Corin

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I was paralyzed momentarily, watching Tate run from what we’d just done.

Paralyzed by confusion, by my own maelstrom of crazy emotions regarding what we’d just done, how it had felt, and about whom I’d done it with. I mean, it was Tate.

This was the girl who had had her first period in seventh grade, in English class, and had been too scared and embarrassed to say anything, didn’t know what to do. So I’d feigned a sudden illness so I could run out, and she’d gone after me “to see if I was okay” and then I’d escorted her to the bathroom, found Aerie in a different class and pulled her out so she could help Tate figure things out.

There are so many stories like that I could tell, each crazier than the last. Getting stoned together for the first time, on the top floor of a parking garage near the docks. Sneaking onto the ferry to the airport and onto the tarmac, nearly getting run over by a jet and then knocked over by jet wash, Tate stumbling backward into me, me into Cane, and Canaan into Aerie, in a row like a set of dominos, before finally being caught by security and hauled home to face our angry parents. Her pregnancy scare senior year, when her period was a week late; she’d shown up at Brett’s garage, where Bishop’s Pawn practiced, sobbing, hysterical, Aerie hot on her heels, as confused as the rest of us because Tate had kept her fears to herself until she couldn’t keep it in anymore.

That was her way, though. She kept her shit locked down tight until it all came boiling over.

Like this, now.

I was also paralyzed by the intensity of everything that had just happened. Disbelief, incredulity. I mean, I’ve been around, if you know what I mean, but nothing—nothing—could ever compare to what just happened with Tate…what she made me feel.

Fuck, when she sank to her knees with me, when she put her mouth on me, fuck…it was—I don’t have words. Beyond incredible doesn’t even start to describe it. I had no idea she was going to do that, and neither did she, I don’t think. I don’t know. I just know I was still shaken by it, trembling, weak in the knees.

Finally, I realized I had to go after her. I shot to my feet, grabbed my T-shirt, and tripped down the dock, hurriedly pulling up my jeans as I ran.

My momentary paralysis had felt like it had lasted an hour, but in reality it was maybe a minute, probably less, in which I stared after Tate as she ran down the dock and into the woods. I caught up to her easily, mostly because she’d only made it a few steps into the forest before collapsing against a tall, thin pine tree, sobbing.

I eased up behind her, putting my hands on her shoulders. “Tate?”

“What the fuck did we just do, Corin?” she wailed, twisting to put her back to the trunk.

Her eyes were red and wet with tears, her gasps coming like hiccups. I wiped the tears away, from beneath her eyes, from her cheek.

“We got carried away, is all.”

She laughed, a raucous, bitter, bark. “I sucked your cock, Cor.”

“And I sucked your tits and finger-fucked you.”

She blushed hard and put her hands on her face, shoulders shaking; I wasn’t sure if she was crying or laughing or both, now. “God, Corin. What have we done?”

I wasn’t sure what she was feeling. Regret? Guilt? Confusion?

“I…” No words came out, and I tried again. “Are you…are you upset? Like, mad at me?”

She laughed again, but this time it wasn’t bitter, more…tender? Amused? Somewhere in between those two. “No, Cor, no. God no. Why on earth would I be mad at you?”

“I don’t know!” I said, with a little too much emphasis. “I don’t know. I’m confused by why you’re freaking out.”

“Because we can’t go back! There’s no undoing this, Corin! We can’t ever be just friends again.” She shook her head, tipped it back, sniffing, and wiped her fingers under her eyes.

“Being just friends went out the window the moment you Skyped us, Tate.”

“We were drunk,” she protested.

“Not so drunk you didn’t know what you were doing,” I said.

“I know, but…” she trailed off, shaking her hands out. “I think that was probably a case of alcohol bringing things to the surface that would never have gotten out otherwise.”

“Exactly,” I said. “This has been brewing for a while.”

“But…it happened so fast, and I—I wasn’t ready for any of it.” She met my eyes, her tears drying up. “The kiss, I wasn’t ready for us to kiss like that, for it to be so…so…”

“Intense?” I supplied.

“That kiss was a fucking game-changer, Cor.” She had her spine to the tree, her hands behind her back, staring up at me. “I’ve never in my life been kissed like that.”

“Me either.”

A silence, then.

Tate shook her head. “I don’t know where to go from here, Corin.”

“Back to the cabin? We should see what Cane and Aerie are doing,” I said.

She nodded. “Yeah, I just…I need another second.”

“I understand,” I said, daring a step closer to her. “I could use a minute or two to finish getting my shit together myself.”

She allowed me to approach, staring up at me. “You seem pretty calm to me.”

“I’m not. That whole thing was as overwhelming for me as it was for you.” I ended up not quite pressed up against her, but my hands were resting on her waist.

“Really?” She hooked her thumbs in my front belt loops.

“Really really.”

Tate snorted a laugh. “Don’t you go quoting Shrek at me.”

“I’m sorry, I just—”

She interrupted me. “Corin, I don’t want you to think I regret what happened back there.” She tugged my belt loops so I was flush against her. “Because I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

A shake of her head. “No, not even a little. I was just overwhelmed by how suddenly it escalated into something so intense, and I didn’t know I was going to…that I’d…that it would feel like that, that you’d—” She stopped, biting her lip.

“What?” I asked. “That I would what?”

“You’ve always been hot. I’ve always known you were sexy, but…” She dropped her eyes, and then returned them to mine. “I had no idea you were packing that in your pants. If I’d known you looked like that, I’m not sure this would have waited so long to happen.”

I laughed. “Tate, when I lifted your shirt up and got my first full look at you, I—” My turn to shake my head in disbelief. “I couldn’t believe how fucking perfect you are. Like…growing up, I had these moments where I saw you as not just my best friend who was a girl, but as a woman, with a woman’s body. When I saw you like that. It was just these isolated moments, but even then, I never imagined you’d have such…” I trailed off, unsure how to finish that without sounding like a crude caveman.

“Big tits?” she said for me, laughing.

I rolled my eyes with a shrug and a tip of my head. “It’s more than that, Tate. It’s not just about the size. Yeah, they’re not exactly small, which I definitely enjoy. But they’re…they’re just perfectly shaped.”

She gazed up at me, eyes wide, innocent. “What do my breasts look like, Corin?”

“Big, tear-dropped. Your skin is pale, like ivory. You’re tan everywhere else, but ivory there. You have complicated tan-lines all over your breasts, which is a major turn-on, for reasons I don’t quite understand. They hang close together, and they’re squishy, juicy, like…there’s no mistaking them for anything but natural.” I spoke softly, a low, rough murmur meant only for her, as if we weren’t totally alone in this forest, echoing with breeze and birdsong. “You have thick pink nipples, and pale, small areolae. Your nipples stick out really hard when you’re turned on, or cold.” I slid my hands up her waist over her shirt, rubbing my thumbs on the undersides of her breasts. “They’re absolutely perfect, Tate.”

“I’m not perfect.”

“I didn’t say you are,” I said, with a grin, “I said these are.” I emphasized the word with both hands cupping the elements in question.

“Oh.” She let her gaze travel down to my zipper. “I’d say you’re pretty perfect too.”

A long, heated moment passed between us, her eyes on mine, her hands lifting to rest on my chest, mine around her waist, our hips bumped together.

“We’re gonna get carried away again, if we’re not careful,” I said.

“All I have to do to get carried away is to look at you, Cor,” Tate murmured.

“A look, a touch…” I let my hand grip her braid, sliding my fist down from scalp to tip. “It doesn’t take much, does it?”

Her fingers trickled down my chest to my stomach, then hooked into the front of my jeans. “Not much at all.”

I stood over her, staring down at her, searching her amber-green eyes, pressing closer, until her breasts were flattened against my chest. My knee slid between her thighs to grind against her core, and she had the first few fingers of both hands hooked into the front of my jeans. My face descended, closer and closer to hers.

“If you kiss me right now, Corin Badd, I will not be able to stop what happens,” Tate said, blinking up at me.

“Me either,” I whispered.

“So maybe don’t kiss me again? Not yet. I’m not ready to go there again. Not yet.”

I backed away slowly, letting go of her reluctantly. “No…no, you’re right.”

“I want to, though,” she said, her voice low and pained. “So bad. Now that I’ve had a taste of you…”

I let out groaning laugh. “You talk about tasting me, Tate, you’ll find yourself tasting me like you just did.”

“Don’t threaten me with a good time, Corin,” she said, her voice heated. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”