#varina

on the mantel, sits a candle in a saucer that has been burning some hours. it hasn’t yet been wished upon.

—

a chair is dragged from the escritoire and set before the window, along which VANA has made a barre.

one hand upon the chair-back, one foot rooted, the other rising away behind her in a long line, patiently sustained. the violet light comes up off the rooftops and finds her thigh, the fine arches of her ribs, the gold chain at the ankle he bought her in spring for no occasion whatsoever. she stands before him wearing nothing but his old pxg jersey knotted at the hip, and a set of delicately laced panties.

RIN watches from the bed and understands that he’s being shown something. she doesn’t perform for him, not exactly, but permits him to be present while she is entirely herself. it's a far more dangerous, tempting gift, and she knows it.

late forties. the years have settled into him fondly, silver arriving thickly at the temple, a hardened jaw. forearms and calves still corded by the sport he can no longer set down. a pale seam of the surgical scar at his knee. reading glasses pushed up into his hair and abandoned there an hour ago. he holds a flute on his sternum and hasn’t yet drunk from it.

VANA (not turning) enjoying the view, are we?

RIN mm.

VANA (pouts coyishly to herself) that’s a rather impolite sound.

she lowers the leg with that unhurriedness of hers and turns to face rin with her hand still on the chair, glancing at him from beneath her lashes.

there’s a perpetual guilt that lives behind his ribs. it possesses a name, and a ring that belongs to another woman and a house full of rooms nobody enters. it’s indifferent to the fact that the house has been cold for eleven years. what it attends to is the twenty years lying between his hand and her hip. at present, it isn’t doing him the smallest bit of good.

RIN come here.

VANA (mock-affronted) it’s my birthday, shouldn’t you come to me?

and all it takes is the spread of his legs beneath the sheets, the strong pat of his hand over his thigh for her to do as he asks. she crosses the parquet with her hair down her back and the shirt slipping from one shoulder. the muscle ticks in rin’s jaw, ever the seductress he’s found himself laying with.

vana doesn’t get into the bed, and instead sets one knee down on the mattress, one hand on his shoulder, and looks down at him, face inches from his, her hair curtaining both their faces. perhaps, to rin, to have her look down at him from above, is one of the few things on earth that reliably dismantles him. he takes the back of her thigh and tugs, until she crumples into his lap laughing, and the laughter goes into his mouth and dissolves there while he kisses with gentle fervor, a hand spread wide at the small of her back and the other rising into her hair to tilt her where he wants her, to which she pliably goes. she tastes of wine and of the ridiculous macaron she ate at four in the morning standing over the sink, and he’s almost convinced that he hasn’t felt the monstrous desire he feels for her since before she was born.

at moments like these, he wonders if she’s not a woman at all but an appetite made to undo him. a girl made of swan down and mottles of dust that shine gold in the sun and the smell of the river, sent to him to sit in his lap and feast on his heart.

—

he lays her back against the pillows. the shirt is long since unknotted and open down the length of her and his palm follows down the line of milky skin, until he reaches her ankle.

she goes still as he lifts her foot and studies it, tender. the high arch and the tape at two of the toes. the callus along the ball, the bruised nail she is vain about and pretends she isn’t. these are the feet of a woman who has been paid to ruin them since she was a child, and he finds them more eloquent than her face, because they simply can’t lie to him about what her life has cost. presses his thumbs into the arch and rolls, coaxing the sweetest, most merciful sounds out of her.

VANA (ragged) oh—ah, that feels—good—

RIN (absorbed) you danced on this today.

VANA s-so? i dance on it every day.

RIN mm.

he works the arch until the tension surrenders beneath his hands, and then sets his mouth to the inside of her ankle, above the gold chain. then to the arch itself with the flat of his lips, and then lower, and he takes the pad of her smallest toe lightly between them.

his eyes come up to her along the whole length of her body when he hears it pull the loveliest little whimper from her throat.

RIN (low) yes?

VANA (delighted, scandalised, wiggling her toes in his face) is that tent you’re pitching just from kissing my feet? mister itoshi rin, if only your fans knew how much of a pervert you really are!

RIN (scoffing, returning his lips to her arch) and still, you love me for it. isn’t that right, darling?

—

there’s a great deal rin is not, at forty-eight. not as quick or tireless as he was in his twenties, but he has no interest whatsoever in proving otherwise. instead, he possesses patience, twenty years of knowing exactly where and how long to withhold it, a settled and stern authority after he’s spent nearly a year keeping a woman half his age tucked beneath him and quietly out of her own mind.

so, he makes her wait. takes her mouth and leaves it. he sets his lips at the hollow of her hip and stays there while she whimpers and begs softly into the dark, and then without any coherent words at all. he’s learned that her body tells him the truth some seconds before her voice allows it, and she’s furious with him, but glorious in it all the same, thighs squeezing at the dip in his waist and her fingers spread wide at the back of his skull and her heel pressed hard to the base of his spine as though she might drive him through the floor of the world.

—

afterward she lies half across him with her cheek on his chest, one leg thrown over his thigh, the sheet somewhere near the floor. he traces the length of her spine. up, down, up, down. she’s damp at the temples and entirely boneless and he is aware of being happy, even if the straight line of his lips say otherwise. he presses a kiss to the crown of her head.

VANA (drowsy, muffled) you forgot my birthday wish.

RIN i didn't forget, you were occupied.

VANA (a snort of laughter against his sternum) and whose fault is that?

vana rises from the bed, not troubling with a shirt, and pads across the parquet in the dark to stand before the mantel with her hands folded at her sternum like a girl at an altar, the small flame throwing her shadow enormously up the wall.

she closes her eyes.

he props himself on an elbow to watch, and the guilt arrives then, punctual as ever, which he lets come. he looks at her lit from below, the loose fall of her hair, the ridiculous and unbearable seriousness of her face—and thinks thinks to himself; if it costs what it costs.

she makes a silent wish, and blows out the candle.