There are a lot of unusual sights to behold in the aftermath of a demonstration-turned-riot. The red and blue aurora created by the sirens of a dozen police vehicles. Detained vandals being carted off by the busload for processing downtown. Broken glass being swept up by hapless shopkeeps who had the misfortune of being caught in the crossfire.
The officers on duty that night - those men and women manning a perimeter ringed in police tape and crowd control barriers - were used to thinking that they'd seen everything a riot could throw at them. That after a dozen crises there was nothing that could surprise them anymore. But even those weary veterans didn't recognize the thunderous roar echoing down residential streets, even they had never expected to see a carbon fiber supercar come whipping 'round the nearest street corner at twenty over the legal speed limit.
In their defense, the Lamborghini Sesto Elemento wasn't really the kind of car you expected to see, ever. About twenty of them existed in the world, and at somewhere around two-and-a-half-million apiece they weren't really meant to be driven anywhere but a racetrack or a showroom. It wasn't even all that practical, not with harness straps in lieu of seatbelts and well-positioned padding instead of actual seats. If you were taking one of those out on the street it was to make a point, and a pretty loud one.
And at that moment, the point was that Coco Adel was pissed.
Coco found what - or more precisely whom - she was looking for a moment later, pulling her car up beside an ambulance in what was either a no-parking zone or a crime scene. Like anyone was going to ticket her. She didn't even bother closing the door behind her as she stormed onto the glass-strewn street.
It was one of those strange mysteries of the universe that the person she was here to see - the person for whom she had broken about twenty traffic laws in about as many minutes - could remain blissfully ignorant of her presence despite the mere strides separating the two of them. And despite her intent, despite the righteous fury burgeoning within her, for a moment all Coco could do was stare. Stare at the woman who had, apparently by witchcraft, stolen her heart.
Velvet Scarlatina remained perched off the back of an ambulance, legs kicking gently with nervous energy. One hand was gripping a battered black camera, balanced precariously on her knees, a free thumb tapping through captured images on the display panel. The other was clutching a transparent oxygen mask, held against her mouth, from which she was breathing deeply. Despite the warm summer night she was draped by the foil of a space blanket, the plastic sheeting enveloping her in what appeared to be a metallic cocoon.
Before Coco could open her mouth, before she could let loose the torrent of damnations she'd spent the drive over rehearsing, Velvet glanced up, with the most ecstatic look in her eyes. She dropped the mask in a heartbeat, a triumphant smile plastered across her face as she schooched over on the lip of the ambulance to give her girlfriend a seat.
"Coco! You have to see these photos I got," Velvet declared, with an enthusiasm and assurance she so often lacked. She tilted her camera, inviting Coco to take a look, and as extraordinarily pissed as she was Coco couldn't bring herself to snuff out that flame of happiness.
Coco had organized enough photoshoots over the years to tell good pictures from bad ones, and she had to admit, Velvet's were really damn good. She might be biased, but she'd seen Pulitzer-winning photographs with less artistry and composition. The glass of a storefront window spider-webbing from a brick's impact, angry faces reflected in the jagged shards. Protestor and counter-protestor screaming at one another, spittle flying, sweat and blood dripping from each. The hard lines etched into the face of the officer in charge, a man on the brink of exhaustion, cast in the blue-red glow of emergency lights.
"I'm sorry, you're not allowed to be-" The voice of an intruding paramedic snapped Coco from her stupor and back to reality, a reality where her girlfriend had, through some cruel twist of Fate, been injured.
"What's her condition?" demanded Coco, rounding on him, with an imperious tone that left no room for retorts. Every element of her appearance was designed to convey unassailable superiority, from her sangfroid demeanor to her designer wardrobe, to her boots whose punishing heels raised her to six feet of flawless beauty. Aviator sunglasses allowed no glimpse of her eyes, her expression betrayed no hint of mercy. Her meteoric rise to the pinnacle of the fashion world had been fuelled in no small part by her own image, a cultivated image of a woman who defined 'best in the world'.
"S-she has a few minor lacerations on her arm, but nothing that will require stitches," the medic stammered out, collapsing under the brunt of Coco's significant displeasure. "She was also singed by an incendiary device of some sort, a few second-degree burns along her face and neck." For the first time Coco processed the bandages covering the right side of her lover's face, and saw Velvet shrink in on herself. "They're superficial enough that she won't require hospitalization, just diligent care." There was a moment's awkward pause. "Also… she got caught in some of the tear gas when the riot squad was dispersing the crowd. Nothing serious, but I've been giving her oxygen out of an abundance of caution."
"Velvet." Coco ignored the medic entirely, focusing her gaze on the woman wilting before her. "We're leaving."
With an apologetic half-smile Velvet shed the thermal blanket and handed her oxygen mask back to the (incredibly-confused) paramedic, Coco's gaze not leaving her for a heartbeat until she was safely ensconced in the car.
As Coco tore down the streets - the few witnesses to her arrival and departure now wondering if that had just been a stress-induced hallucination - Velvet at least had the good sense to look sheepish. Not repentant, mind you, or even all that apologetic, but at least she realized that her vague text message had nearly killed her girlfriend. And several dozen motorists who had the misfortune of being between Coco Adel and her love.
"So whose place are we going to?" asked Velvet, shattering the uneasy silence that had descended on them. Or as silent as you got in a car that could go from zero to sixty in 2.5 seconds. The thin leather gloves on her hands made Coco look all the more like a professional driver, most of whom she could outrace any day of the week. She effortlessly steered them onto the highway, weaving between lanes with practiced ease.
"I was thinking my place," replied Coco, keeping her voice aggressively neutral. 'Her place', of course, being a seven-thousand square foot penthouse condo that was probably the priciest real estate this side of the continental divide. 'Velvet's', by contrast, was a bedroom in an apartment she shared with three college freshmen. Coco was more than willing to slum it in the name of love - there were few souls on this planet who dared critique her lifestyle choices, anyways - but tonight she needed Velvet with her, within four walls where she was Master of her Domain. Though of course she couldn't say that.
"Last I checked, you had nothing but leftover pizza in your fridge," Coco noted.
Velvet shrugged slightly, conceding both the point and the battle. She let the silence grow for a few more seconds before speaking again. "Thanks for picking me up, by the way."
Coco's knuckles tightened around the steering wheel. "Next time, Velvs, make sure it's not from the back of an ambulance," she replied, the wavering in her voice almost drowned out by the roar of the accelerating engine.
"Honestly, Coco, it's just a minor burn," said Velvet, a faint note of confusion in her voice. "I told you the story about when I was working at Macca's for a summer, right? Near enough burnt my arm off in a grease fire. No eyebrows for a month." She laughed faintly at the oft-repeated anecdote, but Coco remained steadfastly unsmiling. Velvet glanced down, and saw that with her free hand Coco had unlocked her phone, was thumbing open an app. She wordlessly tossed the smartphone into Velvet's lap a moment later, a YouTube video already queued up.
REPORTER NEARLY KILLED BY MOLOTOV COCKTAIL AT PROTEST (WARNING GRAPHIC!)
Velvet winced at the clickbait title of the video, and what it must have done for Coco's nerves. The footage was a recording of a local news channel, the majority of the screen taken up by video shot from a helicopter. For the first few seconds the footage was blurry, as the cameraman struggled to focus on what was happening several hundred feet below, but eventually Velvet saw herself snap into focus, pressed up against a wall as men in bandanas ran down the street in front of her. The street itself was mostly empty - reporters and protesters alike having ceded the ground to those more inclined to violence - but Velvet watched herself ignoring plumes of tear gas drifting down the street, instead focusing on swapping out her camera lenses. She felt her stomach sink as she knew what happened next. It was strange, watching herself take a half-step closer to the balaclava-clad man lighting a petrol bomb in the middle of the street, how she actually tried to position herself in front of him so she could get a better shot.
She flinched as the glass bottle was hurled through the air. Whether through indifference, ignorance or malevolence the man lobbing the firebomb had thrown it only a few feet from where she stood. It shattered against a nearby wall, the flame arcing out in a line in accordance with the bottle's trajectory. Velvet watched herself instinctively try to cover the side of her face with her arm, but she could only curse at how slow she had been. The camera zoomed in on her as she stumbled, tripping on the curb and toppling into the pavement. Watching it happen was somehow so much more painful than living it, when all she'd felt was the adrenaline in her veins. Knowing that this was the footage Coco had watched - her clawing herself to her feet, coughing and red-eyed as the tear gas was suddenly carried downwind - made it a thousand times worse.
"Congratulations, Velvet. That video's already going viral."
Velvet looked truly downcast now, staring down at the camera in her hands, the tool of her trade, the thing she'd safeguarded better than her own body. "For what it's worth," she murmured, when the video finally ended, "I'm sorry."
Coco slammed her hand against the wheel, causing Velvet's head to snap upright in shock. In a vehicle as high-performing as Coco's the whole mind-body-car distinction blurred into meaninglessness, the two women rocketing down the highway in accordance with the racing of Coco's heart. "I don't want you to be sorry!" she barked, her composure slipping as she relived the memory again, the moment when she'd turned on the news and witnessed her love being thrown to the ground by the firebomb. The networks had been playing that clip again and again and again, even pulling up an old headshot of Velvet's that they could show side-by-side.
"I don't want you to be sorry," Coco repeated, though this time her voice was more pleading than demanding. "I want you to be safe."
"It's my job," offered Velvet, speaking softly despite the heartfelt plea from her girlfriend. "People need to see what these marches are getting like. That it's not just flag-waving and hot air. That insurgents are escalating things and people are getting hurt."
"Christ, Velvet, it can be someone else's job for a day. Maybe someone who isn't an immigrant should cover violent, xenophobic marches." Not that Australians tended to be the targets of that rhetoric, but Coco was using every argument she could think of.
"Nobody else wanted to be on the other side of the police line," Velvet explained, her voice still infuriatingly calm, spoken with the certainty of someone convinced of their own righteousness. "It's an insurance thing. None of the networks can risk having one of their own getting hurt. I'm just a stringer."
Another thing she seemed to be perfectly content with. Velvet might have been young but she was undoubtedly one of the best photojournalists on the continent. She'd received more offers than you could shake a stick at - including a few exceptionally generous ones from Coco's own media team - but when pressed she always had some excuse to decline. It wasn't all that complicated, Coco knew - Velvet went where she felt she needed to go. Even if that was into the heart of an angry crowd rapidly morphing into a riotous mob, long after her fellow journalists had cleared out.
"And exposing yourself to tear gas? You have asthma, Velvs."
"Had asthma. And I really only caught a whiff, just enough to sting a little," replied Velvet, furrowing her brow ever-so-slightly. "And it wasn't like I chose to. Sometimes these things just happen."
Coco inwardly screamed. "Could you at least have worn a different jacket?" She lamented, and Velvet had to blush a little. "Maybe, I don't know, one without the bloody Union Jack on the shoulder? The people in these crowds are kind of touchy about the whole 1776 thing."
"According to the EMT, the thick leather probably kept the burn from spreading to my arm," Velvet noted, wincing a little when she realized that the sentence probably sounded more reassuring in her head than when spoken aloud. "And besides, it's Australia's Southern Cross," she corrected, latent nationalism causing her to prickle ever-so-slightly. "It looks completely different."
"Don't lecture me about graphic design," shot back Coco, the annoyance in her tone belying the comfort of familiar conversation topics. Coco might have been a fashion designer first and foremost but there was no element of aesthetics she considered outside her domain. "Saint George's Cross, Saint Patrick's Cross, Scottish Saltire: Union Jack. Add whatever stars you want but you're still flashing British pride."
Velvet snorted. "By that logic so is Hawai'i. But I don't see any angry mobs storming Waikīkī."
Coco rolled her eyes, melodramatically. "You are insufferable, you know that? And I work with some pretty goddam insufferable people." But of course she caught the small smile creeping across Velvet's face out of the corner of her eye, and of course she couldn't keep but grinning just a little as Velvet poked her playfully in the arm.
"Yeah, but you still love me," teased Velvet, tucking her legs up as best she could.
"I do," confirmed Coco, taking the moment to cast a glance at her girlfriend, curling herself up as the last rays of light dipped beneath the horizon. She sombered slightly. "So I hope you understand why it scares the living daylights out of me when I see the love of my life burned and bloodied on national television."
"I understand, Coco," said Velvet, an expression of loving admiration playing across her face. "And I love you, too. It's why I care so much about my home, why it's so important to capture what's happening to it."
"Thought 'home' for you was Blacktown, New South Wales," replied Coco, dryly.
Velvet couldn't avoid rolling her eyes at that, at the anachronistic name of the city she'd been forced to use for the majority of her life. The etymology really was as racist as it sounded, too. "I said 'home', not 'hometown'," she corrected, just a little irately. But then she softened. "Home's not a place, you know. Not a postcode or a flat. It's belonging." Her hand crossed the car to find Coco's leg, the gentle pressure so much more powerful than the V10 engine she commanded. Velvet gestured out the window, at the skyline spread out before them. "This is where you belong, Coco. With your studios and your supermodels and your runways and your skyscrapers." Velvet paused, but no words came to Coco's mind. "Me?" A shrug. "Home is wherever you are. It's one of the reasons why I'm out there, with this," she said, hefting her camera slightly as she spoke. "I want your world to be a beautiful one, Coco Adel. I might not know how to solve all the problems in it… but I might be able to show them to people who do."
It felt like an eternity until either woman spoke, the stripes on the pavement blurring into an unbroken line. "So you're not going to go chasing Pulitzers in Aleppo, is what I'm taking away from this?" asked Coco, after the words and their meaning had sunk in.
"Not unless you're planning a vacation there," promised Velvet, leaning across to plant a soft kiss on Coco's cheek.
"Promise me you won't scare me like that again, Velvs."
"If you promise to admit that I can take care of myself," the photographer retorted, with a smile in her voice.
And even if the protective facet of Coco's personality kept her from voicing that belief, they both knew that it existed regardless. It wasn't the first protest-turned-riot Velvet had covered, it was at flashpoints like that one that Velvet had made a name for herself, for her steady hand and her unflinching gaze. Her instinct for finding the story in the chaos, for capturing the moments that needed to be shared. It was between fireballs and truncheons that she'd made her name, a name invited almost on a whim to a panel on Viral Images and the New Media. Which one Coco Adel had just so happened to Chair…
"You remember how you said, 'let's not go to your place, you have nothing but leftover pizza in your fridge'"? called out Velvet from the kitchen, while her girlfriend waited for the other shoe to drop.
"Mm-hm," replied Coco, with forced neutrality, her attention still nominally focused on a laptop and the several hundred unread emails it displayed. She glanced at the designer sunglasses resting on the table beside her. It was only in the security of her own penthouse - where paparazzi and manic fans could never hope to reach - that she ever willingly parted with them. With the few souls she didn't need to veil herself behind mirrored lenses.
Velvet strolled out, a large white pizza box in hand, coming to a stop a few feet before her girlfriend. Coco made a show of politely closing her laptop's lid, just before Velvet raised the pizza box's.
A single, solitary slice of pepperoni stared backed at her, misshapen and morphed by forces unknown to either woman. If a pizza slice could wish for death, this one undoubtedly did.
"That, Miss Adel, is the entirety of the edible foodstuffs in this domicile!"
Velvet was annoyed, but the problem was she was really cute when she was annoyed. She furrowed her brow and clenched her fists, and she scrunched up her nose in a manner that was undeniably leporine.
"So, Chinese delivery then?" asked Coco, glibly. The demands on her time and her company being what they were, Coco almost never ate at her condo, spending every meal either in a restaurant desperate for her blessing or hunched over her desk, knee-deep in crises. After the first time she'd pried open her fridge and faced a rotting garden of uneaten vegetables she'd given up on maintaining the façade.
Velvet thumped her foot impatiently on the floor, demanding attention. The pouty scowl on her face did little to mask the fact that she was reallyhungry. "You. Lied. To. Me." she declared, slamming the pizza box closed.
Coco stood up, closing the distance between them in a few long strides. Velvet shrunk ever-so-slightly, worried she'd pushed the joke just a little too far, before her girlfriend sunk melodramatically to her knees before her, clutching one of Velvet's hands in both of hers.
"Velvet Scarlatina, can you somehow find it in your heart of infinite mercy to forgive this wretched soul?" 'begged' Coco, the drawl of her childhood home slipping into her voice. "Is there anything I can do to make amends?"
Velvet held her scowl for as long as she could. "Chinese delivery," she demanded. "No meat. And… I get to pick the movie."
Coco let slip an annoyed grunt, and the crack of her façade of repentance shattered Velvet's own mock indignation.
"Fine," Coco declared, her voice resuming its habitual coolness as she stood upright once more. "I'll call for food, you get the movie set up. Something on Netflix?"
Velvet snorted. "You wish," she teased, reaching around for her backpack. "I've been saving this one for a special occasion." Coco's stomach tightened a little. She might love her girlfriend to the end of the world, but similar tastes in movies they simply did not share. Sitting on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival had done nothing to dull Coco's artistic snobbery. "We are going to…." began Velvet, melodramatically pausing for effect. She pulled out a Blu-ray case, thrusting it out in front of her, grinning ear to ear, "Enter the Dragon!"
Coco's eyes glanced at the movie's description: "A martial artist agrees to spy on a reclusive crime lord using his invitation to a tournament there as cover." She let out a world-weary sigh, and resigned herself to her doom.
As much as Coco compared her girlfriend's apartment to a not-particularly-nice refugee camp, Velvet actually liked her own place. Yeah she had loud roommates, and the bathroom was kind of gross, and there was an omnipresent miasma of stale alcohol and discarded take-out containers, but it was her place. Had been for years, ever since she'd bid Down Under adieu and crossed the Pacific with little more than an overstuffed backpack. As beautiful as Coco's penthouse was it was tough to compete with the bed she'd slept in for years, with the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere she'd painted on her ceiling.
That said, she had to concede the superiority of Coco's home theater. Before her girlfriend had invited her to stay the night Velvet hadn't even know there was such a thing as a 170" TV, let alone that owning one was a possibly goal for a human to achieve. She couldn't begin to fathom how many zeroes were on its price tag, but she had to admit it beat destroying her eyes with her apartment's cathode ray tubes.
The two women were laying across a black leather couch so overstuffed that Velvet had serious concerns about drowning in it. Or rather, Coco was lying back, propped up against the couch's high arm, while her girlfriend flopped atop her. Velvet kept the right side of her face - the one taped over with bandages and pockmarked with scratches - pressed against her girlfriend's body, so as not to remind Coco of her injuries.
The proceeds of their impromptu feast were sprawled at the base of the couch, a half-dozen cartons disrupting the room's photoshoot-ready décor. At arm's length from Coco rested a half-empty glass of Zind-Humbrecht Riesling, the white wine of her Alsatian ancestors a surprisingly suitable pairing to the Chinese cuisine. Velvet, in another one of her habits that maddened her lover to no end - had forgone wine entirely in favor of a 24 oz can of beer. Velvet remained infuriatingly tight-lipped about her hostility to wine, Coco having only caught the infrequent mutter about 'goon' having ruined grapes for her.
Coco stifled a groan as Velvet scrambled off of her, the photographer folding her legs beneath her and staring enraptured at the scene before them. Coco's ears were already promising to bleed from the horrible ADR, but for Velvet the cheesy dialogue might as well have been ambrosia.
"This is the best part," Velvet declared, casting about for the remote so she could crank the volume. Coco raised a pair of bemused eyebrows as she watched the movie out of a corner of her eye, the spellbound expression on her girlfriend's face consuming far more of her attention.
Bruce Lee, clad in a black tunic, strode up to a figure wearing an orange robe of a particularly garish shade. When he spoke, the horrible dubbing threatened Coco's very sanity. "I see your talents have gone beyond the mere physical level. Your skills are now at the point of spiritual insight. I have several questions. What is the highest technique you hope to achieve?"
"To have no technique," answered Velvet, her voice barely above a whisper, her words and cadence identical to Bruce Lee's on-screen answer.
Coco couldn't help but smile, her heart warmed by the enthusiasm in her lover's eye as Velvet continued reciting line after line, verbatim. She hadn't the faintest idea why this movie out of millions had somehow earned a place in Velvet's heart, but it was charming all the same.
"Now, you must remember," murmured Velvet, now perfectly matching the movie's monk, "the enemy has only images and illusions behind which he hides his true motives. Destroy the image and you will break the enemy."
With the scene concluded, Velvet's gaze finally wavered from the screen, long enough for her to realize that her girlfriend had been watching her. Velvet flushed a brilliant shade of scarlet as she drew her knees up to her chest, wordlessly praying that the leather cushions would swallow her hole.
"Come here, you," ordered Coco, and Velvet reluctantly allowed herself be dragged back across her girlfriend.
"I'm sorry," Velvet said, the apology muffled somewhat by virtue of her face being pressed against Coco's body. Her girlfriend amicably flicked the side of her head, causing Velvet to curl up even closer to her.
"You're silly," declared Coco, "and I love you." Velvet allowed herself to be coaxed out of her fetal position, Coco finding her lips and planting a kiss firmly on them. A few more caused Velvet to fully uncoil, to once again blanket her girlfriend with the warmth of her body. They spent the rest of the movie in comfortable silence, communicating only with brushes of lips and strokes of hands. For the first time in her life Velvet didn't mind missing chunks of the movie, to losing herself not in the cheesy action but in the gentle pressure of a lover's arms.
And to her own surprise Coco would have been content if the movie had never ended, if she could have spent eternity gently brushing the hair of the beautiful woman atop her. Despite the surround-sound speaker system she almost drifted off, the warmth of a lover's body all the blankets she needed. But reality cared not for her unspoken wishes, the last of the credits ending and the disc booting them back to the static title screen, where dramatic music ran on a never-ending loop.
They had needed that, Coco begrudgingly admitted, an hour-and-a-half of martial arts melodrama to cool nerves frayed by the day's events. For the adrenaline and excitement to flush from their systems, for memories of exploding windows and white-knuckled drives to fade ever-so-slightly.
Velvet moved first, detaching herself at a sloth's pace as she planted kisses across her girlfriend's face, a chill running through both bodies at the loss of shared heat. Coco shuffled slightly on the couch, her skin feeling practically plastered to the leather cushions. It was exceedingly rare for Velvet to break a cuddle first, for her to willingly disentangle without a demand on her time… Coco's curiosity was piqued.
"Can… can I show you something?" asked Velvet, her tone nervous, but the note of determination unmistakable. Coco said nothing as she sat herself upright, but Velvet caught the wordless permission to continue.
She scampered off to her backpack, fiddling with the zippers until she triumphantly withdrew her prize: a pair of jet-black nunchaku, held together by a small chain.
Coco couldn't help but laugh a little. "You know most girls just carry pepper spray," she teased, as Velvet raced back to the couch to fiddle with the remote control. Coco, of course, was not one of those girls. The last man foolish enough to make an unsolicited pass at her had become intimatelyfamiliar with what exactly she kept in those designer handbags.
"Just…. give me a second," stalled Velvet, mashing down on the fast-forward button. She finally found the scene she was looking for a pressed the play button, positioning herself between Coco and the screen as she did.
For a few seconds nothing really happened. Coco was re-watching the fight scene playing out on the screen, Velvet was standing around awkwardly, adjusting her stance almost imperceptibly. Then, just as Coco was about to ask what she was waiting for, Velvet cast a fleeting glance at the scene progressing over her shoulder, took a small breath, and moved.
Coco Adel, by her own admission, didn't know a lot about martial arts. But she knew enough to appreciate that whatever the hell Bruce Lee was doing with the nunchaku on-screen it certainly wasn't easy. Which was why she couldn't keep her jaw from dropping as she watched Velvet imitate his moves with perfect precision. The two sticks unerringly slapped into her open hands, spinning and twirling on their chain in a way that could only be called hypnotic. The sticks spun from one position to another with such speed they were often little more than blurs, whirring through the air with a menacing swish. It took her a moment to realize that Velvet wasn't just imitating the movement of the weapons but was re-enacting the entire fight, fending off a legion of invisible adversaries…
The scene ended and Velvet once again scrambled for the remote, this time hitting the button to eject the disk from the machine. As the TV flashed to display the manufacturer's logo Velvet was left standing before Coco, panting ever-so-slightly.
The silence lasted a moment too long, and one of Velvet's hands nervously found its way to the back of her neck. "Sorry, I… I didn't mean to be a show-off," she stammered out, completely misreading the nature of her girlfriend's silence.
"Velvs, that was…" Coco paused for a moment, gathering her thoughts, while her lover flinched in anticipation of a reprimand. "…actually pretty badass," she concluded, and the fireworks behind Velvet's eyes put Disneyland to shame.
"Really?" Velvet squeaked, her voice jumping an octave. She didn't give Coco time to answer, not when she was stifling her with kisses and crushing her with hugs a moment later, the distance between her and the couch evaporating in a heartbeat.
"Mm-hm," Coco eventually got out, a thumb playing across Velvet's lower lip as she spoke. "How long have you been practicing that?"
Velvet tilted her head, slightly quizzically. "Practicing?" She squinted her eyes. "Well I mean I only found a pair of authentic nunchaku on Tuesday. They seem to be weighted slightly differently than the ones used in the movie were, so it took me one or two tries to mentally recalibrate. And the camera's not in the best position, so I couldn't see what exactly his hands were doing all the time. Took some more time to piece it together from different scenes."
Now it was Coco turns to squint. "But you mean… you practiced with nunchaku before, right? Did you take classes as a kid?"
"Oh God no," Velvet replied with a snorted laugh. "Do you think my parents wanted me playing with things like this?" she asked, dangling the weapon before her. The tone of her voice left no ambiguity as to the answer.
"So you're telling me you picked up nunchaku for the first time a few days ago, and now you can fight like Bruce Lee."
"I mean, I must have re-watched that scene a thousand times in my head, that's got to count for something," offered Velvet, a little uncertainly, taking a seat on the couch again. "It's just a party trick, really."
"A party trick?" demanded Coco. "Like peeling an apple in one piece, or opening a beer bottle with your eye socket?"
She shrugged. "You never watched action movies as a kid and tried to do the same moves?" Coco, it should not have surprised Velvet, had not. She was the kind of kid who'd seen THX 1138 before Star Wars. "Some of us just never stop…"
"So you can do all sorts of martial arts moves?" asked Coco, to which Velvet nodded cautiously. She racked her brain. "Like, um… a butterfly kick?"
"Not in these pants," conceded Velvet, drawing Coco's attention to her dark blue jeans. They weren't quite as tight as the leather leggings Coco wore, but seduced her all the same.
"I think I have a solution to that problem, Velvs," teased Coco, as her hands began drifting towards the button of Velvet's jeans.
Velvet batted her hand away with a playful slap and a teasing grin. "You, Miss Adel, are a lech," Velvet declared, clearly savoring the enunciation. She slid herself back on the couch. "Just what do you think the tabloids would have to say about your behavior? Plying a cute, young, impressionable photographer with beer and Chinese food and then trying to crack on her." The twang of her Aussie accent was somehow becoming even more pronounced, as it usually did when she was exposed to alcohol.
"My publicist would probably give me a gold star," replied Coco, teasingly. "Don't you know that there's no such thing as bad publicity or a free lunch?" She pounced on Velvet again, her girlfriend letting loose a giggle-studded shriek as Coco straddled her, a string of kisses planted along the photographer's bare throat. "And now that I've got you right where I want you..."
Nobody could have mistaken the predatory tone in Coco's voice for actual malevolence, nor Velvet's whimpers for genuine fear. Not when both women were barely suppressing idiotic grins. "B-but I'm injured," pleaded Velvet, twisting around on the cushions to show off the bandages on her face. "Surely you'll have mercy on me?"
She'd meant it as a joke, but Coco's ravishments had stopped altogether, a somber expression dousing the flames of desire that moments ago had seemed all-consuming. Coco's hand, which seconds prior had been hovering between Velvet's legs, now drifted up to the photographer's face, a finger tracing the lines where bandage met skin with otherworldly tenderness. Velvet's breath caught in her throat as her girlfriend's hand brushed over reddened skin, the photographer transfixed by the droplets of water oh-so-slowly pooling in the corners of her lover's eyes.
"Come on, I'm changing your bandages," declared Coco, the authority in her voice leaving no room for debate. She grabbed Velvet's hand in hers and yanked her upright, half-dragging her across the condo to her bathroom.
Velvet pouted. "We can do that later," she said, her tone remarkably close to a petulant whine. She quickened her pace to bring herself side-by-side with Coco, licking her lips in a melodramatic display of lust. "How about I let you take some photos tonight?"
"I'm changing your bandages," repeated Coco, with icy indifference. Velvet hung her head in defeat as she was guided into the bathroom, a cavernous room of marbled floors and crystalline glass that had been inspired by a Florentine palace. Velvet was seated unceremoniously on the toilet, left to scowl as the last vestiges of arousal were flushed from her system.
"You know the medic put these on like… four hours ago?" said Velvet, as Coco reached into a cabinet and withdrew a small first aid kit. Velvet's foot tapped idly against the marbled floor while her girlfriend washed and scrubbed her hands.
"That medic was undoubtedly overworked, underpaid, hurried, and sloppy," retorted Coco, spinning shut the taps. "I don't think I've ever seen a bandage applied with so little care."
"Remind me where you got your First Aid certification?"
Coco scowled, withdrawing some bandages and a pair of medical shears. "I cut the cloth for the dress the First Lady wore on Inauguration Day," she declared, "I think I can handle dressing a wound."
Coco actually did have First Aid training, had mastered it as readily as any other skill back when she'd opened up her first studio, to comply with workplace safety regulations. Injuries in her line of work were rarely anything but paper cuts and sprained ankles, but she'd made a point of always being prepared.
Velvet winced as the bandage was peeled from the right side of her face. The dressing wasn't particularly adhesive, which was a mercy for her burnt skin, and Coco's hands moved with the delicacy of a surgeon's. Velvet's heart fell a little as she saw the expression that flashed across her love's face once the bandage was removed, as Coco took in the sight of her raw, discolored skin for the first time.
"I hope they appreciate what you're doing for them, Velvs," murmured Coco, as she tossed the bandage into a small trash can. Velvet's brow furrowed a little at that.
"I don't take pictures because I want to feel appreciated," replied Velvet. "I do it to give voice to people who don't get to be heard. For the people who would never be able to tell their stories otherwise."
Coco let out a non-committal grunt and returned her attention to Velvet's seared skin. Wetting a sterile gauze sponge she began dabbing at the center of the wound, slowly and deliberately. Velvet flinched ever-so-slightly, a faint hiss escaping her. Coco shook her head. "Of all the harebrained things you could've done," she grumbled under her breath. But her gaze didn't drift from the wound, her eyes alight with the same delicate concentration she showed masterpieces underway in her studio.
Velvet shot Coco the stink eye, but the glare went unnoticed. "You know," Velvet began, her tone aggressively casual, "I got an offer from one of the big publishing houses this morning."
"What was it for?" asked Coco, though she didn't glance up. She discarded her first gauze sponge and grabbed another, continuing to clean the wounds with maddening meticulousness.
"They're putting together a book exploring what all these anti-immigrant protests mean for the country." She paused. "Lots of firsthand accounts, on-the-ground perspectives, that kind of thing."
"Oh?" Coco grabbed the bandages she'd laid out beside her, eyeballing the amount of material she'd need, before trimming them to the appropriate sizes.
"And since it doesn't look like the protests are going to be stopping anytime soon, they want me to spend a few months touring the country. Move to a different city whenever it looks like the tensions are going to boil over. They'd want me to start as soon as next week."
That caused Coco's eyes to snap up, the bandage she was in the middle of plastering to Velvet's face missing its mark by a fraction of an inch. "What?"
Velvet couldn't keep a grin from flickering across her face. "Yeah. It pays crap but they said I could expense a new helmet and gas mask. Though I swear I'll probably need a bulletproof vest by the time this boils over."
"Velvet... you…" can't. The word died in Coco's throat, her tongue lolling idiotically in her mouth, pooled tears threatening to streak down her cheeks. Velvet tilted her head, quizzically.
Coco wanted to say no so badly it almost hurt. When she'd seen the news footage of Velvet stumbling away she'd felt nauseous. The idea of her girlfriend putting herself in that same danger again… and again and again and again… it was enough to make her want to throw up. She should have put her foot down, demanded Velvet accept some cushy offer taking photographs of press conferences and pet shows. She'd buy her a very nice camera, set her head straight, and they could spend every evening sequestered in the security of her penthouse.
But she couldn't. As badly as she wanted to, she couldn't declare that ultimatum, couldn't withhold her blessing. She knew too many people content to live their lives in gilded cages, and she couldn't be the person who forced Velvet into one. Not when Velvet heard the call of the voiceless unlike any other soul. Not at the cost of that triumphant smile that shone only when she looked back at the images she had captured, at a story well told.
"Coco? Are you…"
Coco sniffed loudly, uncouthly, then violently shook her head, raising herself up to her full height. "Do you need any new gear?" she asked, barely able to keep her voice flat. "New lenses? Laptop? If you want I know a place that makes jackets with an integrated Kevlar weave, if you're looking for something more discreet than-"
"Coco…" Velvet murmured, a soft smile playing across her face, "I'm not taking the job."
Her mind screeched to a halt. "Wait, you aren't?"
"No," confirmed Velvet, shaking her head a little. "It's a good idea, but they don't want to license the photos to any news services. I'd work for a few months and maybe a dozen photos would end up in a very nice coffee table book. It'd be stylish, probably all black-and-white on glossy paper, but it's not likely to be seen by anyone." She shrugged, a little remorsefully.
The expression of supreme relief remained plastered on Coco's face for a few more seconds, before it rapidly transitioned into a scowl. "You were testing me," growled Coco, annoyed at falling for such a simple trap.
"Was not," shot back Velvet. "I was just telling you about my day. Not my fault you leapt to conclusions."
Coco's glower, somehow, managed to get even darker. She packed up her first aid kid with ruthless efficiency before spinning around to her girlfriend, wordlessly sweeping her off her feet and into her arms.
Velvet kissed Coco all the way to her bedroom, to the sprawling King-size bed she was unceremoniously dumped on.
"I love you," declared Coco, her tone still irate and her brow still furrowed, as she clambered atop a girlfriend who made no move to fend her off.
"I know," murmured Velvet. She slipped out of her T-shirt and tossed it lazily to the floor, her bosom covered only by one of Coco's (many) lacy gifts to her.
"You drive me insane," her girlfriend grumbled back, stripping down to her undergarments with neither pomp nor circumstance.
"I know," repeated Velvet, her smile never wavering. "But you love it." She made room for her girlfriend, and the two slid beneath the sheets, bodies wordlessly entwining. "And that camera you bought me was horrible enablement."
"Sometimes I'm my own worst enemy," agreed Coco, lying flat on her back so Velvet could slide into the crook of her arm. "Oh, before I forget: it's not as cool as nunchaku, but…"
It turned out to be surprisingly difficult to clap your hands twice while one arm was enveloping a lover, but she managed it, the automatic sensor plunging the room into darkness as she did.
Velvet peered up at the ceiling, at the specks of white paint that now glowed in the dark. "Gacrux," she finally said, gesturing to the topmost of five seven-pointed stars now painted to the ceiling. "Delta Crux… Epsilon Crux…" her hand drifted in a lazy clockwise motion. "Acrux. Mimosa." They were stars, whose names she'd learned on a school trip to the Siding Spring Observatory so many years ago. They were the stars that made up the Southern Cross constellation, the navigational beacons of the southern hemisphere. Stars impossible to see this far north. "That's the flag of-"
"-New Zealand. I know, Velvs," interrupted Coco, a playful slap the reward for her teasing.
"Arse." Velvet couldn't pretend to be annoyed, of course, and quickly pecked her girlfriend on the cheek. "Thank you."
"You know, I'd never painted a ceiling before," mused Coco. "I'm practically Michelangelo."
"And so humble, too."
They laughed, then they kissed, then they pulled their bodies together. And finally they drifted off, beneath familiar stars that had guided seafarers since time immemorial.
[A/N: This story was originally published on May 16, 2016. If you'd like to know more about me or my writing, please visit my on reddit or Tumblr, in both cases under the username "pvoberstein". My complete corpus can be found on AO3, under the username "Liara_90"]