Epilogue

Kris woke up the next afternoon with her thighs aching and her cheeks flushed, the sun already high over Laurelhurst. For a few minutes she just lay there in her sheets, staring at the ceiling, running through every inch of what the two girls had done to each other the night before. Her body hurt in places she hadn't known could hurt. Her nipples felt raw against the cotton of her t-shirt, bruised a little from where Valentine's had battled them in the pool. Her cunt felt swollen and sore, still twitching every so often when she thought about the blonde's naked body against her own.

She had been certain, falling asleep, that it had been a finish. That the fight was over, that she would avoid Valentine for the rest of the summer and leave for college with her secret sealed up inside her, where no one else would ever know. That had lasted about as long as it took for the brunette to wake up and reach between her legs.

The truth was, Kris thought, staring at the stain her fingers had left on her panties, nothing was finished. Nothing had been settled. The blonde was still out there somewhere, walking around in her tight skirts and her tiny tops, with her long legs and her milky tits and her arrogant fucking mouth, and the knowledge of what Kris's naked body felt like underneath her. That wasn't a conclusion. That was a door the brunette had just kicked open, and she couldn't close it again no matter how hard she tried.

Three nights later, Kris met Valentine at the lake.

The blonde was already standing on the dock when Kris arrived on her bicycle, wearing the same white t-shirt and the same cut-off denim shorts the brunette had seen her in that afternoon at the pool. Valentine didn't turn around as Kris approached, didn't say anything, just kept staring out over the black water. Kris stepped up behind her, close enough that the blonde could feel the heat of her body against her back.

"Took you long enough, bitch," Valentine said quietly.

"I wasn't going to come, slut," Kris whispered, running her nails lightly down the back of Valentine's bare arm.

"Yes, you were," Valentine said. "You were going to come the second you saw my face today."

Kris didn't answer her, because they both knew it was true. The brunette had seen the blonde at the pool that afternoon, standing just inside the gate with her gym bag slung over her shoulder and her eyes on Kris, and the brunette had felt her cunt clench up so hard she had nearly slid off her lifeguard chair. The blonde had mouthed a single word at her across the water, and Kris had mouthed it back. Nine. The lake. They hadn't needed anything more than that.

Kris slid her hands around Valentine's waist, pressing her bikini-clad chest against the blonde's back, brushing her lips against her rival's ear. "You better be ready, Valentine," she murmured. "Because I'm not going home until you're broken underneath me."

"You're going home sore and beaten, Kris," Valentine said. "Just like last time."

"You didn't beat me last time, cunt."

"You didn't beat me either, whore."

"Then I guess we have something to finish, don't we?"

Valentine turned around slowly in the brunette's arms, and the girls pressed their bodies together in the darkness. Kris felt the blonde's breasts flatten against her own through their thin tops, felt the blonde's stomach slide against her belly, felt the blonde's long legs tangle with hers. They kissed, long and slow and mean, and then they fought, rolling off the dock into the cold water of the lake, tearing at each other's tops and bottoms until they were naked in the water, their long hair spread out around them, their legs locked together, their cunts grinding together underneath the surface in the same vicious rhythm as before. It took two orgasms this time, each one dragged out of each girl with clenched teeth and bared nails, before they finally let go of one another and floated apart, breathing raggedly in the dark.

"Same time tomorrow, slut," Kris whispered.

"I'll be here, bitch," Valentine whispered back.

That was how it started.

For the rest of June and all of July, the two girls met somewhere almost every night. The pool after hours, the lake, the tennis courts behind the pool house, the wooden platform that floated out near the center of the lake, the gazebo in Valentine's backyard the one week Kris's sister was out of town. The brunette started keeping a little gym bag permanently by the door of her bedroom, stuffed with fresh bikinis, a towel, a bottle of water, some aspirin for the mornings after. The blonde took to biking over to the recreational center in nothing but a tank top and her bikini bottoms, not even bothering to pretend she was going there for any other reason.

They fought. They always fought. The girls never quite managed to call what they did anything else, and neither of them ever suggested they stop. The brunette would meet the blonde in the dark with a snarl on her face and a slur on her lips, and the blonde would meet her with a handful of her dark hair and a knee between her thighs, and they would go at each other until their bodies gave out. Sometimes they fought leg to leg, squeezing until one girl screamed first; sometimes they fought tit to tit, banging their nipples into each other until they were too sore to keep going; sometimes they fought crotch to crotch, rocking against one another in the water or on a patch of grass until they both came at the same time, crying into each other's mouths. Kris kept count, in a small notebook she kept hidden under her mattress. By the end of July, neither girl was obviously ahead. Most nights ended in stalemates, the rivals locked up around one another on the ground, shivering with exhaustion, neither one willing to let go.

What neither girl would admit, in those first weeks, was how much of their time during the day was also being spent on the other. Kris started driving past Valentine's house on her way home from the pool, just to see if the blonde's car was in the driveway. Valentine started signing up for shifts at the rec center that didn't actually exist, just so she had an excuse to be near Kris in her lifeguard suit. They stopped calling their other friends back. The brunette sent Jen to voicemail twice in a row one Tuesday, which earned her a worried text that Kris didn't answer until the next morning. Valentine's cheerleading friends texted her about a beach trip to Santa Cruz, and the blonde made up some story about her mother being sick, because she couldn't stand the thought of going three days without getting her hands on Kris.

By the first week of August, they were eating dinner together. It had started, ridiculously, in the middle of a fight. The girls had been locked up on the floor of Valentine's basement, both of them naked from the waist up, when Valentine's stomach had growled so loudly and so ridiculously against Kris's ear that the blonde had started laughing, and then the brunette had started laughing, and then neither of them could stop, and eventually Valentine had rolled off of Kris and gone upstairs in her bikini bottoms to make them grilled cheese sandwiches. They had eaten the sandwiches standing up at the kitchen counter in their ruined bikinis, glaring at each other over the cheese, insulting each other between bites, and halfway through her second sandwich Kris had realized with a cold little shock that she was happy. That she had been happy for weeks. That she had spent more time with Valentine in the last month than she had spent with any of her actual friends in the last year, and that it was easily, obviously, the best month of her life.

She hadn't said anything about it. She had just finished her sandwich, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and told the blonde that her cunt was going to be sorry it had given her a break. Valentine had smiled at her with grease on her lips and told her to bring it, bitch. And then they had gone back downstairs and fought until the sun came up, and then they had fallen asleep together on the basement floor, tangled up in a pile of damp towels and bare limbs, and Kris had woken up with the blonde's face pressed against her throat and the blonde's hand resting flat over her bare breast, and she had not moved the hand away.

The other girls started to notice around the middle of August. Jen was the first. She cornered Kris at a birthday party for one of their friends from the newspaper, dragging the brunette out onto the balcony with her arms folded.

"Who is she, Kris?" Jen said.

"Who is who?" Kris said, feeling her cheeks go hot.

"The girl you have been disappearing on everyone for, you bitch," Jen said. "I haven't seen you in six weeks. You answer your phone once a day, if that. You show up tonight in a tank top that doesn't even come close to covering the bruises on the top of your tits. Who is she?"

Kris stared at her friend for a long moment, feeling her cunt tighten at the very mention of the marks on her chest, which had been left by Valentine's mouth the previous night. She opened her mouth to lie, and then she closed it again. Jen raised her eyebrows.

"You would not believe me if I told you, Jen," Kris said quietly.

"Try me, slut," Jen said.

Kris laughed, softly, and shook her head, and didn't tell her. A week later, Jen saw Valentine getting into Kris's car after one of Kris's shifts at the pool, and Jen did not say another word about it, but from then on Kris caught the other girl watching her and the blonde with a very small, very knowing smile whenever the two of them crossed paths with her in public.

The rest of the observers had a harder time figuring it out. Valentine's cheerleading friends ran into the two of them at a coffee shop in late August and stared in open confusion. The blonde and the brunette were sitting across from each other in the corner booth, their bare legs tangled together under the table, their faces inches apart, whispering something to each other that made Kris's face flush red. To the cheerleaders, it looked for a moment like the two girls were about to kiss, and then it looked like they were about to fight, and then it just looked like neither of them had noticed anybody else walk into the shop. One of the cheerleaders went over and said hi, and Valentine gave her a smile that was somehow both warm and utterly dismissive, and the brunette next to her smiled the exact same smile, and then both of them went back to their whispered argument about whose tits were better, and the cheerleaders left without ordering.

At the pool, the mothers started calling them "the lifeguards," as if they were one unit. Every afternoon now, both of the ladder towers were occupied. The brunette had stopped protesting that the pool had never needed two lifeguards before, because it was easier than explaining why she wanted the blonde there. The two girls sat at opposite ends of the water in their matching red suits, staring at each other through their binoculars, mouthing filthy things at one another across the surface of the pool. None of the mothers could hear what was being said, but several of them remarked, to each other and to their husbands, that the two lifeguards seemed unusually intense about each other. Were they friends? Some of the mothers said no, because the two girls always seemed to be glaring. Others said yes, because they had seen the two girls sharing a milkshake together at the snack bar once, sitting so close their knees were touching. A couple of the more perceptive mothers said something else altogether, and then hushed each other and changed the subject, because the girls were only eighteen, and because nobody was really sure.

The truth, Kris decided, one hot afternoon in late August while she was watching Valentine rub sunscreen into her own long legs across the pool, was that none of the categories fit. Friends, rivals, something else. The blonde wasn't her friend, exactly, because Kris had never wanted to tear the clothes off of any of her friends and grind them into the floor. The blonde wasn't her rival, exactly, because Kris had never wanted to curl up next to any of her rivals afterward and fall asleep with her cheek on their breast. The blonde wasn't her girlfriend, exactly, because Kris could not imagine holding hands with the blonde in public, could not imagine introducing her to her mother, could not imagine any of the soft, normal, sunlit things that a girlfriend was supposed to be.

The blonde was, Kris thought, just Valentine. And Valentine was just hers. And that seemed to be enough.

The week before Kris was supposed to leave for college, the girls met one last time at the dock where they had started. They were quiet for a long time, standing on the edge of the pier where Valentine had once knocked Kris into the water. The brunette looked down at the dark lake, then up at the blonde, and she saw that the blonde's eyes were shining in a way that made her throat tighten.

"I'm going to miss beating you, bitch," Kris said softly.

"You never beat me, slut," Valentine answered.

"I'm going to miss fighting you, then."

"I'm going to miss fighting you, too, cunt."

They stared at each other for a long moment, and then Valentine reached up and pushed a dark curl behind Kris's ear, which was maybe the gentlest thing the blonde had ever done to her. Kris caught the blonde's hand and brought it back down between them, pressing it flat over her own heart, so that the blonde could feel how fast it was beating. Valentine swallowed.

"UC Irvine is only six hours from Berkeley, bitch," Valentine said.

"I know, slut," Kris said.

"Every weekend, cunt."

"Every weekend, whore."

They undressed each other slowly that night. They fought in the lake for the better part of two hours, quiet and brutal and breathless, and somewhere near the end of it the fighting turned into something that was no longer quite fighting, something slower, something that made Kris cry without knowing why, something that made Valentine hold her face in both hands while they kissed. Kris never put a word to what they did out on the water that last night in August, not in her diary, not in her head, not even years later, when she and Valentine were finally living in the same apartment and introducing each other to their parents as "my best friend" with identical knowing smiles, and still arguing every night about whose legs were better, and still occasionally knocking each other into swimming pools, because some things, Kris had decided, did not need names.

They biked home together in the dark, one behind the other, the brunette following the blonde's red taillight all the way back to her house. They kissed goodbye on the front porch of Valentine's house at three in the morning, soft and lingering and mean, the way the two girls always kissed. And then Kris pedaled home down the quiet streets of Laurelhurst with her cheeks wet and her thighs aching and her cunt warm, swearing at Valentine in her head, thinking about the next time she would get the blonde underneath her, thinking about the way the blonde had looked in the water tonight with the moonlight on her bare shoulders, thinking that the summer had been, without question, the best thing that had ever happened to her, and that it was not, not even remotely, over.