venus on a throne of roses (and thorns)
He kisses her, first on the lips, then her cheekbones, then her jawline, then the slender curve of her neck, swan-like and all smooth contours and soft angles; angular but not sharp, razor blades that don't cut. She fists her hands in his spiky Quilfish hair and murmurs his name, soft, feathery words that rush over him and then travel down until they fall in heaps of meaningless jargon.
"Hugh," she mumbles, and he lets go, the kiss is broken (the magic dies), they are just two teenagers again with shame written on their tongues and excitement blazing strong in their eyes.
"Sorry," he mutters, shoving his hands in his pockets, but she laughs, pats him on the shoulder, and tells him to get up.
So he does.
She smells like roses, the scent lingers on him long after she's gone. Eau de Parfum or something like that, she calls it. White and red varieties. A wildflower cocktail that clings to his body like a second skin.
(her lips taste like roses, too)
He watches as his starter, his Samurott, drops like a sack of bricks, crumpling onto their rubble-lined battlefield, the last vestiges of the electrical charge exiting its body and dispersing onto the floor as she withdraws her Electross, hopping over to him with a smile on her face (that could light up the universe with a thousand suns and collapse them into corresponding black holes all at once).
"Let's go," she says, eyes wide, lashes fluttering. "Hurry up, Hugh."
"Yeah, I'll be there in just a second."
His Samurott shudders, its body forcefully ejecting the final traces and its eyes roll back. It's out. He retrieves its Pokeball, presses the button that calls it back, and watches as it dissipates into a cloud of atoms and who-knows-what-else, quarks and protons and electrons from cells with ribosomes and mitochondria, sucked back in with a flash of scarlet. His fingers run over the plastic, the red-white motif, brushing around the hidden dials at the back.
"Hugh!" she calls.
"I'm coming!" he calls back, and he's off, running after the girl (his girl) again (and again).
When they're together, their bodies work against each other like cogs and gears, firmly meshed, intertwined and interlocked, rotating and rotating in endless cycles of mechanical sexuality, raw passion turned into a computer's coding, the speech of processors and microchips. It burns with a fire that rages, and he can still feel the burns on his skin, taste the ashes on his lips, hear that high-pitched wailing keen in his skull, ricocheting around the curved dome of his skull like a Milktalk on Rollout ten or eleven times.
She touches him, he touches her, they groan at the right times but there's a thin veneer of lies to it all, like saran wrap over Tupperware dishes (and leftover food). He's got scars all over him, all inside him, scars she can't see or reach, scars she can't kiss away with her tongue and her teeth, scars she can't use to make him scream. Her hair cascades around them, a curtain, and its a partition; it keeps them close, but oh-so far apart.
"Fuck, Rosa," he breathes as her fingers mash into his skin, working it like Play-Doh. "Shit, what are you-?"
"Don't talk," she commands, and he shuts up and stares down at her brown-haired head, at the tangles in her pigtails, observing the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose while she examines the paperthin lines superimposed onto his torso like watermarks.
She leaves smelling like Old Spice and his cum and damn, she's supposed to look fine in her lacy pink bra but there's just something essential missing from the picture, and besides, he smells like roses again.
It almost feels like heaven when she meets him across a busy intersection.
Winter, and it's snowing, and they're both dressed for summer but trying to be incongruous about it. There's something ironic about it because they're both Trainers (fighters, travelers, killers of gods) and they should realize the importance of wearing a scarf or getting hypothermia, but neither of them really give a shit and that's alright.
She sips from her unseasonal cup of Cherri berry iced tea and says, "We should talk."
He whispers, "Do we really need to?"
She bites her lip. "Do you know what's going to happen?"
"I don't. You keep expecting me to be psychic when I'm not, Rose."
Lashes like dark strands of wheat. "Since when have you called me Rose?"
"I don't know. Since now?"
Standing up on her tiptoes, she kisses him firmly on the tip of his nose, red and oozing snot as it is. Backing away, she stares at him tentatively (in a new light), looking at him like he's a mirror and she's completely nude and trying to figure out of she's fat or not. "Goodbye, Hugh."
He salutes her, knowing this is the last time, this has to be, there's just so much that should have gone wrong but it didn't and now they know that they aren't good for each other anymore. They're as bad as toasters and bathtubs or a skyscraper in a thunderstorm; they are stuck in a particle collider, smashing into each other again and again that it's a wonder they haven't yet crashed and burned (maybe he's psychic or maybe he's just smart because he can see the end coming like a pair of headlights).
The snow thickens, he wants to tell her 'goodbye' but his throat has locked as well. He feels like he's going to choke if he stays any longer, watching her and her plastic cup full of pinks and reds and breathing in her perfume, so he turns away, shoulders his bag, doesn't look back to see if she gets hit by a car or not.