#tabis

the terrace is small enough that the table takes nearly all of it. a tablecloth printed with olives, scorched at one corner by some other summer vacationer's carelessness, and at the ledge lies two euro wine sweating in a bowl of melting ice.

ERIS sits with one leg folded beneath her, sunkissed across the nose, adorably so that KARASU cannot help but lay his lips upon the reddened patch each time he walks past her. currently, he plates the fish at the little grill in the corner: a sea bream off the boat that came in at four and haggled for in a language he doesn't speak. lemon halves are blackened on the grate, tomatoes are split and salted and left to weep into their own oil. he tears the bread rather than cutting it before placing it on her plate—it just tastes better that way, y'know?

what follows is quietude while he takes a seat across from her, fusses over her. takes the bones from the fish with the tip of his knife and moves the good white flesh across to her side of the plate without comment, refills her glass before it is empty. when a strand of her hair falls forward into the oil he catches it and tucks it back behind her ear, and his knuckle grazes the shell of it, lingering there a moment longer than the task requires.

the daylight goes down the hill in stages. first, the water, then the roofs of the quaint little village the couple have found themselves in.

KARASU (low, fond) eat, birthday girl. 's gettin' cold.

she eats, and he watches her do it with his chin propped in his hand, wholly unbothered about being caught at it.

when he leans across for the bread, the pocket of his shorts gapes, and something small and pale swings loose on its chain: a sylvanian families calico cat, no longer than his thumb, flocked white with black and wearing a permament smile.

eris has seen it a thousand times, but she finds that she cannot stop admiring it anyway.

she'd pressed it into his hand at a departure gate a few years ago, when they were new and she hadn't yet brought herself to say the enormous thing and so had said something smaller and silly and sweet, all the same--so you don't forget me over there, to which he'd accepted it with a playful roll of his eyes, a tender palm ruffling her hair. (he'd also not once, in all those years, kept it anywhere but his pocket.) the felt has gone thin along the cat's cheek, worn smooth over a thumb turning it over and over in the darkness of a pocket, on planes, during press conferences, in the tunnel before a match with fourty thousand people roaring from somewhere above.

ERIS (reaching to touch the worn ear) you've nearly loved it to death.

KARASU (catching her wrist gently, turning her hand to press his mouth to her pulse) yeah, well. had a lot on my mind that year.

he rises. it's a very small terrace and it takes him one step to reach her, to cradle his hands around the back of her neck, settle his thumb into the hollows beneath her ear where the salt from the sea's dried faint and fine. his beautiful girl, he tips her face up and kisses her slow, and then kisses the burnt bridge of her nose, which makes her scrunch it up and whine at him, which is plainly the entire point.

KARASU (CONT'D) (admiring her) happy birthday, darlin'. 'm glad you were born.

there's a lemon tart he'd made in the fridge with a candle already jammed crookedly into it, and 11 days of this left--their mediterranean summer--and the little cat riding in his pocket, and his heart, through all of it, going wherever he goes.