#rellamy

The first time was a one-off, the sort of thing good friends just don't discuss, but it opened the door to something that might become habit. He learned what she looked like naked because she brought him to her bedroom once and took her shirt off without warning--impatient as always, skipping over what she did not know how to do by using short cuts and fast tracks--knew the part of his brain that would say bad idea bad idea would be drowned out and shunted aside. And she was right. That was back in the fall after her boyfriend got caught cheating. Seems a lifetime ago now but she's not yet told him if she's over it, if she ever will be.

This one is on him. It's different in ways he can start to name, can't quite pin down. Maybe just that he didn't initiate by immediately stripping.

She'd come over early with this idea they'd go out to breakfast but the temperature had fallen overnight, the sky clouding up and dropping and that heavy, expectant hush in the air, like a storm gathering itself, so they'd stayed inside and eaten the rest of his cereal, then played video games on his couch. The whistle of the wind and the rattle of his windows in the blow and gust of it sounded of winter. He yawned, for real, stretched up his arm and let it rest around her shoulders.

She looked at him like, am I dumb? Do you think I don't notice it?

He gave her a smile that other women would find charming.

But she slid in against his side as she beat his ass six out of ten, threw the controller on the coffee table after and then just turned her face so her nose was crushed in against his t-shirt. He squeezed her arm, gathered her up close and listened to her inhale, and on the rattling long exhale, he slid his hand beneath her shirt.

None of it meant anything except that he was horny and cold and he knew if Raven minded, she'd just shove him away. Tell him to get over himself and shut up.

Now she's talking about romance and he's thinking about her tits, and wondering if she always takes her hair down to fuck.

The question (you're a romantic, aren't you?) is idle and content and hazy with sex, the bedroom small and square and the hour uncertain. His bed, a queen that he doesn't really need, came with the place and barely fits in the room. Around it is a thin border of floor, around and beneath it wall to wall carpet in an ugly gray-green color that always looks dirty, even when it's not. He's been planning to move out of the place for over a year now but hasn't found anything better, and because it was only supposed to be temporary, he never really decorated much: just a single framed painting on the bare white walls, a gift, which he's hung up over the dresser in the corner of the room.

He has two windows, though. That's the best feature of the place: the natural light. Right now they have the overhead light on and the floor lamp by the bed too, because the late afternoon light is the gray-white tone of a storm that just won't break, hazed out and cold. Occasional thin wisps of snow slant by, sometimes. Nothing that will stick; nothing that will stay.

Bellamy can see the snow, and the wintry light just on the verge of tipping into twilight, through the window just behind Raven, the window she's half-framed in. His palms are sliding up and down her legs, steady and warm, and his feet are still tangled up in the sheets of his unmade bed. He's thinking about Raven awash in his sheets and how she'd look if he flipped her right over and landed her on his pillows, and how he'll probably do just that, when he actually wants to come.

For now she's barely moving, only riding him slowly. As she watches him, the smile fades from her face, and she tilts her head and traces the curve of his cheekbone, wafts her fingertips across the freckles over his nose.

"Romantic?" he asks. He means himself, what she'd said, but for a moment she frowns down at him, confused.

Then: "You want a nice girl who will take you home to her parents," she explains, slow and quiet.

He squeezes her leg, feels the strong muscles there, the softness of her skin.

"Why do you say that?"

She shrugs. He wonders if this is the last time, if he should be taking in every detail now, before he tips over an edge, before the storm breaks.