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Assistant: Title: strawberries & cigarettes
        Author: miavada miavada 
        Chapter: 1/1 
        Summary: on the field, they had an electrifying connection. they saw each other, they knew each other. societal standards didn’t matter, the lack of understanding didn’t matter.on the field, they were something.but off the field, they were nothing.or:popular girl lottie matthews x social reject natalie scatorccio. what’s the worse that could happen?
        Contents: Summary:
            
              on the field, they had an electrifying connection. they saw each other, they knew each other. societal standards didn’t matter, the lack of understanding didn’t matter.on the field, they were something.but off the field, they were nothing.or:popular girl lottie matthews x social reject natalie scatorccio. what’s the worse that could happen?
            
        

        
  Notes:





    
      big shoutout to my oomf for being my co-host for this new development at miavada headquarters. buckle up for this cause it’s a wild ride.. lots more to come, i hope you enjoy!
    

    (See the end of the work for more notes.)



  





    
        
          
  On the battered field of possibilities and plays, they were a team. 
 
  They were many things; numbers, members, defenders, shooters, attackers, friends. Their cleats kicked up grass and their laces shot into the checkered pattern of a soccer ball, their voices called for passes while their hands waved zig zags in the air, their knees bruised upon sacrificed impact beneath the dirt, but above all— they were winners. 
 
  Once they stepped out onto the scattered soil and stretched their limbs, it didn’t matter what background any of them came from. The social hierarchies weren’t present, the intricate home lives weren’t more than a lingering thought, the issues withering under their skin burned into flashing moments of victory, and nothing else needed to be a factor except for how good they could play. 
 
  And they 
  
    always 
  
  played good. 
 
  During the middle of matches, everything clicked together. Their heads locked, their eyes honed in on a shared target, they dug the spokes of their shoes into the ground like a bull gearing for defeated success, and they all merged into one collective being instead of a dozen. They fought to win, and they would always win. 
 
  But off the field, they were strangers to Natalie. 
 
  Not all of them, but a good enough portion where she realized the only place she had to chin her head up was during a game— never before, never after. There was Shauna, who she was arguably closer to than anyone outside the locker rooms and sweaty tackles. She passed notes to her in class, elbowed her in the stomach on the occasion of a snarky comment, rolled her eyes with a warm smile on her lips, and she told Natalie to 
  
    “shut up” 
  
  more often times than she asked “
  
    how are you?”. 
  
 
  There was Jackie, Shauna’s other half attached to her bones like permanent ink on paper. She greeted Natalie in the hallways, sometimes she caught up with her at parties with Shauna linked into her arm, she accepted Natalie’s defensive attitude with a clicking of her tongue and an affectionate look that always chided her softly. 
 
  There were Taissa and Van, who almost never came separately and were always found as a pair. Second to Jackie and Shauna, Natalie found herself getting along with them the most; Van is a comedian full of jokes, infectious laughter, a wiggle of eyebrows, and her bantering never went amiss. Taissa is a bucket full of determination, sarcasm wrapped up with a pretty bow, and a tease away from an insult. They acknowledged Natalie everywhere they went, anytime they saw her on campus or off campus they made sure to shoot a nodding look of approval in her direction, or a salutation of a hand from Van. 
 
  There were Gen and Melissa, similar to Jackie and Shauna, although their friendship had an air of independence that the former’s didn’t have. There was no possession or ownership involved, there were only two girls and whimsical smiles, who often doodled in the margins of each other’s notebooks during lectures. Natalie never looked long enough in their direction to recognize whether or not they looked back, and although their jovial features were sworn off for only each other, Natalie would scrunch her nose in curiosity when she saw Melissa’s gaze longingly drift to Shauna’s; who was always staring at Jackie. 
 
  There was Misty, the equipment manager and the odd one out at every practice. Not only because she didn’t play, but solely for the fact that she had a cheeriness to every step she took that felt akin to a serial killer, or someone with festering imposter syndrome who mistook the emotion of happiness too heavily and it stuck with them forever. She chased down Mari in the halls every now and then, who ran from her— effortlessly, each time— and whenever Natalie made eye contact with her, she never returned the grin Misty flashed back. 
 
  There was Laura Lee, notorious churchgoer and firm believer in Christ. She had the bubbliest personality coming second place to Misty, and the only fractured piece of her demeanor that Natalie knew had to be her heartfelt desire to succumb to the wrath of heaven and its angelic creatures. 
 
  And then there was Lottie. 
 
  Lottie was the most estranged from the group. She was popular— not the kind of Jackie popular, because Jackie happened to be classic and kind while intimidating and weary, the sort that hung out around the baseball field after practice to wait for her douchebag boyfriend that she had an ongoing, tumultuous relationship with. She was her own kind of popular; she was preppy, she hung out with friends who stunk up rooms with their own entitlement, she laughed under bleachers with books in her arms, and any moment of space where she looked into Natalie’s eyes, she pretended like she didn’t exist. 
 
  Lottie wasn’t close with anyone on the team. Her favored familiarities lay with Laura Lee, and she strayed the farthest of distances away from Natalie. They walked past each other during empty periods, they never wore smiles directed at one another, Lottie can never be bothered to say Natalie’s name unless forced to, and for some reason, the only time Lottie truly 
  
    looks 
  
  at Natalie is when she’s getting picked on. 
 
  That was a nice way to put it; 
  
    getting picked on. 
  
  She didn’t want to call the shots for what they truly were. Bullying was too childish, harassment was too serious, and the term 
  
    getting picked on 
  
  seemed to be a neutral moral ground where nothing ever seemed too severe or excessive. Even though it 
  
    was 
  
  severe and excessive, it’s 
  
    always 
  
  been severe and excessive, and Natalie has never been able to escape the looping holes of her own destiny. 
 
  Boys called her lots of things. Once she entered high-school, derogatory language had no longer been foreign to her, she had picked it up like a secondhand textbook rental from a library. She didn’t need a dictionary or a translator to understand that the men in her grade reveled in tearing her apart with words; s@xual insults that felt like nothing and meant everything, disparaging rumors they spread just for the grunt of it. 
 
  Her least favorite had been started by her own friend, Kevyn. They were smoking a joint in the parking lot with a bottle of whiskey wrapped in a brown paper bag, and he had laughed through the second puff of weed with words of 
  
    “They should start calling you Nasty Natalie.” 
  
  It was a joke that made Natalie punch him in the arm— at least it started off that way, and because Kevyn Tan can’t keep his mouth nailed shut to save his life, a crowd overheard. 
 
  It started with a cheerleader. She told it to her boyfriend, who told it to his best friend, who told it to his girlfriend, who told it to three of her classmates, and it was like hitting the lottery; a magical combination that worked in honor of the devil. It took one mouth, one up and down movement of lips, and by the second week, even the Yellowjackets in the locker room were wincing about it. 
 “Nasty Natalie,” Taissa had greeted her one ill fated afternoon of practice, “That sounds like a happy hour appetizer.” She continued to joke, “Can I expect to see you on tonight’s menu?” To which Natalie had slammed her locker door shut in a snarl, rolling her eyes incredibly hard to convey her message that it was not funny. It could not be funny, and she would not let it be funny. It didn’t get to her, not the same way needles crawled over her veins and pierced her skin, but it triggered disrupture in her. She hated the freshly coined term, and ever since that October morning, she’s been reminding herself over and over again to kill Kevyn before drugs do.  
  Natalie Scatorccio was just Natalie on the field. Off of it, she was Nasty Natalie, but never 
  
    just 
  
  Natalie. On the field, Charlotte Matthews was Lottie, number five and a gnarly attacker. Off of it, she was still Lottie, albeit less charged and more sophisticated. 
 
  Natalie and Lottie were never seen alone in the same room together off of the grass. It felt like they had a socially metered gap between them, maintaining their hundred feet of distance unless a rare class required them to sit in adjacent desks next to each other. Lottie had her pretentious friends, her straight A’s, her fancy black BMW E38 with a sleek interior, and a massive mansion to sit her ass in whenever she pleased. 
 
  Natalie had shells of friends, wishes of them. They weren’t people she would call 
  
    friends, 
  
  because she used them for booze and recreational purposes that she could never get out of anyone else. She had her teachers who lost hope in a future of her graduation, her chipping leather boots that carried her everywhere as long as they were on her feet, and a trailer home full of bleeding noses and backhanded knuckles that left imprinted smiles of anger on skin. 
 
  The worst part of it all? 
 
  On the field, together, they became something. 
 
  They weren’t just team players, they spoke through ancient texts with each other, they held dialects of languages forgotten. They communicated in passes, they locked eyes over several heads begging for a score, they mutely strategize with each other. Their legs moved in synchronicity, they ran at the same pace with effortlessness. If Natalie sprinted down the middle, Lottie would be at her heels, shadowing. If Lottie veered a trick in between the ankles of an opponent with a thudding ball, Natalie would be on the other side, open for reciprocation. They didn’t call for each other like their other teammates did, they didn’t have to, they could feel their lurking presence before they could see it. 
 
  On the field, they had an electrifying connection. They saw each other, they knew each other. Societal standards didn’t matter, the lack of understanding didn’t matter. 
 
  On the field, they were something. 
 
  More than she would care to admit, Natalie would watch Lottie from across a room. But every time she did, every moment she could steal without it being noticeable, Lottie never returned her watchful eyes. She never spoke to her during a game, or outside a game. Whatever it is they were during plays, where they joined forces and disregarded their separate entities, that didn’t translate into their outside lives. 
 
  But whatever it is they were on the field, they didn’t mirror that off of it. 
 
  Because off the field, they were nothing. 
 
  
  

  The Yellowjackets had just won a home match when Jackie broke the teetering news. 
 
  
    “I’m throwing a music party!” 
  
  She said before adding in a chipper voice, 
  
    “Yellowjackets exclusive, obviously.” 
  
  They were all situated in the locker room, changing out of their uniforms and into their loose fitted clothing to retire back to their houses. Natalie had been sitting on the blue bench, kicking her cleats off with tired fingers, and she craned her neck to look at Jackie standing at the front of the room with wide eyes and an expectant smile. 
 
  
    “What the hell is a music party?” 
  
  Taissa muttered, and Shauna refuted it with, 
  
    “She means like a mixtape party. Where everyone makes their own mixes and brings it over and sh@t.” 
  
  There was a round of silence before she inquired, 
  
    “Is there gonna be alcohol?” 
  
 
  And Jackie had said, 
  
    “Duh!!” 
  
 
  Of course, there were the blank murmurs of confusion on where this idea originated from, but for the most part, everyone agreed swiftly, because Jackie was their team captain and nobody would get in the way of ‘team bonding’— at least not in her book. 
 
  In a natural instinct, Natalie had been hesitant. For good reasons and for no reasons at all, solely for the fact that on off days it felt like she barely 
  
    knew 
  
  these girls, and that the singular thread holding them together happened to be a sport. She wanted to decline the offer, she wanted to shrug it off with a roll of her shoulders, a smooth lie curling off her tongue that said 
  
    I’m busy. 
  
 
  But she hadn’t, because Jackie’s remotely nice to her, which isn’t a lot in comparison to the other girls on their team. Plus, she knew Shauna would murder her if she said no, and there was going to be spiked beverages provided; so why the hell not? 
 
  She sits on the edge of her dipping mattress with the winded tape in her hands, and she taps the plasticity into the bridge of her palm every few seconds. Her eyes sweep over the scrawled letters, the tracks she wrote in sharpie, and she pulls her lip in between her teeth in sacred thought. She breezes over her options, every artist and each song with the rapping of her thumb, and she pretends she doesn’t feel the anxiety dawning inside the corners of her chest. 
 
  
    JACKIE’S PARTY MIX
  

  
    Come As You Are - Nirvana
  

  
    I Will Always - The Cranberries 
  

  
    I Feel - The Sundays 
  

  
    The Biggest Lie - Elliot Smith 
  

  
    Blow Out - Radiohead 
  

  
    Forget Her - Jeff Buckley 
  

  
    Under Pressure - Queen, David Bowie 
  
 
  It’s a solid mixture of everything she enjoys, and she pushes down the hindering voice of doubt that says 
  
    I hope it’s good enough. 
  
 
  For as long as she can remember, she’s made it a point not to care about what other people think of or consider her as. In the grand scheme of things, during the limited shelf life she had roaming this earth, she had far bigger worries than the bleached truths curving into people’s mouths and falling off of their broken lips. She 
  
    doesn’t 
  
  care about what other people think, she’s made an internal pact with herself to go out of her way 
  
    not 
  
  to care ever since her father. 
 
  But on the rarity that she’s confined in a close knitted quarter with Lottie Matthews, all she 
  
    does
  
   is care. 
 
  She arrives at Jackie’s front doorstep on her own accord. Nobody drives down the narrow roads of her park to pick her up, because she doesn’t have a friend like Jackie for that. Nobody knocks on her bedroom door in surprising annoyance, because she doesn’t have a friend like Taissa or Van for that. Nobody catches up to her when she walks up the steps, either, because Shauna’s inside, and she’s just about the only one who would do that for her. 
 
  The door pulls back, and she’s greeted by Melissa. She holds a sincere smile upon seeing her, which is further confirmed by her saying, “Hi!”
 
  She holds a twined basket in her hands that she thrusts forward, that same smile still leaking on her face. 
 
  “It’s the mixtape bowl,” She introduces Natalie once she sees her confusion, “Jackie won’t let anyone in unless they show their proof.” Natalie rolls her eyes silently, digging into the pocket of her leather jacket to pull up her own personal version of her chosen setlist for tonight. She plops it into the dead center, and she hears it clack amongst the others deftly. 
 
  “I feel like you’re IDing me at a club.” She jokes poorly, and Melissa opens her mouth to say something before Shauna pops up behind her, “You wish they’d let you into a club.” She motions at Melissa to do a trade off with the basket, and she hands it to her quietly with her past lightness diminishing. 
 
  They both step aside to let Natalie in, and she sees her teammates equally scattered across the entrance of Jackie’s living room. She gives silent nods to each of those that will look at her— which, again, is everyone but Lottie— and she takes up a seat on the velvet couch next to Jackie, who holds a bottle of beer. There’s faint tones of Liz Phair clicking in the background, a couple lyrics from Whip-Smart drizzling into the air. 
 
  “Whose mix is this?” Natalie asks Jackie as she takes the neck of her beer, swigging a stolen sip of her own. 
 
  “Shauna’s,” Jackie replies, and she isn’t bothered in the slightest with Natalie’s antics. “She wanted to go first.” On cue, Shauna takes the seat on Jackie’s right, and Jackie immediately pulls her legs up to lean them over Shauna’s openly inviting lap. 
 
  “I feel like I 
  
    had 
  
  to go first,” She corrects, and Jackie’s beer has now become a communal drink as she reaches past her best friend to snag it out of Natalie’s hands, “If we started with anyone else, I would’ve fallen asleep.” 
 
  “Has anyone ever told you how humble you are?” Taissa shoots in her direction from the carpeted floor, Van hovering close as their shoulders brush. They’re sitting side by side, two peas in a pod. 
 
  “Humble and honest can be found in the same room, Tai.” She argues, pressing the rimmed tip of the glass to her lips. 
 
  “Not when you’re in it.” Van interjects, which causes Shauna to promptly roll her eyes. 
 
  It always starts out like this with all of them; fun, playful banter, the kind that comes easy and softly, the kind that feels pliable and fragile, like saying the wrong thing would make it break. Which is why they keep it to a minimum— they only joke, they talk about school and classes, but never anything under the bar of deepening topics because that would mean risking the balance of their perfectly built and contained atmosphere they had. 
 
  They drink, they laugh, and they sit individually in their own bubbles while engaging in conversation. Jackie brings out more beers (one for Shauna 
  
    and 
  
  Natalie this time), they continue flipping through tapes, and they make it a circling tradition to guess which mix belongs to who within the first song. It takes a lot of tries to get it right, it’s funnier than it should be, and it passes time in a way that sitting around, staring off into the distance wouldn’t have done. 
 
  Van guessed Taissa’s tracklist when Patti Smith came on, deferring with 
  
    “It’s 
  
  
    so 
  
  
    obviously your tape.” 
  
  After that, Shauna drew conclusions that Jackie’s mix had been playing shortly after when Oasis rang through the room, and Jackie had rolled her eyes, mumbling something about hoping to throw everyone off with that pick. Natalie’s turn came next, and she held her third beer in hand, a gentle buzz filtering into the crevices of her brain that started to soothe her weariness of being present here. 
 
  It’s been hardly an hour and a half, and Jackie stumbles off the couch to eject the tape in a washing change, a soft fit of giggles following within her clumsiness. When she relaxes back into the couch, content by Shauna’s side, Super Trouper invades everyone’s senses and seemingly throws the team for a loop. 
 
  “I think this is Laura Lee’s.” Taissa speaks first, hand in the air. 
 
  “I don’t think ABBA can be classified as worship music.” Van reminds her in a wince, and Laura Lee watches the interaction from where she sits next to Lottie, cheeks flushing. It’s a bright neon sign that they’ve both been duped, that for the first time in this game they’re utterly wrong, but neither of them notice it, and everyone else around her moves on. 
 
  “I don’t know,” Jackie teases her mouth with the edges of her beer can, “I think it could be Lottie’s.” 
 
  From the corner of the living room, Lottie laughs gently, hiding behind her plastic cup. 
 
  “That’s offensive,” She says in a brittle tone, “I hate ABBA.” 
 
  Hearing this, Natalie rolls 
  
    her 
  
  eyes, shaking her head before she dives into another sip of her beer that’s starting to taste bland and barren with flavor. Because 
  
    of course 
  
  Lottie hates something Natalie likes— what else would make sense? Nothing. This is what they were bound by, this is what they were always going to be tethered to; disagreements and contrasting comparisons, personalities that clashed and ideals that differed. This is what Natalie experienced with the group as an entirety, but she felt it heaviest every time Lottie spoke. 
 
  It was hard to understand how they could make such brute connections to each other when the game was at stake. It was a concept she couldn’t grasp, the way their eyes danced and their legs moved with the same purpose, a rhythm neither of them could shake, but a sensation only they could feel. Each time she stepped off that field, she always told herself it could be different. It could be a truce, or it could be neutrality, or it could be a friendly wave in a crowded quad. 
 
  But time and time again, she would be proved wrong. She finds herself hoping for a moment that will never come, and she feels ridiculous when it nears her and flips her sideways. 
 
  Because Lottie is still Lottie, and Natalie is still Natalie.
 
  “Ouch,” Van puts a dramatic hand over her heart, “What’s wrong with ABBA?” Lottie shrugs in mild response, stiffening in the slightest before she takes a sip of her concoction. 
 
  “It reminds me of my parents.” 
 
  Natalie has to hold back a snide remark, because really, what could 
  
    possibly 
  
  be so bad about Lottie Matthews’ parents? They gave her five years' supplies of credit cards in her name, they bought her a new car every birthday she aged, they always left the house to her liking, and when they passed, they would probably leave her a fortune worth of gold for her inheritance. Lottie had all of this and 
  
    more 
  
  to show for, and she still managed to complain, she still whined and moaned when she didn’t get her way, or in this case, when a nuanced song popped up in her ears and she decided she couldn’t stand it because of the implications she made along with it. 
 
  And what did Natalie have? A dead drunken father, a spineless mother, a trailer crawling with decrepit bottles and uncared for items, an absent family and only the fleeting idea of having the luxury to get out of this town. 
 
  She had all of this, and she 
  
    still 
  
  digested this song with a straight face. Why was it so hard for Lottie to do the same? 
 
  “You mean your parents with a garage of foreign cars?” She can’t help it, the pride crawling up the back of her throat like a cough. She looks at Lottie from across the room, awaiting a reply, wondering if she’ll be brave enough to finally look her in the eye. Better yet, she’s wondering if she has the gall to verbally acknowledge her existence, although she’s quite aware it would take a village for Miss Popular Girl to bat her eyelashes at her. 
 
  True to her inner monologue, Lottie doesn’t find her way inside of Natalie’s blue eyes, she stays fixated on the pattern of the rug she runs under her fingertips, and she clenches her jaw in a flexing manner. She wears an unreadable color on her face, a descriptive feature that splits strongly of 
  
    nonchalance
  
  , and it makes Natalie avert her eyes with a scoff. But when she does, an unnoticed flush of embarrassment draws over Lottie’s face, over the edges of her lashes and to the tip of her chin. 
 
  The game continues in a timely fashion, Natalie’s comment forgotten with the passing wind. The song switches, and I Feel by The Sundays makes its way into the living room. Natalie leans back into the couch cushions, she attempts to take a swift sip of her beer before Shauna’s voice cuts through like no other. 
 
  “Natalie,” She glances over to her, a sly smile hidden behind her drink. “Painfully obvious.” She throws her head back slowly as she finishes off the last of her cup, and Natalie brings her middle finger through the air as she mockingly mimics Shauna’s words. 
 
  “Wow, 
  
    not 
  
  obvious,” Taissa says, “I would’ve taken you for a Sublime girl over The Sundays.” 
 
  Natalie hums, bringing her feet over the coffee table in front of her, “Always assuming and never asking.” 
 
  Jackie gets up for another round, shuffling through whatever’s left in the basket to replace it with a new one. When she takes her seat back down next to Shauna, Miss World by Hole plays, and Natalie has to physically hold herself down strappingly from groaning in annoyance. 
 
  “You wanna talk about obvious, Shauna?” She nudges her friend in the arm, 
  
    “This 
  
  is obvious.” 
 
  The only 
  
    obvious 
  
  thing about it, is that it’s externally, so 
  
    obviously 
  
  Lottie’s mixtape. She doesn’t say that though, she could never show her hand for a girl who can’t look her dead in the face, so she sits there and keeps to herself while Van blubbers about how she won’t share. She downs the rest of her beer, she wishes for another one, and she tilts her head back with tired eyes as the song finishes out and transitions into something else familiar. 
 
  I Feel by The Sundays comes on again, and there’s a round of brief, awkward silence that nobody can seem to fill the hole of. 
 
  “I thought we already heard this song?” Melissa says from her spot next to Gen, the two girls who seem to be the most unbothered out of all of them. 
 
  “We have,” Jackie responds in a teasing voice, “I guess we have some repeats.” Van toasts to that with a clinking glass, and Natalie feels her insides flip upside down. 
 
  The irony was too great of a force, it doubled her over in a fold and she had to hide the arrogant smile pulling up her lips. It feels like a victory stronger than winning a game that had been tied all of second half, it feels like being right about a plot point in a movie when all of her friends had spent the introduction convincing her she would be incorrect. It feels like righting someone’s wrongs and coming out a savior, because Lottie sat across from her, the girl who has been her polar opposite, and there was this one sliver of truth they shared together. 
 
  This song, however simple and mundane, happened to make its way onto both of their mixes. And Natalie feels cheekier than she should, or maybe that was a fluttering feeling of cockiness, because Lottie had spent their entire high-school career acting like Natalie was just a player of a game, like she was someone she could never call a friend. She acted like she rode a high horse, like Natalie was so beneath her without having to say anything in particular, as if she knew one thing for certain— that they would never have something in common. 
 
  Yet, here they sat, sharing this in common.
 
  “I’m getting another drink.” Natalie stands to her feet, announcing her departure, and Jackie adds, “Ooh, can you get me one?” She takes her empty bottle in her hands, nodding her head, and she walks over past the string of bodies positioned haphazardly as she makes the trek to the secluded kitchen. 
 
  She tosses the empty bottles before opening the refrigerator to rifle through Jackie’s choices, and she comes across a few interesting options; wine coolers, more beer, cans of drugstore liquor, and a few champagne bottles. It has her thinking that Mrs. Taylor must be an alcoholic of 
  
    some 
  
  kind, functioning or not. She plucks out another beer can and flips the tab open in a sizzling hiss, sipping away to her heart’s content as another song dances through. 
 
  She figures they must have guessed Lottie’s, because she knows for a fact that she would be found dead before putting Billy Joel on her list. 
 
  “Your music taste is sh@t, you know.” 
 
  Her voice, the voice she could pick apart in a crowd of strangers, the voice that, ten times out of ten, is 
  
    never 
  
  directed at her. The voice that she hardly ever hears, although she’s already decided it sounds like a death sentence. She turns around in a low startle, can pressed up into her chest, and she’s met with Lottie’s grave brown eyes. And for the first time in the last four years of her life, she doesn’t look past her, she looks 
  
    at 
  
  her. 
 
  She looks at her, she speaks to her; only for the placeholder of her words to be thrown as an insult. Because, of course, the first and 
  
    only 
  
  thing Lottie Matthews could ever say to her in private would be derogatory, just like everyone else she knows, just like everyone else who looks down on her. 
 
  “Yours is worse.” She offers as a retort, even though it’s redundant in itself, and they’re 
  
    both 
  
  choosing to ignore the truth, because they were the only two people that had managed to put the same song on their tape. 
 
  Coincidental or fated, Natalie couldn’t care for either. 
 
  Surprisingly, Lottie takes a step closer, and she’s found herself frozen in a trance that watches the way her long legs move. That’s what she should do; move. She should move, she should shoulder check her as she walks off with a drink for her and one for Jackie, and she should sit down next to her two friends like she hadn’t been spoken to by God himself. But she doesn’t, she can’t move, and she’s starting to realize she 
  
    won’t 
  
  move. She doesn’t 
  
    want 
  
  to move, because that would mean breaking Lottie out of this vodka induced spell, and that would result in zero conversation from either of them for the next four years of their lives. 
 
  So she doesn’t move. She stands there, fingertips clutching into the cool condensation dripping down her can, over her knuckles, and she doesn’t move. She knows if she does, she will have to go back to curating one sided conversation in her head with Lottie, or she will have to fall back to speaking with her over grass, passing words in the form of a ball. 
 
  And there’s a part of her that can’t have that, a part of her that wants anything 
  
    but 
  
  that. 
 
  Neither of them say anything for a long minute. Natalie stands in front of the refrigerator, the door still open and shining with artificial light, while Lottie stands across from her propped into the kitchen island, elbows popped into the marble. Natalie knows she should leave, and she doesn’t. What she also knows is that 
  
    Lottie 
  
  should leave, but continues to stay there, lips sealed with rickety zippers. 
 
  Natalie doesn’t know 
  
    why 
  
  Lottie remains standing there, when all she’s done— for as long as Natalie could remember— is avoid the chance of standing in front of her. 
 
  And then she does something that shocks Natalie’s brain, something entirely unprecedented: 
 
  “Are you doing anything tomorrow night?” 
 
  She speaks to her again. 
 
  Natalie’s heart hammers in her chest, she feels the deafening beat thrum inside of her veins. She swallows everything she wants to say, everything she wants to throw in her face. She wants to remind her that they shouldn’t be speaking, that Lottie had a reputation to uphold, that Natalie was a few hundred pegs down from her social circle and the structure they brought to the ecosystem of Wiskayok high-school. 
 
  Because that’s why Lottie never spoke to her, wasn’t it? 
 
  She was embarrassed to be seen with Natalie, the same way half of this team was, the same way Gen and Melissa could smile at her during practice and barely make eye contact with her once those locker rooms doors closed. Because Natalie could never 
  
    just be Natalie, 
  
  she had to be 
  
    Nasty Natalie, 
  
  whereas Lottie was always 
  
    Lottie f@ck@ng Matthews, 
  
  in Van’s words. She could be more, she could do more, she had no confinements or restrictions to the person she could become. 
 
  But Natalie did, Natalie still does. And that’s why they could never know each other off the field. 
 
  “Why do you care?” She grips her fingers into the metal of the can, a sudden urge to pull at the neckline of her shirt creasing into her skin to invoke breathing room, and then Lottie answers her question with dodging ambiguity. 
 
  “My friend Cory’s throwing a party tomorrow,” She starts, casually talking to her as if she’s any other, as if she isn’t a social outcast that’s been considered a degenerate since she was a child. “You should come.” She leans farther back causing her skirt to flow in airy waves over her thighs, reaching the midriff, never touching the circulation in her knees. 
 
  “Spend my Saturday night with your stuck up friends?” She scoffs, shaking her head. “No thanks.” 
 
  Why was Lottie inviting her to a party, anyway? That was the searing inquisition in the forefront of her mind, it destroyed her from the outside. Lottie always wanted nothing to do with her, she didn’t want a friend, she didn’t want an acquaintance, she didn’t want 
  
    her. 
  
 
  So why was she standing in front of Natalie, sounding the exact opposite? 
 
  “I have homework, anyways.” 
 
  It’s Lottie’s turn to scoff, and Natalie understands that she’s never seen her do that before. She’s heard it countless of times, just like she’s heard her laugh with Laura Lee after changing out of her uniform, but she’s never seen it up close and personal. Her face twists into amusement, her nose scrunches softly, and her lips press into a thinning smile that’s everything short of vindication. 
 
  “You don’t look like the type to do your homework.” Natalie isn’t sure if she 
  
    means 
  
  to press her buttons, but she does it effortlessly, it comes second nature to her. It makes Natalie squeeze her palm further into her can, nostrils flaring gently with irritation. 
 
  “And you know everything about me?” She presses, voice scratching roughly. Lottie tilts her head, a look of intrigue washing over her face. She’s standing there in the most laid back manner possible, arms coming to cross over her chest, and she looks 
  
    addicting. 
  
 
  “I think I know a couple of things about you.” She says an octave above a whisper, her eyes boring into Natalie’s. The longer Natalie returns her stare, the more she realizes how 
  
    hard 
  
  it is to truly hold it, and she tears away at the same speed fingers rip apart printer paper. 
 
  “Sure you do.” She says it while she looks at the ground, palms pulsing with sweat. “We don’t even talk to each other.” She looks up at her when she states it, and her eyes scream 
  
    you 
  
  
    don’t talk to me. If you let me, I would talk to you. 
  
 
  Whatever sits on Natalie’s face is something Lottie understands without needing to physically grasp it. She takes another step closer to her, and their distance has dwindled into nonexistence. If Natalie pushed herself back, she would be met with the openness of Jackie’s fridge, so instead she plants her feet into the ground and holds steady. She would 
  
    not 
  
  be intimidated by Lottie Matthews, the perfect princess of their team. She would 
  
    not 
  
  let her seep inside of her ears, she would 
  
    not
  
   let her worm her fingers underneath her ribcage. 
 
  “I bought a new perfume,” She changes gears, bringing her hand over the length of her hair that curtains her shoulders, and she brushes it back carefully. “Do you wanna smell me?” She reveals the supple skin on her neck, the curving tan that sits there in the crook in a taunt. She looks so soft there, like Natalie could sink her teeth into the capacity of it all and draw blood with her canines. Her heart speeds up drastically the more she ponders her fantasy, and she swallows a harsh beat, inhaling the oxygen that seems to have left the room the moment Lottie walked in. 
 
  
    She shouldn’t give in. 
  
  She could give in. 
 
  
    She shouldn’t lean forward to brush the arch of her nose into her neck. 
  
  She could lean forward to brush the arch of her nose into her neck. 
 
  
    She shouldn’t draw her eyes over it like a rabid animal. 
  
  She could draw her eyes over it like a rabid animal. 
 
  
    She shouldn’t say yes. 
  
  She could say yes. 
 
  
    She shouldn’t respond. 
  
  She could respond. 
 
  With the devil on her left shoulder and the angel on her right, she comes to a stalemate as she does nothing of the above. She doesn’t reply, she doesn’t say 
  
    yes, no, okay, sure. 
  
  She just 
  
    gives, 
  
  and she closes her eyes when the scent hits her like a thousand pounds of bricks. 
 
  She smells like heartache. She smells like fresh laundry, linen that has just come out of the dryer, warm and fluffy. She smells sun kissed, the same way a sweater hangs out on a clothing line with wooden clips. Underneath it all, there’s a soft floral teasing her, a quiet solitude of it combined. It’s nothing Natalie expected, and it’s everything she wants to feel. 
 
  She smells intoxicating. She smells addicting. 
 
  Natalie wants to smell her until her nose starts to bleed. 
 
  “Do you like it?” There’s that tone again, the airiness to her words that she’s saying like it means 
  
    nothing. 
  
  Like Natalie means 
  
    nothing, 
  
  and this is all just a sick, twisted game to her. It makes Natalie want to refute, it makes her want to lose her mind, and it also makes her want to take Lottie under her bed covers and smell her till her lungs fall apart. 
 
  So she nods her head, and it’s all she can mutely say. 
 
  “Shauna’s coming tomorrow.” She takes Natalie’s opened beer out of her hands, sipping through the cut metal in one quick motion. “You should ride with her.” She takes another sip, long and thick, and Natalie watches the way her shining lips move over the opening. She doesn’t wait for anything else, she doesn’t wait for a response of any kind, she just hands her can back, relinquishing Natalie’s beverage as if they weren’t both standing in front of a refrigerator with plenty of drinks to choose from. 
 
  As if she had to choose Natalie’s out of all of them. 
 
  It’s quick, the way she leans in to hush a sentence against her ear before pulling back. 
 
  “And I’m not wearing perfume.” She whispers delicately, turning on her heel to disappear. Natalie is left standing at the altar, dumbfounded, with her touched drink in hand and a desire to wonder where Lottie’s mouth has been other than on this very can. She looks down at it, and she sees glistening marks reflect back into her eyes. 
 
  She shouldn’t taste it, but she does. She brings it up to her own lips, touches her tongue right where Lottie’s mouth had been, and she consumes the flavor with an unknown vigor. Because it’s all she can think about, the way she tastes after finding out how she smells. The beer pokes its way into her mouth, down her throat, and it’s the lingering faintness of what had been there before that distracts her. 
 
  Strawberry lipgloss. 
 
  
  

  Shauna picks her up with Jackie in the passenger’s seat. 
 
  The moment she slid into the back, the leather underneath scraping into her open thighs that her skirt bares, conversation flowed quickly and time passed relatively. They discussed their day, their classes, and in a cliche, Jackie even brought up the weather. They figured out that Lottie’s friend Cory is throwing the party, although he’s hosting it at his friend Matt’s house instead of his own. 
 
  “I’m surprised Lottie invited you,” Shauna says from behind the wheel, merging into a right lane. “I didn’t know you guys were close.” And Natalie had wanted to say, 
  
    you’re 
  
  
    surprised? 
  
  
    I’m 
  
  
    surprised. 
  
  But she didn’t, and she settled for more silence, which Jackie sewed up like stitches to a wound. 
 
  
    “None of us 
  
  are close to Lottie, Shipman.” She reminds her from where she applies her lipstick, tousling her hair in the glowing vanity mirror from her pull down sun visor. “She’s too cool for all of us.” She jokingly adds in a hot tease, although there's a layer of truth hiding beneath her false accusations. 
 
  And really, 
  
    were 
  
  they false? Or was Lottie truly just another popular, snobby girl with nothing to lose? 
 
  Natalie had always been banking on the latter. But after what happened yesterday— 
  
    whatever it was 
  
  that happened yesterday— she wasn’t so sure anymore.
 
  With the way Shauna shrugs her shoulders, Natalie has begun to think that she’s used to it. That they’re 
  
    both 
  
  used to it, the way the team divides into their own cliques when they’re not playing, and the fact that it didn’t matter to either of them as long as they had each other. It looks like Shauna’s put no thought in it until now, or she simply can’t bring herself to care in the slightest, so she just doesn’t. 
 
  They park a few houses down from where the party is being held. They walk together up sidewalks and grassy plains, and Natalie awkwardly shoves her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket, a feeling of exclusion trickling down her neck. She knows Jackie and Shauna don’t mean it that way, she knows they don’t 
  
    mean 
  
  to make her third wheel, or that they don’t 
  
    mean 
  
  to brush into each other constantly when they walk, the only room left for Natalie in a trail behind both of them. 
 
  But it feels like third wheeling all the same, and she bites her lip intently as she contemplates which drink she’ll pick up first when she gets inside. 
 
  When they enter the threshold, there’s a roaring of bodies in every corner. It’s bigger than most kickbacks Natalie has attended, it’s louder than them, and it smells rank of vomit and expired alcohol the further they dive into the crowd. None of the Yellowjackets are here except for the three of them (plus Lottie, although she hasn’t found her yet), and no matter how high she pokes her chin up and cranes her neck, she can’t recognize any familiar faces. 
 
  Jackie does though, of course she does, and she excuses herself out of Natalie’s presence with Shauna by her side, reassuring her that they’ll catch up with her later. It’s been an hour since then, and Natalie can’t find it in herself to care that she’s stranded in a pit of people she doesn’t know and never 
  
    wants 
  
  to know, because she has three shots coursing through her and a fourth on the way, and that seems to be more than enough company as is. 
 
  She sees a throng of people disperse in the middle of the living room, and she watches with her cup in her hand as they make way to reveal the center of attention. 
 
  Lottie. Always Lottie. 
 
  She stands there with 
  
    a guy, 
  
  some 
  
    unnamed guy 
  
  that Natalie has never seen before until just now, and she wonders if 
  
    that’s 
  
  Cory, or if that one is Matt, and all of her pondering comes to a screeching halt in her brain when her fingertip brushes over the rim of her solo cup, and Lottie 
  
    kisses 
  
  
    that guy— 
  
  
     
  
  whoever he is. 
 
  She has her arms looped around his neck, he wears a baseball letterman, and he’s probably a buddy of Jeff’s that will end up greeting Jackie with a wave and a toothy smile. The kiss is chaste, it lasts only a couple seconds, and Lottie is the one to dislodge it as she pulls away, hands sticking to the back of his neck. But then 
  
    he 
  
  is the one pulling her back in, lengthening the kiss into something longer, something deeper, something personalized, and something Natalie can’t stomach to see. 
 
  She tears her focus away from Lottie, away from him, away from 
  
    both of them, 
  
  and suddenly her drink feels too heavy in her hands and it tastes like iron in her mouth. She sets it down on the nearest counter she can find, and she aggressively pushes through the throes of people to rush into an accessible bathroom. 
 
  Unfortunately for her, almost all of them are occupied with someone or multiple someones, and the longer it takes to find one the easier it is for her to give up. She groans in a huffing sound when she decides she’ll stick it out and hole up inside of a bedroom— she can’t tell if it’s a guest room, or one that belongs to someone here, but she can’t care. 
 
  She closes the door shut behind her in a flurry, and she leans her back into the doorframe, exhaling a taut breath as she closes her eyes. 
 
  She doesn’t know 
  
    why 
  
  Lottie is getting under her skin on a random Friday night. She doesn’t know 
  
    why 
  
  staring at her in the arms of a stranger felt like a dagger slicing down her larynx. She doesn’t know 
  
    why 
  
  her fingers shake, and she doesn’t know 
  
    why 
  
  they 
  
    won’t stop shaking 
  
  even though she’s pulling them into her palms and squeezing her nails into her flesh. She doesn’t know 
  
    why 
  
  she feels tears pr@ck the corners of her eyes, or 
  
    why 
  
  they cloud her vision in blurriness, because it’s 
  
    just Lottie. 
  
 
  She doesn’t 
  
    care 
  
  about Lottie, and Lottie doesn’t 
  
    care 
  
  about her. An unordinary, once in a blue moon experience from last night doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change the fact that they’re not friends, that they will 
  
    never be 
  
  friends, that they hold different lives inside of them with their own set of problems that would never match up in sync. Lottie is just another girl on her soccer team, another washed up, popular girl that she can’t seem to stop staring at, a popular girl that refuses to ever pay her the time of day. 
 
  She takes a nauseating stumble towards the mattress in front of her, and she fumbles in her jacket pocket for her pack of smokes. She’s all trembling fingers when she pulls it out, cursing words and harsh sentences as she searches for her lighter. She doesn’t get the chance to calm herself in the only way she can, because the door she had just been standing in front of peels open in a swift tug, and Natalie jumps softly, already on a fearful edge. 
 
  “Jesus,” She whispers under her breath when she turns around, and then her words ring truer than ever as the person pulling through the door is no one else except for Lottie. 
 
  She puts the heel of her hand up to the crown of her head, in the middle of her third eye while she exhales a thick breath. She doesn’t know whether or not she should say 
  
    you scared the sh@t out of me, 
  
  or 
  
    oh, it’s you, 
  
  because one feels too vulnerable while the other seems incredibly cryptic, and she doesn’t want to deal with either. So instead of saying anything, she stands there in front of Lottie once again, waiting for her to do something. 
 
  “You came.” She breaks the tension, hand twisting the knob behind her as she shuts the door in a creaking sound. 
 
  “That’s usually what people do when they’re invited to things.” She mutters with a quip to her voice, and she can’t catch up to the marathon her heart is running. Lottie shrugs her shoulders, the picture of uncaring, unabashed behavior as she leans up against the door, calm and collected, cool and casual. 
 
  “I’m just surprised,” She starts, a tilt to her words that screams trouble. “Or, I guess I shouldn’t be.” She waits, long and vicious, and then a flicker of a smile licks up her lips. 
 
  “I imagine it’s hard for Nasty Natalie to pass up on a party.” 
 
  Everything she once hoped for comes crashing down over her head. Everything she once believed to be true about Lottie Matthews becomes a concrete reality within her pupils, and it grabs her by the face and forces her to look a breath closer. Everything she wanted them to be, whatever the hell she wanted them to be— acquaintances, friends, something other than just teammates, or a secret fourth thing?— ends in that space. It starts with Natalie’s blue eyes, and it ends with Lottie’s hurting words, and the invisible string between them pulls apart in a snapping shot. 
 
  She feels her heart beat outside of her chest, she feels it crawl down the sleeves of her arms and drop forward into a puddle at her feet. And for some reason, some openly weak, pathetic reason, she feels tears cling to the creases in her eyes. 
 
  “F@ck you, Matthews.” She tries to spit it in a menacing threat, but it crashes down the middle and out pours a dam of insecurities, bleeding bones, and skinned emotions. 
 
  “You just think you’re so clever, don’t you?” She scoffs, a dry laugh slipping out of her mouth. “Bringing me here only to be a b@tch.” 
 
  “I didn’t bring you here,” Lottie dares a step closer, a sultry sway to her step that feels like pain and tastes like alcohol. “You chose to show up.” 
 
  “You 
  
    told me 
  
  to show up.” She grits, a tight jaw with grinding teeth.
 
  “And you listened to me.” 
 
  Natalie’s cheeks flush red, because that was the root of her problem. The fact that all Lottie had to do was say a few words to her, disguise her vengeance with a pretty face and a slim neck, and it had Natalie falling to her knees. Lottie could flick her finger softly, and Natalie would wrap around the spine of it with curious arms. She could speak to her all at once or not at all, and Natalie would still feel her ears perk up in response, like a wolf being called by a whistle, or an owl turning its head in the middle of the night. 
 
  A fool, that’s what she was with her. 
 
  Because she had listened to Lottie, she had tasted her expensive lip gloss, and she had crumbled in submission. 
 
  “Clearly I shouldn’t have,” She replies in a snip, “Being around you always seems to end up as a mistake.” She pushes past her, cigarette hanging in her pocket long forgotten, and she aims to grab the knob before an insistent force knocks her into the frame of the door. 
 
  She twists around to face Lottie, who had pushed her into the wood with a grippingly strong hand, and who leaves no room for her to escape as she hovers over her, towering in height. 
 
  “What the f@ck is wrong with you?” She rasps, even though her tongue feels like lava in her mouth and her throat has started to close up with lack of room to breathe. 
 
  Her instinct is to wiggle, to pop her in the forehead with her own head, or to step on the edge of her toes before she falls backwards. She should be planning her escape route and the plane she’s going to take on her flight out, she should be already contemplating which part of her body she can smack first, but she isn’t. She should be, but she isn’t, because Lottie isn’t just standing away from her anymore, she’s standing 
  
    close 
  
  to her, invading her space with everything she is. 
 
  Natalie smells that fresh linen again, the dewy breeze that had suffocated her nostrils until she couldn’t smell anything more. She’s peering down at her with brown eyes; Natalie always thought they looked like coals from afar, or pebbles of rocks with no names. But now that she’s inches apart from her and her colors, she can see that they have a doe-like quality to them that she’s never experienced up until now, a luring essence that traps Natalie in the waves of her like a siren’s call. 
 
  She’s close to her, impossibly close, and she starts to realize that within all of the moments she’s watched Lottie from afar, within all of the plays they’ve executed on the grass, within all of their unspoken words, this is all Natalie has wanted. 
 
  This is all she craves, this is all she desires. 
 
  To be close to Lottie. 
 
  “Is it true what they say about you?” She breathes into her, and Natalie inhales her words with the expanding air in her lungs. Somewhere in the middle of her pursuit, Lottie managed to slip her hand down to the curving of her waist, and Natalie is just now feeling her skin light on fire. She feels her fingertips sear past her jacket, she feels her nails rake into her pale skin as she secretly tries to find an open spot to latch onto. 
 
  “I have no idea what they say about me.” She plays dumb as her breath hitches, and the hint of a smile flits over Lottie’s mouth. 
 
  “Yeah you do,” She whispers, perfectly long eyelashes fluttering with each blink. “You know what they say about you.” She continues, “I can tell.” She drags her eyes down the length of Natalie’s cheek, past the soft mole underneath her earlobe that no one can ever place. 
 
  “You know what they say about you,” Her breath tickles Natalie’s nose, “And you care what they say about you.” She says in a hush, and sweat starts to drag itself in a trail down the back of her neck. 
 
  “I can feel it,” She smiles, “I can feel that you care.” And she keeps smiling, like she finds this amusing, or that this entertainment is better than anything on the morning news. Natalie almost breaks, right then and there, under her wandering eyes, under her murderous gaze, under her fingers that yearn to scratch into her skin until she bleeds raw. 
 
  “I 
  
    don’t 
  
  care what they say about me.” She corrects, hot and heavy. 
 
  
    I only care if you’ve heard. I only care if you agree. I only care if you say it about me, too. 
  
 
  “I doubt that,” Lottie teases, clicking her tongue. “You know what they say about you, that means you have to care at least a little bit.” 
 
  “Caring about things and hearing about things are two different stories.” 
 
  “I think it’s all the same to you,” Lottie breathes in a soft sigh, “Or else you would’ve left this room a long time ago.” She jerks her face off to the side as Lottie leans in closer, and there’s a wafting scent of 
  
    something 
  
  hitting her nose. 
 
  “You’re wasted.” Natalie states, because 
  
    why else 
  
  would Lottie be talking to her like this? Why else would she have pinned her up against a door like this, with nowhere to go but into her soul? 
 
  “You 
  
    smell
  
   wasted.” She lies. What she smells is Lottie, and what she wishes she could smell is 
  
    not 
  
  Lottie. 
 
  “You smell like cigarettes,” It’s Lottie’s turn to lie, because Natalie hadn’t been granted the chance to smoke one before she was interrupted. “I bet you taste like them, too.”
 
  Natalie’s heart becomes irregular palpitations in her breaking chest. Her breathing stammers, and she holds eye contact with her for the sole reason of spite; it backfires on her the moment she decides it. Because her voice is quivering, she swears her teeth are chattering despite there not being a draft in this room, and she’s heaving breaths like she’s just sprinted a yard. 
 
  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” She doesn’t mean for it to come out as a quiet whisper, but it does. And Lottie smiles again, softly, confidently. 
 
  “Would you believe me if I said I’ve thought about it a million times in my head?” She whispers back, and their lips are centimeters apart. Natalie can 
  
    taste 
  
  the smell of vodka on her, all she has to do is inhale a small beat and it greets the roof of her mouth kindly. 
 
  “No,” She says, firm while unsteady. “I wouldn’t.” 
 
  Lottie looks like she’s won a contest with her response. 
 
  “Good.” She breathes out, and the last thing Natalie sees is that 
  
    stupid 
  
  smile before she’s being kissed. 
 
  She never thought she would be in a situation where she would be kissing Lottie Matthews. She had no expectations for an impossible encounter, something that simply would never happen in this lifetime, at least not 
  
    to her 
  
  or 
  
    for her. 
  
  Even then, kissing Lottie is nothing she expects it to be. With her zero expectations and the brief notions she has, it’s everything all of her past kisses haven’t been. 
 
  Boys are clumsy. They’re rough, they take up space, they’re selfish and they poke their hands in places that don’t belong. They have an urgency that doesn’t come out of appreciation, it comes out of carnal desire, the kind that no one wants to touch with a twenty foot long stick. It’s even worse when Natalie is trapped in bed with one, because they’re sloppy and quick, and she can never quite reach her hand down to finish herself off before a man on top of her does it in first. 
 
  Lottie is none of that. She’s precise, she knows what she’s doing— like she’s done this before, or she’s just 
  
    thought 
  
  about doing it before with Natalie. Their mouths clash, and Lottie is immediate with the way she drags her tongue along her bottom lip. And for the first time she’s kissed someone, she’s 
  
    wanted 
  
  to reciprocate. She’s 
  
    wanted 
  
  to feel more, she’s 
  
    wanted 
  
  to know what comes after this kiss. 
 
  So she opens, and she grants her careful access. 
 
  Lottie slips her tongue in softly, and then she pulls back, resuming their touch of lips and heaviness. Natalie brings her hand forward into her top, she grounds herself, because if she doesn’t, she’ll start to do something idiotic like beg for more or open her mouth further in desperation— desperation everyone 
  
    knows 
  
  she has. 
 
  And it makes her pull away, even in the slightest, because she’s 
  
    proving 
  
  to Lottie that it’s true. That what they say about her, all of it holds a semblance of truth, and that she’s nothing if not someone desperate to be taken. If this were anyone else, she wouldn’t care, she would shove the thought down with more tongue until she couldn’t feel her face. But this isn’t just anyone, it’s Lottie. 
 
  And she doesn’t want Lottie to see her the same way everyone else does. 
 
  But in the similar manner that Lottie had pulled away earlier that night, the roles are reversed, and 
  
    Lottie 
  
  is the one pulling Natalie back in. 
  
    Lottie 
  
  is the one not letting her go, pressing her palms into the small of her waist, cupping every piece of skin she can find with the nails on her fingers. It’s a white flag of sorts, like this alone is saying 
  
    I’m just as desperate as you are. 
  
  It feels a lot like Lottie is telling her— with every nip, with every lick— that it’s okay to want, that she will 
  
    never 
  
  judge her for wanting, because she wants Natalie all the same, she feels it all the same. 
 
  So she gives in. She lets herself want— she lets herself want Lottie like it’s the only 
  
    want 
  
  she’s ever felt in her entire life. She gives in to the way Lottie’s lips press into hers, the way her teeth snare her bottom lip, the way her tongue will dip over her in a tease to leave her 
  
    wanting more. 
  
  She fumbles with closed eyes, and she pushes her hands into Lottie’s hair, her long locks of brown that smell like the sun and feel feather soft under her fingers. She bunches a fistful into her hand as she leans in closer, and Lottie responds with a helpless sound trapping in the back of her throat, tightening her grip into Natalie’s waist like it’s the only part of her she can hold religiously. 
 
  Lottie deepens the kiss, running her hands up and over her sides, and she pushes the openings of Natalie’s leather jacket back until it collapses in a forgotten heap on the ground. She reaches behind her, fingers tracing the knob, and she flicks the lock in a confirming click. 
 
  When Natalie hears this, she pulls away, disconnecting them, and she stares into Lottie’s eyes. Her pupils are blown, her lip gloss is smudged in each corner of her mouth, her chest is bouncing up and down, and she drops her hand into the junction of Lottie’s neck, the spot she had been wanting to touch in her grasp since last night. 
 
  “You’re trouble.” She says quietly, brushing her thumb along the base of her jaw, and Lottie smiles. 
 
  “So are you.” 
 
  She kisses her with a burning fervor, and she latches her hands into Natalie’s with entwined fingertips and warm palms. She walks back by memory or by instinct, dragging Natalie along with her, and she stops right before the back of her knees h@t the thudding mattress. 
 
  When they reach their spacial limit, Lottie flips their positions, and she pushes Natalie into the bed where she lands on her back soundly. She stares up at Lottie, watching with needy eyes, drinking in every movement she makes. She watches the way her hair falls around her face, the way she pulls her cashmere sweater up and over her head, discarding it on the ground to leave her in a thin tank top. 
 
  “How many girls have you been with?” She demands an answer with a gentle voice, and she crawls into Natalie’s lap with legs that straddle her waist. Natalie can see the lace of her underwear peeking out from beneath her skirt that rides up her tanned thighs, and she swallows thickly, feeling a ball of heat form in her stomach and shoot down into her core like a bullet. 
 
  “None.” She replies, finding it hard to look back up at her when her underwear is so clearly in sight, begging to be ripped apart and torn into. 
 
  “You haven’t slept with any at all?” She asks in a heavy question, and Natalie feels a moan die inside of her with the way Lottie’s weight has shifted on top of her, and she pushes pressure right where it matters. 
 
  “You sound shocked.” Natalie pulls her arms upwards as Lottie peels her out of her white top, leaving her in a bra that her br@@sts spill out of. 
 
  She should be offended that she’s coming off with such intrigue and confusion, like it boggles her mind that 
  
    Natalie 
  
  of all people hasn’t considered playing for all teams instead of just one. But she’s not offended, she can’t be when Lottie’s warm palms are skating up her stomach, teasing the valley of her belly button as her hands fall over the top edge of her skirt. Natalie’s almost down to her panties and bra, and it hasn’t even been ten minutes yet while Lottie still wears nearly everything. 
 
  “Not shocked,” She pins Natalie’s wandering hands into her waist, swatting her carefully in a chiding way that says 
  
    don’t touch me yet. 
  
  “Disappointed.” 
 
  “My sexual history disappoints you?” She raises an eyebrow, tightening the bits of her skirt she can get into her hands without being pushed away. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one before.” She rolls her eyes under her wispy bangs, a fond gesture of affection that Natalie 
  
    knows 
  
  she’s never seen her direct at anyone prior. Even when she was watching during practices or offhanded chances outside of campus, she had never seen such a soft look touch down on her features in all of the years she’s known her from afar. 
 
  “Does that mean I’ll be your first girl?” She has a glimmer in her eye, and the way the words slip off her tongue has Natalie’s neck consuming a color of red. 
 
  She’s never thought about being with a girl. She’s never weighed her options or made a roster, she just slept with whoever she could find, and whoever wanted her back. It never occurred to her that 
  
    a girl 
  
  of her picking would be Lottie, and that same girl would also happen to 
  
    want
  
   her back. The idea of it doesn’t make her uncomfortable, in fact, she falls into it with a tingle dripping down her back. 
 
  She’s never thought about being with a girl. But picturing that girl to be Lottie, it all makes sense. 
 
  “You’re getting cocky,” She jokes, hiding the lump in her chest with farce words. “Who said I’m gonna sleep with you?” 
 
  Lottie smiles at her in 
  
    that way 
  
  that gives Natalie butterflies. In that way that makes Natalie question whether or not God made man or if Lottie did, that way that makes Natalie want to capture it in the forefront of her brain and needle it into her head as her first tattoo, that way that makes Natalie wonder how she’s gone so long without seeing an expression so perfect. 
 
  “You’re half naked under me,” She calls out, leaning 
  
    down
  
   in a chase that makes Natalie want to lean 
  
    up 
  
  to brush their lips together, “Do you think we’re gonna be debating whether or not Franz Kafka was better than Shakespeare?” 
 
  Natalie curls her eyebrows in interest, and it has Lottie’s confidence twinkling away with a shake of her head. 
 
  “Sorry, English class. It’s our most recent topic.” She buries her face into the crook of Natalie’s neck, and she presses hot open mouthed kisses, dragging her tongue over her skin in gentle swipes. Her eyes roll into the back of her head as her lashes flutter, and she holds on 
  
    tighter 
  
  to Lottie’s waist, like if she blinks everything will cut to black. 
 
  “What do I have to do with your English class?” She nearly stutters, but she paces herself with the way she replies. 
 
  “I do most of my thinking there,” She murmurs against her, pulling a chunk of her veins into her teeth. “I think about you there.” 
 
  Natalie can’t hide the soft whimper that falls from her lips when Lottie sucks pliant skin into her mouth, and she allows her head to fall back against the duvet with a bitten lip. 
 
  “Y-You think about me outside of soccer?” She whispers, tripping over her own words in a careful gasp when Lottie 
  
    bites 
  
  into her harder like she’s a vampire with thick fangs. 
 
  She hums, “I think about you all the time outside of soccer.” 
 
  She trails her wet kisses down her collarbone, stopping over the junction of her bone, leaving a bite mark that blooms fresh red, and she settles over the top of her br@@sts before planting a kiss to each one of them. Natalie keeps her eyes trained on the ceiling, because if she watches her any further, she might just come from the sight of Lottie kissing her everywhere. 
 
  “You sure as hell don’t act like it.” She whispers, and the hilarity of it all lies underneath the fact that; yes, Lottie 
  
    doesn’t 
  
  act interested in Natalie outside of team efforts, but she sat on top of her anyway, straddling her and kissing her, roaming her hands into every blanket of skin she can find access to. 
 
  “I’ve tried not to,” She confesses while climbing off of her slightly, “Everyone says you’re not good news.” She pulls her skirt down over her knees in skilled practice, like she’s done this 
  
    so many times before 
  
  with 
  
    so many girls, 
  
  it makes Natalie question why she decided to choose her tonight. 
 
  “Do you believe what everyone says?” Lottie helps her kick her skirt off, and it falls onto the floor with everything else she came to this party wearing. All she has now is her bra and her underwear, and despite having done this several times sober, under the influence, or none of the above, she doesn’t remember ever feeling this nervous to perform right. To do a good job, to present properly, to prove to Lottie that she could be good for something, that she didn’t need that boy on the dance floor or any other girl she’s had her mouth on. 
 
  “I really don’t care what everyone says about you.” Her fingers dance over the soft lining of her lace garment, and she slips her thumb into the corner. She looks up at Natalie for permission, to continue, and in her dazed trance of Lottie and everything that isn’t Lottie, she nods her head, consenting eagerly. 
 
  “But I’d like it a lot more if you were bad news.” She pulls her underwear off carefully, she sensually slides it down the length of her legs, and Natalie feels a certain element of exposure as a brisk chill of wind hits in between her folds. 
 
  “And what kind of news do you think I am?” 
 
  Lottie situates herself in between her, hanging delicately off the edge of the bed as she spreads her legs apart. 
 
  “I guess there’s only one way to find out.” And she gives her that smile again, that 
  
    stupid, 
  
  heavenly smile that makes Natalie pause to think; maybe 
  
    Lottie 
  
  is the bad news. 
 
  But she can’t dwell on it any longer, because she wastes no time in diving forward, treating her with a long lick up the center of her wet slit. 
 
  She doesn’t bother with teasing, she 
  
    explores. 
  
  She runs her tongue over her cl@t in delicate circles, and Natalie arches off the bed instinctively with a wanton moan. She’s settled for gripping into the sheets below her, chewing on the sounds that want to escape her throat to save the party outside from hearing. 
 
  Lottie flushes her tongue down, nudging herself in between every pathway, every piece of wetness she can gather, and she eats. She burrows herself further into Natalie, bringing her legs over her shoulders in a soft heave, and the sight alone makes a whimper trickle out of her mouth. 
 
  The pleasure is a rush of endless endorphins in her brain that swarms with Lottie, and it hits her like a tidal wave that she crashes into. She twists her fingertips into the sheets, she grips her own skin, she fights the pull of heat in her stomach that demands her attention. 
 
  Lottie’s fingertips curl into the softness of her thighs, and a realization dawns on Natalie along with another soft moan she can’t hold back. Nobody has ever touched her like this before; nobody has ever taken their time to indulge on her just for the sake of it instead of an exchange. Lottie laps at her like she can’t get enough of her, like losing the privilege of tasting Natalie in this way would lead her to a grave and a bed of dead roses. 
 
  And for the first time in her life— for the first time since she started having sex with people— she enjoys it. She relaxes into the feeling of Lottie’s tongue pressing into her entrance, compliant and yearning to push inside of her. She feels her shoulders slump back into the pillows above her as she stares into the ceiling with a spinning head, and it feels a lot like the high of a new drug she’s just found. 
 
  A drug named Lottie Matthews. 
 She nudges her nose into her cl@t, and her motions have turned into a frenzy the longer she spurs Natalie on. She chokes on each breath she intakes, her hips stuttering while they subconsciously buck up into her face, urging her to go faster, be rougher, and take her harder. Unaware, she obliges, and she flattens her tongue out over the nub of her cl@t, dipping the tip in between folds that have gotten increasingly sticky with arousal.  
  “F@ck,” The curse comes out on its own accord. “That— That feels really good.” She’s a mess of jumbled words and unintelligible sentences, because she’s never 
  
    felt 
  
  this good before. She’s had plenty of sexual relations before, she’s partaken in more than she should, yet nothing has ever made her feel the way Lottie is right now. 
 
  She begs for more without directly saying it; it’s written all across her face, within the contortion of her features and how swollen her lip has gotten from chewing into it. It stains her eyes with l@st, it possesses her throat with each breath she takes that comes out in a strangled sound— a moan, a whine or a whimper, it didn’t matter, she felt 
  
    all of it 
  
  under Lottie. 
 
  Encouraged by her praise, Lottie presses into her closer, and her tongue picks up a pace that hadn’t been there. She’s cutthroat with it, she draws tight circles over her cl@t with precision, and she etches shapes and letters into Natalie’s trembling center that peeks into an @rg@sm. 
 
  All it takes is one broad stroke that pushes up into her cl@t, and Natalie comes like it’s her first, and at this point, it very well could be. Her body shakes with the entirety of it, a ripple of moans and cries spill out from between her lips as she clenches her legs forward, trapping Lottie’s head in a prison. And Lottie takes it all, she brings her through the aftershocks and helps her ride the wave, and once she sees that Natalie has calmed down from her high, she pulls away. 
 
  The bottom of her chin is glistening with Natalie dripping all over her, and her lips gleam in a shining glow that her strawberry lip gloss has never provided. The thin sheen compliments her, it becomes an additional feature to her sculpted face. Natalie wants to reach forward to brush the pad of her thumb over her bottom lip, and she wants to take her own skin into her mouth and suck it clean until she can feel what she and Lottie taste like combined. 
 
  But she doesn’t get the chance to, because Lottie goes again. 
 
  There isn’t a moment of space for recovery or caring moments after, there doesn’t have to be with them. She presses a singular digit up into her entrance, she teases it with the tip of her finger, and when Natalie’s body shows no resistance— when Natalie’s body shamefully reacts with a twitching jerk— she slips into her. 
 
  She moans with the simple contact, she releases a shaky breath that turns into a low whine, and Lottie dives her finger deep, deep inside of her until only her knuckle is visible. And when Natalie thinks it can’t get any better, when Natalie thinks 
  
    yes, this is how good it can feel, 
  
  Lottie proves her wrong, and she shows her how much 
  
    better 
  
  it can get. 
 
  She curves her finger into the back of her wall, and it hits a spot inside of her that she didn’t know she had, a spot that’s never been hit until now, a spot that feels 
  
    just right 
  
  when Lottie’s touching it, and she chokes out a half moan half cry that swallows her vocal cords. 
 
  She pumps in and out of her softly at first, a considerate way of making sure Natalie can properly adjust to the change. And adjust she does, because her walls don’t cling to her, they open up farther, and she parts her legs despite the overstimulation that may come. 
 
  And then she starts thrusting into her deeper, slower, making sure to curve her movements at the very end of each shift. She wants to ask for more, she wants to ask for faster, she wants to ask for harder; she’s had no trouble doing that in the past with previous conquests or men from bars who were one night stands, but this is 
  
    Lottie. 
  
  And Lottie isn’t just any previous conquest or a man from a hole in the wall bar with nowhere to go in life, Lottie is everything intimidating and everything intimate. 
 
  She feels so inherently 
  
    nervous 
  
  and self conscious under her touch, she can’t find herself forming any sentences except for the moans that spin from her mouth. 
 
  Lottie must have read her mind the same way she does on that field they play on, because she inserts a second finger inside of her, and Natalie sees stars. 
 
  “Lottie, 
  
    Jesus—” 
  
  Is all she manages to say as she crawls up her body, fingers still moving in and out of her, hand attached to her like an ingrown limb. 
 
  She f@cks her faster, with more abandon and less hesitance than before. Now that she has an idea of Natalie’s limits, she’s not holding herself back, which means she’ll touch her however she wants to. 
 
  Natalie sinks into the feeling, she gives herself up to the hot wires coiling around her intestines, and she lets herself freefall into all of her. All she feels is Lottie’s fingers ramming into her, the brief brushing of her thumb over her cl@t, and the occasional low rumble from deep inside of her chest that splits in half with each groaning moan she releases. They grow heavily, they don’t stop, they only become stronger the more Lottie pounds into her. 
 
  And then it happens again, that unfamiliarity of an @rg@sm that’s only come to her once so far (with Lottie and nobody else). It takes her by the jugular this time, and she cries out a strangled, broken sound of pleasurable pain as she gets pulled into her second one of today. She throws her arm over her eyes to shield herself from the blinding fluorescents in this bedroom, and Lottie is there at the end of it once more, coaxing her through it with soft pushes and pulls that make Natalie squeeze her thighs together. 
 
  She doesn’t know how long it lasts for, but it feels like an eternity, even as Lottie’s fingers disappear from inside of her and leave her bereft without a certain kind of fullness. She breathes loudly into thin air, and she pushes her arm over the crown of her forehead to open her eyes carefully. 
 
  She sees Lottie hanging above her, trapping Natalie with two hands pinned into her sides, and she smiles wickedly. 
 
  “Do you always come that fast?” 
 
  Natalie isn’t aware if it’s supposed to come out in a tease, or a flirtatious hint of an insult, but it makes her swallow down her thick ignorance all the same with labored breathing. No, she didn’t always come that fast, because she never 
  
    came 
  
  to begin with. Nobody had made her feel so much in such little time except for Lottie, and the comparison she could make to anyone else is so stark and irrelevant in her eyes that it really 
  
    doesn’t matter. 
  
 
  It’s embarrassing now that she thinks about it, that she’s come in record time under her hands, and not under anyone else’s. But Lottie’s looking at her with a slyness in her eyes, astonishment of sorts, and it looks like she really doesn’t care. It looks like she 
  
    likes it, 
  
  the fact that she was the one to make Natalie come to this realization, the fact that she was the one to make her come this way. 
 
  Twin peaks of a blush fall over her face, and she knows that if she looks anywhere else, it’ll only incriminate her further. So she stares into Lottie’s eyes with a different kind of guilt, one that eats her inside and out, upside and down. 
 
  “Are you talking sh@t?” She banters back in the best way she can, and judging by the fraying smile on Lottie’s face, she’s hit her mark evidently. 
 
  “Maybe.” She says, soft and innocent, and then what she does in following renders herself not so innocent after all. She drags two fingers into her mouth; her middle and ring, and she lays it gently on the plane of her tongue before closing her lips around the edges in a seal. She sucks into her skin, she wipes herself clean of Natalie in the most primal way possible, and Natalie watches her throat bob with a watering appetite as she digests the taste of her. 
 
  She pulls her fingers out with underlying mischief and a mask of delicacy, and then she brings herself to a stance as she tears herself out of bed and off of Natalie. 
 
  Natalie watches her every step; she watches the way she plucks her sweater off the ground and slips it over her head, then she studies the way she collects Natalie’s scattered clothing items with a deft hand. 
 
  “Are you going back to the party?” She stupidly asks in a voice of shyness, and she wants to smack herself in the face upon hearing her own tone. It was enough that she lay here naked from the chest down, she really didn’t need to pin her coffin shut with another spillage of her feelings. 
 
  “Yeah.” Lottie answers in practiced nonchalance, and she runs a hand through her messy hair with a lazy hand, like she doesn’t care at all if she comes back to her friends looking freshly f@ck@d, or looking like 
  
    she 
  
  had just freshly f@ck@d someone. 
 
  “You should clean yourself up,” She tosses the items into Natalie’s chest, and they land on her in a quiet plop. “You look like a mess.” 
 
  It feels like she’s being kicked out of a house that isn’t hers, or brushed off to the side in a shun now that Lottie has gotten what she wants. Now that Natalie has nothing else to give her, now that the shininess touching her has faded and she no longer needs a new toy, she’s being kicked to the curb the same way she used to banish boys. 
 
  She personalizes it when she shouldn’t, and it makes her scoff. 
 
  “You made me look like a mess.” She mutters, and Lottie looks up from where she picks a ball of fuzz off the sleeve of her sweater. She smiles out of surprise and pleasantries, and her teeth gleam under the flickering light. 
 
  “I know I did.” She admits, nothing to it. “You have to stop saying what you’re thinking out loud,” She picks up Natalie’s black underwear that she missed, tossing it into her lap. “It’s a bad habit.” 
 
  Natalie looks down to see where it’s landed on the openness of her stomach, and a million thoughts course through her at five hundred miles per hour. The first one being, when did Lottie Matthews get so good at reading her? The second one being, how did 
  
    she 
  
  know she was beginning to blurt things aloud before Natalie knew herself, even though 
  
    she’s 
  
  the one saying them? The third one being, why does she feel so let down knowing she and Lottie will return back to normal life after this, they will go back to the booming party like nothing happened, and they will fall back into being 
  
    nothing 
  
  with each other? 
 
  She has no answers to any of these questions, but she’s certain about one thing; she never started saying her raw thoughts out loud until Lottie started speaking to her. 
 
  “Will I see you again?” 
 
  It’s at the top of a list titled: Things You Shouldn’t Say After Hooking Up With Someone. And then in a subcategory of that, it’s at the top of a secondary list called: Things You Shouldn’t Say After Hooking Up With Lottie Matthews. 
 
  It was a dumb ask and something she already knew the answer to. Of course she wouldn’t be seeing her again, of course this would only be a one time thing; a secret to be kept instead of a prayer to hold. She chews on the inside of her cheek as she refuses to wait for an answer, and she grabs her skirt in her hands along with her beat up top. 
 
  But then Lottie’s closed the gap in between them, she’s standing over the bed looking taller than she really is, and Natalie props herself up nervously on her elbows to crane her head and look her in the eyes. 
 
  “Do you wanna see me again?” To a natural ear, it sounds like a question. But to Natalie’s ear, it sounds like an offer. 
 
  If she knew what was good for her, she would pass. But in her smoky haze of hindered thoughts and brazen l@st, she feels it in her bones what’s good for her, she 
  
    knows 
  
  what’s good for her, and it isn’t seclusion or a rehabilitation center. 
 
  It’s Lottie. 
 
  She nods, slow and feeble, because she can’t say anything else. There are so many words dying on her tongue, so many unspoken confessions that she wants to make, but she decides against it. She wears her best poker face, but she knows her emotion of desire shines through her facade, and her suspicions are confirmed with the way Lottie’s lips upturn. 
 
  “Okay.” She states, simple and efficient. She steps away from her once more, neither denying or agreeing, and Natalie jumps the gun in the harshest way possible, practically shooting herself in the foot.  
 
  “When?” She asks with a little bit of 
  
    too 
  
  much eagerness, and Lottie turns on her heel again with a sigh. She didn’t make it far across the room, she’s only a couple feet away, but the distance feels like leagues and Natalie is itching for another fix. 
 
  “Don’t worry about it,” She reassures her, a nurture in her voice that keeps Natalie on her toes. She steps back into her original position in front of her, their eyes lock, and nothing else comes into her view except for Lottie’s chocolate brown orbs. 
 
  “You’ll see me again.” She says softly, and it sounds like a promise. She drops a kiss down to her lips, a long one that sets Natalie on fire in a crime of arson, and she melts into fading skin the longer it lasts. Lottie pulls away, gaze drifting down her face and over the slope of her jaw, and she smiles gently. 
 
  “Sorry about your neck.” She whispers against her lips, and the look she flashes before turning around tells Natalie that she’s anything 
  
    but 
  
  sorry. 
 
  She touches the softness of her palm to the middle of her neck, feeling for a bruise she knows is there yet won’t be able to feel the lump of. She runs her fingertips across a particularly warm spot, and she watches Lottie unlock the door before stepping out, not offering a single glance over her shoulder as she leaves. 
 
  Natalie looks down to where her pair of black underwear had been sitting over her belly button, only to see that it vanished without a trace, almost as if it grew arms and legs to walk away. But then she recalls the brief kiss, the one where Lottie could’ve virtually done anything; touched her anywhere, moved her everywhere, or even stolen her wallet, and she would have been too engrossed in the taste of herself on Lottie’s lips to notice she had been robbed in plain daylight. 
 
  And she knows that’s exactly what had happened before she left, that Lottie scrammed with an enclosed fist and a trophy of her choice in her grasp. 
 
  She flops back over the bed to gaze up into the ceiling, and two things cross her mind at the same time. 
 
  Lottie stole her underwear on purpose. 
 
  Which could only mean her sneaking suspicion from earlier turned out to be true; Lottie is going to be a lot of trouble. 
 
  Lottie is going to become her favorite kind of bad news.'
User: Summarize the chapter based on the content provided, ensuring to follow the set format and emphasize key aspects within the specified length.
User: Summarize the chapter based on the content provided, ensuring to follow the set format and emphasize key aspects within the specified length.
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