A Stolen Kiss

Jester’s quill stopped abruptly, frozen in the middle of a sketch.

“So,” she said by way of apology, although she didn’t know what she was apologizing for. “I’m not being completely the most honest with you.” Honest? Maybe ‘faithful’ was the better word. Why did this feel like a betrayal?

Jester took a deep breath. “So. There’s this…girl…who is very cool and strong and very pretty, and…” An uncontrollable smile overtook her face, and her hands started fluttering of their own accord. “Ohmygosh ohmygosh this is so embarrasing. Okay. But anyway, she’s very pretty and she also has sex with lots of women. And even when she doesn’t have sex with them, she finds some really obvious way of saying basically, ‘Hey, I want to have sex with you.’ But I mean not like every woman, that would be silly obviously. And not—” Jester swallowed the last word, surprised at the depth of her own feelings. Not me.

She lifted her quill from the journal. A perfectly circular green dot had accumulated on the page: a ruined sketch, a waste of her mother’s ink.

“It’s really hard, you know!” she shouted at the still air, feeling suddenly defensive. “It’s hard when you like someone and you know that they don’t like you back.” Her voice got smaller the more she talked. “Because if she did, then she definitely would have said something by—”

A loud, fake cough sounded behind Jester. She spun in her chair, barely suppressing a squeal of horror as she came face-to-face with Beauregard. The girl stood awkwardly at the other end of the room they’d rented, between the two beds, lit only by the flickering of Jester’s desk lamp. She was dressed in her nightclothes—which didn’t look very different from her dayclothes, and in fact might just be a second set of Cobalt robes and oh fuck Jester was staring now fuck fuck.

“Um,” Beau said, “you know I can always hear you, right? You’re not like, inaudible when you do your whole”—a vague gesture at Jester’s desk, sketchbook, inks, lamp—“thing.”

“I…” Jester could feel her cheeks heating up. She did not blush easily, and when she did, it was not usually in horrifying embarrassment. “I thought you weren’t going to be back yet. For a while. I didn’t hear you come in.”

Beau gazed at Jester from across the room, seeming to consider to her next words carefully, and eventually settled on: “Wanna make out.”

“Yes.” Jester almost tipped her chair, so quickly did she stand.

They walked toward each other, Jester scarcely daring to believe her luck. And she could’ve sworn she felt it—the taste of Beau’s breath, the warmth of her lips—before the illusion faded, and laughter tickled the back of her skull. She stood there in shock for she didn’t know how long, choking back tears, embracing the empty air.