With hands busy dredging fish filets through egg and flour, Juniper responded by opening her mouth. Rowan faltered as she slid the fry through her lips. They’d done this so many times. This time, however, Juniper was thinking of all the other things a mouth could do, and she was pretty sure that’s where Rowan’s mind was at too. As soon as Juniper’s tongue darted out to lick the leftover spicy dust off her lips, Rowan’s lips pressed into hers. Her tongue swiped along her bottom lip to steal some for herself.
“Mmm hot,” Juniper joked.
They both devolved into a fit of giggles over the stupid pun, and the giddiness transitioned into another heated burst of making out. If Juniper wasn’t careful, she was going to burn the first batch of fish. She quickly wiped her hands.
“One moment please,” she said in her most official tone.
She placed her hand against Rowan’s chest to push her back. She flipped the fish over, grabbed Rowan’s t-shirt, and pulled her back in.
After they ate dinner and Juniper packaged up the leftovers for Rowan and her dad who still wouldn’t be home from his actual job as a fisherman for a few more hours, the conversation naturally returned to their impending transition to college in the next couple of weeks.
“Do you think you’ll get to come home at all during the semester?” Juniper asked.
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
Juniper watched uneasiness settle into Rowan’s face.
“My dad doesn’t have money for that,” she added.
“I wish I could come see you,” Juniper’s inflection raised in hopefulness as she spoke. “I’ve never been on a plane! Maybe if I get a job on campus… Fuck, I don’t even know how much plane tickets cost.”
“A lot. I… looked.”
“Oh.”
The warmth Juniper felt at knowing she had looked faded quickly into dread that it didn’t actually matter. It wasn’t like either of them had family money to support them. Who was she kidding? Her campus job money would likely go to keeping herself fed. The constant struggle for basic necessities was something she was intimately familiar with.
“This kind of sucks actually,” she added.
“Yeah.” Rowan responded flatly. “It does.”
“Christmas, though?” Juniper added hopefully, shrugging her shoulders like it was any kind of solution to not seeing your best friend, the person you now realized you loved in a much different way, for several months at a time.
“Yeah, Christmas,” Rowan responded in the same flat tone.
Juniper reached across the table to link their pinkies together. Neither of them brought that topic up again.
That night when Juniper got home, she fought with hermind over which part of the day she wanted to think about as she laid in bed. She had had her first real kiss. She’d kissed her best friend. Her best friend thought she was hot. She was in love with her best friend. Maybe her best friend was in love with her? She replayed the images, the emotions, the feel of the kisses she shared with Rowan in her mind, but her thoughts kept involuntarily shifting to the way Rowan talked so despondently about their transition to college.
She wanted to stay in the happiness, but something about the way Rowan’s mood flatlined during dinner made her keep coming back to the uncertainty. And then there was the way Rowan wasn’t able to fully look her in the eyes after Juniper leaned over to kiss her good night as they sat in front of Juniper’s house later…
Dread settled into the pit of her stomach, and she stared at her bedroom ceiling, begging the tears not to fall. Something was off.
Rivers carve up a landscape, even as they are confined by it. The process by which a river incises itself into the landscape can be impacted by external factors, like the rapidly accelerating impacts of human intervention. In response to these factors, a river may cut downward into its own bed, further deepening its own incision.
Chapter 4
“You two know each other!” Theo’s eyes widened and looked between the two of them.
“We do,” they both said simultaneously, neither of them looking at each other.
The room was spinning on its axis, a vacuum with its walls closing in and all of the air being sucked out at the same time. Juniper felt dizzy and her throat went dry. She tried to be subtle about the way she placed one hand back on the desk to balance herself.
“How did you two meet?”
After a long frozen pause in the doorway, Rowan walked over to the communal table in the center of the room and found the chair closest to the door. Juniper, still standing awkwardly beside her desk like a deer in headlights activating all aspects of fight, flight,andfreeze, was the one to answer. She provided the simplest, most straightforward answer she could come up with amidst her internal chaos.
“We grew up together.”
