"Awkward kiss" prompt fill for tumblr, shoutout to cyaneidae/thestolenrelic for the plot
Title from Like Real People Do by Hozier

Like everything that's ever gotten out of hand, it starts out small and snowballs too quickly for any of them to think "hey, maybe this isn't such a great idea." The first bet is tiny, just Poe and Rey talking trash over the comms during a dogfight, competing to see who can shoot down the most TIE fighters. Rey wins, and Poe has to perform daily maintenance on her starfighter for three days. Then it's to see who can last longer without drinking anything after pouring Rakririan burnout sauce straight into their mouths- Poe wins that one, holding strong and diving for his bantha milk mere seconds after a weeping, suffering Rey caves, and she has to give him her dessert rations for a week. It goes on like that for months, each bet getting a little bit more dramatic, the stakes raising every time. Finn's started keeping record on a datapad of who won what, when, and how, and even though no one else ever participates, most of their friends and fellow soldiers keep up with the betting game like it's a real live holodrama.

A few weeks before the betting game had started, Kylo Ren showed up on D'Qar looking beaten and sorry with a livid scar running up his face, a hint of cybernetics peeking up from his collar, a lot of valuable First Order intelligence, and even more apologies. He'd been pardoned, more of a probation really, on account of his combat prowess and the information he'd brought with him when he defected. A lot of people weren't happy to have him around, Rey and Finn chief among them. But Poe had known him a long time ago, and was almost as happy as Luke and Leia to have him back on their side, so with much determination he managed to talk his two friends down from their bitter hatred to a cautious sort of neutrality. It helped that Rey had to share Luke with him in her training sessions, and got to work out a lot of her anger by beating the crap out of him with a practice saber.

But then "cautious neutrality" started to become something more. Once she stopped being angry and bitter at everything he said, she started to appreciate that he wasn't the monster she thought he was, that he had an awkward sort of softness to him, the kind of warmth that was stiff and odd from disuse but getting better every day. He offered to help her whenever he knew she was struggling, and once she stopped being offended by it she found it he was a surprisingly good teacher, patient and intuitive, and eventually she stopped making him promise that what he was teaching her was light-side and started just trusting him.

For a while, their relationship was at this perfect harmony of peaceful cooperation and cautious friendship. And then she realized he was good-looking, and it spiralled quickly into a pathetic, soul-shattering, and mortifyingly obvious crush.

So really, it was only a matter of time until something like this happened.

"Anyway," says Poe, leaning casually against Rey's starfighter as she lays underneath it, replacing burned-out parts, "all I'm saying is I could probably even drink you under the table. If I wanted to."

"That so?" she asks, grinning underneath the starfighter.

"Please, Rey, this is Poe Dameron you're talking to."

She rolls out from under her ship and fixes him with a look. "Put your money where your mouth is."

"Fine. What are your terms?"

"I win, you do my laundry for a month."

Poe makes a face, then casts his eyes around the hangar for inspiration. All of a sudden his face lights up and when he looks back down at Rey his grin is wicked. "I win, you have to kiss Kylo Ren."

Rey's fairly certain she turns purple with shock and embarrassment, but she can't back down from a bet, and she's going to beat him anyway so she just holds out her hand. "Deal."

He shakes it. "Deal."

That night, they match each other shot for shot for a good amount, but Rey's lower body weight gets the better of her and she goes down one shot before he does. When she wakes up in the medbay, head pounding, she looks over to see him already awake and sitting up in bed. It's not the first time they've ended up in the medbay because of a bet, and despite the hell his body is also probably in he grins triumphantly at her. "I win. Pucker up, buttercup."

Her response is vulgar enough to make a nearby med-droid gasp and swivel towards her in shock.

She tries to stall, of course, makes excuses the first day that she's still too sick to do anything, then the second day that she's just so busy and a lot of important parts on her starfighter mysteriously broke in the night, and then the third day Luke comms her in the morning while she's eating with Finn and Poe and Jessika to tell her that she has to do Jedi stuff today.

Seeing how white her face goes, Jessika immediately asks, "What happened? Is someone hurt?"

"No," says Rey, quietly, miserably. "I have to train with Luke and Kylo today."

Jessika frowns. "I thought you liked doing Jedi shit?" Then it dawns on her. "Oh, is this about the betting game?" Rey nods, still looking like she'd very much like a First Order air raid to come in and strike her dead right now, thank you very much. Jessika shrugs. "Did Poe say you have to kiss him on the mouth? Was that in the terms?"

Finn, dutifully, pulls out the datapad and scrolls to the bet. "Nope, just says 'a kiss,' no specifications."

"There you have it. Just kiss him on the cheek. It's still a kiss, and it's still gonna be awkward, but not nearly as bad as lip action." She goes right back to her breakfast, completely unconcerned. Rey's looking at her like she's just singlehandedly delivered the galaxy from evil, and Poe's looking at her like she just announced a plan to assassinate the entire command structure of the Resistance.

"You're my hero," Rey says, soft and reverent. "I think I love you."

Jessika rolls her eyes. "You've gotta start thinking in loopholes, sunshine, Poe's such an honest, straightforward bastard he never wises up to trickery."

Poe just sulks.

Training with Luke and Kylo is only about half as awkward as Rey anticipated. She still can't quite look Kylo in the eye, knowing what she has to do, and she's certain he senses her frazzled nerves in the Force. Luke does, too, but by his expression of long-suffering exasperation she assumes he just attributes them to her crush, which literally everyone in the Resistance except Kylo is agonizingly aware of whenever the two are within ten yards of each other. Rey's not good at having crushes, it's not like she ever went through the awkward preteen first-love phase.

When Luke gets a comm from Leia summoning him to the control room, he tells them to stay there and meditate till he gets back, and Rey knows that's her chance. As soon as Luke's out of the room, before she can think of a clever way to segue into it, he's turned towards her.

"What's going on?" he asks. "Why are you so anxious and- weird?"

She scoots over closer to him and he tenses a little bit at the proximity. Kylo's still so weird with personal space- he seems to crave physical contact more than anyone she's known (except herself) but at the same time he always shrinks away from people when they get close, as if he expects to be hit. It makes her heart twist and she really, really wants him to be comfortable enough with her that he stops flinching when she gets too close, that she can just touch him and hug him and lean on him like he's any of her other friends.

But that's for another time. Right now, she has a mission. So she puts a hand on his shoulder to keep him in place and goes up on her knees, leaning towards his face to peck him quickly on the cheek. But she's too focused on getting it done quickly and doesn't notice him turning his head and opening his mouth to ask her what she's doing until it's too late, and her lips are colliding with the corner of his mouth in the most graceless, embarrassing joke of a kiss that's ever occurred in the history of the galaxy.

Even more than that morning, Rey begs the Force for a First Order starfighter to swoop out of the sky and shoot her dead where she sits, frozen, her lips still on his, everything in slow-motion like a catastrophic twelve-speeder wreck she can't turn away from.

And then she assumes she must have died of embarrassment, or maybe the living Force took pity on her and made her ethereal before her time, because the next thing she knows, his hand is gentle on the back of her neck and he's turned fully into the kiss, his lips moving against hers. This must be heaven, she thinks, as her eyes slide closed and her mind sails dizzily away into someplace bright and wonderful. She doesn't even realize she's too distracted with her own warm, fluttering existence to kiss back until he starts to pull away, and she comes back to herself enough to grab him by the shoulders and dive back in.

Unfortunately, by virtue of her literally never having done anything like this before ever in her life, she's apparently a really, really bad kisser, and her teeth knock against his, and it totally ruins the moment, and she's right back to wanting the ground to swallow her whole when she pulls away, horrified with herself. "I-I'm sorry," she says, and she knows she must be about the color of a Togruta with how hot her face feels. "I've never- and I wasn't expecting you to-"

"It's fine," he says softly, grinning at her in a warm, dazed way that makes her insides do all those ridiculous things they do in Jessika's trashy romance novels. "You're fine. You're perfect."

"It was a bet," she blurts out, for some stupid, incomprehensible reason. "It was- Poe and I had a bet, and-"

Kylo pulls away from her as quickly as if she'd punched him, and he looks about as hurt. "That's not funny," he snarls, venomous and pained, hands in tight fists by his side.

"No! No, no, the whole reason was- I really, really like you, okay? That's why that was the deal, because I like you so damn much, and Poe knew-" She cuts herself off with a frustrated noise, burying her face in her hands. "This is a disaster," she groans.

After a beat, his hands are on hers, pulling them away from her face and holding onto them tightly enough to betray his anxiousness, despite the steady, searching look in his eyes as they bore into her own. "Do you want to kiss me, Rey?"

She just nods, words leaving her, and then the fond grin is back and he's leaning forward to capture her lips against his own again. Rey gets swept away in the kiss, what little of her floating, spinning mind she can keep ahold of focused on kissing him back as best she can figure out how, and then his body is pressing up against hers, lowering her slowly to the floor, and by increments her little bit of mental presence floats away too, gone entirely in the moment when he reaches up and gently caresses her face, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear and pulling away from her mouth to kiss down her cheek to her jaw and her neck.

They're both so utterly lost in each other that neither of them hears the door open or notices Kylo's mother and uncle standing slack-jawed and vaguely horrified in the doorway until Luke squawks, "That is not meditation!"