July 16: Tom/Daria, Cliche

[kinetic_elaboration]

Tom/Daria, canon-ish I guess, ~600 words, ~20 minutes

*

“My parents are going away this weekend,” he said. “You could come over, if you want.” And before she could answer, he added, “Just to hang out. I don’t mean it that way.”

“The cliche way?”

“Yeah.”

 

They’d already talked about how she wasn’t ready, the first time he ran his hand past the bare skin of her knee and up the inside of her thigh: a warm, possessive, intimate touch that had made her freeze. 

She wasn’t ready. Tom said he understood.

Daria doesn’t take the invitation as pressure, but she knows there’s an undercurrent to it, has to be, or why bother making the overture. The empty house, his bedroom with the door closed and no interruptions. A sort of unusual chill passes through her, goosebumps along her arms, and her breath shakes when she thinks of it. Why isn’t she ready? is a question that sometimes passes through her mind.

They meet up for lunch and then go back to his place. His sister’s at a friend’s house and the rooms all seem to echo, faintly, up to their high ceilings. She’s projecting this weird sense of abandonment on it all. Tom’s house is just his house: filled with various priceless objects, but also the couch where they play video games, the bed where they’ve made out more than once.

Where they end up making out again, to the sound of birdsong in the branches of the tree outside and someone mowing their lawn–having their lawn mowed, Daria supposes–farther out in the neighborhood, too distant to be seen. A bit of chill through the open window makes her shiver. Tom suggests settling under the blankets. Whatever intimacy there is in it, it’s soft enough and slow enough to feel okay. 

She takes off her glasses and she sets them on the bedside table, and if she weren’t still wearing her street clothes, she’d think maybe she was getting ready for bed. 

He wraps his arm around her waist and holds her close and kisses her so slow she thinks that she could actually keep going all night. Every time they get tired, they separate and just lie nose to nose and stare at each other, quietly. His hand runs up and down her back and then settles in the small of her back.

They’re kissing again. 

She expects at some point he’ll try to unzip her jacket, braces herself for it because it seems like something a guy would do and sometimes she still practices thinking of him that way. Instead, he pulls back and strips off his own sweater, leaving just his t-shirt underneath. Without it, he’s somehow so much warmer. She presses herself against him and runs her hands down the warm skin of his arms. She’s okay, then, with the idea of taking off one of her own layers. Her jacket is heavy and she knows he can see the shape of her so much better without it but it’s warm under the blanket, warm against him, so she shoves it off of her and then down to the floor. 

She can hear in how he groans against her mouth that he’s trying not to move his legs to tangle with her legs. Instead he kisses her jaw, her neck. She lies back against the pillows, Tom pulled half on top of her. When he starts to shift lower, she startles and half-sits up, but he only settles halfway down the bed, even with her belly, and presses his face against it. Against her t-shirt, just above her belly button. She feels, sees, hears him breathe in very slow and deep. 

“This okay?” he asks. She slides her fingers through his hair, palm curled around the back of his head and just nods, finally murmurs an uneven, genuine:

“Yes.”