“I was scared,” she whispered, her eyes flickering over my face. “I’ve never been that scared. When I saw you, I thought—I don’t even know what I thought. I was just…”

“I know, Connie. I know.”

She shuffled over closer to me and our legs brushed together. She raised a hand and delicately traced her fingers over the chain around my neck, her touch so gentle that when she brushed against my skin it might have been easy to pretend she didn’t. But then they moved down to slip into mine and I brushed her knuckle with my thumb, felt her squeeze it. I looked at her properly, finally, for the first time in what felt like so very long—no glancing away, no fear, no hiding—and she turned to me. Suddenly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, I leaned over and pressed her lips to mine.

It seemed irrelevant, then, at that moment; all those shifted glances in the hallways and misspent lonely hours. Immaterial, even—all our old talk of incompatible patterns and ill-fitting lifestyles. Absurd, even, to think that something that had seemed so inevitable since the moment she had first leaned across to me had been brushed aside as inconsiderable and frivolous and wrong, when it was so simple, so natural, to sit in an empty room and share a kiss that surely was the only destination the paths of our shared lives had ever led to. An ineluctable thing, more real and solid than anything else. What seemed like an easily forgivable thing, in light of all that was wrong in the world.

When she pulled back, breathing unsteadily with the ghost of a misbelieving smile playing about her lips, we looked at each other in hazy astonishment only momentarily before I kissed her again, my hand automatically running through her hair and pulling her closer. How could there ever have been anything to compare to this, what I had come to see as unattainable, a distant illusion of a lost dream? I remembered how it would feel to have her so close, so damn close every single day, and I had thrown that away. I had let a fundamental part of who I was go, lost a core part of my being. Everything came sweeping back with an intensity that was matched by the force of her lips on mine—every kiss and touch and smile that I had forced myself to forget—a feeling I had only ever known with her. I remembered again the rush of helplessness, the sinking yielding, the surging tide of desire that left my knees buckling—that left me entirely at her mercy. Everything, until the memories of my time without her, swirling around somewhere in the back of my mind, was drowned into nothingness. I remembered and I kissed her, heart pounding in my chest, fire burning in my throat, relief sweeping through my veins.

* * * *

It was quiet, afterward. Unbearably quiet. We sat beside each other on her bed, neither of us particularly comfortable, wearing clothes she quickly fetched from her wardrobe just in case someone popped their head in. I knew I wouldn’t be staying until morning—not when her father was home, and there was a high possibility her mother might have heard the scandalous news of my coming out. Not when Emily could come back from her own night out at any minute. Before, ours were simply harmless sleepovers between two teenage girls. It would be different now, I knew. Even if neither of us said it.