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The rope yanks her back to the world. She’s been dreaming deep, dreaming the way she hasn’t since she was a kid—tiny, the blankets pulled over her head, her hair a static-sweat cling against her forehead. Dreaming of summer camp, she thinks, which is funny, because she never went to camp. Mom couldn’t afford it. Soccer camp’s the closest she ever got, and only because she’d sold all that chocolate, all that wrapping paper, all that—
The rope tugs and Van hisses awake.
“Tai?”
It’s sweltering in their little corner of the shelter. Salt trickles from her temples, beads under her hair, collects upon her top lip. It’s so hot, she almost can’t breathe. The rope skids against raw flesh, blood crusted black in the sparse moonlight dripping through the canopy. She reaches down, curls a finger under the loop for a little relief.
“Tai? You good?”
Tai is on her haunches, arms around her knees. Barefoot, bare-chested, staring into the shadows. Her back heaves as though she’s just come up from underwater. Hesitantly, Van reaches out, laying a hand against her skin. The ridges of spine aren’t as prominent as they were a few months ago. Summer means better eating. Summer means good hunting. Summer means they can leave behind the furs, the traps, the cards.
It's better than it was, but Tai is back to sleeping poorly. They can’t predict the nights she’ll jerk Van from their shared bedroll, coaxing her out into the trees.
“Taissa,” she says, firming her voice. “Talk to me.”
Dark eyes dart in a strained face. Tai licks her lips. Mumbles something Van can’t make out.
“What?”
“Are you real?”
Instinct almost makes her cough out a laugh. Old instinct. Instinct from times before, when there was Chinese takeout and matinee showings of action movies, when Tai was clear-eyed and rock-steady.
The rope tugs again, biting deep. She doesn’t wince. On the other end, Tai is tightening around herself, an orderly stack of limbs and breath.
“Yeah, Tai,” she says. She wants to ask if Tai is awake. She wants to ask if this is the other one asking. She wants the truth, and she isn’t sure Tai is capable of giving it when the hours are small and the air weighs heavy as guilt. “Yeah, I’m real.”
Tai looks at her with haunted eyes, and it is her. That glitter, that skepticism, is a dead giveaway.
“I think I’m here,” she says. “I think. Did I leave?”
Van swallows. “Not tonight.” She holds up her arm, pulling Tai’s along for the ride. The fibers are unraveling, stained, reeking of copper. They’ll need to cut a new tether soon.
Tai touches the bracelet around her own wrist. Her skin is mostly whole. Van tries not to think about why that is. Tries not to think about the jolt of being yanked along in the wake of something neither of them asked for. Tries not to associate that pain, that rubbed-raw heat, with love.
Tai breathes out, a gusty sigh of relief. She lets herself drop onto the blankets, lets the line go slack between them. Her fingers reach up to stroke Van’s cheek.
“You’re real,” she says. Van covers that hand with her own, tracing knuckle and nail, not caring that it’s too goddamn hot for contact. “Real,” Tai repeats with an urgency Van can’t fully understand. Her eyes are wild, too round. Van leans into her, rolling with her, the blankets rumpling under tangled legs.
“I’m real,” she says, the only assurance she can give in the midnight gloom. “I’m real, you’re real. The walls, the blankets, the others. All real.”
The shelter, a series of broken branches turned to walls, endlessly-replaced as they rot or tilt or shatter. The divides, paltry stabs at privacy, made of banners and cloth. The trees around them, keeping out the worst of the predators. The firepit. The makeshift table. Real. Real. All of it is real, and fashioned by hands more stubborn than articulate.
She misses the cabin sometimes, the attic she could almost trick herself into believing was just an apartment. A weird, dank apartment shared with her girlfriend, like it was always supposed to be. And yet, that cabin hadn’t felt as real as this place. Finding it at all had been an accident. It had loomed up out of the wild one day, a temporary offering.
Lottie hadn’t felt good about it from the start, and what Lottie doesn’t feel good about tends to burn down around them. This is better. This is theirs.
“I’m real,” she repeats, dropping to kiss the corner of Tai’s mouth. She feels Tai go slack beneath her, letting the halfassed mattress take her weight. Letting Van curl against her, all skin and shorts, warm and wanting even in her exhaustion.
“You’re real,” Tai says, cradling Van’s neck at the nape, looking her in the eye. “I’m awake.”
Van smiles. “I can tell,” she assures, and it’s mostly true. Most of the time, it is so obvious. The other kisses too hard. The other makes her bleed. The other does not ask, only leads, and Van can’t for her life stop herself from following. There’s a mystery there they still haven’t unwoven. There’s something there Taissa still doesn’t want to see.
And yet, even as she dreads that other, Van doesn’t fear her. It’s still Tai in there. Still Tai’s hands, cupping and stroking, guiding and giving. Still Tai’s breath in her ear, on her skin, drifting in heady arcs. Still Tai, even if it’s a part of her she doesn’t want to own, and Van loves her. Loves all of her. The gentle and the brutal, the fearful and the feared.
She used to waste energy thinking, It wasn’t supposed to be like this. First love isn’t supposed to dig this deep.
But it’s real. It’s real, and it’s all that she knows, and she’s grateful. It’s always you, she doesn’t say. It’s always you, even when you aren’t there.
Like it was Van holding that spear. Like it was Van howling into the sky. Like it was Van, kneeling beside a body, tearing loose that first revolting mouthful.
“Real,” she whispers, letting her hand skim lower, reveling in the near-silent gasp Tai rewards her with. “We’re real, Tai. The realest thing out here.”
Tai holds to her wrist, buries her moan in a willing mouth, and the world sleeps on around them.
***
The thump yanks her back to the world. She’s been dreaming deep, dreaming of cavernous hunger, of flames licking the sky—the table sagging under girl-weight, the knife held high, the ritual of first-bite moans and struggling not to think. Her wrist aches; they want her to untie the rope, to let them lavish her with ointments and bandages. She can’t seem to do it, can’t seem to cut that tie, even without another body on the other end.
A groan from the floor. Van sits up, groggy.
“Tai?”
Nothing for a few seconds. She slaps along the bed with her right hand, straining across miles and miles of unnecessary space. No familiar body beside her. The sheets are still warm. She rolls to the edge of the plump mattress, squinting into the dark.
“Tai? You okay?”
A rustle, and she thinks, God, she’s not there, she’s sleepwalking, it followed us home. Then, quietly, Tai says, “I fell.”
“I see that,” Van says, trying to smile. Taissa Turner, falling out of bed. It should be hilarious. It should be a private joke they beat to death over the next twenty years.
Tai isn’t laughing. She’s sitting with her back to the wall, a shadow just barely visible thanks to blackout curtains and dark wood.
No stars in here. No moon. It feels like death to Van, all that thick, viscous dark pouring into the room. It feels like the last thing she’ll ever see.
She slides from the bed, taking the sheet with her, settling beside Taissa on the carpet. The fibers are too sturdy, too stiff. They do not give the way pine needles do, the way sticks snap and snow sinks underfoot.
“Bad dream?” she asks. Tai leans her head against Van’s shoulder, the close crop of her hair tickling Van’s cheek.
“Are you real?”
Van loops an arm around her middle, counting the ribs beneath her sleep shirt. Tai breathes in shallow gulps, her hand seeking out the bend of Van’s knee. She closes a fist around Van’s pants, holding tight enough to pinch the skin beneath.
“Yeah, Tai. I’m real.” Then, hesitantly: “Do you want to talk about it?”
They’ve been out of the woods for almost three days. It feels like a lifetime. It feels like a dream. No wonder Tai clutches at her with bony fingers, broken nails, a body that seems incapable of nudging close enough.
“We chose you,” Tai says mechanically. Van’s blood stops dead, her heart catching, skipping like a knifepoint off glass. We, not it. Taissa never did believe in it.
Dumb luck, Tai thought at the start. Dumb luck draws. And then, later, as they dwindled down, as they got more and more into the dance of predator and prey: It’s us, Van. How are we supposed to explain this? How are we supposed to be like this?
She remembers the distance in Tai’s face when she’d broken a girl’s leg by accident. She remembers wanting to throw up her own lunch. She remembers like the scene of a movie that didn’t age particularly well, one she might never have the gumption to watch again.
“We chose you,” Tai repeats. “And I kept telling you to run. Run like Natalie that first time. Run, and maybe I could hold them off, but you just. Stood there.” She raises her head, eyes boring into Van’s. “You stood there, and you touched my face, and you smiled.”
Goosebumps rise along her arms. Van takes hold of the rope around her wrist, pulls hard enough to open the scab again.
“I’m here,” she tries to say, but her mouth is dry. Tai keeps talking, her voice low and quick, like she’s trying to run out from under the words.
“You smiled, and you held the knife out to me, and I—” She doesn’t have to finish. Van’s had this dream, too. Van’s had this same dream, trying to ward off the others, trying to hold them apart from Tai like she used to when they’d pick bitchy little catfights at practice. The knife. The blood. That first bite.
Because, of course, the first bite of Tai would belong to her. The first bite of her would belong to Tai. They all have someone they’re responsible for, don’t they? Someone for whom they’d have to grant permission to the rest. Shauna had Jackie. Travis had Javi.
It was dumb luck, that she never had to taste Tai and then share her with anyone else.
The audacity of that world. She can’t imagine living in it.
“But you’re here,” Tai is saying. “You’re here.” Her hand glides from shoulder to breastbone, pressing firm against the center of Van’s chest. She presses her face into Van’s hair, breathes in the hotel shampoo, licks once along her neck like she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. Van’s heart stutters.
“Yeah, Tai. Right here. Not going anywhere.”
“Here,” Tai repeats, almost a growl. She is awake, so awake, but there’s a primal power in her voice all the same. The other is here, beating beneath her control. They’ve been so close to merging lately, so close to clicking into place. A few more months, and there may have been no difference at all.
The idea draws a shudder up Van’s spine. She takes Tai’s hand from her chest, slides down until both sets of fingers rest just above her waistband. Her eyes never leave Tai’s face as she shifts her hips, letting Tai in, pressing herself back against the wall for support.
“Real,” she assures Tai in a similarly low voice. “You can feel it. You can feel me. I’m—” Her breath staggers as she guides Tai’s fingers lower, as they move together in small, rough circles. “I’m right here.”
Dumb luck, she thinks, but we won anyway. We won, Tai. We’re here.
Tai folds into her then, lips parted in urgent strokes, tilting her jaw up to bite at the soft underside. She pushes Van back, straddling one thigh, grinding herself down in a harsh rhythm, and Van focuses all of her attention on the wet, the heat, the gossamer flex of pelting toward the edge. She focuses on Tai’s teeth sinking into her throat, on the private symphony of Tai’s voice muffled against her skin, on the combined pressure of her own fingers circling and Tai’s pressing inside. She focuses on the wall bruising her back and the too-stiff carpet under her trembling legs, and she tells herself she’s here. Here. Real.
“I’m real, I’m so real, we’re so real, god, Tai—”
And she pretends she can’t hear it when Tai, her voice half-feral, whispers, “You tasted real then, too.”
***
The knock yanks her back to the world. She’s been dreaming deep, dreaming of wounds so fresh, they haven’t yet had time to close—the wilderness, the snow, the drip of fat on her tongue. The spot on her wrist where the rope should be itches. She scratches without thinking, padding to the door in too-soft sweatpants, last week’s tank top. Her hair has been trimmed above her shoulders. A brand-new tattoo burns just behind the right one.
The knock comes again, three rattling measures. Van unlatches the chain.
“Tai?”
The air wallops out of her like she’s been headbutted. She’s standing there, Tai, disheveled and uncertain. She’s standing there in a pretty dress, her hair tied back with a bright blue scarf. Her earrings dangle, bright silver filigree catching the low light of the apartment hall. She looks like she’s just come from a party.
Van, hyperaware of not owning a vacuum, of three pizza boxes stacked on the counter, of the leak in the bathroom ceiling and the half-disemboweled VCR on the coffee table, stares.
“Tai. What are you—”
She steps haltingly back as Tai plows forward, storming into her space. Her space. The space she keeps by herself, because she couldn’t stomach living with someone who wasn’t (Taissa) there for the worst of it. The space she has by herself because she (tried) couldn’t get Tai to sit still.
“Taissa,” she says, hating the pleading note in her croaky voice. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Tai flinches. It’s a small thing, barely a twitch around her left eye, but it brings a savage pleasure to Van’s chest anyway. Tai walked out on her. Months ago, Tai walked out, a packed bag and too-calm excuses about moving forward, moving on, getting past it.
It. Like they didn’t both know what that meant. Like they didn’t both know she was just lumping Van in with the shadow puppets of long-dead trees.
“You can’t just do this,” she says. “You can’t just come here at—” She glances toward the TV, the little blue numbers with their hazy glow. “Three-fifteen in the goddamn morning with no warning.”
Tai scrubs at her mouth. Her eyes are serious. Her dress is cut high around her thighs, glorious muscle on display, and Van hates how her skin heats at the sight.
“Can you just—spit it out?” she asks wearily. “Tai.”
“Are you real?”
This again. She closes her eyes, shakes her head.
“Yeah, Tai. I’m fucking real. I’m fucking real, and I’m standing in my pajamas in my fucking apartment in the middle of the night, because you—”
“I’m here.” Tai steps closer: one, two, caging in a wary animal. Her skin is luminous. Her lips are full. Her face is etched into Van’s heart with ink, with blood, with scrapes have long-since scarred. “I’m here. Right?”
The fight goes abruptly out of her as Tai stops, fiddling with the hem of her skirt. She looks so lost. She looks so much like the girl who woke in the night with a scream on her lips. The young woman who rode Van in a prissy hotel room drowned in shadows, murmuring into her neck about how she’d tasted real then, too.
Her stomach is a knot. Her scars feel suddenly so much larger, the itch so acute, it takes all her energy not to tear them open.
“You’re here,” she agrees when Tai just blinks at her. “Drunk, probably. Is that it? You got drunk and came here for, what?”
“You,” Tai says. Then stops. Rubs her mouth again. “I mean, no. Not drunk. Just—I was at this party with this—with some people.”
With this girl, Van fills in automatically. She could run ten miles in the snow on that knowledge. Ten miles with a spear in one hand and a scream painting the sky. She could kill, riding that knowledge.
“And it was too…loud?” Tai looks at the ceiling as if for help. “Too crowded, or too much bad music, and there was a bonfire, and I just kept thinking about the smell of hair. You know? The way it…the way it burrows up into your nose and stays there, when it burns, and then someone pulled out a deck of cards, and I just…lost it.”
She tries to smile. It’s getting more convincing, Van notices, more like the face of the girl in her yearbook every time Tai tries that look on. It’s plastic, sure, but the good hearty kind. The kind that doesn’t melt easy.
“I ran away. Can’t remember the last time I ran like that in a dress like this.”
Van can. Van remembers Doomcoming, remembers bandages and a deliberately-designed mask and the way the colors had danced and fizzed as Tai undressed her in the clearing. Van remembers running, laughing, an uproar of lust and high and love.
“And I know it isn’t fair,” Tai is saying, and she’s so close, Van can smell the perfume on her. It’s new. It doesn’t entirely suit her, but it sends a throb between Van’s legs all the same. “It isn’t fair to come here and put it on you, but I—needed to know. What was real. What was then, and what’s now.”
“Aren’t I both?” Van asks wryly. This time, Tai doesn’t flinch at all. This time, her smile is genuine.
“Always, Van. Kinda makes you the most real a person can be.”
She wants to hate Tai for saying that, wants to hate her for believing it, because it’s not fair. Not fair at all that Tai could walk away and come back and still be that girl who kissed her after a winning game, and with crash dust in her hair, and in the aftermath of Hell itself. It’s not fair to either of them, for Tai to be here tonight.
“Real,” Van agrees. She brushes a thumb along Tai’s chin, liking the way Tai instinctively tilts down to meet her. Some things just don’t change, no matter how badly you need them to.
Tai kisses her like she’s saying goodbye—quick, almost careless, breaking as soon as she’s made contact. Van catches her face in both hands.
“No way,” she breathes. “No way you’re doing that. You came here. You wanted real.”
I’ll fucking give you real.
Tai looks at her, dark eyes gleaming. She moves back in, and their mouths meet in a slow dance. Van angles her head, and Tai’s mouth is a catalogue of all the gifts she’s ever been given. Tai’s lips bear the last traces of liquor, and Van drinks her in, liking the bitter burn, liking the heat of her tongue. She sighs, and Tai is letting her hair run through grasping fingers, and they are flush in the middle of her ravaged living room. Tai’s knees knock against her, Tai’s hips pressing tight and veering away again. There’s something almost taunting about the way she’s moving, something almost like a dare. Follow me, her body says. Follow me down.
Van always has. Van always will. She can’t admit it to herself, not without breaking completely under the weight of loss, but she knows it as completely as any story.
They’re languid, moving across the room—Tai’s hands smoothly gripping her hips, Van’s slipping up the back of that dress—a miracle of momentum preventing either of them tripping over a pair of shoes along the way. It’s coasting. It’s sailing. It’s real, and it’s a dream, and it’s going to eat Van alive in the morning.
But if there’s one thing she learned out there over nineteen harrowing months, it’s how to survive the moment. Survive the moment as it comes, and greet the next one if it bothers to show up on your doorstep. Not before. Not a second before.
Tai has her pinned against the frame of her bedroom door. She slides the dress up, lets her fingers linger on the bruises Tai’s built up from soccer practice. Presses hard enough to coax the breath out of Tai in a hiss, hard enough for Tai to buck once against her in warning. She smiles into Tai’s neck, laughing when Tai shoves her harder against the wood in retaliation.
She hasn’t laughed in a while, she realizes. It tastes all wrong in her mouth. She banishes it with another kiss, Tai obligingly inviting her in.
The dress is around Tai’s waist, bunched in one of Van’s fists. She’s rocking against Van’s flexed thigh, her hair starting to tumble free, her tongue catching on Van’s teeth. It’s so hauntingly familiar, the way she controls her breathing, the way she angles herself down and away. Van wants to catch her by the chin, make her stop just long enough to reverse that question on her: Are you real? Is this real? Do you promise?
There’s a bed three feet behind them. Not a very good bed, cheap and just barely off the floor, but it’s Van’s. It’s warm, and it’s clean, and just the idea of Tai sprawled naked in her sheets makes her cry out with embarrassing intensity. Tai grins down at her, brow raised, and Van rolls her eyes.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Been a while?” Tai asks with playful mock-sympathy, and she doesn’t need to know Van hasn’t been with anyone else, doesn’t need to know Van can’t imagine how to go about finding someone else. Someone who doesn’t already know how she likes to be touched, how she’s sometimes weird about receiving pleasure when she’s tired, how she hates showering alone. Someone who wouldn’t understand why she sometimes slides down the cabinets while trying to cook dinner, her eyes far away, the combined scents of flame and ground chuck making her head spin.
Tai doesn’t need to know Van had stopped wondering how to go looking for any of that before they even left the woods. If she’d ever started thinking about it at all.
“You know, there are these great inventions,” Tai goes on, and it’s so maddening how she can be an asshole while sucking on Van’s earlobe that way. Tai, ever multi-tasking, grinding her hips and turning her voice to smoke even as she says, “Really cute little shops sell them. All you need are some batteries and maybe a candle…”
“Shut up,” Van repeats on a gasp, tweaking a nipple through the silken fabric of Tai’s dress. Tai ruts against her, groaning.
“I like your hair like this,” she says. “When’d you do it?”
“Don’t remember,” Van says. A lie; she chopped it a week after Tai walked out. Tai doesn’t need to know that, either. Tai doesn’t need to know anything about her right now except the slick of her skin, the marks left behind by short fingernails dug into the back of Tai’s thigh. She grips harder, urging Tai to slow down.
Don’t run from me. Don’t go. You’re here. We’re here.
“Say it,” Tai challenges. Her eyes are lidded. Van reaches down, pushes her underwear aside, lets her fingers coast through sticky-wet curls. The fact that she’s even wearing underwear is pleasing. Maybe she wasn’t planning on getting laid tonight. Maybe she really wasn’t going home with another woman. Maybe.
And maybe it doesn’t matter what she was going to do, because her smell is everywhere in Van’s apartment now. This new perfume and this distinct musk, and Van lives for today. Tonight. This.
“Say it,” Tai says again. She’s pushing against Van’s hand, eager. “Van.”
Reluctantly, Van says, “You’re here.”
“Here,” Tai repeats. “Yes.”
“You’re real,” Van says, and knows it will haunt her later. Knows she’s just saving up ghosts. Knows Tai will not stay.
Tai is hot under her fingers, shifting her hips, hungry for friction. “Real,” she says, the measure of her voice slipping. “Real, I’m real, you’re real, you feel so good.”
Van should push her away. Van should push her right out the door. Van should wake up, wake up now, find her pants around her ankles and her hand buried between her own legs. How many times has she had this dream?
Tai, as if reading her mind, rocks once, twice, holds against her with shuddering strength. She kisses Van hard enough to knock her head back against the doorframe, to send stars behind her eyes.
She’s panting, a hand braced behind Tai’s back to keep her steady. She’s panting, and Tai is kissing the crook of her neck, kissing the slope of her shoulder, pulling her toward the bed. If she lets that happen—if she lets Tai into that stupid fucking bed, shitty as it is—she’ll never recover. Aren’t there enough scars between them?
She shakes her head. “Not in there.”
Tai frowns. “But—”
“That,” she says, her voice glacial despite the heat in the room, “isn’t real.”
It’s a knife. It’s a pit. It’s a queen of hearts. Tai looks at her, crumpled dress and messy hair, and slowly nods. She reaches down, steps out of her ruined underwear, drops them to the ground.
She will forget them.
She will “forget” them.
Van will pretend not to see for days and days, until she can’t put off laundry any longer, and she will not cry. She will not let herself cry.
Van doesn’t live there yet. Van is here, now, real. Van is letting Tai take her by the arms and turn her against the wall. Van is letting Tai push the tank top up her back, off her shoulders. Van is letting Tai trace the tattoo with the tip of one finger, the tip of her tongue.
“I don’t like this,” Tai tells her silkily.
“I don’t care,” Van tells the wall. She’s pressed up between two framed posters, Tai’s chest seamless against her bare back. The plaster is cold against her belly. Tai’s hand sneaking around to slip down her sweats, cupped between her legs, is fire.
“I’d have gone with you,” Tai says into the back of her neck, teeth nipping. “If you’d told me.”
Van doesn’t answer. Van concentrates on breathing, cheek mashed against bright blue paint, hips notched back into Tai’s gentle thrusts. She didn’t ask Tai, because Tai doesn’t like tattoos. She didn’t ask Tai, because Tai wouldn’t have wanted her to get something so dark inked into her skin. She didn’t ask Tai, because Tai doesn’t want to remember.
She didn’t ask Tai, because Tai was already gone.
Tai grinds against her ass, fingers playing rough against her clit, and Van groans. Tai grinds against her, pinning her, mouth a brand against the ink, and Van shuts her eyes.
Tai grinds against her, and kisses the tattoo again, again, again—a yellowjacket raked by four jagged claw marks, stark against freckled skin—and Van lets go.
“Real,” Tai says into her ear. “Real. This is real. This.” She gives her fingers a deliberately firm press. Van growls. “This is real, Van.”
Van sags against the wall, Tai holding her up, and for a while, they just sway. Somewhere, in a world where time is not linear, they are in a lake, bare skin in the moonlight, playing a game Taissa always wins. Van can’t help but think that, of all things, is the one constant. Taissa wins. No matter what.
“Real,” she mouths, unable to give the word the power of a whisper. “Real. Real.”
Tai bows her head against the pallid curve of shoulder and says nothing for a long, long time.