long day, always (ain't that right)
Days lately are so goddamn long, it sometimes makes Van wonder if she’s even awake. It isn’t even that she’s bored, although the 700 hundred year old Mr. McGill is certainly not helping matters along on that front. It's just that nagging sense that there are better places to be. Better, more important, infinitely more enjoyable places than the back of a classroom with her chin sagging relentlessly toward the desktop.
She's just wondering if she can get away with an extended bathroom run—less for the sake of her bladder, more to do a few laps around the second floor of the school—when something deceptively small and startlingly vicious bounds off her forehead. Scowling, she rubs the spot and looks down. A folded scrap of notebook paper, shaped like a football.
After practice. Parking lot. You in?
Her heart bounds up into her throat, and it takes every scrap of self-control not to twist and look at the desk to her left. Taissa is idly scribbling in a notebook, evidently unaware of the projectile and the proposal it contains.
She's good. She's always so good. Van wonders if she looks half as contained as Tai has been this whole time, if people really can't see under her skin to the fire beneath. She feels pretty good about it, honestly. No one seems to spare her a passing look. No one knows.
That’s the key to the whole endeavor: secrecy. Because if they did find out? If they were ever caught?
Not worth thinking about the shitshow that would be.
She scrawls a reply, haphazardly folding the page back in on itself. Her lines aren’t as crisp as Tai’s, her aim a little less predictable, but the football sails safely between Tai’s arms all the same. From the corner of her eye, Van watches the message hit home and grins to herself when Taissa leans back with a self-satisfied expression.
Deal. My turn first.
***
Days take forever lately. Classes stretch unnecessarily, teachers wasting everyone’s time with rambling, meaningless anecdotes. Practice is almost as bad; Allie won’t shut the fuck up, and Jackie’s distracted, and Taissa’s sick of them both. She’s impatient to get to the end of the year, to States—which they’re going to crush. They can take Nationals if everyone gets their heads out of their asses. She really believes it. They can take Nationals, and then she’ll get out of this little town, and she’ll never have to look back.
Her skin itches for it. That freedom. The freedom she only feels in the middle of a high-octane game, or when she’s just argued some moron into submission. Or when she’s alone with—
Van is the only thing in her life that doesn’t feel like it’s moving in slow motion these days. Van is all friction and frenzy, a state of being so exhilarating, Taissa almost forgets she’s known it just a few months. If days are endless, that switch was too sudden to see; one second, Van was the too-cheerful goaltender spouting trivia, and the next…
The next, she was up against the lockers, Taissa’s hands fisted in her jersey, and her kiss was the sweetest surprise Tai’s ever stumbled over in her life.
Practice takes roughly a hundred years, but most of the team is actually on their game, for once. Taissa tries to focus on footwork and new plays, on running circles around JV—on anything except the note in her backpack and the grin on Van’s face. That sweet, stupid grin that seems to settle right beneath Taissa’s breastbone.
Van doesn’t know her own power, and Tai isn’t going to tell her. It’s just another part of the secret keeping her warm. That she likes Van is obvious. That she views Van as the best part of her day is entirely, desperately private.
And when it’s all over for the day, when everyone has slapped asses and high fives and giggled their way out of the locker room and out of Taissa’s orbit, she makes her way to tonight’s meeting spot. It changes on the regular, naturally; routine is how you get caught, and that absolutely cannot happen. No one knows. No one can know.
It's none of their fucking business, anyway. It’s theirs, a privately precious gift to make up for long hours and excruciating boredom. It’s theirs, and when Van sidles out from the side exit with her freshly-washed hair hanging loose and her backpack slipping off one shoulder, something at the base of Taissa’s spine seems to detonate.
Freedom. This is pure, simple, idiotic freedom, and Taissa can’t get enough.
***
Days are long, and these stolen moments too short. Still, when she strolls out to find Tai perched on the trunk of her sedan, Van finds herself slowing. Just a little. Just enough to really take in the image, file it away in a safe cabinet deep at the back of her mind. Taissa, long-limbed and athletic and oh-so intentionally careless, with clean sneakers propped on the bumper and head tipped back as if to look skyward. Taissa, unable to hide her grin even in the dark.
Taissa, waiting for her.
Van’s honestly still not sure how she staggered into this situation, but goddamn if she’s going to question good fortune.
“Come here often?” she asks, slinging her backpack to the asphalt without a second thought. Tai wrinkles her nose.
“Could put that in my backseat.”
“I thought that’s where we're going.” Van grins. “And it’s not like we’re working with a Buick.”
Tai flips her off, but her eyes are glittering with that easy combination of humor and hunger Van’s grown to anticipate from these shadowy meet-ups. She pats the trunk beside her, and Van scrambles up, feeling very much comprised of elbows and knees and desperation.
Then Tai is hooking a hand around her neck, pulling her in, and the length of the day is melting away. Van stops thinking about boredom and footwork and what time Mom’s getting home tonight. Van stops thinking. She sighs happily, pressing toward the heat of Tai’s skin under her fresh t-shirt.
Not sure how she got here, and she is never gonna ask. Never going to push. Never going to do anything but check yes on Tai’s notes, and leave her own in Tai’s locker, and surreptitiously tug Tai into corners and closets and bathrooms. It’s hormones, she tells herself, and blind luck, and she is happily at the mercy of both.
“You wanna…?” She trails off against Tai’s lips, her skin electric when a warm hand grips the back of her neck. Blunt nails trace her nape, Taissa’s mouth slanting gracefully over her own. “Car?”
Tai laughs. “Very good, you’ve learned to identify basic vehicles. Maybe now they’ll let you into second grade.”
“Did they not teach you basic vehicles until first grade?” Van teases. Tai nips at her lip, catching her off-guard, and she hisses with no small amount of pleasure. “Okay, come on—”
“Look around,” Tai soothes, as if she isn’t pointedly keeping Van’s attention on herself. “It’s dead. No one’s gonna see.”
She has a point. Practice ran late today, and the silence blanketing the parking lot is almost enough to convince Van everyone except for the two of them vacated Planet Earth. It’s chilly, and her stomach is rumbling for dinner, and, really, she should probably—
Tug gently at the front of Taissa’s shirt, coaxing their mouths back into a now-familiar dance.
Tai makes a triumphant little sound, and everything in Van wants to stop the clock, stop the sun, stop the progression of an ever-expanding universe if it means staying right here.
***
Days are long, but these moments can be longer, if Taissa is willing to fight for them. Van’s light jacket is falling off her shoulders, her head cast back under the scattered light of too-few suburban stars. She’s breathing the way Taissa can hear in her sleep sometimes, that ragged, too-quick inhale-exhale that sets off fireworks behind Tai’s eyes. Her hands are under Taissa’s shirt, skating up her spine, heat on heat propelling them both toward—
Something. Taissa sometimes thinks she’s almost there, can almost taste that next step. She shoves it away each time, unwilling to look it in the eye. Why ruin a good thing, she asks herself. Why try to make it something it isn’t?
She likes Van, her sense of her humor, that edge of a mean streak so easily missed under her smile. She likes Van’s hands, broad and eager, and Van’s slim mouth, and Van’s hair between her fingers. She likes the way Van laughs when they’re hooking up—almost every time, without fail. How Van makes the accidental bonking of heads, the too-sharp dig of teeth, the inevitable slip off a counter into part of the game.
She likes Van on the trunk of her car in a pitch-dark parking lot, all sigh and throttled groan, and some part of her knows the backseat is safer—warmer—a better idea. But the way the starlight catches, the way it skims off blue eyes and pink skin, is too close to a photograph Taissa could stare at for an eternity.
No one’s around, no one cares, and she can almost trick herself into believing that would be true anywhere. In a moment like this, with Van kissing her breathless, she can almost believe this wouldn’t cut them off from society, if someone found out. Wouldn’t be this enormous, shameful beast hunting them through the woods, if anyone knew.
How could it be? When Van is so enthusiastic, when her ankle is hooked around Taissa’s and her hands are shaking with adrenaline, when she breaks from a kiss to offer a smile like a supernova? How could that be bad?
The watch on her wrist is tick-tick-ticking toward dinner and curfew and questions, and Taissa ignores it all. She holds Van firmly, thumb skipping over cheekbone, tongue tracing paths that never seem to lose their shine. Days are long, but these moments? These moments, she can control. If she just holds on. If she just inhales the shampoo scent of Van, the undercurrent of sweat and anticipation, the particular salt of her skin. If she just holds on, kissing until they’re both bruised from the effort, it can be eternal.
Doesn’t need a name. Doesn’t need a reason. Doesn’t need to be anything except what it is.
No one knows, no one cares, and no one ever will.
***
Days lately are fucking endless, and he keeps toying with the idea of just getting up and checking out. Leaving his keys on the apartment counter. Leaving the number his parents never use anyway. Leaving this stupid, constricting little town and all of its stupid, constricting little rules.
What the fuck is keeping him here, anyway? He could go. He could pack a bag tonight, be on the first Greyhound out in the morning. Go west, hit up LA or Seattle. Go looking for a real life, instead of this charade he started just to pay the bills and found increasingly suffocated by at every turn.
It’s closing around him, he can sense. Like a cavern he only meant to explore the mouth of before the lights went out and he got all turned around. It’s closing in, this life of teacher-coach-loneliness he didn’t choose. Christ. Christ, he’s so—
A noise startles him out of his self-pity. He looks furtively from side to side, scanning the parking lot. Should be safe enough. Should be completely vacant. Hell, he has no business still being here so late—but the girls had tried some things in practice, some new ideas that, while inventive, required a little fine-tuning before their next game. He’d gotten lost in the playbook, scribbling notes to himself. Gotten lost in Nat here, and Lottie takes the ball, and Shauna runs, runs, runs it to Taissa for the win.
Those girls. Goddamn. They’re assholes, like all teenagers; think they have all the time in the world, and none of the respect time mandates. Was he any different at their age? He snorts. No. Christ, no. He couldn’t wait for that clock to speed up, to jettison him out of that tiny house, away from those awful people.
They have no idea what’s waiting for them on the other side. The idea makes him feel strangely soft. They shouldn’t know. They’re kids. It’s not on them to know, not yet; they ought to be shielded from such things for as long as possible.
Should be shielded from a lot of things, and he thinks sometimes it’s already too late. The furrow between Nat’s brows; the uncertainty in Lottie’s smile; the helpless flash he sometimes sees in Jackie when she raises her voice and no one turns. They’re already finding the cracks. Or the cracks are finding them.
But they’re so goddamn good. So much goddamn potential. In the span of a year, they’ve taken a team with a nominal success rate to chances of going all the fucking way. They could do it, he’s sure. He can help them get there. And then, hey, maybe it will all have been for something. Then, maybe it will—
There, again; that noise. Voices, he realizes. He creeps uneasily closer, steering around a lamp post. His car is in the shop again, the walk back to his apartment gaping endlessly before him. It’s cold as shit, the March air refusing to twist toward spring. His cheeks already feel chapped, stubble scraping his jaw. But someone is here, someone is…
He freezes. There, at the back of the lot: a car. There, on the car: a body. Two bodies, he realizes. A flash of red hair; a glimpse of brown skin. Fumbling, tangled tight, laugh-sighing as one.
“Ho-ly shit,” he mumbles, half-amused, half-horrified. He knows those girls. He knows those girls, both of them too bound up in one another to have the slightest idea they can be seen.
He was their age, once. Not so long ago, even. He remembers that foundational belief that no one would know if he didn’t want them to. That unshakable certainty that, so long as he kept under the bleachers and in bathroom stalls, it would never come out.
They’re talented, these girls, and they’re smart, and they are so, so young. Teetering on the edge of one reality, about to plunge over into the next. They have so much faith in themselves. So much to give.
So much that can be taken away before they even know it’s gone.
He looks at them for a long moment—not watching so much as considering. Van is giggling, her forehead tipped against Taissa’s. Tai is saying something in return, too soft to drift this far across the lot. Even from here, he can feel the heat of them, the comfortable ease of them. Young and strong and so into one another, they wouldn’t see the blow coming.
They need to be shielded from so much, these girls. They’re kids. They need someone in their damn corner, though they’d never admit it. Stubborn, vicious, talented kids.
Ben backs away, rubbing his jaw. Van and Tai go on, oblivious, and he smiles to himself. Who knows? Maybe they’ll be braver than he is. Maybe stronger, too. Maybe they’ll walk with heads held high one day, and dare anyone to test their bond.
They might not need him. But then again. You never know.
He’ll be here either way. Just in case.