The kiss lasted longer than he expected.

Liam sat completely still, his eyes open, both popcorn buckets still in his hands, his brain somewhere between processing what was happening and completely failing to do so.

Her lips were warm and soft and she kissed him like she had been thinking about it for a while and had decided the movie previews were as good a moment as any.

Then she pulled back.

She sat straight in her seat and looked at the screen like nothing had happened, her hair still loose around her shoulders, her hands finding her popcorn bucket in her lap.

Liam turned his head toward the back of the cinema.

It was dark enough that he couldn’t make out much.

The screen light didn’t reach that far back and the pre-show brightness had dimmed as the trailers started.

He could see the shape of Kelvin’s silhouette in one of the back seats.

Then a hand came up in the darkness.

Thumbs up.

Liam turned back to the front.

He looked at Jane. "What was that."

She kept her eyes on the screen. "Proof."

"Proof of what."

She turned and looked at him. "That I actually like you." She held his gaze. "And before you ask how a kiss is supposed to prove that, Priscilla told me to try it. So."

Liam looked at her. "Priscilla told you to kiss me."

"She said it would work better than asking myself over and over again."

"Okay," he said. He looked at the screen. Then back at her. "I genuinely wasn’t expecting that."

"I know," she said. "That was the point."

He sat with that for a second. Then he looked down at the two large popcorn buckets in his hands, one on each knee, both of them enormous, both of them completely untouched.

"I don’t think I can finish that," Jane said, nodding at the one he had handed her, sitting in her lap.

Liam looked at his. Then at hers. Then toward the back of the cinema in Kelvin’s general direction. "Thank him," he said. "He’s the one who asked for this size."

Jane laughed. Short and real. Her hand came up and she twirled one strand of hair around her finger once before letting it go.

Liam looked at her. "I thought you were mad at me."

She raised an eyebrow. "Why."

"Because I wasn’t planning to come today. I wasn’t expecting to be here at all." He shifted the popcorn bucket slightly on his knee. "I figured that was why you were ignoring me in the car."

Jane looked at him for a moment. Then she said very quietly, "Stupid."

"What?"

She turned back to the screen. "Nothing. You’re right."

He looked at her profile for a second. "So am I forgiven?"

She kept her eyes forward. Then the corner of her mouth moved. "Yeah," she said. "You are."

The trailers finished and the movie started.

The room went darker and the screen filled with the opening sequence, something in a forest at night, the music already doing what horror movie music did from the first frame.

They watched.

About twenty minutes in something moved fast on screen, something large coming out of the dark between the trees, and Jane grabbed his arm with both hands and held on.

Liam felt it immediately.

Her arms were pressed around his, her hands gripping just above his elbow, and through the thin fabric of her top he could feel her chest pressed against his arm, soft and warm, the contact immediate and obvious. She hadn’t worn a bra underneath.

’Oh,’ he thought. Heat moved into his face before he could do anything about it. He looked at the screen and kept his expression exactly where it was.

She loosened her grip slightly when the scene passed but didn’t fully let go, her hands staying loosely around his arm, her side against his.

He didn’t move his arm.

A few minutes passed. The movie continued doing what it was doing.

Then something tapped his hand.

He looked down.

Jane had her popcorn bucket angled toward him and was looking at the screen, her expression completely neutral, eating from the bucket with her other hand. She tapped his hand again without looking at him.

He reached into the bucket.

She still didn’t look at him.

They sat like that for a while, watching the movie, sharing the popcorn she had claimed she couldn’t finish.

Then she said, without turning her head, "You didn’t ask."

He looked at her. "Ask what."

"What the answer was." She kept her eyes on the screen. "To whether I like you."

Liam looked at her. "I was waiting for you to tell me when you were ready."

She turned and looked at him properly now. Read his face for a moment. Then she looked back at the screen.

"The answer is yes," she said. "I like you."

Liam opened his mouth.

Everything stopped.

The screen froze mid-frame, the horror movie monster suspended halfway through a door. Jane’s hair caught mid-movement in a small breeze from the air conditioning. Every sound in the cinema cut out completely.

Two options appeared in his vision, glowing in the darkness of the frozen room.

[Option 1: Prove it. | +30 Lust Points]

[Option 2: I’m flattered but I’m not looking for anything serious right now. | +0 Lust Points]

Liam looked at Option 2 for a moment.

’How am I supposed to say that to her,’ he thought. ’She just told me she likes me and the system wants me to hit her with a speech about not looking for commitment. In a cinema. During a horror movie.’ He looked at Option 1. ’The system is genuinely not giving me a way out here.’

He selected Option 1.

Time resumed.

"Prove it," he said.

Jane blinked. She looked at him with an expression that was trying to work out whether he was serious. Then she turned and looked toward the back of the cinema.

It was dark enough that details were hard to make out but she stared for long enough that she noticed. Priscilla’s head was no longer visible above the seat back. Kelvin was sitting upright watching the screen with the focused attention of someone actively pretending not to be aware of anything happening in the rows in front of him.

Jane turned back.

She smiled.

"Like that?" she said, nodding toward where she had just looked.

Time stopped again.

[Option 1: Why are you still using your mouth to ask questions when you could be using it for something else. | +20 Lust Points]

[Option 2: Yeah, I guess. | +14 Lust Points]

Liam looked at both of them sitting there in the frozen darkness of the cinema.

He exhaled slowly through his nose.

’Of course,’ he thought.

Time resumed.

Liam looked at her. "Why are you still using your mouth to ask me when you could be using it for something else."

Liam glanced up briefly.

[100/100]

He looked back at her.

Jane looked at him.

She held his gaze for a moment, reading his face, making sure she had heard what she heard.

Then something shifted in her expression, the uncertainty gone, replaced by something quieter and more decided.

She leaned toward him slowly.

Liam reached down and moved both popcorn buckets off his lap, setting them on the empty seat to his left without looking away from the screen, keeping his movements small and unhurried, like he was just getting comfortable.

Jane’s hand found his zip in the dark.

She worked it down slowly, her fingers precise, her eyes forward on the screen the entire time, her hair falling slightly forward around her face. She got his button next, one handed, and then her fingers found the waistband of his boxers and pulled down just enough.

His dick came free.

She looked down at it in the low light of the cinema, the screen throwing just enough glow to see by. She wrapped her fingers around him slowly, feeling the size of him in her grip, her thumb moving once across the head.

Then she shifted her hair to one side with her free hand, gathering it back over her shoulder, clearing it out of the way.

She bent forward.

Her lips wrapped around him and she took him in slowly, inch by inch, her head descending in one smooth unhurried movement.

Liam’s hand shot to the armrest and gripped it.

"Holy shit," he breathed.

On screen something screamed.

Nobody in the cinema looked their way.

She didn’t rush any of it.

Her tongue moved first, tracing slowly along the underside of him from the base upward, taking its time, pressing flat and then pointing, feeling every part of him before her mouth committed to anything further.

She circled the head once, twice, her lips barely touching, just her tongue doing the work, learning the shape of him in the dark of the cinema.

Liam pressed his back into the seat.

His hand was still on the armrest, gripping it, his knuckles tight.

His other hand had found the edge of his own seat and was holding that too.

He had nothing else to do with them and nowhere useful to put them and the sounds coming from the movie were the only thing covering the sound of his own breathing which had stopped being quiet several seconds ago.

She took him back in.

Deeper this time.

Her lips sealing around him properly, her head moving in a slow steady rhythm, down and back up, each stroke deliberate and complete.

Her tongue stayed active the whole time, pressing against the underside on every downstroke, dragging back up on every pull, not a single movement wasted.

"Mm—"

The sound from her was low and muffled and sat just underneath the movie audio, swallowed almost entirely by a scene where someone was running through a dark corridor on screen with something behind them.

Liam exhaled through his nose.

She picked up the pace slightly. Her head moving faster now, her hair swaying with the motion, the loose strands she had pushed back falling forward again around her face.

She didn’t stop to fix it. Her hands rested on his thighs, pressing down lightly with each downstroke, steadying herself.

He felt her tongue change what it was doing.

She started alternating, the flat drag on the way down and then something specific at the top of each upstroke, a slow deliberate circle around the head before she went back down, the two things switching back and forth without pattern, without warning.

’Ohh shit’