JUST FRIENDS

"What's going on between you and Isaac?"

Allison's heart stopped. "What?"

Lowering her textbook which she held up in the air in front of her face, Lydia stared at Allison for a moment before setting the book down. Propping herself up into a sitting position on the mattress, Lydia asked again, "I said, what's going on between you and Isaac?"

Allison stared at her, dumbfounded. Lydia stared back, her eyes narrowed in scrutiny, as if she was trying to read Allison's thoughts—to pierce through the lie that she probably thought Allison was going to tell.

"Nothing," Allison replied simply. This wasn't a complete lie. In all honesty, Allison didn't know where she stood with Isaac. She couldn't even pinpoint the exact moment in time when she started hanging out with him—she did, after all, once slash him with a pair of Chinese ring daggers in the back a few times.

Lydia didn't stop staring, a look of accusation bright upon her face. Allison looked at her innocently. "What?"

"What's going on between you and Isaac?"

"I just told you."

"And you're lying."

Allison huffed an air of exasperation from her mouth. "What do you want me to say? I know what you're thinking, and you're wrong on every level. We're just friends."

"Just friends?"

"Just friends," Allison repeated firmly. That much she was sure of herself; there were moments where she had indeed felt something toward Isaac—the electricity that cackled between their fingertips when she placed her hand over his as she taught him the basics of riding a motorcycle, or the feeling of liberation that she felt when she allowed herself to be steadied by him back at the bank vault when her foundation was about to give way beneath her—, but most of the time Allison dismissed them and attributed them to some other emotion, like desperation.

Lydia raked her eyes over Allison one last time before dropping back to her former position on the bed, in which she just lay there. Allison looked away from her and focused her attention on her textbook, propped on top of her lap, and did her best not to dwell on Lydia's question.

She didn't know what it was that was going on between her and Isaac. She knew she would find out at some point, but at the moment she didn't care. It scared her to care.

Allison woke up with a start. She found herself sitting upright on her bed, and to her bemusement saw Lydia fast asleep, completely untouched by Allison's nightmare, and therefore unperturbed. Allison threw herself down, exhaling as she did.

Her panties were so incredibly wet. They were so wet she imagined some of her come had seeped out of them and onto the bed linen; taking precaution, Allison shifted her leg over to where she predicted she had stained the bed, lest Lydia woke up later on and discovered that Allison had orgasmed in her sleep.

She could still feel the relics of her dream; the heat fading in her core, which once was a burning flame before her aunt Kate decided to show up and torture her boyfriend.

Boyfriend, repeated Allison in her mind. No, Isaac wasn't her boyfriend. Why did she think that? Sex partner was more like it...

But they weren't having sex in real life either. They were friends. Just friends, and merely platonic.

But what they were doing before her aunt's interruption—the roaming hands, his kisses that seared themselves into her skin and incinerated her from within, the sounds he ejected from her, the breathiness with which they forced out their words as they struggled to communicate with each other, the satisfaction running like an undercurrent in her veins that came with the knowledge that she could make him hard, the gyration of his hips as he ground himself against her, the friction, the tension, the fire...

She liked it. She loved it. And she wanted more.

As her inner horny teenager gradually retreated, Allison noticed a sharp coldness pressing against the bare skin of her thighs. Reaching down, Allison closed her fingers around the handle of something and she pulled the object out. It was a Chinese ring dagger. The same one she held in her dream as her aunt taunted her to kill Isaac.

In mixed horror, disbelief, and incomprehension, Allison dropped the knife. Her hand was still suspended in midair before she finally sobered and realized what was happening.

It wasn't just a dream. It was a foretelling.

Panic rushed through Allison from every orifice of her body. She leapt off her bed in haste and scrambled clumsily for her phone. Her fingers fretted about the virtual keys on her screen as she tried to find Isaac's number. This could not be happening. This could not be happening...

She dialed his number but the ringing droned on forever before it went straight to voicemail. She didn't bother to leave a message; if her suspicions were right, then he'd never get to them anyway. She dialed again, dread eclipsing whatever prudent calmness she had left, and dialed again when her call went to voicemail again.

"PICK UP THE PHONE ISAAC!" Allison screamed. It was the dead of night and there was a sleeping girl on her bed, but Allison didn't care. She needed the assurance that Isaac was okay. That something bad didn't befall him... that he didn't somehow fall onto a Chinese ring dagger...

"Allison? What's wrong?"

Allison's heart did a double take at Lydia's voice. Allison stared at her in horror, and she temporarily forgot about the incessant ringing of her phone as a solemn quiet settled in the air between the two girls.

"Allison what's wrong? You look like the walking dead."

Terror must had been written all over her face. She must had looked like a scared little girl, like a weak little thing, not a strong force to be feared, not that which she had always sought to attain.

But at the moment, she did not care.

"Call Isaac," Allison croaked. When Lydia raised her eyebrows, she screamed, "DO IT!"

Shocked into submission, Lydia complied, but she received the same result—voicemail. Allison threw her phone down on the table, having given up trying to call him, and began to pace about frantically across her room. This could not be happening. This could not be happening...

"I'm going to go to Scott's," Allison decided aloud. Ignoring the confusion that was plastered on Lydia's face, Allison continued, "If you get a call from Isaac, call me, okay?"

"Alright, but what's going—"

Then Allison's phone rang. For a second everything seemed to segue into slow motion, and Allison stared at her phone, in shock, disbelief, or relief, she did not know.

Then everything sped up and Allison picked up, her heart racing out of her chest. "Isaac? Please tell me—"

"Dude why the hell did you call me a hundred times in the middle of the night?"

Relief washed over Allison, and in that moment Allison told herself that if Isaac was going to be mad at her for the disturbance that she caused him, she wasn't going to complain. He was alright. He was alive. It was all just an overreaction.

"Nothing," Allison said, a smile creeping on her face. She missed his voice. She recalled her dream, before the horror of it all, when the two of them were making out. She reveled in the heat, but as she listened to Isaac rant about her waking up the entire McCall household, she realized that maybe heat wasn't all that she craved—there was pleasure in every moment that she spent with Isaac.

So she talked to him. She talked to him, and she felt like she was being brought out of what she would had regarded as a ceaseless night. And as she did, she saw Lydia staring at her, with a peculiar expression on her face.

"I thought you two were just friends," Lydia said.