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With the way Lottie looks lately, bags under her eyes and a special, pretty kind of pallor Shauna’s only seen on corpses, she’s amazed at how she’s planned anything at all.
No one but Shauna knew about the meds that ran out after just a few days out here, that they might have something (at least something, right?) to do with Lottie’s visions and all this wilderness bullshit. But she’s betting even if they knew, they wouldn’t give a shit. They don’t give a shit that Shauna hasn’t slept a full night since she lost the baby- that she hasn’t been able to keep her hands still since Jackie died out in the snow. She grabbed the gun from Natalie, but they gave her the knife. Let her keep it, the only thing she got to keep. It only meant never getting to put it down.
She’s fixing the ties on her shelter, the little knots of rope and twine that hold her domicile together, when Lottie asks to help her again. She’d already told her to fuck off, once, when Lottie asked if she needed to talk. Lottie had just left her, unflapped. She’s the only person who doesn’t retreat out of Shauna’s presence, who doesn’t flinch away from her when she shows her teeth.
This time, she offers her the mushroom tea- to put her at ease, or flood her brain with good chemicals, or something. She’s not stupid, she knows things have been tense, but that doesn’t mean she needs to be getting stoned in the woods with fucking Lottie, not when she’s in charge.
“Yeah, I don’t think so.”
“You’re carrying a heavy weight. Opening your mind could be the easiest way to ease the burden.” She’s been a lot of things, but she hasn’t been high since Doomcoming. Neither has Lottie. It’s for the best.
“You fucking take the drug-tea, Lottie,” she scoffs. Lottie treating her like she’s Akilah, like she’s Travis. Like she’ll just unravel in front of her for nothing in return. Like there would be anything left of her after she did. She finishes the knot with a sharp jerk, lets the pull of it burn her palms for an extra second.
A beat. No sounds of retreat coming from Lottie behind her. “I could do that for you.”
Shauna stills. Turns back to her slightly, keeping one foot planted. Looks at Lottie over her shoulder, her half-smile. Lottie’s eyes play with her, run over the scars on her knuckles, the broad one on her nose.
Lottie continues: “With you.”
She narrows her eyes. Hands still holding the rope. “The both of us? Not a good idea.”
“Hannah will watch the others,” Lottie says, smiles beatifically before continuing, “And Tai will watch Hannah.”
Lottie’s observance shouldn’t be surprising to her anymore, but she never quite knows how lucid she is. Lottie talks to her more when she’s more aware, and something in Shauna resents that she can’t just brush her off. Twists up her insides- but that, at least, is a feeling she’s used to. She turns away again, sets the posts back without letting the rope slip from her fingers. Hears the two almost perfectly silent steps Lottie takes to come beside her.
“You trust Tai,” Lottie says, putting a hand to Shauna’s shoulder, which stiffens but does not shake off. She doesn’t know if she trusts anyone. But Tai, at least, she can say she knows. Half the time.
“You should let it out, Shauna. Whatever it is.”
She has to stifle a chill at the words, the last time Lottie said them to her in both their minds. Shauna finally surrenders the ropes, turns into Lottie’s gesture to swipe her arm away, more gently than she wants to.
Lottie gets that glassy, remote look in her eye again, just hazing over for a few moments. Shauna can see her tongue swipe across the back of her teeth inside her closed mouth before she swallows. Watches her hair brush her neck in the breeze as her throat bobs. It makes Shauna twitch.
Akilah and Gen pass behind Lottie, coming back from their morning chores. Shauna moves her eyes and catches how Gen holds her buckets of water still for a moment, tilting her head over like she’s trying to eavesdrop. Let her.
She’s not stupid, she sees the others huddling and whispering. Knows everyone wants out, knows they turn to Nat and to fucking Mari. But as long as she has Lottie…
She brings her eyes back to Lottie’s, faces her head on. “Fine. But it has to be today.”
Lottie gives her a real smile, then, teeth peeking through. “I agree.”
–
They start with breathing. She begins to suspect she was brought out here just to have another therapy session, with the way they sit cross-legged, facing one another. Shauna does not have to try very hard to look indignant about the whole thing, but scans the tree line just in case.
“It’s alright,” Lottie’s voice cuts in, “No one followed us.”
Lottie in her netted dress, cupping the rapidly-cooling tea. Shauna met Lottie where she asked, just east of where the cabin had been, far enough from their village, and she was sitting there already with her steaming cup and legs crossed below her, a few animal skins laid out for them.
She drinks the tea without saying a word, two healthy gulps, hands over the same cup to Shauna. Inhale for four, exhale for five. It’s the warmest part of the day. There’s snow in the air, on the ground. Lottie wears a hood and her breath is just barely visible.
She hesitates.
“We can start with an exercise.”
“Of course.”
“Close your eyes for me?”
For me. She scowls at Lottie, but she closes them.
“What do you hear?”
“The wind. Melting snow dripping.” Her own breath, the breath across from her. Her heart, low in her ears.
When she doesn’t go beyond that, Lottie doesn’t push, just moves on. But Shauna can feel her looking at her.
“What do you see?”
She rolls her eyes open, looks dead at Lottie. How she pushes her hood back, stretches her neck, smiles into Shauna’s attention in a way that should be making Shauna nervous.
“I see you.”
Shauna meant it as a barb, but it makes Lottie’s face soften. She resents the vibrant familiarity in Lottie’s gaze, and an insult rises viperously in her throat before she grits it back down. Lottie never reacts to her poking with anything but a tight little smile anymore. She doesn’t even look sad.
Half of Shauna wants to see Lottie rise against her explicitly, toss her hair like she would have in the before-times, but the other half of her splits open, convinces herself that Lottie’s bowed head looks something like submission. Shauna can feel her own misery pouring off of her, how as strong as it is it still can’t gum up Lottie’s chilly consideration, only makes it more biting.
She’s restless. She feels Lottie’s eyes on her. She drains the tea. Was it this strong last time? Could she taste the mushrooms in their end-of-the-line stew? Lottie watches her take the cup down like she wasn't ever worried she wouldn't drink it.
If Lottie sees her hands shake, she doesn’t show it in her face, only takes the empty cup from Shauna’s hands in a movement so fluid Shauna doesn’t realize Lottie has handed off her own hand to her in replacement, the cup sat just under them. She lets Lottie retrieve the other hand, if just to see where this is going, not because she doesn’t hate the feeling of warm skin against her own.
“I may not understand what you’ve been through, Shauna. But… I’ve felt what you’re feeling. Like you’re more… more scared than you’ve ever been but more… comfortable. Or more free. It helped me see.”
It as in the tea, “It” as wilderness. Shauna’s not sure what the underscore on this one is. Maybe she doesn’t want to know. The nettle and earth taste of the tea pools in her mouth. She feels her own heart beat, sees the brown of Lottie’s eyes deepen; is it taking affect already?
“Being here, together. This place…” she looks around, eyes fond and alight, sweeps them back to Shauna. Her pupils are bigger than before and glittering in the white-washed sunlight. Shauna’s eye is caught by Lottie’s hair, again, strands of it parted by flecks of leaf. They’re not all together anymore though, are they? It will just be this. Until there are none left. She looks down at how her fingers twitch against Lottie’s.
Lottie drags her hand through Shauna’s own half-clenched fist, spreads her fingers. Lottie grasps her palm, drags her fingers over the hardened skin on Shauna’s hands. Shauna feels something unzip, doesn’t realize she’s overwhelmed until it spills out and she’s seizing Lottie’s wrist. The other girl’s pulse thrums under a tight grip and a calloused thumb. Shauna squeezes. Pulls her close so Lottie has to lean forward, tilted onto her knees, Lottie’s fingers slipping under the sleeve of her shirt. They both breath heavy for a few moments, together.
She doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want to fucking hear it. But she’s here now so she just bares her fucking teeth at Lottie.
It jostles the look of quiet benevolence off of Lottie’s face for a few moments. Her eyebrows come up in some expression more extreme than she’s had since Natalie tried to get her to leave, a thrilled sort of grin. It passes and she composes herself, adjusting her grip. Heavy, panting breaths pass between them, filling the whole woods with their heat. Taming her smile and her head nodding, she continues: “They’re still with us.”
Shauna rises, stumbles just a bit trying to get out of her grasp. Lottie on her knees, pulling her arm down with all the force of her leverage and gravity, but Shauna plants her legs firm. Both of Lottie’s hands are clasped around her wrists now.
“What do you feel?” The hands tighten. Hers and Lottie’s both. She doesn’t look away from Lottie’s eyes, pupils expanded even further as she looks up at Shauna.
“Do you feel him?” Shauna knows what she means, coils up, blinks to keep tears from rising up. Lottie just readjusts and keeps looking at her, gives a little smile that she can’t help flashing her teeth during. The wind whips around them in the foliage, drowning everything else out.
There’s the hint of something cruel or gleeful on Lottie’s face, and she can’t gather herself quickly enough this time before she sneers, actually letting the emotion pour out of her face. It rushes down Shauna’s throat like the warm tea, brewed too strong, straight to her head. She almost wants Lottie to say some shit like our baby again so she can bite her head off, but maybe she’s picking up on Shauna’s unnatural stillness because she avoids the epithet. What she doesn’t avoid is another name: “Don’t you feel Jackie?”
The ground under Shauna’s feet swirls- fuck. Of course she fucking does. Jackie’s name in her mouth makes Shauna’s vision blur at the edges. Lottie’s already on her knees, so it's not hard to step one leg over her lap and push her to the ground without letting go of her. The tea must have her panting, must be making them both breath heavy. Lottie’s back hits the ground with a soft thud, long legs half-jutting out from under her, the perfect perch for Shauna to descend upon, to hold her down.
Something so familiar about all this to her now. She can practically taste Lottie’s blood in her mouth, feel the ache in her knuckles, and Lottie’s little knowing look like she feels so fucking good about herself for making Shauna feel that way, for giving Shauna the first full night of sleep she’d had in months. Feels it thrill into that stack of memories she's folded over inside herself, resolved never to lose even if she forgets. The first time she made a girl come, the first time she drew someone else’s blood with her hands, the first time she took Jackie’s breath away. The last time. Detects it for the first time ever, colorless light calcified around her heart, jabbing into it as it pumps (The time she held her son, soothed his cries, because that was real, wasn’t it? It felt so real.). Knows that for as long or as little as she has left it will only get worse, and tightens her grip on Lottie, forces her own breaths deeper.
Unlike the last time Shauna got her hands around Lottie's throat no one is there to throw her off, no one to watch. No Natalie and her perfect, appropriate pain, no Melissa who watched the whole thing and somehow thought Shauna wouldn’t take any shred of decency offered her and tear it apart with her teeth. She’s so dizzy, out of her head.
There’s snow on the ground, and Shauna’s not scared of it anymore, except she is.
Also unlike the last time, Lottie smiles. So bright that the sight of her pointy teeth makes Shauna change her grip. She feels for a dizzying moment that maybe she’s just doing exactly what Lottie wants, that this was always the plan. It floods in her gut, a pulpy mix of revulsion and the itch to see it through, to make her bruised again.
Lottie, not releasing Shauna’s arms, “I know why you want to stay, I know… it’s okay. You want what It wants.” The squeak in Lottie’s voice makes Shauna’s breath drag, in and out, filling her lungs with it. No one can hear, something tells her, no one can stop you. Stop her from what?
What’s that Dickinson poem? Much madness is divinest sense.
She loosens her thumbs, removes one hand and adjusts so the splay of her hand is not gentler, exactly, but more intentional, the pads of her fingers able to feel the tiny scars and blemishes on the skin of Lottie's neck, the passage of air legible under her fingers. Not quite crushing her like she may have first considered doing. Her own heartbeat crushing in her ears. Her breaths come out harsh and spread the hair collected on Lottie’s shoulders out onto the ground.
Lottie giggles breathlessly, and Shauna takes her other hand to run it forcefully down the other girl’s body, along the lines of the veins running down her arms, catching in the wrap-netting of this fucking thing she’s been wearing. She wants it off, suddenly. Wants to shear the layers off of Lottie and pile them up with her hooded cape that’s fallen off behind her, wants to peel back until she finds something red and wriggling and real. Hates herself for wanting it, but her mind spins too much to feel the hate.
The blood whistles as it rushes between Lottie’s legs, or maybe that’s hers, maybe they’re both bloodbloodblood and want and ache where they’re joined up. Feels herself getting more worked up that Lottie isn’t scared at all. Angry, but not. Feels right here with Lottie, feels Lottie here with her. Her hair splayed around her, blending in with the dirt. Her fingers twitch around Lottie’s neck.
She feels herself being led, and then Lottie is muttering in her ear, almost nuzzling into her head as she presses down into her.
“So good, Shauna, Shauna, keeping us fed,” she says, and all at once Shauna isn’t immune to how sour they all smell anymore. She moves to keep her arms, shoulders from trembling, keep herself from doing something stupid.
They’ve hurled past the line of drawing one another's blood out here. At the very least: they have boiled water and bad luck to ward off getting killed by infection. She knows deep in her bones that they could never trip into death. It could never be that easy. Only the best of them get to die by accident. It has to be one of them drawing another’s blood enough to kill, has to be an intentional dive. Shauna has taken enough blood to soak the earth, and Lottie’s given freely as much as she feasibly can. Probably more. The pain, or the red, or maybe the smell of it, thick tack between them, causes Lottie to shudder and wrap her legs around Shauna’s waist.
As if reading her mind, Lottie murmurs “It needs you, Shauna - we need you.”
The layers between them don’t hide the heat coming from between her legs, pressing into Shauna’s stomach and waistline through her shirt. The heat that washes over her is telling- she feels it shoot from Lottie through herself like nothing else, straight to her clit, crawling up her throat. It spins her mind, almost to the point of losing her grip, how the juncture of Lottie’s thighs must be getting hot and swollen and sticky. She bears down on her, the both of them groaning, and oh shit, this is what they’re doing, isn’t it?
She can’t help herself from swearing then- a loud and strangled “Fuck- fuck!”
“You should be thanking me.” Lottie’s voice is strong again, like she’s gathering the breath to howl.
“Thank you?”
“For the gift. The one I gave you, the one Nat gave.” Her voice strains into something quiet but no less biting. Shauna doesn’t have to ask what she means. Beating Lottie, bringing Natalie low before the tribe that loved her, all in service of the intangible ferocity that Lottie had made her god, that Shauna had made her very life.
“The one Melissa gave you every night for months. Did it make you feel good?” Good, bad, it made her feel all of it, It makes her feel it now, Lottie makes her feel it. She scoffs. It’s entirely too humiliating to admit any of that so instead she does what she knows how to do.
Pushing Lottie’s neck into the dirt with one hand and her arm with the other, she dips down into the crook of Lottie’s neck and breathes deep. The smell of sweat hits her first, then dirt and hair, the scent-memory of rosy shampoo coming up afterwards as if from nowhere. Conjures up memories of Doomcoming, far enough back where they all still tried to smell like civilization, before the swirl of Vidal Sassoon and deodorant gave way to sweat and waste and pine and the smell of blood and the smell of cunt.
Then she rocks down onto Lottie’s grip, bends her body into recurve to buck her hips and press her teeth above Lottie’s sternum, press harder than she has before. Maybe it’s the way Lottie holds her side, the way she leaves her surrendered arm pinned like an insect to pavement, or the way Shauna’s breath doesn’t feel like hers at all but part of some big thrumming heart. She welcomes it like a hug. Shauna licks at her, open-mouthed, realizes at the cling of iron in her mouth that she’s drawn blood and Lottie hasn’t even flinched. Two little pinpricks from her bottom incisors peek out between the netting of Lottie’s dress.
She traces Lottie’s bare neck and shoulder with her nose and breathes in through her mouth, remembers Jackie’s perfume lingering like a heavy cloud in the car when she fucked Jeff, the same scent on Travis when she held the knife to his throat and felt his pulse thrum under the cutting edge. The whisper-scent of Lottie behind her then, coaxing her like she is now. She’s subtle enough to bring her free hand to Shauna, now, manages to creep under her shirt and skid her palm along her side, long fingers grasping around her hip.
The burst of energy, of rage and something else that sent Shauna into motion is stilled by the look on Lottie’s face when she pulls back up and meets her eye. Though the wilderness has made her gaunt and oddly glowing, her real smile and the glint in her eye are the Lottie that Shauna had gotten to barely know. The girl who hoisted Shauna onto a television cabinet so she could retch flavored rum out of a hotel window in Trenton while Jackie held off Coach Martinez at the door, who spent an entire bus ride next to Shauna not saying a word and then suddenly dared her to steal a jar of pickled eggs from the truck stop so they could throw them at Ricky Maltese’s house on the way back into town.
Disarmed, she doesn’t see it before it happens: in the split second of Lottie craning her neck up, reacting to the animal part of Shauna that was just huffing her fucking scent, she really thinks she has control, thinks Lottie is going to kiss her. A face close to hers, a beautiful girl panting under her hands, reaching out to be kissed, she’s missed, she’s needed. Finally, something in the wilderness they can meet together on. Instead Lottie licks her, tongue soft and warm and wet going briskly from her chin, over her mouth and up one side of her nose. Her head returns to the ground, mouth shining and open and red inside. She’s far away again, face back to that half-cracked smile and blown-out look. It’s filthy. Shauna thinks, god help her, it might be the hottest thing that’s ever happened to her.
So Shauna is the one to kiss her, instead, pours all her fucking fury into it, anything to get Lottie to slip, too angry to be embarassed. And Lottie does slip: kissing her lights her up like she’s that girl again, not a vessel but a girl that Shauna might take between her teeth and bite. She lets herself relish in it for a long while, taking biting kisses without daring to open her eyes, getting used to her feeling, her smell. Lottie’s mouth is sweet and stern, the line of her jaw firm against Shauna’s fingers even as she lets Shauna’s tongue breach past her teeth.
Shauna thinks if Lottie had a girl to kiss every day out here that things could be different.
All her jittery curiosity, her intense faith, poured into something tangible, real, interactive. It turned Melissa from awkward to steady - and Jackie… she strangles the thought before it can flower. She doesn't wonder what it might make her, the negative space around that thought pressing in just as hard as the thought itself might.
Lottie slipping her tongue across the roof of her mouth sends Shauna into an altered state. She can’t help it; she bites. When she does, something slips out from under her. Lottie breathes reverently into her mouth, the way she had when she bit her chest. Shauna is overrun by it. The holy Lottie, giving her adulation like this.
The sun crests over the treeline and shines over them for a moment, and just when Shauna starts to get what she wants, before she can even contemplate what to do with her hands, with Lottie’s toothy grin, her elbows bend and Lottie is flipping her over.
Her back hitting the ground enrages her, but she can’t wipe the wild-cracked smile off of her own face, even when Lottie’s arm braces against her sternum, when another hand pins Shauna’s wrist to the earth with all of Lottie’s weight. She laughs, seizes. The pads of Lottie’s fingers soothe the delicate skin on Shauna’s wrist, the veins alive with color and heat underneath. She imagines them prying her open.
The bicep on top of her flexes, and the bulge of it surprising because Lottie is ordinarily so docile the muscles look like they’re just there for show. She laughs down at her, grinning, and Shauna licks the whisper of Lottie from her own mouth. Struggles against her only as much as she needs.
Lottie gnashes her teeth down at her as Shauna heaves quick, deep breaths and digs her nails in grooves into Lottie’s arm and fuck, she wishes she had her fucking knife, wants to make her fucking scream. When she was with Melissa, making her whine and shudder like a kicked dog wiped her mind clear enough to let her sleep at night. She can see herself, knows when she is taking something too far but can’t bring herself to stop. Lottie’s pupils are totally blown out, anyway- and this seems to be surprising her as much as it is Shauna. Not so holy, then.
She is so warm above her, so soft. Her voiced breaths are rough from being choked, from kissing like she was desperate for it. Shauna lets herself snarl and huff like the trapped animal she feels she is and tries not to acknowledge the fact that it’s exactly what Lottie wanted.
“Fuck, Lottie - ” She can’t stop herself from saying.
Lottie recovers her air, a knowing look in her eye when she says: “It loves you”.
Still holding her down, Lottie casts her head upwards, looking to the sky as muted blue-grey clouds blot the sun. The wind throws her hair about again. The shift in her weight against Shauna, the whole world pinning her down, like she's a danger, like she's a storm- like Melissa or Nat or whoever was the only thing standing between the whole world and a Shauna Shipman rampage. Fuck- Her heart locks up even more at that. She knows its true. Feels it.
If Lottie won’t give her the satisfaction of her pain, she can break her apart another way. Moving their joined hands to Lottie’s hips, she sifts through layers of dress and outerdress to grab onto something besides fabric. She expects athletic pants or jeans under the furls of dress and overcoat, but when Lottie unveils her base layer to her its nothing more than a pair of practice shorts, saved from the padding pile. Hands suddenly greedy, she grips Lottie’s hipbones through the fabric and pulls her down against her, trying to pull the waistband down in the same motion, frenzied at the sight and heat of her skin, her stomach, her long legs.
Fuck. She was already missing summer. Inebriated she can admit to herself that - whether despite the accompanying self-disgust or because of it - she misses ogling the girls in their sleeveless shirts and sweaty dresses. Misses taking Melissa’s long braid in her fist whenever she wanted, the break of sweat on Mel’s skin in the summer night when she’d wake her with a hand down her shorts, how she’d look at her and kiss yes and please up into her until she grew tired of Shauna slapping her around, as if Shauna is capable of anything else, as if Melissa didn’t ask her for it. As if Shauna’s cruelty didn’t make her fucking toes curl. She thumbs the thought away like the page of a journal, braces for winter.
But the cold around them doesn’t stop all the blood in her going molten at the first press of her hands to Lottie’s bare skin- soft like her arms and hands but so, so much warmer. It pools through her, drips down her spine. She pushes Lottie’s dress up further until it bunches, and Shauna can see where a cracked rib healed over strangely from when she beat Lottie, those months ago, that gift Lottie gave her that can never be taken back.
She finally casts off the fucking coat, flips her hair out of her face, and jesus fuck Lottie is so, so beautiful. Noticing it makes her angry.
“What do you feel?” She says again as Shauna squirms, twitches below her, and instead of answering Shauna throws up Lottie's arms and puts both hands into her hair, drags Lottie’s open mouth down to hers. Shows her instead of telling; for once Lottie gets the fucking message. She snarls into the kiss, licking hot and open into Shauna’s throat, pressing her against the ground hard. Letting Lottie breathe into her, bite her chin, sloppy and stuttered, is completely fucking hot. It meets the surge in her and feeds it.
Running over the shifted muscle with her hands makes both of them shudder- not because it hurts. She briefly considers shucking it back into its proper place, drags her thumb along the spot and presses just to watch Lottie’s skin move and feel her buck against her.
She wraps a length of Lottie’s hair around her hand instead, tangling it between her fingers and feeling into her scalp, pulling her back out of sheer habit, muscle memory. Lottie just grins through it, swallows thickly and watches Shauna follow the motion of her throat as she bares it for her.
Fuck. Shauna wants to sit up and meet her there, wants to sink her teeth in and bite. She’s panting for it, mouth open in the cold, scrambling with her other hand to try and get between Lottie’s legs. But Lottie still has leverage on her, holds her down, relishes in the deprived little noises Shauna makes about it. This is who Lottie is- who Shauna wants them all to see and point at in horror at almost as much as she wants to keep all to herself. It’s like they’re both about to crawl out of their own skin, lulled by themselves into sleep or death. Fuck, she’s fucked up. It’s not like weed, not like liquor, not like this same shit back at Doomcoming. It’s a deadly twitch.
She can’t handle this- not having the upper hand. Doesn’t know what to do except gasp and, finally, use her words: “Lottie, fuck.”
“Tell me what you want.”
Her throat catches, her head shakes: no.
Lottie bends down to her face with a pleading look.
“Tell me, and you’ll have it. Let me give it to you, let me, please.”
It all starts to split right then, or maybe she's just finally come around to it, something vibrating through Lottie’s voice. It’s a desperate please, one that says she already knows but that Shauna still has to fucking ask for it.
She burns with the sudden feeling she’s lost anything keeping her on the earth, with that horrible swooping sensation she finally recognizes as shame, all through her. It stokes tears into brimming behind her eyes, bile in her throat. When it’s different, when she’s the one bringing pleasure or pain, she can wipe it away, call it violence or relief or whatever, but underneath Lottie she’s practically begging to touch her, helpless to do anything her way and still feeling like she might die without it.
One hand pulling at Lottie’s hip in vain, the other pinned to the earth, she gets Lottie at her ear again.
“Shauna-” the sing-song of her voice is so different, like it was pulled straight from Shauna’s mind, from her dreams. Ostensibly it is Lottie but fuck, it sounds nothing like her, it sounds like-
“No,” she breaks, sob stretching out in a throaty wail. Her eyes closed, Lottie tutting as her hands run over her, soothing and claiming at the same time.
Something about it would register as almost motherly if she wasn’t also leaving biting, hot kisses along Shauna’s cheeks and the crook of her neck, nuzzling her, responding to Shauna’s uncontrolled noises with animal sounds of her own. Trying to restrain herself only gives Lottie cause to ply the sounds from her, hands pressing into her chest and running over her arms, teeth against her skin.
Her wreckage must be askance enough. Lottie’s voice is mean when she says “Poor baby, Shipman,” and it pulls a thread of a moan from the fabric of Shauna’s rising voice with such precision that she doesn’t even notice it coming out of her, overwhelmed by the pleasure prickling in her gut and gauzing up her ears.
For once she’s not able to avoid thinking of what it means for her to want this, that maybe she always wanted it in some shape or another, always had this yawning hunger inside her that even she couldn't see.
The bare top of a thigh digs into Shauna’s crotch, and it hurts, she never quite healed right after everything, but she doesn’t even feel the hurt. Lottie startles at the heat of her, gasps Oh like she’s the one getting fucked. She remembers deliriously the want that had begun amorphously swirling around her any time she pressed into the heel of her own hand while guiding her fingers with her hips; the time Melissa asked her to fill her up when she went from two fingers to four and her eyes rolled back to her brain. The devout, alien look on Lottie's face intensifies, like she knows, like this, too, is part of her great plan. She didn't even have to do much to get Shauna here, either.
“I love you,” she says into Shauna's ear, sounding so far away, sounding so much like herself and so much like someone else, like the I love you she got once in eighth grade before Jackie got flush in the cheeks and never said it again (because she couldn’t live with the embarrassment, her own voice sneers). It almost gets her there. Shauna wants it, can’t stand to hear it, hates how it ratchets up her temperature and makes her rut against Lottie’s knee.
“Shut the fu- fuck up,” she chokes out, as if she’s not desperate for it. Lottie meets her violence with none of the hesitation she’s accustomed to, lets Shauna bruise what skin she can dig her fingers into even as she flounders on the ground. There’s long hair brushing all along her, sending ribbons of colored frenzy through her even through her clothes. There’s hot breath in her face and fucking meat in her hands and then her shoulders are what’s fastened to the earth and shes humping up on Lottie’s leg like a bitch.
Lottie’s big, graceful hand presses Shauna’s sternum down as she goads her hips with the other hand on her waist and her words in her face, and Shauna scrambles, sweat under her arms and moisture in her eyes and Lottie is all she sees as she moves: her dark gaze and white teeth, her mouth so deep and red Shauna watches her own hand try to reach out and take it.
Teeth sink into her hand, and she grabs Lottie’s face even as she bites her. Sharp pain sears up her arm, along with the feeling of Lottie's cheek on the soft pads of her fingers, her tongue on the callous on her thumb.
Her jaw aches to bite her back and her thumb comes out of Lottie's mouth shiny with spit. She's bracketed in, then, Lottie's face close to hers. They kiss as much as they can with the way she's moving, Shauna taking Lottie's lip between her teeth as she nears the edge of whatever precipice she's found her way to. It's in sight, it's there, huge and scary and ready to swallow her into its darkness and Lottie must know because she wrenches herself away and spits Shauna's bite right back in her face.
Jesus fucking Christ, she thinks, or maybe says, as she’s obliterated.
She tumbles off, finally, hips juddering as she fucks Lottie, something coming close to ruining it by reminding her people could hear and she must give her a wide-eyed look of panic because Lottie sticks the meat of her thumb and about three inches of sleeve between her teeth and finally Shauna can bite as hard as she wants, Lottie's saliva on her face and in her mouth.
Horrible relief floods her body in a wave, makes her squeezing her thighs together even more apparent in the heady mix of what’s flying through her head.
Maybe moments later, maybe an hour, the haze clears and she can see Lottie, terribly pleased, thumb sore but not severed. She’s not back to earth, not really, but the aftershocks of whatever just happened to her are slowing down and Lottie doesn’t ruin it by standing or leaving or trying to fucking talk - something sweet and unnecessary that she doesn’t want to hear and wouldn’t believe anyway. She just maneuvers so she can guide Shauna’s hungry hands finally, finally between her legs.
Thank fucking God, she thinks, Thank God for Lottie. The relief she feels lets her know shes still fucking high more than anything. She doesn’t have to flounder for something to do with her hands, doesn’t have to crash back into her own fucking self, her own life, just yet. It’s not the total control she wrestled from Melissa every time but something even more thoughtless, as brisk as the gouts of cold wind that encircle them.
She wants oblivion, settles for helping pull Lottie’s shorts down, almost bucks her off if not for the one knee firm on the ground; Lottie is back on her lap by the time she steps one leg out and bares herself.
Shauna sits half-up to kiss her, straining against the way Lottie holds her fast to the ground. A pleasant burn settles into her thighs, her stomach, as she pulls Lottie against her, tries to buck up into her. Lottie clamps her legs around her again. The burn crackles when she feels Lottie’s tongue in her mouth and every needy part of her opens underneath, it the whole of her arcing up in flame, body buzzing. She feels dizzily close to coming apart again, without even really being touched- without getting Lottie off first. Both of them feverish and sweating in the brisk afternoon.
She sits up proper and finally shoves a hand between Lottie’s legs, palm up, not even at an angle where she can put her fingers inside but just letting Lottie grind against the heel of her hand, dumbstruck at the hot slide of her. They both groan and Lottie holds Shauna’s face to hers, Shauna squeezing her thighs together at the feeling.
Lottie rides her stomach, her palm, and when she finally adjusts the angle so Shauna’s middle finger sinks into her, Shauna seizes on instinct, curls her finger in that way that would make Melissa lose her balance, her rhythm every time. Lottie just does a little hop and tilts back, looking at Shauna with her blown-out eyes. Nails rake down her neck, and the side of her face blazes in the cold from the sweat, the spit, from the tea, from all the heat gathered around her collar. She adjusts her fingers, goes back in with three, and the moan it pulls out of Lottie feels real, hyper-real, a waking dream. It completely knocks the breath out of Shauna. This- god. The few stupid, stolen orgasms she got from huffing rose and lilac body-spray while using Jeff to get off, more turned on at the twist in her gut knowing she was scraping the traces of Jackie off of him than anything else, don’t come close.
She presses her hips up into her elbow, maneuvering inconveniently, desperately against where she fucks into Lottie above her.
Lottie moving frantically but purposeful, she says her name in her ear, “Shauna, Shauna, Shauna,” every sh- blocking out the world around them. Her whole being becomes her fingers inside Lottie and that mouth at her ear, the reverent tone she’s shucked off so many times from her before curling inescapably around her brain in smoky tendrils. The rest of her is adrift, in a hot spring or in free-fall; a jackhammer couldn’t pull her out of this right now. It’s colder now, the dark settling over them, but her whole body burns and she wonders if this is what it’s like to freeze to death. She hopes, distantly, that they both die right here, that everyone finds them fucked to death and throws a fucking party. Cuts them up, stews them together, puts her bones with Jackie’s, with her son’s. She can’t go home, she won’t.
Her head fuzzes with a drone, the buzz of wings, yellowjacket, bumblebee, hawkmoth. She can feel how sensitive Lottie is, how unused to having anything inside her she must be.
There's a curl of her fingers not even she can control, and she bullies Lottie's clit with her thumb to stop herself from crying, wonders in a moment of wretched self-awareness if fucking another girl will always be like riding a bike to her and if it will always make her so giddy it makes her sick.
Lottie cries out, squeezes her fingers, getting release all over her palm and down her arm, on her pants, mixing with the dirt and snow. It feels like victory, something she made Lottie do, but the emptiness on the other side of it beckons her just the same, just like it always does.
Before her limbs can overload she pushes Lottie’s shoulders down, tells her without telling her to use her fucking mouth. In her magnanimity Lottie gives her this. It’s not hard nor inelegant for Lottie to crawl down Shauna’s body, split her shirt open and pull her jeans down, shove her face between her legs before she's even settled back on the ground.
Lottie exhibits an eagerness that surprises Shauna, and it makes her wonder if Lottie’s thought about this with someone else, if she’s thinking of someone else now as she sightlessly tugs Shauna’s jeans off and tosses an ankle over her shoulder.
There’s a thousand specters between them, and Shauna doesn’t think just as she never does about what any of this means as she curls the thick strands of Lottie’s hair between her fingers, worries it between her thumbs and forefingers. Lottie is sloppily thorough, cleans her up when she’s done as much as you could call it that with the state of their clothes and the blankets, and isn’t done until she’s forced away by Shauna's foot on her shoulder.
She still doesn't feel the cold, wet furs beneath them and the clouds growing gray overhead. Lottie lets her roll her back over - lets her.
“If you fucking tell anyone-” She stops herself, threat catching in her throat as Lottie smiles at her, panting, practically licking her chops.
She doesn’t need to worry about Lottie sharing this with anyone. That’s the problem. This thing of theirs, and nothing else, she will keep between them.
“You know I won’t.”
She hates that she feels understood.