Work Text:
"I don't believe you," Lily says, her eyes hooded, just before she slaps Amanda harshly across her cheek.
Amanda inhales through her teeth, the vibration of stinging heat pulsing through her face. "I don't feel," she tells her, walking Lily back until her heels teeter on the edge of the swimming pool, turquoise water seeping into her expensive tennis shoes. "I can still experience sensation."
Lily purses her mouth, eyebrows low over her eyes. "Well, I don't get it. Feelings are sensation. When you're excited you can feel the dizzy thrill of it in your brain. When you're nervous your stomach feels like it's going to plummet right out of your body. It's all the same thing."
"No," Amanda tells her, watching the water crawl up Lily's lace-trimmed socks, watching the rise and fall of Lily's chest grow faster the further Amanda leans into her perfumed space. "You feel those things. I need something more tangible."
Lily takes a long breath, her nostrils flaring, her body tilting forward almost too slowly to see. Amanda sees it, though. She sees as Lily raises her hand again, fingers straightened and palm flexed.
"Like this?" She asks, before her hand connects again, right where she hit before. It blooms through Amanda, heat and pain coalescing in a bright pink blur that makes Amanda's nerves light up like fairy lights. She might have a mark there if they keep this up, a perfect impression of Lily's dainty hand.
"Like that," Amanda says, her teeth gritted, or maybe smiling. It's hard to say, really.
"What about sex, then?" Lily asks as they shunt chess pieces across the overgrown tiles. She asks it like they're continuing a conversation, but the last thing they'd discussed, as Amanda pushed a stone knight in a long diagonal, was timing Lily's mother's discovery of the corpse.
Amanda has seen Lily's nose wrinkle at far less depraved things than necrophilia, so Amanda's sure there's some dot she's failing to connect.
"What about sex?"
Lily huffs, as if Amanda is some kind of idiot child she has to babysit, and Amanda wonders if she doesn't see it that way, sometimes. It's almost funny, really. She doesn't laugh.
"I've read that orgasm is mostly in the brain. It's like a big rush of neuro-chemical euphoria to all those receptors you say you don't have, more than it's any kind of physical release." She rolls her palm along the stone queen, her nails clipped shorter. Her eyes flick up. "Do you come?"
Amanda shrugs. "I can when I do it," she tells Lily, sliding her sunglasses onto her head. "I know exactly how to touch and how long for. I know the right amount of pressure and when to pinch a bit too hard. It's easy, and kind of boring. But it helps me get to sleep."
"But have you ever, with someone else?" Lily's eyes and teeth are almost shiny in the overcast light. Predatory.
"I never saw the point."
Lily twirls in front of her queen and rests against it, crossing her ankles like she's in finishing school. "Would you let me, if I asked?"
Amanda shrugs.
"I'm not, though," Lily clarifies, smiling. "Asking, I mean."
Amanda shrugs again.
"Tell me about the horse," Lily says, her voice just a warm breath in the din of her lounge. Their legs are tangled warmly on the pristine sofa. Lily's legs are shaved smooth. Amanda's hair feels prickly and abrasive even to herself whenever Lily shifts against her.
"I already did," Amanda replies. On the TV, a muted black and white musical flashes, the actors' mouths flapping, limbs flailing in rhythmic spasms as if waving for attention. It's like a horror film this way, performers robbed of their talents, trapped in an interminable plea for applause.
Lily pinches Amanda hard on her inner thigh, skin sensitive and immediately flushing pink. "Not properly. You cried, didn't you? When it went wrong?"
"It was frustrating," Amanda tells her, poking at the place she'd just pinched. It's still warm, blood rushing back in a burst of sensation. "I was trying for a mercy kill, and I just made him hurt more. Gritting teeth and balling fists only goes so far, crying let a little more of the pressure out."
"But you weren't sad for it?" Lily's fingers keep running over Amanda's skin, the prickly skin, the tough muscle honed from riding. "Seeing it suffer because of you?"
"Compassion, not empathy," Amanda watches the path of Lily's fingers on her skin. She sees the harsh dig of her nails before Lily even sinks them in. "If I couldn't walk and talk like me anymore," she winces around the words, "I would want mercy, too."
"And you don't think not feeling counts?" Lily pulls her fingers back, digs her nails into her own thigh and keens at the sting of it. "You don't want me to take you out back and shoot you in the head?"
Amanda rubs at the nail marks until burning floods back through. She sees Lily watch her, noting it all down. "Once a plagiarist always a plagiarist, huh?"
Lily sips her drink through a silver straw. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
Lily does it after she puts the glasses down, but before Amanda can take a drink.
She strokes over Amanda's jaw, touch almost unbearably light, leaving a trail of condensation across Amanda's skin. She's hyper-aware of sensation, the buzz of body hair standing to attention when Lily leans in and gently licks into her mouth. It's slick, and teasing, Amanda's body thrumming against the stimulus, her fingertips full of pins and needles and her belly swooping and warm.
Lily pulls back with ruined lipstick and blown pupils, her tongue lingering on her lower lip. "Did you feel that?"
"Yes," Amanda says, her breath faster than usual.
"More than the slap?"
Amanda pauses. It's all low buzz, nothing sharp like impact. "I don't know," she says. "Try it again."