Without a Uniform #3
“You constantly hide behind the board’s rules, behind professional ethics, behind that absurd and unhealthy need you have to control everything around you. But then you look at me, and I feel like the whole world is on fire.”
I take a deep breath, feeling my pulse racing in my temples.
“Alicia…”
“No, Clara. This time you’re not going to get away from me so easily.”
She takes another step forward, cornering me against the railing. Right now, she’s damn close to me. I can smell her perfume perfectly, feel the direct heat of her breath on my lips, and sense the fire burning inside us.
“You brought me your own jacket in the rain, out in the middle of the field,” Alicia continues in a broken whisper, gently touching my chest with her finger.
“You looked at me as if you really cared that I might get hurt. So don’t come at me now and tell me that what’s happening between us doesn’t exist just because you’re terrified to admit it out loud. ”
I’m barely able to defend myself, and it’s precisely because of that helplessness that I react in the worst possible way. Because some truths, when they’re thrown in your face, hurt just like an open wound against raw flesh.
“Can you just tell me what you want to hear from me?!” I snap at her, raising my voice much higher than I intended, losing my cool.
“What are you looking for? Do you want me to openly admit that I care about you? Do you want me to confess once and for all that what we have is crazy, but that I’m incapable of going even a single second of the day without thinking about you?
That every time you show up, you turn my life into perfect, avoidable chaos, and that, even so, I can’t get you out of my head no matter how hard I try?
Do you want me to tell you that I dream about you at night and then wake up in a lousy mood because I can’t control my own emotional impulses? Is that what you want?”
Her eyes don’t leave mine for even a millisecond, shining with an intensity that burns my eyelashes.
“Yes, Clara. That’s exactly what I want to hear.”
Brutal honesty sometimes has a beautiful, addictive cruelty.
We stand there, frozen, breathing each other’s air, too close.
With all the frustration that’s built up these past few days.
With all the wild, pent-up desire. With all our mental resistance crumbling like a house of cards.
Until, quite simply, there’s no more physical space or air left to keep pretending we’re sane when we’re not.
Either I kiss her in a fit of passion, or she kisses me, crashing her lips against mine; honestly, at this point, I couldn’t say for sure.
I only know that it happens. Suddenly. Abruptly.
Desperately. Necessarily. As if we’d both been holding our breath for weeks on end, waiting precisely for this blessed moment.
Her back hits the brick wall of the terrace with a dull thud, and my hands find her waist with a desperation that I know will embarrass me terribly tomorrow morning, but right now I couldn’t care less.
At this very moment, the only things that exist in the universe are her mouth, its warm, familiar, intoxicating taste, our pent-up rage, and the wild way she returns every one of my kisses, as if she, too, were exhausted from resisting the obvious.
It’s pure pent-up frustration. It’s physical hunger. It’s everything we don’t know how to control within the bounds of logic.
Alicia cups my face in her hands, pulling me deeper into her, and I feel that dizzying free fall of someone who realizes—too late—that she’s lost control of the game. I pull away from her lips first, purely out of raw survival instinct, gasping for air.
“This is still a terribly bad idea for both of us…” I manage to say, though my voice doesn’t sound convincing even to my own ears.
She presses her forehead against mine, keeping her eyes closed as she tries to steady her heartbeat.
“Yeah, I know. It’s a disaster.”
“We should stop right here and go back to the others before they get suspicious.”
“We should…”
But neither of us makes a move to budge even a centimeter from where we stand.
I truly look at her, without excuses, without defenses, and I realize that I no longer want to provoke her just to get the better of her pride, nor do I intend to control her, nor do I want to keep resisting the inevitable.
What I want, with every cell in my body, is to lose myself completely right there.
In that mouth. In this mess with legs. In her.
Alicia brushes my palm with her fingertips—a gesture that’s incredibly gentle, electrifying, and charged with a clear intention for the immediate future.
“If you really want to stop… then go, Clara. Turn around and go back to dinner.”
And I, acting like any sensible, rational person standing on the brink of an imminent emotional precipice, turn around and leave the terrace.
But I walk with her toward the shadows inside the restaurant.
Toward the dark hallway at the back. Toward the restroom.
Toward each and every decision that my brain knows perfectly well it must not make under any circumstances—and yet, my heart made them for both of us a very long time ago.