⠀⠀⠀𓏲 ⠀⠀GIVE ME BACK MY TIME⠀ 𓂅⠀shauna shipman⠀⠀ ⑅
ིྀ ﹒ ( c.w ) obsessive love magical coercion loss of autonomy toxic friendship unrequited love friends with benefits major character deaths blood self-harm grief cigarettes/smoking psychological horror trauma guilt love turned into possession memory corruption 4.2k words
The One Wish Willow looked like something that should have come free in a cereal box.
It hung behind the register of the crystal shop in a cream-coloured cardboard sleeve, surrounded by amethyst towers and bundles of sage tied neatly with red thread. ONE WISH WILLOW, the package announced in crooked carnival lettering. Beneath it, one smiling man and one smiling woman gazed at each other while tiny stars burst between their faces.
Inside was a single piece of blackened wood, long and thin and carved through with narrow openings. It looked like burnt plastic. Like a child’s toy pretending to be ancient. The cardboard had softened with age, and the red ink came away faintly against Shauna’s thumb when she picked it up.
Then Jackie laughed from the other end of the store.
You were standing beside her with your head tipped close, listening to something she whispered. Jackie’s fingers caught casually around your wrist. Yours rested against the small of her back as if they had always belonged there.
You looked at her with such helpless adoration that Shauna felt embarrassed for having seen it.
That was the thing she could not forgive.
You looked at Jackie like loving her was easy.
Like it had never occurred to you to resist.
Shauna bought the Willow for four dollars and seventy-five cents.
Later, she drove you home.
Jackie had left with Jeff after the party, though not before pressing a secret kiss to the corner of your mouth in the hallway. She thought no one had noticed. You thought no one had noticed.
You sat in the passenger seat with your cheek against the cold window, smiling down at your phone whenever Jackie’s name lit the screen. Outside, rain turned the streetlights watery. Cigarette smoke curled from the crack in Shauna’s window and settled into the fabric of your clothes.
“You really like her,” Shauna said.
You tried to hide your smile and failed.
Shauna dropped you outside your apartment shortly after midnight. You leaned back into the car before closing the door and told her to text when she got home.
“You’re the best, Shauna.”
Friendship was effortless when you were the one being loved.
You ran through the rain and disappeared inside.
Shauna stayed at the curb.
The One Wish Willow lay across her lap inside its ridiculous little sleeve. The painted man and woman smiled up at her. They looked uncomplicated. They looked certain.
She slid the dark stick from its package.
It felt warmer than it should have.
She held it between both hands and thought of your face turned toward Jackie. Thought of all the years she had spent being the person beside the person everyone wanted. Thought of how easily you gave Jackie what Shauna had been starving for.
Then she said, “I wish she loved me more than anyone in the whole fucking world.”
She snapped the Willow in half.
No louder than a bone breaking beneath a blanket.
For several seconds, nothing happened.
Shauna laughed shakily at herself and dropped the two pieces into the cup holder.
Then the passenger door opened.
You climbed back into the car.
Your hair was wet. You had left your coat upstairs. One shoe was untied, and your breathing came in shallow, confused little pulls.
Your hand moved to your chest.
Something inside you had turned sharply toward her.
You looked at Shauna as though you had never seen her before. Not with recognition. With hunger.
Then your expression twisted.
It was not a word of surprise.
It sounded dragged out of you.
You bent forward, pressing your forehead to the dashboard.
For one terrible instant, your face became blank with horror.
You grabbed the door handle, but your fingers released it before you could pull.
Your body turned back toward her against your own intention. Shauna watched your expression change as though someone were adjusting it by hand. The fear remained in your eyes even as your mouth softened into a smile.
You reached across the console.
Your fingers touched her cheek.
You had touched her hundreds of times before. A hand on her shoulder. Your legs tangled together during sleepovers. Your head in her lap while you complained about Jackie.
“You smell good,” you murmured.
Your thumb moved across her bottom lip.
Somewhere beneath the adoration, you looked terrified.
Shauna kissed you anyway.
By morning, you had moved into her house.
There was no discussion. No suitcase packed carefully, no goodbye to the apartment you had entered only hours before. You returned with two trash bags of clothing and stood in Shauna’s bedroom as if you had always lived there.
The wish did not make you subtle.
You slept curled around Shauna so tightly that your arm went numb. You followed her into the bathroom while she brushed her teeth. You waited outside the shower, sitting on the closed toilet lid because being separated by a curtain made your breathing uneven.
You had never called anyone that before.
For the first few days, you looked perfect together.
Shauna became prettier beneath your attention. She wore your love like light. At school, your hand rested in the back pocket of her jeans. You tucked her hair behind her ear while she spoke. You kissed her temple in crowded hallways and watched her with the bright, devoted expression Shauna had seen you give Jackie in the crystal shop.
You played the perfect couple so well that people began to doubt their own memories.
Perhaps you had always wanted her.
Perhaps the glances toward Jackie had meant nothing.
Perhaps love could arrive overnight and still be real.
Shauna wanted to believe that most of all.
She photographed you sleeping in her bed. She kept one of the pictures in her wallet. In it, your face was peaceful against her pillow, one hand curled around the sleeve of her shirt.
No one could see how hard your nails were digging into your own palm beneath the blanket.
The real you had not disappeared.
The taste of Shauna’s toothpaste in your mouth.
A bruise on your knee you could not remember earning.
The shower left running in the quiet house because its noise soothed the thing inside you.
Five beers lined neatly in the refrigerator.
Shauna’s parents away for the weekend.
Sometimes you returned for seconds at a time and found yourself kissing her.
Sometimes you woke in the middle of saying I love you and heard the words finish themselves without your permission.
Sometimes Shauna would look away and you would surface behind your own eyes, clawing silently at the walls of your body.
You discovered that at a party two weeks after the wish.
You and Shauna stood alone in Lottie’s bathroom while music shook the walls. Someone had left a wineglass beside the sink. Shauna was wiping lipstick from the corner of your mouth, smiling because you had spent the entire night staring only at her.
Your body went rigid beneath her hands.
The room arrived in brutal pieces.
Your reflection looking loved and utterly unfamiliar.
“How long have I been gone?”
You reached for the wineglass.
Shauna realized what you meant to do a second too late.
You smashed it against your forehead.
The bowl shattered. Pain flashed white through your skull. Blood ran into your eyebrow, startlingly warm.
For the first time in days, your thoughts belonged only to you.
You raised the broken stem again.
Shauna caught your wrist.
Your voice frightened her more than the blood.
There was nothing theatrical in it. Nothing loud. It was the voice of someone speaking from inside a grave, afraid the dirt would close before anybody heard.
“Please, Shauna. Whatever you did, undo it.”
“I wake up with your hands on me.”
Shauna’s face went white.
Not because of what you said.
Because of the hatred with which you said it.
You stared at her, breathing hard.
You wanted her to understand that beneath the sweetness and the kisses and every adoring look, you were still alive enough to despise her.
Then warmth spread beneath your ribs.
The curse returned like honey poured into an open wound.
The broken glass slipped from your hand and chimed against the sink.
Your mouth curved into a tender smile.
“No,” you whispered. “I’m sorry, baby.”
You reached for her, blood dripping from your fingertips.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
The part of you trapped underneath began screaming again.
Shauna cleaned the blood from your face and told everyone you had slipped.
You emerged from the bathroom holding hands.
Jackie was waiting in the hallway.
She looked at the bandage above your eyebrow. Then at the blood staining Shauna’s sleeve.
“I’m clumsy,” you said brightly.
Jackie knew you were lying.
She had always known the shape of your lies because most of them had been built for her.
Friends with benefits, you called yourselves, though there had never been anything friendly about the way you loved her. Friendship did not explain Jackie appearing at your apartment after midnight because she could not sleep. It did not explain the little pink toothbrush hidden in your bathroom cabinet or the way she pressed her face into your neck after sex and stayed there until morning threatened to make everything real.
Jackie never said she loved you.
Instead, you let her hold your hand beneath blankets. You let her kiss you where nobody could see. You let her leave and return and leave again because loving half of Jackie seemed better than living without her.
Before the curse, you had spent months waiting for her to be brave.
After it, all she could do was watch you give Shauna everything she had been too frightened to claim.
Jackie took Shauna aside that night.
You stood across the room laughing at something Natalie said, though your eyes never left Shauna.
“What did you do to her?” Jackie asked.
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
“Because she looks at you like she’s dying.”
“No.” Jackie’s voice broke. “She doesn’t.”
Shauna hated her for the certainty of it.
“You don’t get to decide that now.”
The sentence found its mark because it was true.
She had simply refused to call you hers until someone else did.
“You’re taking advantage of her.”
“She can barely breathe when you leave the room.”
“That’s what love looks like.”
“No,” Jackie said. “That’s what fear looks like.”
Shauna glanced across the room.
You smiled at her instantly.
Jackie followed her gaze and saw your expression.
For one second, beneath all that devotion, she saw you begging.
The house was quiet when Jackie arrived three nights later.
The shower was running upstairs. It had been on for nearly an hour, filling the walls with the hush of endless water. Five beers remained in the refrigerator. Rain glazed the driveway where the second car should have been.
Cigarette smoke curled through the kitchen.
You sat on the counter wearing Shauna’s shirt, bare legs pressed against her hips. She stood between your knees smoking through the open window while you traced the shape of her mouth with your thumb.
Jackie let herself in with the key you had once given her.
A buried part of you recognized her first.
Jackie, wet from the rain.
Jackie, furious and frightened.
Jackie, who had slept with her ear against your chest as though your heartbeat was a secret she was stealing.
Then the curse recognized her too.
It understood Jackie only as danger.
“Come with me,” she said.
Shauna turned. “Get out.”
Jackie looked around the kitchen. At your clothes hanging over a chair. Your shoes beside Shauna’s by the door. The photographs already taped to the refrigerator.
A whole false life built in two weeks.
The real answer rose like blood in your throat.
The curse transformed it before it reached your mouth.
“I want to be wherever Shauna is.”
She had come prepared for anger. She had not prepared herself to hear your voice choose someone else.
Even if she knew the voice was not truly yours, it still sounded like you.
“Remember the night the power went out?”
Your fingers tightened around Shauna’s shirt.
“You came to my house because I said I wasn’t scared, and you knew I was lying. We slept on the floor beside the fireplace.”
A picture opened inside you.
Jackie’s face gold in the firelight. Her cold feet shoved beneath your legs. The storm beating against the windows while she whispered that she wished the whole town would disappear and leave only the two of you behind.
“You kissed me,” Jackie said, “and then you asked if I thought people could ruin something by wanting it too much.”
Your eyes filled with tears.
Shauna felt your body sway toward her.
“You need to leave,” she told Jackie.
“You said you loved me that night.”
You had never told her that.
“I pretended to be asleep.”
The confession entered you like a blade.
All those months of silence.
Something inside you lunged toward the surface with such force that your body convulsed.
Your face twisted with sudden fury.
She stumbled into the table. The ridiculous cardboard sleeve fell to the floor, though the snapped halves of the Willow had been gone since the night Shauna made the wish.
Jackie touched her bleeding lip.
Her eyes returned to yours.
“You would never do that to me.”
For an instant, you came back.
You stared at the blood across your knuckles.
The kitchen became rain, breath, overturned chairs.
Jackie tried to restrain you without hurting you. She caught your wrists and begged you to wake up. You drove her into the counter. Shauna grabbed at your shoulders, pleading with you to stop, but the wish knew only one command.
Love Shauna more than anyone in the whole fucking world.
More than the girl inside your body who was tearing her hands bloody against the walls.
Jackie reached for the knife block.
Shauna saw the knife and moved between you.
Jackie swung blindly when Shauna grabbed her hair.
The blade entered beneath Shauna’s ribs.
For a moment, there was only the white handle protruding from her shirt.
Then blood spread around it, dark and astonishing.
Jackie released the knife.
Shauna staggered backward against the kitchen sink.
She barely had time to say your name before you knocked her to the floor.
Your hands closed around her throat.
Her nails tore crescents into your skin. Her knee struck your hip. Beneath you, her body twisted desperately toward life.
Shauna slid down the cabinets behind you.
Blood pooled beneath her.
Jackie’s face reddened. Her lips opened, searching for air.
She looked over your shoulder at Shauna dying on the kitchen floor.
Understanding passed across her face.
She knew what would happen when Shauna stopped breathing.
She knew you would come back.
And she knew she would not be alive when you did.
Her hands fell from your wrists.
One rose slowly to your cheek.
The curse kept your mouth stretched into a terrible smile, but tears ran freely beneath it.
Jackie brushed one away with her thumb.
“I’m sorry,” she mouthed.
For not choosing you sooner.
For hearing your confession beside the fireplace and pretending she had slept through it.
For arriving brave only when there was nothing left for bravery to save.
Jackie’s eyes remained on yours.
She refused to make you spend her final seconds alone.
Behind you, Shauna’s breathing became wet and shallow.
Jackie’s pulse fluttered beneath your palms.
A fragile bird battering itself against a window.
Her hand slipped from your cheek.
You felt her leave before her body understood it had been abandoned.
Her head tipped against the cabinet.
The moment her heart stopped, the devotion inside you vanished.
You fell back into your body as though dropped from a great height.
The first thing you felt was Jackie’s throat beneath your hands.
The second was how still she had become.
Your voice came out softly because some part of you believed death could be frightened into permanence.
Her head rolled against the tile.
The marks around her neck were already darkening.
You stared at your hands.
Blood beneath the nails. Skin torn across the knuckles. Jackie’s last tear still wet against your palm.
Across the kitchen, Shauna sat motionless beneath the sink, the knife still buried in her side.
The shower running upstairs.
Five beers in the refrigerator.
Cigarette smoke moving gently through the open window as though nothing important had happened.
You looked at Shauna first.
No grief. No relief. No love.
Only the hollow place where the wish had lived.
Then you looked at Jackie.
The sound that left you did not resemble language.
You crawled toward her so quickly your knees slipped in blood. You pulled her into your lap. Her head fell against your arm with the terrible trust of something that could no longer protect itself.
That warmth was cruelty. It made death look reversible.
You pressed your fingers to her neck.
You lowered your mouth to hers and breathed.
You had kissed Jackie in closets, in cars, in dark bedrooms where neither of you dared turn on the light. You had kissed her laughing. You had kissed her angrily. You had kissed her goodbye a hundred times without ever meaning it.
Now you kissed her only to beg her body not to leave.
You pushed against her chest.
Her head moved weakly with each compression, as if she were trying to turn away from you.
You had been inside yourself the whole time. Watching. Begging. Loving her helplessly while your hands killed her.
But Jackie had waited as long as she could.
You pressed your forehead against hers.
Your tears fell onto her closed mouth.
“That night. You heard me say it.”
“You were supposed to tell me.”
“You were supposed to be brave.”
The anger came then, bright and childish and useless.
“You were supposed to stand up for me.”
You struck her chest once with the flat of your hand.
Nothing could hurt her now.
“You were supposed to take me home.”
You folded around her body.
For days, you had begged silently to be alone inside your own skin.
Now the loneliness was unbearable.
Across the room, Shauna’s eyes stared sightlessly past you. You remembered her in fragments: passing you cigarettes behind the school, lending you sweaters, listening as you spoke about Jackie. Every memory curdled under the knowledge of what she had done.
Tell me something honest, you thought.
Tell me you knew I was still in there.
Tell me you saw me when I looked out through my own eyes.
Tell me you understood and chose yourself anyway, so I can hate you cleanly.
She had escaped every answer.
Tomorrow, the police would come. They would photograph your fingerprints around Jackie’s throat. They would find Shauna’s blood across the kitchen and your skin beneath Jackie’s broken nails.
They would ask what happened.
You would tell them about a toy sold in a crystal shop. A cream cardboard sleeve with a man and woman smiling beneath red stars. A piece of dark wood snapped in half inside a parked car.
You would tell them that your body had not been yours.
You would tell them you had watched yourself become the perfect girlfriend.
You already knew how impossible it would sound.
Your hands had still done it.
There was no magic left in the room now. Only consequence.
Her mascara had smudged beneath one eye. A small cut divided her lower lip where you had struck her.
You wiped the blood away with your thumb.
“I loved you,” you whispered.
At last, the truth had no one left to frighten.
“I loved you when you came over and pretended you only wanted to borrow clothes. I loved you when you talked about boys because you wanted to see if I’d get jealous. I loved you when you left before breakfast. I loved you when you stayed.”
That was the saddest truth.
You would have given Jackie all your time.
Every year she needed to become brave.
Shauna had stolen the choice from both of you because she could not bear to wait for love that would never belong to her.
Give me back my time, you thought, looking at her body.
I will give you back your heart.
The house remained quiet.
You held Jackie until her warmth began to leave.
The cigarette smoke clung to your clothes. It lived in Shauna’s shirt against your skin and in Jackie’s rain-damp hair. You knew you would smell it afterward in every room, whether it was there or not. It had seeped too far into you to ever be washed out.
Sirens began somewhere in the distance.
You could picture the life that had nearly existed before the wish.
Jackie in your apartment, barefoot in the kitchen.
Her pink toothbrush no longer hidden.
Her hand finding yours in public and refusing to let go.
Perhaps she would have learned to choose you.
Perhaps you would have learned to demand it.
Now all those possible lives went dark one by one.
Jackie asleep beside you.
Jackie laughing into your mouth.
Jackie hearing I love you beside the fireplace and opening her eyes.
Jackie at the door, saying she had come to take you home.
Red light flickered faintly against the wet windows.
You rocked Jackie’s body in your arms and cried with the helpless, exhausted grief of someone who had returned to her own life only after there was no life left to return to.
Shauna had wished for you to love her more than anyone in the whole world.
Then Shauna died, and all that false love disappeared without leaving even enough behind to mourn her.
Jackie remained in every ruined place.
In the blood drying across the tile.
In the confession you had waited too long to repeat.
You bent over her and pressed one final kiss to her forehead.
The front door burst open somewhere behind you.
Voices filled the house. Orders. Footsteps. Someone shouting for you to put your hands where they could see them.
You only held Jackie tighter.
Your body shook around a grief too enormous to survive and too permanent to kill you.
All you could do was say her name.
Until it stopped sounding like someone you had loved and became only the sound of everything going dark.
pranked you all into thinking this was a shauna fanfic hahahaha
