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When they're twelve, he really fucks it up in gym class. He really fucks it up all the time, but especially that day. It's all perfect, his arms strong and her pony-tail in the wind as she cheers his name, but he's not exactly a quick one - she always does his thinking for him - and he goes the wrong way, scores in the wrong goal. It's gym class, but it might as well be the fucking olympics for the way he pouts about it, fingers digging into his palms, and she wants to take his hand, but they're not quite dating yet.
But that's the day. She takes his hand anyway and she drags him through the hallways after her, while the other boys and girls watch and pretend they're not jealous when they are. Everyone wants to be them, everyone wants to take their hands. Jackson doesn't understand that, but he's going to.
He sulks and he glares and he still digs in his fingers with that quiet, seething anger that he like so much, but now they dig into her palm instead.
Jackson digs into her, he digs and digs and digs down deep, so deep that she can't claw him out, not even when she wants to.
"We're going to be perfect," she says to him that day, in the parking lot after school. She makes him kiss her and kiss her hard, and he doesn't know how to argue with her quick words and steady hands. "You and me, Jackson Whittemore. We're going to be so good."
He doesn't ever really believe her, she thinks, but she's got conviction enough for the both of them.
---
When they're fourteen, she touches him through the crotch of his jeans and he winces like he's been cut, almost bats her hand away before she grabs him by the face and makes him look at her eyes. She knows what's best. She is the best, and so is he, so when she undoes his zip with her manicured nails, he closes his eyes, drops his head back and shudders with it. Like all of him, it's not quick and easy. He won't look at her hand, won't look at his cock, just keeps his eyes locked on her face. He looks stressed, like it's a chore, like he's afraid of something.
Like he thinks that she'll rip him apart with those hands. Maybe she would, if she knew how.
It takes longer for him to come in her hand than it does for him to come in his own - she's timed him, followed him into the bathroom at school and sat on the sink while he'd taken care of business, deciding on a new shade of nail polish and doing her calculus homework, then doing his just for good measure. She'd be offended by how long it takes if she didn't know him, but that's just Jackson.
He's no good under pressure, and she never lets up on it. Not even when he's gasping, squirming in her hand, racked with the shaky, uncomfortable pleasure that defines every shade of him. He gets come all over her fingers and she cleans it off neatly with a tissue, before zipping him up and patting him consolingly on the thigh.
Jackson sits up, leveling her with that gruff look that would be unnerving if she weren't used to it. "Am I supposed to do something, too?"
"What could you possibly do for me?" she wants to say, because it's cruel and sharp and clever, everything she's set up shop to be. But it's not true, and she's too smart too fool herself into believing it, even if he's not.
"What do you want to do?" she says instead, and tilts her head to the side, smiling her lipgloss smile at him.
He trails his fingers up her skirt, and they're as blunt and clumsy as they are angry. She can feel it in his skin. He wants to hurt her, because he wants to hurt everyone. That's not a shock - Jackson's been a bomb waiting to go off since they were kids, and the fuse is only getting shorter. What surprises her is that he doesn't hurt her. It's slow going, and she doesn't come, just soaks his fingers, gets her heart rate up in an uncomfortable thump that rattles her chest off the path she'd had set. None of this had been in the plans, and that doesn't get her wetter, but it makes her lean her head on his shoulder as he touches her. He barely notices, so caught up in the task. His brow grows thicker by the day, and right then it clenches in concentration.
He always tries so, so hard, but never gets anywhere without her help. This time she doesn't help. She's close, but her parents get back from the grocery store before she can finish. She kisses him goodbye when he goes, and he glares his solemn glare at her temples when he kisses her back.
"This was fun," she says, and if he weren't so dull, she might think she catches a smirk as he turns away.
---
When they're sixteen, he fucks her into the mattress and she can't stop laughing the whole time.
He pulls back, gritting his teeth like she's gone and ruined his stoic performance or something, but he's performing all wrong, and tonight she doesn't feel like hitting the stage. "What is so fucking funny, Lydia?" he says with that long-suffering annoyance, and she tosses her head back as he cants his hips.
"Jackson," she says into his skin, "Jackson."
"What?" he says back, voice gone heavy, and it sinks like a stone as she wraps her legs around him.
She's grown hips and he's grown arm muscles, and they're so grown up with their pencil skirts and their lacrosse teams, but she feels like a child then, dress pushed up, buttons undone. He's completely naked and she's not, and that would be hot if it weren't so tiring. He is tiring. Jackson's in her, and he's fucking her, but he's still that little boy who doesn't know what he's doing unless she tells him, and she's not telling because she's never done this either. She's just got plans and schematics that she's mapped in her head, an ever-spiraling staircase of numbers and equations that all end up at the same finish line, in the same perfect world where they're these two perfect people who don't exist and never have.
Jackson is tiring, but Lydia wants to be tired just then, wants to throw out the schematics. Love comes at her in a flurry of feeling, instead of the measured teaspoons of emotion that she's used to divvying out for herself. Love becomes a thing that exists in this world, and not just the fantasy world that they're always marching towards. She's built herself a mask, a costume to wear to her life, and it fits so well now that it sinks right into her skin.
The problem is that Jackson's mask is just a mask, and his hands are just her instruments, machinated to tug softly on her hair and stroke down her flank, but it's still just a play. The show they put on for themselves in the dark. He comes with a cut-off gasp, jaw clenching and disassociated syllables slipping out between his teeth. She only follows him down that road because all of the other ones are lonely, and Lydia isn't meant to be alone. It's her and him, it's a perfect made up world that seems real, and when she gasps his name into the flesh of his shoulder, she closes her eyes and lets her mind float out to sea, out where there are things to feel that don't pierce as hard as love.
He can't sleep in her bed, and she can't sleep with him pacing like that, and they both stay up all night, but still look perfect for school the next morning.
"I love you," she says to him. She says it all the time, because it's part of what they are, a prop for the play, but she means it differently this time. She doesn't know how she means it, and he doesn't know a thing without her there to tell him how, so he hears the words just the same, and nods and asks if she wants to go bowling this weekend.
Her smile is tight and it hurts the way things only hurt in made-up stories, but she smiles her smile and says yes. She's a great fucking bowler.
---
When they're eighteen, he at least isn't a lizard anymore, which is something.
They'd turned him into a little toy soldier, and it splits her stomach with childish jealousy, like someone had taken away her favorite doll. She's posed his limbs and picked out his clothes for most of his life, and it's no great wonder that he doesn't know how to function as a human being without her. The kanima needs a master, they'd told her. They'd gotten it wrong. He just needs her.
It's kind of a fair trade, if she thinks about it. He becomes a reptilian murderer without her, and her stomach sinks and she can't breathe right or eat anything, or do physics equations half as fast as usual. It's a win-win sort of lose-lose situation, because the thought of being stuck with someone should probably make her terrified instead of making her giddy. It's a terrible situation and they are terrible people, probably, but he sleeps nights in her bed again, frowns against her pillows and lets his firm hands waver on her hips.
He tries to apologize, but only once, and he stops when she stops him. "You made me so sad, Jackson," she says, undoing the buttons on his shirt, because this conversation will go better with their clothes off. "But I'm strong, and I know me and you better than you know either of us. I know you're sorry." His pants go off next, and he stands still, letting her strip him with her steady hands and perfect nails. "Don't talk to me like I don't know you."
He just keeps looking at her like he doesn't know what to do. "I don't know how to talk to you," he says.
"You don't know how to do anything," she tells him, and she smiles it out of being an insult.
Jackson sleeps in her bed, but he walks with his own legs and talks with his own voice, eventually. He still fucks up, he still always fucks up, but there's a feeling that burns tight in her stomach, that makes all the horrible things into beautiful things. He has no mask left, and his costume is torn to shreds, and there are no more plays to put on, and they have somehow stopped insisting on being their own audience. The schematics are all ripped to pieces and they become one of those love stories that is better off not being documented.
He sleeps in her bed and they go bowling on the weekends and he scowls his scowls and she smiles her smiles. There's a math equation somewhere that could explain the universe. There's an equation that could explain them, too, maybe. Eventually, Lydia stops trying to solve it.