fic: lay my head on the hood of your car (new girl) (2/2)
She wakes up the next day sore between her legs and sore just under her ribcage, and that’s not even touching the raging hangover trying to burst forth from behind her eyes.
When she reaches the bathroom, she finds it empty, and she enjoys about thirty seconds of quiet peace as she brushes her teeth until the door opens.
And, it’s Nick.
Her eyes go wide in the reflection in the mirror and she freezes with her toothbrush hanging out of her mouth. To be fair, he freezes at the door and just stares at her and she stares at his reflection in the mirror, and they really need to stop staring at each other.
He finally moves and steps into the bathroom and grumbles what sounds like, “Good morning,” she spits a huge wad of toothpaste into the sink but she can’t seem to shake the deer in the headlights look she’s rocking.
“Hiiiiiiiiiii,” she finally says.
Nick’s face is sort of inscrutable, which is rare with him, as he looks at her.
“This is awkward,” he says, and she smiles small.
“This is awkward,” she says.
“Yeah, so. This can’t -- this can’t be a thing,” he says, and okay, so this is going to be That Conversation. “This is probably definitely so not a thing that is allowed to happen anymore. That was, like, a one-time deal. That was me rebounding.” The way he says it makes her think he isn’t insulting her even though everything she has ever seen in rom-com land and everything Cece has ever told her, rebounding and being called someone’s rebound is bad news bears. But she’s going to roll with this. She can be his rebound, and he can be her rebound, and they can go back to being normal roommates who do normal roommate things that definitely don’t include the sex stuff.
“And me rebounding! I never got my Spencer rebound sex!” she whines, but then she brightens. “It’s a double rebound! Like a double rainbow!”
“Sure, Jess. It was a double rainbow. It was a one-time double rainbow.”
She sticks her toothbrush back in her mouth and swishes it around a few times considering what he just said. She spits.
“They are pretty rare, you know,” she says.
Two or three weeks pass where Absolutely Nothing Of Interest happens. That, is, between them.
Jess thinks though that maybe she has seen too many Billy Crystal rom-coms (or maybe just the one) but she thought that the immediate wake of Them Doing It (In The Kitchen) would be that whatever crazy sexual tension they had built between the both of them would have dissipated.
Like, they would have literally banged the tension out of each other and they could go back to some semblance of Normal, where he watched a lot of baseball and bought a lot of German beer and talked about whatever weird news tidbits he had picked up over the day.
(“You bring up the debt crisis again, I am walking out that door,” Schmidt would say. “I don’t know who this DOW Jones character is, but I really don’t want to hear about how he’s gotta get it up.”
“You know what the DOW Jones is,” Nick would deadpan.
“That may be, but my point still stands.”)
And yeah, they sort of go back to normal, in that she practices her biology puppet show for him (“ . . . Mr. Intestines is kinda gnarly-looking. Like overcooked sausage links,” Nick said) and they share pepperoni Hot Pockets for dinner and she swings by the bar while he’s working and he mixes her different weird cocktails he’s still trying to learn how to accurately and tastily make -- but it’s still strange.
Like they have one of those Fantasia dancing elephants in the corner they’re pretending isn’t there.
They ignore the dancing elephants for awhile.
They ignore them until it’s three AM on a Saturday night and he just got home from work and she’s all sprawled out on the couch with all these empty energy drinks around her (real talk: she didn’t know they were Winston’s energy drinks and thought they were just awesomely flavored fruity juice boxes. So she drank them all). Homeward Bound is playing quietly on the (crooked) TV.
He collapses next to her and sighs heavily. She’s lounging there, completely hyped up, and he’s just looking at her in that way he does, like he’s a Looney Tunes cartoon character, all bug-eyed, so she looks right back at him with the same expression and resumes rambling about Milo and Otis or Amish country or Tom Hanks’s filmography or whatever she was talking about in the first place.
She flails backwards into the cushions on the couch, and her left leg falls across his lap. She can feel the caffeine-crash coming on and she doesn’t move, but he doesn’t move her leg either.
“What are you talking about?” he finally interrupts.
“I don’t knowwww,” she whines. She tires of her own voice eventually (“ . . . make a note, buddy; this right here is a rarity”) and they both just lull into a mutual silence. It’s the first time in a long while that the two of them have just quietly coexisted. Neither of them is rambling to fill the silence, and they’re just sitting there -- alone, together. There is still that tension, taut between the both of them, but she’s trying really hard to focus on the talking animals on the television screen.
They sit there in silence watching the last half of Homeward Bound and she’s sort of drifting off until she feels his hand close hot over her ankle. His thumb passes over the bone that juts there, and when she glances over at him, he isn’t looking at her, but blankly staring at the television screen. He exerts more pressure against her ankle, and then his hand starts climbing higher, inching slowly up her leg, and she is so, so, super glad she decided to shave her legs earlier that day.
His hand rests against her knee, and she doesn’t really mean to, but her legs part, and he smirks down at her.
“Nice boxers,” he grumbles, and she looks down at the shorts and the snowmen wearing Santa hats that decorate them.
“Thanks,” she says, just as quietly, and she crosses her arms over her stomach. “I bought them for Christmastime,” she tells him, wholly and completely serious.
“It’s October,” he says, still in that quiet, gravely voice, and whoa buddy, that’s his sex voice, isn’t it? It totally is. And she hates to give him credit, but it is totally working: she’s already trying not to squirm as his hand drags up her thigh and then he stops, his fingers toying with the hem of her ridiculous Christmas boxer shorts.
He’s leaning over her now, his weight braced on the hand that’s not on her knees, and she looks up into his face. “I like December better,” she says, as if that makes any kind of sense at all.
He purses his lips and nods just once. He tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and then he kisses her. He kisses her slow this time, different than the other times. It’s a lazy kind of kiss, the sort of thing that promises All The Time In The World, exploratory and thorough. She cants her hips up to him, like her hips are operating of their own accord, and Nick uses the moment to drag her shorts and her panties down to bunch just above her knees. He’s breathing hard now, and so is she, and the animals are still lost and talking on the television, but that seems super far away.
He doesn’t stop kissing her. He doesn’t stop kissing her when he worms a hand down between their bodies and presses his hand against her, cupping her, making her grind down against him, and whatever noise she would have made is muffled by his open mouth.
His fingers feel huge inside of her, and he keeps saying, “yeah,” against her mouth, and she’s, like, making mewling noises; she sounds like that cat on the TV if the cat didn’t talk people-language and instead was talking cat-language.
She hears herself say his name, all quiet and in a voice that doesn’t even sound like her own, but it makes him groan, and she’s kinda blown away by how way more intimate this feels than when they did it in the kitchen.
She’s between this thought and absolutely no thought at all, so close to coming, when Nick suddenly stills.
The door to Schmidt’s room opens with a kick and a grumbled expletive. Nick rears back from her quickly and throws the afghan Winston’s grandma knit for him over her body.
“Hey, bro-inski,” Schmidt calls over to him. “You home?”
“Does it look like I’m home?”
“Touche, amigo.” Schmidt stops and stares at the TV. “You watching Homeward Bound, man?”
“Hi, Schmidt,” Jess calls from the couch and raises her hand to wave. Schmidt nods like everything makes sense now, and patters off to the bathroom, muttering about how he’d gladly join them but he doesn’t feel like crying tonight, thanks so much.
Jess pulls her Christmas shorts on underneath the blanket.
Nick licks his fingers.
Wow, she is in so much trouble here.
Okay, so here’s the problem and the problem she should have divined from the beginning:
This
Keeps
Happening.
A few days after The Aborted Couch Make-Out Session, they’re back on the couch in the middle of the afternoon, Nick’s hours at the bar that night and Jess’s students let out at lunch.
They’re back on the couch, and instead of taking the half of a peanut butter sandwich she offered him, he kissed her instead. And she kissed him back. We’ve reached the point in succession of Super Dumb Things Jess Does In The Post-Spencer Era where it is no longer a surprise that she kisses him back when he kisses her.
“We don’t talk about this,” Nick pants, bats her hands out of the way so he can undo his belt faster. “No talking about this to Winston. Definitely no talking about this to Schmidt.”
“Because of The Roommate Dynamic,” she says in agreement, and Nick just says, “yeah, yeah, yeah,” all fast in a row, because he’s got his jeans open now, and her hand is still on his thigh but it’s also super close to his dick now, all exposed and hard, and the proximity alone seems to be enough to get Nick all desperate and needy.
The Roommate Dynamic: the grand excuse for why they aren’t allowed to talk about this with Schmidt and Winston. If One Roommate sleeps with Another Roommate, the casual Roommate Dynamic is destroyed.
The loophole for all that destruction is just not to mention the fact One Roommate slept with Another Roommate to The Roommates Not Involved In The Intercourse.
So Jess does the obvious thing: she lays some ground rules.
When Schmidt is out refilling his liquor supplies and Winston is in the shower, she sneaks over to Nick’s room and unfurls a sheet of poster board.
A sheet of poster board, with The Rules.
“Whaaaaaat is this?” he says. “What even this this can’t be a thing that we keep in our apartment I don’t even understand Rule 7 why am I sleeping with someone who refers to sex as ‘the dirty business’ WHY DID YOU EVEN MAKE THIS IS THAT GLITTER?!”
“The Rules stand!” she shouts back.
She leaves the poster in his bedroom and marches back to her own. She’s got a lot of glitter to vacuum up.
(“We don’t talk about this,” Nick pants, and Jess agrees, and the carpet is kinda rough on her knees, but that doesn’t seem to matter so much when she slides her mouth around the head of his dick and it’s like he’s laughing and moaning at the same time).
It. Keeps. Happening.
She jerks him off in the bathroom early one morning before she has to go in for class, but then Winston walks in all bleary-eyed so they spring apart, leaving Nick to try and hide a pretty impressive boner against the sink.
He goes down on her one the couch while So You Think You Can Dance is on the TV, and it’s not like Spencer never did this for her (he wasn’t that big of a turd), but wow, he definitely never applied himself with this level of enthusiasm. Nick hauls her up by the hips against his face, his forearm laid over her lower abdomen to stop her from bucking and squirming, and if that’s not the hottest thing that has ever happened to her, she’s not entirely sure what is.
There’s the time they totally bang at the bar where he works, back in the storeroom, her ass precariously balanced on a crate of cheap wine.
There’s the time or two or seven they do it on the couch (that poor couch; it’s witnessed too much).
There’s the time in her car when her elbow hit the horn and she bruised her knee on the console-thing-whatever.
And yeah. There’s the time they do it in Schmidt’s room.
Whatever.
He deserved it.
Okay, maybe he didn’t deserve it deserve it.
But yet again, Schmidt drank the last of Nick’s soy milk (“I buy it special! Special as in FOR ME!”), and she doesn’t know: she guesses that’s impetus enough to get nasty in his bedroom. That, and she totally caught him stealing money out of the Douchebag Jar.
“The small room really is small,” she says. She shuts the door behind her, which seems sort of like an unnecessary gesture.
“Can’t believe he came back here,” Nick says.
She’s not sure if it’s the illicit nature of what they’re doing (sex on Schmidt’s bed! what!) or just that she really, really, really wants to be having sex with Nick right now, but she is crazy turned on, and he seems to be a pretty even match for her, based solely on the way he is grumbling, “Why are you even wearing pants?!” as he tries to get them down past her hips.
Schmidt’s room smells the way those fancy men’s clothing stores smell: kind of sterile, but also really cologne-y. She’s still wearing the bowling alley t-shirt she bought at a Goodwill when she was sixteen and Nick still has that blue and green flannel shirt on, but one of them (her?) unbuttoned it down to his navel, and she can’t stop dragging her hands over all that exposed skin as he lays there under her. Her knees slip against Schmidt’s bedspread and her body bears down on Nick’s hard; he grunts and grabs at her ass, his other hand smoothing up her thigh.
“This bedspread isn’t very conducive for my kneecaps. It’s like a lady’s satin nightgown.”
Nick snorts and his fingers dig in low on her hip, and he keeps saying, “I got you, I got you,” but his voice gets all garbled when she lowers herself down onto him, and she keeps pushing down on his chest with the heels of her palms because, yeahhh, balance is proving a hard thing to hold onto on Schmidt’s Slip-and-Slide bedspread. Nick’s feet keep skidding against the bedspread as he tries to gain some traction against her, and every time he raises his hips against hers, they both slip down the bed a little more.
“Get off,” he finally says, and Jess clumsily pitches off his lap. “Come on,” he says, and he grabs her by the arm while she just looks cluelessly up at him, naked save for the super old bowling t-shirt, and he looks just as ridiculous -- hair all ruffled, his shirt wide open, dick curving up and wet, and ok, wowwww. Maybe she’s not staring up at him totally cluelessly but instead whatever the sex variation of shell-shock is.
“Come on,” he repeats, and she moves with him off the bed and lets him draw her down to the floor. He sits down on the super tacky bright green rug Schmidt has laid out and pulls her to him. The carpet is rough against her knees and she’s totally going to have rug-burn in the morning, but it sort of seems worth it the way he’s looking at her all slack-jawed and rubbing the head of his dick against her while he mutters, “We obviously didn’t think the logistics of this one through,” against her collarbone.
She snorts. “Obviously,” because thinking through the logistics of Banging Your Roommate No One Knows You Are Banging In Your Other Roommate’s Room is totally something you’re supposed to think out before you get all naked and sweaty and twisty together.
Nick tangles a hand at the base of her neck, strands of her hair catching around his fingers, and she braces her hands on his shoulders and okay, oh boy, he’s inside her again (and like, dude, what, it’s like no matter how many times they do this (this: the deed, the whole enchilada, the big she-bang, the horizontal tango, etc.) she can’t get used to that immediate push and stretch as he fills her). It sorta burns, but in a good way (definitely not the bad way), and makes her whine a little, her voice all throaty and high-pitched at the same time, and that just makes him sort-of-but-not-really laugh, because he’s kinda groaning, too, and maybe that’s why he bites her, a small nip just below the dip in her throat.
“This,” she pants, “is, so, much, better.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says, each gasp of the word matched with the thrusting of his hips, and that’s pretty great rhythmic-wise.
Her chin bumps against the top of his head and it’s like her hips are moving of their own volition, following whatever tenuous rhythm he’s set for the both of them.
“Kinda loses . . . ” Nick jockeys for more leverage against her as she speaks, and she pauses to screw her eyes shut for a second, because, whoa, that is deep, dude. Banging him is like getting a crash course in her own anatomy, it’s bonkers, and she can totally feel him smirking against her neck because that’s another thing she’s learned: what it means when his mouth twitches a certain way against her -- when he gets her to lose her composure or he gets her all blabber-y or conversely gets her to shut up, he always smirks, and a smirk is different than a smile. It feels different against her skin.
“Kinda,” she starts again, and she licks her lips, “kinda loses the symbolic appeal when you’re not doing it on the bed, you know.”
Nick stills beneath her, but Jess is still rolling her hips, and then she pauses too, her breath all ragged and winded, like that time she did that hot-room yoga thing with Cece and thought she was going to either die or melt -- melt until she died and there was nothing left but some bone and a gelatinous liquid that was once the artist formerly known as her. If she was to get all super introspective -- and now (read: straddling Nick in Schmidt’s room on Schmidt’s floor with Nick’s sweaty hands all over her) is really not the time for that -- she’d think something along the lines that Nick is a lot like that hot-room yoga, but in person form. As in, he sometimes (and often, as of late at least) makes her feel like a gelatinous liquid that was once the artist formerly known as her.
He flips them then, and her legs splay open unattractively around him, but he grabs her by the thigh, hoists her leg up over his hip and he’s moving again and her back is arching up and she’s pretty sure she couldn’t spell her name right now if you asked her (and Jess is a pretty easy name to spell in the first place).
“I’m okay with it,” he wheezes, and he’s got to be getting way more rug-burn than she was, because she had just been rocking against him before, but he’s, like, full-on fucking her here. He only has two hands, but they feel like they’re everywhere -- on her hips, spreading her thighs open wider, pulling at her hair, clutching at her neck, pushing her t-shirt up; he groans really, really loud when he realizes she’s not wearing a bra underneath, and then she’s the one groaning because his hands are everywhere.
“Yeah, I’m okay, too,” she says, her agreement several beats too late, and if he has no idea what she’s talking about it, a) wouldn’t be the first time, and b) he doesn’t say anything about it.
There is always The Turning Point. In these sorts of stories, there always comes a time when the story turns.
We’ve reached that destination.
It’s a weekend, and Winston has traveled up to Chicago to visit Coach.
(“You haven’t seen Coach since you came back from Lithuania?”
“Latvia. And it’s not like Coach has come on down here to visit me either.”)
Schmidt is on Day Three of what will become a seven day relationship and has (as of yet) to leave his new girlfriend’s apartment.
(“Denise’s apartment really speaks to me. As does her bedside drawer full of condoms”).
Maybe it’s the empty apartment, or maybe it’s just natural momentum or inertia or science or whatever, but that night she finds herself in her bedroom, on her bed. With Nick.
Violation of Rule 3(a): no sex in her bedroom.
(Rule 3(b): no sex in his bedroom).
And, you know, she’s kinda getting why this was a rule in the first place. Compared to the other times they have done this (his hand sneaking under her shirt, her hand in his hair, his body pressing hers down with his weight), This Feels Like A Big Deal.
Her room is dark, and they are in her bed, and Nick buries his face in both the crook of her neck, and against her pillows. The floral sheets smell of her and her shampoo and that weird eco-friendly perfume she bought out of that hippie van that one time.
But they are naked! In her bed! And it’s like he is everywhere all at once, and overwhelming feels like too mild a word for it. Like, this is what people do when they are serious people, she thinks. This is what they do when they are serious about one another, and they don’t have poster boards with rules and they don’t fuck exclusively in every single place they can find that isn’t each other’s room.
It’s just that she’s realizing things. She’s realizing that she really likes the way he says her name and she’d like to hear him say it all the time into whatever distant future neither of them can see. She likes that even though he doesn’t understand half the things she does or says he never acts like she’s stupid.
She likes being under him, right now, in this moment.
She likes his body against hers, his body in her bed, his body with hers.
She likes a lot of things, and these days, most of those things seem to be attached to him.
Okay. So yeah. This is A Big Deal.
And as if she doesn’t have enough on her plate --
(“I haven’t even mentioned the politics going on at the school right now. The playground has gone gangland and Ms. Patrice of Art Class is jockeying for the Vice Principal position.”
“Drama!” Schmidt said.
“No, he tried to slit his wrists with a paper plate and is now at a home for the unwell.”
“Eek,” Winston said) --
Spencer has started reaching out to her.
“Rachelle rode her bike. To greener pastures.”
“Is that a death euphemism?” she asks him.
“No. It’s a she-broke-up-with-me euphemism.”
And well. It’s just a lot at once! She is banging her roommate who she maybe has Feelings for (spoiler alert: she does), and at THE SAME TIME, her ex-boyfriend who definitely cheated on her and definitely did not water her flowers (that’s A Big Deal too) is trying to make grandiose overt romantic gestures.
She does the only wise thing she can think of:
She calls Cece.
“I . . . have a confession,” Jess tells Cece.
“Hit me.”
“I’ve been sort of kind of definitely sleeping with Nick. For. Awhile. Now.”
“Whyyyyyyyyy.”
“Whyyyyyyyyy?” Cece just stares blankly at Jess. “No, really. Why are you whying me.”
“Because. Jess! You are the worst, the absolute worst, at doing things casually.”
“That’s not true!”
“It is true. And it’s not a bad thing! You just, you got a lot of heart, kid.”
“Well, not this time, buddy. Nick is just a thing. A thing I do things with. And and and now. Now, Spencer’s been showing up with balloons and bears and a mariachi band all, ‘oh, Jess, my heart, I want to win you back.’”
“Shut up.”
“I will not.”
“Do you want him back?”
Jess screws her face up. “I’m supposed to be conflicted, right? I’m supposed to be all DO I WANT NICK? DO I WANT SPENCER?”
“I thought you were casual with Nick.”
“Yeah. Casual. As in formal wear.”
“What?”
“Ugh.” Jess lowers her head down to the table. “We had rules!” she whines. “And we broke them. We broke all of them. Well, except the no videotaping rule. But that’s because I don’t trust technology.”
Cece waves her hand as though dismissing most of what Jess just said. “Okay, but are you conflicted?”
Jess raises her head off the table. “ . . . not really?”
And, oh god, she’s telling the truth.
She flags down the waiter.
“I know it’s only noon . . . thirty, but I need you to get me a pink drink that has all the vodka in it. Just, all of it.”
“Make that two,” Cece drawls.
AN INTERLUDE TO GIVE THE READER SOME PERSPECTIVE:
(As in, Jess Is Not The Only One Confused By These Turn of Sexy Time Events)
“Yo, you seen Jess?” Nick asks Schmidt.
Schmidt freezes in his tracks, mid-way between the kitchen counter and the couch. “Whoa, bro.”
“What?” Nick asks, already resigned.
“You said that in a sexy tone, bro. You said it in a tone that means you want to have sex with that person you’re using the sexy tone on via their name. In your mouth. I know, man. I know. I invented the sexy tone.”
“You invented it.”
“SSST, my man. Schmi -- ”
“Please don’t finish that acronym.”
“ -- dt’s Super Sexy Tone. Like a dial tone. For those that want to bang.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Pick on up and I’ll push your buttons.”
“Please stop.”
“You playing Operator for Jess. ‘Yeah, baby girl, Imma connect you.’”
“I am begging you. To stop.”
INTERLUDE OVER.
So Jess does the one thing Jess thinks she can do:
Jess Gets Brave.
Jess Gets Brave At A Karaoke Bar. After Several Sake Bombs.
She can’t entirely remember what it is she says to Nick (on account of the sake bombs), but she knows that it definitely involves explaining the idea of mutual exclusivity and ecosystems and how this totally isn’t a One Can’t Live While The Other Survives Scenario, and that she could totally be both A Roommate and A Girl he Likes To Do Dirty Things With.
Without all The Rules. And without All The Secrets.
“We’re in public!” he shouts at her over the music.
“Okay, we are!” she shouts back. And then he just looks at, all hangdog and all I can’t, and he doesn’t even have to say that part, but he does.
He actually says, “I can’t.”
And she gets it, okay. He’s reluctant to make this into anything serious (on account of the Caroline and the whole I Just Got Out Of A Huge Destructive Relationship, and on account of the Caroline).
To that, Jess says, “Alright, well. I am an empowered woman! And I say no to all . . . this!” But the thing is, she says it with these super-wide eyes and a trembling chin, because wow, rejection hurts the second go-round, too, but at least she’s not naked and singing and she wasn’t with him for six years or whatever.
She has what the bartender tells her is a Cosmo but it kinda tastes like lighter fluid even though it’s pink and shiny, and next thing she knows, she’s stepped up on stage and is belting out the Air Supply classic, “All Out of Love.”
She’s pretty sure that elevates whatever weirdness that had just transpired between her and Nick to full on Thwarted Epic Awkwardness.
The awkwardness continues apace.
The go a whole month just being Normal Roommates who do Normal Roommate things. Like pay electric bills and the rent and bicker over whose turn it is to buy more toilet paper and whose turn it actually is to clean the toilet and that kinda thing.
He sometimes looks at her though. He looks at her like he wants to apologize, but she’s been working on this thing called a backbone, so when he looks at her like that she leaves and rides her bike down to the florist on the corner and buys some flowers that are definitely not carnations.
Their apartment is pretty full of flowers these days.
But their commitment to co-existing awkwardly and peacefully only lasts for so long. Much like her flowers.
Their apartment is pretty full of dead flowers these days.
A random Sunday evening in late November, Jess goes to Nick’s bedroom to ask if the oranges in the fridge are his and if so can she eat one because she’s worried that she might be coming down with scurvy.
She leans against the doorjamb, and he’s just reclining on his bed with a really thick book.
(“Are there dragons in your book?” she had asked him the other day when she saw him with it at the kitchen counter.
“It’s David Foster Wallace,” he had said, not looking up from the page.
“Yeah, okay, but are there dragons?”
He gave her Nick Look #5 (incredulity mixed with judgment and just a little affection) over the book.
“All the best books have a dragon in them,” she told him. “Or an elf. Or a magic sword. Or an evil sorcerer. Or . . .”).
“Yeah, you can have an orange,” he tells her. “I’d hate for you to get scurvy. Especially before you and your band of pirates take to the high seas.”
“Ha ha,” she says. “How’s your book?” she asks him.
“It’s good,” he says. And then.
And then they’re just staring at each other like it’s a month before. It’s like they have a month’s worth of untapped tension mounting between them and he’s looking at her all hungry again, but it’s different. She doesn’t know how, but it’s different this time.
Needless to say, she forgets about the orange.
His mouth is at the hinge of her jaw and his sheets are really soft, like they’ve been washed a million times, and he meant to place his book on the nightstand next to the bed but he accidentally dropped it on the floor instead.
He’s kissing her then, and she’s kissing him too, they’re equals in this in that sense, and just as they seem to fit together really, really well, she’s fitting a lot of other things together, too.
Things like: she wants more.
She wants more, and she thinks it takes a lot of courage to admit that, and a lot of courage a lot of times can be mistaken as just being super dumb. So maybe all these Super Dumb Things She Has Done In The Post-Spencer Era have actually been Super Brave Things She Has Done.
She pulls back from him and says, “Yeah. I can’t do this.”
Nick gapes at her a little and she leans back on her heels, her knees still pressed against his bare thigh. “I can’t,” she hears herself saying, “I can’t keep doing the dirty stuff if, like, that’s all . . . this is gonna be.”
She can’t really read her face, but he’s looking at her all funny. His eyes are still really dark, the way they get once he gets his hand in her pants or right before he’s about to press his mouth to hers. But he doesn’t move toward her. Instead he looks down at himself and says, “ . . . you couldn’t have told me that before I took my pants off?”
She’s not sure why exactly, but that right there is enough to set her off.
“I’m sorry, Nick. I guess I’m just not ‘cool’ enough for your little ‘No Strings Attached Club.’”
“That’s a lot of air quotes.”
She stands up and hastily brushes her hair off her face. “Your ‘cool’ ‘little’ ‘club’ warrants ‘them.’”
“There’s no club! It’s not a club, Jess! That’s not even how you use air quotes!” He awkwardly slides his pants back up his legs but doesn’t bother with the belt or the button.
“There are strings!” She’s kinda yelling now, but whatever. “There are strings, everywhere! I have strings, man! I am Pinocchio! Pre-makeover, and I like it! I like my strings! So, you can just go ahead and put away your imaginary scissors and stop trying to imaginary snip snip all my awesome strings away because that’s not cool and I’M not cool, so maybe you should go and find yourself a real cool girl who is cool with your scissors and their snipping and everything and you can go be cool together in your cool stringless cool kids’ club!”
“What . . . the fuck,” he says.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought,” she says.
Nick finally stands up, and his jeans are riding super low on his hips, but she’s ignoring that for the time being. He steps right in front of her and it’s not like she can ignore him, proximity and all that.
“The strings? What? What with the strings?” He takes a deep breath and then both his hands on her shoulders and she kinda wants to sway forward into him, but she doesn’t do it. “Okay, Jess. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to be real adults here and we’re going to talk. We’re going to have a real conversation.”
“I thought that’s what we were doing,” she murmurs.
“No more metaphorical strings,” he says quietly. And it’s like how all this started in the first place: she’s thinking about how life is hard and things are hard, and his face is super close to her face, and he is saying her name. He is saying her name like he means it, like he means her (whatever that means), and she’s still not entirely sure what she’s supposed to do with that, but she thinks she should, especially since she just yelled at him when he had his pants off.
His forehead bumps against hers and she can feel as much as hear him say, “You are a real cool girl, you know.”
“No I’m not,” she sort of laughs, because, okay, she may be a lot of awesome great things, but a real cool girl isn’t one of them.
He chuckles. “No, you’re not.”
His lips brush against hers.
“I thought we were going to talk,” she says.
He smiles against her mouth.
“We got time for that,” he says, and Jess is, like, 99% sure (or okay, maybe a conservative 90%) that she’s got him by the metaphorical strings, too, that they’re a regular balanced puppet show here, and, well, hey: that’s a start.
She kisses him this time, and his mouth is still bent in a smile.
Yeah, she’s sure it’s a smile.
His mouth twitches differently against her skin when he smiles.
fin.