#yengilla

Even as upset as she is, Fringilla somehow musters up amusement at Yennefer and her ever-busy life. “Where are you?”

“Tissaia took me out for lunch.” It sounds more like she’s at a nightclub, or in the lemur exhibit of the zoo. Then a door shuts as Yennefer likely sequesters herself in the bathroom. Her voice takes on a different quality. “What do you need to figure out?”

Fringilla closes the fridge and miserably drags herself over to the couch. “It’s so stupid,” she whines. “Like, really fucking stupid. I messed up the dates for our final project, and I thought… okay. So, they had a model come to the school so we could sketch them and I missed the first date but there was a make-up session. And I thought the make-up session was today, but it turns out it was last week, and the deadline is today. And if I fail this class, I’m absolutely fucked.”

“So you need… what, a model?” Yen laughs. 

Fringilla closes her eyes tightly, blocking out the cruel sound. She only reconnected with Yennefer recently; after boarding school their paths grew apart and their rivalry had dwindled down to nothing. She’s been trying hard to make this friendship work, but she supposes that some of the old wounds are still sore. Or, at least, she’s extra sensitive right now because her life is falling the fuck apart.

Yen coaxes, bringing her back to reality, “Bring your sketchbook out tonight. There’ll be tons of models!”

“Won’t work,” says Fringilla, salty and embarrassed.

“Why not?”

“Because… it was a nude modelling session,” she mutters. “The model was naked.”

She half-expects Yennefer to suggest they go to the strip club, cavalier as anything, but the woman is uncharacteristically quiet. Fringilla can still hear white noise through the call— Yennefer’s heavy breaths, reduced to tinny audio— but otherwise it’s like the line has gone dead.

“Yen—”

“Why don’t you just watch some porn?” Her friend’s voice has taken on an entirely different tone now, one that Fringilla hasn’t heard since they fumbled around a few times. Her blood races even at the word ‘porn’, making her feel juvenile. “There are millions of naked photos online, Fringilla. You could probably even find nudes of the same model.”

“It won’t be the same,” she says, although that is a really good idea. She juggles her phone into her hands and puts the call on speaker, tapping in ‘Francesca Findabair naked photos’. The query returns only a few results, and none of them even look that much like pornography. With a jolt of humiliation, Fringilla realizes she has SafeSearch on. “I need… I need to look at them in person. I can draw from reference, but it’s never the same as seeing the real thing. But… ugh, I guess I can try.”

“That’s the spirit,” Yennefer says, still sounding a little thick. Without warning, she hangs up the call, leaving Fringilla staring at the screen and wondering if it dropped. But Yen doesn’t call her back, so maybe someone else just walked into the bathroom, or maybe Tissaia came to fetch her. After all, it is her birthday. Fringilla should probably bother something else with this.

Her eyes unfocus as she stares at Francesca Findabair’s website. All the photos are incredibly tasteful, and it looks like she does more photography and activism than modelling. The button labelled ‘Contact Me?’ is only one tap away, but Fringilla hesitates.

“I can’t,” she wails to her empty, unsympathetic living room. The dying plant in the corner offers no response. Fringilla swears, setting down her phone and going to heat up dinner. If she’s going to look up random naked people on the internet, she would rather not do it on an empty stomach.

Before she knows it, the microwave has beeped at least six times and she’s deep in a rabbit hole of ethical pornography consumption. Porn has never done much for Fringilla so she’s not sure where to begin to look; even the websites with user-posted content don’t say much about the users consenting to having their likenesses drawn. She looks up nude stock photos and clicks through about four dozen photographs of a lovely woman named Callonetta, but nothing strikes her interest the way a real person would. She considers, idly, using her own reflection— but given that she can’t even draw her own hand without getting frustrated, she thinks it might lead her down a dark path of self-deprecation.

In succession: the microwave beeps a seventh time. Fringilla declares, “Fuck this!” And the buzzer to her apartment rings.

Outside the door is Yennefer, who doesn’t give Fringilla even a millisecond to breathe before heading straight inside. Fringilla doesn’t shriek but it’s a near thing. There’s a dish in the sink from breakfast and her bed is unmade. She hasn’t swept the floors, or wiped the mirrors, and on her phone screen there is still a picture of a blonde naked woman holding a guitar.

Yennefer enters this mess without hesitation or apparent complaint, her gaze sweeping over most of the daily debris. She sees the phone, because of course she does, and she snatches it up, laughing again. Mean and beautiful, just like she was back at Aretuza. “Pretty. Is she your type?”

“No,” Fringilla almost screams, lunging for her phone. Yennefer hands it over easily, grinning as Fringilla swipes away the photos of Callonetta. The woman’s violet gaze is shrewd and too smart for Fringilla’s liking, and under her coat is an extremely tight black dress that looks like she might have been sewn into it. Her birthday dress. Fringilla screws up her face, shaking her head. “Yen, I can’t go out with you. I’m sorry!”

“I know,” huffs Yennefer. “I felt too sorry for you, darling, I couldn’t go out drinking without my favourite girl.” Fringilla’s face heats at that, and she steps away, pocketing her phone. “So I gave it some thought, and I came up with another solution.”

Since she was a child, Fringilla has been extraordinarily bad at accepting help. She understands the benefit of community, but as she was packaged up and sent off to a boarding school for exceptional children, and then failed to make any lasting friendships there, she began to discover that most things really do just work better when you tackle them yourself. She bites her lip now, beginning the motion of shaking her head, psyching herself up for the inevitable fight this will turn into. But the awful, frustrating truth is that she doesn’t want Yennefer to help her, not when Yennefer’s career has gone so perfectly and Fringilla has fought tooth and nail every step of the way. This isn’t her final assignment but it’s important, and she fucked up and she knows it but she still thinks she can handle it herself.

Then Yennefer offers her solution, and Fringilla’s petty irritation evaporates in a heartbeat.

“Yen,” she begins, shakily, as Yennefer takes off her coat. The dress is next; she pulls it up to reveal dark, but not opaque tights stretched over her hips. Under the tights are underwear, under the bust of the dress is nothing. Her breasts spill out easily. Fringilla has, of course, seen her own bare chest in the mirror countless times, but it’s wholly different to see someone else. Her voice softer, more fragile, Fringilla breaks: “Yennefer—”

“Oh, stop it.” Yen actually tsks. Fuck, she’s infuriating. “You need a model, right? So draw me. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”

That much is true. Fringilla still hesitates, even as her mind replays the memories of what they had shared together. She hasn’t seen the other woman like this since the night before they graduated. Somehow, she looks better than ever.

“You’re so fucking difficult,” bitches Yen. “Fine. Fine! I’ll just strip down right here, shall I?”

And Yennefer kicks off her heels, and as Fringilla tries very hard to come up with some kind of coherent protest, the tights come off too. They roll down in one smooth motion, pulling Yennefer’s underwear along with them. Her thighs are bare but other than that she’s unshaved; Fringilla is drawn to the sight like a magnet to the earth’s pole. She stares, helplessly, at the thick mess of curls above Yennefer’s cunt.

The microwave beeps.

Fringilla lets out a squeak, and hurries to open and then slam the microwave door shut. When she turns around, mortified, Yennefer is watching her with deep, mean amusement. Her legs are slightly spread, and her hands are on her hips like she knows exactly what she’s doing. She steps away from her pile of clothes, over to Fringilla’s sparsely decorated living room. She starts to descend onto the couch, and all Fringilla can think about over the furious pounding of her heart is that if Yennefer sits on the couch with her bare pussy, Fringilla will never, ever be able to sit there again without getting insanely fucking horny.

She cries, “Wait!” Yennefer straightens up, and looks over— her small breasts bounce with the movement. Fringilla rounds the couch. “Wait, you…”

Yennefer, for the first time in years, seems timid. She doesn’t cover up but something in her posture changes, making her look like she once had, before Aretuza.

“Not on the couch,” Fringilla demands. “This isn’t Titanic, for fuck’s sake. Get… get on the ottoman.”

Yen glances over at the small ottoman, then shoots her an incredulous look. Fringilla huffs, pulling the footstool over so that she has space to sit on it— and carefully not ogling her in the process.

Yennefer sits, stiffly but not properly, her ankles crossed and her thighs and calves pressed tightly together. Like this, it looks like she could be bathing. Not salacious, aside from the nudity, but not vulnerable either.

“Not— okay, it’s… that’s fine, but I’d like it better like this,” Fringilla tries, sitting down on the couch across from Yennefer. She pulls up her feet onto the sofa, plastering her thighs to her chest and wrapping her arms around her knees. Yennefer, slowly but surely, does the same; she lowers her head to tuck her chin out of sight until only her eyes and nose peek out from above her arms, and Fringilla nods fervently. “Yes, that’s perfect. Can you hold that?”

“Yes,” grumbles Yennefer. “You’re missing all the good parts, though.”

“Well…” Fringilla clears her throat. When did her apartment get so fucking hot? “... Not really.”

Her gaze dips down to steal a glance between Yennefer’s parted ankles, where her gorgeous cunt is hidden in shadow. Fringilla swallows a dry mouthful of air, and when she looks back up to meet Yennefer’s gaze, she sees those violet eyes focused right on her.

“I had better grab my sketchbook,” she stutters, unfolding her body. Yennefer doesn’t move a muscle. “Just… hold it right there.”

-

This isn’t how she had expected to celebrate her birthday.

Fringilla hasn’t moved since she sat down with her sketchbook, except to occasionally shift back and forth on the couch. The sleeves of her college-branded sweater are rolled up to her elbows, and she keeps biting her lip and sticking her tongue out in concentration as her focus dances between her artwork and her model. Yennefer watches her just as closely, taking in the wispy baby hairs above her ears, the lines of her neck, the set of her shoulders. 

When she had known Fringilla, they were just girls— teenagers who fooled around and broke into Tissaia’s secret herb storage, but girls nonetheless. Fringilla is a woman now, and as much as Yennefer has been enjoying rekindling their friendship, she has to admit that she doesn’t really know the woman before her at all. Fringilla’s face might have stayed beautifully smooth and free of wrinkles but her eyes are deep and wise, and there’s a measured sadness in her smile.

Yennefer doesn’t know much about what happened after they stopped talking. She knows Fringilla graduated with honours from university and now is in grad school, pursuing art for some fucking reason. It brings Yen no small amount of joy to imagine how much the art degree must piss off Fringilla’s stuffy old uncle. The joy is only slightly tempered by the knowledge that Fringilla never wanted to go into art— unlike all the other bleeding hearts at Aretuza, Fringilla had been a stickler for the rules. She wanted nothing more than for her life to follow a strict and rigid trajectory— the same trajectory that Yennefer has found herself on. It would be amusingly ironic if it wasn’t so depressing.

Fringilla bites her lip again, this time as she stares between Yennefer’s legs. Her soft lead pencil swirls and swirls, scratching the paper rhythmically, and Yennefer realizes Fringilla must be drawing her pubes. Again, that should be funnier than it really is. Her cunt pulses; she’s been wet for at least the last hour, but somehow the idea of Fringilla carefully drawing each hair is enough to send another rush of arousal through her.

Well, truth be told, she’s been wet since back at the restaurant, when she’d called Fringilla from the bathroom and heard her say ‘nude’ in that stupid, stuck-up, prim and proper voice.

Yennefer rolls her neck around, just once— it isn’t even a full rotation, but Fringilla’s eyes snap up to meet hers. Fury courses through her expression, with remorse hot on its heels. “If you need a break, tell me,” she says harshly.

“I’m fine,” mutters Yennefer, burrowing down behind her folded arms again.

“Thanks again for doing this,” Fringilla says, distracted. It’s actually the first time that she’s thanked her, but Yen isn’t going to get pedantic. She’s distracted too— trying to keep her muscles all still is a workout of its own, especially when Fringilla is staring so closely at the outline of her calves and her breasts pressed up against her knees and her bare ankles. This would work a lot better if Fringilla had just tied her down. Still sounding absent, the other woman offers, “I can get you a drink if you’d like?”

“This would have worked better if you’d just tied me down.” Damn her stupid, stupid, impulsive brain. Fringilla’s eyes flash but she doesn’t rise to Yennefer’s offer or chide her for making jokes, just nodding before returning to the sketch. Somehow the lack of a reaction is more annoying than chastising would have been. “We can get drinks after.”

“Right,” Fringilla mutters. “I’ve never pregamed like this before.”

That knocks a surprised laugh out of Yennefer; her pulse quickens as Fringilla’s eyes dip down between her legs when she laughs. Is she moving there? Is it visible? Experimentally, she tightens and then relaxes her cunt. 

If Fringilla can see a difference, she doesn’t let it show on her face. “I hope I’m not making everyone wait tonight. I really do appreciate your help with this.”

“It’s fine. We weren’t going out until later anyway, right?”

“Right.” Fringilla clears her throat. “Did you invite anyone special?”

Rather than pointing out that she’s spending her afternoon sitting naked in a special someone’s tiny apartment so that they can draw her naked, Yennefer changes the subject: “Do you remember that one time we snuck out to that bar down by Tor Lara?”

Fringilla smiles, and it is radiant. “Yeah. We were all counting on Triss’ ID to get us in, even though none of us looked like her at all.”

“Yes! And poor Triss only wanted to order fries, but we told the bartender it was her birthday and he brought over those godawful shots—”

“Oh, those were terrible—”

“And do you remember Glacella dancing?”

“I remember having to carry her out,” deadpans Fringilla. “Although, granted, she wasn’t as bad as Sabrina! Remember how she threw up in the bathroom?”

“’Course. I remember her throwing up all over one of the Tor Lara boys’ pricks!”

“That is not true,” Fringilla actually gasps. Yennefer laughs; she can’t help it. “None of us were cool enough at Aretuza to actually hook up with anyone.”

“Well,” drawls Yen. “That’s not accurate. We were pretty cool.”

“We were the lamest of all,” laments Fringilla. Despite her whining, she’s obviously embarrassed and pleased by the memory— Yen watches her blush and hide a smile. “We had no idea what we were in for.”

Rather than properly acknowledge that sobering thought, Yennefer cranes her neck to try to sneak a glance at the drawing. Fringilla angles the sketchbook away, and she sighs. “C’mon, I can’t even take a peek?”

“Alright,” Fringilla relents. With obvious hesitation, she turns it around to reveal her work. Yennefer’s anticipation dies in her throat as she stares blankly at the figure on the page.

It’s her, but it isn’t— it’s her as she was, back in high school. Sure, her posture looks the same as it does now, and her jaw is even and symmetrical, but Fringilla has captured none of her adult beauty and all of her inner vulnerability. Curled around herself like this, she looks defensive.

“You’re going to get a great grade,” Yennefer says, the words ashen on her tongue. I hate it. “Is that really how you see me?”

“No,” Fringilla says quickly. “I… I wanted to capture… I wanted to put you in a different light.” Her face twists horribly. “You don’t like it?”

I fucking hate it. “It makes me… I look so sad,” Yennefer says. “So, I suppose it’s very good art. But I can’t help but wish that you saw me, um…”

“I could draw a pin-up,” offers Fringilla. “Really, it might even be better— this is only a first draft!” Her gaze flicks to her watch. They almost certainly don’t have time.

“Fringilla,” Yennefer says, heavy and steady. She lies through her teeth, “I think you nailed it.”

-

Never in her life has Fringilla been this hungover. She practically crawls to the kitchen to grab herself water, noting with distaste the leftover dishes from yesterday and the clothes strewn about her apartment from last night. It’s a wonder she had the good sense to pull on pyjamas, let alone that she’d made it safely into her own bed.

She doesn’t regret it, although right now the pounding ache in her head begs to differ. It had been fun to meet Yennefer’s new friends, and reconnect with their mutual ones— and they were drinking not only to celebrate Yennefer’s birthday, but to celebrate Fringilla not failing her class. She had scanned and sent in the drawing of Yennefer yesterday with a signed consent form they’d drawn up together, and although she hasn’t checked her email she’s sure that her professor will find it as inspiring as she does.

The thought of Yennefer’s disappointed face flashes across her mind. Then another roiling wave of nausea crashes through her whole body, and Fringilla clings to the edge of the sink, sighing. She literally does not have the capacity to think about Yennefer’s reaction to her nude drawing right now. It’s all she can do to not die of embarrassment thinking about how drunk she’d been last night.

She would love to blame it all on Sabrina, since the blonde had been overly generous and eager to get everyone on her level, but… by the end of the night, Fringilla had been the one begging to make future plans with the others after consuming enough drinks to lose count.

Her doorbell buzzes, and the noise is agonising. Fringilla croaks to the mystery visitor, “Absolutely fucking not.” They can come back later, when she’s a human person and not a stack of bad decisions in a sweaty, smelly sack of skin.

The buzzer rings again. “Fucking fuck.”

Standing outside her door is, impossibly, again, Yennefer. Fringilla doesn’t fully open the door this time, too busy calculating the math in her head. They had been out drinking until three in the morning, and she hadn’t even been the last to leave. According to her traitorous watch, it is eight in the fucking morning. That leaves exactly five hours for Yennefer to make herself beautiful again, which somehow she has, and force herself upright, and, for some fucking reason, return here.

Yennefer pushes past her without saying a word. She’s wearing the same heels as last night, and the same coat— her tights are missing, but she’s otherwise flawless. Fringilla’s head swims, and she groans, “Is this going to be a regular occurrence?”

“I just think you could do better.”

“Better?” Fringilla stares, rubbing her temples. She feels like she’s doing pretty fucking great, all things considered— there are no large puke stains on her PJs, so she’ll call this a win. “Better than what?”

Yennefer pushes the door shut beside them, and unbuckles her coat. She removes it, carefully moving to hang it on the coat rack— Fringilla’s coat should be hung up there too, except she must have thrown it somewhere else last night when she stumbled home. She would take a look for it right now, except she’s got more pressing concerns. Like all the air seems to have left the room, and her heart is going a mile a minute. And Yennefer is completely naked under her coat.

“I,” Fringilla begins. Her gaze dips down to Yennefer’s clean, bare breasts. She catches a whiff of the woman’s signature perfume, and she loses her next thought.

Yennefer, unaffected and unbothered, walks over to the ottoman that she had posed on so diligently last night. She doesn’t say a word, just haughtily staring down her nose at Fringilla from across the apartment— so maybe unbothered isn’t exactly true. She sits, folding her ankles primly.

“Yennefer,” begs Fringilla thickly. “I am so hungover.”

“Show me how you see me,” demands Yen.

“What the fuck,” she mutters, and then, when Yennefer doesn’t move at all, her small breasts heaving indignantly as she waits for Fringilla to join her; “fine, fine, you insane woman, fuck. Fine!”

Her sketchbook is right where she left it, and her pencils are still on the table. Fringilla pads over to sit on the couch in the very same spot, and flips to a new page. Yesterday, Yennefer had been static, dignified— a perfect model. Now her shoulders rise and fall, as though she’s nervous to be portrayed. There’s even a slight affect to her voice: “How do you want me?” If she was anyone else, Fringilla would accuse her of being worried.