It turns out “home” is just our dorm, which I guess I should’ve expected. Not like we were gonna walk all the way back to our hometown, where we went to school together and hung out and never even once had our arms around each other like this, so close I can feel her heartbeat hammering against my ribs. Maybe it’s because I never got sucker-punched by a guy who was basically stalking her before. Guess it was for the best, if that was one of the requirements.
My head’s still foggy when we reach the dorm’s front doors, but I feel better now than I did on the KNZ house’s floor. Less like throwing up, at least, and also less likely to eat shit walking up stairs. Which is good, because that’s exactly where Sweetie Belle leads me, striding right past the lounge I was hanging out in one week ago minus one day.
There are two guys I don’t know sitting over there now, staring at us both as we pass. I try to wink at them, but since my left eye’s swollen shut right now it kind of just looks like blinking. Oh well. Hope they got the message: keep hanging out there, guys. You might meet a pretty girl and end up just like me!
On second thought, maybe it’s better if they didn’t get the message.
We’re upstairs before I get a chance to check anyway — actually, up just one flight of stairs. This is Sweetie Belle’s floor, not mine, and her room she’s steering me towards. I guess that makes sense. I know exactly how hard it is to lug a semi-conscious person all the way up to my room.
“Sit,” she orders me once she gets her door unlocked. She’s pointing at her bed. It’s made up now, nice and neat, not rumpled like it was when I was here earlier. I follow her command and perch on her mattress, bracing my hands on either side of me so I don’t fall over.
“Stay here,” she says next, before she hurries back out the door and lets it slam shut behind her. I’m alone. She said her roommate’s gone for the weekend. It’s kind of cold in here.
Oh God, my shirt’s still soaked, and clammy and gross against my chest. I’m halfway through unbuttoning it before I remember where I am. It’d probably be rude to take my shirt off while Sweetie Belle’s gone. I should at least tell her she’s pretty first.
Before I can start rebuttoning, Sweetie Belle charges back in. She’s holding something lumpy and wrapped in a bunch of paper towels, and she thrusts it towards me once she’s in arm’s reach.
“Put this on your eye,” she says.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s…” she starts to say. Then she thinks better of it. Then she says it anyway. “It’s frozen broccoli. Because the icemaker’s broken, and there weren’t any… just put it on your face.”
I take the lump in one hand and press it to my face. It’s kind of pokey, and obviously freezing cold, but after a few seconds the throbbing over my eye isn’t quite as bad. “Thanks,” I tell Sweetie Belle as she sits on her bed next to me.
“Sure,” she says bluntly. She was looking at me for a second, like she was checking to make sure I’m doing sucker-punch-first-aid right, but now she’s staring at the opposite wall with her hands braced against her knees, bunching the fabric of her dress.
“You okay?” I ask her.
“I’m fine,” she answers, in the same terse tone. She’s not okay. I think she’s mad at me.
“Are you mad at me?” I ask next.
“No,” she says, in a way that means “yes.” I don’t really know what she’s mad at me for. I feel like I should try to find out.
“So –”
“I told you to let it go.” Her eyes are squeezed shut. She’s shaking a bit — fists clenched in her lap. “To just move on. And instead you make a big fucking thing of it, and you send Woody after me, and you start a fight with Alkaline like a fucking idiot even though I told you who he was and you didn’t listen. Because you have to be a…”
She grits her teeth and cuts herself off. She’s still shaking. I reach for her hand, and she jerks it away.
“What is wrong with you?” she snaps. “Why do you just do things without thinking? Even when people tell you not to, you do it anyway. Because you think everything’s just gonna work out somehow, and it doesn’t, Button! People get hurt! You get…”
Her voice cracks. She grits her teeth again and looks away — lifts the hand she jerked away from me and wipes both her eyes with it. I don’t know what to think about that. Thinking’s kind of hard right now. I might have a concussion.
“I, um… didn’t send Woody after you,” I mumble after a few seconds. “He kinda did that himself.” She doesn’t say anything, so I add a question that’s been floating around in the stars filling my mind. “What did he say to you?”
She lets out a scoff that’s halfway to being a sour laugh. “You want to know what he did? He blackmailed me. Said he was gonna report Al to the school, tell them all about me and him, get the whole KNZ chapter shut down unless I came back with him and… helped him help you be a fucking idiot.”
Sweetie Belle doesn’t see my eyebrows rise. No wonder Woody didn’t tell me what he was planning on doing. I definitely would’ve stopped him. He was being an even bigger idiot than I was — and even braver than I thought either of us could be.
“Because you were gonna ‘do the right thing’ no matter what,” she goes on, her voice low and bitter again. “And you needed all of us. Him and Crescent and… me, for some reason. And…”
He said something else — I can hear it through the hitch in her voice. But she doesn’t want to say it. She didn’t believe him when he said it.
“And I came back,” she finishes. “And now you probably have a concussion. Hope it was worth it.”
She stares at the floor, and I stare at her. There’s something weird about all this, and I can’t figure out what. It’s not what she said, or how she said it, or the way she looked while she was talking. It’s not her at all — and at the same time, it’s entirely her, barely six inches away from me, close enough that I can smell her flowery perfume and feel the heat of her body. Nothing’s different, but somehow everything’s changed.
“Keep pressure on it.”
She reaches over and presses her palm over my hand, making sure the bumpy broccoli bag covers my swollen eye completely — and I let her do it. I don’t twitch away, or feel my heart start racing in my chest, or forget how to breathe just because she’s leaned in so close to me I can hear a tiny, shaky sigh slip out of her nose. And that’s when I figure out what’s different — what’s changed — what’s always been exactly the same.
I’m not afraid of her anymore.
I’ve been terrified of her all week — of the picture-perfect Sweetie Belle in my head, the one I wasn’t good enough for and could never do enough to deserve, who I had to lie to just so she’d let me keep pretending to be friends with her. But I’ve done so much other scary shit this week, and I survived all of it, and I can’t overthink any of it right now because my brain’s not working right.
So instead of feeling scared, I just feel tired. I’m tired of dancing around what I’ve really wanted to say, of believing that what I did somehow wasn’t who I actually was — of being just about the only person on campus who doesn’t like me.
And when I look at her now — just sit next to her and really look at her — I feel like I can see right through her: past the whorls of hair framing her face that she spent half an hour shaping in a grungy hall bathroom mirror, and the mascara thickened by something she’s trying hard to keep stoppered up beneath it, and the way her whole face softens with concern and makes the whole world go silent around her. She looks pretty because every part of her is beautiful, but all she ever hears is the first part — not just from other people, but from the voice in her head that sounds like the whole world talking at once, that flutters around her in swirling rainbow auras and rings distantly in my ears like a happy memory of the belle of every ball.
I definitely have a concussion.
Doesn’t mean I’m wrong, though.
And now Sweetie Belle’s upset over how stupid I was and how I didn’t listen to her, and I do feel bad about that and I should do something to make up for it. But I’m not scared to do it. I’m not just thinking about it. I’m just gonna keep doing what feels right.
“I’m sorry,” I say first. “You’re right. You told me not to get involved, and I didn’t listen. I thought I could fix everything for you, and I didn’t think about whether you wanted or needed anyone to do that. I hurt you too. And I’m sorry.”
An odd expression fills Sweetie Belle’s face — a mix of lots of emotions, the most visible one being surprise. She genuinely didn’t expect me to say that. I’m not sure I did either.
“You didn’t… hurt me,” she mutters. “I mean, not like… I guess you did the right thing. I was being a coward. Again.”
“You’re not a coward,” I tell her. She screws her face up. There’s only one emotion on it now.
“I’m a fucking coward, Button,” she says, disgust laced through every word. “I am so… fucking scared, all of the time. I try so hard every day to make everyone like me and just feel fucking normal, and all the assholes in the world just do whatever they want anyway, because the world’s their fucking game and they always win. They hurt me, and people I care about, no matter what I do. Because I'm just a..."
No, actually, it isn’t disgust. She’s angry, furious, glowing inside and out with rage — because she used to have an identity and things used to be so simple, and now she doesn’t know who she is or what she’s supposed to do, and everything feels wrong for reasons she can't explain. And it has to be somebody’s fault, and there’s only one person who ever comes up when she thinks about whose fault it must be. No matter what she does. No matter how hard she tries.
It feels familiar, because it is. It feels wrong, because I know what’s right.
I put the broccoli bag down next to me and reach for her hand again. She twitches like she’s going to move away, and I grab hold of her fingers before she can — turn her hand over and press my palm into hers.
“You are so much more than what you do for other people,” I say.
She faces me, eyes wide, lips parted and trembling. She doesn’t know what to say. I don’t either — so I don’t think about it, and just tell her how I feel.
“Since I first met you, you’ve had this fire in you. Since we were little kids, I’ve never seen you be anything but selfless and convicted, never seen you quit on anything or anyone except for one person.”
She grimaces and mutters, “You.” I shake my head and correct her.
“You. You never put yourself first. Part of you thinks you don’t deserve it, that you haven’t earned it, but you don’t need to. You do deserve it, because when you talk to people I know what you’re really doing is looking for a chance to listen, because you’re kind all the way through you in a way most people have to lie about. No matter what you do or don't do, that's who you are. It’s what the whole world should tell you every single day.”
“Stop,” Sweetie Belle mumbles. Her hand’s squeezing mine. Her eyes are squeezed shut. “Just…”
I shake my head again. There’s a lightness in my chest now to match my head. I push past it and keep talking. “It’s what I should’ve told you years ago, every day we were friends. Every day now that we are again. I admire you so much, and it doesn’t matter if you’re not sure who to be right now because I can’t wait to find out who you’re going to become. And I want to help you become her.” My mouth twitches. I’m smiling. “I like to help. I’m a helper.”
Sweetie Belle opens her eyes. They’re shining in the light, swimming in the air between us, dripping down her face and leaving dark tracks of mascara in their wake. “Don’t say that,” she whispers. “People judge me. They’ll judge you too.”
“I’ll talk ‘em out of it,” I tell her. “I’m good at that.”
“I’ll just mess things up…”
“I probably will too.”
She leans closer, face crumpling under weight she’s about to be unable to bear. “I’m not…”
“You are,” I say, “and I am too. We’re fucked up, and stupid, and we don’t know what we’re doing or who we are or who we’re supposed to be. But for the first time in my life, I know who I want to be. And what I want to do.”
She doesn’t look away. She looks like the girl I hugged outside a crowded coffee house — the kid I spent hours with inside made-up worlds that felt completely real — the friend I trust more than anyone else in the universe. She looks perfect. She looks like the biggest chance I’ll ever take in my life.
“Then do it,” she says softly, sweetly — shaking with fear, shining with something I hope to God is hope. “Do what you want.”
“Okay,” I say. Then I let go of her hand, and I lift my fingers to her cheek, and I hold them there and pull her towards me and lean forward so I can meet her halfway.
And I kiss her.
Her lips are hard at first — damp with salty tears, pulled against her teeth in surprise — and then they soften, melting into mine, turning with her head as she angles it into my hand. I’m sure the rest of my body is still there, but right now I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything but heat — tingling through my cheeks, burning under my fingertips, roaring in my core like a space shuttle engine lifting me off her bed and up into the stars twinkling behind my eyelids.
And then I pull back, take a breath, open my eyes and still that hers are still closed. She doesn’t move. My hand is still on her face. I can’t read her expression — and I come crashing back to Earth, every thought obliterated, fiery confidence collapsing into freezing-cold terror.
“U-Um,” I mumble after managing to swallow on my third attempt. My throat’s dry again. My whole mouth is, actually. “Did I read that wrong, or…”
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to. A tiny noise escapes her throat — a groan, almost a whimper — and she surges towards me, grabs my head with both hands, laces her fingers through my hair and crashes her lips back against mine, so hard I almost bite my tongue, hard enough that I actually do fall over on my back. My head misses her bed frame by less than four inches. I grunt in pain anyway.
“Face,” I say once she pulls back, her eyes wide with concern. I gesture up at my own swollen eye. “Face hurts.”
“Sorry,” she sighs. Her breaths come in ragged gasps. Mine aren’t much steadier. “You okay? Was that…”
Instead of talking, I lift my hand up, press it to her cheek, and slide it around to the back of her head. I don’t really know if this is how you’re supposed to do a first kiss, but I’d really like to find out, and Sweetie Belle doesn’t seem to mind. She leans down — shifts towards me, on top of me — and then her hair and her lips are all around and all over me.
Her hands drop to my stomach, undoing the last few buttons on my shirt and peeling the whole thing off of me once it’s fully open. Then she’s holding my head again, fingers light on my scalp, palm angled a bit so it doesn’t hit the bruise forming around my eye. It still stings a bit. I don’t care. All I care about is how soft her lips are against mine, how warm her body is and how mine tingles every time and in every place we touch together, how her breath tickles against my cheek and how all of me thrills at every happy little sound she makes.
I roll onto my side, and Sweetie Belle comes with me, nestling into my chest and letting her arms fall over my shoulders, tugging me closer and twisting so my hands can slide over her wrinkling dress and settle into the small of her back. And then we roll again, and I’m overtop of her — hands braced by her shoulders, kissing her faster, pulse rocketing higher every time a squeak from her throat grows into a blissful groan.
I’m dizzy. I’m delirious. This is everything I ever wanted, and she wants it too, and we both want to…
To, uh…
My eyes pop open. I pull my lips away from hers. She looks up at me — face flushed and eyes sparkling — as I look down at her, and feel her hands around my back and her thighs pressed to my hips and both of us pressed together between them. She’s warm — hot. Holy shit, this is so hot.
And I’m…
I could…
Just a little further, and…
“Um…”
It’s not a word that leaves my throat, barely even a meaningful grunt. It’s just air leaving my lungs, shaped into a question I’ve thought about almost every day and never once figured out how to actually ask.
“Yeah?” Sweetie Belle says, lips curling into a grin, rubbing her fingers along my back — pulling me closer. This is happening. This is really happening. And instead of making it happen, I’m just…
“So…” I say — face and arms burning, voice pitched high with something I’d love to call anything but terror. “You know how I said I didn’t know what I was doing?”
“Yeaaaah?”
“Uuuuuh…” I pull my lips tight — bite on the bottom one until I can work up the courage to force more words past it. “That’s it. Just… fair warning, I guess.”
“Do you want to?”
I blink, take a breath, and look her in the eyes. She props herself up a bit — moves one of her hands up to my cheek to make sure I don’t look away.
“I’m serious,” she says, softly and sweetly. “We don’t have to.”
She really means that, and she means what she’s thinking beneath it: I’m not going anywhere. You’ve done more than enough. We can stop right now and it wouldn’t change a thing between us. And I believe her. I really do. But there’s something else in her eyes right now besides affection — just a hint of something I saw there earlier today, that I never want to see in her ever again.
“Do you want to?” I ask, rushing to get the words out before my brain can yank them back inside my lungs — before I can talk my way out of losing my virginity while I’m literally between the legs of the girl I’ve dreamed of losing it to. “Because I want to, but I… I want you to want to. To… be happy. Does that make sense? It doesn’t make sense. Never mind. I’m just…”
Sweetie Belle smiles — really, deeply, truly smiles. People use that word a lot, for little twitches of the lips and rib-cracking laughter and everything in between, but this is what the word is meant for: something that starts in your chest and spreads through your body and pushes out onto your face because you can’t possibly keep it in any longer.
I was right about what I saw. There was a little part of her that wasn’t sure about this — that couldn’t stop thinking about how badly this went the last time — and I’m sure it was there before because it’s completely gone now. There’s nothing in her eyes now but trust, and confidence, and the kind of happiness that we haven’t made up a word strong enough for yet.
And beneath all that, bubbling to the surface, swelling and surging and scorchingly hot…
“You’re adorable,” she murmurs, leaning up off the bed, pressing her lips to mine and holding them there until I kiss her back. Then she leans up a bit further, pecks me once on the neck, and squeezes me — with her hands, and her arms, and her silk-smooth thighs — as she whispers into my ear.
“And I want to.”
I’m not completely sure what happens next, but I know for sure where I end up: flat on my back, Sweetie Belle straddling my waist and fiddling with a tiny zipper on the side of her dress that I hadn’t seen before. She gets it undone, and I see a flash of silvery fabric underneath it — and then I forget about it entirely, because she’s lifted both her arms and pulled her dress up and over her head and completely off with them.
She drops the dress in a bunched-up pile on the floor, next to where the broccoli bag fell at some point. Then she plants her hands on my chest, grinning down at me, almost every part of her bare and beautiful and bouncing slightly with each tiny twitch of her hips. She’s perfect. This is perfect. And what happens after that is…
Honestly? It’s not perfect. It’s actually kind of awkward, and I mess up a couple times, and once we almost eat absolute shit on the floor because twin beds are really not made for two people no matter how close they get to each other.
But we make it work. We do what we want. And all things considered, it’s still the best night of my entire life.