for the best friends to lovers prompt- "did that kiss mean anything to you"
hope you are doing well!! i love your writing 🫶🏻
Soundless Spin
“You start.”
Doja Cat blasted through Cindy’s speakers, fancy chandeliers overhead shaking from the noise as Rick eyed the offensive Bud Light in front of him. It pained him that Blue Valley, Nebraska couldn’t shake the 20th century out of its roots–Somehow, even amidst 2020 billboard charts, Jackbox games, and Tiktok trends, the only activity collectively agreed upon tonight was spin the bottle.
“Do I have to?”
“Yes,” said Cindy, already bored at how long he was taking. Why was she facilitating this nonsense–she hates half of the school. That said, Rick also didn’t understand how they scored invites to her party. Or why the girls wanted to go. They might have not been at each other’s throats anymore with the ISA discontinued, but it wasn’t exactly like they were close friends. Since the JSA recovered the true Sylvester’s pickle brain, Rick stopped applying logic in his life when he didn’t need to. Crowded between drunk teens sat in a seance approved circle, everyone waited on Rick to start the game he had assumed was a joke.
“No, you don’t have to,” said Beth reassuringly from across the room, though Rick suspected the second it was her time she’ll nope out. She looked around the group of classmates, sober as a judge. “Please remember that kissing should always be consensual!”
Cindy rolled her eyes. “It's not that serious, Dr. Chapel Jr.” She shrugged in that nonchalant way before she stirred the pot. “Rick might land on Cameron, for all we know.”
Yolanda facepalmed. “We’re supposed to be encouraging Rick, not giving him the ick.”
Cameron shot Yolanda an icy look. She raised a brow in retaliation. “I said what I said.”
Courtney, nestled beside him, placed an ineffective hand on his knee. To Rick, she chanted, “C’mon! Spin, spin, spin, spin!”
Everyone joined in.
“Spin! Spin! Spin!”
“Fine. Fine!” he shouted loud enough to be heard, blowing hot air out of his mouth. “I get it!” He raised both hands in the air to get some of Cindy’s cheerleading friends to stop hollering, their enthusiasm giving him minor concern. “I’m doing it. I’m doing it.”
The empty beer bottle spun tightly around their sitting circle–Rick anticipated disaster, regretting his cave to peer pressure the second his hand lifted away. Anyone but Mahkent. Anyone but Mahkent, he nearly prayed in mounting desperation. It whirled around Yolanda on his right, Becky Sharpe, Cindy and the cheerleaders, tipped past Jenny Williams, slowed by Courtney, and crawled past Cameron until it hesitantly landed on Beth.
Rick jerked his eyes up, meeting her gaze. His heart stopped for, like, a minute. He’d been so caught up in who would be the worst option, he hadn’t had enough time to think what would happen if the bottle landed on one of his friends.
What the hell should I do?
Courtney covered her mouth to hide her giggles. “Wow! Must be fate.”
“Girlie,” Yolanda whisper-mimed, shaking her head and zipping her lips. “Shut up.”
It didn’t matter–Rick easily ignored Courtney cajoling them six ways to Sunday because he couldn’t hear her. The music distorted around them as he tried to pick up on Beth’s cues.
He almost asked her, should I spin again?
Then her lips lifted into a small cheeky smile. Of course, Beth wouldn’t have let herself play if she minded getting a few kisses from this game considering she was the one reminding everyone about consent. And, he came to realize, this would be his first kiss sober. It scratched an itch in his brain to think it would be with Beth. They could laugh it off later.
“Well?” some dude huffed, impatient. “Are you kissing or not?”
Rick cleared his throat. “Beth, are you sure…?”
But she was already making her way towards him, answering his question.
Okay. Welp. We’re doing this.
Instead of shuffling into the middle of the circle like a circus act, Rick let her come to him. Once she was in arm’s reach, he reached forward, hauling Beth into his lap to move her away from a sticky beer spill. It was easier, more comfortable—Less of a spectacle, this way.
“Oof.” She laughed breathlessly as he rearranged their limbs. “Hi there. This is close.”
“Sorry,” he said, embarrassed, ready to shove her off him if she didn’t like it.
Beth touched his hand. “Don’t apologize.” She was right, this was so close. He could count every curly eyelash of hers behind those dark frames. “Did you know this only had a 7% probability of happening?”
Rick inwardly rolled his eyes at her math brain guzzling out computations at a time like this. Why wasn’t she nervous? “I did not. It’ll just be a peck, okay?”
Her brown eyes brightened in the dim party room and she nodded. “Sure!”
Rick cupped her jaw, cautious to be gentle, then tipped her chin up so he could lean down and kiss her.
She was ready for it. She closed her eyes and looped her arms around his neck, meeting his quick peck with another kiss before he could end it. It caught him off guard when Beth let out a tiny sigh.
It felt good. Right. Rick couldn’t pull himself away.
She pushed herself up in his lap and then there was more. Rick’s thumb pressed against her cheek. He hadn’t had anything to drink since they first walked in, but his mind went warm and fuzzy, like that first sip of alcohol down his throat. Everything slowed around them. He didn’t know what they were doing or cared where they were, he just wanted the soft way Beth’s body pretzeled against his, her hand now moving, exploring down his neck to rest over his chest. It wasn’t rushed, or unsure, Beth was taking and he was giving or maybe it was the other way around. She let out another hum, and then there was another long lazy kiss, hypnotic enough for Rick to nearly believe that he had a soul she could’ve kissed out.
“Woah, okay! Ew? Too much.” Jenny W clapped her hands. “Time’s up! Spin again!”
He blinked out of the trance. “What?”
She gave him a shy smile. “That was nice.” Beth slid herself out of his lap seemingly unaffected nor aware of how she had just turned his life upside down.
Nice? That was—Okay. Apparently the most intimate moment in his 18 years was just “nice.” Rick was fucked.
“Yeah,” he croaked out, scared that if he spoke further his voice would crack, the tension between them was still palpable. Say something. You have to say something.
He focused on forming a coherent sentence out of his mouth. They should leave. To do what? He had no idea (yes, he did–her lips, that touch, the perfume on her neck, he needed it memorized). He also needed to process what the hell just happened, and, not surprisingly, Beth was very good at analyzing weird shit that happens to them–but not usually to both of them at the same time.
“You heard me, right? It’s your turn now.” Jenny W thrust the bottle into Beth’s hand, not giving Rick the option to get a word in.
“Oh,” Beth said. “Sorry!”
He watched in stunned silence as she returned to her spot and wordlessly spun again. It landed on a guy from Ms. Woods’ calculus support group and jealousy took a hold of him with an iron fist.
He got up and left, announcing he needed a piss, though the terrible excuse was luckily drowned out by the latest remix. Unable to stomach Beth kissing someone else, the rest of the night blurred like watercolors on a canvas.
Nothing except the bleeding dark pinks of her lips dripped into every corner of his mind, the browns of her soft eyed stare, haunting his sleep. He suffered through the blue phantom-pain of Beth in his lap. The way she moved in it and how boldly he pulled her to him without second-guessing what he was doing.
What was he doing?
~.~
“Assuming the calculations from the goggles are correct, we would have six hours in the pocket dimension.” Beth wrote notes to follow her thinking on the Pit Stop whiteboard with a green marker, her goggles projecting a diagram. “That’s one hour in our dimension, meaning hypothetically your hourglass won’t time out.
“Got it,” Rick agreed without understanding, miserably distracted by the fact this was his first moment alone with Beth since Spin the Bottle. Thick tension returned with a vengeance. He could taste how bad he wanted her to like him. Every time she caught his eye Rick was certain he’d need a fire extinguisher to douse his hot heart within him. He sat on the table, his fingers tapping anxiously against the wood surface, really wanting to kiss her again.
She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head like she didn’t quite believe him. Rightly so. He didn’t believe him, and that posed a risk for the JSA tomorrow. “Any questions, then?”
“I don’t think so.”
Beth folded her arms. “Really?”
“Fine. Yeah. One.”
She looked relieved. “Let’s hear it.” She turned around and wrote QUESTIONS on the board and set out to underline it.
“Did that kiss mean anything to you?”
Beth’s impeccable marker line careened to a crooked left. Slowly, she turned around. “That has nothing to do with our pocket dimension trip.”
“You asked if I had any questions.”
“Yes, you did. Fair enough.” She sighed in a way Rick couldn’t tell was wistful or annoyed. “Our kiss, you mean?”
“Yes, our kiss.” Even calling it a kiss, as he had in his brain the last few days, was very modest. There was not just one kiss. There were several kisses. It was an experience.
“Of course it meant something to me,” she said primly. The marker cap pressed into her inner-palm. “That was my first kiss.”
“That’s it?”
She glanced away, fixating on the antiquated mugshots of Per Degatron’s goonies, finally starting to look as nervous as Rick felt. “What more do you want me to say? It was nice.”
He almost winced—There she went again. It was nice. For a girl with her vocabulary, that wasn’t promising.
“It was a nice kiss,” she continued in his stretched silence, “and I’m glad I had it with you. I didn’t think the bottle would ever land on me, or that I would want to play until they made you go first. I’m pretty sure I went into it wanting to watch.”
He furrowed his brows, trying to read between the lines. If she didn’t want to play unless he went first, then why did she continue with her turn afterwards? She must’ve used him to boost her confidence and practice kissing, not realizing he’d read into it so much. Now Rick felt stupid.
“You’re hurt,” she said. He was about to argue, but there really wasn’t any point. Not when his voice would probably crack as he denied it. He cursed the accuracy of the mood reader still embedded in her goggles. Sensing his lingering wariness at the object above her hair, she took the goggles off and laid them aside. An offering that she wouldn’t leverage her emotional advantages in this conversation. She used the stool to step up onto the table, taking a seat next to him. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you how you feel.”
“It’s okay.”
“It doesn’t have to be okay. Wasn’t it just a game?”
His hand inched closer to hers until their fingers brushed. She leaned against his side. He felt a strange catch in his breath as the warmth of her closeness untied some of the knots in his stomach. Beth was beautiful and sweet, and always bursting with compassion. How could he pretend he wasn’t falling for that? “It was supposed to be.”
She looked up at him.
“But..it wasn’t.” He met her stare and swallowed hard. “It wasn’t for me.” He dragged a hand over his forehead in disbelief he managed to say it out loud. He summoned the strength to keep going. “It wasn’t a game. It wasn’t just nice, it was…I didn’t want it to end. I didn’t want it to stop. I felt like we clicked in that moment and I woke up from sleepwalking through feelings I have for you.”
Beth didn’t say anything, like his confession knocked the wind out of her. “You like me?”
He groaned softly. “It’s embarrassing, I know.”
“No! No, no it’s not,” she objected, squeezing the hand nearest to hers, but Rick didn’t think he could handle her breaking his heart so softly.
“Can you just tell me if I need to get over you?”
“I’m not doing that.” Beth sat up straight. “I called the kiss nice because I didn’t know how else to explain how I felt. I was inexperienced and surprised at myself. I won’t lie, the thought of kissing you excited me, but I thought that was because I trust you, so it would’ve been an easy way to get my first kiss out of the way.”
Rick started to smile, thinking back on what she said. “You calculated that 7% chance.”
“I did, and then that happened. I didn’t know if that’s how kissing always felt like or if it was because it was you. So I kept playing and I had a few more turns after you left, okay, but none of those kisses were like ours. But I knew you hated the game, left right after kissing me, and intended to only give me a peck,” she repeated the last fact with fake quotation marks. “I was the one that got carried away. I was the one that was embarrassed. It was easier if I pretended it didn’t happen so I wouldn’t make things weird.”
It was such a relief to hear her say that they were on the same page. “So what do we do now?”
“Well, first, we need to go over the pocket dimension because I know you were not paying attention, which I thought was because you were feeling uncomfortable but now I think it is because you were staring at my skirt.”
“Holy shit.” Rick scratched behind his neck as heat crawled up his face. This was perilous and exhilarating new ground. He liked Beth and she knew it. He was attracted to her and she could feel it. “Uh, I plead the fifth?”
Beth laughed and flashed him that same flirty grin from the party. “But as for right now?” Rick knew he was either in for trouble or a really, really good time. “I can think of a few ideas.”
She unearthed the green marker from her pocket and gave it a spin.
Fictober Event, The prompts for 2023
Here is the list for October this year. Write something short (or long) and tag it with #fictober23 in the first five tags. Let’s see your creativity!
"It's not too late, let's go."
"Don't worry, I got you."
"Okay, show me."
"Do you even know what this means?"
"You're the smartest person I know."
"I can't wait for you."
"Do you recognise this?"
"Give me that, before anything happens."
"I wouldn't do that if I were you."
"It's alright, I'm here now."
"You lost it. Well, we lost it."
"I'm not saying I didn't like it."
"Come with me, hurry."
"If you don't stop now —"
"Fine, explain it to me."
"Do you know a way out of here?"
"I never said it would be easy."
"We can't do this on our own."
"What if we're wrong?"
"This better be good."
"Just in case this doesn't work."
"Who takes care of you?"
"No, you won't understand, ever."
"Is it over? Is it really over?"
"Do I look like I knew that?"
"Honestly, why would I care?"
"I don't know if they will accept this."
"I may not get another chance to say this."
"That's all? Easy."
"Are you with me?"
"It's not your fault."
This event is open to all fanfiction and original fiction.
Start October the First. You do not have to do the prompts in order. Tag your posts with #fictober23. Please state if your entry is original fiction or fanfiction and what fandom at the top. State common warnings and triggers at the top and tag accordingly. I reserve the right to not reblog fics that I find inappropriate. I will reblog things here on @fictober-event, follow this blog to see all the entries.
[ID: edit of the “I’m doing a challenge called November” meme that reads, “This month I’m doing a fun activity called September, it’s where I enjoy and cherish deeply every day of September. A heart and smiley face have been drawn in the corners. End ID]
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