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“It felt awful,” I tell her. I know it only happened a few minutes ago, but it feels like years, the whole thing is already starting to feel nebulous. “But not like actual claws. It’s hard to describe because it was all encompassing, its fingers on my neck were kind of, I don’t know, almost incidental? It felt like it was trying to drag me somewhere instead of injure me.”
She winces. “Okay, now I’m really scared,” she says.
I laugh. “You weren’t scared before?”
She shakes her head as she takes the towel off my skin and rinses it under running water. “I have some painkillers in my bag,” she says. “You didn’t bleed too much, but I want to finish cleaning you off first.”
She kneels in front of me for a second and sighs.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yes. I was glad you came over this morning, because there was something I wanted to talk to you about,” she says. “I guess it doesn’t seem like a huge deal now, but I still wanted to say something to you.”
“Shoot.”
She takes a deep breath.
“What? After what we just went through together, what are you scared of?”
She grimaces. “Javi and I spent the night together last night,” she says in one breath. “We did it on a whim, it wasn’t–I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings or anything. It just happened.”
I meet her gaze, my heart hammering in my chest. “Why do you think you hurt my feelings?”
She shakes her head, grabbing the towel again and dabbing it softly against my neck, though it feels like an excuse to get close to me at this point. “I don’t know. I don’t do casual, I don’t know if you know that about me. I have no idea how to navigate this whole thing.”
“If you don’t do casual, then what do you do?”
“Serious relationships only, until they go sour, neither one of us can stand the sight of each other, neither one of us wants to fix it, and we’re stuck in a terrible cycle until we either ghost each other or one of us gets drunk and breaks up with the other person over text.”
“That…does not sound fun,” I reply.
“Well, it isn’t, but it’s what I’ve always done,” she replies. “And I know how to handle that. I don’t know how to handle this.”
I grab her hand to stop her from moving. “Alana,” I say. “What do you mean by this?”
She shakes her head, looking into my eyes as she does. “That’s the thing. I don’t know.”
I can’t lie to myself, I’m jealous of Javi. I wish I’d been the one to spend the night with her, but I understand why I wasn’t. I mean, I have eyes. I decide that the best course of action is to simply be honest with her, even though it probably makes me look like an idiot.
“Look, Alana,” I say, my hand still on hers. “I really like you. You’re smart, and you’re beautiful, and you’re way out of my league…”
She smiles, shaking her head. “No–”
“Wait. Let me finish.”
“Okay.”
“But I understand that we’re not anything, you know? Like, we hooked up once. I got lucky.”
“And you think you won’t get lucky again,” she says. She throws the towel in the sink, but she’s still leaning down, her face inches away from mine.
“I mean, not if Javi is my competition.”
She shakes her head. “Who says it has to be a competition?”
I don’t know how to answer that, but I don’t have to think about it for long.
Alana presses her lips against mine. She kisses me softly, her hands on each side of my head. It takes me a second to react, since it takes me by surprise.
