Chapter 1
I don’t really know how to start this, except to say that I’d been carrying it around for so long that it had started to feel like a stone in my chest. This thing I wanted. This stupid, embarrassing, ridiculous thing I wanted.
Diana was my best friend. Had been since we were sixteen. She was all golden hair and easy confidence, the kind of girl who walked into rooms and made them feel warmer. And I was, well. Me. Kelly. Pale as milk, dark-haired, the sort of person who apologises to furniture when she bumps into it. We were sitting cross-legged on her bed on a Saturday afternoon in October, the radiator ticking in the corner, mugs of tea gone lukewarm on the nightstand, and I was trying to work out how to say it.
I’d been trying to work out how to say it for about three years.
“You’ve gone really quiet,” Diana said. She was painting her nails. Pale pink. She was always doing something with her hands when we talked, like her body needed an excuse to stay still. “What’s going on in there?”
“Nothing.”
“Kelly.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re doing the thing where you pull at your sleeve.”
I looked down. I was, in fact, pulling at my sleeve. I stopped.
“I have to tell you something,” I said.
She looked up from her nails. Really looked at me, you know? That direct blue-eyed look she has that makes you feel like she can see straight through your skin. “Okay,” she said, quietly. Like she was making space for it.
And then I said it. I just said it. God help me.
“I have this, um.” I stopped. Started again. “I have this kink. I guess. This thing that I think about.”
She put the nail brush back in the bottle, very carefully, and gave me her full attention. Which somehow made it worse.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Being naked,” I said. My voice came out sort of flat and strange, like I was reading from a list. “Around girls who are, like, dressed. Being the only one. Being, um.” I pressed my lips together. “Being made to feel it. The difference. The exposure. I don’t know, Diana, I know it’s weird, I know it’s completely—”
“Hey.” She said it gently. “It’s not weird.”
“It is, though.”
“It really isn’t.” She tilted her head a little. That small, careful look she gets. “How long have you been sitting on this?”
“A while.”
“Kelly. How long?”
“Maybe three years.”
She let out a slow breath. Not exasperated. Something softer than that. “God, you silly thing,” she said, and there was so much warmth in it that my eyes went hot for a second. “Thank you for telling me.”
I nodded. Looked at my hands.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to? Now, I mean.” A pause. “With me?”
The stone in my chest dropped about fifteen centimetres. “What?”
“Is that something you’d want?” She was very calm about it. Genuinely calm, I mean, not performing calm. “You don’t have to. Obviously you don’t have to. But if you want to, I’m asking.”
I sat there for what felt like a very long time.
Then I nodded. Just once. A tiny, mortifying nod.
Diana smiled. Not a smug smile. Not a teasing one. Just, you know, warm. She uncapped her nail polish again and blew on her fingers to dry them.
“Okay,” she said. “Then I want you to take your clothes off for me.”
Oh god.
Oh, that was it, wasn’t it. That was the thing. I felt it go through me like a current, that sentence, low and clean and devastating, and my face went so hot I could feel it in my ears.
“Right now?” I said.
“Right now.”
“Here?”
“Here.” She settled back against the headboard, legs stretched out, perfectly at ease in her jeans and her soft grey jumper, holding her mug of tea like we were just having a normal conversation. “Take your time. But yes.”
I stood up from the bed. My legs felt a bit unsteady. The room was warm, the curtains were drawn, there was nothing practically threatening about any of it, and yet my heart was going absolutely mad.
I stood in the middle of her bedroom floor and I looked at her, and she looked back at me, and there was this moment where I almost laughed, or cried, or ran away. I didn’t do any of those things. I reached for the hem of my shirt.
“Wait,” Diana said.
I froze.
“Tell me how that feels. Right now. Before you do it.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Tried again. “It feels, um.” My voice was embarrassingly small. “It feels scary. Like, I know it’s just you, but my heart’s going really fast, and I feel like, I feel like I’m about to step off something.”
“Good,” she said quietly. “Keep going.”
I pulled my shirt up over my head.
The air was warm but I felt every millimetre of it on my skin, on my arms, on my stomach, and I held the shirt in my hands for a second like I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. I set it on the end of the bed. Diana watched me. She didn’t leer, didn’t make it weird, just, watched, with this very steady attention that somehow made it so much more intense than if she’d been obviously ogling me.
“And now?” she said.
“Now I feel, um.” I looked at the carpet. “Aware. Really aware. Of where I am in the room. Of you being there. Of you having your clothes on.” I swallowed. “It makes me feel small.”
“In a bad way?”
“No,” I admitted. My face was so hot. “No, not in a bad way.”
She nodded, like this was perfectly reasonable information. “Jeans,” she said.
I undid the button. The zip. I pushed them down and stepped out of them carefully, folded them over the shirt, and then I was standing in my underwear in the middle of Diana’s bedroom, in my plain black bra and my cotton knickers, and I had never felt so simultaneously ridiculous and completely, devastatingly alive.
Diana looked at me. All of me. Just, took me in, calm and unhurried, and I stood there and let her, because what else was I going to do.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Like.” I pressed my hands against my thighs. “Like I want to cover myself but I also don’t want to. Like I’m very conscious of where my body starts and ends. Like I’m, um.” I stopped.
“Like you’re what?”
“Like I’m very aware of the fact that you can see me and I can see you and we are not the same right now.” I said it very quietly. “You’re dressed. I’m not. And that difference feels, like, enormous.”
“It is enormous,” Diana said simply. She sipped her tea. “Do you want to keep going?”
I looked at her.
“Yes,” I said. And then, before I could think better of it, before the embarrassment could swallow the want: “Please. Please make me.”
Something shifted in her face. Not dramatically. Just, a kind of settling into it.
“Take off your bra, then,” she said.
My fingers were clumsy. I reached back, unhooked it, and let the straps fall off my shoulders and drop the whole thing onto the pile of clothes. And then I was standing there and Diana was looking at my chest and I wanted to die, I really did, I wanted to absolutely dissolve into the carpet.
“Kelly,” Diana said, and her voice was very soft. “You have the most beautiful little breasts.”
I made a noise. I don’t know what kind of noise it was. Some awful, embarrassing, involuntary thing.
“They’re perfect,” she said, completely matter-of-fact, which was somehow worse than if she’d made a big deal of it. “Honestly. Small and perfect and lovely.”
“Diana, please,” I whispered.
“Please what?”
“Please don’t, I’m, I can’t.” I pressed my hands briefly to my face. “I’m so embarrassed.”
“I know you are,” she said gently. “That’s the point, isn’t it.”
It wasn’t a question. She knew. She just, knew, and had decided to hold it for me, and I was so grateful and so mortified I could barely breathe.
“Knickers,” she said.
I pulled them down. Stepped out of them. Added them to the pile.
And there I was. Completely naked. Standing in the middle of my best friend’s bedroom at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, every pale inch of me out in the open, while Diana sat on her bed in her jeans and her grey jumper, absolutely fine, completely composed, looking at me.
The silence went on for a moment.
“Tell me,” she said. “Exactly what it feels like. Right now.”
I made myself look at her. It was hard. My whole body wanted to fold in on itself.
“Vulnerable,” I said. “Really, really vulnerable. Like there’s nowhere to hide, you know? Like, my skin feels, I don’t know, hyper-real. Like I can feel the air on parts of me that are never usually, like.” I laughed, a short, helpless sound. “I feel exposed. Obviously. But it’s more than that, it’s like, the fact that you’re looking at me and you have all your clothes on, it makes the exposure feel deliberate. Chosen. Like it means something.”
Diana was quiet for a moment. Then: “Your skin is extraordinary,” she said. “You know that? You look like you glow.”
I felt my face crumple, just a little. “I’m so turned on,” I said, and saying it out loud was its own small humiliation. “I’m sorry. I know that’s weird.”
“Don’t apologise,” she said firmly. “Does it feel wrong to you? Being turned on by this?”
“Kind of. Yeah. I mean.” I wrapped my arms loosely around myself and then made myself put them back down. “You’re my best friend. I’m standing here naked and you’re my best friend and part of me thinks that’s, like, completely wrong, and then the other part of me.” I stopped.
“Tell me.”
“The other part of me wants to submit to you,” I said. Very quietly. “Like, properly. I want to just. Give you this. Give you the embarrassing, naked, vulnerable version of me and have you see it and not run away.”
Diana put her mug down on the nightstand. Very deliberately.
“Kelly,” she said. “Do you want to touch yourself for me?”
I stopped breathing.
“What?”
“You heard me.” She said it gently, but without any real softness. “Do you want to masturbate for me? As, I don’t know, a way of showing me. Of trusting me with it.”
I closed my eyes.
“Yes,” I said. My voice was almost nothing. “Can I? Can I, please?”
She stood up from the bed. She was taller than me, always had been, and standing there in front of me while I was completely naked she seemed, I don’t know. Present. Significant. She reached out and touched my jaw very lightly with her fingertips, tilted my face up so I was looking at her.
“Get on the desk,” she murmured. “On your knees. And spread your thighs so I can see you.”
Oh.
Oh, I was done.
“And then,” she continued, very quietly, right next to my ear, “you’re going to touch yourself. And you’re going to tell me how it feels. Every bit of it. Okay?”
I nodded. I couldn’t speak.
The desk was just a plain white IKEA thing in the corner, nothing on it except her lamp and a few books. I climbed onto it, knees on the surface, the wood smooth and slightly cool under me, and I settled back on my heels and then, with every cell in my body screaming with mortification, I let my thighs fall open.
Diana pulled the desk chair out and sat down directly in front of me. Close. Close enough that I could see her face clearly, could see her eyes travelling over me, unhurried and thorough.
I had never felt so naked in my life. Which is, you know, saying something.
“I’ve never done this,” I said. My voice was unsteady. “In front of another girl. I’ve never. I mean, I’ve thought about it, obviously I’ve thought about it, but actually being here and you actually being there and being able to, like, see right.” I stopped. Laughed, a small, desperate laugh. “You can see everything.”
“I know,” she said simply.
“It’s making me so, god, Diana, it’s making me so hot.” I pressed my hands to my thighs. “I feel desperate. I feel sort of wild. Like I need to, like I need to.”
“Then touch yourself,” she said. “Go on.”
I slid my hand between my legs.
The sound I made was embarrassing. Immediately, completely embarrassing, a small, caught sound that I couldn’t have suppressed if I’d tried, because I was so ready, so wrung-out with wanting, that even the first light touch was almost too much.
“Tell me,” Diana said, her voice low and even.
“It’s, god, okay.” I was already losing the ability to form sentences. “It feels like, it feels like relief and terror at the same time. Like I’ve been holding my breath for ages. You watching me is.” I moved my fingers, slow, and my whole body shuddered. “You watching me is making it so much more, like, I can feel you looking at me, I can feel where your eyes are, and it’s making everything more intense, everything’s so, Diana, I’m so close, I’m already so—”
“Stop,” she said.
I stopped.
I actually stopped. My hand went still. My whole body was shaking with the effort of it.
“Diana,” I said. It came out broken.
“I know,” she said. “Just wait.”
I waited. I kneeled on her desk, bare and trembling and completely beside myself, and she sat in her chair and looked at me, and the thirty seconds that followed were the longest thirty seconds of my life.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Now. Come for me.”
I moved my fingers and I came within about ten seconds, which is, you know, mortifying, except that I was so far past being able to care about mortifying. The orgasm went through me like being turned inside out, like every nerve ending I owned deciding to fire at once, and I heard myself make sounds I didn’t recognise, desperate and unguarded sounds that bounced off the walls of Diana’s small warm bedroom, and my thighs were shaking and my forehead dropped forward and I just, held on, held on through all of it until it finally, finally started to ebb.
Then it was quiet.
I became aware of myself in pieces. The smoothness of the desk under my knees. The warmth of the radiator. The fact that I was naked. Still naked. Kneeling on my best friend’s desk with my thighs apart and my hair in my face.
The shame hit me like cold water.
“Oh god,” I said. Very quietly.
“Hey.” Diana was already on her feet. She moved around the desk and put her arms around me from behind, just, wrapped herself around me, warm and solid and completely clothed. I could feel the softness of her jumper against my bare back. “Hey. You’re okay.”
“I’m so embarrassed,” I said. My voice was muffled. “Diana, I’m so embarrassed, I don’t know what I.”
“You don’t need to know,” she said. “You’re okay. You’re really okay.”
I let her help me down off the desk. She picked up the throw blanket from the end of her bed and put it around my shoulders, and I pulled it around myself and sat on the edge of the mattress and just, sat there, feeling scraped clean and fragile and somehow very, very young.
Diana sat beside me. Close enough that our shoulders touched.
“That was beautiful,” she said. “You know that?”
I shook my head.
“It was. You were.” She bumped her shoulder against mine. “You trusted me with something huge, Kelly. You actually let yourself have it. Do you know how hard that is?”
“I feel ridiculous,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” she said. “You also look like someone who just had the best orgasm of her life, so.”
I laughed. God help me, I actually laughed, and it was the good kind, the kind that breaks the tension, and Diana laughed too, and for a moment it was just us, exactly us, her in her jeans and her grey jumper and me wrapped in a blanket on her bed.
“Thank you,” I said, when the laughing had settled.
“For what?”
“For, just.” I shook my head. “For not making it weird. For making it, like, safe. For actually.” I stopped and pressed my lips together and tried again. “I’ve wanted something like that for so long and I didn’t think anyone would ever just, let me have it. Let me actually experience it. So.” I looked at her. “Thank you.”
Diana put her arm around me and squeezed.
“Any time,” she said, and I knew she meant it.
