Chapter Text
“I need you to like, do some mental gymnastics and think ‘Wow, Matt’s being so sincere right now.’ Hard to believe!” She stands up on the couch, thinks about using the whiteboard. Her hands are shaking too much. “I know, I don’t like it either. It’s like -“
“Matt…”
“Right.”
It has to be a new personal record for a run-on sentence, fifteen minutes and it feels like she took two breaths. She chews up the end of the ballpoint pen, takes a sip out of a bottle that’s only backwash and idly pulls out at least twenty strands of her own hair. Jay cycles through every single human expression, knowing from years of experience that there’s no room to get a word in.
She tells him nearly everything, or some version of the transformation that’s still intangible to her, but feels like she’s said nothing, she feels wrung out and wonders if she spoke a single word of English. She sits down on the back of the couch, her head thunks against the wall.
“So - that’s basically it!” She says, dizzy, relief and dread fizzing in her stomach. “Any questions?”
Jay has both hands linked behind his neck, his elbows caging his head and his eyes are glossy. Pure shock and information overload. In any other context she likes this look on him but can’t enjoy it right now. She peels another piece of the couch leather off. There’s never been a silence like this one in history, even as an ambulance wails down the street.
“Where…” Jay says, “Where the hell did this come from?”
He doesn’t sound angry but a cold spike of fear tears through her. One world ending, or the other. The backs of her hands start to feel numb.
Jay exhales sharply. “You’ve never talked about anything like this before.”
“I wasn’t - I didn’t know it was an option.” Matt chuckles without any force behind it. “It all happened so fast, I-“
Jay lightly presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “This started in May? It sounds like you thought about it for like - a few weeks, Matt. And then you just…kept it to yourself? I know something was going on, but…”
“How could I tell you? It’s crazy, it’s so fucking crazy. I didn’t know how far I wanted to take it, or if it would help. And then I didn’t know what to say! And usually I do, or I just say it anyway. But it was locked up.”
“Matt. I just feel like -“ Jay says, quietly. There might be some anger coming up, or is it worry? Matt doesn’t know for sure. At least there’s no disgust, that would have been the end of it all, instantly. She knows he’s struggling to articulate what’s going on inside him. “You get these ideas in your head all the time and obsess over them, but this is like - fuck, this is your entire life, you know that? I don’t know what to think.”
“Of course I know its my entire fucking life!” She shouts. “You think I’d - do you think I don’t know what I was risking?”
It occurs to her then, that they would have gotten lost either way, if she didn’t do this. The month of her birthday she hated Jay, wanted him to hurt just so she could feel anything at all. And he wanted to run. Every plan looked like a blank, tedious jigsaw puzzle and the band was too bright of a light to glance at, a star she couldn’t be. Life was leaving her behind.
“You never know what you’re risking.” He shrugs. “Look, I just need a minute.”
And then he just looks sad, betrayed, lost, from her perspective. Lied to by his best friend without any impulse control. Jay doesn’t say another word and just chews at the corner of his lip, avoiding her gaze.
She wonders if she should have weathered that apocalypse, stored away the girl she envisioned in a bunker until she fucking starved to death, and the Matt that Jay wanted could live on radioactive scraps. But it’s too late. She’s more alive than she’s ever been just to feel this in perfect clarity?
“Jay…” It’s all Matt can get out. The adrenaline is gone and she’s sinking like a stone in water. She bunches up her hands in her hair so hard it hurts and curls in on herself, breath fails to reach her lungs. She cries like a child.
“Shit, wait. Fuck…“ Jay says, the way he does when he’s said something stupid. She hears the wooden wooden floor creak, hears him shuffle over the random items she’d gathered while pacing around the living room and he sits below her on the couch.
“Ok, uh -” Jay’s hands hover over her knee, before trying to pull her down by an elbow to sit with him. “I’m sorry. Come on. Take it easy, Matt.”
“I didn’t - I had to,” She says through heaving sobs. The complete loss of control scares her, “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He pulls her with a little more force and she slides down to sit next to him. He touches her shoulder lightly, he’s never had to do this before. Matt had made sure of it for as long as they’ve known each other. Most of the time his presence was enough.
“I had to, Jay, I had to.” She wants to lean into him and bury herself into his skinny shoulders, knowing he would let her. She doesn’t. “You don’t get it.”
“I know,” His voice is soft and careful, something she’s not used to. “I got fucked up for second. It’s just like. It’s huge. I’m sorry. I don’t think - you don’t need to be sorry.” He grabs her upper arm with his other hand, his thumb rubbing the sensitive skin there. It’s too much and she pulls away.
“Please don’t hate me, please…” She says, the one thing she never wanted to beg him for. It’s as though she’s just gutted herself in front of Jay, pulled out her intestines and is feebly asking: ‘Isn’t this gross? Do you want this?’
“Out of all the reasons I have to hate you,” He says, “I’m not picking this one..”
She manages to take one deep breath. Matt wants the relief to overcome her but she finds it hard to crawl up from an emotional fall like that, her whole body hurts in a strange, heavy way. Against her will she remembers the high school counselor that tried to teach her about ‘intentional breathing’ after she’d thrown a Geography textbook at a boy’s head who called her a fag and she’d almost gotten suspended. The joke was on someone, but she wasn’t sure who at this point.
She lets herself focus on the hand on her back and how it’s just limply sitting there. Jay isn’t very good at this and it’s better than if he was. They linger in the quiet for a moment.
“Maybe you would - you’re an asshole.” She says, wiping tears and snot onto the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
“No I’m not. I’m like, way more progressive than you.”
“Since when?” She smiles thinly. ‘And definitely not now.”
“You’re gonna set the movement back a fucking century, Matt. You’re a terrorist.”
“Yeah- I’m a hired plant, actually.” She chuckles. “The trust didn’t pay out, it was the opposition cutting me a check. Like, inject this for a year and then start blowing shit up.”
Jay laughs. There’s no apocalypse. Not yet. She’ll probably look for it in everything for a while, if not the rest of her life, like she always has.
“It helped?” Jay says, cautiously. His mouth presses into a thin line and eyes are downcast. “You were gone for a little while, in summer.”
“Yeah.” She sighs.
“I hated it.” His voice is very quiet, and Matt sees how he’s fidgeting, picking at the cuticle of his thumbnail with his index finger.
“Me too.” She says, “But it did help. More than helped - I think, I don’t know. I didn’t know what I was missing, Bird. Like everyone else had gotten something when they were born and I was skipped. So I had to go find it. And everyone, they’ve all had it forever but for me it’s like, hitting all at once and it’s so fucking intense, right?” She sighs, adjusts to sit cross legged on the couch. “This sounds so stupid, after school special shit but - does it make sense?”
Jay has a small smile on his face, and his dark eyebrows furrow. “Maybe. You’re okay though?”
She nods.
“Cool.” He nods back. “Estrogen sounds pretty sci-fi. Like Gattaca.”
Matt grins like an idiot, she’s exhausted and still reeling, but she feels like she can come up for air.
“Dude, right? And people go the other way too, you know steroids?”
A few hours and a massive takeout order later, Matt finished first in the Mushroom cup and Jay is acting like it doesn’t bother him. She could fall asleep at any second.
“So…” Jay says, head tipped in his hand, sipping at a bottle of whatever they had in the fridge. “What’s your plan?”
It’s late into the night and they hadn’t talked about much, wanting a reprieve from the intensity of the last few hours. The heating clicks on as the winter night settles in.
“What plan?”
“Your like, girl plan.” He shrugs.
“I don’t - I had a plan, and I executed it.” Matt says.
“So you need a new plan?” Jay asks. “Or you don’t want to tell me because I was a dick about it…”
Matt starts another race and Jay has to scramble for the player two controller on the coffee table, nearly knocking over the beer bottle as he sets it down. Matt focuses on getting a head start and they do one lap in silence. She really hasn’t thought ahead of this point, if she’s being honest. Any plans she made that would include telling Jay only got caught up in how she would tell him.
“Are you gonna like-” Jay says, “Do you have a different name?”
“No - and fuck your green shell, this is nothing to me. You’re fucked. It was over before you even started.”
“Are you still gonna wear the hat?”
“What kind of - are you stupid? Boneheaded fucking question.” She smacks the side of his head. He’s unfazed.
“How do you want to dress? I feel like that’s like, a basic question.”
“I don’t know…” She groans. This was starting to become a sore spot for her. Part of her would be just fine with being on estrogen and going along the same, business as usual. But there’s another part that wants to get like, slutty and crazy with it. This might be a gender math thing that requires further research. Jay bringing it up so casually is making her stomach twist, in a way she can’t tell if she likes or not.
“You don’t know? Like, not any different or you actually don’t know?”
Matt tears her eyes away from the screen to stare at him. His expression is comfortable, neutral.
“Why are you acting like you want to play dress up with me? Is this some sicko thing I don’t know about?”
“No. You just have really bad taste.” He shrugs and finishes in first while Matt was looking away. He smiles when Matt throws the controller at him.
—
Fuck it, right? Jay thinks, It’s Tuesday and Matt’s a girl now.
He feels at arms length from himself, and deeply relieved the big secret from this summer wasn’t accidental murder, or bioterrorism, or cancer. His hands clench and unclench at the memory of Matt begging Jay not to hate him - her? They didn’t talk about that. Jay hates that Matt didn’t trust him but can’t help but understand. What they’ve built together isn’t quite trust.
Does Jay trust Matt? A complicated question and in most respects, he doesn’t. Not with his safety, his stuff, his sanity. But with something like this — painful and personal and scary, that’s what a friend is supposed to be. They’re friends, even if it feels as though they’re more like conjoined twins who got sutured together after the fact.
It makes him feel worse about putting his foot in his mouth and making her cry. Because of course, the first thing he does to girl Matt is make her cry.
The next morning, Jay hears Matt running down the stairs at full speed, and he jumps up when he sees that she’s holding scissors.
“No!” He shouts, getting ready to run out of the apartment in socks.
“Wait! It’s not - Bird!” She puts up both hands on a gesture of peace. Her hair is wet.
It’s the first time he’s seen her in just a t-shirt and sweats in at least a month. He can see the outline of a sports bra under her thin shirt. Earlier she’d said there“really wasn’t all that much going on yet” but she had an excited, conspiratorial look in her eyes. An unbearable sort of tenderness alights inside him, even though the sight of Matt walking in his direction with a sharp object should be setting off a red alert.
“Bangs.” She sits on the coffee table across from where Jay was sitting.
“Oh…” He sighs in relief.
Matt pulls a section of her hair in front of her face and hands him the scissors. She stoops down a little bit, and Jay sits up so they're at an equal eye level.
“Probably like, here?” She says, drawing an arc across her face. “Don’t go - don’t cut above there, we learned that it’s shorter when it’s dry.”
He missed haircut day, a tradition that started when Matt got sick of the salon and Jay was too lazy to make an appointment for himself. A third of the time they would botch it and need to get fixed up professionally, but he had a slightly better track record because of his hand eye coordination. Jay really, really doesn’t want to fuck this one up. He touches the top of her head to adjust her position and presses a finger to the spot on her temple she indicated. The chill of her wet hair immediately warms to his hand.
Jay smiles while her eyes are closed. She’s pretty. Her full lips and the softness in her face, the distinct line of her nose. Jay wants to have a more nuanced thought, and when he digs for one he just comes up with the fact that Matt’s always been cute to him, which is troubling.
He positions the scissors and makes the first cut.
“Do you remember, when you fucked my shit up so bad two years ago?” She says.
“Stop talking.”
“I looked like I had a grown-out tonsure.” She laughs, and scrunches up her nose when the clipped hair falls on her cheeks.
“Shut up and don't make a face or I'm gonna fuck up again.”
He brushes the fallen hair off of her face. Her cheeks turn pink and she manages to stay still, Jay watches the column of her throat as she swallows. It’s a simple line to cut and he thinks he does it well. The bangs were a really nice idea.
“Okay, I think you’re good.” He says.
She sits there with her eyes still shut.
“Matt?”
“Yeah! Yeah?” She springs up and tries to check her reflection in the oven door, crouching down peering into it like a crystal ball before smiling. Jay realizes he might need to be lobotomized.
The next two months are both mostly normal, and a total excavation of Jay’s heart and mind. They run Rivoli schemes that almost make it, but a lot of them probably never stood a chance. She’s just as annoying, dangerous and demanding.
Matt will come home with entirely random articles of clothing she got from God knows where. In her words she’s “casting a wide net” to see what works. At first this is a private affair, before she asks if Jay still has that “big gay mirror” he keeps in his bedroom and she brings it downstairs. Matt hates doing anything by herself and it still amazes Jay that she kept this a secret for six months. She calls him a prude and a pervert in the same sentence for the crime of looking away when she strips down to her underwear to change. She’s right, there’s no way for him to win in this scenario.
It ends up feeling more like a rehearsal as he’s sat at the piano. Matt rarely asks his opinion and writes everything down in a small notebook.
In: A ratty pair of cargo pants with bleach stains. “Kinda like Laura Dern? Jurassic park? If she was like - wearing pants.”
Out: Mid length denim skirt. “I look like I ride horses, in a sincere way.”
Standby: A very, very short and shiny dress with a built in belt that’s loose and flowing in the shoulders. Jay feels like an old-timey character in the books he didn’t read for high school where guys pass out from seeing ankles. “The places my dick has to go to make this work, it’s like - it’s not fucking sustainable long term.”
Undecided: A baby blue cable knit sweater with a wide neck. “Birdie, is it the bangs that make me look like fucking horse girl? Is it because I’m white? I like this one though.” (Jay: “It’s cute.”)
In: A long navy blue skirt, paired with an open button up and a tank top. And the hat. “Ask me to ditch the hat one more fucking time, you’re out of the band.”
In: A regular t-shirt but one size smaller than she usually wears. “Can’t knock the classics.”
Out: A pair of low rise jeans that fit so well Jay has to bite the inside of his cheek and involuntarily burns the sliver of her stomach below the undershirt into his mind forever. “Poor range of motion. Keep playing, Jay, what the hell?” (Jay: “Why not - why not standby?”)
Matt being tomboyish and fickle about what she likes, occasionally drawn to spectacle makes sense to Jay. He’s at a crossroads where he feels more tormented by what hasn’t changed, than what has. All of the feelings he had denied about Matt when she was a guy just float to the top of his mind with urgent intensity in this new light. Back then, the way Matt’s tongue would stick out when she laughs would twist him up inside with a nameless sort of feeling. Or how she literally jumps up and down when she’s excited. The way her eyes bug out to punctuate a sentence. The evil glint in her eyes as she pulls him into something that could get the both of them seriously hurt. How she carries herself as if drawn by a magnet to what she wants but looks back to make sure he’s there, and smiles. Messing up his hair, clinging onto his shoulders, kicking his feet out from under him and laughing. These things have always existed and the sudden understanding he’s always been terminally endeared by them unlocks something that tears him up inside.
Last spring, before all of this Jay had gone over to a girl’s apartment, where she lived with some gay guy with a mean smile and clothes that were too tight. They both annoyed him, they were artsy coke addicts that put on vinyl records and finished each other's sentences, and looked at Jay like a specimen under a microscope. This didn’t stop him from drinking their liquor (he refused the coke, white drugs scare him) and attempting to talk about music but not keeping up with their try hard tastes. She started kissing Jay in front of this guy, taking her time. He had every chance of refusal when she looked from Jay to her roommate who was standing near the loveseat, and had put a hand on his shoulder. If it was for a girl and he just let it happen, didn’t seek it out again, maybe it wouldn’t mean anything. The guy stuck his tongue into Jay’s mouth and it tasted like bitter chemicals and cheap whiskey. He moaned out loud when the girl rubbed a hand up his thigh and asked him if he liked that. Jay did, and knew he shouldn’t be pulling at this thread but kept going, trying to get him to come down and sit on his lap. Apparently he wasn’t playing the game right, there was some bizarre powerplay he was hooked into and she didn’t want Jay going crazier over this guy than her. So she brought him to her room, learned he was kind of a middling lay, and he never heard from them again.
Shame and exhilaration buzzes in his head whenever he thinks about it late at night. Even if Jay talked to Matt about his sex life, he told himself that night would be buried with him. He wonders if it’s a similar shame to what Matt felt. It’s a connection he doesn’t want to make but feels it happening anyway.
—
A few weeks later, Matt looks around the corner, towards the swinging double doors that lead out of the catering kitchen.
“So we just, grab some shit – and then we find the guy that won the Arts & Culture auction, and get him to recommend us to the Rivoli. Like, pretend we’re struggling artists.” Matt whispers, adjusting the black skirt of the catering uniform.
“We are struggling artists. I’m struggling.” Jay says, fastening the last button on his shirt.
“You’re not fucking struggling. You’re thriving.” She swats the back of his head. “We’re about to get a show.”
“Do we need to poison the piano player?” He scratches his face, at the corner of his jawline.
“Shh! Shut the fuck - oh my god.” She cringes as a man holding an empty tray walks by, not paying them any attention. “Obviously yes. The best part is when I point and go ‘I’m here, and he’s playing for you right now - welcome to the preview!’”
“Yeah, you’re right.” He nods.
“Duh.” She checks the door over her shoulder but feels Jay looking at her.
The two of them have been looking at each other a lot these last couple of months. She knows where her mind is at, somewhere between wanting to throw Jay through a full-length plate glass window and taking him on a gondola at sunset to Lady and the Tramp a big plate of spaghetti. She thinks he’s spinning some perversions in his mind, but he’s not acting quite like he does when his ten or so IQ points that aren’t allocated to music are put towards getting his dick wet. There’s a lot of meaningful gazing that, if she really thinks about it, had always been there. Either the volume is turned up now or her reception is more sensitive. And lately he’s been acting sweet, which is scary, and he’s still goofing off with her, which added up together gives Matt visions of half-drowning him off the side of the gondola but saving him last minute in a semi-erotic sort of way. It’s all mixed up. Matt’s cataloguing for now. There’s a lot on her mind.
“You look good.” He says. “The like, half-up hair thing.”
She glances back at Jay, narrowing her eyes, but doesn’t turn her head to face him.
“Okay…?” She says.
“What?” He shrugs. “I can’t give you a compliment?”
“Aren’t - aren’t we kind of fucking busy right now?” She feels her face getting red.
“Fine, nevermind.” He shrugs. “You look like shit.”
“Bird…go grab a fucking tray or I swear on my life -”
The plan goes sideways almost immediately. Matt spills an entire tray of hors d’oeuvres onto the lacquered floors, and Jay gets the drink he put laxatives in thrown onto his shirt.
They run for their lives down the concrete hallway before ducking behind an unused hot table pushed into a corner, with piles of spare equipment obscuring them from view.
The two of them crouch, breathless under the fluorescent lights. Any second either of them could start blaming the other but they just maintain steady eye contact. Matt can see the light cast of freckles on Jay’s sweating face, faded in the winter but still countable, if she wanted to. She finds that she does. Matt wants to count every one of his eyelashes, all of his teeth, every hair on his head. She sits up and crawls closer to him and he doesn’t flinch away, another development in their relationship.
“Matt -” He says.
“Are you gonna treat me right?” Matt asks with her face inches away from Jay’s.
“Hell no.” He says, barely a whisper. “Will you?”
“Not on your fucking life.” She grabs the back of his neck and kisses him. He pulls her close so she's nearly on top, tangling a fist into the collar of his shirt while his hands squeeze at her waist. It’s better than how she ever might have imagined it, feeling the coarse hair against her skin, the frantic and clumsy way his tongue traces her lips. She knows she’s not being elegant, either, probably less so. Matt bites at him a little and his fingers dig in hard. The two of them continue like that on the dusty floor as footsteps occasionally pass them by.
They get caught eventually and have to run again, out into the street. It’s freezing and early February slush is piled against the curbs and corners.
On the streetcar home they’re standing at the back and Matt rests her chin against his shoulder, chiding him about how his head wasn’t in the plan, how catering is a scam and they’d do better faking a higher status next time. He’s all boyish angles and presses his cheek against her head, tries to smell her hair discreetly, which is so weird but she likes it.
Jay gets it in his head to flirt with her as they walk to their apartment door. It’s acutely embarrassing, she always found his game humiliating and being on the receiving end of it isn’t any better. But it distracts her from the nervousness settling in her stomach. One thing she misses about not really having much of a body is being completely unconcerned with it, but now she has the old fear of touch with the new one of being perceived, of fucking it all up.
“Because I am pretty good with my hands…”Jay says, low in his chest, a crooked smile on his face. She laughs out loud in response.
“Oh my god, Birdie. Does that actually work?” She lightly pushes on his shoulder. “Is that how you do this?”
He clenches his jaw in embarrassment but she sees a light flare up in his eyes. He liked that. “I dunno - it seems like it’s working on you.”
“In like, a pitiful way.” She straightens out his jacket. “Like I’m doing you a favor.”
He shrugs.
“You want to come up or not?” He asks. “I have exactly two beers in the fridge.”
“So soon? What kind of girl do you think I am?”
He just smiles.
—
Jay feels like he might die tonight. Matt has him pushed up against the fridge, her entire body flush against his own and licking at his open mouth like she’s going to eat him from the inside out. He’s thoroughly touching every part of her he can reach. Her lower back, the ridge of her shoulder blades, the bumps in her spine. She bit down on his neck when he grabbed a handful of her ass. He’s going to last one second, if that, and knows needs to cool off. Matt isn’t cooling off and has started unbuttoning his shirt.
“Matt -” Jay says, cupping her face. Her pupils are blown out and she’s breathing heavily. She leans into the touch and he realizes she might have needed something to ground her, too. “Upstairs?”
“Yeah.” She says.
Jay pushes all of the clothes off of his bed, and they accidentally race to see who can unbutton their shirt with shaky hands the fastest. Matt wins and pulls the undershirt up and over her head, her hair stuck up at odd angles. He’s briefly seen Matt in her underwear over these last few months, the athletic briefs and sports bras she likes with the gray elastic bands. She’s never been modest and has always gotten ideas in any state of dress, that need to be processed as soon as possible, but Jay tried not to completely perv out on her, her words. For a long moment she watches Jay watch her with a frantic intensity as she removes the catering skirt.
Matt’s never been shy in a normal sense, it’s more like she becomes overwhelmed with self awareness and just freezes, daring Jay to look at her and react because she’s caught in a feedback loop. He’s nervous enough about having sex with his best friend, he can’t imagine if it was his first time, in a body he’d risked everything to get and only had for a few months. When Jay thinks about it like this he’s suddenly very, very overcome with love for her, it’s so intense that it could blow up the city block.
He roughly pulls her on top of him on the bed, they’re both sitting up and she’s happily straddling his legs. He presses wet kisses along her throat, rubs his hand along the soft curve of her stomach. That really does something for her. She’s panting, keening into the touch and testing her short fingernails on his scalp, her hair tickling the back of his neck as she leans down. Matt’s touching his chest, doing some cataloguing of her own that makes his vision blur.
He looks down at her thighs, toned from running everywhere. There’s a substantial dark spot in the gray of her underwear.
“Did you - ” He starts to ask.
“No,” She chuckles. “It just kinda - does that.”
Before he can get entranced by this concept, she bites his ear way, way too hard. The pain breaks through his arousal and hurts like hell.
“Fuck, Matt!” He shouts and pulls away. “Ow…”
“Sorry! Sorry -” She pets Jay’s head. “You’re not bleeding, it’s not bleeding. You’re fine. I just, like, got ahead of myself.”
He reaches his hand up to check, when she says it twice it makes him worry. He’s not.
“What the fuck?” Jay says, trying not to get angry and failing.
She takes this opportunity to take her top off. In the very back of Jay’s mind he knows she’ll do this to get out of at least a thousand future arguments, because it works. Jay looks at her small chest, the familiar moles dotted along her torso.
“Isn’t that cool?” She says, like she’s showing him a picture in a magazine. What a completely ridiculous person, Jay thinks, he needs her so, so bad.
He leans forward and sucks a bruise into her sternum, until he reaches one of her pink nipples and takes it in his mouth. She whines, he feels her hips push against empty air.
“Wow,” She gasps, “Don’t bite me as revenge, okay? They’re like - ah - so sensitive right now I would actually fucking, I’d throw up.”
He traces his hands along her inner thighs before his fingertips trace the elastic on her briefs, still gently teasing the bud of her nipple with his tongue. His own erection is begging for absolutely any attention but he’s too fucking obsessed with Matt to care. Story of his life.
He reaches in, she’s half hard and has been leaking like crazy. Matt hisses through her teeth as Jay takes her in hand and starts stroking from base to tip, even going slow the wet sound is obscene. She rocks into it.
“Fuck,” Matt whines, she takes his wrist with one hand and redirects him. “It’s better if you, yeah, with like pressure and - oh my god - your thumb, oh god, fuck, Jay…”
She lets out a choked sob as he massages her cock, teasing under the head in circles with his thumb. She makes a mess all over his hand as she grinds into the touch, her breath hot in his wounded ear. He can smell her sweat. Jay wishes that every woman would have just told him what to do. He can follow instructions. He likes to.
Jay looks at her nipple, reddened and erect from his attention and starts in on the other for the sake of symmetry. Matt starts to come apart.
“Jaybird, fuck - you’re, you’re getting chained up in the loft. I’m serious.” She pants. “This is all you’re gonna do, forever. I’ll kill you, I’ll fucking kill you”
This makes his stomach flip, his head fills up with cotton. He quickens the pace and kisses at all the moles on her chest and shoulders. She comes with a high pitched cry, convulsing over and over again on top of him before sinking down to bury her face in his neck, breathing like she just ran a marathon.
He wipes his hand onto one of their discarded shirts and holds onto her, using his clean hand to brush the hair out of her face. She sniffles, not quite crying but just on the edge of it.
“You want me to jerk you off?” She asks.
“We can give it a minute.” He says, not really wanting to give it a minute but wanting to hold her for a while longer.
Eventually she sits up and looks at him. She looks dazed, her eyes glossy and mouth red from kissing.
“Do you remember that show, A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila?” She says, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear.
“You cannot be fucking serious right now-“ Jay groans.
“That was crazy, right? A bisexual dating program, with like, a softcore angle.”
“I can’t fucking stand you...”
She leans forward to kiss him, heavy and slow, her hands cupping his jawline to keep him in place. He moans into her mouth. She takes up every single one of his senses and it’s the only thing he wants, as she reaches down to palm at him through his boxers, not breaking the kiss. Jay presses himself into her hand and can feel her smiling.
“You were very good to me…” She whispers into his ear.
His blood runs hot, hotter than he’s ever felt it. He just nods. She takes his dick out and strokes him slowly, he arches into the touch, desperate for release.
“Come on, Birdie,” She says, putting a hand on his chest, her other thumb teasing the tip of his cock. “Let me take care of it.”
“Okay, yeah.” He closes his eyes.
“You like to listen, don’t you?” She chuckles.
Jay’s heart rate spikes, whatever part of him that might protest went dormant after she called him good, maybe after he made her feel good from her instructions. There was a sudden, immovable peace in his head, like warm honey sticking up the gears.
She works on him for what feels like an eternity, even though it had to be only five minutes. He’s about to start begging, holding onto both of her arms when she finally brings him over the edge. They hold onto each other like they did before, just trying to catch their breath.
For a moment they find it hard to look at each other, not out of pure embarrassment but a need to buffer. As if the context of their relationship hadn’t been broken in two dozen different ways in the last year, they’d just crossed another line and lay side by side in Jay’s room taking it all in. They make a poor attempt at cleaning each other up, but it’s a lost cause. Matt is nearly dozing off into the stickiest sleep of her life before Jay starts talking.
“Do you think-”
“Tila Tequila’s A Shot At Love was probably a crazy intro to bisexuality as a concept for a lot of teens with cable? Yeah - and it was a bad show too, which was even worse.”
“Nevermind, go to sleep.” Jay turns over, a little theatrically.
“Stop it - if we sleep like this we’ll fuse to the sheets. What were you saying?”
“We should go out tomorrow.” He says, moving onto his back. “And don’t say: ‘Duh, Bird, we go out like, every day’ -”
“I don’t sound like that.”
“I just think we should go out. It’d be nice.”
“Where?” She says, a tired smile on her face.
“Let’s find one place in this city that’ll open a champagne bottle for us. The right way.”
“Deal.” She says.