Ava closes the gap. It’s not a kiss, not at first—it’s a press of silence, a shared inhale where their lips meet and all the charged air between them ignites. The taste is jasmine and chemical sharpness, a developer’s bite, and it’s nothing like Ava imagined. It’s real. Diana’s hand tightens in her hair, not pulling, just holding, a gentle claim that makes Ava’s knees go liquid.
Her own fingers are clenched in the soft cotton of Diana’s shirt, an anchor as the world tilts. The cool tile of the wall meets her shoulder blades. Diana’s body follows, a warm, solid line against her, and Ava makes a sound—a broken, desperate thing—into her mouth.
Diana smiles against her lips. It’s a dark, knowing curve Ava feels more than sees. “There she is,” Diana murmurs, the words a vibration against Ava’s mouth before she kisses her again, deeper this time. Her tongue traces the seam of Ava’s lip, and Ava opens for her, a surrender that floods her with heat.
She is wet. The awareness is a shock, a stark, physical truth that arches her spine away from the wall and into Diana. Her hips seek pressure, a clumsy, instinctive rock, and Diana meets it with a grind of her own that punches the air from Ava’s lungs.
“You feel that?” Diana’s voice is rough, her breath hot on Ava’s cheek. Her free hand slides down, fingers splaying over the frantic beat of Ava’s heart through her thin t-shirt. “That’s you. Not the girl in the photos.” She kisses the corner of Ava’s mouth, her jaw. “This is you wanting.”
Ava’s eyes are closed. She can’t look. If she looks, she’ll see the truth in Diana’s storm-cloud gaze, and it will be real beyond the dark behind her eyelids. So she turns her head, finds Diana’s lips again, and answers with her tongue, with the clutch of her hands, with the wet ache between her legs she can no longer pretend isn’t there.