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“Hey.”
Lupe snapped back to attention at the soft sound of Jess’s voice in the darkness. She would be having an easier time focusing and casually conversing if Jess’s thigh weren’t pressed against her own, if Jess didn’t have such an easy hold on the beer bottle hanging between her knees, if Jess’s fingers weren’t lingering on Lupe’s every time they passed the bottle back and forth. All of it shorted out her senses and reminded her of the bar and everything that had happened there two nights before. “Mm?”
“You want any more of this?” Jess lifted the almost-empty bottle slightly to clarify. There had been only two beers left in the house, and they made the decision to share, leaving the other behind. You know, in case someone else was looking forward to a drink on the porch at the end of a real fucking hot day, Jess had suggested hesitantly, thoughtfully. Lupe had agreed with a shrug. It was only polite, the right thing to do.
They sat at the top of the front steps just after sunset, the hazy gray of the evening settling around them. Lupe shook her head, “Nah, I’m good.”
Jess downed the last sip, set the bottle aside, and leaned back on her elbows. Lupe tried not to notice – tried even harder not to ache – when the movement pulled Jess’s thigh an inch away from Lupe’s. C’mon, García, she tried to reprimand her fragile heart. She’s barely an inch away.
An inch that Lupe pretended she didn’t close when she stretched and shifted her own position a minute later. She thought the move was subtle enough maybe to fool even herself, but Jess flashed her a quick, knowing smile and put her hand gently on Lupe’s thigh. It was innocent – just barely above Lupe’s knee – but it only reminded Lupe even more.
It had been one of their objectively tamest nights out, but nonetheless the events rattled loudly around Lupe’s mind. Even though it had been a decent crowd, and the Peaches were fresh off a win, Jess and Lupe only flirted with other patrons half-heartedly for a few minutes before instead drifting off to a small side table to start a game of cards by themselves.
Jess’s ankle had been pressed against Lupe’s under the table until another butch approached and asked to join. In making room for a third player, Jess slid around to the other side of the table into the seat beside Lupe’s.
Lupe shuffled the deck and dealt. Jess slouched a bit, rolled her neck, and stretched her legs out to where her thigh met Lupe’s warmly – accidentally, incidentally, Lupe told herself despite everything between them that indicated that that probably wasn’t true. The contact had shaken Lupe’s brain enough that she played terribly that next hand.
Jess had laughed at her, taking Lupe’s still-mostly-full beer and joking, “Think maybe you’ve had enough.” Lupe rolled her eyes but didn’t reach for it back. She wasn’t about to try to offer an alternate – more accurate – explanation or to interrupt Jess’s loose and lithe posture, the gentle flex of her fingers around the sweating bottle.
When Jess took a sip, Lupe had to look away to not watch the bob of her throat or her lips where Lupe’s had just been. She recollected the deck and handed it to the butch across the table. In the shuffle of cards, Jess passed the beer back, saying, “I’m just playing, Lu,” and then whiting out Lupe’s brain when she squeezed Lupe’s thigh softly, reassuringly, and then left her hand there.
Jess played that whole hand – and then the next – one-handed, which meant that Lupe ultimately lost badly three times in a row and felt she needed to call it a night for the sake of her pride and her emotional wellbeing currently boiling in Jess McCready’s easy affection. As exposed and unraveled as she felt in the heat of the attention, it still quieted her mind and steadied her heart when Jess swallowed the last of her beer and scraped the legs of her chair across the floor as she stood to head out too, like it was a given that they would leave together.
As they were leaving, when Lupe reached for Jess’s empty bottle and their fingers brushed lightly, Lupe slowed her touch, just a bit more obviously deliberate. Jess’s mouth quirked up slightly, her gaze warm and heavy. They held the shimmery heated eye contact until Lupe looked away and Jess let go of the bottle. “I’ll meet you outside,” she said as the moment slid past them.
Lupe had almost grabbed her elbow, almost said, “Jess, wait,” and dragged her to the bathroom or a back room or even a dark corner. Somewhere to finally close the gap in what they’ve both been circling around for weeks now. She wasn’t oblivious to Jess’s intention in these instances, and she wasn’t about to doubt Jess’s authenticity. She just… didn’t quite know the right way to handle things, how to give them the grace they deserved. She had never fallen for a friend before, and Jess was no ordinary friend, no ordinary best friend.
So she let Jess walk out, and her thoughts swirled restlessly as she closed their tab. On the walk home, the impulse of reaching for Jess’s elbow morphed into an insistent mental image of linked hands, intertwined fingers. The whole way home she wanted to nothing more than to live in a world where it would be safe for her to take Jess’s hand.
On the porch, the loop of memory kept getting caught there – take her hand – at that unresolved and persistent itch in the back of Lupe’s mind. Fuck it, Lupe thought, and settled her hand overtop the one Jess had resting on her thigh and laced their fingers together, despite the awkward hold. It only took a second for Jess to smile again, softer, and flip her hand over to fit palm to palm instead.
They sat like that for a few soothed and sated minutes, not smoking, not drinking, not talking. Just resting thigh to thigh and palm to palm in the falling summer dusk. The full contentedness in Lupe made it seem, even under the cacophony of cicadas and the muted sounds of teammates inside the house, that they were held in their own moment, quiet and still.
**
They didn’t get another moment of quiet and still for several days. That kind of peace and space was rather hard to come by with a crowded house and a well-loved bar.
It was a Sunday afternoon, a slow and sticky, hot and humid day. The Peaches had opened all the windows in the house, but it just seemed to stir the stifling air from room to room. Jess and Lupe were sprawled side by side on Lupe’s bed, now alone in the room with Esti having just bounded down the stairs to join Maybelle and Shirley to go get ice cream.
“Oh thank god,” Lupe murmured once the door closed. She sat up to shrug her shirt off her shoulders – the shirt she had been slowly unbuttoning, one by one, as the temperature in the room seemed to rise and rise – leaving her in her undershirt. Lupe watched and tried to keep her breathing steady as Jess’s eyes drifted to her exposed collarbones, then down the line of her arm to her hand where it rested between them.
When Jess looked back up, her gaze lingered a second too long on Lupe’s mouth, and Lupe needed to break the tension to avoid doing something embarrassing like shiver or something reckless like kiss her – especially when the house echoed with the sounds of Maybelle yelling upstairs to Jo and Esti looking for her shoes and Greta and Ana down the hall bickering about dinner that night. She reached over to her side table for her pack of cigarettes, her lower leg sliding off the edge of the bed in the strain to reach it. She stayed like that, one leg hanging off the bed and her thighs spread wide in front of her as she shook one out of the carton. “Smoke?”
Lupe understood the look of momentary bereavement in Jess’s expression that quickly turned into a soft, understanding half-smile. They couldn’t, they both knew, despite the simmer of the unspoken but increasingly obvious fondness for each other that had wrapped them slowly in something dizzying and gossamer, almost intoxicating if they slipped under it.
“Sure,” Jess said, delayed, fishing her matches from her pocket. They couldn’t touch in the ways they wanted to, but Jess could light Lupe’s cigarette, their lips could touch the same place as they passed it back and forth, their fingers could brush and linger as they did.
It had to be enough, Lupe knew, but it wasn’t. She curled her toes and sighed in frustration as she leaned against the headboard. She tipped her head back and almost snapped when Esti and her flurry of excited energy burst back into the room, rooting under her bed, presumably still looking for her shoes. Through the open door, Lupe could see Ana and Greta head down the stairs and could hear Jo’s surrender to Maybelle of, “Okay, okay, fine. Give me one minute.”
And then, once Esti had left again and shut the bedroom door behind her, it was just a few more beats of chaos and voices and footfalls before the house’s front door slammed shut, and then –
Silence.
Lupe knew better than to assume the house was empty, but it was the kind of quiet that would give away any footstep or pin drop nearing their door. Jess seemed to share the realization as she rolled from where she was lying on her back to face Lupe and look up at her, gaze warm and mirthful. “Hey.”
She had the cigarette still dangling between her fingers, which Lupe gestured for and took a drag from – an effort to fortify her courage – before stubbing it out in the ashtray by her bed. She turned back to Jess and heard the coarseness in her own voice when she echoed, “Hey.”
Emboldened now by maybe the closest they could have to privacy, Jess reached out, like in a continuation of the moment lost prior, and traced with light fingertips the veins on the back of Lupe’s hands. It was so delicate and gentle that now Lupe couldn’t not shiver under Jess’s touch. As she followed the veins to Lupe’s wrist and then continued up her forearm, Lupe’s skin goosebumped in the wake of Jess’s fingertips.
“Jess,” Lupe whispered, as they both watched the slow movement.
“Hm?” Jess hummed, looking up at Lupe, and Lupe wondered just how much her expression might be giving away as her heart pounded and her cheeks warmed.
“Come here.”
“I am here,” Jess replied with a half-smile as her fingers moved higher up Lupe’s arm.
Lupe rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t help the noise that escaped when Jess scraped her nails against Lupe’s skin, just hard enough to leave faint scratches. “Closer,” Lupe murmured.
Jess hummed again as she propped herself up on her elbow to stretch and lean in to continue the path from Lupe’s shoulder across her collarbone. Lupe shivered again, and Jess smiled as her fingertips came to rest gently in the hollow at the base of Lupe’s neck.
“Like this?”
Lupe licked her lips, cracked and dry from the summer’s dirt and dust and sun, and blinked slowly. “Almost.” She hooked her fingers in Jess’s beltloops and pulled her hips closer. Jess went easily, pushing herself up to eyelevel with Lupe and settling with her legs folded underneath her, her thighs slotting between the spread of Lupe’s.
“Hey,” Jess repeated with more intention, the two of them now face to face with her hand still hovering above Lupe’s chest, only two fingertips tenderly skin to skin.
Lupe’s hand drifted from Jess’s waistband up to her face, skimming her cheek lightly as she reached to tuck a few flyaway hairs that had unraveled from her braid back behind her ear. Jess’s cheeks colored just slightly but still so stark against her pale complexion. Lupe ran her thumb across the pinkened skin.
She watched Jess’s gaze fall to her mouth again and couldn’t help but mirror the attention as her hand drifted down Jess’s cheek to graze her full lower lip. Jess’s eyes fluttered closed, and her exhale turned into a groan as Lupe pressed just a bit, just enough to catch and drag the lip a little as she pulled her hand away.
“Lu,” Jess protested at the loss of Lupe’s touch. But she wasn’t gone long as she merely moved up to trace the childhood scar in Jess’s eyebrow, a touch so soft, barely there, with the rest of her hand hovering above Jess’s face. Lupe was unsure if something like, fuck, cupping Jess’s cheek would be too much. They hadn’t ever touched like this, so gentle and purposeful and caring and overtly intimate.
But Lupe’s worries were short-lived, as Jess just tilted her head slightly to press her cheek against Lupe’s palm, eyes closing at the contact. Lupe’s brain stalled at the heat of her, at Jess’s soft breath against her skin. They stayed like that for a long moment until Lupe couldn’t take it – the too-much and not-enough of it all – and leaned in to nose into the crook of Jess’s neck. She knew Jess’s smell; they shared too many clothes and too much space to not. But pressing into her tacky skin, it enveloped her and dragged her deeper into her affection, her desire.
She pressed a slow, closed-mouth kiss to the skin there that elicited another wanting sound from Jess as she arched into Lupe’s touch, a breathy groan that Lupe needed to hear again. She repeated the gesture before adding just a flash of teeth that shaped the pitch of Jess’s groan into something closer to a whine. Lupe soothed the spot with her tongue and then kissed again softly, innocently, before just resting her head in the warmth radiating from Jess’s flushed skin.
They stilled, breathing against each other, until Jess shifted restlessly. Her hand still remaining at the base of Lupe’s neck slid higher to cup Lupe’s chin and tip her head up just as she angled her own face down, leaving them cheek to cheek. The position had Jess’s face cradled between Lupe’s palm and cheek, a hold so gauzy and intimate to Lupe it felt almost surreal: Jess – so wild and tough and brazen – right there, in a moment so tender and vulnerable. Right there with Lupe – despite all of Lupe’s wounds from the world that made her feel unworthy and unlovable and flawed, despite Lupe’s own protective tough exterior and guarded walls.
It was the overwhelming, bubbling affection floating up with these thoughts that washed away Lupe’s hesitation. It was barely a turn of her head for her lips to brush Jess’s, gentle and slow. Jess’s hand slid to the back of Lupe’s neck, holding her close to kiss her back, deeper.
Jess’s fingers tangled into Lupe’s hair, the light pull eliciting a low groan from Lupe. It started to get away from them, tongues sliding together and touches trailing and bodies pressing together needily.
It felt too sudden, too soon, when they heard a door open, a pair of footsteps on the stairs. They pulled back, separated into something more forgivable, but they kept their eyes on each other, taking in the image of one another, kiss-bitten and flushed and breathing hard. For a brief instant, Lupe’s stomach dropped, afraid of what someone might think – know – were they just to open the door.
But the footsteps passed by them, thank god, and the house went silent again. They both knew, though, they had pushed their luck far enough. Lupe sat back against the headboard again, catching her breath and feeling the cool surface behind her in contrast to the heat low in her gut and under her skin.
Jess turned, shifted over to sit beside Lupe, their legs stretched out parallel in front of them. Side by side but no longer touching. Lupe found herself once again trying not to mourn the loss of touch with Jess right there, just an inch away. But it was Jess this time who closed the gap, pressing her thigh to Lupe’s and holding out her hand for Lupe to lace their fingers together, intertwine themselves in the small ways they could, as long as the moment would stay quiet and still.