Chapter Text
It wasn’t until more than three years later, Arya resting her head in Gendry’s lap inside his beat-up pickup truck parked by the school gymnasium, in her blue strapless dress that matched his eyes, her bare arms covered in gooseflesh despite the relative warmth of the May evening, that Gendry kissed her.
One moment they’d been talking and laughing together. Making fun of Westeros High’s assistant principal who they agreed must have looked seventy years old even when he was a teenager himself. Laughing at the bitchy cunts from the Casterly Rock subdivision south of town, with their dresses from The Magnificant Mile that must have cost two thousand dollars, their dyed blonde hair, and their plastic smiles.
And then the next moment they weren’t talking at all. Gendry looked nervously at the dashboard and fidgeted with his hands, starting to blush a little. And then he swallowed hard and looked directly into her eyes.
The look she saw there caused her heart to stutter in her chest.
He drew his bottom lip between his bottom teeth, then, not dropping her gaze. And he gently cradled the back of her head in his strong hands.
“Arya…” he breathed, almost inaudibly. He grinned at her, looking nervous and not a little feverish.
She had no experience in this sort of thing but she was fairly certain she knew what came next.
And she had no intention of fighting it.
She instinctively wound her arms around his neck and pulled him down to her at the same time he leaned forward and gently pressed his lips to hers.
It was a slow kiss, and very tentative. Arya knew that Gendry knew how to do this – he was a lot older than her, for one thing, and he’d had a few girlfriends since he graduated from Westeros High. Even so, he didn’t rush the kiss. He moved one of his arms from the back of her head and began slowly running it up and down her side, making her shiver, and gently traced her bottom lip with his tongue. But he didn’t push, and even when she opened her mouth a little for him he kept himself in check, as if he were handling a delicate object that might shatter into pieces at the slightest wrong movement.
Despite the sluggish pace Gendry was setting – or perhaps because of it – Arya’s heart felt like it was about to beat right out of her chest.
At length he took his lips away from hers and touched them gently to her chin. He pressed slow, lazy kisses along her jaw it until he reached her ear.
“Are you sure you want this?” he whispered into her ear. His breath tickled the small wispy hairs on the back of her neck, making her shudder.
“Wh-what do you mean?”
He pulled away from her ear and looked her in the eye again. He began caressing her hair, causing some of it to tumble out of the carefully arranged knot Sansa had piled on top of her head earlier tonight. But Arya didn’t care about that. “I mean… you know what I am, Arya. I’m not going to college. I can’t afford it. And I don’t have much money….”
Ah.
“Goddamnit Gendry,” she interrupted. “None of that means jack shit to me. And it never has,” she’d said emphatically. She punched his shoulder for emphasis, hard, and she could tell he was fighting a smile at her action. “I like you because of who you are. I couldn’t care less about who you aren’t.” She huffed in frustration. “I asked you to take me to prom because, yes. I want this. I want you.”
When an awkward silence fell between them after her speech, Arya decided to take a chance.
His eyes were still downcast, but Arya licked her lips and steeled her nerves. She’d never done this before, but that didn’t matter. Not with Gendry. She took the initiative this time and roughly pulled him down to her, and pressed her lips to his, mimicking what he’d done just a moment before.
If Gendry was shocked by her initiative he recovered very quickly. He began kissing her back almost immediately, in earnest this time, wrapping his arms around her small frame and pulling her close. His body was radiating heat, and it matched the fire pumping through her veins.
She thought, fleetingly, that this was a hell of a lot more fun than she expected prom to be.