Title: The Thing to Do

Author: Harper

Fandom: South of Nowhere

Pairing: Spenser/Ashley

Ep-Centric: The Girl’s Guide to Dating, so spoilers for that included

Archiving: This will be at www.realmoftheshadow.com/harper.htm. Kim is my archiver, with much thanks.

A/N: Another tiny post-ep fic from me. Hope you enjoy it. I’ll be at Xfjnky2@yahoo.com.

Morals.

Scruples.

Things she wasn’t even sure she possessed, and yet there they were, running rampant.

Scratch that. It was panic. Sheer panic.

“How do you know if you like girls?”

She’d heard the words, knew they’d been spoken, but some freaky weird cosmic force field kept her from moving, because surely, the thing to do when the girl you’ve been lusting after with an appalling lack of subtly says something like that?

Well, it’s not ditching her to chase after some boys.

No, the thing to do when your sun-warmed and half-naked object of desire says something like that is more physical and less fear. Something that involves letting slightly sweaty skin fuse itself together as your lips find hers and you answer, definitively, the question of just how you know. The thing to do is bury your knees in the sand and wrap your fingers through blonde silk and do nothing short of devouring all that angst and naiveté and clearly telepathed reckless desire and fear of making the first move any more so than its already been made.

The thing to do is trail your fingers along the skin of her stomach, skin that you know is going to feel like satin and taste like sin, and look down at the girl who’s trying to bare her soul and uncover yours, and let her see just how right it is. Let her look in your eyes and know, know in every cell that’s rushing through her body, that you want her as much as she wants you. Let her know that, as much as it is about desire, it’s not about that at all. Let her know that you’ve been hooked, that you’re an addict and your drug of choice is her.

The thing not to do is run screaming, literally, in the opposite direction. It’s not to let the sudden, overwhelming panic that this girl could somehow break you supersede everything else until you find that you’re callously talking about everything but the one thing she needs to say and you need to hear.

It is making it up to her.

And when she turns and looks at you one last time, slipping back into her house and out of the day of everything reckless that you’ve just shared, and fixes you with a gaze that’s suddenly not quite innocent at all…

The thing to do is drive away, find someplace private, and scrape the remains of your melted, charred body from the seat. And as soon as you can, the thing to do is plot and plan and find any way under the sun to feel that heat full force, millimeters away instead of feet.

A burn that you’re determined to feel, one that you won’t even begin to imagine because you want the first time it hits you to be raw and fresh and unexpected and surprising.

And feeling it? That’s the thing you will do.