white-hot
Of all the things forbidden to her, this might be the sweetest.
It starts with a burned-white sky. It's the height of summer; the hottest Yukina ever felt. Wanting to soak the sunlight into every surface of her body, she hikes her white dress up above her knees, so she can feel the hot, dry wind up and down her bare legs, and Kazuma throws her shoes and stockings somewhere to his left.
She slowly, carefully unbuttons Kazuma's butter-yellow shirt, and tosses it across his body with her shoes. His skin is almost as white as hers, and when he lays down on the white blanket in the middle of the meadow, her cheek fits perfectly in the crook of his arm. Sometimes his opposite hand will come and rest on her thigh, her belly, her ribcage without prompting, but more often he lets her pick it up and arrange it how she sees fit.
Sometimes they talk, sometimes until Yukina can't tell if it's her skin sweating against the heat of his or vice-versa. Sometimes they have to talk, because Yukina doesn't understand humans and Kazuma doesn't understand Ice Maidens. Today, mostly, it's too hot to talk, but not hot enough to lie still, and Yukina is certain the subject is closed. Every possible word that could have been has been said, and every possibility has been floated, debated, discussed, evaluated, despaired of, and planned for.
Kazuma breathes in the scent of the sun baking the earth. "This won't happen again in my lifetime," he says, repeating her words.
"It can't," she answers. "It's biologically impossible."
She squirms, partly to get closer to him, partly because her dress is bunched up beneath her and blocking the sunshine from her skin, blocking Kazuma from her skin. The more she can get out of the way, the better, and when she places it there, his hand spans the width of her thigh. Only the very edge of his thumb brushes against the white-hot cotton dress and even that's too much as she pulls it up higher, higher, higher.
"Someone's going to see us," Kazuma says, half-hearted and automatic. He might still believe it.
"No one will say anything," she says back. "So we'll never have to know."
"Put up an ice barrier," he says.
She kisses his neck and says, "Silly. Then we'll get cold."
Her skin sweats under his hand, and that's lust now, not the summer heat. She unbuttons her dress, lets Kazuma and the sunshine kiss her breasts, and lets the hot ache between them reinforce her conviction that this is what she wants to do.
At some point, either by accident or by design, Kazuma will end up shielding her from the sun. His body casts a heavy shadow over hers, as she feels it begin where hers ends. But Kazuma doesn't take her warmth away without giving something back, and in the short burst of clarity that shoots through her mind right before that moment, she is sure her choice is the right one. The possibilities all flash behind her bright red eyes and even the ones that aren't ideal are acceptable, are better than nothing at all.
The first time they talked about it, Kazuma wanted to know what would happen when it was over. Yukina told him truthfully that she didn't know, that they loved each other now, before it was over, and he loved her back then, before it started, and that he would always have a place with them, if that was what he wanted, but she didn't know what things would be like afterward. None of her people had ever done such a thing. And human society was so different…
"Of course I'll still love you," Kazuma said back then. "And if things go back to the way they were before, that's acceptable."
"It's not acceptable to break your heart," she told him. "But there's no one to ask. My mother died rather than live without him."
Kazuma respected her enough not to say the half-dozen possible insults that he could have leveled at her brother (accurately or inaccurately) and instead, just confirmed:
"You're sure you still want twins?"