content :: mdni 18+ content ;; sexual themes, fluff, angst, comedy, forbidden romance, good old lesbian yearning (lots of it), homophobia (openly expressed/implied), closeted reader, afab reader βΈΊ men dni, swearing, bullying, mild violence/fighting, descriptions of injuries, typical highschool drama, ellie is insanely conflicted, reader being an ass, reader's boyfriend ALSO being an ass (x100), greg returns and crashes out, modern au, songfic, multiple part fic,, lmk if i've missed anything !!
wordΒ count :: 13.9k
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synopsis :: it starts the way most disasters start: quietly, and in a school cafeteria. ellie williams has a problem. it isn't the bruises, or the skipped classes, or the journal she really should have held onto more carefully. it's the girl across the lunch hall β the one she can't stop looking at, the one who looks back like it costs her something, the one who is, by every reasonable measure, the worst possible person to feel this way about. she knows that. she has always known that.
it doesn't seem to be helping.
THE CAFETERIA WAS LOUD, the way school cafeterias always were β a wall of overlapping sound, trays clattering, chairs scraping, someone three tables over laughing like a foghorn someone had taught to be obnoxious on purpose. It was the kind of noise that didn't just fill a room but colonised it, pressed itself into every available corner and set up permanent residence. A living, breathing thing made entirely of chaos and the smell of overcooked pasta.
Ellie didn't hear any of it.
You were the still point at the centre of a spinning room.
That was the only way to make sense of it β the way the afternoon light came through the high windows at just the right angle, just the right moment, and found you like it had been searching. Like it had crossed ninety-three million miles of empty, freezing, indifferent space with one singular destination in mind, and that destination was you. It poured into your hair like liquid gold being tipped from a jug, pooled at your shoulders like it was reluctant to go any further, gilded the edges of you until you were less a girl eating lunch and more a Renaissance painting that had gotten up, gotten dressed, and decided to haunt a school cafeteria for reasons of its own.
The noise, the chaos, the aggressive institutional ugliness of the room itself β none of it touched you. It broke around you the way water broke around a stone. You had your own atmosphere. A separate, sovereign one, with a pressure system all its own and weather that Ellie had never once been able to predict.
You were talking to your friends, gesturing at something with one hand β laughing, maybe, it was hard to tell from here, which was a tragedy that Ellie felt in her actual ribcage β and even the gesture was a small catastrophe, a grenade with the pin pulled, because you moved like punctuation. Like every motion was a sentence that knew exactly where it was going. Even a wave of your hand was a complete thought.
"Ellie."
The rest of the room had become scenery, a painted backdrop, a film set that existed purely as context for you, and the light kept doing what it was doing and you kept being what you were, this impossible, incandescent, gravity-bending β
"Ellie."
β thing, this force, because that's what it was, that's the only word that fit, a force, the kind that couldn't be reasoned with or negotiated with or looked at directly for too long without something in Ellie's chest doing something embarrassing and structural, like a building developing cracks along its foundational walls, and she was aware, distantly, the way you're aware of weather through a closed window, that she was staring, that she had been staring, that staring was an understatement for what she was doing, which was closer to orbiting, helplessly, uselessly, like a satellite that had long since run out of fuel but kept going anyway because gravity didn't care about her situation β
"ELLIE."
The world detonated back into existence.
"What β" She startled so violently she nearly launched her lunch tray off the table like a trebuchet, one hand slamming down on it a half second before disaster, her elbow catching the edge of her drink hard enough to send it rocking, and a fork went skidding off the edge and clattered across the linoleum with the specific kind of loud that made three nearby tables look over at once. "Jesus β Greg β"
Greg was watching her with the serene, comfortable expression of a man sitting in a lawn chair watching someone else's house burn down. He had his chin propped in his palm, his lunch sitting half-eaten in front of him, and he radiated the energy of someone who had been attempting this intervention for a deeply unreasonable amount of time and had made his peace with the wait.
"You were gone," he said. Not accusatory. Almost impressed. "Like, not just checked out. Like, evacuated. I was one minute away from checking you for a pulse."
"I was thinking," Ellie said, and she said it with the dignity of a person who had not just nearly catapulted a fork across a public space.
"Yeah." Greg's gaze drifted, slow and inevitable as a tide going out, over Ellie's shoulder. She knew the trajectory. She watched it arrive at its destination. She watched his face conduct a rapid and unflattering series of calculations. "About her."
Ellie did not turn around. She retrieved her fork from the floor, set it back on the tray with surgical precision, and took a long, unhurried drink of water. Buying time. Building a wall out of nothing.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Ellie. I could trace your eyeline with a ruler."
"I was zoning out. It happens."
"In the exact direction β"
"Greg."
"β of the girl who is, conservatively, so far out of your league that the concept of a league is no longer a useful framework β"
"Greg."
"β like we're talking different sports, different continents, she is playing chess and you are, with an enormous heart and terrible odds, playing Go Fish β"
"I know," Ellie said.
And that was the end of it. The words landed flat and definitive, a period at the end of a sentence that had already been written and wasn't looking for edits. Not angry. Not wounded. Just the particular heaviness of something that had already been turned over so many times in her hands that all the sharp edges were worn smooth. She knew. She had always known. She kept the knowing in a locked box in the basement of herself and did not go down there on purpose, and on the occasions she found herself there anyway, she turned the light off and went back upstairs.
"I'm not doing anything," she said, quieter. "I'm not trying anything. I'm not an idiot."
Greg looked at her for a moment. The entertainment evaporated off his face and left something more honest behind.
"I know you're not," he said.
"Don't," she said.
He closed his mouth. He understood, which was why she kept him around.
She stood up and grabbed her tray. "Come on."
They wove through the thinning cafeteria toward the tray return, moving in the comfortable tandem of two people who had been navigating spaces together long enough to do it without thinking. Greg had pivoted to a detailed critique of the comic run Ellie had lent him last week β specifically, and incorrectly, the third act β and Ellie was in the process of constructing a rebuttal like a lawyer who had been waiting for this cross-examination, because the third act was a masterpiece and Greg's problem was not with the writing but with his own constitutional inability to sit still for a slow build, which was a character flaw she had been documenting for years and intended, eventually, to cite formally β
"Hey."
A beat.
"Loser."
Time did not stop. Ellie would not say time stopped, because that was dramatic and she was not dramatic. What she would say was that the word hit her nervous system like a match to a fuse, that her heartbeat went from baseline to a full sprint in the space between one syllable and the next, that her hands flooded with cold sweat against the lunch tray and her face became a furnace and every hair on the back of her neck stood at attention like soldiers who had been called into service and were extremely aware of it.
She didn't need to hear it twice. She didn't need context or confirmation. She knew that voice the way she knew her own name β better, maybe, in some humiliating biological sense, the way a compass needle knew north, not by choice, not by any conscious arrangement, but by something deep and structural and completely indifferent to her feelings on the matter.
She turned around.
There you were.
Three feet away, wearing an expression like a knife that had learned to look decorative. Your posse arranged behind you the way shadows arranged themselves around a light source: instinctive, inevitable, orbiting without meaning to. You were looking at Ellie with the lazy, half-lidded assessment of a cat watching something cross the floor β mildly curious, entirely unbothered, already certain of the outcome.
In your hand, held up with the casualness of someone displaying a particularly boring trophy, was a journal. Thick, soft-cornered from years of being shoved into backpacks, colonised by stickers from a collection that Ellie had been curating since she was eleven. Her name was written on the inside cover in her own handwriting.
Her brain, normally a loud and opinionated instrument, went briefly and completely silent.
"Forget something?" you asked, and your voice was warm the way a lit match was warm: pleasant right up until it wasn't.
"I β" Ellie started.
That was as far as she got.
"I," you repeated, tasting the word, turning it over in your mouth like you were deciding whether it was worth swallowing. The syllable became a scalpel in your hands. A small, precise, devastating one.
Ellie's face was a bonfire. Her brain came back online in fragments.
"Yes," she managed, and it exited her mouth at half the intended volume and twice the intended vulnerability, thin and breathless as a thread pulled too tight. "Can I β that's mine β"
She stepped forward. This was reasonable. This was rational. She was simply recovering her property; this was not a big deal; her heart was not trying to punch its way out of her chest cavity like something in an action movie.
Behind you, your friends had formed a small, murmuring parliament of cruelty. A sound drifted over β something about the jacket, probably, or the shoes, delivered in the specifically calibrated register of not-quite-quiet, the kind of cruelty that wore plausible deniability like a coat β accompanied by laughter as thin and sharp as paper and just as capable of leaving a cut.
Ellie's jaw locked. She kept her eyes on the journal.
"Sure," you said, and the word was a door being closed politely in someone's face. You pivoted the journal out of reach as naturally as breathing, as if your arm had always intended to be somewhere Ellie couldn't quite reach, and flipped it open with the air of someone settling into a very good armchair with a very good book. "Oh, this is β hm. This is interesting."
"Give it back," Ellie said, and the panic was a live wire dragged straight up her spine, white-hot and instantaneous, burning the last of the embarrassment off her clean. She stepped in with her hand out, reaching β "Now β"
You stepped back. Ellie followed. You turned, still reading, unhurried as a Sunday morning, and what unfolded next was not in any way a graceful sequence of events. It was not choreographed. It did not reflect well on anyone. It ended with Ellie's chest pressed to your back and her arms stretched forward, hands closing over yours where they held the journal, the two of you stacked together and frozen mid-reach like a sculpture depicting something its artist was still working out the title for.
The cafeteria became a distant concept.
The noise fell away like wallpaper peeling off a wall.
Ellie could feel the warmth radiating off you through two layers of fabric β could feel it the way you feel sunlight through a window, in the places it touched and the places it didn't, could feel the arrested stillness in your frame like a held breath, the sudden awareness of two bodies that had not consulted each other before arriving here, at this precise and inadvertent geography, pressed together like two notes accidentally played at the same time that turned out, improbably, to be a chord.
Her lungs had forgotten their job. Her ribs felt like they were made of glass.
And your face β she couldn't see your face, not from this angle, not with her chin nearly at your shoulder, but she could see the tip of your ear from here, and the tip of your ear was the deep, telling pink of something that had not been prepared for this either, a bloom of colour as involuntary as a confession, and Ellie filed it away in a compartment so far beneath her conscious mind that she could almost believe it didn't exist.
Almost.
"Hey."
The word fell into the moment like a stone into still water, and the ripples were immediate and violent. They jumped apart like they'd been defibrillated β Ellie backward, two full steps, landing unsteadily; you forward, spine snapping upright, shoulders squaring, the whole architecture of your expression rearranging itself in the half second it took for the situation to demand it.
Asher (your dickhead of a boyfriend) materialised like something the room had grown specifically to be inconvenient. He was leaning against the nearest table with his arms folded across his chest, a physical equation that was trying very hard to add up to something intimidating, all jaw and crossed arms and the specific energy of a person who considered his own arrival a statement. He was looking at Ellie the way you looked at something sticky on the bottom of a shoe.
"She got a problem?" he said, and the she was a dart aimed directly at Ellie's general existence, casual and contemptuous and entirely comfortable with itself.
"No," Ellie said.
It came out the way water came out of a tap. No temperature, no texture, no particular feeling about itself. She looked at him the way she looked at a blank wall β registered the surface, found it offered nothing of interest, moved on. It wasn't hostility. It was the total, undecorated absence of it: the specific brand of indifference she reserved for things and people who had not earned the dignity of her actual disdain. He blinked. He'd been expecting a different kind of reaction, the kind he could do something with, and she'd handed him a door that opened onto nothing.
She watched him recalibrate. It was not entertaining enough to be interesting.
You, meanwhile β you were not looking at him.
You were looking at Ellie, and your expression was doing something that Ellie's brain started reaching for and then abandoned, because it was shuttering closed too fast, the way curtains got drawn against the light, a smooth and practised motion that left no evidence of what had been there before it. Whatever it was, it was gone. You looked at Ellie the way you looked at a finished conversation. Then you held out the journal.
Quietly. No theatre. No ceremony.
Ellie reached out and took it.
Your fingers did not immediately let go.
One heartbeat. One single, suspended, airless beat where time seemed to hold its breath and fold itself in half β the journal floating between you in the space where both your hands met, your fingers against hers, a contact so small and accidental and fleeting it barely qualified as a thing that had technically happened.
It was the loudest thing in the room.
Then your fingers fell away like autumn, like something letting go on purpose. You turned, reached back, and looped your hand through Asher's arm with the brisk efficiency of someone closing a tab they'd had open too long. He said something; you didn't look like you were listening. You moved, and your constellation moved with you β a brief, ungainly scramble of heels and murmurs and people rearranging themselves like iron filings following a magnet β and then the cafeteria swallowed you whole, and you were gone, and the room left behind by your absence was a smaller, flatter, considerably less interesting place.
Greg appeared at Ellie's elbow like a dog who had been sitting at the door for a while.
"Hey." His voice had shed every last layer of amusement. He was watching the direction Asher had gone with an expression that had real structural integrity β the kind that was built out of something other than a passing feeling, something load-bearing. "You okay?"
Ellie looked down at the journal in her hands. Turned it over once. Pressed her thumb to the corner of the cover.
"Yeah," she said. "Fine."
She tucked it under her arm, and they walked out, and the noise of the cafeteria closed over them like water over a stone, and that was that.
Except.
Except that Ellie Williams, who was not an idiot, who had told Greg less than ten minutes ago that she knew better, who kept the box in the basement and did not open it β
β smiled.
Not a performance of a smile. Not the sarcastic, armoured, public-facing smile she used as a deflection tool. This was something that happened without her permission, small and private and stubborn, living only in the corners of her mouth and the interior of her chest, where it had no witnesses and she could maintain, in good conscience, the polite fiction that she was absolutely fine and none of this was happening to her.
Your fingers against hers had been a spark. A stupid, accidental, three-second spark.
It burned in her chest all the way to fourth period, faithful as a pilot light, small as a star seen from a very long way away.
It did not go out.
The parking lot in the middle of the school period was its own kind of quiet.
Not the quiet of absence β the school was still full, still breathing, still running through its daily machinery of bells and syllabi and thirty-something students staring at whiteboards and willing the clock to move faster by sheer collective force of misery. The noise of it bled through the brick in a low, institutional hum. But out here, between the rows of cars baking slowly in the afternoon heat, the air had a different quality. Looser. Unsupervised. The kind of quiet that belonged to people who had made an executive decision about how to spend their Tuesday and were at peace with the consequences.
Ellie was at peace with the consequences.
She was sitting on the concrete kerb at the far edge of the lot, the secluded corner where the English teacher's ancient Volvo created a natural wall against the sight lines from the main building's windows β a discovery she had made in ninth grade and guarded with the same devotion other people reserved for good parking spots. Her skateboard was on the ground beside her, one wheel spinning idly in the breeze like it was bored. Greg was next to her, both of them nursing vending machine drinks and the mutual, comfortable warmth of two people who had agreed wordlessly that whatever was happening in this period could happen without them.
"He reads off the slides," Ellie was saying, with the tone of someone delivering a verdict after a very long deliberation. "Like, verbatim. Word for word. He prints the PowerPoint, puts it on the projector, and then reads it back to us like we're not all sitting there looking at the exact same words in real time β"
"He does the thing," Greg said, pointing at her, nodding with the intensity of a man who had been waiting for permission to bring this up. "The thing where he pauses and looks at the class like he just said something profound β"
"Like he's waiting for applause β"
"Like he expects someone to weep β"
"I was there for thirty-five minutes last Thursday," Ellie said, with the dead-eyed sincerity of a trauma survivor recounting the incident, "and I learned nothing. Genuinely. I came in knowing nothing, I left knowing the same nothing, except I was also tired β"
"You were asleep for twenty of those minutes β"
"I was resting my eyes β"
"Ellie, you snored."
"I breathe loudly β"
Greg laughed, that full-body thing he did where it seemed to involve his entire skeleton, and Ellie let herself grin, let the afternoon settle around them like a blanket, let the tension of the cafeteria β the journal, the journal pressed between your hands, the pink tip of your ear β slide off her back for the first time in an hour. This was good. This was normal. This was the world as it should operate: just her and Greg and the sun on the asphalt and nothing that required her to feel anything complicated.
She picked up her skateboard and set it across her knees, running her thumb along the edge of the deck out of habit, the worn texture of it as familiar as a heartbeat.
"Mr. Peterson, though," Greg was saying, warming to the subject with the enthusiasm of a man who had been storing this grievance for weeks. "He talks about himself. He will segue from mitosis β mitosis, Ellie β to a story about his lake house, and no one has ever once questioned it, we all just sit there and let it happen like we've been hypnotised β"
"The lake house," Ellie echoed reverently. "We know more about that lake house than we know about anything on the curriculum. I could pass a test on that lake house. I could write a thesis β"
The doors of the school opened.
Not the way doors opened normally β with the casual, mundane swing of someone who had somewhere to be and was going there. These doors opened the way things opened when they were preceded by intention, flung wide with the particular momentum of a group of people who had decided on a direction and were not planning to be stopped by something as minor as a fire door. The bang of it carried across the parking lot like a starting pistol.
Ellie heard it. Her thumb stilled on the edge of the deck.
Four of them came through first β Asher's usual architecture of loyalty, the specific collection of broad shoulders and performative swagger that trailed in his wake the way debris trailed a comet. They came down the steps with their eyes already moving, already scanning, already locked onto the target with a speed that meant this had not been an accident, that someone had looked out a window, that the secluded corner had been found. They moved across the parking lot with the kind of coordinated, purposeful energy that turned a group of boys into something with a different name, something that rhymed with mob and felt like a weather front.
Ellie was on her feet before she knew she'd decided to stand.
"Greg," she said.
"Yeah," Greg said. He was already up. His voice had flattened out, gone careful. "I see them."
They came fast, spreading out as they approached, a net tightening around its catch, until they had formed a loose but deliberate ring around the corner β one on the left, two coming from the right, cutting off the gap between the Volvo and the kerb with the practised ease of people who had done this before, who knew the geometry of cornering someone and applied it without needing to think. Ellie assessed the exits in the half second available to her and found them all closed. Beside her, she felt Greg go very still, the way prey went still, the deep animal instinct of something that understood what was happening and was calculating on its feet.
Then Asher came through the doors.
He didn't rush. That was the thing about Asher β he never rushed. He had the kind of confidence that didn't need to hurry because it had already decided how things were going to go and was simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. He came down the steps with the unhurried, heavy-footed certainty of a man crossing a room he owned, hands relaxed at his sides, jaw set, eyes moving across the parking lot until they found Ellie and stopped.
He walked over. His friends parted for him without looking.
He stopped two feet in front of them.
He was tall in the way that had always seemed specifically designed to be used on someone β not incidental height, not just the result of genetics, but height that had been weaponised, deployed, stood up to its full advantage and pointed at the world like an argument. He stood in front of them and looked down, and his gaze did a slow, pendulous swing from Greg to Ellie and then settled there, on Ellie, with the weight and precision of a pin through a butterfly.
The silence stretched like taffy. Like something being pulled past the point it wanted to go.
"Cafeteria," he said finally. Just the word, dropped in front of them like a coin on a counter. His voice was low, conversational, the kind of low that was a performance of casualness, wearing it the way a fist wore a glove. "What was that."
Ellie's hands were steady. Her heartbeat was not. "Nothing," she said. "She had something of mine. I got it back. That's it."
"Hm." He tilted his head. Considered her the way you considered something you hadn't decided what to do with yet. "See, here's my thing. My thing is, she doesn't like you. She doesn't wanna be around you. And I've seen the way you look at her." He paused, and the pause was a shovel. "I know what that is."
"Then you know it wasn't a problem," Ellie said.
Something moved across his face. Not a flinch. More like a gear catching.
"Let me be clear about something," he said, and the conversational register dropped away entirely, shed like a coat, leaving something colder and more architectural underneath. He leaned forward, just fractionally, just enough to shrink the two feet between them into something that felt like inches. "You don't talk to her. You don't look at her. You don't exist near her if you can avoid it. Because girls like you β" and he dsaid girls like you the way people said things they had decided were self-explanatory, the way people said things they considered too obvious to require completion, and he left it there, in the air between them, to do its work. "She doesn't need that around her. You understand me? Keep your issues to yourself."
The words were rocks dropped into still water. Ellie felt the ripples move through her in a straight, cold line from her throat to her stomach to somewhere deeper than that, somewhere the words found the places she'd already worn thin and pressed down on them with deliberate, knowing weight. Her jaw tightened. Her hands found each other at her sides and she pressed her knuckles together and breathed through it, slow and even, the breathing of someone who had learned, through repeated occasions, to absorb this particular kind of hit and stay standing.
She was fine. She was fine. She had been called worse, implied worse, had the shape of herself outlined in uglier terms, and she was fine, she could take it.
Then Asher turned to Greg.
And said what he said.
It was quick. It was almost casual. It was the kind of comment that arrived with no fanfare, no escalation, dressed in the same tone as everything else β a flat, offhand, contemptible thing delivered the way you delivered trash, which was to say without ceremony, because it didn't require any. Just words. Just a sentence. Just Greg's most personal geography laid out and stepped on by someone who hadn't earned the right to know it, let alone flatten it.
And well, thatβs all she could remember.
The thing that moved through Ellie was not anger, exactly β anger was something she had a relationship with, something she could negotiate with, something she could put on a leash and walk. This was different. This was the thing underneath the anger, the subterranean thing, the fault line going β and she thought about Greg's face, what was on Greg's face right now, and she didn't look, she couldn't look, because if she looked she would see it and then it would be worse and she couldn't afford for it to be worse β
Her fist connected with Asher's face with the full force of every last gram of it.
The sound was a single, sharp, declarative crack, as definitive as a full stop, as satisfying and as catastrophic as a window shattering from the inside. His head snapped back. He staggered β one step, two, genuinely staggered, not performed, not for effect, but rocked back on his heels by the geometry of a hit he had not, in his fundamental and structurally unsound confidence, seen coming. For one bright, blazing, fleeting second that Ellie would store in a separate compartment from everything else β the good compartment, the one without a lock β he looked genuinely surprised.
Then his hand went to his face.
Then the parking lot became a different place entirely.
It happened the way natural disasters happened: with a speed that outpaced comprehension, with a force that didn't wait for consent, with the kind of scale that reduced the individual to a small thing caught inside a much larger motion. Asher's friends moved like a single organism, a flock of something with no good intentions, and Ellie had time for one sharp, preparatory breath before the first hit landed, and then it was just sound and motion and the hard, specific language of a parking lot in the middle of the afternoon being used for something parking lots were not designed for.
She took three hits before she stopped counting. They came fast β face, shoulder, ribs β each one a blunt, percussive argument, each one the sound of knuckles meeting bone with the particular intimacy of violence, which was to say without any distance at all. Her face became a series of points of impact, her eye socket a lit fuse, her cheekbone a bruise still in the process of deciding its final shape. She did not go down. This was the thing about Ellie β and she was not proud of it, because she knew it said something about the kind of life that had made her β she did not go down easily. She was built for absorbing things. She was architecture designed for load-bearing.
She went down on one knee. Her palm hit the asphalt.
To her left, Greg was fighting a different battle β fighting to move, which was the more maddening one, two of them holding his arms back and behind him in a vice grip that was not about hurting him so much as making him watch, which was crueller, which was the point, and the bruises blooming up his arms from the grip of their fingers were the colour of storm clouds, deep and spreading and wrong against his skin in a way that made Ellie's vision go briefly, incandescently red even through her own pain.
"Greg β" she started.
"I'm fine," he said, tight and breathless. "Ellie, I'm fine β"
Asher crouched down to her level. His nose was a swelling event. There was a satisfaction lodged in Ellie's chest that not even the current circumstances could fully dislodge, stubborn as a splinter. He looked at her from six inches away with his jaw working and his eyes doing something flat and final, and he stayed there for a moment the way you stayed somewhere to make sure the point had been made.
Then he stood up.
"Stay away from her," he said, and it came out nasal and compressed and considerably less authoritative than it had been ten minutes ago, and that too went into the good compartment, filed under small victories, cherish these.
He walked away. His friends unpeeled themselves from Greg and followed, the whole assembly retreating across the parking lot with the energy of something that had said what it came to say and was ready to be done, and the sound of the doors closing behind them was an ending the same way a curtain dropping was an ending β definitive, institutional, this portion of the programme is now concluded.
The parking lot settled back into its Tuesday afternoon quiet.
Ellie stayed on one knee on the asphalt for a moment, breathing. Just breathing. Cataloguing. The side of her face was a symphony of wrongness, two or three distinct movements playing simultaneously in the key of this is going to look terrible tomorrow. Her ribs were filing a formal complaint. Her eye was beginning to swell in the unhurried, committed way of injuries that had decided to take this seriously.
Greg appeared in front of her, folding down to the ground, and she saw his arms β the dark thumbprint bruises already stamped into his skin like signatures β and her stomach turned over hard.
"Don't," he said, reading her face with the accuracy of four years of practice. "I'm fine. They were just holding me. I'm fine."
"Your arms β"
"Ellie."
She looked at him. He looked back at her, steady, with the quiet and deliberate fortitude of a person who had decided how they were going to hold themselves and was holding. She thought about what Asher had said. She thought about the look on Greg's face when he'd said it, which she had seen in the half second before she'd stopped thinking and started moving, and she pressed that image down and sealed it over.
"I'm sorry," she said. Flat. Sincere. The most genuine two words she owned.
"Don't be," Greg said. "The nose was worth it."
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
"It really was," he said.
She let out a breath that was almost, in some technical sense, a laugh.
They sat on the asphalt in the thin afternoon sunlight, two people held together by years and a shared disaster, bruised and slightly wrecked, and the parking lot sat around them in its middle-of-the-day quiet, and Ellie's skateboard lay on the ground a few feet away with one wheel still spinning, idly, faithfully, like it was waiting for her to come back.
She reached over and stopped it with her hand.
Then she sat back, pressed the heel of her palm gently against her swelling eye, looked up at the sky β wide and indifferent and enormous, stretched out over the whole unreasonable mess of her life like it had all the time in the world β and breathed.
The skate park at four-thirty in the afternoon was the closest thing Ellie had to a church.
Not in the quiet way β the park was never quiet, not really, always threaded through with the percussion of wheels on concrete and the occasional sharp crack of a board meeting the lip of a ramp at the wrong angle and the distant, overlapping noise of the city doing what cities did at the end of a school day. But church wasn't about quiet, not really. It was about the particular quality of being somewhere that received you. That didn't ask anything of you except your presence. The skate park took Ellie the same way it took everyone β bruised, badly, on a Tuesday with a swelling eye β and simply continued to exist around her, indifferent and solid and endlessly, reliably itself.
She pushed off and rolled, long and unhurried, from one end of the flat section to the other, the wheels humming their low, continuous note against the concrete. Then back. Then forward. Back and forth, back and forth, a metronome that had forgotten what it was counting.
Greg, sitting on the bench behind her with his skateboard upended across his knees and a rag and a small bottle of wheel oil in his hands, was in the middle of what could generously be called a monologue and less generously called a one-man theatre production about the subject of Asher and what Greg thought about Asher and where, specifically, Greg felt Asher could go and what he could do with himself when he got there. He had been in the middle of this monologue for approximately twenty-five minutes. He was, by any reasonable metric, nowhere near the end of it.
"β and the audacity," Greg was saying, working the oil into the bearing with the focused aggression of someone who was only technically performing maintenance and was mostly just doing something with his hands before his hands did something else. "The sheer, uncut, factory-grade audacity of him walking out there like he owns the β like we're the ones who β" He stopped. Regrouped. Swore, comprehensively, in the manner of someone who had run out of regular words and needed to reach for a different register entirely. "I'm telling you, Ellie, I'm telling you, the next time he comes within ten feet of either of us, I swear to every god that has ever been worshipped on this earth β"
Push. Roll. The wheels hummed.
"β and what he said β " Greg's voice tightened around the edges, briefly, before he pried it back open. "What he had the absolute nerve to say, I have been turning it over in my head for the past three hours and every time I do I want to β"
Push. Roll.
"β because it's not even the hitting, right, the hitting I can process, the hitting is a known quantity, but the words β "
Push.
"β Ellie. Ellie, I'm saying, are you even β"
"Do you think she really likes him?"
The monologue stopped.
The wheel oil paused mid-application.
Greg looked up from the undercarriage of his board with the slow, blinking expression of someone whose train of thought had just been derailed by something that had come from an entirely perpendicular direction. The silence stretched out between them, thin and slightly bewildered.
"...What?" he said.
Ellie rolled back toward him, one foot dragging lazily against the concrete to slow herself, and came to a stop a few feet from the bench. She was looking off to the left, at the middle distance, at nothing in particular β or more specifically at the particular kind of nothing that served as a screen for the something she was actually looking at, the interior movie reel that had been running on loop since approximately noon.
"Her," she said, with the self-evident tone of someone who felt the pronoun was sufficient context and didn't understand why clarification was being requested.
Greg stared at her. "Ellie. I need you to understand that I was in the middle of a very important β"
"Her," Ellie said again, and this time she turned her head and looked at Greg, and the look said everything the word wasn't bothering to.
Greg's expression completed its journey from confused to resigned with a brief layover at of course. He set the oil bottle down on the bench beside him with the measured care of a man putting down something that needed to be put down before he could fully engage with the situation at hand.
"Are you," he said, "telling me that I have been talking to you for β" he checked his phone "β twenty-seven minutes, and your brain has been β"
"Can you just answer the question."
"β has been entirely elsewhere, specifically at the address of β"
"Greg."
"β the girl who makes your eye twitch every time she's within fifty feet β"
"I will leave," Ellie said. "I will get on that board and I will physically remove myself from this conversation."
Greg held up a hand. A concession. He looked at the sky for a moment, the way people looked at the sky when they were deciding how to deliver information they already knew wasn't going to land well, and then he looked back at her.
"Fine," he said. "Fine. You want my honest opinion?"
"I wouldn't have asked if I didn't."
"She likes him enough," Greg said, picking the words with the care of someone navigating something that had sharp edges and didn't want to be held. "Or β she likes something about the situation. The stability of it, maybe, or the way it looks from the outside, or β I don't know, maybe she genuinely β" He made a gesture that was trying to be diplomatic and mostly just looked tired. "People stay in things for all kinds of reasons, and not all of them are because they're madly in love, and not all of them are because they aren't. She could like him. She could be in it for something else entirely. She could be doing the thing where you convince yourself you like something because the alternative is figuring out what you actually β"
He stopped.
The rag went still in his hands.
He looked at Ellie.
Something had crossed his face β quick, electric, the specific expression of a thought arriving at full speed from a direction he hadn't been watching. His eyes went slightly wider. His mouth opened a fraction. He had the look of a man who had been putting together a puzzle for a long time and had just found the piece that told him what the picture actually was.
"Oh," he said.
Ellie said nothing. She was studying the ground with the focused intensity of someone who had suddenly developed a profound interest in the specific texture of skate park concrete.
"Oh," Greg said again, louder, the vowel round and full and carrying all the weight of the realisation behind it. He sat up straight. He set the skateboard fully aside. He was now giving this conversation the entirety of his posture. "Ellie. Ellie. You're not β tell me you're not actually β" He pointed at her. She did not look at the pointing finger. "Are you planning something?"
The concrete was very interesting. Genuinely fascinating. A rich subject.
"Ellie Williams," Greg said.
"You're being dramatic β"
"Am I?" He leaned forward on the bench, elbows on his knees, and levelled a look at her that could have stripped paint. "Because from where I'm sitting, you just interrupted twenty-seven minutes of completely justified grievance to ask me whether your bully β your bully, Ellie, the girl who has made it her personal mission to β"
"She's not that bad β"
"She called you a loser in front of half the school this morning β"
"That's just how she β"
"She does it regularly, with consistency, like it's a hobby she's committed to β"
"Greg β"
"And not only is she your bully," Greg continued, steamrolling ahead with the unstoppable momentum of someone who had been handed a point and intended to arrive at it regardless of the terrain, "she is also the girlfriend of the guy who just rearranged your face β" he gestured broadly at Ellie's swelling eye, which was, admittedly, making its presence felt with increasing insistence β "in a school parking lot β"
"I'm aware β"
"In broad daylight β"
"I was there β"
"And despite all of that," Greg said, spreading his hands like a lawyer addressing a jury he had begun to lose faith in, "you are sitting here β you, specifically, Ellie, with your one functioning eye β thinking about whether she genuinely likes the guy who gave you the other one." He paused. Let it settle. "Does that sound like a person who is not planning something?"
Ellie pinched the bridge of her nose with two fingers. This did not help her eye. She did it anyway, because she needed to do something with her hands and it felt approximately right for the quality of this moment.
Greg was off the bench now, pacing the short strip of concrete in front of her with the energy of a man who had been handed more than he could hold still with. "She has a boyfriend, Ellie. A boyfriend who is a nightmare, yes, an absolute portrait of everything wrong with βyes, fine, terrible person, we are agreed β but he is still there, he is a real and present entity, and you are standing here β skating here, whatever β daydreaming about a girl who called you a loser this morning β"
"She gave me my journal back," Ellie said.
Greg stopped pacing.
He looked at her.
"Her fingers," Ellie said, and then immediately looked like she wished she hadn't said that.
There was a silence.
"Her fingers," Greg repeated. Slowly. As if handling it carefully.
"Forget I said that."
"Her fingers have convinced you β"
"I said forget it β"
"β to potentially pursue a girl with a boyfriend who employs muscle, " Greg said, resuming his pacing with renewed conviction, "because her fingers touched yours during what was, by any objective measure, a bullying incident β"
"It wasn't β"
"She was reading your journal out loud in front of her friends!"
"She stopped!"
"Why are you defending this!"
"I'm not defending anything," Ellie said, and she said it too quietly, too evenly, and that was the thing that was the most damning thing about it β not the volume or the heat but the flatness of it, the calm of someone saying something that had been sitting inside them for long enough to settle. "I'm not planning anything. I just β I was just asking."
Greg stopped pacing.
He looked at her for a long moment. The skate park moved around them, indifferent and continuous β a kid on a half-pipe in the distance, the sound of wheels, the long flat light of late afternoon falling sideways across the concrete and turning everything gold and slightly elegiac. Greg's expression had been cycling, rapid and expressive, through its range, but it landed now on something quieter. The specific quiet of someone who knew their friend better than their friend thought they did, and was choosing, carefully, how to carry that.
He sat back down on the bench.
"Ellie," he said. Gentler, now. Sanded down.
"Don't," she said.
"I'm just saying β"
"Greg. I know." She pushed off, one small, restless kick, and rolled a few feet and came back. "I know what I'm doing. Or I know what I'm not doing. I'm not doing anything. I'm just β I'm thinking." She dragged the heel of her shoe against the concrete, scuffing it, staring at the mark it left. "People are allowed to think."
Greg watched her. Said nothing. Let her have it.
"It's fine," she said.
It landed like a coin dropping into an empty jar: small, definitive, slightly hollow.
The wheel on her skateboard hummed beneath her, low and constant, rolling and rolling and going nowhere, and the afternoon light kept doing its gold, indiscriminate thing all across the park, and somewhere above them the sky stretched out in that enormous, unbroken way it had, and Ellie stood in the middle of all of it and looked at the horizon and thought about the pink tip of your ear and the ghost of your fingers and the specific gravity of a feeling she had decided, months ago, she was not going to do anything about.
She pushed off again.
Greg picked up his oil and his rag and went back to work.
Neither of them said anything else for a long time.
It was enough.
Ellie's room looked like the inside of a very specific kind of mind.
Which was to say: it looked like chaos, but the organised kind, the kind that had a logic to it that only made sense from the inside. The walls had long since surrendered to the occupation β band posters colonised every available surface from the baseboards to the ceiling, overlapping at the edges, layered in the geological way of something that had been accumulating for years, each one a timestamp, a mood, a particular Tuesday afternoon when she'd decided this mattered and put it up with tape that had since yellowed at the corners. The Misfits. Bikini Kill. Hole. A large, slightly lopsided poster of the solar system that she'd had since she was nine and refused to take down on principle, the planets faded now to softer versions of themselves, Jupiter a pale shadow of its former drama. Beside it, a hand-drawn map of a comic universe she'd been building in her head since middle school, tacked up in pieces, connected by lines of red string that had seemed less unhinged when she'd put it up and now looked, in certain lights, like a conspiracy board.
The desk in the corner was a civilisation unto itself. Stacks of comics, organised by a system that would have been incomprehensible to anyone else but was, to Ellie, as legible as a library catalogue. A half-finished drawing she'd abandoned two weeks ago. Three pens that worked and one that definitely didn't but kept getting picked up by mistake. A small potted cactus that she'd named Gerald and watered erratically and which had, against all reasonable odds, survived.
The guitar lived against the wall beside the window β an old acoustic with a crack along the body that had been there when it was given to her by her dad, Joel, at fifteen and which she'd never gotten around to fixing, partly because she didn't have the money and partly because she'd come to think of the crack as a feature, a mark of character, a thing that had a story. Its presence filled the room the way all instruments filled rooms, with a particular kind of potential energy, the sense of something that could become sound at any moment if asked.
On the floor, a skateboard she hadn't put away yet. On the ceiling, a cluster of glow-in-the-dark stars she'd put up in seventh grade, arranged not randomly but in the actual configuration of Orion's Belt, because she had been that kind of twelve-year-old and some things didn't change.
It was, in every way that mattered, entirely hers. The room of a person who had been filling space with the evidence of herself for years, who decorated like she was leaving proof.
Tonight, it felt like a very small place to contain a very large mood.
The journal was open across her knees, and the pen in her hand was moving with the furious velocity of something trying to outrun itself.
She was not writing neatly. Neat was not the register she was operating in. The words came out pressed hard into the page, the pen dragging with the specific pressure of a hand that was communicating with its whole body weight, the letters angular and fast and running slightly uphill the way her handwriting always did when she was past the point of caring about presentation. It was less like writing and more like an exorcism β dragging things out of the dark interior of herself and pinning them to the page before they could do any more damage in there, getting them outside where they could be looked at from a distance, filed and categorised and rendered slightly less enormous by the act of having been named.
Asher, she wrote, and what followed was a paragraph that would have made Greg applaud and her mother weep, a dense architectural construction of frustration and fury with its foundations in the parking lot and its towers reaching all the way up into the general, aching unfairness of how the world was organised, who it rewarded, what it permitted and what it quietly endorsed by its silence. She wrote about his face when he'd said what he'd said to Greg, the flat, casual cruelty of it, and felt the anger move through her again like a current β still live, still hot, still capable. She wrote about the parking lot and the hits she'd taken and the hits Greg had taken, and her pen pressed so hard into the paper at that part that she went through slightly, leaving a ghost of the letters on the page beneath.
She wrote: I don't regret it. And underlined it twice. And then a third time for structural integrity.
She wrote about the cafeteria, and the journal being held out to her at the end of everything, and she wrote her fingers and then went back and scribbled it out, several times, with the pen going back and forth until the ink was a solid dark bar, a redaction, a classified document. She was not writing about that. That was not the kind of thing she was writing about tonight.
She filled two more pages. She didn't time it. When she finally stopped, the pen hovering over the paper, there was nothing left to write that wouldn't be circling back to things she'd already been over twice, so she stopped.
She closed the journal.
She sat in the quiet of her room β the quiet that wasn't silence, that was the city outside the window and the hum of the light above the desk and the creak of the building settling into itself β and pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes.
Breathed.
Let the anger cool the way things cooled: slowly, unevenly, the heat still present in places.
She sighed β a long, full-body thing, the sigh of something deflating by degrees β and dropped her hands from her face, and her right hand caught the side of her cheekbone on the way down.
"βhssβ"
The pain fired up sharp and immediate, a lit match dragged across the bruise, and she pulled her hand away and held it in the air as if apologising to it. She reached up gingerly, instead, and pressed two careful fingers to the ridge of her cheekbone, testing the topography of the damage like a geologist assessing unstable ground.Β
The bruise had fully committed now, had moved from possibility to statement, a deep and spreading thing beneath her eye that she'd glimpsed in the bathroom mirror an hour ago and decided not to look at again until morning, when presumably she'd be better prepared to deal with the particular aesthetic of having been punched in the face by someone with more mass than personality.
She sat with her eyes closed.
The room was quiet. Gerald the cactus did not offer any comments.
And in the dark behind her eyelids, where there was nothing to look at and therefore nothing to choose not to look at, you arrived without invitation or preamble, the way you always arrived in the unguarded spaces β not dramatically, not with any of the fanfare you'd think something that caused this much structural damage would bring, but quietly, almost gently, settling in like a tide coming in, like a frequency she was already tuned to.
The afternoon light in your hair.
The pink at the tip of your ear.
The way your fingers hadn't immediately let go.
Ellie exhaled. Slow. Measured. The exhale of someone practising containment.
Her thumb, moving with its own agenda, was already tracing the edge of the journal in her lap. She noticed it doing this. She told it not to. It continued anyway, the way the body continued things the brain hadn't signed off on, operating on a different authority entirely β the authority of want, which didn't ask permission and didn't particularly care about consequences.
She opened the journal.
Not to the new pages. Her fingers moved backward through the book with the instinct of something that had made this trip before β back past the furious entry, back past the half-finished thoughts and the doodles in the margins, back through weeks of herself, until the pages changed quality. Until the writing gave way to something else.
She stopped.
There you were.
Spread across three pages in soft graphite, built out of the kind of careful, compulsive observation that Ellie could only justify to herself by the fact that she'd never intended to show these to anyone, ever, and therefore they existed in a separate category from things she needed to be accountable for. They were not portraits, exactly. They were studies. Fragments. The way a scientist filled a notebook with measurements of something they were trying to understand β not to possess it, but to comprehend it, to make it less mysterious by breaking it into its component parts and looking at each one.
Except the thing being studied was you. And Ellie was not, if she was being honest with herself, and she was not being honest with herself, approaching this scientifically.
There was the sketch of just your hands β the one she'd done from memory, which meant it was probably slightly wrong in the specifics and completely right in the feeling, your fingers curled loosely around a pen in third period, the particular way you held things, unhurried, like everything you touched could wait for you. Beside it, in her small cramped handwriting, a note: always looks like she's about to say something important. And below that, a bracket, and the word: doesn't. And then: or maybe she does and I'm not close enough to hear it. She'd written that last part in smaller letters, like she'd been trying to make it take up less space.
There was the sketch of your profile β just the outline, the particular architecture of your face seen from the side in the forty seconds she'd had in the lunch line two weeks ago before you'd moved and she'd had to stop looking before someone noticed. Annotated: the way her chin tilts up when she's talking to someone she thinks is boring. And then, at the bottom of the page, almost to herself, a note that she'd pressed lighter than the others, barely there, a whisper in graphite: tilted up at me once. in the corridor. didn't look bored.
There was a sketch of the back of your head. Of your hands again, different angle. Of the particular way you sat β spine straight, never fully relaxed, like you were always half-prepared for something, like rest was a performance you'd learned and not a thing that came naturally. She'd written next to that one: who taught her she had to sit like that?
And threading through all of it, the annotations of a person trying to decode a language they'd never been taught β small observations, careful and private and slightly devastating in their honesty, the handwriting of someone writing for an audience of one and still hedging.
Ellie looked at the pages spread across her knees and felt something move through her that was the internal equivalent of stepping off a curb you hadn't seen β that sudden, weightless, stomach-dropping moment of oh, this is happening.
You did ballet. She knew this the way she knew most things about you β involuntarily, through the osmosis of proximity, information that arrived without being asked for and then refused to leave. She'd seen you come out of the gym once in the early morning with your hair up and a bag over your shoulder and the specific, turned-out way you walked that she'd catalogued and filed and told herself was nothing. Ballet. Pink and precise and entirely incompatible with the girl sitting in her room right now with a bruised face and band posters and a cracked guitar and a cactus she'd named after a middle-aged man.
She was a punk. She owned three shirts in any colour other than black and wore two of them ironically. She had skated so many times she could feel the specific texture of the park's concrete in her sleep. She read comics by lamplight and knew the names of every star you could see from the roof of this building and had strong, extensive, practised opinions about guitar riffs.
And you β you were the opposite of all of it. You were the negative image of her. You moved through the world like it had been arranged for you ahead of time, like the lights came on as you walked and went off when you left, like everything that touched you either belonged there or briefly believed it did. You were held together at every seam. You were the popular girl with the popular boyfriend and the posse and the rich, perfect family.
You were so completely, utterly, structurally different from her that it should have been a closed case. A non-starter. A door that had never been open in the first place.
And yet.
And yet here were three pages of graphite evidence, pressed into the paper with varying degrees of pressure and annotated in small handwriting by the specific, traitorous hand of a girl who knew better.
"Oh, come on," Ellie said aloud, to no one. To the room. To Gerald.
She slammed the journal shut.
The sound was a verdict. Sharp and final and slightly embarrassing, muffled by the room's soft clutter, absorbed by the band posters and the solar system and the three-years-worth of herself layered on every surface. The journal sat in her lap with the smug, inanimate energy of something that knew exactly what it contained and had no feelings about it.
She pressed both palms down on the cover. Held them there.
You don't even like me, she thought, and the thought was directed at the journal, at the pages inside, at the graphite studies of someone who called her a loser in public and held her journal out of reach and looked at her with an expression that shuttered closed before Ellie could read it. You don't even β I shouldn't even β this is so β
She groaned. A full, low, ceiling-directed groan, the sound of a person losing an argument with themselves that they'd been winning for months and had now, clearly, decisively, completely lost.
She fell back onto her bed. The journal went with her, clutched to her chest. She stared at the glow-in-the-dark Orion's Belt on the ceiling, which had not yet charged enough to glow, just sat there in the dark in the plain and patient configuration of three stars that had been called a hunter for thousands of years by people who needed the sky to make sense.
She understood the impulse.
She closed her eyes.
You shouldn't like her, she told herself, with the firm, reasonable authority of someone delivering a memo to a department that had already stopped listening. She is your bully. She has a boyfriend. She is the opposite of everything you are. You are going to get nothing from this except an inventory of the ways it doesn't work out. You know this. You have known this for months. You have the knowledge. You have the evidence. You are an idiot for even thinking that you have a chanceβ
The tip of your ear. Pink as a secret.
"Shut up," Ellie whispered, to herself, to the ceiling, to the three stars she'd arranged up there at twelve years old because even then she'd been the kind of person who needed to put things in their right places and call them by their names.
Outside her window, the city moved through its evening, unhurried, enormous, deeply uninterested in her predicament. Gerald sat on the desk in his usual posture, which was the posture of a cactus and therefore involved no feelings about the situation. The guitar leaned against the wall, all that potential sound locked inside it, waiting.
The glow-in-the-dark stars, slowly, began to glow.
The morning had the particular quality of mornings that had not yet decided what they wanted to be.
Grey at the edges, the sky outside the school's narrow corridor windows the colour of a thought that hadn't finished forming yet, the light filtering through the glass in thin, uncommitted strips that fell across the linoleum and did nothing especially interesting with it. The hallway between second and third period was its usual organised catastrophe β a river of shoulders and backpacks and the overlapping percussion of lockers being opened and closed with varying degrees of emotional investment, conversations fragmenting and reconnecting like mercury, the whole thing operating on the specific frequency of two hundred teenagers who had been awake for two hours and were deeply unconvinced it had been worth it.
Ellie stood with her back against the locker beside Greg's open one, one foot propped against the metal, watching the hallway with the detached observational energy of someone standing on the bank of a river they had no intention of entering. Greg was elbow-deep in his locker, conducting what appeared to be an archaeological excavation of its contents, narrating the discovery of each item with the running commentary of a man to whom silence was a personal affront.
"β and I genuinely don't know when I started keeping a granola bar in here, but it's been here long enough that I'm emotionally attached to it β"
"Throw it away," Ellie said.
"I can't, it's like a roommate at this point β"
"It's a granola bar, Greg."
"But it's been here longer than some of my friendships β"
She was listening. She was mostly listening. Some percentage of her attention was on Greg and his emotional support granola bar, and the rest of it β the percentage she would not have been able to name without incriminating herself β was doing what it always did in crowded hallways, which was run a quiet, automatic, completely involuntary background process. A scan. A search function she hadn't installed and couldn't uninstall, running on a frequency she didn't choose, returning one specific result.
Her eyes moved across the hallway.
Found your friend group first β the constellation without its sun, gathered in the usual corner with the usual architecture of performance: someone doing the talking, someone doing the agreeing, phones out, hair touched, the elaborate social machinery running at full operational capacity.
Her eyes moved across the group.
Moved again.
Her brow furrowed.
You weren't there.
The group was complete in every other respect, the full roster present and performing, but you β the axis, the fixed point, the thing the whole arrangement orbited around β were absent. The constellation without its brightest star, still going through the motions of being a constellation, slightly less luminous for the gap at its centre.
Ellie's gaze swept the hallway with the efficiency of something that had done this before.
Then it snagged on the other absence.
Asher wasn't there either.
The realisation settled into her stomach the way something unwelcome settled β not loudly, not dramatically, but with a quiet, uninvited weight, a stone dropped into still water with no splash, just the rings spreading outward and the thing sitting at the bottom, heavy and unreasonable and not prepared to be reasoned with. It was jealousy, plain and ugly and domesticated, the kind that had been living inside her long enough to know its way around, and she hated it the way you hated something that knew too much about you β personally, and with a specific resentment reserved for things you couldn't evict.
She looked away.
Looked at the ceiling. Looked at Greg, who had located his textbook beneath what appeared to be three months of other people's futures and was now regarding it with the expression of a man encountering a distant relative he hadn't expected at a family gathering.
"There it is," he said. With feeling.
"Incredible," Ellie said. Flat. Meaning it.
The bell rang, cleaving the hallway noise in two.
Greg closed the locker with the definitive thud of a chapter ending and turned to her, already re-organising his bag. "You've got math," he said, with the tone of someone delivering a piece of information they already knew wasn't going to be well-received.
Ellie's expression underwent a brief, specific journey. "I have allegedly got math," she said.
"Ellie β"
"The keyword being allegedly."
"You've already missed it three times this β"
"Three is a coincidence," Ellie said, pushing off from the locker with her foot. "Four is a pattern. I'm not ready to be a pattern."
Greg looked at her with the resigned, sun-weathered expression of someone who had stopped fighting a tide a long time ago and was now simply observing it with documentary interest. "You're going to fail," he said.
"Not today though," she said. "And today is all I've got."
He opened his mouth.
"Go to class, Greg."
"I'm just β"
"I'll see you at lunch."
He pointed at her. The point said: we're going to talk about this. She pointed back. Her point said: no we aren't. They had an entire conversation in the space between their index fingers, and then Greg sighed the sigh of a man who had made his peace with a great many things and walked away, absorbed into the thinning river of the hallway.
Ellie walked.
The hallway was emptying out in the rapid, purposeful way it emptied when the bell had technically rung and the window between acceptable lateness and actual consequences was closing by the second. She moved against the current of the last stragglers, unhurried, hands in the front pocket of her hoodie, the bruise under her eye making its daily editorial comments about her life choices.
She passed your friend group on the way.
She didn't look at them. This was a practiced art β the deliberate, forward-facing non-look of someone who had learned that acknowledging a thing gave it power and had therefore developed an aggressive policy of visual neutrality. Eyes ahead. Jaw easy. The posture of someone who was simply a person moving through a hallway, which was all she was, which was absolutely and completely all she was.
"Nice jacket," said a voice from the group, in the particular register that made nice mean the opposite of nice, the word hollowed out and repacked with something else entirely.
Ellie did not break stride.
"Does she buy those at the men's section, or β"
She did not look. She did not slow down. She let the words move over her the way weather moved over a landscape β it happened, it passed, the landscape remained. She had built herself to be the landscape. It had taken a while, and there were still storms that found the cracks, but on a Wednesday morning in a school hallway about a jacket, she was fine.
She was fine.
She rounded the corner, and the voices dissolved back into the general noise of the school.
She was fine.
The plan was simple. The bathroom at the end of the east wing was the jurisdiction of no one, a neutral zone, tucked past the art rooms in a corridor that smelled like turpentine and ambition and where the traffic dropped to near-zero once the bell had rung. She'd skipped in worse places. She'd skipped in better places. The bathroom was comfortable. She'd read half a comic in there last Thursday and nobody had come in the whole time.
She heard it before she reached the door.
Soft. Barely there. The kind of sound that was trying very hard not to be a sound at all β compressed and controlled, held between the teeth, with all the effort of something that had been trained to take up as little space as possible. It was the specific acoustic signature of someone crying who had no interest in being caught crying, crying the way you cried when you'd gotten good at crying privately, when the architecture of your composure was still technically standing but the foundations were doing something structural and quiet and not visible from the outside.
Ellie stopped.
She stood outside the bathroom door with her hand not quite on the handle, and the sound came through the gap and she turned it over in her head for a moment, this small, compressed, trying-not-to-be thing.
Then she pushed the door open.
The sniffling stopped. Immediately. Like a tap turned off. Like a light switch. The silence that replaced it was the specific silence of someone going very still and performing the absence of themselves, the aggressive quiet of a person trying to convince the room they weren't there.
Ellie stepped in.
The bathroom was cold and fluorescent, the kind of lighting that did nobody any favours, the kind that turned everything it touched slightly greenish and exposed. Two sinks, the mirror above them running the full width of the wall, a paper towel dispenser with a broken lever that had been broken since September. The tiles on the floor were the colour of old cream.
At the far end of the mirror, you stood.
Not crying. The crying was gone β vanished, packed away, dismantled with a speed and thoroughness that was itself a kind of performance, the performance of a person who had long practice in making themselves presentable under any conditions. Your eyes were clear. Your chin was level. You had constructed the face you wore in the hallways and you were wearing it, complete and armoured and assembled with the precision of something that knew it might need to withstand scrutiny.
The only evidence was the slight, betraying pinkness at the rim of your eyes. The kind of pinkness that no amount of composure could fully recall. The kind that stayed after everything else had been packed up, small and stubborn, the last ember of something that had briefly been a fire.
Ellie looked at you.
You looked at her.
For one unguarded half-second, your eyes went wide β just slightly, just briefly, a crack in the composure, a hairline fracture that the camera would have missed but Ellie, standing four feet away in a fluorescent bathroom, did not. It was the expression of someone who had been expecting anyone else. Anyone in the world. Anyone but the specific person who had just walked through the door.
Then it was gone. Shuttered. The curtains drawn so fast the motion was almost theoretical.
Your gaze dropped.
And landed on her face.
Specifically: on the bruise that had made its full, committed entrance overnight, spreading beneath her eye in the deep, decided colours of something that had settled in for the long haul β purpled at the centre, fading outward through red into a yellowish green at the edges, the cartography of someone's knuckles mapped in pigment onto her cheekbone. She had looked at it in the mirror that morning and felt the way you felt about weather you'd predicted correctly: grimly vindicated.
Something moved along your jaw. Subtle. Quick. A tensing, barely visible, the muscle pulling tight the way things pulled tight when they were working against something. A reflex with a latch on it. Your eyes stayed on the bruise for a fraction of a second too long before your expression reassembled itself back into its default setting, which was impeccable and slightly arctic.
"Who did that to you?" you said.
You said it the way you said most things β with the bored, ambient cool of a person enquiring about something that was mildly interesting and completely beneath them. The question wrapped in the tone of someone who didn't particularly care about the answer and was asking purely as a formality, as a social gesture, as the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
Ellie blinked.
She realised, in the same moment she registered that she was staring at you, that she had been staring at you. She pulled her gaze sideways, looked at the broken paper towel dispenser, looked at the wall, rearranged her face into something approaching functional.
"Fell," she said.
Your eyebrows rose. A millimetre. Maybe two. In the language of your face, which operated on a scale of extraordinary subtlety, this was practically a standing ovation.
"You fell," you said.
"Down some stairs," Ellie said. "It was a whole thing."
The corner of your mouth moved. It was the smallest possible distance the corner of a mouth could travel and still technically qualify as movement, and it was weighted with the specific amusement of someone who had heard something they found contemptible but couldn't entirely suppress finding funny. It was not a kind expression. It was the expression of a scalpel that had been taught to smile.
"You fell," you said again, savouring the syllables like they were something to be tasted. "Down stairs."
"It happens to people," Ellie said.
"To you apparently." You turned back to the mirror, extracted a lip gloss from somewhere with the practiced ease of a magician producing something from their sleeve, and uncapped it. "Must have been quite the fall. Stairs do all that on their own, or did you trip over your β" your eyes moved, briefly, to the reflection of her, starting at the shoes, moving upward with the unhurried assessment of a customs officer looking for contraband, "β ensemble."
"The stairs had strong opinions about my hoodie," Ellie said. "Very aggressive. We had words."
You applied the lip gloss with the focused, deliberate attention of a painter adding a final detail, pressing your lips together after in the way that Ellie absolutely did not clock and was not filing anywhere. "You should watch where you're going," you said.
"Noted."
"Especially in buildings," you said. "Buildings with floors. Which you seem to have some difficulty navigating."
"Really valuable advice," Ellie said. "Transformative, even. I feel like a different person."
You made a sound. It was the sound of something that had started to be a laugh and been intercepted and redirected into something more architecturally appropriate, something that emerged as a breath through the nose with an undercurrent of something warmer that was gone almost before it arrived, like a radio signal passing through from a distance.
You put the lip gloss away. You turned to the mirror again, ran your fingers through your hair with the particular efficiency of someone re-assembling something that had briefly been in disarray, each movement precise and practised, the ritual of a person who understood that their appearance was armour and maintained it accordingly. Ellie watched the side of your face in the mirror and thought: who taught you to hold yourself like that, and the thought arrived in the same handwriting as the annotation in her journal and she told it firmly to leave.
"There's a party," you said.
It was casual. So casual it was practically horizontal β laid out flat in the sentence with all the deliberate nonchalance of something that had been dropped in very specifically and was pretending it had always been there. You said it to the mirror. To the reflection of your own hair. To the air approximately six inches to the left of anything that could be interpreted as intention.
Ellie's brain, which had been running at a manageable pace, briefly redlined.
"A party," she said.
"Friday," you said. "At Jake Brown's place. It's a whole thing apparently."
"Right," Ellie said.
"People are going," you said.
"People tend to," Ellie agreed.
A beat.
Another beat.
Ellie felt the thing that was happening in her chest doing what it was doing, which was building toward something she wasn't certain was a good idea, and she looked at you in the mirror and you were still looking at your own reflection, still straightening up your hair with the focused indifference of someone who had not said what they'd just said, who had not brought up a party in the middle of a school bathroom on a Wednesday morning to a girl they had allegedly no opinions about.
"Are you β" Ellie started, and she kept her voice flat, kept it level, kept it from doing the hopeful, cresting, idiotic thing it wanted to do, "β are you inviting me?"
The transformation was immediate.
Like a wall going up in real time, brick by visible brick β your spine straightened, your expression cooled, and something moved across your features that was not quite disgust and not quite discomfort and was instead the specific, hybrid product of both, the look of someone who had been caught doing something they'd decided they weren't doing and was now administering a correction.
"Inviting β" you said, and the word in your mouth was a thing you were holding at arm's length, something retrieved from a surface you wouldn't normally touch. You turned from the mirror to look at her directly, fully, the first time you'd done it since she'd walked in, and your eyes were winter. "I was making conversation. It's called small talk. People do it."
"Right," Ellie said.
"I wasn't inviting you," you said. The emphasis landed like a gavel. "Why would I invite you? You're β" your gaze moved over her again, brief and merciless, "β you."
"Me," Ellie said.
"You'd show up in that," you said, gesturing at the hoodie with a hand that conveyed an entire aesthetic philosophy in a single motion, "and stand in the corner reading a comic book about the solar system or whatever β"
"I don't read comics at parties β"
"β and bore everyone within a five-foot radius with facts about space β"
"I've been to parties," Ellie said, with great dignity.
"Have you," you said, in the tone of someone granting a point they did not grant.
"Multiple," Ellie said. "I've been to several parties."
You looked at her. Something moved at the very edge of your expression β that intercepted almost-laugh again, surfacing and being pushed back down, your mouth pressed into a line that was working harder than a line normally needed to. You held her gaze for a moment, and in that moment the cold of your expression had the thinnest possible layer of something else over it, something that was almost, from a distance, in poor lighting, with a significant number of caveats, almost warm.
Then you looked away.
You turned to the mirror one final time, checked your reflection with the swift, comprehensive, top-to-bottom assessment of a general reviewing troops before a deployment, found it satisfactory. You picked up your bag.
"It's a good thing you weren't invited then," you said, and your voice had recollected itself fully, was back in its regular register, smooth and cool and armoured at every seam. You moved toward the door, your heels a clean, deliberate percussion against the old cream tiles. At the door, you paused β not long, not dramatically, just a fraction of a moment, a held note β and said, without turning around, to the door, to the air, to no one specific:
"You'd never get in anyway, loser."
The door swung shut behind you.
The bathroom returned to its cold fluorescent quiet. The paper towel dispenser stood broken at the wall. The mirror showed Ellie her own reflection: bruised eye, worn hoodie, the expression of someone who had just been dropped into deep water and was still working out which direction was up.
She stood very still.
Then she turned to the mirror.
Looked at herself for a long moment β at the bruise, at the hoodie, at the face she had been born with and the expression currently living on it, which was confused and flustered and just fractionally, structurally annoyed β and she breathed.
She thought about the way you'd asked who did that to her.
She thought about your jaw, tightening at the sight of the bruise like it had done it without asking you first.
She thought about the party you hadn't invited her to.
She thought about the way the corner of your mouth had moved and the sound that had been a laugh before you'd stopped it and the way you'd said you'd never get in anyway to a door you were already walking out of, like it needed to be said quickly, like it needed to be said away from her, like the distance was load-bearing.
She straightened up.
She rolled her shoulders back.
She looked at her own reflection with the focused, calm, absolute certainty of a person who had just made a decision and felt good about it, who had identified a direction and was pointing herself at it, who had been told she couldn't and had heard, beneath the can't, in the register beneath language, underneath the cold of it all β something entirely different.
She was going to that party.
She was going to that party, and she was going to wear whatever she wanted, and she was not going to bring a comic book.
a night out, your charmingly awkward girlfriend, and the lingering presence of a stranger.
or
in which everything is not what it seems.
warningsΒ :Β ellie williams x reader. modern au. established relationship. themes of cheating/infidelity. pet names (babe, baby). brief mention of insomnia, and a brief mention of anxiety attacks. slight insecurities indicated. fluff :P
w.cΒ :Β 3.8k
Ellie doesnβt particularly love going out, but she always tags along if you want her to.Β
She doesnβt enjoy how crowded a bar can getβdoesnβt like when drunk people act as though theyβre putting on a show instead of just existing.Β
But still, when you want a night out? Sheβs there.Β
Sheβs there to watch with a fond smile as you dance with your friends, and to help you hold the bathroom door shut if the lock is faulty. Sheβs there to help you rifle through your purse when youβre too drunk to find your chapstick. She prefers not to dance, but if you tug her along, she will. With a faint grin of amusement, and red cheeksβ¦ she will.Β
The thing about it is that youβve pretty much had Ellie hooked from the moment that the two of you had met. Itβs impossible for her not to humor you, honestly.Β
Still, Ellie would laugh whenever you got sappy, or referred to her as your dream girl. Not to discredit your sentiments, and not to mock them. She just still didnβt know how to react to your earnest adoration sometimes, despite the amount of time with which the two of you had been together.Β
So, Ellie would release an airy chuckle, duck her head with flushed cheeks, and mutter something smart in return.Β
She was good at physical affectionβgood at sinking into the feeling of her lips exploring over your skin, and her hands sliding around your waist. She was good at taking care of you, offering to do whatever chores she knew you would be too tired to complete, even if she was also tired. She was good at making you laugh, no matter how stupid the joke.Β
But when admissions of love spill relentlessly from your lips, Ellie canβt help but feel like the girl that she was a few years agoβthe one that could barely string together an intelligent sentence while in your presence.Β
Case in pointβyou wanted to get drunk in a shitty dive bar, or spend the night dancing at a club? Ellie was there.Β
And Ellie was there, as in currentlyβas in she had even changed from a hoodie, to a flannel when you had declared that you needed a night away from your laptop and the reminders of the existence of deadlines.Β
You were missing her at your side though, as you had ventured into the bar bathroom aloneβsomething that was out of the ordinary for you. Normally your girlfriend always went with youβbuddy system, safety in numbers and all thatβand also so that you could chat away with her when the lines were too long. You werenβt even entirely sure why you had come to the bathroom alone this timeβ¦ something about the bar being crowded tonight and you didnβt want to risk your spot getting taken, or something. Ellie was holding it down for you.Β
Still, as you stumbled out of the stall and toward the sinks and mirrors, you felt a sharp pang of longing as your gaze landed on a small group of girlsβlaughing in an unfiltered manner and taking selfies in the corner. You knew that Ellie was only several feet away, and you would quite literally be seeing her again in a matter of seconds. Itβs not like the two of you had to be attached at the hip, but the very fact of the matter was plain and simpleβa drunken bathroom trip was no fun without your girlfriend.Β
As you washed your hands, you met your own gaze in the bathroom mirror. The world around you felt as though it were on a three second delay, and you could hear the music booming from beyond the bathroom.Β
There was no tiny bar filled with older men and country music tonightβyou had gone just a bit out of town to find a place that better suited your age demographic. It was louder, darker, more crowded.Β
You blinked at your reflection, eyes glassy from the drinks that you had so far consumed throughout the night. Your thoughts shifted to Ellie, and an automatic smile tugged on your lips. You knew that she was sitting alone, waiting for you, so you hastily dried your hands.Β
Feeling just a bit uncoordinated and weighted, you pushed through the bathroom door with your elbow, and were greeted by the loud atmosphere washing back over you at once. Whatever upbeat song was playing just served as fuzzy background noise as you focused on making your way through the crowd to return to Ellie. You were eager for herβdrunk and wanting to tug gently at her freckled cheeks, to watch them tint pink under your touch.Β Β
Despite not catching sight of her just yet, your smile remained at the mere thought of her. When your gaze did find her across the bar, your heart thumped with affection.Β
Ellie was on the other side of the bar and sitting at the small table that the two of you had previously claimed upon arrivalβexactly where you had left her. She was sipping a beer, her flannel sleeves rolled up just so, her tattoo on display. She was squinting a little due to the dim lighting, and she wasβ¦Β
Talking to someone?Β
You paused your steps, craning your neck slightly as a small group of people were standing in the way, nearly blocking your path and your ability to see. The corners of your lips twitched, your brain seemingly unable to decide whether you should smile or frown.Β
There was a girl lingering near Ellie, leaning casually against the tableβyour tableβas she spoke. You couldnβt hear anything, obviously, due to the loud sounds around you. You could, however, see the way in which the unfamiliar girl cocked her head to the side when she spoke to your girlfriend. You could see her adjusting her top, fluffing her hair, and smiling as Ellie had responded to whatever she had said.Β
You gave a slight shake of your head, almost feeling tempted to pull out your phone and record the moment to save it as evidenceβ¦ because Ellie was oblivious. She never seemed to grasp when she was being flirted withβcould hardly comprehend it even when it was blatantly spelled out for her. The two of you had danced around each other for so long before finally getting together, due to the fact that you had been too shy to make a move, but Ellie had clearly been determined not to ruin the friendship. You finally had to get the guts to make the move, which had obviously turned out for the best.Β
Admittedly, you were a little amused watching the scene unfold from where you stood. You felt slightly bad for your girlfriend, knowing that she was probably feeling awkwardβ¦ but still.Β
The other girlβthe strangerβshifted her standing position so that she could be a bit closer to where Ellie was sitting, giving up good posture in favor of leaning closer toward Ellie.Β
Amusement still lingering, you expected to see Ellie shift awkwardly in the wooden chair, or to start scanning the bar in an attempt to look for you.Β
But she didnβt.Β
A crooked smile appeared on Ellieβs lips. She leaned back comfortably in her chair, knees spreading as she took a slow sip of her beer, her gaze locked with the other girlβs.Β
Your smile faded. With your stomach suddenly giving a weird lurch, you stood still and analyzedβ¦ whatever that was.Β
Itβs just that Ellie looked comfortable, which was out of the ordinary for her in an environment like this. She didnβt really love attention from strangers, but Ellie tilted her head to mirror the other girl, the two of them suddenly laughing.Β
Right. Okay.Β
You swallowed hard, unable to determine if you felt a little too drunk now, or too sober. Because the girl only seemed to be standing closer and closer, and Ellieβs knees continued to spread to make more room for the girl. That girl didnβt need that much standing roomβnot that close to your girlfriend, at least.Β
The song playing within the bar changed, causing an energy burst throughout a nearby group of girls. One of them accidentally bumped into you and apologized, but you didnβt respondβdidnβt even attempt to mutter anything in return, because why was Ellie holding such intense eye contact with that girl, even as she continued to take slow sips of her drink?Β
You felt uncomfortable watching. Maybe it was just because you had too much to drink. Or maybe it was because youβve never seen Ellie so at ease while speaking to a stranger before. Maybe it was because the girl invading your girlfriendβs space was prettyβlikeβ¦ belonging in a Miami club instead of a random, shitty Wyoming bar. Her clothes fit like a glove, and her hair wasnβt even frizzy despite the warmth inside of the bar.Β
You were secure within your relationship. It was solid. But something within you rapidly began to ache as Ellie made no effort to put any distance between herself and the girl, even as she reached out to adjust the collar of Ellieβs flannel.Β
Ellie could be oblivious about flirting advances, but she wasnβt stupid.Β
You hesitated, morbidly curious to continue to watch the interaction unfold, despite the fact that your palms were starting to sweat.Β
The unfamiliar girl reached out an apparently very confident hand, and you stretched your neck just in time to see her trace her fingers along Ellieβs tattooed forearm. Ellie did not lean away from the touch. Insteadβcrooked smile still in placeβshe lifted her other arm, casually wrapping it around the girlβs waist and tugging her just the slightest bit closer.Β
You couldβve been sick on the spot.Β
You had been gone for maybe five minutes. Had you been forgotten that quickly? Or did Ellie just simply not fucking care?Β
Head dizzy with alcohol, disgust, and upsetβ¦ you stared at the sight of the two girls chatting and laughing as if they had even actually known each otherβuntil your eyes started to go blurry. Ellie never even glanced in your direction, didnβt notice that you had returned from the bathroom and were standing just several feet away. If she caught you in her peripheral, she didnβt seem to care. Her green eyes remained locked on the girl standing directly in front of her, while your eyes started to sting.Β Β
ββββββββββββββ
Ellie slept peacefully, without any guilt. Her arm was slung around you, her chest pressed against your back.Β
You, on the other hand, were having a fitful sleep. Your mind was filled with images of Ellieβs smileβyour girlfriendβs smileβdirected toward another. You saw flashes of her hands that you absolutely adoredβand admittedly worshippedβreaching for some random girlβs waist.Β
You were barely conscious, but you had a lump in your throat. Too upset to stay asleep, you started to stir.Β
The first thing that you actually registered was Ellieβs nose against your shoulder, and her arm around you. Just like it had been around that girl. Still in that hazy space of existence between sleep and wakefulness, your elbow and leg both shoved backward.Β
βThe fuck?β Ellie rasped, jolting out of her peaceful slumber due to the sudden jab.Β
You didnβt acknowledge her, and instead curled into yourself.Β
βWhy the fuck did youβ Hey?β Ellie managed, her voice low and slightly hoarse with exhaustion. The bedroom was dark and her eyes werenβt adjusted, but her gaze shifted to your form anyway. Ellie propped herself up on one elbow, squinting to look at your back. βBabe. What the hell?βΒ
You squeezed your eyes shut, unable to rid yourself of the hazy images dancing throughout your mind. Still, you managed one shaky sentence. βIβm pissed at you.βΒ
Ellie blinked, her eyebrows furrowing. βYouβreβ¦ what?βΒ
βIβm pissed at you,β you repeated, your voice slightly muffled by your pillow.Β
Immediately, Ellieβs stomach dropped.Β
Sheβs heard you call her annoying through your laughter, and sheβs heard you jokingly call her rude whenever she deadpans a joke. But this? Just a blatant Iβm pissed at you with no hint of lightness in your tone? Ellie hasnβt heard that before. Hasnβt wanted to hear it, and never wanted to hear it again, quite frankly.Β
Ellie was essentially frozen, staring at your back like it could help her figure out the sudden cause of this. She swallowed, her jaw working as she desperately tried to clamp down on every insecurity and fear of abandonment that suddenly seemed to flare. βWhy?β Ellie reached out a hesitant hand, allowing it to hover before she rested it gingerly against your back.Β
At the question and the gentle touch, you were torn between melting and going rigid. She was so fucking sweet, and so careful when she had to be. And yet, those fucking imagesβΒ
βBecause. You and this girl, like, laughingβ¦ and shit. And touching. And you were drinking a beer, andββΒ
Ellie blinked, forehead creasing as she listened to your tired, upset mumbling. βDude, what the fuck are you even talking about?βΒ
You huffed, suddenly shifting onto your opposite side so that you could face Ellie. As you did so, Ellieβs hand cautiously left your back. You blinked rapidly, willing your eyes to adjust quickly in the dark.Β
Ellie was still propped on one elbow, a concerned expression etched across her features. Eyebrows drawn together, her gaze locked on your face as soon as you had turned to look at her. Ellie hadn't taken down her hair before going to bed, her half-bun barely even existing anymore as most of her auburn strands had slipped away from the hair tie. She looked soft, basically, in a way that made you want to wrap your arms around her and stay like that forever.Β
Instead of meeting her gaze, your eyes drifted downward as if to study the faded band shirt that she was wearing. It was so worn, that tiny holes were starting to form around the neckline.Β
βYou cheated on me,β you finally said, the words nearly getting caught in your throat. Your heart hammered, your body feeling uncomfortably warm with stress and anxiety due to the situation.Β
An immediate scoff left Ellieβs lips. βNo, the fuck I did not? BabeββΒ
βIn my dream,β you clarified pointedly, finally meeting her gaze with your own accusing expression.Β
Ellie went silent. She blinked once as she stared at you, her lips slightly parted. βOkay?βΒ
βWhat do you mean, okay? You cheat on me, and then donβt even fucking show any remorse?β you shot back instantly. The soft sheets pooled around your waist as you sat up, internally feeling much too heated to remain snuggled within the covers.Β
Ellieβs expression twisted, like she didnβt know whether to laugh or be annoyed. βBabe, though, I didnβt cheat.βΒ
You found yourself rolling your eyes before you could even think about holding back the action. βYou literally did, though.βΒ
βIn your dream.βΒ
βYes.βΒ
βOkay? So no, I did not.βΒ
You huffed, fingers twitching with the urge to grasp your pillow and smack your girlfriend with it. βWhat is your literal problem? You canβt even apologize, or be remorseful?βΒ
βWhatβs your problem?β Ellie retorted, nose wrinkling. βYou like, elbowed the fuck outta me.βΒ
Expression faltering, your eyebrows knitted together. βWait, really?β you questioned, your tone softening. βDid itβ Are youββΒ
Ellie snorted, shifting to lay back down. βNah. Iβm good. Just scared the shit out of me,β she mumbled, getting comfortable once more as her head rested against her pillow.Β
You watched her with a frown, reaching out to nudge at her shoulder. βWhat are you doing?βΒ
βSleeping?βΒ
βUm, no? Ellie. We have to talk about this.βΒ
Ellie mumbled something under her breath, her fist raising to scratch at her nose. βTalk about what?βΒ
βThe fact that you cheated?β you said like it was obvious, prodding at Ellieβs shoulder through the material of her shirt.Β
Shaking her head slightly, Ellie closed her eyes. βI love you?β she attempted, already feeling the tempting lure of sleep washing back over her.Β
With a huff, your hand fell away from her shoulder. βIβm not even joking, El. It was so messed up.βΒ
βUh huh.βΒ
βWe were like, at some bar. And I went to the bathroom, but when I came back, you were talking to some girl. And she was like, leaning really close. And I couldnβt see the front of her, but her boobs probably looked great and she was like, right there, andββΒ
βBabeββΒ
βAnd she was like, touching your tattoo, and you put your fucking arm around her waist? And you looked really hot, like, how you were sitting, but I was literally gonna throw up because you were just letting her in your space like that, andββΒ
βJesusβ BabeββΒ
ββlowkey nothing else happened I donβt think, but I honestly feel like you were gonna kiss or something, like, it was like you just forgot about me so fastββΒ
When your voice broke, Ellieβs head whipped to look at you.Β
βShit, dude, youβre actually upset?β she asked, sitting up once more and tentatively reaching for you.Β
Ellieβs hand landed on your kneeβa comforting touchβbut you still glared at her. βThatβs what Iβve literally been saying,β you said, narrowing your eyes at her.Β
βYeah, but I thoughtβ¦ I dunno, thought you were, likeβ¦ I donβt know.βΒ
You let Ellieβs hand linger on your knee, and you shifted to sit a little closer. βIt was a bad dream,β you admitted, reaching your hand to rest against the bare skin of Ellieβs knee, too.Β
βStupid fuckinβ dream,β Ellie muttered, studying your expression. She was still torn, slightly thrown off from being woken up so abruptlyβ¦ and the less than serious nature of it all. Still, how many times had you stayed up with Ellie when insomnia had beenβquite honestlyβbeating her ass? How many times had you talked her down from an anxiety attack? Ellie huffed. βBabe, you know Iβd neverββΒ
βI know,β you mumbled softly, your free hand moving to fiddle with some strands of your hair. βI know, I know, I know."
Ellieβs hand moved from your knee to your back, rubbing slow, soothing circles over your shirt. She still felt the urge to comfortβsomehowβdespite the fact that she had beenβ¦ a little annoyed that you were annoyed due to a dream, and caught off guard because of your genuine emotions over the whole thing. βIs thereβ¦ Did I, like, do something? To make youββΒ
βNo,β you interrupted quickly, though your tone remained gentleβquiet between the two of you. βIt was a stupid dream.β Your eyes tracked your thumb as you dragged it over Ellieβs knee. βLike when you had that stupid dream about me leaving you for the girl from Alien.βΒ
Ellie had opened her mouth to speakβto provide you with automatic reassurancesβbut your words made her mouth slam shut. Her brows furrowed, a slight hint of embarrassment pressing at her like a prickle on the back of her neck. βOkay, thatβsββΒ
βWhich one was it again?β you continued, shooting Ellie a curious look. She almost wished that you would go back to accusing her of something over a dream rather than revisit this topic. βEllen Ripley, or Rain Carradine?βΒ
Ellie exhaled, her hand slowing to a stop against your back. βLikeβ¦ either,β she mumbled, avoiding your gaze. Stupid. Embarrassing. Not that Ellie cared.Β
Your focus, however, had already been entirely shifted to the topic. βBaby, Iβd never,β you murmured, shifting to sit on your knees and reaching for Ellieβs face. Ellie rolled her eyes and tilted her chin away. βNo badass Alien character could ever replace you. Youβre just as cool. Even cooler.βΒ
βUh huh,β Ellie remarked dryly, pulling her arms away from you and shifting slightly, just barely escaping your attempts of touch.Β
Barely deterred, you grabbed Ellieβs hands. βYou could totally fight aliens.βΒ
βIβd be the alien killing master. Any sort of monster, or whatever, honestly. Iβd be a pro. Like, imagine me killingββΒ
βStop. I donβt even want to have to think about you being in some, likeβ¦ horrible, scary worldββΒ
Ellie pulled her hands away from your grasp, one of her knees digging into the mattress as she shifted to face you. βI thought you were pissed at me, though?β she muttered dryly, cupping the sides of your face.Β
βLess than pissed, now,β you murmured, your gaze flickering back and forth between Ellieβs eyes.Β
Ellieβs response to that was a wordless one. She leaned over you, pressing a firm kiss against your lips while simultaneously guiding your form down, your back cushioned by the soft bedding once more. Ellie made herself sturdy, her other leg positioning between your thighs. Not pressingβbut there. You melted in delight, fingers moving to gently tangle within her auburn strands. You broke the kiss with a laugh, however, when the hair tie that had been practically holding on for dear life slipped away from Ellieβs hair and into your grasp.Β
Lips tugging upward at the sound of your amusement, Ellie pressed a quick kiss to the corner of your mouth before pulling away. She flopped onto her back with a tired groan, which earned another laugh from you.Β
βYou sound so ridiculous, you know that?β you jokingly chided, turning your cheek against your pillow to look at her. Your shared bedding was cozyβmismatched patterns of shades of green and florals that just seemed to work. The sheets were now twisted around your legs. βYou make fun of Joel whenever he does the whole grunt and groan thing when sitting around, but you kinda do it, too.βΒ
Ellie wrinkled her nose, mirroring your action by turning her head to look at you. βDonβt compare me to Joel,β she grumbled. Despite the quiet complaint, she shifted onto her sideβso you did the same.Β
Practically nose to nose, you studied each other. Your smile lingered, all soft and faint with a tired sort of fondnessβnightmare be damned. Ellieβs expression held a trace of concern, though. Her teeth pulled at her bottom lip.Β
βYouβre so fucking pretty, itβs unfair,β you whispered.Β
Ellie nearly snorted. βSays you.β She almost hesitated, her hand seeking out your skin. She rubbed her palm over the expanse of your armβfrom your shoulder down to your wrist, back and forth. βHey. You know Iβd never actuallyβ¦ right? Iβd never do something that fucking dumb, likeββΒ
βEl, I know,β you replied, lifting your leg slightly to hook it around her. βAnd Rain Carradine could never be you. The similar hairstyle doesnβt mean anything, truly. Iβd choose you any day.βΒ
βWow. Thanks, babe. Youβre so sweet.β
Β Despite Ellieβs dry tone, you caught the curve of her smile before she ducked her head, her lips lazily getting busy against your neck. Your eyes fluttered shut, a quiet hum escaping you. Gone were the lingering feelings of unease, the impact of your dream. The images grew hazier as they faded, replaced by the very real feeling of Ellie mouthing at your skin.Β
βAnd,β Ellie pressed on, speaking between each kiss that she planted against your neck. βI could do the whole Alien thing, or whatever. Yeah? Right?βΒ
You feigned a groan, though the sound came out much too brightly due to your amused, affectionate smile. βUgh, youβre so annoyingββ
notesΒ :Β shhh go back to sleep... tumblr user elleloquently just posted some bullshit.
sorry to those that thought i was actually going to come through with the angst for once... i'm just not built like that </3
anyway! something short n sweet (and unserious) for the time being while i work on my other stuff :) lots more to come bc i genuinely cannot turn my brain off and i keep thinking of more fic ideas and it's stressing me ouuuutttugghhh
every day i am reminded that white lesbians will never actually be in community with black lesbians, they show that theyβre white before anything every. single. time.
thank god i was born when i was because what would i do without my thigh high compression socks and my jelliebend and my pain meds and my abby anderson smut and my vibrator and my
β‘βΛγββββγ2.4k . hot to go! masterpost | jock!ellie x vi's gf!reader . vi & reader have a somewhat open relationship ( to ellie only <3 ) because sharing with ur friends is caring , vi's absent for most of this part , reader's rly ditsy , smutty smutty smutty , dom!ellie , sub!reader , explicit pics/vids being taken & sent , ellie n vi are really cocky , some degradation , u nearly burn her lips off with lipgloss β‘, oral & strap-on sex κ°Β r.rec κ± , strap referred to as cock , dacryphilia , reader is hyperfeminine . minors & ageless blogs will be blocked ! reblogs 'n comments greatly appreciated β‘
πππππ'π Β ππππ Β . . .  ౨ৠγhaiiiii !!!! here's part two of collab with @cinnamongirlsev <3 three's coming soon and it's abt to get even nastierrrr!
no typical campus buzz today, rather the end-of-week exhaustion settling in. fridays always seem to drag, especially by the end of the year, when freedom is near but not quite near enough.
you've slugged through it long enough, gotten through a quiet class that hardly anyone else showed for, and noon's just hit. you have just enough time to grab a bite to eat before your sorority gathers in the late afternoon.
... ugh.
you'd give anything for a rest this evening, or to be able to support your girlfriend at her soccer practise. it's been a while since you could.
the walk towards the dining hall is more comfortable than usual, no tightly packed crowds to dart through, but still, your face contorts into that of utter disappointment as you swipe your id over the door and step inside.
there is a line.
a line bigger than you have ever seen in this β usually β ghostly place.
"jesus, fuck me gently," you whisper to yourself, clutching your notebook against your chest as you begin the walk to the back of the line. "jus' wanted some food."
everyone else shares the displeasure, judging by the sunken, soulless eyes and heavy frowns that you pass. the chatter echoes off the walls, every word around you blurring into a gradient, easy to tune out but still harsh on the brain.
so when you hear the faintest call of what could be your name, you don't pay it any mind β that is, until you get just a little closer, and hear it again. this time you make out a pretty familiar voice, raspy, curling around each vowel in your name like a miracle.
she stands in the line, a lazy smile on her lips and her hands in the pockets of her jeans.
"ellie!" you give her a bright smile, approaching with a renewed pep in your step. your hand grazes the fabric barrier, clutching it as you eye the girl on the other side. your head snaps back to the front of the line, then the end of it, and you make a pretty hasty decision. "can i get in line with you?"
"what's in it for me?" ellie replies, quirking a brow at you. you fumble over words, batting your lashes like it's the only thing you know how to do anymore, and she chuckles. "yeah you can, pretty girl. i'm messing with you."
"ugh. hold this," you say, handing your notebook across the divider, where ellie quickly slides her hands out from her pockets and takes it for you.
you stretch the divider as far upwards as you can to climb under, drawing a few complaints from the people behind ellie. you don't pay them any mind, you can't, because ellie keeps her back to them and pulls you against her side to share some warmth.
"you are a lifesaver, 'cos i'm on a time crunch and i am starving," you say. your hand gravitates to one of the usual places, the string of her open hoodie, where you fiddle and play. "what's with the line?"
she shrugs, lips curving down. "your guess is as good as mine, angel. what's your time crunch about?"
"another sorority meet," you mumble. "i wanted to come watch practise tonight. i miss vi. and you. and..."
"owhh, whiny girl." ellie grins, and just like that, her hand drops from your waist to the frills along the back of your skirt. your back straightens, filling her open palm with your ass, where goosebumps rise along the skin beneath the fabric. "yeah, we miss you. you're so busy."
"my damn sisters!" you exclaim, pouty lips drawing another laugh from ellie. "just 'cos we're getting closer to the end of year, we have to have all these stupid meetings and organise stuff... like, i'm busy! with college!"
she tuts, shaking her head. "wellβ are you coming to watch us play on sunday? vi told you? we can't play without our little cheerleader in the bleachers."
"she did," you confirm with a nod. what a strange feeling, the rush of excitement and the endearment fluttering around your body at the mere mention of your girlfriend, all at the very same moment that ellie's sly touches are making your tummy flip. "i wouldn't ever miss a game."
"oh, i trust you," she responds. "it's an important one too. semi-finals."
before you get a word out in reply, ellie grabs you by the back of your neck, turning you forward. "watch the line."
you fill the empty space in front quickly, bashfulness running hot in your cheeks. "you could'a said something sooner."
the line moves up, slow as ever, but the buffet table is within your line of sight now, and ellie speaks up again.
"hey, you wanna get this to-go and find somewhere else to eat?"
that sounded like a good idea to you, so ellie swept you away to her and vi's favourite lunch spot; a secluded place, caged in by hedges and cypress trees, one of the nicer places on campus. not to her surprise, you've requested not to stain your clothes or knees in grass, which led to ellie reluctantly removing her hoodie for you to sit on next to her.
ellie's a great person to be around. of course, your girlfriend must pick good company, and you're the perfect example of that. but ellie is too.
vi swore to you ellie'd take care of you if you needed her to, and she does. maybe it's genuine care, an inherent need to look after the people she knows. or maybe it's that she owes it to her friend for being allowed to do what she's doing right now.
the breeze batters against her now bare arms, one outstretched towards you. her bicep tenses, and as you reapply a layer of shimmering lipgloss you eye the vein leading into her inked forearm. she's rubbing up and down your side, slow and casual, before her hand travels to your chest and squeezes confidently.
you pause before capping your lipgloss and tilt your head to the side, eyes flitting up to ellie's tongue darting over her rising smirk.
"you wanna let your girl know what i'm doing right now, huh?" she says, free hand taking out her phone. you quickly nod, humming in agreement, and she hums back. "mm. that's the rule, isn't it, angel?"
so vi receives a text in the middle of a lecture, the image of greed glaring back at her in the form of your puppy pout, upturned eyebrows, and ellie's hand cupping your left tit.
smellie: look who i ran into :)
fat hands: precious
fat hands: give her a kiss for me
ellie continues her fondling as you take in your surroundings. you watch the trees and how their leaves rock languidly in the wind, a calmness settling over you before her cold rings are on your cheek, turning you eye to eye with her again.
her lips find yours with no time wasted, swallowing your tiny gasp as she scoots closer. she is a taste you've come to love now, a force very different to your girlfriend's. vi's love is clashing teeth and your hair wrapped around her wrist; ellie's kisses are calculated, hands pushing your body into hers, sucking your lower lip.
you begin to crawl onto her when she pulls back, whining lowly at the loss of attention. "ellieβ"
"ugh, your stupid lipgloss is so tingly, likeβ ow, goddamnit." you pout as she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and she looks up at you, scoffing. "look at that face. you don't even fuckin' need this plumping shit."
"you guys both don't understand," you argue, narrowing your eyes. "iβ mm!"
she kisses you again, steady yet punishing as she pushes you onto her lap. her lips travel, peppering kisses from your chin to your collarbone, and your weak grinding over her thighs draws out a chuckle that stops her from continuing her trail further down.
"if you wanted an excuse to get out of that meeting, there's a perfectly good one right here."
you fall as the backs of your knees hit the edge of ellie's bed, the mattress dipping below your quivering body. she climbs right over you, attached to your neck like a vampire and pinning you down amongst her pillows.
"ah!" you suck in a breath, head falling back as ellie nips the soft skin beneath your jaw. she licks over the spot, but continues, likely leaving a mark that might piss vi off a little. friendly fire, really.
you open up your legs, trying to draw ellie closer and get some of the indulgent friction your cunt aches for β it's as if there's no brains left in you, your pulsating need charging forth and taking over your every move.
a moan escapes you as her lips travel over a particularly tender place, kissing hard over a fading mark vi left mere days ago. you're loud, loud enough to stop ellie.
"god, you are fucking greedy," she mutters. "look at you. happy, aren't you? happy being passed around like a whore?"
your glossy pout turns upside down, a smile full of sheer pride on your face. you're preening. "well yes!" you giggle, sliding your legs around her waist. "vi says my pussy's so pretty she just had to share!"
ellie scoffs, but still, places a last kiss on your cheek. she looks down, fingers sliding up your thighs until they reach your panties. she pulls them to the side, cool air hitting the glistening wet skin.
all that pride vanishes in an instant, a slew of moans and whimpers flying out of your mouth as she glides her fingers through the sticky mess between your legs.
"fuckin' slutty princess," she says in a gravelly voice, glancing up at your half-lidded eyes. "you want me to take 'em off?"
"mhm, yes, yes," you beg, nodding as fast as possible. you don't know when you became so desperate and so greedy, as ellie put it, but you can't stop it.
"awhh, you sound so dumb right now, little miss 'pretty pussy'," she mocks.
as soon as your panties are off, ellie pushes your skirt up before getting down, lying on her stomach. her hands grasp either side of your hips, and she doesn't waste any more time. she dives right in.
"oh god," you whisper, hips bucking into ellie's mouth. she applies some more force, keeping you down, and her tongue laves over your clit with precision. the pleasure's inescapable, dragging out long moans and making your chest heave.
she glares upwards as you start to squirm more and more, soon becoming so restless at every flick of her tongue that she sits up. "get up."
and that mountainous high she was building you to dissipates within seconds.
"h-huh?" you blink, lower lip quivering. "els, i was so closeβ what do you mean?"
"hands and knees, angel, hurry up."
you take a second to move, shedding your cardigan as you do, and watch ellie reach into her bedside drawer.
ohhhhhhh. right!
you bite your lip as she clips the harness on over her jeans, the sight of her stroking lube over the forest green cock so enticing that you start to leak down your thighs.
and as soon as you feel the head moving through your folds, gathering up more of your juices and catching at your entrance, you mewl, arching your back into her.
ellie grabs your ass, fingers digging into the flesh. "you want it?"
"yes, isn't that fuckin' obvious, i meanβ? ellie..." you whine. "stop teasing me!"
her palm meets your ass cheek with a deafening smack, heat spreading across the skin like fire. you let out a dry sob, quietly rambling something about just needing to be filled before she finally gives in.
your folds stretch around her strap as every inch disappears inside you, and your arms start to buckle beneath you already.
it's pure bliss.
she rocks her hips back and forth, a pace building steadily. your mouth hangs open, broken gasps and cries filling the air once she digs her fingertips into your hips and pulls you back into her thrusts.
"so pretty," ellie mumbles to herself, the rippling of your ass egging her on, even after you collapse and your face hits the pillows. "poor girl, you couldn't take it? it's that good? that's okay."
the cruelty of her cock kissing your cervix with every thrust starts to grow tiresome for your trembling body, tears pooling on your lower lashes. soon, they stream down your cheeks.
she slows suddenly, squeezing and groping your ass, and you think she might be giving you a break. you think she might be showing some mercy, until you open your eyes to her phone camera pointed at your ruined face.
"do you wanna say hi to vi, pretty girl? she's gonna watch this..."
"mmh," you whimper, your weak fist uncurling to try and wave. and you open your mouth to speak, only for a shriek to come out as ellie starts pounding into you again.
she laughs, tossing her phone aside after stopping the recording. she focuses, the wet sounds of your cunt clamping around the strap and your unintelligible noises coaxing her to go harder until you snap.
your body tightens, glorious pleasure washing over you. she keeps at it, the feeling of fucking you through your orgasm drawing ellie nearer to the edge as well.
"fuck," she grunts, leaning over you and pressing a soft kiss to your back once it's all said and done. "so good, angel."
light laughter hits your ears, the feeling of warm hands sliding under your body and picking you up. you peel your eyes open and try to rub the crusted mascara out of them, your girlfriend's familiar scent wrapping around you.
"jeez, with the way she acts, it seems like you're only giving her the bare minimum, dude."
you feel vi's chuckle in her chest where you rest your head. "yeah, trust me, she's just an attention whore. don't waste time getting ready, by the way, we're already running late and coach is gonna kill us."
"sure, but that's your fault for getting here late," comes ellie's annoyed reply. "don't let the door hit you on the way out, asshole."
vi carries you out of the room, feeling you begin to stir.
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