#mirini

Luca rips the next wax strip away and flattens her hand over the sting immediately. Joan doesn’t actually know if it’s helping; but she can feel all the lines of Luca’s palm through the pain, and that alone is doing something.

“More sensitive up here,” Luca warns, pulling her hand away to drag the wax up into the pit of Joan’s knee. They’re working at an awkward angle: Joan on her back, her leg out straight, 45º and balanced by the ankle on Luca’s bony shoulder. Luca, on her knees, leans in just a little.

“There’s not even any hair there,” Joan mutters. Luca only shushes her.

The paper goes down. Luca smoothes it out and tears it away again in two quick motions, and this time the tears in Joan’s eyes burst over her lashes. Luca pauses in her movement for the next glob of melted wax.

“It hurts because you moved,” she says, not admonishing, rather simply telling.

Joan sniffs. Now that the tears have started, they won’t stop. Luca comes all the way forward, till Joan’s thigh is pressed up snug against her, knee hooked over her shoulder. Her eyes are wide and icy blue, pupils nothing more than pinpricks. She gets this look when Joan cries, or when they argue. Joan knows she’s getting off on it. She likes being the cause of something.

“Fuck off,” Joan bites, voice wavering. She doesn’t mean it, and Luca can tell, because she looms even closer, long fingernails biting into the still-stinging back of Joan’s thigh. Her other hand finds the waistband of Joan’s underwear, and then slides up without hesitation to the elastic of her bra.

If Joan wanted her to stop, she would say so. But Joan sinks her teeth back into her bottom lip and thinks of the pain, thinks of the last time she crashed, thinks of that stupid Honda, and the tears keep coming just the way Luca likes.