Laurel and I enter into her apartment, and I got to say, it’s nice. It’s well lit, she’s got some fancy living room furniture, a second room she uses as a workout room, and I notice the bedroom as well. I wonder if I’m going to make it to the bedroom tonight; she has been rather suggestive, but I keep in mind that we’ve been at odds a lot longer than we’ve been friendly.

She makes a pot of coffee as promised, and we plop down on her couch. We talk for a while, and it’s actually really nice just doing that. We have a lot in common. We both grew up in the area, we’re both fighters, and we enjoy a lot of the same things. I ask her about her time as a marine, and it sounds like it had been a brief stay despite her ability as a translator. “Where did you learn Arabic?” I question.

“My mom,” she says, “before she met my dead she had been married to this guy for like ten years, and he didn’t speak any English. She was living in the Middle East working with the Doctors without Borders. The man started talking about moving off the base permanently –basically he was starting to wish he had married a sweet, obedient Middle Eastern woman in a headdress… and when he started trying to get my mother into the lifestyle, she left him. She met my dad later that year after she moved back to the states. He was a marine –surprise, surprise. He wanted a boy, but he got me. Mom taught me her ex-husbands language, which annoyed the hell out of my dad, but she convinced him it’d be good for me educationally. It was; learning a second language makes it easier to learn more, if that makes sense.”

“So you speak other languages?” I ask.

“Persian, Kurdish, Mandarin, and I’m learning Russian now,” she says.

“Damn, girl,” I say. “Is this, like, a hobby of yours, or something?”

“I guess so,” she says and takes a sip of coffee, “I love fighting, but I suppose with my skillset I could probably get a real classy job somewhere. I used to work a desk job. I’ve worked as a translator too, but the whole PTSD thing was really rough then. I’m better now, but during my lowest point in life fighting is what kept me steady. I enjoy it too much.” Suddenly she laughs, “wanna watch a movie?”

“Um… sure?” I say, not sure what’s so funny.

She flips on her television, and I see that she had been watching Fight Club on her DVR. I laugh. “You’re telling me you don’t own Fight Club?” I question, “What kind of mixed martial artist are you?”

She turns down the lights and we start the movie. We’re only about five minutes into the movie before her hand lands on my knee, and I take it as an opportunity to scoot closer and prop my arm around her shoulder. We’re both really hesitant –how couldn’t we be after we’ve treated each other like shit for the past few months? Her hand starts rubbing my right knee, and for some reason it’s really turning me on just to have her touching me.

Her hand slowly makes its way towards my inner thigh, and it stops there –massaging me slightly, her eyes still glued to the television. I move even closer; my head rests on her shoulder, and I breathe heavily against the back of her neck. She cringes, and I think I’m making her toes curl. When I catch her eyes look towards me, her head still facing forward, I lean in further. Finally, she turns her head, and I plant a kiss on those pretty lips of hers.

“Mmmm….” She says as though she’s taking a bite out of something good. One of her hands reaches out and touches my chest.

I take her face into my hands, pulling her closer to me. We’re no longer interested in the movie. Our breathing gets heavy as our lips continue to caress against one another’s. I slide my hands down her neck and then down her back towards her hips. She shutters slightly; I move my lips down to her throat. Now, with my hands on her hips, I pull her towards me, and she climbs into my lap. Laurel drapes her arms around my shoulders and leans forward, kissing my lips and face.

My hands start to work their way up her shirt; she’s still got on a damn sports bra from earlier, so there’s no chance of me quickly popping her bra loose. I do, however, manage to slide one of my hands up underneath her bra to gently squeeze her breasts. My other hand reaches downward, and I go to unzip her jeans, but she stops me. There is this looming discomfort between us now –did I try to go too far? “Um…” she says, and her face turns red. I move my hand away from her groin and instead wrap both my arms around her waist.

“Okay,” I say, “We don’t have to.”

She looks embarrassed. She had been the one to invite me up and the one to turn down the lights and the one to start touching me. Maybe she feels like a tease? I don’t know exactly what’s going through her head, but I don’t want her to pull away from me just because she doesn’t want to sleep with me. As much as I really want to sleep with her right now, I’m pretty content where we are. I run one of my hands up and down her back and smile at her. She’s still seated in my lap; her head falls, and our lips meet again. Good –I didn’t scare her off.

After several long, deep kisses, I manage to coax her out of her top and sports bra, but I don’t go for her pants again. There’s a clear line that’s been drawn tonight, so I don’t intend to be the one to try to jump over it. I suck on her nipples, making them hard, and she gasps slightly when I do so. We wind up lying down on the couch, facing one another. I continue to play with her breasts, to kiss her lips, and to stroke her bare back and her arms. She gets me to take off my shirt, and I feel a rush of adrenaline I normally only feel during sex when our bare skin touches against each other. She presses her chest against mine, and I wrap her tight in my arms.

I’m not sure how to express how I am feeling in this moment. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this sort of passion. Its passion… mixed with a bit of sexual frustration, but it’s still endearing. We kiss and touch one another some more, and soon it grows late. Its pitch black outside; I’m pretty sure it has to be close to three in the morning. Laurel’s eyes start to droop, but she keeps pulling me back in for more kisses –but I don’t mind.

There’s a clock hanging on the far side of the wall; I confirm that it is 3:15 in the morning. “I should go,” I say, but I look down to see that she’s passed out on my arm. I smile and lay my head back down beside her, pulling her closer to me.

Did I really just stay up half the night making out? I haven’t done that since I was fresh out of high school. Normally, I never would have stuck around if a woman had slapped my hands away the way Laurel had, but for some reason I stayed. I stayed, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I fall asleep beside her, and for the first time in a long time I actually sleep well.