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Cordelia kissed Harmony first, under the bleachers in the seventh grade and she tasted like bubblegum chapstick and cheap beer they stole from a cooler the seniors weren’t very good at pretending to hide from parents and administrators that long ago stopped caring. She calls it practice and Harmony is a very good student, an even better teacher. She teaches Cordelia how to train, how to nudge a tongue with just a slow stroke of her thumb along the bottom of an eager jaw. She calls it practice again, under the light of the moon when her heart feels like it is breaking, but maybe it is revenge.
“Revenge,” the other girl says, her lips full and her eyes curious and she’s only a breath away when she makes her accusation, “It is a foolish goal.”
Cordelia tsks and gestures the other girl’s eyes closed, drawing a thick line on the lid, teasing her skin with long, slow strokes, “I said it was practice. And anyway revenge can be fun.”
Her eyes are closed and she is vulnerable and she could almost be possessed like that, her face laid bare and her hands folded in her lap patiently. Cordelia wants to sit in her lap and hook her ankles behind her back and show her what revenge tastes like.
Like bubblegum chapstick and cheap beer.
Instead, she holds out her hand and says, “Ready” maybe and laughs like this really is the last time or the first time and she isn’t picking her way towards destruction in the arms of a Slayer anyway.
There are threats and there is training and there is a well-armored missile and Kendra is none of those things and all of those things. She can’t be anything but those things because she is a soldier and that’s what she was trained to be. She is none of those things because she is a girl who wakes from dreams of a girl with a broad smile and dark brown hair and a steady hand.
A steady hand can tell you a lot about a person.
Her first kiss is on a dance floor with a loud beat in her ears they tell her is music and the taste of coffee coating her tongue and light fingers at her hips. Her first kiss pretends to be practice and tastes like revenge.
And she thinks.
Maybe sometimes soldiers can take the place of armor.
If the princess smells like cinnamon and lust and treats you like a girl instead of a weapon and her kisses scream of something you’ve never touched before. Something normal. Something not quite so normal. Something a little bit like pink bubblegum.
She says its training.
She’s really good at lying.
You don’t mind.
You take it anyway.
You think: so this is what it is like to be a girl. (Even if you are taking the girl instead of being one. What is the difference? To taste a girl or to taste like a girl? To sit still beneath a girl’s hands or to have long steady fingers with perfect nails?
“Practice,” she says, her smile more of a smirk than a promise.
“Practice,” Kendra repeats, because training is something she knows she can do.