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heat pools in her stomach watching sunkissed skin in the morning glow, taut over the muscles and bone. eyes trailing down, she finds a slender wrist flicking at the morning paper, sending strokes across the black-and-white printed tiles with a pencil.
she could almost beg to touch her.
lux runs a hand through her golden hair, letting the sunlight illuminate parts of her face, letting it cast shadows over the others. it's a vision as sweet as a renaissance painting — vermeer, jinx picks out from her personal catalogue. master of light.
she turns around to smile at jinx, and jinx realizes she can touch her. it's all she's done before.
"good morning," the starry-eyed blonde says before she can. no, not starry-eyed — her eyes are pools, really, like a blue you could sink into. she places her pencil on the coffee table. “you’re up.”
jinx scrunches her nose. “are you reading the newspaper? ”
“hm,” lux frowns, turning back to the paper in her lap as if it wasn’t there before. “i’ve already finished it, really. i’m working through the crossword.”
oh, gods. “why are you reading the newspaper of all things? that has to be like, the most old-people thing you can do,” jinx throws off the covers and saunters over to the shelf on the opposite side of the room.
lux snorts in response. “because i want to get the news of the day? what do you do?”
jinx fiddles with the knob of a contraption lying on lux’s shelf. “listen to the radio.” the speaker crackles to life, a buried voice slowly beginning to rise above the static.
“in other news, the medarda family are, quote, ‘facing difficulties’ in public opinion — this comes in light of ambessa medarda’s most recent press conference, where she mentioned her plans to lift tariffs for the trade of weapons between noxus and piltover. this has sparked controversy among piltovians, who fear the popular politician’s ulterior motive for such a policy-”
“well, mel can’t be having a good day,” lux comments as jinx cringes and turns the radio off. “i thought mel was disowned,” she replies in turn.
blondie shrugs. “people will look at you the same way, connected to your parents or not. but maybe she’ll just stay in the admin office,” then a smirk. “jayce must be happy about that.”
the mention of golden boy summons a sour taste in jinx’s mouth. “i can’t believe viktor is still fine with this arrangement. she’s just some random girl he met in the club, who-”
“who convinced all of us that she was already with him from the start,” lux rebuts, unfolding her palm in point. “besides, if he’s fine with it he’s fine with it. different strokes for different people, you know?”
jinx still can’t manage to scratch at the itch seeping under her skin, gnawing at her brain. she can’t figure out what the problem is, but she just- she just- “i just don’t like it!” she shouts, exasperated. “what happened to being committed? like- you don’t just go around falling in love with people, if it happens with someone then you stick with it, it’s just-”
“he is committed,” lux raises her eyebrows, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “he’s committed to both of them-”
“no, i know that-” okay. deep breaths. she can do this. she runs a clammy hand through her well-worn hair, sighing with a shake. different angle. she just had to put this in a different frame, something that was more familiar, easier to understand.
she looks up and the sun’s rays splash across lux’s skin just the right way, with her pool-eyes and her dove lips, body splayed across the chair and her arms lying idly by the edge of the seat back — and as always, jinx’s brain works faster than she comprehends, the heat rises to its boiling point in her stomach, and the words spill themselves out of her mouth — “i don’t think i could ever imagine anyone else touching you.”
it’s awkward, it’s a jumbled sentence of words — but it’s enough to send the opposite girl visibly reeling, eyes blown wide and mouth parted as if at a loss for words. her entire body tenses, then it relaxes, and then her expression turns calmer, at the downward turn of a slope of revelation.
jinx doesn’t wait for her to reply. she walks over (with a little bit of a stagger, really, why is she so nervous? ) and straddles her instead, thighs enveloping lux’s perfectly. she holds the blonde’s face in her hands. runs her thumb over that one area beside her mouth that makes her eyes soften, go slack. pulls her own mouth into a pout. “forget it,” she mumbles. “let’s talk about something else.”
lux nods, numbly. she really didn’t expect her to be quiet for so long, it’s so unlike her. jinx takes a minor glance at the newspaper on the coffee table with its black-and-white-printed tiles, then flicks her eyes back as fast as they went.
“you think your family would be happy ‘bout ambessa?”
she doesn’t miss the way lux gulps. ignores the way the answer flows freely from lux’s lips, like a mathematical equation you’ve practiced too many times and are too good at in the test: “yeah. any loss for noxus is a win for us. we’ve invested a lot in jarvan, even if he’s not as… popular. in the neutral sense.”
“and you would be happy if he won? because he is the most conservative piece of shit alive?”
lux laughs, soft, and jinx really, really wants to curse at the morning sun for being so good today. “my mother would be, certainly. but at that point i’d just move out.”
i don’t believe you, jinx almost grits out. her voice dies in her chest, though. sometimes it’s just hard to break the bubble of irreality, irrationality, the idea that there isn’t a world out there that she and lux affect and vice versa.
really, it’s so so irrational. so so unreal. lux’s face shouldn’t be cradled in her hands. jinx shouldn’t be under lux’s covers every night. lux shouldn’t even be ten meters of close of being the only person to have traced every inch of jinx’s blue-inked-tattoos, in a room where color didn’t matter under harsh yellow fluorescent lights.
but it’s nice to imagine, right? it’s nice to live it, right?
so she grips lux’s face tighter, leans in closer. “did you know,” she informs, haughtily, thumb on lux’s skin swapped for an index finger trailing its way down her neck and to her collarbone, “that you look so fucking sexy like this in the sunlight?” her finger dips into the slit of lux’s collar, subtly undoing the buttons as they come, enjoying the uneven rise and fall of her chest.
even so, lux’s face is an angel of tranquility. “is that so?” she muses, trailing her own hand across jinx’s mischievous arm. “then i should wake up early more often.”
“the shirt helps too,” she admits, undoing the last button and exposing lux’s full midriff to the air. “you should thank me for that.”
“i know,” lux says, smugly. now jinx wonders if her falling asleep with it on last night was an accident all along. “i’m too lazy,” she’d said, voice taking on a lighter tone than before.
“ you should know,” a hand grips jinx’s wrist, and she’s startled out of the moment for a bit, eyes snapping back up to lux’s, “that.”
the breath that lux releases is deep, like it had been held inside before for a long long time, for contemplation. “i’m sticking with this.” her voice is firm. “you don’t have to worry about me going anywhere.”
the bulb in her head flicks on by a switch, and her grin suddenly grows wider by the thousands. oh, now she gets it. the sentence spells itself out in her brain, and it’s like a wave of dopamine unfurling in the center of it.
“good,” she says. “i wouldn’t want anyone else.”
lux doesn’t reply to that, even if it’s half a lie, and jerks jinx’s wrist (and the rest of her) towards herself instead, lips meeting jinx’s in the middle. it’s like nectar, liquid gold, she can’t help but feel it melt in her mouth. her tongue darts out, thirst resting within her throat, and lux lets her in.
her hands snake around lux’s waist and she leans her hips forward in the hopes of being as close as she can, lux does the same- and good god, sometimes strength can really show how much you want a person. the heat lying in jinx’s stomach starts traveling up her chest, down her arms, gets to her head, weak under lux’s forceful kiss. it’s a giddy haze in there, and before she can think it through her arms squeeze around lux’s torso-
lux moans a little, breathy and high-pitched, into jinx’s mouth. like she can’t help it. as the heat strikes between her thighs, jinx can’t help but smile into the kiss.
-
a week later, she finds that she can’t help it again.
mel is talking to her as they round the corner- something about the geometrics of the shapes they’ve been experimenting with in Introduction to Autodesk or whatever. jinx isn’t trying to say the conversation isn’t interesting. it is interesting. in fact, she’d probably put it the higher tiers of conversation topics that have ever caught her focus, and mel is definitely a pleasantly intelligent person to converse with, but- but it all just goes out the fucking window when she sees who’s on the other side of it.
lux talks to ezreal, in that way she always does — elbow propped on the table with her palm relaxedly waving about to accentuate her point, shoulder curved in to indicate some sort of interest. her eyes wander around while she thinks through the words that fall out of her mouth at the same time, though she consistently manages to hold ezreal’s gaze by the time she’s finished a sentence. she’s wearing a red hoodie, zipped down to reveal a white tee tucked into her jeans. it’s a simple fit. it’s nothing special, nothing out of the blue, even for lux.
“um, hello? did you even hear me?”
then lux tucks her chin into the palm of her hand, hooks a little finger onto the corner of her mouth, and that giddy feeling gets its way to jinx’s head again.
“jinx. what the hell are you staring at?”
god knows. jinx is sure she looks stupid as hell right now, stuck in the middle of the street, gaping in front of a cafe window. but god. can she even stop?
and lux must feel the burn of her stare too, because her head turns around in jinx’s direction, the movement slow and slightly stuttered. nevertheless, she breaks into a huge smile, a real, full-blown smile, and her hand removes itself to give jinx a small, shy wave, fingers wiggling in the air.
what the hell has gotten into jinx? or more like, what hell has jinx gotten into?
her heart gnarls in her chest. her mouth goes drier than even before. the heat in her stomach is less liquid and more jittery now, like a thousand firelights bumping around the insides.
mel has to pull her away by the arm, her grip scalding with annoyance. even then, jinx can’t tear her eyes off the window as she stumbles away.
-
like she said, she really couldn’t help it.
she snatches lux from the doorway, hours after, the moment she steps out into the corridor. she never lets go of her wrist despite her multiple questions and protests, and with her strength and determination, it’s only a matter of seconds before she’s pushed her up against the nearest unoccupied corner on the fourth floor and devoured her lips like an animal satiated with hunger.
lux pulls away, gasping, face flushed red, hands on jinx’s shoulders — “jinx, we can’t, people might see-” — she too readily gives into the kiss jinx initiates anyway. when they break it off again, jinx says it somberly. “i know,” she responds. “but i haven’t stopped thinking about you since the afternoon, i want you now. ”
lux takes a moment, head shifting to glance at jinx’s hand pressed against the wall beside her waist. she’s been doing this more now — taking her time, letting silence fill the air before she can steal it back with her words. jinx should be irritated — it’s something the blonde said she’d never do, just to prove that she hadn’t been as alike as her upstuck, calculating family back home. with this, jinx wonders what’s the risk.
she watches as lux slides her tongue over her teeth, her breathing hollowing out. her hair is mussed, jinx finally notices. her eyes look tired, in the way that doesn’t really make her worry, it’s more of a “i slept way too late last night” kind of tired. crooked between the nook of her collarbone are four small bruises, each in the shape of a small uneven oval. she almost reaches out to touch them but good thinking has her resisting that urge.
she leans up into the blonde’s personal space, letting blonde strands tickle her face and her nose brush against hers. “it’s late,” she reassures her. “no one’s prowling along these corridors at this hour. if you just want you and me, i promise it’s just you and me.”
“you really don’t know how good you make words sound, do you?” lux’s sigh spills, warm breath fanning across jinx’s cheeks. it makes jinx’s heart skip a beat.
“i still have class after this. make it quick.”
she can’t help the grin on her face.
it feels like hours and hours when it should just be thirty minutes. jinx makes sure her hands roam every inch of lux’s skin she can roam — ‘round her waist, down her arms, up her shirt, down the zipper of her jeans — lux slaps her hand away for that one, even though she doesn’t stop kissing her to mumble the words into her mouth. “i still have class,” like an indignant reminder, and jinx can’t help but laugh into the kiss, because oh, it’s so cute. it’s all so cute. lux has always been cute. it’s one of the first things jinx noticed when they first met.
and she likes it — she likes it when it’s like this, warm and slow and full of the evening sun’s glow ― can’t help but like the way lux draws spirals across her back with only her fingertips, only splays her fingers across skin when jinx bites into her lip. likes the way lux’s hips slot perfectly against hers, likes the way it’s hot and heavy even when she’s turning into putty under her touch, likes the way lux lets out little hums of approval when jinx does something particularly good. when they’re done for the while, and the clock behind them spells five-fifty-five, the smile on lux’s lips is a heartstopper all on its own.
pair it along with luminescent pools of blue, and jinx can hear the voice in the back of head saying “you’re done for.”
her eyes drift, again, to the motley of purple on lux’s collar. it gradually dawns on her, what the uneven ovals look like.
her hand traces over the knuckles of lux’s slackened hand. and as much as the small flare of anger in her stomach tries to find someone to pin all that blame on, she can’t miss the way lux’s smile turns empty, tinting itself with melancholy instead.
“i-”
jinx ghosts her lips over the hurt skin. one. she presses her lips softly against the bruise. two. she tries to be as gentle as she can, just enough so lux won’t wince. three. there’s that silence again, the kind that has lux’s breath all wrapped up and jinx’s heart hammering in her chest- four.
she leans back, a little bit. “there,” she murmurs. she looks back up.
she barely gets to even gaze into sparkling eyes fully before lux has pulled her in by the wrist again and kissed her fully by the lips. it’s that kind of forceful again, the kind that has jinx all confused with her head running around in circles — lux lets go of her wrist and settles her hand behind jinx’s head instead, pulling her in so harsh, kissing like she can’t let go.
when they break away, probably for the last time now, lux is glowing. “thank you,” she says, all the undercurrent in her voice swept away.
jinx only nods. “good luck for class,” she breathes.
“it was only one time, i was just worki-”
she sets two fingers against swollen lips, effectively shutting lux up. the other girl looks dumbstruck as jinx cuts her off. “i don’t need to know,” she tells her. her hand goes through muscle memory and moves to the area beside lux’s lip, stroking it tenderly. “you don’t have to tell me.”
lux nods, numbly. then she moves sideways, out of jinx’s presence. grabs her messenger bag lying by the wall beside them and makes her way back to the main corridor. her white shirt creases along the lines of her back as she raises her arms to sling the bag over her shoulder.
then she turns around, stature small. her shoulders hunch, her hands fiddle with the link of the canvas strap, and her feet are crammed unnaturally close together. “are you…” she says, eyes trained on the middle of jinx’s torso. then she looks up, an eyebrow raised tentatively, nervous. “are you coming over tonight?”
the curve of jinx’s lips is hard to shake. “yeah.” she shrugs with a smile. “yeah, i can come over.”
orange and red are beautiful hues across lux’s face. they pinpoint all the different highlights of a perfect portrait; even the shadows. “okay,” and this time, her nod is vigorous, happier. “okay.” and she breaks into that full smile again, all teeth and crinkled eyes.
gods, she’s gorgeous.
jinx stares at the back of her head as she walks away, retreating further and further down the corridor to her next class. this settled, warm feeling in her chest. it’s hard to throw.
eventually, she has to snap out of it because- “lux! your hair! it’s all messed up! rat’s nest! rat’s nest!” she screeches the last additions for good measure.
“shit!” a blot of peach runs through golden strokes, in the distance. “oh my fucking god, thanks!”
jinx chuckles. hands tucked into her pockets, she starts walking the other way, back down the road. it’s beautiful, this orange glow. she should paint it sometime.