Chapter Text
Shauna Shipman has finally tasted the forbidden fruit, and it really was sweet.
Too sweet.
She should be relieved, if not ecstatic. This is exactly what she always wanted, but never thought was possible. Years of feeling like a fucking idiot with a hopeless crush (more than a crush; more like a need, a craving, a religion), washed away in a torrent of vindication. It wasn’t just her foolish imagination, her perverted brain reading into stolen glances and touches that lasted a second too long. It meant something, it really did.
Maybe.
Or maybe Jackie was just bored, or horny, or looking for something to do to fill the endless hours in their forested purgatory. Why shouldn’t she? Isn’t that what Shauna’s been doing? Maybe this is all just a game. It wouldn’t be the first time. On the cusp of freshman year, cross-legged on Jackie’s bedspread with the sticky heat of late summer creeping through the cracked window, Jackie bemoaned entering high school a kissless loser. Shauna was quick, too quick, to assure her that she wasn’t a loser, that went almost without saying (though Jackie liked when she said it), but not kissless either, thanks to a bout of giggling experimentation at a nearly forgotten sleepover.
But that doesn't count, Jackie whined, we're both girls. It never counts if you're both girls.
Shauna likes to think that Jackie wouldn’t be so casually cruel, but she knows better. She more than anyone knows what Jackie is capable of, even (maybe especially) when she’s just trying to be a good friend. She said “I love you,” sure, but nothing means anything out here, especially not words. She also said “when we make it out of here,” and they both know that that’s never fucking happening.
Or maybe it is love, true love, and all of this—the smug smiles and rude gestures melting into real fucking heat—was just Jackie slowly working up the courage to consummate something that terrifies her just as much as it terrifies Shauna. A part of them had always been something more than friends. Is this intimacy, sinful as it feels, really even something new?
Well, either way, if Jackie wasn’t terrified before, she certainly is now that Shauna fucking bit her like a wild animal.
So no, there’s no ecstasy or relief for Shauna Shipman. All she feels is dirty. She feels guilt, and shame, and disgust, and absolutely paralyzing fear.
She doesn’t even know if this is what she wants. Maybe all she really wants is what she knows she can’t ever truly have. Why else would she have fucked the homecoming king and the homecoming queen? It’s the kind of move that Jackie would call any other girl a total slut for pulling. Maybe that is all Shauna really is: A slut.
Except Shauna never longed for the homecoming king. He never danced across her dreams and through her nightmares in equal measure, his name never burnt her lips and crushed her heart. Fucking Jeff meant nothing to her, she knows that now, it was never anything but the next best thing.
The next best thing compared to what?
Shauna knows the answer to that question, but she can’t and won’t acknowledge it. She just buries it deep, deep down like she always does when her feelings get the best of her and she takes things too far.
So, Shauna avoids Jackie for the rest of the day. Not that it really requires all that much effort, because Jackie avoids her too.
At least at first.
For the first merciful day after the incident, Shauna doesn’t have to deal with Jackie at all. They pass the day in parallel, leaving the room just as the other one enters.
Shauna pretends she doesn’t hear anything when Jackie asks Akilah where the first-aid kit is.
But on the second day, Jackie doesn’t avoid Shauna at all. She comes up beside Shauna and refuses to leave, playing the doting best friend like everything is fine, like Jackie didn’t just make Shauna cum so hard she broke (and broke skin with it). For a moment, Shauna allows herself to think that nothing happened, and that things can go back to the way they were, and that maybe this was all just a bad dream. Then Jackie yelps and moves her hand to guard her collarbone (now covered entirely by a snugly buttoned long-sleeved striped shirt) and everything comes rushing back. The movie theater in her mind spools up its projector and splashes memory across its screen, and Shauna goes crimson and needs to excuse herself again.
On the third day—at least Shauna thinks it’s the third day, when she’s this hungry she starts to lose the ability to tell—Shauna’s lonely journaling is interrupted by the sound of someone climbing up the rickety attic ladder.
It can’t be Tai. She’s off chopping wood with Van, and for some reason it always seems to take a full hour longer with Van than when it’s Shauna helping.
No, Shauna can tell who it is before she actually pops her honey-blonde head up, just from the ladder’s tentative creaks beneath light feet, trained by years of trying to sneak back in after curfew. She knows Jackie that well.
After the séance, Jackie refused to set foot in the attic, even with Shauna’s invitation, terrified of any ghosts that might still be lurking.
Or maybe it wasn’t ghosts that she was so afraid of.
Whatever terrified her, Jackie is here now. Maybe it’s a kindness that Jackie came up to the attic to talk to her. It’s the closest thing that Shauna has to home turf out here, but there’s still only one exit. She’s cornered like an animal, and maybe that’s exactly how Jackie wants it.
Shauna doesn’t know, because all she can think about right now is Jackie’s surprisingly expert fingers between her legs, tearing her to pieces, and how badly Shauna wants her to do it again. How badly she wants Jackie to do so much more, wants to do so much more to her.
(If she drowned between Jackie's thighs, would that really be so bad?)
“Hey.” Jackie says, tentatively.
“Hey.” Shauna croaks back.
“Can we talk?”
Shauna just stares. Nothing good has ever come from a question like that.
“The past few days I—We got carried away and in the heat of the moment we said and—” Jackie takes a deep breath. “We… did some things that we really shouldn’t have done.” Jackie says it like she’s been rehearsing it, her posture perfectly straight like she’s giving a locker room pep talk.
“Oh.” Shauna feels her chest start to contract. She isn’t sure what she wanted to hear, what would have made her feel okay (or if anything could), but it certainly wasn’t that.
“I think it would really be for the best if we just act like this past week didn’t happen.”
Shauna starts to stammer something out but she can’t find the words. The plane was crashing all over again, everything burns.
“That night, when I heard—” Jackie catches herself. “When I saw you in the woods, I just—”
Shauna’s stomach drops.
Jackie was judging her, that’s what all of this is, Shauna could feel it and now Jackie just let it slip. She heard her saying Jackie’s name and now she is punishing her. Staring at Shauna with those big, hazel, what-makes-you-think-you’re-good-enough-to-think-about-me-when-you’re-touching-yourself eyes.
“I just wanted to make you feel better,” she pleads, trying to convince herself as much as Shauna. “I didn’t know that you would kiss me, I didn’t know that you would take it that far.”
Shauna freezes. How fucking dare she? Jackie is doing what she always does: “I” becomes “we” becomes "you.” Jackie is always blameless. She can never fail, she can only be failed. After all, isn’t that how you worship a goddess?
Except Shauna is done playing acolyte.
“Really, Jackie? I took it too far? I was just trying to clear my head, I needed to get off, fucking sue me! You could have just left me alone! You just had to stay and watch and then show off like that and then drag me out of the cabin and—” Shauna pauses, unsure if she should keep pushing, but the pout on Jackie’s face means that she has no choice. “You were all too happy to kiss me back and then fucking finger—”
“Stop!” Jackie cuts her off before Shauna can take them out of the safety of minced words and euphemisms, gentle shackles like what we really shouldn’t have done becoming something real, becoming action.
“Do you just get off on fucking tormenting me?” Shauna blurts out.
“Torment you? Are you serious? What do you mean, torment you?” Jackie seems genuinely wounded by the accusation. “I have done nothing but try to pull you out of this spiral you’re completely stuck in.”
“What are you even talking about?” Shauna asks. “I am not spiraling.”
“Your masturbation addiction? Moaning my name when you—touch yourself in the woods? You fucking bit me when you came!”
(She says "when you came" like it was something that happened spontaneously, not something that was conjured by Jackie's index and middle fingers.)
“When did you become this person, Shauna? You were never like this before, you were never into sex like this.” Jackie nearly shouts, as if she momentarily forgot that they’re not alone in this cabin.
Shauna wants to bite back, bring up how Jackie probably fucked herself until she cried the second that Shauna left her there with blood dripping down her neck, or ask her if she stayed behind to watch Shauna after she put on a show with her Oral-B (even though she would never admit it if she did), but there’s no point. This all goes so much deeper than that, it has been going on for so much longer than just the time they’ve spent in the woods.
Shauna forces out a laugh. “I have always been that person, Jax, you were just too busy trying to hook me up with Randy fucking Walsh to ever notice.”
Jackie moves closer. “That’s not fair, Shauna. I just wanted you to stop feeling so bad about being single, except apparently nobody is good enough for you.”
That isn’t true, only one person is good enough for Shauna, the problem is that Shauna isn’t good enough for her.
“Is anyone good enough for you?” Shauna means it as a barb, an attack, but it comes out more like a genuine question.
“What kind of a question is that? You know that—”
Shauna sneers. “Well, anyone who's ever spent more than five minutes with you when you’re drunk knows that Jeff has never gotten you off. Maybe you’re just broken.” Shauna takes a breath, watching for a reaction. “Then again you seemed to have a pretty good time with me. I wonder what will come out the next time one of us has a little too much to drink.”
Jackie just stares at Shauna with that stupid fucking look on her face. The temptation to kiss her again, to devour her, bubbles up inside of Shauna. It would be so easy—they’re face-to-face and close, up here and alone. Shauna stops herself, but Jackie reacts to the impulse anyway, like Shauna just spit in her face.
Jackie grabs her by the collar and pulls her even closer, but there is no lust here this time, no hunger. Something else simmers beneath the surface, and the spark of possibility—that what happened out here won't die out here, what they shared won't stay buried under a tray table gravestone—catches on something flammable.
“If you ever breathe a word of what we did to anyone,” Jackie takes a breath like she’s stabbed herself in the lungs, “I swear to God I will never speak to you again.”
This isn’t one of Jackie’s ten thousand break-up ultimatums to Jeff—the sort of edict that Jackie rescinds in the face of a half-wilted bouquet of roses from the shitty drug store on Osprey Lane. Jackie is dead serious, and that means there’s no world where Shauna doesn’t walk out of this attic even more ruined than she already is.
That also means that there’s nothing that Shauna can say at this very moment that could make things any worse, so why not just say what’s really on her mind?
Shauna goes for blood. “Why can't you just admit that you liked it? You shoved my hand down your pants and begged me to put more fingers inside you, begged me to fuck you! You clearly fucking liked it!”
“No, Shauna, I didn’t! We aren’t like that! I'm not like that, I have a boyfriend and—”
“A boyfriend that you happily fucking cheated on.” Shauna snarls. The irony of the accusation burns Shauna’s tongue as it comes out. How did everything get so fucked up? They used to tell each other everything, and it was all so easy.
“That— That’s not true.” Jackie stammers. “What we did wasn’t cheating. It was just fooling around. We’re both girls, so it—”
“We’re both girls so it doesn’t count? Is that really the line you want to use? It was just practice for the real thing? This isn’t making out at a seventh grade sleepover!” Shauna can’t hold it in anymore. “You fucked me, Jackie! I fucked you! We FUCKED! When are you going to quit lying to yourself and just fucking admit that you’re a—”
Shauna stops herself, swallows the bile before it comes out because it’s a poison that will destroy them both.
“That I’m a what?” Jackie’s voice shrinks to almost a whisper. “Say it.”
Shauna can’t bring herself to say the word, so Jackie says it for her.
“I am not a fucking dyke, Shauna, and neither are you. We’re both bored, there are no guys out here, and you’ve always been tragically desperate. That is all any of this ever was!”
(Jackie always knows how to twist the knife.)
Shauna withers into something very small. The worst has happened, and it’s so much worse than she ever possibly imagined. She can’t bear to say anything but she knows that she has to ask. She has to hear it come out of Jackie’s mouth.
“In the woods, did you mean it?”
“What?”
“Did you mean it when you said that you loved me?”
“Shauna.” Jackie’s face softens. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, of course I love you, you know that I love you, just… Just not like that.”
There it is. That’s the killing blow. It shouldn’t hurt, not as much as it does. It was something that Shauna had internalized years ago, even if she couldn’t say the actual words to herself: Jackie Taylor is just her friend, her best friend maybe, but still just her friend, and she will never be anything more.
Except that isn’t true. For one beautiful moment out here, she was more. She was everything. Everything Shauna wanted and needed (and maybe even more than that). Shauna knows what Jackie said out there, and how she said it. That was real, or at least it was real at the time, even if it’s already faded away in the sun like that first snowfall in late autumn, when the sky is cold enough but the ground isn’t ready yet.
If Tantalus was allowed to have one bite of the forbidden fruit, would that have made his torture better, or worse? Because then he would know exactly what he could never have again. Shauna doesn’t know the answer, and she isn’t sure if she ever wants to.
“Shauna, I am so sorry, but—please don’t tell anyone what happened. It was a mistake and that’s all it has to be. Please. I don’t want to stop being your best friend."
The look on Jackie’s face isn’t anger, it isn’t condescension or sadness or judgment. It’s fear. Jackie is terrified. Shauna has never seen her this scared before, not even when their plane fell out of the sky and death was all but guaranteed.
Shauna wants to tell her to fuck off, tell her that she doesn’t get to treat her like this just because she’s even more in denial about who she is, who they are, than Shauna.
But she can’t.
Shauna loses Jackie no matter what. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby growing inside her will make sure of that. Because Shauna just can’t help herself, just can’t ever resist temptation, she has given their life-long friendship an expiration date.
But Shauna doesn’t need to lose Jackie yet. It won’t become obvious for a few more months that she’s getting fatter while everyone else wastes away, and Shauna would rather spend that time miserable with her best friend than miserable and utterly alone. At least Jackie will still be happy, at least for those few months.
And then…well, there’s always a chance, isn’t there? There’s always a chance that it can all still work out. Maybe rescue will manage to track them down before then, and Shauna can get it taken care of before Jackie ever finds out.
If that happens, maybe they can still be friends.
(It won’t, and they can’t. But maybe.)
This is her punishment, this is her penance, this is what she deserves. This is what she’s always deserved.
“I won’t Jackie, I promise.” The words spill out of Shauna like a knocked-over bottle of Malibu.
Jackie’s sigh of relief fills the room.
(Even when everything falls apart and the first snowflakes threaten to come down and she says everything she can to hurt Jackie as much as Jackie hurt her, Shauna Shipman keeps her promise.
Would it have saved Jackie if she confessed her sins, if she had told Jackie everything? Would it have made a difference if Jackie knew that the reason Shauna let Jeff inside her was the same reason she bit Jackie when pleasure overtook her? Would Jackie have done anything different if she knew that Shauna loved her too much and always had?
Would Shauna?
Or was Jackie always destined to die alone in the cold?)
“A few of us are going down to the lake, if you want to come.”
One little promise and Jackie was already smiling like nothing had happened and everything was fine (even though it never will be again).
Shauna takes a deep breath and steadies herself.
“Okay, Jackie.”