AN; I contemplated on calling this one the calm before the storm...
Ironically, the more I was with Mio, the less I thought about what had happened. And I think it was the same for her. We started to properly depend on one another, and fell into an easy routine, one that kept us both from teetering into despair. I stayed home, she came over in her new car, I studied and she whisked around me; helping, cooking, sleeping, hugging. And in those hours, we were in a place between reality and falsity, a perfect balance that was distracting enough to work.
She tried not to cook me eggs every day and I tried not to neglect my work to touch her. We once spent a whole day lying on the living room floor, making study cards and revision resources.
"I'll have to go back soon," I said, stacking the cards in my palm. Across from me, Mio was still cutting through sheets of coloured card paper, coding them into subjects.
"Back for exams?"
I hummed in response.
"Are you nervous?" She asked, then added, "which colour for maths again?"
"Not really, and blue."
She smiled with eyebrows raised, "that confident in your intelligence?"
"Yes! Why? Don't you think I'm smart?" I grinned.
"Of course I think you're smart. I know you're smart," Mio said, and she said it almost proudly. Like she was proud of me. I decided I liked that feeling. I wanted to give her more reasons to praise me, lots more, so I'd live on her appraisal like fuel to my very being - that and her need for me.
Though it was only my first instance, I was sure I would never love like this again. In a way where I was understood, even through little to no words. I'd thought it since I'd met her, she could read me, she could really know me. And her progression through that was speedy.
We talked aimlessly, through most days, but I found our best conversations happened after the longest beats of silence. After napping, after eating, especially after sex (which was not always). I found that she was almost nocturnal, and it started to make a lot of sense why she was always awake in the night. She spent most of the day sleeping to the side of me, on the couch, or on the carpet, always by my hip. And if she didn't, her eyelashes fluttered as she kept herself awake, her smiles grew lazily, her limbs were slack and slightly heavy when she hugged me. She reminded me of the Dormouse from the Alice In Wonderland book at times. So, when she was awake, often waking with important things to say or heavy talking points, we conversed and kissed and she helped me study.
Studying with her was motivating and rewarding. Completely dissimilar to when I used to study with Jackie, who sat in concentrated silence and asked very serious questions. Mio sat cross-legged on the carpet, often right at my feet while I sat up on the couch, and tested me with the cards we'd made and bites of information from my textbooks. When I answered correctly, she raised her eyebrows like she was constantly surprised and rubbed my calf in encouragement. There were also the praises of 'very good!' and 'you're doing such a good job'. It was so simple, and frankly quite pathetic that I enjoyed it so much, but it made me so warm. It made my pulse skyrocket, it made me determined and I was sure I would remember those feelings when I finally did sit my exams. She played off my wrong answers coolly, by making an amused face and drumming the back of my leg with her fingers. Mistakes were okay. She found them quite funny, I thought, but only because she had the answers right in front of her eyes.
I'd noticed, now with all the time we had to be alone, that she always liked to touch me. Not always sexually. When we were close, she always had her hand on my leg, or the back of my arm, or in my hair. She rubbed my shoulders and my back, and laid against my thigh when she slept. She hugged my waist when she woke up, pulled at the waistband of my shorts so she could kiss my hip and my waist. She was affectionate like I'd never expected her to be when I had first met her. She was so herself it was admirable. She'd unfolded and blossomed in the months she'd spent knowing me. She was no longer a reserved housewife, feeling lonely in her own home, feeling miles away from everyone in her life. She had me. I was her undoing, her unravelling, a human sign that posed the question, 'are you really happy?'
And she hadn't been. I saw that then. She'd always been quiet, and half-there, and withdrawn. Not chatty, not humorous, just a shell of a woman that I'd been interested to know so deeply. I'd always wanted to know her. Our meeting had sparked a need to know in me, from the beginning. From the very start. I'd wanted to see her happy, make her happy. Coup de foudre, perhaps. For me, certainly, but her, I don't know. When did she really see me? When did it start? Did it start when I told her what I felt? Or afterwards? Or when we first sat alone and just talked?
I wanted to ask her, but at the right time. At a time, where I'd be able to elaborate. Because those questions would only bring more. They'd bring an endless conversation. And we didn't have endless hours, only seven at the most.
Weeks went by, and all too quickly, it was almost time for our routine to dissolve. I would go and sit my first exam. She would go back to her lonely house and we'd both wish for summer.
It was coming. The heat was climbing, advertisements for vacation packs were being put up in shop windows and people were already planning what they'd do until September came again. But what would we do in the summer? We'd have to face our regular lives for a bit, and within that time, everything could change. We'd have to find a way to communicate, and somewhere we could be together, somewhere where nobody knew us. But to leave Twin, only for a day, would take a lot of planning, a lot of distracting. And that distracting wouldn't last long. What lay beyond our time together was always uncertain and anxiety-inducing. And most of the time when I thought about it in bed after she'd left, I didn't have a solution to our problems. There weren't many routes we could go down to remain happy. Something would always ruin it, and I was afraid of her being upset in her life.
The day before we split for our false normality, we decided to spend our last hours lazing. We had been most days anyway, but that day, we put the textbooks and the study cards away. I probably should've studied hardest that day seeing as it was the one before I'd sit my first exam, but I assured her I would work after she left, and she seemed satisfied with that.
I wanted to do something normal.
"Shall we watch a film?" I asked, hovering by the shelf above my thick, grey television. It wasn't sleek or new like Mio's home TV. But we, a year back, bought a second-hand DVD player, one that we'd connected to the back of our grey TV. On our shelf, we still had an abundance of VHS tapes from our old system that held too many memories to rid.
"We should," Mio said from the couch, her bare feet tucked under her body, cardigan wrapped tightly about her.
"I can't believe we haven't yet," I smiled, flicking through the titles on the shelf.
"What kind of movies do you watch?" She asked casually. "Wow, you've got so many, do you collect?"
"They're mostly VHS tapes from when I was born and that my dad has been collecting. He loves romance films, and I love horror, so there is quite the mix up here," I said, biting my tongue as I tried to find something she would enjoy. But I wasn't sure what kind of films Mio even liked.
"Bit of a difference. Is that all that's up there?" Mio asked.
"No, there's... dramas and home videos too," I said.
I could hear the smile in her voice when we spoke, "can we watch those? The home videos. It would make me happy to see you as a baby."
"No. Anything else but that."
She laughed, hard.
"I'll pick five out, then you close your eyes and choose one," I said, slipping a few off the shelf randomly.
"How can I choose if my eyes are closed?" She sounded genuinely a little bit confused, and it was endearing.
"Just point to one. No looking!"
I turned and she'd closed her eyes tightly and had one arm outstretched to pick. I came forward and held that reaching hand while I spread the DVD cases in my hand evenly like they were cards. Then I told her to choose one. She made a show of waving her hand like she was thinking, and pressed the tip of her perfect finger down onto the middle case. Romeo + Juliet.
I hummed. "Good choice."
"I haven't seen that one," she said, inspecting the back of the case.
"Good time to watch then, one of the only romances on the shelf I enjoy," I said, grinning.
I popped out the disk and fed it to the DVD player, let it load up then went and sat beside Mio. Reflexively, like she did most times I sat beside her, she hugged into my arm, shuffling to be comfortable against my body. It was moments like that that made my heart leap, even after the thousandth instance.
She was quite vocal as we watched, praising the soundtrack and reacting appropriately to events and character deaths with a loud gasp. At one point, I thought she'd fallen asleep as she was so quiet, but she was just processing what she was watching with round eyes. She hummed in reaction at the last moments of the film instead of saying anything at all. I don't think I stopped smiling through the whole thing, not even because I enjoyed the film - I'd seen it countless times before - but doing such a normal thing with her felt incredible. I wanted lots of days of film watching and couch hugging, perhaps after we'd eaten meals and were tired from the food.
After the scene in Juliet's tomb and the tragic death of both lovers, the credits rolled up the screen and Mio was very silent.
"Did you like it? I hope that's a stunned silence," I said, amused, squeezing her shoulder gently.
I heard her sniff. I frowned.
"Are you crying? Hey, hey, look at me," I encouraged softly, trying to look down at her face, nestled into my side.
Her head tilted up sheepishly, eyes red and wet with blooming tears. She blinked, letting a few straying beads run down her cheeks. I smiled widely down at her, despite the aching churn of my stomach at the sight. I'd found a trivial weakness of hers; romantic films.
"I can't believe you," I whispered, cupping her cheeks and swiping the straying tears on her cheekbone.
She shrugged, sniffed and said, "it was sad!"
"How cute," I laughed.
She scrunched up her face like I'd said something awful. "You're definitely not allowed to call me something like that. Especially for crying."
"But sexy is okay?" I asked, referring to the compliment I'd given her in the bath back in that house.
She relaxed her brows. "Sexy is okay," she said in a quiet voice.
I wiped her face with the sleeve ends of my sweater and continued to laugh at her a bit. She sat up properly, keeping her hand on my arm, as to not disconnect us even for a minute. She was such a woman; strong yet delicate features, smooth hands, lovely fingers, shaped red-painted nails, olive throat, plump bottom lip, dark lashes that fluttered when I came close enough. She was everything I wanted.
"You know, I haven't seen your room yet," she said, looking up from under those lashes at me.
"Oh? It's nothing special, it's quite small and boring," I said then smiled slowly, "do you want to see?"
She nodded. We stood up and her hand slipped to my wrist, then to my fingers. I was only an inch or two taller than her, but I felt incredibly lanky then, and she seemed like she'd only grown to my lips. It was strange.
I guided her up the stairs and across the landing, passing the bathroom and my dad's room and stopping outside my white-painted door. There was an old sticker half-peeled by the handle, one from an old child's sticker sheet. I pushed the door open and for the first time in a few hours, she let go of me. She stepped inside, studying all the posters I had on my wall, smiling at old photographs, eyes skipping over the one of Jackie and I lay face-up on the dresser. Along the left side of my room, I had posters neatly tacked up on the walls; Bjork, Prince, The Twilight Zone and The Shining. All of them lined up and spread equally. Since she'd been coming over, I'd made a good effort to keep my bedroom tidy. The carpet was hoovered, my bed was always made, my clothes were folded and hung up in my closet. I was hoping she was admiring it, thinking it was very me, that it smelt of me, that it felt like me.
She came past me and smoothed her hand over my duvet, then turned to sit down on the edge of the bed. She was gazing at me, both hands flat on the mattress to the side of her. She looked so pretty, sitting on my thin single bed, entirely out of place in my little bedroom. I moved towards her, getting close enough for her to touch my waist and hold me there.
"You're so pretty," I mumbled, staring down at her.
"I am?" She smiled coyly, fingers dragging up and down the curve of my waist.
"You are," I whispered, brushing her fringe away from her forehead with my palm, keeping her head tilted to look up at me. My heart had started up inside me again, beating loud and hard, just at the fact she'd visibly yielded to me. For a bit, she'd be in the palm of my hand, and I'd take care with that.
"Lie back," I said gently, letting my hands slip from her face.
She slowly lay back, resting her head just below my pillow, one leg up and bent, making her skirt tent against her thighs. On my bed, for me.
I propped myself atop of her, flushing our legs, my skin against hers. She was gazing up at me, lips parted, tongue pink inside that open mouth. I bowed my head down close to her mouth, but didn't connect, only hovered above. I watched her tilt her jaw to try and meet my lips, but I didn't lower my head any further. Her breath was shallow and impatient against my chin.
"Please," she begged quietly, lashes fluttering as she looked from my mouth to my eyes.
I bowed my head, but instead of pressing against her lips, I met her neck with an opened-mouthed kiss. She sighed softly. I found her pulse-point with my mouth, felt the beating of her heart through her skin, nipped at it, soothed my tongue over it. Her heart was fast, and my own mirrored that rhythm at the knowing that I'd made it that way. Her skin was hot and I saw that her cheeks were pink when I lifted my head for a second. I tugged at the neck of her top, pulling it to reveal her collarbones, which I kissed wetly. One my hands smoothed up under her shirt, my fingers brushing at the wire of her bra. I ducked lower, my mouth finding her chest, then the valley of her breasts, keeping her top pushed up by her throat. She was sighing and whimpering, and rolling her hips against my stomach, which was pressed firmly between her legs. Her skirt had ridden up around her hips, exposing her inner thighs that she had squeezed about my waist.
I slipped down her bra straps, letting her breasts spill from the cups. She'd trapped me against her body with her legs where she'd crossed them over my back. We were so close, we could've melted into one another. I wanted to be nowhere else. Nothing mattered except this.
-
We lay afterwards, bodies warm and damp, beneath my covers in my thin bed. My chin was resting on the crown of her head and her cheek was laid against my bare chest. I could've fallen asleep like that, in my tiny bed with her on my hip, but we only had an hour or so left with one another. I wanted to savour it and prolong it until there was nothing left to stretch anymore.
"Do you want to know how it's really been?" She asked quietly, and instantly, I knew what she wanted to tell me. It was time we were honest about how life was, just for a bit.
"At home?" I said, speaking into her hair.
She nodded. "It's bad, it's really bad."
Nervously, my heart started to drum in my chest. I rubbed her shoulder encouragingly. "What's happened?"
"He doesn't know," she said.
"Mr. Reed?"
"Yes. He doesn't know, and Jackie isn't talking to me at all. She hasn't spoken to me since the day she found out, but gives me these really horrible looks. Eddie noticed those and it had only caused arguments. He tells me he doesn't like my behaviour, that I'm depressing, that I'm a burden. He picks at me," Mio told me in a thin voice, "one morning, Jackie left a note on my pillow that said, 'I know you're a whore.'"
That enraged me. I gripped Mio's shoulder and pressed a kiss to her forehead, whispering, " you're no such thing."
Her eyes were wet, I felt her tears on my skin. She hugged into my hip tighter. "I only feel happy with you anymore, Norah."