Paige coils her arms around Spencer as they watch Mona Lisa Smile in Spencer's dark dormitory room, squeezed onto a single twin bed that's bookended by posters of Holly Golightly in a little black dress and Gloria Steinem in aviators. Whenever Julia Roberts and her Italian-teaching paramour have a scene together, the couple stops paying attention to the movie long enough to make fun of its women's college tropes.

"Of course the birth control-friendly nurse is a dyke," Spencer snarks.

"And of course she's miserable and alone," Paige adds.

Tropes or not, these are things that both girls naively believed to be true when applying to Barnard two years' prior.

Spencer's the first to confess. "I think this movie made me want to come here," she whispers. She sighs whenever Julia Stiles comes on-screen, a confession of another sort. Paige feels Spencer's chest rise and fall dreamily, and notices how her eyelids hang heavy with longing for the brilliant character, blonde pincurls and all.

Paige chuckles, understanding the appeal. It's so unlike the time that Emily whimpered at Scarlett Johansson's direction for the duration of Iron Man; an unrealistic vixen of a character in an even more unrealistic movie. Try as she might to contain her envy, her tensed brow and red cheeks were a dead giveaway; Emily knew.

The unlikely girl that Paige wound up falling for has a layered, intricate desire that's rooted in body but also in brain. Spencer fawns when Stiles' Joan Brandwyn knocks at the door of knowledge wearing a tiny felt cap and a proud smile, swoons as the character effortlessly rattles off the names of works of fine art, and grins when she butts heads with her professor over an unsatisfactory grade.

All Paige can manage is a smile into the brunette's shoulder. She wants to understand the things Spencer finds flavorful, be it Paige herself, another woman, or some generations-old Hasting family recipe. This time, the feeling she believes to be love doesn't feel like manic jealousy. Instead of possessively pulling Spencer closer, Paige turns up the volume on the remote.

She's a switch hitter like Paige. The sex is playful, beginning with them trying to top one another. Paige's body tells on her as Spencer gets her wet by simply holding the swimmer down by the wrists and looking at her with satisfaction. Her free hand dances across Paige's ribs like a marimba, lower and lower down the enharmonic scale until Paige's body elicits that deepest note of desire.

Spencer learns her girlfriend with the tenderness that she explores any other subject. She knows that Paige has never been the most submissive; that's she's always been the first to give and the last to get.

As has Spencer.

"You always resist at first," she tells Paige as she removes the girl's panties.

"So do you."

"The curse of being a perfectionistic people pleaser," Spencer murmurs against Paige's hipbone.

When Spencer enthusiastically trails her tongue down her girlfriend's inner thigh, Paige feels so virginal that she forgets to move, her body frozen stiff against the bed. She thinks of a recent anatomy and physiology lesson on rigor mortis. That's how she feels, minus the death.

"What's the Latin word for 'life'?" Paige breathlessly asks.

"Vivo, Vivere, Vixi, Victus…," Spencer murmurs, kissing further still. "Depends on how you're conjugating it. Why?"

"No reason."

Paige feels Spencer's lips on her. She remembers how to move again, just in time to hold her girlfriend's hair back.