About Last Night (G!P)

Was that so hard?

Jennie

Lisa strokes down the length of her guitar neck almost tenderly. I'm focused on her hands rather than her mouth as she recounts last night's date to me, distracted by the deft movement of her fingers, which aren't exactly small. It's an oxymoron —paradoxical, even— that her thick fingers would move with such gentle precision.

I shift around where I'm sitting on her bedroom floor, criss-cross with an uncomfortable heat rising from the bottomless pit of my stomach to my tight collar. The white button up I'd worn under my sweater vest is a size too small. I'm really starting to notice.

I peel out of the vest and hope it'll help me calm down.

"She wasn't exactly sweet," Lisa says, plucking a string, listening to the sound, and tuning it this way or that depending on how she liked it. "I think she wanted to get it over with, which isn't really my thing. She was in my lap before I could make it clear I wasn't interested in anything quick."

I lift my gaze from her hands. She must feel me watching her face. She looks up in tandem and smiles reassuringly. "It's fine. I kind of thought she was getting into it, she was like a vampire on me at one point, but I wasn't feeling it and it's clear she wasn't either. Drove her home. How was your night, did you watch that tape?"

I trace the coil of a black curl down to her shoulder, and can't force myself to meet her eyes as I ask, "A vampire?"

"What?"

"She was like a vampire at one point, you said." Lisa's arm goes still. "What did you mean by that?" I ask.

She puts her guitar down on the floor. I worry I've said something truly dull for her to place her sweetheart in such a rush, but Lisa's like that. She can tell I'm embarrassed no doubt, and she's giving me the answer to my question as swiftly as she can to soothe the wound.

"Here, look," she says. She pushes her hair away from her neck on one side and tilts her head, bearing a wine-stained curve of skin to me unabashedly. "She kissed me. She gave me a hickey, used a lot of teeth. That's why it's bruised so much on the edges."

Warmth I've never felt rushes in, like my blood has superheated, and it's written on my face. Lisa's room feels suddenly a thousand times smaller than before and more intimate, her poster wallpaper curving in, the space between me inching closer.

"Sorry," she says, "I know it's kind of weird to show you."

"No, I'm sorry," you say, mortified. "I shouldn't have asked you."

"Yeah, you should. You didn't get it and now you do. I don't mind telling you."

Lisa lets her hair fall back against her neck, a kinky curtain that looks ridiculously soft in the orangey light of her lamp. There's a butter smoothness to it, and the way she moves as she does is worse, her hand open and reaching for me. She doesn't hold my hand, doesn't even try, just lets her upturned palm hang off the edge of her knee as if to say, Ask me whatever it is you want to ask me. It's cool.

"Why would she do that?" I ask, gesturing to my neck.

"It's not her fault, I was flirting with her a ton trying to make it work."

"Not like that."

Lisa's hand turns toward her knee. "Like what?"

I hand drifts to my own neck absentmindedly. I get kissing, wanting to be kissed and wanting to give them. I understand why she kissed her neck; if I'd been in her position, alone in the car with Lisa laying her charm on thick, I might climb the console and push aside her hair too.