One rainy afternoon, standing under the awning outside the library, she looked up at you with eyelashes stuck together from mist and whispered:
“Can I… be your girlfriend? Please?”
You said yes before she even finished the question.
She cried happy tears into the crook of your neck for so long you thought she might fall asleep standing up.
Seven days ago her tiny suitcase came to live beside yours. She arranges her things with painful neatness, as though apologising for existing in your space. Every night she climbs into bed wearing one of your old T-shirts (far too big, slipping off her narrow shoulders) and immediately curls into you like she’s returning to the only safe place in the universe. She falls asleep listening to your heartbeat, one small hand pressed flat over it like she’s making sure it keeps beating just for her.
But love, it turns out, has a body.
And her body has started speaking a language she doesn’t understand.
This morning you wake to tiny, hiccuping sobs.
Hana is sitting curled at the foot of the bed, knees hugged tight to her chest, face buried against them. The oversized T-shirt has ridden up her thighs. Her breathing is fast and shallow. When she lifts her head her cheeks are blotchy red, eyes swollen and terrified.
“I—I’m sorry,” she chokes out the moment she sees you’re awake. “I didn’t mean to wake you… I just… something’s wrong. Really wrong.”
She hesitates, then — with trembling fingers — lifts the hem of the shirt just enough for you to see the damp, darkened patch on the pale pink cotton of her panties. A small wet spot, translucent, clinging to her.
“I woke up and… and there was this… sticky stuff,” she whispers, voice cracking on every word. “It’s all over my panties again. Like… like I wet myself but it’s not pee, it’s… thicker. Clear but slippery. And it smells… sweet? But strange. I changed them twice yesterday and it keeps happening. I thought maybe I was sick, or bleeding inside, or… or broken.” Fresh tears spill. “Am I sick? Is something wrong with me because I sleep next to you?”
She wipes her eyes roughly with the back of her hand.
“And it’s worse when you touch me,” she confesses in the smallest voice possible. “When you hold me from behind at night… when your arm goes around my waist and your chest presses against my back… everything gets hot. Down there. Like… like warm honey is melting inside my tummy and then it slowly drips lower. My… my flower —” (she always calls it that, because no one ever taught her another word) “— it gets puffy. And tingly. And… and it flutters. Like a tiny heartbeat that isn’t my real heartbeat. Sometimes it squeezes so hard I make a little sound and I have to bite my lip so I don’t wake you.”
She looks down at the wet spot again, horrified.
“And when you kiss my neck… or breathe warm against my ear… or just stroke my hair really slowly… it’s like electricity runs straight down. My nipples get hard under the shirt — I don’t even have to touch them, they just… stand up all by themselves. And then more of the sticky stuff comes. A lot more. That’s why I’m crying. Because I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know what it wants. I just know it only happens when I’m with you… when I feel how much I love you.”
She reaches out hesitantly and clutches the front of your shirt in both small fists.
“I’m scared,” she breathes. “I don’t want to be dirty. I don’t want to ruin everything. But every time you hold me tighter… every time you say my name soft… it gets stronger. And I don’t know what to do with all this feeling. It hurts but it also feels… good? And that confuses me even more.”
Her eyes — huge, glistening, completely unguarded — search yours.
“Please… tell me I’m not broken. Tell me it’s okay that my body does this when I’m near you.”
She’s shaking.
Pure, untouched, overwhelmed Hana — twenty years old and drowning in her first taste of physical desire, convinced she’s failing at love because her panties keep getting wet and her body keeps begging for something she doesn’t even have words to explain what.