Chapter 12

“Ok. I’m off. I have a family recipe to conquer before Sasha gets home from work.”

“God speed, young squire! I’ll see you soon… hopefully before the year is out.” Hannah pretended to wipe a tear from her eye.

Sienna blew a raspberry and gave her friend a hug, “We’ll have you over for dinner. Sasha turns out to be rather handy in the kitchen…”

Sienna took the subway downtown and let herself into Sasha’s apartment. She laid out the ingredients on the tiny kitchen counter. “No wonder everyone orders in in New York, I can barely chop a green bean in this space…”

She got the print out of Maria’s email and looked around for a place to put it. She laughed. “I’ll just have to tack it on to the fridge…” she used one of Sasha’s fridge magnets to attach the piece of paper to the door.

“Purge clams. Ok.” She read through the email again. “What else… boil water, chop parsley.’ Ugh. I hate this stuff.”

Sienna dutifully chopped up the parsley and set it aside. She looked at her watch… Almost 6. Sasha had texted that she’d be back around 6:30. Sienna turned up the heat for the pot of water and started moving through the recipe. She was grateful for Maria’s additional notes, which always seemed to anticipate her questions.

With all but the last step done, and the dish looking pretty decent, she worked on the last flourish. She took all her clothes off, folded them in a neat pile on Sasha’s bed, and put on the “Keep Calm and Kiss the Chef” apron she had found at a store in the Village earlier that day. She smiled, feeling little lurches of arousal between her legs as she moved about the apartment.

She took one last look at the print-out: “Final step… drizzle olive oil.. stir in parsley, however… ‘however?’ However what? Oh shit.” The email must have been two pages long, but she remembered only grabbing one page off the printer.

Worried that she had made some monumental mistake, she quickly pulled up the email on her phone and scrolled manically through it. “Here it is. ‘…however, I always think of the parsley as optional, because some people (like Sasha) really don’t like it, and it ruins the dish for them. Have fun making this!'”

“Oh good. I hate parsley too.” Sienna put the phone down and plated the pasta. Waaaaaait. Wait-wait-wait-wait. Sienna read that sentence again. And again. She totally fricking knows.

And that is what Sasha walked into when she got home. Sienna, naked except for an apron, looking at her phone, horrified, with her hand on her mouth. Sasha shut the door behind her, and dropped her backpack onto the floor.

Sienna looked up, “Sasha!”

“Luuuuucy, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do!” Sasha surveyed the scene.

“I made you dinner,” Sienna smiled shyly.

“I can see that,” Sasha kicked off her shoes.

“And I took my clothes off…”

“Uh-huh, that is also a statement I agree with.”

“… and I might have accidentally tipped off your mother that something happened between us.” Sienna said the last bit very, very quickly.

“You are three for three, Sienna Logan. My mother called me twice today. Once this morning… and once again before I came home. She was incredibly curious about whether we had plans to get together any time soon.”

“Sorry Sasha. I called to ask her what your favorite dish was. And it wasn’t until she asked why did I realise I should have been a little less obvious.”

Sasha wrapped her arms around the blonde and gave her a kiss, “Mom was bound to find out, so I just copped to it. She was so happy she broke into Italian. Hey — look at that!” Sasha spotted the plates.

“This looks delicious,” Sasha pinched a noodle and tasted it, “Oh wow!” She picked up a clam and popped the meat into her mouth, “Hmmm. Good. Is this my grandmother’s recipe?”

Sienna nodded. Then, to her surprise, Sasha grabbed some tinfoil from a drawer and wrapped up the dishes.

“Not good?” Sienna’s stomach fell.

Sasha grinned and slid the dishes into the oven and set the temperature, “It’s very good. But it’s not as good as you… in nothing but an apron.”

“Oh!” Sienna felt a bolt of desire shoot from the tips of her toes to the back of her scalp. Sasha read the words on the apron and chuckled, “C’mere.” Sasha leaned forward, and then picked Sienna up in a fireman’s carry.

Sienna screeched, “Sasha, you’re going to drop me. I’m too heavy!”

Sasha gently let Sienna down on the bed, “You were the one who dropped me in 10th grade… and look, you are now perfectly safe.”

Sienna reached behind her back to undo the apron’s ties, “You said ‘give me a minute,’ so I looked away. You chose to move before the minute was over.”

“Sienna, it was a fucking ropes course trust fall.” Sasha snorted. Sienna blushed, remembering Sasha’s look of stunned surprise when she found herself flat on her back in a muddy field.

“How about you let me make it up to you?” Sienna dropped her voice to a lower timbre, and slowly pulled the apron off herself.

Sasha stopped laughing immediately and crawled over so she was right over Sienna’s body. “It was incredibly painful,” she said with mock agony.

Sienna reached up and started undoing the buttons of Sasha’s shirt, “Where did it hurt? Here?”

Sasha shook her head.

Sienna unbuckled Sasha’s belt, “Here?”

“Lower,” Sasha rasped.

Sienna’s hand snaked into Sasha’s boxers. “Here?”

“Hmmm… getting closer…”

Sienna’s phone, which was still sitting on the kitchen counter, started ringing.

“Probably my mother…” whispered Sienna. Her hand reached its destination.

“News travels fast, I guess.” Sasha sucked in a breath as Sienna slid two fingers into her.

“Then I don’t need to talk to her, do I?” Sienna grinned wickedly as her fingers teased Sasha’s inside walls.

Sasha shuddered, “Nope….”

Chapter 12: The Lab (Summer Before Senior Year — One Week Later)

Sienna sat in the lab, daydreaming about Sasha. Sienna’s pre-med summer program was a ten week rotation through research lab work, supplemental coursework and seminars, with some clinical staffing at Manhattan General Hospital. Sienna got the lab rotation first and was assigned to an immunology research team focused on viral immunomodulatory proteins. Sienna didn’t know too much about this particular discipline, but data entry and database management was something she could handle.

“You shouldn’t look this happy reconciling an excel file with thirty tabs in it,” mused her supervisor.

Sienna turned, “I love excel!”

Andy shook his head, “It’s your first week — you’ll be wanting to punch a hole in that screen by the time you’re done. Nobody here wants to go anywhere near that thing.”

“Why is this even in excel? Don’t you guys use the MedBase platform to pull data from participating hospitals?”

“Yes, but we do our analytics on Healthlytics, and it doesn’t talk to MedBase. Excel is the translator.”

“I’m just the idiot intern, and I love a good excel model, but it seems like there should be a better way.”

“Yeah, probably. But it’ll cost money we don’t have. Unless you know a coding whiz who would be willing to help us for free, this is the status quo,” Andy cocked his head, “Why are you smiling like that?”

“Because I know a coding whiz,” Sienna grinned.

“Will he help us out pro bono?”

“She.” Sienna lifted an eyebrow, bristling at Andy’s mistaken assumption, “Girls can code too, you know?”

Andy looked appropriately admonished, “Yes.. yes.. okay. Point taken. Seriously though, would she help us out?”

“I can ask,” Sienna nodded.

“I think I can convince her…” Sienna nodded.

And that is how Sasha found herself in the basement of the Barnes Medical Research Center the next evening.

“There’re no windows down here,” she looked around.

“I won’t get skin cancer!” Sienna shrugged, “It’s only for three weeks. No biggie. It’s only been a couple days, but I know for sure I don’t belong in a lab.”

Sasha plopped down in front of a computer, “This one?”

“Sure,” Sienna leaned over her shoulder and clicked open the relevant files and applications.

Sasha shifted just a little so their cheeks would touch. Sienna gave her a quick kiss before turning back to the screen, “Here are the two databases. This is the monster excel data dump that I don’t want to reformat and rename column headers for. Do some magic and make it go away.”

Sienna looked at Sasha and realized Sasha wasn’t looking at the screen, but at her.

“Sasha,” she whispered, “Stop looking at me like that.”

“I can’t help it…” Sasha wiggled her eyebrows and let her gaze move from Sienna’s ice blue eyes, down her neck, and the neck of Sienna’s shirt, which gaped open as Sienna leaned forward.

“Sasha!” Sienna tried to sound stern, but she loved that Sasha was checking her out.

Sasha watched two subtle bumps form under Sienna’s bra. She reached for one of them.

Sienna slapped her hand away, “Sash, stop it. I mean, temporarily… the faster you figure out my computer problem… the faster you can have all of this.” Sienna gestured at her body.

Sasha ran her eyes up and down Sienna’s body, “We can skip dinner?”

“Depends how much database pain you take away from me.”

Sasha tore her eyes away from her lover and turned to the computer, “Ok. I’m not going to solve this tonight — I need to figure out how which backends they use, but…” Sasha plugged in a flashdrive, “it shouldn’t be a huge lift.”

“So you can get the two databases to talk to each other?”

“Databases are just big dumb buckets of data. What we need to do is figure out if we can use or create something in the existing App or API…”

“Are you really going to waste time dorking out on this?” Sienna sat down on a chair, undid two buttons of her blouse, and leaned forward once more.

“Fair point,” Sasha’s eyes lingered on Sienna’s cleavage, “You are such a tease.”

“Perv,” Sienna shot back, “But I confess that I quite like it when you stare at my boobs.”

Sasha opened her mouth to say something, but stopped herself, “Hold that thought. Let me just…”

Sasha turned back to the computer after giving Sienna a quick wink. Sienna gripped the seat of her chair, holding herself down from the urge to launch herself onto Sasha’s lap.

“You need to breathe, Si,” Sasha murmured as she typed, “I work better when I can hear you breathe.”

“Stalker!” Sienna chuckled.

“Maybe. I’ve always liked hearing you breathe. In the non-stalker sense…” Sasha kept toggling between screens.

“I don’t know,” Sasha shrugged, “Doing homework with you when we were in school was one of my favorite things — we would be together, doing our own thing, and I liked hearing you breathe near me. It’s the next closest thing to hearing your heart beat.”

Sasha pulled up a new screen and started typing. When Sienna didn’t say anything in reply, she looked over, “What?”

Sienna shook her head, “Nothing — just finish what you need to do, okay?”

“As you wish,” Sasha smiled.

Sienna tried to collect her thoughts, which were hyperactively bouncing around in her brain, partly due to the happiness of being in a room with Sasha, but mostly because of what Sasha just said about needing to hear her breathe. There was something so enormous and scary and enchanting all mixed up in that sentiment. Scarier still, Sienna loved it. She loved that Sasha’s ears were attuned to her breathing. She loved that it’s been something Sasha had internalized since forever ago. It felt intimate in just the right way. I love it so much. And I love… her… Sienna’s eyes widened with her silent confession. Of course you do! said the voice inside her head, her thoughts still whirling.

Sasha, meanwhile, was trying to focus on the task at hand. It was true, what she said about doing homework with Sienna. Back then, it really was the proxy for how desperately Sasha had wanted to be with Sienna. Now, she heard a slight hitch in Sienna’s breathing and it was all she could do to not revel in it, because Sasha understood it meant that Sienna’s pulse was climbing too. It thrilled Sasha to know that Sienna was reacting to her. The past week had been a continuous recalibration of fantasy and reality for Sasha, with reality proving to be exponentially more amazing that her yearnings ever yielded.

“Okay!” Sasha closed out the windows and extracted the flashdrive. She turned to see Sienna staring at her, her eyes a stormy blue.

“Really? You’re done?” Sienna ran her tongue over her bottom lip. If the lab didn’t have security cameras installed, she’d already be naked.

Sasha nodded, her brain stalled; Sienna was looking at her like a cat waiting to pounce.

“Take me home, Sasha, right now.”

Chapter 13: The Declaration (Summer Before Senior Year — Another Week Later)

“What do you want to do today?” Sasha was propped up on her side, one hand tracing long, looping lines up and down Sienna’s torso.

“Not much. Hannah’s been hankering to hang out with us the past two weeks, so I think we should keep our plan to meet her for dinner tonight. But until then…” Sienna pushed Sasha onto her back and wiggled her eyebrows.

Sasha grinned, “Oooh! A time-bound challenge. I like that. Any preference on where we start?”

“You stay right there,” Sienna straddled Sasha and reached across to the bedside table, “And we re-introduce our friend here to your hips…”

Sasha lifted her legs as Sienna pulled the harness up. Sasha tightened the straps and waggled the dildo, “Now what?”

“Now fuck me like you did last night.” Sienna rolled over on her back and spread her legs wide.

Sasha growled, “Oh, I think I can do better than what we did last night…” She slotted herself between Sienna’s legs and paused, “I think I can make you scream louder than that.”

Sasha placed her hands gently on Sienna’s breasts, “You see, in my haste to make you come last night, I forgot to worship your magnificent breasts. And I think they felt a little left out.”

Sasha’s thumb made a slow orbit around Sienna’s nipple. “Ohhhhhh…” Sienna moaned.