Spencer felt herself surrendering to Toby's embrace, sinking deeper and deeper into his arms, feeling her senses overdosing on the familiar scent and feel of him. She felt warm and protected - and terrified. She knew how this would end. She woke up hyperventilating, surprised that her labored breaths hadn't awakened Paige. She rolled over onto her back and pulled Paige's arm from underneath her neck. She knew that this new position would become uncomfortable for Paige, once her arm fell asleep. More than that, she needed some physical separation from Paige at that moment.
Spencer clenched her fists so tight that her trimmed nails left imprints in her palms. Despite the pain, she clenched even tighter. It was the only way that she could keep her fists from pounding against the mattress in frustration. She was livid at herself for having had this dream. Again.
She didn't remember exactly how long she had been having the dreams. She didn't know how she could ever tell Paige about them. About the only thing that she did know was that, sooner or later, Paige would catch on. They knew each other too well.
Spencer wasn't worried that Paige would be worried or threatened by the fact that she had been having dreams about her ex. She was worried because she knew that Paige would know the real reason that she had been dreaming about him. It wasn't that Spencer wanted another go with Toby. It was that she was afraid that Paige wanted another go with Emily. Spencer couldn't bear to let even her subconscious mind go there, so her clever, cruel subconscious had simply switched the players around in her dreams.
In some ways, this thing with Paige felt like the uneasy truce of their field hockey days at Rosewood High. She and Paige had been thrown together by circumstances and were forced to figure out how to get along. Beyond that, Spencer didn't know. Did Paige love her? She wasn't sure. Did she love Paige? She wasn't sure. She knew that they both loved playing together. On and off the field.
And she knew that she couldn't handle any more of those dreams. But they wouldn't go away until she sorted things out with Paige.
"Let me read something to you."
"Okay," Paige said, closing her book. She had picked up the nervousness in the almost imperceptible tremble in Spencer's voice, and it made her nervous as well.
It was any random Saturday evening, and Spencer and Paige were sitting, as they often did, on the floor of Paige's dorm room with their backs against the bed that Paige's roommate had no use for on the weekends. They were present with each other, but not doing anything together until those six words broke the silence between them.
Paige wasn't surprised to hear the words from Spencer. It was one of Spencer's favorite lead-ins, and Paige certainly didn't mind what it ordinarily led to. Spencer would read some political or social opinion piece just to stir things up. It would lead to a bitter argument and violent screaming match, and, ultimately, to incredible sex, as they worked out their differences between the sheets.
But Paige could tell that it was different this time. Even before they were together, Paige always felt that she had a pretty good grasp of what Spencer was thinking, because, in so many ways, they thought alike. Over the course of the semester, as they progressed from being friends of convenience to lovers, and, finally, fixtures in each other's rooms, Paige had become more and more adept at reading Spencer's feelings. And Spencer's nervousness was a pretty good indication that this was about Emily.
Paige felt a quiver of dread in the pit of her stomach.
Were this to be one of the normal "read something" moments, Paige might have lifted a finger, signaling for Spencer to wait until she finished the paragraph. This time, though, she closed her finance book in her lap right away and turned slightly toward Spencer, signaling her full attention.
Spencer closed her eyes and tightened her lips, and Paige did something that she couldn't have done even a month earlier: She reached for Spencer's hand.
Although this was Spencer's first physical relationship with a woman, she was definitely never shy when it came to public displays of affection with Paige. She was a Hastings, and she would never apologize for or feel the need to hide who she was.
Except to Paige.
Competing with Paige had become ingrained at an almost cellular level into Spencer's essence. In many ways, competition defined their relationship. It certainly defined their sex life. So it took a monumental shift in Spencer's psyche for her to admit – either to Paige or to herself – that she needed the reassurance of Paige's hand in the same way that she would have from Toby's hand - or anybody else's, for that matter. Only as Paige established a precedent and a pattern of allowing herself to surrender to Spencer's comfort and nurture did the switch flip somewhere inside Spencer, giving her the permission to be vulnerable.
She leaned her head on Paige's shoulder, and Paige encircled her with her arms, placing her lips on the top of Spencer's head. Spencer rested there for several seconds and then pushed herself away, ready to Hastings her way through.
"Evening Star," Spencer announced with a heavy sigh, "by Edgar Allan Poe."
As Spencer read, Paige cringed internally, straightening her body to create a distance from Spencer. The cold moon, her cold smile, surrounded by the planets, her slaves;– it was Emily. It wasn't too far off from the description that Paige had given of Emily when Spencer called her out over their break-up. When Spencer read the part about turning away from the moon to the distant but warmer light of the Evening Star, Paige recognized Spencer. Not the actual Spencer Hastings, but the Spencer Hastings that existed only in that dark corner of Spencer's mind, standing forlorn, dwarfed by the monumental effigy that her mind had erected to represent the way that she feared that Paige perceived Emily.
The problem with dating her ex's best friend, Paige had come to realize, was that Spencer had had a front row seat for Emily's relationship with Paige. Spencer knew what Emily was thinking about the two of them before Paige ever did, and, in many cases, Emily even shared things about Paige with Spencer that she never shared with Paige herself. This insight only served to make Spencer insecure, once she and Paige got together. She knew how much Paige loved Emily. Even when Emily's moon turned a hard, cold face toward her, Paige couldn't keep herself from coming back. And Spencer knew how genuine the thing that Paige and Emily had was, and how different it was for Emily with any of the other women who got pulled into orbit around her.
It didn't matter that Paige had never compared what she had with Spencer to what she'd had with Emily. Spencer, herself, made that unwinnable comparison almost constantly.
"So," Spencer said, closing the book but leaving her finger inside to hold the page. Without moving her head, she glanced at Paige for not even a second before she lowered her head and let her eyes follow her finger as it traced over the raised letters on the cover of the book in her lap.
"So," Paige echoed, knowing that Spencer had more to say and was only waiting for an acknowledgment that Paige had finished processing what she had just heard.
"So, am I just your Evening Star?" Spencer asked, now idly thumbing through the pages of the book, smoothing out dog-eared corners on some of the pages with the nail of her middle finger.
"If, by that you mean…"
"You know what I mean," Spencer said impatiently, letting out a huff as she let her head fall back against the thin mattress of the dorm bed. "Consolation prize. Second place. Second best. Second fiddle. Second…"
"Spencer!" Paige was trying to keep her composure, but she was weary of this. As bad as the circumstances behind her move to California had been, they had given her the opportunity to move on from Emily. But Spencer just kept dredging her memory up.
Part of Paige – a very large part – knew how Spencer was felt. She had spent most of her relationship with Emily thinking that she was out of her league, and wondering when Emily would realize that and move on. She often wondered what it would be like to be the Emily in the relationship – the secure one, the one in control, the one with the upper hand. But, now that she found herself in that situation, she didn't like it.
"Banana," Spencer said weakly, and when Paige shot her a confused look, she clarified, "Second banana," with a faint smile.
Paige opened her mouth to say something, but a single laugh escaped instead. She wasn't sure why, but it had something to do with the number of "Second" examples that Spencer had come up with, and with the fact that she couldn't let it go without saying the last one.
Spencer nudged her shoulder against Paige's, her smile now full, as the emotional weight of the room ebbed slightly. She stood up, with her right hand on her hip, and her left hand, the one closest to Paige, on her forehead. Paige allowed herself a brief stare up Spencer's long, toned legs, enjoying the view that she was afforded by the angle of their relative positions and the skimpy practice shorts that Spencer had on.
Whether it was intentional or not – Paige wasn't even sure how aware Spencer was that she was doing it – Spencer had begun dressing in ways that accentuated the physical features that Paige preferred. Especially those features which she felt could compete with Emily's. Especially when she and Paige were alone, just hanging out casually. Especially on certain days of the month.
Spencer's upraised arm had also lifted her shirt, allowing Paige a distracting glimpse of the curve between Spencer's hips and ribs.
Spencer held the position for several moments before she tossed her head back, smoothing the hand that had been on her forehead through her disheveled hair. "Oh, God. I'm sorry," she said, slowly shaking her head. "I'm being so pathetic right now." Spencer tapped her toes against the floor, trying to hide how much of a struggle it was to hold things together.
Paige hated seeing Spencer like this. Really hated it. It left her feeling swindled; a victim of the old bait-and-switch. This isn't why you date a Hastings, she thought. She had expected someone who could keep up with her and challenge her, not someone who was vanquished by insecurity over the memory of Paige's ex.
Paige was done. She would have to end this, and the sooner the better.
Spencer never saw it coming.
In one swift motion, Paige swept her arm behind Spencer's knees, causing her to tumble back onto the bed with a gasp of surprise. In an instant, Paige was on top of her, grabbing her wrists so tightly that it turned her skin white. Spencer saw the fire in Paige's eyes as she looked down at her like a demon hovering above some helpless soul that she was about to devour alive. My Ass! Spencer thought. She bucked her hips with such force that it knocked Paige onto the floor and, acting purely on instinct, catapulted herself on top of her prey with a feral yell, pinning Paige against the ground with her arms pressing down against Paige's shoulders.
Paige could've given in right then and there and let Spencer have her, but she wasn't sure that she had made her point, yet. After trying in vain to counteract the advantage that Spencer had on her in leverage, getting nothing from her efforts except the Hastings smirk of superiority, Paige relaxed her shoulders and kicked with her legs, sending Spencer into a somersault. Paige opened her eyes in panic when she heard Spencer's body thud against the door.
"Oh, shit! Are you okay?" Paige rolled over, the fastest way to close the distance between the two of them, and reached a concerned hand toward Spencer's head. Spencer swatted her hand away and grabbed her by the shirt, clenching her fists into its material as she pulled Paige in and began kissing her aggressively, grunting like a Viking at dinner. This, Spencer realized, was what she and Paige were about. Emily, Toby, and everyone else was irrelevant. She and Paige were pure, animal attraction. When that was working, nothing and no one else mattered. And, if that only lasted another day, another year, or another minute, so be it.
When it was over, after they had each, in a fever of unrestrained lust, destroyed the clothes that the other was wearing, after they had finally made it to the bed and worn each other out, emotionally as much as physically, after their breathing and the balance of power between them returned to normal, Paige finally spoke.
"The Evening Star," she said, her voice going up ever so slightly as she formed the question. "That's Venus, right?"
Spencer nodded her weary head against Paige's chest. Her arm was stretched across Paige's body, and she was lazily rubbing the pad of her index finger over the semicolon tattooed on the inside of Paige's wrist, enjoying the way that its roughness felt in contrast to the smooth skin around it.
"And Venus was the goddess of…"
"Love, fertility, sex, seduction," Spencer interrupted, spitting out the words in rapid succession, compelled by the Hastings in her to prove that she knew the answer. As the words tumbled out of her bruised lips, she realized the point that Paige was making. "Oh," she said softly, freezing her finger in midair, an inch or so above the black dot of the semicolon. "Well, you could've just said that," she said with a hint of playful irritation in her tone before she allowed her finger to drop and continue exploring the ink on Paige's wrist.
"Could I have?" Paige challenged. "You really think that anything that I could've said would have gotten through?"
Spencer shrugged, turning her back to Paige and laying her head on top of her own hands. She knew that Paige was right, but she didn't feel like admitting defeat.
"Besides," Paige added, grabbing Spencer's shoulder as she turned toward her, rasping into her ear, "where's the fun in that?"
"You know, McCullers." Spencer rolled over with a smirk, facing Paige. "Venus is also the goddess of victory."
"In your dreams, Hastings."
Spencer laughed, content, at those words. This was her dream; not the recurring Toby nonsense. This was one of those unbelievable flights of fancy that could only happen in dreams, where impossible situations come and go regularly, way too fast for the mind to keep up with them. It was a dream as exhilarating as it was exhausting; as comfortable as it was confusing; as familiar as it was fractured.
"Yeah," she smiled, threading her fingers into Paige's hair. "In my dreams."
A/N - Sorry, guys. This was my third attempt at writing a second chapter that didn't betray the mood of the first chapter. (I'm sure that you've all read one-shots that were extended by popular demand but would've been better left as one-shots.)
I was able to retain the theme of lifting titles from poems by Edgar Allan Poe. This chapter's title comes from the poem, "Dreams."