Chapter Text
It’d be easier, probably, if the realization had slammed into Jackie all at once. If it had been accompanied by a lightbulb going off above her head, or even hit her like a slap in the face. If she could’ve looked over at Shauna one morning, grinned at her and watched her grip the steering wheel with two hands and just thought to herself, Oh. It’s you.
But things are more complicated than that, and it’s all muddied and made messy by the fact that it’s always been Shauna, and not in, like, a weird lezzy way—not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just… not who Jackie is, obviously—but in the way that they’re just going to spend their lives together forever, just like they always have. Two boys at their sides (not Jeff or Randy, but hot college ones, eventually), ideally living on the same street, forever intertwined, raising their kids to be best friends and eventually sharing those caramel old lady candies in rocking chairs on Jackie’s front porch.
So it doesn’t come all at once. It’s in stages, a slow creep that Jackie can’t quite pinpoint the start of, can only look back on and find the steps scattered haphazardly across her lifetime:
Shauna decking two boys for calling her “bug eyes” during recess in elementary school and Jackie feeling like a princess out of one of her favorite Disney movies, all light and fluttery and beaming as Shauna, her hero, had angrily sent them crying back to their teacher, tiny fists clenched, upper lip curled into a snarl.
The time she'd fallen off of the monkey bars during a playdate and injured her wrist, and Shauna had held it in her hands during the drive to the hospital, and then kissed it better so softly in the lobby while they waited for a doctor to see her.
At eleven years old, getting ice cream together and watching Shauna accidentally get a spot of her vanilla cone on the tip of her nose, then getting the sudden urge to lick it off and just acting on it, not getting nervous about it afterward but just feeling a sense of utter joy when Shauna had sputtered blushingly at her and then acted like she’d committed some cardinal sin by touching Shauna’s nose with her tongue.
Shauna kissing a boy a whole year after Jackie already had, but still too soon, always too soon; Jackie hadn’t been ready for it even though it hadn’t meant anything to Shauna, apparently born from a stupid dare in a game Jackie hadn’t been around for. She hadn’t been prepared for the way her stomach had twisted and swooped unpleasantly when she'd found out, and she’d told herself that he hadn’t been deserving of Shauna’s first kiss, that he just wasn’t good enough.
Jackie getting ready in her bedroom for her first date at Funcoland with Jeff, Shauna sprawled out on her bed, shirt riding halfway up her stomach in a way that had made Jackie’s gaze catch before she’d distracted herself with I bet Jeff looks nice without his shirt off.
Stealing her parents’ old, forgotten bottles of wine at sleepovers, drinking, giggling and reaching out for Shauna just to have her hands on her, because it had always felt nice and right and easy to touch her.
Jeff’s fingers in her with another sleepover on her schedule afterward during sophomore year, and how she’d closed her eyes, waiting for it to be over so that she could go to Shauna’s and gossip about it and cuddle, and then how thinking about the comforting press of Shauna’s body against her own had made his fingers slide a little easier—not enough to get her off, because it still had never felt good, but enough that it hadn’t quite hurt anymore.
That night junior year when Jackie had jokingly told Shauna to look nice for her after they’d decided to try a new place for dinner together, and then Shauna had shown up with so much makeup on and Jackie hadn’t been able to breathe correctly when she’d first laid eyes on her.
Shauna’s mouth when she smiles. Shauna’s laugh when Jackie finally says something that can pull it out of her—a real one, not the shorter, appeasing one she does thinking Jackie won’t notice the difference. Shauna’s intense expression when she scribbles into her journal, her eyebrows and lips pinched tight.
Shauna’s lips. Shauna’s chest, her hips, her thighs, and the way Jackie looks at them as they develop and thinks Ugh, she’s got such a better body than me and hates it, hates that boys are going to notice Shauna eventually (instead of her, she tells herself) but then Jackie’s the one who keeps noticing Shauna most of all.
Randy. Randy, who is perfect, because they can double-date and that will make going out with Jeff better, because adding Shauna to anything makes it better, and who is also perfect because Shauna doesn’t like him that much (which means he can’t break her heart and he’s the ideal practice boyfriend for her) and he also knows Jackie will rip his balls off if he does anything Shauna (or Jackie) doesn’t want him to—Jackie makes sure to tell him so. But then Shauna doesn’t date Randy anyway, and it’s another sign in hindsight that Jackie is simultaneously happy and sad about it, and that the sadness is mostly because what if she finds someone she likes better instead? Better than Randy. (Better than Jackie.)
It’s all of it, over the course of a decade, and then in the middle of the first semester of their senior year it still doesn’t happen like a lightbulb going off; Shauna’s just up late studying on Jackie’s bed, cross-legged and hunched over while Jackie reads a magazine, and Jackie looks at her mouth for the dozenth time tonight as Shauna bites at her pencil, feels the same buzz in her stomach that studying Shauna’s lips—and how much nicer they are than Jackie’s, because that’s allowed; girls are jealous of their friends and complimentary of each other’s features all the time—always makes her feel, and something in her brain just goes: You should kiss those.
It’s still not a massive revelation. The thought almost makes her laugh, even. How funny would that be? Passing a bottle back and forth on one of their drunken slumber party nights, Shauna still so inexperienced with boys, Jackie still trying to figure out why Jeff is so bad at it all, and maybe offering that they help each other out. It’s a normal idea. It doesn’t even faze her that she’s thinking about it.
It doesn’t faze her that the idea lingers, or that when Shauna pulls her close at sleepovers Jackie starts to acutely notice all the little points of contact between their bodies, especially where Shauna’s hips are pressed to her own, because she’s always noticed how nice Shauna’s hips are and this is just an extension of that.
She kisses Jeff and thinks about kissing Shauna during, because her mind’s gotten preoccupied with this idea of mutually beneficial practice kissing. She kisses Jeff and thinks about kissing Shauna, who is probably better somehow because Shauna’s just good at so many things without trying. She kisses Jeff and thinks about kissing Shauna because… because. She kisses Jeff and thinks about kissing Shauna.
She watches Shauna stretch on the ground on the soccer field with her legs splayed out in a wide V, and while her brain would’ve thought something like yep, there’s Shauna before and maybe sent a small amount of endorphins coursing through her because she’s looking at Shauna, now it’s been infected with a parasite that thinks Shauna’s legs are spread and Jackie feels wrong and gross even though she’s just making a factual observation.
Shauna takes her shirt off in the locker room after practices and stands there in a sports bra, and Jackie used to look like it was nothing, but now she looks like it’s nothing and feels like she’s hiding something as she does it, and worries someone will somehow notice that there’s a difference in her she can’t even name but knows exists.
The infection grows—and maybe it’s always been there, just dormant or half-asleep or somewhere Jackie hadn’t quite been able to take hold of it, because Shauna’s shirt rides up in the privacy of their bedrooms when she moves a certain way and now Jackie’s eyes jump straight to the bare skin and she doesn’t think of Jeff shirtless anymore.
It could all be normal; something girls just don’t talk about. The body comparisons. The curiosity. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.
Except Jackie wants Shauna’s tongue in her mouth.
She dreams about it once, just a month after You should kiss those, in vivid detail: Rolling on top of Shauna in an imaginary bed that doesn’t belong to either of them, flirty and giggly, and Shauna is shy but nods and lets Jackie’s mouth descend on hers, and Jackie wakes up after what feels like so many long minutes of frenching Shauna and listening to her weak little moans, and what’s supposed to happen between her thighs with Jeff has happened so intensely that she hadn’t even realized her body could do… all of that.
It’s somewhere around then, looking back—in November of her senior year—that she finally starts to get it just a little bit.
-
The panic lasts a full month. Jackie is insanely good at hiding it, after years of tailoring her personality to the people around her; so good she almost scares herself.
Right away, she’s back on Randy, even though she doesn’t want to be, but just for the cover of it all. “He really likes you,” she pushes, usually before they go out to a party where they know he’ll be, and Shauna will scoff dismissively and roll her eyes and Jackie’s heart will go Yes! and then her brain will tell her Fuck, stop, you want her to like him, dumbass! and Jackie will pout at Shauna and say something like, “I just think you should give him a chance,” and Shauna will scowl and Jackie’s heart will leap all over again.
She makes it through the rest of the semester staring and wanting and worrying about getting caught and rocketing from emotion to emotion like she’s hitting puberty for the first time again: lust, shame, yearning, fear, affection, guilt, more lust.
She knows she definitely likes Shauna the way she isn’t supposed to like her, but she doesn’t even know how any of it’s supposed to work. She doesn’t want to figure it out, either, because that’s a whole can of worms she cannot open. So in a perfect world, they’d do all of the same stuff they were always going to do with their lives, only maybe their future husbands would think it’s hot if Jackie and Shauna were just allowed to finger each other occasionally or something, since hand stuff wouldn’t even count. And maybe, also, it’d be nice if Shauna’s husband could put in his wedding vows that he understands Shauna will always love Jackie the most, and then hopefully both of their husbands could work very long hours so that it’d just be Jackie and Shauna and the kids most of the time.
(She really doesn’t know how any of this is supposed to work.)
New Years hits, eventually, and Jeff drives them out to a house party, and it goes the same way it usually does: Shauna makes it incredibly obvious that she doesn’t want to be there, and avoids Randy, and skulks around with the same adorable broody scowl as always while Jackie tries to pump her up so she’s not so fucking miserable for once.
But then Jeff drags her away to put time in with his obnoxious friends, and she figures she’s doing Shauna a favor by not making her come along and socialize with them, so she gives her a quick wave goodbye and then loses track of her in the crowd. Jackie’s still half-thinking about the red lipstick she had talked Shauna into applying before they’d gone out and how good it had looked on her lips when the New Years countdown begins. She chants the numbers with everyone else, dreading hitting one, and Jeff crushes his mouth to hers at three, tasting like beer and using too much tongue, like always.
Shauna wouldn’t use too much tongue, Jackie thinks, but even if she did, it’d be okay.
She finds Shauna maybe fifteen minutes later, Shauna’s hair looking a little messier, which makes sense because she tells Jackie unprompted, too quickly, that she just stepped outside for a few minutes, and Jackie just hooks their arms together, says, “Okay,” and doesn’t make a comment about how windswept her hair looks. “So who’d you kiss, Shipman?” she jokes instead, because she knows there hadn’t been anyone, obviously, but Shauna balks and then looks nervous.
“What?” she asks Jackie. “I—I didn’t—“
“I know,” Jackie laughs out, pulling her along, ready to find Jeff again and turn in for the night. “I was kidding. Like you’re gonna kiss some stranger for New Years.”
“New Years,” Shauna echoes. “Oh. Yeah, no.” Jackie feels her relax. “I didn’t even hear the countdown. That’s such a lame tradition.”
“You think everything popular is lame,” Jackie teases, because it’s painfully true.
“Not you,” Shauna teases back, bumping her affectionately, and Jackie’s heart feels full and warm.
Later, as they’re peeling their clothes off and changing into their pajamas in Jackie’s bedroom, Jackie looks at Shauna’s face so that she won’t look at her body in her bra and underwear and realizes, “You took your lipstick off?”
Shauna falters, confused for a moment, and then her eyes dart away to avoid Jackie’s. “Oh. Yeah. I wiped it off in the bathroom.”
“It looked nice,” Jackie reassures her. “Better on you than it does on me.”
Shauna forces a laugh. “Yeah, right.”
“Really.” Jackie doesn’t push harder because she doesn’t want to give herself away, but there’s always a perpetual dilemma there: act normal but worry she’s telegraphing her feelings, or act differently and leave Shauna wondering what’s changed. Shauna’s smart. Too smart to hide from for too long.
She should just ask for it. Just look at Shauna and suggest they practice kissing each other. Shauna does most things Jackie wants. Maybe she’ll push back on an outfit or two, and Randy’s still a bust, but mostly she’ll offer a half-hearted complaint at worst and then just follow Jackie’s lead.
So, if Jackie sells this the right way, she’s pretty sure she can get Shauna’s mouth on hers all without even showing her how much she wants it. And Jackie’s pretty sure she’s a good kisser anyway—Jeff says so, though she’s not sure if he’s a decent judge given his own lack of prowess—so it’s not like she’d be torturing Shauna. Right?
So, her first order of business is to shove down the guilt and gather the courage to take what she wants. But her second order of business is to make sure that Shauna enjoys it too, so that she’ll get to do it again.
And then… and then Jackie still doesn’t have a plan, but making out with Shauna on the regular feels like a good thing. It can only improve her life, ultimately, so long as her parents don’t find out about it, and even if they do she’ll just save face by telling them the truth about it being for fun, for practice. Because it mostly is, even with—It just mostly is.
She spends a month trying to find the right moment: the right sleepover, where Jackie has enough guts and doesn’t keep stopping herself with thoughts about being a perv or taking advantage of her docile best friend.
If she puts it off until they’re cuddling, it doesn’t happen, because Jackie gets lost in thoughts about Shauna’s body and feels gross and predatory and winds up talking herself out of it.
If she waits until Shauna yawns and says she’s tired and reaches for the lamp, they’ll be cuddling before she knows it, and then she’s stuck in the same dilemma.
But if she asks too early, they’ll kiss a little and then be wide awake for too long afterward, and Jackie doesn’t want to have to sit with all of that, at least not for the first time, when she’s not sure about how well she’ll be able to play it all off.
Because she is going to play it all off. She’s going to lie her fucking ass off if she has to. Anything to avoid unpacking things that don’t need to be unpacked, to go beyond I like Shauna more than I thought I did and I just wanna explore it, is all.
No commitments. No labels, for them together or especially for Jackie as an individual; she thinks about Shauna in ways she shouldn’t but she’s not a—
It’s just. One thing at a time. Dipping her toe in. Just to see what happens, and what Shauna says and does about it all.
-
On the night they finally kiss, Shauna’s facing Jackie with her journal propped up against her knees, scrawling almost frantically into the pages, and Jackie sits with a fluttering in her stomach as she steals glimpses at her and plays with her pink Tamagotchi (Shauna has a matching green one, naturally), wondering if Shauna’s writing about her.
They’d spent the whole day together at the mall. Jackie had talked Shauna into buying a new top that Shauna had hated at first, but Jackie had spent a full twenty minutes explaining all of the ways it was perfect for her—the fit, the color, the neckline, the flattering way it hugged her waist—and in the end Shauna had placed it into her bag along with two flannels and a new pair of chucks.
Moments like those are some of Jackie's proudest. They make her feel useful, like she’s needed, like she’s not just someone Shauna keeps around because they’ve just always been together. Like she’s a good friend.
She wonders often if Shauna writes about her a lot. If she ever scribbles down the kinds of things that bounce around in Jackie’s head without an outlet. She’s been aching to read an entry for years, just to get a glimpse into Shauna’s brilliant mind for just a moment.
She has this theory that Shauna could be really romantic if she ever wanted to be. Aren’t writers supposed to be? Maybe she secretly wants to try this kissing thing too. Maybe she’s as curious as Jackie, and she scrawls down lines about Jackie’s lips or her shiny hair or any of the other things boys are always complimenting Jackie on.
Wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t that be the biggest, most flattering compliment to have ever been paid to her, so much more everything compared to Jeff Sadecki leering at her and telling her she looks hot? Shauna would probably find some magical way to convey it all, if she ever wanted to, with bigger words that the boys at their school haven’t ever even heard before.
Jackie checks the clock. It’s a good time; not too early, not too late. Her hands are already starting to sweat but she wipes them off on her shorts and keeps her breathing steady. It’s just Shauna. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.
She tosses her Tamagotchi aside and practically lunges at Shauna, beaming, grabbing her knees and greeting her, “Hey.”
Shauna jumps and slams her journal shut, then shoots Jackie a half-alarmed, half-withering look that almost stops Jackie in her tracks.
“Sorry,” Jackie rushes out flippantly before Shauna can complain. She has to be perfect in her execution of this. Thread the needle. Stay aloof. “I just got an idea.”
She’s losing her fast; she can tell. Shauna still looks annoyed with her, and Jackie sees her eyes flicker to the lamp.
It gives her another reason to rush through this, beyond ripping the Band Aid off, and so she just says it. “We should kiss.”
Shauna’s expression loosens almost to the point of blankness and then she blinks twice, like she’s not sure she’s heard her correctly. Then she laughs—forced, tight. “Sorry, what?”
Jackie has no clue what to make of that reaction. All she can do is power forward. She lifts a brow, smiles, plays it cool. “Are your ears broken, Shipman? You. Me. Kissing.”
Shauna blinks again, lips parting. Then she just asks, dumbly, “On the mouth?”
She’s so cute. Jackie nods eagerly at her. “Yeah. I was thinking—You literally haven’t kissed anyone aside from getting slobbered on a couple of times in middle school. Let me do you a favor.”
There’s a flicker of something across Shauna’s expression, just for a millisecond, that Jackie wants desperately to be able to read and just can’t. She’d trade her entire collection of Ralph Lauren dresses to know what it means. But it’s gone as soon as it had appeared, and then all that’s left is Shauna, walls up, confused, and studying her like Jackie’s the enigma here. Jackie swallows and prays she won’t be seen through, but the fear of it is palpable with Shauna’s piercing eyes on her.
So she tosses the red herring between them like bait, giving up a little to hopefully get a lot more. “Okay, so Jeff sucks ass at it,” she reminds her, because she’s complained about him in this way before, and in plenty of other ways too. “He’s hopeless. So I was thinking that if you kiss me, I can teach him, and then everyone wins.”
Shauna’s expression smooths over immediately, still hard to read, but Jackie thinks she can kind of see the acceptance there, the slight annoyance. Those are both good things. Shauna believes her.
But then she says, “That’s so dumb,” and Jackie feels her hopes fall. Shauna won’t look at her, suddenly. “You already know how to kiss.”
Fuck. She has talked up her own skills over the years. It’s coming back to bite her.
She huffs, crossing her arms, thinking quickly. “Yeah, but I don’t know how to teach. And if I want him to be good, I have to practice with someone who is. If I kiss you and you’re bad, I can practice teaching you to be good first, like tutoring a B student for practice before I tutor an F student. And if you’re good, it’ll help me figure out what I need from him.” She grins, internally patting herself on the back. “Plus, you get to kiss a good kisser, Shipman. You should be grateful.”
Shauna’s lip gives a brief twitch at her final sentence, and she looks away again. Then she sets her journal aside and something in her seems to deflate. “You’re just gonna keep bothering me until I do it anyway.”
Jackie’s smile falls. She sits back on her calves, putting some more distance between them, her stomach churning unpleasantly. “No,” she insists softly, feeling the comment like a gut punch. “I—I’d never make you. I just thought…” She can’t finish that. Can’t tell Shauna she’d assumed she’d just be down for it because she usually just wants whatever Jackie wants. That she’d just assumed they’d be on similar pages about this because they are about almost everything.
Shauna watches her falter, watches her stumble, and then sits forward out of nowhere and takes Jackie’s hand, swallowing hard. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t,” she blurts, and then gulps again like she’s not sure if she’ll regret her own words.
Jackie bites her lip, studying her, and the churning fades. Butterflies are replacing them, and they’re strong, and Jackie has to stop herself from just grasping Shauna’s face and going for it then and there, both because she doesn’t want to spring it on her and doesn’t want to seem overeager. “So you will?” she pushes gently.
Shauna gives an obligatory eye roll, and Jackie bites back a smile. “I… I guess. If, like… it’ll help you out.”
Jackie nods eagerly, then shuffles around and sits up against the wall next to Shauna, bringing her knees up to mirror her. Shauna’s so tense next to her, staring straight ahead, everything tight from her jaw to the hand that’s still clutching Jackie’s.
“Okay,” Jackie starts off quietly, and something drops low in her gut at the sound of her own whisper. The reality of it all seeps into the air, making it feel thicker, heavier, as Jackie turns her head to Shauna and then Shauna slowly mirrors her. Bodies twisted half-toward each other, Jackie’s left knee touching Shauna’s right, Jackie goes on, “Just close your eyes and sort of… relax your mouth a little.”
She almost thinks Shauna won’t do it—not with the flicker of hesitance in her darkened eyes, with the way her jaw still hasn’t loosened and she almost looks angry. Except she couldn’t be angry, because it wouldn’t make sense, because they wouldn’t have gotten to this point if she were.
But then Shauna’s eyes flutter shut and her jaw unclenches, and then her lips part and her tongue wets them, and she’s exhaling soft puffs of air and Jackie is staring at her mouth.
She should lean in now, but her heart’s thudding out of rhythm in her chest and she hadn’t truly processed what she’d been asking for, not even after so much time imagining and dreaming about it. None of it had prepared her for the real thing.
She’s taking too long, and Shauna’s eyes pop open out of nowhere and she flushes angrily. “What’re you—?” she starts, and Jackie cups her cheek and leans in to cut her off, and Shauna melts against her instantly.
Shauna’s mouth is like heaven. Jackie eases off after the initial pressure, ignoring her instincts, trying to keep herself together. She makes it tentative and featherlight at first, a gentle brush of their lips, and then it’s Shauna who comes to life out of nowhere, tilting her head, pressing forward, readjusting and closing her mouth around Jackie’s bottom lip.
Jackie’s whole body wakes up for the first time. Her skin feels hot and yet she can tell she’s covered in goosebumps. Her heart’s pumping a mile a minute. Her brain isn’t working, her stomach is tingling, and her hand is grasping Shauna’s cheek too tightly.
She puts every effort she has into not making a sound and then breaks the contact between their mouths, but only so she can part her lips and do it all again: the meeting, the movement, the feel of Shauna’s jaw working under her hand. Again, and again, and they’re maybe on the edge of making out and she has no idea how Shauna knows how to—
She pulls away, regaining control as best as she can, breathing unsteady, and reins herself in long enough to manage a whispered, “Oh, you’re good at that, Shipman.”
Shauna’s eyes flutter open and she licks her bottom lip, cheeks a faint pink, and just mumbles, “Thanks.”
A few more breaths, and Jackie has enough composure to fake it again. “Well, now we can both say we’ve kissed a girl,” she jokes. “And now I know what I’m working with.”
“Right.” Shauna’s unreadable now, looking away, eyes darting to her journal like she wishes she could go back to writing in it.
Had that been it for her? No big deal? Just a short interlude, an annoyance? Jackie interrupting her journaling with her pathetic little request; Shauna indulging it momentarily so that she can get back to what she really wants to be doing with her night?
The thought of it is unbearable. Before she can second-guess herself, Jackie reaches for Shauna’s cheek again and turns her head, and then leans in swiftly to capture her lips again. Shauna stiffens, but then sinks into it, and it’s a little faster, a little more confident on both of their ends, but it only lasts for a few seconds before Jackie pulls away again.
Shauna’s beet red this time, and the satisfaction Jackie reaps from that is almost as good as the buzz of the kiss itself.
“Just keeping you on your toes,” Jackie teases, because she doesn’t know what else to say to justify it, and Shauna exhales harshly through her nose and then manages a half-hearted roll of her eyes.
“If you’re done ambushing me, can we finally go to sleep?”
It’s so easy. Jackie should’ve known it would be. Everything is so easy and natural with Shauna. “Yeah,” she says, softening, wondering if she’s being too obvious with the fond, wanting way she’s looking at Shauna now. “You have to cuddle me, though.”
Shauna doesn’t say she won’t, and when Jackie turns the lamp off and they settle in, Shauna is there, pressing firmly against her like always, and Jackie still feels the phantom slide of her mouth even with her eyes closed.
This hasn’t sated her appetite for Shauna; it’s just given her a taste and made her more ravenous. She doesn’t think she can sleep. Every breath Shauna exhales against the back of her neck is an unknowing attempt at making Jackie shudder against her. Every press of her fingertips to Jackie’s stomach is a reminder of where they could be if they just slid a little lower, to where Jackie suspects she might be ready in a way she’s never been for Jeff, to where she is thrumming and pulsing and warm and damp.
Whatever it all means, whatever she has to say or do to make sure it keeps happening, she needs to kiss Shauna again.
Chapter 2
Notes:
Feels like a good time to mention that Jackie is in a straight relationship here and dealing with comphet and so while nothing explicit will be narrated in detail, basic warnings apply.
On another note, I said this on my Twitter but this fic is only covering up through JackieShauna's first hookup, or to the end of chapter one of Curse. It's ending there. Sorry!
Chapter Text
Shauna acts like nothing’s changed afterward, which is maybe ideal, but also a little bit terrifying.
She’s often blasé and passive about things, so it’s not like it’s not in-character for Shauna to take something in stride while Jackie makes a bigger deal of it, but this? Was this not completely revelatory for her? Did she not miss hours of sleep multiple nights in a row reliving it?
Because Jackie feels like she’s simmering with the knowledge that it’d happened and also with the knowledge that she can make it happen again, and she takes the feeling everywhere with her.
To church, where she hates that she feels guilty.
To school, where she pretends that she’s happy, and that the Homecoming crown she’d won early on last semester had filled the void inside of herself she’d so desperately been hoping it would.
To soccer practice, where that same fucking junior girl with her stupid obvious crush on Shauna definitely needs to run an extra lap because Jackie said so. (She’ll take care of her eventually; she has experience with doing it, after so many instances of catching boys checking Shauna out and sneaking a moment alone with them just for long enough to sneer out a condescending, “She isn’t interested.” Because Shauna wouldn’t be. As her best friend, Jackie just knows it.)
And to Jeff’s, for Valentine’s Day, which she’s been dreading and trying to convince herself she isn’t dreading.
She’d used to feel generally okay about Jeff, especially early on. Everything about being with him has always felt like she’s just working out the kinks, tweaking a few little things here and there to try to make it all finally feel right. Isn’t that how it is with boys? They’re messes, and hard to understand, and they don’t understand women either because women are from Venus, or whatever. It’s normal to complain about them to your girlfriends. And Jeff’s, like, the most popular boy in their grade, so there’s nowhere up to go from him anyway until college.
But Jackie’s on year four of this project and she’s a little frustrated by the lack of progress. Shouldn’t it be getting easier, not harder, to be with him? Instead it feels like he’s wearing her down.
He’s planning their Valentine’s Day, at least, which takes that off of Jackie’s plate for the week leading up to it and frees her up to focus on the Yellowjackets and the test she has the day after, on a Monday.
She invites Shauna over that Saturday night to help her study, and she genuinely does mean to study with her, but also, she has a date with Jeff tomorrow and it’s been a week since they’ve kissed, and Jackie knows an opportunity when she sees one.
They’re on Jackie’s bed together, textbooks and notebooks scattered across the mattress between them, and it’s so easy, like always, to just exist in Shauna’s presence. Jackie doesn’t have to try with her, doesn’t have to laugh at jokes that aren’t funny or pretend that she cares about which boy from the football team probably has the biggest dick or listen to girls richer than even herself complain about getting a Benz instead of a Porsche for their sweet sixteen last year.
It’s why she likes the Yellowjackets best, even if she’s never said it; they feel real, and they care about things that actually matter, like making Nationals.
“I would literally kill myself next year without you at Rutgers,” she groans out when they finally shut their books for the night and tuck them away into their bags. “You’re, like, the best person I know at explaining things, ‘cause you’re a genius.”
She flops onto her back when she’s done packing up, stretching out with a soft groan. Her brain feels fried.
Shauna laughs shortly and shuffles down next to her, facing Jackie with her head on the other pillow. “Thanks,” is all she says.
Jackie thinks about it for another moment, unable to hold her smile back. Next year. College. She doubts she’ll still be with Jeff by then, with the way things are going, and there will be new boys at new parties. Smarter, hotter boys from bigger cities. Boys who can kiss and touch her right. Shauna might actually be able to tolerate one of them too, if Jackie can find her one who knows something about the kinds of books that use words like “thou” and “thy” or whatever. She knows it’ll be her best friend duty to play matchmaker, but she also knows she’s not exactly excited about it.
If Jackie has her way, she and Shauna will have kissed a lot by then, at least, and they’ll have every night alone in their dorm together to keep doing it if they want. To do whatever they want.
She doesn’t say any of that, though. Instead, she sighs dreamily and tells Shauna, “I’ll decorate our room for us once we move in. I already have everything planned out. What’ll be pink and what’ll be green, you know?” She’s done Shauna a favor, she knows, getting it plotted out in her head ahead of time. Shauna hates doing this sort of thing herself. She’ll probably spend their first week plodding around campus to find out exactly where their classes will be so that they don’t miss them on their first days.
Shauna blinks at her, jaw flexing, and just nods shortly. “Yeah, it’ll be nice.”
It really will be. Jackie could fantasize about it for hours—she kind of already has—but there’s something else to get to. She’s been trying all night to keep her mind off of it so that she can actually do some learning, but it’s invading her brain at a rapid pace now and she knows it won’t go away until she gets it out.
“So,” she starts, rolling onto her side to face Shauna fully, “Jeff’s taking me out to dinner tomorrow for Valentine’s Day. He says he has something special planned.”
Shauna doesn’t really react beyond to ask, “To that Hibachi place you’ve been wanting to try out in Matawan?”
Jackie laughs like that’s silly, like she hadn’t wondered it herself and asked some sneaky strategic questions to figure it out, and been assured by Jeff that it’s somewhere in Wiskayok. “Yeah, right; I can’t ask him to blow his whole allowance on a dinner, Shauna, c’mon. I’m just gonna ask my parents to take me there after graduation.”
“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.” Shauna just looks at her, and the silence stretches between them, and Jackie almost feels awkward, strangely. They so rarely have moments like this.
She feels like she needs to keep speaking to rid the room of it. “Anyway, we’ll probably go back to his place after,” she says, giving Shauna a knowing look, a look that says and then we’ll do stuff, the sort of stuff you haven’t done, but don’t worry; I’ll tell you what it was like later.
She doesn’t tell the full truth about it, ever; Shauna knows that she doesn’t get off and that sometimes it’s actively bad, but sometimes Jackie tells her that it was decent this time, and that part’s a lie. She’s worried that if she says it’s only ever been okay at best that Shauna will think she’s weird. Because what if it’s her, somehow, and not Jeff? What if something in Jackie is wrong and broken?
When Shauna doesn’t take the bait, Jackie feels a little dumb and adds, “And then kiss, and stuff.” Shauna’s eyes lower to stare at the bedsheet and she makes a noncommittal sound in her throat. Jackie forces her lips into a playful grin and keeps pushing forward. “Remember that time he stuck his tongue so far down my throat it made me gag?” She's being harsh on him. It had been freshman year, and he’d been so new to it. He hasn’t been that bad again, at least.
“Yeah,” Shauna replies evenly, “and then you told him if he ever did it again you’d bite it off.”
It’s a funny story, but Shauna sounds a little bored. Maybe Jackie’s just brought it up too many times. She makes a mental note to give it a break for a few months. She gets more mileage out of Shauna with the one about him trying to finger her in the Funcoland bathroom on their first date, anyway.
“He still kisses with too much tongue,” Jackie complains, her segue completed, her pulse picking up. “I know I want less, but like, how much less, you know? He has all the fucking subtlety of a bulldog about it.”
Shauna’s body locks up and this time Jackie knows she’s made her laugh for real. “Fucking gross, Jax,” she chuckles, cringing, and Jackie beams at her.
“Anyway, we should try it,” she says, and Shauna chokes on her own laughter, and it’s not until registering the shock in her expression that Jackie realizes Shauna had thought last week was a one-time thing.
It’s devastating. Jackie had explained it, she’d thought. Made herself clear. And Shauna had been so content this week, so normal. Existing, apparently, in that contentedness with the expectation that she’d never kiss Jackie again.
She hadn’t craved it. Hadn’t spent any nights thinking about it. Doesn’t feel… whatever it is that Jackie’s been feeling; the curiosity, the want, the need to try it again.
Jackie can feel her smile dying. She feels so silly and stupid.
“Sorry,” Shauna rasps, rubbing at her sternum, wincing at herself as she recovers. “Um, yeah, okay.”
Jackie straightens, getting mental whiplash, blinking back at her rapidly. She recovers at record speed. “You okay, Shipman?”
Shauna huffs at her like she knows she’s being teased. “I’m fine.” She pushes up onto an elbow, eyes darting away from Jackie’s. “Should we, like, sit up, or—?”
Jackie nods and then does, and pulls Shauna up before she can do it herself, just to feel like she has a handle on her, like she’s in control. She doesn’t know what might happen if she lets it slip, if she loses her grasp on the situation, but something in her gut tells her that she can’t, that it’s important to always be in charge for this. Maybe because of what might come out of her if she ever isn’t.
She smirks at Shauna. “Well, since you’ve never frenched anyone before, you kind of have to take it slow, so I feel like I’m at least pretty safe from gagging this time.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” Shauna says shortly, and then Jackie gets the surprise of her life when Shauna takes her hand and tugs her closer, just a little, and not forcefully at all, but something about even that little bit of nonverbal come here and kiss me makes Jackie’s abdomen start blazing.
It’s the thought of being wanted, she knows. The idea that Shauna could be more than just a passive and half-heartedly willing participant. So the want doesn’t eat her alive, but maybe she still likes it when it does happen. Jackie will take that victory.
“I won’t,” Jackie promises, sincere this time. “Just do what I do.”
She leans in, and finally she’s back where she wants to be, invading the space near Shauna’s mouth, breathing the air that’s just circulated through her, curling her fingers along Shauna’s throat.
Shauna’s lips are so different from Jeff’s. Less dry and cracked, thanks to the flavored chapsticks Jackie’s always pushing her to use. Soft like pillows, full and smooth. Jackie could live against them. Could survive on the oxygen passed from Shauna’s mouth to her own.
When she kisses Shauna, she understands why the PDA in the school hallways can get so egregious, and why couples make out on couches at house parties like they’re trying to eat each other’s faces off. Devouring Shauna doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Kissing her harder, faster, until it feels like she’s consuming her.
Jackie doesn’t do that. She can’t do that, because it’d be losing control, showing too much of herself. She could scare Shauna with it. She could scare herself with it.
So she stays soft, and slow, and swears she can feel the heat in her blood flowing quicker through her veins as she works Shauna’s mouth open, and Jackie doesn’t make a sound because she’s trying so hard not to but she doesn’t know what to think about the fact that Shauna doesn’t either—and then Jackie’s tongue flicks into her mouth, brushes something slick that she knows must be Shauna’s tongue, and she feels Shauna’s sharp intake of breath before she hears the tiny gasp that comes with it.
Arousal zips through Jackie like lightning and she feels the air bubble up her throat, a gasp of her own waiting to slip out, but she smothers it and withdraws her tongue, and they’re still kissing and now it’s Shauna’s turn. Jackie braces herself internally for it.
It’s a tentative poke, less of a delicious slide, only thrilling because it’s Shauna, and Jackie pulls away from it just briefly enough to swallow and then nod encouragingly, their foreheads touching enough for Shauna to feel the motion. “A little more,” Jackie whispers, and kisses her again, and this time Shauna invades her mouth before she’s ready, exploratory, bolder, and Jackie can’t choke down the moan in her throat, can only make sure it sounds low and muffled there before it can make its way up out of her mouth.
Shauna freezes against her for half a second, and Jackie thinks it’s completely fucked up now; it’s ruined, she’s—
Shauna reaches out and grips her waist and then kisses her harder. Still slow, but forceful, and it’s so messy, their tongues are doing things that are so gross when she does them with Jeff’s tongue, but all Jackie’s broken mind can think about is that Shauna is being aggressive, Shauna is taking, which means that Jackie must have something that Shauna wants.
She breaks it abruptly before the thought can drive her too wild, wiping at her mouth, and Shauna looks at her with wide, dark eyes and then does the same, the back of her hand and wrist sliding over her lips. Jackie commits that look to memory—and the rest, all of it, while she’s at it.
“Was that okay?” Shauna asks her, and even the slight remnant of breathlessness in her voice makes Jackie pulse where she’s desperately trying to ignore her own body. She can’t even think about what the fact that Shauna’s seeking out her approval is doing to her.
She pulls herself together again. Smiles, makes sure her own breathing is even before she replies, “It was alright for your first time.” She can’t be honest. It would ruin everything to tell Shauna that she’s never felt anything like it before.
She shifts around, rearranging the comforter, starting to tuck herself into bed, and sends Shauna a knowing look as she says, “Don’t even try to say I wasn’t amazing, because Jeff always tells me I am.”
Shauna doesn’t deny it, which is something Jackie will cling to until next time, but she doesn’t say anything at all. Just makes a short sound to acknowledge that Jackie had spoken and then slides under the covers next to her, and waits for Jackie to turn the light off.
-
The next day, Jeff takes her out for burgers and fries. It’s fine. Jackie only eats half of her burger.
They go back to Jeff’s place after, up to his bedroom, which always smells like musk and aftershave. She’s never liked it. When he kisses her on his bed she thinks to herself that it doesn’t feel so much different from Shauna, actually, but it must be in the technique or something. Or that boy tongues are just bigger. Shauna’s tongue had curled and slid and rubbed just right, her hand so tight on Jackie’s waist, and she’d tasted faintly like the cherry coke soda she’d been drinking just before, in between talking Jackie through math problems, and Jackie had listening and stared at the way her lips moved, studied the slope of her nose and the length of her neck and the dip just above her collarbone—
“Whoa,” Jeff pulls back to breathe out, his hand in her shorts, his fingers exploring. “You’re, like, really… wow.”
He pushes in. It doesn’t hurt at all this time, but it just sort of feels like there’s something inside of her. Jackie hauls him back in for a kiss to distract him, gives it about two minutes and then fakes a few moans. She’d given up on fixing this part with him a long time ago. College boys will hopefully have it figured out.
He usually wants her to put her mouth on him after, and she dreads it even though she knows it’s just part of being a girl. Her friends complain about it too: the taste, the soreness after, the gagging when boys aren’t careful or kind.
She’s resigned herself to it, but then Jeff unbuckles his pants and asks her, “Can you do it with your hand?” and Jackie feels relief flood her. This is messy and gross, too, but it doesn’t hurt, and if she does it right it’s over faster, so it’s slightly less of a chore, at least.
She thinks about her test during. She’s in Statistics because taking Calculus with Shauna and Tai had felt too intimidating, and it’s not like it matters for her college application given that she’s already gotten into Rutgers. But Shauna, of course, has always been such an overachiever. She’d sat there last night and talked about Z-scores and T-tables like it was nothing, even though she’d jumped right from Trig to Calculus and hasn’t even taken Statistics before. Just one quick skim of a chapter in Jackie’s textbook and she’d been able to—
Jeff grunts, hips jerking, and it’s over. Jackie looks down at his lap, an emptiness in her chest, a half-digested burger sitting heavy in her stomach like it might be debating coming back up.
She scrubs thoroughly at her hand in his bathroom before she leaves.
-
She makes it sound funny with Shauna twelve hours later, on their morning drive. “How is it fair that we learn to do ten seconds of this,” she makes a quick jerking motion with her fist and Shauna grimaces at her briefly, face twisting in disgust before she refocuses on the road, “but guys act like finding one little spot and sticking to it is harder than hunting for the holy fucking grail?”
“Because guys are morons?” Shauna offers placatingly.
“Not all guys,” Jackie insists, but internally she’s just hoping it’s true. “Like, older ones probably know what they’re doing.”
“I thought you wanted to lose your virginity to Jeff.”
She does. Did, at one point. But now she’s not so sure it’s worth it when she knows they aren’t built to last anyway. The idea is romantic: her first boyfriend, her high school love. But also, if Jeff can’t make her feel anything with his fingers she’s not sure shoving something even bigger into her—and with less stamina—will be any better.
“I just don’t want to show up to college a virgin,” she says, which is at least an honest answer. “No offense.” Shauna rolls her eyes and says nothing, not even at Jackie's playful look, and so Jackie falls back on old habits to get a reaction. “You know, Randy would be happy to—“
“I’d literally rather fuck a piece of glass,” Shauna interjects, and Jackie can’t help the giggle that bubbles out of her.
“That’s a horrific visual,” she says in spite of herself.
Shauna swats at her like she’s offended. “Don’t picture it!” She rolls her eyes. “I don’t need anyone. I’m perfectly fine with—“
She stops. Jackie processes the pause, then raises an eyebrow, glancing at her. Watching her cheeks pink slightly.
Jackie bites back a smile. “Your current girlfriend?” There’s a twitch at Shauna’s mouth; a flicker of confusion and something else. “Palmela Handerson?”
“Shut up,” Shauna groans, shoving at her shoulder as Jackie dissolves into laughter again. “That’s so stupid. Did you hear that from Jeff?”
She had, but she shakes her head and denies it. “I definitely came up with it myself.”
“You’re such a liar.” Shauna rolls her eyes again, blows out a breath, and takes a long pause before she mumbles, “Whatever. Everyone does it.”
Jackie’s smile falters and then she swallows a lump in her throat and looks away. Her thoughts race.
She has done it. Enough to be decent at it, to know what she’s doing, but not often enough that she’d say what Shauna’s just said, that she’d just assume it’s normal and admit to doing it. Shauna must do it a lot, then.
She presses her lips together tightly and stares out her window, thinks things to herself like Oh, look, a strip mall and reads a few signs so that her mind doesn’t wander.
Those thoughts, she’ll draw the line at. If she doesn’t, they’ll suck her in like quicksand, she thinks, and she might find herself drowning in them forever.
Chapter 3
Notes:
Again, trigger warning for het stuff
Chapter Text
Melissa is becoming a nuisance.
She’s not even talking to Shauna, but it’s the entitlement that’s grating on Jackie’s every last nerve. Melissa’s entitlement to… to looking, and fucking existing with whatever delusional version of Shauna she must have in her head to even consider for a second that she’s not wasting her time with her stupid obvious staring.
It’s been different with the boys that send Shauna lingering glances. Jackie has them all figured out. Usually she can scare them off with a look; if not, her practiced condescension. In dire circumstances, a quick flirty comment will distract them long enough to wipe Shauna from their minds and replace her with Jackie. Shauna wouldn’t want to deal with the hassle of attention from high school boys, anyway, and it’s thankfully not that frequent of an occurrence compared to how often Jackie gets hit on even despite having Jeff—probably because Shauna doesn’t ever show any interest in dating.
But Melissa spends a lot of time in Shauna’s vicinity, thanks to the Yellowjackets, so Jackie can’t just make her physically go away, and soft-bullying her during practice and in the halls isn’t working. She’d been trying to be considerate here, to not bring it all into the light—even in private, just between the two of them—in case Melissa’s going to freak out about someone knowing, but at this point Melissa’s practically brought it on herself with the way she’s always hovering near Shauna, smiling and waving at her, sneaking extra glimpses at her in the locker room as Shauna takes her uniform off.
The last one makes Jackie’s blood boil the most. Shauna isn’t a piece of meat. And Melissa doesn’t even really know her, hasn’t seen the inside of her room or tolerated her terrible music or comforted her while she’s cried, so what gives her the right to look at Shauna’s body the way she does?
Jackie has to take care of it, once and for all, and so on a day Melissa’s finally slow to leave the locker room Jackie hangs back and waits by the door for the others to clear out.
When it’s just Melissa left, Jackie watches her rise from the bench and turn, and looks her up and down even as Melissa falters, noticing it’s just herself and Jackie left.
She’s not… unattractive. Maybe the kind of girl boys would call cute. Nice eyes. Hair that’s a touch blonder than Jackie’s, who’s always been a little too dark-headed to fully earn the title. Something she’s always secretly resented, because boys like blondes.
Jackie’s mouth twitches. Shauna wouldn’t be into—Except Jackie does remember how obsessed she’d been with She-Ra back in the day. But that had been because of the big sword, not the blonde hair. And not fucking like that, obviously: they were in elementary school and Shauna isn’t gay like Melissa.
Jackie really doesn’t hold it against her, that part. She just needs to refocus it somewhere else. Like Gen, maybe. They can go down on each other to their hearts’ content, or whatever, and Melissa can stop perving on Shauna.
“Hi,” Jackie greets her brightly, folding her arms across her chest and pretending like it’s not pleasing her to see Melissa looking all tense and fight-or-flight-y right in front of her. “Let’s talk.”
“About what?” Melissa asks haltingly, like she doesn’t know. But Jackie’s radiating too much animosity for her not to have some idea.
Jackie won’t torture her. She gets right to it. “Shauna’s too nice to say it, so I will. Leave her alone.”
There’s a flicker of panic on Melissa’s face, and Jackie sees her gulp and then turn red. “What are you talking about? I barely even speak to her.”
Oh, God. She thinks she’s not obvious. That’s embarrassing for her. “You know what I’m talking about,” Jackie says shortly, stepping toward her. Melissa steps back and almost trips over herself. Jackie’s eyes narrow at her. “Stay the fuck away from her. She’s not like that.” Like you, it goes without saying.
Melissa’s lip quivers, but then her expression hardens. She looks at Jackie like she knows something Jackie doesn’t. It makes Jackie falter, just for a moment, but then she remembers herself, and how important this is to put to bed for good. “And I won’t say anything,” she promises, and knows what’s being left unspoken. A silent if that she can tell is received loud and clear when Melissa’s eyes widen just a tad. “Okay?”
Melissa loathes her; she can tell. Maybe she already had before this, given the grief Jackie’s been giving her over the past few months. “Okay,” she says sharply, her jaw clenched.
“Good,” Jackie says, and pushes out of the locker room feeling like she’s done something wrong. It’s the threat part of it, she knows, even if she’d never be cruel enough to make good on it. But the last thing Shauna needs are those sorts of rumors, especially after never having had a boyfriend to refute them, and Melissa’s attention could fuel them if other people start to notice. Jackie had just been helping her, is all.
-
The third time they kiss, they’re drunk for it.
Jackie’s dad is working late and her mom has popped a Valium for the night, so it doesn’t really matter that it’s a Wednesday; she winds up sneaking a bottle with Shauna anyway, turning up the small radio in her room, and stumbling through a few dance steps to “This Is How We Do It” even as she tries to make Shauna move her feet properly.
Shauna’s in one of those moods where she just wants to drink tonight, which is rare but usually means she’s feeling broody about one thing or another, which then means that Jackie wants to pry.
“C’mon, what’s bothering you?” she presses even as she takes a swig of wine straight from the bottle and collapses next to Shauna on the bed, the radio playing some alt song now that she’s sure Shauna loves. “Your Bart Simpson was even more tragic than usual.”
“I’m fine,” Shauna insists, taking the bottle from Jackie. “Just tired lately.”
Jackie hums, wanting to press harder, because she’s confident Shauna’s not telling her the full truth. But the alcohol’s making her head buzz, and she might regret drinking so much of it in the morning but right now it’s making her feel nice, and less and less determined to make Shauna talk.
She lets Shauna have a few more gulps, and then takes several herself, and soon the bottle’s almost empty. It’s the sweetest white she could find in the back of the second fridge in their garage, so it’s not staining their mouths, but Jackie can see the liquid shine of it on Shauna’s lips. It catches the lamplight and Jackie tries not to stare.
“Do you wanna sleep over?” she asks, aware of her words running together but unable to stop them. “I’ll make sure you sleep well. Tuck you in.” She grins, and Shauna licks the wine off of her bottom lip.
“Can’t. Even if your parents said it was okay, my mom’s car is at the shop and I promised her I’d drop her off at work in the morning.”
Jackie’s smile falls. She pouts and leans over to rest her head on Shauna’s shoulder. “You’re still gonna pick me up too, right?”
“If you want.”
Shauna sounds so distant. Now that Jackie’s thinking about it, she’s been like this on and off lately. More in her own head than usual.
Jackie’s immediate worry is that she’s done something wrong. Nothing’s changed between them lately, beyond the kissing, and Shauna had been fine after the first time. She hadn’t hated the second time, seemingly. So it can’t be that. Jackie really, really hopes it isn’t that.
The wine’s kicking in. She’s not just thinking things she shouldn’t, now; they’re reaching her mouth too. “Are you mad at me?”
Shauna nudges Jackie off of her shoulder and furrows her eyebrows at her. “Why would I be mad at you? Do you think I have a reason to be?”
“I don’t know,” Jackie lies. Shauna takes the wine bottle from her, stares at it for a moment, and then finishes off the last few sips of it. Her lips are shiny again. “You just seem upset.” Jackie wants to kiss her, but she needs a reason. She doesn’t have the brainpower to think through some excuse about Jeff right now. “Let me cheer you up,” she says, smirking at the clicheness of it, at using some line on Shauna she feels like she’d see in a movie, and then leaning in.
Their lips meet for just a moment and then Shauna’s pulling away, alarmed, slurring, “You’re drunk.”
“So are you,” Jackie says softly, and kisses her again, and that’s all it takes.
It’s never too fast with them, Jackie’s starting to realize, and for Jackie it’s because ramping it up like that will make her look like she’s trying to do something she’s not. She just wants to kiss for now. Just wants to learn all the ins and outs of Shauna’s mouth and how she uses it.
She’d thought a slower pace would help to keep it less passionate too, lighter, but she knows after this time that that’s not necessarily the case. She can mask some of her own desire when she’s not sliding her hands everywhere and kissing Shauna hard and fast, but the passion is inescapable.
Even drunk, even sloppy, her tongue tastes Shauna’s bottom lip and something pulls tight beneath her navel. She moves her body without thinking, knowing she shouldn’t, so faintly aware of some sober version of herself deep in an internal pit and sealed behind a barrier, pounding on the glass and screaming, and then she’s straddling Shauna’s lap, the empty bottle is slipping out of Shauna’s hand and onto the floor, and Shauna’s face is flushing as Jackie cups her cheek and neck and leans in again.
Okay, you definitely like this, she thinks to herself, pleased, still seeing Shauna’s heated face behind her eyelids as their mouths get reacquainted. At least when you’re drunk.
It makes it easier to do everything she wants, to be aware of everything she’s feeling. The warmth of Shauna’s thighs beneath her, the sticky heat building between her own legs, the slow way Shauna’s tongue sweeps into her mouth and retreats like she’s teasing with it, like she can tell somehow how badly Jackie wants to chase it. Jackie does chase it, and feels Shauna’s pulse fluttering under her hand, and then there’s a low vibration there and she knows it’s a trapped sound, because Jackie’s been burying them herself.
It drives her crazy. She wishes Shauna’s hands were on her, too. She’s not sure why they’re not.
She pulls back reluctantly to look, catches a glimpse of one of them clutching the comforter so tightly that Shauna’s knuckles are white, and can’t help but insist, “You can put your hands on me, Shipman.”
Shauna maybe almost says something, but Jackie kisses her before she can. Her hands hover, for one second, and then two, and then five, so Jackie just laughs against her mouth and grabs them, pressing them to her waist. Leave it to Shauna to overthink something so simple, even drunk.
“Silly,” Jackie murmurs, meaning to tease, but it comes out condescendingly. Shauna responds by biting down hard on Jackie’s bottom lip.
A sound rushes up out of Jackie’s mouth, and she barely crushes part of it at the tail end so that all Shauna earns is a soft whimper for it, but it’s still too much, too revealing, and Jackie jerks away from her, her lip tingling as it’s pulled taut for a moment and then slides out from between Shauna’s teeth.
Their chests rise and fall in tandem, and Shauna’s looking up at her with flustered surprise, all dark-eyed and still so flushed, like she could be seeing right through her. Jackie can’t bear to let the moment sit, so she raises a hand to her mouth right away with a laugh and says, “Wowza, Shipman; watch the teeth. You’re gonna tear my lip off.”
It makes Shauna’s eyes leave hers, mercifully, settling lower, and then she breathes out an ashamed, “Sorry.”
“Just surprised me,” Jackie breathes, and then she’s too aware all over again: of herself on a Shauna’s lap, Shauna’s hands on her waist.
She slips off of her immediately, collapsing next to her, the room blurry, her eyes seeing double. She laughs. “Shit. I’m trashed.”
“I know,” Shauna says, glancing back to the head of the bed, curling an arm helpfully around Jackie’s back. “I’ll help put you to bed and then I should go.”
Go? Shauna can’t go. For one thing, she’s too drunk to drive. Also, Jackie doesn’t want her to go.
“Stay,” she says, scooting back and tugging Shauna with her, but that only makes Shauna slip away from her entirely. She gets to her feet without stumbling—something Jackie definitely couldn’t manage right now.
“I can’t,” Shauna says shortly, not looking at her. “It’s getting late.”
She starts to gather her things, and Jackie stares after her, trying to stop her head from spinning long enough to process what’s happening. What she thinks is happening.
It’s just for fun, she wants to say. You don’t have to leave. It’s okay if you like it.
Instead, she says, “Be careful,” and lets her go.
After, her bedroom feels too quiet. Jackie turns the lights out and worms her way under the sheets, her pulse still elevated, her skin feeling too sensitive. She bends her knees and her shorts feel uncomfortable where they press at the apex of her thighs. She’s so warm there. She closes her eyes and thinks of Shauna’s mouth moving against her own, and it makes things worse.
Shauna had stuck around after, both times before. Jackie had relaxed and waited for her body to calm because she’d had no other choice. But even if she had been alone, like after her dream, to do anything else would’ve felt… not wrong, not—just, maybe a little big. A new step she couldn’t take while she’d been thinking too hard about it.
She rolls onto her side now and doesn’t think, just lets the fresh memories play like a reel in her head, and then her thighs are tensing and squeezing tight. Even that feels good, she’s already so…
She expels a heavy breath. Her mouth feels dry from the alcohol, and licking her lips barely helps. She doesn’t know how one part of her body can be so dry when another part is so wet she can feel it without even touching it.
Why can’t Jeff make this happen? Why can’t she even make herself get like this, with all of the other memories she has at her fingertips? She’s tried so many different things over the years. Reliving makeouts with Jeff, that freeze frame of Bruce Willis’s wang, the few times Jeff’s fingers had brushed her in a way that almost felt nice for a second or two before he lost it.
She’s tried fictional sex, a fantasy: some nameless boy saying all of the right things, sweet and romantic, and then Jackie would sort of just stop there in her head while she touched herself, because even thinking of some sweet imaginary boy thrusting on top of her hadn’t particularly appealed to her. It’s the romantic prelude she prefers to focus on, and even that doesn’t exactly inspire arousal in her. It’s just nice.
It’s not that she’s, like, permanently sporting the Sahara Desert between her thighs—she can usually make it work, still—but it’s not like this. Like something out of the secret collection of romance novels her mother keeps and doesn’t know Jackie’s snuck a peek at. She’d used to giggle at words like “soaked” and “dripping”, and she still does, because they’re still a little cartoonish compared to the real thing. But they’re also not nearly as far off from reality as she’d thought, apparently.
She rolls onto her back again with a sigh, legs splayed out, eyes shut tight. Shauna had rushed out so quickly, all nervous and flushed. Maybe she’d felt what Jackie’s feeling now. Maybe she’d just wanted to get home and be alone. So she could do what everyone does, what she must do regularly with the way she’d spoken about it.
Jackie had promised herself she wouldn’t think of this, and immediately she tries to shut it down. But it’s like she’s cracked the door open to it and now it’s immediately barreling through, forcing its way in.
That vibration in Shauna’s throat. The way she’d tried not to make noise. Is she like that alone? What does she think about? Will she think about Jackie’s mouth now?
Her breathing feels shallow. There’s a nervous, tight ball in her abdomen, and her body won’t stop pulsing between her thighs. An image of Shauna’s flushed face swims behind her eyelids, Shauna’s teeth in her own lower lip, neck straining, eyes shut tight, lips parting to moan out—
Jackie whines and then fumbles to get her hand into her shorts, and she’s never touched herself when it’s like this before so she’s stunned by the slick slide of it, and the way even a brush of her fingertips gives her so much relief that it makes her gasp.
She pictures it: what Shauna might think of what their kissing has done to Jackie’s body, how she might look at Jackie if she liked it, if she felt it. Shauna’s hand is only a little bit bigger than hers; they’ve compared, palm to palm, so many times over the years. Her hand would probably feel just like Jackie’s feels now, only somehow better, inexplicably, because Shauna would just know how to touch Jackie, probably, just like she’d somehow just known how to kiss her.
Jackie thinks of her going lower, inside, even as she sticks to circling herself, and the thought of it makes her heart beat out of rhythm. It’s never felt like anything with Jeff, but something about holding any part of Shauna in her, Shauna moving in her…
She moans, rolling her hips into her own touch, and it’s like she’s in a new body, one she didn’t know could do this, could feel like this. She would crave Jeff if him touching her felt like it does now, and her thighs are quivering already and her breath is coming in soft gasps.
Shauna’s mouth, Shauna’s hands, Shauna gripping her waist, Shauna could be nice to her like her imaginary boy, could say to her you’re so pretty, your body’s so perfect, I can’t wait to touch you, and Jackie would combust on the spot, almost breathes out holy shit just imagining it. Shauna’s so pretty too, especially in the right light, with shadows cast along her face and when she’s concentrating and her teeth are nibbling at her lower lip or biting at it the way she’d bitten down on Jackie’s lip tonight—
Jackie snaps, and comes apart with a long moan, her fingers stilling and pressing down against herself to prolong it all, and it’s never felt like this. Like her nerve endings have lit up everywhere, like her head’s spinning and her body’s soaring through the air. She could get addicted to it. She could do it so much more often than she does.
She pulls her hand out and wipes it on her shorts, still panting slightly as she opens her eyes and stares up at her bedroom ceiling. She feels like she’s been broken all along and someone’s picked up the shattered fragments of her and finally put them together just right. Like puzzle pieces slotting together where they need to be.
It’s a blessing and a curse. Some things are hard to un-know once they’ve been learned. Other things are impossible.
-
“I need to know if this lipstick will smear when I make out with Jeff tonight,” she says to Shauna three days later—flippantly, casually, overcompensating again.
There are too many things she can’t let Shauna know: That she’s felt so insecure about how she’d initiated it last time, about her stupid drunk self saying “let me cheer you up” like that had made any sense beyond just being a transparent excuse to make out with Shauna. That she feels like she has to steer hard into the Jeff thing and project confidence to make up for it.
That she’s thought about those long seconds of kissing Shauna in her lap so often that she’s been zoning out in most of her classes.
That she’s touched herself three nights in a row to thoughts of her.
Shauna’s been hovering near the doorway in her usual flannel with a touch of makeup on, radiating impatience as Jackie’s gotten ready—probably eager to just get to this party and get the night over with, Jackie knows—and her eyes drift to Jackie to watch her put the finishing touches on her red lip.
“It’s supposed to not,” Jackie adds, just to say something. “It was in the advertisement and everything.” And then she sits down on the edge of her bed, tilts her head at Shauna, and beckons her over expectantly.
Always poised, always overly aware of herself. Nothing seeping through.
It gives her a cocky little thrill when Shauna just shuffles over to her like it’s automatic and plants herself next to Jackie on the bed without protest. They’d snuck a shot of vodka each about ten minutes ago and Jackie wonders if that’s helping Shauna a little, because it’d been enough to have Jackie just a touch wobbly while she’d been trying to do her makeup. They don’t have to worry about driving; Jeff should be here to pick them up soon.
Alcohol or not, Shauna could always say no, and she isn’t. She likes doing this too. Thinks Jackie’s good at it. That it feels nice. And each one of those affirmations is more thrilling than the last.
Jackie has an excuse to be a little more aggressive this time, a little sloppier, given the lipstick thing, and so she just slides a hand into Shauna’s hair and pulls her in, mouth open, and then it’s so much hotter when she understands exactly what it’s going to do to her, that the thin fabric under her skirt is going to dampen, that she’s going to crave more of it as soon as it’s over and use her memories of it when she’s alone in bed later tonight.
Shauna’s leaning into it too, a palm planted against the mattress behind Jackie to hold herself up, her other hand moving to rest on Jackie’s knee, and it’s so casual, so sexy, actually, the way she’s taking this in stride too, all aloof and easy about it after her quick exit last time. Jackie almost thinks she likes her better when she’s calm and confident, because at least it means she’s enjoying herself, not thinking about leaving.
But then Jackie bites at Shauna’s bottom lip, remembering how good it’d felt when Shauna had done it, and Shauna lets out this tiny new sound Jackie’s never heard before: a short, high whine that comes from her nose more than her throat, almost on the edge of a moan.
Jackie hadn’t expected it. The want in it. The submission. The fucking desperation. It makes her cheeks light up with heat. It makes her feel like she’s going insane.
She releases Shauna’s lip and kisses her harder, just to keep her own mouth busy, because she had felt it wanting to open, wanting to turn her thoughts into something for Shauna to hear: Oh my God. I could listen to that sound forever. I love you.
Don’t say that, she reminds herself in a fearful rush, and then she inhales sharply when Shauna’s tongue slides into her mouth. Don’t make it weird.
Of course she loves Shauna. Of course she does. She always has. They’re best friends. It’s okay. It’s okay.
She pushes Shauna away by her shoulders without warning her, and Shauna looks alarmed for half a second, and then confused, and then nervous, and Jackie’s lipstick is all over her mouth. It’s so fucking hot—how it’s smeared there, how it’s evidence that she’s had Jackie’s mouth on hers, how it’s proof of what they’ve just done together.
Jackie laughs, and wonders if it sounds higher than usual to Shauna, because it is. “Wow; talk about false advertising.” She pushes up to her feet, almost stumbles because her body’s off-kilter, and it’s just the alcohol. She finds a pack of wet wipes and takes a couple for herself, then tosses it to Shauna with a cursory glance at her before focusing on herself in the vanity mirror and adding, “Get cleaned up; Jeff should be here any minute. I think I’ll go with the gloss instead.”
She hears the crinkle of the package. Shauna is listening. Something in Jackie’s chest loosens with relief.
-
The house party passes in a blur, uneventful, running together with the others. Van gleefully handing out beers to anyone she recognizes, Mari having one too many and puking on Laura Lee, Jeff’s arms around Jackie too frequently for her liking, him pulling her away from Shauna at some point to make out in a hallway. Feeling him against her thigh.
She’s been sticking to using her hand and making excuses with him about her mouth for a short while, ever since she’s started kissing Shauna, ever since she’s discovered that she can do things with her mouth instead that actually turn her on. It’s worse now, tonight, because now she’s dared to fantasize about her mouth between Shauna’s thighs. Just once. Last night. She’d pushed herself over the edge so quickly thinking about it, and then felt guilty afterward, like she’d violated Shauna somehow. She’d sworn not to do it again, and to draw the line at things that have actually happened between them.
But she knows the difference now. Knows what it feels like for messiness and wetness and gross fluids to be hot under the right circumstances, and that her disgust is actually just specific to Jeff. And it’s too easy to be aware of when something’s wrong now that she knows something else could be right.
Maybe all girls don’t like it, but she’s starting to think that they can’t hate it like Jackie hates it. They couldn’t keep doing it forever if they did. Or else Jackie’s just particularly weak-willed, or Jeff’s just particularly gross, or Shauna’s particularly appealing to her as an alternative, or all of the above.
She’d said to Jeff at first that she’d gotten elbowed in the jaw during soccer practice and it aches enough already, then told him the next time that she has a canker sore on her gums. He always kisses her a lot more on nights where he wants that, specifically, like he’s hyper-focused on the part of her body he wants on him. And he’s doing it tonight. She knows she’s not getting out of it this time, that if she comes up with a third thing he’ll know that she just doesn’t want to. And then he’ll complain, and she’ll remind him that he doesn’t go down on her either, and he’ll point out that that’s because she won’t let him, and he’ll have a fair point with it, and then she’ll just do it to stop fighting about it.
It’s easier to just do it before it reaches that point, usually. Easier to not argue in the first place.
Something about knowing it’s going to happen has her drinking more, clinging to Shauna more, flirting with her in the harmless way she likes to, knowing Shauna will shrug it off and maybe Jackie will get a few pretty laughs out of her. Or those cute nervous ones she does sometimes that make Jackie feel powerful.
“If you weren’t such a stick in the mud at these things,” she tells her, grinning, while Jeff’s off with Randy and giving her a temporary reprieve, “I bet you’d have boys all over you.” She’s so thankful Shauna doesn’t. Jackie wouldn’t know how to handle it. “The whole ‘I’d rather kill myself than talk to anyone here who isn’t Jackie’ vibe isn’t exactly magnetic.”
“Doesn’t make it any less true,” Shauna mumbles, sipping on a beer and then grimacing at the taste of it. Jackie can’t help but beam at her, feel her own eyes crinkling at the corners with joy.
“You’re my favorite person to talk to, too,” she says, reaching out and squeezing her hand. They’re leaning against a wall in a crowded living room together, hovering close because it’s the only way to hear each other’s voices clearly over the music, and Shauna won’t look at her, suddenly.
“Until Jeff comes back,” she says.
Jackie scoffs. Shauna can’t actually believe that. She’s doing that thing Jackie does sometimes, when she just needs to hear a compliment and knows how to make Shauna give her one. “Please. The only thing Jeff wants to talk to me about is his boner.” She rolls her eyes and does another thing she likes to do with Shauna: makes light of something that doesn’t feel light, because maybe if she acts like it doesn’t matter that much it just won’t. “Doubt he wants to do much talking about it tonight, actually, anyway.”
Shauna tenses up right away, which wasn’t supposed to happen. Then she lets go of Jackie’s hand, which also wasn’t supposed to happen. She says, “Well, he is your boyfriend.”
She’s right. As long as Jeff’s her boyfriend, this is her job to do. There’s only one way to permanently get out of it.
She’s been trying to endure him for as long as she can. Just to not have to deal with the drama of it, the questions, the what about the Prom crowns of it all, even though Jackie hopes to be in Seattle for Nationals on the weekend of the dance anyway. They were supposed to have sex at some point and then break up in the summer, and Jackie would be ready to start anew in college, armed with experience and with Shauna at her side.
She’d had that plan for a reason. It’s a good one. So why does the thought of sticking to it make her feel sick to her stomach now?
“I don’t even like him that much,” she confesses idly, like it’s mild, like it’s not a secret. She feels vulnerable as soon as the words are out, like she needs to take them back.
She looks at Shauna, sees her not reacting beyond a slight shrug of her shoulders, and knows that her tone has worked. A part of her is disappointed. She wishes she couldn’t fool Shauna—at least not about this. Shauna’s the only person she sometimes wishes she couldn’t fool. She’s also the person Jackie knows sees her the most clearly. Which is maybe why it’s so scary to say things like this to her, and to do what they’ve been doing together. She’s always risking that last little inscrutable portion of herself that Shauna hasn't quite seemed to figure out finally being seen.
She shakes herself out of it and retakes Shauna’s hand, slipping on a smile like a mask. “Let’s dance,” she suggests, tugging at her, but Shauna sighs and doesn’t budge. Jackie pulls again, and this time she comes along.
Jackie dances, and teases Shauna good-naturedly for her attempts at it, and drinks, and drinks, and drinks, and Jeff shows back up eventually and Jackie throws her arms around him and kisses him like this time will be better somehow, and laughs at herself after for how dumb she’d been to even hope for a change when it’s always been the same, over and over again.
She catches Shauna’s eye mid-grin, and Shauna cuts the contact immediately, lifting her latest beer and downing the rest of it like it’s nothing. She can only do that when she’s had a lot, too. So they’re both drunk. Which means that it would be so easy to—if Jackie could just get her alone somewhere without—
“Babe,” Jeff says into her ear, and Jackie catches a whiff of his sour breath. “Want me to take you home now?”
Jackie’s stomach drops, and she leans away from him and takes hold of Shauna’s wrist. “Let’s stay a little longer,” she says to the both of them, but then she trips on her way out of Jeff’s arms and Shauna has to catch her, and Shauna sides with Jeff—of course, always so eager to leave.
“We should go.”
So just like that, Jackie’s in Jeff’s passenger seat with her window down, trying to use the wind to sober up just enough to be aware of herself, but not too much that she has to be fully present for what’s next. She can see Shauna in the rearview mirror, staring out her own window at nothing with her chin in her hand.
“Shauna,” Jackie slurs, waving at her in the mirror. “Did you have fun?”
She hopes she did. She always hopes, just like kisses with Jeff, that the next party will finally be a good one. That she’s done enough to make Shauna happy for a night.
“Yeah,” Shauna says shortly, nodding. She’s not even trying to be convincing. She’s not even looking back at Jackie in the mirror. “It was fine.”
Jeff laughs next to Jackie. “You guys missed the best part! Randy tried to crush a beer can against his head, but he didn’t realize it was supposed to be empty first. I think he gave himself a concussion.”
Jackie giggles, because she should, and then finally Shauna meets her eyes in the mirror and gives her the clearest look Jackie may have ever received from her: a slight eyebrow raise, a twitch of her lips that says and you seriously expect me to date that moron?
It makes Jackie laugh harder, genuine this time, but she’s also just that specific level of drunk where everything’s funny, and Shauna is always the funniest without even trying.
“Here we are,” Jeff announces just as the sound’s dying in her throat, and they’re at Shauna’s house now, slowing to a stop.
Jackie unbuckles her seatbelt to say goodbye, and Jeff gives her thigh a squeeze—a silent reminder to stick around that she doesn’t need. She knows.
Out on the curb, she pulls Shauna close and holds her, and Shauna hugs her back tightly. “You can stay the night if you want,” Shauna murmurs, something empty in it, like she doesn’t mean it, or knows Jackie won’t take the offer.
“Can’t tonight,” Jackie says, like they’d both known she would.
“Okay,” Shauna agrees, and Jackie wonders, briefly, if Shauna’s ever thought about just fighting for it for once. “Love you.” She could tell her straight up: just come with me; don’t go with him. And Jackie thinks there’s a chance that she just would.
Jackie glances back at Jeff, her thoughts shifting to what comes next, preoccupied. Her stomach feels heavy.
Shauna lets her go.
-
When she gets home, throat sore, skin sticky, she scrubs at her teeth and gums and tongue with a toothbrush until she tastes blood.
After, she stands in the shower, trembling, and still doesn’t feel clean, and then scrubs at her face and her arms and hands and hair and everywhere else he’d touched her, everywhere it had gotten on her, and it feels like no matter what she does she can’t get it off of her, even when her skin’s rubbed raw. Some of it’s in her. She thinks about sticking her fingers down her throat to get rid of it, like she had once with food back in middle school, but then doesn’t. She thinks there’s a chance it might come up on its own soon anyway.
She’d been too aware of it all, the whole time, even with the alcohol. How sick she’d felt when she’d popped his pants open. How revolting it’d been to put her mouth on it. How he’d pushed gently on her head when he’d said, “Do it like you normally do it, Jackie,” like it all hadn’t been a big deal. How she’d wanted so badly for it to be over but also known how awful it always is right at the end, too. She’s too aware now of how much she hates it, how much she’s always hated it. How it’s always made her feel horrible and empty and miserable after.
Other girls can’t possibly feel like this about it. They wouldn’t all still be alive if they did.
She sinks to the floor of her tub, sitting down, pressing her face into her knees, letting the hot water rush over her scalp and mingle with her tears, and she thinks to herself, I can’t do this anymore.
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.”
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