Preferences
He liked his women not like her.
Coarse women with large breasts for coarse large hands that smelled, and probably tasted, of the barroom. Women with red lips and hooded eyes, smiling knowingly. He liked them like that.
She only ever liked him.
And he knew it.
And it made him laugh, even as he fished for the lumps of relatively nothing beneath the virgin pink of her kimono, his skin reeking of other, filthy mouths. As if he only ever did it for a laugh. And because it was easy, and because he could.
Because she loved him. She couldn't trace the root of it, it was hidden, twisted in with other avenues. Whenever she tried to visualize it she pictured the lines in his hands caked with dirt arching out in thousands of small branches too small to properly trace with the naked eye.
She suckled the palm of his hand, as if by sucking from its crack the soil and sweat she might obtain some answer, some logical conclusion that may clear it all up—
only to follow him back to camp, just as confused as her ruffled clothing while Jin sits, back straight and eyes dim behind the bright lenses of his glasses that flash in her direction once and only once, reflecting waves of light and heat from the campfire—
without her noticing. He goes back to watching the logs crack and dissolve under the pressure of the fire, and visualizes the lines of sunflower petals—searching for some answer, a logical conclusion, the root of his strange preference.