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She comes every eight-thirty, strawberry pink lips stretched from ear to ear in a wide smile, delicate hair framing a round face, and she whispers, “Good morning, Wriothesley.”
Cigarette smoke swirls around her like cotton candy, sizzles into solid dust as it is pressed onto an ashtray. He wants to quit smoking.
Five feet apart, she sits across him five feet apart, always. Wriothesley wants to feel her skin, but his hands are too calloused. He settles for a kind smile, like hers.
“Are you going to go to work?”
Wriothesley nods.
“Good. That’s what men should be doing.” she laughs, and her blue eyes disappear into the creases of her white skin, “Maybe then, you can take me out on a date.”
He licks his lips, leans forward, “We can talk for a while, Furina.”
She laughs softly, and smiles sweetly.
“Stupid… What will we talk about?”
Four corners; the eastern side is littered with dirty plates atop a broken dishwasher and a small stove; the western side is an open cabinet with haphazardly thrown-on clothes, it creaks; the northern side is a window with two steel rails where the light sifts into a wooden bed; the southern side is a silver square TV, a small table, and a chair. He looks to his left, five red pairs of shoes squashing and stretching beyond their confines call to him in mockery— they obscure the horizon, and he remembers, he is beneath where the sun sets.
You’d think he’d already gotten used to twenty-three years of living underwater.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She chuckles, and his chest tightens, “Don’t be. You can’t help it.” a slender finger points at his lips, “Your lips are chapped.”
—
Wriothesley’s lips are strawberry pink, he licks them often because they have never tasted sweeter.
She comes around seven-thirty in the morning and ten in the evening now, twice. She has longer hair and thicker lashes. He has two bedrooms and a living room. Tonight, he will set a down payment for a brand-new car; his gym had a car dealership beside it, and the dopamine his daily work-outs provided funneled into a subconscious attraction to the window displays.
Sleek, sharp, fast.
Wriothesley’s palms felt too rough against the velvet padding of the steering wheel, it would take thirty more years to get used to it. But it all feels too comfortable looking at the rearview mirror, at blue, mismatched eyes in a half-moon smile.
“I like the seats.”
Wriothesley notes, this is the first time she’s ever said she liked anything about him. And he smiles for himself. He steers left.
“Thank you, all the more softer so my princess can sit on it.”
She rolls her eyes, “Don’t be like that.”
“But I’m happy, Furina,” he grins, now, “I’ve never driven as much as I wanted to, with a pretty girl in the backseat.”
She squints, “You should put the windows down, let some air in.”
“Your hair will get all frizzy, though.”
“It won’t, because the shampoo I use is nice,” her eyelids close, and she is farther away, “And I’ll go home anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”
“It’s been three years, don’t you want to sleep over?”
Her eyes open. She leans forward, cranes her head, and rises, ever so slightly, to stare more intently at the rear-view mirror, “You have dark under eyes.”
—
His eyes look brighter, Wriothesley notices, when he stares at himself in a five-foot wide mirror.
Perhaps the under-eye cream finally worked, or everything is brighter when his bathroom’s windows are taller than him.
“It works, doesn’t it?” Furina calls, her sweet voice echoing, “I think you look more handsome now,”
He looks back at her, and she sinks underneath the bubbles of his porcelain tub. Her hair is shorter now, her neck slimmer, and her fingers bonier. They are both forty, but somehow, her pretty face stays the age he had first seen her.
He kneels beside her, and buries his face in his crossed arms, “Of course, because I love you, Furina.”
“I can tell.”
The corners of her strawberry-pink lips lift themselves in a soft smile, and her fingers, adorned with clusters of blue bubbles, barely caress the tips of his greying hair. Her powdery scent wafts in his nose, and slowly, he closes his eyes.
“I could sleep like this, I think,” she whispers.
As his vision dims, his body feels as if it is floating in warm waters, and the rough skin in his fingers turns to soft prune. He sinks somewhere, he’s sure, and Furina pulls him in for a kiss, and her lips are smooth and supple and taste like strawberry.
He wakes up to the silver screen hanging in the middle of his bathroom. His bath’s bubbles simmer into green foam against clear water. Wriothesley is alone, again.
Wriothesley goes to work.