Chapter Text
“Do you ever wonder,” Cat whispers, “if we were meant for something more?”
They’re out in the north field. It’s close to midnight; Ellie is lying with her head in Cat’s lap, her hair strewn out across the warm skin of Cat’s thighs. Cat’s fingers are whisper light against Ellie’s face. She’s tracing the shape of her nose, the contours of her lips, the scar dissecting her eye brow. The sky above them is dark and heavy, like a swath of creamy velvet, studded with sharp pricks of starlight. Ellie closes her eyes, feels the heady sensation of Cat’s breath against her cheek.
“What do you mean?” She asks, quietly, and the scar on her arm throbs.
Cat doesn’t answer. She dips her face down to meet Ellie’s, brushes her lips across Ellie’s jaw till they find her mouth. For a long minute, Ellie closes her eyes, feels herself relax into the raw awareness of Cat’s body on her’s. She tastes like mint and weed, a weird combination, one that Ellie has come to savor. She reaches up, threads her fingers through the locks of Cat’s shiny black hair, cups the side of her face.
All too soon, Cat pulls away. She sits, her face dangling above Ellie’s, hunched over so close that all her beautiful hair blocks out the silvery starlight. “What do you think you would be doing right now,” she says, “if the world hadn’t gone to shit?”
Ellie blinks uncomfortably. Cat is the most artistic person Ellie knows, and sometimes some of that wandering, introspective spirit of her’s gets a little more real than Ellie is cool with. Questions about destiny, about intention, about alternate lives where they weren’t all lumped together for the simple sake of survival behind Jackson’s walls hit too close to home. Ellie will be seventeen in seven months, two years almost to the day when she was bitten in the boarded up mall and her life changed forever. She’s trying not to count down the days, but there’s always something ticking there, in the back of her mind.
“Probably not lying in horse shit in some field in the middle of fucking nowhere,” she says, to distract Cat, and it works. Cat pulls away, laughs. Ellie rolls off of her, sits up in the grass with her legs tented before her. “What time is it?” She asks, because even though Joel gave her a watch, she’s forever forgetting it, and tonight is no exception.
Cat smirks. “Got somewhere better to be?”
“Yeah,” Ellie says. “Not grounded.” She sighs, scrubs her palms against the thighs of her jeans. “I have to be home by midnight.”
“Oh, well in that case…” Cat falls forward onto all fours, creeps like a cat over to Ellie, fits herself between her legs. Kisses her delicately. “You’re already late,” she says against Ellie’s lips. “What’s a few more minutes?”
It’s only a six minute walk from the field to their house. Four, if she runs, which Joel will appreciate, because then it will look like she actually really cared about making her curfew. She grins, feels Cat’s teeth catch on her lips. “Five more minutes,” she acquiesces, and falls backwards, Cat’s weight on top of her.
*
Five minutes turn to ten, and then Ellie has to really force herself to get up, fix her hair, rebutton her flannel. Cat watches from where she lounges on the grass, lighting another joint. Ellie squints at her. “Walk me halfway?”
Cat shrugs. “Nah. Gonna stay here a little longer.”
Cat doesn’t have a curfew. She’s too cool for that kind of stuff, Ellie thinks irritably, and sighs. “Okay,” she says, then hesitates. “See you tomorrow?”
Cat puffs out a mouthful of smoke. “Sure,” she says casually, and Ellie turns and leaves, trotting down the hill with her flashlight trained on the ground in front of her, alert for horse shit or rocks. It’s a warm night so there’s a cluster of horses pastured out here tonight; she stops to pet the few that meander over to her before slipping between the rails of the fence and jogging towards home.
Jackson after midnight is a special kind of beautiful; the streetlights buzz dully at their lowest setting, the houses she pass sit silent in slumber. In the distance, the lights on top of the wall are dim pinpricks; they feel as distant tonight as the stars.
On her street, Tommy and Maria’s house sits dark, save for the soft amber glow of a light left on in their kitchen. There’s a red wagon left abandoned on their walkway, a hula hoop, a faded plastic big wheel. Everything sleeps- except for the light on on her porch, the light in the living room window.
She toes her sneakers off on the porch, kicks them to the side so Joel won’t trip on them first thing in the morning. The front door is unlocked, which she’s grateful for, because she left her keys with her watch on her desk before she left. She steps inside on silent feet, eases the door shut behind her, turns the lock with a soft snick. From here she can see Joel’s shadow in the living room, merging with the shadow of the couch. It stirs something in her- a little irritation, she thinks, but mostly fondness. Cat’s mother doesn’t wait up for her, she knows, and even though Cat acts like it’s totally cool, every time she mentions it, something inside of Ellie twangs with hurt.
“Ellie?”
She moves into the doorway. Joel is reading on the couch, the same place she left him hours ago. There’s a half empty glass of something amber on the coffee table in front of him. She smirks at him. “You drunk?”
“No,” he says. He doesn’t look up from his book. “You’re late, though.”
She sighs. “I forgot my watch.”
Joel turns a page. “That,” he says drily, “Is a real shocker.”
She rolls her eyes, then catches sight of the clock on the wall. “It’s only fourteen minutes,” she says, hopeful. He looks up at her then, eyebrow cocked.
“Fourteen minutes late is still late,” he says, but when she groans and flops down on the couch next to him, he lifts his arm so she wedge herself in there. She kicks her feet up onto the coffee table. Joel’s glass rattles. “Careful,” he says lightly, and she tells him:
“I’ll do the dishes all week. And I’ll chop firewood tomorrow.”
He snorts. “Dishes is already your chore, smart ass.”
She flounders a second, tucks her arms around her. “I’ll chop firewood for Tommy?” She tries, then snaps her fingers. “I’ll mow the lawn.”
“And run over half my garden again?” Joel shakes his head. “Pass.” Then he pulls on her ponytail. “Don’t worry about it,” he tells her. “Just- don’t make a habit of this, okay? I’m too old to be sittin’ up late worryin’ over you.”
“You can always just go to bed,” she retorts, a little too heatedly, because the side eye Joel gives her is only half amused.
“So you can stay out and get into trouble all night?”
She rolls her eyes, but Joel’s already told her she gets a pass on being late tonight, so she decides not to push it. She jerks her chin towards the book in his lap. “What’re you reading? Some cowboy shit again?” He’s been into westerns lately, which is weird as all hell, Ellie thinks, when you’ve got so much good sci-fi lying around.
He grunts. “You nailed it,” he says. “Some cowboy shit.” Then he nudges her. “You have a good night?”
She closes her eyes, tries to conjure up the feeling of Cat on top of her, the soft prickle of the grass beneath her, the sweet mountain air all around them. “It was okay,” she says, going for cool, casual, and Joel barks a laugh.
“Go to bed,” he tells her, and she drags herself from the couch with a long moan, stretching her arms above her head.
“Are you coming up?” She asks, starting for the stairs, and Joel leans forward to pick up his glass with a clink.
“Nah,” he says. “Gonna finish this.”
Ellie pauses, her hand on the bannister. “Okay,” she says, then adds, because she sort of feels like she needs to: “Sorry I was late.”
He takes a sip of his whiskey, shakes his head at her. “S’okay,” he tells her. “You’re okay. Go to sleep.”
She smiles at him, and he smiles back, in that content, tired way she doesn’t think she’ll ever get sick of seeing on him, and goes to bed.
*
Sunday mornings in Jackson are slow and lazy. Ellie wakes after nine, with the sun streaming in through her curtains, the scent of bacon drifting up the stairs. She can hear voices; Tommy and Maria and Rafa are already over, and at any minute Joel’s going to holler up the stairs for her, so she rolls herself out of bed and into the first pair of semi clean jeans she finds on her floor.
Downstairs, Joel is flipping French toast at the stove, and Tommy is leaning against the island, mug of coffee in hand, and Maria is at the kitchen table, one eye on Rafa, who’s toddling around the table with a crust of bread in his hand. He screams when he sees Ellie, and she swoops him up, swings him in a circle so fast that it almost - almost- pitches them both over. Rafa is delighted by this, Tommy less so, because he says, “Jesus Christ, Ellie,” and grabs her elbow.
“I’m fine,” she says, shaking him off. She props Rafa up on her hip, pretends to take a bite from the crust of bread in his hand. He smashes it into her cheek. Tommy watches them with fond amusement.
“Thought we were goin’ to have to eat without you,” he says to her, and before Ellie can respond, Joel says:
“Someone had a very late night last night.”
Ellie glares at the back of his head. “I could have been later,” she tells him, and Tommy snorts into his cup of coffee.
“You’re not going to win any points with that argument,” he tells her, and Joel turns around, slides a platter of golden brown French toast across the island to her.
“Put the baby down and set the table,” he tells her, but there’s no actual gruffness in his voice, so Ellie presses a kiss to Rafa’s cheek, passes him to Tommy, and brings the food to the table.
In short order they’re all gathered around the table, Rafa on Maria’s lap trying to take handfuls of food from her plate. Ellie dips a strip of bacon in honey, passes it to him. Maria grimaces. “That’s disgusting,” she says, and Ellie sniffs.
“It’s delicious,” she responds, and doubles down by dipping another piece of bacon in honey and stuffing the whole strip in her mouth. Maria shakes her head, takes a sip of her coffee.
“So,” she says, “You ready for school?”
School.
Ellie’s second year at Jackson’s school starts tomorrow, and she feels more than unprepared. Last year the eight months she attended before it let out for their break alternated wildly between really good and really fucking awful. She likes to think she’s evened out some since their first few months here, but there are still some days when she’s caught off guard by something someone says or does or her own fucking brain. She’d argued against just not going back, taking more shifts at the farm or gardens or stables, but Joel had flat out shot that down.
“Ellie?” Maria says, and Ellie sighs.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m super fucking excited.”
Joel raises an eyebrow at her, mouths language at her. She looks away, stabs a hunk of potato with her fork, tries to tamp down on the feeling rising in her: that swelling tide of powerlessness, of not really being in control. That’s what being a kid is, sometimes, Tommy had told her a few months ago. Sometimes it’s just sitting back and letting other people take care of you, trusting them to make the best decisions for you. For Ellie, who oscillated wildly between being corralled and being ignored her whole life, it’s not something that sits easy with her.
Tommy, who’s always really fucking good at diffusing tension, chimes in. “Well, you get to go out hunting this year with your class,” he tells her, and it’s on the tip of her tongue to snipe back that she’s already a good fucking hunter, she doesn’t need to go to school for that, but when she looks over at him, he’s angling his eyebrows at her in that way that says he’s throwing her a lifeline and she should take it, so she does.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m excited for that.” She crams a piece of French toast in her mouth, says around it, “And the science shit.” Which she actually really fucking likes. Hard pass on math, but she could science all fucking day long.
Tommy nods at her, and she smiles at him with her half chewed breakfast on full display, and Joel says, “Beautiful,” so sarcastically that even Maria laughs, which sets Rafa off laughing, which sets them all off laughing, and soon Ellie is scraping the last bit of honey off her plate with her finger, despite Joel’s objection.
“Can I go?” She asks, which is as close as she’ll ever get to saying may I be excused, and Joel grimaces as she stuffs her fingers in her mouth, sucks it clean.
“Clear the table,” he tells her, as if she needs reminding, and she gets up and does that, taking plates from Tommy and Maria so fast that she drops a little bit of eggs on the floor. Joel sighs when he sees it, and she says quickly:
“You know what would be super useful right now? A dog.”
“Or a kid who doesn’t have to move at the speed of light,” he grouses, and Ellie drops the plates in the sink, comes back to bend down and scoop the splattered yellow eggs off the ground.
“You’re just mad you can barely move at all anymore,” she replies, and grins when he sighs, world weary. She takes his plate from him, being careful not to spill anything, and deposits it in the sink before wiping her hands on her jeans. “Can I go now?”
“Where you off to?” Joel asks, and Ellie edges towards the back door, smirking.
“The fucking moon, man,” she tells him, and escapes.
*
Ellie goes to Cat’s, where she finds Cat still in bed, curtains still pulled shut. Only a thin sliver of golden sunlight slips through, illuminating and dissecting Cat’s huddled form in a sharp line. Ellie eases her bedroom door shut, slips off her sneakers, and crawls beneath the covers with her, easing her arms around Cat’s stomach, drawing into her. Cat mumbles in response and turns her head. Her breath is hot and stale on Ellie’s cheek, her voice husky from sleep.
“When’d you get here?”
Ellie buries her face in the back of Cat’s neck, in a swath of that black, black hair and tells her, “Just now.”
Cat smiles. Ellie can only see half of it in the singular tract of sunlight. “You smell good,” she says. “Like honey. And…” she sniffs. “Bacon?”
“New perfume,” Ellie tells her seriously, and they both giggle before Cat turns her head away, presses it back into her pillow. Ellie leans into her, presses her face into the line of Cat’s back. “What are we doing today?” She asks. “This?”
“This,” Cat murmurs in agreement.
“All day?”
“All damn day long.”
Ellie grins.
*
They lay in the stillness of the bedroom for what feels like hours to Ellie. Being with Cat this way is easy, precious. There’s none of the charge that there was last night when they slunk together beneath the stars; this morning its all comfortable touches, long stretches, slow kisses that turn into yawns, sighs. Time passes slowly, languidly, like a summer dry river.
Sometime around lunch, when the sun coming in through the curtain is bright white, Cat’s mom comes home. Ellie hears her moving around downstairs, opening and closing cabinet doors, humming to herself. They don’t move; Cat’s mom doesn’t seem to mind her coming over, her slipping into her daughter’s bed and curling around her. When Ellie brought it up, tentatively, the first time she’d come over, Cat had laughed.
“It’s not like we can get pregnant,” she’d said.
Joel hadn’t agreed. The one time she’d brought Cat home after school, introduced him to her, he’d pulled her aside after Cat had gone upstairs and told her she needed to leave her bedroom door open. Ellie had gaped, incredulous. “Are you fucking kidding me? It’s not like we can get pregnant,” she’d said, and Joel had pinched his lips together, shook his head.
“Ain’t about that,” he’d said. “Door stays open. We clear?”
After that, Cat hadn’t come back over. “What a weird fucking hill to die on,” she’d said when Ellie had told her his ultimatum, and Ellie had agreed, even though she felt a little bad about talking shit about Joel to her. It wasn’t so bad; she knew Joel was just old fashioned. She knew he was just looking out for her. Cat wouldn’t agree though, so she didn’t push the issue, and Cat didn’t come over anymore.
Cat’s mom leaves shortly after she arrives, and Cat takes the opportunity to sit up in bed, stretch. “I’m gonna take a shower,” she declares. She crawls over Ellie, kissing her as she goes, and leaves the room.
Ellie lies in the middle of Cat’s bed, swathed by her duvet and pillows, and looks around the room. It’s a good room, she thinks. It’s got more stuff than Ellie’s does. Cat’s been in Jackson for almost as long as it’s been around. She and her mom were one of the first families to settle in the town, and Cat’s been in the same bedroom since she was a little kid. Ellie gazes around at all the pictures tacked to the walls, the bookshelf overflowing with picture books and boxes of art supplies and weathered stuffed animals, the glow in the dark stickers stuck to the front of the dresser, and feels a stab of envy. Her room is nice now- they’ve painted it and Joel built her new shelves, a nice desk, and she’s got some stuff, some posters of her own and tons of clothes and books, but it feels new sometimes, like a pair of sneakers she hasn’t quite broken in yet.
Cat comes back from her shower and dresses, and then she demands food, so they go downstairs. Cat eats cold potatoes from the skillet in the fridge; when she offers some to Ellie, Ellie declines, and Cat rolls her eyes a little. “Let me guess,” she said, “Your fake dad made you a big ol’ hearty breakfast.”
Ellie blinks, shifts. He did, but Ellie hates when Cat calls him that - her fake dad- and she sort of hates when Cat rags on the shit he does for her. She gets annoyed with Joel too, but thats like, her God given right. It’s not Cat’s.
“Whatever,” she says. Her face is hot. She stands from where she’d been sitting on the opposite side of the table from Cat. Cat squints up at her, says around a mouthful of cold potatoes:
“Jesus Christ, Ellie, I’m kidding. You know that.”
Do I? Ellie wants to ask, but she doesn’t really want to fight. She sits back down with a sigh. “I don’t want to sit around here all day,” she says instead, and Cat swallows a last bite of food, leaves the fork and the skillet there on the table and stands.
“Fine,” she agrees. “Let’s go do something.”
Ellie waits till Cat’s gone to put a bra and sneakers on to put the skillet back into the fridge, the fork in the sink. It feels weird to leave them just lying around, even though that’s sort of what Cat and her mom do. Their house is never clean. If Ellie left half as much shit lying around as Cat did, she would never hear the end of it.
They leave the house and make their way across the town to the old watchtower. Cat’s got her pack slung over her shoulder, and when they climb up, she settles herself on one of the benches there and takes out her sketch pad. The mountains spiral their way up to the sky in front of them, and Cat props her sketch pad on her thighs and gets to work with a wedge of charcoal, shading and rubbing and squinting. “You wanna draw?” She asks Ellie, and Ellie shakes her head, slumps down against the back of the bench. She’s not into landscapes; she likes people, animals, things in motion.
“Nah,” she says. “Wake me up if I fall asleep, okay?”
She’s content to sit there and bask in the sun. It’s a warm fall day, and the scents of the meadows around them are strong, like fresh cut hay and horses and the smell of smoked meat drifting towards them from the smokehouse. She jolts when Cat nudges her.
“Don’t fall asleep,” Cat says, then grins at her. She leans over, kisses Ellie. Ellie moves into the kiss, but her heart starts to pick up pace. She likes being with Cat, and she likes to touch her, kiss her, feel her, but she sees the way some people look at her when they hold hands out around town. Cat doesn’t care, but she does, a little. She pulls away.
“What time is it?” She asks, because she did, once again, forget her watch, and Cat regards her coolly.
“Why does it matter?” She asks. “What do you have to do thats so important?”
Ellie looks away so Cat won’t see the small prickles of heat on her cheeks. “I’m just asking a fucking question,” she says, as coldly as she can manage, and Cat snorts.
“You have hours before midnight, Ellie,” she says, and Ellie feels that tendril of anxiety in her stomach, the one she’s come to recognize as a precursor to a fight or argument with Cat.
“I have to be home by four,” she says, and watches Cat roll her eyes, slump pointedly over her sketchbook. “We have- I have dinner. With my family.”
“Didn’t you just have breakfast with them?” Cat snips. She scrubs furiously at a line on her paper. Ellie scowls.
This is always the sticking point, between her and Cat, the line in the sand they keep coming to and tugging each other back and forth over: Cat thinks all the stuff Ellie likes to do - spend time with Joel, hang out with Tommy and Maria, play with Baby Rafa, generally be a “good kid,” is stupid. She hasn’t said it quite as plainly as that, but Ellie can read body language, can listen to the words unspoken. She doesn’t know how to explain to her that this is important to her, that having a family is still a pretty new deal and she’s only just starting to be really comfortable with it, to be sure of her place. She doesn’t want to fuck this thing up too.
“Why do you always have a problem with them?” She asks finally, just to say something, and Cat cocks her head at her, sweeps the hair off her neck and pulls it up into a pony tail.
“I don’t have a problem with anyone,” she says. “I just think it’s weird how like, super attached you are.” When Ellie opens her mouth - to say what, she isn’t sure- Cat shrugs one shoulder, as if she isn’t bothered by this whole thing. “I just thought you wanted to like, spend the day together. Since school starts tomorrow and we’re not really going to see each other as much.”
“There’s like, a hundred kids at school,” Ellie points out. “We’ll find each other, I’m sure.”
“I mean, like, I’m going to start training for patrol,” Cat replies. “And you’re too young, so we’re really not going to be together all the time.”
Ellie opens her mouth, closes it. Feels the tendril of anxiety grow a little thicker, a little twistier. Sometimes she feels like she’s gorging herself on all these emotions: balancing Cat and her family and herself and all that shit she’s still got going on in her head in her two hands. Something’s always slipping between her fingers. She’s so scared that one day she’s going to wake up and find that it’s Cat who’s fallen away in the night.
She turns her head away, forces herself to say, “I can stay a little longer. I just - I don’t want to be super late. This is important to me.”
This is important to me.
Those are supposed to be the magic words. They work on Joel, on Tommy, on Maria. Sometimes, on herself. Cat just shrugs, like she didn’t hear the last thing Ellie said, and asks, “Did he give you shit for being late last night?”
“No, but-”
“Okay, so what’s the big deal then? He clearly doesn’t care.”
She’s wrong. If there’s one thing Ellie knows Joel does, it’s care. Sometimes to the point where it makes her want to fucking scream, but she never doubts that. But she doesn’t want to keep fighting with Cat. She’s fought basically her entire fucking life, and right now she just wants to relax. So she forces her shoulders to settle, forces herself to slump back into her seat, and says, “It’s fine.”
Cat beams at her, reaches over to smudge a sooty fingertip against Ellie’s nose. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s find somewhere more private, okay?”
Ellie swallows, smiles. Agrees.
*
It’s not fine. By the time Ellie pulls herself away from Cat, the sun is turning orange on it’s descent towards the mountains, and she is very late.
They do family dinner every Sunday at Tommy and Maria’s, and it’s usually one of Ellie’s favorite times of the week. As she heads towards their house today though, she can’t ignore the sickening clench of anxious anticipation in her stomach, the way her breath keeps catching, again and again, just shy of her throat. She goes over the backlist of excuses she hasn’t used yet, stupid shit like “I took a nap and fell asleep” or “I forgot that was today.” Telling Joel she forgot her watch isn’t going to keep cutting it, but neither are any of the lame extra excuses she has. By the time she turns onto her street, she’s decided that she’s going to go for tight lipped and surly, and hope none of them are feeling eager to fight her on it.
That tactic only gets her as far as their front hallway though, because as soon as she steps in the door she can see that the table has been emptied and cleared except for her usual place. The dishes are stacked neatly in the sink. Even worse, the clock on the wall reads an obnoxious 6:13 pm, which is way later than she actually thought it was.
“Motherfucker,” she hisses, and hangs her jacket on the hook on the wall and goes to find her family.
They’re on the back porch. Ellie can see them through the kitchen window: Joel and Tommy are drinking whiskey out of short glasses, and Maria is rocking Rafa on the porch swing. Rafa’s the one who gives her away; as soon as he sights her through the screen door he rockets forward with a scream. All heads jerk in her direction. She opens the door and steps through, bending to pick up the charging toddler.
“I’m sorry,” she says, before any of them can say anything. She feels weirdly close to tears, which is definitely not part of her surly and tight lipped plan. She buries her face in Rafa’s curls for just a second. “I- I- I didn’t realize how late it was. I’m sorry.”
When she looks up, Tommy and Joel are exhanging long, weird looks. She thinks suddenly, that she’s probably walked in on them talking about her, and the realization has her setting her jaw. When no one says anything, she says, “Okay, someone fucking say something.”
Joel purses his lips, takes a sip of his whiskey. “Where’s your watch?” He asks, and she cringes a little at his tone: clipped, cool, short. Great, she thinks, he’s fucking pissed.
“I forgot it,” she says loudly. He nods, like that’s what he was expecting her to say, and that sort of really pisses her off. She shifts Rafa to her other hip, pulls his hands away from the hank of hair he’s got caught between his fingers. “Is that a fucking crime now?”
It’s probably the wrong tone to take, because Joel sits up sharply, bristling, and Ellie braces herself for the fight they’re about to get in, but then good ole Tommy stands up, hands Maria his glass of whiskey, and reaches for Rafa. “Come on,” he says. “We saved you a plate.”
Ellie feels strangly exposed without Rafa there to act as a buffer between her body and the rest of them. She tugs him back, squeezes him. “I’m not hungry,” she says stoutly, and Tommy opens the screen door, props it there with his arm.
“Look,” he says, “Ya’ll can yell at each other as much as you want when you go home, but right now I’m trying to enjoy the rest of my day, so I think it’s best if you just cool your heels inside for a bit.” He’s got that look on his face again, like he’s doing her some sort of favor, and it rankles her. She thrusts Rafa at him and then ducks past into the kitchen. He follows her, jerks his head at the table. “Go on and sit,” he says, and when she doesn’t, he adds in exasperation, “Ellie, for the love of-”
She sits, and watches as he wrangles Rafa onto one side while pulling a plate out of the oven with his free hand. He brings it to her at the table, places it none too gently in front of her. “You thirsty?” He asks, and despite herself, she is, so she nods, and Tommy brings her a glass of ice water.
“Just eat,” he says. He puts a hand on her head, and she ducks away from it. He sighs. “El,” he says, “Not everything’s gotta be a fight.”
“Easy for you to say,” she mutters, and Tommy chuckles.
“You forget that he raised me too?” He shakes his head, starts back towards the door. “Come on out when you’re finished.”
Tommy leaves. Ellie watches him through the window as he settles with Rafa back into his rocking chair, listens as his voice joins the hum of conversation. Ellie kicks her heels against the legs of her chair, gulps some water, tries to eat the plate in front of her. Maria’s made roasted potatoes and sweet peas and lamb with mint and honey, but it all tastes like rubber in Ellie’s mouth. She’s mad, she realizes, at herself for not sticking her ground with Cat, for not making her listen when she told her that getting to Sunday dinner was important to her. Because it is. She loves to sit around this little table with her people, likes to eat Maria’s piping hot food and give Joel a hard time and squirrel bites of food to Rafa and laugh. She likes to be with them, and even though it’s just one week, missing those moments makes her feel a little gutted, shaky.
And then there’s the whole being late two days in a row. Usually she’s better at spacing it out, better at toeing the line she and Joel have sort of mutually agreed upon in their relationship, where he tells her what to do sometimes and she does it and they don’t have to snap at each other, raise their hackles. It mostly works, and she mostly sort of loves it. She likes knowing that someone’s looking out for her, someone’s expecting something of her. Until she met Joel, she didn’t know that accountability could run hand in hand with love, and it makes her mad as hell that she’s letting him down.
She gives up on eating and clears her place. She finds a clean dish towel in a drawer and wraps her plate with it, leaves it on the counter to take home. Joel’ll eat it for breakfast or something, because if there’s one thing they never do here in Jackson, it’s waste food.
It takes her a long minute to weigh her options. Half of her wants to go into the living room and flip through whatever book Tommy’s got lying around, avoid the awkwardness of going out there and sitting with them all when they all know she’s in trouble. But then a bigger part of her is still mad she already missed dinner with them, so she takes a breath and goes out onto the porch.
They all look up as she comes out. Rafa’s moved from Tommy’s lap to Joel’s, where he seems very invested in trying to eat the buttons off of his flannel. He reaches for Ellie as she steps ou, and she gives in, slips onto the porch swing next to Joel, pulls Rafa to her. Joel eyes her a minute. She can tell he’s still mad by the sort of flinty look in his eyes, but he just lifts his arm, an invitation, and says, “You eat?”
Something like a small grain of warmth twinges behind her breastbone. She settles into the space he’s created for her, grateful for the heavy way his arm sits across her shoulders. “Some,” she says, and smiles tentatively at him. He doesn’t smile, but he nods, palms the back of her head, real gentle, and turns back to his conversation with Maria. Some of the weight leaves her stomach, and she reclines back against the seat back. In her arms, Rafa is drowsy and heavy. She closes her eyes, asks Joel, “Can you swing us?” And he does.
*
She’s in her room later that night, packing her backpack for school. She’s already pulled everything out once, catalogued it, put it back in, and taken it back out, one more time, just to be sure. It helps to ease some of the clenching in her chest.
Behind her, Joel knocks on her doorframe. “You busy?” He asks, and she half turns, notebook in hand.
“Not really,” she says. “What’s up?” Even though she already knows what’s up. She’s not a fucking idiot.
“Can I come in?”
He always asks. She nods, and watches him cross her room, stepping over discarded sneakers, books, crumpled jeans and t-shirts. He sniffs. “You ever think about cleanin’ up in here?” He asks, and she rolls her eyes, turns back to stuff her notebook into her backpack. She hears the springs of her bed creak as Joel sits. “Thought you already packed that.”
“I’m just - double checking.”
“Thought you did that too.”
Ellie huffs a sigh. Her shoulders stiff, she turns to face Joel, backpack hanging from one hand. “Can we just get this over with?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Get what over with?” He asks, like he doesn’t already know, and Ellie feels her fingers tightening around the strap of her backpack.
“Just fucking yell at me or ground me or whatever,” she says. “I got shit to do, man.”
Joel sighs. “I don’t want to do any of that,” he tells her wearily. “Can we just - talk, for a minute?”
Ellie holds out for a second longer, then tosses her backpack onto her desk chair and slouches to her bed. She crawls onto it and wraps her arms around her chest, sits ramrod straight against the headboard. Joel watches her, something like sadness jumping around on his face. Finally, he says, “You nervous about tomorrow?”
She is, actually, but she’s not about to admit that. “I’m fine,” she lies. “I’ve done this before, you know.”
“I know. I’m just… checking in.” He scratches the back of his neck, looks around her room. “Haven’t seen much of you these last few days.”
Ellie feels some of the rigidity leave her shoulders. She clasps her hands in her laps, studies them. She’s spent more time with Cat in the past two months than anyone else, and she doesn’t want to feel guilty about it, but she does. “I’m okay,” she tells him. “Just been...busy.” When he doesn’t say anything, she takes a deep breath, exhales slowly. “I’m sorry,” she says, hoping she sounds steadier than she feels. “For missing dinner today. I know - I know it’s important to you.”
Joel nods. “I thought it was important to you too,” he says, and even though he says it so softly, like he’s talking to Rafa when he’s upset, it feels like he’s cutting her wide open. She sets her jaw and looks away, at her desk.
“It is,” she says. “I’ve just been busy.”
“If something’s important to you, you make time for it,” Joel says. Her face burns at the admonishment. When she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at him, he goes on, “I’m not goin’ to give you any grief over this, Ellie. I know - I know you’re young and you’ve got friends now and your girlfriend and I want you to have all that, okay? But if you make a commitment to something, I want you to honor it, all right? Especially for family.”
Her vision blurs a little. She wipes at her eyes with the heel of her palm, sniffs. She knows he’s right, and she knows that skipping dinner to give in to Cat was the wrong choice, and she knows he’s being really, really good about all of this, but there’s still something in her that chafes against being called out on her shit. Maybe if this was something she’d had all her life, it would go down a little easier. But she hasn’t, and it doesn’t, so she just hunches her shoulders and mutters, “Whatever, man.”
She waits for him to bite back, waits for the fight to begin. She’s sort of looking forward to it. Fights she can handle; the back and forth, the volleying, the wounded feelings on either side. Licking your cuts after, shakily making up. Those first few days or hours afterwards when you tiptoe around each other until some semblance of normalcy bleeds back into the house and you can just lift up the corner of the rug and sweep it all away. It’s what she knows. Fighting is basically her craft.
But Joel is more committed to this Good Parenting thing than she thought, because he doesn’t take the bait. He says, thinly but evenly, “You have to be up early so I don’t want to drag this out. In the future, just keep me in the loop about what’s going on and we can figure this sort of stuff out, okay? We’re a team.” His hand reaches out, hovers a second, then squeezes her knee. She tries not to pay attention to how much better it makes her feel. “Clean slate,” he says, “Okay?” Which is what he says when he means he’s done with something, he’s moving past it. Ellie is equal parts relieved and irritated. A clean slate for Joel means she’s left walking around with all these leftover feelings clanging around inside of her, and now she’s gotta find somewhere else to put them.
She doesn’t say that though. She just swallows against the tightness in her throat, nods her head jerkily, says, “Aye-aye, Captain.” Joel smiles at her then, and she makes herself smile back, and inside, she feeds another log to the flames.
*
Joel insists on walking her to school in the morning. “Dude,” she tells him, “I know where it is.”
“I know you do,” he replies from where he’s seated on the couch, lacing up his boots. “I’m going that way anyways.”
“Bullshit,” she says, but when he doesn’t give in, just stands and pulls on his jacket, hands her her backpack, she lets herself feel the tiniest bit happy. No one ever walked her anywhere before, besides FEDRA teachers when they took the classes to see the hangings, or Riley when they were sneaking around the QZ, so it’s sort of nice that she has someone to do this mundane thing with her. She decides to be nice, even goes so far as to hold the door open for him. “Ladies first,” she says with a smirk, because she can’t be that nice, and he glares at her as he stomps by, but the corners of his lips are twisting.
“Little shit,” he says, and she grins and follows him off the porch.
At the school house, he leaves her with a quick hug and the admonishment to “Be good, for Christ’s sake,” and then heads away down the road, lifting his hand in greeting to someone she can’t see. Ellie watches him go till he turns the corner, then she hikes up her backpack and joins the stream of kids going inside.
Their school isn’t really a school. It used to be an office building, she thinks. It’s two stories with lots of glass windows, a lot of narrow, nondescript hallways and small rooms, and a kitchen downstairs. There’s only a hundred or so school age kids in Jackson, and they fit them all into one place, with the little kids downstairs and the older kids and teens upstairs. Ellie trudges upstairs and greets one of the teachers, who is passing out hand written schedules at the top of the stairs. She smiles when she sees Ellie.
“Welcome back,” she says, like she didn’t kick Ellie out of her class four months ago for calling Carlos Lager a fuck nugget, and rifles through her stack of paper till she finds what she’s looking for. Ellie takes her schedule from her without a word and goes to find Dina.
Dina is waiting for her in front of the cubbies lined up along the second floor hallway. They’re a motley selection of some real lockers, some filing cabinets, but mostly just shelves with students’ names written on them in black marker. Ellie’s and Dina’s are side by side, like they were last year, and Dina straightens when Ellie approaches.
“What’d you get for your work roster?” She asks, and Ellie passes her the piece of paper, drops her backpack at her feet. Her work detail, which she does ten hours a week, is at the stables, but all the teens have rotating rosters that they have to do three days a week. It usually changes every two weeks, so some weeks you’re shadowing a construction crew, others your in the garden, others you’re at the farm. Everyone learns everything, and when you’re out of school, it helps to know where you can serve best.
“Damn.” Dina whistles, passes Ellie back her paper. “Farm and kitchen this month. Sucks to be you.”
“Tell me about it,” Ellie grouses. “Have you seen Cat?”
Dina stiffens a little at the mention of Cat. They don’t get along, and it’s been sort of a sore point between them two. “Nah,” she says. “But I wasn’t really looking.”
But Ellie has been, and she hasn’t seen her. She’s hard to miss - she’s taller than most of the other girls by a mile, and her tattoos draws everyone’s attention. Ellie swallows the uneasy feeling in her stomach, yanks a notebook out of her backpack. “Come on,” she tells Dina. “I’m sure she’s here somewhere.”
She sits through math without hearing anything the teacher says, and then history, and then in English, when Mrs. Acre asks her if she knows the definition of a predicate, she says, “Fuck if I know,” because all she can think of is that Cat’s not here at school on the first day, and it’s all she can do to keep herself planted in her seat instead of going to look for her.
As soon as their out of class and on their way to the canteen for lunch, Dina asks her, “What’s wrong with you today?” And Ellie’s not sure how to put into words how it feels when someone isn’t where they’re supposed to be. How Cat not showing up to class makes her sick to her stomach, even though she knows she’s probably just at home, high as as fucking kite; how she remembers that they argued yesterday; how maybe this is her avoiding Ellie because she’s realizing, sort of like Ellie might be, that this thing between them isn’t really as fun as it used to be, that maybe just being the only two gay girls in town isn’t enough reason to be together, and that’s what really scares Ellie, when she starts looking down the barrel of their relationship: her options are super fucking limited, and it feels like it’s Cat or no one, and at the end of the day, Ellie desperately, desperately, does not want to land on the latter.
But she can’t say that to Dina, so she just forces herself to smile, forces that writhing tendril in her stomach back into the cage she usually keeps it, and says, “I’m just fucking hungry, dude.” Dina studies her for a minute, then smiles, nods, and Ellie nods back, and then later, when they’re back at school, she throws up her lunch in the bathroom and hopes no one heard her.
*
As soon as school is out, Ellie tells Dina bye and goes to Cat’s. She’s supposed to be at the stables, but her anxiety over missing Cat has reached a crescendo, and it’s all she can do to keep from vomiting or crumpling or both. She knows Cat’s safe, she knows she is, but she has to see it to believe it. She knows she gets in her own head a lot, and she knows this is one of those times, but she’s told Cat before that it makes her really upset when Cat blows her off without any warning, and she likes to think Cat cares about her enough to take that into consideration, so there’s the chance - the smallest fucking chance- that something’s actually happened to Cat, that she needs help, and Ellie isn’t going to be able to chill the fuck out until she knows for sure that’s she’s all right.
But when she gets to Cat’s house, there’s no one there. The front door is locked but the back is open, so Ellie lets herself into the kitchen, calls out for Cat. There’s no answer. Upstairs, Cat’s empty room stinks like weed. Ellie stands there in the dark for a second and grips her hands together and tries to breathe, in and out, like Joel taught her to do when it starts to feel like the whole world’s spiraling around her.
Joel.
For a second, she thinks about going and finding him. He’s either at the site for the new grain barn or at his workshop on Main Street. She knows that all she has to do is find him and tell him she needs help, that this is important to her, and he’ll drop whatever he’s doing and listen to her and come up with some sort of plan to get her shit sorted out. That’s what he does.
But then she remembers that Joel doesn’t really like Cat, and he’d probably like her even less if he knew she was skipping school and freaking Ellie out, so she doesn’t go to him. She goes instead to their spot in the north field, where her and Cat like to lie together in the sun and giggle, where they first kissed, almost six months ago, but Cat’s not there either, and by now she’s really late for her shift at the stables, and she’s beginning to feel a little woozy, like she can’t get enough air, so she takes a few minutes to sit in the grass with her head on her knees and breathe before climbing to her feet and heading to the stables.
She’s still spiraling by the time she gets to the stables, and she’s out of breath, both from running and from low key panicking, so of course the first person she sees when she steps through the side door is Tommy. Tommy doesn’t come to the stables to work too much anymore; between heading up the patrol schedules and trainees and Rafa, he’s pretty much always busy. Ellie gets the feeling that when he does come around to the stables, it’s really just to check on her, even though he always says he’s there to see how things are going. He’s an awful liar.
Ellie takes a second in the shadow of the doorway to try to collect herself, and then she tries to step past Tommy with her head down so he won’t notice her. He’s talking with Jerry Fischer, who took over managing the stables when Tommy stepped back. He’s an okay guy but he’s not Tommy, so Ellie tries not to like him too much.
She makes it to the personnel room, where she dumps her backpack in her bin and trades her sneakers for her boots. She’s halfway through lacing them when Tommy steps into the room. “I’m sorry,” she says right away, before he can say anything. “I know I’m late, I just - I had to check on something and it took longer than -”
“It’s okay,” Tommy interrupts her. She looks up at him, which is a mistake, because she still sort of feels like she can’t breathe right and also like she might cry if anyone even looks at her sideways, and she knows Tommy can see all of that on her face because his brow drops immediately. He comes a step closer. “El,” he says, “What’s wrong?”
She’s horrified to feel the telltale burn of tears behind her eyes. She ties her boot in a hurry, stands in a rush, pretends to root around in her backpack for something. “Nothing,” she says. “I’m fine. Just- annoyed. I’m late.”
“Are you sure?”
She snaps, “I’m fucking fine, Tommy.”
He’s quiet. When she turns back around, jamming her Boston Red Sox cap on her head, Tommy is studying her, his dark eyes probing, burning. She feels her shoulders tense. “What?” She challenges, and he just shakes his head.
“Nothing,” he says. “Just checkin’ in on you is all.” He hesitates, licks his lips. “School went okay?”
She snorts. “Fabulous.”
“All right.” He takes off his hat, runs his hand through his hair. It puffs up around his fingers. “Pepper and Mayor just came back from patrol. Need to be rubbed down.” She nods stiffly, steps around him without another word.
She gets to work, rubbing Pepper all over with her towel, trying to focus on the quivering of the horse beneath her hands, the smell of the hay and manure. All things that usually work to calm her down, slow her racing mind, but it doesn’t work today. She’s still worried about Cat, and she’s starting to feel bad about snapping at Tommy. He didn’t deserve that, especially since she knows he’s here on his free time to check in with her. He’s always good about meeting her where she’s at, about being really intentional with the time he gives to her. He doesn’t have to be. He doesn’t owe her a damn thing, and he’s always so good to her, even when she’s being shitty to him.
That’s the problem, she thinks angrily. She takes Pepper by her lead, turns her into the feeding paddock where some of the other horses are milling around. She spent her whole life being shitty on purpose to people -FEDRA teachers, dorm monitors, soldiers, other students-and now she’s finding that even when she doesn’t want to be, she has a real hard time not being shitty. She picks fights with Joel when she’s mad or argues with Dina or snaps at Tommy or Maria. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t keep things smooth between her and Cat. There isn’t a single relationship in her life that she doesn’t feel like she’s fucking up, and sooner or later, they’re all going to realize that she’s probably more work than she’s worth.
She goes back to the stalls, finds Mayor sweat soaked and muddy. He’s a tall, brown gelding, feisty by nature, and Ellie moves slowly when she’s around him. He’s bitten more than one stable hand, and it’s taken her a long time to convince the veteran hands that she’s capable of taking care of him on her own.
She rubs him down and then lets him into the paddock with the other horses before going to the feed room and filling buckets with grain. She just has to do this, she tells herself, and then muck a few stalls and clean some tack and she can go back to looking for Cat. This is the first time she thinks she’s ever been antsy to leave the stables; sometimes she tries to draw her chores out so she has more time with the horses or the sheep. Today though, she’s in a hurry as she heaves herself up over the paddock rails and begins dumping grain into the feed bins. The rustle of the pellets brings the horses over in a rush, and she slips backwards off the fence, goes back to the grain room, fills the buckets again-
There’s a sudden high pitched scream, a wild thrashing, banging. Ellie drops the buckets and follows the noise at a run, her heart hammering. Too late she realizes her mistake: she let Mayor into the paddock with the other horses, and he’s supposed to be left alone to feed in his stall, because he’s territorial as fuck. He’s the one causing the commotion; at the feed bin she’d just filled, Mayor’s biting at Thurber, a smaller roan gelding, his hooves flashing out, and Thurber is snapping back. The other horses in the pen are snorting, tossing their heads, stomping their hooves at the commotion.
Without stopping to think, Ellie grabs a rake leaning against the wall near her and leaps onto the fence. She’s seen Tommy and a couple other guys break up a horse fight before by sticking the handles of rakes between them to spook them into separating, but she’s not tall enough to reach over the fence and do that. She’s straddling the top rail, getting ready to drop down into the pen near the two fighting horses, when someone grabs her from behind and heaves her backwards so hard that she lands awkwardly on her heels and goes over. Her back jars against the rough floor, her palms bite, her head knocks. The rake clatters from her hand and Tommy swoops it up, turns back to the horses. There’s a couple other stablehands there now; some of them are in the pen, trying to corral the other horses to settle them, and some of them are with Tommy at the rails, trying to spook Mayor and Thurber apart.
Ellie sits up, breathing heavily. Her head hurts where it hit the floor and she’s shaking, so hard that she has to clasp her hands together between her knees. She closes her eyes as Thurber screams again, the sound like a drill through her brain. You fucked up, she thinks. You really fucked up.
The sounds of the fight dies, settles. When Ellie opens her eyes, somone’s got a lead rope on Thurber’s halter and is tugging him away. Mayor still paces at the fence line, tossing his head, snorting, salivating. Tommy passes the rake to Jerry Fischer, then comes and crouches beside Ellie. He looks shaken. “Are you allright?” He asks, and she opens her mouth, closes it. Tommy takes her hands and gently pulls them apart, clutches them in his with his thumbs rubbing her knuckles. “Ellie,” he says. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Breathe.”
She tries, but it hurts to pull air into her chest, and she can’t seem to get it out past her throat without wheezing. Tommy’s fingers tighten around her’s. “You’re okay,” he tells her again. “Breathe with me, okay, honey? In and out.” He takes a few long, exaggerated breaths. She follows, her eyes burning, and soon she feels that clamp in her chest loosen, shiver free.
“I’m sorry,” she says in a rush. “I didn’t- I wasn’t thinking and I let Mayor into the pen, I just fucking forgot-”
“Ellie, stop.” Tommy shakes her hands. “Just - take it easy, okay? Let’s just breathe, for a minute. Can you do that?”
She’s suddenly aware of the people around them, the stablehands at the paddock trying to fix her mistake. She can feel their eyes pricking her skin every time one of them glances their way. She thinks she might actually die of embarrassment, right here and now, on the dirty stable floor.
“I’m fine,” she growls, and tries to pull her hands away, but Tommy gives her a look like he’s not buying her bullshit for one second. He does’t let go of her hands, but he does turn them over. Her palms are scraped raw and a little bloody. There’s a jagged black splinter in the heel of her thumb on her left hand. Her stomach heaves when she sees it.
Tommy purses his lips. “Can you walk?” He asks, and she would roll her eyes but her head hurts too much for that.
“Yes,” she tells him, and he stands, pulls her to her feet. Her head swims when she comes up, and she stands for a minute while Tommy reaches around her, pulls some hay out of her hair, dusts off the back of her shirt. She lets him do his fussing; normally she’d try to bat him away, but she’s feeling too woozy for that. The anxiety that she’s just barely held at bay all day is back and crowding her throat.
“Come on.” Tommy takes her arm and leads her back into the personnel room, where he nudges her into the bathroom. “Wash your hands,” he tells her. “Let me go get the first aid kit.”
“I’m fine,” she tells him again, but he just rolls his eyes and closes the door.
She washes her hands, biting her lip when the soap burns in the scrapes on her palms, then fixes her hair. There’s no bump where her head hit the floor but it’s tender to the touch. When she comes out, Tommy is back, sitting in a chair by the window with the first aid kit open on the wide windowsill beside him. He nods to the chair across from him and Ellie sits. They’re so close that Tommy has to shift so their knees don’t bump.
“Are they- the horses going to be okay?” Ellie asks, and Tommy takes her right hand in his, frowns down at it.
“Mayor got in a couple good bites, but nothing to worry about.” He probes the red raw patch on her palm. “I’m sorry,” he says after a minute. “I didn’t mean to throw you like that. You just - scared the shit out of me. I panicked.”
Ellie blinks. “You don’t have to apologize,” she says. “I’m the one who fucked up.”
Tommy frowns at her. He pours a little moonshine - Jackson’s primary antiseptic- onto a clean rag and presses it gently against her hand. Ellie grits her teeth against the burn. “You didn’t fuck up,” he tells her firmly. “You made a mistake. It happens. You learn from it, you move on.”
She shakes her head. “They could have-”
She can’t finish the sentence : they could have died. A horse fight is not no big deal. “It could have ended really badly,” she says, finally. “And it would have been my fault.”
“You know what would have been bad?” Tommy asks, putting down her right hand and moving onto her left. “Is if you got in between them like you were tryin’ to do.” Her face burns. She looks out the window, at the sheep milling around in the paddock. There’s an undercurrent of anger in Tommy’s voice, now that the scare has passed and he’s thinking a little more clearly about what she was doing. “What the hell were you thinking, Ellie? I know you’re smarter than that. I know I taught you better.”
Being scolded by Tommy is somehow a thousand times worse than being scolded by Joel. Probably because he’s usually so calm, so fun and easy going, and they get along in a way that she can’t quite pull off with Joel. Him doing it now makes her want to shrivel up and die, all over again. She hunches her shoulders. When she doesn’t speak, Tommy sighs, lets go of her hand.
“I’m going to need to cut your hand to get the splinter out,” he tells her. “You okay with that?”
She sniffles, wipes her nose with the back of her sleeve. “What’s my other option?”
“Leave it in and lose your whole hand to infection.” When she doesn’t react, just sniffles again, Tommy adds, gentler, “We can wrap it for now and go find Joel. Do you want to do that?”
“Why?” Ellie asks waspishly. “So he can yell at me about being stupid around the horses too?”
Tommy sighs. He sits back in his chair, fiddles with the pair of tweezers in his hands. “I didn’t yell at you,” he says pointedly. “You did something you shouldn’t have, and it could have ended much worse than it did. I need you to understand that.” When she doesn’t say anything, just thrusts her hand at him, he takes it and begins cleaning around the splinter with the moonshine. Ellie sets her jaw, breathes through her nose, her eyesight going glittery.
“You ready?” Tommy asks, and she nods once, jerkily.
“Have you ever done this before?” She asks, and he grimaces.
“Don’t ask me that.”
She watches with some level of morbid fascination as Tommy slices a small stripe into her hand where the splinter entered. A bead of blood wells up, then breaks and trickles down towards her wrist. It moves raggedly, and it takes her a minute to realize it’s because she’s shaking.
“Hey,” Tommy says sharply. She snaps her head up, meets his gaze. “Look at me,” he tells her. “Or the sheep. Not at what I’m doing.” He waits till she nods, then lowers his head and goes back to work on her palm. She keeps her eyes trained on the top of his head.
“You have a lot of grey,” she says finally, and Tommy snorts.
“Between you and Rafa, I’m surprised I have any hair left at all.”
She chuckles, then winces as the pain in her hand sharpens. “Did you get it out?”
“Almost.”
She licks her lips, looks around the office, at the wooden board walls, the desk piled high with paper and feed bags, the cubbies with everyone’s bags and sneakers squashed in. “Don’t tell Joel, okay?” She asks him. “About me trying to get in the pen. I won’t do it again.”
Tommy grunts. “Damn right you won’t.” He sits back, holds up the tweezers to the light. There’s a shard of sharp wood, coated in blood, clutched in them. “Do you want to keep this as a souvenir or something?”
“Hard pass.”
Tommy throws the splinter away, then cleans her hand with more moonshine and wraps it all up in a clean linen bandage. When he’s done, he doesn’t move to get up. “I’m not in the habit of keeping secrets from Joel,” he says firmly. “Especially not about you.” When she rolls her eyes, he holds up a hand. “Just tell him what happened. You weren’t hurt, you learned your lesson, its over. Done. Clean slate.”
Clean slate, Ellie thinks, and grimaces. Tommy watches her a minute longer, then leans forward, plants his elbows on his knees, his chin on his folded fists. It’s his “Let’s Have a Serious Conversation” pose, and Ellie actually groans out loud.
“El,” he begins. “Are you okay?”
She picks pointedly at the bandage on her hand. “I’m fine,” she says, but she knows Tommy’s not buying it by the way he doesn’t move, doesn’t give her a fucking inch to take a mile out of. “I’m fine,” she says again, stressing the word ‘fine.’ “Mostly just sick of everyone asking if I’m okay.”
Tommy narrows his eyes. “How’re things between you and Cat?” He asks, and Ellie sucks in a breath. Tommy knows he’s hit the proverbial nail on the head, because his forehead furrows slightly. “You know, you can talk to me about anything,” he tells her gently, and that’s just the thing. She knows she can; she knows Tommy is a safe place, safer sometimes than Joel, because he’s not going to lose his shit and ground her for something trivial, like missing curfew. But it still rankles her that he can read her so clearly, so she blows out a breath of air, crosses her arms against her chest.
“We’re great,” she says, falsely cheerful. “We’re getting married next month.”
Tommy doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t even crack a smile. He’s committed to this Serious Conversation, Ellie realizes with a sinking feeling, and she goes back to fucking with the bandage on her hand.
“Don’t mess with that,” Tommy tells her, and she blurts out:
“She didn’t come to school today.”
When Tommy just inclines his head towards her, she goes on, heart stammering a beat against her ribs, “We kind of had a fight yesterday and then she didn’t come to school today and it- it freaked me the fuck out. Like, I know she’s okay, I know she’s safe, but it’s got me like, worried that she’s avoiding me, or like - when she says she’ll be one place and then she’s not it just really freaks me out.” She doesn’t have to say what it makes her feel like. He knows her story, the stuff she dealt with in Boston, the stuff she dealt with on the road. “And it just - she knows how much it gets me going. I’ve told her before, about how much it scares me, and I know it’s not her job to manage my emotions, but it makes me feel like she doesn’t care about them at all and I-I just don’t know if what I say really even matters to her.”
“Why do you think that?” Tommy asks, and she clenches her fingers around the arm of her chair, feels the slick wood burrow into the gouges on her palms.
“She gave me shit about leaving early to go to dinner,” she says. The pain of it - that sharp stab of unimportance, of not being heard- still aches in her chest. “I told her it was important and she got mad at me, so I fucking stayed and then I missed dinner and Joel was mad at me, and I put up with all that bullshit just for her to scare the shit out of me today.”
Tommy nods, slowly. He sits back, rubs his hands over his thighs, takes a deep breath. “Look,” he says, “I’m gonna tell you something, and I need you to not take this the wrong way.” She scowls. “You made the decision to stay with her yesterday. You know you could have left and come to dinner, and she would have gotten over it. That’s on you, honey, sorry to say.”
She scoffs. “Tommy-”
“But the rest of it,” Tommy goes on, holding up his hands placatingly, “isn’t. If you feel like you aren’t being heard or respected in a relationship, Ellie, then that’s a sign that something’s not right. Something’s gotta change. You’re her girlfriend, yes, but that ain’t all you are, and at the end of the day, your partner should respect that. You can’t be just everything to her. You’ve got yourself to take care, you’ve got your responsibilities at work, at school, with us. If she can’t see that, then maybe you need to have a conversation about that.”
Ellie croaks, “But how?” and Tommy sighs.
“I wish I could tell you, but the fact is that no two relationships are the same. I could tell you how Maria and I hash shit out, but me and Maria aren’t you and Cat, so I don’t know if that would help you, or make things worse. What I do know is that you can’t be the one taking all the hits and bottling all this up inside. Just be honest with her. Start there.”
Ellie wipes at her eyes. “What if she gets mad?” She whispers, and Tommy shrugs.
“Then she gets mad,” he says. “And you have your answer. Like you said earlier, it’s not her job to manage your emotions, and it’s not yours to manage hers. It’s a two way street, sweetie.”
She frowns at him. “Don’t call me that,” she says, but she’s only half joking, and Tommy laughs. He stands, claps his hands against his thighs.
“Come on,” he says. “Let me walk you home.”
“I’m not done with my tasks,” Ellie points out, but Tommy’s already passing her her sneakers, already has her backpack in her hand.
“It’s fine,” he says. “Let me take care of you, okay? Jesus, girl.”
She laughs, and even though it’s sort of snotty and thick, Tommy smiles at her. He hooks his arm around her neck, pulls her in to hug her. He smells like soap and horse, and a little bit like Rafa. “Listen,” he says, suddenly serious again. She stills against him. “You know we’re all in your corner, right? Cat doesn’t have to be your end all. Joel might get on you sometimes but that’s just what parents do. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for you. Same goes for me and Maria, all right?”
“I know,” she says. She lets him hug her a minute longer, because he seems like he needs it more than her, before saying, “Dude, you fucking smell,” and he pushes her away, rolling his eyes.
“Disrespectful little shit,” he mutters, but he still carries her backpack all the way home for her.