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You’re sitting on the edge of her bed. Somehow the change of setting has undone the familiarity you had worked up alone in the change room. You’ve even been over to her house, before. Had sleepovers, even. Yet, sitting on the edge of her bed while she futzes with the little boombox in the corner has you more tense than you’ve been even on missions. She insists that it doesn’t count, not really, but it seemed to count a lot more after each practice session you’ve managed to eke out here and there. At least, it counted a lot for you.
So you consciously have to unclench your hands from the edge of her bed, smoothing out the fabric as much as is reasonable for the slightly messy bed. Then, you have to do it again. Thankfully she comes and sits next to you before you can do it a fourth time. She looks coy and flushed, but still enthusiastic. You feel a cold grip wrap around your heart and drag it down into your gut. You want this, she wants this, it’s just practice, so why do you feel like you’re committing a crime against your friend and everyone around you.
“Kim?” Her voice is light, kind, she always knows how to sound unbelievably safe to be around.
“Yes?” Your throat is tight and thick, but your voice is thin and wavering.
“Are you okay? Like... with all of this?” Her hand rests on your knee, and flashes of horrible intimacy flood the backs of your eyes, poured directly from your hypothalamus like molten steel.
You catch her eyes, careful, caring, kind. Yet still some part of you recognizes a hidden hope behind it all. You nod unevenly, relinquishing the blush, which flows over your features. You pray in hopes it eases the situation. “Just... we’re in your bedroom.” She looks a little confused, so you continue. “It’s more... real? I mean, we went out shopping, and got tea, and then came back to your room.” You blush a little harder as you let your hopes get ahead of you. “It’s almost like a real date.”
That catches her, making her eyes open wider, and suddenly she’s blushing up to the tips of her ears. “O-oh. I didn’t, ummmm, think of that.” She’s speaking with a lot more uncertainty than you expected, hesitancy you wanted to avoid.
“Not that that’s bad! I had fun! I just...” You drop your eyes, unable to look Tara in the eyes for this next part. “I didn’t expect practice to turn into... this? Are you sure? With me?”
What happens next catches you off guard entirely. Tara giggles, she giggles in that cute way she does whenever she talks about a crush. “Yes, Kim,” she giggles your name out, it guts you, “yes I’m sure. I like this. I like it a lot.” She leans in closer, and you feel a vibrating anxiety build up from your fingers past your elbows up into your chest. “I like you a lot.”
Her face is so close that your voice simply shrivels up and withers into thready dust. You’ve been closer before, many time even. Her eyes flick down to your lips questioningly, and it is all you can do to gasp out a little wheeze in assent. Then she locks her gaze onto yours, getting closer still, till you can hardly see both her eyes at once.
“Kim.” Her voice is breathy and heavy, the way she sounds after practice. It sends a tremulous jolt through your gut. She holds steady, just an inch away. “I like you a lot.” It comes out so soft it barely dents the air around you, but the question underneath it rings like a bell.
The reverberating anxiety building up in you hits a resonance that aches in every cell of your body. She’s so close, you could just barely lean forward and take her lips like you have so many times before. Your voice needn’t enter this agony, but, deep in your gut, you want to take the plunge. You’ve wanted this to count. Ever since the first time you’d been lying when you said it was for practice, but it was a safe pretense.
Now she’s asking if you want to shed the pretense, and you are so scared you can hear your heart slamming into the capillaries in your ears like a ten ton anvil. You are only just starting to understand this, and you know it’ll hurt. You know it’s wrong. You’re aware vaguely that this is beckoning an anger you don’t really know yet. You want it, though. You want it. Oh God Almighty please lend mercy, you want it.
“I,” your voice cracks and evaporates, but you hold her in place, so close you can’t see her, so close you can only see her, “I like you, too.”
What have you done.
It doesn’t matter, because when she smiles, and she smiles, you find your voice among the clouds. “I like you, Tara.”
Any horror can come, but this moment cannot be broken.
Your stomach drops out, but it’s different this time. Anticipation claws its way through your bones, awaiting the moment you kiss for real this time. No more practice. All the sensations are the same, but louder, and warmer, and holy. Time unravels from its endless arbor. You swim in flood of chemicals that she meters out from your brain unbidden, unrestricted. You’re not sure if it is you, her, or both of you who leans in first.
When her lips rest against yours, it’s electric. A simple, chaste kiss, light on the lips. Just like the first time you practised. Only, this time was a thousand times louder. Every nerve in your body is sending reports back carved into stone so the details can never be lost. The softness of her lips, the gentle smear of her lip balm, strawberry just like the rest of her, the tickle of her breath on your skin, the brush of her hair against your cheek, the lightest tensing of her fingers on your knee. Everything hits you like a truck.
Then she pulls back, pupils blown, blushing so bright you wonder idly if it will ever fade. You hope it doesn’t. Her voice hits you before the words do, soft and hungry and questing. “Kim.”
Your hands relinquish the edge of the bed and find their ways to her elbow, her shoulder, and pull. You’re pretty sure you pull her in. The intoxicant coalescing and cooking away in the base of your brain fades away intent and amplifies want.
Her lips are on yours again, still soft, but no longer gentle. No longer a request, but a demand. Whose, you don’t care. Your fingers dig in harder, and her hands skate closer, one behind your neck, the other on your thigh. It counts.
Her lips part ever so slightly to accommodate a hungry little keening sound, and you chase it with your mouth, your hands. She’s made sounds like this before, during practice, and you’ve yet to slake the thirst for it. Your fingers skate along her skin, pressing, gripping, pulling in concert with the kiss you are trying to create. You need her to know.
When the tips of her fingers trail along the hem of your crop top, a little gasp jumps it’s way free from you. She seizes the opportunity to make use of a little trick from practice, and nips at your lower lip lightly. Electricity melts the wires that run along your spine, and your arms link behind her neck. Unable to pull away with you locking her in place, she bites again, harder, and you make an airy, hungry moan that only encourages her further.
She pushes onto you, legs tangling, and pushes her tongue into your mouth eagerly. You’re running up against the edge of what you’ve practised, but you don’t mind at all. Before she can take full control of the kiss, you push back, slipping one leg over hers and cleaving your tongue against hers in a fight. You feel her hand that was tracing along your ribs grip on, and her other presses against your shoulder.
Before you know it, she’s pressing you down on her bed, legs slotted together, one hand holding you down by the shoulder. Her other hand anxiously dances under your shirt, and you pull her down on top of you. You cant your head up, restarting the kiss before either of you can take a real breath, uncaring for the oxygen that isn’t from her lungs. Your hands stay locked behind her neck, and when your legs wrap around one of hers you create a microcosm of the point. She kisses you, slipping tongue past your lips like she might find what she hungers for so urgently in your mouth. You hold her close, unwilling to let her go further away than full entanglement.
Her weight shifts, and the pressing of her leg between yours becomes suddenly the most urgent thing in the world. It propels from you a needy little sound, a mewling that echoes in her mouth and brings her teeth down on your lip again. The pinprick bright pain zaps your muscles, and there you find a new need that supplants life support itself. You roll your hips, pressing against her thigh hard, and your next breath comes out long and loud.
Tara giggles again, and if you were really conscious you would have heard the innocent evil in her voice. Her kisses rain down along your jaw and neck and shoulder, nipping and suckling in a way that sends shocks and shivers rolling through you. She owns you, now. You are an instrument under her ministrations, and she is more than happy to find every sound you can make. You simply pant and buck and make little sounds at her discretion. It is an utter surrender to her, and something you’ve needed for so long. No more rushing to do everything, no more demands to be everywhere, only Tara, only her hands and her lips and her weight and her leg pressing against you.
When she eventually pulls away, your eyes make their way to open again. She’s leaning over you, smiling and flushed and giggling. Your breathing, heavy and fast, is synced. Your heart flutters in an entirely new way.
You find your voice tucked under some rock in the back of your mind. “What’s funny?”
She giggles a little harder, giddy, and the emotion bubbles over into you. “Practice makes perfect.”