Chapter Text
Shelby knows as soon as she meets her that Toni Shalifoe is her soulmate.
That’s not even accurate, actually; she knows as soon as she hears her that Toni Shalifoe is her soulmate.
Shelby’s seventeen at the time, and freshly transferred to Hopewell Lake High School because she has a distant relative that lives there—she’s still not fully sure what their exact relation is, but it’s something in the vicinity of “second cousin once removed” and it’s the only relative she’d been able to find to take her in after…
Well, let’s just say that when she finds out her soulmate spells “Toni” with an ‘i’ instead of a ‘y’, Shelby isn’t exactly shocked by it.
They share an English class, and on Shelby’s first day she sees Toni walk in with a friend of hers and thinks “Who is THAT?” and then when Toni takes a seat a few rows behind Shelby and mutters, “Shit, Marty, this class is gonna be so dope; look at the board. No homework all semester? I’m gonna get to pack in so much extra shooting practice.”
There are words scribbled onto Shelby’s hip that’ve been there since the March after she’d been born: words that tell her the last thing her soulmate will say to her before she kisses her for the first time. They’ve been there since March 31st, according to her parents, so Shelby has that information to work with, too. She doesn’t need it, though. Those few sentences from Toni in English are enough.
It'd been a rough time even before Shelby’s big gay revelation, because her family has always been so uptight and proper, and the words are… well, they’re not exactly the words of someone her family would be inclined to approve of, boy or girl. Shelby’d learned to grow fond of them eventually, but she’d certainly spent most of her upbringing grimacing upon sight of that absolutely mortifying paragraph and keeping it covered whenever she could.
Becca, her best friend from back home, had gotten, “God, you’re so beautiful.” Dot from her childhood soccer team had, “Is it okay if I kiss you now?” Even an asshole like her ex-boyfriend Andrew had been blessed with “I’m having a lot of fun.” Becca’s and Dottie’s invoke an image of some kind of gentle, romantic moment, packed with love and tension. Andrew’s makes her envision a sweet night out, a date with a girl who’s falling for him.
Shelby’s been, obviously, less fortunate.
But it’s definitely Toni; there’s no mistaking it. On the bright side of things, there’s definitely something to this soulmate thing, because Toni’s so unbelievably hot to her that even just glancing at her is enough to make Shelby’s cheeks go pink.
Shelby hasn’t suffered like she has to just let all of this pass her by, so on that very first day, she resolves to get to know her. Which, because Shelby has no experience with any of this, involves following her to her locker at an awkward distance, watching her bid goodbye to her friend “Marty”, and then gassing herself up to move in and say hello only to be beaten to the punch by a dark-haired girl who greets Toni brightly and then pulls her in for a kiss.
Shelby’s stomach drops. This complicates things.
There’s no obligation to spend your life with your soulmate. Some people never find theirs. Others find them too late, when their lives have already been built with someone else. But it’s certainly supposed to be the pinnacle of romance—the best it’ll ever get, if you can both manage to meet and give it a shot—and yet, still, people get lonely and pass the time with someone else.
So Shelby, not one to be a homewrecker, decides to wait and see if it runs its course. In the meantime, she vows to focus on Martha Blackburn instead, who turns out to share another class with Shelby, just the two of them, and is friendlier than Shelby ever could’ve anticipated.
“Come eat with us at lunch next period!” Martha offers when she finds out Shelby’s new to Hopewell Lake on their third day of chatting. “It’s just me and my friend Toni, and her girlfriend Regan.”
Shelby follows her there afterward, lets Martha guide her through the cafeteria line and then to the end of a row of tables, where Toni and Regan are already there, Toni laughing while Regan feeds her a french fry. Shelby feels insane for being jealous over strangers, and senses it’s not something she was ever going to be able to control. It feels like her body’s operating without consent from her brain, reacting to Toni like it knows exactly who she is.
“This is Shelby,” Martha introduces her brightly when she arrives. “Toni, she’s in our English class. She’s new this year.”
Regan addresses her before Toni does, a friendly smile on her lips. “Hey, wow, you transferred in just for senior year?”
Shelby takes a breath and prepares her best grin: it’s a talent she’s perfected after years of pageantry. “Yep. All the way up from Texas,” she explains, her southern drawl coming out full force. “It was pretty darn tough making the trip, but I’m enjoying my first week.”
Toni pauses with a fry halfway to her mouth and goes stiff, looking at Shelby like she isn’t quite sure she’s seeing her correctly. Regan and Martha don’t seem to notice the change, but Shelby catches her eye with a silent curiosity, very aware that Toni has some words to work with on her body same as Shelby does.
“I’ve noticed you in English class,” Shelby says, even though she feels mildly guilty about addressing Toni at all with Regan right there, “so you must be Toni.”
Toni gulps. “Uh, yeah. That’s me.”
Regan catches onto the tension, then, and looks back and forth between them for a moment before the realization hits. Her expression shifts: into something closed-off and tense. She goes quiet, taking Shelby in like she’s suddenly sickened by her: not in an angry, explosive way, but like she’s sick to her stomach with melancholy. It occurs to Shelby, then, that Regan’s probably seen all of Toni’s body, which also means seeing Shelby’s first words before their first kiss. And clearly Shelby’s said something discernable since her arrival, given the reactions she’s getting.
Shelby sits too quickly in the seat across from Toni, floundering internally, and then her eyes fall desperately to the food on Toni’s tray. She feigns an enthused gasp and says, “Sweet baby Jesus; they serve y’all hushpuppies here? They’re my favorite.”
Toni goes pale like that’s made it worse somehow. Regan gets up and leaves without another word. “Wait,” Toni blurts, glancing back and forth between Regan and Shelby in a panic. “Shit, Regan—” And then she’s gone, too, just as quickly, and Shelby’s left sitting alone with a very confused Martha.
“Um. What just happened?”
Shelby grimaces. “I think it’s better if Toni explains it to you.”
***
It’s messier than Shelby’d envisioned this would all be, in the moments she’d imagined meeting and falling for her soulmate.
The Regan thing is bad on all its own: Regan dumps Toni literally on that same day, as soon as it’s clear who Shelby is to Toni, and Shelby hangs back uncertainly in the parking lot while Martha talks a crying Toni down about it all. She feels horrible, like it’s her own fault, even though all she’s done is exist.
Shelby tries not to overhear any of their conversation, but when she catches Martha asking, “How do you know?” and then sees Toni pull her basketball shorts up to show Martha something on her thigh, Shelby can’t help but recognize what’s going on there and start to tune in afterward. Martha inhales deeply and then offers, like she’s trying to cheer her up, “She’s really pretty!”
Shelby twists away where she’s resting against Martha’s car and waiting for a ride home, pretending not to be paying attention right as Toni’s eyes slide past Martha to look at her. “Yeah,” she hears Toni murmur, “she’s beautiful.”
Shelby feels butterflies explode in her stomach, and it takes everything in her not to whirl around and gush to Toni about how beautiful she is, too. It feels like the wrong time for it.
And even aside from the Regan stuff, Shelby has no idea how to go about any of this. And it becomes clear very quickly that Toni doesn’t, either.
“Should we, like, show each other the words or something?” Toni asks her shyly the next day, when they get a moment alone in the hallway.
Shelby bites her lip. “Feels kinda like cheating, doesn’t it?”
“I guess.” Toni thinks it over. “Yeah. I guess it should happen when it happens.”
“I’m sort of,” Shelby starts, feeling heat rising to her cheeks, “inclined to take those things kind of slowly, anyway.”
Toni’s eyes snap to hers and Shelby’s blush feels unbearable. Toni looks equally captivated by her, which just compounds the whole thing. “So you’ve dated before?”
“Just a boy,” Shelby says quietly. “And hated it. We only kissed.”
Toni swallows. “So you’re… I mean, you haven’t…” She trails off, and Shelby waits, not sure if she’s referring to having a girlfriend, or something else. Toni goes as red as Shelby as she finishes, “Been with anyone?”
Shelby shakes her head, and then says, because it’s just true, just an inevitability, “No, you’ll be my first.”
Toni’s pupils blow out and Shelby can see the way she suppresses a full-body shiver. “Oh,” she squeaks. “Uh. Dope. A-Anyway, class.” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder and then hurries away, but Shelby’s pretty sure she sees her duck into a bathroom at the end of the hallway, not a classroom.
Shelby finds one of her own not long after, happy to splash some cold water onto her face to help cool it down.
***
“Can you show me yours? Please. I’ve seen Toni’s!”
They’re only two weeks into this and Martha is drunk at this party. Shelby hasn’t seen Toni in at least half an hour, which makes sense because mixing Shelby, Toni, and alcohol feels like a recipe for several mistakes, so it’s probably better that she just stay away.
Shelby’s open to Martha’s idea in her own inebriated state. “Are you gonna tell her what it says?”
“Promise I won’t,” Martha swears. “I just wanna see if it’s obviously her. Cause you can totally tell hers is you.”
“Oh, it’s obvious,” Shelby says, but leads Martha into the nearest bathroom anyway. Once the door’s locked, she lifts up one side of her top and then pushes her shorts down just a little, showing off the stupid damn essay on her hip.
Martha’s jaw drops and then she guffaws loudly. “Okay, yeah, that’s definitely Toni. When did you realize it was her?”
“Two seconds after hearing her open her mouth for the first time,” Shelby sighs. “Spent darn near sixteen years thinking I was doomed to fall for the most insufferable boy on the planet. But I think it’s kind of cute on her.”
Martha gives her a soft smile. “I feel bad for Regan, but I can see the way you two look at each other. And I can tell Toni’s working her butt off trying not to jump you right away.”
“We both need time,” Shelby says, but her heart feels warm. “And I know the right person for Regan is out there.” She pats Martha’s shoulder. “And you. What does yours say, anyway?”
Martha holds out her wrist for Shelby to read: “You had a what with the same name as me?”
“Assuming it’s already happened, I have it narrowed down to a few names,” Martha informs her. “I’ve had a hamster named Theo, a pet worm named Zeke, and one time Toni stole a mannequin from a store as a prank and I named it Marcus. But there are no boys that go to our school with any of those names, so I’m hoping I’ll meet him next year.”
The doorknob jiggles aggressively behind them, and Shelby twists away from Martha and unlocks the door. It swings open and Toni’s on the other side, brightening at the sight of them. Well, mostly Shelby. It’s immediately obvious that she’s trashed. “Shelby!” she declares with the familiarity of someone who’s known her much longer than two weeks—which isn’t due to the alcohol; they’re mostly just like that—and then grabs her by the wrist and pulls her away from Martha.
Shelby’s wary of their destination, but Toni takes her outside instead of upstairs to any of the bedrooms, then leads her around to the side of the house and presses her firmly against the side of it. “Hey,” she slurs, beaming, “can you say your thing now?”
Shelby blushes, very aware of how alone they are. “I don’t know what it is, Toni.”
“Lemme show you,” Toni insists, reaching for her shorts, but Shelby grabs her hand and puts a stop to that. Toni groans. “Alright. Um. You look fly tonight.”
Shelby raises an eyebrow at her. “I look fly?” She’s used to Toni’s word choices, between spending time around her in person and having years to process the speech on her hip, but this time it seems to come out of nowhere.
Toni nods. “Super fly. Outfit’s dope.”
“Thank you,” Shelby says, trying not to laugh at her given how drunk she so obviously is.
Toni huffs, seemingly frustrated by her reaction. “How I talk bothers you, right? Makes you feel some type of way?”
Shelby giggles when she realizes. “Are you giving me hints?”
“No,” Toni lies.
“Trust me, Toni,” Shelby says, “there’s absolutely no way you could force the nonsense on my hip out of yourself on purpose. It’ll happen when it’s meant to.”
Toni dips her head anyway, brushing her nose over Shelby’s, and Shelby’s stomach flips. “But I wanna kiss you now.”
Shelby inhales shakily. “Wish I could’ve had that on my hip.”
“Maybe we can do some rewrites,” Toni mumbles, and Shelby gives in with a nod and parts her lips, but she knows, deep down, how this works, how fate wouldn’t be fate if it weren’t meant to be.
Their lips are a millisecond from brushing when there’s an angry shout from a few feet away, and then a laughing boy is blowing past them and causing them to jerk away from each other in surprise. He has a pair of pants in his hand, and a moment later a smaller, skinnier boy comes sprinting after him in a pair of boxer shorts.
Shelby cups Toni’s cheek with a sympathetic smile. “I don’t think it’s gonna happen.”
Toni sags against her with another groan instead, then wraps her arms around Shelby and holds her tight. “I just feel like I know you already.”
“Me too,” Shelby agrees quietly. “But we don’t. Not really.”
Toni settles for kissing her cheek, instead. “Maybe we should get started on that.”
***
Shelby learns about Toni slowly.
She’s been through enough to leave her guarded, and so it comes out piece by piece, even though they both want to share and reveal. It makes their bond feel stronger each time they do, and as hot as she finds Toni, there’s nothing that makes Shelby feel more intensely drawn to her than she does after they’ve just spent half an hour talking about life in Martha’s bedroom.
That’s one of the first things Shelby learns: that Toni’s a foster kid, that she spends more time at Martha’s than she does at whatever her current home of the month is. Eventually, they talk about their parents, about how they both feel abandoned by them: Toni for drugs, or simply by nature of existing at all; Shelby for who she loves.
Toni doesn’t cry when she tells her story, but Shelby cries during her own. It’s still so fresh, ultimately, and she’s happy to have had someone to fall back on, but it’s completely uprooted her life so quickly and she still hasn’t fully processed how much it’s changed everything.
Toni soothes her in her arms, rubbing her back and murmuring, “They’re so fucking sick for that, Shelby. You deserve so much better. You deserve the world.”
Shelby can’t help her watery laugh. “You barely know me.”
“I know I’m meant to love you,” Toni says. “That means you’re worthy of everything.”
Shelby hears the way Toni talks about herself sometimes, in comparison, and about her relationship with Regan, which, as it turns out, had been rocky even before Shelby’s arrival. “I’m not worth shit,” she’d said once, the only time Shelby’s ever seen her cry, and she hadn’t known exactly the right thing to say then, but she’s learning quickly.
“So then you must get that I feel the same way about you,” she says. “How I can know you for barely two months and already feel like I’d die without you.”
“I don’t know how I lived without you,” Toni whispers, and when Shelby’s breath catches she can’t help but wonder how she’s wound up with the words on her hip when Toni’s the kind of person who says stuff like this to her.
“Kiss me,” Shelby whispers, and then Toni’s breath is warm and heavy against her lips.
The bedroom door swings open. “Girls, dinner’s read—oh!” Bernice backs out of the room sheepishly. “I didn’t realize Martha had given you two some alone time in here.”
The door closes and Toni rests her forehead on Shelby’s shoulder with a groan. “Odds of some bullshit happening again if we just go for it another time?”
“We could try anyway,” Shelby offers.
“Fuck it,” Toni says, and goes for her lips again.
The door swings open. This time it’s Martha. “Hey, did you guys hear my mom say—”
“We heard,” Toni huffs, and then gets to her feet and offers her hand to a giggling Shelby.
***
Basketball season starts, which is a very good thing for Shelby, because the words on her hip tell her that it’s a necessary preclusion to their first kiss.
She also just likes Toni in her jersey.
“I’m all sweaty and gross,” Toni says in the parking lot after her first game, while Shelby’s pulling her close by her jersey and then running her hands all over Toni’s shoulders and arms.
“It’s sexy,” Shelby declares, and immediately Toni straightens up and offers a lopsided grin.
“Oh?” She gestures to her jersey. “You a fan of the swag?”
“Don’t say swag,” Shelby tells her shortly, still running her thumbs over Toni’s biceps.
Toni’s grin only widens. “Bet. Got you simping anyway, though.”
“Whatever you’re trying to get me to say, I promise it isn’t worth making me suffer through this,” Shelby warns her. “I’m gonna leave you for someone who doesn’t talk like a teenage boy with an energy drink addiction.”
Toni’s eyes soften for a reason Shelby doesn’t discern until she asks, “Leave me?” but not like it’s bad, like it’s a suggestion about something.
Shelby knows right away what this is about. She blushes. “I mean… we’re us now. That’s how it works, right?”
“We just never had that conversation,” Toni reminds her. “And I like that conversation.”
Shelby smooths over the sweaty locks Toni still has pulled into a ponytail and asks, “Wanna be mine?”
Toni nods, eyes dropping to Shelby’s mouth. “Yeah, I do. I am.”
“Okay,” Shelby says gently. “That’s it, then. You are.”
“Tell me you’re mine, too.”
Shelby kisses her cheek, near her ear. “I’m yours.”
***
Toni’s cocky after her next game, when Shelby meets up with her outside of the locker room and then walks with her down the hall, toward the front parking lot where Martha’s agreed to wait for them by her car.
The attitude feels familiar in a way Shelby can’t quite place, but she knows it has her buzzing with anticipation even though this isn’t even her favorite version of Toni. That’s reserved for the girl who holds her when she cries, or tells her she’s beautiful, or insists on Shelby vocalizing that Toni’s her girlfriend.
She’s rambling, and Shelby’s listening. “Next week is against Lakewood, who’ve been our rivals going back, like, two decades. It’s a slam dunk, though; they beat us last year when I was stuck on JV but this time Hopewell has our secret weapon.” She jerks a thumb toward her own chest and Shelby hides a smile.
“I heard they won the state championship last year. That’s what Martha says, anyway.”
“Underdog effect,” Toni counters. “Crowd’ll give us a boost. Home field advantage, too.”
Shelby bites back a laugh. “Uh huh.”
“What?” Toni huffs, noticing. “You don’t have faith in your own girlfriend?”
They round a corner into another deserted hallway, and Shelby rolls her eyes. “I’m just saying, a loss might sting a little less if you don’t talk a big game beforehand. And I keep hearing from everyone else that you’re probably gonna lose.”
Toni shakes her head, grinning. “With this amount of flyness and swag packed into one hot-ass point guard? No way.” Shelby looks to her sharply, her body tingling, her mouth going dry. She knows these words. “We’re gonna crush them, and it’s gonna be dope as fuck. Like, all of the dopeness of Michael Jordan dunking from the free-throw line combined with that sick block from Lebron James against the Warriors. You’re gonna be simping for me from the sidelines and eating those words, just watch.”
Shelby grabs her wrist and turns her with a laugh, pushing her up against the wall, and Toni’s eyebrows shoot up but her eyes drop right away to Shelby’s mouth. “Sweet baby Jesus,” Shelby mutters affectionately, “your vocabulary is so darn embarrassing.”
Their kiss, soft and hungry and deep and loving, goes uninterrupted this time.