Chapter Text
She doesn’t break up with Jeff right away, even though she wants to.
She has to toe the line of it perfectly, balance out the scales of her life and make sure that dumping Jeff won’t destabilize it. She needs it to make sense. She needs something to tell her parents eventually. It needs to be his fault. It has to be just right.
Besides, after she leans into a few excuses about being on her period and then being too busy with the Yellowjackets now that they’re six weeks out from Regionals, he seems accepting of what he thinks is a temporary reduction in their time spent together, and appeased with some occasional kissing. For all his faults, he knows how much soccer and Nationals mean to her. It’s almost annoying that he decides to be a decent boyfriend right when she’s looking for anything to find wrong with him and start a fight about.
But he’s also actually nice to have around for a little while longer, in a way, so that she doesn’t feel like she’s under a microscope every time she sends Shauna a look or a smile she worries she shouldn’t have. He’s also her current excuse to make out with Shauna, and she needs time to either come up with a new one or to ease into being comfortable with just not having one at all. With showing herself to Shauna, at least partly, and hoping it won’t change anything between them.
Would Shauna even kiss her back if she knew it wasn’t actually about Jeff? Jackie thinks so. But she wants to know so, and so she shifts her attention to the most important part of any good experiment: data collection. (Shauna would maybe be proud, she thinks, if she knew how determinedly Jackie was setting her mind to this, especially given how useless Jackie is in their shared Physics class.)
The first step is to remove Jeff from the kissing equation, as nervous as it makes her. To just not say his name. Maybe Shauna will make assumptions anyway—and Jackie will certainly start off by leaving the door open for it—but maybe she won’t.
She always drives Jackie home after soccer practices—and usually on days without them, too—and so Jackie loops an arm around Shauna’s on their way across the parking lot one evening, both of them still in their practice uniforms, and suggests, “We should see if that kid at the Circle K will sell us alcohol again, and then go park somewhere and make out.” She tosses her hair, too aware of the sticky sweat making tendrils of it cling to her neck. She wishes she didn’t feel so gross, that she could look and smell nice for this, but beggars can’t be choosers. “I can probably just show him my bra strap again or something.”
Shauna’s oddly quiet as they walk. Jackie gives it a full three seconds before she chickens out. She’ll have to try it without using Jeff some other time. “I think it’s making Jeff better, you know.” She reaches down and squeezes Shauna’s hand, and still there’s nothing but silence. It’s making her so nervous. “C’mon. You don’t hate it, do you?” She asks like it’s a mild inconvenience if she does, like she isn’t hanging onto Shauna’s answer like it could ruin her.
“No,” Shauna says evenly, neutrally, and then digs through her duffel bag for her keys as they reach her car. “It’s kinda nice.”
Jackie gapes at her, pretends to be playful, pretends that it’s not good enough. Her heart is soaring. “Excuse me? Kinda? Fuck you.”
Shauna shoots her an indiscernible look as they get into her car together, but Jackie thinks she might be a little amused, too. It eases what remains of Jackie’s anxiety.
She goes alone to get the alcohol once they reach the Circle K, picks out Shauna’s favorite flavor of Malibu, and leans toward the fifteen-year-old son of the owner from across the counter, batting her eyelashes. Again, she wishes she were sporting better clothes and a full face for this, but pretending to check him out and then asking, “Have you been lifting weights? I think you might have bigger biceps than my boyfriend,” seems to do the trick.
She’s practically preening as she slips back into the passenger’s seat a few minutes later, paper bag in hand.
“So did you show him your vag?” Shauna asks as she starts the car, and Jackie’s jaw drops until she looks over and sees the smirk on her lips.
“Jesus, Shipman; just call me a whore next time. I’d be less offended.”
She’s got a pack of smokes in the bag, too, and when they’re tucked away behind a warehouse where they won’t be seen and sitting in Shauna’s back seat together, Jackie lights up while Shauna unscrews the cap on the Malibu.
“You’re gonna taste like smoke,” Shauna says to her, and then lifts the bottle to her lips. She grimaces and only takes one gulp.
“Twins,” Jackie offers, holding out the cigarette. “Then you won’t notice.” Shauna doesn’t look like she loves the idea, but she trades the cigarette for the bottle anyway.
“Have you ever made out with Jeff high?” Shauna wonders out of nowhere, and Jackie almost laughs. If she had, Shauna obviously would’ve heard about it.
“No, why?”
“I don’t know.” Shauna shrugs. “Nat said something about it in the locker room one day. That it’s nice.”
She’s handing this over to Jackie on a silver platter, and yet Jackie can’t be sure that it’s intentional. She takes it anyway. “Wanna try it sometime?”
Shauna lifts her chin and blows out smoke, then pulls a face at the smell and turns around to roll down the window behind her. Every second she goes without responding has Jackie in agony. She can’t be doing it on purpose, because it’s not like Shauna to play games, and yet it makes Jackie feel so pathetic.
Again, she can’t stand it. “Weed’s made me puke before, and if I’m gonna hurl on someone mid-kiss, and I’d rather it be you than my boyfriend.”
Shauna rolls her eyes. “Just drink, Jackie.”
That’s different. Shauna being so condescending and dismissive about this, like she’s sick of hearing Jackie speak. Jackie hates it, and also, it’s kind of hot.
Jackie had been about to drink, but being ordered to do it makes her take the cigarette back instead. She takes her time with it before she puts it out, and doesn’t lift the bottle to her lips until it’s been so long that Shauna’s words don’t feel like they have a hold on her. Shauna watches her swallow, and Jackie tears her eyes away to jam the cigarette into an old mark already burned into the upholstery, thinking of Shauna’s eyes on her, thinking to herself, I’d let you do so much more than kiss me, eventually, if you wanted.
That it pops into her mind unbidden is unsurprising, but that she knows right away it’s true is unsettling. Maybe it shouldn’t feel like a revelation. She’s certainly imagined it, and gotten off on it, and she’s always known that she’d be open to it at some point. But it’s one thing to want it abstractly and another to want it with Shauna right in front of her.
“What do you think girls do to each other?” she blurts, and immediately regrets it but does her damnedest not to show it. She fixes Shauna with an expectant look, like Shauna should just know somehow since she knows everything else there is to know, and feels her knotted stomach loosen when she sees that Shauna’s cheeks have gone pink.
“I don’t know,” Shauna says too quickly, and oh God, she does know, then.
Jackie thinks she does too, maybe; she’s literally done fingering and she’s heard enough jokes about rug-munchers, but she’s assuming there’s other stuff she doesn’t know about, too. She wiggles her eyebrows playfully. “Kinda seems like you do.”
“I mean…” Shauna gives a shake of her head, almost like she’s in disbelief that they’re talking about this, and then takes two heavy gulps from the bottle and passes it back to Jackie. “I can guess.” Jackie takes a long swig herself, until it burns so badly she has to stop, and then screws the cap on and sets it on the floor. “Like. Common sense stuff.”
“Yeah.” The cigarette and bottle set aside, her body still warm and sticky despite the AC Shauna has running, Jackie does the bravest thing she’s ever done: scoots closer, reaches out for Shauna’s waist, and skates her hand up the last couple of inches of her leg on the way, thumb just barely stroking over her shorts at her inner thigh before her fingers curl around Shauna’s hip. “Like, hand stuff,” she says, and their faces are close enough that she can tell Shauna isn’t breathing. Her eyes have dropped straight to Jackie’s mouth. She hasn’t kept her composure like Jackie. She’s telegraphing what that small touch has done to her, and Jackie can see it. “Stuff that doesn’t count,” Jackie whispers, and hopes it’s reassuring, that Shauna will think about it and realize that it doesn’t have to be a big deal if they don’t make it one.
I think I might go crazy if you don’t ever touch me, she doesn’t say, letting the words die on her lips as she closes the gap between them and tastes smoke and coconut rum on Shauna’s tongue.
And I think you will someday.
I think you feel inevitable.
-
They fall into a new rhythm, after a couple of additional tries. Jeff’s name stops coming out of Jackie’s mouth beforehand. Sometimes she uses other excuses instead, like the lipstick trick. Sometimes she doesn’t say anything at all, and lets Shauna assume whatever she assumes. Sometimes there’s alcohol, and sometimes they’ll just be studying or lounging around in one of their bedrooms, and Jackie will close a textbook or a magazine or even close Shauna’s textbook or journal for her, set it aside, and curl a hand around Shauna’s neck, and Shauna will be hers for a while.
She knows that Shauna likes it, because she’s not insecure enough to delude herself into ignoring so much evidence that it’s true. Sometimes Shauna sucks on her bottom lip or her tongue like she’s been thinking about doing it all day. Sometimes she’s studying while Jackie’s pretending to be busy with something else when really she’s just being hyperaware of Shauna, and she’ll catch Shauna pausing to glance over at her every few minutes like she’s anticipating Jackie interrupting her.
And Shauna must know that Jackie likes it, because if she didn’t know it before, she definitely knows it after the time they wind up pressed together beneath Shauna’s sheets, kissing hot and heavy, and Shauna’s hand tries to move from Jackie’s hip to her neck and accidentally grazes her boob through the thin material of her pajama shirt along the way. It takes everything for Jackie to rein her body in and boil her reaction down to a fervent, heated moan right into Shauna’s mouth.
“Sorry,” Shauna mumbles like she’s done something wrong, and if Jackie weren’t so busy processing how wet she’s gotten just from that one little graze she’d laugh at the absurdity of Shauna feeling guilty about it.
She thinks about Shauna’s boobs a lot. She thinks about grabbing them while they make out and getting to hear what it does to her, but there are lines they unspokenly aren’t crossing yet, and this is one of them. Their kissing stays exclusive to their mouths, they try to keep their noises soft, their hands don’t roam, and they don’t really talk about any of it until right before it’s time to go at it like… well, like horny teenagers. Often, they don’t even talk about it then; they just look at each other and then Jackie moves in.
She almost breaks up with Jeff after a few weeks of it, when he gets a little antsy about Jackie not having touched his dick for a full month, but that fight happens out in the parking lot right after the winning game that officially qualifies them for Regionals, after he’s offered to drive her home, and she can’t do it then.
She can’t do it then, because two hours earlier, before the game, she’d been carefully painting blue and yellow stripes onto Shauna’s cheek in the locker room, and Shauna’s eyes had kept flickering to her lips, and Jackie hadn’t been able to just say you have to stop that and then Mari had looked at them for a second too long and then Van had too, and then Van had said something quiet to Tai that had made Tai laugh, and Jackie knows it technically could’ve been anything but she had felt too seen and too full of panic and still hadn’t been able to say anything to stop Shauna.
She plans to give her a warning that night, when Shauna stays over, but she knows that Shauna doesn’t look at her the way she does on purpose, and a part of Jackie doesn’t want her to stop, either. She loves it. She loves… she loves her.
God, she does, so much. Is that okay? Is it allowed in the framework of the life Jackie wants to build for them?
She thinks it could be. It’s not so different from friendship; they’ve always been close like this. She just wants to kiss. She just wants to touch sometimes. They could, for a while, secretly. It doesn’t seem so ridiculous when she lets college play out in her head: boys more tolerable than Jeff and Randy during the day, each other at night. Four years is a long time; she doesn’t have to worry about the rest for a while.
So she pushes it to the back of her mind for now, and splays herself out on the bed next to Shauna after they’ve showered off their latest soccer practice, and laughs out, “For an undefeated team we have, like, no depth on our bench. Did you see Robin trying to juggle today? She couldn’t get past four.”
Shauna hums noncommittally and snuggles up next to her, and Jackie already feels herself softening even before Shauna mumbles, “Don’t be mean, Jackie.”
“I’m the team captain; it’s my job to notice,” Jackie says, turning her head to look at Shauna, inches away, close enough that Jackie can see each individual one of her eyelashes. Shauna’s hand is warm where it’s resting on Jackie’s stomach. Jackie chooses her words carefully. “Do… you notice? Like, the juniors?” She forces a laugh. “They’re always messing up.”
Shauna shrugs half-heartedly, like she isn’t particularly interested in this conversation. That’s a good sign. “Not really. I barely know their names.”
Jackie hums and lets it go. Melissa’s been good lately. Always sneaking looks at Jackie now more often than she does Shauna, like she’s afraid of her. “I think we’ll do well at Regionals,” she decides. “I mean, I might still vomit the night before, but I don’t think we’ll actually get tested for real until State.”
“You won’t vomit,” Shauna promises her with a soft little half-smile. “You’ll be fine, and then after we win we’ll get to celebrate in our motel rooms with the rest of the team.”
Jackie’s stomach flips pleasantly at the reminder. She’d practically pounced on the suggestion when Coach Martinez had pulled her into his office and offered to use their leftover fundraising money on rooms for the night. Of course she’ll be sharing with Shauna. And they’ll be miles and miles away from their families; from Jackie’s family. Free to do whatever they want.
Her heart beats faster just thinking about it. Her mind threatens to race. Though it’s easier over at Shauna’s place, Jackie’s always a little bit conscious of it in her own room: the things they’re doing, the sounds they’re trying not to make. The touches Jackie thinks about but doesn’t attempt, and then tries desperately not to think about when she’s alone with her own hand between her thighs.
It would be so easy now, with Shauna’s hand where it is now: to cover it with her own, to guide it lower. She thinks maybe Shauna wouldn’t stop her. She wonders, always, if Shauna thinks about touching her too. She wonders what Shauna thinks about when she’s alone.
“So,” she says, preparing Shauna for a subject change, letting a playful smirk take over her mouth, letting her eyes get brighter, radiating I’m about to embarrass you a little and you’re gonna have to deal with it; Shauna’s highly familiar with it all, and it shows in the immediate way she huffs out a small breath as she waits for Jackie to continue. “Can I ask you something?”
Then comes the eye roll, the knowing, “Does it really matter whether you have my permission or not?”
It’s all always been cute on her, the whole ‘I’m gonna act like I can’t stand you right now but immediately do what you want anyway because I love you’ thing Shauna does, and Jackie’s found it more and more endearing the longer they’ve been doing this new intimate way of bonding.
She doesn’t answer, just pushes forward and says, “Remember a few weeks ago when we were talking about your girlfriend, Palmela?”
Shauna turns red immediately, lets out a short groan and buries her face in the pillow. “Oh my God, Jackie.”
Jackie’s stomach is bubbling from a mixture of amusement and nerves now, and she can’t stop giggling. “Okay, you were the one who was acting like it’s totally normal.”
“That doesn’t mean I wanna talk about it.”
“Well, I do,” Jackie says, grinning, because it’s usually just that simple with them. It’s decided. “And you should want to. This might be the one thing you have more sexual experience in than me. It’s practically your area of expertise.”
“Don’t be a dick,” comes Shauna’s voice, muffled, into her pillow, and Jackie softens. It’s still a little funny, but only because she’s scared of what it’ll be if she doesn’t laugh about it. But if she’s genuinely hurting Shauna’s feelings, she’ll have to make sacrifices.
“Okay,” she promises, her smile falling. She reaches down and squeezes the hand on her stomach. “Maybe I need advice.”
She doesn’t. She’s lying. She just wants to know. Or maybe has to know.
Shauna doesn’t move. She’s clearly still mortified. Jackie stares at the side of her head and keeps going, pretends she’s the version of herself from a few weeks ago, before she’d solved this on her own. “It just doesn’t feel that great for me, you know?”
Shauna unburies her face and looks to Jackie tentatively, red, visibly trying to seem unmoved by her confession. Jackie can tell she’s catching on. She’s realizing where Jackie is steering this.
Jackie wonders if Shauna’s skipping steps in her head, if she thinks Jackie’s already trying to reach the end of this inevitable train of thought too quickly. Jackie’s only shooting for the first stop tonight. She just wants to talk about it. To plant the idea into Shauna’s head: You touching me. You inside me. Me inside you.
Jackie couldn’t have become the most popular girl in their grade without Jeff’s help, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t still earned every bit of the rest of the way to the top. Hasn’t learned how to say the right things, and when to say them, and when to let things sit and be ruminated on. Tonight is about planting a seed and then letting it grow.
“I think about stuff,” she goes on. It’s a little embarrassing to be confessing this, but it helps that it’s old news, and that there are newer things she’d be far more mortified to have to detail for Shauna. Saying, “Like, Jeff stuff,” is nothing when she could be saying I thought of me eating you out once and it worked better than anything ever has.
It’s also a step backward, though. Using Jeff. It’s probably going to give Shauna the wrong idea—though Jackie’s pretty sure Shauna must have at least considered the truth by now given how little Jackie’s been bringing him up lately. Certainly she suspects that Jackie enjoys everything more with her, even if Jackie can’t admit it to her aloud yet.
She makes it better, she thinks—clearer, even—when she adds, “It doesn’t really help, though. I feel like I’m doing something wrong.” And then, finally, she gets to what she’s been working toward: “What do you think about?”
Shauna’s eyes flick away, then back, and away again. Her fingers twitch on Jackie’s stomach, and she swallows hard, and something in Jackie’s navel tightens, and she just knows. After a lifetime of friendship, after so much time spent trying to read Shauna when she’s quiet or when she’s doing that thing where she tries not to look sour but won’t give anyone more than one-word answers and won’t quite look them in the eyes. She knows Shauna, just like Shauna knows her.
Shauna has thought about her. At least sometimes. At least once.
“You can tell me,” Jackie says, thumb sliding back and forth over the back of Shauna’s hand. It’s sweaty beneath her own. “You can tell me anything.”
Shauna tenses up, pulls her hand back, and rolls over with a mumbled, “Normal stuff, okay? Let’s go to sleep.”
Jackie’s chest aches. Are you scared? she wonders. You don’t have to be. It doesn’t have to be a big deal if we don’t make it one.
“I’m not tired,” she declares, keeping her tone light. Trying to set an example. She looks around, spots a fairly new chapstick on her nightstand, and it feels like a life raft. “Hey,” she says brightly, reaching out for it, grasping it tight, and then holding it up above her head where she lays, examining it. “Did I tell you about this new chapstick I bought? It’s root beer flavored, or at least it’s supposed to be; I’m not sure if it’s any good because I don’t drink root beer. But you like root beer.”
She looks over. Shauna hasn’t moved at all.
Jackie licks her lips, feels a pang in her stomach, and tries harder. “Wanna taste it? I can put it on.” She doesn’t wait for an answer, just uncaps it and runs it liberally over her bottom lip, then rubs her lips together. She sets it aside when she’s done, then reaches out for Shauna’s arm, pulling gently. “Come here,” she says, forcing a light laugh she hopes Shauna doesn’t see through. “I’m sorry I asked you about Palmela. Your relationship’s none of my business.”
Shauna shifts onto her other side to face her with a roll of her eyes, and Jackie can’t help but smile fondly at her.
“Whatever,” Shauna mutters, glancing at her lips. “It’s probably not any good.”
“Come see,” Jackie teases, shuffling closer, just happy to have whatever that was just now over with, because as long as Shauna’s kissing her everything feels like it’s how it should be.
She kisses Shauna first, leaning over her, because she always kisses Shauna first, and feels them both falling into it. It’s becoming more intense now that they’ve started to do it lying down sometimes, though it’s usually on their sides; Jackie always feels the tension coiled tight between them like a loaded spring, almost like it’s mirroring what always happens in her lower abdomen, that guilty warmth she knows she’ll want to take care of and won’t be able to with Shauna around.
“It’s okay,” Shauna whispers, her tongue brushing over Jackie’s bottom lip, and for a half-second Jackie’s heart flutters at the soft reassurance—it’s like Shauna can sense exactly where her thoughts are—before she realizes that Shauna’s talking about the fucking root beer, about the flavor, and she almost wants to groan.
“Doesn’t matter,” she confesses, and then sucks on Shauna’s bottom lip in return. “Just wanna keep practicing.”
She’s giving her a pretty major hint here, but she’s still not ready for something as strong as even just wanna keep kissing you. But Shauna reaches down and grips her waist tight like that’s what she’d said anyway.
Shauna pulls her down, or maybe Jackie drops—she’s not really sure—and then Jackie’s half on top of her, their bare legs are intertwined, and her heart is thudding hard against Shauna’s chest and Shauna’s is hammering right back, and Jackie’s hand is on Shauna’s ribcage, so close to her breast, and Shauna’s fingers are pushing through her hair, and Jackie is lost in her mouth, overstimulated by it all and not sure how to handle it.
There’s an ache between her thighs, dull but painful, and her hips want to move, and Shauna’s body is right there, and it takes everything to not because she’s promised herself she’ll work her way up to it, plan it out ahead of time so that she doesn’t ruin everything between them by pushing too hard too fast.
Shauna is humming softly under her mouth every few seconds, not quite moaning but not not moaning, little sounds of affirmation that make Jackie’s body feel blistering, and the real thing is so much better than her dream.
Her imagination hadn’t gotten it right at all: the way Shauna’s leg would skate over hers, smooth in some places and a little scratchy in others where she’d missed some spots shaving. The uneven rise and fall of her chest against Jackie’s. The way her fingers would curl against the material of Jackie’s shirt and bite faintly into the skin of her hip. How her breathing would stutter against Jackie’s mouth, how they wouldn’t quite catch each other’s lips just right in the frenzy of it, how Jackie’s arm would start to hurt from trying to hold herself up a little so that she doesn’t crush Shauna completely.
This imperfect version is better than anything her brain could’ve invented. She really could do this forever. Kiss and touch the person she cares about most in the world, this girl she cares about most, this girl she loves.
She pulls back abruptly, pushing up off of Shauna like she’s peeling herself away, and right at the same time she almost thinks Shauna’s hand might’ve started to shift lower on her hip, down toward her thigh, but she’s maybe imagined it, and her brain’s too preoccupied to dwell on something that probably didn’t happen anyway. Shauna’s hand falls away back to the mattress.
There it is again. Love. She loves Shauna. For something that doesn’t have to be a big deal, it sure feels like one.
Shauna’s still catching her breath beneath Jackie, her lips swollen, her eyes so dark. Jackie watches something swim behind them and then Shauna asks her breathily, “Am I getting better?”
Jackie had called it practice, hadn’t she? Are they both really still pretending that’s what this is?
“A little.”
Apparently.
Jackie flops onto her back and licks her own bottom lip like she might be able to taste Shauna on it. There’s nothing save for the notable absence of root beer chapstick, messily kissed away and consumed.
Jackie’s so turned on. She doesn’t know how not to be.
“Just a little?” Shauna asks, and there’s something in her tone… something pressing and maybe slightly annoyed, or whiny, or needy.
Jackie uses her wrist to wipe at her mouth and closes her eyes, trying to wait out the pounding between her thighs, willing it to just go away before she says or does something she shouldn’t.
“Yeah, a little,” she says, because if she gives her anything more than that, Shauna might know too much, and Jackie might also lose another excuse to keep doing this. She’s not ready to give up her security blanket; that word: practice. Not when she’s only got a hunch about how Shauna feels, a hopeful hypothesis based on weeks of observation and experimentation.
But later, once Shauna’s fallen asleep, Jackie looks at her in the dark, watches her breathe evenly beside her, lips still plump and kiss-swollen, and tests it out in her head again.
I love you.
It’s still so big, and yet it’s not big enough. She takes a breath and then ghosts her fingers over the softness of Shauna’s cheek, watching Shauna’s nose twitch cutely in her sleep. She readies herself to think the whole truth. (Though, even then, it won’t be the whole truth, the full encapsulation of everything she wants, because it will be even longer before she can be brave enough for that.)
But for now, she looks at Shauna and then she thinks, I’m in love with you.
It sounds so simple in her head. It can’t have possibly always been this simple.
I’m in love with you, she thinks again. I’m in love with Shauna Shipman. I’m in love with you. I’m in love with you.
“I’m in love with you,” she whispers aloud without meaning to, and then tenses up, staring hard at Shauna, waiting. But Shauna doesn’t stir, just nuzzles into Jackie’s hand and drools onto her pillow.
Jackie watches her carefully for another few seconds, just to make sure, and thinks of herself half on top of Shauna, how close they’d been pressed, how Shauna had gripped her waist like she’d never wanted to let her go, how she’d looked up at her and then sought her approval. She mouths the next part, voice barely at a whisper.
“I think maybe you might be in love with me, too.”