June 7: Tai/Shauna, Conclusion

[kinetic_elaboration]

The last part of my Tai/Shauna fic

Written in a little over an hour, 1,700 words

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this… I feel like i can perceive my own fatigue in it haha. I am looking forward to spiffing it all up and taking it to AO3 though.

Also the Van quote is not exact, partially because I’m too lazy to look it up but also because Taissa would not remember it exactly either, so it sort of makes more sense this way.

*

When she was a kid, the seasons had meaning.

Fall and the start of a new school year. Winter, the holidays, and hoping for snow. The fresh breath of air that came with spring, and the lead-up to summer, the end of classes, rolling heat waves and endless, long days.

(Summer abundance, food, warmth, living outside without worry, and then the crackling, dry fall with that portentous chill. When winter came, nothing but snow and darkness. The brain atrophies with boredom. Wind whistles in through the cracks in the walls. Numb, flat, bitter winter. Starvation.)

I know the brain forgets—or whatever—as a defense mechanism. So you can stand it—

 

In New Haven, when the days started closing in shorter, and she forgot her gloves and her hands went numb, she’d stand outside smoking with the guy from Civ Pro and curse herself and the gray clouds they exhaled, crystallizing in the cold, and she’d hate the inconvenience of it all so much more than she’s ever hated anything. Go inside afterward and eat lunch in the cafe, which was so stuffy with artificial warmth she couldn’t breathe.

But we ate a kid.

Seasons don’t mean as much anymore. The school year, some. Spring break now and she’s back in Wiskayok again.

Maybe it means something that last time, Shauna didn’t start showing until the crisp, foreshortened days of fall, the world around them bronzed over, crackling, and decaying, more and more leaves falling down from the branches of the trees, and she didn’t give birth until winter, in the middle of a storm. Maybe that was some sort of omen or a curse. And maybe it means something that, this time, it’s the lightest and gentlest of springs and the window is cracked open to a soft breeze and as the world is growing again, coming alive again, Shauna’s baby is growing, too.

In the cabin, she’d lose track of days through the white blur of snow past the windows. She had the strange thought once, what if we don’t know how his birthday. What if we never actually know. And in fact to this day she doesn’t remember, and she’d never dare ask Shauna if she knows.

She’d sit on the floor next to Shauna, curled up in blankets, waiting, and she’d plan out so sincerely and so carefully how it could work. Lottie acted like they’d all be the moms somehow or something weird and mystical and vaguely crazy, and Tai knew it wouldn’t be like that. But Shauna would need someone. Jeff wasn’t around. Jackie—gone. So she’d need someone. To kind of keep it together.

So she sat next to her, Shauna in her loneliness, drifting farther and farther back into herself. Like she’d given up waiting for anything, even that death that Jackie had predicted. Like this was it now, she was in it.

She’s not drifting in the same way, this spring. But she’s deep in some sort of thought that Tai can’t follow. The window’s open and the smell of flowers wafts in, and the grass that Shauna’s neighbor is mowing, and the sunlight hits the window sill and then keeps going, stretching through dust motes, shivering with the shadows of tree leaves when the breeze picks up. Tai watches the sun, which is thin and an unreal shade of yellow, and the tiny flowers on the bedspread on top of the guest bed, which they have left in disarray around them. Less often, she looks at Shauna herself. Because when she does, she gets this fear she’ll never be able to look away.

Shauna’s half-turned toward her and her eyes are open, but like she’s not really seeing. Somehow, she’s gotten Tai’s shirt and she’s wearing it, which is how Tai notices for the first time that it’s developed a small hole right at the collar. Not surprising; it’s old. She’s had it since high school. Shauna’s long legs extend out from under it, rubbing against each other sometimes, slow, when she stretches or rearranges herself to get comfortable. If Taissa didn’t already know she was gay, that would do it. Just watching Shauna’s legs, idly, and then trailing up her body and accidentally catching her eye. 

Tai rolls closer, her own bare skin seeking out patches of coolness on the sheets. Her hand finds Shauna’s hip and curls around it, and she slides in closer still, on an inhale.

She had this dream once, in the cabin. The baby was born and he was a boy and he grew up to be some sort of forest king. But the rest of them weren’t there. They’d left, or something had happened to them. He ruled without a crown. He was everywhere. She never saw his face.

Shauna is kissing her now so slowly and with only the barest hint of insistence, which is how she knows it’s Shauna, that even in the quiet, she’s still there. She pulls Tai’s lower lip between her lips and sucks on it, and then she grazes it with her teeth.

For a moment, Tai has this idea, that they’ll spend the night together again, but in her mind it could only be in the cabin and something shivers in her, like nausea, like something trying to come out.

It’s spring now, it’s new life. There’s an omen in that. There’s some sort of meaning.

But Shauna never wanted to be Lottie’s fertility goddess, or whatever, never wanted any of that, never knew what she wanted. Afterward, when the snow stopped coming down but before any of it melted, and they were stuck inside and the place smelled like unwashed flesh and blood if you let yourself smell it, she’d lie unmoving for hours and not let even Tai touch her. And Tai had thought of telling her, I’ll take all of your emotions if you’ll give them, I can handle it. Had worried that maybe this was all Shauna had to give and how the worst, the very worst thing that could happen, was that she’d always be like this. That her spell would never break.

This spell. She’s caught up in a spell.

She grabs at Shauna’s hip, she slides her hand under the soft edge of the shirt. Shauna pulls away from the kiss with reluctance, out of breath as if exhausted, falls onto her back and then Tai’s hand slides down as well, and ends up on the warm skin of her belly, over the roundness of it, so obvious now, though it’s still hard to see when Shauna’s dressed.

She startles and almost takes her hand away, but Shauna looks at her like she’s daring her not to, so instead she cuddles in close and keeps her palm where it is. Her other arm is squashed in between them. Shauna looks down and, after a moment, puts her hand on top of Tai’s hand.

“Maybe you are the father,” Shauna jokes.

“Plenty of ways that’s not possible,” Tai answers. And, she supposes, at least once in which it is. 

She’s never really thought she’d be a parent, to anyone, in any way. Maybe she’d like to be. Maybe there’s something amazing in it.

Shauna’s arm curls around her and squeezes her so tightly, so close.

A real human being in there. One who will live. One who will really live. And she feels all the urgency and all the need to protect this kid, from everything, always, as if it were really all wilderness out there.

There’s just something so delicate and small and hidden about it, this unborn kid, and something delicate but also hardy about Shauna and the way she’s set her jaw and the way she’s staring straight up at the ceiling. The way she’s wearing Tai’s shirt and the way she’s holding her close.

“Jeff always wanted to be a dad,” Shauna says, after a while. “Even when we were in high school, he wanted it someday. I guess I thought if I gave him me, it would make up for—everything that happened. But giving doesn’t work like that. Nothing works like that.”

Tai has no desire at all to talk about Jeff.

Won’t realize until later they were talking about Jackie, and underneath that, most importantly, about Shauna herself.

“You want to be a mom?” she asks.

Shauna shrugs. “I want—something,” she says. But she can’t answer any more than that, and Tai guesses from the sound of her voice that it’s because really doing so might bring up all those heavy, overbearing emotions again. She could say I could handle that but Shauna should know that by now.

I could handle anything.

And Shauna, so secretly fragile, might be the only one, really, at least anymore, who she trusts to handle everything fucked up and wrong about her.

Shauna with a knife in her hand, standing in her kitchen with the ceramic rabbits on the windowsill, cutting up raw chicken, scarred lines on the cutting board and the thwack of the blade against it. The butcher. The wife.

Don’t you miss that time when we could just RAGE—

Tai leans in and kisses her again. She means it to be sweet. With Shauna, it never remains so. 

She imagines this may be their secret for the rest of their lives, but they cut off the habit abruptly after the baby’s born. Everything changes with a newborn around. And anyway in her last year of law school, she meets Simone, who is so beautifully put together and so steady and so safe, that Tai can actually imagine a foundation beneath her feet, with her. First time in a long time. 

Simone is someone who looks at her without blinking and says we can do this, and that means everything.

They move back to Jersey and she starts practicing real estate law. Someday she’d like to get into politics. She and Simone talk about getting married. She is following the path. She’s doing the right things, what she’s supposed to do. The sounds of bugs at night, chirping, cicadas, crickets, and the warmth of summer air, none of that calls to her. She’s shaken her head free of a bad dream.

She and the Sadeckis don’t live that far away from each other anymore and she even sends birthday gifts for Callie’s first birthday, and her second. She keeps the burner phone and she doesn’t tell Simone about it. But after a while, it just becomes easier for everyone if she and Shauna don’t talk.