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“Just a few more, babe.”
Tara’s machete is splattered with the dried grass insides of the combat dummies she’d propped up on sticks for them, her shirt speckled with a fine coating of hay dust. All around the clearing are slashed-up corpses of scarecrow enemies. And besides a faint rosy tinge to her cheeks and a fine layer of sweat on her sun-pinkened arms that glistens in the light, she doesn’t even look tired.
But Denise doesn’t have her hard-won stamina, and she’s drenched in sweat, her blonde hair darkened by perspiration and plastered to her sticky skin. She’s panting; she lost her breath nearly twenty minutes ago and hasn’t managed to get it back since. She doesn’t have nearly the same coating of hay innards or the pile of mock bodies her girlfriend’s managed to accumulate.
“Tara,” she pants, bent double with her hands braced on her knees. “Tara, I can’t. You know I can’t, I’m not - I’m not good at this - I’m hopeless, Tara...”
“You’re getting better!” Tara insists at once, even though suggesting that Denise has improved at all is generous to the point of absurdity. “You got that one over there, just about ripped its head off-“
“Tara. Baby. These ones don’t move and I can barely kill them.”
“You’ll get better!” Tara insists again. “I used to be awful, I couldn’t kill them even from a distance, you just need practice-“
“I don’t need practice, I need an - an act of God. This isn’t me, Tara, it just isn’t.” Denise shakes her head with a short laugh, kicking at the dust of the earthen floor of the clearing. “It’s never going to be.”
Tara sighs, letting her machete drop back into its sheath on her hip. “You’re...you’re not a natural. You’re never going to be a great fighter. But...I just want you to be safe. I want you to be able to protect yourself if...if I can’t.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” Denise says softly, reaching out for Tara’s callused hand. Her own are much softer, calluses just beginning to form on the pads of her fingers. “I promised you I wouldn’t leave, remember? Wouldn’t go outside the walls...?”
“The day might come that you don’t have a choice.” Tara takes her hand, squeezing it firmly. “We’ve already been overrun once. It could happen again. I was terrified for you the last time...I just...I want to know you can protect yourself. If you have to.”
Denise sighs, looking up from the dusty earth into Tara’s deep chocolate brown eyes. “...a few more. Just a few more. And...you have to make it up to me tonight.”
Tara grins, showing her teeth, the faint smile wrinkles at the corners of her mouth crinkling. “And how could I do that, pretty girl?”
Denise flushes to her very hairline, squeezing Tara’s hand. “Oh, um - you have to have an actual dinner with me where we both sit down and you stay there until your plate is clean. And then cuddle with me. And stay there. Until tomorrow morning and I am awake instead of going to work. I want a good morning kiss I’m actually awake for.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal, butterfly.”