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“I’m sorry. I’m only twenty-five. I don’t flop.” Melindakissed Kyle’s forehead. “I won’t flop – I hope, at least – until I’m in my fifties.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I meant that you very gracefullyclimbedon top of me naked while I’m fully clothed.”

“Whose fault is that?” Melinda lifted an eyebrow. “I set my alarm to go off a full twenty minutes early so that we could have a quickie, and I find you out here with barriers to said quickie.”

“In that case, you should’ve let me in on your plans last night,” Kyle replied.

“I like spontaneity in the bedroom,” Melinda told her. “You should keep that in mind.”

“I plan to,” Kyle said, smiling up at her.

“Hey, are you okay?” Melinda asked. “Last night was…”

“I know. I’m sorry I brought the mood down.”

“No,” Melinda said, shaking her head. “Babe, you didn’t bring anything down. This is part of dating: we’re getting to know each other, and that means the bad with the immense multitude of good.”

“Immense multitude, huh?”

Melinda nodded seriously and said, “Yes, definitely. I had an amazing night last night, Kyle. I feel like just talking to you about all the stuff you’ve been through tells me about who you are, and who you are is a very good person, whom I happen to really, really like.”

“Thank you for taking care of me last night,” Kyle told her and cupped Melinda’s cheek to give her a quick kiss, their first of the morning.

“I assume you mean the talking and the holding and not the orgasms?”

Kyle laughed and replied, “All of the above.”

“Well, I’d love to deliver more of all of the above right now, but I have to get ready for work.”

“I was enjoying you lying here on top of me, though.”

“Trust me, me too. But I’m opening this morning, so I can’t be late. You can stay here for as long as you want, though. The beauty of me working right downstairs is that,if you want to hang out, you can do so, and when you leave through the office whenever, I get to kiss you goodbye.”

“Unless I leave when you’re walking people around the city, showing it off.”

“Well, don’t dothat, obviously.” Melinda winked at her and kissed her again before she climbed off her.

Kyle stared at Melinda’s ass as the woman walked back into her bedroom. She’d had so many plans for that body until her mother had shown up and changed their night entirely. She still couldn’t believe how close she felt to Melinda already, though. She’d never shared the things she shared with her last night with another lover, date, or girlfriend in her life. Most of them, and there hadn’t been all that many, just thought she and her mother didn’t get along very well. None of them had known the extent of it until Melinda. Kyle wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, but she liked the idea of having someone to talk to about all the stuff she’d been holding in.

Her sister was someone who understood the experience of growing up with their mother, but she was the baby in the family, so she oftentimes sided with Kyle in the moment but went crawling back to their mother when the woman told her she loved her and needed something like money or someone to pick her up from work because her car died again. Jolie wasn’t someone Kyle knew she could ever tell all her feelings to because of that, and she didn’t want to do that anyway. To Jolie, that was her mother, and she had her own experiences and feelings for the woman that weren’t all mixed up with the complicated ones Kyle had for her, so Kyle didn’t want to impose her own feelings and opinions onto her sibling. Melinda was a different story. Melinda was hers, or at least, that was how it felt to Kyle. She could tell her anything, and Melinda would still be there to listen. Kyle had never had that, and as she lay on Melinda’s sofa, thinking, she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to be without it again.

“Lunch today?” Melinda asked, coming out of her bedroom, wearing her work uniform.

“You look cute,” Kyle noted.

“I look like I’m going to work.” Melinda looked down at her outfit.

“In your cute uniform.” Kyle wiggled her eyebrows at her. “And yes, to lunch.”

“Do you want to hang out in the office until I have to go, or go with me?” Melinda sat down on the sofa, lifting Kyle’s legs into her lap.

“No, I have my own work to do, unfortunately,” she replied before she rolled a little to pick up her phone and held it up.

“On your phone?”

“My laptop is at the house,” Kyle said. “I’ll leave with you and work from there.”

“What if your mom shows up?”