Best Friends' Off-Limits Kiss - Chapter 3

Rachel

It’s 9 p.m. and Dr Hargreaves’s energy hasn’t waned one bit. Astonishing, really, considering I’m ready to crawl into bed and pass out. My bed, specifically, and definitely not the neighbouring one, no matter how tempting the occupier of said bed is to me.

Which, in the last days, is far more than she should be.

‘Right!’ Dr Hargreaves says, clapping once, and I’m beginning to think the clapping is just how she punctuates sentences. How have I never noticed this until now? ‘Before we break for the evening, we’re starting with our first team-building exercise. Pairs, so find your roommate if you haven’t already.’

Maya appears at my elbow from nowhere, raising her eyebrows at me in a what fresh hell is this expression. I raise mine back.

‘This evening’s exercise,’ Hargreaves continues, producing a tray from somewhere with the confidence of a bloody magician, ‘is a blind taste test.’

She pauses, clearly expecting a reaction. She gets murmuring.

‘Now, I know what you’re thinking—’

I genuinely doubt that.

‘—but hear me out. As clinicians, you are trained to observe. To assess. To make split-second decisions based on incomplete information.’ She gestures broadly at the tray. ‘This exercise strips away your primary sense and forces you to rely on communication, trust, and your ability to both give and receive clear instruction. Skills that save lives.’

Polite nodding from around the room.

‘One partner will be blindfolded. The other will select items from the tray and feed them to their partner, who must identify what they’re tasting. Then you swap. Simple, fun, illuminating.’

Illuminating.

I look at the tray. Then at Maya. Then back at the tray.

The exercise is completely reasonable. It is a normal thing that normal colleagues do at normal team-building retreats and I am a normal person who is not currently imagining feeding my best friend in a dimly lit dining room whilst she can’t see my face and therefore can’t read every single feeling I have ever had written plainly across it.

‘Blindfolds are on your tables,’ Hargreaves says cheerfully. ‘Off you go!’

Maya turns to me. She’s got a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth, the one that means she finds something either very funny or very stupid and hasn’t decided which yet. I know where I land on that spectrum.

‘So,’ she says. ‘Who goes first?’

‘You,’ I say. ‘You go first.’

Maya picks up the blindfold from our table, turning it over in her hands. She holds it out to me.

‘Do you want to—’

‘Yeah,’ I say, taking it before she finishes the sentence. Purely practical. I’m just helping. This means nothing.

She turns around so I can tie the blindfold around her head, and I am suddenly very aware of the fact that I’m standing close enough to count the small moles along her neck. I’ve always known they were there. I don’t know why they feel like new information tonight.

I settle the blindfold over her eyes, and she turns back around to face me.

Something shifts.

It’s the same Maya. Obviously it’s the same Maya; she’s been standing in front of me for the last thirty seconds. But without her eyes, she looks different. Softer, somehow. Less guarded. Her chin is tilted up slightly, lips parted, waiting.

I look away and reach for the tray.

Around us, the room fills with laughter and protests as other pairs fumble through the same exercise. Someone’s loudly insisting that they’re being fed cat food.

‘Ready?’ I ask.

‘Ready,’ she says. ‘But I want you to know, my palate is extremely sophisticated. I once identified a 2019 Burgundy blind at a restaurant, and the sommelier started crying.’

‘You identified it as red wine and got lucky.’

‘That is deeply hurtful revisionist history, and I won’t stand for it.’

I pick up a small piece of dark chocolate from the tray and hold it in front of her mouth.

‘Open,’ I say.

She does.

I set the chocolate on her tongue and pull back while trying not to think about the fact that my fingers were just at her lips. I’m a medical professional. I have excellent fine motor control. I’m completely fine.

‘Chocolate,’ Maya says immediately. ‘Dark. Decent quality, not supermarket brand. Hargreaves has standards, I’ll give her that.’

‘Correct.’ I reach for the tray again. There’s a small cube of something yellow. Hard cheese, by the look of it. ‘Next one.’

This time I expect it. The warmth of her mouth, the brief brush of her lip against my fingertip. I expect it and it doesn’t help at all.

‘Cheddar,’ Maya says, chewing thoughtfully. ‘Mature. Good.’

‘You’re annoyingly good at this.’

‘I told you. Sophisticated palate.’ She grins, and it’s so familiar and so utterly Maya that something aches in my chest. ‘What else have you got?’

I scan the tray. Strawberry. Slice of apple. Something that might be smoked salmon. I pick up the strawberry because my hand moves before my brain can weigh in on the decision, and then immediately recognises the problem because a strawberry is not a cube of cheese. A strawberry requires a different geometry entirely. One that might put my fingers in far more contact with her mouth.

I should put it back and get the apple.

‘Rachel?’ Maya asks. Her head tilts slightly. ‘You’ve gone quiet.’

‘Just deciding,’ I say.

I bring the strawberry to her mouth. She takes a small bite, and I am still holding it and her lips close around the tip of my fingers and—

‘Strawberry,’ she says softly.

‘Yeah,’ I say. My voice comes out lower than I intend.

A beat of silence, and then I see it: the drop of strawberry juice pearling from her lip and sliding down her chin. It takes me a second to process what’s happening, which is idiotic, because what’s happening is a drop of juice sliding down my best friend’s chin, and what I should do is hand her a napkin. Or just tell her. Normal people do that. But I am not normal, not where Maya is concerned, so instead I reach out on some ridiculous impulse and swipe my thumb gently along the curve of her chin.

I can feel her breath, a sharp intake right as I press my thumb to the corner of her mouth. And before I can recover, before even a single neuron fires to warn me off what I’m about to do, I lean closer, fingers still against her skin, and kiss the line of strawberry juice away.

The room is still loud. But all I can register is the softness of her mouth, the subtle taste of berry and feel of her skin against my lips, the blindfold still covering her eyes. Maya gives a tiny, incredulous gasp, and by the time I remember to move away, her hand is already on the back of my neck, holding me right there.

Then we’re kissing. In a dining hall with forty of our colleagues nearby, we are absolutely, really kissing, and the only thing more terrifying than that fact is how natural it feels—like this thing between us hasn’t just been in my brain but she’s felt it too. And has for some reason chosen right now to let it out.

It doesn’t last more than two seconds. Three, if you count the half second where she tilts her head so our noses don’t bash together. We break apart at the same time, as though we’ve both clocked simultaneously just how exposed we are, and I lurch back into my own chair.

A second passes.

Then Maya lets out a sound, low and incredulous, and gropes for the edge of her blindfold, tugging it up to her forehead. Her pupils are enormous. She blinks at me. ‘Was that…?’

‘Yeah,’ I breathe, and then I’m absolutely and completely certain we should not be doing this, not here, not with our colleagues around us. Even the one glass of wine we had is too much of an impairment to our judgement for me to tell if this is real or some impulsive decision.

Something has changed in the last thirty seconds, and I think we both feel it. Maya’s
expression is unreadable.

I stand up. Chair scraping, napkin dropped, the whole graceless production of a person making a terrible decision in real time. ‘I have to go,’ I say.

Maya blinks up at me, blindfold still pushed into her hair, cheeks flushed. ‘What?
Rachel, we should probably—’

‘I’ll see you in the room,’ I say, and I walk out of the dining hall with the careful, deliberate steps of someone who is absolutely not falling apart, down the corridor, and into our cabin.

I close the door. Put my back against it. Press both palms flat to the wood behind me and stand there in the dark.

What did I just do?