high school fake dating au pt. 1
“I can’t have friends over,” Luisa says, holding a French fry between her fingertips and stabbing it in Clara’s direction. “I threw this huge party last year and everybody came and it was great.” She leaned across, propping her elbows on the cafeteria table the way that proper ladies don’t, a huge, bright grin on her lips.
Clara tried not to look at her lips. Or she tried not to look at them too long. She wasn’t ashamed of looking. She liked looking! A little too much, maybe, and she probably wouldn’t be staring so much if Johnny Neanderthal had caught her behind the gym at her old school and kissed her a little too much a little too quickly – he’d bit her lower lip so hard it split and his hands had been very rough and very not okay – and her mom had sued the school board. And his family. And a lot of other things, none of which had ended in their favor, and then the sports kids got mad at her because he was the star quarterback or something to do with some sport that she couldn’t have cared fuck all about—
Her mother had ripped her out of that school and brought her to this one, and now she was sitting in the cafeteria staring at the girl who hadn’t left her side yet for hell or high water, trying not to look at her lips – not too look at them too long – and wonder if kissing her wouldn’t be an altogether much more pleasurable experience.
Luisa’s eyes twinkled when Clara looked back up to meet them – My eyes are up here, Ginger! – and she knew that she’d been caught looking. Well, fine! Let her catch her! She didn’t mind!
Actually, she would much rather take Luisa out behind the gym of her new school and—
Something. Kiss her! Or something.
Luisa winked at her, and Clara blushed a bright red, staring down at her cardboard box milk. She fiddled with her straw. “A party sounds fun,” she said, but she said it like a question.
“Oh, it was great.” Luisa leaned back in her metal chair, straightening her short skirt. It was barely long enough to go past her fingers, and it certainly wasn’t that long when she was sitting, but Luisa tried to make it look like it was. Most of her skirts and shorts were like that. (Clara’d kept track. Not that she’d tell you that!) Luisa began to twirl a strand of her wavy brown hair around one finger. “Dad wouldn’t have minded coming home to a huge party. He kind of expected it. You know, leave a high school kid at home alone for the weekend, they’re going to have a party, yeah? But we broke into his favorite liquor cabinet and drank the entire thing and he wasn’t happy about that.” She heaved a great sigh, and her chest moved, and Clara was very gay. “So I can’t have friends over anymore.” Luisa shrugged and leaned forward. “What about you?”
“Me?” Clara certainly didn’t squeak. She wasn’t the sort of girl to squeak. She was more the sort to fiddle with her straw some more and pretend that she wasn’t still blushing a bright scarlet red. It wasn’t like she didn’t have other friends! She did! But Luisa had been her first. Friend! Her first friend!
Oh, this was bad.
Clara shook her head without looking up. “Mom would love for me to have friends over, but she’s the sort of person who would peek in every two or three minutes to make sure that we were still friends and we were doing our homework like good little children and are you going to stay for dinner you aren’t allergic to anything are you what do you mean you’re a vegetarian? and then she’d give me a huge glare like it was some personal offense that you don’t eat meat.” Her brows lifted, and she met Luisa’s eyes again. “Trust me, you don’t want to go there.”
“Hm.” Luisa’s lips pursed. “So how are we ever going to spend time together if you can’t come to my place and I definitely don’t want to go to your place?”
Clara blinked twice. Luisa said spend time together as if they weren’t going to just jump onto Netflix and watch Buffy. Or Orange Is The New Black, which Luisa said was only good for the first two seasons, but she should really see those. And which Luisa demanded they see together, since she hadn’t seen it. Probably something about wanting to see her reactions. It probably wasn’t even good. She’d rather just—
“You know, if we told him we were dating,” Luisa mused, her head tilting to one side, elongating her neck, and sometimes Clara was certain that Luisa was doing all of this just to mess with her, although she wouldn’t say she didn’t enjoy it.
Clara wondered, briefly, if Luisa had ever kissed anyone. Probably. Definitely. Which meant she was probably good at it. Better than Clara was anyway, what with all her practicing with those stupid dummies and masks and they tasted horrible and she gave up after a while. And the Cosmo tips were probably dead wrong! Mouth fruit names like pomegranate or avocado or whatever the fuck they said. Johnny Neanderthal hadn’t done anything like that.
Well, of course, Luisa was nothing like Johnny Neanderthal.
“If we told him we were dating,” Luisa said, and Clara hadn’t even noticed it until the rest of the sentence was finished, “we could probably hang at my place. Dad didn’t say anything about no girlfriends. Just no friends. And, yeah, I know, girlfriends has friends, but you and I know that it’s an entirely different thing and he’ll at least let it pass for the first time and then we could Netflix and chill and have homework out whenever he comes and checks in on us.” She laughed and shook her head. “He never checks in on us. And he always knocks first. We’d just have to worry about—”
“You want to tell him we’re…we’re dating.”
Clara took a long drink of her milk. She wished it was chocolate, but they’d been out. She frowned and reached out, swiping the chocolate milk from Luisa’s tray and taking a swig of it instead. Then she rubbed the back of her hand against her lips so that she wouldn’t get a mustache – Luisa didn’t use straws. Something about too much plastic waste. Clara just didn’t want the mustache.
“Just so we can watch Buffy.” Luisa grinned. “Or so you can watch Orange Is The New Black and I can watch you watch Orange Is The New Black.” She didn’t say anything about the chocolate milk. Maybe she’d been done with it. She took another bite of her French fry. “You in?”
Clara gave a firm nod, even though her stomach was doing flip-flops. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m in.”