Chapter 3
Rowan flipped her dad’s truck’s tailgate down to slide her and Juniper’s fishing poles into the slatted grooves of the truck bed.
A hot pink bikini-clad Juniper hopped onto the tailgate to sit, but instead of dangling her legs off the edge like she usually did while Rowan re-situated their stuff, she screeched and slid off theatrically.
“I think I burned my ass!”
Rowan flicked her in the soft curve of her waist.
“Well duh, the truck’s been in the hot ass sun all day,” she managed to get out before she realized she was still staring at her best friend’s wet and lusciously-brown bare skin. And thinking about her also luscious ass.
“Don’t flick me!” Juniper protested through her laughter as she flicked Rowan back.
“I’ll flick you whenever I want,” Rowan countered defiantly.
Then she thought about that for a moment and scratched the back of her neck. Not exactly what she meant. But yeah, that thought had crossed her mind many more times than she’d dared to count that summer. She needed to abandon this whole flicking conversation as soon as possible.
She had never touched anyone like that, much less kissed anyone.
Not that she hadn’t wanted to, she just knew she was into girls, and in their small community, it’s not like girls who liked girls were very prevalent or even open about it.
That she liked girls — and that she had fallen in love with her best friend that summer — were the only two things she had never actually told said best friend.
She grabbed an old flannel shirt out of the lockboxes at the back of the truck bed and laid it across the tailgate. Juniper smiled at her and hopped back up. Rowan tried not to gawk at the way her boobs bounced when she did. She was… unsuccessful.
She placed her hands on the edge of the tailgate and lunged her legs backward to stare at the ground beneath her instead.
“Junie,” she posed as more of a question without looking up, “did you want to kiss Jason?”
“Fuck no, I did it because it was a dare.”
Rowan chuckled at the little shiver she caught Juniper doing out of the corner of her eye, combined with a grumble of ugh.
During a round of truth or dare at a party their friend threw while his parents were away, Juniper had been dared to kiss their classmate Jason.
At the time of the event, Rowan hadn’t understood the real reason why she was so upset seeing Juniper kiss him.
She chalked it up to her best friend ditching her — even though she was sitting right next to her and the kiss lasted all of five seconds — or the fact she had been dragged to the party when she would have rather been doing almost anything else.
Another one of Juniper’s attempts to get her to live a little, as she said.
When Rowan played back Juniper and Jason’s lips touching in her mind that night, and finally put a name to the turmoil in her mind and in her stomach, she knew.
As she lay next to Juniper in the cramped twin size bed in her room, she listened to Juniper’s light snoring mix with the cicadas chirping through the open window and had an overwhelming urge to redo that kiss.
To wipe that kiss from Juniper’s mouth and replace it with hers.
She slid her face across the pillow to get even closer than they already were.
She stared at the glow of moonlight across her lips and swiped a gentle finger down the bridge of her nose.
Then traced the curve of her rounded cheekbone up to her hairline.
Juniper swatted Rowan’s hand in her sleep as if it were a bug, and Rowan’s face shot straight back forward to stare, eyes wide, at the ceiling instead.
She folded her arms over her pounding chest and forced her eyes to close. That was enough of that.
“You would tell me if you’ve kissed someone you wanted to right?” Rowan asked.
“I mean, yeah. I literally tell you everything. Why?”
Rowan raked the gravel under her athletic slide forward and backward.
“I don’t know.”
She felt Juniper’s bare foot nudge her ribs.
“Why, you wanna kiss someone Ro?” She teased.
Rowan’s heart rate skyrocketed. She jerked her leg to stop messing with the gravel like she’d been physically caught in a trap. She exhaled and settled her foot flat back against the earth.
“What if I did?”
Juniper hopped down from the tailgate and leaned her face over Rowan’s extended arm to give her a silly look.
The proximity to her face, the fact that Juniper’s cheek was resting on her arm and her plump lips were parted so perfectly in that goofy grin, was enough for Rowan to finally be baited into giving a real answer.
“What if it was you?”
She watched as Juniper’s eyes flitted to her lips then back up to meet her gaze.
“What?” She asked on a whisper, a slight crease forming between her eyebrows as her grin softened.
Rowan shook her head and redirected her gaze back to the ground.
“Nothing.” She whispered back.
Juniper plucked Rowan’s hand from the tailgate, pulling her to stand up and face her.
But in a move that made Rowan’s breath catch in her throat, Juniper didn’t drop it.
She held it. Sure they’d shared all kinds of physical touches before, including holding hands, but this was different.
This was actually holding hands. She was holding her hand.
“Don’t do that,” Juniper protested softly.
“Do what?”
“Take it back.”
“You… don’t want me to take it back?”
“No, I mean, I don’t know.” Juniper looked down at their joined hands and swung their arms back and forth a couple times. “No.”
“That means…” Rowan ventured into unknown territory. “You want to kiss me too?”
“I think I’ve wanted to kiss you for a while now.” The crease was still apparent in her eyebrows, but the grin was taking a new shape on her face. “I think I wanted to kiss you that night instead.”
Rowan grinned a little. “Yeah?” She let out a slight laugh. “I wanted to wake you up that night and kiss you.”
“You should have.”
Juniper traced a stray wisp of hair across Rowan’s temple, along the brim of her tattered backwards baseball cap, to tuck behind her ear. Rowan resisted the urge to shift under her touch, or increasingly warm gaze.
“Do you want to kiss me now?” Juniper asked as she inched even closer.
Rowan swallowed. She really wished her mouth weren’t so dry at the moment.
“I do.”
“Then kiss me, Birdsong.”
Rowan took a moment to savor the glimmer of the golden specks in her best friend’s hazel eyes.
She needed to commit that sight to memory before she did the same for the feel of her lips.
Juniper parted those lips, and Rowan mirrored the action as she leaned in closer.
She watched Juniper’s eyelashes flutter closed before hers did too.
She positioned her lips between Juniper’s and held her breath as she softly pressed them together.
The warm, satiny feel of Juniper’s lips interlocking with hers was beyond anything she’d spent her summer imagining.
The yielding, the surging, a summer of pining born out of a lifetime of pure platonic love, and then suddenly of the only love she could ever imagine being hers.
Breath unsteady, their bottom lips stuck together momentarily as they pulled back, reluctant to leave each other as if they had found their new home.
Faces inches apart, Juniper reached up to gently graze her fingers against the skin where Rowan’s collarbone met her neck.
Rowan’s hands found Juniper’s waist to pull her closer, and she marveled at the soft, pliable skin gliding under her fingertips.
Rowan’s heart beat in her throat at the eagerness of Juniper’s lips pressing back into hers, kisses coming one after the other until she was pretty sure she’d never be able to breathe again.
They kissed over and over again, and once more before Juniper leaned back.
“That was…” Juniper trailed off.
“That was what?” Rowan nervously filled the silence.
Juniper smiled. “Like really good.”
Juniper hopped back onto the truck bed, placing her hands between her slightly spread thighs to lean forward and smile even harder.
“Again?” She asked.
Rowan knew the blush on her cheeks was apparent. She could tell in Juniper’s demeanor. She had always known exactly how and how much to push Rowan to get her to open up, experience things she might otherwise be too shy to do. It was one of her favorite things about her.
“Yeah, again.” She confirmed. Over and over again, she hoped.
She swallowed hard as the realization of their new positioning hit her. Was she really about to slide between the legs of her best friend? Before she had a chance to second guess herself, she felt a sharp tug on the drawstring of her basketball shorts that propelled her waist forward.
“I’m too short to keep leaning up like that. Plus, I like you better here, like this.”
“Oh my god Junie,” she breathed out against her lips before they crashed back together again.
Juniper’s hands shifted to cup her face as she changed the angle of their kiss and used her tongue to push Rowan’s mouth open.
Rowan started to panic about what to do with her own hands.
While her tongue was busy being led through a series of movements completely new to her, her hands were currently gripping into the grooves of the tailgate beside Juniper’s thighs, white knuckling the plastic, itching desperately to do something else.
What she wouldn’t give for even an ounce of the confidence Juniper had in this moment.
But the moment she felt legs wrap around her waist to hook against her lower back, her hands shot to grip Juniper’s hips instead.
Fuck, she loved those hips. She had watched Juniper slide in and out of tiny shorts all summer, revealing even smaller bikini bottoms that caused her to war with her own eyes over whether they should look or get lost.