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Late at night, the taste of Mari’s flesh still fresh and fragrant on her tongue, Shauna aches. Her eyelids flash every time she closes them — moths buzzing dangerously close to a rotating fan, snow frosting perfect porcelain skin, Travis’s eyes, drunk and all-knowing: My favorite thoughts are Jackie’s. She rolls over on her side, like the images are printed on the top of her hut rather than the inside of her brain. Her skin itches, fingers twitching with a latent eagerness, an unrealized desire to touch, to take, to consume.
She misses Jackie. She thought that maybe, even if the others she’s feasted on couldn’t, Mari might have satiated her, might have kept the ravenous hunger that tears holes into the pit of her stomach satisfied at least for a few days. No luck — mere hours after gorging herself, she aches and aches and aches; she needs more, she needs Jackie, she needs to know what the hell Travis was going on about.
Do you ever wonder whose reality we’re living in? She twists the sentence over in her mind. My favorite thoughts are Jackie’s. What is the implication there — that Travis is living in Jackie’s reality? He told her things only Jackie could have known, and when would she have told him? When he was inside her on that dirty attic floor, feeling her body from the inside out? Did she tell him when she finished, just to dig the knife deeper into Shauna’s chest? Here are all my secrets, Travis, you can have them too.
Fury fills the gaps in Shauna’s gut, setting her body aflame despite the mid-autumn Wilderness chill. She finds herself rising, stomping out of her hut with a wild determination, shaking Travis awake inside his half-covered hammock under the trees.
His eyes open slowly, blinking wearily into a hangover-induced wince. “Fuck,” he mutters, rubbing at his brow. A moment passes before he registers Shauna’s in front of him; the wince widens to convey an emotion Shauna’s becoming all-too used to seeing on her teammates’ faces: fear.
“Come with me,” she says roughly, turning to shove her way out of Travis’s shelter. She glances back only once, to make sure he’s close behind, and then leads him quickly into her hut.
She sits on her pelt and he stands awkwardly at the entrance, staring at her with the careful wariness most of the girls have now taken to observing Shauna with. She says nothing to begin with, taking the time to watch Travis right back, examining him in full for the first time since she’s known him. He’s handsome, she guesses, at least compared to what she remembers of him before the crash. His eyes are softer, his hair is long and wavy around his shoulders. Handsome isn’t the right word, Shauna realizes — the person standing in front of her is beautiful.
“You can sit,” she says, glancing at the pelt on the other side of the hut, the one that belonged to Misty and then to Melissa. No one shares her shelter with her anymore.
Travis hesitates, but eventually he flops down across from her, knees pulled close to his chest. It’s disorienting — Travis never used to sit like that. Javi did, though, young and anxious and curled tightly in on himself. A chill dances down the length of Shauna’s spine. Now that she thinks about it, everything about Travis’s demeanor reminds her of Javi: the wideness of his eyes, the smallness of his form, the hair hanging in front of his eyes. I’m pretty sure some of my thoughts are Javi’s thoughts, Shauna remembers him saying. She shivers.
A moment passes, and then Travis speaks. “Shauna?” he says, and again, unsettlingly, the quiet timidness of his voice reminds her starkly of his younger brother. He swallows; she watches his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. “If you’re going to kill me, will you please just do it quick? I don’t want to be hunted. You can just slit my throat, like you were going to do to Natalie.”
Shauna furrows her brow. His assumption is fair, but it confuses her anyway. It hadn’t even occurred to her to try to kill Travis. She just wanted to talk. “I’m not going to kill you,” she says.
“Oh.” He relaxes slightly, but he doesn’t seem relieved, exactly. Questioning, maybe, would describe his expression more accurately. He seems almost disappointed. “What are you going to do, then?”
She doesn’t answer his question, not directly. Instead she asks a question of her own. “What you said to me yesterday — what did it mean? I want to write it off, call you crazy like Lottie, but I don’t understand how you could’ve known what you said you know about me and Jackie. Did she tell you? When you were fucking her, did she talk about me?” It’s not what she meant, but her body reacts with arousal despite this: she imagines Jackie lying under Travis, saying Shauna’s name, picturing Shauna thrusting into her. She shakes her head to clear the image before her mind takes it too far.
Travis’s demeanor shifts; he looks less like a scared baby deer and more like the awkward teenage boy Shauna remembers him to be. “Not… when I was, um, fucking her. Before, sort of.” Shauna’s eyes flash, and Travis quickly amends: “She didn’t tell me any of the things I said last night. Well, she sort of did, but… not then.”
Shauna frowns, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. She’s so fucking sick of the mind games people keep playing with her. “What do you mean she sort of did?”
Travis sucks his top lip between his teeth, and Shauna nearly jumps, because the gesture makes him look so much like Jackie her heart starts racing. “I mean… it’s hard to explain. She tells me things, sort of. But it’s more like… it’s more like she’s in my head, so when she thinks things I think them too. I knew those things because I remembered them. I still remember them.” His eyes meet Shauna’s, and they look almost green. “I remember being fourteen at a sleepover, cross-legged on your bed and gnawing on my lip as I asked you to help me practice making out. I remember stealing your journals and reading them while you were asleep; I remember the way the tears felt on my cheeks as I turned each page — I’d never cried like that before, Shauna. It was the hardest I’d cried in my entire life, even harder than when my pet rabbit died when I was seven. And I remember sitting on that log outside, so cold I couldn’t feel it anymore but too stubborn to walk back in. I remember you coming out and apologizing, leading me back inside. And I remember waking up from that — because that was a dream, Shauna, really you left me out there — and then… not waking up at all.”
Shauna’s shivering now, breath coming out thin and shallow. “Jackie,” she whispers. “You’re — how — ?”
“I’m not Jackie, Shauna,” Jackie — Travis — says, and Shauna hates him for it. “I just… feel like her, sometimes.”
Shauna shakes her head. She gnaws on her bottom lip, swallowing hard before inching closer to him. “Can you just… pretend?” She reaches out, hand tentative and trembling, and touches his cheek, cupping his chin with the curve of her palm. She expects a bit of roughness, some stubble he wasn’t able to get with only the knife, but his skin is smooth, baby-soft, like he’s never grown anything there at all. He leans into her, exhaling a soft, pretty sigh, so much like the sounds Jackie would make in her sleep.
“Shauna,” he says, and just like that, Travis is gone. The person looking up at Shauna with soft, heavy-lidded eyes is Jackie Taylor. Before Jackie can say anything else, before the illusion can be broken, Shauna kisses her, presses her lips against hers rough and hungrily, taking as much as she can all at once.
Jackie gasps, but she doesn’t pull away; her hands come up to fist the heavy fabric guarding Shauna from the cold, her body presses warm and flush against her. Shauna moves closer, pushes Jackie down onto the pelt and straddles her waist. She looks over her for a second, and her head spins with confusion — Jackie doesn’t look right, her mind keeps telling her. Why doesn’t Jackie look right?
Shauna shuts her eyes tightly. She takes a shuddering breath, then says, “I want you to fuck me.”
She hears Jackie shift beneath her. When she speaks, her voice doesn’t sound the way it should. “Um… okay. I — I think I still have a few condoms somewhere — ”
“No,” Shauna cuts her off harshly. She opens her eyes. Travis is back, nervous and uncomfortable on Melissa’s old pelt. “Not like that. I only want you to do what she could. I want you to do what she would.”
Travis blinks slowly, eyes softening with understanding. He nods. “Okay.”
They switch positions: Shauna lies flat on her back and Travis hovers above her, demeanor melting back into something softer, firmer, uncannily Jackie-esque. She takes Shauna in, pupils dilating and eyes darkening as she drinks in her form, hands twitching like it’s taking everything in her not to rip her apart. Shauna wishes she would.
Finally, Jackie slips her hands under Shauna’s layers, feeling her way up her torso before peeling each garment off, leaving Shauna bare and shivering and somehow unbearably hot. “Please,” she hears herself whispering. It’s not a word she’s ever said when letting someone fuck her, but it’s impossible not to beg for Jackie to touch her. She’s waited for it far too long. Jackie bends down, lips ghosting the shell of Shauna’s ear, and attaches herself to the curve of her jaw. She kisses softly, and Shauna whines, desperate for something harsher, something painful. Jackie indulges her, sucking the skin into her mouth and rolling it gently between her teeth. Shauna gasps, gripping Jackie’s back, breathing heavily as she bites her way down Shauna’s neck and torso, devouring her inch by inch by inch. A hand comes up to cup Shauna’s right tit; Jackie sucks the left one into her mouth.
“Fuck,” Shauna exhales, and Jackie whimpers.
“God,” she says, coming up for air and speaking between kisses, “I fucking love your tits. I’ve always loved your tits, Shauna, I’ve wanted them in my mouth for so long.”
Shauna makes a sound that would be most accurately described as a mewl, gripping a fistful of Jackie’s hair and tugging hard. She’s vaguely aware Jackie’s hair is too short, that it’s shades too dark and not as soft as she remembers, but she pushes the thought aside and grinds her hips up into Jackie’s thigh. Jackie understands her needs, doesn’t make her wait any longer. Shauna’s pants come off, her socks, her underwear, and then Jackie’s head is buried between her thighs. Shauna’s obsessed with it, intoxicated by having Jackie do exactly what she wants, no requests or pretenses necessarily. Jackie’s tongue, cool and soft, licks a stripe up Shauna’s vulva, and it’s better than anything Shauna has ever experienced.
“You taste so good,” Jackie murmurs, and Shauna can feel the vibrations of her voice against humming her clit. She squirms, desperate, hungry for more, and Jackie’s quick to give it to her: her lips attach to Shauna’s clit and her tongue moves in a circular motion, up and down and side to side, slow and then fast and then slow again. She’s a little clumsy, inexperienced for sure, but Shauna doesn’t care: as far as she’s concerned, nothing has ever felt as good.
“You taste better,” Shauna says, dizzy, mindless.
Jackie looks up at her from between her legs, eyes too dark and pupils too large. “I guess you would know, wouldn’t you?” Suddenly, she seems to shift, wearing not the warm dark skin of Travis or the sunkissed tan Jackie was known for, but dressed in a dark, sickly, caramel color, burnt and wrinkled like an overcooked chicken — and Shauna finds herself lurching away. Jackie follows, crawling on her greased-up hands and knees like she’s determined to finish her meal, and says, “Don’t you want to know what it felt like, Shauna? Don’t you want to know how it feels to be ripped apart?”
“Stop!” Shauna screams, clawing at her face, covering her eyes. “Stop it, Travis, fucking stop!”
Hands come up to rip Shauna’s arms away from her face, and Shauna realizes with an aching relief that Jackie is gone. Travis looks at her, big brown eyes confused and frightened. “Shauna,” he says, “what’s wrong?”
Shauna stares back, chest heaving, breath coming out quick and shallow. “You — why would you do that?”
Travis shakes his head. “What did I do?” There’s no trace of Jackie left in him, not the animated roast corpse or Shauna’s beautiful best friend. Shauna can’t feel anything but a sickening, terrified rage.
“Get out,” she says. “Go away. I don’t want to see you within ten feet of me again.”
Travis blinks, dumbfounded, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.
“Go!” Shauna shouts, and for good measure, she grabs one of her discarded shoes and throws it at his head. It misses, but it has the intended effect: Travis runs out of Shauna’s hut, leaving her alone. Shauna collapses, pulling her legs close to her chest and exhaling shakily. She can’t get Jackie’s corpse out of her head; the skin between her legs feels slick and slimy, like the hallucination left residue behind. She pulls her clothes back over her body, each piece of fabric feeling like an extra layer of protection — this will keep Jackie from pulling my flesh off.
She lays back down on her pelt, pulling a deerskin over her and wrapping it tightly around herself. As she stares up at the ceiling, she doesn’t feel any safer. She knows better, and Jackie does too: they can’t be protected from each other. They’re buried too deep in each other’s bones.