Chapter Text
Maybe it was like that feeling when he was a child, and his father would rub his hands over his son’s back to help ease the insomnia away. No, it was closer to those videos, the ones where people whispered into microphones and broke apart dead leaves into putty. But that wasn’t it either. Steven forced himself to relax on the bed. The comforted had been pushed aside, his shirt had been pushed up, and he just knew Connie was giving him that look.
“It’s glowing a little,” she giggled.
She rolled the tip of her finger right on the curve, where Steven’s skin rounded around his gemstone, transitioning from human to rock. Steven tried to smile, but as soon as Connie touched him he drew air through his teeth and shut his eyes, turning his head aside. What was Connie drawing parallels to here? She laughed at his squirming, like she would if he was being tickled or balking at a blood draw (which he had seen, but definitely wasn’t looking to try).
Discovering the sensitivity was an accident. A windy beach walk had blown sand onto Steven’s Gem, and Connie had wiped it away nonchalantly. When Steven nearly doubled over, the two of them had had a long and awkward conversation. But here they were now. Steven stretched out on his comforter, forcing himself to breath as Connie sat up over him, one arm holding his shirt and the other tracing the facets of the stone. The other Gems were helping over at Little Homeworld for the day, and Steven had accepted a day off, much to their surprise. Nobody knew about Connie’s arrival, and he wanted to keep it that way. There was no good way to explain what was going on here.
“Have you tried to do it to yourself?” Connie said. “Or is it like tickling, where you only feel it if someone else is doing it.”
“I-I think it’s kind of like a massage. I did try, but I had to press harder to get the same feeling that I get when you do it.”
“Good to know! I’ll have to be over more often, then.”
“Hey!”
A quick swirl around the ring was enough to shut Steven up for any future protesting. He didn’t like how he felt immobilized, but there was a safety to it with Connie here. There wasn’t another human on the planet he would have let touch his Gem like this. The girl pressed her thumbprint into the smooth center.
“What’s it feel like, Steven?”
That was the one question he hoped she wouldn’t ask. Steven kept his mouth closed and shrugged. Connie looked down and raised an eyebrow.
“Do you like it?”
Apparently, there were two questions. Steven turned his head away as blood rushed to his cheeks. He was enjoying himself immensely. There were no nerves in his Gem as far as he knew, and yet every touch resonated through his body. He felt them as if they were pulses, but there was no clear beginning or end. It was as if there was a warmth, like from sunlight, but coming from inside his body and touching each part of himself intensely. Piercing light, needles of strange pleasure, diluted soul — there were so many melodramatic words he could think of to describe ‘a good kind of weird.’
Connie was almost enjoying herself more, though she didn’t say a word. She tugged on Steven’s shirt until it folded up over his belly, then took both hands and went to work. Her fingers traced circles around each section of the stone, up and down the lines leading to his central pentagon. Soft skin pressed against the pinkness, the fingers flowing and eking light from the boy. Steven could see the faint glow on the ceiling increase in intensity, and Connie looked up as well with a grin.
The more fingers teased him, the more intense Steven felt like squirming, but his will to move away was stifled in like kind by how the feelings bound his body. It was only whenConnie’s hands moved to his stomach that he was able to release his breath. His friend’s laughter as she pressed her hands into his skin was almost more embarrassing. Connie rolled her thumbs slowly near the edge of the Gem as the glow died down.
“I hope you know that I’m enjoying myself immensely , Steven Universe.”
“I hope you know that I’m mortified.”
“Why? Nobody’s around to see us.”
“YOU’RE around to see! And I’m here with my shirt up and… You know.”
“I know what?”
He couldn’t say a word. Did he have to? Connie’s smile fell into a curious line, as if she was waiting on him to get over the hurdle of shame and just come out with it already. Steven met her eyes and recognized the feeling again. The more he wanted to tell her, the less the words felt like coming out. There was no pleasure in this. Shakily, Steven brought up his hand to take Connie by the wrist. He couldn’t guide her anywhere, or bring her hand back to his Gem in silence, ordering her into a complicit impasse. Holding her was all he could do. Her skin was warm, a different kind of warm.
With his hand occupied, Connie scooted back a foot. Steven watched in slow-motion as the girl looked at him, bent over, and planted her lips right on the face of his Gem. His mouth opened in protest a half-second too late, and the blurted name came out in a breathless gasp.
“Connie—!”
The jolt made his heart pound in double-time. Everything felt like it was in double-time, a burst through his body like he had never felt before. Out of all the memories in the moment, he felt like he did on Homeworld, when he fused with his Gem and reformed once more. The sensation of being outside himself and then whole again rocked his body on the bed. Steven gripped Connie and the sheets as tight as he could muster without hurting or tearing. On the kiss’s impact, Steven felt as though he was astrally projecting into himself. There were two bodies, twice the nerve endings, twice the sensations coursing through his bones. Entire systems felt the energy from Connie’s kiss. In the span of a second, from the touch of the lips to their removal, Steven was rattled and returned, left panting on the bedspread.
Connie blinked and rubbed her eyes as she sat back up, both hands removed from Steven’s body. She smiled again, this time in awe.
“Did you see that?”
Steven’s brain felt like eggs scrambled in the bottom of his skull. Everything in the room seemed a little bit tainted pink, and he had to shake himself back to consciousness. He pushed himself upright and shook his head no.
“That was the brightest I’ve seen you glow without using your powers,” Connie said. “Did you feel something different?”
“Y-yeah,” Steven mumbled.
“Was it...good different?”
He had released her arm without realizing it. Steven pulled his shirt back down over his Gem before he took Connie by the hand. One breath in, one breath out, and he could look her in the eyes again.
“I can’t describe it, but it’s good in a way that I wouldn’t want to feel with anyone but you,” Steven said. “I know, it’s sudden, I’m sorry, but — it’s so hard to say that. But you know that, right? You’re the only person ever that’s allowed to do that. Because — you know why.”
Both of them knew why and Steven felt like a coward for not saying it. Connie understood, and if she was hurt she didn’t show it. She must have understood. The girl put one hand over the other, over Steven’s, and squeezed softly.
“Steven, does it feel good...in a special way?”
The boy narrowed his eyes in confusion until he realized exactly what Connie was talking about, and then he wished he had never realized anything in his life. Connie was already turned her head down and away, staring at a point on the floor. Was she okay to be in the house alone with him? Did she feel safe? The implication and the subject matter were so stunningly obvious that Steven didn’t know how he hadn’t felt that way from the start. He had sensed it from the first moment he pulled up his shirt.
“Connie, would you believe me if I said it wasn’t exactly like that?”
“Of course I’d believe you! You’d tell me if it was. Right?”
“I don’t know if I could say it with words.”
“...with…actions?”
Steven’s cheeks flushed again. Connie didn’t move closer, but she didn’t move away. When she looked into Steven’s face, he read a kind of determination in her gaze, a questioning. She wasn’t asking for his approval on whether or not he was attracted to her; it was a matter of honesty. Steven bit his lip and swallowed. The distance between them didn’t change a bit and yet it seemed to grow smaller by the second.
“I’m not ready,” Steven said quietly.
Relief crossed Connie’s face. They were having a conversation. It was all that she had wanted, and the girl sighed and nodded in reply.
“Me neither. I see kids at school, and they’re talking about doing just — weird things, awful things to each other, and then acting like they’re cool, and I almost feel worried.”
“That you should be doing them too?”
“Exactly! It’s so wrong!” Connie said. “But they’re talking about it, and when I think about… When I think about sex, I feel like I’m obligated to do something about it even though I know I’m not ready.”
“Connie, I’d never want to make you feel like that!”
“I know, and I know you too, Steven. You haven’t done anything wrong. I’m so sorry.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong either, though!”
“What about just then? The kiss?”
It hadn’t been sexual, but it had been something. Steven paused for a moment as he defined his thoughts in his head. They were allowed to enjoy touching each other without it turning into something of an explicit nature, strange as that sounded. Anyone who walked in might think they were up to something. He had felt embarrassed about it, but it was an emotional and confused type of embarrassment, something he had felt before, like when the Gems had asked all those years ago about who his little friend was on the beach. Now that little friend was here, and her lips had been where nobody else’s had been in his life. No, that didn’t help.
“Well, okay,” Steven said slowly. “Why did you want to come over and try this out?”
Connie fidgeted with her shoulders, tapping her fingers on the back of Steven’s hand.
“Because I wanted to spend time with you. And… And I wanted to try something a little more physical. Just to see what my own limits were, if I was really feeling the way I did, or if I was ready after all. I didn’t know if you were, and I guess I wanted to see if you were okay with it, too. I didn’t… I feel like I used you a little. I don’t know.”
“It’s not something you can easily ask,” said Steven. “I honestly would have done the same thing in your position if I felt that way. The Gems aren’t really… Well, I don’t know about Garnet, but in general, we don’t really talk about that stuff. Not like things at your school.”
Connie opened her mouth, probably to apologize. Steven cleared his throat and brought up his hand to squeeze Connie’s once again, all four hands now wrapped around each other in a clumsy bouquet.
“Connie, I wouldn’t have had you over if I didn’t want this. I knew it would be awkward, with you in… Well, it’s a private place. But I invited you! And I meant it. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
They say quietly for a moment until smiles appeared on both their faces. The mouths moved slowly, one inching along after the other, as if the two were unsure who should be relieved first. As the teenagers exhaled the stressed sighs they had been holding in, Connie looked at their mess of hands and gave a half-shrug.
“This kind of touching is fine by me,” she giggled.
“Same here.”
Steven felt silly, and after that thought, he was relieved. He didn’t want to think about the future where they would be sitting next to each other and thinking about bodies, about physicality, about existing in the same space with an air of awkwardness over their heads. When they were alone, Steven knew that he’d be mulling over some feelings of his own, and Connie probably would as well. The boundaries had been set. Steven still felt too young, too volatile, unprepared for how he could make Connie feel and the ensuing consequences. And that was fine. He was happy, and unsurprised, that Connie could talk about and overcome the beast of ‘peer pressure;’ he hadn’t considered it seriously until now. Feeling silly about their feelings was so much better than feeling unfulfilled, predatory, than feeling worried.
Just like the day before Connie had left for space camp that one summer, Steven felt a pause, and he pulled the knot of hands to his mouth. He closed his eyes and kissed Connie’s knuckles, feeling the flutter of tension before he let go. It took a moment before he realized what he had done. He opened his eyes and stared at Connie as his mind went blank.
The girl was sitting upright, and she opened her mouth once, then closed it, then smiled and pulled the hands back to her own face. Steven watched as her lips touched his fingers, sharing the motion, sharing the closed eyes and rosy cheeks and the brief pause as the hands came down together.
Too nervous to say I love you , too tight in the throat to even laugh, the teenagers rocked on the bed and squeezed each other’s hands. It was the most they could do. When Steven’s face relaxed, he found that he was still smiling, and he couldn’t have been happier. Once he got his voice and his nerves back, the teenager knew exactly what he was going to say. He was going to tell Connie how it felt to have his Gemstone touched, how the stone and his body were connected, and how much he had enjoyed the sensation even when it seemed like he was going to pass out. He was going to tell her afterwards how the little kiss on his hand felt even better.