Alison's room is dark and quiet, peaceful even, but Emily is far from asleep. Like an old broken record, skipping and repeating in an endlessly random fashion, memories play on the back of Emily's eyelids, blurred but bright and effectively thwarting any attempts to rest. It could be midnight or it could be 5:00 a.m., but it doesn't matter anyway, because this night feels absolutely infinite and tick-tock of the clock is completely drowned out by this tangled mess of thoughts and the soft breathing of the girl next to her.
It's impossible to understand exactly how she got here, wrapped up in a room that smells entirely too much like the past, and it's useless to try and decide how she feels about it, especially when she can still hear Alison's confession replaying in her head; "those kisses weren't just for practice…"
They try to keep their distance, facing away from each other with a carefully calculated space between them, and they succeed with this for a time, but when Emily shatters the silence and they turn to face each other, their initial resistance is short-lived and half-hearted, because it's clear that they both want this.
Emily knows the truth, she knows that Alison has a nasty habit of spinning pretty lies, and she realizes that this night might just turn into another elaborate story. She knows this, accepts it as reality, but when she sees Ali there with wide, questioning eyes and the moonlight that softly frames her face, Emily simply cannot find it in herself to care. So she takes the chance, laying her heart on the table and leaning forward to press her lips against Ali's, just daring her to raise the stakes, and when she pulls back, there are no questions in Ali's eyes, only love and the trust that it requires.
They kiss, they collide, and it is unlike anything they have ever shared before. Previous encounters had been chaste and sweet, but this kiss is burning like hot coals and searing past pretenses, leaving them aching for more like they would die without it and never truly lived before it. It is the kiss that changes everything, marking an irreversible shift in their relationship and turning this into something truer than a lie, and even if this doesn't belong to Emily in the morning, it damn well belongs to her now.
