Ten.
She doesn’t mean to kiss Trevor. Not really. His lips are chapped and dry, and all she can think about is the heartache that’ll resonate in Paula’s eyes when she finds out that Olivia is kissing the boy she likes. But then again, she thinks as she sucks gently on a dry lip, Paula deserves it. Paula is the one who doesn’t want her. She’s just getting her revenge on a loveless relationship.
Scratch that. Not a relationship. Just a one-sided, silly, little, crush. The thought makes her bite down, and she doesn’t draw blood but she can tell by the intake of breath that Trevor likes it. She moves her tongue against his, stroking it, promising other endeavors with each breath, and she feels Trevor harden against her bare thigh. She wants to brush it away, disgusted that she chose to wear shorts instead of pants, but she doesn’t because she’s playing a role. She’s playing the role that she was born to play, and she does it with aplomb.
She hears a choked sound behind her back, and she unlocks her lips from Trevor’s for long enough to turn and meet terrified, horrified, disgusted and furious, warm and beautiful brown eyes. Suddenly, she’s too cold to move, too frozen to remember that she has a role to play and one never abandons ship before the tale is over. Horror fills her thoughts.
Shit, she thinks. Fucking shit. This wasn’t part of the plan.
Paula turns and runs, runs away from the dorm, and Olivia can hear the soles of her shoes slapping against the carpeted floor because each step feels like a stab to her beating heart, and she pushes Trevor away with an anguished cry. That, at least, she doesn’t need to fake.
“Oh my god,” she says, covering her mouth and letting the tears flood her eyes. She’s done something terrible, a tiny voice tells her, and Paula is never going to forgive her. “Oh my god. Trevor, I—”
She turns and runs. In the opposite direction of Paula, because she’s a coward and a bully and she knows it, she knows it but she can’t change who she is now. She’s cemented her own reputation in front of her best friend and she’s a monster.
She tries to suffocate herself with her pillow but instead she wakes up the next morning with swollen eyes and ugly tear tracks down her face, and she looks like what she feels inside. A behemoth.
Nine.
“Can we talk?” She can’t ask, so she writes it on a note and slips it on Paula’s dresser. Her dorm-mates let her in, only because Paula hasn’t told them anything yet. One of them tells her she looks like shit, and she flips them off but doesn’t tell them otherwise. Sure, she looks like shit. She feels like shit too. At least now she matches, inside and out.
Paula texts her and they meet at Olivia’s favorite café. She orders Paula a latte, and nurses one herself as she waits for Paula.
She doesn’t show, and Olivia allows herself to be stood up because god, she thinks, she deserves it.
Paula is excellent at avoiding and deferring, so it’s not until they’re both drunk at a frat party that Olivia would never usually attend that Olivia corners her and tells her, sloppily, the drink spilling out of her hand, screaming so that she can be heard over the too-loud and too-bad music, “I’m sorry.”
“What?” Paula yells back, and she repeats herself enough times until Paula hears either what she has said or her tears, and Paula takes her elbow and guides her into one of the rooms where there are no couples making out.
She tells Paula that she didn’t mean to, that it was a lapse of judgement, that she really doesn’t like Trevor and she doesn’t know what possessed her. “Coke,” Paula comments sardonically, and she lets her.
Paula doesn’t tell her she forgives her, but she answers Olivia’s next text message and Paula shows up at the café that Olivia loves the next time she asks her.
Eight.
She tosses the invitation out as carelessly as though she hadn’t spent the past few days of her life tossing and turning in bed, agonizing over how best to word it. In the end, she shouldn’t have worried anyway, because Paula doesn’t look at her any differently and says yes almost immediately. Olivia heaves a breath that she would tell anyone who asks is to release the smoke from her pipe, but is really tinged with too many notes of relief to be that.
“I’ve never been to Hawaii,” Paula murmurs against Olivia’s skin, the two of them bundled together on the couch, limbs entwined and bodies close enough that they’re almost embracing.
“It’s depressing,” Olivia responds. “But beautiful.”
Paula hums an agreement, and Olivia loves that she doesn’t have to explain why Hawaii is depressing and why Hawaii is beautiful—Paula gets her the way that only time can really teach, and Paula is also doing a thesis on colonialism. Really, Olivia thinks, this might be cruel to her.
She doesn’t retract the invitation. She wants Paula there, and she doesn’t want to have to ask Hallie or Dominic or any of the other people she can call a friend. None of them are as quick as Paula, and she doesn’t think any of them really understand what it means to have privilege. They would get along too well with her parents.
Paula’s privileged too. Enough that she can wear Burberry in the fall and Channel in the summer. If she wants, of course, but she doesn’t, because everyone knows that thrifting is the only way they’re going to stop this planet from exploding into ashes before they all see the tender age of eighty. Thrifted clothes look good on Paula. They hug her body too tight sometimes, and other times are loose enough that they show an expanse of soft, kissable skin.
“I wish we had coke.” She murmurs in lieu of her thoughts.
Paula snorts. “We have finals in an hour.”
They won’t miss it, either. Paula’s too smart to not make the dean’s list for something as stupid as being too high to take a final, and she’s too stubborn to be anything less than Paula in case Paula decides that intelligence is a requirement to be part of her life.
Olivia sighs. “Fuck.”
Seven.
The boy—man, but young, so Olivia calls him boy—walks past them in his hotel uniform and Paula’s eyes trail after him. Olivia doesn’t miss this, because she doesn’t miss anything about Paula, so she asks her. “Who’s the boy you’re staring at?”
“No one,” Paula replies, and goes back to her book. Olivia doesn’t really absorb another word of R.W. Connell for the rest of the day.
She tries to back off, tries to not let herself think too much, because god knows she deserves it if Paula doesn’t want to tell her about a boy. At the same time, though, Paula forgave her, and Olivia likes to think she hasn’t done anything to any other boy since then. It smarts that Paula doesn’t trust her.
It stings when she feels the bed dip and Paula climb out of the bed. She swallows the sleep and the anxiety and tells herself that they’ve only been at the White Lotus for a few days. There’s no way that Paula is already in love with this boy. If she wants to fuck around, let her. Who’s Olivia to stop her?
Maybe he has AIDs, Olivia thinks, and then gasps at the implications of her thoughts and wants to flagellate herself. She puts her face down in the pillow and groans, loud enough that it resonates in the silence, quiet enough that even if her brother were still in the hotel suite he wouldn’t have heard her.
Paula climbs back into bed smelling like the sea and sex, and Olivia suppresses the urge to retch because she’s not disgusted by sex but something like bile rises to her throat whenever she thinks of Paula writhing under someone else. Someone who isn’t her.
She turns, and offers Paula another chance to stop the cracking of Olivia’s heart, and Paula rejects it and takes a hammer to the growing crack.
Fine. She turns back to her side, and already she’s plotting and angry and hurt.
Six.
She has always been stunning, Olivia thinks to herself distantly as she watches toned legs wrap around the man—hardly a man, she scoffs to herself—and hears the sound of deep breathing and moans. It’s on a loop in her ears. Thrust in. Moan. Pull out. Groan. Thrust moan pull groan thrust moan pull groan. It makes even the sound of the waves lapping against the sea fade into the background until she wants to bang her head on the floor and make the sounds stop.
She walks back to their hotel room, and she’s disgusted by the sliver of arousal that quickly runs riot against her skin, the small fire stirring until she feels consumed by it, and she comes with her hand clasped to her mouth and tears in her eyes. She feels dirty, betrayed by her body, but she can’t get a shower now so she lies back down and tries to pretend that she doesn’t feel the dip of the bed and the sting in her heart at the sound of a whispered, “What? Oh. I just couldn’t sleep.”
She doesn’t care, doesn’t mind, and the mantra runs in her head accompanied by the sound of thrust and pull and thrust and pull. She thinks she might go insane, and so she puts her mind to good use. She doesn’t read a single word of Weber even though she finishes the book she brought and her eyes burn holes in the back of the boy’s head.
Five.
She storms into her mother’s room, asking for something to staunch the headache that has Paula rolling around on the bed with agony in her wisps of breath. Her mom tells her she has Advil, and she’s so frustrated she wants to rip her own mom’s head off because how could anyone not know that Paula is fucking allergic to Advil? She finds a painkiller and gives it to Paula, and tries not to chew through her lip until she can feel her relax, the tension draining out of her body slowly.
She’s a coward, Olivia knows, because she only touches under the pretense of ‘are you okay’ and ‘do you need my help’. She’s a greedy coward, though, because her hands always linger just a second longer than propriety suggests on the smooth, tan skin that she dreams of tasting, before she snatches them away like she’s been burned and hopes Paula doesn’t notice.
Paula probably does. She’s observant that way, the way Olivia would be if it wasn’t Paula and she wasn’t a greedy coward. Paula doesn’t say anything, though, and Olivia lets herself pretend that Paula doesn’t notice.
“I’m okay,” her voice is soft, weak, almost, and Olivia doesn’t gasp with the relief she feels flooding her veins. She just nods, and retracts her hands before Paula notices her touch on her bare arms. “Thanks.”
“It’s cool.” She says, and is proud of the way her voice isn’t shaking. She picks up her book, and Paula mimics her, and they let the silence settle over them, the sound of paper rustling the only noise in the open room.
Four.
She doesn’t like the way the boy’s eyes rove across her chest, but she sticks it out and steps closer anyway. She isn’t sure if she should feel vindicated by the way he finds an excuse to step away (Paula isn’t completely blind, after all, and that only makes her more conflicted), or if she should feel insulted by the way he doesn’t even watch her leave, even though she wore her shortest skirt.
She’s lying to herself, of course. She feels neither. What she really feels is a savage joy, joy that she’s once again sabotaged any chances she might have with the only person she actually wants to be with. It’s an almost euphoric experience, because does she really deserve anything when she’s privileged and heartbroken and a monster who selfishly subjects Paula to her even after she betrayed her?
She thinks back to telling her second boyfriend she isn’t a masochist when he asked. She isn’t so sure anymore.
Three.
Of course her mind doesn’t go to Paula when she comes back and finds her dad with a bloody nose and her mom shaken, the contents of the safe with the password set to her birthday emptied. Why would it? She’s the one who brought Paula on this trip, she’s the one who fools herself into thinking that ASMR sessions while they’re both high mean something more than simple gal-pal behavior. But Paula is pale and stiff the rest of the time they have there, and she sits alone and pukes more than she usually does when she has an allergic reaction.
She wants to fight her mom when she says, almost offhandedly, “Oh, so she is actually allergic.” The insinuation that Paula would lie, that she would lie about Paula’s health, makes her steaming except she remembers then that she is the one who wanted them to get high on the beach and she is the one who really lost the pills that would have helped Paula now. She’s frozen in her seat, watching Paula puke her guts out, and her mom, her mom, is the person who has to tell her to go and help Paula hold her hair back.
She does, and tries not to fixate on the feeling of thick black curls in her fingers and how she wants to run her fingers through them, not hold them back while Paula empties her stomach of its contents.
Paula is withdrawn and pale, and Olivia can’t, for the life of her, figure out why. Surely it’s not about the stupid necklace that Paula lost from the safe. She knows her precious metals, (she grew up around Cartier and Bulgari and she’s long since learned to tell what is real and what isn’t) and what Paula wore was sterling silver at best. Valuable, but even with the added meaning of it being her dead grandmother’s, not so valuable that Paula would be grieving it. Then the man, the smarmy hotel manager who she is sure snorted her K, tells them the thief’s name and she feels like a tsunami has overtaken her mind.
She can do nothing but stare, and even though she should feel betrayed, her mind blanks and then the only thought is: we’re even.
She gloats, nearly glows in that knowledge until she realizes that Paula won’t see it like that. The thought settles deep into the folds of her mind, weighting down all of the light and airy thoughts that had flown only a few moments ago. She feels injected with lead, and she lies like in paralysis as she listens to her parents revel in their sexual attraction after her father acted the hero to her mother’s damsel in distress. The thought of telling her parents that Paula is the reason for their newfound sexual activities doesn’t even cross her mind.
She tosses out her confrontation as casually as she invited Paula on this trip, and she lets Paula appease her. “Someone could have gotten hurt.” She says, desperately clinging to some morsel of self.
Paula looks at her, and she shies away from her gaze and waits for the answer. “Someone already did,” Paula whispers, and Olivia wonders if the tears in her eyes are from the boy or from knowing that she ruined the boy’s life.
Paula will never forgive her, Olivia realizes. She’s not sure where the sudden clarity comes from, but she knows it without a doubt. Paula will never forgive her.
Paula will never love her.
She accepts it, the way she accepted the fact that she wasn’t the perfect WASP girl that she should have been when she realized that she didn’t like the way boys looked at her, and curls up to Paula for a hug. Olivia holds on tight to soothe Paula’s shuddering shoulders because Paula will never love her and what has she got to lose anymore?
Two.
The manager dies, and Olivia can’t find it in herself to feel bad about the things she thought about him. Paula still doesn’t look at her.
One.
“Thanks for inviting me,” Paula tells her when her mom drops them both off at school. The term’s starting in a week, and she’s sick of her parents so she didn’t even bother going back to their home.
She waves her hand like it doesn’t matter (it does).
“See you later.” She doubts she’ll see Paula later again. Not this time, not again. But she still nods, smiles, and says, through the pounding pain of a beating chest, “See you later.”