Other Worlds - The Wilds

Chapter 30

AN: I don't want to spoil this but I'll put a TW for mature and slightly dark content. I feel like if you've read this far then you're alright with some of the darker/more mature stuff in this. So I feel like I'm gonna settle down a bit on the trigger warnings and such because they are all in the note in the first part and I don't want to spoil the plot :)

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  After stopping and getting pizza from some hole in the wall restaurant that Shelby swore by, they went back to Shelby's house. Though the window, of course.

  Toni spent the night in Shelby's bed. She had locked the door before they got into bed, giving Toni enough time to hide or sneak out the window if Shelby's parents knocked at the door. Or if her siblings just tried to barge in. Toni never had only ever had foster siblings and they were a menace. Toni wasn't sure whether real siblings were similar or not but based on Shelby's siblings, they were.

  She had always slept on the floor the few times she had spent the night, but it was different tonight. Shelby asked her to stay in bed, and she didn't want to go either. So she stayed.

  Once Shelby put her laptop away following their Netflix binge, they laid there, on their backs, two feet apart. Toni certainly didn't want to speak first so she was relieved when Shelby said: "So... are you feeling better now?"

  Toni shifted uncomfortably in the cold, thousand thread count sheets. "I'm fine," she answered stiffly. She glanced over at Shelby who was staring at the ceiling and biting her lip. Fuck it, Toni thought. She rolled over and shuffled closer to the other girl.

  "Shelby," Toni murmured, and waited for her to turn over and face her. "Are you okay with me here?" she finished when their eyes finally met.

  "I don't know how to do this," Shelby admitted.

  "Do what?"

  "Be with you."

  Normally Toni would kick off at a comment like that thinking it was directed at her, but she knew Shelby well enough now to know that it was almost nothing to do with Toni and everything to do with the fact that she were sleeping in the same bed, under her family's roof.

  Toni tucked a piece of Shelby's hair behind her ear. "I think you do."

  Shelby smiled, the expression barely visible in the darkness of her room. "Somehow, being with you is the easiest and most difficult thing I've ever done. Does that kind of make sense?"

  "Actually, it does." Toni might not have understood exactly how Shelby felt because she didn't have the shame, or Dave Goodkind. But she knew that being with Shelby was easy, if only being with her was just that, without all of the other things that were standing in their way.

  "Can't we just be us? Here, like this?" Toni asked quietly, unable to hide the vulnerability from her voice.

  "I think we can manage that," Shelby answered, surprising Toni by pulling her in by her waist.

  "Yeah?"

  Their mouth's were a millimetre apart. Their breath intertwined.

  "Yeah," Shelby confirmed with a grin, before letting their lips meet.

  They kissed softly at first, their mouths tentatively pressed against each other. Somewhere it changed. Toni wasn't sure if it was her or Shelby but soon their lips were crashing together almost messily, desperate to be closer.

  Both girls were breathing heavily when Shelby pulled away slightly. Toni opened her eyes to see Shelby's staring right back at her with a longing that she was sure was mirrored her own expression.