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“Bea, look! We should get one for Camila.”
Ava grabs her arm and pulls her to a stop outside a little tourist shop, pointing excitedly at a stand outside and bouncing on her toes.
“Ava, we’re not on holiday,” Beatrice tries to keep the exasperation from her voice but getting anywhere on time with Ava by her side was becoming infuriatingly rare. Leaning in close, she adds in a whisper, “We’re in hiding.”
Beatrice doesn’t need to see Ava’s face to know the expression that will emerge, but she leans back to capture it fully regardless. In all honesty, her protestations have become nothing more than a facade. She finds herself enjoying the teasing, craving the little scoff that escapes Ava’s lips and the way her eyes roll with barely contained affection. The way Ava only looks like that for her.
“I know why we’re here, Bea. The amount of times you tackle me to the ground on a daily basis is enough to remind me of that. Not complaining, by the way.” Ava wiggles her eyebrows.
That’s another thing that has been occurring with evermore frequency. However, that is something Beatrice doesn’t yet know how to handle. As much as she might like to think, it isn’t unwelcome. The heat that rises to her cheeks, the quickening of her heart, the shallowness of breath. Sensations that had laid buried for years, pushed down and dormant, now feel as familiar as the goosebumps erupting along her skin.
This is the way Ava chooses to tease. Beatrice is yet to work out whether it is simply the way she is, or whether there is something intimate in the exchanges. Whether Ava purposefully looks for her reactions as Beatrice looks for hers.
But Ava never waits for a response to those types of remarks. Almost as soon as the words had left her lips and the connotations danced across her face, she turned back to the stand of postcards and started flicking through.
Her finger stops and she grasps a card, a delicate smile pulling at the corner of her mouth as she regards the landscape. “Look, this is the mountain where we train sometimes.”
Beatrice takes the card as Ava holds it out to her. She looks upon the snowy peaks, looming over the crystal blue lake below. She wonders what it may have been like if they had come here in winter; how Ava would no doubt complain and whine about the cold and the unfairness of it all.
She imagines dragging Ava out of their tiny apartment, wrapped up in three layers of clothes and clutching a hot drink between her gloved hands.
The bitter air burning as it enters their lungs as they run and spar, until their bodies find reprieve in the heat of exertion and the friction of skin on skin.
Ava begging to go home , as she had come to call it and Beatrice had so easily followed suit. Capturing Beatrice in her mesmerising gaze, her eyes expertly pulling at the sympathy in Beatrice's heart. Beatrice pretending to protest, to berate her for the laziness, but secretly cracking and crumbling under the guise of those puppy dog eyes.
They would shower and wrap themselves in blankets. Beatrice would make them hot chocolate and they would sit, huddled together in the small space, sharing stories.
It's a simple thought but one that Beatrice finds herself latching onto with surprising ferocity. A moment in time that she has no right to experience, yet she yearns for.
Of all the impure thoughts that she has worked so diligently to tamp down, forcing them into the shadows for fear of what they might reveal, it's this simple wish that truly terrifies her.
“Yes, it’s pretty," Beatrice says, gently shaking herself back to the present. "I don’t know that it would mean much to Camila though. It could be anywhere really.”
“Oh no, that one’s for me, obviously.” Ava plucks the card back out of Beatrice’s hand.
“For you?”
Ava watches her for a moment, her dark eyes reflecting the sun like glass until she dips her head and fixes her gaze back on the little photograph. When she speaks next, it’s soft, the playfulness tucked away behind something deeper, “It’s been a long time since I’ve made memories I want to keep.”