Disclaimer: I don't own.
Summary: After getting a taste of George, it's hard to move on. Caroline's still addicted, seventeen years later, but her drug has changed. Rated for implicit descriptions of sex.
: Addiction :
We're lying on a table. Plush velvet thrown over the sewing machine makes for a makeshift pillow. I'm clothed in nothing but the yards and yards of antique lace that he bought in the spur of the moment because he said the pale ivory color reminded him of my skin. Even in the moonlight, I can tell the lace has the yellowed tint that tells its age. It makes it more valuable but I wonder if my skin holds the aged color. They are similar in that way; I can never tell if their compliments actually mean something a little more disapproving, but it's hard to concentrate on anything when their silky voices are whispering in my ear. He is telling me the secrets of the whispering flowers, bathed in moonlight, bowing their heads against the door of the studio. The flowers were first planted there by Miwako. They bloomed as pink as her hair.
He is purring in my ear, as seductive as a panther. The muscles along his inner thigh tense and I run my hands through his blue-black hair. He feels like he's ready to spring into a feral jungle, run away from me, a permanent citizen of the dirty, gray metropolis. When I first saw him, I thought he was an urbanist, a child of the city, not one of a much more raw, pure world of smoke and wood and roses. Well no; to be honest, that wasn't the first thing that came to my mind. When I passed him on the street that day, I did a double take. He was in the exact likeness of his father. And then I realized what this meant. There was another woman out there that had felt the desire pulse through George and drip from his brow. There was another woman that felt the room pulsate with dazzling colors and saw stars explode above their heads as George growled, deep in his throat, like a wild animal that had been tamed by a maiden. Or was it the maiden that had grown wild because of the beast?
I had no illusions of George's chastity or his fidelity, even when we were together so I didn't know why it hurt so much, crushing jagged, sand crusted glass into my stomach. Maybe that was why I took his hand as he passed me on the street. I remembered those strong hands with the long, almost delicate fingers. In that moment, I remembered those same nimble fingers dancing across my skin, making me laugh and gasp in turns. It's hard to move on, one you get a taste of the paradise that George creates. Paradise Kiss. The name fits the person so well.
He and I are rolling around the ground now, the moonlight pouring in through the open studio door. We are like children, holding onto one another as we close our eyes and roll down a grassy hill, to land on the bottom disheveled, out of breath, and ecstatic. But only one of us is really a child. His skin is more taut and it glows as though he is infused with light. While people say I hardly look a day over twenty-one, how you've kept youryoung innocence! Your skin! It glows like a child's! it's hard not to feel my age.
But he doesn't seem to mind. He murmurs those secrets against my skin and his words and kisses melt honey and pearls over me and I am washed in pleasure. When I kiss him goodnight, it's hard to believe that the soft, thin lips aren't of George. Standing in the shadows, I can pretend like I am seventeen again, or that he is thirty-six, like me. Pressed against the wall in the darkness, I can ignore all moral and societal qualms. But it is harder to ignore these matters as I leave him and silently let myself in and the house is silent and dark, save the light in the kitchen.
I walk in there to find Tokumori sitting at the table with a glass cup filled with amber colored alcohol.
Where were you, he says.
The photo shoot ran late, I answer. The lie rolls effortlessly off my tongue. He leaves it at that, like he always does, and puts away the glass and I turn off the lights.
When we go to bed, I dream of George, my George, and the boy that I love in a strange sort of way, for being a substitute to my addiction.
: Fin :