0 (prickle)
"This water's been sitting here for days," she says. "Can I use it?"
Otto looks up and blinks at her. "Sure, sure," he says, after a beat. He just drank out of that glass ten minutes ago, but now that he thinks about it, he realizes it was there when he walked into his workroom this morning. He tends toward tunnel-vision when he's working, and the workroom has played host to a number of fuzzy, green-tinged dishes. Rosie calls them science projects, and Otto has never been able to tell whether she's being ironic or not.
She takes the glass of water and carries it to the window opposite Otto's desk. Dipping her first two fingers in it, she wrinkles her nose, and waters the little garden she keeps in the rhombus of afternoon sunlight that falls over the sill. Flicking her fingers, she does it a drop at a time.
Rosie doesn't like roses; that was the first thing Otto learned about her, the first time he took her out. She grinned all the same when he presented them from behind his back (a cliché clipped out of every movie he had ever seen; not something he'd ever had a chance to do in practice) cocked to the side so that she could take them up in her arms, cradle them the way girls did in the movies, like a baby, like their lover's head. Instead she grabbed them right by the stems – luckily they were thornless, stripped by the florist for an extra dollar – her grip firm, and nodded graciously, excusing herself to find a vase. Her roommate, a weedy girl in Lennon glasses and a peasant blouse that surely had never been near an actual peasant, twisted in her chair to watch Rosie into the little hole of a kitchen, smirking.
"Don't bring her roses again," she said, shaking her head at Otto like he was a naughty child. "She's not really into that. She's into, like, cactuses." She rolled her eyes, an indictment of Rosie's taste. Otto looked past the roommate, whose name he can't remember now, twenty-five years later, and watched Rosie through the kitchen doorway. She was arranging the roses in a voluptuous and uneven ceramic vase with more care than they deserved, spreading them and nudging them into place with her fingertips. She cupped a droopy, half-open bud in the palm of her hand, tilting her head at it with a faint, faint smile, and Otto's heart beat a little faster. But for some reason, all he could think was that surely Rosie knew the plural of cactus was cacti.
A sprinkle for each squat, hostile little cactus, enough to keep them alive for weeks. Otto used to find her love of cacti incongruous, back when he still thought of her as delicate, as petal-skinned and airy. He has since learned how much sense it makes, Rosie and the cactus; both are hardy, self-sufficient, a little on the short side, dangerous when rubbed the wrong way. Both do well with a minimum of attention – something Otto has long since stopped feeling guilty about. Rosie and the cactus probably make more sense than Rosie and him, he reflects, and turn back to his notes, the silvery sound of her fingernails on the water glass still chiming from across the room.
When he looks up again, there is a new, full glass beside him, beveled with condensation and leaving a ring on his desk. Rosie is standing beside it, a foot to the left so she's not in his light, tilting her head at the same fond angle she did for that sleepy little rose.
"Thank you," he says, indicating the fresh water. "I'd have gotten it myself after a while, you know." She smiles and bends forward to lean her elbows on the desk, propping her chin in her hands.
"No you wouldn't," she scolds, raising her eyebrows. "If I didn't take care of you, who would?"
Propriety like this used to raise his hackles, but he can admit now that she's right. He'd been drinking from the same glass for three days, after all.
She cups his face in one hand, gently. "Prickly," she says, running her thumb over his chin, which was last shaven about forty-eight hours ago, and only cursorily at that. "I've a sudden urge to water you."
"Already have," he says, grinning and taking a sip from his glass.
She kisses him, a hot shock after the cold water.
This is why Rosie does not like roses, she says: they're too delicate. They wilt. Their scent is cloying, saccharine. (Her words.) They remind her of old money, pretension, institution. Outmoded feminine ideals. (Her phrase.)
Worst of all, though, they're needy and temperamental, hard to satisfy, thirsty for attention, always wanting more.
Like Rosie's kiss, rather. The asymmetry is jarring, to a physicist. Then again, Otto is a believer in chaos, and always has been.
Her kiss is chaos. Hungry energy, wild-dancing tongue, heat out of nothing. He kisses back, he kisses back, he kisses back. They are unbreakable, fused together at their shared, sweltering mouths.
His hand comes up, inkstained, to tangle in her hair, and she is –