“What if we just focused on one thing at a time?” Ellie suggests with a calmness I instantly tether myself to. “One flash card.” She plucks a card off the stack and holds it up.Diversificationis scrawled across it in black ink. An easy one.
“Diversification. That’s when you spread your assets around into different investments to lower risk,” I rattle off.
Her mouth ticks up. “See? One down.” She sets it facedown on the bed, then holds up another card. This one I get wrong, along with the next three. My fingernails dig tiny little crescent moons into my palms.
“One at a time,” she reminds me, straightening the small stack of cards I’ve gotten wrong. “You can manage that, right?”
“Right,” I say. After all, I’m talking to the woman who convinced me I could pull off an elaborate lie in front of her entire family. If anyone can fool me into believing in myself, it’s her.
We work our way through the stack of flash cards, gradually shifting closer together as we do. If my answer isn’t letter-perfect to the definition on the note card, the whole thing goes in the “wrong” pile. I swallow my arguments and keep going. Ellie is slow and deliberate and committed to the details, just like she was while making puppy chow. One card at a time. One vocab word. One practice question. One inch closer to her on the bed as I resituate, shifting a pillow beneath my head or reaching to move the teddy bear out of the way of the expanding “right” stack, not so subtly brushing my hand against hers as I do. Maybe no one is flicking each other’s pom-poms, but just being close to her like this is magic in its own right. Whether or not we’re close next year, whether or not we’re living in the same state or on the same wavelength as to what we are—friends,girlfriends, somewhere blurred in between—I like taking it one thing at a time with her.
Somewhere between midnight and morning, I blink out of a sleepy haze to the sound of gentle snores and all the lights still on. I don’t remember drifting off or whether we got through the full stack of flash cards before I slipped away to dreamland, but beside me, Ellie sleeps soundly, her mouth hanging open an inch and a flash card still pinched between her thumb and forefinger. I breathe the smallest laugh through my nose. Not even in my dreams could I imagine something as perfect and downright wholesome as the two of us studying until we both fell asleep. Slowly, I peel myself off the bed, but I pause before my feet hit the floor. I don’t want to risk waking Ellie up before I get a chance to fully soak in this moment—the flutter of her lashes while her eyes stay closed, the pinch of pink on her cheeks that shades in the space between her freckles, and most of all, the warmth of knowing that, of all the places she could choose to be, she’s right here by my side tonight. I press every detail between the pages of my memory, then tuck this moment away for safekeeping. I’m not sure when—or if—she and I will have another one like it.
I clean up the flash cards, then tiptoe across the bedroom to flip off the lights. Feeling my way through the dark is a lot harder now that the furniture has been rearranged, but by the time I’m back in bed, my eyes have adjusted enough to make out the outline of the woman beside me. I can’t resist pressing a kiss against her cheek—one small, delicate kiss, but it’s enough to stir her. Ellie groans and drapes one sleepy arm over me, pulling me against her until I’m nested in the curve of her hips. She’s thesmallest big spoon there ever was, but we fit like this. My breath hitches for a moment; then I align the rhythm of my breathing with hers, each inhale and exhale in perfect synchronicity. I’m certain she’s drifted back to sleep until I feel her lips brush against my neck, and my heartbeat quickens. I can feel hers speed up, too, knocking against my back like a visitor asking to be let in. I answer with a tilt of my hips, rocking back into her in time with our breaths.
“Mm.” Her low, sweet hum of approval vibrates through me. “Mm-hmm.”
“Mm-hmm?” I ask. A question posed wordlessly.
“Mm-hmm,” she replies, and her fingertips find the button of my jeans just as I misplace my breath. It crosses my mind that I should stop falling asleep in all of my clothes, but the thought evaporates the moment my button gives way to her fingers. There is no should. Not now. There’s just me and Ellie and the warmth of her touch sweeping against the sensitive skin above where I want her most. I rock into her again, hoping the tilt of my hips will guide her hand lower. Her throaty laugh hums against my shoulder. “Yeah?” She whisper-asks. “Can I?’
“Yes.” My voice flutters. “Please.”
When her hand slips behind my zipper, I close my eyes, and all I can see is blue. Blue like her eyes and the nail polish on her fingertips, stroking and circling and exploring how to best make me tremble. Blue like the first sign of morning in the sky, which creeps up the horizon with the promise of a damp new day. It’s blue when she touches me, but what color am I for her? There’ll be time to find out later; for now, Ellie asks the questions.
“Can these come off?” She tugs on my belt loop like she’sdone a dozen times, but this is different. More eager. My heart tugs back as I jolt upright and start working my jeans over my hips. Midshimmy, I catch the early glow of sun warming the edges of the curtains, and for a moment, I hesitate. The responsible thing to do would be to cut this short and go back to sleep so I’m well rested for my test tomorrow—or rather, my test today—but I’ve been responsible all week, and I’ve got a dozen different study methods to prove it. I bite my cheek and bargain with a better version of myself: a few more hours of sleep won’t make or break my grade, and my grade won’t change the transfer deadline or keep my parents from selling the house. I can feel my priorities shifting like tectonic plates migrating toward a certain earthquake. As they collide, I yank my jeans over my feet and fling them somewhere into the dark.
Ellie giggles, then pulls me by the forearm back onto the pillows and into a long, dizzying kiss, the kind that makes me shudder and confirms I chose correctly. We’re not in her father’s garage anymore, sneaking victory lap kisses before dinner. This is fervent and frantic, open-mouthed and honest. Ellie kisses me like she needs to, and thank God, because I need it too. I need her palm on my jaw and the cool bump of her septum ring against my upper lip. I need her soft hair tickling my cheeks, even when I have to pull away to pinch a stray blonde strand off my tongue. We laugh and pick up where we left off, just the way I need us to. As long as Ellie is touching me, I have proof she’s here with me, and that’s what I need the most.
Ellie’s fingers wander between my thighs again, and she falls into a gentle rhythm, tracing slow, sleepy circles that pick up speed each time I gasp. She touches me so sweetly, so expertly,that I almost forget my body is new to her. A moan spills like warm honey from my mouth into hers.
“Shh.” I feel her smile spread over my lips as her fingers drift back north, cuing my hips to buck without my permission. I’m not choosing anymore, only reacting. My body tenses and rolls against hers in waves that match the rhythm of her fingers, and I don’t notice I’m approaching the edge until I’m gazing out over it, trembling and triumphant as I dive into the blue.
A good amount of time elapses before I can find a normal breathing pattern, but Ellie’s still holding me when I do. She kisses my nose and forehead before landing on the top of my head, nuzzling into my hair. “So that’s what I had in mind when you invited me over to study,” she murmurs.
I trace my lower lip with my tongue. My room isn’t quite as dark as when we started, but I’d barely call it morning. My exam is still hours away.
“Take your pants off,” I say. “We’ve got a lot more studying to do.”
twenty-five
I was right from the start—Ellie and I are not the stuff of Hallmark movies. No Hallmark executive would’ve green-lighted what just happened in my childhood bedroom under the supervision of a teddy bear and a watercolor elephant. Now, Ellie and I are starfished as much as my full-size bed will allow, both of us entirely spent and baking in the tiny bit of sun that’s fought its way through both the cloud cover and the curtains. It’s early, and I’m exhausted, but I wouldn’t trade a second of this for a full night’s sleep.
When my panting slows to nice, even breaths, I break the silence with a question. “Are accidental sleepovers our thing now?”
Ellie laughs through closed lips. “Who said this was accidental? I fully planned on winding up in your bed. I thought we were on the same page until you brought out the flash cards.”
I turn my head to the side and see that Ellie has already done the same; we’re nose to nose, bathing in each other’s morning breath, but neither of us seems to mind. “So this was all part ofyour master plan, huh?” I squeeze her side, and Ellie squeals, swatting my hand away. So she’s ticklish. Noted.
“I didn’t have a plan,” she says. “Just a lot of hope.” She laces her fingers into mine as a preventative measure against further tickling, but the warmth of her palm feels more like a prize than a punishment. In another life, maybe I’ll be the type of person who can bask in this glow without analyzing it to death, but right now, I can’t be. Especially not with Ellie heading back to Champaign today. We have so little time, and I’m not wasting any more of it wondering where we stand.
“So,” I say, “what do you think?”
Ellie shifts, and the sheets rustle beneath her. “What do you mean?”
“You know. What do you think about…this?” I sweep my one free hand through the air, gesturing to our sweaty, bare legs, but also to the events of the last hour. Or several hours. I haven’t checked the time. “Was this a one-time thing, or…?”
“I told you that I don’t do the casual thing,” Ellie reminds me.
