#tanyarps

i. 

It was a week after they met. If having a random conversation online that started off so casual and spiraled into something that went into the early hours of the morning could be called a meeting. It’d been an annoying week, one of those weeks where Ivy felt stuck with a team that didn’t care about dance the way she did, and a roommate she didn’t care about, and a boyfriend she barely got to see.

That night, she had a dream about kissing someone who wasn’t her boyfriend.

She didn’t remember it the next day.

ii.

She’d finally caved and taken a peek at his picture. Just one, she’d thought to herself as she hesitantly enlarged his icon. After that, she’d never look again. 

It was his smile that she noticed first. No trace of the big game he talked could be found in a smile that seemed to take over his face, from his eyes to the way his lips stretched from ear to ear. 

She wanted to know if his lips tasted the way his smile made her feel.

She clicked away from his picture and didn’t even go to his page for a week.

iii.

She knew he had a girlfriend. It wasn’t like they hid that fact from each other. Her own significant other came up in conversation a lot. But she’d never actually seen said girlfriend, and this time it was on accident as she scrolled her feed.

She tried to see what the appeal was. His girlfriend was pretty, with a smile that matched the sweetness he claimed she possessed, but Ivy had never been particularly fond of anything overly sweet anyway.

Sweet wasn’t for him. She knew that. She felt that.

She wanted to kiss him and remind him of the other flavor profiles out there.

iv. 

She didn’t have bad weeks. Well, she claimed she didn’t have bad weeks. But it had been the bad week to end all bad weeks.

Every routine she worked out fell flat in her private classes, her favorite pair of pointe shoes had finally seen their last dance, and she just kind of really wanted to see her parents.

She hated weeks like these because she hated being reminded that she could be just like everyone else.

On a whim, she messaged him, preparing to bitch about everything and open up to him the way they did with each other, until she got his response.

Hey you, I was just thinking about you.

She forgot why she was upset, and she wanted to thank him wordlessly.

v.

She was trying so hard to understand why he would be upset about her past relationship, or rather she was trying to understand without admitting to herself what they both already knew.

Suddenly it dawned on her that as soon as she admitted to having slept with Ryder, he would be thinking about it, picturing their lips and bodies moving together in that way only lips and bodies could.

(She guessed he would assume it had been good, that it had worked. She’d never felt it.)

She wanted to take that mental image and substitute him for Ryder. She wanted him to think about his lips whispering secrets into all the places she only hinted at beneath her clothes, hell, she wanted it to actually happen.

She was in way too deep.

+ i.

There was nowhere she liked being more than the spotlight, but when her eyes landed on him, she wondered if maybe she’d finally found something even better.