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Tara watches from across the room as Darcy tips their head back, hair falling in their face as they laugh — loudly, unabashedly,
Beautifully, Tara’s mind supplies. Unhelpfully, might she add.
She feels the air tighten around the two of them as they tilt their head forward to look at her once more, the oxygen supposedly surrounding her having abandoned her in her moment of need. Her chest tenses up, lungs burning, but she feels she could die right then and have died happily, to her favourite sound. Then Darcy's eyes seem to gravitate to hers and they’re still smiling and their laugh is so them and everything rushes back. The air returns, her lungs are no longer burning, and Tara discovers she’s never breathed properly in her life because she’s never felt this way before. Her hands are shaking but everything feels so so right it almost hurts.
Closing her eyes, she steadies herself with a long breath and when she opens her eyes again, Darcy's still grinning at her, though now it’s joined by a feather dusting of pink on their face. They make their way through the crowd without breaking eye contact or even saying bye to the people they were with and Tara feels like she’s standing on the spot marked with an x, Darcy’s gaze making her feel like she’s the only person in the entire universe.
They make their way to her and they’re speaking, their mouth is moving but all Tara can hear is her blood rushing and her heart pounding as she fixes her stare on Darcy's lips and she can’t find it in herself to force them somewhere else. She’s never wanted to know what someone would taste like until this moment; she needed to know the feeling of their lips pressed to hers and she could hardly think of anything else.
Darcy's lips finally stop moving as they realize she’s not listening, settling into a small pout instead that makes Tara's head spin. Tara finally tears her eyes away from Darcy's lips and up to their eyes, which are roaming along her face until they rest on hers once more. As her senses finally return after having eluded her for so long, she feels her face warm up considerably and she mentally thanks her dark complexion and the bad lighting in the room for not outing her feelings to Darcy — ones she doesn’t properly understand herself. All she knows is that she needed to be closer to them, as close as possible. She wants them to meld into a single being and never separate and transform into a beautiful tangle of lips and limbs for the rest of time.
A line from a poem she’d read earlier absently crosses her mind and she latches onto it and holds on for dear life, as if to ground herself. The enormity of my desire disgusts me, she remembers. She hears herself distantly yelling her agreement in the back of her mind and yet she continues aching to be touched, to be held, to be loved by the beautiful person in front of her. She thinks Darcy is the moon, pulling her waves in towards them and giving her reason to go on.
Tara so desperately wants to know what their lips would feel like if they pressed together, what their hands would feel like if they intertwined, how Darcy's eyes would sparkle if they smiled at each other.
But Tara is scared. She’s terrified actually.
She remembers the underwhelming feeling of Nick's lips pressed against hers when they were younger. She’d been wanting to do it for months and when it finally happened all she could think was “Was this really what I was waiting for? Just this?” and she absolutely could not go through that again, not with Darcy. Especially not with Darcy.
A whisper of her name cuts off her train of thoughts, one clearly meant for her — and only her — to hear. Her breath catches in her throat and she manages to choke out a quiet ‘Darce?’ because that’s what this was all about, wasn't it? Everything always leads back to Darcy. She breathes out and says their name again, still looking in their eyes and noticing their roseate complexion returning.
Darcy takes a step closer and slowly moves a hand to Tara's waist. They whisper “Can I… Is this okay?” and begin worrying at their bottom lip with their teeth and Tara wants to ask if she can instead have their lip in between her teeth, but instead she nods and says yes. Something almost indecipherable flashes behind Darcy's eyes and they move their other hand to rest on her waist as their face turns slightly awed.
“Darce, what are you thinking about so intensely?” Tara instinctively giggles, placing her hands on their upper arms and letting them rest there. Darcy's eyes quickly dart down to one of them and return to Tara's face just as quickly to see a shy smile form.
“Ah, you know…” they start, smiling “just wondering how I got so lucky to have the prettiest girl ever in my arms.”
And oh, Tara feels faint. She wasn’t prepared for flirting. She saw the nervousness clear as day on Darcy's face and her mind raced with all the possibilities, with anything that could happen. Would they take it back and play it off as a joke? Or would they stick to it and…
And what? What would happen? Does Tara want to know? Will they kiss her?
“Tara,” Darcy says, “is… was that okay?”
“Oh! Uh, yeah. I, um, I liked it a lot, actually.” she stutters out, feeling her face burn hotter than ever before.
Darcy visibly relaxes, “You’ve just been spacing out a lot tonight…” they breathe out, light traces of nervous laughter within.
“Sorry,” Tara winces while releasing her own nervous laughter, “you just… you caught me off guard. I didn’t expect you to… to say that.”
“Can I say something else? And you have to promise not to space out or… or go quiet again, please?”
“Okay, I promise.”
"I really want to kiss you right now.” they whisper, eyes travelling down to Tara's lips.
"Oh,” she breathes out, forcing her hand to move from their arm and cup their face, noting just how much it’s trembling, “you do?"
“Yeah,” they whisper, “I really do.”
Tara licks her lips unconsciously and watches how Darcy’s eyes track the movement.
“Well… what are you waiting for?”
The blush on their face deepens considerably as Darcy slowly moves one of their hands to the back of her neck.
"I'm waiting for you to say yes." they say, moving their eyes up to meet Tara’s.
"Yes. Please. Kiss me"
Darcy leans in slowly and finally, finally presses their lips gently against Tara's and Oh, it’s nothing like it was with Nick. Suddenly the lights and music and people fade to the background and everything is just darcydarcydarcy.
Tara tastes the orange flavour of the drink they had been nursing earlier and when Darcy tilts their head ever so slightly, she thinks she’s died. And well, Tara's not religious but she thinks that if Darcy was a religion, she could get into that. Kissing them feels so unfamiliar, yet so natural that she’s convinced this is the best feeling she’ll ever experience — up until Darcy pulls away, giggling and flushed and Tara knows she was wrong. She feels foolish to have entertained the idea of Darcy being the moon that pulls her tide in. Darcy is the sun. and Tara feels the sun’s rays in full force, mesmerizing her as she feels her wax wings melt away, but she isn’t scared anymore. No, she’d fly close to the sun every second of every day if it got Darcy to smile at her like that even one more time.
“God…” Darcy breathes out against Tara's lips, eyes twinkling, “I've wanted to do that for so long.”
And Tara feels like they’ve just stolen all the air from her lungs once again, “Yeah?”
Darcy closes their eyes, leans their head forward and rests their forehead against Tara’s and they can’t stop smiling and Tara wants to kiss that smile so badly, so she tilts her head slightly to the side and she does, pulling back infinitesimally to whisper “Me too.” before reconnecting their lips.
And, well, Tara feels like she could spend the rest of her life like this, kissing Darcy, being close to them, holding and being held by them. And from the way Darcy’s eyes sparkle and the smile that hasn’t left their face and the way their grip tightens on her to pull her closer, she thinks that maybe maybe, Darcy feels the same.