Chapter Text
Bruno Yuson had a great smile.
That was the first thing she'd list whenever she caught herself wondering what the hell she was doing. Great smile. Like a toothpaste commercial. Like a guy in a stock photo holding an acoustic guitar at a beach bonfire—which, coincidentally, he actually did, because he played guitar, which was item number two on the list: plays guitar. Not in a pretentious way either, not one of those guys who showed up at a party and immediately started strumming Wonderwall at the girl he wanted to sleep with. Bruno played for himself. Quietly. In his dorm room with the door half open. It was one of the first things Enid had noticed about him and one of the things she kept bringing up, mentally, every time her brain started trying to compile a Reasons to Reconsider list.
Nice shoulders. That was three. She'd liked his shoulders. She was allowed to like shoulders. Shoulders were a thing girls were supposed to like, and his were broad without being one of those gym-dudebro broad that made a guy look like his head was too small for his body. He had shoulders like a golden retriever who'd started strength training on accident. Appealing. Objectively.
Attentive. Four. He remembered things. Not the big things, which anyone could do—he remembered that she liked her coffee with oat milk and a stupid amount of vanilla, and he remembered that she was allergic to actual kiwi but not kiwi-flavored candy, and he remembered that Tuesdays were her worst day because of her early morning chemistry lab followed by her even earlier morning social studies seminar.
Patient. Five. And that one she'd really leaned into.
For six months Enid Sinclair had looked at her boyfriend, ticked off those five items, and told herself that was enough. That five good things about a person was, in fact, plenty. That she was being so lucky, actually, because a lot of girls had way shorter lists, and some girls had lists that were just, like, he's tall, and called it a day.
She was, she now saw with the sort of clarity that only came from finding out said boyfriend had been getting his rocks off somewhere else, delusional.
Because the list was a cope. The list had always been a cope. The list was what Enid had been reciting to herself in the quiet moments when she'd be making out with Bruno on his bed, his hand working its way up under her shirt, and she'd be thinking about the laundry. Or her bio homework. Or that one scene in Inside Out that always made her cry. Anything, honestly. Anything except what was actually happening on the bed.
And she'd tried. God, she had really, genuinely tried. She'd given him handjobs with what she was pretty sure was textbook technique (she'd Googled it, more than once, in what she now had to acknowledge as a deeply depressing chapter of her internet history). She'd given him blowjobs and learned exactly how to tilt her head, exactly how to breathe, exactly the right noises that seemed to work on him. She'd let him touch her, and she'd learned to make the right sounds back—little gasps at the right intervals, a whimper here and there that she'd studied from movies—and she'd gotten good at it. She'd gotten so good that he'd told her once, breathlessly, that she was incredible, and she'd felt proud. Like she'd aced a pop quiz.
But her body never did the thing.
Her body never did the thing it was supposed to do, the thing every movie and book and terrifying conversation with Yoko promised was going to happen. She didn't get wet. She didn't get achy. She didn't get that feeling people described where you needed something so badly you couldn't breathe. She got bored. She got itchy. She got the sense that she was very politely waiting for a bus that was never going to come, while pretending, with increasingly award-worthy enthusiasm, that the bus had already arrived.
So she hadn't let him go further than hands and mouths. I'm not ready, she'd told him, maybe fifteen different times in slightly different phrasings, because saying it once hadn't seemed to be enough. I want to, I just want it to be right. And he'd said he understood. He'd said he'd wait.
He'd understood so much, in fact, that he'd waited exactly five months before sticking his dick in a gorgeous senior named Sofia Reyes.
So. That was that.
Six months, two coffees a week, one shared Spotify playlist, and a lot of nights staring at her ceiling wondering what was wrong with her—all boiled down to a Saturday afternoon in October when Enid had walked into the back of the art studio looking for Bruno with a cupcake in her hand and had found him instead with Sofia's legs wrapped around his waist and Sofia's mouth on his neck and his hands—those patient, coffee-bringing, attentive hands—up the back of her sweater.
The cupcake had rainbow sprinkles. It was a really nice cupcake. She'd thrown it at his head.
"I'm going to key his car."
Yoko, sprawled diagonally across Enid's bed with her sunglasses pushed up into her hair, did not look up from her phone. "Kay."
"I'm going to key his car and then I'm going to put a hex on his guitar."
"Kay."
"I don't know any hexes, Yoko. Help me."
"I'll find you a hex."
Enid flopped face-down onto the foot of her own bed. The comforter smelled like her detergent and, faintly, like the cheap drugstore cologne she'd been trying to scrub out of the fabric for two days. She made a sound into the mattress that was somewhere between a scream and a whimper, muffled and damp.
"He's a bitch," Yoko said, companionably. "Just objectively. I'm not even being biased. He's a bitch."
"He's a massive bitch."
"Massive."
"With bitch energy."
"Radiant bitch energy. Visible from space."
Enid rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. There was a water stain there shaped vaguely like California. She'd been looking at it for a year and a half and she still couldn't decide if it was getting bigger or if she'd just been imagining the original outline. "I just keep thinking, though—"
"No."
"—like, what if—"
"Enid. No."
"—what if I had just—"
"Enid Elizabeth Sinclair. Do not. Do not sit there and workshop the ways this was your fault."
"I'm not workshopping," Enid said, workshopping. "I'm thinking. I'm thinking that if I had just been, you know, normal about it—"
"Normal about what."
"The sex thing."
Yoko finally lowered her phone. She did it slowly, the way someone would set down a drink before addressing a small fire. She looked at Enid with an expression Enid couldn't quite read. "Okay. Look at me."
"I'm looking."
"He didn't cheat on you because you weren't putting out, Enid."
"I know—"
"He cheated on you because he's a person who cheats. That's on him. That's a whole, complete, free-standing him problem. You could have been letting him hit it like a jackhammer three times a day and he still would have fucked Sofia Reyes, because Sofia Reyes was available and he's a worm."
Enid snorted, because hit it like a jackhammer was not a phrase she'd ever expected to hear in her life, let alone from Yoko, let alone directed at her. "Okay—"
"I'm not done."
"Oh."
Yoko was sitting up now. She'd pulled one leg up under her and she had that look she got sometimes, the one where she was about to say something she'd been rotating in her head for a while. "I've been listening to you, you know. For like. Months."
"I know."
"The faking. The, like." Yoko made a gesture with her hand, a wobbly little rotation that Enid interpreted, charitably, as the entire general situation. "The not-getting-there thing. The pretending. You told me. Multiple times."
"Yeah."
"And I kept thinking you were gonna figure it out."
"Figure what out?"
Yoko looked at her. She looked at her for a long second, and Enid felt, distantly, the way she sometimes felt when Wednesday looked at her too directly, like she'd been x-rayed by a machine that could see things she hadn't decided to show yet.
"I'm just saying," Yoko said, carefully, "maybe the problem was never that you weren't ready."
"What does—"
"Maybe the problem was Bruno."
There was a second there where something in Enid's stomach did a little lurch, the way a stomach does on a staircase when you miscount the number of steps. It was a small thing—almost nothing—and she moved past it so fast she almost didn't notice it.
"Well, obviously the problem was Bruno," she said, loud and bright. "I mean, hello, he was a cheating bitchbaby the whole time. Right?"
Yoko watched her for another second. Then she went, "Right."
"Right." Enid sat up and shook out her hair, which was a thing she did when she needed to physically relocate her brain out of a conversation. "Which is why, Yoko, which is why, I have an idea."
"Oh no."
"It's a great idea."
"It's already not a great idea."
"I want him," Enid said, "to see me."
Yoko blinked.
"To see me with someone," Enid clarified, because she could tell from the expression on Yoko's face that she'd jumped ahead of herself. "I want him to see me with someone new, looking happy, looking hot, looking like I have completely fucking moved on, and I want him to go to sleep every night for the rest of his miserable worm life thinking about what he threw away."
Yoko's mouth pressed into a line, but she didn't say anything.
"A fake boyfriend," Enid said. "I need a fake boyfriend. Just for a little bit. Just until he, you know. Suffers."
"No."
"Ajax."
"Enid."
"What! Ajax would be perfect, he's sweet, he's already my friend, he's got those—"
"Ajax is still in love with you."
Enid stopped, with her hands still spread out from where she'd been gesturing. "He's not. That was, like, six months ago."
"Enid. Ajax is still in love with you. Every person in this school except you knows that Ajax is still in love with you. There's probably a pigeon in the quad right now that knows Ajax is still in love with you."
"That's—"
"You broke up with Ajax for Bruno. Using him would be cruel, and I'm not just saying that because I'm being, like, responsible. I'm saying that actually, as your friend, because you're not a cruel person and when you sober up in a week you are going to feel like absolute shit about it."
"Okay, so not Ajax—"
"Not anybody, Enid. The plan is bad. It's bad regardless of who you cast in the role. You're mad and you want a band-aid and this is a terrible band-aid."
"I can't just sit here," Enid said, and she heard her voice crack a little at the end of it, and she hated that, and she kept going. "I can't just sit here in this room and smell his cologne in my sheets and be the girl who got cheated on. I have to do something. I have to—" she waved her hand, "—redirect."
"Redirect your energy into, I don't know, murder. Or kickboxing."
"I'm doing it."
"Enid."
"I'm doing it."
"Enid, I am telling you, as a person who loves you—"
"I'm doing it, Yoko." Enid was standing now. She grabbed her jacket off the back of her desk chair and she pulled it on and she was already halfway to the door. "I have to. I'm doing it."
Yoko stayed where she was, one leg still tucked under her, the phone dark in her hand, watching Enid the way you watched a car you could see was about to miss a turn.
"Okay," Yoko said, flatly, to the closing door. "Okay, cool. Great."
And then, quieter, to nobody: "Godspeed, you idiot."
She'd walked to the Weathervane. She'd walked back from the Weathervane. She'd stood on the bridge over the little creek on the east side of the quad for a stupid amount of time looking at her reflection and thinking about the phrase moral high ground and whether she was currently on it or under it. By the time she'd arrived at Ophelia Hall she'd rearranged her plan enough times that she had a pitch. An actual pitch. She'd rehearsed opening lines. She'd considered visual aids.
The typewriter was going when Enid pushed open the door, which meant Wednesday was back and also meant Wednesday was not, technically, available for conversation. Wednesday at her typewriter was a whole ecosystem. There were rules. You didn't interrupt Wednesday at her typewriter unless you had a very good reason or unless you were Thing, who did whatever the hell he wanted.
Enid had, she felt, a very good reason.
"Wednesday."
Clack clack clack clack.
"Wednesday, I need you to hear me out because I have a plan, and I know you love plans, especially plans that involve the suffering of other people—"
The typing stopped, and Enid knew she had her. That silence was the sound of Wednesday's attention relocating from whatever gothic murder-prose she was currently constructing (Viper's Nest, Book 3, or whatever, Enid had stopped keeping track of the titles after Wednesday informed her they were "not for her consumption, demographically speaking") and landing, full wattage, on her.
Wednesday did not turn around. She rarely did, for the initial attention grab. The back of her head—braided, severe, the part down the middle straight enough to use as a ruler—was all Enid got.
It was still more response than most people on earth got out of Wednesday Addams, so Enid took the win.
"So. Okay. So you remember how, yesterday, when I told you about Bruno, you very calmly said the words 'I will exsanguinate him in the courtyard at dawn,' and I was like, Wednesday, no, and you were like, Enid, yes, and then we compromised where you didn't do that and you watched the Notebook with me instead?"
Clack.
"Right. Well. I've had some time to think."
Wednesday finally turned in her chair. Just her head, just enough to pin Enid with one of those looks—eyes like a stained-glass window in a very haunted church, unblinking, the kind of look that back in their first few weeks of living together had made Enid briefly consider moving rooms. These days it just made her stomach do a small, confusing flip that she had decided to stop investigating.
"I'm listening."
"Okay. So. I don't want to hurt him hurt him. I want him to, you know. Suffer. Emotionally. Psychologically. From afar. Like, I want him to spend every Econ lecture thinking about me and hating his life."
"A reasonable goal."
"Thank you."
"Continue."
"I want," Enid said, bracing both hands on the back of her own desk chair because she needed something to hold onto while she said this part, "to fake-date someone."
Wednesday blinked. Once. Slow.
"I want Bruno to see me happy and thriving and unavailable, specifically to somebody that he has to look at every single day, and I want it to eat him alive from the inside like one of those parasitic wasps you told me about that one time at breakfast that I begged you not to tell me about."
"The Glyptapanteles."
"Yes. That one. I want to Glyptapanteles him."
Wednesday considered this. Her fingers hovered over the typewriter keys and then, slowly, lowered to her lap. Fully engaged. Enid, absurdly, felt flattered.
"Who."
"Ajax."
"No."
"Wait, but—"
"He is a snake, and he is pathologically still attached to you. Bruno would not find your returning to a prior option threatening—he would find it flattering. It would improve his mood." Wednesday's mouth did the thing where it almost moved. "You are trying to do the opposite."
"Fine. Okay. Sebastian."
"Bruno's friend."
"Yeah, like—the betrayal angle, right? He'd—"
"No."
"Then what about—"
"No."
"You didn't even let me say the name."
"Whichever name you were about to say, the answer is no. The pattern of this conversation indicates that you are about to suggest someone who will either fall in love with you, sleep with you under false pretenses, or gossip. I am saving us time."
"Oh my God, is this you caring about me?"
"This is me having watched you cry for six consecutive days last week and deciding that I do not have the emotional bandwidth to do it again."
"Sure, babe."
Wednesday's eye twitched at babe, and Enid filed that away for later, because she was a woman in crisis, not dead.
"Okay, well, if every option I pitch is a disaster, Your Majesty," she threw her hands up. "You do it, then."
It was a joke. It was a joke. It was the kind of thing you said at the end of a brainstorming session when the brainstorming session had officially collapsed, the verbal equivalent of tipping the Monopoly board off the table. Enid said it, smacked her forehead onto her desk and was already mentally moving on to Plan B, whatever Plan B was going to be—
"Fine."
Enid didn't move for a second.
Then she lifted her head.
Wednesday was still looking at her. Same posture, same face, same composed stillness, the only difference being that the word fine was apparently now just hanging in the air between them.
"I'm sorry, what?"
"Fine. I'll do it."
"You'll—" Enid sat up. Slowly. "You'll do it."
"Correct."
"You will."
"Is there an echo in here?"
Enid stared at her. She was waiting, she realized, for the part where Wednesday said obviously I'm joking, Enid, the proposition is absurd, Enid, you're fucking crazy. But the part was not coming. Wednesday was just looking back at her, unbothered, her hands folded in her lap now, as though she had made a perfectly ordinary decision about a perfectly ordinary matter and was now waiting for Enid to catch up.
"I am your roommate," Wednesday said, when Enid apparently took too long to form words. "The proximity is pre-established. Bruno is already intimidated by me, which shortens the performance curve significantly. I do not have a reputation for emotional entanglements, which means my involvement will read as a genuine departure on your part rather than a predictable rebound."
Enid heard it and didn't hear it, in that order. The words landed a little strangely, the way words do when they're the right shape but not quite the right weight, and then her brain moved on because her brain was too busy flailing to linger.
"Wednesday." She sat forward. The scheming had drained out of her voice, and she let it. "You really, seriously, don't have to do this. This is a lot. I was being dumb. I'm being dumb."
"You are often being dumb. This does not change my answer."
"I'm serious—"
"As am I." Wednesday's head tilted, just slightly. "If this is what will remove Bruno Yuson from both of our lives, I consider the cost acceptable."
"Wednesday—"
"Enid. The decision is made. Stop attempting to unmake it on my behalf."
Which was Wednesday for drop it, and Enid, against every instinct, dropped it.
"Okay." She took a breath. "Okay. So. Ground rules."
"Public performance only. Holding hands in the quad. Walking to and from classes together when feasible. One, possibly two strategic displays of affection in Bruno's direct line of sight. No unnecessary escalation beyond what sells the narrative."
Enid opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. She felt like a person who'd walked into a car dealership to browse and somehow walked out with a lease. A Wednesday Addams lease. With terms and conditions she hadn't fully read but had apparently already signed.
"Cool. Cool cool cool." Cool cool cool cool cool. "Great. That's a very reasonable list of things from a very reasonable person."
Wednesday had already swiveled back toward her typewriter, one hand lifting to the keys like the meeting had adjourned and she'd been dismissed from it by some internal parliamentary procedure Enid hadn't been invited to.
"I'm gonna—" Enid jerked a thumb at the door. "Yoko. Dinner. I should tell her. Not that I'm telling her, I'm not telling her, I'm definitely not telling her, but I'm gonna go sit across from her and not-tell her very aggressively."
"Mm."
"Okay. Okay, bye."
"Enid."
She turned in the doorway.
Wednesday was looking at her over her shoulder. "Take your jacket. It's cold."
Enid grabbed her jacket and was halfway down the hall before she realized she hadn't heard the typewriter start up behind her.
She made it exactly as far as sitting down across from Yoko in the dining hall before she cracked, which she felt was actually pretty impressive considering her previous personal record for keeping a secret was about the length of time it took to walk from one confession to the nearest person who would listen.
"So I have news."
Yoko looked up from her tray.
"Good news, actually. You're gonna be so proud of me. I took your advice. Fully took it. Zero percent of my fake-boyfriend plan involves Ajax."
Yoko's fork paused halfway to her mouth.
"Okay."
"Right?" Enid beamed. "You were so right about Ajax. I heard you. I heard you and I sat with it and I was like, Yoko has a point, Yoko has several points, Yoko is correct, and I pivoted. I am a pivoting queen."
"Who."
"Hm?"
"Who'd you pick instead?"
"Oh." Enid reached for her water glass, took a sip, and set it back down with a little flourish, because this was, genuinely, one of the more satisfying reveals of her life. "Wednesday."
Yoko did not move.
For a second Enid thought maybe she'd mumbled it, or maybe the dining hall noise had swallowed it, so she leaned forward and clarified, "Wednesday. Addams. My roommate."
"Enid."
"What?"
"This is worse."
"How is it worse."
"It's a million times worse. For you. For her. And for me, because I have to watch it."
"Yoko." Enid spread her hands. "It was her idea. Well. Kind of. I floated it, and she said yes, like, immediately, and—"
"Immediately."
"Yeah."
"Wednesday Addams said yes. Immediately. To fake-dating you."
"Right?"
"Enid." Yoko pushed the sunglasses up into her hair. Her eyes were doing a thing Enid couldn't quite read—something tired and a little sad and a little what are we doing here. "Has it, at any point in the last hour, occurred to you to ask why."
"Why what?"
"Why she said yes."
"Because she's a good friend." Enid shrugged. "Because she thinks Bruno is, and I'm quoting, a pustule. Because Wednesday loves revenge more than oxygen and I offered her a free pass at psychological warfare. It's, like, her Super Bowl."
Yoko searched her face. Enid watched her do it—watched Yoko's eyes move from one of her eyes to the other and back, like she was looking for something specific and not finding it. Whatever Yoko had been about to say, she visibly rethought it, swallowed it, and set it down next to the fork.
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay."
"Great. So we're aligned."
Yoko took a long sip of her drink. She did not respond. She picked up her fork again and returned her attention to her plate, and Enid, satisfied, speared another fry.
"I told you it was a good plan."
Over the next two weeks, Enid made a few discoveries about fake-dating her roommate.
The first was that fake-dating Wednesday Addams looked, to the untrained eye, exactly like being friends with Wednesday Addams, because they already did all the things couples did. They ate together. They walked to classes together. They existed in the same room together for so many hours per day that Enid had started to suspect Wednesday's presence in her life had its own gravity, like a small, disgruntled moon. The only thing they were not, technically, already doing was holding hands, and so Enid, on day one, reached out and took Wednesday's hand in the quad with all the confidence of a woman with a plan.
Wednesday's hand went rigid in hers like she had just been handed a dead fish and told to pretend it was alive.
They walked thirty feet. Enid could feel every finger on Wednesday's hand thinking about escape, visibly plotting the most efficient tactical withdrawal. By the time they'd reached the bio building Enid was pretty sure Wednesday was about to start gnawing her own wrist off just to be free, and Enid let go before she had to witness it. Wednesday wiped her palm on her skirt. Not in a cruel way, just in the way a person wipes their palm after handling something unpleasant, which, if anything, was worse.
So Enid tried to escalate.
She tried jokes first, because surely Wednesday could be provoked into, like, one public laugh. This was not an outrageous ask. Wednesday had laughed exactly four times in the span of their friendship, and Enid had documented each occurrence in her mental filing system under Section A titled Evidence She Is Not Actually a Robot, so she knew it was possible. She cracked a joke at lunch on a Tuesday, loud enough for Bruno two tables over to hear, something about a professor that was admittedly not her best material but was at least a solid six out of ten.
"Wednesday, that was funny."
"It wasn't."
"It was a little funny."
"If I laughed, it would be to reward inadequate effort, which would encourage future inadequate effort, and I don't tolerate you enough to want that for you."
Which—okay, one, rude, two, the phrase I don't tolerate you enough to want that for you was a wild way to phrase that, and three, Enid filed it away under Section B: Things Wednesday Says That Probably Mean Something Normal But Sound Like They Were Pulled Out of a Nineteenth-Century Letter.
Next: the head-on-shoulder move. This was a classic. This was, like, Fake Dating 101, chapter one, page one. Enid had seen it in every romcom ever made, and for once her roommate's height worked in her favor since Wednesday's shoulder was exactly at the correct altitude for a resting head.
She lowered her head onto Wednesday's shoulder in the library. Wednesday turned into a plank. Her entire body went so still and upright and wooden that Enid briefly wondered if Wednesday was actually as allergic to affection as she was color.
"You're supposed to act natural," Enid whispered.
"This is natural," Wednesday muttered back. "I am naturally uncomfortable."
Strike two.
Strike three came on a Thursday, when Enid brought Wednesday a coffee in front of Bruno's usual study spot in the corner of the dining hall. She'd gotten one for Wednesday and one for herself and she'd made a little ceremony of it—here you go, babe, in a voice she thought was very convincingly girlfriendy—and Wednesday took a single sip, set it down on the table, and said, flatly, "This is the wrong order."
"It's fine."
"It's a vanilla latte."
"Just drink it."
"I don't drink vanilla lattes."
"Wednesday. Bruno is looking."
"No. I have standards, Enid."
She didn't drink the latte. She never drank the latte. The latte sat there, unloved, a little foam heart dissolving into nothing, while Enid tried not to think about how that foam heart was probably a metaphor for her entire life.
A day later Enid had a small epiphany: all the places she was taking Wednesday were places they normally went together, so of course no one noticed them together, because they were always together. The solution, clearly, was to drag Wednesday somewhere she did not normally go. So Enid dragged Wednesday to a pep rally (Wednesday stood with her arms crossed, staring at the bleachers like she was appraising them for demolition), to a frat party on Greek Row (Wednesday lasted eleven minutes and left through a window), and to the farmer's market in town on a Saturday morning (Wednesday bought a jar of honey and informed Enid that if she had to look at one more child's handmade friendship bracelet she was going to start a small fire).
Nothing. Not a ripple.
Bruno didn't look. Bianca didn't raise a single immaculate eyebrow. Ajax, who was usually emotionally attuned to Enid's social maneuvering on the molecular level, didn't even text her a hey, what's going on. Enid Sinclair and Wednesday Addams were, it turned out, about as socially noteworthy as the weather, and when Wednesday spent most of the time with the body language of someone accompanying a stranger to the DMV, the performance had a credibility problem.
"You look like you'd rather be literally anywhere else."
"I would rather be literally anywhere else."
So really, in retrospect, no one should have been surprised when Enid got a little desperate.
The plan, such as it was, went like this: the bench on the quad's east side sat directly on the foot-traffic artery between the library and the Tell Tale Cafe where Bruno got his stupid overpriced chai every afternoon between his stupid two-fifteen and his stupid two-thirty, and if Enid positioned them on said bench at two-twenty on the nose, Bruno would walk past at a maximum range of eight feet, and at eight feet even a man with the emotional perceptiveness of a damp paper towel could not fail to notice two girls being visibly in love on a bench.
Bench: check. Two-twenty: check. Girls: check-ish.
The bench was cold through her jeans and Wednesday's hand in hers had all the warmth of a granite slab, which Enid was choosing not to take personally. Two-twenty-two. Bruno was late, which was a character flaw she was mentally adding to the ever-growing list titled Why He Was Never Actually That Great, Enid, Please Stop Mourning Him.
She'd angled them toward the Tell Tale Cafe. She'd put her head almost on Wednesday's shoulder, in a way that telegraphed intimacy without requiring Wednesday to be a participant. She'd laced their fingers together about four minutes ago and Wednesday had allowed it, though allowed was maybe generous—Wednesday was reading a book, one hand bracing the spine, the other hand held captive by Enid's and about as engaged as a prop.
"He's coming."
"Mm."
"Okay. Be cute."
"I'm reading."
"Wednesday—"
Bruno appeared on the north walk and Enid went into full girlfriend mode—tilting her head, giving a little smile, doing the thing where she rubbed her thumb over the knuckle of Wednesday's thumb like they'd been doing it for months. She watched him. She watched him hard. She watched him with the intensity of a woman sending a telepathic message, and then she watched him walk past without so much as a twitch of his stupid patient-guy head, and Sofia was on his arm, and Sofia was laughing at something he'd said, and Enid's stomach did the staircase thing again.
"He didn't even look."
"Hm."
"Wednesday. He didn't even—you weren't watching. He didn't look."
"I have faith in your assessment."
"We have to escalate."
Another hum. Page turn.
Enid was about to launch into Plan D (which was drown herself very publicly in the fountain), when she saw them stop by said fountain. Sofia had turned toward Bruno. She'd put one hand on his chest, gone up on her toes and kissed him. Just like that. In the middle of the quad, in the middle of a Thursday, in the middle of Enid's entire life.
Fuck it.
She grabbed Wednesday's wrist and yanked.
The book hit the grass. Wednesday was on her feet without apparently having chosen to stand, her eyes a little wider than usual, her mouth opening around the first syllable of what was almost certainly going to be Enid, what the fuck.
She cupped Wednesday's face with both hands and kissed her.
There was a second where Wednesday was a statue, unresponsive in a way that made Enid, in some distant corner of her mind, start pre-drafting her obituary (Enid Sinclair, 19, died as she lived, committing a social crime on a Thursday afternoon; survived by her embarrassment).
And then Wednesday's hands came up.
They landed on Enid's hips—not a push or a shove. Her fingers pressed in, ten small points of pressure through Enid's sweater, and Wednesday leaned in, and Enid's brain, which had been running a very productive panic in 4K surround sound, simply switched off.
Kissing Wednesday was nothing like kissing Bruno. Kissing Bruno had been dry toast. Kissing Wednesday was a glass of cold water after a run. Wednesday's mouth was softer than anything about her had any business being, and when Enid's lips parted, Wednesday followed, and her fingers tightened at Enid's waist in a small, private way that Enid felt somewhere very south of where it had any business being felt.
Enid's hands had moved from Wednesday's cheeks to the back of her neck. She didn't remember making that call. Wednesday's braids were a rope between her fingers.
"—Enid?"
They jumped apart.
Well—Enid jumped. Wednesday stepped back in a single smooth motion, one hand already rising to smooth her braids, her expression arranging itself into its usual collected blankness so quickly that Enid almost believed she'd imagined the other thing.
Bruno was standing three feet away. Sofia was behind him, one hand still on his sleeve. His face was doing something Enid couldn't parse, and a month ago she would have catalogued every micro-shift of it and turned the results over in her head for a week, but right now she was having trouble remembering her own middle name.
"I didn't know you and—" Bruno gestured, loosely, at the both of them. "That you guys were, uh. Together."
Enid opened her mouth. She was going to say something. She was definitely going to say something, any second now, a full sentence with a subject and a verb and everything, but her lips felt warm and swollen and strange and the air behind her teeth seemed to have been replaced with a low, steady buzz, and what came out was, "I, um—"
"We are."
Wednesday's voice cut in clean over Enid's stammer, flat and unbothered. She'd stepped back into Enid's space in that smooth, deliberate way of hers, just close enough that the geometry of the three of them became obvious. Her book was still on the grass. She hadn't picked it up.
"I wasn't aware we owed you the update," Wednesday went on, eyes settling on Bruno with what could be described as extreme disdain. "Consider yourself informed."
Bruno's mouth did a half-open thing. Sofia's hand slid off his sleeve.
"Right. Okay. Cool. That's—"
"You may go."
Bruno's mouth opened again—to argue, or explain, or to do whatever it was people did when they'd been told you may go by Wednesday Addams in that specific voice—and then closed. Sofia tugged at his sleeve. He looked at Enid for one more half-second, something in his face that a better-functioning Enid would have eaten for dinner, and then he turned, and they went.
She was still standing where Wednesday had left her when she realized Wednesday had left her.
"Wednesday?"
Wednesday was already moving. She'd bent, collected her book from the grass in one clean motion, and was three steps into whatever tactical withdrawal her brain had selected before Enid's voice caught up with her.
"Where are you going?"
"I'm late to meet Thing."
"Okay, but—" Enid took a step. "I feel like we should probably talk about—"
"Later."
"Wednesday—"
"Later, Enid."
And then she was gone—just walking with that Wednesday walk; the one that made it very clear she had already relocated her attention several buildings away and there was no use trying to retrieve it. Enid watched her go. She watched the braids swing once, twice, and then Wednesday disappeared around the corner of the humanities building, and Enid was alone on a bench in the middle of the quad. Her lips were tingling. Her fingers were tingling. Her hips were tingling, and she tried very hard to pretend she wasn't aware of any of it.
It was a fake kiss. Obviously. It was a performance, engineered specifically for Bruno Yuson's stupid face, and it had worked—mission accomplished, Glyptapanteles achieved, wasp larvae successfully implanted in Bruno's brain, et cetera. It meant nothing to Enid. It clearly meant nothing to Wednesday, who had walked off like she'd just helped Enid lift a heavy box and was now very busy with the rest of her day.
Enid walked back to Ophelia Hall. She put Wednesday's book on Wednesday's desk. She did homework, ate dinner with Yoko (who took one look at her face and said, don't, and Enid had, in an act of self-preservation she was rather proud of, not), and came back to the dorm to find Wednesday's side of the room still empty and waited, patiently, for later to arrive.
And it never did.
Wednesday came back to the dorm at almost midnight, let herself in on cat feet, got changed in the dark without so much as a hi, and slid into bed facing the wall. Enid, who had been lying on her back with her eyes open for two hours staring at the ceiling, said nothing, because apparently nothing was the new vibe, and Enid was flexible, Enid could roll with a vibe.
It was fine. It was obviously fine. And when Enid found herself rolling from one side of her bed to the other like a rotisserie chicken with unfinished business, staring at the ceiling, at the wall, at the stupid water stain, it was definitely not because of the fake kiss, which had meant nothing, which she had already processed and filed and moved past.
"Enid."
Her name. Low, and close, and hers.
Her eyes opened to the dark of the room and to Wednesday standing beside her bed. She was a cutout against the wall, shadow on shadow, but the moon caught her face—a long pale slice of cheek, the curve of a mouth, eyes so dark they swallowed the rest of her features whole. And in those eyes was something Enid had never seen there before: hunger.
"Wednesday?" Enid whispered. "What's—"
Wednesday bent down and kissed her.
There was no hesitation in it this time. No statue-stillness, no diplomatic withdrawal, no reaching for a book afterward. Her mouth was warm and certain, and Enid made a sound into it that in any other life would have embarrassed her into an early grave. Her hands found the front of Wednesday's shirt and pulled, and Wednesday climbed onto the bed and settled her weight over Enid's hips like she'd been invited a long time ago and was only now getting around to the RSVP.
Wednesday's hands moved down her shoulders, her collarbones, the flat plane of her chest through her t-shirt. When her palm curved over Enid's breast Enid arched into it without making the decision to, and Wednesday made a small, pleased sound against her jaw and Enid thought she might just die on the spot. Then Wednesday's mouth was at her neck, open and hot, and her other hand was sliding under the hem of Enid's sleep shorts, fingers trailing up the inside of her thigh, reaching for—
Enid moaned, and the sound of her own voice woke her up.
She was alone.
She was alone in her bed, and her heart was a small animal trying to break out of her ribs, and her shirt was stuck to her back, and across the room, Wednesday's breathing was a slow even thing in the dark; in, out, like a metronome.
Okay.
Okay, okay, okay. Enid closed her eyes. She was going to go back to sleep. She was a responsible adult college student who had had a very weird day and a very weirder dream and she was going to roll over, right now, and sleep. Clearly her brain had filed the fake kiss incorrectly and this was a processing glitch. Totally normal. People had weird sex dreams about their roommates all the time, probably, she wasn't going to look it up, she could fix this with sleep.
Her body had other plans.
Her body was, in fact, staging a hostile takeover. The metronome of Wednesday's breathing across the room kept insisting on being heard. In. Out. In. Out. Enid counted with it. Counting was a thing people did to fall asleep. She was going to count, and breathe, and be a person about this.
She made it to fourteen before her hand moved.
Just to her stomach at first. Totally innocent. A hand on a stomach was, like, a medical position. People slept like this. She was just resting. Then her fingertips drifted lower, over the waistband of her sleep shorts, and she stopped them, because—absolutely not. Wednesday was ten feet away. The kiss had been for Bruno. It had been a prop kiss, emotionally equivalent to CPR, and if Enid started making it into something else in the dark of their own room like some kind of—some kind of feelings gremlin—she was going to have to transfer schools.
Her hand pressed down through the fabric, and the noise that tried to escape her throat was humiliating and she swallowed it so hard she almost choked.
Don't. She yanked her hand back to her stomach. Do not.
The ceiling, the water stain, California. She tried California. She tried mentally reciting the periodic table, which she didn't know. She tried running through the Pythagorean theorem. She tried, God help her, to think about Bruno, which was supposed to be the emergency kill switch, and her brain simply refused to load the image. Bruno had been 404'd.
Instead her brain offered, helpfully, the specific pressure of ten fingertips against her hips.
Her hand slid beneath her waistband.
She was already wet. Embarrassingly, cartoonishly, I'm-going-to-have-to-burn-these-sheets wet, and the first deliberate stroke of her fingertips over her clit made her bite down on her lower lip so hard she tasted copper. Her free hand found the inside of her own thigh and gripped, hard, because that was where the hand in her dream had been, and if she was going to hell anyway she might as well do it properly.
She slid a finger inside herself and had to clap her free hand over her own mouth.
Every noise she didn't make collected in her chest and had nowhere to go, which meant it went, instead, down, pressing into the low heat already coiling there, and she was chasing something specific now—Wednesday's mouth at her neck. Wednesday's palm on her breast. Wednesday's weight settling over her hips like she'd been waiting. Enid's hand moved faster and she pressed her face into her pillow and she was thinking about Wednesday, specifically, with her face and her eyes and her braids, and there was no room left to pretend about it.
The orgasm didn't build so much as ambush her. Her vision went white at the edges, then staticky, and she shoved her face back into the pillow and rode it out in tiny, strangled gasps, her thighs shaking around her own hand, a long slow wave that had the audacity to keep cresting after she'd already decided it was over. She was pretty sure she saw actual fucking stars.
She lay there for a long minute, chest heaving, hand still pressed against herself, aftershocks moving through her in slow, small pulses.
She slid out of bed on unsteady legs, eased the door open carefully, and padded down the hall to the bathroom. The fluorescents snapped on in an ugly flicker. She washed her hands for longer than hands needed washing, cupped cold water against her face twice, and then made the mistake of looking up.
The girl in the mirror looked like she'd just committed a felony.
Flushed to the collarbones. Hair doing something that could only be described as post-incident. Pupils blown so wide her irises were basically a rumor. Her lips were still pink and puffy from where she'd bitten them, and there was a small aftershock currently attempting a comeback tour somewhere low in her abdomen, which she chose to ignore on principle.
She stared at herself. Her reflection stared back like a golden retriever that had just eaten an entire birthday cake.
The kiss had meant nothing. The dream had meant nothing. The—activity—had meant extremely nothing. It was stress. It was adrenaline. It was a biological pressure valve, medically necessary, entirely unrelated to the specific girl currently asleep ten feet from Enid's mattress.
Absolutely. Nothing.