August 11: Tom/Daria, Cliche Pt.8

[kinetic_elaboration]

I wrote this in a fugue state.

700 more words, Tom/Daria, to read the whole thing click the tag “cliche.”

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Her own breaths are coming out uneven. The only way she knows to keep herself steady is to keep holding his head just like this against her; she takes comfort in the weight of his body against her legs. And in the knowledge, she realizes, that he’s kneeling for her. 

Not just kneeling at her feet but for her. 

Her legs want to buckle. “Need to sit down,” she manages, barely, a warning before she slightly untangles them and steps away. She’s not far from the bed at least and when she falls down on it without any grace at all, she immediately reaches out as if to pull him closer again. Then he’s pressed up against her legs, her knees, kissing her knees right at the first bit of bare skin below the hem of her skirt. She’s got her fingers in his hair again, lightly carding through the strands. This is so good. He is so good, and this is the best way she has to tell him that because she doesn’t have any words. 

“Are you okay?” he asks her, an echo of her own words coming back to her. She lets out the breath she was holding, and her hands slips down to the back of his neck so her fingers can feel along the bit of skin beneath the collar of his shirt and over his shoulders.

“I’m all right,” she answers. Her own voice sounds so foreign to her. But then the version of herself that she knows wouldn’t have a boy just a few inches from pressing his face right between her legs. That—that is probably one of the later bases.

But they said they weren’t going to think of themselves or their relationship that way. So what if she wants to feel his breath on her, or his tongue? He’s told her at least three different ways that he’d do it. She’s always told anyone who will listen that she doesn’t care what people think.

The thought of him lying in bed with her, on top of her, like a scene in a movie: that’s alien and weird and it feels like giving herself up to some narrative that was never really hers. And it makes him seem like any guy and not Tom, who she’s come to trust in inches and by degrees, and who she knows, and who she knows so well that she can feel the wanting and need in him just from the way he keeps his face at her knees and doesn’t dare move up her skirt, doesn’t dare do a thing she hasn’t given him permission for, how he just holds on to her legs and takes those deep breaths. 

And that thought calms her. He’s hers and he won’t do a thing she doesn’t want, and she can want anything. She can decide what she wants just by listening to her own uncurling need, her own aching.

She slides her fingers along that hidden skin, the top of his back and his shoulders. How nice it would be to feel more of that skin, and to see him. Asking him to take his shirt off feels… not quite right. Both the order and the question are embarrassing, but she steals herself anyway, and says, low, “Take this off.”

He stiffens for a second, what she at first takes for disapproval, but realizes a moment later is surprise. “All—all right.” He sits back on his heels and strips off his sweater, leaving him in a t-shirt like the one he was wearing last time. Last time they tried this. She can see his arms now and more of the shape of his torso but she keeps going anyway, pulls at the sleeve of it.

“This too.”

People at the beach have seen him more undressed, but it still feels taboo, him half-naked with her. Probably because he’s still on his knees, she reminds herself. 

What is she supposed to do, with a half-naked boy at her feet?

When he looks up at her and his face is so obviously flushed and his lips are parted and he can’t stop staring at her, looks almost awed by her?