July 31: Tom/Daria, Cliche Pt. 5

[kinetic_elaboration]

All parts on the tag ‘cliche.’

~900 words, 28 minutes

Just under the wire

*

By the time Tom picks her up from school two days later, she has just about convinced herself that the afternoon in his bedroom was a dream. Or at least, that it was a makeout session like any number of others, over the course of months of dating. They were just kissing. That was all, and any weird, uncanny shiver she gets when she tries to remember it, in bits and pieces, is just her inexperience. 

It’s certainly not the kind of thing that one could gossip about. That one could tell one’s friends–if she were in the habit of telling Jane anything about her romantic life with Tom, which she probably wouldn’t do, even if their history was simpler.

It wasn’t a base. It was kissing. And cuddling under the blankets in bed.

 

When she climbs into the passenger seat and closes the door behind her, it’s instinct to lean over and kiss him. She presses her hand to the side of his face. The kiss lingers longer than it usually does.

“Hey,” he says as she pulls back.

“Hey.”

“You all right?” he asks, a slight furrow forming between his brows, and she wants to answer right away but she can’t. She’d realized, in the first moment of looking at him up close–oh, he really was between her legs.  He was kissing her thighs. Her hands clench in her lap like she’d tugged on his hair, fisted her hands in his shirt.

“Fine,” she answers.

But he doesn’t believe her because he doesn’t start the car right away. Just looks at her like he’s really trying to read her. Then he allows, “All right,” and pulls out from the curb.

As he’s turning into traffic, at the end of the half-circle in front of the school, he says, “About Wednesday–was that too much? You can tell me if it was.”

“It wasn’t.” She shakes her head. The words after that, the full explanation, don’t want to form. She can feel the redness spreading across her cheeks, but at least Tom is focused on the road. “It wasn’t too much. It just feels like… it shouldn’t have felt as intense as it did.”

“We were being pretty intimate, Daria.”

She looks at his profile and his hands on the wheel. This man would have gone down on her. Maybe saying it more starkly will help her believe. 

“More intimate than I’ve ever been with anyone,” she admits, with unwarranted shyness, given that he already knows.  “It wasn’t too much for you?”

“Not at all,” he answers, with such emphasis on the last word, like he’s trying to hold back the emotion but in the final syllable it all bleeds out. Not at all. Far from it. Maybe better to say not enough. “What, uh–what made it okay for you?”

She folds pleats into her skirt with her hands, bunching up the fabric as if into a fan and then letting it go. Thinks it out, as the neighborhood around the school passes by the windows, and the afternoon clouds over so thickly that the light takes on the cast of early dusk. 

“That it wasn’t the bases,” she says.

“What do you mean?” He frowns again, sticks and unsticks the heels of his hands from the wheel.

“We weren’t just doing the next thing to do it. It felt like us.” She considers, and admits, “It was a lot more intimate than I thought sex could be. And it wasn’t even sex. But I liked what you said, about just wanting to be close to each other.”

“It was easier to think of it that way?”

“Yeah.”

Tom considers for a moment. He pulls up at a red light, the backdrop that heavy gathering of clouds, rent suddenly, sharply, by a strike of lighting in the distance. 

“I like not thinking about it on those terms, either,” he says. “Like checking off boxes. But… if you wanted me to do more, I would." 

Not us, she notices. Things he could do. Things she could ask of him, or tell him.

"I mean stuff that looks like sex,” he clarifies. “I mean I would have–”

“Yeah.”

He exhales through his nose. He’s flexing his hands on the wheel again, like it’s the only part of him he’ll allow himself to move.  

Daria’s own insides are twisting over themselves, forming painful knots. This wanting so bad she can taste it. This not daring to have because–what if she’s wrong, about what he wants, about what she could ask of him, about what he would do. She thinks the words a long time before she says them. But when the light turns green and he switches his foot to the gas, they come out of her as if on a whim. 

“I think the weather’s too bad to go get pizza.”

An indoor activity, but Tom takes the bait.

“What if they called a weather alert and we were stuck inside all night?”

“With my classmates,” she finishes. “We could go to your house instead?” And, because she does not want to be coy, she does not want to be unclear about her wants, “I’d like to continue what we were doing before.”

She glances over at him, notices his cheeks are slightly pink, and how he swallows hard when he nods.