May 22: Taissa/Shauna, Dual

[kinetic_elaboration]

Continuing along with the Tai/Shauna thing.

1480 words, 41 minutes

Quasi…explicit?

See tag “my yj fic” for everything that came before. Coming soon, hopefully, to AO3.

*

She’s lying next to Shauna in bed, face to face, like they’re at a slumber party sharing secrets. The windows are dark but the curtains not drawn, and she just knows without looking that the air is heavy with almost-snow. She just feels it, that expectant December hush. That feeling like her lungs won’t expand to their full depth anymore, like everything is close and closing in. She reaches out and she runs her thumb along the length of Shauna’s nose. The gesture’s not really meant to be affectionate, more like testing out if she’s real, but Shauna smiles anyway and when she does she actually looks sweet.

In the wilderness, Tai really did think of herself and Van as being married, in some unspoken, fundamental way. It wasn’t just a joke. She was in the one place where people like her could be honest and free, and it was either a sick twist of fate or some kind of warning, that in so many other ways it was hell. She had to dig so far down into herself there. Excavate all of herself. Live scraped raw and pained but real. And that part of herself, truly, was Van’s wife, and she knew it every day when she woke up and when she went to sleep at night.

 

She understands this now with a particularly rare sort of clarity, the kind of clarity that doesn’t come about in the real world very much, because she’s just fucked a married woman in the guest room of that woman’s house. But it’s Shauna so it almost doesn’t count.

She had Shauna first, after all. Not chronologically, exactly. Jeff was hooking up with in the backseats of cars and the off-limits upstairs bedrooms of house parties, long before Tai thought of her as anything but a teammate. But he didn’t really know her. He wasn’t there through the terrors that Tai saw her through. He married her but he’s never been wilderness-married. He just doesn’t understand. It’s not the same.

Shauna takes her hand and kisses it right at the heel. She’s so loose and free, she looks like a different person, her hair wild around her face as she turns over onto her back and looks up. One of her arms is stretched up over her head, across the pillows, straining at the headboard. The other has brought Tai’s hand down to her breast, as if it were an accident, but Tai knows that it’s not. She lets her fingertips trace stray patterns along Shauna’s skin, around her nipple, down toward the center of her chest. She has great tits, but even now Tai’s not sure how she’d react to hearing that out loud.

The first time she slept with a girl in a real bed was at Howard, after she and Van were broken up this time for real. Another girl from the soccer team—she played striker, like Jackie—who had purple streaks in her hair. They’d had to squash together on one of the narrow dorm mattresses. It was weird, to be with someone new. She realized afterwards that she wasn’t really over her ex, but she waited a couple of days to say it, just to make the letdown a little less harsh.

What she and Van should have had was a king bed and high thread count sheets and fluffy pillows and everything—the best indulgence like apology for all those nights on the floor, and the nights before that in the hidden corners of the school or the back of Tai’s car. Fuck. If they got what they really deserved maybe they’d still be together. Maybe somehow fairness and accounting and cosmic ledger sheets really could work just like that.

She lets her hand fall lower, down to Shauna’s hip, down to her inner thighs. She’s not trying to start anything up again but Shauna hums as if she were, and gives Tai this look that’s all dare. A reminder again of what’s so attractive about her. Why Jeff fell for her, and Melissa, and—this isn’t the time to be coy—even Jackie. It’s that sense that anything could happen, that sharp danger about her, that bite.

Tai curls in a little closer, feels along Shauna’s most sensitive skin, not teasing but just feeling. Taking her right to it while she has it. “I didn’t think this was what you meant by spending the night,” she admits.

“I didn’t.” She shifts a little, gets more comfortable against the pillows, crosses her arms behind her head. The blankets are tangled down past their knees. Shauna, in this position, looks beautiful and obscene. Gorgeous, in her obscenity. Tai could memorize her like this. “I didn’t plan this any more than you did. But I don’t regret it.” Confident until the last, then she shifts her gaze to Tai, fast and questioning.

“I don’t either.” She doesn’t have space for regrets anymore. “Did you always know you were attracted to girls?”

Shauna smiles, in an arch, wolfish way. “I don’t know. I mean, what’s there to know? I always knew I’d marry a man.”

That twists her up inside but she won’t admit it. She never knew that. Would never do that. Kind of just thought, when she was younger, that she’d always have a secret life or else she’d just end up alone. She’d always be so far ahead of the world and its slow-changing pace.

(In the far-future again, she’ll stand with her wife and smile for cameras—you’re like the queer Kamala—)

“But probably not Jeff.”

Shauna closes her eyes a moment. Tai expects she’ll admonish: we can’t talk about him now. Instead, she says, “If you’re really asking about Jackie—”

“I don’t expect you to want to talk about her now.”

“We were never like that. We were a lot more than that. You know.” Her breath tremors, but she doesn’t stop. “Like parts of a whole or something.”

She’s damn honest when she’s vulnerable. Tai hums, and tucks her head in closer against Shauna’s side. She lets her brain go numb. She drags her nails slowly up the sensitive inside of Shauna’s thigh, and hears her quiet moan, and is filled with a hollow sort of affection for her that does not admit, cannot really believe, a certain awe of all the things she’s seen this body do. How intimately she knows this body. How deeply she knows it.

She spreads Shauna’s legs a little wider just to know she’s splayed and wide just for her, and leans up and looks her in the eye again. “Right now it’s like there’s no one but you and me,” she says. And Shauna stares up at her wide-eyed and nods.

That’s the best feeling she knows in this world: shutting absolutely everything else out and just leaning in and kissing her.

The other side of the coin: sitting side by side on Shauna’s bed, not quite touching. Shauna’s hand has settled down below her stomach, and Tai wonders if the gesture is instinctive, or like some message she’s trying to send to one or the other of them, or to both. “You know I’m pregnant,” she says, and Tai just blinks at her.

“Am I supposed to say congratulations this time?”

“Well, you could, I guess.” She considers a moment, and self-consciously takes her hand away. “Not a lot of people know. Just Jeff and, like, his parents. It’s early yet, just a few weeks.”

Tai’s own hands are curled around her knees, and she notices her grip is talon-like there, and purposefully stretches out her fingers. “Did you know,” she asks slowly, “before, the night you picked me up at the station?”

“It’s not yours, if that’s what you’re asking,” Shauna says, a little sharp, like she actually thinks this is a good joke.

“Funny.”

She rolls her eyes. “No. I suspected, though.”

“Was it—I mean, do you want a kid?”

She shrugs. That’s a no, then. “Jeff does. And. I don’t know.” She waits another moment, breathes in deep. “I think it probably is going to be okay this time.”

Tai takes her own slow, shaky breath. A baby. A kid. Shauna as a mom. She’s turned all these thoughts around in her head before, and she’s back there in the cabin, and she’s right here in Wiskayok, back home, and none of these places are home and they all are. It’s like some sort of well-grooved path has been formed in her head and now all she can feel is fear, fear, fear. Irrational feelings of fear. And she supposes that she’s not the only one. 

She doesn’t know what else to do so she holds out her hand for Shauna to take. Palm against palm, and a strong grip, that holds the rest of the universe in it.