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1.
Don’t get him wrong. If there is one thing Luke loves to do, it’s annoying Julie. He doesn’t know exactly why or what it is about driving her up the wall that gives him such a thrill, but it’s a fact. Especially if it involves touching her, like his new favorite hobby of tickling her.
And it’s a rad hobby, and he’s going to keep doing it and enjoying it, but it’s like when he finishes a good song – it leaves him wanting more.
Tickling her has taught him that the skin on her waist is really soft. Like, unfairly soft.
He doesn’t know if it was propaganda or whatever, because he doesn’t have much evidence to work with here, but he has always had the vague idea that girls’ skin is soft. Don’t ask him, okay? He has had the idea since he can remember, before he even started looking at them that way. They have always looked like they have soft skin.
His mom did, he guesses. He doesn’t think he can touch her like he can touch Julie, but he hasn’t had the nerve to try yet. It would probably freak her out. Which means that he has to work with what he sort of remembers from the time they used to hug, and it somehow reinforces the vague idea that girls have soft skin.
Apart from his mom… Look, don’t judge him, okay? Maybe he was focused solely on his music back in the 90s. Sometimes a random fan or friend to hug. It’s fine.
But then he found out about Julie’s ticklishness, so now he sort of wants to touch her all the time.
Well, he wanted that before, too.
The fact of the matter is that those quick brushes he does while tickling her just aren’t enough. Yeah, they casually touch shoulders and legs on the piano, and there are the occasional hands on arms and stuff, but… man, her skin is really soft and he wants to touch it for real.
On one hand, he thinks he should consider himself lucky, because Julie is the type of girl who likes crop tops (and apparently they are making a comeback? Because they are old enough to be considered “vintage”? What the fuck?). That strip of brown skin that peeks between her shirts and her jeans always has his attention.
Always. It’s not even funny.
He can’t count how many times he has imagined what it would be like to be able to walk up to her and run his hand over that patch of exposed back until he could hold onto her waist and pull her close and…
You get the picture.
He loves the crop tops. But, like, does she have to wear them all the freaking time? It’s driving him insane.
So he does what he can and tickles her at every opportunity. And if he sometimes lets his hands linger while she’s catching her breath, then it’s nobody’s business.
Julie doesn’t seem to mind, which would be one of the few things that could get him to stop. In fact, there are times when he is pretty sure that she leans into it. Then there are times when he is sure she leans into it, into him, like that time on the piano before she had to leave to the hospital with her brother.
What he does, then, is simply get more into her personal space.
Until that day, when he was certain that he would screw things up by climbing into the bed behind her, and instead…
He was hypnotized by her skin, okay? It looked soft. It smelled nice. He needed to taste it. He doesn’t know what came over him to give him the guts to do that, but he is glad he did. He replays that night constantly in his head – her neck and her lips under his, the feeling of her bare waist, her bare stomach, her bare ribs. He just wants to touch, touch, touch, as much as she will let him.
That doesn’t mean he has many opportunities to, unfortunately. The fact that she has to go to school still sounds like bullshit to him (who needs to learn history when she can sing like that?), but it’s her dad’s rules and he will respect them. With her gone most of the day and then holed up in her room to do homework for a couple more hours, then band practice, and her having to eat and sleep, there just aren’t many opportunities to catch her alone.
He gets a little desperate, and he may get a little mopey.
(“Dude, you look like a kicked puppy.” “Shut up, Alex.” “She was late and didn’t kiss you good morning. Get over it.”)
So Luke ambushes her.
He waits on her desk chair, spinning and propping his feet up on the table while she isn’t there to scold him for it. He hears the car arriving and her steps on the stairs, and then she shows up at the door and promptly jumps back at his, “Hey!”
He takes her in as she recovers, with a hand over her heart and a few choice of words coming from her mouth. She’s wearing high-waisted, dark green cargo pants, which he could go on about for a while, paired with a black T-shirt with some white flowers. As usual, he can see the fabric pulled back from her midriff, probably knotted at the back. Perfect.
“You can’t just be in my room when I’m not here!”
Luke caught that last bit and immediately sat up. “I’ve been here for, like, ten minutes! I swear!”
“Ten minutes is a long time.”
“I was just waiting for you,” he used his most innocent voice, getting up and walking to her. “You left in a rush in the morning.”
Tension dropped from Julie’s shoulders. “Yeah, I hit snooze and slept through the second alarm. Sorry.”
He wants to say something a bit more daring, like how he has been missing the kiss she didn’t give him earlier, but it doesn’t come out. What he does instead is step into her personal space and carefully place his hands on her hips. It does the trick, and she is leaning up to give him a kiss. Her heels drop back on the floor, but Luke just presses down, one finger tracing up to her bare skin on each side.
With a smile, Julie drops her chin and her mouth is out of his reach.
“How was your day?” he asks lowly instead.
And she talks. She tells him about boring classes, like geography, and less boring classes, like music theory, and about the questionable food in the cafeteria, and about Flynn’s newest jacket – and he listens, making the appropriate noises.
As she talks, Luke lets his hands wander. He moves them completely to her waist, soaking in the skin’s softness and warmth. His fingers slip under the shirt a bit, never satisfied, circling her ribs to the muscles on her back and again to her sides, slowly caressing. He follows the dip between her ribcage and her hips, up and down, over and over, and how can a simple curve be so attractive?
It's also so, so soft.
“… aaaand you’re not listening to a word I’m saying.”
Luke blinks. “Hm?”
Julie gives him one of her unimpressed looks. “I just said my curtain’s on fire.”
“What?” He turns around, just to check, and is rewarded with an eyeroll and her stepping away from him, which isn’t what he is going for. “Hey!”
“I have to read two chapters for Home Econ and answer a billion open questions,” she says, bending down to grab the backpack she dropped at some point. “I gotta start now if we want any chance of rehearsing before dinner.”
Luke feels his face morphing into a pouty expression, one hand already reaching out to her waist again. “But what about me?”
At that, Julie stops moving and considers him. Her head tilts to the side a bit, a little crease appearing between her eyebrows as she thinks. Luke only turns up his charm, caressing her side.
Finally, she heaves a designated sigh (but a smile is also peeking out). “You have to promise to behave.”
“Yes!”
As a general rule, Julie doesn’t do much studying in her bed. She tries to be a well-adjusted person and do work on the desk, or so she tells him. It doesn’t always go like that, though, especially if it’s late at night. This time, she takes a look at the single chair and concludes that Luke isn’t going to fit in there with her – although he wouldn’t be opposed to holding her on his lap, nesting his head against her shoulder blades – and drops her bag on the bed.
Soon, they settle into a position similar to the one that led to their first kiss – Luke leans back against her pillows and Julie leans back against him between his legs, schoolbook in hand and a few other supplies next to them on the duvet. She means it when she says she has to focus, so Luke doesn’t try to distract her.
Not actively, at least.
Luckily for him, though, Julie releases the knot at the back of her shirt so she can lean comfortably on him. He is happy to let his hands touch her bare waist again, inhaling the floral scent of her hair as she works and enjoying the freedom that her loose shirt gives him.
And if she shivers occasionally and spends way too much time on a page, then he isn’t going to comment on it, just hide a grin in her curls.
2.
LA is mostly a warm place. It isn’t rare for people to wear shorts and skirts. If it fit his look (and if he could actually feel the weather), Luke would not wear pants so often.
Julie feels the weather, though, so he finds her wearing something other than full-length bottoms at least once a week. It depends on her school schedule for the day, he comes to learn.
He spent a while trying not to, but he is only human (he guesses?). Be it a dress or just ripped jeans, Luke’s eyes start to drift more and more to any patch of skin he could find on her legs and his hands itch to touch. He bets they are as soft as her waist.
He has managed a few times. Julie has this pair of jeans with rips on the knees, and he has, on occasion, taken advantage of the fact when they were writing on the studio’s couch. His nails scraped the thin lines of fabric over the brown skin, yearning for a way under, but that was all he could get. There was also a rip on her thigh, but he only had courage for a quick brush over that one.
And yeah, okay, he has touched her ankles a few times. It makes him feel like a seventeenth century dude, getting excited over curling a hand over her ankle on the couch to get her attention, but it just… He wants to slip his fingers under the hem and trace up until the fabric can’t stretch anymore.
Then, one day, her family is out to God knows where, and the boys somehow understand his pleading gaze, poofing away. Julie says it’s too hot to do much, so Luke proposes a movie. She leaves him to set things up – and he tries his best to remember how to do that – and, when she comes back, she has changed into a loose T-shirt and what looked like gym shorts.
His brain short-circuits a little.
Luke has seen her in shorts. He has. He has seen her in pretty, flowy dresses, and he has seen her in tight jeans, and he appreciates her legs in everything. Gym shorts are new, though.
He fails epically at trying not to stare when she bends down to grab the right remote, but he is pretty sure she doesn’t catch him.
At first, Julie curls under his arm. Her thigh presses right into his, skin against dark jeans, and he can’t really focus on the movie. He has got one hand in her curls and the other by his side, and moving any of them to rest tentatively on her leg would be a weird stretch.
But around half an hour into it, fate smiles down at him and gives him one (01) opportunity.
Julie has crossed and uncrossed her legs a few times throughout the movie, and now she has one bent under her. With a shimmy, she stretches that one out, briefly stretching both of them in front of her, and turns her body to him a bit more, head on his shoulder. She looks like she could be more comfortable. Hit with a sudden idea, Luke doesn’t stress over it and moves his free hand under her knees.
“What…?”
Her question dies in her throat when he pulls her legs over his thighs. There is a moment of silence, during which he almost goes down into a spiral and apologizes profusely, and then she is relaxing against him again. She even cuddles further, one hand on his stomach.
Since she didn’t seem to mind, Luke moves his hand from under her knees to on top of one of them, the farthest from him. He is not paying one fraction of attention to the screen, half of his mind going crazy over the amount of brown skin on display and the other half alert, searching for any signs of discomfort on Julie’s part.
He goes slow, like he did with her waist. Small strokes of his thumb until he is confident enough to move from her knee to her lower thigh and, fuck, yeah, the skin is soft there. There is a faint layer of hair covering it, so thin that he completely missed it when he was just looking. He understands next to nothing about whatever girls do with body hair and he honestly couldn’t care less right now. Her thigh is as soft as he imagined, and she is letting him touch it.
As previously established, Luke craves more. He wants to spread his hand and run it up the side of her leg, as far up as he dares, and then back down. Maybe squeeze her ankle and do it again.
Could he?
I mean, Julie isn’t pushing him away.
Okay, yeah. He’s going to try it.
Featherlight, he brushes his knuckles up the side of her thigh, slowly transitioning to the backs of his fingers, then to his fingertips, until it’s his palm. He caresses back down. He lets his hand fit over her knee for a moment before dragging it down the length of her calf. He encircles her ankle.
Breathing normally is a bit of a challenge. Luke feels like he’s breathing too loud, or maybe it’s the rush in his ears, but Julie is close enough to notice, so he tries to tame it; switches it up and uses his other hand to brush against the soft cotton covering her waist instead.
Although the angle is less weird if he holds her hip. He just goes with it.
Taking a deep breath while trying to make it not look like he is taking a deep breath, Luke moves his hand again, now up her leg. He glances down with only his eyes, noticing how there are little dots on her skin. The thin hairs that he only found on her thigh are standing up. He would think she was cold if it weren’t for the aforementioned impossible heat of the day.
Luke bites down a smile. He is giving her shivers. He is barely doing anything, and she is having a visible reaction to him.
He stops thinking too hard on it and lets his hand do its thing. It’s just caressing. So he settles more comfortably against the couch, feeling as though he was holding too much tension on his shoulders this whole time and now he can relax. His head tilts to the side until her curls tickle his cheek.
On the screen, there are a few people in what looks like a dance studio. They are dancing, but they mostly suck at it. Alright, there is one girl in the middle who has got moves, he can tell, but the routine is over in a few seconds, not enough for him to draw a conclusion. He has no fucking idea what the movie is about or what is going on.
The camera pans to this dude, sitting on a bench, typing away on his phone and, huh, he’s fit, Luke will give him that. And it may be a total coincidence, but it’s at that moment that Julie sighs against his shoulder.
Huh.
Luke readjusts the arm he has around her, pulling her slightly closer.
He watches some more as the characters dance individually, confirming his suspicion that the dark-skinned girl was the only one who actually had moves. If he had to guess, he would say that the blonde one was the main character, just from the general vibes. She looks like a lead.
Then Julie sighs again. “How can she dance so badly and still be attractive? I swear she’s like an angel.”
Luke was not expecting a comment like that. “Hm?”
“Sabrina Carpenter. That actress. Even when she’s pretending that she can’t dance, she looks like a literal angel.”
She is very pretty, Luke concludes, but he knows better than to wholeheartedly agree. Besides, she’s not his type. Beautiful, perfect blondes with big, blue eyes are, well, beautiful, but he has always been partial to brunettes and curls.
He nestles closer to Julie’s hair.
Then there’s this weird dance competition going on, and Luke zones out, getting caught up in the mop of hair under his cheek. He turns his face more into it, almost nuzzling it. It’s as soft as her skin. Honestly, by now Luke is convinced that all of Julie is soft to the touch, which only makes him more determined to touch it all.
His hand is unashamedly splayed over her thigh, thumb working back and forth, when he zones in again a while later. Handsome Guy is telling Blonde Girl something, and Luke catches the tail end of it.
“You gotta… let your body drive you.”
Luke can almost taste the sexual tension between the two, and it only increases as they start dancing in a place that looked like under a bridge. And… huh. Handsome Guy can dance. Blonde Girl can suddenly dance as well. They work off each other until they end up pressed tightly together and, to absolutely no one’s surprise, kiss.
The scene changes to the girl in her room and then brushing her teeth the following morning. Julie sighs. Again. “How are they so good?”
Luke doesn’t have an answer for her. In fact, he thinks it’s a rhetorical question, so he only moves his cheek over the frizz on the top of her hair absentmindedly.
“And so good-looking, too. It should be illegal.”
“Hmm, you’re pretty,” he finds himself saying. “And you kill it on the dance floor as well.”
Julie turns her head, forcing him to stop nuzzling it. When she looks at him, she has a little frown on her face. “How would you know that?”
He mirrored her frown.
“You guys have never seen me dance. You can’t know if I’m any good. Unless,” Julie gives him an accusatory gaze, “you’ve been spying on me during dance class.”
“What?” Luke scoffs. “I don’t spy on you during dance class! Promise!”
There is a slight blush covering her cheeks and it steals Luke’s attention for a moment. He wants to kiss it. He knows she is still talking and it could be considered rude, but he ends up leaning down and kissing her cheek anyway. He then mutters against it, “I don’t need to watch you in dance class; I know you got moves, and you’re gonna show ‘em someday.”
Julie doesn’t have an answer for that, so Luke traces her cheekbone with his nose until he locks their lips together. This time, her sigh is for him and only him – no handsome dudes or pretty blondes; she’s going to pay attention to him.
His hand on her thigh moves as he deepens the kiss, pulling her closer. Luke never gets tired of kissing her, touching her, breathing her in. It sends his heart – which, by all means, shouldn’t be beating – into overdrive, lighting up his senses. He just needs her closer.
At some point, he realizes that he did pull her closer and sideways onto his lap. Then he realizes that Julie is enthusiastically participating in the kiss while on his lap, meaning that she doesn’t mind being there. That’s important information that he’s storing for later; for now, he is just going to keep her pressed up against his chest.
Julie’s got both hands framing his face as she kisses him. With a pang to his heart, Luke realizes he has never been held so delicately by another person that not Julie. It was the first thing she did when they noticed that they could touch – cup his face. She didn’t even hesitate. Ever since, she has the tendency to do it often whenever they are close enough. She likes to hold his jaw and swipe her thumbs over his cheeks, keeping him right in front of her face for whatever she feels like doing: kissing, talking, just looking.
The warmth spreads from his heart to the rest of his body, and Luke holds her closer, feeling as though he would die all over again if she wasn’t as close as possible. He might have been a little enthusiastic, because Julie pulls back with a gasp. Oops, she sort of has to breathe.
Not to be deterred, Luke attaches his lips to the patch of skin peeking out from under her hair. Julie inhales sharply, soon releasing the air, and it’s sounding a bit labored. Encouraged, he works his way along her neck, using one hand to brush her curls out of the way, the other still glued to her thigh. When he is confident enough to reach the underside of her jaw and leave little bites, soothed by open-mouthed kisses, he notices that Julie has tilted her head back.
He chooses to focus on her breathing and how it’s definitely labored now. Her fingers flex against his shirt, balling the material on his chest, and then one traces his neck and holds the back of it, as if to keep him in place. Luke is more than happy to oblige.
Man, he is absolutely intoxicated by her scent. He feels light-headed, his touch on her thigh and back the only things keeping him grounded.
They end up not watching the movie, which is fine by him. Julie lets him bite her neck, kiss her lips, caress her hair, and knead her leg, staying on his lap even after things have winded down. He makes a comment about the cute blush on her cheeks, which makes her hide her face on his shoulder, and she stays there a while.
When Julie starts rearranging herself every few seconds, Luke maneuvers them into a horizontal position so she can be more comfortable, and she ends up taking a nap on his chest. The movie ends, and another one queues up, starting without his permission, but it hardly matters.
There is a thin layer of sweat dotting her forehead, so she’s probably overheating, but when Luke tries to move away, she doesn’t let him. Apparently, cuddling him is more important.
He only lets her go when her family arrives.
3.
Luke knows he is pushing his luck. He knows. Seriously, he should not be staring so much, even if 99.9% of the people on that beach couldn’t see him.
“Dude.”
Alright, 98%.
Regrettably, he tears his eyes away from the mountains of brown just a few steps away.
“I don’t think you blinked for, like, a whole minute.”
Luke frowns at Reggie, seated next to him on the sand. “You’re one to talk, man. You spent the last ten minutes having a one-sided conversation with those girls over there.”
Reggie doesn’t have an argument for that, and so Luke is back to his staring, especially after Alex plots down to show the new shells he has found. Luke tunes him out, focusing on the expanse of Julie’s back as she and Flynn wait for the sunscreen to stick or whatever before going in the water.
The girls are sharing an umbrella to shield them from the midday Californian sun. Flynn is lounging on a towel, so he can’t see much of her except her head, but Julie is merely sitting. Her hair is tied into two braids today, both of which are over her shoulders, cascading down her back. She has taken off her dress, leaving most of her skin on display with that bikini, which… yeah. Has his head spinning a bit.
He has touched most of her available skin at some point. All of her arms on a warm day; her shoulders, when she wears sleeveless shirts and dresses; her waist, between her cropped tops and jeans; her stomach, when he hugs her from behind and creeps a hand under; the length of her legs, as far as he has dared. Her face. Her neck. Her collarbones. He can touch it all.
Now, though, watching her there with her back to him and nothing covering it but a few straps to keep the bikini in place, he regrets not offering to put the sunscreen on for her.
Logically, if he thinks about it, he has touched most of her back. Her lower back is a given whenever he pulls her close, and he always slips a hand under her shirt if he gets the chance, just to feel the warmth and smoothness. The upper part of her shoulder blades as well, when she’s wearing sleeves tops and he gives her a massage. But, you know, he wishes he could run his hands through the whole expanse of it. Preferably without a bikini strap in the way.
Luke doesn’t think his wish would come true so quickly, considering how much he has spent longing in the past.
However, after a long day on the beach, the girls later being joined by the rest of Julie’s family, Julie is exhausted. She finds the boys in the living room – since, you know, they couldn’t all fit in the car for the ride back, like Reggie wanted – and drops one of her hands from her bag’s straps, discretely wriggling her fingers at Luke as she takes the first step up the staircase. He jumps up from his seat to follow her.
(He also ignores the sniggers and teasing comments he gets for that.)
Once safely inside her room, and with the door closed, Julie drops the bag completely and falls on her bed face-first with a groan. “Can you teach me all your cool ghost skills? Because I’m dead.”
The words are a bit hard to make out, muffled and low so her family wouldn’t hear, but Luke understands and chuckles. “C’mon, it can’t be that bad.”
“It is, though.”
With another groan, Julie pushes herself up until she can reach her pillows and promptly hugs one of them.
“Jules?”
“Hm?”
“You’re gonna get sand all over your bed.”
“Don’t care.”
But she will, as soon as she is rested enough to be bothered by it, so Luke puts one knee on the mattress next to her. “C’mon. Shower, then a quick nap before dinner.”
“I unfortunately don’t have the strength to get up.” Julie opens one eye to glance at him. “Carry me?”
Even without the pleading smile, Luke knows he would do as she asks, but there is a serious problem with that plan. “Your family will see you floating.”
Julie groans more strongly this time, burying her face on the pillow.
Honestly enamored with her grumpiness (he is always enamored with her), Luke puts a hand on her back and starts caressing it. Before he can say anything, Julie almost purrs and shifts closer, her face relaxing, and he melts.
So he keeps doing it. He moves to fully sit down and runs his hands over the thin fabric of her dress, paying special attention to the bare skin of her shoulders, exposed due to the large, strapless top of her clothes. When his calloses meet her skin, Julie sighs happily and tiredly. Gradually, he starts adding more pressure until it turns into a massage.
Luke is happy working away the knots in her muscles and watching her relaxed expression, even though his wrists begin to hurt from doing it sideways. As if reading his thoughts, Julie does a vague gesture to her back.
“Hm?” he asks.
“You’re almost falling off the bed,” Julie replies.
She can’t exactly know whether or not he’s falling off, because she hasn’t bothered to open her eyes in the last few minutes. It’s true that she didn’t leave him much space to sit with the way she threw herself on the mattress earlier, but he’s far from being unstable or uncomfortable. He goes to tell her that when she gestures again, and this time he gets the message.
Oh.
Well. He’s not going to refuse her.
Luke kicks off his shoes and carefully straddles her hips. It takes a bit of maneuvering until he can comfortably sit without crushing her, but then things are much better. His wrists aren’t straining in a weird angle anymore and he can put more pressure into the work.
He also has to stay very, very focused on his task.
As anyone could have guessed, his hands start to linger and explore the bare skin of her shoulders. With each stroke, he pushes his fingers under her dress to reach more, touch more, feel more. She is warm, like always, and in fact a bit more than usual due to the time spent in the sun. He can’t tell if she has got any burns, but he thinks it’s unlikely. He would totally look like a shrimp right now, but not her and her perfect tan skin.
Luke is kneading the back of her neck at one point, because he finds a lot of knots there, and her bikini’s strap is in the way. He does his best, slipping his thumbs under it and trying not to think too hard about it. Apparently, that is not Julie’s plan.
With a small, frustrated sound, she reaches up and battles his hands away. Then she grabs one end and pulls the tie loose. Satisfied, she puts her hand down again.
And Luke doesn’t know what to do for a moment, and you can’t blame him. He didn’t expect her to untie her bikini like that in front of him. Sure, she’s lying on her stomach, which means nothing is going to fall out of place, but still. Give him some kind of warning.
With fingers that now are slightly shaky, Luke pushes the two straps away and gets back to massaging her neck.
There is a faint line where the straps were, lighter skin.
It’s nothing he hasn’t done before, so his heart steps down from its erratic rhythm quickly. She usually doesn’t have a strap covering her neck like that, so he has touched her like this numerous times throughout the months he has been corporeal to her. It’s fine. He can do this.
But then his fingers are wandering again. It’s not his fault, not completely, because he yearns to touch her all the time, and Julie is not pushing him away in any capacity. The collar of her dress is straight, going from one shoulder to the other horizontally, and he really, really wants to pull it down to reach her back without anything covering it.
So Luke starts doing that, very attentive to her reactions. He brushes both hands up and down her shoulders, pushing the fabric down with each stroke. Once he is confident enough, he runs them over her shoulder blades, meeting on her spine, and then traces a line up to her neck and down to where her dress begins.
He thinks she shivers.
Kneading his thumbs into the soft skin beneath them, Luke leans down to press a kiss to the back of her neck, unable to resist. It’s salty from the sea. This time, she definitely shivers.
“You give really good massages,” Julie sighs.
He hums against her. “I bet you tell that to all your masseurs.”
“Only to the ones who give kisses as well, and I’m afraid you’re the only one.”
Julie said it in a light, almost teasing tone, and he knows she is joking, but just the thought of someone else touching her like this sends a strong wave of jealously through him and has him murmuring with a bit more fire than originally intended. “I better be.”
He gives her neck one final bite and then sits up straight again.
Slowly, her dress is pushed farther and farther down, until it gets to a point where it’s useless to pretend he’s not taking it off of her. Julie raises her chest from the bed and pulls the fabric down in her front. Then she tells him to hold the ends of her three-quarters sleeves and pulls her arms out of them. Luke stares at the white, buddled up mess round her ribcage and grabs it, dragging it lower and lower until it’s right by his hips and her entire back is exposed.
Well. Technically, not her entire back. Luke gets back to the massage, much easier now without the dress, but he keeps eyeing the last bikini strap circling her ribs. Should he? She untied the other one, after all, and it would make his life even easier.
But maybe it is precisely because she already untied the other one that he shouldn’t untie this one as well. Right?
For a long time, he doesn’t make up his mind. He works around it, dipping under it whenever needed and getting a peek of the tan line underneath.
Then he makes the decision. If she is uncomfortable, she will just tell him to tie it back up. She has never been afraid to speak up her mind when it comes to her boundaries around him.
His fingers begin to shake again as he rubs the skin around the strap, working up his nerve. It’s simple. Too fucking simple. Just grab one end and pull on it so the bow dismantles and then – oh. And then it falls apart in his hands and he can push the straps away. And now he has Julie’s entire back before him, not a simple piece of fabric on it.
Luke waits for a beat to see if she will protest.
She doesn’t. In fact, she shivers when he brushes his knuckles over the length of her shoulder blades and sighs into the mattress. Now, that’s a sight he wants ingrained in his brain.
He gets to it, then. He sets out to explore every curve and every dip of her back, every muscle and every bone. He leans down to kiss a patch of skin when it seems like it’s calling to him, inhaling her scent while he is at it. He kneads her shoulders, and he presses down on her lower back right where it forms those enticing dimples, and he circles her ribs as far as he dares. He kisses her spine. He knows how ticklish she is, but he licks a path on one of her lower ribs and closes his mouth over it on her side. He presses his thumbs into her waist.
Then there is a knock on the door and they both startle.
“Julie? Carlos is finished with the bathroom.”
They have two, four seconds at most before her dad pushes the door open, so Luke jumps to the side as Julie sits up facing the door, pulls her dress up, and puts her arms through the sleeves again. Her dad pops his head in half a second later.
“Hey,” the man smiles. “Carlos was done a while ago, in case you didn’t hear it.”
“Yeah!” Julie quickly says. “Yeah, no, I heard. I’ll be right there.”
Her voice sounds far too breathy and far too forced to be anywhere near casual. By the look on her dad’s face, he notices something is off, and he is about to ask when Julie repeats that she will be right there and that she is just tired. With one final comment about how she is going to get sand all over her bed – Luke pokes Julie’s waist at that and she flinches –, Ray is thankfully gone, closing the door on his way out.
Luke shuffles from his place behind her so he can see her. Julie has one hand holding the front of her dress up, even though she doesn’t actually need to do that. And then he notices her bikini’s straps, loose and hanging from the open collar next to her braids, and he suddenly understands. Thinking in retrospect, they played a dangerous game those few seconds trying to pull themselves together, what with Julie’s bikini top completely untied and her dress down to her hips. Maybe it was a good thing that he jumped to one side and she sat up facing the other.
Maybe. Or maybe he would just spend the next few weeks fantasizing over it.
“I, uh, I should probably… take a shower before he shows up again.”
Luke blinks out of his Julie-induced haze. “Yeah. Yeah, sure.”
She runs her eyes over his face, her front teeth lightly biting her bottom lip for a mere second. “Wait for me?”
His attention is still mostly on the lip she just bit, but he tears his gaze away to meet hers. “Of course.” And then, because he can’t help it, he leans over and kisses her.
It’s a soft, quick kiss that turns into light pecks until they are both smiling. Julie plants a last one on his cheek and pushes herself out of bed, going straight into her closet and picking up a few clothes to take with her to the bathroom. She is still holding the front of her dress when she reaches the door, hesitating for a second before turning to him.
From his place on the bed, Luke watches as her face turns into a mix of shyness and boldness. Then she grabs one of the loose strands and pulls her bikini top out of her dress. Just like that.
She doesn’t hold the front of the dress after that, just bites down a smile and leaves. She leaves him with the knowledge of how little she is wearing under that thin, partially see-through white dress. She leaves nearly making him whine, because why did she have to turn around immediately and not let him catch the smallest of glimpses of how the skin and shape of her chest looked under the light material? She leaves him, as always, yearning for more of her.
She is going to be the second death of him.
1.
If they were organized people instead of seventeen-year-old boys who shared a garage, they would have put their clothes away and sorted them into piles to make changing easier. Even if they had to hide said piles so as not to raise suspicion, it wouldn’t be impossible.
However, they are not organized. Not even Alex could organize it. He tried, in one of his many attempts to clear his head, but three days later and it was back to its initial mess, so he gave up.
Which is how Luke finds himself in the loft, shirtless, searching through the bag that held his clothes while he tries to find his red cutoff shirt. He is pretty sure it’s there, because he bought it after running away and there is literally nowhere else it could have gone. He hasn’t looked for it in the months he has been back, so it’s probably at the very bottom.
As he searches, he bops his head to the CD he put on the stereo down at the garage – well, he corrects himself mentally, it’s not actually a CD. Julie gave him a USB flash drive or whatever she called it, which he came to learn is like a floppy disc or a cassette, but could fit so much more data. She makes him playlists with bands she thinks he will enjoy from the 21st century and she is only hardly ever much wrong.
All that to say that he is distracted and not paying much attention to his surroundings while searching for that fucking red cutoff shirt. Seriously, how hard can it be to find one shirt? It has to be down at the bottom, but he is now on his feet and turning the damn thing over and still can’t–
Two hands come around his waist and something tickles the backs of his shoulders, right where they meet his neck. “Hey.”
The tension drops from his body as quickly as it built. “Hey. Sorry for the mess.”
Without breaking the hug, Julie peers around him at the array of clothes on the floor. “Yeah. Did your wardrobe do something to you? Did it threaten to regrow sleeves on everything?”
“Ha, ha,” he rolls his eyes and tries to turn to properly greet her, but her arms tighten around him. He feels her rest her cheek against the space between his shoulder blades as she interlocks her fingers over his stomach. A bit confused, but happy nonetheless, Luke covers her hands with his and leans into the hug. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, just comfy.”
And he would be happy to stay in her embrace for as long as she liked, if it wasn’t so random. Julie hugs him a lot, it’s true, and she loves to cuddle into his chest or under his arm. She even likes to hug his shoulders from behind whenever she’s in a position that makes her taller than him and tuck her face into his neck. This is just… random and just a tiny bit unusual for her to make him doubt her claims of being fine. He can only do so much without seeing her face.
Luke takes one of her hands and brings it up to his lips, kissing from her knuckles to her palm. Then he starts paying attention to the hand she has on his stomach when she flattens it against his skin and a shiver runs through him. Oh, yeah. He’s shirtless.
He feels a kiss on his spine and the tension begins to build again, although this time it’s not out of fright. At some point, he realizes he closed his eyes and is loosely holding her hand over his mouth, lightheaded from the kisses Julie is leaving on his back.
Her hand moves under his and she traces her fingers across his cheek. Her touch is light, but it’s following a path – from his cheeks to his jaw, where she brushes her knuckles, and down the side of his neck, making him arch it in the opposite direction to give her more access. Featherlight, her fingertips run down his collarbone, his chest, his ribs, until they reach his stomach, where her other hand still is under his. Then that one breaks free and does the opposite, going up. By the time it reaches his shoulder and makes to go back down, he can’t take it anymore.
Luke turns around and immediately leans down to capture her lips, hands finding her waist and pulling her flush against him. It sets off hungrier than they usually start off as, a warmth already filling his body and his pants already feeling tight.
“Sit down,” Julie whispers against his lips.
He hums in question without stopping his kisses.
He even forgets she said anything by the time she pulls away and commands more clearly. “Sit down.”
This time, it registers in his brain.
It’s… new. Julie always bosses them around, since their very first conversation, and Luke does call her “boss”, but she has never… asked for anything from him in that tone and in that context. He isn’t complaining, by any means, and, even through his slight confusion, just licks his lips and does as she says.
Julie, looking flushed the way he loves to see and loves to be the cause of, gestures for him to scoot backwards. Luke does so until his back hits the wall. Then she kicks some of his clothes out of her way and promptly settles onto his lap, straddling him. He barely has time to be excited over it and she’s back to kissing him.
While it’s completely out of the blue and escalating quickly, Luke isn’t complaining one bit about being attacked in the loft. He isn’t sure what brought this on, but he responds to Julie’s lips and hands enthusiastically.
Then something pulls him from the haze of Julie, Julie, Julie. Her nails scrape down his chest on both sides, sending a tug to his lower abdomen. It has happened often enough that he knows to expect it, but he was usually wearing a shirt the other times. His skin feels oversensitive under her touch.
She doesn’t stop there. As they trade languid and heated kisses, and as Luke keeps pressure on her hips and thighs, she lets her hands wander. She strokes his shoulders and then down his arms, leaving goosebumps on her way. She scratches the back of his neck, making him arch into it. And then she moves lower down his body.
That is when he is certain she will be the second death of him.
Her touch starts light – down his chest, brushing his ribs, stopping on his stomach, and going back up again. Every time she cycles through it, she puts more pressure and explores a little further. Luke can’t hold back a shiver when she caresses his ribs, even though he can feel her shit-eating grin against his mouth at him being the ticklish one this time around.
Luke thinks his ribs are as sensitive as it gets until she moves past his stomach. It’s a little frustrating, because she pushes away from his body to make space for her hands, but he forgets about all of that at the first touch to his lower abdomen.
Now that’s sensitive. Also dangerous territory. He isn’t sure she knows what she is doing to him, what she will do to him if she keeps it up.
(Not his best phrasing for the moment. He is working on it.)
Regardless, Julie keeps on kissing him and caressing the skin around his bellybutton, sending waves of shock through him every time she ventures lower. Luke is doing is fucking best to keep his hips firmly on the floor, but it gets harder every time (again, he is working on his phrasing) and there is only so much he can hold back. Occasionally, they move up without his say in it. Thankfully and frustratingly, Julie isn’t right on top of them since she scooted back to touch him. His hands on her waist itch to reposition her, though.
Julie doesn’t bother moving up his chest anymore. It seems like she has a goal in mind, and that goal is to make him lose his breath. With the back of her hand, she traces the skin over the waistband of his jeans from side to side, hip to hip, which makes her fingers really close to even more dangerous territory. Does she know what she is doing to him?
Eventually, he gets so breathless he can’t kiss her, which is saying something, because he is a ghost. Instead, he leans forward, drops his head, and keeps his face hidden in her neck. Slowly, Julie strokes his lower abdomen one last time and then moves her hands up his body and over his shoulders until she can hug him back. They push each other as close as they can. She gently outlines the shapes of his shoulder blades and upper arms, being a bit counterproductive to his attempt at cooling off, and patiently waits for him to catch his breath.
When he finally feels like his head is not spinning anymore, he presses a long kiss to her neck. He works his way up to her lips, taking them between his own in a series of calmer kisses.
Julie sighs contently against his mouth, which makes him smile, which makes her smile, which makes him smile wider, which makes her flushed and she ducks her head. Which makes the angle perfect for him to drop a kiss on her forehead.
They don’t look at each other, not yet, preferring the safe, comfortable place of each other’s cheeks and neck so they wouldn’t have to realize what they did. Maybe they should talk about it at some point.
No, they definitely have to talk about it. Julie is far too precious for him to lose over something like this in case they eventually aren’t in tune in every aspect.
Luke doesn’t know how long they stay there, hugging, breathing, caressing, and dropping random kisses, but they are pulled back to reality with a literal bang as someone pushes the garage door open downstairs.
“You know you don’t have to open the door like that,” Alex’s voice comes first, followed by Reggie’s.
“Says the ghost who once failed to grab the doorknob and didn’t wanna poof out.”
“That’s not…”
Luke misses a part of the conversation as Julie climbs out of his lap and, oh, yeah, they have band practice now. Their friends are here. Bubble burst.
With a smirk, Julie grabs a shirt at random from the collection around them and tosses it at his face. Luke isn’t quick enough and takes the blow. Before he can crawl over and tickle her in retaliation, she gets up, running a hand through her hair, and leans on the railing, calling out a greeting to the guys.
Whether they make suggestive comments about what the two of them are doing up there is lost to his ears once he realizes she tossed him the red cutoff shirt he was looking for in the first place.