“I love you too,” she whispers into the dark room.
But Jessica sleeps on, head heavy with the booze she drinks to forget.
It never works. There’s never enough. Jess’s memories, her tragedies, are a desert, vast and dry. There’s not enough liquor in the world to drown them all.
Still, she tries.
Maybe now–one less monster to haunt her dreams–maybe now she won’t have to try so hard.
Trish steps a little closer to the couch, slowly lowers herself to kneel on the floor. She’s close enough now to see the way the orphaned strands of hair around the sleeping woman’s face flutter with every deep exhaled breath.
“You were my first kiss, you know,” the blonde whispers, slipping back into the memory. Fifteen and lonely, something dangerous and desperate about the way she’d leaned in one night as they were arguing.
It was forbidden, of course.
Knowing that made it all the more satisfying, of course.
It had been a good night–there were so few of those back then. Not that they’re more frequent now, anyway.
But then, in their childhood house, with her mother lording over them, good nights had been few and far-between.
Alone in the house. A hidden cache of forbidden junk food. A marathon of terrible horror movies.
All the horrible things they’d experienced in their lives, one might not think fake blood and exagerrated screams could get to them.
But as the sky outside got darker and hour got later, they’d inched closer and closer together. Until Trish’s head lay on Jessica’s shoulder, and even Jess–strong, fearless Jess–gripped the blonde’s thigh during the bathroom scene in The Sixth Sense.
Trish missed it, the ghost that spirited across the screen. She’d been too busy trying not to lean in even further, trying to ignore the warmth in her stomach, the curious way it flipped and flopped whenever she felt the heat of Jess’s breath. Pleasurable and unfamiliar and definitely taboo.
Something her mother would not approve of.
She hadn’t been able to bite back the whimper when Jess clutched her thigh in that moment of apprehension. A small reminder that they weren’t just two girls watching movies. That Jess was something … more, something special.
“Did I hurt you–” Jess had asked, always so careful of her strength when it came to the blonde. “Fuck, Trish, fuck.”
She leapt off the couch, hands in the air. Afraid of what she could do to the only person who mattered to her.
“I’m so sorry, Trish–are you okay, did I …?”
And the blonde can hear the loathing in her friend’s voice, the self-hatred.
“I’m fine, Jess,” Trish says slowly, calmly. And it’s true. Nothing broken. Maybe a bruise, but she won’t tell the other girl that. If Jess thought she’d marked her, it would kill her. It would break her beyond repair.
She moves toward the coltish brunette, well aware that at any moment, at any sudden movement, Jess is likely to bolt. To run up to her room and bury herself in a dark corner, shaking with fear at what she might become.
Trish’s greatest fear isn’t about Jess and her strength. It isn’t about the other girl hurting her. She’s never felt anything but safe with Jess.
Instead, the blonde is afraid of what Jess might do to herself. Because already she can see the self-destruction brewing behind those dark, dark eyes.
“Really, Jess, I’m okay,” Trish tells the taller girl. “Come back. Let’s finish the movie, okay?”
And even though her eyes are still wary, and her fists clenched tight, buried in the pockets of her torn, worn jeans, Jess nods, and moves toward the couch again.
It takes a while before she lets Trish move closer, before she lets her friend lean up against her again. But eventually, Trish crosses the invisible boundary between them.
But instead of laying her head down on the brunette’s shoulder again, Trish pulls Jess into her, and laughs when she looks up at her in surprise.
“You don’t always have to be the strong one,” the blonde teases.
And maybe it wouldn’t have gone further. Maybe it would have stopped there. The night could have ended with a dark head in her lap as they finished watching their movies.
It didn’t.
Jess looked up at her, so vulnerable. Aching for something. Penance, perhaps. Forgiveness. And something more. Something heated. A flame, flickering in the dark of her eyes, hungry and wanting.
To this day, Trish doesn’t know where she found the strength, the courage. But in the end it doesn’t matter.
Because she did.
She leaned down, just a single breath between them, and hovered. For one heartbeat. Another.
Until she knew. Until everything she was feeling coalesced into a single, cogent need. Until she could feel, without a single doubt, that this was right.
The kiss was soft. It was gentle. Tenative, at first, but slowly, slowly, the fire in her belly grew, and grew. Stoked by the feel of Jess’s lips moving against hers, noses bumping together playfully.
It was the kiss that set the standard for every other. For all the first kisses and last kisses that would come after.
Still, all grown up and with her fair share of notches on the bedpost, she’s never found someone who kissed her like Jess did, who made her feel what Jess did.
Lately, Trish is starting to wonder if anyone ever would.
Lately, she’s starting to think that that person, the person she was meant to be with, has been with her all along.
On the couch, Jessica sighs and shifts, grunting as she rolls onto her side.
Trish brushes the hair out of the brunette’s face, careful of the stitches, the cuts, before ghosting a kiss over her best friend’s brow.
“I love you too,” she whispers.