Sick of losing soulmates (Cheryl Blossom & Toni Topaz)

7

She kisses Heather for the first time in the locker rooms before P.E. No one's arrived yet and, since they both have free period before this class, they arrive early most days of the week. Cheryl is rummaging through her locker, looking for her shorts, when she feels Heather come up behind her. She's a few lockers down, bottom row. Cheryl's near the showers.

"Hey." Heather says, and just hearing her voice makes Cheryl melt from the inside out. She grips the locker door tighter, pulls out her shorts. Her heart's beating ridicilously fast and she hasn't even looked at Heather yet. It's stupid. It's stupid that she feels this way and it's stupid that she's never felt this way with anyone. Cheryl sometimes wonders, in the back of her head, if anyone will ever make her feel like this. Maybe her soulmate will, if she ever finds them.

Maybe.

Cheryl turns now, faces her. She's real close.

"Hi." Cheryl replies, voice a whisper. She involuntarily looks at Heather's lips — they're so full and look so soft. She has some pretty lip gloss on that makes her lips look so kissable.

So. Heather kisses her. It's tentative and nervous but Cheryl's insides are contorting, twisting and her blood is on fire. It is – it's on fire and all of her nerve endings are on edge so she's hyperaware of the shorts in her hands and the locks digging into her leg and the footsteps nearing the locker rooms,

Footsteps.

They pull away from each other like they've been burned, but there's this blush on Heather's cheeks and Cheryl's face feels hot, too, but the girls that come in don't care or don't really notice anything. Heather disappears to her locker and Cheryl realizes she's gripping the shorts too tight. She wants to invite Heather over to her house, to her bed, so she can kiss her and never ever stop but she knows that's dangerous. Her mother is dangerous. She has a strict no-locked-doors policy and, locked doors or not, Penelope always seems to know what's going on in her household. Cheryl's pretty sure she has hidden cameras in every room that feed back into monitors hidden in her closet. It makes sense, honestly.

So.

So Cheryl and Heather kiss in locker rooms and empty bathrooms and behind the school building. It's amazing. It's really amazing and Cheryl can't ever get enough of Heather. This is the first time, ever, that she thinks about forever with someone because God, she could kiss Heather forever. She could get used to this — to Heather kissing her slow and nibbling on her lip, to Heather telling her how pretty she is right into her ear, to Heather holding her hand under the table in biology and drawing patterns onto the back of her hand.

"I like you a lot." Cheryl tells Heather one day at Pop's. They're sat across from each other, a vanilla milkshake sitting in front of Heather and a strawberry one for Cheryl. It's perfect. Like a scene from a movie.

"I like you more." Heather responds, feet playing with Cheryl's under the table.

I love you is on the tip of Cheryl's tongue, but.

She's not sure if she does. She's only ever loved her Nana Rose and Jason but that's family, a different kind of love. Cheryl might not even be feeling a romantic love — it might be adoration or infatuation, even. She wants to say it, though. She really does. It seems appropriate.

The silence streches but then Heather's phone rings and it's her mother. She has to go home. They have company over. Heather kisses Cheryl on the cheek for longer than necessary and Cheryl watches her go through the windows of Pop's.