Velvet Collision

The party was loud enough that I could feel the bass in my teeth, and I was already calculating how many minutes I had to stay before I could reasonably leave without my roommate calling me antisocial for the rest of the semester. Twenty more, I decided. Twenty minutes, one more drink, and then I'd walk home alone through the cold, which honestly sounded better than another hour of watching drunk freshmen grind against each other in a living room that smelled like cheap vodka and someone's vanilla candle doing its best to cover the damage.

That was the plan. I'm telling you this so you understand that I wasn't looking for anything. I wasn't hoping. I was counting down.

Then Ani walked in.

She was late, the way she was always late, and she came through the door with her jacket half off her shoulders and snow melting in her dark hair, and she scanned the room like she was looking for someone specific. Not me. She didn't see me at first. I was tucked into the corner by the bookshelf, holding a warm beer I had no intention of finishing, and I watched her find her friends, watched her laugh at something, watched her tip her head back and expose the long line of her throat. I'd been watching her do things like that for three months. Three months of sitting next to her in a seminar on postcolonial literature, three months of her borrowing my pen and never giving it back, three months of me telling myself it didn't mean anything.

She found me eventually. She always did.

"There you are." She slid onto the arm of the couch beside me, close enough that I could smell her perfume mixing with the cold air still clinging to her coat. Something floral and sharp. "I've been looking for you."

"You just got here."

"I saw your car outside." She stole the beer from my hand and took a sip, made a face, handed it back. "That's disgusting. Why are you drinking that?"

"I'm not. I'm holding it."

She laughed, and her hand landed on my shoulder, and I felt it through my sweater like a brand. "You're so weird. Come outside with me. I need to tell you something."

It was colder on the back porch, but quieter. The music was a dull thud through the wall, and the sky was clear enough that I could see my breath and a few stars doing their best against the streetlights. Ani pulled her jacket tight and leaned against the railing, and I stood a few feet away because if I stood any closer I was going to do something stupid.

"So," I said. "What's the thing?"

She didn't answer right away. She was looking at me the way she did in class sometimes, when the professor said something she disagreed with and she was waiting for me to catch her eye so we could share the look. But there was no professor now. No one to share it with.

"I broke up with Daniel," she said.

"I didn't know you were still with Daniel."

"I wasn't. Not really. For a while." She shrugged, and the movement was smaller than her usual shrug, more careful. "I just. I wanted to tell you."

I didn't know what to do with that. I'd spent three months convincing myself that whatever I felt for her was one-sided, a crush I'd get over, a bad idea I'd avoid. She was my friend. She was complicated. She had a boyfriend, then she didn't, then she did again, and I'd stopped keeping track because keeping track hurt. And now she was standing in front of me in the cold, telling me something I hadn't asked to know.

"Why are you telling me?" I asked.

She stepped closer. One step. It wasn't much. It was enough.

"Because I'm tired of pretending I don't want to," she said.

I should have said something smart. Something careful. Something that would have given us both an out. Instead I said, "Want to what?"

And she kissed me.

Her mouth was cold from the outside air, and then it wasn't. She tasted like the beer she'd stolen from me and something sweeter underneath, and her hands came up to my face like she'd been thinking about doing this for a while, the way I had, and I stopped thinking about anything else. The railing was at my back and I didn't remember moving, but she was against me, her body fitting into mine like we'd been designed for it, and my hands found her waist under her jacket, under her sweater, skin warm against my cold fingers. She made a sound into my mouth, low and surprised, like she hadn't expected it to feel like this either.

"We should go inside," I said, against her lips. "People are going to come out here."

"Let them."

"Ani."

She pulled back just enough to look at me. Her eyes were dark, her mouth red, and she was breathing hard. "My place," she said. "My roommate's gone for the weekend."

The drive took eleven minutes. I counted. I kept my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road and I didn't say anything, and neither did she, but her hand was on my thigh the whole way, high enough that I could feel the heat of her palm through my jeans, and every red light felt like a test I was barely passing. When we got to her apartment she fumbled with the keys, and I pressed her against the door in the hallway and kissed her again, harder this time, and she dropped the keys and laughed into my mouth and said, "Okay, okay, hold on," and then she got the door open and pulled me inside.

Her bedroom was small and messy. Clothes on the floor, books on the nightstand, a half-empty glass of water catching the light from the street. She turned on the lamp and then seemed to think better of it and turned it off, and in the dark I heard her breath, fast and shallow, and I heard my own.

"You're sure?" I asked.

"I've been sure," she said. "I've been sure for months. You're the one who's been oblivious."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to point out that she'd had a boyfriend for most of those months, that she'd never said anything, that I wasn't oblivious, I was respectful, I was careful. But she was unbuttoning her jeans and stepping out of them, and the argument died in my throat.

We didn't talk after that. Not with words. Her skin was warm and her hands were sure and she pulled me down onto the bed with her, and I learned the shape of her in the dark, the soft hollow of her throat, the curve of her hip, the way she gasped when I touched her there, the way she said my name like it was a question and an answer at the same time. She was louder than I expected. She was softer than I expected. She held onto me like I might disappear, and I held onto her like I'd been waiting my whole life to be allowed.

Afterward, she lay with her head on my chest and traced patterns on my skin with her fingertip, and I stared at the ceiling and tried to memorize the feeling of her weight against me.

"So," she said, eventually. "That happened."

"Yeah."

"Are you freaking out?"

I thought about it. I should have been. This was complicated. She was complicated. We had a class together, we had mutual friends, we had three months of unspoken tension that had just exploded in the space of an hour. But I wasn't freaking out. I was terrified of how much I wasn't freaking out.

"No," I said. "Are you?"

She was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I started to hear the clock on her nightstand, the hum of the refrigerator, the distant sound of a car passing on the street below.

"I don't know," she said, finally. "Ask me in the morning."

But in the morning she was gone. Not gone gone. Her coat was still on the hook by the door, her shoes still kicked off in the hallway. But the bed was empty beside me, and I could hear the shower running, and I lay there in her sheets with the sun coming through the blinds and wondered what I was supposed to do now. What we were supposed to be. Whether this was the start of something or the end of something that had never really begun.

The shower stopped.

I sat up.

And I waited to find out.