Grease and Cream

I woke up naked in a bed that wasn't mine, with an arm across my middle that definitely belonged to somebody else. My head was pounding like a drum line. I lay there for a good minute doing math, and the math kept coming up as "oh no." Not because I didn't remember. Because I did, every second of it.

The arm belonged to Beatrice. My neighbor. Thirty-four, graphic designer, the woman I'd argued with about parking spots for two years. She was still asleep, breathing slow, her hair a dark mess across the pillow.

And I was thirty-two years old and had no pants on.

I slid out from under her arm an inch at a time, like that would somehow undo whatever happened. It did not undo it. My clothes were in a pile by the door, and my bra was on the desk lamp. The desk lamp!

Beatrice cracked one eye open. "You're awake," she said. "Good. I was starting to think you'd sleep till noon."

"We really did that," I blurted out before my brain could stop my mouth, which is my whole problem in life honestly.

"We really," she said, stretching like a cat. "Twice, if memory serves. Maybe you remember it differently?"

"I remember a bar. I remember karaoke. I remember someone doing shots of something blue."

"That was you. Two of them. Then you switched to water to win the karaoke, and you made me switch too."

"That was me, okay. I remember the water. I remember all of it." I sat down on the edge of the bed, holding the sheet over my chest like that mattered at that point. "Beatrice, I don't do this. I don't do this at all. I haven't done this since, God, since I was twenty-four, a fling with a guy at the shop, and even that was a disaster. Eight years."

She propped her head on her hand. "So you're saying I'm your first in eight years. I'm going to be smug about that all week."

"Please don't be smug."

"I'm already smug. It's happening." She threw the blanket off and stood up, entirely unbothered by being naked at nine in the morning in front of a woman she'd once left a nasty note about. "Stay there. I have a proposition and also breakfast."

She padded out to the kitchen area and I sat there panicking quietly, running through all of it.

* * *

The party. Right. Some car show after-party at Lou's cousin's place, this huge loft, everyone from the shop plus a bunch of strangers. I'd gone because Lou basically pushes everyone out the door at five and says go have a life, which I resent and appreciate in equal measure. Beatrice had shown up too, some friend of a friend thing, and we'd ended up at the same table by the dessert spread.

That's when she did it. There was an éclair, cream filled, and she picked it up, held it to my mouth, and said, "Open."

I opened. I don't know why I opened. I was laughing and the whole room was loud and she just fed it to me like it was the most normal thing in the world, and cream got on my fingers, and she took my hand and licked the cream off my fingers, slow, looking right at me the entire time.

I remember my whole face going hot. I remember saying, "You can't just do that," and her saying, "I absolutely can, watch," and doing it again.

The rest of the party is a blur of noise, but not that part, and not one minute of what came after it. That part is in 4K.

* * *

Beatrice came back carrying a plate of croissants and an entire can of whipped cream. Not a little can. The big one. She set it on the nightstand and sat down cross-legged on the bed like we were about to plan a garage sale.

"Croissant?" she offered.

"I'm hungover and naked and confused. Sure."

She handed me one and I ate it in about four bites because apparently my body had decided food was happening whether I approved or not. She watched me with this little smirk she gets, the one I've seen across the hall a hundred times and never once thought about in this context.

"So," she said. "Do you remember the dessert course?"

"The éclair. Yes. I remember the éclair." My voice came out higher than I wanted. "Beatrice, what even was that?"

"That was me showing you my thing. The thing I've done before, but never with someone who got it like you did." She picked up the whipped cream can and turned it over in her hands. "Food. Feeding. Mess. Whatever you want to call it. I know it sounds silly."

"It does not sound silly. It sounds..." I hunted for a word. "Specific."

"It is very specific." She laughed. "I've had exactly two partners who were into it and one who thought it was gross, which killed the mood permanently, so I know what works. So when you let me feed you that éclair and didn't make a face, I may have gotten a little enthusiastic."

"A little. We ended up here."

"We ended up here," she agreed, and the smirk came back. "And there's one more thing I wanted to try last night, and we never got to it. You'd have been very into it."

"Oh no!"

"Oh yes!" She held out her hand. "Can I show you? It's just cream, Lis. It washes off."

I looked at her hand. I looked at the can. Every sane thought I had said go home, take a shower, never discuss this again, but apparently my sanity had been outvoted around the time of the finger-licking, because I put my hand in hers.

She shook the can, tapped my wrist with it like a doctor, and then squirted a fat white line of whipped cream across her own thigh, from just above the knee halfway up. My mouth went dry in a way that had nothing to do with the tequila.

"Clean it up," she said, quiet now, no smirk.

"I don't..."

"You can stop any time. That's the deal with all of it. Any time, any part of it. But I don't think you want to stop. I think last night you liked it more than you expected to, and I think that's scaring you a little."