PLAY IT COOL

An Interracial Lesbian Body Worship Short by Dove Harper

The apartment was too fucking warm. I’d cranked the heat the second Amy texted be there in 10 and then spent the next nine minutes rearranging the throw blanket on the couch to make it seem casual. Cool. Me. Cool.

Play it cool.

We’d been together a month. One month. I was allowed to be a person. Right? Besides, this was the first fucking time she’d be seeing my apartment. I need to make a good impression.

I waited a full three seconds before I opened the door for her because I was a person who played it cool and I totally wasn’t waiting by the door for her.

She was pink-cheeked from the November air and wearing that half-undone bun she wore when she wasn’t trying. Her coat was already halfway off her shoulders because she’d started taking it off in the hallway.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“It is so cold out there.”

“It was cold yesterday too.”

“It was also cold yesterday.”

She stepped past me and dropped her bag beside the couch with a thunk — a big bag. As if she might choose to stay over.

“Did you get popcorn?”

“Top cabinet.”

“The good kind?”

“Of course. I didn’t make it yet, I left it for you to make so you can do the butter situation however you want.”

She laughed and headed for the kitchen.

I stood in the living room.

Cool, I thought. You are cool. You are a cool person.

I followed her into the kitchen.

She was squinting at the back of the popcorn bag like it had said something rude to her. The microwave beeped as she set it. Cabinet opened, closed. She was wearing that Sterling hoodie — oversized, soft, the grey one — and her bun sat a little sideways and I stood six inches behind her and the microwave hummed and I just couldn’t wait anymore.

My arms went around her waist from behind.

Not planned. My hands linked together over her stomach before I’d made any decision about it. She was warm and solid and her hoodie was cotton-soft and I pressed my face against the back of her shoulder and stayed there, breathing.

“Hi,” Amy said.

“Hi.”

“The popcorn’s not done.”

“I know.”

She’d gone still. I could feel the moment she exhaled — slow, like she was deciding to let herself have it — and her whole body settled back against me, just slightly. Her belly was soft under my forearms and I held on a little tighter because I couldn’t help it, because she was here and she smelled like outside air and whatever soap she used and I had genuinely no idea what I’d done to deserve any of this.

“Kalani.” Her voice was careful. “What are you doing.”

“Nothing.”

“You’re doing something.”

I turned my face so my mouth was against her hoodie, not quite a kiss, just existing there. My palms spread flat. Checked she was real.

“Kalani.”

“Mm.”

She laughed — surprised, quiet. “You’re quite something, you know that?”

I didn’t answer. I pressed a kiss to the back of her neck, at the base of her bun where a few curls had come loose, and Amy made a small sound — wordless, but it meant alright, okay.

Then her hand came down and covered mine. Her fingers slid between mine and held.

The microwave beeped.

“Popcorn,” she said.

“Yeah...”

Neither of us moved. In the dark microwave window I could see both of us, small and vague — me behind her, my dark skin blending into the reflection, her warm and wide and steady against me.

“You should get the popcorn,” I said.

“You should let go of me.”

I didn’t.

She squeezed my hand.

“Thought you were playing it cool,” she said.

“I was.”

“Uh huh.”

“I waited three whole seconds before I opened the door. Promise.”

She turned her head just enough that I could see the side of her face, the corner of her mouth going up. “Three seconds.”

“It’s more than zero.”

“Incredible,” she said. “You’re incredible.”

The popcorn was definitely a little overdone.

Amy had looked at me when she pulled it from the microwave, the bag darkened at one corner, and I’d said “that happens sometimes” and she’d said “does it” and I’d said “yes” and she’d laughed, which was better than any movie.

We ended up on the couch sideways, the bowl between us, neither of us having turned the TV on yet.

“Okay,” Amy said. She had her legs folded under her, facing me. “How long had you had that planned.”

“Had what planned.”

“The kitchen ambush.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She pointed a piece of popcorn at me. “Sock feet.”

“I live here.”

“Kalani.”

“What.”

“How long.”

I took a handful of popcorn and didn’t answer. Amy watched me eat it with the expression of someone who had all the time in the world and knew it.

“Since you texted,” I said.

She laughed, loud and real, the kind that moved her whole body. I watched it happen. Watched her shoulders shake, the soft line of her throat when she tilted her head back. The hoodie had slipped off one shoulder.

I looked at the popcorn bowl.

Cool, I thought. You are a cool person.

The textbook story had come up exactly twice before: once on our first date, when I’d brought it up as proof that the universe wanted us together, and once when Amy had told it to her roommate on the phone in my bathroom, thinking I couldn’t hear, saying she’s kind of ridiculous, honestly in a tone that did not sound like a complaint.

Here is how it went. Professor Okafor’s Sociology of Gender syllabus listed Connell’s Gender and Power as required. Not recommended, not supplementary. Required, underlined, with a note that said this text is central to every discussion from week two onward. The Sterling bookstore had ordered fourteen copies for a class of twenty-two, because the bookstore always ordered fourteen copies, because whoever handled the ordering had apparently never met a college student. I got there on a Tuesday at ten in the morning, which I thought was early. There was one copy left on the shelf.

I was reaching for it. So was Amy.

We both stopped with our hands in the air.

She looked at the book. She looked at me. “I need this for Okafor’s class.”

“So do I.”

“There’s one copy.”

“I can see that.”

She picked it up. Actually picked it up and tucked it under her arm. I stood there. She looked at me for a long second, the kind of pause where someone is doing arithmetic, and then she said: “I’m in the Tuesday-Thursday section. When are you?”

“Monday-Wednesday-Friday.”

“So you need it Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.”

“And to read ahead on weekends.”

“I need it Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“And to read ahead on weekends.”

Another pause. She said, “We could share it. You’d have to give me your number so we could work out who has it when.” She held it out toward me. “Or you could order it online and wait three to four weeks for shipping.”

I gave her my number. She texted me from the parking lot, a single period so I’d have hers. I wrote back: this is Kalani, your textbook co-parent. She didn’t respond for four hours and then sent: please do not call it that. I kept calling it that for the entire semester and she kept acting annoyed about it right up until the night she kissed me outside Grounds and then leaned back and said, quietly, like it was only for her, textbook co-parent.

“I still think it was a scheme,” Amy said.

“The bookstore under-ordered. That was not me.”

“You were very calm about the whole situation.”

“I’m a calm person.”

She looked pointedly at the kitchen. I leaned forward and moved the popcorn bowl to the coffee table.

“Come here,” I said.

“I’m right here.”

“Amy.”

She didn’t move, but the corner of her mouth went up. I closed the space between us slowly, watching her face for the moment she’d tell me to stop. She didn’t tell me to stop. I settled beside her, my knee against her thigh, and turned to face her.

Up close, the hoodie was really off her shoulder. The curve of it. The soft weight of her upper arm against mine. My pulse pounded.

“You’re doing the thing again,” she said.

“What thing.”

“Where you look at me like that.”

“I’m looking at you.”

“Uh huh.” She reached over and stole a piece of popcorn from the bowl she could not reach without leaning across me.

She ate the popcorn slowly, watching me, and heat crawled up the back of my neck and down through my shoulders, both directions. I pressed my lips together and looked at the dark TV screen.

“We should probably start the movie,” she said.

“Probably.”

“Kalani.”

I turned back. She was watching me with that expression, patient and warm and fully aware of what she was doing, and I put my hand on her knee and left it there.

She looked at my hand. Back at my face.

“There it is,” she said, soft.

“I can move it.”

“I didn’t say move it.”

She was warm through the fabric of her leggings, solid under my palm. I slid my hand an inch up her thigh. Stopped. She went very still in the same way she had in the kitchen, the way that meant she was paying full attention to everything, and I could see the small rise and fall of her breathing get slightly less even.

“Amy.”

“Mm.”

“I really like you.”

She blinked. Then she laughed, breathless, and shook her head. “You are such a—”

“I know.”

“One month.”

“I know.”

“You’re already like this.”

I leaned in before she could finish the sentence. Not all the way, just enough to leave barely any space between us. Her breath touched my face. She hadn’t moved back.

“Is that a problem?” I asked.

She looked at my mouth. Looked up.

“No,” she said.

I kissed her.

She kissed me back, and it wasn’t like our other kisses, the careful short ones outside Grounds after coffee and the one in the parking lot where we’d both pretended it was casual. This one had somewhere to go. If it was in public, it would have said something like, ooooh look at the interracial lesbians.

Her hand came up to the side of my face and I made a sound against her before her other hand found the hem of my shirt.

I pulled back to look at her. Her bun had come fully loose on one side. Her cheeks were flushed and she was still holding my face.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

I kissed her again. She pulled my shirt up and over and I let her, and then her hoodie came off one shoulder and then the other, and the soft, warm, heavy weight of her in my hands was the best thing I had ever touched. I told her so.

“You’re so dramatic,” she said, against my mouth.

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

She didn’t.

Her hoodie hit the floor and I forgot about everything.

Not in a metaphorical way. The movie we hadn’t started, the half-eaten popcorn on the coffee table, the November dark outside the window. All of it. Gone.

Amy had her hands at the hem of her shirt, a soft grey cotton thing, and she paused with it halfway up. Old habit. I’d seen it before: that half-second where she waited to see how a person looked at her.

I looked at her the way I always looked at her.

She pulled the shirt over her head.

I didn’t say anything immediately. I just looked. The full, soft weight of her. The round of her belly, the generous width of her hips, the way her bra cut softly into the flesh at her sides. Her skin was pale, ivory tipped pink at her cheeks, and in the warm lamplight of the apartment she looked like something that was painted. A sculpture.

“Kalani,” she started, the first edge of a joke in her voice, the armor coming up.

“Don’t,” I said. “Just, wait.”

She went quiet.

I reached out and put both hands on her waist. Flat-palmed. She was warm and her skin was so soft that I pressed my fingers in a little just to feel it give, and I heard her exhale.

“I love your skin,” I said. Not to her, almost. Just saying it out loud because it was true and I was tired of it only being true inside my head.

“The color of it. Right here.” I ran my thumb along her side, where the lamplight caught her.

I got close and reached around her to unclip her bra. The full, heavy weight of her breasts, pale with dark pink centers, resting warm against my hands. My hands were dark against her, brown fingers curved under soft white skin, and the contrast stopped me for a second. Not in a way I could explain, just in a way that made me want to stay there.

“These,” I said. “I think about these.”

“Yeah?” No teasing in it anymore. Just the word, a little rough.

“Constantly.” I pressed my lips to the side of one, then the curve of the other. She made a sound and her hand came up to the back of my head and I felt her nails against my scalp and the want in me sharpened to a point. “I think about you all the time. You know that.”

“You should tell me more often,” she said, and there was nothing cool about how she said it.

I looked up at her. The composure was gone, the patient half-smile she wore like a second skin, the raised eyebrow. She was watching me with her lips parted and her color high and she looked like herself, the version of herself she didn’t show people, and I pulled her toward me by the hips.

She reached for my shoulders and I let her push my shirt up and off. For a second she looked at me the same way I’d looked at her, which I hadn’t expected, and it hit me square in the chest.

“You’re so pretty,” she said.

“Amy.”

“You are.” Her palms ran flat down my sides, over my ribs, the narrow cut of my waist. Her hands were wide and warm and my skin felt electric under them.

“You’re so small. I’m always scared I’m going to break you.”

“You’re not going to break me.”

“Kalani, I could—”

I put her hand on my waist and held it there. “You’re not going to break me. Promise.”

She laughed, not the loud one, the lower one. The one she kept for when she was actually undone.

I pushed her back gently against the couch cushions and she went, which still surprised me every time, this woman who held the room, just going where I put her. I ran my hands up her sides, over the soft wide curve of her hips, along her belly. She watched my face while I did it.

“You’re doing the thing,” she said.

“You like the thing.”

A pause. “Yeah.”

I pressed my lips to the center of her stomach, the softest part of her, and her hand tightened at the back of my head. Her skin was warm and clean and I stayed there, mouth open against her.

“I love this,” I said, voice muffled. Into her skin. I moved up. “And this.” Her ribs. “And this.” The underside of her breast. “I love every single thing about you and you make me insane.”

The sound she made was not a word.

I lifted my head and she pulled me up by my face, both hands, urgent, and kissed me like she’d stopped thinking about it. No strategy in it. No patience. She kissed me like the month before had been a long wait and this was the answer.

Amy sat up.

“Lie back,” she said.

I did.

She looked at me for a moment, stretched out on the couch. Then she swung one leg over and settled above me, her thighs wide over my hips, her weight on her knees.

“Don’t worry,” she said. She was looking down at me with that patient expression.

“I know I’m fat.” She let a beat go by. “I won’t crush you.”

I looked up at her. The lamplight behind her, her hair loose, her skin warm and pink and perfect.

“What if I kinda want you to crush me,” I said.

She went very still.

Then she let her hips down.

The full, heavy, solid weight of her settling over me. My breath left in a rush that wasn’t pain. She watched my face while it happened, and whatever she saw in my expression made her do it again, shift and settle lower, her thighs wide over mine, her belly soft against my stomach.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Yeah.” The word came out quieter than I meant.

She leaned forward and put both hands flat on the cushion above my shoulders and looked down at me from very close. Her hair fell around us.

“You,” she said, “are a lot of things, Kalani.”

“Good things?”

“Don’t push it.”

She kissed me, slow and heavy and soft and forceful, nothing left in it of the strategic pacing she’d been doing this entire time. Her hips moved, grinding into mine and I moaned against her mouth. She did it again and I grabbed at her sides and she laughed low against my lips.

“Easy,” she said.

“Amy.”

She sat up and looked down at my naked chest. Her thumbs brushed my bare nipples, slow, watching them go stiff.

“I like your tits,” she said, simply, like she was telling me the weather.

“That’s.” I stopped. Started again. “Okay.”

She bent and took my hard nipple between her lips and my back came off the couch. She pressed me back down with one flat palm on my sternum, not rough, just firm, and kept going. Her mouth was warm and her hair was everywhere and I had my fingers threaded through it because I needed something to hold while her mouth worked its sweet ecstasy on me.

“Amy.”

“Mm.”

“I need y—”

“I know what you need.”

Her hand moved down my stomach and I watched it go, past my navel, to the waistband of my leggings. She slid her fingers under slowly, and I lifted my hips, hungry for her, and she took her time anyway. By the time her fingers found the warm, slick center of me I’d been waiting so long that I barely recognized the moan that emanated from my lips.

She stroked slowly along my slit and watched my face.

“There it is,” she said, quiet.

“Don’t stop.”

“I’m not stopping.” Her fingers moved again, parting me. “You’re so fucking wet, Kalani.”

My face burned and I couldn’t look away from her. She was watching me with complete focus, no teasing in it now, just her full attention on what she was doing to me, and that alone was almost too much. Her thumb found my clit and circled it, easy, and I pulled at her hair without meaning to.

“Good?” she said.

“Don’t ask me if it’s good.”

“Why not?”

“Because…mmfffuck, I can’t talk right now.”

She smiled, and it was the realest smile I’d seen from her all night. Not the raised-eyebrow one, not the patient one. Just her, pleased, looking down at me while her fingers worked slow and steady in my pussy and her weight held me pinned to my own couch.

I pulled her back down by the back of her neck and kissed her with everything I had.

She let me, for a moment. Then she lifted her head just far enough to look at me.

“Still want me to crush you?” she asked.

I answered by wrapping my legs around her and pulling her hips down hard against mine.

We kissed for a moment more, then I knew had to have her.

My way.

I pulled her up by the hand.

She came without asking where. I led her down the short hallway, my hand in hers, and I didn’t turn the bedroom light on when we got there. The streetlight through the blinds laid thin stripes across the bed and that was enough.

Amy stood at the edge of the mattress and looked at me. The teasing was fully gone now. What was left was even better.

I sat on the bed and looked up at her.

“I want you to sit on my face,” I said.

A beat. She looked at me for a long moment, almost blankly, then warming.

“Kalani.”

“I know.”

“I can’t promise I won’t crush you.”

“I know.”

She looked at me a second longer. Then she hooked her thumbs into her leggings and pushed them down, and I watched her step out of them, and my mouth went dry.

She stood there and let me look. All of her, in the low evening light. The wide, soft landscape of her thighs. The full curve of her belly. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in any room.

“Lie down,” she said.

I lay down.

She climbed over me slowly, taking her time, her knees on either side of my head. She looked down through the dim.

“Last chance,” she said.

I put my hands on her thighs and pulled her down.

The weight was first. Full and warm and total, her thighs closing against my ears, the whole soft heaviness of her settling over my face, and the world reduced to her. The sounds of the room went muffled. Her scent was everywhere, warm and sharp and intensely, specifically Amy, and the heat of her against my mouth made me groan before I’d even started.

I licked along her slit, slow, getting my bearings. She inhaled.

I did it again. Parting her. Finding the slick, swollen center of her and lapping at it in long, open strokes. She was wet and warm and tasted like want, and the sounds she made above me were low, half-swallowed things, the kind she’d been holding back all evening.

Her hips shifted. A small grind, testing.

I pressed my palms flat against the wide, soft weight of her thighs and worked my tongue in steady circles around her clit, and she ground down harder. The pressure increased. My face was full of her. I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear much, could barely breathe except in short pulls between strokes, and every single one of those breaths was her.

I hummed against her and she shuddered.

“Kalani.” Her voice came down to me muffled and wrecked. “Don’t stop.”

I didn’t stop. I lapped at her clit in slow, deliberate passes, then tight circles, then slow again, feeling her thighs tremble against my ears. The vibration of my own sounds went back into her and she gasped and rocked forward, grinding roughly now, her full weight shifting with each movement. The pressure bloomed at the edges of my vision.

I was in fucking ecstasy.

Not performing it, not chasing it. Actually there, completely inside it. The weight of her, the heat, the smell, the sounds filtering down through the press of her thighs. Her grinding had found a rhythm and I matched it, working my tongue up and up, and her moans were coming lower and longer now, the held-back quality gone out of them completely.

Her hands found the headboard.

She started to ride my face with intention, full weight, thighs locked, and I stayed with her, tongue flat and steady against her clit. She was close, I could feel it in the shake of her, and I pushed the flat of my tongue harder against her and she cried out, short and sharp, the most unguarded sound I’d ever heard from her.

The wave that moved through me came from nowhere and everywhere at once. No build-up I’d tracked, no clear beginning. Just a sudden tightening, a heat between my own legs that crested fast and broke, a small warm rush of wetness against my inner thighs. I made a sound against her that she felt as vibration. Her hips stuttered.

“What was—” she started.

I pulled her tighter by the thighs and kept going.

She braced against the headboard and shook through it, emitting groans she couldn’t shape into language, and I held on and let her and kept my tongue steady through every second of it until she stopped shaking and her weight shifted forward and she was just breathing, ragged and slow, her thighs still framing my face.

I turned my head and pressed my lips to the inside of her thigh.

She climbed off slowly and lay down beside me. Both of us on our backs. The ceiling was dark and the streetlight made thin lines across it.

After a while she said, “You okay?”

“I am so okay.”

A pause.

“Kalani.”

“Yeah.”

She turned onto her side. Her hand found mine on the mattress and covered it.

“I’m crazy about you,” she said. Quietly. Like it had been waiting behind the teasing all along. “Since the bookstore. You know that.”

I turned my head to look at her.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

She brought my hand up and pressed her lips to my knuckles gently.

“The popcorn is probably cold by now…”

Authors Note: Thank you for reading! If you want to support my work now, the Soaked duet (Parts 1 and 2) and The Professors Muslim Bride are on Amazon Kindle Unlimited.
Soaked takes place in Sterling, the same fictional city that those two stories take place in. ~ Dove