"Define other stuff," I say.
She takes my hands and puts them back on her bare thighs. "Kissing. Touching. Anything with another person that wasn't a handshake."
I wince before I can school my expression, that night rushing to the front of my mind uninvited. "One."
She waits.
"The girl from the prank," I say. "That was — that was the last time anyone was this close." I pause. "Or on my lap."
I brace for the pity, or the careful handling that makes you feel like a problem being managed; but it doesn't come. Instead she reaches up and slowly unbuttons my shirt
"Okay," she says. "So, we start there."
"Start where?"
"Here." She runs a hand along my chest. "Just this. Nothing you don't want."
My hands are still on her thighs. I'm aware of approximately eleven things simultaneously and able to process maybe three of them. "I should tell you, I talk when I'm nervous."
"I've noticed."
"It might get worse."
"Bennet." She tilts her head. "Shut up and let me help you."
She says it so plainly, so without agenda, that whatever wound knot that’s been in my chest for ten years loosens by one degree.
Just one. But it's something.
"Okay," I say.
She leans in slowly, giving me every opportunity to change my mind, and when her mouth meets mine it's different from the pier — no camera, no performance, no reason for it except that we're here and she's offering something I haven't let myself have since I was eighteen years old.
My hands tighten on her thighs.
She doesn't laugh.
I sigh into the kiss and let her lead it, bringing my hands to the hem of her dress and sliding them underneath, palms flat against the heat of her back. She scoots closer and deepens it, her tongue finding mine, and whatever flatness I felt at the pier is gone. This is different, this is a thunderstorm building from nothing, heat moving through me in waves that keep cresting higher and I'm desperate for the next flicker of her tongue against mine in a way that feels almost unbearable.
I'm so fucking hard. She has to feel it because the next thing I know her hips start to move in slow tortuous grinds, and she moans into my mouth when I drag my nails gently down her spine.
"Fuck, that's a good move," she breathes against my lips. "Again."
I oblige.
When she moans the second time, it’s like the sound hits the wrong switch.
Her hips. The heat. The building intensity of it pressing in from all sides.
The laughter.
The lights.
The wet fabric against my skin and a room full of faces.
I try to shake it off. I try to stay here, in this apartment, with Jenn, who is warm and real and not Blaire. But the grinding doesn't stop and the heat keeps building and the past and the present are collapsing into each other in a way I can't separate fast enough and suddenly I can't...
I grab her by the waist and lift her off my lap and I'm on my feet before either of us understands what's happening.
