you're too young & eager to love

Here we go, the final set of shorts, the second half of the thank-you gift! daintiestmartyr, I hope you enjoy!

Notes!

* There’s some repeat kiddos in this second set of shorts, but I intentionally tried to make them differ completely in tone, mood, and, well, even the subject matter. Also, it’s okay to have favorites. There, I said it!
* The Haven and Luke short is toxic as hell. It’s essentially a drunk fight-and-fuck scene, but things get nasty and violent. I also begin in the middle of it, so there’s not much context as to WHY they’re fighting. I just wanted them to fight. Fair warning.
* In an effort to not write sex scenes for every single short (I have to practice writing something else, damn it), I accidentally get Margot and Jasper into a bit of a tiff. So sorry. They deserve better. I don’t know how to write happy scenes! They're so boring! I said that too, okay!
* Harper and Oriol’s short is set a short time after they’ve started getting physical as a trio with Zane but before they’re going behind Zane’s back together due to their ~pair bonding~.
* Introspective!Palmer is the hardest thing to write. He really doesn’t get enough time/attention in my brain, so I struggled to, well, think about what he’d think about.
* The final short introduces a new set of characters! As a surprise! I kept it all vampire-centric to avoid stepping on fleshing out the nun’s personality and details and all that creative licensure. I’m also really digging the idea that older vampires “claim” territories, so Gideon gets to claim Linemell, running off lesser vampires and defending his turf until some bigger baddie comes in. If that ever happens.

( so Eden sank to grief )

This is a thank you to my dearest of dears, daintiestmartyr, who made me one of the best gifts I have ever received: a character-themed personalized calendar. Since she gave me 12 character-themed months, I am doing the same! … Except with writing rather than visuals since I have all the artistic skills of an undertaker.

I've been having a bit of trouble with my writing, probably because I haven't been keeping up with it as well as I should, so I tried to focus these as shorts and go off of the idea of focusing on a moment rather than having each short tell an actual full narrative. So! That's the idea.

Part One! 6 more to follow (eventually).

( I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace ... )

Weeeelll, this didn't pan out. Posting just because.


-


Palmer flashes Mac a hard, fixed smile. “Back so soon?” he asks, digging his fingers into the rind of an orange, nails blunt but pressure hard.

Mac’s expression is boyish in response. “I’m a glutton, it’s true,” he says, his smile splitting his face, the hint of dimples at each corner of his mouth adding a flair of sweetness that Palmer knows he personally has never possessed.

Sunniva is more diplomatic. She pivots her weight to her good leg, taking Mac’s arm in a practiced gesture of welcome. “Patrons like yourself are always welcome here.”

“What she means to say,” Palmer clarifies, his fingers wet from where he’s broken into the heart of the orange, “is that you’re welcome as long as you can pay.”

Sunniva’s gaze is hard. Her mouth purses into a thin line. There’s a warning in the look she’s giving Palmer, but he ignores it.

“What? Let’s not pretend we’re running a shelter instead of a business, my dear.” He flashes a full-teeth grin that doesn’t reach his eyes.

Mac laughs good-naturedly. Sunniva looks unamused, but she steers the young man towards the atrium with an outstretched hand. “Come on. Eda’s waiting.”




The atrium is golden. It’s the finest room in the Isle, the mosaic tiles scrubbed to shine, the sun glittering off the clear waters of the shallow pool. There’s a few girls lounging on the lavish furniture, enjoying the afternoon breeze. Eda has her feet in the water, perched on the edge of the pool. She is resplendent in pink, the delicate shade of seashell and beach sand. The dress is damp at her calves where the water has hit her. She’s missing one of her pearl earrings, and Mac’s first thought is that she’s lost it swimming.

Sunniva releases his arm and clears her throat. The girls recognize the signal and rise together, slipping through discreet exits. They cast knowing glances over their shoulders. Eda is the Isle’s prize – she has a room larger and more lavish than any others, but she’s not limited to entertaining guests in a 12 by 13 space. She can have them anywhere, or they can have her.

“Take your time,” Sunniva tells Mac, closing the double doors behind her.

Eda dances her fingers across the water. When she smiles at Mac, her entire face arches into the expression. She looks like she’s spent her day waiting for him.

My Muffinpants posted a piece, so naturally I became inspired, and this happened.

Oldies but goodies! A few snippets because I’m too lazy to write anything legitimate at the moment.

~



Chason has the hands of a miner. They are rough with thick callouses blanketing his palms. There are scars on his knuckles, old wounds with even older histories.

Ita presses her thin mouth to them in the dry desert night. She has a tongue that blisters despite her silver softness, and Chason instinctively bends his hand away from the heat.

She looks hurt.

But then, she always looks hurt.

“What are they from?” Her questions are never loaded, her mouth too unaccustomed to saying what she actually wants. Sometimes Chason swears she has trouble even shaping certain words.

Words like love, like separation, like future.

He forces the uncomfortable laugh back down his throat and pushes a hand into her pale hair, an apology of sorts (he does that a lot: laughs at nothing, at everything, hoping to hear the response of his brothers and sisters on the horizon). He curls his fingers, and he can feel the sand under his nails, the tangle of knots that cause his hand to stick. Both, he knows, are caused by their failing journey, and he feels the responsibility, the guilt, settle over him like a shroud.

She’s a delicate thing, long-limbed and snow-skinned. She is blistering beneath the heat of the sun and shivering during the long hours of the night. She is starving, he thinks, her ribs like sharp blades against her stomach when he presses her to him.

But she is his.

In this form or another, she is his now.




~


She likes her tea scalding hot with a heavy dose of lemon and just a hint of honey. Once, Ita brought her a gold-rimmed cup syrup-thick with honey, and Augusta had thrown it at her feet after one sip. The porcelain had shattered; the tea had burned; Ita had caught her voice in her throat.

Augusta had said nothing, and Radomir had made her a new cup, the saucer as fragile as a toy boat between his large hands.

When he placed it on the table beside her folders and official documents, she had touched his wrist in passing, a sweep of her fingers in gratitude. She’d sucked the end of a fountain pen into her mouth, her teeth white and sharp against the metal, and caught his eye. There was something amused there, something dark in her red glance, something he appreciated and understood.

Ita had seen it, and she had shivered.

Mated, she’d thought, bonded, paired.

The idea had unsettled her, and the scent of lemons still makes her skin crawl.




~

Eda is a waif, but she is horribly pretty. Too pretty, Sunniva sometimes thinks. She has all the beauty of a desert flower but none of the poison. Sunniva worries she might have bet her money on the wrong horse, so to speak, that her investment is not as promising as it once was. She could be losing.

Financially, and maybe something else.

Palmer shrugs, his movements slow from plum wine. “She’s a hell of a survivor though, that one. Better than a fucking flower.”

“Some cacti can survive two years without a single drop of water.”

“I thought we were talking about flowers? Who said anything about cacti?”

Sunniva rolls her eyes, her mouth a straight line, but there’s a slope to her shoulders that reveals her amusement. She finishes counting the last of the day’s coin and refills Palmer’s glass from the pitcher between them. It’s been a long time since she’s poured for charm’s sake, but there’s still a practiced, natural elegance to the way she holds out her arm, to the flash of her white wrist, and the curve of her fingers.

Palmer catches her hand.

There’s a hungry look about him, like a dog scavenging for bones, that makes her want to push her nails into his face.

But then he laughs, his off-kilter, off-balanced, rumbling sound, and strokes her the soft center of her palm with his dangerous fingers. “You could be a flower, you know. You’re pretty enough.”

“A flower?” she deadpans. “Tell me, does this type of approach work with all your women, or just the particularly vapid ones?”

“Eda likes flowers. She would be a Canterbury bell. Some dainty purple thing. But you, you would be …” Palmer sucks the air into his mouth in thought, still stroking her palm, circling his fingers closer to the thin veins near the bump of bone in her wrist.

He is silent for so long that Sunniva finds herself uncomfortable, unfamiliar with her embarrassment. “What?”

“A prickly pear.”

She snatches her hand back to the protective shield of her body, scoffing. “Charming. Very charming.”

Palmer laughs again and drinks from his refilled glass. “As ever, my dear, as ever.”

He flicks a coin at her playfully, but later he will fall asleep thinking of the desert claw and its copper blossoms.

I'm counting this as a warm-up rather than a piece, because it's not really anything close to what I wanted to write.

--

I.

The first time Augusta hears of the Emerald Isle she has sand in her hair and blisters forming on the otherwise smooth contours of her palms. They’ve stopped for the night in a ramshackle tavern, held aloft by what looks like drift wood but can’t be, since they’re more than seventy miles into the desert and too far from the coast.

The name trips over the excited tongues of straight-backed boys cleaning tables, sets the eyes of the middle-aged bartender alight, tip-taps sideways from mouth-to-mouth down the bar by the customers, in-between mouthfuls of cactus juice and gin. Augusta is wrapped in layers, her lips dry and cracked from the weeks of traveling, and she raises an eyebrow at Radomir from across their teetering table to see if he has also heard the whispering. He casts a wide shadow, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, one of his large hands wrapped around a baked clay mug that he lifts to his mouth every few moments. There’s a tilt of his head in acknowledgement before he scans the crowd of men at the bar one more time.

They haven’t been bothered by their waiter (or any other prying eyes) since he split open the whole chicken they ordered with his rough, bare hands, his fingers oblivious to the heat and steam of the meat. He had cracked open the breast in the gesture of a blink. But Radomir never fully relaxes while they travel, so he keeps roaming his gaze, memorizing faces and listening to pulses.

She tells him it’s because she’s tired and they’re still three weeks from the mountains, because she wants a hot bath and a pretty, long-fingered girl to wash her hair. He knows, however, that the real reason Augusta tells him they’re changing course is because she doesn’t like anything to consider itself out of her jurisdiction.

She is resolved to be unimpressed, and that holds until the first time she sees Palmer in the atrium, eating a pear, leaning against a column beside the reflection pool. Palmer, she realizes immediately, is a switchblade, slim in the waist but broad in the shoulders and arms. Radomir circles him in what he must intend to be a casual manner as a one-legged woman continues to welcome them from somewhere to their left, but Augusta only half-listens. She watches the exchange between her beast and this business man, half-amused when they seem to circle each other like jungle cats, although Palmer is talking casually, motioning grandly with one arm, pantomiming ease.

“Your companion does not seem to like my partner.” The brunette woman says now that she is beside Augusta, her hands clasped in front of her slender body.

“No,” Augusta corrects, unwrapping one of linen scarf from around her head, the sheen of her hair bright beneath. “No, it isn’t that. It’s that they’re the same, I think, except your partner is a knife wound and Radomir is a closed-fist punch.”

To her surprise, the woman laughs. It sounds sweet, like honey, which does not seem befitting. “Yes, I think you are exactly right, Minister.”


II.


When Radomir had first seen Augusta, long before the fighting pits and her government position, she had peered at him with her bright eyes and the breath had been knocked right out of him. He had seen a lot of girls, been with a lot of girls, touched them and watched them and tormented them the good way and the bad, but Augusta, in her long-limbed, adolescent youth, had sucked his breath right out of his lungs like no other.

Eda does not elicit the same response. She’s a petite little thing, a little bird, ready to take right off. She’s got big eyes like a doll’s, lids sliding shut and open again in a languorous blink. She’s beautiful in a way that will only be ripped apart.

“I am not made of glass,” she tells him, politely, mistaking his slowness for hesitancy rather than disinterest.

Augusta tips her drink back, hiding a laugh, ice clinking, from a chair in the corner. She has been freshly cleaned, rubbed raw by the heat of the water and some attendant’s caring hands. Her hair is still damp and Radomir, briefly, becomes distracted by the smear of wetness it leaves on the side of her neck when she pushes it back.

“You’re like one of those …” He reaches out and touches Eda, his big hands running up her sides. “One of them little ballerinas inside the music box.”

She smiles. “That’s lovely.”

He is close enough now that all Eda sees is the wide breadth of his shoulders and the way his shirt stretches of his body. The hair on his forearms is fine, but dark. He is a collection of geometric configurations. He is planes and lines and points connecting harshly with the contrasting softness of mouth and eyes. He looks too large for the suite, even though it is the best the Isle has to offer, and Eda swears her moans will echo off the walls.

He undoes the tie of her shirt. He is gentle peeling it off her arms, gentle when pulling it up over her head. She notices, but does not mind, that his eyes aren’t on her at all. They’re somewhere over her shoulder, past her shadow, focused on the other woman.

Eda is certain this is some kind of seduction. She takes a relaxing breath. “You don’t need to worry about hurting me.”

From behind them, Augusta throws back her head and laughs.

In a way that could be fond, Radomir nips the bottom of her ear, his voice a growl. “I wasn’t.”

This is a bit abstract/vague. That’s what happens when you have a bunch of scenes in your head and then you try to connect them.

Talking about the thing kind of ruins it, but oh well. Just real quick. This bounces back and forth between before and after Sunniva and Palmer slept together. Their one-time love fest is alluded to. I also wanted to do an intiation scene, or a test scene, sort of, between Eda and Palmer that Sunniva over-sees, but I didn’t get there. Instead, I have Sunniva feeling inexplicably annoyed (and also unable to express that annoyance properly) that Palmer has sex with Eda without any type of involvement from Sunniva.

Because that makes sense. Anyway! Here we go.




I am only responsible for
my own heart, you offered
yours up for the smashing,
my darling. Only a fool
would give out such a vital
organ. – Anais Nin



i.

From the other room a record will play, and some nights Palmer hums along with it. It makes her scared, it makes her nervous; there is nothing soothing about it.

Palmer will put a hand on her arm, and he knows, in these moments, that Sunniva hates him.

He knows, too, that she hates how her stomach can twist and knot out of fear and lust and something like anger just because he trails his calloused fingers up her neck.


ii.

The first time Eda slept with a man, Palmer was there.

Eda was young. Too young, the type of young that damages easily. This was before the Emerald Isle, when she was a parentless waif left to the savagery of the wasteland. It had consumed her, and Palmer had watched.

Eda didn’t care about coins then. She was meek and mild and half-dead. A man was on top of her, in a wet, murky establishment no more than a shack, and she was completely silent. She rolled over, and Palmer could see the side of her face. Her eye caught his and he smirked. She held his gaze for longer than he expected.

Brave girl, he had thought.

And then, there were those cheekbones of course.


iii.

Routine is simple. Her bed is his bed is her bed. His body fits easily with hers and he smells like a man, which is something Eda must learn to drawn some small familiarity from.

The first time, she is bent over a gilded table and halfway through a record skips and stops. The first time, Sunniva is not there and Palmer thinks he might be breaking some type of contract, some inherent, unspoken rule. But the simple truth is that he wants it, and Eda wants, and she is wet for it, her hips arching, trying to follow the path of his hand.

His body easily dwarfs hers as he holds himself over her. He can’t see her face, her hair obscures his view. Eda is shaking, her breath sharp and rapid, his chest flush with her back. He grabs a fist full of her hair and draws it back from her face; her cheeks are not red but pink, pink like a girl’s, and her lip is caught between her teeth. He thinks she must have learned that from Sunniva, but then Eda looks guilty, ashamed – and he likes that. He laughs, mouth against her ear.

When he bites at the skin of the back of her neck, she makes a hot and sticky noise in the back of her throat.

He tells Sunniva about it later, mouth thick from wine, and does not realize her disappointment or the way her eyebrows draw together in distaste.

“She’s just a purse. A collection bag.”

“You didn’t pay.”

Palmer shrugs and tosses a few coins onto her desk. Sunniva sighs but pockets the money all the same, the gold disappearing between her fingers in one sweep of her hand. When she still looks displeased, he runs his fingers back through his dark hair and groans, loud, like a boar on the hunt. “What? What now? You cannot be jealous. We’re going to have a shit of a business if you’re already jealous. Fucking women and their emotions.”

The thought of jealousy makes her scoff. She flicks her eyes in an upward roll. It’s an expression he’s grown accustomed to seeing. Nonetheless, her voice is steady, neutral. “I worry about your attachment, is all. I worry about the privacy of the act. She’s a silly thing. She’ll put too much emphasis on it.”

“Good. It will make her all the more indebted to me. Not that she isn’t eternally grateful as it is that I saved her from that mold-infested shack two years ago.”

“You keep singing that tune.”

For emphasis, Palmer whistles, as high and sweet as paradise lovebirds.


iv.

He looks dangerous when the oasis is empty of clients. Sometimes he intimidates the girls, although he is more boss than bodyguard. There are the sharp lines of his body, violence contained and incarnate. Untethered brute strength and a lifetime of learning survival.

Peeling an apple in smooth, fluid strokes, he tells Eda that, according to the old religions, woman came from Adam’s rib. He’d like to remind Sunniva of that.


v.

“There is such a thing as power in sex. You can diminish another man, a man who thinks he is better than you, to something senseless. A thing that begs for release.” He kisses the insides of Eda’s palms. Of her wrists, where the skin is thinnest and the most vulnerable.

He doesn’t mind being on his knees, tucked in front of her like an acolyte, admiring the new gauze-mesh of her latest dress from their latest patron. He’s a bit drunk from last night’s celebration, but he isn’t nearly drunk enough. He’d like to forget the earlier morning hours and the frigid coldness that had accompanied it.

Sunniva, half as bright as yesterday, like the permanent shadow that she is, regards from her usual high-backed chair. She would be queenly if she weren’t so stone-faced. He sees her swallow and remembers the taste of her spit.

Because he knows she’s watching, Palmer catches the back of Eda’s finely shaped thigh in one of his well-worn hands and lifts her ballerina’s leg to trail his mouth down her thigh, across the curve of her knee. He drags his mouth lower still, murmuring words against her calf, the scratch of his beard on her skin making her laugh. Looking up at her, this perfectly crafted, well-worn doll who flutters her eyelashes like they’re butterflies, he decides that what he wants from her is to make her bottom lip tremble.

So many wolves so hungry for the slaughter, and Palmer wonders if the problem might be that they’ve run out of lambs and have begun to hunt their own kind.

Writing exercise with my Muffin-pants! Trying out a new character. 3 wine glasses in.

-


Eda has fingers for days. Long, tapered, white as snow. You have never seen snow, but a whore read you a poem once and snow was described as pale and pure and light. When she sweeps her fingers through your hair, down your throat, you feel that coldness. You bite at her collarbone because it discomforts you, because you are a man who consumes and burns. She laughs, and it’s high and silvery, and you want to swallow it down.

You like her. You like her pretty legs and her thick hair. The deferential way she flutters her eyelashes. You like the hot gash between her legs and how willing she is. She bends and bends and takes all that you can give. Sometimes you bruise her. You hold her hip with a hand and tangle your other in her hair. You mouth obscenities against the column of her throat and think of Sunniva, of her untouchable, unclaimable spirit.

The oasis is hot and moist and terrible to you. So wet that you forget the difference between it and being with a woman. A man can’t get lost in this type of dampness, but you try. Eda is willing. Eda is a soft body and a pliant, moldable will. This, here, with her, becomes you and your cock and the noises you ply out of her. A different man, a better man, would feel bad about it. Or maybe not, because Eda likes the clank and clatter of coin. She takes pride in a service well rendered. You wonder, sometimes, if you are just another client for her, another wayward man she takes to her bed. You come all the same, half-angry, half-elated, your breath already stale on the curve of her breast.

You call her a minx, a she-devil, a whore. She laughs and pushes away your sleepy hands afterwards, tugs at the damp collar of your shirt. She lights you a cigarette, because she knows your habits, and you lean against the window of her room, talking money, talking girls, talking dreams. You steal words from poets and pretend you do not notice the way her eyes glitter, or how you sometimes think of how that expression would look like in another woman’s gaze.