s

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He's a little too focused on how her taste bares such a strong and sharp resemblance to sweet sugary cotton candy to begin to comprehend her short chipped nails curling easily, carelessly into his comparatively stiff palms - weathered from months of solo travel and training, yet softening into hers within seconds - hands fitting perfectly between his slender thumbs and forefinger like a porcelain doll's; how the rim of her tiny hips shift against his knee from where she is sitting, innocuously tilted upwards from her position on the ground to reach the curve of his mouth with her own. He can sense a fountain of messy questions, unorganized and unpolished poems rising in his throat, fighting to bubble over and ruin the silence, the listless breeze tousling the grass; but he swallows them down because the potentiality of breaking a moment this simultaneously fragile and this paramount is enough to make a chill of terror run down his back, prick heart skin and send goosebumps shivering to life on the pale skin stretched over pale bones.

The only thing minutely expelling the awkwardness of his posture and tenseness of his muscles, is that she is still smiling against his flat-line lips, staining them ruby red and vibrant, as if she is breathing life into his otherwise calm and colorless visage - he knows, he can sense the same red reaching his cheeks even brighter than the color on both their mouths. His eyes are painfully wide open, but staring pin-straight ahead - too fearful that if he looks down, their gazes could eventually meet there - that he only half-notices the way her eyelids crinkle tightly underneath black feathery lashes, and now he's sure that she's kindly fighting not to laugh at him, and now he's red and sweating and soon every steel bone in his gangly body is going to melt away into nothing.

He twitches, marginally - the first movement he's made in what feels like centuries - and she bonks his nose with her own stubborn one, forcefully enough that he has to wonder if it was intentional, as he collects a pitiful gasp at the touch.

And he wonders if she heard, because she leisurely pulls away, as if to confirm his fears. His painfully knee-jerk reaction is to brush the back of his hand against his warm mouth - close enough to cement the reality of the event that had transpired, that it was no ghostly apparition skin-to-skin with him but an actual earthly, beautiful girl - far away enough that he doesn't smudge her breath-of-life scarlet mark even further, and after a handful of seconds he is still stuck stiffly in that awkward position, somewhere between terror and bliss and blank shock.

"So? How'd I do?"

Even with eyes wide and misty and unsure of where to settle his stare, he can just feel her wide grin still there, the feather-lashed eyes scrunched closed with unwavering pride, the raw anticipation of his answer. He cannot satisfy her probing, not yet, as his other hand reluctantly breaks away from hers and meets the first to once again confirm that he had, indeed, just had his first ugly, uncomfortable, perfect kiss stolen by the trainer from Nuvema Town. Most surprisingly, she didn't even seem to mind taking it.