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“You know what I want? How could you? How could you possibly? I don’t even know, myself.”
Her eyes are burning with anger and I close my eyes. My head finds its way to rest in my hands. I’m trying to be kind, but she doesn’t make it easy when she takes a tender moment and turns it hard. “That’s not what I meant, Mabel. Please, stop--stop twisting everything I say. I was trying to be… sexy, I guess.” The admission turns my cheeks hot, and I can feel my skin turn darker in the low light.
“Oh.”
Mabel plops down beside me, reclining, the fight gone out of her. It’s difficult some days to love Mabel Martin, but you can’t choose who you love, and even if you could. I would choose her over and over again.
“You know, you don’t have to try. To be sexy, I mean. You are--you just are. Empty platitudes about what I do and don’t want, they don’t--they do nothing for me. Just get my defences up. All you have to do is be yourself.”
I know, I know that Mabel can’t lie, that even if she isn’t fae, she has enough of them in her for lies to be impossible. Still, I disbelieve.
“Yeah, thanks.”
Mabel looks at me. Her green eyes are so intense, I feel like she is pinning me to the settee with just her gaze.
“Anna. Anna, Anna, Anna.” Mabel’s eyes soften, and her hand reaches out to caress my cheek. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
She quirks an eyebrow and tells me, “that’s a lie.”
Ugh. Fine. “It’s just, I don’t know. I guess--I mean, I wish we could just be girls again. I wish we could just be girls in love, or women or whatever. Without all this bullshit. Without the hurt.” It’s painful to say because I know what Mabel’s response is going to be. What it always is.
“Anna. We can only ever be what we are.”
“I know. But still.”
“You’re the one who told me that the world out there was mundane.”
I bite my tongue to keep from lashing out at her. “I know what I said, Mabel. It’s just hard to know I can never go back. It’s hard, and I’m afraid.”
Her expression softens, then, loses its intensity. “I want to make it better. Let me make it better.”
Mabel’s hand is still on my cheek, her thumb still stroking the soft skin there. She turns my face towards her, and her kiss is softness and fire. It sends a shiver through me, delightful and wild, just like her. She bites my lip just a little bit too hard, a reminder she cannot be tamed, that I would not tame her even if I could. She soothes it with her tongue, and when we part, she looks as dazed as I feel.
“I want you,” I say, without meaning to, and she smiles, all her sharp teeth glinting in the firelight.
“Good.” She climbs into my lap and makes me forget, for just a little while, what we have become.