It had taken less than half the movie for Scott Fester to fall asleep, which left Julie sitting on the couch next to him in a fume of aggravation. He'd been the one who picked it out, after all. Historical period pieces like this weren't a favorite for either of them, but Scott had a thing for one of the stars and pleaded with Julie until she gave in.
Damnit, Scott
, she thought when she realized he was snoring.
Worse yet, as he'd nodded off, his shoulder and arm had slumped in next to hers, pressing strong, well-muscled biceps and deltoids against the skin of her much softer ones. Since the droolingly good looks of the film's leading man had been the only thing worth paying attention to, the sensation of contact with male flesh – Scott's flesh – set something simmering in her.
She sighed and looked at his face, pointing straight up as his head leaned back against the couch cushion.
Wake him up, Julie. Elbow him in the ribs. Make him suffer the rest of the way through this thing with you so you can bitch at him about it once it's done.
But she really couldn't. The clean, smooth cut of his features, all so perfect, and the mischievous disarray of his sandy curls went right through her. In moments like this, she saw all the way back to her first glimpse of him in third grade, when something about his eyes and his grin as he juggled a soccer ball struck a funny feeling into her chest that she didn't understand.
Oh, no, Julie
, she thought.
Don't. Not this again.
Across the room, angst shivered the voice of the film's heroine as she pleaded with her man not to return to the war. "I need you! I need you here! I couldn't bear it if ..."
Julie picked up the remote with her left hand. The wise, mature eighteen-year-old inside her meant to crank the volume up and jostle Scott with her elbow. But the weak, wistful young girl dialed it down instead, to just more than a whisper.
Her gaze returned to Scott's snoring face. Her right arm stayed pressed against him. Dropping the remote, she brought her left hand over and up, just short of brushing her knuckles and the back of her hand across his cheek. She moved the hand as though caressing him, diagonally down along his face, fingers curling, passing beneath his chin, then the whole hand extending to hover at his far cheek, feeling the warmth of it radiating through the air to her palm. At no point did she make contact.
She felt herself sucking her lower lip between her teeth, though she wasn't conscious of having initiated that.
Okay, that's enough. Wake him up and watch the rest of the movie, or just send him home.
Her hand glided through the air before his Adam's apple, eased its way in a careful curve that paralleled the front of his shirt, fabric tight across those athletic pectoral slabs, looser where his rib cage gave way to abs.
She heard her own breathing, faster than it should be.
There. That was very hot. Now move the hand away ... or ... or move it back up, pretend that you're feeling that powerful chest.
But she did not. Instead, her hand continued to float an inch or so above the line between his shirt and pants, right over the belt buckle.
She'd been moving her eyes back and forth from Scott's angelic, sleeping face to the path of her hand through the air. Now she focused them lower.
He lay slouched deeply into the couch, pelvis almost flat against the seat cushion. His legs weren't closed ... plenty of room between them for her hand.
Julie ...
She eased her fingers within a half-inch of his fly, then turned her hand and moved it farther, curling the fingers down between his legs, cupping the air just over his crotch.
Oh my god, what are you doing?
She had never gone this far before. The throb of her heart drowned out what was left of the sound from the television.
A glance at his face – still serene, snoring.
She shifted her body slightly, turning just enough to let her steal her right hand into the juncture between her legs without changing the contact between her upper arm and Scott's.
The touch of her finger, feather-soft against the tight fabric of her shorts, made her close her eyes a moment. She pressed more firmly, burrowing the finger between the flesh of her thighs to reach that perfect spot, right above her clitoris.
She gasped, trembled, lost her concentration – the fingers of her left hand grazed a seam in Scott's crotch.
Her eyes popped back open in a panic, but Scott didn't stir.
I'm touching him there
, she thought.
And she was. The seam ran right across a soft, smooth bulge that had to be his penis. Her fingertips remained in contact with that seam, its thick, firm weave telling her nothing about the feel of what lay beneath it, yet still electrifying to feel. Something surged within her. The flesh inside her panties inside her shorts under her hand heated and swelled.
She opened her legs a little and began to rub gently along the curve of her mound.
Her left hand slid off the seam, a fingertip tracing his shape under the thinner denim below it.
Oh, Scott ...
He was still snoring.
Both of her hands scaled their movements up – one braver, more raptured by curiosity in its explorations, the other more carnal, hungrily chasing the right position and the ideal amount of pressure to heighten her arousal and move forward into passionate masturbation.
The round shape beneath her left hand's gentle fingers now began to respond, first by swelling faintly, then by tensing, tightening the cloth that overlay it.
He's getting hard
, she thought.
I need to stop ...
Inside herself, though, she felt the harbinger warmth of her own orgasm approaching. Still at some distance, but getting closer, closer.
Her right hand intensified its desperate press of self-love. Her left eased tenderly up and down the tumescent shape in Scott's pants, no heavier than a tickle, but apparently enough to connect with something primal in him even in the midst of sleep.
She began to pant through her nose, trying to stay quiet. The rush and throb of climax called to her, very near now and being pulled steadily nearer with each stroke of her finger along the dampening crotch of her shorts.
Scott shifted, mumbled. His cock was a beam in his jeans, her hand folded around the upper curve of its length, easing up and down.
I need to stop, I need to stop –
So close ...
"Aah! Whu – " Scott's entire body suddenly stiffened harder than his dick beneath her fingers. "Julie! What the hell are you doing?"
Both her hands leapt in terror from their delightful work to her mouth.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"
A sea of guilt and fear, icy, sharp, washed the orgasm far away before it could carry her off.
Scott was gaping, looking from her to his own lap and back. "Oh my god!"
She felt herself starting to cry. Reflexively, she turned away and curled herself into her corner of the couch. "I'm so sorry, Scott, I don't know ... what an idiot, I ..."
"Oh, Jules." The shock had softened out of his voice. She didn't have to turn around to know that he had his hand on his forehead and that look in his eyes. "Julie, please don't do this."
She sniffled and quaked. She felt the touch of his hand on the round curve of her shoulder.
"Honey, come on," he said. "I'm sorry I freaked. One second I was having this fantastic dream with Trent Harkness all over me and the next – I mean, you just can't do that."
"I'm such a mess, Scott."
"No," he said strongly. "No, Jules, you're not. You're the greatest person I've ever met, and I've fucked up your life for almost three years now – "
The wind went out of her self-loathing and grief. She sniffled again and turned and put her arms around him. "Don't say that. You're not – it's not – "
"It is," he said, holding her tight. "It
is
my fault."
"Scott, I've told you this so many times. It was my idea. You know it was."
"But I said yes, and I've let it go on way, way past the point that it was obviously hurting you."
"It's not hurting me to pretend I'm your girlfriend, Scott. It's hurting me that I can't
be
your girlfriend. And it's going to hurt me whether we keep pretending for everybody else or not."
None of this was new. They'd said the same things a dozen times – more and more often this past year. The only difference was that this was the first time she'd tried to hand-rape her best friend in his sleep to get herself off.
"I shouldn't have touched you," she said, still breathing hard but with fewer tears now. "It was wrong, I knew it was wrong, I should never have done it. I'm really sorry, Scott. It won't happen again. Just please don't leave me."
He sighed and kissed the top of her head. "I just don't know what good it does anymore. It's only a couple months to graduation. So what if we break up? People break up all the time. Two and a half years – I don't think anybody's going to suddenly suspect I'm gay if we break up after two and a half years."
"No," she said, keeping her arms clenched around him. "But I'll have to spend the next two months with everybody feeling sorry for poor fat Julie Plunkett, who's so sweet but gosh we never did quite understand why somebody like Scott would be dating her."
"Shit, Julie, I wish you wouldn't talk that way about yourself."
"What, the way everybody else talks about me?"
"That's right. You're better than they are."
She was quiet for a while, holding close to this person she loved – so close, but without any possibility that they would ever be closer.
"Scott," she said at last, "when you go off to State ... that's going to break my heart whether you're my pretend-boyfriend all the way to the end, or if we pretend-breakup tomorrow. Can we just not change anything? Okay?"
"Okay, Jules, whatever you say." He rubbed her back with one hand. "But look, the part where you don't molest me while I'm sleeping is definitely one of the things we shouldn't change, all right?"
She laughed a little and squeezed him, though the empty and sad part of her still bobbed around inside her chest.
"Now," he said, "give me that remote so I can shut the damn TV off. Trent has let me down this time, that's all I have to say."
She gave him the remote. A little while later, he gave her a last hug and went home.
* * *
Prom was one of the biggest reasons Julie didn't want Scott to end their pretend romance. She knew it wasn't good for her to keep faking a relationship that he no longer even needed for cover – he'd been completely right about that. Football season was long over, everyone had senioritis, and Scott had never dived all the way into the social scene that the rest of the jocks carried on with. After four years on the team and two-and-a-half with a steady girlfriend, Scott Fester's sexual identity was not something anyone was going to waste their last couple of months in high school speculating about. But it was spring of senior year, and there was no way the school's most reliable fat joke would be getting a prom date if she and her boyfriend broke up, and then she'd miss out on that fabulous rite of passage that everyone spent the rest of their lives remembering. And anyway, how were she and Scott supposed to keep hanging out together if they'd publicly ditched each other as a couple?
