Chapter 3 #2
Her stiffness fell away as she melted into the girl she loved in front of her. So many other thoughts flashed through her mind as she slid her hands up, gripping Juniper’s waist to further arch her body into hers.
I love you. I don’t want to leave you to go to school 800 miles away. I wish you could come with me. I wish this could last forever. I wish I was braver like you.
◆◆◆
Juniper hadn’t quite mastered the ability to not throw accelerant on an already blazing fire, so the fact that she already had her legs wrapped around her — best friend!
— mere minutes after sharing their first kiss seemed like a natural progression.
The fact that her shy best friend was reciprocating by forcing her hips into hers was much more surprising to her.
She knew she had been preening that summer, and she was pretty sure Rowan had been taking notice.
The first time she noticed something different was when she tried on two new swimsuits she’d gotten at the general store on the Rez.
She’d saved up money from dancing powwow competitions in the spring and watched the clothing section of the store like a hawk ready to pounce when they released the summer stuff.
If she weren’t quick enough, all the good swimsuits would get bought up, leaving her with the frumpy out-of-style swimsuits she was determined to never have to wear again.
Her boobs had grown exponentially that year, and she was ready to show them off.
She bought four swimsuits, but she knew she could really only afford two.
When she stripped her shirt and bra off to get Rowan’s opinion on which ones to keep and which ones to return, she noticed a shift of uncomfortableness from where she sat on the edge of her bed.
She leaned down to dig in her bag to get the first one, the hot pink string bikini she was most excited about, and stood up to catch Rowan shifting her eyes quickly from her chest to a spot on the floor.
They had seen each other naked plenty of times before, but Juniper knew this felt different.
Juniper also knew she could be a little shit sometimes, so from that moment on, she kept finding ways to test the waters of Rowan’s attraction.
She hadn’t come to terms with exactly how she felt about this changing dynamic, but she knew she liked the heated gaze directed at her when Rowan thought she wasn’t paying attention.
That’s when she lost her own game, when she came to realize just how much she liked Rowan’s muscled shoulders and arms, the way her stomach flexed when they stripped down to sports bras and shorts to shoot hoops at Rowan’s house, the way Rowan’s gentle and thoughtful demeanor always made her feel safe.
Juniper’s body had often been a site of pain, rejection, and trauma at the hands of others; with Rowan, it was a site of joy, respect, adoration, protection, and what she secretly hoped it could be, pleasure.
The realization that she had always felt cherished and protected so completely by one person throughout a lifetime of pain from those who were actually supposed to love and protect her stopped her in her tracks that day.
From that moment on, she saw her future align fully with that one person. Her person. Rowan.
“This is mine now,” she teased Rowan by waving the baseball cap she’d swiped from her head in front of her before putting it backwards on her own head.
“Junie,” Rowan sighed out with a smile.
Juniper hopped back down from the truck.
“What? I want to keep this with me while I’m at school.
I’ll sit it on top of my computer monitor so it stares down at me as a reminder of all the things you’d tell me.
” Juniper shifted her tone to one of fake authoritativeness.
She shoved one hand against her hip and wagged her finger in the air dramatically.
“Junie, do your homework! Junie, study for your exams! Junie, the school is gonna see your search history!”
Rowan shook her head and laughed. “Please don’t use the internet at school for that.”
“See!” Juniper accused, but then she smiled back. “I’m just happy to be able to use the internet at all!”
“Same,” Rowan agreed, with a smile that could split her face in half.
Their Rez didn’t have reliable internet and wouldn’t for several years after that.
All of the studying they had done for the SATs to even be able to go to college had been done the old-fashioned way.
By checking test prep books out from the library that already had all the sample tests either filled in or torn out.
Rowan traced the edges of the hat down to cup Juniper’s face.
“I think you look kind of hot in my hat.”
“I think you think I look hot all the time.”
“Caught me.” Rowan giggled as she threw her hands in the air in mock surrender.
Juniper caught her hands and watched Rowan’s eyes widen as she quickly wrapped them around her waist. They had spent the last ten minutes making out and yet she was still tentative about taking anything without permission first.
“I think you’ve been staring at me all summer.” She paused and lowered her tone. “Have you been checking me out, Birdsong?”
“I have,” Rowan admitted while a slow smirk formed on her face.
Juniper mirrored the smug energy of the smirk plastered across her shy best friend’s face by narrowing her eyes.
Fuck, that was hot. And it made her want to check Rowan out too, again.
Her eyes raked over the skin exposed around her bikini top, eyeing especially the new ways her lean upper body muscles rippled more pronounced under her skin.
Where Juniper’s body was all boobs, hips, and ass, the curves of Rowan’s body were much different than the curves of her own.
The rounded curve of the deltoids on her shoulders slicing diagonally into the rounded curve of her biceps. Fuck, that was hot too.
“Can we try something I always see in the movies?” Juniper asked.
“Anything.”
“Will you dip me and then kiss me? You look strong enough.”
Without answering, Rowan transitioned one arm from around her waist to behind her shoulders and swiveled to dip her in her arms. Juniper let out a shocked giggle that was met with a bright smile from Rowan as she leaned down to kiss her.
Juniper happily curled one hand around Rowan’s shoulder and the other around her arm. She lifted her back up with ease.
“How was that?” Rowan asked honestly.
“Better than the movies.” Juniper stood on her tiptoes to kiss her again.
A little more emboldened, Rowan shoved her hands into the back pockets of Juniper’s shorts. Right as they were about to get carried away again, Juniper’s stomach rumbled loudly.
“I’ll make out with you all day and all night, but I need to eat first.”
Rowan removed a hand from her back pocket and double tapped the styrofoam cooler beside them. “Lucky for us, we have a whole feast worth of trout.”
“That sounds like something my grandfather would say,” Juniper teased.
Rowan shrugged and smiled.
On the drive to Rowan’s house, Juniper leaned over to grab Rowan’s hand and threaded their fingers together. Her cheeks burned from more than the sun as she turned her face to watch the sunset roll along the horizon through the passenger-side window.
After they made quick work of unloading the truck, they settled into their normal routine of taking care of each other, a couple of kids mostly left to fend for themselves; or how they had always done it, to fend together.
Juniper stayed inside Rowan’s house to get the batter ready and oil heating up in the cast iron skillet while Rowan cleaned and gutted the fish outside.
Juniper put their favorite Rihanna CD into the boombox to play while she got everything going.
When Rowan tapped the back screen door with her foot, Juniper bounded over to open it and let her in.
Rowan balanced the tray on one hand and waved her free hand covered in gunk in Juniper’s face.
“Fish guts.”
“Gross! Wash your hands!”
Juniper flipped the water faucet on to let the warm water stream out so Rowan didn’t have to touch the handle with her nasty hands.
Rowan scrubbed her hands then settled her hip into the counter to watch Juniper batter the filets she’d made out of the trout and fry them up.
Juniper had already opened a can of corn and dumped it into a small pot on the back burner with her own special blend of seasonings.
“How do you always make canned vegetables taste so good?” Rowan asked.
“Desperation.” Juniper dramatically rolled her eyes.
They both laughed, but it was true. If that’s the only kind of food on your Rez, you find a way to doctor it up.
And Juniper had a lot of experience cooking for all of her younger siblings and cousins.
After the third toddler she helped raise by virtue of being the oldest girl in the family, she was close to an expert.
If she could get a toddler to eat a vegetable, she could get anyone to eat a vegetable.
Rowan reached up to rummage around a cabinet over their heads.
Juniper wasn’t sure why she felt the need to hide her secret stash of snacks — she was an only child.
It wasn’t like the free for all of four kids living at her trailer, not even counting the cousin or two that always wound up finding their way there too.
Sharing two bedrooms was the least difficult part.
Sharing snacks, or not sharing snacks – that was an outright battle.
She watched Rowan procure a rolled up bag of hot fries from deep in the back of the cabinet. She opened the bag and pulled one out.
“Hot fry?” She asked.
With hands busy dredging fish filets through egg and flour, Juniper responded by opening her mouth.
Rowan faltered as she slid the fry through her lips.
They’d done this so many times. This time, however, Juniper was thinking of all the other things a mouth could do, and she was pretty sure that’s where Rowan’s mind was at too.
As soon as Juniper’s tongue darted out to lick the leftover spicy dust off her lips, Rowan’s lips pressed into hers.
Her tongue swiped along her bottom lip to steal some for herself.
“Mmm hot,” Juniper joked.
They both devolved into a fit of giggles over the stupid pun, and the giddiness transitioned into another heated burst of making out. If Juniper wasn’t careful, she was going to burn the first batch of fish. She quickly wiped her hands.
“One moment please,” she said in her most official tone.
She placed her hand against Rowan’s chest to push her back. She flipped the fish over, grabbed Rowan’s t-shirt, and pulled her back in.
After they ate dinner and Juniper packaged up the leftovers for Rowan and her dad who still wouldn’t be home from his actual job as a fisherman for a few more hours, the conversation naturally returned to their impending transition to college in the next couple of weeks.
“Do you think you’ll get to come home at all during the semester?” Juniper asked.
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
Juniper watched uneasiness settle into Rowan’s face.
“My dad doesn’t have money for that,” she added.
“I wish I could come see you,” Juniper’s inflection raised in hopefulness as she spoke. “I’ve never been on a plane! Maybe if I get a job on campus… Fuck, I don’t even know how much plane tickets cost.”
“A lot. I… looked.”
“Oh.”
The warmth Juniper felt at knowing she had looked faded quickly into dread that it didn’t actually matter.
It wasn’t like either of them had family money to support them.
Who was she kidding? Her campus job money would likely go to keeping herself fed.
The constant struggle for basic necessities was something she was intimately familiar with.
“This kind of sucks actually,” she added.
“Yeah.” Rowan responded flatly. “It does.”
“Christmas, though?” Juniper added hopefully, shrugging her shoulders like it was any kind of solution to not seeing your best friend, the person you now realized you loved in a much different way, for several months at a time.
“Yeah, Christmas,” Rowan responded in the same flat tone.
Juniper reached across the table to link their pinkies together. Neither of them brought that topic up again.
That night when Juniper got home, she fought with her mind over which part of the day she wanted to think about as she laid in bed.
She had had her first real kiss. She’d kissed her best friend.
Her best friend thought she was hot. She was in love with her best friend.
Maybe her best friend was in love with her?
She replayed the images, the emotions, the feel of the kisses she shared with Rowan in her mind, but her thoughts kept involuntarily shifting to the way Rowan talked so despondently about their transition to college.
She wanted to stay in the happiness, but something about the way Rowan’s mood flatlined during dinner made her keep coming back to the uncertainty.
And then there was the way Rowan wasn’t able to fully look her in the eyes after Juniper leaned over to kiss her good night as they sat in front of Juniper’s house later…
Dread settled into the pit of her stomach, and she stared at her bedroom ceiling, begging the tears not to fall. Something was off.