Work Text:
the stable girl has soft lips. they both have soft lips.
mira is at that age where she has a stash of orlesian cosmetics hidden in a lower drawer of her vanity--not the elaborate paints and potions of the court, but understated, expensive things she has salvaged from the paltry collection of her mother’s toilette that is all that remains after her father’s many rages.
soft lanolin hand cremes, gently scented with floral and citrus tones. subtle lip colors that soften skin and protect against the sun and salt-spray wind of the coast.
mira touches her lips with gentle petal-pink color and softens her hands with creme and soaks in the scents and vague sense memory of her mother. it keeps her hands from hardening to the bow--sometimes she still gets blisters.
so when the stable girl touches her sun-bronzed cheek, tracing the freckles faintly spangling her cheekbones like constellations, her lips are soft.
they kiss.
katriona--a good starkhaven girl, her voice a bubbling brook of soft burred consonants and broad vowels--kisses her.
lips soft, full and sweet like taffy, and mira sinks her teeth in without thinking. the tender bite takes the kiss into a depth that surprises her--when kat’s tongue flicks kitten-quick and gentle against her upper lip, tasting the salt of her skin, she freezes.
she startles so easily: at a caress, at a gentle touch.
the kiss becomes still, hesitant, for a heartbeat, two. mira pulls back, her breath caught and stifled in her throat, an ache of anxiety and uncertainty and frantic want building in her chest, and blinks her eyes open. gold and green meet.
je suis prest. mira breathes the words, barely voiced, and sways forward like a willow oak in a high breeze, her lips crashing against kat’s like the tide pulsing up the shore--their kiss is all salt and slick. as are the caresses that follow.
after, she feels like her heart will escape her. it hammers in her chest, and she licks her lips until they are raw and chapped, tasting the sea long after it would linger.
she thinks surely her father will know. that he will fly into a rage and strike her, or go cold and hateful. he is volatile. but instead it is a good week--he is casual and warm, and when his hand settles on her shoulder she tries to hide the flinch.
her entire life is the sea. mercurial, storm-tossed, tainted by rotting bladderwrack in the heat of summer.
but on her lips, all she tastes is the salt.