“Like…” Jessy considered and discarded a dozen suggestions instantly, filing them away as either too mild or far too dirty. “Like, never have I ever kissed someone below the chin.”
“Really, never?”
“Never ever.”
“I’m not putting a finger down for that. It’s dumb. You can’t seriously have gotten to be nearly twenty years old and never done that.”
“But I haven’t!”
“Come here. Kiss me right here on the neck, and then think of another one.” He was laughing, but he did lean forward and pull his shirt away from the side of his neck, clearly intending for her to follow through.
With another blush – would they never stop? – she bent and pressed her lips quickly to the spot where his neck met his shoulder. It was brief, but she was still pleasantly surprised by how warm his skin was there.
“Alright, now think of a better one than that,” David said with another laugh, sitting back.
“I can’t think of anything. You say one.”
“Alright, fine. Never have I ever…made out with a hot girl who was sober.”
It was Jessy’s turn to laugh. “Wait, how many drunk hot girls have you made out with?”
“Just one, but she was scorching.”
“Oh, prettier than me, huh?” She meant it as a joke, but her tone fell a little short of the levity she was going for, and she ended up sounding a great deal more jealous than she felt.
“Well, no, I mean, not prettier than you, per se…”
Jessy gave him her most dramatic look of mock-hurt. “You don’t think I’m pretty, David?”
“Are you kidding? You’re beautiful, Cass. But you’re…you know…you’re Jessy.”
A jolt of something like fear, but entirely not, shot through Jessy’s stomach. He’d never said that before, that she was beautiful. True, he’d qualified it, but at the same time…he thought she was beautiful. Her face warmed.
“I’m tempted to make you make out with me and pick another one, just because you were so obnoxious about mine,” Jessy said, laughing.
David laughed once, but then his smile became something decidedly more inviting.
“Oh, really? That wasn’t obnoxious. I was merely pointing out that there are things in this life that you should have done in your teenage years.”
“And making out with a girl with no alcohol involved is definitely something you should have done. I still have another couple months before I’m out of my teens. You’ve missed the boat already! Anything you do now is necessary just to catch up.”
“So you think I should have done…this?” He rolled up onto his hands and knees, which put his face directly in front of hers, an inch or two away. After a pause, their lips touched, and in her surprise at the suddenness of it she broke the kiss to suck in a startled breath.
He backed away a couple of inches, thinking he’d startled her unpleasantly, but Jessy followed him, leaning forward until they were separated by a mere sliver of air. David kissed her again, softly at first, but then inspiration seemed to strike, and he sat up a little, putting his hands on either side of her face to hold her to him. When he finally released her, both of them were breathing a little harder, eyes a little wide, movements a little uncertain.
“So,” David said, clearing his throat and sitting back. “So, I guess I can’t use that one anymore. Unless you’ve been drinking, of course?” Still too stunned to react properly to his comic jabs, she merely shook her head. “I thought not. You’re not alcoholic enough to sneak a flask into a movie theater. Well, is it your turn to think of one, then, or are you going to make me go again?”
“I, um…” Jessy shook her head a little, cleared her throat. “Well, let’s see. Never have I ever…” She thought of the moment earlier when David had pulled his shirt back from his neck, showing off the lovely, muscled shoulders he was secretly proud of. She wondered if the rest of him was as nice as his shoulders. “Never have I ever seen any of my friends naked.”
David’s eyebrows shot up. “What, you’ve never been in a locker room before?”
“When would I have been in a locker room?” Jessy laughed. She was not the athletic sort, as David was well aware.
“Still, never? Like, you’ve never gone streaking, skinny dipping, changing in front of each other, anything?”
Jessy shook her head, grinning. David stood up next to the bed. “Well, I can’t let that go unchanged. Seriously, nudity among friends – it’s a rite of passage!”
He seized the back of his shirt and tugged it over his head, dumping it unceremoniously on the floor before going to work on his belt. Jessy watched with a mixture of horrified amazement that he was actually stripping naked in her bedroom, laughable discomfort because it was David, and a growing appetite for the new perspective she was gaining on him, this thought of him as a real, handsome, sexy boy – not just her buddy David.
His pants hit the floor and he stepped out of them, standing awkwardly in his boxers for a moment before seizing the waistband and tugging those down to his ankles, too. Jessy couldn’t help but stare; she’d never seen any boy totally naked, and here was a very fine specimen of man, standing in front of her with much less self-consciousness than she would have expected.
After a moment, he bent to pull his boxers and pants back on, but Jessy protested.
“Aw, you’re going to put it all back on?” she asked jokingly. “Here I thought you were going to play the rest of the game that way.”
Shrugging, David sat back at the end of the bed as he had been, with the notable difference that he was now stark naked. “This hardly seems fair.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m totally hanging free here, and you’re still bundled up like a nun. A little reciprocation would be fair, don’t you think?”
Jessy shuddered at the idea of David seeing her naked. She was self-conscious enough about seeing herself in the mirror.
But David was staring at her expectantly, and she knew he would play along no more without this quid pro quo. She stood nervously, then pulled her shirt up over her head, dropping it beside her. David just watched, expressionless except for his small smile, so she carried on.
Her skirt followed her shirt to the floor, and then with a deep breath she unclasped her bra in the back and dropped that onto the pile as well. Without looking at David, and with a face undoubtedly colored like a beet, she slipped her panties off, sliding them down her long bare legs and kicking them off onto the pile of discarded clothes.
David’s eyes took in every inch of her nudity, and he sighed; she thought she heard him say “Cass” under his breath. When his eyes trailed back up to meet hers, he smiled. “And now neither of us can use that one.”
Jessy sat back down, a little closer to David this time, their knees touching. “It’s your turn.”
David hadn’t taken his eyes away from her yet, and still didn’t as he answered without hesitation, “Never have I ever touched every inch of a girl’s naked body.” His hands were already reaching out to touch her shoulders, trail along her leg, cup her face. Grabbing her legs, he pulled her farther down on the bed so that she could fit lying down without hitting her head on the headboard. He took her face in his hands and kissed her sweetly.
“David!” Jessy cried in a voice that was half a laugh when they paused to breathe. “What are you doing?”
“Not sure yet,” David said absently, tucking her hair behind her ears and kissing her soundly.
Jessy could feel her heart beating in every extremity; had she ever been able to feel every inch of her hypersensitive skin the way she could now? David did not stop kissing her as his hands fell away from her face, slipped down her neck and gently ran over her breasts to her stomach. When his thumbs grazed over her nipples, a shock wave ran down through her torso, straight to that soft, dark place between her legs. She had never been as aware of that spot as she was at that instant.
David was kneeling over her now as she lay back on the bed, and in their mutual nudity it was impossible for him to hide his body’s appreciation of this turn of events. His erection brushed against her thigh as he shifted, and she tensed, the unfamiliarity suddenly overwhelming her.
The kissing stopped immediately; David sat back, concernednEVER on his face. “Is this okay? Are you– I mean, is this too weird?”
“No, no,” she assured him, and she meant it. All this felt surprisingly natural, even as quickly as it was moving – as if this was the most obvious and right state for them to be in, and everything they had been and done before had been awkward and unsatisfying. “Please come back.”