ethan & emma: talking with you.

Going Steady

A/N: There's some weird spacing in this chapter again, idk why, it's not purposeful. Just an fyi. Okay enjoy~

Emma was cocooned in warmth, so much so that she felt herself overheating before she even really woke up. She shifted a little, her body heavy and slow. When that brought no relief, she found herself swimming back to consciousness, the tendrils of her dream slipping away from her.

Where am I?

Emma stirred, and she blearily opened her eyes, blinking a few times before she could focus. A computer desk with two monitors - a drum set? This wasn't her room... 

Oh. Suddenly everything from the night before came flooding back to her. 

Sun was streaming through the edges of the windows around the curtains, thin sunbeams dancing quietly across the bed. They illuminated little dust motes drifting in the air. Emma was sprawled in Ethan's bed underneath his comforter, the thick, fuzzy blankets trapping heat against her body. She was definitely sweating out all the water she'd ever consumed in her life, and in Ethan's hoodie, no less. Emma nudged the blankets off her legs, desperate for cooler air.

Ethan was lying next to her, his face buried in his pillows, and all Emma could see were his bare shoulders beneath the blanket. His arms were propped under his pillow to cradle his head. Emma could see his legs sprawled across the bed beneath the blanket. He was making soft snoring sounds, his breathing even and low. Emma listened to him for a second, her eyes drifting across the tan slope of his shoulders, the tiny freckles from the sun that dotted across the back of his neck.

That's when Emma heard a cabinet slam shut, the clink of silverware drifting through the bedroom door. That must be what woke her up - Grayson in the kitchen cooking breakfast.

Abruptly, Emma's face flushed red, consumed in memories. Ethan hovering above her, her fingers digging into his shoulders, his mouth against her neck, the sounds he made as she moved against him... 

She looked away, sucking in deep breaths. She wasn't a virgin anymore. She wasn't a virgin anymore, and Ethan Dolan had taken her virginity. 

Well - he didn't take it. She gave it to him. She felt even her cheeks get even hotter as she remembered asking to come to his bedroom, practically begging him to take his pants off. God, she hoped he didn't remember that part. 

Emma lifted her hand into the air and watched how the dust motes swirled between her fingers, her skin pale and translucent in the sunlight, her red acrylic nails a little too grown out. She needed to get them redone. But she looked the same. 

It was just like last night, staring at herself in the mirror. She seemed exactly the same on the outside, but on the inside she felt frazzled and older and weirder and wiser and a bit unsettled. And kind of hollow. She didn't know what to feel. Was this normal?

Well, everyone always said virginity was a social construct anyway. It wasn't even a real thing, right? No wonder she didn't look any different. Nothing had actually changed. 

But maybe for them, everything had...  

Emma turned over in the bed, her gaze resting on Ethan again. With her head on the pillow, all she could see was the slope of his shoulders, the tan muscles in his back, and the soft fuzz of his hair, mussed by the pillows. 

Emma smiled to herself and pressed her face into her pillow for a second, squeezing her eyes shut. Even from the back, he was adorable. Sometimes it was hard to reconcile the stranger she followed online for years with the man she knew so well. But she couldn't fall back into her old mindset anymore, not when their relationship had changed so much. And she knew him.