Begin Again | on hold

twenty-six

"So, I think I might have had a sexual breakthrough," Sunny says as she drops onto Ravi's sofa with a flump at ten past four, that sliver of a sweet spot when he has just got back from working at the record shop and she has thirty minutes before she needs to leave for her shift at Percolatte.

"Holy shit. Did you and Viv have sex?"

"No. Not in this lifetime, anyway," she says. At Fraser's slightly confused expression, she explains. "Yes, we've had sex at some point in the fourteen months of our relationship but not in the, like, two weeks that I've been around for. If that makes sense."

"Weirdly enough, it does." He sits down on the armchair and pushes a beer across the table to Ravi. "Anyway, go on. As you were saying?"

Sunny recounts the date and how she realised she might just possibly, maybe, be falling in love with Viv (for the second time) – at which Fraser grins and makes a happy little sound, and Ravi fondly rolls his eyes because of course Sunny's in love with Viv, she'd be crazy not to be – and then she gets to last night. This morning? She can never decide if the night ends at midnight or when she goes to bed, because those are very different boundaries.

"I was feeling horny, which is rare enough," she says, the boys unfazed by her oversharing because they have shared everything since they were eighteen, "so I was like, perfect, I'll flick the bean and it'll put me to sleep, kill two birds with one stone."

"Naturally," Fraser says, nodding seriously.

"But then I was reading my smut and I kept picturing Viv," she says, her cheeks going pink at the thought. "And it wasn't a turn-off or anything. It kinda ... made it better? And then I felt slightly guilty for thinking about her while I was touching myself, but I also felt good. Really good. Is that weird?" She blurts it all out shamelessly and looks up for the boys' reactions, eyebrows raised.

"That's not weird at all," Ravi says. "At least, I don't think so. I think it's pretty normal to think of the person you're dating when you do that." He shrugs and tips his head at Fraser and says, "I'm almost always thinking of him when I have a wank."

"Um, excuse me? Only almost always?" Fraser plants a hand over his chest and feigns indignation. "I want to be the only one you wank over."

"You're the only one I've ever wanked over," Ravi says. Sunny holds up a hand when she senses the conversation veering off in a totally different direction.

"Do I tell Viv?" she asks. "This is all virgin territory for me." She sits on her hands to stop herself from fidgeting and overthinks how much eye contact she's making, tearing her gaze away from Ravi to look at the plant in the middle of the table. Unlike Delilah's botanical paradise, there is only one plant here and it always looks like it's teetering on the cusp of death, its leaves turning brown and curling in on themselves as though they're cringing away from the light, towards the dusty, dehydrated soil.

"Do you want to tell Viv?" Fraser asks.

"I don't know. It feels like a big step. You know, feeling that way about her. That doesn't come easy to me." Pulling her bottom lip between her teeth, she digs in until it hurts, trying to decipher how she feels. She's had fourteen hours to figure it out but it's still murky and she's confused and she wishes sex wasn't such a big deal to the world because it's making her overthink something that most people probably don't even think twice about.

"Babe." Ravi drapes an arm around her shoulders and pulls her closer, so she's tucked under the nook of his armpit. "I hate to say it but you're the only one who knows Viv in that way. Only you can know if you want to tell her."

"But is it a weird thing to tell someone?"

"Well." Ravi purses his lips. "Personally, if Fraser told me he jacked off thinking about me last night..." He taps his chin as he trails off, looking pensive. "I think I'd want to jump his bones right then and there."