Warning: Implications.
Commentary: For the folks at Docspace. =) Thank you all for being so kind.
Five hundred words here, and five minutes: a challenge for myself. A wish, too.
I hope you enjoy it.
DECEMBER
"I've never done this before," Ami admits. Her breath steams in the air before her, a vaporous fog. She is shivering because the beginning of December is cloudy and cold and she left her favorite scarf, the thick red one, sitting at home on the bar. She is shivering too because Makoto's lips are tracing feathery trails along the nape of her bare, vulnerable neck. Those lips are very soft, and maybe a bit wet, and now she feels them curve as the other woman smiles.
Truth be told, Ami doesn't much miss the scarf.
"Don't worry," Makoto tells her, mouth moving over flesh. "Everyone has to have a first time." She adds, "It's easy. I'll show you."
Makoto's hands frame Ami's hips from behind. They curve over, palm the small rounds. The lightning soldier's fingernails skit along the seams of Ami's denim pockets. She tucks her head in protective promise above Ami's; the puff of the smaller woman's knit cap scratches her nose.
Looking down at their mingled shadows stretching across the sidewalk, Ami hedges, "What if we're caught by the park attendants?" She goes maroon just thinking about the possibility of being spotted publicly in such a compromising position.
"If we're caught," Makoto says firmly, "we'll tell them the truth. We'll say we're just"—and she lowers her voice into a wicked conspirator's tone—"having fun."
She pauses. Her hands tighten a little. Ami arches into them.
"Maybe we'll even invite them to join us," Makoto muses.
With an indignant squawk, Ami turns in the bower of arms to provide her lover a well-deserved swat. Makoto, grinning, allows her this small violence.
"So," she says when Ami is finished, "are you ready?"
Ami says nothing. Nibbling her lip, she looks sidelong down the walk again. Sunset stretches its ember fingers across the park's manicured lawns and hills. The surface of the manmade pond nearby glimmers clear and still, stirred to slow ripples sometimes by the evening's lingering breezes. The starlings are calling, their chirruping preet-preet a forebear of night's cape.
Sensing her worry, Makoto kisses the tender spot just above Ami's right eyebrow. She whispers to her friend, "It's late. No one will see." And then: "Just you and me here."
Those final words galvanize Ami. She flicks her eyes from the park to Makoto's face—to Makoto's eyes. She holds them. She furls her fingers over the taller soldier's wrist and agrees, "I'm ready."
Makoto allows her no time to change her mind. Her hands fall to Ami's hips again, flex, caress. They seize, lift—the arms behind them tense, shiver.
Makoto swings Ami gently into the massive pile of leaves left alongside the sidewalk by the park's custodians. Seconds later she leaps in herself, sending an explosive wave of deciduous detritus skyward. Ami shrieks. Makoto roars. The leaves crunch deliciously and they fling them at one another in an autumn war neither woman really wishes to win.
The sun sinks to the sound of their laughter.