"Right." She settled back onto her heels, and her hand found me again, still hard, because apparently a near-discovery hadn’t done a single thing to dampen the situation. "The nympho thing. You were about to tell me it’s not a problem for you."

"I did tell you that."

"Tell me again." She stroked, slow, and her voice dropped into that lower register, the one stripped of performance, the honest one. "Because most people say it’s fine and then they get weird about it. They like it in the moment and then they think about it after and decide it means something bad about me. Or they treat me like a thing instead of a person, like the wanting cancels out everything else." Her thumb circled the head, and I hissed through my teeth. "So tell me again. That the real me isn’t too much."

I reached down. Caught her chin. Tilted her face up so she had to look at me instead of at what her hand was doing.

"You are exactly enough." I held her gaze. "The wanting doesn’t cancel anything. It’s part of you, same as the fashion opinions and the way you clock a room in three seconds and the fact that you build illusions when you’re happy that people say feel like coming home. You don’t get to keep the parts you think are acceptable and hide the rest. Not from me."

Her breath caught. The hand went still.

"Damn it." The words came out wet. "You did the thing again. The seeing thing. I was trying to seduce you and you turned it into feelings."

"I’m gifted."

"You’re impossible." She surged up, kissed me hard, and it tasted like salt and me and the specific desperation of someone who’d been waiting a long time to be told the thing I’d just told her. When she pulled back she was smiling, wrecked and radiant, the illusion of our fake selves still murmuring cinema criticism two feet away because she’d forgotten to drop it. "Okay. Okay. Feelings established. Can I finish you now, or do you want to process more."

"Finish."

"Thank god." She dropped back down.

And this time when she took me in, there was something different in it, less the hunger of proving a point and more the ease of someone who’d stopped bracing for the moment it went wrong. Her rhythm turned slower. Deeper. Her free hand slid up to rest flat against my stomach, not to grip, just to feel the muscle jump under her palm every time she pulled a sound out of me. The illusion beside us kept dissecting the third act in her voice while the real her did something with her throat that made my thoughts scatter like startled birds.

"Felicity." My grip found her hair again. "Close."

She hummed. The vibration undid me. Her free hand moved down between her own thighs, under the ruined skirt, and I realized she was touching herself while she worked me, chasing her own edge again, because of course she was, because too much was the whole point and she’d stopped apologizing for it somewhere in the last five minutes.

"Mmm, mmph, nnh." Muffled, greedy, both of us climbing at once, her hips grinding against her own hand, her mouth relentless, the wet sounds obscene enough that if the worker came back no illusion would save us.

I came with her name behind my teeth and her nails biting into my stomach, and she took all of it, swallowing, moaning around me as her own second finish rolled through her a half-second later, her whole body curling forward, her forehead pressed to my hip, muffling the sound she couldn’t quite stop.

The illusion beside us flickered. Died.

Silence, except for the movie and the ragged sound of two people trying to remember how breathing worked.

She sat up eventually, boneless, and let herself tip sideways into the seat next to mine, her head finding my shoulder. On screen the hero was walking into a sunset with his team, the credits threatening to roll, ninety minutes of Tokyo heroics wrapped up in a bow neither of us had watched.

"So." Her voice came out hoarse. Satisfied. Ruined in the good way. "Best friends who occasionally destroy each other in campus movie theaters and then make faculty employees think we’re discussing pacing."

"That’s a specific arrangement."

"I’m a specific person." She turned her head, pressed a kiss to my jaw, soft and unhurried, none of the earlier urgency left in it. "You’ve got Sloane at eight. You should shower first. You smell like me and she’s going to know."

"She’s going to know regardless."

"Yeah." Something flickered across her face, quick, gone before I could name it. "She is. And you’re going to tell her, aren’t you. First. Before she finds out through gossip or that bond thing you won’t fully explain."

"That’s the deal I made."

"Good." She said it like she meant it, and mostly she did, but there was a hairline crack under the word, the sound of a girl deciding to be okay with something before she’d actually gotten there. "For what it’s worth. I’m not trying to blow up your life. I know that’s what this looks like from the outside. Girl with an agenda, wedging herself into a relationship that already exists." She sat up, started fixing her skirt, her hair, the disaster of her makeup with the resigned efficiency of someone who’d done damage control before. "But I meant what I said. I want the version where everybody keeps everybody. I’m not built for the version where someone loses."

I watched her put herself back together in the flickering light. The performance sliding back into place piece by piece, the sharp warmth returning to her eyes, the loneliness folding itself back under all that charm where nobody was supposed to see it.

"Felicity."

"Mm?"

"You’re not going to lose."

She stopped. Compact and mirror out, mid-swipe at the mascara wreckage on her cheek.

Then she smiled, and it was almost the real one.

"Go shower, Belmont." She snapped the compact shut. "Your girlfriend’s waiting."