I’d tear to pieces
Oriental poppies. Wonderland flowers. Does everything in the desert have two names or just the most beautiful? Anandi smiles at the thought, breathes in deep again the scent of a faraway land. “Do you have a second name too?” Anandi doesn’t know, of course, that Apolonia’s second name is the one everyone else calls her by.
The kelpie did not often like listening to others talk. Most people had a tendency of droning away, trying to impress her (or so she assumed). Apolonia’s not like that, though. She is thoughtful and eloquent and speaks from the heart– an expression that before now seemed trite and overused.
Anandi listens, enamored (with what, we won’t say– sometimes all a lady has is her secrets), and even when Apolonia is done she waits a long moment before speaking, in case any more precious words are going to rise to the surface. “You love it,” she’s a little breathless, thinking of that word. The statement is almost an accusation– somewhere along the way, perhaps from the very start, Anandi had decided that, like it or not– although she would endeavor for the first to always be true– Apolonia was hers. And she would seize every grain of sand in the desert and make it hers too, if only to say “this is mine” and “I did it for you” and be thanked, and loved, and maybe even a little bit feared.
So this is how girls set their sights on kingdoms. Love, or something like it.
“I want people to speak of me like that someday,” the twilight princess admits with a soft giggle. Two girls, with the future wide open before them. No ceiling but the stars themselves, and even those– close enough to reach out and touch.
She looks back, raises a brow in question as the other girl’s teeth gently scrape her hips. Then Apolonia smiles into her skin and her heart does a strange little dance, not in her chest but her throat, like she could spit it out and they could both watch it, dark gleaming red, flopping on the ground.
Anandi swallows, and her heart tumbles down her throat and back into the safety of its cage. She’s so very good at resisting her base instincts. With a sharp grin, eyes hazy with forbidden thoughts, she bats away the touch of a playful flick of the her tail against Apolonia’s neck. The heat of the touch lingers long after she turns away, like a blush.
“The sea gets so deep, there are places the sun never shines,” she speaks over her shoulder. “But it’s not completely dark. The fish down there have lights all over their skin, little lures of blue-green. It’s like the night sky, if all the stars were in constant motion. And at the surface, in the light,” they reach a clearing of sorts. It’s the undercanopy of a massive banyan tree, big as a whale. She blinks, awed. “there’s so much of everything, you wouldn’t believe it. Colors, scents. Life. And it’s all in constant motion.” Sometimes slow and patient, sometimes urgent and restless.
Anandi steps forward and turns to Apolonia. Apolonia, dappled with moonlight that pierces the canopy in determined rays of silver-blue. Apolonia, cream-kissed, sun-stung, neat and perfect and– Anandi thinks– and violent down there somewhere. Ready to kill. Waiting for the right reason. I can give you a reason. I can show you--
Face to face, Anandi asks: “Do you know how to dance?” She tilts her head with a grin, letting the sparse light catch her high cheekbones. Hip still warm with the memory of the smile (and, even more memorably, the teeth) pressed so sweetly to the flesh. Leaves are falling so slowly to the ground in the clearing around them, it's like the air itself has turned to honey.
was an estuary you could never survive inside.
A N A N D I
@
some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing
☾
