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“Max?”
Max reaches up between them, lays a calloused hand on El’s face, lips full and eyes wide. She runs a soft thumb across El’s cheekbones, looks briefly at El’s mouth, back to her eyes.
They’re both dressed down, in sweatpants and tanktops with messy hair in frizzled ponytails. They bought best friend necklaces earlier that week, two halves to the same heart, if Max was being honest, like really honest-
She’d say that El has somehow taken both halves, she holds Max’s not so fragile heart in her soft hands that smell like vanilla with fingernails that are painted blue and pink.
“You’re-” Max starts, stops, thinks. Hopes. “You’re the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen.”
El’s eyes widen, her lips part in shock. Max drops her hand, thinks she’s gone too far, thinks she’s done something wrong. It’s too late to be doing this, to be saying this, to be acting like this. El is too far, she’s never been in reach and Max knows that. She’s known that. El is in love with Mike and Mike is in love with El. It’s how it’s always been, and always will be. Max knows.
Max moves back, covers her face with her hands. Breathes, breathes, breathes.
Instead of leaving, of screaming, of ripping off her half heart necklace and telling the Party to snub Max, El moves Max’s hands from her face and holds them softly.
Max kisses her quickly, not so smoothly. It’s all nervousness and pent up emotion, so long of looking and not touching, of watching her kiss Mike and wish she was Mike. It’s jealousy she didn’t understand. It’s all teenage girl in not love but close to love with her best friend, her friend’s ex-girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend who she never really liked like that best friend’s ex-girlfriend. It’s all please and I’m sorry and this isn’t what I planned when I met you.
Max pulls back fast, wide-eyed and chest heaving. Her face is flushed, she can feel it, must look redder than a ripe tomato. Max looks away, at the bedsheets, as she always does when El looks at her for a moment too long. She’ll look anywhere, her shoes, the floor, even the fucking sun as long as she doesn’t have to look at someone she wants. She doesn’t want El like Billy wants the girls at the movie theater he picks up too easily. She doesn’t want El for a few minutes only to let her go. Only to take and never give.
Max doesn’t want that. She wants to hold hands with El and brush her hair behind her ear, curl around her while they sleep because since last Halloween the nightmares are more and more frequent. She wants El like El wants Mike or Nancy wants Johnathon. She wants romance. She wants the calm she gets when she knows El is safe or the butterflies she gets when El smiles in her direction.
She just wants. And she knows, Max knows, it isn’t right.
(She hates it. She wants to be better. To like Lucas and feel something when he kisses her and tells her she’s different than other girls. She wants so much, too much, to be normal.)
El cups Max’s face with both her hands, laying them on both cheeks. “You… you’re beautiful,” she says slowly.
“I’m sorry,” Max whispers meekly. “You don’t have to-”
El shakes her head, moves her head so she can hold Max’s eyes for longer than a whisp of air. “It’s okay,” El soothes. “I feel it too.”
And fuck, if Max doesn't want to cry. If she doesn’t want to scream. To laugh. To kiss and hug and hold and cherish El. If she doesn’t doubt, if she doesn’t worry, if she doesn’t-
“No,” El shakes her head again, faster, more brutal, when she sees Max’s lip quivering. She wraps her arms around Max’s shoulders and brings them closer. It’s a mess, Max is sitting on her calves and El is sitting criss-cross, it’s too many knees and feet and hands. It’s too much perfume Nancy got for El last Christmas, too much hair that’s falling out of ponytails. It’s too much.
El holds her close, leads Max’s face to her shoulder, they’re tilting. It’s not balanced, they’re doomed to fall, to fail, to not-
Then El kisses Max’s hair, even though it hasn’t been washed in five days and smells like sweat and pine from climbing trees to get apples from the night before. “You’re beautiful.”
Max shakes her head, leans back to look at El. They’re sharing air, breathing the same inhale and exhale, sharing the same heat. “I don’t want you to feel like you’re forced, I don’t want you to feel like you have to think that if you don’t. I don’t want-”
She does want, she does. Max wants more than anything. But El, how El feels, comes first.
“It’s okay,” El says. “I want. This.”
“You swear?” Max says almost too quietly to be heard.
El nods, brings Max’s face level to her own. “I swear.”