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“Oh my god, my eyes!” Rhonda exclaimed, bursting into the library.
Quinn looked up from the book she was reading, “Everything alright?”
“No, everything is not alright! I just,” she shuddered, “I just walked in on Wally and Maddie and they were…” Her sentence trailed off but the implication was clear.
Quinn raised her eyebrows, “Got it.”
“Quinn, I feel like you are not sufficiently shocked and horrified by this.”
“Well, about,” she checked the clock on the wall, “five minutes ago, the same thing happened to me. Only with Charley and Yuri.”
“Oh my god. All four of them, no decency to lock the door,” Rhonda groaned, face in her hands.
“Can we lock doors?” Quinn asked.
“That’s not the point. The point is…” her eyes lit up, “we’re going to get revenge.”
“I don’t think I like where this is going.”
Rhonda stood, “No, it’s genius. They’re all going to be here within the next couple of minutes, right? So we convince them that they’ve walked in on us.”
“Doing what?”
“Making out. But we’ll actually be fake making out.”
“How does one fake make out?”
Rhonda paused, “Well, I guess it would be real making out. But we would know it didn’t mean anything, hence it’s fake. For us. But it’ll scar them just enough and we’ll get our payback.”
“Okay fine, let’s do it.”
Rhonda grinned and led her to one of the couches in the library. Quinn sat, picking at her nails.
“Press your lips together.”
“What?”
“It needs to look like we’ve been kissing for a bit, press your lips together.” As they aggressively pressed their own lips together, they made eye contact and broke into a fit of giggles.
“This might be the stupidest thing we’ve ever done.”
“Just bear with me.”
“Oh I’m bearing.”
Rhonda reached out a hand to lightly touch Quinn’s hair, “Can I?”
“Oh um, yeah, sure. Go ahead.”
Rhonda tousled the other girl’s hair. It made Quinn’s heart skip a beat, feeling Rhonda’s hands in her hair. She shook away the feeling best she could, grabbed Rhonda’s hat off of her head, and threw it onto the floor.
“Ooh, sexy,” Rhonda said.
“Shut up.”
“You should unhook the straps of your bibbers.”
She nodded and did so. It was so…vulnerable. It wasn’t like she wasn’t wearing anything underneath, but the action felt intimate.
“I’m not going to bite, you know.”
“Sorry?”
“You look like you’re about to fall off of the couch.”
Quinn glanced down. She was hugging the end of the couch more than she had realized. She shifted closer to Rhonda, pulling her legs up underneath her.
Rhonda gently placed a hand on Quinn’s waist, “Is this okay?”
“Uh huh,” she choked out. She could feel all of the blood rushing to her face at that moment.
She lifted her hands to cup Rhonda’s cheeks, “Does this work?”
“Perfect.”
They stayed there for a moment, neither one of them moving or breaking eye contact. It was silent except for the pounding Quinn swore she could hear coming from her heart. Could her heart even race anymore?
Eventually, she glanced towards the door, “When will we know when they’re coming?”
“Wally’s loud. We’ll hear it.”
Quinn nodded. There was another beat. And another. It was getting almost too awkward to bear when they heard Wally’s voice echoing down the hallway, followed by Charley’s laugh.
“You ready?”
“Aye aye, captain.”
And with that, Rhonda pressed her lips against Quinn’s and Quinn absolutely melted. Rhonda pulled her in, just an inch closer, and the world seemed to disappear around them.
That is, of course, until there was a squeak that sounded distinctly like Wally.
The two girls broke apart, trying to act like they had been caught. Charley, Yuri, Wally, and Maddie all stood frozen in the doorway.
Maddie was the first to speak. “Sorry to interrupt.”
“No! Sorry, um, we have something to show you guys.”
Quinn jumped off the couch, ignoring the strange look that Yuri was giving her. Fuck. She couldn’t be…she wouldn’t…damn it to hell, she liked it. She liked kissing Rhonda and liked the taste of her lips and liked holding her face in her hands. She liked it and she wanted to do it again. This was a disaster.
Quinn paced outside the pottery room for a solid 15 minutes before deciding to bite the bullet and go in. Yuri sat at his wheel, making the same vase he always made.
“Do you have a minute?”
“Sure, what’s up?” he asked, wiping his clay covered hands off on a towel.
She sat down on an adjacent stool, “Do you promise not to tell?”
“Quinn, I pretended to not speak English for over 40 years. I can keep your secret.”
“I think I like Rhonda.”
“And that’s a problem because…?”
“Because there’s absolutely no way she feels the same!”
“Sorry, I think I’m missing something here. Did I not just see you making out literally yesterday?”
She chuckled halfheartedly, “Oh, right. That was fake. It was to get back at you guys for the fact that we had to…”
“That’s pretty smart, actually.”
“I can’t take any credit, it was her idea.”
“It was her idea to make out with you but there’s absolutely no way she could like you?”
“It was fake!”
“Well, making out is making out.”
“What do I do?”
“You tell her.”
“I can’t do that.”
He smiled, “Sometimes you have to do the scary thing. Take it from the guy who destroyed his whole act just because a cute boy smiled at him.”
“Are you sure? Because-”
“Quinn. Tell her.”
Quinn found Rhonda in the teachers’ lounge, sitting on a table, throwing jelly beans into a coffee mug across the room.
“Rhonda?”
She turned around, “You want to join me?”
Quinn nodded and sat down beside the other girl. Rhonda handed her a jellybean which she halfheartedly threw in the direction of the mug.
“Are you okay?”
“How did you–”
“You usually love doing shit like this.”
Quinn sighed, picked up another jellybean, and rolled it back and forth between her fingers, nervously.
“Quinn?”
“The kiss was real to me,” she blurted out.
“What–”
“When we pretended to kiss yesterday, you said it would be fake because it didn’t mean anything. But it meant something to me. And I can’t stop thinking about the fact that I really want to kiss you. For real, this time.”
Rhonda scooted closer on the table, “I’m really glad to hear that.”
“You are? Because I totally understand if this is just an awkward situation and you’re trying to be–”
“Quinn, will you stop talking and let me kiss you?”
“Gladly.”
This kiss felt different. So different. And so much better. There was an electricity between them, charging their every movement. The bowl of jelly beans clattered to the floor but neither of them noticed. Or if they did, they didn’t care. Quinn somehow ended up in Rhonda’s lap as they kissed each other senseless, arms wrapped around each other, hot breath mixing in the space between them.
“Oh come on, you guys!”