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When Kat Baker realizes she might be sort of into her best friend for the first time, it hits her like a kick to the stomach.
(Or like a cold, hard sheet of ice to the spine.)
They’re both seventeen, still with a semblance of the bushy-tailed-bright-eyes that will be completely gone in a few years, and Jenn is stretched out on the floor of one of the upstairs studios, halfheartedly rotating her hips in and out, back pressed against the carpet for resistance. Kat is supposed to be practicing at the barre, a series of leg extensions that need to be rock solid by the end of the week, but instead of the single-minded focus she usually has, this morning she keeps stopping after a few repetitions, when Jenn raises her head to ask some question about school or if Kat’s excited about the weekend.
It’s only the fifth time this happens, when Jenn’s tank top slips up to reveal smooth, pale stretch of her stomach, abs clenched tightly to keep her legs in the air, that a shock travels down Kat’s neck.
Jenn looks up and smiles, her eyes meeting Kat’s with a flash, and Kat’s skin suddenly feels a little too tight.
It’s sort of like last week when she caught a glimpse of Charlie Graham running laps, shirt off and shoulders newly broad, in the afternoon during her own practice, except that this is Jenn. And Kat has a pretty good idea of the thing’s she’s supposed do to (listen to her mother, win, smile, listen to her mother some more) – looking at Charlie Graham’s abs probably isn’t too much of a violation of that, as long as she doesn’t do something stupid like try and touch, but Jen – her competition, her only real ally – is a whole different story.
Jenn is her favorite person, after all, like her favorite person in the whole world, and that’s way too sacred, too important, for Kat to ever jeopardize for this buzzing in her temples that she can’t quite name. And Jenn is beautiful, like objectively so, Kat’s eye has been trained from birth to take apart other girls’ bodies and map them for weakness, for the strong points she needs to beat and the failures she can exploit.
It makes sense that her eyes find the flexed muscles of Jenn’s upper thigh, the tension in her forearms, the quiet strength in the arch of her back mid-routine. It’s just training, just muscle memory, exactly what her mother taught her to do. So Kat pushes the beginning of whatever burning this might be deep inside her chest, looks for the lazy bend in Jenn’s knee and the imperfect presentation of her fingers, the less-than-incredible places, and focuses on making herself as good as possible, better than any sloppy warmups her best friend might do.
(For the record Jenn is always precise, always just as good as Kat, but Kat tries not to focus on all the ways she measures up, because it is so much easier to cool down the heat in her stomach at the icy thought of failure.)
On the floor Jenn sits up, moves to loosen her calves, and at the barre Kat shuts her eyes, blocking the rest of the world out, narrowing it down to the smoothness of the wood against her palms and the press of her feet against the floor. No distractions, whispers her mother’s voice, and she knows how to work with that.
///
It’s okay until it’s not.
It’s okay until one night just after her nineteenth birthday Kat gets so drunk that she can’t get out of bed for the entire next day, and dives forward to press her mouth against Jenn’s in a dark room at a party that they decided to go to at the last minute. Jenn has her hair back in a ponytail, different than the ones she does up at the rink, with wisps drifting into her face and a shiny, glossy mouth, and Kat wants to press her against the closest wall, to run her hands over this body she knows almost as well as her own and taste every inch of Jenn’s skin.
That is, obviously, not happening and also a little bit creepy, but she is nineteen and feels invincible so she finds Jenn’s lips with her own, hands braced against Jenn’s cheeks, and for a moment the world goes perfectly, gloriously still.
(The truth is that yes, she gets fucked up that night, but only after the kiss, when she accepts any drink in a three-mile radius to erase the impossible softness of Jenn’s kiss, the way her lips had parted against Kat’s without any kind of resistance, the sweetness of her tongue and the warmth of her face against Kat’s constantly freezing fingertips.)
But then Kat had pulled back and Jenn’s eyes had been full of something new, something she’d never seen before, and all the bravery, all the drive had vanished, leaving a halting shell of a girl and Kat had run to the other side of the house, gotten drinks from all the boys she could find and avoided any hints of black hair or pink mouths or searching eyes, and the next time she remembers seeing Jenn was at the end of the night, at the wheel of her car, gaze resolutely on the road while Kat lolled in the passenger seat.
Kat thinks about that, how Jenn will always get her home, as they pull up to the front of her mom’s house, windows dark thanks to Serena’s early bedtime and Carol’s penchant for the night shift.
Kat might feel so boneless that she can’t imagine ever leaving the car, ever moving again, thanks to a potent combination of vodka and roiling fear that she can’t quite remember the cause of, but Jenn is stronger than she looks – every skater is – and she pulls open the passenger side door to lug Kat up the front steps without comment or complaint. The door opens easily under her hands, a quick turn of the key that Jenn takes from Kat’s pocket, and then they’re stumbling inside, Kat giggling while Jenn steers her toward the bathroom, and then her bed, trying her best to keep them both quiet.
There’s a moment, when Kat is tilting against the tile countertop and Jenn spits mouthwash into the sink, that their eyes meet through the bathroom mirror.
It’s the first eye contact they’ve made since early in the night, since Kat’s mistake, but this time Jenn smiles up at her and Kat realizes how remarkably exhausted she is.
The rest of the night, and the worst, most-hungover parts of the morning, she only remembers in flashes – Jenn’s fingers around her wrist, guiding her to bed; Jenn’s shoulders, pulling the blankets over both of them; Jenn’s legs bent against hers as Kat curls their bodies together.
The next morning Jenn wakes up first, spends the morning periodically knocking on the bathroom door to make sure Kat’s still alive and flipping through Netflix on her bed. They don’t mention the kiss, the slip, and it seems like the world hasn’t entire shifted on its axis after all. A lot of things can be excused at a party, secrets getting out and regrettable choices, so this isn’t anything unusual, really. At least that’s what Kat tries to tell herself.
///
Do you ever get tired of this?
Of what?
Taking care of me?
Never.
///
Kat doesn’t date.
She doesn’t open up to people.
She stays focused and tough and eyes on the prize.
She kisses boys sometimes, at parties, at night, when her mother is being particularly terrifying, has sex with her body that feels too-tense when its late enough and dark enough that none of them ask about her bruises.
Some of them are nice, and some of them are less nice, but they’re all peripheral and she likes it that way. If there’s one thing she knows from her mom, from the entire mistake of her birth, it’s that skating has to be the one thing, the only thing, that everything else needs to be enough on the outskirts that it could fall away at a moment’s notice. It doesn’t make sense, exactly, where Jenn fits into this landscape, but Carol only ever warned her about boys, at all the ways they want to hurt you, to keep you small and fragile and theirs.
Jenn isn’t any of that. She’s just as strong as Kat.
And every girl needs a best friend, Kat knows she’s only a loner up to a point, and as long as she really does have one person in her corner everything seems like it could be okay.
Skating is, more than anything else, a show of strength cloaked in weakness, death-defying feats practiced until everyone can forget the unholy magic of it all, coated in enough beauty and faux-ease that no one knows how hard you’re trying. No one can ever know how hard you’re trying. No one can know it hurts.
Carol used to say that, hissing it into Kat’s elementary-school ear if she fell on the ice and didn’t want to go back out. The world according to Carol is two things – pain and pretending not to feel it – and Kat learned that lesson well. She thinks that might be the difference between her and Serena, how Serena still thinks that hope lurks around every corner while Kat’s been seeing ghosts and jump scares her entire life.
Kat is pretty good at it, the whole pretending to be light as air while your legs scream and everything pulses with bright, hot pain thing, but once in a while her face gives it away. She knows, because Carol always tells her.
Never let them see you break. Don’t be an idiot.
Jenn, on the other hand, is the best. Her game face snaps into place like the airtight reflex it is, and she keeps her head high, her bones long and tall, never slumping with exhaustion until she’s fully inside the locker room.
Kat’s weakness is too-often her temper, how hot her blood gets with so little warning, and one of the reasons she and Jenn are friends is because Jenn feels the same way sometimes, adrift in the vast ocean of her own impossible impulses. But where Kat has learned to make herself big, to scratch at her feelings until she’s strong enough to fight any of her demons, Jenn can lock herself away at the drop of a hat.
She’s not as brave as Kat is on the ice (off is another story, where Jenn is nearly fearless and Kat spends most of the time following her lead), but where Kat takes risks that end in more than a few falls, Jenn lands almost everything she does. If Kat is a storm, all peaks and valleys and crashing waves, Jenn is the eye, calm and fair and deceptively smooth. More than once over the years, Kat follows Jenn into the locker room and audibly gasps at the bruise rolling across her best friend’s shoulder, or hip.
Jenn always smiles, in a way that betrays pain she doesn’t show to anyone else, and Kat silently thanks whatever god might be listening that they have each other.
///
The night they have sex (the first time) is one of those bad-bruise ones.
They’re at the rink late, the kind of Saturday night that goes entirely toward practice instead of anything fun. The hours, by then, have blurred together into some sort of endless current, marked by the scrape of their blades against the ice and the door to the ice opening and closing as everyone else trickles away. The youngest kids are the first to go, shepherded away by their parents, and then, one by one, everyone else clears out.
Jenn and Kat like to do this sometimes, see if they can sneak in a little solo skating time at the very end of the day. When they were younger they would put on pretend shows, displaying new tricks for one another set to humming and eager, hasty clapping. But then Kat would lunge at Jenn, or the other way around, and they’d set off on a game of tag around the rink, slipping and sliding out of one another’s grasp until the chase was declared a tie.
This time feels different.
They haven’t been that young in a long time, and the world feels low and heavy on their shoulders.
Jenn’s eyes have been tight all day, clenched in pain so subtly that no one would ever notice, but Kat is uniquely trained in the fine art of reading her best friend’s body language and when Jenn pulls to a hasty stop in the middle of the ice, scraping a little too much for comfort, Kat realizes that it’s already past eleven. Too late for real work anyway, and everyone knows that late nights lead to sloppy form and unnecessary injuries.
She pulls up behind Jenn, tugging her away from her next drill, and Jenn follows without complaint. Kat can’t decide if this is a good sign or not, pliable Jenn might mean that all the fight’s gone out of her, but she twirls them both out across the ice before they come to a stop at precisely the same time. Still in sync after all these years.
The locker room, when they get to it, is still and quiet, cleaner than Kat would expect and warm after the chill inside. Jenn’s eyes are still pained, her movements stiff, and when Kat looks over and their eyes meet, something flickers in her gaze. Kat’s eyebrows must scrunch, because Jenn sighs and pulls off her shirt, revealing a bright purple bruise spreading up the entire left half of her ribs. Kat realizes, distractingly, how pretty Jenn looks right now, face flushed from the cold and whole body glowing from the exertion of a good skate.
This is normally when she’d wonder if she looks terrible, sweaty and ragged next to Jenn’s unassuming radiance, but instead all she notices is the quiet around them. And the blood rushing in her ears. And Jenn, whose eyes switch from hurting to curious, to a question that Kat can’t put her finger on but somehow knows the answer to deep in her bones. Yes. One second Jenn is by the benches in the middle of the room, getting ready to pull a towel out of her locker, and the next her body is crushed against Kat’s, even though Kat has no idea which one of them moved first.
All she knows is that Jenn’s lips are just as soft, her mouth just as warm, as they had been a year ago, except that this is so much better because instead of one kiss, one moment followed by crushing waves of shame and way too much alcohol, this time Kat gets to kiss her over and over and over again.
The thing about them is that Kat makes Jenn bolder. The thing about them is that Jenn makes Kat more focused. Kat’s pretty sure that neither of those things have been more apparent than they are right now. Jenn’s hands twist in her hair, sending a fresh wave of goosebumps down her back, and Kat responds by opening her mouth wider against Jenn’s. This should feel strange, she thinks in the back of her mind, as Jenn pulls her shirt off and Kat’s fingers slip down to explore the thighs she’s seen a thousand times before. This should feel strange, she thinks, as Jenn’s lips travel from her collarbone to her sternum. But all it feels, really, is good.
They fuck in the locker room like that, bruised body against battered finding an entirely new purpose, warm skin against cold air, Jenn’s face tucked into Kat’s neck and Kat’s back arching against the floor.
Afterward, tucked into Kat’s unmoving car, Jenn’s feet pulled up onto the passenger seat with the rest of her body and Kat braiding her hair in the rearview mirror, they both break into laughter, so long and bright that Kat thinks it might be impossible for Jenn to feel like anything other than safety.