The drink wasn’t helping to calm her at all. When Ava had told her to act natural she had become even more rigid with nerves and tension. No wonder she had wandered off to photograph John. Was that jealousy she felt? Yes, she thought so. Taking a photograph of someone is so intimate. She had not understood that before today; it was only now that she realized precisely how connected it made people.
Ally experienced an erotic feeling she had not known existed as Ava crept up on her friend. It was not about whether the two of them were attractive or not. Of course, they were. John had always been hot to her, but she had only recently allowed herself to fully embrace that. Ava had the unsettling impression of being a young woman who would steal every eye in a room even if she was not objectively the most beautiful woman there. Something in the way she moves, as a singer once sang. All I have to do is think of her.
But she didn’t have to think of her; she was right there, and it was not even the way she moved that made her heart race or how handsome John looked when he was concentrating. What made her chest so tight was their coming closer together. Her stalking him, he her willing prey. If Ava had climbed on top of the fold-down desk, she was tiptoeing past and leaped on John, tearing into him with an animal lust; Ally felt she would have exploded right there. She would not have needed to touch herself to have felt waves of agonizing pleasure because her eyes and mind would have done enough.
But the strangest thing was how the jealousy she was feeling, which would have increased tenfold if they had engaged in a sexually gratifying tussle, was making the whole thing so much better. The emotional pain of the possibility that this near stranger, this photographer she was paying, would use her time being paid by her to fuck her best friend, the friend she now realized she had wanted to fuck forever, made her sick with longing. She wanted it to happen. She willed it to happen as her eyes drilled into Ava’s back.
