by KL Hughes
“Oh, you heard that, huh?”
“Well, of course,” Grandma Sophia said. “Just because we’re old doesn’t mean we’re deaf. Y’all were screaming like banshees, after all.”
“And yet no one came to help us.” Lizzie crossed her arms over her chest and leaned her hip against the arm of the couch. “Michael was just, you know, tossing us into the snow with no coats on or anything. Fiona has stage-three hypothermia, and one of my toes will probably fall off later tonight, but whatever. No big deal.”
Rosie looked to her husband. “Does hypothermia come in stages?”
“Beats me,” he said with a shrug. “But I know you can live without a toe or two. Ain’t that right, Mom?”
Grandma Sophia swayed slowly back and forth in the rocking recliner closest to the fire. Madison lay lazily in her lap, shoes off and bare feet stuck out toward the warm glow. “Mhm. Your daddy only had two toes on his left foot, didn’t he, hon?” She grabbed one of Madison’s tiny feet and squeezed her last two toes, one by one. “This little piggy right here, and this little piggy right here.”
Madison giggled, and her foot squirmed out of Grandma Sophia’s hand. “But why’d he only have two toes, Grandma?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You better ask Pop.”
Madison slung herself over the side of the chair so she could see Charlie Sr. “Why’d Grandpa only have two toes, Pop?”
“Dad, no,” Lizzie said before he could even begin. “Don’t tell them that story.”
“And why not?”
“Because it’s terrifying.” She moved back to Fiona’s side, hovering near the foyer. “Not to mention gross. I had nightmares about that story for years.”
“That’s because you were the one who always mowed the lawn,” Grandma Sophia said with a laugh. From her mouth, it sounded like the amusement of an old witch, cackling about the latest batch of children she’d turned into toads for her frog-leg soup.
Fiona leaned a bit closer to Lizzie, their shoulders brushing, and grinned at her. “Okay, I’ll admit I’m interested in hearing this story now.”
“I’ll tell you upstairs,” Lizzie said. “We can leave the theatrical version to Dad. Let him horrify the children on his own. Besides, you’re still shivering, and we’ve got hot chocolate waiting.”
“Oh, you two are no fun,” Rosie said. She poked Lily’s thigh. “Are they, Lily?”
Lily was stretched between her grandparents on the small sofa, head on Charlie’s lap and feet on Rosie’s. The iPad practically glued to her face didn’t budge, and she didn’t make a peep.
“Clearly, she disagrees,” Lizzie said, then tugged Fiona’s arm to lead her upstairs. “Let’s go.”
They were halfway up when Rosie called after them. “Don’t take too long, girls. As soon as the others are back from the store with the stuff, we’ll be getting started.”
“’Kay, Mom!” Lizzie rolled her eyes at Fiona. “There’s always something to be ready for in this house.”
“You guys definitely like your activities,” Fiona said, though her focus was less on the conversation and more on the warmth of Lizzie’s hand still wrapped loosely around her forearm. She wasn’t sure why Lizzie hadn’t yet let go, but she couldn’t deny the part of her that was glad she hadn’t, the part that secretly hoped she wouldn’t.
“Yeah, notice how the only people who seem to have time to relax are the old people and the kids.” Lizzie tugged her over the last stair and down the hall. “Napping by the fire while everyone else gets a task.”
“They all looked awake to me.”
“Give it a minute. Grandma’ll be asleep before anyone gets back from the store, and good luck waking her up once she’s out.” She stopped in the hallway and faced her. “Actually, it’s not that hard to wake her. Just nobody likes to do it, because she’s grumpy as hell if you wake her up unless you shove a cup of coffee under her nose before she has a chance to open her eyes.”
“My dad’s the same way about his coffee,” Fiona said, “and his naps.”
They stood in the hallway alone, smiling at each other but saying nothing. Lizzie’s hand still held Fiona’s wrist. She stroked her thumb back and forth over the smooth skin there, a strange kind of hypnosis. Fiona found herself falling into the feeling. Her eyelids grew heavy, and her feet felt as if they had somehow grown down into the floor. She couldn’t move, could only feel and be and wonder what might come next.
Lizzie, on the other hand, didn’t seem stuck to the ground at all. She was loose and liquid, flowing toward Fiona like a slow-rolling wave. She inched closer, then closer still. Her hand slid down from Fiona’s wrist to her fingers. Their fingertips rubbed together, and Fiona felt the static and friction like lightning bolts. They zapped up the length of her fingers, up her arms, and over her shoulders. They sizzled down her spine, sparking along the way. Under Lizzie’s touch, she was a live wire gutted and frayed. She was dangerous, combustible. With the right trigger, she would ignite, and there would be no going back from that.
“Are you…?”
The swipe of Lizzie’s tongue over her bottom lip almost made Fiona miss the words. She was distracted by every little tick of movement, every vibration magnified. Every freckle was a destination as she mapped her way up from Lizzie’s mouth to her unique, searching eyes, staring at Fiona as if they needed to find something, something specific.
Fiona took a slow breath through her nose and exhaled through her mouth, as if preparing for a leap. She was standing on the edge of something, though she wasn’t sure what. The only thing she was sure of was that she ought to take a step back. She ought to retreat. She ought to know better. Her feet remained rooted to the floor regardless. She wasn’t going anywhere as long as Lizzie was touching her this way, looking at her as if she needed something. Whatever it was, Fiona wanted to provide it. “Am I what?”
“Hot chocolate’s getting cold!”
The call from downstairs seemed to jar Lizzie out of whatever searching reverie had entranced her. She shook her head and stepped back. “Guess we should hurry up.”
Fiona’s fingers tingled from the cold loss of touch. She itched to have Lizzie’s hand on hers again but made no effort to reconnect them. The moment was lost, gone in a single blink of two different-colored eyes. “Yeah,” she said, the word escaping in a weak rasp of sound. Her throat was a dust-blown desert, all the moisture in her body having flooded elsewhere. “I guess so.”
“Okay.” Lizzie lingered, shuffling in place as if waiting for something, anything, to keep her there a moment longer. When Fiona offered nothing, she shrugged and said, “Well, see you down there, then.” She walked off, leaving Fiona alone in the hallway, staring at the wall with a million different thoughts swirling about her brain and feelings she couldn’t name stirring in her gut.
Fiona sat on the floor of her and Michael’s bathroom in nothing but her panties and bra. Her damp clothes lay strung over the side of the bathtub. Earlier, she’d been desperate to get out of the cold and into something warm and comforting. Now, the cold comforted her. It seeped into her back as she sat against the tub with her elbows propped on her knees. Her forehead rested in the palms of her hands as she stared down at the floor.
She’d barely managed to get herself undressed and changed into fresh, dry underwear before needing to sit down and think. Breathe. Heat washed through her like a sickening wave, making her stomach knot and roll. Part of her feared she might actually be coming down with something, an unfortunate consequence of being buried in the snow. The other part of her knew what really afflicted her.
“What the hell am I doing?” The whispered words bounced off the bathroom floor and back, hitting her in the face like a stinging hand. She repeated them again and again, reveling in that sting as it brought her back down to earth, to reality, to the hard-edged, bold, and underlined truth: that she needed to stop.
Stop thinking. Stop feeling. Stop wondering. Stop wanting.
Fiona closed her eyes and pounded her head against her hands. “Fuck,” she croaked. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
She couldn’t stop, no matter how much she knew she should. Thoughts and feelings weren’t things to be controlled. They were nature, wild. They would wander as they pleased, unafraid to be. At most, both could be ignored, avoided, but to do so was skirting the edge of danger. She could see the beast before her, and she needed to turn the other way, find another route, run in the opposite direction as if her life depended on it.
The thing was, she didn’t know how to do that.
For two days now, she’d been stuck in the same house as Lizzie McElroy. Granted, it was a big house, and Fiona was fairly certain she could elude her, even if it meant locking herself in Michael’s brother’s childhood bedroom and not coming out again until it was time to leave. Such a tactic, however, wasn’t tenable in her situation. She was there to show off to the family so his mother and grandmother would lay off Michael for once. She couldn’t very well do that if no one ever actually saw her. His family would be convinced instead that he’d settled down with a socially inept troll who’d only come to take over one small bathroom of their massive house and charge a toll to anyone looking to shower there. So that meant being out and about, spending time with the rest of the family.
But to Fiona, it seemed as if Lizzie was everywhere, which wouldn’t be a problem if Fiona’s insides didn’t catch fire every time she came around. But they did. It plagued her day and night. She had accompanied Michael for a specific purpose, to be his person for the weekend. His. Instead, she’d spent the entirety of the weekend thus far pining for the wrong damned McElroy.
That was the code: bros could date whomever they wanted, so long as they respected each other’s families and boundaries. Mothers, daughters, sisters—they were all out of bounds, weren’t they? Fiona wasn’t a “bro,” but she was pretty sure that the unwritten, unspoken rule applied in this situation anyway.
“Jesus,” Fiona said to herself, “maybe I’m just over-fucking-thinking it.” Maybe she’d misread Michael the night before, and he wouldn’t actually be mad at all. No one could help how they felt, right? Maybe he’d understand that. Maybe since he had so many sisters, it would be ridiculous to assume they were all forbidden. She growled under her breath and dug her fingers into her hair. “Maybe girls aren’t anyone’s fucking property, and I can kiss whoever I want, dammit.”
“That’s right. You tell ’em, girl.”
Her spine rammed against the side of the tub as she jolted up, but the pain barely fazed her. She was too concerned with the new presence in the room. Her mouth hung open as she stared. “I…uh…”
Lizzie stood in the bathroom’s open doorway with an easy smile on her lips and a steaming mug of hot chocolate held in both hands. “You’re not dressed.”
Fiona looked down at herself, nothing but lanky, naked limbs and blue cotton panties that didn’t match her maroon sports bra. She felt the redness in her cheeks, neck, and chest, burning with humiliation. “I literally want to die right now.”
“Really?” Lizzie laughed. “I thought you wanted to kiss someone, dammit.” She crossed the small room, sat on the floor in front of Fiona, and passed over the hot chocolate. “You were taking a while, so I figured I’d bring it up. I heated it up in the microwave, good as new.”
Fiona didn’t want to look at her. At the same time, she couldn’t look away. The mug warmed her fingertips as she took it with a muttered thank-you. The scent wafted up and soothed her, calmed her racing heart. “Where’s Michael?”
“Lily and Madison roped him into a game of Twister. He’ll end up throwing his back out if the others don’t return soon.”
Fiona couldn’t muster up much more than a half-hearted, lifeless laugh. Lizzie shuffled a bit closer. Her hand danced over Fiona’s shin, as if ready to touch, then retracted. Lizzie smiled at her, but it was different. Sad, maybe. Worried.
“Listen. Are you okay?”
“Oh yeah.” Fiona swallowed the lump Lizzie always seemed to inspire and stared down into her hot chocolate. She wished she could drown in it. “I’m great. I’m just sitting here in front of Michael’s sister, basically naked.”
“Having a crisis over wanting to kiss someone?”
Fiona looked sharply up at her.
“Should I go get my brother for you?”
It wasn’t serious, the question. Fiona could tell by the look in Lizzie’s eyes. That one look told her all she needed to know: Lizzie knew exactly who Fiona really wanted to kiss, and it damned well wasn’t her brother. “Lizzie.” She said it like a warning, a tone to ward off whatever was drawing them closer, weaving them together, tying them into a knot. Whatever it was, they needed to stop it before it became impossible to disentangle themselves, before they became such a mess together that there would be no hiding it, no going back. No retreat.
Lizzie’s pale, freckled hands didn’t hesitate another moment. They didn’t hover. They found purchase on Fiona’s shins, slid themselves up to her knees, and squeezed. “Hey,” she whispered, inching closer. Her thumbs drew soothing circles into the sides of Fiona’s kneecaps. “It’s okay.”
“It feels really not okay,” Fiona said, the words barely more than breath. She expected another round of reassurance. Instead, Lizzie took Fiona’s hot chocolate from her and set it aside on the floor. She then slowly, and one by one, straightened Fiona’s legs out and inched them aside. Fiona wanted to ask what she was doing, but her voice was a useless clump in her throat, stuck, unmoving, as if afraid to interrupt whatever it was that was happening.
The silence had never seemed more alive than it did the moment Lizzie reached for her. It vibrated around them as she moved right into the space beside Fiona, with her denim-covered thigh rubbing against Fiona’s bare one, and leaned in. Her eyes remained wide open, her lips a slightly upturned sign of confidence and comfort, of welcome. But she didn’t greet Fiona with her lips, as expected. She didn’t offer the kiss Fiona both dreaded and desired more than she cared to admit. Instead, she closed the gap between them by slinking her arms around Fiona’s cold, naked back.
The embrace melted her. She liquefied in Lizzie’s arms, all the tension leaking out and away so that all she could do was sink. The breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding eased free as she closed her eyes and buried her face in Lizzie’s neck. Gliding up the soft, fuzzy material of Lizzie’s sweater, her arms returned the embrace.
A quiet hum buzzed in her throat, the sound of satisfaction, serenity. Lizzie’s hair smelled like apricots and wood smoke, a strange combination that Fiona found inexplicably intoxicating. Her body was warm and inviting, like the feeling of lying in the sun or beside a hearth. “This is nice,” she mumbled against Lizzie’s skin, reveling in the rake of short fingernails up her back and under her hair.
Lizzie touched her as if they were familiar, as if they’d known each other for years. She touched her the way one touched a lover, with sure hands, hands that knew their way without direction and felt at home on naked skin. Every touch was confident but soft, delicate, slow, nothing like the rapid heartbeat Fiona could feel thumping steadily against her own.
It shook her, that tiny revelation of how nervous Lizzie actually was beneath the surface, how excited she might be by an embrace that felt both tremendous and treacherous. She couldn’t help but wonder if the same potent heat rolling through her body also coursed through Lizzie’s, comforting her as effectively as it devoured her. Was Lizzie clenching her thighs? That thought was enough to rattle her, to yank her out of her drowsy reverie and into electric awareness.
She became acutely aware of every point of contact, every pop of static on her skin as Lizzie’s fuzzy sweater lay against her, and every seductive scratch across her scalp. How exposed she was. How exposed they were. Her senses lit up
like the Christmas tree downstairs, and suddenly she was more anxious than she was comfortable. She opened her eyes and stared intently over Lizzie’s shoulder at the open bathroom door. It stood before her like a one-way mirror, bright on their side and shadowed on the other, the unlit bedroom beyond. She knew no one stood watching, but her body thrummed with the feeling of being observed, the uneasiness of possibly being caught, any second now, doing something she shouldn’t be. She squirmed in Lizzie’s arms, unable to tame the growing nerves or temper her sudden embarrassment, her discomfort. Her arousal.
“I’m naked,” she blurted, then immediately bit her tongue and tamped down the urge to smack herself on the forehead.
Lizzie’s sweet laugh was more a purr than a melody. “Almost,” she said, turning her nose in toward Fiona’s neck. The tip rubbed up and down, back and forth, every puff of warm breath against her skin the best kind of torture. “And trust me, I’m extremely aware of how almost naked you are.”
Every word was sex, rocking its way down Fiona’s body and back up, driving her toward the edge. She was on the precipice of doing something she knew she shouldn’t do, something that could send up in flames the best friendship she’d ever had. But when Lizzie pulled back from the embrace and looked at her, eyes determined and wanting, tongue flicking out to wet her lips, Fiona was ready to burn her life to the ground just to meet her halfway. Just to taste her, if even for only a moment.
That moment passed in a hard blink and a cleared throat, in the sudden withdrawal of Lizzie’s warm, soft body and hooded eyes. “You should get dressed,” she said so quietly that Fiona almost missed the words. “The others are probably back by now.”
