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rainbowfic2020-06-28 06:32 am
ilthit) wrote in rainbowfic2020-06-28 06:32 am
Entry tags:
Kohl #1: Summer's End (Peccadillo Parlour)
Name: Summer's End
Story: Peccadillo Parlour
Colors: Kohl #1: Lipstick
Supplies and Styles: Eraser, Pastels
Word Count: 3,368
Rating: explicit
Summary: What if Pru hadn't been adopted by her Aunt Amelia?
Contains: Discussion of drug addiction, crime, and racial discrimination. Illegal hiring practices (child labour). Mildly D/s sexual dynamic.
Notes: Written forfemslash_kink exchange as a treat and used for squares on trope_bingo and seasonofkink , and I'm planning on crossposting on creativechallenges , but I really feel it belongs here!
Pru started working in the flower shop a little younger than was legal, when her mum first went into rehab. Her dad knew the owner’s cousin, and they needed some way to make money to replace what Paula had been bringing in from the bar. If anyone peeked in the back Langtry's Lilies and saw a twelve-year-old making up bouquets, it was easy enough to dismiss. “Oh, she’s a friend’s kid, her school’s doing a careers thing.” “She loves playing with the flowers.” “We’re teaching her how to make ‘em for a children’s charity.” Nobody asked, in the end. The fact she and Melanie were both Chinese seemed explanation enough.
Pru was at the shop every Saturday and every other afternoon after school and was paid in cash. Working days meant the independence to pop into a store on her way home to buy a candy bar or a comic on the sly. The rest went to dad, to beer and ready meals, and presumably rent.
Ten years later Paula was in rehab again and Freddy was in Vegas. Pru hadn’t spoken to her father in years, but the rumors had filtered in anyway—the tricked-out coin machines, the shady car dealerships, the arrests. The flower shop was still on the same Brooklyn corner, on a street connecting Prospect Park to Greenwood Cemetery. It wasn’t too far from the apartment, and she had a car now, the fifteen-year-old GMC Canyon she’d bought off Melanie when she had taken over the shop. She kept the truck spruced up with paint and polish, and the shop’s name emblazoned on the side.
Mr Collings, who had had the shop before Melanie, had been a fan of a romanticized 19th century aesthetic, which still showed up in the trellis arching over the doorway and the faded rose-pattern wallpaper on the back wall, as well as the sugary cursive of the shop sign. Lily Langtry gazed soulfully out of a sepia photograph framed and hanging behind the counter. After all this time, Pru hadn’t wanted to modernize too much. People knew Langtry’s and they liked it the way it was. But competition was tough, the economy tougher, and so she did what she could. She replaced the white-washed counter with smooth imitation marble and the short fat lace-patterned vases with tall, slim glass ones to attract new clientele. She paid an art student to retouch the sign and design posters to hang up and down the streets by the cemetery to make sure no-one had to visit a grave without a fresh bouquet. She even hired another twelve-year-old, partly from nostalgia, partly to save a few pennies. You didn’t have to pay a kid the same as she did her trainee and Mel Jr. So far, she’d kept afloat.
“Jamal, no,” she told him as he picked out another orchid by the stem, and gently guided the flower back into its vase before his scissors could reach it. Their hands were similar—small and narrow, one white, the other brown. She could already tell that in three years Jamal would tower over her. “You’re costing me an arm and a leg, kid. Stick to the bargain flowers, okay?”
The air at the back of the shop was moist as the summer heat penetrated through the open back door and evaporated the water in the vases and the sink. Sweat stuck Pru’s hair to the back of her neck. Jamal pursed his lips and tossed his head. Pru knew he’d have his mitts on her orchids and roses again as soon as she turned her back, but hell, the kid had talent. She just needed someone to walk in who happened to want an orchid corsage.
The bell rang. She slipped back to the front, putting on her best corsage-selling smile. The woman closing the door behind her, her bare forehead gleaming with a touch of sweat, gave Pru the wary look of someone preparing for a confrontation. Large eyes, short-cropped natural hair with its tips dyed orange, a heart-shaped face that ended in a defiant chin-point. Tie-dyed shirt hanging off square shoulders, a silver Venus pendant around her long neck. She was the hottest thing Pru had ever seen.
“You got my sister’s boy Jamal back there?”
That was how Pru met Eve.
-
The summer heat gave way to a mild autumn, the first after a series of Indian summers. Pru lay on the grass in the park under the shade of an oak tree, her head pillowed on Eve’s lap, utterly in love. Not with Eve, as such, or not only Eve, but the touch of cool wind and birdsong, the smell of sausages crackling on barbecue and the hum of talk and laughter all around. Eve had family, and more than that—she had community. And now Pru did too.
“There’s a right way and a wrong way to eat potato salad,” Eve’s eldest sister was saying to her husband Ray. Marla was like the sun, bigger than life, and everybody who came into her orbit ended up either crawling for her or fighting her; everybody except Ray. “See, the way you’re doing it? That ain’t right.” Ray gave her a big, potato-salady grin, and her laughter rang out through the park.
“I’m not going to Juilliard,” Jamal was telling Kevin, the only white guy at the barbecue. “I’m going straight to Broadway.”
“…Pride’s not just a big party, come on, Dee. It’s an event. It’s an experience. You’ve really never been?”
“…Seventeen apartments empty now, just because this asshole wants to wait until that mall’s finished building so he can hike up the rent.”
“You have to read it…” “Coming out is a process.”
She’d never had this many people in her life. People whose names she knew, who weren’t regulars at Langtry’s. But when you knew Eve, you got to know everyone Eve knew, too.
Jamal still worked at the flower shop, but no more school evenings, weekends and holidays only. At the end of that lecture on child labour laws and the importance of education, and a number of heartfelt apologies, Pru had asked Eve out.
Flat-out, just like that, almost before the argument was over. It could have gone pear-shaped in so many ways. The necklace had been a hint, but you never really knew. Eve had stared at her like she was crazy, and Pru had bitten the inside of her mouth till it hurt, because this wasn’t the kind of thing she ever did. Pru was a planner. She had everything scheduled. She had her five-year plan written out.
Then Eve had laughed, and told Pru she’d better be paying. Fair enough, budget dining at the Taco Bell it’d be. They’d both worn their best dresses and faces made up like catwalk models or beauty gurus (thank you, nickietutorials), smeared their ruby-red lipstick on greasy chalupas and, later, on each other. And Pru had never been happier to have to rewrite her five-year plan.
Eve ran her fingers through Pru’s hair, spreading it out over her knees like a thin blanket. She smiled her slow, sleepy, tipsy smile, the one that softened the defiance out of that jawline. Pru reached up to trace it with her nail. “Happy?” she asked.
“Happy,” Eve confirmed, her smile spreading.
“Told you,” Pru murmured.
Eve had a habit of getting lost inside her head when she wasn’t working, either at the little queer bookshop she ran on a corner in the Village or on one of the countless projects she volunteered in, and God knew she loved her work, but all the work and worry wormed their way inside her head and left her frowning and tight and unhappy. Ultimately she needed people, the same way Pru needed her own bed with the window open to the scent of her flower box and the noises of the city at night, a book across her knees and the night lamp’s light cocooning her into the moment.
Pru tugged on Eve’s ear as an invitation for her to lean over, and propped herself up on her elbows to meet her mouth with her own. It was a perfect lazy kiss, soft and open. They knew each other's lips now, had found a rhythm, familiar and still novel every time. Eve made a soft sound at the back of her neck, like a purr, and Pru sat up to kiss her all the better. She tasted a mixture of beer and daiquiri—that would have been Marla’s.
Eve slid her hand down along the curve of Pru’s back. “You’re sleeping at my place tonight, girl,” she told her, and although it had been Pru’s plan all along, she felt a spool of desire begin to unravel at the end of her spine at the tone. She nodded and kissed Eve again, tongue searching for the taste of alcohol.
-
They stumbled into the apartment above the bookshop, having snatched another couple of Marla’s cocktails after Kevin had broken them apart by sprinkling crushed ice down Pru’s neck. Pru felt light on her feet, like she was floating, and Eve’s gaze on her was soft around the edges, even as she grabbed her by the waist and nipped at her neck. Pru laughed and squirmed, but the teeth were gone almost as quickly as they’d appeared. Eve knew well that you had to work that spot patiently, and at just the right time.
Until Eve flicked the switch, the kitchen had only been lit by the glow of the microwave lights and what filtered through the curtains: the flickering streetlight, the glow of the magenta and turquoise light-up advertising sign on the other side of the narrow street. The slow-lighting eco-bulb revealed Eve’s papers still spread over the small kitchen table, her knitting project thrown over and spooled in a straw basket, the leaves of the peace lily shading the window next to the cat’s food bowl. Through another door, the bed was made, but the patchwork throw was wrinkly, still showing where Pru had sat while she’d nagged Eve to get dressed to go out just a few hours earlier.
Eve twisted and turned with her as in a dance and set her down on that same spot, following the motion down to push her on her back. Her lips touched Pru’s, then worked down her chin, the soft skin of her neck, between her collarbones. Pru felt her hands on her bare knees, the light gray knit dress sliding up her thighs, and then Eve was kneeling on the floor between her legs. She couldn’t help it; a suggestion of a push and she spread them, her knees coming up and her dress bunching at her waist, and then she could feel Eve’s nose nuzzling at the fabric of her briefs.
“Oh, God,” said Pru, who never prayed except in bed. “No, honey… Let me. Please.”
Eve came up for a kiss, a silent mark of acquiescence. They rolled together on the quilt, tangling in each other, mouth finding mouth and ear and a dozen words of endearment and encouragement. Pru’s hands were on Eve’s covered breasts, cupping the swell of them, her thumbs on the hard nubs of Eve’s nipples. She thumbed one of them out of the loose thin bra Eve was wearing under her top and closed her mouth over it, tasting cotton. A touch of teeth bought up a gasp and a hiss, and the undulation of Eve’s hips under hers, white khaki shorts against Pru’s bare thighs.
Eve’s fingers brushed against Pru’s sensitive neck and oh, she wanted her mouth there, wet and merciless, but no, no. Service. Tonight could be their last for a while, and she wanted Eve on her tongue, coming so hard she’d never forget the taste of her. More than anything she wanted Eve burning, and Eve didn’t ignite like wildfire. She started like a campfire that needed careful and patient work until sparks began to fly, then caught the accelerator and burst into flame.
Pru let Eve heat up on the fire of her own want, not even trying to hold back the whine of need when Eve’s questing hand found her buttock and squeezed and massaged it like it belonged to her. Pru shifted and let that hand slip between her legs, to feel the heat of her, then pressed her hips down to ride Eve’s thigh. She could hear Eve’s breathing pick up, saw her lower lip disappear between her teeth, and set to rediscovering that tight, hard button of a nipple.
“Jesus,” Eve blasphemed as Pru undid the buttons of her shorts and slipped her hand underneath, pressing her middle finger firmly against that warm, moist groove. She was rewarded with a buck of Eve’s hips, and her thigh coming up against her own crotch. Eve rutted against that pressure, moaning and moving her hand, coaxing more moisture out to drench Eve’s lace cotton panties. She knew that pair, the lace worn through on one side, black with little dots like ladybugs.
They hadn’t even got out of their clothes, she realized, either of them, and they were half-way gone. Pru threw her head back to gasp for air, and her gaze met that of Eve’s sleek, aloof tomcat Spokane, who was watching them from the windowsill. Spokane rested in a triangle of streetlight where his curled body had pushed the drawn curtains aside, his tail flicking back and forth as if challenging Pru to make trouble. She let her eyes flutter closed. Not even Spokane’s disapproval could pull her out of the moment.
Eve tugged on Pru's hair. “Go on, then,” she purred, voice low and hard, like it go when she was really horny. “Go down on me, baby.” Eve nodded yes, yes please, and they shifted until Pru was kneeling where Eve had been when they'd first started. Eve kicked off her pumps—they hadn’t even taken off their shoes—and let Pru drag her shorts all the way off, catching those black and red panties along with them and leaving her in nothing but her light top and bra and jangling bangles.
She smelled like musk and heaven as Pru sank her face into those short curls, drinking her in. Craning her neck, she found the taste of her. It drove her over some invisible cliff in her head, and she knew then why Eve lit up so quickly at the evidence of Pru’s own lust, because nothing, nothing was hotter than someone who was hot for you, too. She tongued her open, lapping up the taste as Eve’s fingers tightened in her hair, encouraging but never pushing. Eve cried out aloud as Pru’s tongue found her clit.
Soft and steady and merciless, Pru licked and teased in turn, drawing circles around the sensitive flesh with her tongue until Eve was panting and her legs on Pru’s shoulders were shaking. “Fuck me, girl, fuck that’s good,” she moaned. “Oh, Jesus, the way you do that.” Eve’s hands left Pru’s hair to grasp at the quilt on either side of her hips instead, clinging on for dear life, her muscles working to push up against Pru’s mouth.
When she came, it was with a burst of warmth down Pru’s chin and the stiffening of her muscles. Pru hummed and lapped it all up, even as Eve cried out sharply as she brushed against her now-too-sensitive nub. Eve's body fell against the covers in a nerveless heap, and Pru wiped her grinning mouth on her hand. Her head was buzzing with pleasure.
“Give me a minute,” Eve gasped, and Pru passed that minute kissing the insides of Eve’s thighs, making appreciative little animal sounds, still overwhelmed by smell and taste and feel of her. Then Eve curled up and pulled her back up to the bed.
“Come here, you.”
Pru let herself be flipped onto her hands and knees and her panties pulled down until they locked her knees together. Eve took another handful of her hair and directed her head down into the pillows as she gently but firmly slipped two fingers inside Pru’s soaked folds.
Eve didn’t mess around when she finger-fucked a woman. Pru got the first slow, tortuous roll and then the addition of a light touch of ring finger sliding against her clit, and bore it with barely a whinge even as the feel of it unraveled her from belly to head. But then Eve picked up pace, and she could no longer keep her hips still. The pillow muffled her moans.
They always ended up this way, with Eve taking the lead and Pru surrendering. There was a sweetness in that surrender that healed her heart, over and over again. She let it sweep through her now, taking away shame and doubt and fear and leaving her opening like a daisy under the sun.
“How’s that, baby?” Eve murmured in her ear, knuckle-deep inside her.
“So good. God.” Pru’s prayers always sounded better in her head.
“Do you want to come?”
Pru nodded and whined and finally said yes.
“Then come on, come for me.”
Damp and hot and fragrant.
-
“I wanted to do you,” Pru said afterwards as they lay in a half-clothed mess of drying sweat, limbs tangled together. Spokane had already made bold to jump off the windowsill and into the bed and make a heavy bundle of himself against Eve’s back. “Give you pleasure.”
“You did.”
“More than you gave me. You always leave me owing you.”
Eve lifted herself up on her elbow and gave her a curious look. “No I don’t. I get pleasure both ways, you know that. You do too. So… what’s up? What’s all this about?”
Pru turned her face away, towards the sliver of curtain-breach Spokane had left behind. “I may not be able to see you for a while.”
“Okay.” Eve frowned, but asked no questions.
“…Paula called. My mother.” Pru had called her Paula since she was sixteen. “She’s coming out of rehab this Friday.”
It was overdue. The bills were stacking up. Pru had spent the morning tidying up the apartment and boxing up everything valuable to her, to take with her to Langtry’s and keep in the locked cabinet in the back. She’d thrown away old photographs and postcards from Freddy, anything she thought would remind her mother of reasons to get high. It wouldn’t work. The whole apartment was a reminder. But there wasn’t anywhere else for her to go.
“She’ll need me around, to keep her on the straight and narrow.” For a little while, at least. Until her excuses won over and Pru would find her looking through her coat pockets for a key to Langtry’s and its cash register. “She can’t be on her own a lot.”
“Okay,” said Eve again, and Pru recognized that tone. It was a fighting tone. She smiled up at her and traced the resolute line of her chin, just as she had earlier in the park. She noted that the sex had dried the alcohol out of both of them.
“It’s not a battle to fight, it’s just something I have to do.”
“You need someone to be there for you, too,” Eve said. “And I will be. And this home will be here, when you can’t deal with yours anymore.”
“You’ll be my safe place?” It was such a little-girl thing to ask, such a naive, silly, needy thing. It broke her a little to let herself be that open. Especially knowing how tough an armor she’d need to have in place by Friday.
“Always,” said Eve and kissed her salty lips, squeezing her hard against herself.
The heavy dark thing that had been threatening to pull Pru under ever since she’d first seen her mother’s eyes glassy and strange and full of unfamiliar intensity… Maybe that wasn’t for forever. Maybe that black fire wasn’t the defining color of her life.
Maybe it was Eve’s lipstick smeared on hers, or the colors of rainbow tie-dye and the autumn sky over the city. Of daiquiris and quilts and cats.ù
At least until Friday, it could be.
Story: Peccadillo Parlour
Colors: Kohl #1: Lipstick
Supplies and Styles: Eraser, Pastels
Word Count: 3,368
Rating: explicit
Summary: What if Pru hadn't been adopted by her Aunt Amelia?
Contains: Discussion of drug addiction, crime, and racial discrimination. Illegal hiring practices (child labour). Mildly D/s sexual dynamic.
Notes: Written for
femslash_kink exchange as a treat and used for squares on trope_bingo and seasonofkink , and I'm planning on crossposting on creativechallenges , but I really feel it belongs here!Pru started working in the flower shop a little younger than was legal, when her mum first went into rehab. Her dad knew the owner’s cousin, and they needed some way to make money to replace what Paula had been bringing in from the bar. If anyone peeked in the back Langtry's Lilies and saw a twelve-year-old making up bouquets, it was easy enough to dismiss. “Oh, she’s a friend’s kid, her school’s doing a careers thing.” “She loves playing with the flowers.” “We’re teaching her how to make ‘em for a children’s charity.” Nobody asked, in the end. The fact she and Melanie were both Chinese seemed explanation enough.
Pru was at the shop every Saturday and every other afternoon after school and was paid in cash. Working days meant the independence to pop into a store on her way home to buy a candy bar or a comic on the sly. The rest went to dad, to beer and ready meals, and presumably rent.
Ten years later Paula was in rehab again and Freddy was in Vegas. Pru hadn’t spoken to her father in years, but the rumors had filtered in anyway—the tricked-out coin machines, the shady car dealerships, the arrests. The flower shop was still on the same Brooklyn corner, on a street connecting Prospect Park to Greenwood Cemetery. It wasn’t too far from the apartment, and she had a car now, the fifteen-year-old GMC Canyon she’d bought off Melanie when she had taken over the shop. She kept the truck spruced up with paint and polish, and the shop’s name emblazoned on the side.
Mr Collings, who had had the shop before Melanie, had been a fan of a romanticized 19th century aesthetic, which still showed up in the trellis arching over the doorway and the faded rose-pattern wallpaper on the back wall, as well as the sugary cursive of the shop sign. Lily Langtry gazed soulfully out of a sepia photograph framed and hanging behind the counter. After all this time, Pru hadn’t wanted to modernize too much. People knew Langtry’s and they liked it the way it was. But competition was tough, the economy tougher, and so she did what she could. She replaced the white-washed counter with smooth imitation marble and the short fat lace-patterned vases with tall, slim glass ones to attract new clientele. She paid an art student to retouch the sign and design posters to hang up and down the streets by the cemetery to make sure no-one had to visit a grave without a fresh bouquet. She even hired another twelve-year-old, partly from nostalgia, partly to save a few pennies. You didn’t have to pay a kid the same as she did her trainee and Mel Jr. So far, she’d kept afloat.
“Jamal, no,” she told him as he picked out another orchid by the stem, and gently guided the flower back into its vase before his scissors could reach it. Their hands were similar—small and narrow, one white, the other brown. She could already tell that in three years Jamal would tower over her. “You’re costing me an arm and a leg, kid. Stick to the bargain flowers, okay?”
The air at the back of the shop was moist as the summer heat penetrated through the open back door and evaporated the water in the vases and the sink. Sweat stuck Pru’s hair to the back of her neck. Jamal pursed his lips and tossed his head. Pru knew he’d have his mitts on her orchids and roses again as soon as she turned her back, but hell, the kid had talent. She just needed someone to walk in who happened to want an orchid corsage.
The bell rang. She slipped back to the front, putting on her best corsage-selling smile. The woman closing the door behind her, her bare forehead gleaming with a touch of sweat, gave Pru the wary look of someone preparing for a confrontation. Large eyes, short-cropped natural hair with its tips dyed orange, a heart-shaped face that ended in a defiant chin-point. Tie-dyed shirt hanging off square shoulders, a silver Venus pendant around her long neck. She was the hottest thing Pru had ever seen.
“You got my sister’s boy Jamal back there?”
That was how Pru met Eve.
-
The summer heat gave way to a mild autumn, the first after a series of Indian summers. Pru lay on the grass in the park under the shade of an oak tree, her head pillowed on Eve’s lap, utterly in love. Not with Eve, as such, or not only Eve, but the touch of cool wind and birdsong, the smell of sausages crackling on barbecue and the hum of talk and laughter all around. Eve had family, and more than that—she had community. And now Pru did too.
“There’s a right way and a wrong way to eat potato salad,” Eve’s eldest sister was saying to her husband Ray. Marla was like the sun, bigger than life, and everybody who came into her orbit ended up either crawling for her or fighting her; everybody except Ray. “See, the way you’re doing it? That ain’t right.” Ray gave her a big, potato-salady grin, and her laughter rang out through the park.
“I’m not going to Juilliard,” Jamal was telling Kevin, the only white guy at the barbecue. “I’m going straight to Broadway.”
“…Pride’s not just a big party, come on, Dee. It’s an event. It’s an experience. You’ve really never been?”
“…Seventeen apartments empty now, just because this asshole wants to wait until that mall’s finished building so he can hike up the rent.”
“You have to read it…” “Coming out is a process.”
She’d never had this many people in her life. People whose names she knew, who weren’t regulars at Langtry’s. But when you knew Eve, you got to know everyone Eve knew, too.
Jamal still worked at the flower shop, but no more school evenings, weekends and holidays only. At the end of that lecture on child labour laws and the importance of education, and a number of heartfelt apologies, Pru had asked Eve out.
Flat-out, just like that, almost before the argument was over. It could have gone pear-shaped in so many ways. The necklace had been a hint, but you never really knew. Eve had stared at her like she was crazy, and Pru had bitten the inside of her mouth till it hurt, because this wasn’t the kind of thing she ever did. Pru was a planner. She had everything scheduled. She had her five-year plan written out.
Then Eve had laughed, and told Pru she’d better be paying. Fair enough, budget dining at the Taco Bell it’d be. They’d both worn their best dresses and faces made up like catwalk models or beauty gurus (thank you, nickietutorials), smeared their ruby-red lipstick on greasy chalupas and, later, on each other. And Pru had never been happier to have to rewrite her five-year plan.
Eve ran her fingers through Pru’s hair, spreading it out over her knees like a thin blanket. She smiled her slow, sleepy, tipsy smile, the one that softened the defiance out of that jawline. Pru reached up to trace it with her nail. “Happy?” she asked.
“Happy,” Eve confirmed, her smile spreading.
“Told you,” Pru murmured.
Eve had a habit of getting lost inside her head when she wasn’t working, either at the little queer bookshop she ran on a corner in the Village or on one of the countless projects she volunteered in, and God knew she loved her work, but all the work and worry wormed their way inside her head and left her frowning and tight and unhappy. Ultimately she needed people, the same way Pru needed her own bed with the window open to the scent of her flower box and the noises of the city at night, a book across her knees and the night lamp’s light cocooning her into the moment.
Pru tugged on Eve’s ear as an invitation for her to lean over, and propped herself up on her elbows to meet her mouth with her own. It was a perfect lazy kiss, soft and open. They knew each other's lips now, had found a rhythm, familiar and still novel every time. Eve made a soft sound at the back of her neck, like a purr, and Pru sat up to kiss her all the better. She tasted a mixture of beer and daiquiri—that would have been Marla’s.
Eve slid her hand down along the curve of Pru’s back. “You’re sleeping at my place tonight, girl,” she told her, and although it had been Pru’s plan all along, she felt a spool of desire begin to unravel at the end of her spine at the tone. She nodded and kissed Eve again, tongue searching for the taste of alcohol.
-
They stumbled into the apartment above the bookshop, having snatched another couple of Marla’s cocktails after Kevin had broken them apart by sprinkling crushed ice down Pru’s neck. Pru felt light on her feet, like she was floating, and Eve’s gaze on her was soft around the edges, even as she grabbed her by the waist and nipped at her neck. Pru laughed and squirmed, but the teeth were gone almost as quickly as they’d appeared. Eve knew well that you had to work that spot patiently, and at just the right time.
Until Eve flicked the switch, the kitchen had only been lit by the glow of the microwave lights and what filtered through the curtains: the flickering streetlight, the glow of the magenta and turquoise light-up advertising sign on the other side of the narrow street. The slow-lighting eco-bulb revealed Eve’s papers still spread over the small kitchen table, her knitting project thrown over and spooled in a straw basket, the leaves of the peace lily shading the window next to the cat’s food bowl. Through another door, the bed was made, but the patchwork throw was wrinkly, still showing where Pru had sat while she’d nagged Eve to get dressed to go out just a few hours earlier.
Eve twisted and turned with her as in a dance and set her down on that same spot, following the motion down to push her on her back. Her lips touched Pru’s, then worked down her chin, the soft skin of her neck, between her collarbones. Pru felt her hands on her bare knees, the light gray knit dress sliding up her thighs, and then Eve was kneeling on the floor between her legs. She couldn’t help it; a suggestion of a push and she spread them, her knees coming up and her dress bunching at her waist, and then she could feel Eve’s nose nuzzling at the fabric of her briefs.
“Oh, God,” said Pru, who never prayed except in bed. “No, honey… Let me. Please.”
Eve came up for a kiss, a silent mark of acquiescence. They rolled together on the quilt, tangling in each other, mouth finding mouth and ear and a dozen words of endearment and encouragement. Pru’s hands were on Eve’s covered breasts, cupping the swell of them, her thumbs on the hard nubs of Eve’s nipples. She thumbed one of them out of the loose thin bra Eve was wearing under her top and closed her mouth over it, tasting cotton. A touch of teeth bought up a gasp and a hiss, and the undulation of Eve’s hips under hers, white khaki shorts against Pru’s bare thighs.
Eve’s fingers brushed against Pru’s sensitive neck and oh, she wanted her mouth there, wet and merciless, but no, no. Service. Tonight could be their last for a while, and she wanted Eve on her tongue, coming so hard she’d never forget the taste of her. More than anything she wanted Eve burning, and Eve didn’t ignite like wildfire. She started like a campfire that needed careful and patient work until sparks began to fly, then caught the accelerator and burst into flame.
Pru let Eve heat up on the fire of her own want, not even trying to hold back the whine of need when Eve’s questing hand found her buttock and squeezed and massaged it like it belonged to her. Pru shifted and let that hand slip between her legs, to feel the heat of her, then pressed her hips down to ride Eve’s thigh. She could hear Eve’s breathing pick up, saw her lower lip disappear between her teeth, and set to rediscovering that tight, hard button of a nipple.
“Jesus,” Eve blasphemed as Pru undid the buttons of her shorts and slipped her hand underneath, pressing her middle finger firmly against that warm, moist groove. She was rewarded with a buck of Eve’s hips, and her thigh coming up against her own crotch. Eve rutted against that pressure, moaning and moving her hand, coaxing more moisture out to drench Eve’s lace cotton panties. She knew that pair, the lace worn through on one side, black with little dots like ladybugs.
They hadn’t even got out of their clothes, she realized, either of them, and they were half-way gone. Pru threw her head back to gasp for air, and her gaze met that of Eve’s sleek, aloof tomcat Spokane, who was watching them from the windowsill. Spokane rested in a triangle of streetlight where his curled body had pushed the drawn curtains aside, his tail flicking back and forth as if challenging Pru to make trouble. She let her eyes flutter closed. Not even Spokane’s disapproval could pull her out of the moment.
Eve tugged on Pru's hair. “Go on, then,” she purred, voice low and hard, like it go when she was really horny. “Go down on me, baby.” Eve nodded yes, yes please, and they shifted until Pru was kneeling where Eve had been when they'd first started. Eve kicked off her pumps—they hadn’t even taken off their shoes—and let Pru drag her shorts all the way off, catching those black and red panties along with them and leaving her in nothing but her light top and bra and jangling bangles.
She smelled like musk and heaven as Pru sank her face into those short curls, drinking her in. Craning her neck, she found the taste of her. It drove her over some invisible cliff in her head, and she knew then why Eve lit up so quickly at the evidence of Pru’s own lust, because nothing, nothing was hotter than someone who was hot for you, too. She tongued her open, lapping up the taste as Eve’s fingers tightened in her hair, encouraging but never pushing. Eve cried out aloud as Pru’s tongue found her clit.
Soft and steady and merciless, Pru licked and teased in turn, drawing circles around the sensitive flesh with her tongue until Eve was panting and her legs on Pru’s shoulders were shaking. “Fuck me, girl, fuck that’s good,” she moaned. “Oh, Jesus, the way you do that.” Eve’s hands left Pru’s hair to grasp at the quilt on either side of her hips instead, clinging on for dear life, her muscles working to push up against Pru’s mouth.
When she came, it was with a burst of warmth down Pru’s chin and the stiffening of her muscles. Pru hummed and lapped it all up, even as Eve cried out sharply as she brushed against her now-too-sensitive nub. Eve's body fell against the covers in a nerveless heap, and Pru wiped her grinning mouth on her hand. Her head was buzzing with pleasure.
“Give me a minute,” Eve gasped, and Pru passed that minute kissing the insides of Eve’s thighs, making appreciative little animal sounds, still overwhelmed by smell and taste and feel of her. Then Eve curled up and pulled her back up to the bed.
“Come here, you.”
Pru let herself be flipped onto her hands and knees and her panties pulled down until they locked her knees together. Eve took another handful of her hair and directed her head down into the pillows as she gently but firmly slipped two fingers inside Pru’s soaked folds.
Eve didn’t mess around when she finger-fucked a woman. Pru got the first slow, tortuous roll and then the addition of a light touch of ring finger sliding against her clit, and bore it with barely a whinge even as the feel of it unraveled her from belly to head. But then Eve picked up pace, and she could no longer keep her hips still. The pillow muffled her moans.
They always ended up this way, with Eve taking the lead and Pru surrendering. There was a sweetness in that surrender that healed her heart, over and over again. She let it sweep through her now, taking away shame and doubt and fear and leaving her opening like a daisy under the sun.
“How’s that, baby?” Eve murmured in her ear, knuckle-deep inside her.
“So good. God.” Pru’s prayers always sounded better in her head.
“Do you want to come?”
Pru nodded and whined and finally said yes.
“Then come on, come for me.”
Damp and hot and fragrant.
-
“I wanted to do you,” Pru said afterwards as they lay in a half-clothed mess of drying sweat, limbs tangled together. Spokane had already made bold to jump off the windowsill and into the bed and make a heavy bundle of himself against Eve’s back. “Give you pleasure.”
“You did.”
“More than you gave me. You always leave me owing you.”
Eve lifted herself up on her elbow and gave her a curious look. “No I don’t. I get pleasure both ways, you know that. You do too. So… what’s up? What’s all this about?”
Pru turned her face away, towards the sliver of curtain-breach Spokane had left behind. “I may not be able to see you for a while.”
“Okay.” Eve frowned, but asked no questions.
“…Paula called. My mother.” Pru had called her Paula since she was sixteen. “She’s coming out of rehab this Friday.”
It was overdue. The bills were stacking up. Pru had spent the morning tidying up the apartment and boxing up everything valuable to her, to take with her to Langtry’s and keep in the locked cabinet in the back. She’d thrown away old photographs and postcards from Freddy, anything she thought would remind her mother of reasons to get high. It wouldn’t work. The whole apartment was a reminder. But there wasn’t anywhere else for her to go.
“She’ll need me around, to keep her on the straight and narrow.” For a little while, at least. Until her excuses won over and Pru would find her looking through her coat pockets for a key to Langtry’s and its cash register. “She can’t be on her own a lot.”
“Okay,” said Eve again, and Pru recognized that tone. It was a fighting tone. She smiled up at her and traced the resolute line of her chin, just as she had earlier in the park. She noted that the sex had dried the alcohol out of both of them.
“It’s not a battle to fight, it’s just something I have to do.”
“You need someone to be there for you, too,” Eve said. “And I will be. And this home will be here, when you can’t deal with yours anymore.”
“You’ll be my safe place?” It was such a little-girl thing to ask, such a naive, silly, needy thing. It broke her a little to let herself be that open. Especially knowing how tough an armor she’d need to have in place by Friday.
“Always,” said Eve and kissed her salty lips, squeezing her hard against herself.
The heavy dark thing that had been threatening to pull Pru under ever since she’d first seen her mother’s eyes glassy and strange and full of unfamiliar intensity… Maybe that wasn’t for forever. Maybe that black fire wasn’t the defining color of her life.
Maybe it was Eve’s lipstick smeared on hers, or the colors of rainbow tie-dye and the autumn sky over the city. Of daiquiris and quilts and cats.ù
At least until Friday, it could be.
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