i needed you more (we wanted us less)
Let her come to you.
It isn’t a conscious thought, exactly. More like a neon sign structured behind her eyes, blinking too fiercely to ignore. Let her. Come. To you.
Taissa stays still.
It’s crazy, she knows; the whole night has been crazy. Pulling strings only to jump ship, dining and dashing, running pell-mell through the goddamn streets like they’re still seventeen and she forgot her wallet in the backseat of Lottie’s car. She feels half-asleep these days, run ragged on Simone’s departure, Natalie’s death, Van’s…everything with Van. She’s making decisions she’d never have made a year ago. She’s making decisions she would have made over and over again at nineteen.
And now she’s here, standing in the alley, in the cold, in the yellow lamplight, and that neon sign is blinking its erratic, insistent message.
Let. Her. Come. To. You.
She holds steady beside the wall, watching as Van breathes, as Van looks. As Van moves in. And even then, even as Van closes the distance, Taissa does not meet her halfway. It isn’t a question of want; she’s wanted this for six weeks, ever since that ill-advised kiss at Lottie’s compound. She’s wanted it since Van crooked her a self-flagellating little smile, said, Don’t flatter yourself. She’s wanted it since she saw the shop, saw the world Van built with her own two hands, saw red hair and vivid scars and eyes that will follow her to the grave.
She wants so badly, and she does not move, because if she does—if she does, Van will go up in smoke. She will teeter back on her heels. She will remind Taissa yet again: you have a son, a wife, a family, a life. You have—had it all, and you only have it because you threw what we had to the wolves.
She hasn’t earned this. She wants it more than oxygen, more than her next heartbeat, but she has not earned it. Not with all the petty crime and fine dining in the world.
Van comes to her anyway. Van, who told her to fuck off just this morning. Van, who has been stubbornly sleeping in Sammy’s gaudy marigold room, scrunched into a bed intended for a child. Van, who looked at her uncertainly over a luxury-laid table, perking up at the idea of pizza.
Van, who cradles her face now, easing a curl aside to touch hot skin. She palms the wall as if being this near Taissa is unbalancing her, as if she might tip at any moment.
Taissa doesn’t move. Barely breathes. Van’s thumb grazes near her lips, and she parts instinctively, wanting to turn, wanting to take it into her mouth. She resists. Let her come. It has to be this way. Has to be Van’s call.
After everything, she owes Van that.
It almost doesn’t feel real, Van being this close now. Almost doesn’t feel real, the way her eyes fix on Taissa’s mouth, the way her nose brushes Taissa’s nose. The way she leans in. Closes the gap so completely, Tai can’t imagine ever shearing it back open again.
There is triumph in this moment the likes of which she can’t contain. Van’s eyes are closed, Van’s hand brackets her cheek, Van’s lips are growing ever more feverish. Van is here. Solid. Real. She isn’t disappearing, isn’t blinking out like a dream, like a manifestation of some sleepwalking corner of Taissa’s frantic brain. She’s pressing in, the length of her body fitting as neatly to Taissa’s as it ever has, and god, how have they resisted one another this long?
Taissa kisses back, trying to hold herself in check, trying not to lose her grip. The pressure of Van’s hand on her cheek, framing her ear, dimpling her skin, is making her crazy. She grips at a blue coat, feels Van rise into her, lips and breath and such potent desire, the world seems to tip beneath Taissa’s feet. She cracks open her eyes for a moment—just to make sure the street is not, in fact, changing angles underneath their combined weight, and—
And there’s a shadow. A long, lanky shadow watching from a not-great-enough distance. Watching with vacuous pits where eyes ought to be. Watching them.
“What?” Van asks, a breath away from her lips. She sounds dazed. She sounds worried. Only one of these will serve the night ahead, and they’ve waited too long. Too long to let some fabrication get in the way. Taissa smiles.
“Nothing.”
And then whatever grip she had on herself draws taut, an elastic band pulled to breaking. She rotates on instinct, spinning Van to meet the wall. What was a gentle, almost tentative kiss turns messy in an instant, and something inside of her rises and stretches and snarls its appreciation. Van’s head tips back, her mouth open, her hands clutching. They’re not even kissing now, as if kissing is too little, too childish, too soft for the need stretched between them. Taissa’s hand slides across Van’s jaw, and Van’s hand is spanning the side of Taissa’s face, and they’re both clutching, clutching, begging the other to stay without a single word.
The thing in Taissa’s chest howls. Van’s body is volcanic against the cool stone wall, her fingers trembling. She can’t seem to settle, can’t seem to decide where to grab Taissa or how hard to hold on. Taissa grins. Her hand slips down Van’s front, skimming her chest, and Van gasps. She arches off the wall, hips meeting Tai’s in a rough grind, and for a moment, all Taissa can think is, I get my needs met. She bites back a laugh, crushing her mouth to Van’s still-open one.
This isn’t how she imagined it, isn’t how she thought for even a second they’d come back together—but it feels right. Feels so much like being kids again, bundled into the locker room’s bathroom stall, muffling panting groans into one another’s shoulders. How many times did they hook up just like this, one or the other held up by wall and hands and a dire need for it not to end?
Van seems to be thinking along the same lines. She isn’t grinning, but she’s making sounds Taissa remembers all-too well; chest-deep, reckless sounds edged with sharp breath. She sinks them into Taissa’s mouth, her hands exploring the cap of shoulder and curve of spine through a slick leather jacket. Her shoulder blades press harder into the stone, her hips rolling when Taissa slips a thigh between her legs and pushes.
“Tai,” Van groans. “We—”
Taissa hesitates, waiting for her to say they have to stop, they have to go back to the restaurant, they have to forget it all. Van clenches around her thigh.
“Please,” she says, sounding broken and feral and so much like Van. Taissa has missed her so much, it feels like lightning beneath her skin. She jams Van more tightly to the wall, hears herself moan aloud, hears Van cry out in reply. She is purity of sensation, utterly lost in the rustle of cloth, the skid of skin, the way Van parts her lips when a thumb traces the seam of her mouth. Her tongue flicks against the pad, against a print she once practically had tattooed on her skin, and Taissa tilts down until their foreheads rest together.
“Please,” Van repeats, eyes open, brow furrowed. Taissa nods slowly, reveling in every minute place of connection. Her hand works down, cupping, and Van whines.
This isn’t how she saw it going, isn’t what she imagined. She wanted romance—wanted to wine and dine Van, to woo her, to banish every bad decision and make it worth Van’s while. Wanted Van to see who she is now, who she can be: pristine, polished, perfect. Nothing like before. Nothing like they had to be out there.
But Van doesn’t want that version of her—never fucking has. Van wants the girl who drove mercilessly toward every win. The girl who leaned into a wicked sense of humor at every turn. The girl who laughed into her mouth and teased her under tables and dragged her into dark alcoves.
She wants the girl she knew, the one Taissa’s been trying to kill and bury for twenty years. She wants her, hips bucking and mouth claiming Taissa’s lipstick-smeared kiss without apology, and with Van, she has to admit: that girl is still in her. She is that girl. You can’t kill the basest part of you, no matter how badly you might want to, and Van—Van has always known that.
She works her fingers in rough shapes, all friction between Van’s thighs, and swallows the increasing frenzy of breath as Van clings to her in the dark. This isn’t how she dreamed it, but it’s what it needs to be. What they’ve always been. Appetite gone unsated for far too long. Starvation of the most delirious kind. Taissa delves her free hand into Van’s hair, forcing Van close, knowing there is pain here, and pleasure, and perfection of its own kind. Van’s teeth catch on her lower lip, sinking in, and the thing in Taissa’s chest cheers. She remembers a bloody admission sketched into her arm. Remembers the annihilation of Van’s smile, sweet and unapologetic as it’s always been, despite everything.
Remembers the girl she’d been, the girl Van loved so completely, she would have done anything to protect her. The things she’d done. The things they’d both done. They’ll be haunted by those decisions until the grave finally reaches up to claim its eternal prize, and even then—even then, Taissa thinks she won’t be able to apologize for it. Won’t be able to say sorry and mean it.
She holds Van’s lidded gaze, stroking the increasingly damp crotch of Van’s slacks. There is power in this moment, in this coupling, in the frenzy and the fever. Van licks her lips, trying to lean in for another kiss, and Taissa holds her back.
“Come home with me,” she says, her voice so low, she almost can’t recognize herself in it. Which version of her is real? The politician, the wife, the mother—or this? Teasing Van in the dark. Driving hips. The impression of teeth in a swollen, stained lip.
“Come home, Van,” she says, and the sound Van releases will follow her to whatever lies beyond Jersey and trees and regret. She shudders as Van forces herself in, forces herself past the barrier Taissa has created, kisses her with open mouth and open hunger.
How they make it home, Taissa won’t remember later. She will only remember the leap, the transition itself, how Van was kissing her even before the key was in the lock. How Van was wrenching at the leather of her jacket, at the fabric beneath, like she was seeking some kind of bedrock she hasn’t set foot upon in decades. How Van looked at her, dilated eyes so far from the clear blue of childhood, her face a wreckage of blush and borrowed lipstick, and nodded toward the bedroom.
The thing behind Taissa’s ribcage roars approval, and there aren’t candles or flowers or incense, because none of that shit is Van. None of that shit is them. They are stumbling intertwined, shoes kicked off in the hall, jackets cast aside. They are naked almost before Taissa can register, and some part of her aches with the tragedy of not taking it slow, not reminding herself in fits and starts of Van’s skin. Not making herself wait, not making herself deserve it—
But Van is grinning that old unselfconscious grin somehow, as if she couldn’t care less about the added years, added pounds, added lives they’ve lived apart. After all of that? After the starvation, the wolves, the violence of that place—those things are a gift. They never thought they’d have it, and they should have had it all together, but fuck it. Fuck it. You can’t go back.
You can’t, but Taissa is trying all the same. She needs this, needs more. She’s been refusing her most basic cravings for far too long.
The image of Van in her bed at last is almost jarring, almost a violence of its own. Taissa gazes at her for a long time, mentally cataloguing freckles and slim muscle and tangled red hair across her own pillow. Long enough for Van’s mouth to quirk. Long enough for her to raise her eyebrows and say, “What? Like you haven’t seen it before.”
And maybe she does sound just a little bit uncertain. Taissa clears her throat, eyes stinging. She slides into bed, cradling the side of Van’s face, thumb tracing that old, old scar. Van’s eyes briefly close, her mouth pinching.
“Everything you give,” Taissa whispers. “Everything I see. I just—”
“What?” Van says again, her voice hoarse. Taissa shakes her head.
“Want more.”
Van’s fingers skim the hollow of her throat, tracing the edges of her collarbones. She pauses, her hand splayed between Taissa’s breasts, watching the rise and fall of pale on warm brown.
“Can’t believe I’m back here,” she says softly. Taissa’s stomach plummets.
“Do you want—”
Van doesn’t let her finish. Her kiss is adulation, her body shifting to match Taissa’s inch for inch. She rolls them across the sheets, moving southward with such deliberation, Taissa can only hang on for the ride. She is certain she’ll die with Van’s mouth at her throat. Certain she’ll implode with Van’s teeth at her breast. Certain she will return to stardust when Van’s lips caress between her legs.
Certain, most of all, that she has not been real, has not been her, for such a long time. She was playing a part, she knows. She was fashioning herself into a fiction too good to be believed. She was trying so fucking hard to run from this person, the one Van loved—loves still, maybe; the one who would have killed for Van Palmer until they were the only two souls left standing.
She folds a hand over her mouth, unsure if she’s sobbing or moaning. Van reaches up, eyes fixed on Taissa’s, prying her fingers away. She spreads Tai with one hand, the other knitting between Tai’s fingers, and her tongue is a benediction Taissa does not deserve. Even so, she bucks to meet every swipe. Even so, she gives herself over completely.
This won’t be the only time, she tells herself. Won’t be the last. But she needs to remember it anyway. Needs to file every sensation, every sound, every scrap of sense memory Van is drawing to the surface as she consumes everything Taissa has been trying to give for weeks. She grips Van’s hand tightly enough to hurt, and Van only squeezes back. Only bobs her head as if saying yes, good, more. Violence has always been the core of it. Pleasure has always come with pain.
Taissa shudders apart too soon, and Van barely has time to give her that grin again, that self-satisfied smile she thought might be gone for good—and Tai is dragging her up, searching out the warmth of her. With Van straddling her lap, she slips her hand between their bodies, slips her fingers in and crooks hard. Van makes a sound halfway between a curse and a cry, pumping her hips in time with each thrust. Taissa lets her head fall back, smacking the headboard. The wet of Van, the slick tightness of her, the way she folds both hands around Taissa’s shoulders and lets her nails bite deep—it’s all so raw, so indefinably real, Taissa almost loses her grip all over again. She presses her free hand to the small of Van’s back, guiding her, refusing to let up even when Van’s rhythm slips. She cranes in, her kiss a savage articulation of everything she cannot say. This isn’t sex, she understands. This is a refashioning. This is putting back together what should never have split apart.
It wants us together, she thinks without knowing to whom the thought belongs. She’s too far gone to care, sweat trickling between her breasts, thumb stroking Van toward the edge even as she is knuckle-deep, even as she is thrusting with sharp, instructive power. She’s too far gone to care about anything except Van’s increasingly frantic groans, Van’s body enfolding her, Van’s mouth fused to her own. And still, that thought comes.
It wants us together.
It is pleased.
It wants more.
Of course, of course, of course it does.
On that count, Taissa is helpless to disagree.