"Mmmm…" Kim brushed a gentle kiss across the crown of dark hair, smiling into its thickness. "Let me hold you for a minute?"

"You hear me complaining?" Moments dissolved into a quiet peace, and almost unwillingly Abby listened to the ambient noise of the music on the television. "I think I lost my virginity to this song."

"Really?" An amused murmur.

"Yeah." She crawled up the length of Kim’s body until, propping her head on a hand, she could look the other woman in the eye. "Feels like I just lost it again too."

A wry brow arched, but the reverent press of Abby’s lips against hers forestalled any reply. The psychiatrist’s mouth was a place Abby had discovered she most liked to tarry, enjoying the shape and taste of the full lips beneath her own. The languor with which Kim approached kissing had been a revelation to Abby in their first encounter; and in the ensuing weeks, it had become one of the touchstones of their connection.

"Thought I wasn’t your first woman?" Kim managed between the infinitesimal partings of their lips.

"You’re not," Abby agreed, pulling back to gaze at the bronzed form of the woman so recently become her lover. "I don’t know what you are," she confessed, without pausing to consider her words. "But I’m pretty sure you’re the first something for me." Felt too powerful to be any different, she knew, but that kind of admission wasn’t yet a part of their vocabulary. Abby didn’t know when– if ever– it would be.

Kim Legaspi and Abby Lockhart were the unlikeliest of lovers. Everyone would say that– in fact, just about everyone at County General had said that in one form or another in the short time their liaison had been common knowledge.

If pressed, Abby wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint one single instant when she realized that what was happening between them had taken a carnal twist– in fact, she hadn’t known it for certain until her mouth was on Kim’s and their hands were tangling in cotton and denim in a frantic attempt to reach one another’s skin. In a single instant– blind longing had short-circuited common sense, wisdom, and the kind of circumspection designed to keep things like this from happening.