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She had feelings and now everything was all complicated and yucky and she had no idea of what she was going to do.
THE DOORBELL RANG at half past three exactly, and Billie, who had both been expecting it and not expecting it, practically leaped out of her armchair.
In that tiny moment she felt such a swelling of relief that she knew that she’d really thought that Jules wouldn’t come back.
Except now she had a whole new problem, she realized as she walked slowly toward the door. Because now Jules had come back and… and what?
She stood stock still in front of the door, not opening it. What was she going to do? What could she possibly say?
“You know, I can see you through the glass,” Jules said from the other side of the door.
Billie swore quietly and opened the door. Jules looked smug on the doorstep. “You’d better come in,” said Billie gruffly.
“You going to be all weird again?” Jules asked, lifting a questioning eyebrow.
Billie swallowed. Weird? Like kissing weird? Or weird like… normal weird?
Jules pushed past her. “Only I don’t do weird, so if you’re going to be all gruff and pretending like you’ve got a stick up your bum and you’re better than me and all, then I’ll spend my afternoon elsewhere.”
She was already in the living room. Billie slammed the front door closed and hurried after her, only to find that Jules was already sitting at the piano.
Alright, so they weren’t going to have a conversation about this. That was fine. That was good, better than she’d expected actually. They were just going to ignore it and Billie could just do her job and then fade away back into her life and pretend that none of this had ever happened.
“Ready for this?” Jules said.
She took a second to place her fingers properly and then, at great speed, played through the part of the song she’d already memorized. She halted at the end of a bar.
“Too fast,” Billie said. “And the end of the third line has a half beat rhythm.”
“A half what?” Jules said, looking faintly offended that she hadn’t been praised.
Billie rolled her eyes. “Like this.” She reached over Jules and played two bars, demonstrating her point and at the same time brushing her breasts across the top of Jules’s shoulders in a way that made her breath get stuck in her lungs.
There was a silence when she was done.
“I see,” Jules said quietly.
Billie moved, sitting down on the chair next to the piano stool before realizing that it was too close to Jules, that she could touch her without meaning to. “Just play the next part,” she said. “The stickers are on the keys already. It’s a two beat chord followed by a one beat and a one beat. Red, yellow, then green.”
“I know how this works by now,” Jules grumbled, before angling her wrists and playing the chords perfectly the first time.
Billie was impressed. “Not bad.”
“Would it kill you to say something nice?”
“That was nice.”
“Was it?” Jules asked. She turned on the piano bench. “Why did you kiss me?”
Billie’s mouth flapped open before she could stop it. “To shut you up.”
Jules’s fingers slid away from the keyboard, brushing against Billie’s wrist, encircling it so that Jules’s thumb could stroke the inside of Billie’s arm. “To shut me up?” she echoed.
“Yes,” Billie said, struggling for breath as her pulse started to race and her heart tried to keep up. She couldn’t stop herself looking into Jules’s eyes, seeing amusement there.
“You did it because you wanted to,” Jules said, softly.
Billie said nothing. Jules’s thumb moved in circles.
