sixteen #3
I want to not hurt those around me. The path that had led her to this position was so clear that it was a miracle nobody else had seen it.
Yet not even if Sulim had prayed to the Void itself could she have imagined standing here in her private space with the first woman in her life to make her behave like this.
“I don’t know what I was going to say. I both wish you would go away and take me far away from here.”
“Like I said…” Mira kept her distance. “If I could, I’d teleport us both out of here. Somewhere nobody knows who we are.”
“I can’t believe this…” Sulim scratched her face as she imagined such a thing.
Showing up with someone like her. Pretending that we’re meant to be together.
Feeling no regrets that she touches me the way that she does.
“I feel like a monster.” She didn’t mean to raise her voice, but the hiccups did that to a woman.
Fucking. Air. The same air she had swallowed.
“If you had never shown up, I would still be… I could at least pretend…”
“Live a lie? You have even less time in your life to do that than we julah, and if there’s one thing we hate, it’s living a lie.”
“Yet your kind do it all the time!”
Mira was slightly taken aback by the outburst that was soon followed by a mighty hiccup.
“I don’t,” she said.
Sulim’s hand was over her mouth as she suppressed another hiccup. I need water. Best she could do was go outside and tilt her head toward the sky, but she didn’t bother. Nor did she hustle up the ladder where she kept a store of drinking water alongside her tea and crackers.
“Most of ‘my kind’ don’t live any damn lies,” Mira amended.
“They just don’t go around blabbing about their affairs and latest art projects. For one thing, seduction can last a century, and your insufferable auntie spends a whole millennium pondering the next great julah novel without writing a word.
Then she comes out with a bestseller nobody had any idea she was writing!”
Slowly, Sulim lowered her hand. Her diaphragm had calmed down. “Very specific.”
“I’ll give you that she was an anomaly in my father’s family. Most people with the last name Dunsman can’t keep their mouths shut about their ambitions. Yet my father found a way to keep most of his personal life private.”
Mira shook her head. “But even he doesn’t live a lie. Most julah his age or older know what and who he is. But he’s got the family and the power to do whatever he wants in private. Me?”
She snorted. “I’m terrible at keeping who I am to myself. I want to tell the whole world what I’m up to and what I’m thinking.”
Sulim leaned against the wall, arms crossed and head hanging in contemplative disbelief. “Fine. I know nothing about you all.”
“Hon, it takes us centuries to figure out the ins and outs of our own culture. Best of luck to any human who tries.” Mira sighed. “But, for what it’s worth… I’d still take you far away from here if I could. Even if for just a few hours. This place is suffocating.”
“Where would you take me?”
“Does it matter? We could go to your favorite old haunt back on Qahrain. Or I could teleport us to the middle of the Great Forest on Yahzen. There are empty meadows on Sah Zenlit that are gorgeous year-round. I’ll even take you to Cerilyn if that tickles your strange fancy. I mean,
you might get recruited into something you don’t want…”
“Like being a mercenary or a courtesan?”
“…Such as a very dangerous drinking contest. They slam back alcohol there like water.”
Sulim lowered her arms. “Not very romantic.”
“Oh, you want romantic? Because that’s easy.”
Although Mira slowly approached again, Sulim couldn’t help but be slightly confused at this refocus on flirtation. “What’s romantic?”
A hand landed on the wall beside Sulim’s head.
Mira had to slightly lower herself to be eye-level with her, but when she was, nothing was sweeter than the crazed look in her amber irises and the slow parting of her delectable lips.
Even Sulim was powerless to do anything but slightly blush underneath the onus of that heavy gaze.
“Your little cubby up there. Very convenient.”
She whispered that with the seductive reverence of a woman who had been chasing after the love of her life for the past century. If only I could live so long. It was still unfathomable to someone like Sulim, who had already lived halfway through her youth.
And here Mira was, not looking a day over twenty-five at five-hundred.
“You were waiting up there for me.” Sulim’s body unexpectedly loosened now that Mira was so close. Even if someone rode up to the old barn, the sheets of rain were so thick that there were still a few seconds to enjoy each other’s company. “Why?”
She knew why.
Mira slightly tilted her head as her breath filled the gap between them.
“So I could kiss you again.”
This time, Sulim knew that once those lips were on hers, there would be no stopping until they finished saying everything there was to convey. Silently. Loudly. Everything in between.
Yet it was her heart that thundered the loudest as the rain splashed on the muddy ground and Mira kissed her with no intention of letting Sulim get away again.