Chapter Text
i could be the one, or your new addiction
it’s all in my head but i want non-fiction
After Ellie moves into the garage, Dina keeps ending up in her bed.
The first time, it’s an accident — or at least, Ellie’s pretty sure it is. The group out on the day’s patrol found a huge stash of Nancy Drew books in some long-dead little girl’s room, and Ellie and Dina both grabbed one, always eager for something brand new to read. There is an empty flask between them on the mattress; the sunset blazes red behind Ellie’s makeshift curtains. Dina’s tucked her legs under Ellie’s worn-in comforter, curled up around The Scarlet Slipper Mystery, brow furrowed and tongue poking into her cheek like she needs to solve the mystery before Nancy does. Ellie does not — does fucking not — find this endearing.
She’s reading The Secret of Shadow Ranch, stretched out on her back with the bottom of the book’s spine resting against her stomach. Her eyes drift over the words unhurriedly. She’s passively interested in where the plot is going, but she’s mostly wondering if she’s correct in thinking that Nancy’s friend George is gay.
Her eyes dart over to Dina, as if compelled by magnetic force, like her curiosity about a girl in a century-old book is an echo of her curiosity about the girl who is —
Fast asleep. Hair fanned out on Ellie’s spare pillow. One finger still hooked between the pages of her book, which has fallen shut. Lips just barely parted, eyelashes brushing her cheeks. Breathing long and deep.
Ellie stares at her for a beat. “Dina?” she whispers.
No response.
“Dina,” she says, at a more normal volume. Her voice cracks along the syllable break in Dina’s name, and she clears her throat. None of that causes Dina to stir.
“Hey, Dina,” she says, a touch more loudly. That seems to reach Dina, but just barely: her eyebrows draw together, she shifts a little, and then she mumbles something unintelligible and smushes her face into the pillow.
Ellie snorts an incredulous breath out through her nose. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?” she says, her voice low, but it’s hardly disparaging. Fondness creeps into the words and pulls at the corners of her mouth.
Carefully, she pulls Dina’s book away from her hand. In its absence, Dina’s fingers curl loosely toward her palm. She has a mole on her fourth finger, just above the knuckle, and a fairly fresh-looking cut along the side of her index finger, presumably from her day in the kitchen. The cuticle around her thumbnail looks a little ragged, like she’s been biting at it. Ellie stares at Dina’s hand for too long, her own fingers twitching for a pencil, aching to commit it to paper, to memory.
She snaps herself out of it and picks up her own book and the flask, sliding off the bed and walking over to her desk, where she sets them down. Then she approaches her bed again, holding her breath for some reason, and carefully eases her comforter up Dina’s body, settling it around her shoulders.
“Okay,” she murmurs to herself. She wipes her hands on her jeans, her palms a little slick with sweat.
She watches Dina while she quickly changes into the t-shirt and sweatpants she sleeps in, feeling deeply, desperately paranoid that Dina is going to wake up and see her in her underwear. Dina wouldn’t even care — she’d say nothing, or she’d make an easy joke. Ellie’s seen Dina strip down to her underwear and run into the lake with half the other teenagers in town, either unaware of or totally unconcerned with the guys staring at her ass, imbued with the kind of confidence Ellie could never find in herself, not even in a world where she could travel to the stars. But Ellie would care if Dina saw her kicking her jeans off, because in spite of all the ways Dina has determinedly wormed her way into Ellie’s heart, there are still walls, there are still boundaries, because Dina is straight. There is a sublevel of honesty and vulnerability that Ellie will never be able to unveil in front of her, because to do so would be to destroy the foundation of everything they’ve built since Dina smiled at her crooked and bright and curious and said, hey, you came back!
Once she’s dressed, the frantic pace her heart is keeping finally eases up. She brushes her teeth as quietly as she can at the utility sink, scrubbing the brush a little viciously, determined to make sure Dina won’t cringe away in horror at the smell of her breath in the morning.
God, the morning. Dina doesn’t seem inclined to wake up any time soon, so it’s looking pretty damn likely she’s going to be here in the morning, to see Ellie’s crusty eyes and smell Ellie’s stale breath and look at her across the pillows like they’re —
Her heart is racing again. She rinses her toothbrush, sets it down, and all but tiptoes back toward the bed.
This doesn’t mean anything. Hell, for all she knows,
Dina’s been falling asleep at various houses around Jackson for years. And she was tired. And she was reading, which can so easily lull a person to sleep. And they had whiskey. It’s casual, it’s friendly, it’s nothing.
Ellie gets into bed slowly: knee, hip, hand. She tries her best not to jostle the mattress. When Dina sighs, she freezes like she just heard a clicker, and only moves again when it’s clear from the rhythm of Dina’s breathing that she’s still fast asleep.
Lying down, she feels so close to Dina. Closer than she did before, when they were both awake. There is an intimacy in sleeping, in sharing a blanket, in sharing the night. When she first moved into the house with Joel and first started sleeping in this bed, she thought it was huge, big enough to throw out all of her limbs and still be cushioned by the mattress. It was luxurious beyond comprehension, way bigger than her bunk in the QZ. But with Dina in it, it feels treacherously small. It would be so easy — so fucking easy — to touch.
And even as she tries to keep a buffer of space between their bodies, Dina invades her senses. The whisper of her breath. The heat radiating off her body. The way the mattress dips toward her, like it’s beckoning Ellie in. The scent of her.
She smells like the kitchen. Like thyme. Like sugar beet. Like something warm, something full.
Ellie purposefully slows her breathing, inhaling as she counts to four, exhaling for the same duration. She does it over and over again until her eyelids start to feel heavy and her mind loses interest in counting, until she’s tired enough that Dina’s presence doesn’t feel so acutely terrifying.
Balanced on the very edge of the mattress, she finally falls asleep.
They wake up curled toward each other, toward the center of Ellie’s bed, like parentheses. Sun leaks in at the edges of Ellie’s curtains, spilling over the bed. It turns a slice of Dina’s face golden; for a moment, it turns her blinding.
They blink at each other, eyelids still drooping. Ellie thinks maybe she should smile, but it seems all she can do is stare. Dina is so — so fucking cute in the morning, eyes a little bleary, hair all tangled, imprint of the pillowcase pressed into her cheek. An ache blooms in Ellie’s chest and stretches its wings, reaching out to her shoulders, up into her throat.
“Morning,” Dina says. Her voice is scratchy, a smidge lower than it usually is.
“Morning,” Ellie echoes. Her mouth is bone dry.
Dina yawns, cupping a hand over her mouth halfway through, and then stretches. When she lifts her arm up, Ellie can smell her sweat, tangy but strangely sweet, strangely alluring.
“We fell asleep?” Dina asks, looking at Ellie with sleep still clinging to the corners of her eyes.
“You fell asleep,” Ellie corrects. “ And then I…had to go to bed eventually.”
“And you didn’t wake me up?” Dina props herself up on an elbow. “Didn’t kick me out? You let me stay all night in your…your sanctuary of solitude?” A grin stretches across her mouth. “Damn, Ellie. Am I, like…really fucking special?”
Yes, Ellie’s brain sighs. “More like too heavy to throw outside,” she tells Dina dryly.
There is a looseness in Dina’s smile — it’s so warm, so honest, so easy. She always smiles like happiness is a free thing. Her tongue pokes out between her teeth. “Uh-huh.”
She pushes herself up into a seated position, kneading her fingers into her neck for a moment. She runs her fingers through her hair; Ellie balls her fingers into a fist. “I have to pee. Do I need to go squat in a bush?”
Ellie rolls her eyes and pushes back the blankets, telling herself that there’s no reason to be self-conscious of her pajamas, even though the shirt is a bit threadbare. “Come on, we can go in the house.”
Dina follows her. “Do you squat in a bush sometimes, though?” They both squint against the sun when they step outside. “You can tell me.” She gestures to the left. “That one around the side looks very healthy.”
Ellie casts her a look, lips pressed together so she doesn’t smile. “You’re an idiot.”
“Takes one to know one, El,” Dina says, like they’re fucking twelve years old, but then she hooks her arm through Ellie’s even though they’re only walking, like, maximum twenty steps, and anything else Ellie might’ve said is zapped right out of her brain.
The second time it happens, they’re just back from a bonfire, tipsy and stupid. Ellie drops her key on the ground twice before she can open the door, and Dina cackles behind her forearm, which is pressed hard against her mouth so that they don’t wake Joel. The moon is a sliver in the sky. Ellie says, through her own helpless laughter, “Shut up, shut up.” Dina’s smoky hair tickles her nose and her mouth is wine-sticky on the shell of Ellie’s ear as she says, “You gotta put it in.” Ellie’s knees nearly buckle, her breath caught in her throat, but then she’s finally turning the key and they’re stumbling into the garage in a tangle of limbs and crisp night air. She toes off her Chucks while Dina pulls her hoodie up over her head and Ellie stares, unable to stop herself, at the bare skin of Dina’s abdomen that’s revealed when her tank top rides up too. Dina tugs it back down, drops her hoodie on the floor, and says, “I’m so fucking tired,” as she flops onto Ellie’s bed. And that’s Ellie’s last memory before she wakes up with a headache, and the scent of the smoke is still in Dina’s hair, and Dina’s hair is in her mouth.
The third time it happens, Dina comes over for dinner with Ellie and Joel. Afterward, Ellie washes the dishes and Dina dries them. She keeps flicking the towel at Ellie, and Ellie retaliates with soap bubbles splashed in Dina’s direction, and the floor gets all wet. Joel walks through and mumbles “Fuckin’ workplace hazard in here,” with a half-smile on his face, and Dina’s cheeks are damp in a way that makes them look as shiny as polished marble and pink at their highest points. They watch Curtis and Viper 3 when the kitchen is clean, and Dina jostles Ellie’s knee with her own when Joel quietly recites a line along with Viper. When the movie is over, Joel and Dina are both asleep. Ellie turns the TV off, tosses a blanket over Joel, and leans down toward her friend, her hand light on Dina’s shoulder as she asks, “Hey, you wanna go home?” Dina says no, and Ellie nods, pulls Dina to her feet and guides her to the garage, her palm pressed softly to the small of Dina’s back as she steers her toward the back door.
The fourth time it happens, they’re playing gin rummy on her bed and sharing a joint. Ellie tries not to think too hard about degrees of separation, the way Dina’s mouth has touched the joint just before hers does. She pours her concentration into the game, and she’s got a strong winning streak going for a while, but Dina eventually breaks it, crowing triumphantly, arms stretched above her head. She dances around with her hips and her upper body, making the mattress shake. When she shimmies her shoulders, the v-neck of her shirt slips lower, revealing an extra inch of skin. Ellie kicks Dina’s shin; Dina runs tickling fingers over the sole of her foot in retaliation. Ellie gasps a laugh as Dina demands, “How does it feel to be a loser?” and Ellie rolls her eyes and reminds her, “You’ve been losing this whole time, dumbass.” But Dina just beams and sprawls out on the bed, head on Ellie’s pillow, like there’s never been a sweeter victory.
The fifth time it happens, Ellie is nursing a hypothesis that Dina doesn’t like to sleep alone. It’s just a theory, but still — the thought seems to open up something raw inside of her, something that stings when Dina’s ankle hooks around hers long after midnight, when Dina’s fingers slip beneath hers on the mattress, when Dina curls up so close to her that her cheek is on Ellie’s pillow and her exhalations are filling Ellie’s mouth. There is something about the reach of her body. It feels like an unmet ache.
“I’m here,” Ellie wants to say, but she never does, not even when she’s certain that Dina’s asleep. She thinks it as loud as she can instead: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
Late on a Tuesday, Cat is in Ellie’s room.
Cat is in Ellie’s room, stretched across the middle of her bed perpendicular to the pillows, her shoulder pressed tight to Ellie’s, laughing in a silly, unstoppable way as they compete, on either side of the spine of Ellie’s sketchbook, to see who can draw a better portrait of Shimmer. Ellie is laughing too, low in her throat, heat pricking in her cheeks and something tremulous happening at the bottom of her belly. Cat reaches over with her pencil, onto Ellie’s side of the page, and Ellie nudges her away. When they turn toward each other they are so, so close.
Cat is in Ellie’s room and they’re kissing, mouths moving slow and exploratory. Ellie feels like her lips are shaking. Like all of her is shaking. They haven’t kissed since her seventeenth birthday, when Joel came in with a cake and ruined everything, but she thinks they’ve been circling around this since then. There was just — everything life in Jackson entails, rotations and duties and community obligations, and there was the awkwardness of what happened with Joel, and there was…
Well, Dina.
But Cat is in Ellie’s room now, and Ellie is shoving her sketchbook away, pencils clattering to the floor, as they tumble away from the beginning of something and right into the fast-paced, frenetic middle of it. Cat’s tongue slides along the seam of Ellie’s lips and Ellie opens her mouth. She’s aching between her legs, pressing into Cat as Cat presses right back into her, legs entwining. Cat tastes like a hint of aloe vera, a little bit like venison stew, and a lot like holy fucking shit. Cat breaks the kiss for just long enough to look at Ellie, fingers making quick work of the buttons on Ellie’s flannel, and in wordless reply to the little quirk of Cat’s eyebrow, Ellie rolls halfway on top of her, pressing her into the mattress as she pulls her shirt down off her shoulders and tugs the sleeves impatiently over her hands. She’s kissing Cat hot and needy and maybe even demanding, and Cat is tracing the neckline of Ellie’s sports bra with one hand and tugging the elastic out of Ellie’s hair with the other.
A knock on the garage door pulls them apart. Ellie frowns faintly, breathing hard. If Joel is interrupting this again —
“Pretend you’re not here,” Cat whispers, sly little smile on her kissed-red lips. Ellie is seriously considering it, even though the light from her lamp is probably an obvious indication of her presence to whoever is standing on the other side of the door, but then the knock comes again, accompanied this time by a voice.
“Ellie?”
It’s like being doused with cold water.
Dina.
Ellie tries to speak, but her voice won’t come out. She clears her throat. “Uh,” she says, grabbing her discarded flannel. “One sec!”
She must take too long shoving her arms into the sleeves and fumbling with the buttons, which she’s matching up in complete misalignment, because Dina calls, “One Mississippi!” Her tone is so light it’s frothy, bubbled with teasing. Ellie’s feet feel heavy on the floor. She gives up on her buttons, trying to tug the collar of her shirt into something approaching symmetry, and opens the door with the weight of a stone sinking slowly in her stomach.
“Dina!” she says brightly. Too brightly. She sees Dina register that, sees her smirk a little, and then watches Dina’s mouth slacken as she looks at Ellie’s mouth, which is probably as red and wet as Cat’s is, and at Ellie’s flannel falling off her shoulder, and at Ellie’s ponytail hanging on for dear life. Her eyes dart past Ellie’s shoulder. Something passes over her face, sharp as an arrow.
“Hey,” Ellie says, in a more modulated voice. She feels so mixed up that she thinks her head could spin right off her shoulders. Dina is here, Dina was likely expecting to come in, Dina was probably going to fall asleep next to Ellie in her bed, and she wants that, wants it like hell, but Cat is already in her bed and she wants that too — or at least, she wanted fiercely a minute ago.
“Were you, um,” she starts, not quite managing to meet Dina’s gaze. “I mean, are you — ”
“I’m just leaving,” Dina says.
It takes Ellie a beat to absorb that, and then she says quickly, “Hey — wait — ”
But Dina’s already turned on her heel, already walking away with her head bent into the wind. Ellie’s mouth hangs open helplessly for a moment, and then she slowly closes the door, her hand lingering on the doorknob.
“What’s up?” Cat asks from the bed. She’s sitting up, hands pressed into the mattress behind her. Her hair is mussed up, her bangs pushed to one side.
“Um,” Ellie says. “Nothing. She just… thought she left something here.”
Cat tips her head to one side. Her gaze is steady and inquisitive. “Did she?”
The question feels like a loaded gun. Ellie swallows. “No,” she says softly. Her voice sounds pinched.
Cat’s arm stretches out across the bed. “You coming back over here?”
“Yeah.” Ellie sort of coughs out a laugh. “Yeah, of course. Did you, uh — did you bring that graphic novel you were talking about? The, um… The Watch?”
“Watchmen. Yeah.” Cat studies her for long enough that Ellie starts to feel fidgety. “You wanna look at it?”
“Yeah. That sounds great.”
“Sure. Yeah.” Cat gets up off the bed slowly, like she wishes she didn’t have to move, and then goes to dig in her bag. When she brings the book over to Ellie, Ellie reaches up and smoothes Cat’s bangs back into place with careful fingers. Cat smiles at her softly.
Ellie feels like she should maybe say sorry, but she doesn’t.
On Wednesday, Dina has a massive hickey on her neck, red and purple and black like a fucking bite. It’s noticeable all the way across the community hall. If Ellie had a hickey like that, somewhere anyone could see, she’d blush so hard she’d spontaneously combust. But Dina is Dina, and she just moves through the room like she always does, her chin up and her footsteps easy. When Bradley stares at her she says What? all guileless and with only the slightest edge — but it’s a sharp one.
Ellie is not sure she’ll ever be able to look Jesse in the eyes again. What the hell did he do, fucking maul her?
Dina strides right toward her, slides into the chair on the other side of the table. “Hey!” she says, all happy, and immediately starts cutting into her pancake.
“Hey,” Ellie replies. She takes another bite of her own pancake. Chews it, swallows. She can’t say nothing. The bruise is so big it might even deserve its own greeting.
She curls her fingers around her cup of water. “You, uh… look like you had a fun night last night.”
Dina snorts and pulls her hair down in front of her shoulder to partially cover the evidence. “I mean — you did too, right?”
“Uh.” Ellie blinks. “Um, yeah. Right.”
Silence lingers between them, save for the sound of Dina’s knife scraping against her plate as she saws into her breakfast with more force than required. Ellie wets her bottom lip with her tongue.
“Look, Dina,” she says quietly, “I didn’t know you were — ”
“I’m happy,” Dina interrupts, before Ellie can say going to come over. She’s smiling her normal smile, sweet with a dash of impishness, but her eyes are totally flat. “I’m — I think it’s so great that we’re both happy. I’m happy for us.” When Ellie doesn’t say anything, Dina’s eyelashes flutter and she prompts, “Aren’t you?”
“…yeah,” Ellie manages to say after a moment. Her mouth twists a little as she stares down at her food. “It’s great that we’re happy.”
Dina nods and takes another bite. As she chews, she kicks Ellie gently under the table. Ellie waits for her to say something more, but she doesn’t — she’s uncharacteristically quiet for the rest of the meal.
But her foot doesn’t move. Her boot rests against Ellie’s sneaker, and it stays there until they get up to go.
Dina and Jesse break up a couple weeks later. Ellie hears about it from Rory, who’s telling Theo, voice in the low but eager register of gossip.
(“Should I ask her out?” Theo demands, and Rory laughs hard enough that it drowns out Ellie’s unimpressed snort.)
Cat finds her when she’s leaving the greenhouse, hip bumping gently into Ellie’s, hand brushing along Ellie’s forearm and down to her wrist. “Fancy meeting you here,” she says.
Ellie smiles at her. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world.”
Cat laughs and smiles back, all warmth. “I promised my mom I’d eat dinner with her tonight. But I can come over after?”
Ellie bites the inside of her cheek. The words roll around her mouth for a moment before she says them, as though they know she should think about them twice. She says them anyway: “I have, like…the worst fucking headache. I should probably go to sleep early.”
“Oh.” Cat takes her hand, lacing their fingers together, and squeezes gently. “I’m sorry. Do you need anything?”
“Nah.” Ellie squeezes her hand back. “Just some water and some sleep, I bet.”
“Postponed until tomorrow, then,” Cat says.
Ellie walks her home, their hands swinging lightly between their bodies. Cat kisses her goodbye, tells her to feel better, and Ellie leaves Cat’s porch feeling like a jerk.
She stares up at the ceiling of her garage for a long time that night. Eight o’clock passes, and then nine. She listens to Jeff Buckley and feels pathetic, arm thrown across her eyes. My kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder. She switches over to Nirvana and doesn’t find it much better. I feel stupid, and contagious. Ten o’clock passes and she starts imagining the sound of a knock on her door. She turns off the music.
She’s halfway through Frankenstein and actually really enjoying it, but her brain refuses to concentrate for long enough to allow her to read even a single page. She groans into a pillow. It’s almost eleven. She’s so fucking stupid, she really is. She blew off Cat for this. She was so certain Dina would come, and for what reason? What allowed her to be so idiotically confident? For all she knows, Dina and Jesse have made up and Dina’s in his bed getting her neck bruised to fuck again. For all she knows —
Three soft raps on her door.
She all but bolts off her bed, tripping over her feet as she stands. She pushes a hand through her hair and tries to smooth the wrinkles out of her shirt.
She swings the door open, and there’s Dina, a too-big denim jacket hanging around her shoulders. She looks right at Ellie.
Dina’s eyes are so big, so brown, so goddamn fucking beautiful. Ellie clutches at the doorknob like it’s the only thing keeping her upright, and then steps to the side, a silent invitation.
Dina walks inside and immediately shrugs off her jacket. After that, she unties her boots and yanks them off, leaves them lying on their sides on Ellie’s floor. And then — and then — she pulls off her sweater, so she’s just wearing a camisole trimmed with tired-looking lace in such a deep shade of purple it’s nearly black. She pads over to Ellie’s bed in her mismatched socks and curls up under the comforter like a sad kitten.
Ellie trails after her and lies down, too. Dina’s got the comforter pulled right up to her chin. The coolness of the breeze clings to her skin and her jeans and drifts toward Ellie in the cocoon they’ve created for themselves.
“You okay?” Ellie asks her softly.
“Yeah,” Dina says. There is a quick, blink-and-miss-it quiver in her bottom lip, and then she sniffles. Her hand pokes out from under the blanket to swipe at her nose. “I don’t know.” Her eyes are dewy. Ellie aches for her, and aches to pull her closer. “Ellie, I don’t know,” Dina whispers, like a confession. “I don’t know fucking anything, I don’t think.”
“’Course you do,” Ellie assures her. “It’s just, um… it can be hard, I guess? Relationships can be hard,” she offers, lamely.
Dina studies her, eyes roaming all over Ellie’s face. “Where’s Cat?”
Ellie shrugs the shoulder that’s not pressed into the bed. “Don’t know,” she lies.
“What do you know?” says Dina. It’s the kind of asshole question they’re always asking each other, but there’s something real in it tonight, something different about the way Dina is looking at her.
It takes Ellie a long time to answer. Dina just waits, patient as the mountains, worrying the corner of her bottom lip with her teeth.
“I knew you would come,” she finally says, and the dew in Dina’s eyes turns to full-fledged wetness as she face crumples.
“Oh, fuck,” Ellie says, alarmed. “Don’t — don’t cry. Dina — fuck — ”
“I’m not,” Dina says firmly, even though she very much is.
With painstaking care, Ellie lifts the edge of her comforter and uses it to dab away the tears on Dina’s cheeks. Voice even softer than a whisper, she says, “’Kay.”
In the morning, it’s as it always is: Dina all crowded into Ellie’s space. Her face is in Ellie’s shoulder; she’s drooling on Ellie’s Metallica tee. Her toes are trapped between Ellie’s calves. She stirs as Ellie does, eyes squinting halfway open. She brings her fingers to the corner of her mouth and pulls away slightly, her nose wrinkling.
“Oh, gross,” she says, swiping away drool as she shifts back a little. Her voice is as raw as the day is new. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Ellie says. “Are…you okay?”
Dina nods against the pillow. “It was stupid. Thanks for — you know. Letting me stay.”
Ellie gives her a half-smile. “I’ve told you. I can’t move your ass once you pass out.”
Dina smiles back. It’s a soft, tender thing that twists in Ellie’s chest. She lifts an arm out from under the blankets and reaches out toward Ellie, touching Ellie’s arm. Her fingertips skim over Ellie’s tattoo. “Can I see?” she asks quietly.
Ellie’s eyebrows tick upward. Dina has seemed thoroughly disinterested in her tattoo until now. “Sure,” she says.
Dina moves in closer again, her hip pressed to Ellie’s. She’s so warm from sleep; Ellie feels like her own skin, on the other side of two thin layers of fabric, must be burning red, nearly aflame. Dina puts both hands on her arm, turns it a little so she can examine all of Ellie’s ink. Her fingers brush across Ellie’s skin, tracing leaves and wings. As she moves, the strap of her camisole shifts and falls, hanging off her shoulder and down onto her arm. Ellie can see the swell of her breast. Dina sighs, chest rising and falling. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. Ellie might actually die.
“It’s beautiful,” Dina says softly, her touch still heart-wrenchingly delicate, as if Ellie’s heart isn’t screaming, as if her whole body isn’t pulsing rapid-fast and fiercest of all at the apex of her thighs. “It suits you, El.”
It feels like a fight to remember how her tongue is supposed to work. “Yeah?” is all she manages to say.
Dina’s thumb smooths over the moth. She seems to be feeling the ridges of Ellie’s burn. “Yeah.” She turns her face toward Ellie’s. “But you didn’t have to cover this.”
Ellie breathes out slowly, through her nose. She does not look at Dina’s half-bare breast. She does look at Dina’s mouth, she can’t fucking help it, but it’s only for an instant. Dina’s eyes are dark and somber when she meets them with her own again.
“I wanted to,” she says, somewhat raggedly. Dina nods slowly, like she really understands, or at least she really wants to. Her hand stills against Ellie’s arm.
The sound of a brisk double knock on the door startles them apart. They both inch backward, creating space between their bodies like they’ve been caught at something.
“Ellie?” Joel’s gruff voice calls. Once again, Ellie forgets how to speak.
Dina is the one who ultimately answers, calling back, “Just a second!” She slips out of the bed, pulls her sweater back on, and crosses the garage to unlock and open the door. “Hey, Mr. M,” she says, with such sunniness that even Ellie, frozen sitting upright on the bed, feels disarmed.
“Dina,” Joel says slowly. She steps away from the door to collect her boots, and he steps inside. A stunned sort of look slaps itself onto his face when he sees that Ellie’s still in bed and registers the comforter turned back from Dina climbing out on the other side. “G’morning,” Joel mumbles, his eyes slightly narrowed as they slide back toward Dina.
“Good morning,” she chirps as she finishes tying her laces. She’s moving so slowly, completely unembarrassed. But of course she’s not embarrassed — nothing happened between them. They just slept. “How’s the weather?”
Joel’s eyes flick in Ellie’s direction and then settle back on Dina. “Not half bad.”
She dimples up at him, reaching for her jacket and shrugging it on. “That’s my favourite kind.” She turns to Ellie, still smiling balmy and sweet. “Thanks for the sleepover, Ellie. Had such a blast summoning spirits with you!” She gives Joel an extra winning grin, leans toward him like she’s confiding in him as she adds, “Girl stuff.”
And then she all but skips out the door. Joel gapes after her. So does Ellie.
He turns back toward her slowly, seeming to gauge her with his gaze. His voice is careful as he tries to put a sentence together. “Is — is she — are you — Dina’s your — ”
“No.” Ellie’s voice is leaden, so flat and firm that Joel just nods. He rubs the back of his neck.
“Benji’s at the door,” he says. “Wants us to go over for breakfast. And probably… play fuckin’ Candyland.”
Ellie’s not about to say no to her quasi-cousin. Especially since she’s pretty sure she can convince him to play Mouse Trap instead.
“Let me get dressed,” she says.
Joel nods again and slowly, downright fucking glacially, steps outside and shuts the door of the garage.
Ellie collapses back onto her pillow and jams the heels of her hands into her eye sockets.
“What the fuck?” she whispers to the empty room.
Her bed smells like Dina and acrid hope.
tbc.