Chemistry Lessons

by Jae

  The ache in Ky’s chest increased. She peered at Regan’s face, but her friend was still focused on the singer. Did she even realize she was holding Ky’s hand?

  The big video screen showed a close-up of Jenna as she jumped down from the stage and sang the last line while extending the rose toward an auburn-haired woman in the first row.

  Once the last note of the song faded away, silence reigned for several heartbeats.

  Then the lights came back on. Jenna and her wife shared a tight embrace. The crowd around them cheered, whistled, stomped, and clapped, but Ky barely heard any of it. Her focus was still on Regan’s hand in hers.

  Regan didn’t let go for several more seconds. Finally, she loosened her grip one finger at a time, as if reluctant to let go. “Should we get out of here so we’ve got a head start and beat the worst of the traffic?”

  Ky glanced at the now empty stage. “Won’t she give an encore?”

  “After that last song?” Regan shook her head. “I don’t think anything could top that.”

  “True. This time, our friends can’t accuse us of not trying hard enough to create a romantic mood.”

  “Definitely not. We get an A-plus for creating the perfect setting for our little experiment.”

  As Ky followed Regan toward the exit, she wondered what the lab report would say if this really were a chemistry lesson. Would Regan write, no indications of a chemical reaction, or had this series of dates affected her in unexpected ways too?

  * * *

  Regan pulled into the parking lot of Ky’s apartment building and turned off the car. For several seconds, they sat in silence, interrupted only by muted sounds of traffic and the barking of a dog.

  It was getting late, and she had to catch up on her grading tomorrow and make a mnemonics video for her AP students. She really should just drop Ky off, but she didn’t want the evening to end.

  “So,” they said at the same time.

  Their voices were hoarse, probably from singing along with Jenna and shouting comments to each other earlier. Ky might pretend to barely like Jenna Blake’s music and be unimpressed by the pop star, but Regan saw beneath that cool facade. She had caught Ky singing along at least twice.

  “Come on,” Regan said. “I’ll walk you to your door.”

  “It’s right there.” Ky pointed. “You don’t have to—”

  “You don’t want to downgrade my A-plus as a date to a B-minus, do you?”

  Ky held up both hands and chuckled. “Wouldn’t think of it.”

  They got out of the car and walked to the front door, close but not touching. When they reached it, they paused and turned toward each other. The light was on in the apartment, bathing them in its glow.

  Ky slid one hand into her pants pocket as if to pull her keys out but then didn’t. Instead, she swiped her bangs out of her eyes with her other hand—a gesture that always made Regan smile because of its awkward cuteness.

  “So,” Regan said, “this was it. Our third and final date.”

  Ky shoved her other hand into her second pocket. “Yeah. Don’t think I’m going to kiss you good night just because it’s the last one.”

  “Chicken.” Regan made a bawk-bawk sound. “But maybe it’s for the best. You couldn’t handle me.” Or maybe you’d be the one who couldn’t handle it, a voice in the back of her mind said. Regan ignored it.

  Instead of bantering back, Ky smiled softly. “No. I don’t think I could.”

  Regan looked into Ky’s eyes, and her playful mood shifted. “Thank you for tonight, Ky. For the tickets and for indulging my fangirl moments.” She couldn’t even remember when someone had last gone out of their way to plan such a great evening for her. Probably Ky for her last birthday.

  “My pleasure,” Ky said quietly, and Regan could feel that she meant it.

  She put one hand on Ky’s shoulder to avoid losing her balance and leaned up for a quick thank-you-and-good-night kiss.

  Ky stood very, very still. Her cheek was smooth and warm beneath Regan’s lips. God, she smelled incredibly good, even after hours in the crowded arena. Regan deeply inhaled her scent while she lingered close.

  A splotch of color rose where Regan’s lips had brushed Ky’s cheek, and Regan lifted her free hand to tenderly trace it with her fingertips.

  Ky pressed into the contact, bringing their faces even closer. She peered down at Regan from mere inches away, her eyes wide and silvery in the dim light.

  Regan couldn’t look away. Neither could she rein in her much-too-fast breathing or her thrumming heartbeat.

  Ky’s gaze flicked down to Regan’s mouth.

  A wave of heat rolled through Regan, and she licked her dry lips.

  They were even closer now—so close that their breaths mingled. Someone groaned. Regan had no idea who’d moved or how it happened, but their lips met in a gentle caress as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  Regan’s eyes fluttered shut, and their surroundings fell away, leaving only them. She melted against Ky until their thighs brushed.

  Ky’s hand came up, and she touched Regan’s face in a mirror gesture. The slide of her lips against Regan’s was tender yet intense, making her head spin in the most delicious way.

  A low sound escaped Regan, half gasp, half moan. So soft. So good. So—

  Ky jerked back as if she’d been zapped, breaking the kiss so abruptly that Regan’s wobbly legs nearly buckled.

  So…wrong. Even though it had felt completely right, this was Ky, for Christ’s sake! Her best friend. Regan blinked as if waking from a trance. She stared at Ky, into those familiar eyes that all of a sudden did completely unfamiliar things to her. Her hand had coiled into Ky’s shirt without conscious thought, and now she quickly let go, breaking the last connection between them.

  Ky stared back, one fist pressed to her lips as if hiding the evidence of their kiss.

  God. They had kissed!

  “I, uh… I’d better go.” Ky pointed vaguely in the direction of her front door. “Lil is probably…”

  “Yeah.”

  Ky stumbled to the door. Her keys jangled as she searched for the right one. Then, with one last “night” tossed over her shoulder, she was gone.

  Regan placed both hands against the wall to hold herself up. Oh. My. God! What just happened?

  She didn’t know. The only thing she knew for sure was that their experiment, meant to prove that there was no chemistry between them, had been a complete and utter failure.

  Chapter 8

  Holy hell. Did we really just…? Ky sank against the closed front door and dropped her keys without caring where they landed. She rubbed one hand over the cheek Regan had kissed, then pressed her fingers to her still-tingling lips.

  Lilia rushed over from the living room. “Kylie! What happened?”

  Ky lowered her hand and gave her a dazed look. “Wish I knew,” she mumbled.

  “Are you…drunk?”

  Ky laughed—a surprisingly rough and husky sound. “No. I’m stone-cold sober.” Or maybe she was drunk on the feeling of Regan in her arms, her mouth moving against hers.

  Once or twice, years ago, she had wondered what it would be like to kiss Regan—really kiss her, not just share an awkward peck the way they had when they’d been six. Clearly, her imagination sucked. None of her immature teenage fantasies came close to what it had actually felt like when Regan had kissed her.

  And that’s what she had done. Regan had kissed her. Or had Ky made the first move?

  She wasn’t sure. It was all a blur of hot breath, pounding hearts, and then Regan’s soft lips on hers. But she didn’t think she would have initiated the kiss, no matter how much she secretly longed for it. At sixteen, she’d shoved her crush on her best friend into an airtight container and had written the words Do not open across it in big, fat letters, with a permanent marker.

  She would have never done anything to risk opening that particular Pandora’s box, but now Regan had blown it wide open, and Ky had no
idea how to deal with it.

  Dammit, Regan! Ky let out a growl and slammed her fist against the door. Why did she have to do that? Before, whenever her thoughts had strayed in that direction, it had been easy to rein them in and be happy with what they had because she’d been convinced that Regan would never have the slightest interest in her beyond friendship.

  But did she really? Was she interested in Ky in a romantic way, or had she merely reacted to the tantalizing atmosphere at the concert? Maybe it had been a spur-of-the-moment thing for her—one of Regan’s infamous spontaneous impulses that turned out to be a bad idea and got them both into trouble.

  “Kylie?” Lilia stared at her with wide eyes. “You’re starting to scare me. What happened?”

  Ky shook her head. How could she explain what she didn’t understand herself?

  “Did you and Regan have a fight?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” Lilia asked. “You seem kinda angry.”

  Ky fisted her hair with both hands. “I’m not angry. I’m—” She bit her lip hard.

  Lilia eyed her. “You’re what?”

  Scared to death. Of course Ky would never admit that. She pushed past Lilia and marched to the kitchen. “I’m fine. Just hungry.” She really was—but not for food. Her lips still tingled, and every inch of her body was sensitized, yearning for more. Now that she knew what kissing Regan felt like, how was she supposed to go back to strictly platonic hugs? Could she place the lid back on the box?

  You have to. She grabbed a chocolate bar and a beer and slammed the fridge shut so hard that the condiments in the door rattled.

  Even if there was a certain amount of chemistry between them, Ky knew from the warning signs all over Regan’s classroom that some chemical reactions could get dangerous. If she wasn’t careful, her entire life could explode into fragments.

  Ky had long ago come to the conclusion that she, like her parents, sucked at relationships, and Regan didn’t have the best track record either. Even if Regan was interested in trying, they would probably mess it up, and that would be so much worse than any of her previous breakups.

  Regan was her rock, her safe place, the person who knew all her secrets. Well, all except for one. Every single one of Ky’s happy childhood memories included her. Most of the happy moments as an adult too. She couldn’t risk losing her. She wouldn’t.

  With a sharp plop, she twisted the cap off her beer bottle.

  As it flew across the kitchen and ricocheted off the wall, Lilia quickly ducked. “Yep, you’re clearly just peachy.”

  Beer bubbled up, splashing over Ky’s fingers.

  Damn. She stared at the dripping mess. Yeah, putting the lid back on was definitely the safest bet.

  * * *

  The next morning, Regan’s face felt as if it were stuck in a cement mask, so grinning into the camera took a real effort. Instead of making chemistry seem easy, she probably made it appear as much fun as cleaning cat vomit from a shag rug.

  “BARF,” she said into the camera, which fit her thought about cat vomit. “Break, absorb, release, form. When a bond is broken, energy is reformed. No. Absorbed. Shit.” She stabbed at the stop button on her cell phone, deleted the video, and screamed into one of the throw pillows.

  This was her seventh attempt to record the mnemonics video that was supposed to help her students remember bond formation. She tossed the pillow aside and gulped down the remainder of her coffee. Even though it was only nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, it was her third cup, but all the caffeine in the world wouldn’t help her focus after tossing and turning for most of the night.

  The only bond she could think of had nothing to do with the AP exam.

  Her night with Ky at the concert kept playing through her mind in full HD glory: Ky’s face in the glow of a dozen cell phone flashlights, both of them swaying to the beat of Jenna’s song, all the emotions the romantic lyrics had stirred in her. Each continuous loop ended with the kiss.

  She pressed the pillow to her burning cheeks again.

  God, that kiss. She could still feel Ky’s lips on hers, yet at the same time, the thought of her and Ky kissing was so surreal that she could almost convince herself she had only dreamed it.

  But even in her dreams, she had never kissed Ky…had never even thought about kissing her. Sure, lately, she had noticed how good Ky looked in her dating outfits, and there had been that confusing moment in the movie theater restroom, but that was a far cry from kissing her. Why on earth had she done that?

  The question had kept her up, but she still hadn’t found an answer—at least not one that sounded convincing.

  Had she just been on a romantic high after the concert? Maybe it had put her brain on autopilot, so she had walked her date to the door and kissed her good night.

  Even though that theory sounded logical, it didn’t quite ring true. At least not the part that made Ky seem completely replaceable.

  Would she have kissed any of her friends if they had been with her last night? No, she couldn’t imagine that.

  But then again, neither could she have imagined kissing Ky.

  And yet she had. She had known whom she was kissing too. There was no confusing Ky with some random date. She had kissed her not despite her being Ky, but because of it. Last night, she had felt so close to her and had needed to be even closer. Maybe the kiss had been an unconscious attempt to make that happen. Apparently, her mind had mistaken one form of closeness for another. Just because she loved Ky didn’t mean she loved her romantically, right?

  Her silent apartment held no answers.

  God, she was so confused.

  The worst part was that she couldn’t even call her best friend to talk it out and help her see it more clearly, as she normally would have done. Ky had always been her go-to person whenever she needed to talk, but now she was the one person she couldn’t call.

  She wondered how Ky was dealing with this mess of a situation? Was she pacing her apartment, wishing she could call too? Had she slept or—?

  Her phone rang.

  “Aargh!” Regan nearly flung it across the room. She pressed her free hand to her wildly pounding heart. Oh jeez, was that Ky?

  She peeked at the name flashing across the screen.

  Eliza.

  A complex mix of disappointment and relief rushed through her. She swiped one damp finger across the screen and lifted the phone to her ear. “Hi.”

  “Sorry for calling so early,” Eliza said.

  Truth be told, Regan was glad for the distraction. Neither her video recording nor her ruminating about the kiss was producing any good results. “That’s all right. I’ve been up since six.”

  For a moment, only silence answered. “On a Sunday? I thought you hated mornings?” Eliza paused again. “Unless…something happened to change that. Which is what I’m calling to find out.”

  Regan’s exhausted brain was lagging behind, so it took her several seconds to figure out what Eliza was implying. Great. She flopped down face-first onto the couch. Now she couldn’t even get angry at her friends’ constant teasing and hinting about her and Ky anymore because something had happened between them.

  “Regan? You still there?”

  “Yeah, sorry. The connection must have cut out for a sec. And to answer your question, I still hate mornings.”

  “Ah, too bad.” Eliza’s sigh drifted through the phone. “I was hoping you and Kylie…”

  “Eliza.”

  “I know, I know. Wishful thinking. I still think you’ve got great chemistry, but you two gave it a try, like you promised, so I’m gonna shut up about it from now on.” Eliza made a zipping sound.

  Regan bit her bottom lip. Shutting up their friends had been their goal when they had agreed to the chemistry experiment, but now she couldn’t be happy about it. She felt awful about lying to Eliza, even though it was only a lie of omission. But she wasn’t ready to talk. Not before she’d talked to Ky.

  “…Saturday?”

 
Eliza’s expectant tone jerked Regan out of her thoughts. Damn. Eliza was clearly waiting for a reply, but Regan had no idea what she’d just asked. “Um, sorry, I missed that.”

  “I asked if you and Kylie are still up for helping me move in with Denny on Saturday.”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. We’ll be…um…” Regan bit her lip again. If she wasn’t careful, she’d leave a permanent mark.

  Their friends tended to treat them like a couple, expecting each of them to have the right to answer for them both. And up until now, Regan had never had a problem with that, and neither had Ky. Why bother pretending they didn’t spend most of their spare time together?

  But was that still true now?

  The mere thought that their dynamic might change sent a sharp stab to Regan’s heart. Had she forever harmed their friendship because of an impulse she didn’t even understand?

  “Regan? If you’ve got other plans, that’s okay. My bosses have insisted on helping, and, of course, Heather, Salem, and Matt will lend a hand too, so we should be all set.”

  “No, no,” Regan quickly said. “We’ll be there.”

  “Great. We’re meeting at my place—my old place—at eight.” Eliza let out a giddy chuckle. “I still can’t believe I’ll be living with Denny this time next week. No more waking up alone. No more saying good night at the door.”

  The memory of saying good night to Ky started playing through Regan’s mind again. As much as she tried to focus on Eliza and her obvious happiness, the autorepeat wouldn’t stop.

  “—could you let Kylie know?”

  Shit. She had missed part of the conversation again. “Um, let her know what?”

  “That we’re meeting at eight. I’ll call her myself, but if you talk to her first, could you let her know?”

  “Sure. Will do.” She would have to face Ky eventually, and at least that would give them something to talk about…something other than the kiss.

  “Are you okay?” Eliza asked. “You’re acting a little strange.”

  Regan held back a sigh. “I’ve got a busy week ahead. My kids take the AP chem exam on Friday.”

  “Are you sure you’re up for lugging around moving boxes and dismantling furniture on Saturday, then? I’d really understand if you want to hibernate all weekend.”