I'll be brave, I'll be brave

“Have you ever kissed a woman?”

It takes every last bit of decorum stored in Maura’s body to not spit out the bite of Pad See Ew she’s just deposited in her mouth. She doesn’t, but now she’s struggling to choke this hard lump of food down her throat, having hastily swallowed after way too few chews. She drops her fork back into the compostable takeout container as she coughs twice.

“Pardon me?” she asks, voice hoarse, and watches as Jane casually skewers a shrimp from her own container of Pad Thai.

“Sorry, is that a bridge too far?” Jane lofts one eyebrow. “You’ve given me pretty explicit play-by-plays of your sexual encounters with men, so I thought perhaps this was, y’know, well within the bounds of our friendship.” She pulls the shrimp off her fork with her teeth.

“It just surprised me, that’s all.” Maura tries not to get too defensive. “We’d been talking about work so it was a little out of the blue.”

“Fair enough.” Jane twirls her fork in her rice noodles, gathering another bite. “It’s just that I got called a lesbian at work—again—so it’s kind of been on my mind.”

“Lesbianism has been on your mind?”

“How about you answer my question first, hm?” Jane takes another bite of her food, watching Maura expectantly.

Maura wets her lips, her brain cycling through some relevant memories: being pressed back against the wall in a hallway at her boarding school, one particularly flirty lab partner at BCU, a dashing older woman at a forensic conference she’d attended in New Mexico. She’d done a lot more than kiss some of them.

“Yes, I have.”

“How does it stack up?” Jane says. “Like, compared to men, I mean.”

Jane has almost no reaction to this revelation about Maura, which is a little disappointing. This fact about Maura’s romantic history has always felt like a big, important secret that Maura has been keeping and Jane being so exceptionally casual in response makes it feel like she always knew.

“I mean, every person I’ve kissed has felt quite different, Jane.” Maura tries not to let her exasperation show. “I don’t know that there’s a clear line between the men and the women.”

“Yeah?” Jane chews thoughtfully. “I feel like every guy I’ve kissed has felt exactly the same.”

“Oh.” Maura’s pretty sure that Jane doesn’t mean that in a good way. “I guess… I mean, obviously, there are—broadly speaking—some physiological differences,” Maura says. “The women I’ve kissed have been softer, on average. Less stubble.”

“That’s it?” Jane frowns. “No difference in approach?”

“Jane, you know I really hate to generalize.”

“Humour me.”

Maura sighs. “Fine. I guess, in my experience, women have been more likely to treat kissing as an end in itself rather than a means to something else.”

Jane stares at Maura in that way that she does, where Maura is pretty sure Jane knows exactly what Maura means but she’s demanding Maura dumb it down anyway, like some kind of blue collar reparation. Maura sighs and relents, as usual.

“They kiss like it’s the main event, not just a concession to get sex.”

“Hm,” Jane says, infuriatingly inscrutable. “That does sound nice.”

“What, um…” Though Maura yearns for more information, she realizes that she doesn’t know how to ask for what she really wants know. “Is that…helpful?”

“Maybe.” Jane shrugs. “I just keep getting called gay, so I figure maybe I should just go out and kiss a woman and see if there’s any truth to it.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works, Jane,” Maura says. “You can’t just go out and kiss any woman and judge based on that. You need to be attracted to someone for a kiss to be any good.”