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11. Memory: Kern/Aila, 617 words

“Kern, what are you doing?”

Well, she could see what he was doing, really. The room was strewn with gardening magazines that she swore she’d thrown out a few months ago, and plastic bags, and that suitcase he kept under the bed was on her side of the sofa, open, spilling yet more scraps of paper onto the floor as it threatened to tip, was already tipping,
Was all over the floor. Great, she could guess who’d end up cleaning that up, in a week’s time, when she was utterly sick of it.

But she didn’t know what he was actually doing this time, in general, not in particular. In particular, he was gesturing moodily at the table, swearing at the suitcase for falling, at the paper for sticking to his fingers rather than whatever it was supposed to be sticking to, and at her for coming home too early. She had to smile.

“A surprise?” She crouched down to help him pick up the mess from the floor. “Or none of my business?” It was cute when his ears turned red she decided, for the umpteenth time. The grouchiness didn’t do anything for her really though.

“Isn’t it bloody obvious?” He picked through a few of the packets of photos- how long ago was it now that he’d insisted on getting a digital camera?- “You said it’d be a good idea to put all this crap into some order, an’ it’s coming up to your birthday an’ I didn’t have a clue what to get you, an’ I know you’d be pissed if I didn’t do anything so- oh shut up.” Because she had that look which meant that he’d done something sweet and she was inordinately happy about it, which either meant that he’d have an argument or sex, and he was blushing again.

Then she was trying o look at the damn thing and he was snatching it away, and she was climbing over him in blatant disregard to her silly middle-class decorum or any regard to where hands or knees ended up, and his mood was rapidly lightening as he held it out of reach.

She ended up on his lap, with the scrapbook in her hands, laughing that strange silent helpless laugh, at the early pages with the stuff from school, and she knew that he couldn’t draw, especially things that didn’t exist, like clarinet legs, and if she thought that he’d leave out a running joke like that, the one that’d got him his first ‘shut up’ kiss, she really didn’t pay any attention whatsoever.

The clarinet, or at least that was her only guess at what it could be, running on its silly legs across the bottom of the page, and the red roses from her gardening magazine labelled ‘daffs’, and all those memories which would make no sense at all to anyone else, and it was proof that this really mattered to him, it was making her feel like a schoolgirl again. All those things that he’d kept, she’d seen the ticket to their prom in the pile she’d scooped off the floor earlier, next to that pile of newspaper scraps, although she knew the reason he’d remember that night.
And Kern knew that the only way to shut her up when she got like this was to kiss her.

Walking back into that mess was a bit of a downer for Kern after work the next day. Still, it was probably worth it.

“The cat missed you” he wrote in the middle of the next page, settling down for another evening of nostalgia that he’d never be able to live down if his mates ever heard about it.


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20. Fortitude: Lilly/ Anna, 246 words

Lilly knew well why the Pedreovitch boys were so often accused of mother complexes. Few people in their right minds would have refused an opportunity for sex with a woman like Anna. The mistress of the house was nothing short of beautiful, with an attitude that Lilly tended to aspire to herself. With those breasts, the high cheekbones, the glossy ringlets of hair which took far too long for even Lilly to contemplate arranging daily. With the creamy complexion and blushed cheeks, Anna could have taken over the world. By marrying Pedre Mikhaylov, she really got rather close. Pedre, the harmful lunatic with a fortune to match the size of his native country, and a roving eye for the ladies, was completely and willingly henpecked by this woman.

She was Lilly’s idol.

And Lilly tended to manage to get close to her rivals, by hook or by crook. There is a very thin line between idolisation and desire. Lilly wanted to have her, not fully possess perhaps, but just to prove herself against this woman. Besides, any woman who managed to tempt the very-homosexual brother of her husband had to be quite something, and Lilly was in no way above gleaning satisfaction from bedding anyone who was desired by others.

So when Anna proposed a show for Pedre, it wasn’t the kudos from the boss which motivated Lilly’s smile and ready acceptance. And it wasn’t exactly without a few hints and suggestions that the event occurred.


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57. Sacrifice: Set/Teiya, 459 words

Watching her from across the room now, it was almost worthwhile. She sat with her head on his shoulder, her long legs over his. She was smiling. The look in her eyes was enough to convince Set that he’d done the right thing, at least. Such a look of utter joy he hadn’t seen before. In his long list of couples he’d known, Teiya was really something else, even with the family predisposition to devotion. She was happy, even in this place so out of character for her, twenty times the size of her own apartment, with the ceilings that the maids had to use ladders to clean. He still remembered her nervous awe at their other house, back when it was still his place to show her.

Focusing on his own wife, Set couldn’t really work out how the situation had turned this way. Sure, Teru was cute, the crush of the majority of boys in the school in her time, but she was hardly Teiya, with those legs and that arse (Set had never been much of a breasts man. It had made things that much easier during that brief excursion into teenage experimentation.) And to put aside natural shallow aspects, Set sometimes feared that Teru was more suited to his father, rather than himself. They certainly got on well enough, and Set wasn’t stupid enough to disregard the role of his family fortune in Teru’s attraction.

Teiya, on the other hand, would be as much, if not more, in love with a freezer salesman as one who stood in line to a mafia fortune. Her love of children too, wouldn’t it be more suited to him than Ruki, who swore blind that he wanted as little to do with messy, dirty, noisy children as physically possible?

But of course Set just had to know better, had to have seen the way Ruki looked at her, back when he was Richard or Rikki and her nickname hadn’t stuck to him. He had to have connected her increased curves up into him, her increased ardour, with the sound of his brother’s sax, and known that it wasn’t just coincidence. He hated that, hated how much attention he found himself paying to her distraction, to their disjointed little chats in the kitchen, to his silent little brother opening up in ways that he’d never seen before.

Sometimes Set wonders if he could still be with her, if he had just been a little more selfish, but then he shakes his head and turns again to trying to coax his wife from under the bed, or out of the pantry, or wherever she is this time. He just isn’t the type to be able to do that, and never was.