𝚜𝚌𝚙𝚜𝚒𝚜

"oh, don't be like that," instead of baring her tongue cher drops her head backwards, the crown leaned gently against the dark plush of the booth, opening up her gaze to his full height. it has the terribly intimate impression of looking up at him from a pillow. when she stands it's sudden, fluid, one shoulder of her coat falling off a round shoulder. cherise takes another drag of her cigarette, trying to replace the sugary taste thats leaked in. she's very good at all this too, the performance of perpetual casualty, but there's a moth jumping from rib to rib that keeps cherise from straying too close. when she steps forward its in slow, sauntering steps, a pace at once asymmetrical and baring innate grace.

"at least get the jury and executioner out here before you make any final decisions." judge, of course, wouldn't call for either. he never had, and that's the joke, the punchline that bruised ⸺ he had no need for them or anyone else. or perhaps what she's remembering is he didn't need her. not enough to reevaluate an expired promise or to stay past dawn, to put out the fire he left raging in a rumpled bed. a thumbnail works its way between her teeth, the acrylic smooth and lacquered against cher's tongue. smoke smoulders near her face. she raises a brow. "⸺ is that really all the welcome i get?"

cherise's temerity had been one of the many traits that attracted judge to her in the first place. she was bold face font, ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, in your face yet graceful in every way. he'd wanted to inhale her like the stupid fucking cigarette she had her lips wrapped around, but now ? the male was seething with an unfamiliar, misplaced anger.

anger was not a foreign concept to judge, but it was indisputably unwelcome in his bones. as a child, rage was ever-present within his family. his father's indignation shook the very walls of their home, booming like thunder. it leaked into his siblings and cousins, took hold of his mother, and, he suspected, would've sunken it's piercing teeth into him too, had he not left for kilmer cove in 2006. now a grown man, judge reserved those feelings for only the worthiest of occasions. except, this one didn't feel deserving at all.

it occurred to him that he was holding his breath, letting the oxygen cook inside his lungs like a hot oven. nostrils flared as he desperately gasped, hardened expression remaining cold. as the femme loomed closer, he began to feel hunted. ( their dynamic had always been playful in nature. like a cat and mouse. but he was the predator, and he'd fight to stay that way. )

"judge," his name comes out warm and rolled in the careless warmth so characteristic of vedia's voice. she's wine-drunk and lighthearted for it, smiling, a pink silk balloon filled to the point of shining. "i was wondering if i'd see you tonight." her eye glance over the length of him, clad in the vaguely familiar look of what she assumes to be a true seaman. though there were too many years between them for vedia to register judge as anything tangible, he had the platonic charm of a well-timed sunset or a neatly assembled cabin: a view on the roadside you enjoyed simply because it was there. "i don't know how you do it..." vedia cants her head, little fingers curling against the line of her glass, nails milky and round and clinking against the stem. like set of pearls pried from oysters they kept in the back. "if this was any better it would be positively indecent."

her ethereal radiance was excellent for business. as good as a kilmer-level celebrity endorsement. he'd have sat her by the window if it wasn't too obvious, like a beautiful little advertisement — hopefully a social media post or two would do the trick, if she even used that stuff. panhandle oyster co's interior design was intentionally instagram-able, all moody lighting and high-end finishes. he'd consulted professionals.

wymon had said sit, but after the slow trail in following him from bathroom to the hearth — too nervous to make the trek on her own, too shaken to deviate from his path — vedia remains standing, shuffling her weight and the bulk of her thoughts from one foot to the next. the room itself is inviting enough, small and slanted in a way the exterior of the parsonage implied, but there's the lingering sense of being something unsuitable for this house. it's foreign, and therefore she has no measure with which to understand what is acceptable — if it would be terrible to stain that couch there with the wet of her hair, or worse still to sit in the armchair in the corner, which might have belonged to a stern man in a dark robe — but it's also familiar. cast in a noxious glow. you are not welcomed in this house or anywhere my nephew, miss sahin.

it's the expletive that breaks her reverie, and from behind him vedia shifts uncomfortably. she feels suddenly very small, condensed in size by all this water, stripped of her clothes and some of the buffering volume of her presence: little more than some tiny doll that wymon could fit in the curl of one palm. her heart, however, remains the same size. it throbs with discomfort at wymon's expression of pain, and the knowledge that she doesn't know what to do with it.

"is it a splinter?"

" yeah ... " wymon admitted in defeat, grimacing as he assessed the damage. he would've chosen to endure the stinging, written it off as a mild finger prick, if not for how she uses the wound to bridge the gap between them again. her hands are the same as they always were : delicate, fairy-like. though wymon was not a particularly large man, one of his hands could swallow both of hers, could pin each dainty wrist together effortlessly when the moment called for it. recollection tied a knot in his throat as her nail scraped against rounded, now puckered flesh.

he suckled on his lower lip, raking it between his teeth as a makeshift dam, fearful of what may spill out if he didn't. her inquiry proved to make that impossible. " i've been ... " the male trailed off, hypnotized by the repetitive grating of her fingernail, the oxytocin release that her grip inspired.

what he wants to say : i've been awful. i've been alone. i've been riddled with enough grief to drown an olympic swimmer. i am water-logged and always leaking, leaking, leaking. my body is a piece of broken driftwood. i'm haunted by mistakes and burdens that aren't mine. even more than that, there is not a day that i am not haunted by YOU.

his hands are gentle to the point of reverence, and in the slow unthawing of her skin she feels oversensitive, raw. the fingers that draw cleansing water along the backside of her calf brush only incidentally against the underside of a knee, only grazing against the little tendons there, but still her breath falls out round and heavy, the jolt that follows it is so hot and white-coloured that it seems dangerous to be so close to water. you weren't supposed to let electricity near anything wet.

then he says it's my job, and vedia knows what he's referencing and what he isn't. the bigness of the statement ⸺  not the words themselves but the pillars behind them, the full, round implication ⸺ touches her like another hot hand, and suddenly it's all too much. it's too much on her body, on her heart. she cannot remember the last time she was touched so sweetly. she she cannot recall the last time she met someone as beautiful. the ankle in his grasp pulls away, retreating softly into the open air.

"but it's not."

what wymon is referencing — the innate duty of care, the obligation of one heart for another — hadn't been his job for four years. it was supposed to be, before ⸺  it was meant to be his forever. she had meant to be his forever. the water is sloshing gently from her sudden movement, and against the accompanying quiet it sounds like reprimand against the porcelain. despite the greater trespass not being hers, vedia feels as though she's done something wrong. even in all her hurt, wymon's innate gentleness made even disagreement feel like an act of violence.

"it's not your..." slowly she returns her foot back to its place, an attempt at recovery. like placing a brick in the spot a bridge burnt down long ago. " ⸺  it's been a long time, wymon."

angled surface of his cheekbones grew warm at vedia's admittance, blooming with ruddy abashment akin to her own. they were two virgins, born-again — meek and mousey — fumbling and flustered. for a moment, he found himself wishing he'd wake up already. that this was some lewd fantasy cooked up in his wicked subconscious while his mortal body wept in it's sleep.

but her recoil is too tangible to be a work of delusional fiction. a cruel reminder that his romantic bygone was still not his to hold or behold. this tryst was a one-off, likely never to be repeated. pathetic for him to have hoped otherwise.

wymon didn't touch her again, even with her retrogression. there's reverence in how he kept his hands to himself, instead occupying his fingers with a new task : pulling the bathtub plug. the drain let out a guttural gurgle, sucking down the dirt, sucking away the evidence that he'd read her flesh like braille only moments ago. he stood up from the cobblestone floor, more sure-footed than he'd been all night.

" i know. " lament is weighted. a stone sinking at the bottom of a well. though he means no ill will, the words tasted sour, almost poisonous. an apology boiled at the back of his throat, but he swallowed it down with an audible gulp. wymon let out a sigh before speaking again. " come sit on the hearth. i'll start a fire. "

her elbows collect on the hostess stand, weight leaned all the way into the dark wood pedestal the same way cherise slants all her charm onto the woman behind it. hey, i've got an interview with judge. could you grab him for me? at her nearness the hostess's features pull from unsure to in some way dazed, unbalanced by both the appearance of the type of face that certainly doesn't belong in the cove — beautiful and metropolitan, marked quietly by something larger than life — and the conspiratorial way with which it hovers. she's good at that, cherise already knows, but the reminder is a sweet, steadying force against that teetering creature of her nerves, so she lays it on a little thick, warming herself against the girl's astonishment. a hand brushes her wrist. thanks honey.

behind the partition of the waiting area she sits and pulls one bare thigh over the other, her legs collected and assembled in an angle that would make a mathematician reach for his instruments. how do we replicate this slant? she lights a cigarette from her place on the leather bench, and it's only partially to curb the gnawing sense of wariness: the other part of her simply wants to stain the place he holds dear. when judge comes around the corner, cherise finds he looks the same as remembers: handsome and full of blame.

"well?" she says instead of a greeting, using in place of hello or hey there some unrelated word with little meaning. it resembles in some way how they used to speak, substituting dense phrases for polite ones that could be used in public: you win for this need is making me sick, or come here for there's nobody for me but you. the smoke she exhales comes from the stick of her lit cigarette, but for a moment there's the sensation that it's summoned from somewhere deeper, that she's breathing out the fumes from some ember that crackles and spits at his nearness. her gaze tilts over the rim of her sunglasses, burning hot. she smiles, pointedly unpretentious, scalding. "i didn't get my interview time wrong, did i?"

he was a trained guard dog, sniffing out an abnormality, investigating his domain. premature in her adulthood, the hostess's voice barely graced his ears before judge was already bounding towards the restaurant's entryway. it's a fault of his — one of many, and so minor in comparison to others — that he often doesn't give his youngest staff members the time of day. his brain didn't have the capacity for their frivolities. as they say, he didn't have the spoons. spoons ... " is someone rolling silverware ? " he heedlessly barked out of the side of his mouth, nose still guiding him towards the unwelcome smell of cigarette smoke. " who the fuck is smoking in h— "

her presence was a gust of wind and he's an already rotting hovel.

silence, as it often did, took hold of judge's tongue like a creature he'd consumed, now making it's way back up his throat. he kept his jaw clenched, masseter muscles tense enough to create divots in his skin in the very places her manicured fingers had once perused. her stunning visage alone scorched crimson as the cherry end of her cigarette, and though he'd put her flame out against his own skin time and time again, he'd nearly forgotten about the splotchy burn scars that once littered him.

for when she disappeared so wordlessly, so carelessly, cherise had taken all the evidence of their affair with her. leaving him to pick up the pieces of a crime they'd committed together, but he bore the punishment of alone. judge had grown to enjoy that solitude. diminutive and peaceful, he lived in it comfortably, like his cottage on the beach. she would not threaten that again.