I drove us back to Carly's apartment as the sun was going down and the city was lighting up. We had come down, so we weren't acting weird around Spencer, but we still had the munchies. We talked him into making spaghetti tacos for us, and man, they were great. The flavors were just layered so precisely.
Now it's late at night, and Carly and I are sitting on the floor of her bedroom, flipping through the channels on her little 13" TV that she keeps up here. We're in the dark, leaning against her bed, stripped down to our sleeping clothes - nylon shorts and tank tops.
We watch a few minutes of some terrible movie on the Science Fiction Channel, something about a mutated giant fish that eats college kids during Spring Break. When the commercial comes on, Carly says, "I wonder if that kid today noticed we were high."
"Eh, he's probably too young to have noticed. I mean, I doubt he recognized the signs."
She draws her knees up to her body, like maybe she is cold. "I just wouldn't want the word to get out. I mean, I still forget about the whole 'being famous' thing. I guess we both still are, kind of."
"Hey, as long as people are still asking for autographs..." I trail off.
She rests her chin on her knees and hums a few bars of some tune I can't place. "What did we do before iCarly?"
"What do you mean?"
"We were friends for years before we started doing the show."
"And we'll be friends for years after," I reassure her.
She smiles. "Even if we just grow up to be totally normal and boring and get jobs as office drones or real estate agents?"
"Hey, you're the intellectual. I'll probably just go to work at the fish canning factory downtown after I graduate high school."
"You're too pretty for that," she says quietly.
I scoff. I suppose 'psss' is an appropriate scoffing noise.
"You are," she insists.
Now I draw my knees up close to my body to fight the sudden chill that spreads across my skin even as a warmth fires up low in my stomach.
"You are," she repeats softly. "You know, for a long time I didn't think I was good enough to be your friend."
"You didn't think you were good enough for me?" This astounds me, that the smartest, sweetest, prettiest girl I know, who rescued me from white trashery and juvenile delinquency, thought she wasn't good enough to be friends with Sam Puckett, the spawn of criminals and low lives and junkies and thieves.
"I thought I was all gross and weird looking," she says. "Especially when I was little. I looked like a frog or something."
"Don't ever say that," I tell her, turning to her, fighting the fluttering of my heart and the tightness in my throat and the little shivers I can't control. "You're beautiful."
I can barely read her expression through the dim glow of the TV. The colors shift across her face, and I can't tell if she's going to laugh or cry. She picks the remote control up off the floor beside her and turns the TV off. We sit in total darkness.
"So we're two beautiful girls," she says. "What are we going to do with our lives?"
I shrug, even though I know she can't see me. "What do you love the most?"
Silence for a long time.
"Carly?"
"Come over here, Sam."
And it's just a few feet of dark space, but it seems to take forever for me to feel my way across the carpet. I move until I feel our heat mingling in the short distance between our bodies; and I can sense her hesitation, her final moment of doubt, but then her hand is on the curve where my neck and shoulder meet, and there is the smell of toothpaste and strawberry lip gloss as her lips graze mine.
I kiss her back, and it is soft, just our two mouths tasting each other. Her hands are on me, cold at first but quickly warming as they glide over my skin. She shifts her body forward until she's practically sitting on my thigh, and runs her hands under my tank top, counting my ribs, sliding her hands around to the back, her palms flat against each side of my spine, moving up until I realize she's taking my shirt off. I let her do it, then my fingers go to the hemline of her shirt, and she raises her arms to let my strip it up and off. I toss the shirt aside and my mouth goes to her breasts. Her hands are twisting knots in my hair as she moans deep and slow, and I have to do this - I have to give her this pleasure; I have to let her know she is beautiful inside and out.
But oh, now she is taking charge, guiding my body to the floor, the carpet on my back, her sylph like body on top of me now, light as a piece of paper. My fingers dance along her spine while hers slip under the waistband of my shorts and explore.
"Your hair is so soft," she whispers against my ear as her fingers work through my pubes, work lower, the pad of her index finger now teasing at my entrance, sliding up and down with the barest touch. Waves of pleasure pulse out from my center, to my hips, down my legs, up my spine. My arms tighten around her, and the warmth of her breasts and tummy and legs burn against my body. I kiss the hollow spot under her ear.
And now somehow she has worked my shorts down and wiggled out of her own and locked her body against mine, our warmth and wetness intermingling. She is rocking back and forth in an easy, unhurried rhythm, rubbing her clit against mine. The slender muscles along her back are so tense. She lets our short, ragged moans. She draws her head up and opens her eyes and looks at me, and even in the dim light that is seeping in through the window I can tell there is no fear or doubt or uncertainty. There is only love. There is only this moment.
My left hand is on her lower back, and my right hand is grabbing fistfuls of carpet beside me, and I know that everything has changed.
And so we both continue to moan in the darkness and rock against each other; and the one thing I am sure of is that we both will eventually find IT, whatever IT is, that thing we both need to make our lives complete. We'll figure it out and everything will work out right.
And I know that things always change, but you live through that stuff anyway.
