Shelby comes over one evening to watch a movie with Martha in her room, and Toni avoids the both of them, for the most part. Shelby seems uncertain about how to behave around Toni now, Toni's noticed—probably because of the frosty way their last night together had ended.
Toni does homework in her room until she gets hungry and then peeks into Martha's room to ask them, "Hey, I'm ordering takeout, you guys want anything?"
"We ate leftovers earlier, but thanks," Martha says from beside Shelby on the bed, and Toni tears her eyes away from where Shelby's blatantly staring at her to look at the television instead.
"Oh, okay." She doesn't recognize the movie, but it seems to be coming to an end—these two awkward teenagers are swaying together on the dance floor, the boy's hands resting at the girl's ribcage with a foot of space in between their bodies, and Toni wants to laugh. "That's not how you dance with a girl," she says, and then leaves.
Her food comes half an hour later and she's almost done eating when there's a soft knock on her bedroom door. Shelby's on the other side when she opens it, and Toni takes a step back instinctively, having expected Martha; Shelby's curfew is in half an hour and so Toni had assumed she'd left by now.
"Martha's asleep," Shelby tells her, and she seems a little shyer than usual. "Can I come in? I don't have to leave for another twenty minutes."
Toni sighs and looks toward her bed, then decides maybe it's a good idea; after last time they both could probably use a quickie: something hard and fast and detached to remind them both of what this is supposed to be, to show that whatever the fuck that was before was just some fluke, just a strange way to end a strange day. She opens the door wider and lets Shelby slip past her, but almost immediately Shelby says preemptively, "I wanted to ask you somethin', I guess."
Toni thinks oh, more talking, but remains silent and just stares at her, an anxious pit forming in her stomach and a sense of foreboding washing over her as Shelby fidgets and looks everywhere but at Toni, because the longer the silence stretches, the more she's sure that Shelby wants to ask about the very thing Toni is trying so hard to forget.
"Um, is everythin'—? Are we—?" Shelby inhales sharply. "Are you upset with me?"
Toni blinks at her. "No."
"Oh." Shelby licks her lips and she's very obviously nervous. "I just thought that maybe I'd... I don't know, if maybe I'd said or did somethin' wrong, before—"
"We're fine, Shelby," Toni says in a way that makes it very clear she doesn't want to talk about it, and Shelby looks a little disappointed and also a little relieved all at once, somehow. Toni can tell Shelby wants to ask her something else, or maybe to just say something more on the topic, but then she exhales and Toni can see her letting it go, at least for the time being.
"Okay." She offers Toni a small smile. "Well, in that case, would you like to teach me how to dance with a girl?"
Toni's so thrown by the request that she almost asks Shelby to repeat it, just to make sure she hasn't imagined it entirely. "Dancing?" is what she ends up blurting out instead.
"It's not like I can learn anywhere else," Shelby says, which is a fair point, but Toni's still stuck on the initial request.
"You want me to dance with you." At Shelby's nod, Toni narrows her eyes suspiciously, wondering how this can possibly be turned around on her or used against her. "Well, I don't have music."
"I have a phone." Shelby digs it out of her purse and Toni takes it from her immediately. "Hey!"
"You're not choosing the song 'cause I can't handle any more Taylor Swift." Toni scrolls through the current hits until she finds a song from The Weeknd she recognizes, and it's a little fast but it's fine enough, so she puts it on and tosses the phone onto the bed. "Alright, come here," she sighs out, pulling Shelby close by her wrist, and Shelby seems more than content to settle right in front of her and let Toni guide her arms to Toni's shoulders. "It's not hard." She places her own hands on Shelby's waist and moves in closer, and then their noses are almost touching and Toni feels like she's just been manipulated a little, maybe, and that Shelby's probably at least here to make out.
