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Jenny came back in from the pool a shockingly short span of minutes later, dripping wet, asking where Deborah kept her towels.
At this point, Ava was stratospherically high, and might not have done the best job not staring. For all she could have gone without ever seeing Jenny Reagan again post-eighth grade graduation, seeing her in bra, panties, and pool water was something else. While Deborah gestured vaguely towards several potential towel locations with seemingly no regard for how much chlorine Ava’s unasked-for guest would drip all over her carpets and/or floors, Ava did her best to keep the Damn, girl— I would not have guessed about at least kids two, three and four as an internal thought only.
She probably succeeded. The bit of her that heard it ringing in her ears was probably just having a high-quality weed-induced auditory hallucination. She had those sometimes. Usually when she got too anxious around random party people she didn’t know, went outside or into a bathroom or closet, and hyperventilated because if she was too quiet, her heart would sound so loud in her ears she’d think she was dying.
Deborah elbowed her, though, so either she’d said it, or she’d missed a cue to say something else, but by then Jenny had already dripped out the kitchen door.
“Are you going after her?”
“What?”
“She was giving you a look.”
Ava made a face. “No she wasn’t.”
“Yeah, she was.”
“Was it a ‘great to see you haven’t leveled up since middle school' look?”
Deborah snorted. With the spoon in her mouth. “Probably, but it was also a ‘I’d fuck you anyway’ look.”
Ava tried to give her a deadpan one in return, but it was really hard with the current spoon situation and overall state of her brain cells. “She just fucked Jesse McCartney.”
“Maybe. Or maybe she just wanted you thinking about her fucking Jesse McCartney so your middle school crush on him would rub off on her.”
On her current level, that almost made some kind of sense. Still, being manipulated by that kind of thing was what got you labelled as a disaster bisexual, and Ava knew perfectly well she already wasn’t beating the allegations. She didn’t need to add another year to her horny jail sentence. She was getting too old for this. At some point, you age out of being a disaster bisexual and turn into a functional elder queer, or whatever. Maybe not at thirty though.
Deborah snorted.
Ava blinked. “How much of that was out loud?”
“I mean, all of it, as far as I know.”
Ava groaned, but Deborah was doing something that borderline resembled giggling, and it was way too cute, so at some point the groan turned into a stupid smile, and then they were just smiling at each other over that bowl of absolutely inedible goop, and before even three more seconds of eye contact could elapse in that state, they were both laughing.
A few minutes later, Ava couldn’t have told you whether or not the goop had reached the conclusion of the recipe or achieved sentience, but it had definitely been left behind in the kitchen when they relocated to the party couch.
“I have the strongest urge to pop a balloon,” Deborah said airily. “And if it were just about waking up the house I’d say fuck it, but I just know I’m going to absolutely hate the sound.”
Ava took a minute to process this, staring at the balloon arch with a distinctly second hand kind of longing, then sat bolt upright and dug around in her pocket, emerging with a white rectangle clutched in a triumphantly raised fist.
Stoned Deborah was remarkably patient with her antics. She waited until Ava had 1.) Opened it upside down, 2.) Fished both AirPods out from between the couch cushions and 3.) Said, “They noise cancel like a bitch.” before she even bothered to ask, “...What?”
Ava sat forward on her knees, became briefly distracted by the sheer volume of dangly earring affixed to her target, then very, very carefully put each AirPod into the correct one of Deborah’s ears.
And extra carefully, definitely not out loud this time, did not say anything about how soft they were in the process.
As the case pinged its little charge sound when she snapped it closed, Ava beamed at her.
Deborah still looked primarily: confused.
“Now you can pop one!”
Deborah removed one AirPod. “What?”
“Exactly! They’re the Pro 3—total noise cancellation. Go pop a balloon!”
Deborah stared at her for another five seconds, then let out a chest-wheeze of a laugh. “Christ, that was such a process I forgot I even asked.”
But she did get up, and after several seconds seriously studying the various party utensils available for the task, selected none of them, resettled the second AirPod, and marched up to the horseshoe of balloons. There, she undertook another moment of intense deliberation before opting for a silver victim.
She popped it with her claws.
Damn that was loud. Ava’s ears rang, but she gave a whoop anyway, incidentally flinging the charge case somewhere in the process.
Deborah didn’t even flinch, turning around and grinning at her before, with a devilish gleam in her eye, popping a second one, then a third.
By then, she had her head thrown back with laughter, and Ava was just… staring at her.
Smiling, still, but mostly because she didn’t really have simultaneous cohesive control of various muscle groups, not because it was a smile that matched the emotion she was having right then, in that moment.
That’s my best and only friend—and I’m in love with her.
Obviously, it wasn’t a totally new, only-while-stoned kind of thought. Many, many opportunities to think that thought, give herself a full lecture about the stupidity of that thought, and file that thought away in the Do Not Open While Inebriated Fireproof Safe of Stupid Emotion Thoughts had occurred, and many shitty interactions in the intervening months had done a good job convincing her to just leave the safe door closed shut for good.
But then there’d be a night like this one, and she’d see this Deborah. A little bit vulnerable. A little bit open. A whole lot of wild.
And the thought would pop up again whether she’d opened the damn safe or not.
She was running out of room to keep cramming copies of the same thought in there. Next time she opened it up, they’d all come flying out like spring snakes. Snake tubes. Tube springs. Those things magicians would load up in a can. Or was that clowns?
“Now that’s a look,” Deborah was saying, still smirking from her balloon murder spree but trying to hand back over the AirPods.
And maybe because the alternative would be trying to explain that the look on her face was because she was picturing a lot of spring-loaded multi-colored cylinders, Ava blurted out, “I had a sex dream about you once.”
Christ, that was one of the other safe thoughts that must have gotten out while she was jamming in the more existentially ruinous one. It was all one stumbling rush, so there was a chance it wouldn’t even penetrate the high, but Deborah arched a brow at her in a way that said she’d definitely heard, then quipped, “Only once?”
So there went any hope of that.
And before Ava could figure out what else she intended to say about this statement she’d inflicted on the both of them, Deborah sat back down, pushed the AirPods into Ava’s jeans’ front pocket one after the next, and said, “This is the weirdest game of truth or dare I’ve ever played.”
Ava just stared at her pocket, bemused by the total wrongness of naked AirPods in there and definitely not thinking about where that meant Deborah’s hand had just been but very glad to let it unduly distract her anyway.
“Like, I committed a noise violation without the dare, and there you are, spouting guilty little secrets without even getting asked. Then again, that’s not all that unusual for you.”
Ava could feel her face going very, very pink around the edges. “Is it midnight yet?” she asked, turning her wrist sound in her lap like it would make an invisible watch suddenly reappear.
“Nuh-uh,” said Deborah, tipping up Ava’s chin with one finger. “You’re not off the hook for that yet, birthday girl.”
It had to be past midnight. But then again, the THC time dilation was real.
So was Deborah, staring her right in the eyes, one corner of her mouth twitching a little till she parted her lips, quirked a brow, and asked, “Was I good?”
Ava had to shove the hand away with a sound of indignation. “Hey! You can’t ask me that, I’m impaired.”
Deborah snorted again. “You started it.”
“And I’m finishing it,” said Ava firmly, making a motion like she was going to start tidying up the coffee table, except the assortment of items there were absolutely beyond her comprehension right now so all she actually did was pick up a single appetizer plate, then put it down again but on top of a wine glass this time, belatedly realize that a balancing situation like that one was beyond her, pick it up again, and relocate it safely onto a much more horizontal magazine.
“C’mon, satisfy an old woman’s curiosity.”
Either the cajoling tone or the near miss with tableware jenga nudged a bit of sobriety into Ava’s general state of hazy mortification. She shot her a look. “You do not want me to tell you that. Definitely not now; also not ever.”
“Says who!”
“Says you, straight lady. As someone who was once a middle school bisexual, I know that nobody wants their best friend suddenly oversharing that kind of thing at the slumber party.”
“Well we’re not having a slumber party,” said Deborah primly. Then her eyes twinkled. They fucking twinkled. “Not yet.”
“Stop it,” Ava said then, and she meant it to be all ha-ha jokey lighthearted knock it off bestie, but it came out a little hard.
Because Deborah giving her that no-shame joke-flirting look with batted fucking lashes was giving her heart palpitations, and she was definitely still stoned and prone to actually experiencing a thing like that without the joke-filter, and she did not want to ruin a perfectly nice night with dumb stupid feelings.
But Deborah said, “No :)”
Just like that, as if the smile she said it with was a full second word. Like Ava was aurally hallucinating the same evil little smile she was seeing while Deborah…
Was leaning in. Till their noses were about two inches apart, and Ava was full-on hyperventilating about it.
“Yup!” she choked out in sheer panic. “Great dream, great time, great dream time, we good?”
Deborah blinked twice, then a third time, then finally pulled back a little. Ava thought she almost looked… disappointed. “That’s what I thought,” she said, and reached out for a glass on the table like she was ready to chase down her vindication with a triumphant swig of possibly wine, only to visibly reconsider when she remembered there were many, many glasses on various surfaces, and god knows who any of them had belonged to.
Ava stared at her. And stared. Because okay, sure. She was high. They were both high. Borderline crossed, though she’d been feeling warm and fuzzy enough about the whole situation without a drink that she probably had only had like two separate half glasses of anything all night. But Deborah had just gotten all up in her personal space, then looked disappointed?!
“Were you trying to kiss me?” she blurted out.
Deborah’s eyes shifted away. She patted her hair. “No.”
“You were!” She gave it an accusatory pointed finger and all. “You were going to kiss me!”
“No,” Deborah said, this time with an exasperated edge. “You were going to kiss me.”
Ava recoiled, face screwing up. “No I wasn’t.”
Deborah let out a huff through her nose and set aside the mystery beverage. “No, I mean— I was egging you on to— Oh, never mind.”
At that, Ava’s entire brain short circuited. When she reemerged from a complete and total white-out, she stammered out, “You were trying to make me kiss you?”
Some part of Ava had already played out the next several seconds in her head before she even finished saying the words: Deborah would make some dismissive noise, get up, maybe quip, “Trust you to ruin the punchline, Ava,” and march off to bed leaving Ava to absolutely stew in the sulfurous hot spring of miserable overthinking until the sun came up.
So it was to her total shock that instead, Deborah tucked her bare feet up under her ass, leaned back against the armrest, propped her elbow on her chin, and just… looked at her.
Denying nothing.
Ava gaped at her.
Deborah continued to do nothing.
Ava remembered she had the power of gesticulation at her disposal, waved her arms between them for a while in emphatic silence, then came out with, “Explain yourself” to accompany the motion, which didn’t necessarily fit.
But Deborah said “Hmm,” closing her eyes, suddenly world-weary. “Let me just… channel you for a second here. Try to ‘explain’ this, in excruciatingly tedious detail. Then maybe we’ll both be sober and appalled enough to just… walk away.”
Ava continued just. Absolutely stare-maxxing.
As Deborah Vance tilted her head back, sighed, then brought it all level and in again like she was staring down the edge of the spotlight.
“I keep thinking… Maybe I really would like to fuck that girl. She looks like she needs it, and despite my far more… refined sense of taste, I just know she’d feel amazing in my arms. She’s this lithe young thing who—” An eye roll, almost a wink wink nudge nudge to her captive audience of one. “—connects emotionally with women and was given god’s gift to lesbiankind’s hands but clearly isn’t making good use of them just holding a pen for me all day. So there’s that. But that’s also why I absolutely never want to go down this path. You’re… Christ, you made it to thirty but you’re still less than half my age. Fucking you would be the kind of thing Marty does at my age, and I’m not above much in this life, it takes some damn work to embarrass me, but I should be pretty fucking ashamed of myself if I actually start having some kind of torrid affair with my one-day-past-twenty-something assistant.”
Okay, yeah. Ava was still absolutely gaping at her.
And trying to process it back.
She finally forced out, “Wow, the first part of that was the most me thing I’ve ever heard you say,” then licked her lips with a very dry tongue. “Also it was uh… wildly hot. Sorry. I mean, no. I’m not sorry? Also? That is not my job title. Also also, that was an insane way to describe being thirty and for a third also… Neither one of us is married? So it would be… a lot of other things, for sure, but it wouldn’t be an affair.”
Deborah’s nose wrinkled. “I think that makes it worse somehow.”
And Ava laughed. It was a little too loud because it had been torn directly out of her chest without permission, but it was real, because it did, didn’t it? If it wasn’t a torrid affair, it would just be them, and that was just—
Ava’s thoughts reeled to a hard stop, because Deborah, who’d one second ago been glowering at her for laughing, had just leaned up on her knees, and kissed her.
Somehow despite any and all of the words that Deborah had just said, out loud, directly to her, the idea that she actually might have meant any of them had not been real until this exact face-on-face second, right the fuck now.
Ava’s eyes were wide open, and her mouth was completely closed.
Except by the time her brain cells registered both of those things, they weren’t true anymore. Her mouth had opened, just a little, in response to whatever Deborah’s lips were doing and her eyes had scrunched closed in a way that was more like she’d eaten a lemon than was getting lost in a kiss, but maybe that was more of a knee-jerk reaction to wondering if, per the topic that had incited this whole thing, maybe this was a dream.
Because the last time it had happened had definitely been the aforementioned dream. And kisses in dreams…
Well, according to a lot of pop psychology that probably started as some real science somewhere, right? Clearly dream kisses are all about yearning. No matter how far you get, you wake up filled with stupid unresolved wanting for something that didn’t really happen. Sensations more like lying in sunlight than lying in bed with another person. Warmth, and wondering, and wanting, but missing all the messy humanity that comes with kissing someone in real life.
Dream Deborah had been warm and soft and… lovely. In the kissing sunlight kind of way. Real Deborah was warm and soft and beautiful and tasted a little like weed and a lot like she’d had one of Ava’s birthday kombuchas between the glasses of wine and had nails that pressed hard against the nape of her neck, holding her into the kiss, not letting go until she’d gotten it just right—the angle, the pressure, the give-and-take. Real Deborah kissed like she’d been kissing people for a very long time and had no patience for letting any of them, even a first one, be bad.
And Ava, who mostly expected first kisses to be a total waste of anything other than clearly expressing intent and desire (to get better at it later, hopefully) found herself at the end of this particular first kiss borderline struck dumb, swaying a little bit, and staring at Deborah with totally unfocused eyes, mouth a little bit open (still) because she was too distracted by just how much her entire body had responded to a kiss like that.
She was tingling all over, and it wasn’t the mild hallucinogenic high kind of tingling. She had an urge to hold up her hand in front of her eyeballs to make sure all her atoms were still touching each other.
Deborah, meanwhile, was already adjusting the smudge of lipstick in the upper corner of her mouth with one of those nails that had just been—a shiver stole up Ava’s whole body at the memory—skewering her neck.
“Your turn. Truth or dare.”
Ava gaped at her.
“I’ll take that as a truth.” Deborah was looking smug as hell. “So. Who did it better?”
“What?” Ava stammered out.
“Me? Or the sex dream?”
Ava felt the full head rush of turning absolutely crimson, which wasn’t fair, because how could Deborah have somehow known she was actively comparing?
“Or do we need to do more for you to make an informed judgement call.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Ava, then “No.” Then, “Yes.” Then, “I mean— What the hell? You kissed me!”
Deborah got that airy, dismissive look on, shimmying a shoulder, flipping back a nonexistent strand of hair that was still almost fully imprisoned by the updo. “Well, you weren’t going to do it, were you?”
“No!” Ava exclaimed, making a face. Then, indignantly, “Maybe?”
Deborah leaned closer. “Prove it, then.”
Ava gulped.
It would be so easy, right now. Deborah was like three inches away. Deborah had literally already kissed her. They were both high, it was her birthday, truth or dare had been invoked because of something about balloons: Ready made excuses. Right there.
And really, really nice lips, also right there. Lips that had just made every tiny hair on her forearms stand up and salute under her striped sweater.
She leaned in, then stalled out.
Deborah arched a brow. “Well?”
Ava was pretty sure she made a noise, then. And she did try to get closer, but as soon as she was too close to keep eye contact without going absolutely cross-eyed, a feeling of complete and total rat-scrabbling panic seized her by the throat and yanked her away.
Her mental image of that moment wasn’t so much standing up and starting to pace as being bodily abducted off the couch by a tiny package delivery drone-style UFO and deposited across the room.
“We’re not doing that. We’re high! You’re probably drunk too! You can’t consent to- to sexual activity. I’m not going to just— I would never— I can’t take advantage of you like that!”
Deborah scoffed. “It’s a kiss, Ava.”
Literally how could Deborah scoff in a way that was that effective an interruption of Ava actively lecturing at the top of her lungs.
“Your generation is too precious about when you can and can’t have a fun time. Drunk sex is great. High sex is… well. It depends. But we are both on the delightful end of the high spectrum and if you can give me that speech, you can get in my bed.”
Ava, whose pacing had taken her directly onto the rubber massacre under the now-bedraggled balloon arch, jerked to a complete and total standstill, frozen, staring at the black tinsel curtain still glitzing with pastel passes of the disco ball lights in the other corner of the room. “I thought you said a kiss, Deborah.”
She sounded very, very sober in her own ears just then.
Almost like it had just hit her that it might be more than one teasing birthday kiss that Deborah was actively goading her to make real.
“What, did you seriously think I wanted to have a slumber party?”
“I don’t know!” Ava threw up her hands, spinning around to face her. “Half an hour ago we were talking about being BFFs for life!”
“Speak for yourself,” Deborah sniffed. “When I say someone is my only friend, I mean they’re my god damn soulmate.”
In that moment, Ava thought she would’ve been pretty damn justified to collapse dramatically to her knees like she’d been fucking knifed. Youch, right in the emotions safe. Critical combination lock failure. Oh my god.
“And I’m probably trying to see them naked. It’s just that usually it’s a rich asshole with facial hair and I’m saying it to stroke their—”
“Deborah!”
“I was going to say ego, Ava. Not cock.”
Ava had both hands up in the air beside her face. “I mean Deborah, shut up, oh my god, are you trying to kill me?”
“What?” she said innocently.
And that was it.
That was it.
Ava marched back across the room (knocking over at least one hopefully empty kombucha along the way), took Deborah’s face in her hands (fingers still fully splayed in the exact same stiff indignation as before) and kissed her.
Deborah laughed. She laughed! She snort-laughed directly against Ava’s mouth and Ava reared back before she’d even really done anything. “Fuck you!”
Deborah rolled her eyes. “Oh, come back here.”
And dragged Ava down again by a fistful of her shirt.
This time, she met the kiss halfway, open mouth to open mouth and…
God, she wasn’t wrong at all, these were good kisses. It had been long enough since they smoked that their mouths weren’t dry. Just enough of that in-the-moment world-disappearing high fixation that meant both getting totally lost in it, in it, in it, like there were sounds, there was tongue there were—
Deborah’s hands on the hem of her shirt, tugging up in a way so familiar to Ava that she didn’t think twice about going with it, lifting her arms, letting her get it up over her head and then suddenly Deborah was kissing her in just her bra and like?? Why was that even hotter? Even with Deborah still totally covered up, it was wildly hot that she was straddling Deborah with no shirt on, except now it was probably her job to do something about leveling the playing field, only Deborah had her lip in her teeth and she had literally no idea how to get Deborah out of any of the outfit she was wearing without breaking the kiss to find out what she was working with and if Ava knew one thing in this moment it was that she absolutely did not want to break the kiss right now, but maybe she’d remember how clothes work if she stood up? So then she was up, and she had Deborah on her feet too but she had both hands curled around the back of Deborah’s neck and wandering up in her hair and that was no good for clothes removal, and somehow Deborah, despite definitely still having at least one hand curled around her face in a way left a nail scratching a bit of skin behind her ear that made her feel absolutely insane with animal freaking lust right now, had also somehow just undone the button on her jeans?
And also, backed her up onto some stairs.
Halfway up them, Ava got the silky kimono-style cardigan off Deborah’s shoulders and almost stopped the makeout session just to fist pump with triumph.
Instead, she focused on not tripping backwards onto the landing while still maintaining three points of physical contact, at all times, with Deborah Vance.
Who was shucking Ava’s jeans down her thighs and pushing her backwards onto her bed.
“Hey!” Ava gasped, the comforter a cool shock to the back of her suddenly bare thighs. “Hold up, hey, hang on a second!”
Except Deborah was already climbing onto the mattress after her, now wearing only the slinky blue sleeveless number she’d had on under that fancy over-shirt. Except also full denim-colored slacks. Socks. Also those big dangly earrings Ava would for sure bet on the scales of a soul-weighing contest against both pieces of her own remaining attire. Which were underwear.
“Ummm, why?”
And literally who gave her the right for that ummm to be sexy?
The combination of Deborah almost on top of her and that one inane sound almost derailed the point Ava had intended to make completely. But she shook her head and glared up at her and said, “I’m the birthday girl.”
Deborah looked at her like she was regretting every choice in her life that had led to this moment.
Somehow, in this exact moment, that only made Ava have to actively stop herself from grinning.
“And as the birthday girl,” she continued, leveling Deborah a stare that was probably totally ruined by the state of her hair and her mouth and also eighty-five-percent nudity. “I want to touch you. I want to get you off.”
For a second, Deborah was very still. Face unreadable. Body tense.
That did give Ava a little dent. “I mean, shit, sorry, I—”
“I’m not getting naked,” Deborah muttered sharply, snapping back into motion like the moment hadn’t happened at all.
“Okay,” Ava said cautiously, waiting for further denial while actively resisting the desire to at least start running her hands down the bare, freckled forearms that were so close at hand.
But Deborah wasn’t saying anything. Instead, she was fumbling with the button of her slacks and unzipping the zip and then carefully swinging a leg up and over Ava’s thighs and grabbing her the hand and actively positioning it so the back was braced on Ava’s own thigh and—
“You,” Deborah said, griping her wrist, hard. “Are not going to move, do you hear me? Lay right there, and just let me—“
In the sexiest single movement Ava had seen in her entire life, Deborah sank down onto two of her fingers.
She was warm, inside, and… soft. Soft in a way she wasn’t used to, because what she was used to was wet. Deborah wasn’t, not really.
Still, she sighed when she’d settled her hips against Ava’s palm, closing her eyes for a second, and Ava got distracted from what was happening down there by just… staring at her.
Very specific Deborah Vance sex dream and one ill-advised near miss golf caddy incident aside, it wasn’t that Ava hadn’t had a fantasy or two about an older woman. But somehow they were always a kind of… Hollywood-older. Like a thirty-five-year-old playing fifty. Maybe some little smile lines and artistically graying hair, but really still all photo-finish smooth and trim and perky.
Deborah Vance was so much more real than a fantasy, but somehow that was… better? It was hot, how the way she had her lips pursed in concentration made all those little creases deepen around her mouth. The way her up-do was more half-and-half at this point, and the wispy fineness of her real hair peeking out from underneath caught the light. And this eerie, delicate softness all around her, holding her in.
“God,” Deborah was muttering, slowly shifting her hips in a sort of circular motion. “I can’t believe you’re going to make me actually do this.” The circle became rocking, a little deeper with each press of her hips. “Do you know how much work it is to come at my age?” Deeper, slower, and she was… fluttering, a little, inside. Ava was used to a lot of slick body sounds and a kind of hard, steady pulse. This was softer, quieter, more intimate. “When I do this with a guy I don’t even have to pretend anymore. They just assume deigning to get in bed with me in the first place is plenty. Look at you.” Deborah put a hand on Ava’s chest, bracing herself to go deeper, and her wrist was starting to ache like it did when she’d typed for too long at a weird angle, and her fingers were kind of going to sleep, but Deborah’s hand an inch from her throat made her heart go faster and her breaths get all shallow and gaspy, and she was capital-N Not going to complain about any of it. “So fucking determined to do this. Well,” and all of a sudden there was a kind of gasp mid sentence, and Deborah’s head hung a little lower, and her eyes hooded, and she was wet now, Ava could feel it. “You get one out of me and I better get ten out of you before you ask again, because this is— this is—“
A shaky breath through the nose, and then Deborah slumped down to meet her, kiss her with a gasp more than her lips, and freeze, all at once, pulsing softly around Ava’s stiff, aching fingers, and Ava had never. never been happier in her entire life.
“Wonderful,” trailed out of Deborah’s mouth like an afterthought, and Ava was absolutely fucking glowing about it.
“Happy fucking birthday,” she groused a few minutes later, lying on Ava’s chest, in Ava’s arms. Sans the pants.
Ava just kept smiling.
She’d save making a point that it might be a little bit easier with some more foreplay for later. Same with teasing wasn't Deborah glad she hadn't gone after Jenny Reagan? Same with... everything else. Everything that wasn't exactly this. Once in a while, she could, in fact, stop herself from ruining a perfect moment.