Steph
Billie is gorgeous. It’s something that Steph noticed the first time she saw her, stepping out of that too loud car in those too tight jeans. Steph notices, but she doesn’t linger on it. She thinks a lot of girls are pretty, and practically everyone in the parking lot is staring at Billie, anyway.
So Steph thinks ‘Wow, she’s gorgeous’, and gets on with her life.
At least she tries to.
~
Billie immediately joins the women’s basketball team, because of course she does. Because this California beach babe has decided that her new favorite hobby is driving Steph up the goddamn wall.
Steph is so caught up in pointedly not staring that she misses three separate shots. Then Billie rams into her at full force, knocks Steph onto her back, and gets up right in her face to spit ‘plant your feet, Harrington.’
Steph’s face is burning up. She kind of wants to shove Billie away, maybe swing for her face, though that might not be the best idea considering her track record with fistfights.
But she also kind of wants to stay like this for a moment; wants to remain close enough to study Billie’s face and smell her drugstore shampoo and what has to be men’s cologne.
Billie’s got freckles, Steph realizes, all over her nose and cheeks. Her eyes are porcelain blue, and Steph can see where she’d tightlined them with kohl. (Steph tried tightlining on herself at one point, but it didn’t look right, just made her look a bit squinty and tired.)
Then Billie is shoving her back onto the gym floor, knocking Steph’s breath right out of her, and the trance is broken.
~
That evening, Steph notices that the plates in her mother’s cabinet (the ones that never get used, because they’re reserved ‘for company’, like Steph’s parents are ever home enough to have people over for supper) are nearly the same shade of blue she’d stared into that afternoon. She tries not to think about it; eats her dinner standing at the kitchen counter, gets about six pages into Death of a Salesman before her head starts swimming.
The next morning, Steph pulls out one of her mother’s good plates and eats her toast off of it.
~
Billie is becoming a goddamn problem. She inserts herself into Steph’s day, all bouncing curls and swaying hips and snide remarks, and it’s driving Steph insane. She’s trying, really, to be a better person, but it’s fucking hard.
Steph knows that she’s been a bit (or a lot) of a bitch that past few years, that maybe she wasn’t as good of a girlfriend to Nathan (although she did love him, honestly, and maybe it still stings just a bit) as she could’ve been, that she’s treated a lot of people poorly. She knows that even when she wasn’t the one doing the bullying, she stayed quiet behind Tonya and Caleb, complicit and enabling.
Queen Stephanie would’ve turned right back around on Billie, maybe would’ve considered spreading some vicious rumor about her sex life. But that isn’t who Steph is anymore. She’s different. She’s better.
So she ignores Billie’s taunts, ignores her when she revs the engine of her Camaro at 8:15 in the goddamn morning just to watch Steph jump, and she keeps trucking through.
~
Steph even ignores Billie in the women’s showers after basketball practice. And it’s hard, too, because Billie is absolutely shameless. She lingers in the showers like nobody else does, takes her sweet time while the other girls dry off and dress.
It’s one day in early November when Steph finally just looks. She’s wrapped in a towel, digging through her locker for a hairbrush, when the last person leaves the locker room (a dark haired junior who Steph had made fun of at try-outs last year for the stretch marks on her legs. She should catch her one day and apologize).
Billie is still standing under the water, golden curls piled up in a messy bun. She still has her west coast tan; it stands out even more now, as they’re creeping up on winter and nobody in Hawkins has even seen the sun for at least two weeks.
Steph walks over to the mirror, starts working through her damp hair, because if she doesn’t brush it while it’s wet she might as well just give up. But she can see Billie in the reflection. The soap makes white rivers down her body, traces down her back and hips and Steph is going to have a fucking anyuresm.
She zeroes back in on herself. She’s going to comb out her hair, get dressed, and leave.
Billie turns around and catches Steph’s gaze in the mirror. She flashes her teeth in something that could be considered either a smirk or a snarl, and Steph flushes.
“If you wanted to look, princess, you could’ve just asked.” Billie reaches behind her to turn off the water, still holding eye contact by proxy in the mirror.
Steph’s hands still, and she watches as Billie pulls the tie from her hair, shakes her head a bit so the curls settle on her shoulders.
“Trust me, you’re the last thing I want to look at.” Steph says. It’s not really a lie, because sure, maybe she does want to look, but she doesn’t like that she wants to look.
Billie laughs, snaps her towel at Steph as she walks by.
~
Steph lays in bed for a long time that night. Her eyes have adjusted to the dark, but she’s not looking at anything in particular. She’s preoccupied with thoughts of blue eyes and freckles and tan skin. A small part of her wonders what it would be like, to be pinned down by those strong thighs, to have Billie hovering over her like that day in practice. Except this time, she wouldn’t be hissing out an insult. Maybe, just maybe, she’d even call Steph ‘baby’.
Steph turns over, then realizes that she’s now facing the window overlooking the pool and turns back over. Here she is, fucking lusting over a girl who, up to this point, has been nothing but a headache to her, and for what? Is this all it takes to get to her, lush curves and pretty eyes and biting words?
God, she’s pathetic.