Avery clearly noticed and tried to pull the rest of the comforter up to cover our cousin, failing. “K! He can see!”
Kaia rolled her eyes and looked back at Avery. “Gee, you think? Nothing he hasn’t seen before.”
“He…what?” Avery now looked more confused than anything.
Kaia sighed. “Fine. Yeah, I suppose some explanations are in order.”
I nodded and Avery grunted in agreement. Kaia sat upright, leaving the blankets around her waist, so she could turn her head back and forth with Av and I on either side of her. Avery looked scandalized but seemed to have given up pointing it out.
“Alex,” she said, looking at me first. “Av and I have been close for a long time. You know that, right?”
Avery placed a warning hand on Kaia’s arm that was ignored.
“Yeah,” I said.
Kaia smiled. “Well, we’re very close. During a sleepover when we were teens, we decided to test our kissing skills on each other. I know, total cliché, but neither of us had started dating yet.”
“K!” Avery’s face burned red. I couldn’t blame her. I was embarrassed for her.
Kaia sighed. “Oh, like you don’t think he’s figured out at least some of what’s going on here? Give him a little credit.”
Avery looked at me and I gave a slight affirmative shrug. Her blush deepened and I did my best to convey an air of being understanding.
“See,” Kaia said. “He’s cool. Anyway, that was all there was to it — just some kissing. We liked it, though, and it was an every-now-and-then kind of thing for years. Until last summer.”
I was intensely curious to hear this next bit, yet it still felt wrong hearing Kaia spill their secrets when Avery clearly wasn’t on board with it. It was awkward witnessing what amounted to a betrayal. My sister, though, seemed to have given up resisting now that the secrets were flowing and I hadn’t condemned her.
“Last summer?” I prompted her to continue.
“Last summer, when Av grew out of that phase,” Kaia said. “I was bummed, but she knew she was all into boys and was starting to feel weird about it.”
Totally not what I’d expected. “I see.”
Kaia said, “Then I went to college and met Deena, a friend of my roommate. Straight up lesbian. She was cute and rocked my world for a few weeks.”
I could feel the heat rising in my own face, not to mention down below. I hadn’t seen that one coming. “And then…?”
Kaia shrugged, which made her breasts bounce distractingly. “I concluded that I liked girls, but not as relationship material. And, worse, being with her only made me miss Av. Deena got that I wasn’t looking for the same thing she was and we moved on. I spend the next couple months counting down the days until we got here.”
Avery groaned and buried her head in her pillow.
“And to my good fortune,” Kaia said, relishing Avery’s reaction, “Av was turned on by my stories of that experience. Turned on enough to get back into kissing. And stuff.”
I was most definitely getting aroused at this point, and it’d probably soon be showing through my shorts if it wasn’t already. I just stood there, smiling, and nodding along to the story. “Stuff.”