Today is international kissing day. To celebrate I thought I’d post Rina and Hibiki’s first kiss from The Dreams. The entire story is available online so if you want more, be sure to check it out!

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Hibiki would be coming over any minute now. Rina was ready. Since they had been on a few more dates she had finally started to relax a bit. After the second date she had stopped stressing about the clothes she wore. Now she had stopped worrying about thinking up fun and exciting things to do with him. Being with him was enough, and she thought the feeling was mutual.

Tonight they were studying together. Corine told her that was a lame date idea, but Corine did not like studying, and, well, she and Hibiki both took their academic careers very seriously and they could see each other more if they studied together rather than separately. Tonight they were staying in her room and studying, and in her opinion it was just perfect.

As long as she stayed positive she knew she had nothing to worry about. She had cleaned her room so she had no fear of humiliation by way of her housekeeping skills. She focused as much as she could on making this place as guest ready as possible. If she worried about being a good hostess then she did not have time to worry about the possible implications associated with inviting a boy she had been seeing fairly regularly into her room.

Her entire home at this point was a bedroom, but the invitation to her bedroom was still there and she knew it. She did not want to be nervous about such things. She wanted to believe that she had no reason to be nervous about these things with Hibiki, but she was not a stupid girl, and she knew that even the nicest people she seemed to sync up with the most could still at times misinterpret her motivations. Allowing her mind to accept this fact, even giving herself a chance to confront such a notion was enough to set her into a spiral of panic. She knew she had to keep busy. Without time to think much she would not have time to come up with excuses to worry.

She tidied and straightened up until the moment her phone buzzed on her desk. Quickly, she checked her text messages. Perfect. Hibiki was just on time. She hurried out to let him into the building.

He had never been inside her dorm before. All of their dates prior to this one took place else where. Hibiki came to pick her up and Rina exited the building and off they went. Now he finally got to come inside.

Spending too much time in the hallway outside her room seemed like a bad idea to Rina. Usually nothing too strange happened in this building, but knowing her luck today would be the day someone decided to get sloppy drunk in the hallway. It had happened on other floors before, but so far the rooms around her had been spared from any such incident. At this point they were probably over due for some chaos.

Overall her floor of the building was a quiet one. She had the only single room, but the other rooms all had girls that kept reasonable hours and got along just fine with their room mates so things tended to be quiet and peaceful.

“Here’s my room,” she announced before cringing at how lame the statement sounded.

She opened the door and allowed Hibiki to enter ahead of her. As he took in the room she watched him for signs of disapproval or disgust. So far he seemed to be completely content, but she could not stop herself from worrying.

“Um. I don’t have a lot of spare seating options, so you can take the desk chair and I’ll sit on the bed if that’s okay with you.”

“Sounds perfect,” he replied.

He crossed the room and sat down at her desk with ease that made Rina believe he could not possibly be feeling even the least bit nervous about being in her room. She tried her best to emulate his cool demeanor as she crossed the room herself.

“So what do you have to work on today?” she asked.

He pulled a notebook and a thick textbook out of his bag and sat them on her desk. From her seat on the bed she could not see the title of the book.

“I have a history exam in two days so I need to memorize names and dates. What about you?”

She held up her anthropology text and made a silly face.

“Three chapters with a vocabulary quiz tomorrow. Do you think you could drill me on the vocab list after I finish the reading?”

“Sure. You want to drill me on these history chapters after that?”

“Sounds like a plan to me.”

After that short exchange they fell silent and got to work. Rina found it nice to have someone to study with that actually wanted to study as much as she did, but at the same time she missed talking to Hibiki. Most of their time together up until this point had been spent talking and now it felt almost wrong to be so quiet with him.

Once she focused on the chapter she had to read the silence stopped seeming out of place. She found her study zone and once she made it there almost nothing took her out of it until she was good and ready to leave. With that mindset she made great progress on her reading assignment and soon had her full vocabulary list made and she had practically drilled the words into her brain.

Then as seamlessly as she fell into her study zone she rose back into the world of full awareness. She looked up from her work and glanced over at her desk. Hibiki was watching her intently from her desk chair. He seemed lost in thought while watching her and did not immediately notice or care that she was now watching him watch her.

She smiled at him. He smiled back.

“Were you waiting for me to finish?”

“Yes, but not for long. And I was enjoying the view during my wait.”

Rina blushed. “Are you ready for me to quiz you on those chapters?”

“Sure.” He picked up his book, handed it opened to the correct chapter over to her and then moved to sit next to her on the bed. “Ask me anything. I should know it all.”

She could feel herself growing warmer. Soon she would boil over from excessive blushing. He was sitting so close to her — as was necessitated by the narrow single bed — that she could touch him if she just leaned over ever so slightly. On all of their dates they had never been this close. It was exciting, but she always found herself worrying when her face heated up and her heart started to beat so hard it might nearly pound out of her chest.

“Won’t you be able to peek if you’re sitting right next to me?” she managed to squeak out.

“I could,” he admitted, “but I won’t.”

His arm draped over her shoulders and drew her slightly closer to him. Rina would certainly have blushed more if she had not already reach her maximum blushing capability already. She did manage to feel a bit light headed to make up for it. Their study date suddenly took a turn more toward the date side of things when they had been so comfortably settled in the study side of things thus far.

“I’m glad I can trust you to be honorable.”

“Of course. I know cheating my way into the answer won’t do me any good in class.”

“Good.”

She looked down at the book in her lap and tried to scan the paragraphs to see if she could glean out a good question to begin quizzing Hibiki. The words blurred together and the only thing her brain wanted to focus on was the arm over her shoulders. She liked the way it felt, but had no idea how to let him know how she felt about it.

“Rina?”

“Yeah?”

She turned to look at him and he quickly kissed her. It was a brief encounter, more than a peck on the lips, but still barely more than a brush of their lips together. A spark of electricity ran through her from the brief contact. That shock left her without words for a moment. It did cure her of her inability to look him in the eyes. His eyes were a shade of light brown that caught the light in the room and changed facets of his iris to a amber hue. Now she could not stop looking at him.

He reached out and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. She leaned in and kissed him, lingering longer than he had dared.

As she pulled back she took pleasure in seeing his satisfied smile. She did not know what had come over her. She had never initiated a kiss before. She had never kissed like that before. Up until today all of her kisses so far had been dry, boring pecks on the lips that were given mostly out of custom at the end of a date. Kissing in the middle of a date — kissing like this at all — was completely new territory for her.

“I hope this isn’t moving too fast for you,” Hibiki said as his fingers brushed against her cheek.

“Oh no. Not at all. Now that we’ve made it here I’m pretty sure this pace is just perfect.”

“Oh good. I’d been hoping you’d give me some signal since our first date, but then you got so worked up over your shoes that I couldn’t tell and since then I’ve been worrying I missed my chance.”

“Well, I think that it turned out perfectly. No complaints here at all.”

“Good. I’m glad. Now I’m not sure if I can stop kissing you.”

“Maybe I don’t want you to stop.”

She leaned in again so their noses were nearly touching. She could not explain what had come over her. There was nothing in this that she could consider to be part of her normal behavior. All of this qualified as unexplored territory for her. For once it felt right to actually step outside of her comfort zone so she put faith in herself to know where the new boundaries would be placed and not to cross those lines until she was good and ready.

“What about studying?” he teased.

“We did study. Drilling each other on vocab and dates is just bonus studying.”

“Yes. I see. I suppose our grades won’t suffer too greatly if we take a short recess.”

“Indeed,” she could barely stop herself from giggling.

He kissed her again and very nearly took her breath away. She liked to think that she could get used to this.