May 20: Tai/Shauna Night Pt. 2

[kinetic_elaboration]

Surprisingly enough, a continuation of Night Pt. 1. All parts of this fic on the tag ‘my yj fic.’ Right now that’s the only thing on there.

Taissa/Shauna, 700 words, 19 minutes

*

“What?” She tilts her chin up, maybe threatening, maybe calling some sort of bluff. Her spine straightens, but Shauna doesn’t back down. “I’m not going to—to romanticize what we did out there. I’m not going to say it was okay, or good.”

“Oh please. Get off your high horse. You broke Ally’s leg before nationals—”

“Not on purpose—”

“Because you cared so much about winning. About being ruthless and winning.” She’s staring at Tai, beating the pillows as if fluffing them, but with too much force.

 

“That was years ago—”

“And now you’re in law school.”

Tai breathes out hard through her nose. She’s broached most of the space between them, has stood up and walked over, and is now standing even with the end of the bed. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said. Winning means being dangerous sometimes. Or—playing at being dangerous.” She falters for the first time and her gaze falls to her feet.

Shauna. Sometimes when she goes quiet, her eyes unfocus, like they’re looking out to a far distant other-world that isn’t quite the past, and Tai has never been able to follow her there but only because no one ever could. She has spent so much time sitting next to Shauna, lying next to her, waiting her out. Waiting for her to come back. In some ways those hours were harder than weathering her worst emotions: all those big, angry, loud, violent feelings that drive everyone else away and then it’s just Tai holding her or holding her back or grabbing on to her and steadying her. Because in the quiet, when she’s unreachable, Tai has to wonder if she’s lost. And in the wildness of her emotions, she’s everything Tai could never admit that she is, too.

What Shauna is saying is that Taissa is big, too. She is a person who takes up so much SPACE. And she’s never wanted to be anything else.

“It’s just that if life is going to suck all the time,” Shauna mutters, “it should at least mean something.“

Tai snorts. For a moment, how Shauna glares at her, she thinks this will be taken as some threat, but she hadn’t meant anything by the noise at all. Only that it was the first thought that came into her mind. How stupid that was. It should mean something.

"It didn’t mean anything,” she answers.

Shauna’s eyes are deep and round and sunken, staring up at her from beneath her lashes, that dark, familiar brown.

“So everything now,” she says, “is just perfectly fine?”

Taissa laughs again: aborted, genuine, near-hysterical and enough to make Shauna smile. “Obviously not.” And then she steps a little closer and reaches out to hold on to Shauna by the arms of her too-big plaid shirt. She wants to say something anodyne and polite that will end this conversation, like thanks for letting me stay anyway, but instead she says, “It’s pretty fucked up actually.” And it’s the truest thing she’s ever said.

Sometimes with Shauna, more than with anyone else she knows, or maybe has ever known, she just feels like she’s letting everything go. Maybe just because Tai’s seen the rawest and ugliest parts of her, maybe because Shauna is as unapologetic as she is. But she just knows she’ll never be judged for the rawest and ugliest parts of herself, either.

So she just lets go, and she turns up that part of herself that is all instinct, the feral part, the part that the wilderness knew. She doesn’t cede her thoughts or her consciousness or her control. But she indulges, as if in some guilty, pleasurable vice.

And she takes Shauna’s face between her hands and she kisses her. Shauna is startled for the briefest moment. Then she kisses back. “Yes,” she murmurs, guttural and rough at all the edges, right there against Tai’s mouth. “Yes.” She’s grabbing on to Taissa just as tightly as she can. It would almost hurt if Tai cared anything for pain. But all she wants is to feel and to feel and to feel. She wants to stitch herself together to admit that she’s falling apart.