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Your hands are in her hair, your fingers curled around the strands short and soft and she is there, right there before your eyes, in your arms, on your tongue. Her lips are on yours and it is messy, so, so, so messy like the fluttering of your chest between the gaps in your ribs, like the irregular beats that thump under your skin threatening to burst free.
“We—”
She kisses you quiet like she knows what you were about to say, steals the thought with first touch of her tongue, spirits it away into the depths between you.
There isn’t space for it to come back.
There shouldn’t be, pressed between your skin, the feeling of her on you, her hair in your hands, your face in hers, there isn’t space.
There isn’t space but the thought sits in the lulls of your heartbeats and you give in, give in and break the surface for clarity.
“We shouldn’t,” you say but her lips are right there and she knows you better than you know yourself. Her breath curls over your skin in wisps so hot you swear you can see them distort the air. She doesn’t let go. She doesn’t relent.
She kisses you now, kisses you harder than she did before and it’s teeth now with their round sharp edges that take your lips and lay claim to you, the promise of what is to come if—
“Mai,” you breathe.
Now she pauses, stills, hands over your skin, on your skin. Her eyes sweep across you and it’s like she knows, like she’s seen and she understands even if you haven’t said it. She doesn’t. Does she?
She is warm, the air between you warmer still.
“Maki,” she says and the pit of your stomach falls out into the darkness with the way she says your name like it means everything. “Don’t you think we’ve had enough?”
You know what she wants like you must have somehow always known because it doesn’t sit any different, settles silently, smoothly into place in the caverns of your heart like it has always belonged there. It startles you, how little it startles you and it’s a stupid thought even for a fool.
Yes, your breath trembles as her lips brush over your still ones.
Yes.
“Don’t you think it’s been enough?”
God, yes, your heart says to the words she isn’t saying.
Yes.
Yes, yes, yes. But you’re afraid like you’ve never been afraid before. Before, when it was just you and no matter what they did to you, they did it only to you. Only to you.
But now it isn’t. It won’t be. If you take this step, cross this line, it will never just be you again and that fills you with the stupidest of hope and the wildest of joys, strikes you with the jolt of deep heart-rending fear that you can’t, can’t, don’t dare shake.
It’s not yours to shake and you can’t—if something happened, if something happened, if it is your fault—She deserves better, better than you.
She does.
She—
“Maki,” she whispers and your heart cracks. “Don’t you—” her voice shakes now and you can’t bear it. You’ve never been able to bear the quiver in her words, don’t want to think about what put it there or who when you know it’s you, it’s you, it’s always ever been you, it has.
And yet she comes back.
She comes back to you, waits for you, holds her hand out for you like she knows you’ll take it.
And you do. You lean in and you pull her back to you like nothing else matters because it’s true—if there isn’t a space for the two of you you’ll make one, tear a hole in the world, put it back together right, fix it the way you need to.
You will.
This time, you will and so, this time, this time you hold her in your hands and you give her what she wants.
You kiss her.
You do.