:
Explosive Decompression
altunderscore
8
Her fingers were tangled in the thin cloth of a cotton nightshirt. She didn't need to open her eyes to see the faded blue fabric bunched in her fist, or to know that it missed the two pale buttons closest to the collar.
She'd been here-
-Right here-
-countless times before.
Drowning wasn't the right word, despite the pool of fluid in her throat.
This was like being buried alive.
".. Max?"
That shirt had belonged to William Price.
He had given it to Chloe.
Chloe had sulked for days when Joyce had gotten rid of it.
-ten years ago-
It was everything she could do not to open her eyes at the soft ghosting of fingertips across her cheek.
"You had a bad dream, Max.." Chloe whispered sleepily as she pulled the blanket tighter around them.
Max could barely hear her speak through the choke of her own breath or the dizzying throb in her head, but the half-forgotten pressure of a clammy heel hooked over both of her knees and the faint scent of bubblegum toothpaste in the inches of air between them was enough to frame the scene through the eyelids she had crushed shut.
She tried to swallow, but the motion caught somewhere below the back of her tongue and she sputtered instead, exhaling heavily through her nose in a retching motion that was half a cough and half a gag. She inhaled sharply and recoiled, hacking, as the iron trickle backslid towards her lungs.
She couldn't breathe-
"Max?"
'Max?'
She couldn't-
Something -popped- inside her head as she was jerked onto her shoulder. She felt something take hold of her firmly by the jaw and roll it at an angle with significantly more force than what would be considered gentle, but with another release of pressure and a sudden seizing in her chest, she felt air rush into her lungs.
"Max, can you hear me?" Came Victoria's voice from above her, quiet and clear.
Max coughed wetly in reply, but opened her eyes all the same. Victoria's voice had been calm and measured, but the look on her face was just south of frantic. Max brought the hand that wasn't pinned underneath her up towards Victoria's wrist, clumsily taking hold of it in a gesture that was supposed to be reassuring but wound up unsettling both of them instead.
Her hand wasn't supposed to shake like that.
She inhaled again -more deeply this time, and forcibly stilled her nerves.
'Just breathe, Max.'
She exhaled slowly, content simply to let the world stop spinning in its own time.
After a minute or so had gone by without any surprises, she felt collected enough to try to speak.
"I'm okay, Victoria.." Max said softly, and this time her hold on the other girl's arm was firm.
Victoria visibly relaxed; the tension leaving her in a wave from the tight furrow of her brow down to the jitters in the thigh Max's head was resting on. The blonde's clipped fingernails brushed along Max's chin as she shifted her hold to allow her a bit more room to move, and Max's next breath came out as a relieved sigh as she rolled onto her back.
Victoria exhaled, the hand she didn't have cradling Max's head in her lap moving up to brush her fringe out of her eyes in one of her few nervous habits.
"What the hell was that?" Victoria asked, and Max swallowed as she considered how to reply.
"I.. get nosebleeds, every now and then." Max said, trailing off somewhere in the middle, no longer able to meet Victoria's eyes.
She still heard Victoria's teeth click together, even if she couldn't see the expression on her face.
"Since when, Caulfield?" Victoria asked, a familiar acidity bubbling somewhere in her tone. "I think I'd have noticed by now if you-" Victoria exhaled harshly as she abruptly cut herself off.
Max felt the hand on her shoulder flex, thin fingers clenching and shifting restlessly as Victoria navigated through whatever was in her head.
When she spoke a moment later her voice had softened, but had somehow become heavier for it.
"Look, Max.. I know it sounds self-centered, but I've been fucking watching you for a while now, and I think I'd know if 'random nosebleeds and fainting' were some of your things."
Max's lips turned upwards, affronted, but Victoria just clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and lowered an eyebrow in response.
"Don't look at me like that Caulfield. I'm not saying there can't be anything about you I don't know- I'm saying that I would know something like this." Victoria said, gesturing down at the bloody cashmere sweater Max was now using as pillow-slash-towel.
Victoria's grip shifted, and Max looked back towards her face in time to see her expression change into something less anxious and more.. tired? Frustrated?
Disappointed?
"If I had thought -this- was a thing that could happen, I- we would have been ready for it. I wouldn't have been-" Victoria's head lolled back as her gaze drifted skyward.
"Fuck.." Max heard her say, her voice more a breath than a whisper.
They stayed that way for a handful of moments, letting the sun set.
Victoria eventually pulled her left knee upward, drawing the back of Max's head downward into the valley where the top of the blonde girl's thigh met her hipbone. She stretched her other leg out in front of her and to the side, sighing heavily as she rolled her shoulders and propped herself up on her arms.
She met Max's eyes again.
"You are okay, right?" Victoria asked, and Max paused to actually consider her question.
She licked her lips.
"Okay's a.. strong word, but I think I'll live." She offered honestly, wiggling so that she could lay more comfortably at an angle between Victoria's legs.
Victoria laughed, surprised.
"I'd hope so. For a second there I thought you'd had an aneurysm or something."
She laughed again.
"Can you imagine explaining any of this to the peanut gallery back at Blackwell? It'd be an absolute fucking circus."
She shook her head idly, then glanced downward as Max spoke up.
"At least Juliet would have something new to talk about then: 'Local Girls Elope, Die in Occult Woodland Tryst', or something dramatic like that." Max said, giggling tiredly.
Her laughter faded as her eyes fell on the stained sleeve of Victoria's sweater.
".. I really am okay, though. A little lightheaded, but I'll make it." She said, her cheeks pinking somewhat in embarrassment as her stomach chose that moment to growl weakly.
".. a little hungry too, apparently." Max said, twisting her head a little so she didn't have to look at the girl she was laying on.
Even still, she could feel Victoria's smug grin.
"Well, we did come here for food in the first place, before someone decided to have a medical emergency in the middle of what was supposed to be a romantic photo-shoot." Victoria grumbled in faux-frustration.
"Romantic?" Max questioned, looking up at the girl above her.
"Mhmm." Victoria murmured as she met Max's eyes playfully. "I was going to woo the hell out of you, Maxine."
Despite the clearly joking tone in Victoria's voice, Max still turned fuchsia at the abuse of her given name.
"I think you're taking some liberties there, 'Tori." Max said, rolling over dizzily so that the haughty blonde wasn't so upside-down.
"You know I -hate- my name." She growled, planting one of her palms in the leaves next to Victoria's hip and leveraging herself up.
She only wobbled a little. Progress.
Victoria just showed her teeth, and in a motion that was almost lazy pulled Max's planted arm against her side, bridged her hips, and rolled both of them over.
"I'll take whatever liberties I want, Maxine.." Victoria purred, her face millimetres away from Max's own.
Oh.
The way Victoria's eyes raked over her in the moments that followed caused her breath to hitch, but Victoria's heavy expression quickly broke into a wry smile as she leaned up and let go of Max's arm.
Max groaned as Victoria's pleasant weight left her, but the blonde clicked her tongue again and pinched her brow in frustration.
"We've missed lunch already because you're too fucking cute for your own good, Caulfield. We're not missing dinner, too." Victoria said as she rocked back onto her knees.
Max mewled, snaking a heel behind where Victoria knelt between her legs and gently pressed her forward.
The litany of emotion that Victoria could convey with just the expression of her lips and jaw blew what remained of Max's mind. The one she settled on was complex in a way that was hard for Max to describe, but the pull of her voice, the pressure of the hand pushing down against her hips, the restless flicker of a tongue behind teeth-
Hungry.
Victoria leaned down, catching Max's jaw in the palm of the hand that wasn't currently pinning her to the ground. Max squirmed, futilely attempting to press more of herself against the girl between her knees, but no matter how she twisted she just couldn't-
"Victoria.."
Green eyes bored into her, -through her-, the heat of their focus holding her in place far more effectively than the hand at her waist or the nails against her cheek.
"Caulfield, you mutinous slut," Victoria hissed, "we are going to get up, go back to the car, un-fuck ourselves, and go to dinner. Is any of that particularly hard to understand?"
The grip on her jaw relaxed somewhat, and Max recovered enough to shake her head side to side wordlessly.
Victoria looked her over one last time before leaning down and pressing their lips together. Max could feel the better part of the blonde's hawkish intensity unwind against her lips in the warm seconds that passed before she pulled back, just far enough away that they could meet each other's eyes.
How Victoria could make a smirk look equally brazen and vulnerable of all things..
"Good. I wasn't sure if I could tell you no again. Now we don't have to find out." She confessed, but before Max could respond Victoria had stolen another kiss and was pulling both of them to their feet.
Max fought down a brief wave of vertigo as she rose, but it wasn't anything a few seconds of forceful eye-rubbing couldn't fix. Anything to keep her from having to look at the blonde girl busying herself gathering their things from around them before she'd had time to catch her breath, really.
She took a moment to dust herself off a bit before she followed the taller girl out of the clearing. The couple of minutes they spent heading back to the car were mostly quiet aside from the soft rush of wind through the trees and the occasional snap of a fallen branch underfoot.
By the time the white Miata had come back into view, Max had cooled down enough that she could think through some of the less-heavy things that had happened in the last hour or so.
Her first attempt at speaking got lost in the sounds of Victoria opening and searching through the trunk of the car, but Max's second try was articulate enough to reach her through the mostly organized mass of supplies.
"If I'm being too aggressive, I'm sorry." Max said sincerely as she stepped around towards the back of the car. She would have tried phrasing it in a way that was slightly less blunt if she thought she could have managed it without stumbling over her words, but if Victoria's expression as she turned around to face her was anything to go by, the blonde had understood what she'd meant regardless.
"Max, I basically dragged you across second base a couple of hours ago and I was worried that -I- was the one being too forceful then." Victoria said, holding a thin jacket out for Max to take.
Max peeled herself out of her dirtied cardigan before taking the darker jacket from Victoria, slipping it on carefully as the other girl continued.
"This isn't the first time this has come up, which means it's something we're both thinking about, right?" Victoria asked, tossing her sweater and Max's cardigan back into the trunk together before pulling a folded skirt from the top of the duffel-bag in front of her.
Max hmmed an agreement while she checked her reflection in the screen of her phone.
"When you say it that way it makes sense, but it's.. ugh." Max faltered, taking the moment she needed to wipe at her lips with her dampened fingertips to collect herself.
"It just feels weird how weird it doesn't feel." Max said, nodding emphatically as everything came together in her head.
Victoria's eyebrow crept upward and she snorted, almost stumbling as she stepped into the puddle of her skirt.
"Run that by me one more time, Caulfield." She said, visibly confused but grinning nonetheless.
Max's cheeks pinked at the way Victoria was looking at her, but she explained herself as best she could anyway.
"It just catches me off guard how good all of this is. I like seeing you like this, and it's hard to pull back and look at things rationally when just being with you is as nice as it is."
It was Victoria's turn to blush, but Max continued.
"Every time I catch you looking at me there's a second where I think I'm crazy for imagining all of this; that I'm insane for thinking I could be close to Victoria Chase of all people, and then you turn red and look away just like you're doing now and I can't keep the smile off my face, because seeing you like that.. it's.."
Max swallowed and shook her head.
"Look 'Tori, I've got all the time in the world to gush and stroke your ego, but the short version is that if you like me half as much as I apparently like you, neither of us has much to worry about."
Yeah.
That sounded right.
If the small smile the blonde tried to hide behind her hand as she stepped towards the other side of the car was anything to go by; Victoria agreed, too.
Portland's waterfront wore the twilight like a ballgown dyed in amber and blue.
Max looked down at her dingy canvas sneakers and denim jeans.
She felt underdressed.
There was a warm pressure around her wrist for a moment and then she felt fingers slipping between her own.
Max was suddenly very aware of the dozens of people walking all around the two of them, but Victoria's hold did more to ground her than it did to set her on edge.
Still, the girl at her side seemed to notice something was amiss and she turned to face her as well as she could without letting go of her hand.
"Stagefright, Max?" Victoria asked, her eyes flicking between the uncertain set of Max's feet and the nervous jitter of her fingers against the blonde's own.
Max started to shake her head on reflex, then paused as she reconsidered.
She nodded softly.
"A little, yeah." She admitted, then hastily amended her statement when she noticed the way Victoria's eyebrows crept towards her hairline.
"It's just.. this is our first date. My first date ever, really, and you look incredible. I look like a.. grungy hipster, or something." Max said, shuffling awkwardly in place.
She heard a muffled snort, and looked up in something like alarm.
Victoria was grinning despite the unsteady air.
"Right now you're my grungy hipster, Max; it's part of your charm." Victoria said, with about as much theater as if she were discussing the weather. Still, despite the casual -almost dismissive- delivery, Victoria's eyes and smile never wavered. Her bluntness was more of a reassurance than anything else, really.
Honest, and careless of the consequences.
Cavalier. That was the word.
Max was pulled from her thoughts as the blonde gestured around them at the multitude of people going about their lives.
"Besides, this is Portland. Half the grungy hipsters on the planet are right here in this city. This is where they make your kind, Max." Victoria said flippantly.
She looked at Max again and her expression softened, her smile going from playful to something more complex as she stepped in close, resting her free hand on Max's hip underneath the dark fabric of her jacket.
"And, if you haven't noticed, 'grungy hipsters' are kind-of my thing."
She looked around them briefly and then back down at Max, pulling her closer as she did so.
"Well, -this one- is, at least."
Max could almost feel Victoria's words sink into her, warming her from the inside like fuzzy little embers.
She laughed softly, the sound quickly turning into a sigh as she rested her forehead in the center of Victoria's chest.
"I'm definitely wearing something nice the next time we go out. I promise." Max said, raising her head to meet Victoria's eyes.
Victoria, for her part, looked scandalized.
"Are you asking me on a second date before we even finish our first? The audacity, Miss Caulfield-" she said, cutting herself off with a melodramatic huff as she stepped away and spun on her heel, turning her back to Max.
Max missed the pleasant warmth of Victoria's hand in hers already and it'd only been about two seconds that they'd been apart.
Fuck.
She'd worry about that later.
For now, her hand flexed involuntarily, eager to reclaim the warmth it had held moments ago. She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Victoria's middle from behind, pulling the taller blonde as flush against her as she could manage without setting the two of them off-balance and tumbling into the railing at their side.
"I know a good thing when I see it, 'Tori.." Max mumbled into the middle of Victoria's back in a way that smushed her words together as they left her mouth.
She turned her head to the side, listening intently to the soft, steady thrum of the heart just inches away.
She felt a smirk of her own creep across her face.
"And nobody said it had to be our second date we go out for. I was thinking our next one would be just the two of us and some cheesy movies or something; the fancy stuff can wait a few more weeks I think."
The way Victoria's heart sped up just the slightest bit as she spoke coaxed a wholehearted smile up from within her.
She squeezed the blonde in her arms a bit more tightly.
"Now hurry up and get me to this restaurant before we starve; I can feel how empty you are and -my- stomach's been growling since noon."
She felt Victoria's breath hitch as the taller girl stifled a laugh, but she stepped forward and tugged Max around the corner of the building they stood next to and down the path ahead nonetheless.
"You're being a drama-queen, Max." Victoria said as she pulled the brunette to the front of a smallish building about a block from the waterfront.
"A little hypocritical coming from you, isn't it?" Max sniped back playfully as Victoria juggled both their conversation and talking to the hostess just inside the door.
"No. It's only hypocrisy when it comes from the rabble, Maxine. When I say it, it's an expert opinion: you're being a drama-queen. I'd know."
The sincerity with which Victoria spoke seemed to catch both Max and the hostess herself off guard as she brought the two of them past islands of dimly lit tables towards a booth at the back corner of the restaurant.
The hostess nodded to them, mentioning offhandedly that a waiter would be with them in a moment. Max squeezed herself into the seat on the far side of the table and was glad that she could still see the door through the bustle of the restaurant if she craned her neck a little.
Victoria followed the path of her eyes towards the door, but didn't make a point of it.
"You've never had actual sushi before, right?" She asked, idly paging through the exotic-looking menu without paying it too much attention.
Max shook her head emphatically, glad to have something to talk about.
"Not really, but a lot of it looks good. Really colorful." Max said, flipping through her copy as well. "What's that?" She asked, pointing at a picture of what looked like little orange balls wrapped in what she knew to be dried seaweed.
Victoria squinted a little as she leaned across the table to get a better view of the page, tracing a finger along the Japanese characters underneath the picture on the menu.
"Ikura. Salmon roe." She explained. "Not bad, but a little adventurous for a first-timer. You ever had caviar?"
It was Max's turn to arch an eyebrow.
"My dad's not Scrooge McDuck, so no, I haven't." Max jabbed, taking a bit more pleasure than was probably proper in Victoria's affronted expression.
"Then maybe give that one a pass until next time. Now this-" she said, sliding her finger down the page to point towards a dark-brown and rich-looking something fixed to a pad of rice by a green band of seaweed, "is unagi, and it's amazing."
It did look pretty good..
"Most people recommend starting out with salmon and tuna," she said neutrally, pointing towards a pair of orange and pinkish pieces near the top of the page, "but then it's easy to just get that far and stop, you know?"
Oh, she was pretty sure she knew what Victoria was getting at.
"You're saying that people that only eat those two things are 'plebeians'." Max said, smirking. The airquotes might have been unnecessary, but the blonde girl's response was worth it.
Victoria's mouth dropped open a little in shock, but she managed to pull herself back together quickly enough, whether from necessity or raw obstinance Max couldn't tell.
"Taylor." Victoria said, as though the other blonde's name was some sort of curse.
Max couldn't help it. She giggled.
"She said you'd say something like that. 'Sushi snob' may have been the exact words she used, but I was a little sleepy at the time and might be misremembering."
Victoria growled.
"Salmon nigiri is the chicken nugget of real sushi and nothing will change my mind." She said, no longer even bothering to hide the disdain in her voice.
"What's that make, I dunno, California rolls?" Max asked innocently.
Victoria surprised her, leaning back in her seat as the beginnings of a smug smile twitched into being along the edge of one cheek.
"A fucking prank, Caulfield." She said, and probably would have gone farther into her spiel if not for the waitress approaching with their drinks and a bowl of what appeared to be salted green pea pods.
The waitress, a pretty dark-complected girl that looked to be a few years older than they were asked if they were ready to order, and with a questioning glance Max's way, Victoria said that they were.
What came out of Victoria's mouth in the ensuing thirty seconds or so was a string of mixed Japanese and English that the server appeared to have no trouble following but left Max feeling a little lost. Victoria noticed the way Max was looking between the two of them and spoke.
"I got a bunch of different stuff to share that we can go over when it gets here, so if you want to pick something safe that you'll definitely like, that would probably be the best call." She said as an aside, and Max nodded in response.
She turned the menu back towards the second page and pointed towards what she recognized as a fried pork cutlet over a bowl of rice and greens. The pang in her belly as she'd looked at it was all the suggestion she needed.
"I'll take this one, please." She said, doing the best she could to keep her hunger out of her voice.
The server nodded quickly and made a note on her pad before asking what they wanted for drinks. Two orders of green tea later and the pair of them were alone again, the waitress stepping out of sight after a polite gesture.
"You got the katsudon, right?" Victoria asked, and Max nodded, remembering the word the girl that took their orders had used.
"Mhmm. It looked like a good compromise, so that's what I went with. What'd you get?" Max asked, curious.
"Unadon." She replied, then leaned forward a little to explain. "Basically the same thing you picked, but with grilled eel instead of pork."
Something had apparently shifted in Max's expression because Victoria then cocked her head to the side and continued, a little nonplussed.
"Don't look like that Caulfield, it's really normal-tasting. A little sweet, like Japanese barbecue, actually."
Max was going to give Victoria the benefit of the doubt on this one. She trusted her.
"I also got us a few different kinds of nigiri and sashimi- sushi with and without rice- to try. Nothing too crazy, just some crab, eel, octopus, toro, and salmon."
Max laughed, "The 'chicken-nugget of sushi'?"
Victoria shrugged her shoulders and grinned.
"I said it was vanilla, not that it wasn't good." Victoria said, pointing at her with one of the green pods she had picked out of the small bowl at the center of the table.
Max took one herself and looked it over, noticing the way the salt stuck to the skin of the warm beanpod. She glanced up at Victoria and watched as she pressed on one edge until a vibrant green bean poked out of the other side, which she then popped into her mouth with an idle flick of her wrist.
Max mirrored her, a content sigh escaping her as the salty flavor reached her tongue. She hadn't eaten all day, and everything was delicious.
"Edamame. Steamed soybeans." Victoria said, taking another from the pile, sliding the bowl to the side as she did so to make space for their drinks which had just arrived.
Next to the pot the waitress set in the center of the table went a pair of cups, and after them were two bowls of a cloudy ocher soup-broth that smelled absolutely amazing.
Max couldn't contain herself and she snagged the nearer of the two, wiggling restlessly in place as she inhaled the earthy steam. Inside the broth were little cubes of what she recognized as tofu, along with a few squares of seaweed.
It tasted twice as good as it smelled, which was saying a lot, Max thought.
Scalding the tip of her tongue was a small price to pay, all things considered.
Her second sip was considerably more careful despite that, and she noticed Victoria suppressing a smile of her own as the blonde watched her over her cup of tea. She knew what that look meant: there was a snarky comment incoming, and it was coming in fast.
Probably best to head that off while she could.
"It's nice being away from Blackwell, isn't it?" Max asked too-cheerily, feeling a little lame as soon as the words came out of her mouth. That was the best she had? Really?
Victoria surprised her again though; a tired but relieved sigh escaping her in response to the question.
"It really is." Victoria admitted as she leaned back in her seat, unwinding as she did so. "It's good to be able to go off-script a little."
Victoria swirled her tea around in its glass as she considered what she was going to say next, and Max suddenly didn't feel so self-conscious about her question.
The blonde's lips quirked minutely.
"Dana'd be about three songs into her Top-40 playlist and I'd be trying to decide if today was going to be the day I climbed out the window on a bedsheet and made a break for it, like Blackwell was an asylum or something." She finished, sipping her tea with a bemused expression on her face.
Max leaned forward across the table, grinning as she set her miso to the side as carefully as she could, yet somehow still managed to slosh a couple of drops onto the tabletop anyway.
"As if the valley-girl hiphop you blast at six in the morning is any less obnoxious," she snarked, "And besides, why not just hang out with the rest of the Mean Girls Club like you usually do?"
Victoria glanced back at her askance.
"Alright; first, fuck you Lamefield- it's a guilty pleasure and anybody that doesn't like it can cope." Victoria huffed, dropping her arm along the backrest before she continued. "Second, Taylor's usually up to her neck in overdue homework this far into the weekend, and Courtney has some sort of movie-buff group she goes to on Sunday nights."
Max didn't flinch at Victoria's tone, instead choosing to answer with a meaningful look of her own
"You let your minions have off-days?" She asked, sounding maybe a little too surprised.
"Of course, Caulfield. You think I'm a cartoon villain or something?" Victoria replied with a huff. She sipped at her tea again before speaking again, "Besides, Taylor knows way too much. Keeping her happy makes things a lot less stressful in the long run."
A faint buzz came from the direction of the blonde's purse, and Max watched as one corner of Victoria's mouth twitched in response.
"Speak of the devil.. " Victoria muttered mostly to herself as she checked her phone. Whatever she was reading caused the faintest pink flush to cross her cheeks for an instant before she schooled herself, hastily tapping out a response. When she was done, she unceremoniously dumped her phone back into the bag she had pulled it from and raised her eyes to meet Max's, her expression chagrined.
"Taylor wants it to be known that she needs pictures." Victoria said, an eyeroll somehow audible.
"On a scale of 1 to J. Jonah Jameson, how enthusiastic are these demands?" Max asked teasingly, relishing the few confused seconds it took for Victoria to get the reference.
"The crazy editor guy from those cheesy Spider-Man movies?" Victoria asked rhetorically, almost visibly appalled by Max's taste.
Her indulgent smile probably wasn't doing her any favors here, in fairness, and Victoria shook her head in mild disgust before she spoke again.
"I don't know, like a 7?" She said dismissively, but there was an undercurrent of something else in her tone. "There might have been a threat or two somewhere in there, but Taylor's all bark anyway. I'm not worried."
Victoria said that, but there was something in the way the other girl was refusing to meet her eyes that told her she wasn't so sure.
Max reached across the table and gently took Victoria's hand in hers.
"It's okay 'Tori. Taylor scares me a little bit too."
The other girl immediately looked up -red in the face as though she'd been slapped- with an acidic barb springing to life on her lips.
She was like a little blonde cobra.
She even hissed.
It was way cuter than it had any right to be, but Max's chance to tell her exactly how cute was interrupted by the server returning to their table, this time carefully balancing a tray laden with what Max would have first assumed was an art display, if it didn't smell so ridiculously good.
The server glanced down at their joined hands on the tabletop, then briefly at the nakedly flustered expression on Victoria's face.
"She's cute when she's cranky, right?" Max asked before her brain had the chance to tell her to stop.
The curly-haired waitress -Noelle, by the tag on her blouse- laughed as she placed their bowls down in the open space on the table.
"You both are, really." She said, and suddenly Max's was the one fighting down a blush, and she saw the mocha-skinned girl smile from the corner of her eye.
"If you two need anything just wave and I'll be right over, and enjoy your date." She said with an almost teasing lilt to her voice as she placed the slate holding their sushi between them. Max didn't miss the amusement plain on her face as she glanced between them one last time before departing.
For a handful of seconds, the only sound between them was the ambient bustle of the restaurant itself. Then, Victoria spoke.
"Did we just get bullied by our waitress?" The blonde asked, incredulous, and Max laughed.
"You got bullied. We got complimented." She said, then took a moment to look over all the food in front of them. If that meant she could plausibly ignore Victoria's glare while she did so, well, she -was- starving after all..
Her mind made up, she attacked the bowl of katsudon first, and she knew before she even closed her mouth she had made a good choice. The first bite actually froze her in place as she chewed, like her brain didn't believe what her scalded tongue was telling it.
Victoria just plucked a piece of crab nigiri off the artsy piece of slate between them with her fingers and smirked as it disappeared into her mouth.
"Good shit, right?" She asked after she swallowed, and Max had to agree. The next several minutes passed in a haze as she worked her way through most of the food in front of her with a seemingly mindless focus, pausing once or twice to take a piece of fish Victoria offered her.
Octopus was a bit too chewy, but the eel was good enough that she convinced Victoria to part with some of her unadon in exchange for an unspecified favor at some point in the future.
The blonde was, however, prepared to guard whatever it was that toro happened to be with her life. Max took one look at the hard glint in Victoria's eye and decided not to press her luck. Instead, she bit into the piece of crab nigiri she had stolen while the blonde was distracted lording over the toro and signaled for their waitress, swallowing as she did so.
The well-dressed young woman didn't take long to notice Max's waving hand, and she quickly made her way towards their table with a smile that was a hair too mischievous to be fake.
"Everything alright so far?" She asked easily, glancing curiously between the two of them as she set their empty dishes off to the side of the table.
Victoria was busy chewing, a blissfully vacant expression on her face, so Max answered for the both of them.
"Kinda perfect, actually." She said as she absently fiddled with her almost-empty teacup. "Maybe some more tea?"
Noelle nodded and made a note on the pale green pad in her hand.
"Have you thought about dessert?" She asked, and immediately Max's eyes widened as she remembered Taylor's very strongly worded suggestion.
"Oh! I was told not to leave without trying whatever mochi ice-cream is, if that's okay." Max said in a way that was somehow half a question.
The dark complected girl just hmm'd in agreement and made another note. She looked at Victoria for a second or two as well, but it only took about that long to notice that the blonde girl seemed to be content exactly the way she was.
Noelle stashed her notepad in a side pocket of her apron and expertly hefted their remaining dishes into one hand before she again disappeared down the aisle and into the back of the restaurant.
She came back only a couple of minutes later with another decorative slate, this one ornamented with a handful of pastel oval shapes around the same size as smallish plums. They had been split in half and arranged in a spiral pattern around what looked to be a chocolate flower-bud, and had been topped with a variety of colorful things. Max recognized powdered sugar, chocolate sauce, and strawberry glaze, but the green and dark brown dustings were brand new.
Victoria forsook the offered tiny spoon entirely and popped one half of the mysterious brown ball into her mouth with her fingers, meeting Max's eyes and arching an eyebrow as she did so.
Max knew a challenge when she saw one, and quickly followed suit.
'Mocha', she thought idly the moment the cold spoonful met her tongue. The thin mochi itself was slightly gummy, but held the ice-cream together in a way that made it really satisfying to chew. She swallowed carefully, then looked at Victoria appraisingly.
"What's your favorite flavor?" Max asked, genuinely curious.
"Coffee," Victoria replied, carefully wiping her fingers with a cloth, "but strawberry and vanilla are close seconds. What about you?"
"Birthday cake-"
-Victoria laughed out loud-
"-but vanilla hasn't let me down yet." Max said, suddenly a little self-conscious.
What was wrong with birthday-cake?
Victoria brushed her fringe out of her eyes with a shake of her head and spoke up, her tone as wry as the expression on her face.
"Don't look at me like that, Caulfield," she said as she picked up half of the strawberry mochi, careful to take the thin sliver of actual strawberry garnishing it as she did. "It's not a personal attack or anything- birthday cake is just a really -you- flavor is all."
Max still scowled at her, unconvinced.
Victoria shrugged. "I kind-of like your flavor, if you haven't noticed." She said, dropping the pinkish ball onto her tongue without breaking eye contact.
To Max's credit, she maintained her stony facade for all of three seconds before the first giggle managed to sneak out from behind the hand she had covering her mouth.
Victoria swallowed swiftly and instantly cringed, wincing at the cold, but quickly regained her composure despite the imminent headache.
"Coming on a bit too strong?" She asked rhetorically as she pressed the fingers of one hand to her temple.
"Just a little, maybe." Max answered anyway, her tone light enough to hide her dishonest intent as she used Victoria's moment of weakness to steal both halves of the vanilla mochi.
She wasn't as sneaky as she thought she was, and it was in the middle of the scuffle this caused that their waitress chose to come by, pausing only long enough to slide the bill onto the table before scurrying away to a safe distance.
It took all of Victoria's political acumen, but after a minute or so of heated negotiation the two of them managed to reach a payment plan they could both tolerate: Victoria would cover the bill, and Max would put her share towards the tip and maybe gas for the drive back home.
That seemed fair.
The pair said their goodbyes to Noelle when they passed her on the way towards the door, and with a final polite wave from Max, they stepped out into the Portland night.
At this time of year it was beautiful, in an eerie, urban sort of way.
The pale glow of the streetlamps above them spilled out and downward, forming long, thin islands of light interspersed along a dark winding stream of sidewalk. The long-limbed, almost gangly shadows cast by the people around them appeared to wade through this river-in-silhouette, and it was easy for Max to let herself unfocus, to mentally find the shot she knew was just in front of her.
-There-
There was a click somewhere to her side and she flinched on reflex, even as she heard Victoria make a triumphant noise at the top of her throat.
Max's heart beat in her ears for a moment and her fingers furrowed against her palm, tense like a cramped limb, but the eagerness in Victoria's voice-
Victoria's voice
-from so close helped her steady her breathing and re-center herself.
"This is a good one, Max.." Victoria said, and after a moment of conscious effort, Max got her neck to relax enough that she could turn and check the display on the blonde girl's camera.
It really was a good picture, she thought.
The focus had been set just behind the smallish group of people in the frame, fogging-over the outline of those at the forefront and instead focusing on the willowy and almost ethereal shadows drifting across the puddles of pale lamplight at their feet.
It was impersonal; almost cold in a way, but something about the image on the display was familiar, at least in abstract. Max remembered a storm from when she was little; a particularly bad super-cell that had knocked out power to most of the Bay for days. She remembered anxiously sitting in the living room with her parents, watching her dad work his fingers in front of a flickering oil lamp as they waited for the worst to pass.
"They're almost like shadow puppets.. " Max said, gingerly reaching out towards the camera. She hesitated before her fingers had fully closed the distance, but Victoria picked up on what she wanted and stepped close, tilting the screen so Max could better see.
"Shadow puppets?" She asked, her voice trading in its usual bite for a softer sort of curiosity.
Max nodded her head absentmindedly, focused instead on the smell of heavy rain and kerosene in a too-dark house.
-Look at the wolf, Max-
Her father's voice, sounding more tired than she remembered.
The air was thicker, staler, too.
A slow exhale, until her lungs and head were empty and she couldn't hear the rain wash against the rooftop anymore.
She nodded again, almost clinically, and took the camera from Victoria's unresisting fingers.
Victoria watched as Max quickly cleared the display and stepped away from her, tracing the rake of the brunettes eyes across the trickle of people down the causeway. She knew the instant Max found what she was looking for though, as she came to a stop mid-step only long enough to preserve her balance before sinking low into a crouch, resting the soft underside of her elbow against the top of her knee to keep the camera still.
Max's expression was blank as she pressed the shutter-release, but Victoria didn't miss the way the brunette recoiled away from the camera the moment she had taken her shot.
She stood, and in two quick steps had crossed the space between them, handing the camera back to Victoria wordlessly as soon as she was within arm's reach.
She never even looked at the display.
Instead, she laughed; silent except for the muted rush of breath from her reddening nose, and closed Victoria's fingers back around the shell of her camera.
"Yeah. Shadowpuppets." Max said, her tone tired but firm.
She shivered, then pulled her cardigan closer around herself and tilted her head towards the mouth of the sidestreet they had come down originally.
"Wanna get some pictures of the waterfront before it gets too cold?" She asked, and Victoria considered her response before she replied.
"We can, as long as it doesn't take too long. The last thing either of us needs is you getting sick and blaming me for it." Victoria huffed, a bit too dramatic to be serious.
Max smiled again, this one significantly more genuine than the last.
"Look at you acting like you don't want more cliche moody pictures to put in your portfolio." Max jabbed over her shoulder, biting down the beginnings of a grin as Victoria puffed up defensively.
Right on cue
"Excuse you?" The blonde girl said, looking like she'd been struck. "I know it's hard for the untrained eye to understand homage, Caulfield, but please at least try to keep up."
"'Homage', right." Max prodded, disguising her smile by looking down to button her cardigan mid-step. "Is that what you call your Richard Avedon look-alikes?"
Victoria sputtered something indignant that Max couldn't make out, but the intent was clear. It took a deep breath, but she collected herself well enough to carry on.
"I am not going to be called 'cliche' by a doe-eyed wallflower with a fetish for polaroid selfies of all things."
Max scoffed and began counting off on her fingers, "Okay; first, I've touched my polaroid maybe twice this weekend; second, you've taken more pictures of me this week than I have; and third, you like my selfies- you're just grumpy because I'm picking on you."
Victoria's mouth immediately opened as though to respond, but her acerbic look quickly faded into one of resignation as she thought through Max's reply.
She pinched the bridge of her nose just below her brow and shook her head in frustration.
"Let's just take the damned pictures and go home before you find a way to get pneumonia, okay?"
Max's long backward steps towards the waterfront became considerably more energetic as a victorious smile crept onto her face.
"You're lucky you're cute when you pout, you know?"
"I'm cute all the time, Lamefield. I'm glad you noticed." Victoria cut back almost distractedly, but instead of continuing into an attack the way Max had expected, she paused.
The rest of the walk was quiet aside from the sound of their footsteps, and soon they managed to reach the edge of the path overlooking the dark banks of the Willamette. The wind blowing in off the waterfront was heavy and cool, but not particularly uncomfortable. She turned, and saw Victoria was already looking her way, an uncertain look on her face.
This close to the river, her breath came out in little grey clouds.
"So, it wasn't just me, then." Victoria said quietly; making adjustments to her camera just to have something to do with her hands.
"Hmm?" Max said inelegantly as she turned, pressing her hip into the chill metal handrail for support. "What do you mean?"
Victoria was silent for a beat as she stared down at the pale reflection in her viewfinder.
"You really haven't been taking many pictures recently." She said, and a moment later Max nodded in agreement.
"Yeah. It's not just you." Max admitted. She dragged the fingers of one hand along the top of the cold railing behind her, suddenly uneasy.
Victoria twisted the camera in her hand and pressed her finger against the shutter-release, but hesitated.
"I just.."
She swallowed, then tried again.
".. It's strange, Max, seeing you without your camera. I'm not trying to act like I know what you're going through right now, but at least for me, just taking pictures helps me.. I guess, put some distance between my head and all the bullshit, if that makes sense."
There was the -snap- of a shutter, but Max was expecting it; had been expecting it.
She didn't flinch.
Instead, she watched Victoria pull her lip roughly between her teeth while her nerves spilled out of her in thin ribbons of mist as she spoke.
"When I was little, I would write. Anything. Everything. I read Leaves of Grass when I was 11 or so, and from then until high-school all I really did was write. I'd read some of it to my parents; the less personal stuff, at least. Most of it wasn't very good; definitely not enough to make art-gallery owners like them ooh and ahh the way I did over Whitman, but it meant something to me, you know? Notebooks full of sonnets I wrote to caterpillars, lines in free-verse about the empty bird's-nest in the tree outside my bedroom window, or just pairs of words I thought sounded nice together. Anything. Notebook after notebook. Every now and then, I'd get a smile out Dad, but all mom ever did was nod her head. No matter what I wrote, or how much I poured into it."
The shutter-snapped- again.
"The summer before I started high-school, we moved. None of my notebooks survived the trip. My mother hadn't put them with the things we were bringing with us to the new house, and they had been thrown away."
-snap-
"I was maybe a little too upset, and there was an argument. It was bad to begin with, but got worse as I realized, gradually, that my mother genuinely didn't believe she'd done anything wrong, and didn't understand why I was as torn up as I was. It got bad enough that Dad heard us from his office, and had come down to see what all the screaming was about."
Victoria pulled the camera away from her face and looked at Max through the weak glow of the display and the fog of her breath.
"Dad took a minute or so to piece together what had happened, told my mother he was going to have a discussion with me, and brought me upstairs. I though he was going to kill me."
At Max's look of alarm, Victoria blanched.
"Figuratively, Caulfield." She said quickly, raising her hand in a halting motion. "Anyway, Dad brought me upstairs to his office, and told me to sit down in the big armchair on the other side of his enormous desk. We talked about a few things; how I felt, what I thought about what had happened- stuff like that, and when I had calmed down enough, he explained what was wrong."
At that, she raised her camera back up to her eye, framed her subject, and paused; her finger loose against the shutter-release.
"It turns out, my mom has a series of conditions that, among other things, mean she's incapable of the same kinds of responses most people have to emotional stimulus- she doesn't feel the way normal people feel. On one hand, it helps make her one of the best maxilofacial specialists on the West Coast, which is amazing."
-snap-
"On the other, it meant I'd never have been able to make her smile with just some pretty words on paper. It'd be like singing to someone without ears; masturbatory, in a way, if the only one that can hear you sing is you, you know?"
Victoria shook her head and tucked the longest bit of her fringe behind an ear with an idle motion that ended with her head pointing mostly skyward.
Max watched as a long, foggy plume of breath bled itself upward into the night.
She felt the ghost of a tingle in her hand, like ants under her nails.
Victoria clicked her tongue dismissively against the roof of her mouth and looked back down, through the viewfinder and towards the river.
"To cut this exercise in angst and indulgence short before I completely forget my point, that argument -and everything that followed- tainted the love I had for writing. Every now and then I'll scribble something in the margins of some homework or quote something cheesy on my whiteboard, but I haven't been able to seriously write anything ever sense then. I just remember the flat look on my mother's face and then my pen is down and I'm doing something else."
She huffed and cupped her forehead tiredly in her hand, letting her camera drop to dangle from her neck by its smooth leather strap. Max could just barely make our her eyes through the splay of her fingers and the anemic wash of a streetlamp a handful of yards away.
"The point I'm trying to make, Max, is that you are too fucking good to put your camera down unless you absolutely have to; not for spots in a gallery somewhere, or to make the important people in your life proud, but for you. It's fucking cruel when the thing you throw yourself into to cope with all the garbage becomes another reminder of the bullshit it's supposed to be helping you push through."
Victoria stepped forward a pace or two and turned; half towards Max braced against the rails, and half towards the moonstruck water behind her. She wrung an anxious hand through her hair, stopping just outside of arm's reach.
She swallowed.
"Fuck Mark Jefferson." Victoria hissed, the cold night air making the words come out as steam. "He's the entire reason I picked up a camera in the first place, and I refuse to let him be the reason I put it down. I'm one of the best photographers in one of the best programs in the country and I'm not going to stop taking pictures until he's a fucking footnote in the worst book they write about me fifty years from now, and I will be damned if the only reason I'm the best photographer to ever leave Blackwell is because you retired too early, Max."
Max felt a burn in the back of her throat that made it hard to speak.
"Victoria, it's not that easy-" She began to protest, but the blonde pushed through anyway.
"I know, Max. Just.." The blonde interrupted herself and exhaled, heavy and slow.
After a second of silence she lifted her head and blinked once, twice-
"This has been the worst week of my life and I can't even imagine how much worse it's been for you. All I'm asking is that you not let one week of hell rob you of what should be a lifetime of peace and recognition. Your camera fit you better at eighteen than Mark Jefferson's did in his entire fucking life, and you deserve to know that every single day of the rest of yours. You deserve to be able to walk into any lecture hall in the world thirty years from now with that fossil you call a camera and have students fighting tooth and nail just to hear you speak. You deserve-"
Victoria's teeth clicked together sharply as she stopped herself. Her exhale was more forceful this time. When she spoke again, her voice was low.
"You deserve.. so much more than this, Max."
Max's hip ached from the weight she was resting on it, pressed against the railing, but she wasn't sure how much she trusted her legs at that moment. The metal was cold through her jeans, and even colder on her naked fingers, but she couldn't pull herself to push away.
"It.. means a lot; all of this, that is." Max said, her throat strangely dry. "I'm not sure I really deserve most of it, but I guess we can't all be walking balls of confidence like Victoria Chase, right?" Max joked weakly.
Subdued as it was, Victoria's laugh was still genuine.
"It's a front sometimes, but I'm pretty sure you already knew that.
"Yeah." Max nodded softly. "Your secret's safe with me though."
"Better be, Caulfield. I know where you sleep and I'm petty." Victoria replied pointedly, but there was a glint in her eye as she spoke that blunted most of her usual edge.
A tiny smile twitched into being on Max's mostly-healed lips.
"I'll have to move in with Kate then; she'll protect me." She said, and her smile grew a little more as she saw Victoria's reaction; even in the weak light of the streetlamp some distance away, Max could tell that the flush on her cheeks was just as real as the snarl forming just below it.
Max stepped forward and stopped just short of coming toe-to-toe with the taller girl. She reached out, as quickly as she was able without upsetting her still-unsteady balance, and took Victoria's hand between both of her own.
It was warm.
"What the fuck Caulfield, are you part lizard or something?" Victoria said, flinching away from her cold fingers on reflex, but Max's grip was firm.
"Shh, Victoria." Max whispered, and surprisingly enough, the blonde listened.
"I'm not sure I can ever live up to your expectations for me," Max confessed quietly, "But just knowing you're willing to believe in me when I don't believe in myself makes me feel.. a lot of things, really. 'Warm', but not just warm, you know? It's a pressure, but a good kind of pressure; something that builds up gently and fills you from the inside, strong and soft all at once."
Max paused for a moment, clearly trying to keep a smile from splitting her face.
"Look Victoria, I'm -not- a poet. One day soon I'll be able to hand you a picture or play you a song that explains perfectly how you make me feel, but until then we're going to both have to settle for me being clumsy with my words; you mean a lot to me, and there's very little I want more than to be even half the person some of the people in my life are convinced I can be."
Max pushed herself up onto the tips of her toes and slowly pressed her lips against Victoria's. The warm hand she held between hers tensed against her palms, but she didn't let go. Instead, she shifted her grip, tugging the taller girl downward into her as she did. She felt more than heard Victoria's token protest hum against her lips, but the unabashed hold the blonde girl had along her waist told her everything she really needed to know.
Max parted her lips only far enough to trap the lower ridge of Victoria's own between them, pulling gently to get the other girl's attention. Victoria's fingers dug into her skin in the soft space just below her ribs, but with some coaxing she managed to meet Max's eyes, as hooded as they were.
Max pulled away, and carefully didn't look too long at the slick rouge she had just abandoned to the cold October air.
"As much as I'd like to stay like this for a little longer, I think the responsible move is to head home before we freeze, right?" She asked and, after a brief pause, heard a grumble of agreement come from somewhere above her.
"If it were even five degrees warmer I'd fight you over this, you know." Victoria said, and Max felt the taller girl's hold on her waist tighten as though to emphasize her point.
"We could always turn the heat on in the car?" Max replied, her tone just suggestive enough to be a question.
Victoria laughed.
"You talk a good game, but I know what you look like when you're sleepy now Caulfield." Victoria said plainly.
Max looked up at the smirking blonde with the best glare she could muster while trying not to yawn.
That bitch.
"You can't bluff for shit and I know you, Max. I'll bet you anything you'll be out by the time we get onto the highway." Victoria said, sliding her hand off Max's hip and down towards where their wrists met in the space between them.
It was -really- hard to focus on not letting Victoria walk all over her when she was doing the thing with her fingers, but Max was going to try her best anyway. Keep it simple, right?
"You'll bet anything?" She asked, quirking an eyebrow teasingly as she did. A little heavy-handed, but it should throw Victoria off enough that she'd slip up somehow.
The blonde's reply came quickly and without reservation.
"Sure; fuck it Caulfield. Anything." Victoria said, almost aggressively smug. "If you can stay awake long enough for us to get to the highway, I'll give you anything you want."
"And if you're right and I fall asleep?" Max asked, a strange mix of curious and concerned. The blonde girl was entirely too confident.
Victoria made a show of being lost in thought; shifting her gaze out over Max's shoulder and biting the corner of her lip theatrically as she did. It was only a beat later though when both of her brows shot upward and she made a pleased sounding noise in the back of her throat.
"I have a great idea, Max." Victoria said cheerily as she pulled on Max's wrist and started them both back down the waterfront path to where they had parked.
"Are you going to share with the class, or just stand there and gloat?" Max asked, not eager for Victoria to have even more leverage. The girl was already impossible as it was.
Victoria turned to look back over her shoulder at Max, careful not to let go of her hand or miss a step as she walked.
"If I win, you let me pick what you wear to our Halloween party. No objections," Victoria said, "And no weaseling out. Sound fair?"
Max opened her mouth to voice the first of several complaints, but paused. Victoria just wanted to pick her outfit, and in return had given Max the equivalent of a blank check for her own prize.
Honestly, that wasn't a bad deal.
"I accept." She said evenly, and she tried very hard to ignore the flicker in Victoria's eyes when she did so. How bad could it possibly be?
Her attempt to think that through was interrupted by the happy chirp of Victoria's keyfob as they came within range of their car. Victoria let go of her hand and opened the passenger door before stepping around and opening her own. After walking around for so long, being able to sit down and relax felt amazing. It helped that the interior of the Miata was as comfortable as it was. Max reached to the side and shut the door with a little effort, and when she leaned back into her seat, she caught the tail end of Victoria fiddling with a knob on the central console. Max hardly had time to wonder why the blonde girl's smile was so vicious before she realized with dawning horror exactly what she had gotten herself into.
Heated seats.
Victoria turned the key fully in the ignition and the quiet purr of the engine filled the cabin for only a moment before it was drowned out somewhat by a soft twanging melody coming from the stereo.
Was that Alt-J?
She huffed and let her head thump against the backrest.
"You're fucking cheating, you know that right?" Max said despondently. Even now she could feel herself melting into the cushions.
"Don't be a sore loser, Maxine." Victoria teased as she slipped the car into reverse and pulled them out onto the street.
"I haven't even lost yet, 'Tori" Max tried to snipe back, but her words had slurred together a little towards the end. Her mouth was way too dry.
She didn't have to be looking at the girl in the driver's seat to see the self-satisfied expression on her face.
"If you didn't want me to know your chillout mix, you shouldn't have let me hear you play it." Victoria said primly. "What if I had impure intentions?"
Max didn't have the energy to call the blonde girl out for that one. Instead, she wiggled down into her seat a little, feeling Victoria's eyes on her a couple of seconds later.
"You can lay the seat back a bit if you want to, you know. I won't judge." She heard the blonde girl say faux-sweetly.
She would have responded, but her eyelids were heavy and her words were slow. She blinked, and in the time it took her eyes to open again they were on a stretch of road she didn't recognize and slowing down.
With a grunt of effort, Max pulled herself back upright and turned her head to look towards the driver's seat.
They were stopped at a red light, and Victoria was looking back at her. The watchful glint in her eye was present as usual, but the curve of her smile was was so much less sharp than Max had ever seen it in the hallways at Blackwell. There, it was a thin sort of thing- hooked and made to wound. If she looked hard enough she could still see the familiar edges just underneath the surface; ever-present but sheathed, like a cat's claws. Was it weird that she found that comforting in a way? Like laying on a tiger's chest, floating on warm nothingness as the thunder sung her to sleep. Victoria mouthed something as the light turned green, but she couldn't hear it over the rumble in her ears.
There probably wasn't a safer place to rest her head on earth.
There was warmth.
Warmth, and a ticklish sort of pressure. She grumbled in protest and rolled her head to the side, but the warm pressure followed her.
Slowly, she opened her eyes.
It was dark, but there was enough residual moonlight to see the shadowed interior of a car as her surroundings came into focus.
The passenger door was open, and she could make out a lean silhouette halfway kneeling in the doorway.
"If Mr. Madsen comes by in a couple of hours and finds you passed out in the passenger seat of my car, he's going to have questions I don't have answers for, Max."
Max groaned and started to speak, but an urge to stretch overwhelmed her. She tensed from her shoulders to her knees, and after a moment of helplessness -and a yawn that felt like it'd never end- she recovered enough to turn sideways in her seat and plant her feet on the familiar asphalt of Blackwell's parking lot.
Much better.
"I've got exactly one 'Get Out of Jail Free' card with Mr. Madsen; I think we'd be okay." Max said as she stood. It was wobbly at first, but after a moment of effort (and another full-body stretch) she was able to find her balance and step away from the car, shutting the door behind her with an idle movement of her arm.
She watched as Victoria stepped around behind her towards the rear of the car, and heard the blonde huff quietly as she opened and shut the trunk over the course of a few seconds. When she returned, she held a bundle of their discarded clothes under one arm and a bottle of water under the other. She unscrewed the top and took a sip with one impatient motion, then capped and tossed the bottle to Max as she stepped past.
"If I'm thirsty, you're thirsty." Victoria said plainly as she shrugged, catching Max's look down at the bottle then back up at her. "I'm doing laundry in the morning anyway; I'll get your stuff back to you after class if that works?" She said as she flicked her eyes to the bundle of clothes she held.
Max nodded in agreement as best she could while shamelessly draining what was formerly a bottle of water.
The motion-sensitive lights in front of the dorm snapped on as they approached and Max winced as the bright light blinded her for a moment, but she felt something warm press against her wrist and tug her forward.
"Alright Cave-Max, there's no need to be dramatic." Came Victoria's voice from just in front of her, and as tired as Max was the quip still made her feel better.
"Cave-Max?" She asked as they rounded the hallway towards the stairwell, and Victoria turned to look at her as she stepped onto the landing.
"You know, like the cave-people in 'The Descent'?" Victoria said, but then her eyes widened and she amended; "But like, significantly cuter, just so we're clear."
Max's look was blank as Victoria spoke, and she saw Victoria's head tilt as she recognized Max's confusion.
"You know, 'The Descent' ? One of the best horror films ever made? Feminist tour de force? That one?"
Max blinked owlishly as they reached the top of the stairs and stepped off into their hallway.
Victoria shook her head and grumbled something under her breath as she pinched her brow between her fingers.
"Alright, we're finishing our next movie night with 'The Descent' then. Sweet T can't do horror movies, and Courtney does horror movies way too well. Does that work for you?"
Max thought for a second, skeptical.
"Okay, but only if I get to pick the two movies we watch before it, alright?"
Victoria immediately nodded her head in agreement and grinned.
"Perfect." She said contentedly as they came to a stop at the end of the hall, each in front of their doors.
Victoria opened her mouth as though to speak, but closed it after a moment's hesitation.
Max watched as the blonde's eyes flicked over her in the darkness. After a second's consideration, she stepped forward.
Her arms cinched behind the narrow span of Victoria's back effortlessly as she pulled the taller girl close. She couldn't quite hear the blonde's heart beating, but if she focused, she could just barely feel the steady thump of it against her cheek.
"Thanks for all this, Victoria.. " Max said softly, relaxing her grip somewhat as she did. She felt the taller girl shift her weight against her momentarily, and suddenly the warm pressure from earlier was back. Victoria was running her fingers through her hair, and it felt amazing.
"It was dinner and some pictures, Caulfield. Don't get your panties in a bunch." Victoria replied quickly, but despite what she said, her tone was low and calm.
She never stopped moving her fingers, either.
Max laughed, even though most of it got lost in Victoria's chest.
"I meant for everything." She said, then pulled her head back so she could look into the green eyes above her. Victoria immediately flushed scarlet even in the low light of the hallway, but Max continued unperturbed. "I know I keep repeating myself, but I mean it; I don't know where I'd be right now if you weren't here with me."
Victoria considered for a moment.
"Probably Kate's room." She said, but it lacked her usual venom.
Max recoiled.
"I was trying to be sincere, you unromantic ass." Max said, her expression halfway between offended and amused.
Victoria shrugged as well as she could without taking her fingers out of Max's hair or her arm from around her waist.
"I know, but don't sell Kate short; she's a good friend. She'd have helped get you through all this."
Max stilled, slightly stunned. She knew Victoria wasn't wrong, but to hear something like that from Victoria herself was.. significant.
Some of her surprise must have been evident because suddenly Victoria's smug grin was back in full force, even if it wasn't enough bravado to wipe the blush off her face.
"Shocked?" Victoria asked quietly. "I might not agree with everything she preaches, but she's a good friend to you, Caulfield. You'd make it through this whether or not I was here to help. You're strong like that." Victoria admitted, her expression faltering towards the end. She swallowed, and a moment later her grin was back as though it had never left.
"Fortunately for everyone, I am here, and I can do things Kate can't do."
Max's eyebrows quirked upward in surprise as she spoke.
"Like what?" She said, and Victoria's grin turned feral in the moonlight streaming through the window at the end of the hall.
"This." She whispered, and in an instant the pressure on Max's hip doubled as fingers knotted in her hair and pulled her up. They stumbled backward two steps and then three as they were unbalanced, but Victoria caught both of their weight against the door to her room with an ease that was almost casual. Max's eyes widened for only a moment before they closed on reflex. Victoria's kiss was unhurried but heavy; a sort of slow, inevitable, massive heat that was uniquely hers.
It was something like a sunrise; warm and relentless and constant and blazing and vast in a way that washed out everything else in the sky, until there was nothing left but her and the sunlight on her skin.
Absently, she felt her own fingers work against the cloth separating the two of them; desperate to pull as much of that warmth into herself as she could before it was gone.
She felt the beginnings of a happy laugh form against her lips and growled as they left her own. She felt Victoria pull away from her and something inside her lashed out, low and spine-deep.
She felt her slick lips pull against her teeth as she stepped forward on instinct. She pushed, driving up from her feet to her hips to her core and out. Victoria's back met her door again with a low -thud- and she followed, unwilling to let even an inch come between them. Her knee came upward, wedging itself between Victoria's thighs at the same time her grip split on the blonde girl's back; one hand surging upward to take the nape of her neck and the other hand dipping low on Victoria's hip.
Her lips met Victoria's for a moment, -fleetingly- before she dove low, burying her face in the hollow of the blonde's neck. Her mouth opened even as her fingers bit into the flesh they held. Anything-
-anything-
-to bring them closer.
She inhaled, half-ragged and almost a gasp.
Vanilla.
Vanilla and sweat.
She could feel Victoria's pulse racing against her tongue and every beat made her breath stutter in her lungs. She could feel her fingers shaking.
Victoria's grip in her hair was tight, but wasn't pulling her away.
..
Max paused, and a moment later her teeth closed around air.
Fuck.
Max's breath left her in a frustrated hiss, her face still pressed into the soft arch of Victoria's throat.
She began to speak, to say -something-, but she suddenly felt Victoria giggle underneath her.
She pulled back and met the pair of green eyes looking down at her in the dark, taking in the confusion and embarrassment equally plain on the brunette's face.
"Max, are you a biter?" Victoria asked bluntly, her expression a mixture of surprised and.. awed?
Max blanched, unable to bring herself to reply, but Victoria seemed to take her silence as answer enough.
"It looks like you really do learn something new every day.. " She said quietly, straightening herself as best she could given her position. She looked ready to prod Max some more, but a glance at the mortified expression on the freckled girl's face made her reconsider.
"Max?" She asked, and a moment later the brunette managed to meet her eyes, as embarrassed as she was.
Victoria grinned.
"You're a grown woman, Caulfield. You're allowed to have kinks." She said plainly. She could tease Max about this all she wanted later. "You're allowed to have kinks. If it makes you feel any better, you already know one or two of mine, so if anything, we're even now."
Max groaned and her forehead came to rest against Victoria's collarbone.
"You don't think I'm.. weird?" Max asked quietly, and Victoria laughed again.
"Of course I do, but you're my kind of weird." The taller girl said, fighting down an amused smile. "We can go over this the right way when we get some alone time later, but for now since I know you won't be able to sleep without something, just know that you don't have anything to worry about from me as long as you're willing to step back if I ask you to, and let me know a little in advance before you spring any curveballs, okay?"
Victoria's expression didn't seem to be anything but genuine, so Max nodded her head.
"I'll text you in the morning then?" She asked cautiously, and felt most of her anxiety leave her as Victoria nodded her head in response.
"Definitely. If I don't text back right away, I'm either still running or in the shower. Worst case scenario, knock on Taylor's door and tell her what's up and she'll probably know what to do. Sound good?"
Max nodded her head emphatically, then took a step back towards her own doorway. Before turning the handle however, she paused, looking back towards where Victoria stood quickly tapping at the dim screen of her phone.
"Good night, Victoria." Max said as she stepped into her bedroom, and Victoria surprised her by scoffing.
"It was a perfect night, Caulfield. Now get some fucking sleep." She said, unlocking her door with a click.
Max laughed tiredly at the reply, and when she opened her eyes, it was just in time to watch the door click shut behind Victoria on her way into her room.
She turned and stepped over the threshold into her own room, not even bothering to turn the lights on to see as she closed her door absently with a foot, vaulted dizzily over her guitar laying on the floor, and peeled her way out of the layers of clothes trying to smother her.
'I'll shower in the morning..' She thought sleepily as she balled up her pants and blouse and tossed them carelessly into the hamper in the corner of the room.
Her knees hit the top of her bed first, followed a beat later by her face and hands as they dug hungrily into the cool, soft mass of her favorite pillow.
'It's so good to be home..'
It really, really was.
