by Dahlia Adler
She hooks a finger into my belt loop, her knuckles grazing the bare skin at my waist. “I think maybe I’ve changed a little, too. And I’m pretty happy about it.”
“I think changing together is not the worst thing.”
“I think you are very wise.”
“I think it’s time to go back to my apartment and get you out of that dress, sweetheart.”
She smiles against my lips. “Have I mentioned you are very wise?”
I press a hard kiss to her mouth and take her hand in mine. “Let’s go and I’ll have you screaming that in about twenty minutes.”
• • •
Getting off in the bathroom sustains me for maybe half the ride back to my apartment, but between her arms wrapped around my waist, her tits pressed against my back, and her perfume floating on the breeze, I’m so keyed up by the time we pull up to the building that I nearly fall off the Vespa in my rush to get inside. The second I slam the door shut behind us, I push her up against it and attack her mouth with mine, and we grab at each other’s clothing with a fierceness that makes it a wonder nothing rips. I’d been afraid I was too insatiable to settle down with one person, but if anything, I’m even more insatiable when it comes to her. I can’t even imagine getting enough of this girl, can’t imagine wanting to stop—
“Uh, guys?”
Unless it turned out we accidentally have an audience. I pull away from Sam with a sigh and slowly turn around to see Lizzie and Connor on the couch, gawking at us. Connor smoothly slides a throw pillow onto his lap.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry.” Even in the dimly lit room I can see Sam’s face flaming red, and I grin.
“Please, don’t let Lizzie give you shit. She’s seen way worse.”
“Yeah, well, my boyfriend’s not quite highly evolved enough to be immune to the sight of two hot girls going at it, so.”
“Elizabeth.”
“I’m just gonna wait in your room.” Sam dashes past me and slams the door behind her.
“I think I’ll follow her lead,” says Connor, disappearing into Lizzie’s room.
“You’d think our significant others would be far more brazen by now,” I muse to Lizzie.
“Significant, huh?” Lizzie straightens her shirt and curls her legs under her butt. “So you’re all in now? Finally?”
I think of Samara—my girlfriend—lying on the other side of the wall. How I can’t wait to touch and taste her again, to see what lingerie she’s wearing. How I know that we’ll both come again tonight, sure, but we’ll laugh plenty too. How someday we’ll make lasagna together, and choereg, but lots of nights will just be pad Thai or pizza on the couch, and that’ll be perfect too. How there’s still so much I want to learn about her, but so much I already know. How I worried this was going to be the end of who I am and instead it feels like a beginning.
“I’m all in now,” I confirm. “Finally.”
• • •
I can’t help hoping I’ll open the door to Sam lying on my bed in lingerie—or nothing at all—but no such luck; she’s fully clothed, pacing across the floor. Doesn’t matter; we’ll get there.
“Hey,” I say softly.
She stops pacing. “So, that was painfully embarrassing.”
I smile. “You’ve heard the story of how Connor and Lizzie got caught, right? Trust me, that was nothing.”
She tips her head. “Fair point.” Then she finally relaxes into a smile too.
This should be the point where we meet in the middle and fall back on the bed and live happily ever after, but before all that begins, I know I need to ask her the question that’s been plaguing me since I found her wrapped in a blanket on my couch. If I don’t, I’ll always worry about it happening again, and if I’m going to do this—for real—I need the last of my doubts soothed. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
I take a deep breath. “Why did you really break up with me that morning?”
“I didn’t b—”
“Yeah, you did, and you know it. Why?”
She levels me with a stare, and the little spark in her eyes makes me shiver. “You know why.”
“Tell me.”
She drops onto the bed, bracing her palms on her thighs. “Because I realized I had completely fallen for you.”
Christ, those words…and saying them to me from my bed, smoky-smelling hair in her eyes, and coming from those kiss-swollen lips…fuck. “I thought that was the whole point.”
“The point was to fall for each other. And when you didn’t show up, I assumed that meant my feelings weren’t mutual. But I told myself it doesn’t matter, that I was putting too much pressure on this, and on sex. I thought if I showed up here, ready to go no matter what it meant, I could be detached about it, just like you are.”
“Were,” I bite out. “Before you.”
Her delicious lips curve up at the corner. “Right. Anyway, I tried. It didn’t work. From the second you put me in front of that mirror, I knew it wouldn’t. Not because that is hands-down the hottest move I have ever seen in my entire life—though it is—but because I knew I would do anything you told me to.”
“Sam—”
“I don’t mean I can’t think for myself or because you pressured me,” she clarifies, and I feel a tension slipping from my shoulders I hadn’t even realized had been gathering. “I mean because I trusted you so fully and completely. I have never felt that with another person, Frankie. I have spent years in fear of how my friends and family will react when they find out all of who I really am. But you already knew, and you looked at me like…God, I don’t know. You make me feel perfect, exactly as I am.”
Inside my chest, my heart is cracking into a thousand tiny pieces, and all those pieces are furiously making out with each other. I can’t even muster words, just a nod in agreement that yes, that is exactly how I see her.
“I was so terrified of that feeling. Because to be the only one in a relationship who feels it? I couldn’t. I couldn’t let myself feel like that and be alone in it.”
“You weren’t,” I manage around the lump in my throat. “I swear on everything I have, you weren’t.”
“And now I know that,” she says, rising, “so I’m here.”
She is. The girl who knows exactly who I am—has always known—and loves me anyway.
No, not “anyway.” Just straight-up loves me.
I watch her walk toward me, slow and sinuous and mindfuckingly beautiful, and when she’s close enough to feel the words on her lips, I say, “I love you.” I always thought saying those words to someone for the first time would feel like a surrender, but they don’t. And when she smiles and says, “I love you, too,” I realize that somewhere along the way, this most terrifying thing became the best kind of foreplay.
She’s got fingers hooked into my belt loops to hold me close, and her mouth on mine is a delightfully teasing thing—slow strokes of her tongue, gently nipping teeth, barely there brushes against my lips that nearly bring me to begging. I’m about to kiss her for real when she says, “Now I have a question.”
I have to stifle a frustrated cry because I am fucking throbbing, but I got to ask my question, and she certainly gets hers. “What is it?”
“When you called me from New York, were you…?” She trails off, blushing fiercely, and underneath skin-tight denim, a useless scrap of fabric drowns.
“Was I what?” I ask innocently.
“Frankie.”
“Samara.”
“Frankie.”
“Ask your question,” I say as coolly as I can manage considering the look in her eyes is liquid fire.
Her gaze just barely slips off mine. “Fine. Were you…touching yourself when you were talking to me on the phone?”
She says the words so quickly that if I weren’t in a state to hydrate the Sahara, I would’ve laughed. “Let’s say I was. Is that bad?”
She shakes her head, swallowing loudly, and I love that she can still be teased like this, less than an h
our after being fucked in a public bathroom. Still so much innocence in there.
Or at least I thought so, but then she rasps, “Show me.”
Jesus fucking Christ. Now I’m the one feeling shy. I’ve done a lot of stuff with a lot of people, but not that. Not in person.
But with the way she’s looking at me right now? No way in hell I’m saying no.
I place a hand on her shoulder and walk her slowly back to the bed until her thighs hit the mattress and she’s forced to sit. Then I drop my fingers to the button of my jeans and keep my eyes on her as she watches me undo it as torturously slowly as I can. We’re so close her breath is tickling my hand as I move to my zipper and lower it at glacial speed. Then I abandon my jeans to stroke and tease my way down the silken fabric of my low-cut top until I hit the waistband of the pink-lace-edged thong peeking out, and stop.
“I think it’s only fair you give me something to look at.” I brush the little strip of skin just above the lace with a fingertip, and judging by the breath she sucks in through her teeth, she’s at least as tortured by the motion as I am.
She recovers quickly, though. Her lips curve into a sly smile and she says, “Fair enough.” She moves back on the bed and rises to her knees, then pulls her dress over her head in one smooth motion.
My hand freezes. “Mother of God.”
“Will this work?” she asks innocently.
“This” is a corset-panty set, completely sheer save for intricate, strategically placed embroidery of black vines and roses that snakes around her lithe form and begs in a moan to be touched. “Let’s find out,” I utter, unable to resist for another second.
I dare say it doesn’t surprise either of us when I shudder the second a single fingertip brushes my clit.
“Guessing that’s a yes,” she murmurs, then slides back on the bed until she’s up against my pillows, watching and waiting. I push my jeans down to the floor and pull the top over my head, far too impatient now for a full-on strip tease, and crawl over her until I’m straddling her waist.
Then I dip my hand down below again.
“Frankie.” My name is nothing but a breath.
“Mm?”
“This.” She hooks a finger into my thong and slides it down just an inch, her fingertips sizzling my skin where they graze it. “The last one.”
“Told you you’d find it eventually.”
“Fuck, that’s hot,” she murmurs, placing a kiss right over the black ink reading Mine. “Now get back to work.”
I’m so fucking aroused my clit may as well be a land mine, and neither Sam’s hands holding me upright by cupping my ass nor her smoldering gaze as she watches me is doing anything to cool me down.
“Is this what you had in mind?” I ask, slipping a finger inside, just up to the first knuckle, knowing she can tell exactly what’s happening through the thin lace of my thong.
She shakes her head slowly. “You are always so, so far beyond what I can even imagine. Nothing I can conjure in my head ever compares.”
“But you do conjure me in your head,” I can’t resist saying.
“Frankie.” She gently pulls my hand free, her gaze holding mine as she takes my wet fingertip into her mouth. “I do everything to you in my head.”
“Jesus, Samara Jane, do you fuck your girlfriend with that mouth?”
She tugs my lip between her teeth. “Only when she’s good.”
Holy fuck, this girl. I can’t take another breath without kissing her, so I do, over and over until I don’t even know whose tongue is whose anymore. “Doesn’t seem like either of us is being very good tonight,” I murmur against her lips. “So maybe you should tell me what you want, my newly minted bad girl.”
She smiles and takes my face in her hands. “Know what I want?” Another kiss, this one gentle against my lips. “I want you to fuck me like you don’t know you’re the only person I’ve ever been with.”
“I don’t know that,” I point out, sliding my finger just inside the panty string spanning her hip. “You’re the one who’s been dating around while I’ve been taking care of myself all over my apartment.”
“Oh come on,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper as she skates her hands up my ribcage and palms my breasts. “You didn’t seriously think I hooked up with anyone, did you? Frankie, I can’t even look at myself in a full-length mirror without thinking about being with you.” She unhooks my strapless bra and tosses it to the floor. “For as wild as I like to think I’ve become”—she punctuates her sentence with a swirl of her tongue around my nipple that sends goose bumps over my entire body—“only you do this to me.” She sucks my other nipple into her mouth, sending my eyes rolling back into my head. “Only you make me feel like I can do absolutely anything.”
“You definitely can,” I say on a groan. “Especially that.”
She smiles against my skin and sucks again, harder, and my hips respond by pressing back equally hard, fabric rubbing against fabric, so close to what I want, what I need, but not quite there. I sit back and slide my finger back inside that string. “I think it’s time for this to go.”
There’s no argument from her as we part just long enough for me to slide her underwear down her legs, and her to do the same to me. Then she turns to present me her back, where the corset dips low into a line of complicated little hooks. I groan as I start to unfasten them, and find that my clumsy, far-too-eager fingers can’t do a damn thing. I kiss the top of her spine and give up. “This will have to stay. Get back here.”
She turns back to me and I waste no time climbing back on top of her and covering her mouth with mine, straddling her until wet, naked flesh rubs wet naked flesh and ignites me with hot, desperate need. I fuck her like I don’t know I’m the only person she’s ever been with, and I fuck her like I know she’s the only person I wanna be with, and we both come so hard I swear the earth must be shifting beneath us. It feels like hours before I can even open my eyes, but when I do, there she is, right next to me, my girlfriend, my girlfriend, my girl.
“Good news,” Sam says, tucking a piece of sweaty hair behind my ear when we can finally breathe again.
“What’s that?”
“I am definitely gay.”
I laugh and kiss her shoulder, her cheek, her lips. “Phew. I know that was touch-’n-go there for a little while. Glad it turned out to be touch-’n-come instead.”
“Oh my God, Frankie, that was horrible.”
“I’m sorry, it really was.” But I can’t help grinning anyway. “Still like me?”
“Questionable.”
“Still love me?”
“Possibly even more so.”
I reach between us for her hand and squeeze it. “Most important question, though, my book-loving girl—do you ship us?”
“How could I not ship us?”
“But, like, where do we rank? Do we beat Tim and Jenna?”
“You mean Taylor and Jonah?” She sighs. “Yes, Frankie, I ship us harder than Taylor and Jonah.”
“What about those books where you switched teams from one guy to the other in the middle? The one where you said the pink-covered book almost turned you bi.”
She contemplates for a minute. “I ship us harder than the girl with either guy,” she says carefully.
“But not more than if they were a threesome.”
“I mean…come on.”
“Fair. What about—”
She places a finger over my lips. “There’s no competition, Francesca. I don’t know what I want to do about my family, and I don’t know what I’m actually gonna do with this degree and…God, there is a lot I don’t know. But you are the first thing in my life that’s ever been exactly what I want. So as long as you’ll stick by me while I figure it all out, we are my OTP forever and ever.”
“Your O-what?”
She sighs. “Shut up and kiss me.”
“If I follow your instructions, does that make me a good girl?”
“It might have if you’d
done it.”
“Touché.” But I shut up and kiss her anyway, because I want to, and because I need to prove that I can be good when she needs me to be—that I will be, as she figures the rest of this stuff out. Maybe I’ve officially earned her and maybe I haven’t, but I think part of loving someone is that you never stop trying either way.
Our kisses become lazier as we both grow sleepy, and I finally help her out of that corset so she can get comfortable. As I curl around her to pull her close and cover us with a blanket, I get a little pang in my chest as I remember the last time we fell asleep together. “Hey,” I whisper into her ear. “You’ll be here when I wake up, right?”
Under the blanket, she wraps her fingers around mine. “I’m not going anywhere this time. I promise.” She brings our hands to her lips and kisses my knuckles. “What about you? If I make a reservation for that restaurant for tomorrow night, will you be there?”
“With bells on. No promises about pants.”
She sighs and pulls our arms around her waist. “So this is what I’m committing to, huh?”
“Gotta take the bad with the good, Sam. It’s what keeps life interesting.”
I can practically feel her roll her eyes, but she snuggles into me anyway, and it’s all the response I need. Yeah, the tiniest part of me still finds the prospect of a serious relationship scary. And the tiniest part of me is worried I’ll still freak out sometimes. And I know that not everything will always feel as perfect as it does right now. And I know there’s bound to be some shit ahead.
But right now, I’m falling into a peaceful sleep, and I’m as happy as I’ve ever been, in a way I never knew I could be. I spend every day in that studio or at my easel or sketchpad trying to capture and create beauty that pales in comparison to the girl in my arms right now. And if I had to interpret Hope again, I know I’d paint it a lot like this.
Possibly with more clothing, but probably not.
end of junior year
Frankieeee!! Hurry up!!!
Chill, Lizzie B, I text back. The more you make me stop to respond to you, the slower I’m gonna go. I know that’ll shut her up, so I shove my phone back into the pocket of my cutoffs and continue my last-chance survey of the apartment before leaving for the summer.