She’s laughing at your joke when she sits down on the couch next to you and you realize that you might be a little in love with her.
You finished the movie over an hour ago and then the two of you just kept talking. Sweat clings to the backs of your knees and the insides of your elbows and it feels almost like your skin is webbed when you bend them. Bite your lip and find it cracked but not enough to taste blood. Look over at her and realize she’s waiting for you to continue.
“Ok,” you say. “So, Emma tells me she doesn’t trust Kate around me. On account of how gullible I am. And I tell Emma that I don’t know what she could possibly mean by that.”
Her head leans back and a laugh exits her throat again like a spirit escaping. Like what you said is funnier than it really is. Closed fist hits the side of the pillow next to you before bouncing rhythmically against it. She looks at you with excited eyes that almost seem to sparkle. Lips closed but thinking. Hair sticky with hours of sweat in that way that makes it all different shades of brown.
Her voice is soft in a way her laugh isn’t. Ever so slightly deep and dark in a way that you realize might excite you a little. She’s so close to you, too. When it was her turn to talk she’d stand up and pace, but while you talk she just sits there and watches you.
“Well, Emma doesn’t really know how to respond to that, so she asks me if I trust her. And I tell her that of course I trust her. And she gestures at me like that proves something.”
You look away from her as you finish speaking. Isn’t there some rule about seconds of eye contact? You wouldn’t be able to talk much longer if you had to look in her eyes the whole time.
“Well, you are pretty quick to trust,” she says.
You can hear that she’s still smiling as she says it.
The TV across from the two of you is turned off. Has been since right as the movie ended. In it, you can see a vague outline of her. Silhouette shifting as she talks and listens. Hues erased and just the shape of her visible.
“No, I’m not,” you insist automatically. “I’m exactly the right amount of trusting.”
You shift in your seat. You have a bruise on your leg from where you walked into a pole earlier. You had gotten distracted talking in a call and totally missed it. You’ve been trying not to get so easily distracted. It’s harder around her.
“Uh huh. Didn’t you just tell me that you had stayed over at her place the first night you met her? And, looking at the time, aren’t you about to do the same with me?”
You thought nothing of it at the time, though now the idea of staying the night at her place takes on additional meaning. You wonder if she’s seeing you blush. Do people really visibly blush?
“This is different. I mean, you’re right. But I didn’t mean to do it, this time.”
In the reflection in the television, you can see her start to lean closer toward you, and you turn around to face her.
“Literally five minutes into this conversation we talked about this and you accepted my invitation.”
Her words are sharp and quick, no sign of the exhaustion you’re beginning to feel. It’s getting late. Time is passing and you’re beginning to lose count as numbing fuzz builds in your head.
“That doesn’t count,” you say, leaning away from her to clear your head.
“Uh huh? And why not?” she says, leaning even closer.
But then she leans a little too far, and her elbow presses right into your bruise.
It’s an involuntary noise. A sound that slips from your lips unbidden. Loud and sharp like the pain. Stinging pain that appears rapidly. It lingers as heat before fading away.
And when you look up at her, she’s not making the same expression as she was before. Now her eyes are wide open in a different way, staring at you with focus that you didn’t think she could show. Maybe she wasn’t fully awake, but she is now.
Her elbow is still above your bruise, hanging and waiting.
And as she looks at you with what must be some kind of desire, you realize several things about the both of you very, very quickly.
On days that aren't Saturday, I write short things for my patreon. Somewhere between 'exploratory kink writing' and 'working on getting better at writing'. Then on Saturday I select one of the pieces from the week to share on tumblr. This is that. Hope you liked it!