Chapter 2: The Research Begins
The awkwardness the next morning was a tangible thing. It hovered in the space between their twin beds as they shuffled to their shared microwave to heat oatmeal, avoiding direct eye contact. It was in the way Fender cleared his throat three times before asking if she wanted the last of the almond milk. It was in the way Callie’s fingers trembled slightly as she wiped her glasses on her shirt, replaying the feel of his mouth on her neck in a silent, looping instant replay.
“So,” Fender finally blurted out over the cacophony of his spoon scraping the bowl. “I was thinking. We could… watch a movie. Tonight. Over at my place. My roommate’s gone for the weekend.”
Callie looked up, meeting his gaze. His expression was painfully hopeful, like he’d just proposed a radical new theorem and was awaiting peer review. It melted the cold knot of post-mortem anxiety in her chest. He wasn’t running. He was… scheduling further research.
“As friends?” she asked, testing the waters.
“As… us,” he said, shrugging. “Whoever that is now. But with a movie. As a buffer variable.”
She smiled. “A cinematic control. Yeah. Okay.”
Fender’s single dorm room was a dim cave, lit only by the frantic glow of a spaceship battle on his laptop screen. They’d chosen a deliberately safe, loud sci-fi epic. They sat on his futon, a respectable foot of space between them, a bowl of stale popcorn balanced precariously on a textbook between them. They shouted comments about the bad physics, argued about the protagonist’s logic, and for two hours, they were exactly what they’d always been: best friends.
It was a relief. It was also, subtly, a letdown.
When the credits rolled, the silence felt different from the comfortable ones they usually shared. It was loaded, like the air before a thunderstorm. Fender stretched, his arm brushing her shoulder. “Well, that was profoundly unrealistic.”
“The warp core alignment alone violated at least three laws we know of,” Callie agreed, her voice sounding too loud. “My laptop died. Can I check my email on yours? I’m waiting for a TA response on the project.”
“Sure, it’s on the desk,” he said, getting up to gather the bowls. “Password is ‘Einst3in’ with a three.”
She settled into his creaky desk chair. His laptop desktop was a chaotic mess of files and folders labeled things like ‘QUANTUM_GOBBLEDYGOOK_FINAL_REAL_FINAL’ and ‘PROBABLY_NOT_A_VIRUS’. She opened a browser window.
The search bar autofilled as she clicked.
how to know if you are good at kissing
Her whole body went still. The cursor blinked. She hit the down arrow.
what does it mean if a girl lets you kiss her neck
is it weird to be twenty one and not know how to do things
how to not be awkward the first time you hook up
Each query was like a little electrical shock. They were phrased with a clumsy, academic precision that was utterly, devastatingly Fender. Her face flooded with heat. She heard the soft tread of his socks on the linoleum behind her.
“Did it load?” he asked.
She couldn’t speak. She just stared at the screen, a monument to their shared, secret terror.
“Callie?” His voice changed. He saw what she saw. The bowl in his hands clattered into the small sink. He was beside her in two strides, his hand slamming the laptop lid shut with a definitive click. The room was plunged into a deeper gloom, lit only by the fairy lights strung over his bed.
“Oh,” he said. The word was hollow. “That.”
“You… you were researching,” she said, finally turning to look at him. His face was pale, his ears a brilliant, burning red.
“It’s not what it looks like,” he started, then groaned, running a hand through his hair. “No, it’s exactly what it looks like. I was gathering background data. After. Last night. I didn’t know… I didn’t want to break anything.”
The sheer, absurd honesty of it broke the tension. A laugh bubbled up in Callie’s throat, born of equal parts panic and profound recognition. “You Googled ‘how to not be awkward’?”
“It wasn’t very helpful,” he muttered, sinking onto the edge of his rumpled bed. “The top result was a wikiHow article with cartoon drawings. It was infantilizing.”
She swiveled the chair to face him, pulling her knees up. “I looked at stuff last night too. After you fell asleep.”
He looked up, surprised. “You did?”
“Yeah. ‘How to tell if your best friend thinks you’re a bad kisser.’ ‘Signs of platonic versus romantic kissing.’ It was… a deep dive.”
A slow, shaky smile spread across his face. “Any conclusive findings?”
“The sample size was too small. Data was inconclusive.” She hugged her knees tighter. “We’re so bad at this.”
“We’re so bad at this,” he echoed, but he was fully smiling now, a real one. The humiliation began to diffuse, leaving behind something raw but clean. A shared secret. “It’s just… we know how to learn anything else. We find the manuals. We run the simulations. This doesn’t have a manual. Or the manuals are terrible.”
“And the simulations are… other people.” She made a face. “Not ideal test subjects.”
They sat in that for a minute, the admission hanging between them like a bridge they’d just built.
“So,” Callie said, her voice softer. “Have you? Ever kissed anyone? Before… you know. The camp thing and last night.”
Fender nodded, looking at his hands. “Once. At a party last year. This girl from my chem lab. It was… wet. And there was a lot of tongue in a way that felt like she was looking for a lost contact lens. It lasted about seven seconds. We both pretended it didn’t happen. So, technically yes. Qualitatively? No.”
Callie digested this. Her own two kisses felt similarly procedural. “So we both have theoretically adjacent, practically null experience.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
She uncoiled herself from the chair and took the two steps to stand in front of him, where he sat on the bed. He looked up at her, his eyes wide behind his glasses. The flickering light from the fairy lights caught in them.
“Okay,” she said, her heart doing a wild, frantic rhythm against her ribs.
“Okay what?”
“Can I kiss you?”
He swallowed. A slow nod. “Yeah. Yes. Please.”
“Don’t move,” she instructed, her voice barely above a whisper. It wasn’t a command, it was a request. A plea for stability in her own turbulence.
He went perfectly still, his hands flat on the comforter on either side of him. He held his breath.
Callie leaned down. She placed one hand on his shoulder for balance, feeling the sharp angle of his collarbone under his t-shirt. She closed her eyes, eliminating visual noise. She focused on the input: the sound of his shaky exhale, the clean scent of his soap, the warmth radiating from him.
Then she pressed her lips to his.
It wasn’t like the kisses from the night before, which had been explorations of a shocking new frontier. This was a calibration. A deliberate, closed-mouth press that lasted three, maybe four seconds. She focused on the sensation: the softness, the slight give, the perfect stillness of him following her order.
She pulled back just enough to see his face. His eyes were open, watching her, dark and unreadable.
“How was that?” she breathed.
He finally released the air from his lungs. “Optimal,” he whispered. Then his goofy grin broke through. “I mean, good. Really good. Your methodology is… sound.”
She laughed, a giddy, nervous sound, and rested her forehead against his. “We’re ridiculous.”
“We are,” he agreed, his hands coming up to rest lightly on her hips. “Do you want to… run more tests?”
She nodded, her nose brushing his. “But maybe we can put the theory aside for a minute.”
This time, when their mouths met, it was less of an experiment and more of a conversation. A slow, quiet, sentence formed in the dark.
A slow, quiet sentence formed in the dark. It was punctuated by the soft catch of her breath and the hesitant part of his lips. The academic anxiety, the rigid parameters of their research, began to dissolve into something warmer and far less defined.
She deepened the kiss, letting her mouth soften, a question she didn’t know how to voice. He responded in kind, his hands tightening just slightly on her hips, pulling her a fraction closer. They did so naturally, forgetting to analyze, moving on a instinct that felt startlingly their own.
When they parted to breathe, his forehead still against hers, his voice was rough. "Like, how about you sit here?" He said, pointing to his lap.
She looked down at the space, then back at his face, flushed and earnest. "Okay," she agreed, the word innocently soft, a single datum in a new set.
Moving felt monumental. She pivoted, her knees sinking into the mattress on either side of his legs, and lowered herself. The weight of her settling onto his thighs was an undeniable fact. His breath hitched. Her hands found his shoulders for balance, feeling the tight strain of muscle beneath the soft cotton.
"This is different," he murmured, his palms skating up from her hips to rest against the dip of her waist. His touch was electrifying through the thin fabric of her t-shirt.
"It's a better angle," she whispered, before capturing his mouth again.
The kiss transformed, fueled by the new, full-bodied contact. It was less a question and more a shared statement. She could feel the solid plane of his chest against hers, the rapid thud of his heart. One of his hands drifted up her spine, a slow, scorching path that ended with his fingers tangled in the hair at the nape of her neck.
He broke away, gasping, his eyes searching hers in the fragmented light. "Callie." Her name was a verb, an action, a plea. "Is this... are we breaking the experiment?"
"We're expanding the sample size," she breathed, tracing the line of his jaw with her thumb. "Radically."
A sound escaped him, half-laugh, half-groan. He leaned in, burying his face in the curve of her neck, his lips and breath hot on her skin. The sensation was immediate, overwhelming. Her head fell back, a moan catching in her throat.
"You like that," he said against her skin, a note of awed discovery in his voice.
"Yes." It was the truest, simplest code she'd ever written.
He repeated the motion, his mouth open now, learning the rhythm that made her fingers clutch at his shirt. The intellectual scaffolding of their friendship was still there, but it was vibrating with a new, profound frequency. Every hesitant touch, every shaky breath was a collaborative rewrite of what they were.