hundred foot radius
"Tara," Amber deadpans, her tone uncharacteristically grave, "I'm going to ask you something, and you have to tell me the absolute truth."
It makes Tara roll her eyes so forcibly that she's almost certain they're going to fly out of their sockets. "What," She grits out, annoyance clear in her tone.
"I'm not bullshitting right now, you have to be honest!"
"Okay!" Tara throws her arms up, certain that whatever comes out of Amber's mouth next was going to give her an aneurism, or a stroke, or a fun combination of both.
Amber drops her hands onto Tara's shoulders, the weight of them heavy and familiar as she bores into identical brown.
"Have you suffered any severe blunt force trauma in the last twenty-four hours?"
Tara shoos Amber's hands off of her, flopping onto her back atop Amber's bed with a loud and obnoxious groan, if only to put some distance between them.
"You're so fucking irritating."
"Tara, I'm being serious!" And Tara would've believed her if they hadn't known each other as long as they have. Amber's tone is urgent and her face is stoic, but her eyes give her away— crinkled in a way that reveals how amused she is. "You sound like you have brain damage or something, come here."
And Amber begins crawling towards the foot of the bed, hovering over Tara's body as tries poking and prodding at her forehead like she could be able to tell just by touch alone.
Tara pushes her away again, swatting at her hands before they come too close. She's only mildly successful though as Amber does get a few shoves in.
She's finally able to catch Amber's wrists, holding them still above her. "I'm being serious too, Amber!"
And she really is genuine, contrasting Amber's teasing.
Amber sighs, leaning back so that Tara can sit up. She vaguely gestures towards her, signifying she's ready to hear Tara's reasoning.
"Okay," She begins a bit animatedly, excited to share her master plan, "So Wes is like, kind of reserved,"
And Tara swears that she doesn't mind, it's just that when he's not reserved, he's not exactly... skilled at what he's doing either.
Amber is already grabbing a pillow and shoving her face into it, letting out an exaggerated whine that gets muffled by the stuffing. Just the mere mention of his name made her want to set herself on fire.
"So," Tara pointedly continues anyways, snatching the pillow away from Amber's grasp. She's met with a very unamused glare, "I'm almost twenty and I've barely ever made out with anyone!"
Amber frowns, "And I keep telling you that there's nothing wrong with that!"
Tara rolls her eyes again. "Well, that's easy for you to say." Amber's had sex with more people than Tara's kissed on the cheek.
Amber grabs the pillow back just to smack it across Tara's face.
"Ow,"
"That's for slut-shaming me."
"I didn't say it was a bad thing!"
Amber's frown only deepens as she hugs the pillow against her chest, resting her chin atop one of the corners.
It's awfully adorable and Tara would've said so if she knew it wouldn't warrant another whack on the nose.
"It's actually a good thing!" Tara quickly exclaims, and Amber quirks a questioning eyebrow, waiting for her to elaborate. "That means that there's an entire pool of people you can hook me up with."
Amber groans again, even louder than the first time as she raises the pillow back to her face, looking like she's actively trying to smother herself.
"Stop it," Tara scolds, shoving the pillow that Amber's holding, but it only makes her fall onto her back and she continues her loud, and drawn out groan.
"Y'know I could go hook up with a rando too," Tara tries reasoning with her, "And then you wouldn't get to give them the seal of approval."
This finally gets Amber to peel the pillow away from her face as she cranes her head up from her lying position to get a good read on Tara's expression.
"You're so bad at manipulating people." It makes Tara pout. "Like, seriously, we've been friends since embryo days and you've learned nothing."
"Amber, please," She crawls up closer to Amber's head and begins lightly shaking her shoulders, "If those embryo days mean anything to you, you'll help me."
It's Amber's turn to push her away, "Jesus, fuck, you're giving me a migraine." Tara stops shaking her, but doesn't stop peering down with her irresistible puppy dog eyes.
Amber glares up at her. "That doesn't work on me anymore."
"You bought me ice cream yesterday cause of it though."
"I bought you ice cream 'cause you said you'd fill up my gas for me if I did."
And Tara relents, because yeah, that was true.
So she moves on to her next tactic.
Begging.
"Amber please," Her hands are back on Amber's shoulders now, shaking more vigorously, "I can't be like Wes!" She exclaims, "I can't be twenty and never kissed with tongue!"
It’s an exaggeration, but the sentiment still stands.
Amber repositions the pillow so that it's covering her chest, blocking Tara from her assault.
"I'm not hooking you up with someone, Tara!" She begins pushing the pillow in Tara's direction to get her to back off. "You wouldn't like any of the people I know anyways."
"But I don't have to like them!" Tara quickly refutes, "I just have to like their face."
And Amber looks wholly unamused, and a little bit pissed honestly.
"Tara, who gives a fuck! Move on your own timeline, don't feel so pressured into doing all this shit-"
"Wes and I had sex!" Tara quickly blurts out, faster than she can stop herself.
Amber freezes, and it's one of the extremely rare occasions where the girl is actually rendered speechless.
"What," She asks dumbly, her eyes blown wide. It would be funny if it weren't also concerning.
"I don't know, we got back from that party last week and we were both drunk and a little high, and then things just happened so fast, but then all of a sudden his dick was inside me and it was like... bad?"
And Amber immediately opens her mouth to comment, but Tara interrupts her.
"But consensual!" She quickly adds because Amber looks like she wants to drive a knife into something, "But like, also bad." Tara admits. "He's such a bad kisser, but I can tell he's trying so hard, like he just sticks his tongue in my mouth and then I get all grossed out 'cause it feels like a worm, so then I'll turn away."
Amber is still shell shocked, rightfully so, but her silence only makes Tara continue her rambling.
"But he was so sweet and he kept asking if I was okay, and I was, but it just didn't feel right."
And Amber is just still kind of slow blinking up at her.
"And he's so nice, and I really like him but everything else is just so... bleh!"
Tara had only broken up with him a few days prior, but her reasons had been that they were better off as friends, which was true, but also the fact that his fingers were clumsy and he couldn't find the clit to save his life.
Amber still wasn't saying anything. It was like she was in a state of shock. It was kind of freaking Tara out. She'd never seen Amber be so intentionally silent, especially when it came to Wes.
"Hello," She waves a hand in front of her face, "Are you the one with brain damage now?" Amber still doesn't speak, so Tara begins poking her temple, "Are the neurons still firing?"
And Amber still doesn't talk, but she grabs Tara's wrist to stop her from poking her head, and it does relieve Tara just a bit to see that there was still some form of sentient life in there.
"Can you say something, you're freaking me out."
And with an expression still eerily blank, Amber asks, "You seriously gave your virginity to Wes Hicks, to bleach head?!"
Tara had held off on telling Amber for a reason. "I told you I wasn't sober!" God, she was never taking another edible again. Chad could go screw himself before he gave Tara another gummy.
Amber rolls onto her side so that her back faces Tara. "Oh, god, I'm gonna puke."
Tara shoves at her back, face formed into a full pout. "Stop," She whines, "I already feel shitty about it, I broke up with him like four days after our first ti-"
The other girl immediately slaps her hands over her ears, singing lalalalala obnoxiously loud. This was more the reaction Tara was expecting the first time.
Tara pulls Amber's arms away from her ears, struggling a bit at first, but eventually succeeding.
"Do you see why I need to get laid so bad now?!"
Amber still refuses to turn around.
"It's like pemdas, or something, I need to cancel out that... experience with a better one." She phrases it that way in the hopes it won't make Amber physically cringe.
It barely works as she finally rolls onto her other side, eyebrows drawn down into a frown. "You're so shit at math, oh my god."
"Does that mean you'll help me?" Tara asks with a hopeful grin, peering down at Amber through her eyelashes.
Amber doesn't budge. "Is grass blue?"
Tara reflects her frown. "No," She answers dejectedly.
"Well, there you go," Amber grumbles as she sits back up, shoving Tara back to her side of the mattress near the end of the bed. "Now, go do your stupid econ homework."
Tara shuffles back to her laptop and begrudgingly picks up her spiral notebook.
"I can't believe you used up our break on this shit." Amber huffs as she leans back against the headboard, similarly picking her laptop back up and resting it on her thighs. "Like, there's just so many layers of wrong you dropped on me."
"Amber, if you don't shut the fuck up I'm going to stick this pencil in your eye socket." Tara raises her mechanical pencil up as a threat, which Amber boredly glances at before saying-
"Like, seriously, Wes? His mom read him Dr. Seuss for bedtime up until graduation day!"
The next few hours of their studying go like this, with Amber momentarily filling the silence with jabs at Wes while Tara nudges her with her foot to get her to shut up.
All the while, Tara's pencil never strays from her hand.
༼ つ ╹ ╹ ༽つ
Much to Amber's dismay, Tara doesn't let up.
She keeps bothering her about it for the next week, insistently asking for Amber to hook her up with someone, anyone.
She even said she'd hook up with the guy in Amber's second year painting class who secretly slips into the backroom to sniff pottery enamel. At least he was kind of hot, in that edgy, artsy way.
They're walking across the courtyard, on the way to grab some lunch, before Amber finally snaps, abruptly stopping in the middle of the crosswalk. Tara barely bumps into her arm before Amber swiftly turns around, grabbing onto Tara's shoulders with both of her hands.
"Tara, I would commit gruesome and violent murder for you, but the constant talk about how much you want to get fucked is making me, not only homicidal, but suicidal."
Tara frowns, "Who's slut-shaming who, now?"
Amber sighs, squeezing her eyes shut in frustration for a moment before opening them. "You're not missing out on anything, Tara. I promise. Sex is kind of a chore anyways."
Her frown deepens. "Okay, now I know you're lying because you hate chores but you still bring someone back to your apartment every weekend."
Amber removes her hands, not waiting for Tara before she turns back around and starts making her way to the dining hall again.
"That's different," Amber assures when Tara catches up to her, ignoring the unconvinced look she receives. "It doesn't mean anything, it's like busy work."
They walk for a few more paces before Amber asserts, "The kind of sex you," She pokes a finger into Tara's arm for emphasis, "Are looking for, is the lovey dovey kind, where all you do is give each other gooey eyes in the missionary position."
"No," Tara quickly disagrees, "I want what you have. No strings attached, just good, primal-"
"I know that is not the word you wanted to use." Amber interrupts her, crinkling her nose in brief disgust.
Tara rolls her eyes but keeps going. "I want to experience college!" She exclaims. "I spent the entirety of freshman year locked up in my dorm studying American history!"
Tara deflates a bit, staying in stride with Amber as the dining hall comes into view in the distance. "There's nothing wrong with being a dork, Tara." Tara gives her a look that blatantly says she doesn't believe her. "Even if I say otherwise. You're just fun to tease."
When Tara's pout doesn't dissipate, Amber breathes out a quiet sigh before slinging her arm around Tara's shoulders, pulling her in so that their sides bump into each other with every step they take.
"Listen, if you wanna fuck somebody on the sink in a frat bathroom, by all means," She levels Tara with a look to show that she means it, "But I just don't feel comfortable introducing you to any of the bums I know, you're too good for them."
It's one of the rare moments where Amber is explicitly kind, not that she's ever mean to Tara, but she's not exactly good at being vulnerable.
"And you're not?" Tara asks, tone light so as not to scare her away, but genuinely curious. She wasn't a stranger to the death glares Amber received from abandoned flings.
Amber just shrugs, smirk cemented in place. "Eh, I never stick around long enough to find out how shitty they are anyways."
Tara grins. "You're wretched."
Amber bumps her hip into Tara's. "I try."
༼ つ ╹ ╹ ༽つ
Amber says it as a joke. She swears it was just a joke, but the look Tara was giving her pointed to the younger girl genuinely considering it, and the prospect made a deep and uncharacteristic panic settle deep in her chest.
"Wait," Tara asks, a little bit too excited, "Really?"
It's about a week later, another week of constant begging.
"Tara," Amber warns, this was quickly delving into uncharted territory.
"No," Tara quickly interrupts her as she raises a matter of fact finger. Amber kind of wants to snap it off her hand. "You said, you'd rather have sex with me than let that guy within a hundred foot radius of me."
Amber barely awards her a side eye before digging around her salad some more, like she was searching for some hidden treasure.
"True, or no."
"I hate when you get all Nancy Drew on me."
"True, or no."
Again, Amber barely acknowledges her, crossing her fingers that if she just ignores her, then Tara will magically disappear into a cloud of glitter.
"So you'll have sex with me!" Tara exclaims, a bit too loud for Amber's liking as she quickly punches her arm and glares.
Tara is practically undeterred though, smiling like a lunatic.
"I didn't say that!"
"You said-"
"Jesus Christ, it's a figure of speech!"
"But it would solve both of our problems!"
Amber was joking about the brain damage at first but Tara was genuinely acting deranged.
"In what world would this solve any of my problems?" She could feel her eye twitching. God, she needed to get her blood pressure checked.
"I would finally stop annoying you about this," Tara answers like it's the most basic solution in the world.
"No," Amber shakes her head resolutely, "No," She says again just for emphasis, "Throwing this," Amber gestures towards Tara's entire body, "Off of a steep cliff would solve my problems."
"But we've kissed before!" Tara reminds her.
"Yeah, when we were ten!" Amber hisses, "And that barely counts, it was a peck."
It had been their respective first kisses.
It hadn't been monumental or particularly special, shared under the privacy of Amber's covers during a sleepover after watching A Cinderella Story.
Like Amber had said, it was just a peck, laying on their sides facing each other. It wasn't passionate or fiery, they were ten, but she remembers it being comfortable, familiar.
It didn't feel awkward or weird, Tara had just grinned big at her afterwards and turned over, expecting Amber to spoon her, and she did.
"No," Tara quickly corrects her, "Jill's graduation party when we were fifteen."
Okay, yeah, Tara got her there. They were drunk out of their minds, partly the reason why Amber hadn't remembered it at first.
They were giggling in the hallway, tripping over the other's feet as they clung onto each other's arms in a poor attempt to balance themselves.
Tara had said something about not knowing how to kiss properly because of a lack of experience.
Amber had boldly claimed that she'd teach her.
They made out against a wall for at least six minutes until Chad came stumbling up the stairs and found them.
He threw up almost immediately after.
"This is just like another teaching experience."
And it's not like Amber hadn't thought about it before. She was only a woman! But this wasn't a no name hookup. Amber knew Tara, like, knew her so well she could probably guess the next words that were going to come spewing out of her mouth.
Something like: But we're besties! It doesn't have to mean anything, and sparkles and sunshine and glitter and blah blah blah.
But much to Amber's dismay, Tara says, "I mean, I've always wondered what it'd be like."
Amber chokes on a piece of cucumber.
Like so violently that Tara has to start slamming her palm against her upper back.
Amber chugs down her glass of water so quickly she's almost certain that she's gonna choke again.
"W-what?" She stutters, her voice hoarse from the coughing.
Tara just shrugs, almost sheepishly, as her cheeks get painted a light pink. "I mean, well, yeah..." She avoids looking in Amber's general direction, "Haven't you?"
And Amber takes maybe a little too long to answer, because after a few prolonged moments of silence and Tara's scrutinizing gaze boring into her skin, Tara's eyes suddenly light up in satisfaction. "Oh my god, you have."
Amber's cheeks light up red and it's all but emphasized by her pale skin. Tara has to actively refrain from whipping out her phone and taking a picture because she swears that she's only seen Amber blush like a total of three times.
Sometimes Amber forgets that her extensive knowledge of the inner workings of Tara Carpenter's brain was not unrequited. Tara probably knew her better she knew herself too.
"See," Tara declares, "Now we can both fulfill our hidden desires!"
"Jesus, Tara!" Amber squirms at the words, "Don't say it like that, it makes us sound like creeps."
"But you are a creep."
"Takes one to know one."
And they sort of get caught in this staring match, neither wavering. If there was one thing they shared in common, it was their stubbornness.
"I could always go ask mohawk over there." Tara nods her head in the direction of the guy Amber explicitly said she would not let Tara near.
Amber's eyes squint into thin slits. "You wouldn't."
And Tara takes it as a dare, abruptly standing up, her chair squeaking in the process before she saunters over to him.
Amber watches amused, waiting for Tara to turn on her heel and walk back because, seriously, he was just so blatantly not Tara's type.
But she keeps walking, and with every step closer she gets to him, Amber's smirk drops, and drops, and drops, until Tara is plopping into the seat beside him, her eyes flirty as she shyly tucks a piece of her hair behind her ear.
Amber is caught between wanting to repeatedly smash her head against the table until she's unconscious, or flinging her food tray across the hall like a deadly frisbee to decapitate mohawk's head, or Tara's, either would be a win. Her aim had never been very good.
Instead, she slings her bag over her shoulder and grabs Tara's tote as well, quickly walking a few tables over to where they were talking
As she approaches, she hears Tara's giggle, obviously fake to her Tara-trained ears, but the boy doesn't know any better, his ego inflating almost tenfold.
Amber actually yanks Tara out of her seat, hard enough that the girl stumbles back into her, almost falling.
"I think I have food poisoning." She lies, her voice so low and gravelly that Tara almost has a hard time making out what she's saying.
"Hey," The guy throws his arms up in Amber's direction, "We were talking!"
Amber's glare is so deadly that Tara is briefly terrified that she's going to have to be a police witness in the immediate future.
"Say another word and I'll make sure you never talk again." And then Amber is pulling her out of the dining hall, her grip on Tara's bicep firm, but not painful.
She doesn't let go even when they make it outside.
They walk for about ten minutes in silence, sort of aimlessly. Tara just kind of assumes that Amber is too angry to really have a destination in mind anyways, just sort of walking as far and fast as she can.
After another five, Tara mumbles, "I got within a hundred feet of him."
Amber stops and whips her head around, almost in awe of how obnoxious Tara is.
"When the fuck did you get so horny?!" She asks incredulously.
"When I found out my hot best friend has thought about having sex with me."
Amber shakes her head, turning back around, if only to hide another blush, and continues walking.
"So does that mean you'll-"
"Tara, shut up."
"Yeah, okay."