that an invitation to follow? Because she’s taking it as one.
Neither of them says anything as the energy in the room comes alive. Every passing second, the air grows warmer with dangerous friction that lifts the hair on her arm in a rise of prickling gooseflesh. Anticipation takes root, twisting down deep into her gut and rooting there amongst the alcohol as she waits for the silence to break.
She would give anything to climb into Jackie’s mind and know what she’s thinking.
A slight movement catches her eye. It’s Jackie, swallowing. The column of her throat bobs with an emotion that Shauna can’t place—nervousness, perhaps? No, no, not that… Something else, then?
“Did you see him downstairs?”
“What?” Shauna asks, confused.
“Jeff.” Jackie clarifies, emboldened by her puzzlement. “Did you see him downstairs?”
Her first instinct is to lie. No, I didn’t even know he was back in town. It would be the easiest thing to do.
But Shauna doesn’t want to risk the long-term for a more comfortable short-term, not this time, not when she’s sparing a space with Jackie and breathing the same air. It isn’t worth the lie. Is that growth on her part? Sometimes Shauna worries that she’s still the same person she was a year ago. The same girl that would sleep with her best friend’s boyfriend, because—she winces.
Because, because, because…
“I saw him.” She says, watching Jackie’s face for a reaction. “He tried to talk to me and Taissa, but I blew him off.”
That must be the right answer, because Jackie nods. “Okay. Yeah. That’s what he told me, too.” Well, that confirms her suspicions. It was a test. At least she passed.
Shauna tilts her head. “You talked to him?”
“Yep,” she says, popping her lip and enunciating the end of the word. “I told him to get lost. Did he?”
“Uh—I think so. I didn’t see him while I was looking for you. I—well, Taissa… we told him to leave too, but he obviously didn’t listen, but I guess you scare him more than I do.”
“Do you still want to fuck him?”
The sudden pivot slaps her across the face. “What? I—no. Like, not at all. I wouldn’t.”
“That is objectively untrue, Shauna.”
She winces. “Okay, yeah, I know that—I just meant that, like, I wouldn’t again. Ever.”
“Why not?” And though Jackie’s expression remains defiant, angry even, her voice exists in stark contrast: soft, gentle, and pleading.
“Because I don’t like him, Jax, and I don’t want him. I—I never have. I swear.”
“Why not?” Jackie whispers. It’s another pushing plea that makes Shauna’s heart squeeze.
“Jackie, I…”
“No, Shauna,” she whines, shaking her head. “Tell me. Why don’t you want to fuck him? Why don’t you want him?”
“Because I don’t.”
“Since when?”
Shauna sputters. “Like—since always? I don’t know!”
“But you wanted to when you did it, didn’t you?” Jackie doesn’t stop, poking an accusatory finger against her shoulder. “What changed between then and now?”
“I didn’t—Or, I guess I did, but not really. Jackie, can you just—”
“Oh, my god!” Jackie erupts with a rise of volume, shoving half-heartedly against Shauna’s chest. “Why can’t you ever just say what you mean? For once, please? This is driving me crazy.”
She doesn’t mean to get angry, but it happens all the same. When Jackie pushes her, Shauna barely moves, grabbing instead for Jackie herself. She curls her fingers around the slender circumference of Jackie’s wrists and locks them tight against her body.
“Let go of me,” Jackie says, raspy and breathless.
Shauna presses forward, trapping Jackie between her body and the wall, feeling half-frenzied and entirely hectic. “I don’t want to fuck Jeff! Can you just listen to me? You never listen.”
“You never have anything to say!” Jackie yells back.
Despite her command to be released, Jackie doesn’t make a move to escape Shauna’s grasp. Instead, she stares, red-faced with anger and alcohol, hard enough that Shauna can’t help but wonder if Jackie is experiencing this moment the same as she is, not that Shauna could explain it at all.
She feels the subtle warmth of Jackie’s thigh against her kneecap. It scalds through the layers they’re both wearing. Jackie splays her fingers out over Shauna’s collarbones, wrists still held firmly in place.
“I don’t want to fuck Jeff.” Shauna says slowly, tilting her head forehead. It’s not enough for their foreheads to touch, but it’s close enough to blow smoke through every rational part of her mind. But, hey, it’s not like she’s known for being rational. “I don’t.”
When Jackie speaks, her breath is warm on Shauna’s face, smelling faintly of mint and beer. “Then why did you? Why would you do this to us if you didn’t even want him?” Her fingers twist into the fabric of the t-shirt underneath Shauna’s flannel. “Please. I need to understand.”
Shauna wants nothing more than to give her what she wants. But the words stay lodged in her throat, or more accurately, her mind. Has she ever acknowledged it? No, not even in the privacy of her own mind, and not in her journal. Certainly never out loud with real audible words.
“I don’t know how to—to explain it. I told you.” She huffs, looking away to stare at the baby blue shower curtain.
To her horror, her eyes well up with tears.
“Will you try?” Two fingers come to rest on her cheek, nudging her back. She obeys, looking into Jackie’s eyes. “I promise I’ll listen.”
Maybe it’s the way she smells, or perhaps it’s how soft her hand is on Shauna’s face, but something very small and very deep crumbles inside of her at the request.
Shauna’s eyes are scared and reluctant. Jackie’s are calculated and searching. She lets go of Jackie’s wrists and puts her hands on the wall, creating a box of just the two of them. Jackie tilts her head and reaches up to touch the side of Shauna’s face. They’re at an impasse—a stalemate of no strategy.
Slowly and cautiously, Jackie pulls at her shirt. Shauna’s feet are concrete and lead, but she moves forward all the same. What is she doing?
“Why?” Jackie asks, voice soft. She’s trying not to scare Shauna, but knowing that scares her, anyway.
“I—It’s…” She fortifies her insides and gathers up every hint of bravery she can muster in her drunken, muddied mind.
What is it about Jackie that turns her into such a fool? Who is she to know all of Shauna’s secrets? Demanding the truths that are hers, and hers alone?
Jackie swipes a thumb across her cheekbone. “It’s okay. You can tell me.”
Shauna’s mouth opens, but no words come out. There are rolling implosions beneath her skin. She’s volatile and helpless as Jackie stares at her. And that look on her face… she’s so fierce, so beautiful, as she wages war and destruction over Shauna’s final gilded deception. It feels like she’s being torn asunder.
For a moment, it’s too much. She’s the one caging Jackie in, so why is she the one feeling trapped?
Her heart thumps a deafening beat, and the blood pumping in her head increases its temp to match. It’s all so overwhelming.
“Because of you.” She whispers.
And there it is. It’s out there.
Jackie’s thumb freezes on its path across her cheek. A frown forms on her face. “Because of me? What does that even mean?”
“It means that I—that I did it because of you. But it’s not—it’s not what you’re thinking. You didn’t do anything. It was me.” She rushes to get it all out before Jackie has a mind to interrupt. “I know that I’m not explaining it right. I told you—it doesn’t make sense.”
“Just keep going,” Jackie says patiently. “How—how could it be because of me?”
“I smelled you on him.”
It’s the first time she’s ever admitted that, even to herself, though the truth still existed in the darker corners of her mind, hidden past conscious thought, too out of reach for her to ponder the way she would with anything else, tucked away with her hopes and fears and dreams.
Jackie’s hand slides away from her face and comes to rest on her shoulder. “What?” She asks, half-whisper, half-breath.
“You two were fighting the night it happened, and I was so… angry. Because I just knew it would be like every other time. That you would get back together with him before the weekend was even up. And—and…” Shauna trails off, trying to put the pieces together in a way she herself can understand, let alone explain. “And then the cops busted the party. We were separated. I was alone with Jeff, and he—he hugged me after we escaped. And I could smell you on him. Not just your perfume, but you, yourself.”
She closes her eyes, unable to stand to see whatever expression Jackie has on her face right now.
“Then what?” The gentleness of her touch is almost enough to have Shauna open her eyes again. Jackie lets her thumb move in a slow circle over Shauna’s shoulder, blistering and encouraging, all at once.
“I kissed him. He brought me to his car. It started raining… and then I had sex with him in the backseat.” Her whisper is colored with an old embarrassment.
“I know that,” Jackie says without malice, curious—if anything. That’s bizarre. Shauna opens her eyes and sees Jackie watching her with a guarded but expectant expression. “What else?”
“And… fuck, I know this is insane, but I was so mad at you—and… I wanted—” She stutters, feels the snap of her brain clicking and skipping, stumbling with confusion at the direction of her own sentence. “I—I only wanted him because he was yours. He doesn’t mean anything to me. He never has.”
She expects that to make Jackie angry, because it’s an objectively terrible thing for her to say, right? And an even worse thing to feel. She braces herself for another shove, or the cool absence of Jackie’s touch, but neither of them come.
Instead of a scathing retort, Jackie merely offers a simply put, “What else?”
Her expression is still difficult to decipher, but Shauna’s pretty sure that she’s not mad. Not yet, anyway. Maybe that understanding gives her the courage to keep going. That, and the alcohol of the night.
“I thought about you the entire time.” Shauna says, because it’s true.
Something about that sentence brings Jackie to life. The guarded expression disappears. What was once subtle curiosity morphs into blatant intrigue. She grips tighter at Shauna’s shirt—a hot thrill runs down her chest.
“You did?”
Shauna nods slowly. “Every second.”
“What—what did you think about?”
This is the moment Shauna finally realizes that something is happening between them. She sees, now, that they were racing up to the precipice of a transcendental possibility. Her heart thuds in her chest; it batters her rib cage and kicks at her lungs. This is a terrible idea.
So, naturally, Shauna continues.
“You.” she says, low and smug over the way it makes Jackie’s breath catch. “I kept picturing what it would be like to see you like that. How your face would look. How—how you would sound. What it would look like to see you enjoy yourself like that.”
“Did—did it work?”
Shauna feels a heat in her cheeks, knowing without a doubt that she’s gone red in the face. “I did.”
Jackie nods, chewing on her bottom lip. Shauna’s heart waits to hear her voice. “I wouldn’t enjoy it, you know. Not—not with him.”
“What if it were someone else?” Shauna asks, hushed now, struggling to hold that bravery. Her lips buzz, and her fingers twitch. The anticipation of Jackie’s answer leaves her trembling.
“Yeah.” she says, eyes flickering over Shauna’s face. “I could.”
That sends her mind racing—this was the first time they were seeing each other in six months. A lot could happen in that amount of time. Had Jackie been with someone else while she was at Rutgers? The thought had crossed her mind before, but it still makes her chest pang.
“Are you still—” She swallows. “Like, have you… been with anyone?”
“No.” Jackie says it like a promise. It’s fucked up for her to care, but the knowledge makes her brain soar. “Everything’s kept me too busy, I guess.”
“Oh.” Shauna says nothing. She isn’t sure she trusts what might come out of her mouth.
After a second of staring, Jackie smiles. “So… you really thought about me the entire time?”
Classic Jackie… always wanting to be reassured about her standing—constantly needing to take the center stage in Shauna’s mind, even after these months. Difference now is that understanding makes her go pliant with fondness. Why is that?
“It was always about you.” It surprises her with how good it is to say that. The way it puts an odd light into Jackie’s eyes makes her skin prickle and flush with triumphant warmth.
Their eyes meet once again. Jackie is penetrating, and Shauna is struck. She cannot move. In a moment of blinding sober clarity, she becomes suddenly sure that Jackie understands exactly what she’s trying to say. It’s you, you, you. This realization is merely the work of a series of small moments, yet she knows it has the power to do so much damage. Like a lit stick of dynamite. A rising mushroom cloud. In Shauna’s mind, there is a wreck—a devastating plane crash—no survivors.
Jackie is so close, and she’s so, so, warm.
“Come here.” She slides a hand up to rest against the back of Shauna’s neck, and then pulls her in for a bruising, close-mouthed kiss.
It’s delicate, like Jackie’s afraid to allow more. But Shauna, meanwhile, wants to devour her alive. She wants to cut the cord on this veil of restraint and let her passions loose.
Shauna pushes forward in a desperate motion, pressing her body against Jackie’s. She’s panicked. There’s no restraint. But everything she takes from Jackie seems to be willingly given. Her mouth is hot against Shauna’s, and when her hands find purchase on Jackie’s hips, she’s rewarded with the rumble of a low groan.
Jackie slides her tongue past Shauna’s lips. It leaves her reeling, oblivious to everything except the way this feels.
She’s never thought about what it would be like to kiss Jackie—not as herself, anyway. Now that she has, she doesn’t think she’ll ever recover from it.
A frantic whine spills from Shauna’s lips into Jackie’s mouth. She drinks it up like water and threads her fingers through Shauna’s hair.
It’s all so much. Jackie is feverish. Shauna is fervent.
Her hand slips up Jackie’s body to brush at the side of Jackie’s chest, fingers tapping out a request for access like it’s a message in morse code. Jackie responds by reaching for that hand, bringing it up to cup her entirely.
Shauna moans, pierced by the act of touching , touching Jackie. It’s profoundly delicious.
She wants to do this again. She needs to do this again. She would gladly endure a lifetime of contrition and lecture if it meant she could kiss Jackie again, and again, and again.
Jackie digs her nails into the back of her neck. With her other hand, Shauna reaches for the chain of her necklace, gripping it hard, like it’s a tether between them…
“Jackie! Where the fuck are you? Are you in there?”
Natalie’s Scattorcio pounds at the door. Her voice washes over them like a bucket of ice water. Shauna’s first instinct is to spring away, but when she goes to move, Jackie tightens her grip, keeping them pressed flat against each other. Shauna stays. Of course she does.
“Yeah, I’m in here!” Jackie yells back, looking at the door. “Give me a minute and I’ll be right down.”
There’s a long pause, and the faint sound of a scoff. “You’re not going to open the door?”
Jackie rolls her eyes. “Just a minute, Nat. Geez, I’ll be right out.”
“Fine. I’ll be at the bottom of the stairs with Van. We’ve got a cigarette for you if you want one.” There’s a pause, and then Nat says, “Good job of finding her, Shipman, but I hope you played nice.”
Shauna stays quiet, gazing at the side of Jackie’s face while Natalie’s footsteps fade away until they finally lock eyes again.
“Hey,” Shauna murmurs.
“Hi.” Jackie says, blinking up at her like a lost doe.
“Are you… okay?” She bites her lip. “With—with what we just did?”
Jackie inhales sharply, as if she’s only just now making sense of the last three frantic minutes. “I—I kissed you.”
Hesitantly, she nods. “And I kissed you back.”
“Wowza.”
“Yeah. It’s the same for me.”
Taking a deep breath, Jackie pushes against Shauna’s shoulder. “I think I should go to Van and Nat. I need to—I need to have a minute to think, or whatever.”
Fear gnaws at the sides of her brain. “Okay, yeah. No, I get it.”
“Shipman, this isn’t—” Jackie shakes her head and reaches out to put a hand on Shauna’s arm. “We’re… well, I wouldn’t say we’re okay, because we haven’t been in a while. But we’re as okay as we can be right now. I just—I need a minute.”
“I understand, Jax, it’s totally fine.” Shauna gestures to the door and feels blood rush in her ears. “We’ll talk later—or tomorrow, probably, because honestly, I should be getting home. I’m, uh, pretty drunk.”
“Yeah, that’s… that’s good.” Jackie nods slowly. “We’ll talk soon.”
They stare for another minute, until finally, Jackie turns and walks over to the door. She pulls it open in one quick swoop and disappears out the other side. Shauna moves to stand in the frame so she can watch her retreating figure.
“Bye, Jackie.” She calls out, just as Jackie starts down the stairs.
She freezes and turns to look over her shoulder. A smile tugs at the side of her mouth, small, but undeniably there. “Bye, Shauna.”
Well? How was that for a reunion?
That’s the main event of the night. Everything after doesn’t matter too much. All you need to know is that Shauna left the party, bringing a reluctant Taissa along with her.
Jackie, on the other hand, stayed for another two hours, refusing to answer Van and Natalie’s questions, before getting dropped off at home later that night.
They both go to sleep drunk and confused, and entirely stuck on that moment in the bathroom.
Now it’s probably a good idea to tell you about Shauna’s year before we go on to the next part. You’ve already heard about the first contact and the first kiss. But Shauna’s had an entire semester too, and you’re going to need some of that context as we go forward.
Do you remember when we went over Jackie’s summer and first semester? We’re going to do Shauna’s just like that.
- On a late spring afternoon, Jackie finds Shauna’s journal in its not-so-carefully hidden spot underneath her mattress. Later that night, as they’re dressing before the kegger, Jackie confronts her, and everything goes up in flames.
- Shauna spends that first night sobbing into her mother’s arms. It was bad. Deb was disappointed in her, and that hurt nearly as much as Jackie’s pain, but she was a steady presence those first few terrible days, offering affection and soothing words. In a roundabout way, it brought them closer together.
- She spends the first three weeks of summer locked in her room with only her journal for company, avoiding all attempts at contact by her friends (Lottie, mostly.) Eventually, the calls stop coming. It isn’t until the middle of June when she sees them again. They’re nice, happy to see her, but she just knows they look at her differently. How could they not? She was a boyfriend-fucker, a wannabe home-wrecker, and they all knew it. Or, at least, that’s how it feels to Shauna.
- Except… not Taissa. They were never extremely close in high school, so it was to Shauna’s great surprise when Taissa showed up on her doorstep at the very end of June. She came bearing the loss of her own friendship (which Shauna finds out later was a relationship) with Van, as well as four weeks’ worth of gossip about Jackie.
- The breakup with Van was messy. Taissa wasn’t exactly very kind in how she ended things. It puts her on a similar level as Shauna—a not-quite social pariah. That shared exclusion, however, is what solidifies their friendship. Everyone picks sides, and neither Shauna or Tai end up on the winning team. One sleepover in early July (a few days after Shauna discovered the peanut butter on her car, actually…) they sat together on Shauna’s bed, laughing together at the idea of their friends imagining them to be villains. They laugh so hard that they end up crying, and then sobbing. That night, they whisper to each other their secret shame and share the weight of the other’s guilt. It’s a friendship forged in hiding.
- They become inseparable for the rest of the summer. One week, she accompanies the Turners on vacation—it’s nothing crazy, just a stay at a beach house in South Carolina. It’s fun, and she has a good time, and for a little while, it’s like she doesn’t even miss Jackie at all.
- August comes, and August goes. Taissa and Shauna hug each other goodbye and go their separate ways. They both act like they won’t talk very much over the coming year, but as soon as they move into their respective dorms, the first thing they do is pick up the phone to call each other.
- Shauna falls in love with Brown and with Rhode Island. Her classes are challenging without being overwhelming. Three days into the semester, the quad fills with rows and rows of club tables seeking new recruits. She signs up for the literary magazine, and everything is as deep and intelligent and worldly as she’d ever hoped. They say it’s practically impossible to have your piece chosen as a freshman, but in early October, they choose Shauna’s submission.
- She’s so fucking excited. Like—genuinely fucking stoked. When she finds out that they’re picking her story, she almost cries. It’s that happiness that finally does her in, regarding Jackie. She’s made plenty of friends on campus, and yeah, her mom is super proud of her. But none of them are Jackie. Shauna knows in her bones that Jackie would be over-the-moon excited for her. There would be squealing, rapidly formed dinner plans to celebrate, and a long warm hug. It buckled her, how much she missed it.
- Then it was like Pandora’s Box. After freeing Jackie from the proverbial closet she’d shoved her into, Shauna wasn’t able to let her go. What was doing at Rutgers? Did she join that sorority she was always talking about? Has she decided on a major yet? Was there a boyfriend? And—well, because she couldn’t help but be curious—had she lost her virginity? The curiosity drives her insane well into late November.
Now, with that out of the way, let’s get back to the present.
As I mentioned before, Shauna left the party right after her kiss with Jackie in the bathroom, and went straight to sleep. But as you can imagine, she had a lot on her mind the next morning. Well, really, only the one thing.
When she wakes up after her drunken night, she’s stuck in bed for the night, chained to her mattress by the unforgiving weight of a persistent hangover. Despite the pounding headache and shitty taste of old alcohol in her mouth, she writes everything down in her journal. Every detail—every breath, and squeeze, and beat, and moment. She wants it all inscribed into her personal history while it’s still fresh in her mind, before time and circumstance come to erode and warp the edges of her memory.
Her fingers twitch constantly over the next forty-eight hours, aching to grab the phone, to call Jackie and listen to her voice—learn what she’s thinking, and to perhaps ask, do you want to do that again? But she doesn’t want to push, and she doesn’t know where they’ve drawn the line. Jackie said they would talk soon, so does that mean she’ll be the first to call? Or should it be Shauna?
The last thing she wants to do is break this tentative… Well, peace isn’t exactly the correct word. Nor is truce, or armistice, or ceasefire. They’ve gone from arguing to kissing to anxious silence, and nothing is resolved and everything is in the air.
It’s purgatory. Just an endless sea of passing time with nothing to do except obsess and brood and ponder. Her mom notices that something’s going on, but she must sense the brittle edge to Shauna’s tone, because she doesn’t prod her to open up.
Late night, on Christmas Eve, is when the dam finally breaks. Shauna doesn’t celebrate the holiday, but Jackie does, and she’s keenly aware of that fact all day.
It’s an hour before midnight, and there’s still been no word from Jackie. It’s impulsive, no doubt, but Shauna can’t spend another day trapped in her bedroom, waiting, and so she kicks the covers off of her legs and takes matters into her own hands.
A reasonable person ought to have tried the phone, but Shauna is impatient and tired. Besides, who knows how long Jackie is planning on making her wait? Shauna won’t do it. It’s been too long already. And she doesn’t just mean the last two days, nor does she mean the last six months. Hasn’t it been so much longer, anyway? Months and years—an entire decade of time, devotion, miscommunication, and a longing she didn’t fully understand until one heated moment against a bathroom wall.
Reason was thrown out the window a long time ago. She’s running on impulse, and maybe passion, too? Or something like it. She wants to kiss Jackie again. Not as much as she wants to be her friend again, but close, and maybe that’s the answer to everything, right?
We know that, of course, but Shauna doesn’t, though she’s close to figuring it out.
Now—let’s go see what Jackie is up to. That’s what Shauna is doing, after all.
Christmas Eve
December 24th, 1996
Jackie, pitifully, sits alone in her dimly lit, empty living room.
The low, white glow of the Christmas tree lights cast soft shadows across her face as she gazes thoughtfully into a dark, empty fireplace.
It’s silent in the house, allowing each room to be a sanctuary (or prison, depending on how you look at it) of unspoken thought. The stillness is palpable, a second presence in the room, broken only by the steady ticking of the grandfather clock that stands proud and tall in the hallway. Her parents went to sleep hours ago, leaving Jackie to her quiet apprehension.
She can almost convince herself that it’s a Christmas Eve like any other.
Almost being the key word.
Physically, it’s all exactly the same.
A grand fir Christmas tree sits in the room's corner near the windows, hand-picked by her mother after Thanksgiving. It reaches almost to the ceiling, and along the branches hang the same gold and silver ornaments from the year before, and all the ones before that. An angel sits on the top, gazing distantly into the darkened house with a glassy stare that she can relate to all too well.
Pinned along the fireplace mantle are three stockings, pale-cream except for the glittery red inscriptions for their names. Cindy. James. Jackie. Her mother picked them out ten years ago, after the big house remodeling, because they would be a better match to the furniture and winter color scheme.
Hm. They were more similar than she would like to admit—Jackie and her mother. She sighs about that and gets up from the couch.
Her feet—wrapped in a pair of striped, blue fuzzy socks—are silent on the wood floor as she pads back into the hallway. She passes the dining room, the formal one, not the nook they used for breakfast, and sees the holiday china inherited from her grandmother. Each plate boasts a painted scene of some winter wonderland or another, refined with traditionalist design.
Hanging on the wall next to the stairs is the same advent calendar from her childhood. It’s a departure from her mother’s careful tastes; fabric-based, and bright with red and green. Kitschy is how Cindy describes it, but when Jackie was a little girl, she used to love it. She would get so excited to move the felt candy over to its new spot every passing day, growing and buzzing with anticipation of Santa’s arrival. She hasn’t touched it in years, but she remembers that old enthusiasm.
Is that why her mother still hangs it up every year without fail? Is there a part of her that goes warm while remembering the early days of Jackie’s childhood? Or is that just wishful thinking?
She grabs the candy cane and moves it to the pouch bearing a stitched white 25.
Yeah, it’s still an hour too early, but who’s counting? Santa isn’t real, anyway.
Everything looks the same, but nothing actually is. She’s in the same house, living the same day, doing the same things she’s always done, but only now it’s worse. It’s lonelier, and she doesn’t know what to do about it.
She’s got her face pressed flat into her pillow, trying to sleep, because what the fuck else is there to do?
The weight of the last two days—the last six months—presses down on her, falling flat on her back, pushing, pushing, pushing, until her ribs strain under the mass, until her lungs struggle to expand, until her heart beats so fast she’s horizontally dizzy.
A deep sigh escapes her, heavy with unfulfillment.
Like the period to a sentence, a sharp, bulleted snap hits her window. She freezes in place, lifting her head and looking anxiously at the curtain glass.
What the…?
And then there’s another—sharp, too sharp, like it’s an attempt to get her attention. (Or someone trying to smash her window. She hopes it’s not that.) Her first assumption is Natalie. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d come to Jackie’s window tossing pebbles… though she was usually softer in her throws. But Natalie was still annoyed with her after the party, and—wait a second. She bolts up and scrambles off the bed. The synapses in her brain fizzle with surprised disbelief.
Could it be? There’s no way, right? She tries to tell herself that it’s impossible, but her feet carry her over to the window, anyway.
She pulls the curtain open and pushes at the wooden window frame with the heels of both hands until gives way by a couple of inches. Then she curls her fingers along the bottom to yank it all the way up. The hinges are still greased from her senior year, a way to allow Jeff to make his way in and out easier. She tries not to let that sudden remembrance sour her growing excitement.
Jackie sticks her head through the window, looks around, and—
“Ow, what the fuck?” She hisses in pain, stumbling back into her room with her palm pressed flat against her forehead.
A small, smooth pebble—plucked from the garden—clatters to the floor between her feet. Jackie bends down to grab it and flings it back out the window.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to!”
“Shauna— ” She’s leaning out the window again, glaring, “you just threw a fucking rock at my face.”
“It was an accident! You opened the window so fast, and—well, I was still trying to get your attention, so I didn’t see—”
“Shh!”
Shauna goes silent. Jackie looks over her shoulder at her bedroom door and listens for any sign of her parents. After a couple seconds of anxious quiet, Jackie looks back; soothed, but cautious.
Standing in the middle of her yard in a knitted white beanie and a cozy maroon hoodie is Shauna Shipman. Now that Jackie isn’t being pelted with projectiles, she’s finally able to look at her.
A rumbling unfurls from deep inside, followed by an ache—blunt, but building. It starts in her fingertips and twists through her limbs to cover every inch of her until she is but a mere shell of her former self. ShaunaShaunaShauna. She smiles, struck with an echoing in her bones that leaves her concave, and hallowed out.
She unravels in a metaphorical messy heap, because it’s been so long—these last two days.
Shauna.
Shauna: shivering in the biting winter air. Shauna: with hair longer than Jackie remembers. Shauna: wearing a pair of jeans that sit snug around her hips and send her fingers twitching. Shauna: looking up at Jackie like she hasn’t seen her in years.
Shauna.
Jackie’s already lost to those steady brown eyes, staring back, unblinking. Jackie can’t help but wonder what she sees.
Regardless, she knows at that moment that Shauna is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen, and she greedily gulps down every moment of the exhilarating sight of her. It’s different. Now, she looks into those eyes, and the secrets they whisper to her make her feel weak with knowing.
I thought about you the entire time.
It was always about you.
The smile that Jackie gives her is extremely shaky, but it’s more to do with her desperately trying to reign in her emotions than any sort of unease on her part. Which… that’s nice. She’s missed that.
Shauna’s smile is subdued and nervous. She seems unsure. But every look she gives Jackie is edged with a wonderful kind of hesitation that Jackie’s never seen from her before.
“Can I climb up?” She asks, half-whisper, half-shout.
“Yes.” Jackie says without hesitation. Then—when Shauna’s boots crunch across the snow—she suddenly sputters. “Wait. No—my parents.”
The idea of being caught with Shauna in her bedroom makes her insides twisty with anxiety. She knows that it’s a foolish fear, irrational. While they certainly wouldn’t be happy that she was sneaking anyone over, it wouldn’t be the first time they’d found Shauna in the house under their noses. It was a regular occurrence back when they were in middle school. They would see it as two college girls, basking in shared adolescence, even as they were angry at the sneaking. But she still worries—would they say the kiss written all over her face? What if they look at Jackie and know right then that there’s something wrong with her—that she’s not the perfect daughter she knows she’s supposed to be?
“Uh—okay. I won’t,” Shauna says slowly, confused, like she doesn’t understand what the big deal is, but also doesn’t want to piss Jackie off.
“I’ll come down.”
“Are you sure?” Shauna says with a clear frown ringing in her voice. “It could be slippery.”
“It would be for you too if you tried to climb up. Hold on a minute. Let me get dressed.” Jackie pushes away from the window before Shauna protests and rushes to slip into her snow clothes.
Her mind drifts again to her parents once more. She can’t help but think it might be a good thing for her parents to read the truth in her eyes. Yeah, it would be horrible—she refuses to imagine their disapproving faces, or the scathing words that might come tumbling out in angry breaths—but if they see her, and they know, then… fuck, maybe they could explain it to her.
Because she’s got no clue what’s going on in her own mind. Is this what Shauna had meant?
She touches her fingers to her lips, remembering in heated clarity what it felt like to have them pressed against Shauna’s. It’s a heavy memory to swallow. It threatens to make her go insane. This will be the death of her. That kiss—and the girl waiting for her outside.
Shauna’s still out there, cold and vulnerable and waiting for Jackie. She hurries to finish getting dressed.
Jackie takes slow quiet steps across the room, trying not to make too much noise with her snow boots, and presses against the window with a throaty sigh. She did this to herself—this confusion, this longing, this buzzing in her mouth—and she did it to Shauna too. She can’t forget that.
Fear grips her for a moment, but only a moment, because then, like it blows in with the cold, cutting wind, she feels braver than ever before.
Because Shauna’s out there, and she’s waiting. For me, her thoughts whisper from a distant corner of her skull.
“I’m coming out now,” Jackie says into the frigid air, looking for Shauna on the lawn, but not seeing her anymore.
“Please be careful.” Shauna’s moved closer, standing now at the base of the house, right underneath Jackie’s window. She’s got her neck craned up, looking worriedly at the thin wooden trellis that Jackie was planning to use for her descent.
Jackie can’t help but smile at the familiar sight as she hefts her body up onto the windowsill. She giggles. “What are you doing so close? Are you going to catch me if I fall, Shipman?”
“I’m going to try,” Shauna says, very seriously. She’s got her arms out in front of her, and is shifting her weight nervously between her legs, as if readying herself to dart in either direction. But when she catches Jackie’s eye, she goes still, and a matching grin appears on her face. “Come on, you can’t blame me for being worried, can you? You’ve always had bad luck in the snow.”
“I do not!” Jackie scoffs in protest, sticking her legs out the window and scooting down the slanted roof on her butt. Snow immediately soaks through her jeans, but Jackie doesn’t stop to worry. A cold ass wouldn’t kill her. “Ice is slippery and I get excited sometimes. That’s all.”
“Yeah, well, don’t get excited right now. Just—be careful. Try not to break your neck. Or mine. Nobody will believe me when I say it was an accident.”
“Sounds like a plan. We don’t want you going away for murder. Alright—”
She looks down at the trellis, covered in its familiar coat of winter-dead ivy and snow, and dangles her legs over the edge. Below, Shauna shifts around nervously, as Jackie swings her feet around until they find a firm footing on the top wooden crossbar.
With a surprisingly graceful shift of her weight, Jackie lets go of the shingled roof edge, and twists to face her bedroom window. Her feet, now uncomfortably angled to the side, pull from their slots and shift forward, shoving back in once they’ve found the proper angle.
Snow bites at her bare skin while she makes a descent, but despite the chill, she makes it down to the ground in no time. When she’s a foot from the ground, she hops from the trellis and lands on her feet in a puff of snow.
She grins. “See. I told you I could do it.”
“Yeah.” Shauna returns the smile, full-toothed and all. “You did.”
Her street is as picturesque as the inside of her house; a tableau of wintry beauty fit for the front of a postcard. Each of the houses along the winding street is as big—if not bigger—than Jackie’s, and they’re all adorned with the sweet sight of freshly fallen snow. Christmas lights flitter from every direction, including her own roof above them.
It’s pretty fucking cute, to be honest, and it makes Jackie smile. But more important than the admittedly beautiful scenery is Shauna, standing in front of her with a red-tipped nose, cold and cute, and seemingly nervous too. She’s got her arms wrapped around herself, watching Jackie with cautious, brown eyes.
“I’m—I’m happy to see you.” She says, expression open and honest and the unexpected (but actually, very expected) welcome sight of it shoots lightning through her spine.
Jackie gulps down her anxious energy. She needs to calm the fuck down, for one, because there is a sense of impending impulsiveness raging in her blood like a stampede of angry trolls. She needs to smother it, because if she doesn’t, she’ll do something stupid.
It would be easy. If the other night was any sign, Shauna would let her. All she needs to do is reach out, and Jackie could have her.
The problem is—she doesn’t know what that means right now. To have Shauna. And shouldn’t she know that? Know?
So, instead of jumping head-first, Jackie swallows and gets her shit together.
“I’m happy to see you, too.” She smiles, because yeah, above all the hurt, and distance, and whatever the fuck was going on in her head, that’s true.
“Well—uh, do you want to drive around or something?” Shauna gestures to her car, where it’s parked a little ways up from its usual spot. “The heater is still a piece of shit, but… it’s better than nothing.”
“Uh, actually… I think I’d prefer to walk around. If that’s okay.” Jackie tugs down on her sleeves to cover the ends of her fingers.
She hates the cold, but she isn’t sure that being trapped alone in the car with Shauna was a very good idea. That night in the bathroom awoke something in her she hasn’t even begun to make sense of. All she knows is that it’s wild and out-of-control, and she needs to do her best to rein it in.
“Oh, er… alright.” Shauna’s lips curve into a puzzled frown, even as she nods her agreement. “But—I mean… Why, though? You hate the cold.”
“Because I just want to, okay?” Her tone isn’t quite irritated, but there’s certainly a subtle edge to it she knows Shauna will pick up on. Perhaps it’s meant to be a jab, just to see if she can still rile her up.
(Careful Jackie, you’re playing with fire…)
But Shauna’s doesn’t rise to the petty quip. Instead, her frown deepens.
They’d crossed so many boundaries at this point—in the best and worst of ways. They’d been cruel and vicious, joined at the hip, intertwined at the soul, and ripped apart, and yet… Shauna had never aggressively cornered her the way she had two nights ago, and Jackie had certainly never pulled Shauna into a frantic, searing kiss before.
So, does that mean everything is… new? Like, duh, of course—their friendship imploded in a shit storm of betrayal and resentment. You understand what she means, though, right? That this is even newer than it was already going to be?
Her mouth buzzes again at the memory.
Yeah. That was… deliciously, wonderfully new.
Whatever the shift, Jackie can’t stand to see Shauna upset, not right now, not when it feels like they might actually talk to each other.
She holds out one of her hands for Shauna to hold. “Look around. It’s so pretty outside. I thought it would be nice to walk around with you, that’s all.” But instead of reacting the way Jackie expects, Shauna’s frown only deepened even further.
“You’re not wearing any gloves.” She says, clearly disapproving, looking at Jackie as if she expects an explanation for such blatant bad behavior.
That old concern makes her go warm inside. Shauna was always so protective—before, at least. It’s nice to see it again.
Jackie says softly, “We’re not going to be out here for too long. It’s not a big deal.”
But Shauna’s already in the middle of tugging her own gloves off. She pushes them in Jackie’s direction. “Here, wear mine. I’m always warmer than you, anyway.”
“No, you should keep them.” Jackie weakly offers them back, but her protest is obviously half-hearted. A happy smile tugs on her lips, and the blush on her face must be obvious, because a sweetly smug expression takes over Shauna’s face.
“I want you to wear them. Go on,” Shauna says in a clear rise of confidence. She looks pointedly at the gloves. “Put them on.”
“Fine, fine.” Jackie slides them over her hands, taking a moment to wiggle each finger into its designated slot. They’re warm with a leftover heat that spreads all over her body from head to toe, and everywhere else too. It’s like before at the window. The rumbling in her chest… that rolling static.
Shauna waiting in the snow. Shauna, arms wide, ready to catch her. Shauna wanting to keep her warm.
It’s like old times, but different too—much like most of today—only... This is a good different, even if she doesn’t yet know what it means.
“Thank you.” Jackie says earnestly, reaching down to try for Shauna’s hand again. “Come on, let’s go.”
“How, uh—how was your Christmas Eve?” Shauna asks, sounding shy. Jackie hears the way her breath catches mid sentence and sees pressure on the lines of her face. Reassuringly, she gives their hands a squeeze. “I was, uh, wondering about—about you, today. If, uh—if you were having a good time.”
“It was the same as it always is.” Jackie says, much more blasé than she really is. “So, y’know…”
Christmas lost its shine over the years. She didn’t care about it the way she used to as a little girl. Sure, yeah, she enjoys the gifts. Who doesn’t love presents—sue her. But aside from that, her parents don’t exactly work very hard to cultivate the magic and spirit associated with the season.
Whatever. She always preferred Hanukkah at Shauna’s, anyway.
Jackie used to look forward to spending those special moments with Shauna and Deb. She misses licking powdered sugar and raspberry from her fingers after making dessert with Deb. Shauna always used to sit on a stool at the island and watch, offering unhelpful commentary and occasionally reaching over to grab a strip of elastic dough from one of their trays.
It sucked to miss out this year.
She almost called Shauna again on the last night of Hanukkah, having been thinking about her and Deb lighting the last candle without her. But after their disaster of a Thanksgiving conversation, she decided not to. She’s pretty sure that she spent that night dragging a reluctant, grumbling Nat all over the mall to take her mind off what she was missing.
“Did your mom get into an argument with her cousin again and ruin the entire dinner?” Shauna asks with a wry smile, glancing sideways at Jackie with a knowing look in her eyes.
“Yes, but I mean—she does that every year. It wouldn’t be a Christmas Eve dinner if she didn’t. No, the funniest part was that this time, they had two fights. They ruined dessert, too.”
“Oh, no shit?” Shauna laughs and squeezes her hand. “Well, c’mon, you have to tell me about them.”
“So, my mom started the first one. Surprise, right?” It’s like old-times—in a good way. Jackie’s eager, happy to revel in something as familiar and nostalgic as talking with Shauna. “We were in the middle of dinner, and she said to Beth—completely unprompted—that her Christmas sweater this year was fitting a tad snug.”
Shauna shakes her head and clicks her tongue. “Oh, Cindy, never change.”
“And, like, of course, Beth can’t help herself. She’s just like my mom. I swear, it’s a good thing those two aren’t friends.” Jackie giggles. At the time, she hadn’t found it all very funny. She was in too bad of a mood. But now that she’s here, telling it to Shauna, she finds it hilarious. “Anyway, Beth throws her fork down on the table and tells my mom—well, Cindy, at least I didn’t dress too young for my age in the family Christmas card. I can’t believe you sent that to Aunt Susan, honestly.”
“Wow, that was a great Beth impression.” Shauna laughs, eyes alight. “It almost felt like she was here for a second. And—honestly, good comeback from her, you’ve got to admit. What was the other fight about?”
“It was even more stupid, if you can believe it. Beth started it this time.”
“Clearly, she was still upset about the Christmas sweater comment,” Shauna remarks.
“Exactly. So, my dad, like, brought this red wine for them to share? They open it during dessert, and right after she takes her first sip, Beth looks over at my mom and says it was a brave choice.” Jackie giggles, before arranging her face and voice into her best impression of an irritated Cindy Taylor. “I’ll have you know, Bethany, that this is an exclusive vintage.”
And there it is again—the sweet sound of Shauna’s laughter. Jackie smiles and squeezes her hand.
“Why didn’t you call me?” Shauna asks, voice soft, wary of spooking Jackie and sending her running. “After the other night when we were in the—in the bathroom—you said that we… that we would talk soon. I remember that.”
Jackie remembers it too.
She clung to Nat and Van after Shauna left. Despite their extensive questioning, she refused to tell either of them about her conversation with Shauna. Nat was still angry with her over that. Instead of opening up, Jackie set to work on getting even drunker than she already was.
Before Shauna even touched her, she was tipsy, but then suddenly she was caged against the wall, feeling delirious and dizzy like she’d just taken a dozen shots. The feeling made her high enough to blow their house of cards to the ground with one desperate kiss. Perhaps she shouldn’t have let her in the bathroom. All she’s done over the last two days is spiral about it.
I kissed Shauna. It was spectacular. Shauna kissed me back. She fucked Jeff because he smelled like me. Why would she do that? Because of me, me, me. She slept with Jeff for me, so I kissed her. It was spectacular…
That was about all she could manage when it came to Shauna.
Then there were the deeper questions. Bigger implications that left her gasping for air and longing for the security that came with burying her head in the sand. (Mind you, Jackie struggles to even think of the word lesbian.)
But she doesn’t know how to explain that to Shauna without spewing out a stream of indiscernible word-vomit.
Jackie pulls her hand away from Shauna and crosses her arms over her chest, giving Shauna a pointed look. “Maybe I was waiting for you to call me. Did you ever think about that?”
For the second time that night, Jackie baits her, attempting to push Shauna into something a little sharper, a little meaner.
(I told you, Jackie, be careful…)
For the second time that night, Shauna doesn’t push back. She only looks confused, and a little sad, tucking her bare hands underneath her armpit, and frowning at Jackie.
“But… you kissed me.”
Jackie is entirely flustered by her candor, immediately going red with a blistering thrill and a heady dose of annoyance. She’s irritated—this is about more than the kiss, even if that’s a big part of it—nevertheless, she welcomes this exchange, and every give and take.
“I called you first. On Thanksgiving.” Jackie rolls her eyes, still in her quest to get a rise—a reaction, another darkened push like the night of December 22nd. “Or did you forget about that already?”
“Of course I didn’t forget,” says Shauna, aghast at the implication, resentment coloring her tone. “But like—you fucking hung up the phone, Jax. Was I supposed to take that as a sign you wanted me to call you?”
Yes. I called you first, Shauna, but you were supposed to call me second. Or—is Shauna the only allowed to have unspoken expectations?
“You fucked my boyfriend, Shauna!” And—and then—you… you fucking tell me you did it because of me. That you thought about me, while you—during—” Jackie’s voice sputters loud down the quiet suburban street. “And then I—I fucking kissed you after. So—I don’t know—maybe, yeah, that was a sign for you to call me. I mean… this—this fucked up distance between us is your fault. It’s what you wanted, right? And like, sure, I could have called you, but I don’t even know if you still hate me or not—”
“I don’t hate you—” Shauna tries to interrupt, sounding mournful and pleading, but Jackie’s on a roll, and she continues without stopping.
“—and I’m confused, okay? Because I don’t understand what it means that you fucked Jeff because of me. And like—why the hell did I kiss you for it?” That question is directed more to herself than to Shauna. She seems to understand that, acknowledging it with a jerky nod of her head. “And—you—Shauna, you—you kissed me back. Like… what? And it was…”
Jackie runs out of steam. Her chest heaves while she catches her breath. Shauna, meanwhile, stares at her with enormous brown eyes.
“It was good.” She supplies, eyes tracking helplessly down the length of Jackie’s face. “Wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” Jackie gasps. Her breath fans out like cigarette smoke in the air between them. “It was.”
There are snowflakes in Shauna’s eyelashes. It makes her look like she’s teary-eyed. She’s so pretty it makes Jackie’s heart clench. She’s so filled with reverent worship for this girl walking beside her. It’s always been this way, hasn’t it? Like—doesn’t it feel sometimes like loving Shauna is what she was always born to do? Maybe (probably) that’s just her being dramatic, but it feels good to lean into her big feelings.
It’s interesting, the way life works. For all intents and purposes, this night should not be happening. And yet, here it is. Happening.
One moment built on a pile of many. Her heart beats quicker with the effort of staying present with it, and not floating away.
Does she have any say in this? What brought them to this point? Or—was it inevitable? Were they simply destined and doomed to hurt each other in their desperation to know one another—to claw at the small parts of themselves in the name of love and consumption?
More than anything, she’s hurt over how deliberate Shauna was in her goal of betrayal.
That the person she loved most would rather lash out and lie instead of talk to her makes her feel small, naïve. Why couldn’t Shauna have just been honest? Or at least tried to? Why did Shauna have to blow them up, smashing her self-esteem to smithereens in the process?
How could Shauna have been arrogant enough to think she could escape their self-immolating friendship? Why had Jackie been so close to letting her?
Layered between each stitch and fiber of her hurt is also a sick, selfish pleasure that she was all Shauna could think about while she was in the back of Jeff’s car. There’s a sense of… ownership—or possession, perhaps—in knowing that Shauna’s first time was about Jackie, and that it always would be.
If nothing else, she’ll always be tethered to Shauna for that alone.
And—fuck, again—what does it all mean? What does it say about her that she loves that?
Maybe it means she loves Shauna wholly, entirely, with everything she’s got, if not a little unhealthily too.
She always has, ever since the moment they met. Why did Shauna not believe that?
She has to wonder… What made Shauna so fearful of herself? So resentful to her own wants and passions? So… angry? Jackie believed their friendship was beautiful. How could something so innately right be so, so ugly to Shauna’s own perceptions?
Was it her? Did she make Shauna feel like she couldn’t speak up or have an opinion? That was never her goal. She wanted everything about Shauna, opinions and complaints included.
People like Shauna Shipman—carefully composed strands of rage, loneliness, and love with nowhere to go—they don’t just happen, or appear out of nowhere. So, again, was it Jackie’s fault? Did she make her feel small?
As she looks down at their composed hands, thinking back to two nights ago. Shauna certainly didn’t seem to feel small then.
Jackie remembers how their mouths moved together—warm and wet and sweetly out of sync—how her Shauna’s hands ghosted over the curve of her chest, excited, but tentative. Shauna’s first time would always be about Jackie. And Jackie still has her virginity. She can’t help but think…
Fuck—what a feeling. Though she’s being shamefully wanton, the burning feeling is tempered by the sheer affection she has for this dangerous, complicated individual.
Jackie shivers.
It catches Shauna’s attention.
“You’re cold.” She whines, yanking them to a halt.
“I’m fine, Shauna.” Jackie protests, but once again, Shauna’s not waiting. She drops Jackie’s hand and reaches up to pull off her white beanie. “Really—you don’t need to—”
“Be still.” She orders in a voice full of a hissing steam that makes Jackie’s insides boil and churn with something reverent and rapturous. “Let me keep you warm.”
Jackie complies. To Shauna’s satisfaction, she notes, seeing the pleased smirk that pulls on her lips, more than a little smug. Jackie stares, because… well—she’s tasted those lips. Now she knows what happens the minute they press to hers. She comes to life—awakened and aware. What an addictive feeling that is.
She slips the hat over Jackie’s head, moving slowly and taking care not to mess up her hair. Not that it looks particularly amazing, or anything. Still, she’s touched by the gesture.
It slips snugly over her ears, and admittedly, she’s much warmer now. Both from the extra coverage, but also from the gentle touch. Let me keep you warm.
Shauna’s eyes creep downward, curling over Jackie’s jaw before trailing back up to her lips. She exhales a tiny, shallow sigh. Jackie knows this sound. She heard it for the first time only forty-eight hours ago. Shauna wants. This knowledge makes her chest go twisted and tight. She knows exactly how Shauna’s feeling. Intimately so.
“There,” Shauna murmurs, smiling to herself. Jackie wants to know what she’s thinking. “That’s better.”
They stand there, Shauna’s hand still on Jackie’s face, her fingers brushing the line of the hat near her ears, while Jackie simply stares.
Her eyes break Jackie’s heart.
She closes her eyes before she cries. It’s—fuck, it’s like she brimming with love, an entire semester’s worth, and maybe longer than that. Love, and a deep, hopeful fear. She wants so much for this reunion to be exactly that—a reunion.
Slowly, she pulls Shauna’s hands from her face and interlaces their fingers so they can begin walking down the sidewalk once again.
“I—I don’t know where we go from here, Shipman.” Jackie says, looking at the ground. “I’m being so honest with you right now. I—I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now.”
She peeks a glance. Shauna is biting into her bottom lip. After a brooding moment, she speaks, still staring resolutely at their moving feet. “Jackie… are you, at all, like—angry… or—or upset with me?”
“Uh, yeah? That’s sort of the whole point.” Jackie arches an eyebrow. Hey, can you blame her for being a little sarcastic? Besides, there’s no real malice in her voice, anyway. “But, uh, like—for what, specifically?”
“For…” Shauna’s hand flexes around Jackie’s as she takes in a long, slow breath. “For thinking about you while I was… with Jeff. Because—I know it’s insane. I mean, you know, I already told you I’m fucked in the head, or something. But I just… I don’t know—I know it was wrong of me… to—to want you like that, I guess.”
That last bit lights her up like a bolt of electricity.
Shauna wants her.
It isn’t wrong—or, well, it might be, but not how Shauna means it.
So many people have wanted her, but none of them were Shauna. She struggles to plan a reply.
“I—what? Shauna, no. It’s not—you’re not—like… honestly, of all the reasons you could have done it for, that…” Wanting me, she thinks, fiddling with some space in the thumb of her (Shauna’s) glove. “I mean, it’s definitely than if you—fucking… were in love with him, or whatever. I guess that—geez, if you’re fucked in the head, then so am I—because like, I don’t know… you thinking of me… it feels good?”
They’re afraid to look at each other, but also unable to look anywhere else. Shauna’s eyes widen, and her pupils blow wider, darkening sweet brown into a predatory black. “It does?”
“Yes. But—also, no? You fucking betrayed me, Shauna, on purpose. So, no, it doesn’t feel good—except… except it does, but only the part where you thought of me… not the—not the rest, but—” Jackie yanks them to a halt again. “Can we just set that part aside for a minute? And also like… everything to do with me kissing you?”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay.” Shauna quickly nods.
“So, it’s not even that you had sex with Jeff. It is, but like, not really. It’s more that you wanted to hurt me. Like god—Shauna, why couldn’t have been honest instead of screwing my boyfriend? If I really was stifling you, or… if you wanted things to be different… Why didn’t you tell me you hated me?”
“I don’t hate you.” Shauna says, sounding so sad. Jackie wants to believe her. She really, really does. “I swear—I don’t hate you, Jax. I’m so sorry for making you think I did.”
“This whole thing sucks, you know?” The words tumble from her mouth in a hurried domino-rush. Why did they have to wait so long to do this? Why couldn’t they have said these things to each other in May? “Because, like, we’ve lost so much time together. This whole semester, we could have been—like, I don’t know, at least in contact. Do you know how much I missed you?”
She’s done such a good job at not crying, but the emotional distress is tallying up, and the bill needs to be paid. Jackie’s face scrunches up, and she tries to will the tears away, cursing the few that escape. They carve a cold path down her cheek. She lifts a hand to wipe them away, but Shauna stops her, lifting her own palm to do the job herself. Somehow, despite wearing no gloves, her touch is still hot against Jackie’s skin.
“You’re right, you’re right. I should have talked to you—I just… I need you to believe me, Jackie. I didn’t understand.” Her eyes are so wide and pleading. She swipes at Jackie’s cheekbone with her thumb. “I am so, so sorry for what I did to you. I regret it, and I would take it back if I could. But—like, I was seriously in a messed up headspace. I don’t—like, even right now—I don’t fully understand it.”
“Okay.” Jackie says gently, lifting her hand to cover Shauna’s, and lacing their fingers together against her cheek and hair.
“I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry,” Shauna says again. There’s a crack in her voice, sending her tone pitching up high. Jackie’s heart curls, and her fingers too, holding tighter to Shauna’s hand.
“I know you are.” She’s trying to soothe, even as her own mind spins and rambles in anxious confusion.
“And I missed you, Jackie.” Shauna says shakily. Her eyes flicker rapidly between Jackie’s, frenzied in a way that should scare her, but only make her feel seen. “I know I fucked up, like—tremendously bad. Fucking horrifyingly bad. But I want to fix it—because, like, I missed you, and I need you—because we have to fix this, right?”
“We can’t go back to the way it used to be.”
“No.” Shauna nods her head in firm agreement. “We can’t. You’re right. But we can try to… to be something else. Different, and better, maybe? I really miss being your best friend.”
Jackie closes her eyes, sighing. “I miss being yours. So fucking much.”
After looping around the block, Jackie and Shauna come to a stop at Shauna’s car.
“Do you forgive me?”
Jackie doesn’t need to think for long to come up with her answer. “No, not yet.”
The effect of her words on Shauna is instantaneous. She inhales sharply, eyes flickering down to the ground, brows furrowed, and mouth already curving into a frown. “Oh.”
“But I want to, okay?” Jackie drops her hand, but reaches out to touch her arm. “I really do. It’s just—it can’t be done in a single night. This was good, but I’ve got to… think about everything, you know?”
“I understand.” Shauna sighs, looking reluctant to leave. But she nods. “It’s probably a good idea for me to go home, anyway. I’m getting cold.”
Jackie nods, but doesn’t make any move to head back to her house. She wants a hug.
Does Shauna want that too? Is Jackie able to reach out and pull into an embrace the way she had for years?
It’s strange to even question that.
Before Jackie can decide, she’s interrupted by the high-pitched, rhythmic beat of a watch. Shauna glances at her wrist, staring. A second later, a smile unfolds across her face. She looks up at Jackie, soft, sweet, and winter-beautiful.
“It’s midnight.” She holds up her arm so Jackie can see. “Merry Christmas, Jackie.”
“Oh, yeah.” Jackie blinks, surprised by that. “Uh, thank you—and… I wanted to tell you… I missed you and your mom during Hanukkah this year. I thought about you a lot, especially the last night. I, uh, almost called you.”
“Really?” Shauna asks, looking heartened by that. “My mom and I talked about that night, actually.”
“You did?” It’s Jackie’s turn to get blushy and bashful.
“Yeah. She misses you a lot.”
“I still need to call her. I promised her I would on Thanksgiving.”
“She would like that.” Shauna tilts her head, eyes flickering across Jackie’s face. “I wish I brought a Christmas present for you.”
Jackie taps the knitted white beanie that still sits snug on her head, keeping her eyes toasty and warm, and wiggles her gloved fingers in Shauna’s face. “You kept me warm, silly. That counts as a present to me.”
“Will you keep them?” The words slip out in a rush of warm breath and wispy condensation. “The hat—and the gloves. Please?”
Her expression is open and imploring, like it’s very important to her that Jackie accepts the gifts. She feels that warmth again in her stomach—that tender yield. A faint blush stains her cheeks when she realizes Shauna is trying to map her features. Jackie nods. “I will. Thank you.”
Shauna grabs Jackie by her arms and yanks her close with a bruising force, pulling her against her chest for a tight hug.
She leans into it, resting her cheek against Shauna’s shoulder.
When they pull apart, Shauna looks over Jackie’s shoulder at the house, squinting suspiciously at the trellis again. “Please be careful when you’re climbing up.”
“I will, I will.” Jackie rolls her eyes playfully. “Goodnight, Shipman. Get home safe.”
“I will.” Shauna says, smiling. “But I’m not leaving until I see you make it into your house.”
“Fair.” She wraps her arms around her chest and bites into her lip. “I’ll call you. For real this time, so we can keep talking. I promise.”
“I’m looking forward to it. Really.”
And fuck, Jackie can’t help herself. She isn’t ready to say goodbye to this contradictory girl. With a reluctant groan, she flings herself forward to claim a second hug.
Shauna’s breathy giggle blows warm on her cheeks as they press into each other once more. This embrace lasts longer than the first, and when they pull away, it’s slow—fingers dragging down arms, hands lingering, arms brushing against each other for longer than necessary.
But, eventually, they separate. Jackie walks back up to her house. She’s halfway there when Shauna calls out for her in another half-whisper, half-shout.
“Hey, Jackie?”
She turns. Shauna is staring, snowflakes dusting her hair like powdered sugar and glitter. Jackie wishes she could take a picture of her. “Yeah?”
“Just, uh, one more thing. Did you… did you like it? Our kiss?”
Jackie blinks. Without thinking, she touches her mouth with her gloved fingers—let me keep you warm—and remembers. “Yeah, Shipman. I did.”
“Would you ever want to do it again?”
Yes.
Yes, fuck yes, a thousand times yes. Affirmative. Absolutely. Of course.
You betcha. — Please, can we?
Jackie wants to kiss right now, and also yesterday, but most definitely tomorrow.
It’s as if her entire universe experienced a shift ever since that kiss—a flash, a photo negative, the white light of an atomic bomb—her world view has completely inverted. There is something so surreal about this moment. She feels swooping, soaring hope and painful pangs of frustration and confusion.
She wants to do it again. She wants more—more than she can even articulate, but there’s so much work to do, so much left to resolve.
As much as Jackie wants to kiss her, she won’t let that impede what matters. Them—Jackie and Shauna—a unit, two girls, best friends, halves of the same messy whole.
“I don’t know.” Jackie lies, looking away so Shauna will not have to stare directly at her sacrificial falsehood. “Maybe—but… I don’t know yet. I’m sorry.”
It’s bittersweet on her tongue.
“You don’t need to apologize. I understand.” Shauna sighs. She smiles at Jackie, gentle and sweet. “It’s cold, Jax. You should go inside.”
That’s all, folks!
Just kidding.
The story today is all about the moment of impact, and Jackie and Shauna have just a little more ground to cover until we call it a day. I know, it’s been a long one, but bare with a little while longer. What comes next is the key. It’s the glue that will hold the next six months together—the crucial puzzle piece in the story of their reconciliation.
If you were worried about Jackie climbing back into her window, you don’t need to be. She makes it up the trellis without issue.
As promised, Shauna doesn’t leave until she sees Jackie is safely outside. In fact, she doesn’t even get into the car, not until Jackie waves at her from the warmth of her bedroom.
Approximately one minute after Shauna drives away, Jackie is struck with a longing so intense it nearly makes her knees buckle.
After—what was it again? Two hundred something days? After going however many days without seeing Shauna, it feels viscerally wrong to watch her drive away. She feels like a child again, like her truest self, because nothing is more natural to Jackie Taylor than longing after Shauna Shipman. It’s always been this way, she realizes.
How is she supposed to climb into bed and sleep after this? She wants more. Needs more, as dramatic as it sounds—as much as Shauna will give her, as much as she can take, take, take.
Which… that was already a problem before… Jackie taking.
She took too much, but Shauna always let her, tearing off pieces of herself for Jackie to consume with eager greed, falsely believing it was a gift freely given. She doesn’t want to do that anymore, but unfortunately, she doesn’t know any other way.
Yes, they’ve agreed to find one together, but old habits die hard, or in her case, perhaps not at all.
The route from Jackie’s house to Shauna’s takes, on average, twelve minutes by car. It will take longer tonight because of the snow, and Shauna’s generally careful attitude about driving. Jackie keeps this in mind.
She waits fifteen minutes before picking up the phone.
Jackie doesn’t know it, but her timing is perfect.
The night of December 24th is a big one, but it’s not over yet. Although… If we’re being technical, and we are, it’s now the early morning of December 25th, and we’ve got one last thing to cover.
Christmas Day
December 25th, 1996
Shauna thinks she’ll remember the moment Jackie first came into view for the rest of her life. Setting aside the embarrassment she felt after nailing her in the forehead with a badly timed pebble, she was struck still with a deep and resounding shock, the sort that started in her fingertips, spreading and usurping all of her motor function in a wave of dormant dominance.
She just… she looked so good.
Honestly, Shauna doesn’t think she’ll ever stop being completely undone over how naturally stunning Jackie is—hair hanging loose, wearing a simple white sweater that highlighted just how sinfully rich her skin tone was.
She’s thinking about that again, later, as Jackie scrambles back up the trellis and into her bedroom window.
It’s expertly done—which, sure, it’s her bedroom, and this is by no means the first time Jackie’s snuck back inside. But she does it still with an athleticism that has Shauna thinking: do you still play soccer? Do you still run? And do you still hate it as much as you used to, despite doing it diligently, every day?
There’s so much about Jackie’s new life that remains a mystery to her. She hopes to learn these new secrets.
“Fuck.” She throws herself into the car. It’s cold.
The engine roars to life with only a minimal amount of stalling. The car is in fairly good condition considering its age, but the cold weather always seems to make it run just a little bit worse. A blast of cool air hits her right in the face, and she hurries to switch off the heat. It takes forever to warm up, and that’s only if it decides to at all.
Jackie’s promise to call her alone makes the cold worth it.
They’re going to talk. Jackie is going to call her, and Shauna will learn about everything she missed.
When the car finally warms up enough to drive, she flips the heat back on. It’s not much better than the first time, but something like warmth blows out from the air vents. She pushes them away from her face, sighing.
Shitty heat is better than none at all.
She presses her foot to the gas and drags down the snowy street. Already, she’s soothed by the moving car. She’s always so much more settled when she’s in motion—running, driving, writing, fucking—it reminds her that things are always going, that there’s always change.
Nothing stays the same for long, for better and worse.
Glancing out the window, she looks at the sidewalk, where she can still see the line of her and Jackie’s footprints. They won’t be visible for much longer, not if the snow keeps coming down like it is, but seeing them there side-by-side puts a smile on her face.
She cruises—slowed by the weather and her own thoughts. It all keeps playing on repeat in her mind. Jackie, an angel in the window, holding her hand, telling Shauna about her day. Jackie, saying the kiss was good, that she liked it.
Jackie liked it. It was good.
Shauna won’t deny it. Something’s been opened within her. There is a version of her from before kissing Jackie, and a version of her after, and she will never be the same.
For a moment there, when Jackie was blinking up at her with eyes wide and sparkling, she almost tossed caution to the wind and kissed her right then. It was so overwhelming. Her lips were set in that perfect pout, set against tanned skin that was soft and pink underneath the pads of Shauna’s fingers.
She was so fucking cute wearing Shauna’s hat. What else was she supposed to do besides give it to her?
Shauna considers what might have happened had she given into the impulse—if she’d let herself go, let herself take—she’s sure that she would have devoured Jackie alive. Shauna would have pushed and worked and fought for the gift of each beautiful sound Jackie’s lungs could produce.
And there would be so many.
So… in the end, it was a good thing she resisted, because Jackie didn’t know if she wanted to do it again. Because Jackie needs time to think, and because they need time to heal together. — Then again, it could be worse. Maybe Jackie was just trying to spare her feelings. Maybe she didn’t like it. Whatever. The result was the same. It was a good thing she didn’t kiss her.
Even if Jackie doesn’t know if she wants to kiss Shauna again, she at least wants to try to forgive her. Which… in the grand scheme of things, that’s much more important, anyway. So… did that make the night a success? Shauna’s inclined to think so.
Will Jackie call soon? How long will she have to wait?
There’s a lot of worry stacked on her deck—fear that she’s going to blow this up. Anxiety that she and Jackie would never work together, as friends, or as whatever they were tonight. She feels the familiar temptation to spin out, waiting for her in the wings of her mind like a hawkish referee. She reminds herself that tonight was a step. A big one, an important one, but a single step all the same. They’re going to find their way back to each other. They have to. She repeats this to herself like a mantra.
Wiskayok High School sits before her windshield, looking drab and gloomy under a blanket of snow and moonlight.
She stares at the front, remembering countless afternoons spent waiting for Jackie right outside those doors, back when they were still young enough to ride the bus. They would never be those versions of themselves again, would they?
Was it even possible for her to be just Jackie’s friend? Shauna’s heart and hands—they scream no—but her mind screeches at her to take whatever scraps she can get. Hasn’t she learned by now that she doesn’t want to be without Jackie? Wasn’t this semester proof enough? Shauna wasn’t miserable. Hell, she was even quite happy on most days. But something was missing.
Still—would friendship be enough?
For the first time in her life, Shauna was given control. Sure, Jackie may have been the one to start the kiss, but it was Shauna that pressed her into the wall. Shauna that dug her fingers into Jackie’s hip. Her neural pathways spark wildly as she remembers the gift of it. Control. She was a stranger to it, and her attempts at reaching for it often ended clumsily, with devastating results. But that kiss—that was something. A new chapter, a fresh page, something untouched and virgin in the fire of her own mind.
Control: not seized, but offered, so freely, so sweet.
Remembering sends waves of warmth rolling through her veins. Her fingers curl around the steering wheel and glow with heat. Her stomach flutters, teasing the insides of her thighs until they were helplessly trembling with the wonder of this new and remarkable something Shauna was experiencing.
She knows what it’s like to kiss her.
How is she ever going to come back from that?
When she walks into her house, she’s met with the sound of the phone ringing. Her mom is working tonight. She usually takes the Christmas shifts to give some of her coworkers the holiday off, but it means that she’s not here, and the phone won’t disturb any of her much needed rest.
Still, Shauna rushes to the kitchen. She certainly doesn’t expect it to be Jackie, but she hopes it is all the same.
“Hello?” she says, after grabbing the phone off the hook.
“Shipman? Hey. It’s me,” Jackie’s voice is raspy in her ear.
Shauna strains with her effort to appear effortless, but the excitement she feels over Jackie calling is physical. She grins, feeling like the luckiest compilation of atoms on the planet. “Hi. I, uh, wasn’t expecting you to call so soon.”
“Didn’t I promise you I would?”
“You did. I just—I thought you meant, like, tomorrow, or something.”
“Well… I can call you tomorrow instead, if you’d rather not talk right now?”
“No—no!” Shauna rushes to spit the words out. “Right now is just fine.”
“Awesome. I was kinda hoping you would say that.”
“I’m, uh, glad you called.”
“Yeah?” Jackie asks, fishing for compliments. Shauna hears the bait threaded between each letter of the word, and can imagine the little smirk on her lips. It’s so vivid in her mind that for a moment, it’s like Jackie’s standing right next to her.
That used to annoy her. But before… before Jeff, and before bitterness and resentment… She used to like it. It made Shauna feel important when she found the perfect words to make Jackie feel good. There was something about knowing the exact combination of praise to make Jackie smile… it was as old of a pastime as writing in her journal. How had she forgotten that?
Shauna sighs happily. “Yes. I missed you as soon as I drove away from your house.”
“Wow, because I started missing you as soon as I was back in my room. Guess that means I’ve been missing you for longer than you’ve been missing me.”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, but you’ll need to miss me for just a little while longer. I’m on the phone downstairs right now.” Shauna laughs, twirling the cord around her finger, and hoping sincerely that Jackie wants to stay on the phone. “Can I hang up again and call you back from my bedroom?”
“I don’t want the ringing to wake up my parents…” Jackie huffs with familiar annoyance. “How about I call you again in, like… two minutes?”
She grins. “Sure. That works.”
“Alrighty then. Talk to you in a minute, Shipman.”
She takes the stairs up to her bedroom two at a time, rushing so hard that she nearly slips on the way up the ladder. Pathetic of her, really, considering she’s made it safely up these rungs are far more precarious circumstances.
Her room is a little messy—scattered with clothes and books and little stray pieces of her life. She hasn’t been doing a wonderful job of keeping it tidy since returning for the winter, but that’s about par for the course for Shauna. The difference in appearance from how it’s always looked is that it’s absent all of her old Jackie memorabilia.
During the summer, when she could finally leave her mother’s arms and come up for air, she’d purged every reference to Jackie Taylor. Now—no matter how upset she was at the time, there was no way Shauna could ever bring herself to actually get rid of everything. She was far too sentimental for that.
Instead, all of her pictures, their shared clothes, classroom doodles, and silly trinkets were stored away in a set of small boxes in the back of her closet. Her eyes slide in that direction with little thought. She wonders… Will she have the opportunity to put them back on display? Maybe in her dorm? And would they take new pictures to make up for lost time? That sounds like an idea Jackie would come up with. She hopes very badly that she’s right.
The phone rings again, yanking Shauna back into the present with the shrillness of its alarm.
“Hello?” Shauna answers, smiling already before Jackie even speaks.
“Hi.” Jackie says, sounding suddenly shy.
A gooey calm wraps around her heart. “I’m really glad you called.” And she doesn’t mind—not even a bit—that she’s repeating herself. It’s the truth, and therefore the best thing to say. Right? See? She’s learning.
“I missed you.” Apparently, Jackie doesn’t care about repeating herself either. Perfect. They can talk in circles together all night long, if that’s what it takes to keep her on the phone. “I never stopped, you know? Missing you. Like… in general.”
After their big fight, she heard little about what Jackie was doing. There were some rumors that first month that she’d gone off the rails, but according to Taissa, off the rails really just meant a couple of drunken nights crying in front of others at a party. Shauna can’t blame her for that. She’s hardly the person to comment on another’s drunken shenanigans.
Shauna wondered so much about Jackie during the back half of the semester. What she was doing, who she was doing it with, if she was happy or not, and… yeah—if Jackie missed her or not.
It feels pretty damn good to hear that she did.
“Really?”
“Yes, Shipman, really.” Jackie’s sarcasm is laced with fondness. “Every single day.”
It’s sick how much that pleases her. She sits down on her bed and kicks off her shoes. “Same here. And sometimes it was more than a little bit. Actually, it got kind of annoying after a little while.”
One-hundred percent, full off, Shauna meant that as a light-hearted joke. But Jackie doesn’t seem to take it that way. Instead of precious laughter, Shauna is met with silence, and the sound of shuffling from the other side of the phone.
“Was it… annoying? To think of me? It’s okay if it was. I’m genuinely curious.”
Wait, what? No, no, that’s what she took from that? Shauna frowns. “No—Jax, no, it wasn’t like that at all. I definitely didn’t mean to sound… well, mean. I was only joking—like, that it was constant, missing you. That’s all.”
Is she messing this up before it even begins?
“Look, Shauna…” Jackie sighs, all raspy and tired sounding. “I know there is still so much shit we still need to talk about. But—I don’t know, like… can we just maybe not, for tonight?”
Sometimes, Shauna shakes with the pressure of keeping all the words she has trapped inside of, but right now she feels only relief. “We can talk about whatever you want. Which—since we’re on the subject… What, uh, do you want to talk about?”
“Uhh…” Jackie says, stretching out the word, silly again, “Honestly, I have no clue. I just wanted to hear your voice, or whatever. Can you decide?”
Can you decide?
How many times had Jackie asked her that question, and how many times did Shauna scramble to think of an answer Jackie would love too? — Conversely, how many times did Jackie not ask that question, and how many times did Shauna fester over it?
She’ll pose the question to her journal later.
Hm… what could they talk about? Perhaps the fact that they know everything about each other? Or, at least… that they should. That Shauna has far too many feelings for Jackie, and maybe she always has, and maybe she’s hated herself for it for a very long time.
No, too heavy.
Maybe she should mention that she’s always been completely at odds with who she is as a human being, and that the only moments of solace she can remember were spent with Jackie, painful as they may have been at times.
Or—fuck, she’s corny. This is embarrassing—but what if they just didn’t talk? What if they just fell asleep together on the phone, lulled into unconsciousness by the sound of the other’s breathing?
Thank goodness Jackie isn’t here to see her, because her cheeks go red at the thought. She lets her eyes wander aimlessly over her room, sliding across her wall to her nightstand—it’s topped with a couple empty glasses of water, an assortment of jewelry she was too tired to return to the jewelry box, and a rolled up bag of Cheetos she’d been eating earlier that evening. However, next to the side table is a ratty, open book bag. She stares at it.
A book peeks out with a faded, dark green cover.
She just sort of blurts it out—it’s stupid, silly, but she says it anyway.
“I could read to you? If—If you want?”
Shauna doesn’t think about the words leaving her mouth until it’s too late. Her blush deepens, becoming something uncomfortable now. She starts to spiral, but before she can take a full step over the ledge into full embarrassment, Jackie comes to save the day.
“I think that’s a great idea, actually.”
“Or—I mean—we could do something else. We can talk, or… I don’t know, whatever you want, really.” She’s talking too fast, she can hear it, but the words keep rushing out. “But I just thought it could be—fun? But it’s totally okay if you don’t—”
“Shipman, stop.” Jackie’s laugh is bright, twinkling against her ears like music. “I would love it if you would read to me.”
She nods slowly. “Okay, uh, yeah, alright. I can do that. Do you care if I pick the book, or do you have a preference…?”
“I think I’ll be happy with whatever you choose. Anyway, you know more than I do about what makes a good book.”
“Sure, alright. Uh—one second.” Shauna drops the phone onto her bed and scrambles across the blanket to grab the book. She resettles against her pillows and puts the receiver back to her ear. “So, I actually read this one a couple of weeks ago for school. It’s kind of a weird choice, but I really like it.”
“Ooh, for what class?”
“Victorian Literature.”
“Ha.” Jackie laughs. Her heart beats faster. “That’s such a you class to take.”
Shauna laughs. “Yeah, and so what?”
“Nothing, I think it’s cute.” She can hear Jackie smile through the phone. “But go on, tell me about the story.”
“Well… it’s called The Secret Garden,” Shauna explains, running her fingers over the front cover. “It’s technically a children’s book, from like 1918 or something, but I thought it was really good.”
“A children’s book from back then is harder to read than an adult book made today.” Jackie says flatly. “Just—promise me it’s not boring.”
“It’s not. If anything, it’s kind of cute?” Shauna smiles. “We spent three weeks on it before Thanksgiving. I guess I never brought it back to campus with me.”
“Well, you know how much I enjoy a good children’s story. I like the lessons.” There’s a rustling sound on Jackie’s end. Shauna pictures her in her pajamas, tucked in bed, and trying to get comfortable. “Do you remember how obsessed I used to be with Charlotte’s Web?”
“Uh, duh?” Shauna snorts, teeth flashing in her private grin. “It was the only book you would read for all of third grade.”
“What can I say… I like what I like. Anyway, you read it to me way more than I ever read it myself.”
“Yeah.” Shauna smiles, remembering. “That’s true.”
As Shauna opens the book to the first page, Jackie murmurs into the phone. “I’m happy I called you.”
“Me too. I missed you, Jax.” Shauna is learning. She’s learning how to do this again—how to be scared and soft and silly.
“Yeah, yeah, you’ve told me all about it.” Jackie giggles. “Now—come on, I’m excited. Get to reading. Chop chop. I’m all ears.”
Shauna looks down and takes a deep breath.
“When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression...”
Later that night, Jackie says goodbye. Shauna listens to her steady breaths, one two, three, and then there is a dial tone.
Surprisingly, the severed connection doesn't sadden her. She finds that she's so enriched by that magical interlude that they have shared that she doesn't even spend that night awake replaying their words, or obsessing over their meanings. She doesn't do any of that.
Instead, Shauna falls asleep to a daydream of hearts and hands and other limbs dancing, backdropped by the sound of a turning page.