Chapter Text
September
The first time Hope Mikaelson really, truly noticed Josie Saltzman, she didn't know that was what she was doing.
They'd existed in the same building for three years without anything more than the occasional nod in the hallway. Hope was both a cheerleader and a Mikaelson, which at Mystic Falls High School were both facts of a similar magnitude, each conferring their own kind of visibility.
Her father's name was on the science wing of the building and on the donor wall outside the gymnasium, and this, combined with the cheerleading, her beauty and her boyfriend Landon and the ease with which she occupied her position in the school's social hierarchy, meant that Hope had never had to try for status. It had always been effortless.
She was not unaware of this. She had a clear-eyed understanding of what she had and why. The right friends. The right boyfriend. The right looks. She had worked, quietly and with skill, to maintain the shape of a life that looked, from every visible angle, exactly as it should.
Senior year reshuffled the desks in AP Literature, and Josie Saltzman ended up two rows away.
Josie was openly gay. This was not news at Mystic Falls High, she'd been out since sophomore year, which Hope knew the way you know things at a small school: factually, without much attached to it. Josie had not hidden it and had not made an event of it, and most people had absorbed the information and moved on.
It helped, probably, that Josie was the kind of person it was difficult to dismiss. She was genuinely beautiful in a way that made people’s heads turn, sharp enough that teachers quoted her back to the class, and so kind that it was essentially impossible not to like her.
The school had accepted who Josie was because who she was gave them very reason not to. Hope had filed this away as a fact about Josie without examining what it might say about her own fear, which was that she was not sure she was any of those things in the same way, and not sure the same ease would be extended to her.
Hope had not given this much deeper thought until suddenly she couldn't stop.
Josie sat in class like someone entirely at ease taking up space. She was always dressed well, sometimes in skirts that showed long legs, and wore her long dark hair loose over her shoulders. Her dark brown eyes often seemed to be processing two conversations at once. And she had a calm about her that that seemed to radiate.
On the first Friday of September, their English teacher asked what Fitzgerald was really saying in The Great Gatsby. Three people gave the expected answers about the American Dream.
Then Josie said, without looking up from her notebook: "Self-deception as ambition. The idea that if you want something badly enough, you're entitled to invent the version of yourself that deserves it."
A brief silence.
Hope found herself looking at Josie in a way she hadn't intended, which was directly, for longer than was strictly casual.
Josie glanced up from her page. Their eyes met, and Hope felt something move through her she had no name for: a shift in pressure, the distinct sensation of something changing. She quickly looked back at her own notebook.
She copied the quote from the board. She did not look at Josie again. But walking to practice afterward, with her bag over one shoulder and Landon waiting at the far end of the corridor, the comment was still in her head. She turned it over. She told herself she was thinking about Fitzgerald.
She was thinking about the way Josie had said it. Her certainty. The complete absence of any need for the room's approval.
She’d always known Josie Saltzman was smart. But somehow this was different.
The second time was a Wednesday, two weeks later. The green light chapter. Josie said something about desire being a form of distance, that wanting something keeps it permanently in front of you rather than in your hands, and Hope sat with her pen pressed to the page without writing anything for longer than she meant to.
After class, Landon caught up with her and kissed her cheek and asked about the weekend, and she smiled and said the right things.
She told herself: I should pay more attention in English. This explanation worked for several weeks.
-----
October
The life Hope had at seventeen looked, from the outside, like something assembled with care and good fortune. And behind all of it, her father's money, which manifested in small constant ways, the luxury car, the house, the quietly stated permission to occupy more space than other people.
None of this was nothing. She was not foolish enough to think it was nothing. She had watched enough people navigate life without those things to understand that what she had was structural, that it held things in place.
She knew what she looked like from the outside and she knew it looked right, and there was a quiet satisfaction in that, not happiness exactly, but a sense that she had the life everyone else wanted.
She had not, until now, wanted anything that didn't fit that into that.
Her social circles began to meld with Josie’s through Lizzie Saltzman, who was somehow both Hope's friend and Josie's twin, a fact that now felt less like coincidence and more like the universe's sense of humour.
The Saltzman twins started appearing at the same gatherings, parties mostly, the kind that happened in houses whose parents were reliably away, where the lighting was low and the music too loud and the ordinary rules of social behaviour got temporarily suspended.
Hope noticed that she noticed when Josie Saltzman walked into a room.
Not with alarm, just with involuntary attention. Josie arrived somewhere, and something in Hope's awareness would adjust and take in the presence of the taller girl.
She was always conscious of where in the room Josie was. She could be in conversation with three other people and track, in her peripheral vision, the fact that Josie had moved to the left or if the distance between them had decreased. She held the knowledge that if she turned her head slightly she could see her.
She told herself this was natural. Josie was interesting. Smart. Objectively gorgeous in a way Hope filed under: I am capable of appreciating beautiful aesthetics.
But it was something more than that, and she knew it, even as she refused to name it. She noticed small things such as the way Josie's hair fell across her shoulder when she turned her head. The perfect colour of those dark eyes. Those long legs. The way she smiled in a real way, coming with this slight involuntary tilt of the head, and which Hope became, extremely good at identifying from across a crowded room.
There was one morning in AP Literature when Josie came in slightly late, coat still on, her cheeks faintly flushed from the cold, and Hope looked at her and felt something she had no clean category for. Her heart jumped. She looked back at her notes. Her pen had stopped moving without her noticing.
She kept doing this, registering and immediately reclassifying. Aesthetic appreciation. Intellectual interest. The heightened emotion of senior year. She was running out of justifications.
The thing was, Josie made it look easy. She was exactly who she was, without apology or concealment, in a social environment that offered plenty of reasons not to be.
Hope watched her and felt a sense of envy and maybe longing. It was probably both in ways she could not cleanly separate.
Because here was what Hope understood about her own life. It had a shape, and that shape was legible and the legibility was the point. Her father had expectations that were never spoken aloud precisely because they didn't need to be. Her friends expected her to be who she was. Landon expected her to continue being the version of herself he had been dating for ten months.
The school expected her to be the girl at the top of its particular hierarchy. All of these things pointed in the same direction, toward the same clear and navigable future, and she had, until September, felt something close to comfort in that clarity.
Josie Saltzman was not in the direction of any of that.
There was an afternoon in the second week of October, a small gathering at Lizzie and Josie’s house. Josie said something that made MG laugh loudly enough that most of the room turned.
Josie didn't look around to register who had noticed. She just took a sip of her drink and continued, unhurried, privately pleased with herself in a way that had nothing to do with anyone else's response.
Hope realised she had been staring.
Penelope Park, beside her, had been watching. "What?" she said, following Hope's gaze towards Josie and then looking back.
"Nothing. I was thinking."
Penelope said nothing, which was unlike her, and somehow felt more unnerving for it.
That night, lying in the dark of her bedroom, Hope went through the afternoon with the methodical inventory she reserved for things that troubled her. She reached the moment she had been staring at Josie Saltzman and stopped.
There was a word for what she was experiencing. She had never once applied it to herself because to apply it to yourself meant something. It meant the life she had constructed with such care might not be the container she had always taken it to be.
She put it away. She was practised at this. She went to sleep.
-----
The Halloween party at Penelope Park's was the third week of October. Hope went as Hecate, she'd chosen it deliberately, having read about her in a reference book: goddess of thresholds, of the in-between, of transitions without clean edges. It had seemed apt for reasons she was not going to examine.
Josie arrived late, her dark hair loose, wearing a dress that was understated but still looking effortlessly beautiful.
They eventually ended up in the same corner of the kitchen, the only quiet place in a house otherwise entirely too full. Hope had drifted there because she needed a moment away from the performance of the evening. She had not, she told herself, been hoping Josie might be there.
She was aware of the exact moment Josie came to stand beside her. Beside her, not in front, standing close enough that Hope caught the scent of something light and clean, shampoo or perfume, she couldn't tell which.
When someone pushed through the narrow space and Josie shifted to make room, her shoulder pressed briefly against Hope's. Hope felt the contact, which lasted all of maybe two seconds, send a jolt through body but kept her expression perfectly still.
"Athena?" Josie said, nodding at the costume.
"Hecate," Hope said.
Something shifted in Josie's expression. Recognition, maybe. "Goddess of transitions. In-between spaces."
"You know your mythology."
"I know a lot of things." Josie held her gaze with that directness Hope had been cataloguing since September and still hadn't found a category for. "You're surprised."
"I'm not surprised by you at all, actually." Hope felt herself smile in a way slightly outside her control, and watched something shift in Josie's face in response, a small involuntary thing, there and then managed.
Josie looked away first. Which was, Hope noticed, the first time she had.
They talked for an hour. It was not the kind of conversation Hope usually had at parties, or anywhere else, lately. Josie asked questions that assumed she had real answers, and listened in a way that made Hope want to give better ones.
They disagreed about Gatsby. Hope thought the tragedy was self-made, Josie thought that was too easy, that it ignored what the world had arranged against him before he'd arranged anything against himself.
The disagreement was clean and direct and oddly exhilarating, the pleasure of being pushed back on by someone who expected you to hold your ground.
She held her ground. Josie's dark eyes were bright when she argued and Hope was aware the entire time, underneath the conversation, running alongside it, of the six inches between them, of the way the ambient noise created a kind of privacy, of the fact that Josie smelled like something understated that she would think about later without wanting to.
"You're not what I expected," Josie said at one point. Not a compliment exactly. An honest observation.
"What did you expect?"
Josie considered it. "Less."
"That's not flattering."
"No," Josie agreed, and the corner of her mouth moved. "But it means the real thing is better than the version I had. Which is…" She didn't finish. She didn't need to.
Penelope appeared in the kitchen doorway, looked at the two girls, took in more than she appeared to, and left.
They were eventually separated by the party's own gravity. Hope found Landon on the back porch and stood next to him and said the right things, and felt, very precisely, like someone who had been mid-sentence when a very important word was interrupted.
Walking home, she built her explanations in her head. It was loneliness. Good conversation. The intensity of senior year pressing on everything. All true. She pulled them together.
In bed though, she lay awake for a long time thinking about the moment Josie had looked away first, and what it meant that she'd noticed, and what it meant that she couldn't stop thinking about her.
-----
November
The thing Hope kept not doing was not allowing herself to think about whatever was going on with Josie might mean.
She had been practising this particular skill for years, keeping certain things in the peripheral vision of her mind, present but not confronted. She had managed it with the specific loneliness that lived underneath the life she performed.
She had managed it with the quiet knowledge that Landon, who was kind and patient, didn't reach whatever part of her had been waiting for something to reach it. She was skilled at peripheral vision. She could keep things in the periphery indefinitely.
October turned into November, and the thing she was not looking at had moved into her body, which was a different problem entirely.
Before, the things she'd managed had been thoughts, which had been containable within careful reasoning. This was different. This was physical and it did not respond to reasoning.
She would hear Josie's laugh across a hallway and feel something move through her before she had registered who made the sound. She would see Josie from across the car park, crossing toward the building with her bag over one shoulder, hair loose, graceful and completely unhurried, and Hope would feel it in her chest and her throat and she would have to make a deliberate, effortful choice to look somewhere else.
The deliberateness was the problem. Things you have to consciously stop doing are not things you have stopped.
She had always known that her life's shape was a performance as much as a reality. The cheerleading was a role. The friendship group had its own unspoken hierarchy and its own rules, and she played her position in it with practiced ease. Landon was uncomplicated and she was grateful to him for not looking too closely. She liked the shape. The shape was safe.
What she was feeling about Josie Saltzman did not fit the shape. It was not safe. And it was not going away. It was getting louder.
She tried to rebalance toward Landon. He deserved someone who was actually there. After he kissed her one afternoon she stood in the corridor trying to locate whatever that was supposed to make her feel.
She walked to her next class and sat down and Josie was two rows away and Hope spent the next forty minutes trying and failing not to look at her and her hands and the particular way she held a pen.
She was in trouble. She had been in trouble since September. She was simply not ready to know it.
-----
The lake house party was a Friday in the second week of November, the nights already coming early, the cold in the air carrying that specific urgency of a season contracting.
Hope had been drinking, not recklessly, because she was never reckless, but enough that her self-control about Josie, about trying to not think about her had loosened, that the effort of not-looking had become harder to maintain.
Landon was on the other side of the house with his friends. She went outside because the house was too warm and too full and she needed a moment in the cold air where nobody needed anything from her.
Josie was already on the back porch.
She was leaning against the railing with her drink, looking at the lake. The water was dark and very still, the sky above it pale at the edges.
She turned when Hope came out, that slight, specific adjustment of attention, the quality of looking at someone that suggested they had already been occupying some space in your thoughts.
"Hey," Josie said.
"Hey." Hope leaned against the railing beside her. The cold was an immediate relief. "It's better out here."
"It's always better out here."
They stood for a moment looking at the lake. Hope was aware of the distance between them, three or four inches, with a precision that had nothing to do with the actual space.
She felt the warmth Josie radiated against the cold air. The fact that she was wearing something dark, sleeves pushed up despite the temperature, and Hope registered the outline of her perfect body against the railing and made herself look at the water.
They talked. They always ended up talking. The conversation was easy in the way it had become over months, the ease of something built gradually, and Hope was aware that this ease was itself a problem.
She was comfortable with Josie in a way she hadn't planned for, in a way that had crept up on her. But being comfortable and safe were not the same thing.
At some point they had both turned to face each other instead of the lake. The railing was cold at Hope's back. Josie was close, not inappropriately close, just close enough that when the dark-haired girl reached past her to set her cup on the railing, her arm brushed along Hope's. The contact lasted a second. Hope felt her own heart race in the aftermath, quick and undeniable.
She looked away. She looked back.
Josie was saying something, something about a book, and Hope was watching her mouth, her lips and had been watching, she realised, for some time now.
The way Josie spoke, unhurried and precise. Hope's attention had narrowed to that point and wouldn't widen. The lake was gone. The party noise was gone. All that was there was the two of them.
"…don't you think?" Josie said.
"Sorry. What?"
Josie looked at her. That full, unhurried attention. "Where did you go?"
"I'm here."
"You stopped listening."
"I'm listening now."
She made herself meet Josie's eyes, which was not an improvement. Dark eyes, entirely steady, watching her with the quality of attention Hope had never quite been able to account for.
The silence between them had changed texture.
Josie said something light, a small joke, and Hope laughed and reached out the way she did with people she felt easy with, reaching for her arm. But her hand found Josie's hand instead, and their fingers tangled briefly in the cold air, and neither of them pulled away.
Hope looked down at where their hands were. Then back up.
Josie was watching her with an expression she hadn't seen on the dark-haired girl before, not the composed attention of class, not the warmth of Halloween. She was waiting to see what Hope would do.
Hope's gaze dropped to Josie’s mouth, to her beautiful, full lips. She couldn't stop it. It was not a choice.
When she looked back up, Josie had seen. There was no version of this where she hadn't.
Hope was aware of her own breathing. Of the cold at her back. Of the weight of Josie's hand under hers. Of the fact that on the other side of the house door was Landon, and her friends, and the entire careful structure of her life that looked right from the outside. She was aware that this did not fit that structure and had never fit and she had known it since September.
She leaned towards Josie anyway and let her lips press against her the taller girl.
Tentative at first, the kiss began with the lightest pressure.
She pulled back a fraction. Josie had gone very still. Hope could see the slight unevenness in her breathing, dilated pupils, the small visible evidence that this was not nothing to her either, and something that had been holding on very tightly inside Hope let go.
She kissed her again. Longer. The other girl responded in kind. Her lips parted, warm and inviting, giving Hope’s tongue the perfect opening to slip inside and trace hers. As the kiss deepened, Josie's hand came up to her face and Hope felt like something was settling into place that she had not known was out of place.
She hadn’t known kissing another person could feel like this, so exhilarating, so wild, so good, which was its own particular kind of terrifying.
Then there were voices from inside. The moment broke. The two separated, both breathing hard.
Hope composed herself. She found a bathroom, redid her lipstick and went back into the party. She found Landon and stood next to him and said normal things in a normal voice, and he put his arm around her, and she looked at the room full of people who knew exactly who she was, and felt, for the first time she could remember, like a stranger in her own life.
On Monday, she passed Josie in the hallway with a smile that was perfectly pleasant and completely ordinary and contained nothing from Friday except its careful absence. She felt Josie register it. She kept walking.
She told herself: that was the end of it. It had happened, it was done, it would stay in the periphery with everything else she managed not to look at.
She almost believed it.
-----
December
It happened again before Christmas, and this time it didn't stay private.
The second time was in the back of Josie's car after a party in early December, both of them waiting for Lizzie to finish whatever conversation she was having inside that showed no signs of ending.
It was cold, properly cold now, the kind that fogs windows from the inside, and they had been sitting for twenty minutes talking about nothing in particular, and then they weren't talking at all, and the silence had the specific quality of a held breath.
Hope had been watching Josie's hands while she talked, the way she gestured when she was making a point, precise and unhurried, and at some moment she had stopped watching her hands and started watching her face instead, and then her mouth, and she had the particular experience of something happening that bypassed the part of her that made decisions entirely.
She reached across and touched Josie's jaw, turned her face toward her, and kissed her. This was not the tentative, questioning way she’d begun the kiss from the lake house. This was different, the relief of no longer resisting, of finally stopping the effort of not wanting it and giving in to desire.
Josie kissed her back, just as passionately. Her hand came up into Hope’s hair and Hope felt herself lean into it and press up against the other girl, pulling her closer. She could feel their hearts thudding in tandem.
Hope let her hands move under Josie’s shirt, touching her back, then moving down to her legs. The other girl let out a soft moan that sent a jolt straight to Hope’s core.
By now the windows had fogged completely and Hope wasn't thinking about anything except this very moment, this feeling, of wanting to take whatever Josie was willing to give her.
Then car door opened.
Not Lizzie's side. The other side, the side closest to where they were. Someone reaching in for a jacket they'd left on the seat, probably, someone who hadn't expected to find anything, and who found something they very clearly had not expected.
It was Penelope Park.
The three of them existed in a single frozen second: Hope with her hands still high on Josie’s leg, under her skirt, pressed against the other girl. Josie's fingers still in Hope's hair, both of them turned toward the open door and the cold air and Penelope's expression, which was not shock exactly. Penelope was not easily shocked.
"Sorry," Penelope said, retrieving the jacket from the seat with a composure that was somehow more unnerving than any other reaction would have been. "Didn't realise." And she closed the door.
The silence in the car was entirely different from the one before.
Hope sat back. She was aware of her heavy breathing, her own hands in her lap, of her heart, of the fact that the careful thought of keeping this contained, keeping it private, manageable, had just been breached by someone who was in her friend group and who missed very little and who had already, on at least one occasion, looked at her in a way that suggested she had already suspected something.
"Hope," Josie said quietly.
"I know."
"It's Penelope. She's not going to…"
"I know," Hope said again. Her voice was steady. The rest of her was not. "It's fine. It's fine."
She said it the way people say things when they are trying to make them true by saying them.
Josie looked at her in the dim fogged light, with that patient, clear-eyed attention. "Is it?"
Hope didn't answer. She was staring at the condensation on the windscreen, at the blurred shape of the house beyond it, at the amber light in the windows where the party was still happening, where Landon was, where her friends were, where everyone who knew her in the specific way she had always been known was going about the evening entirely unaware that something had just shifted.
She thought of what might have happened if Penelope hadn’t interrupted them. What she wanted to take from Josie. What Josie might have let her do.
"I don't know what I’m doing," she managed. It wasn't an apology. It was just what was true.
"I know," Josie said.
"Does that bother you?"
Josie thought about it honestly. "It would bother me more not to know."
Hope turned to look at Josie, who looked younger in the dim light, less composed, and something moved across her face that Hope couldn't fully read. Then the passenger door opened and Lizzie climbed in, oblivious, talking before she'd even settled into the seat.
The moment folded back into itself. But it did not disappear. It existed now, outside the car, in Penelope Park's precise and comprehensive memory, and Hope knew it, and the knowing changed the texture of everything that came after.
The following week at school, Penelope said nothing. She looked at Hope once, across a lunch table, with an expression that communicated: I see you, and I am choosing, for now, to let you be. It was the most generous thing Penelope had ever done for her.
It was also a reminder that the choice was Penelope's to make, not Hope's, and that the thing she had been keeping in the periphery now existed in the world outside herself, which was a different kind of existence entirely.