It was like finger painting, and Emma was so soft.

Once upon a time, when Taylor had been younger and stupider, and when she had still been unable to apprehend the real why of why it all hurt, she had fancied herself some kind of artist. Every day, she drew hesitant lines of mottled and blending paint across blank paper with her fingertips, until her canvas was soggy and sagging. It was nothing special, but people treated it like she was the next great artist.

Now, Taylor traced her fingers along Emma's soft skin, and she was as clumsy as the finger painter she had once been, but Emma seemed to appreciate it anyways. The corner of her mouth was yielding, a pliable valley. Her long auburn hair was a carrot crown dipped in the same marmalade glow of evening which painted the walls red.

Emma's breath was warm. She smelled sweet in a way that Taylor couldn't place, two steps to the left of apricot juice. Underneath her chapstick, her lips were cracked from the erosion of nervous habit and too-sharp teeth. Her chapstick tasted like it was three steps to the right of honey.

From far below there came a cut-off commotion, the sound of bodies in motion, vibrating up into the driftwood bones of the house and settling through the walls. Creak. Taylor pulled away from Emma, glancing down to the floor at the side of the bed as if she could see through to find who had made the noise.

Neither of them moved for twenty seconds, as if the slightest twitch would bring the roof down upon their heads. And when the sound of feet against the corridor to Taylor's room didn't come, they relaxed. Emma let loose a nervous giggle, drunk in the moment. Certainly not drunk with alcohol, or with proper lust (they were perhaps too young for that). Not just with their feelings for each other, but with a kind of simple and earnest self-satisfaction.

This was something that was just for them. A moment that existed only for them, hidden furtively not because it was shameful per se, but because the secret somehow made it more meaningful, or because exposure would denigrate it.

Emma shuffled a bit, kneeling on the bedspread, and the noise was lost between the slats of the headboard. She looked shyly at Taylor, working up the nerve to re-initiate.

So Taylor did it for her. It felt a bit bad, initiating things; but she couldn't expect Emma to do all of the work for her, right?

And if she was being honest with herself, that was true, but it was also a rationalization; maybe she wanted Emma, maybe she wanted contact, maybe she had a twisted sense that if only she continued finger-painting the boundaries of their bodies, then she could redefine the borders of her own stupid skin, then she could change the way her bones and sinew took up space. A sense that she could bend herself into something not-unbearable through some imitation of osmosis. A ridiculous idea.

This was the kind of thing that she could never ever admit, because it made it sound like she didn't care about Emma except as a tonic for herself. But she did care. That was why she had agreed to 'practice' kissing with her. And it was only 'practice kissing' because even alone, just the two of them, they needed plausible deniability to broach the subject.

This was stupid. She was stupid. They were too young to be doing this (and 'this' was only kissing). Obviously.

Emma explored the space between Taylor's shoulders, her whirligig nails sketching circles and loops. Her smile was cider.

It felt nice.

"This was your idea," Taylor said without thinking about it, the words falling out of her mouth before she could even hear them in her own head. Her voice dim with thoughtlessness. "Why me?"

"Huh-? Who else? You're my best friend."

"You know what I mean," Taylor said. She somehow managed not to avert her eyes and look down to her lap, which was the first instinct of embarrassment, but also completely unhelpful given the circumstances. "You know…?"

Emma stared blankly, tense with confusion, which was perhaps proof that no-one thought about this as hard as Taylor actually did.

"Was it because you think of me as a boy?" Taylor asked, stumbling through the clumsiness. And Emma made a raspberry, shoving her tongue out with visible disgust.

"Oh, is that what you mean?" Emma deflated, her face lighting up with comprehension and falling with a kind of relief. "Don't be silly. Of course I don't."

"But you wanted to practice kissing with me?"

"Like I said: best friend?" Emma lay down next to Taylor. "You don't need to be a boy to be worth kissing."

"Oh," Taylor said, a shade stupidly. This wasn't some particular revelation; she knew, in principle, that you could kiss girls. She even knew that you could be a Girl Who Kissed Girls. It hadn't quite occurred to her, though, that the fact was relevant to her case in particular. Lesbianism was something that happened to other people, not a demographic that Taylor had expected to fall in personally.

Not that there was anything wrong with being a lesbian. Or that Emma was a lesbian just for kissing Taylor and enjoying it. Or that Taylor was a lesbian just for kissing Emma and enjoying it.

Where was she going with this? Right.

"But, you know…" Taylor trailed off. Dumb. Both of them already knew what she was about to say, anyways. "I used to be a boy."

Emma rolled her eyes, cast in the air of the long-suffering apologist.

"No you didn't."

"I did too," Taylor protested.

"Taylor, I swear to god, you were always the worst at pretending to be a boy, and if you think you were anything but the absolute worst, then you are seriously in need of a schooling."

Oh, well of course Emma would think that. She was the one who had seen Taylor (short-haired preschool Taylor, in jeans and a T-shirt, before the idea of transitioning or living as a girl was even a twinkle in her eye) and immediately decided that they were going to be BFFs, without fear of cooties, without realizing that Taylor was supposed to be a boy. Maybe Emma had always been the smart one. That was a nice thing to believe.

"I can't tell if you're trying to be nice or mean to me here, Ems."

"Nice, duh. You think I could ever be mean to you?"

"Not really," Taylor admitted.

"Well, good, because I won't ever be," Emma said pointedly. "Besides, I don't kiss people because I'm trying to be mean to them."

"I thought we were only practice kissing?"

"Same thing," Emma said flatly. "Sorry Tails, you're never gonna be my boyfriend. You could be a nice girlfriend, though."

Oh god, why was Taylor blushing? They'd already kissed. This was a completely stupid hill to die on. "I would not."

"You would too," Emma said, her eyes closed off to everything that wasn't in her own head. "You would be super cute. We would be super cute."

"Dad wouldn't understand. He already barely understands."

"You don't owe it to him to explain the completely obvious."

"But I want him to understand?" Taylor said.

"You can't spend all of your time justifying yourself before you even bother to live at all, Taylor."

"I can too."

"Well, you can, but you shouldn't." Emma nodded. "You know it. We'd make good mothers. You would make a good mother."

The image of Taylor and Emma, playing house as mother and mother in kindergarten, drifted in and out of Taylor's eyes, ringed in dust. She choked on her own words.

"E-Emma! You are being completely ridiculous."

"You're just using big words to avoid admitting that it's true."

Because Emma's eyes were still closed, of course, she didn't see the pillow that descended upon her face. And then they were at war, a pillow war, a pillow fight that could be remembered throughout the ages and sung of in epics.

And then the issue was dropped, for another time that would never come; and instead of maybe-girlfriends they were just friends who were girls. And by the time that Taylor knew they would never kiss again, well, it was as if they had never kissed at all. Because their intimacy only existed in their memories, and if Taylor tried to bring it up, well, Emma would deny it. And who would believe the word of a loser like Taylor over a popular girl like Emma?

And then, at the end of it all, the secrecy and of whatever they had enjoyed only served to hollow it out on the inside.