Work Text:
The cursor blinks.
Tina stares at it from her kitchen table, both hands wrapped around a mug of coffee she made forty minutes ago and hasn't touched. It's cold now. She doesn't care. She's been sitting here since she got home, coat still on, keys still in her hand for the first ten minutes until she realized she was just standing in her own entryway like a woman who had forgotten what came next.
She starts typing.
Bette,
I don't know how to begin this so I'm just going to begin it.
Last night was a mistake.
She stops. Deletes the last sentence. Stares at the wall.
Starts again.
Bette,
I need you to know that I'm not someone who does things like this. I need you to know that because I think you might have gotten a very specific impression of me last night and I want to correct it before–
She stops again. Her fingers hover over the keyboard.
Before what, exactly?
Before Bette thinks she's easy? Before Bette thinks it meant something? Before Tina has to look at herself too clearly in the mirror of whatever she's about to write?
She deletes it. Starts over.
Bette,
I had too much wine. I want to say that first. Not as an excuse. I know it's not an excuse, I'm a grown woman and I made choices last night that were entirely my own.. but as context. Because sober Tina would have said goodnight with the other guests. Sober Tina would have thanked you for a lovely evening and meal, kissed you on the cheek maybe, and gotten in a cab.
Sober Tina would not have stayed.
Sober Tina would not have said yes to the massage, would not have–
She pushes back from the table.
Walks to the window. Stands there looking at nothing, the early morning street below gray and unhelpful.
The massage, she thinks. That fucking massage.
It had begun innocently enough. After the last guest left, Tina had complained about the knot in her shoulders from a long week. Bette offered a massage on the wide leather couch, nothing more. Tina lay face-down in her dress, and Bette’s hands started at her shoulders.. warm oil, slow pressure, thumbs working along her skin in firm, careful strokes.
Jazz played low.
It was safe...
until..
Bette’s palms slid lower, over the curve of her waist, then lower still. When they reached the swell of Tina’s ass, the touch changed. Deepened. She couldnt help but gasp as Bette cupped and kneaded her there, thumbs spreading her cheeks just enough.
By then, Tina was wet in a way she didn't have a reference for.. not like this, not from something as wordless as touch. It embarrassed her and thrilled her in equal measure.
Then Bette leaned down, and paused.. just for a moment, just long enough that Tina understood she was being inhaled. Her thighs pressed together so hard her hips lifted off the couch.
“Mmm… I can smell you,” Bette whispered, voice ground down to its grain.
Tina's face went scarlet. She was dripping at this point, her pulse concentrated entirely between her legs.. and the fact that Bette knew it, could smell it, was reading her body like an email she hadn't meant to send, made her throb harder.
She wasn't ready for the kiss.
Not there.. pressed to the base of her spine first, just above the waistband of her ruined panties. Then lower. Much lower.
She took her time with Tina, who could only moan and squirm into the cushion, fingers clawing the leather, hips rolling back trying to get more of it.
Unable to control herself any longer, Bette buried her face between Tina’s spread thighs from behind. Her nose pressed hard against her, breathing her in again with a low, hungry sound before finding her swollen clit and kissing it open. Lips and tongue worked through the soaked fabric like it wasn’t even there, sucking Tina’s folds greedily until the cotton went transparent and useless against her skin.
The pressure was new, overwhelming, and relentless. Tina couldn’t remember anything that had existed before this couch, these hands, these teeth dragging the fabric aside as a slick, demanding tongue slid deep inside her–
BWAAAMP!
Somewhere outside, a car leaned on its horn and Tina's eyes snapped open.
She came back into her body all at once.. heart hammering, thighs still clenched tight under the kitchen table, the memory dissolving before she could catch the edges of it.
The massage, she scoffed to herself.
As if that's what this was about. As if it was the wine, or the way Bette's apartment smelled like strawberries and oil paint, or the way Bette's voice had dropped an octave when her last guest finally left and she'd turned to Tina with that look–
Tina knows that look now. She didn't before last night. She'd seen it directed at other people, at paintings, at ideas one found beautiful, and she'd thought she understood it abstractly. But she was wrong. She hadn't understood it at all until it was aimed at her.
She refocuses on the email.
I don't know what I am.
I mean, I've thought about it. Obviously I've thought about it. What woman hasn't, at some point, in some quiet corner of herself, wondered.. but wondering is different from knowing and knowing is different from–
last night.
You were so careful with me. That's the thing I can’t stop thinking about. No one’s ever been that careful with me, and I don't know what to do with that. I don't know what to do with any of it. The way you touched me. The way I–
I wanted it. That's what's making me insane. I wanted it so much I forgot to be frightened until afterward, until I was lying there in the dark listening to you breathe and the fear came in like a tide and I thought: what have I done, what am I, what does this mean about every choice I've ever made–
But underneath all of that
it was the most–
She stops typing and looks down at her shaking hands like they belong to someone else.
It was the most awake I've felt in years.
She doesn't type that part. She just thinks it, sitting alone in her kitchen in her coat with her cold coffee, and the truth of it opens in her chest like a door she's been leaning against for years.
I think, she types finally, that we should agree it was a mistake. I think we should be adults about this and acknowledge that it was a strange evening and we both got caught up in something and the kindest thing we can do for each other and for whatever relationship you have with Alice and I have with Eric that we might still be able to salvage is to–
She pauses, takes a deep breath and reads it back.
The kindest thing.
She thinks about Bette's hands. She thinks about the moment she'd turned over from her “massage” and found Bette watching her with that expression.. not triumphant, not smug, just present, just fully and completely there in a way that made Tina feel like the only solid thing in the room.
She thinks about how she'd reached up.
How she'd been the one to pull her back down.
Tina closes the laptop and sits with her hands flat on the table.
The apartment is very quiet and morning light is finally starting to come through the curtains properly now.
She thinks: I could finish it. I could send it and she would understand and we would never speak of it again and everything would go back to the way it was.
She tries to locate, somewhere in her body, any desire for that outcome.
But instead, she finds nothing. Just the warm, terrifying thing in her chest, still sitting there, patient as anything.
She opens the laptop. Selects all. Deletes it.
She sits with her hands flat on the table and thinks: I have been the sensible one my entire life. She has said the right words and worn the right expression and wanted the right things from the right people and somewhere in the middle of all that careful living she had apparently sealed herself up so thoroughly that it took one woman's hands and one night on a leather couch to remind her that she had a body at all.
She picks up her phone and dials the number before she can talk herself out of it.
It rings twice.
"Tina?"
She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out.
“Tina, are you–”
"I wrote you an email," she blurts.
A pause. "Did you?"
"And then I deleted it."
Silence. Then, quietly: "What did it say?"
Tina looks at her cold coffee. Her coat. The cursor still blinking on the empty white document like a question she's finally ready to answer.
"I want to have dinner with you," she says. "Not a party. Just... dinner. Just us. Friday, if you're free, or Saturday, or honestly whenever, I'm embarrassingly available, which I realize I probably shouldn't have–"
"Friday," Bette interrupts, and she is definitely smiling. "I'll pick you up at seven."
"Seven," Tina repeats.
"Tina."
"Yeah."
"I'm glad you deleted the email."
Tina closes her eyes. The warm, terrifying thing in her chest has stopped being terrifying entirely. It's just warm now. Just warm, and solid, and completely hers.
"Yeah," she says softly. "Me too."