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“How do I look?”
AJ twirls around in Drift’s dorm room, adorned in Drift’s silk pyjamas. Since she’s about a head taller than AJ, the sleeves slip down and engulf her hands, and her feet are swallowed whole by the soft fabric. But her shoulders are wide and her arms show years of labour, muscles causing the shifts of gentle pearl to cling to her biceps and her chest. The front is partially unbuttoned, so Drift can see the dip of her collarbones, faint scarring littering AJ’s skin, some a soft and healing pink and some old and pale.
She’s beautiful, the most beautiful thing Drift has ever seen, spinning around her stupidly expensive clothes without a care in the world.
“You look very pretty.” Drift complies. AJ gives a final twirl before giggling.
“Thank you~”
Dressed up in her clothes, with her hair loose, AJ is a portrait of comfort, the high strung energy that so frequently grips her, pulls her taut and cagey mellowing into something warm in the way sleep is, the way a soft memory is, late nights when her mother was well, when her house felt like home.
Drift wants to hold her and kiss her silly, but there is something searching in AJ’s gaze, the way she sways and shifts her weight. AJ smirks at her recognition.
“I have an idea.”
“Good idea or bad idea?” Drift questions.
“Oh Open book, all my ideas are good ideas!” Drift sends her a knowing look. AJ rolls her eyes. “It’s a fun idea.”
“You have a weird understanding of fun.”
“And you love it.” AJ retorts. Well, Drift cannot deny that.
“Okay, shoot.”
AJ turns her back to her, pulling her hands to her chest. When she whips back around, her shirt is fully buttoned up, and she has a face like a lost little lamb, big eyes and mouth slightly open. She places one hand against her forehead and uses the other to fan herself. Once poised, AJ begins to circle the room, eyes skirting around, making high-pitched worried noises under her breath.
Ah, of course, Drift sees where this is going. AJ was right; her performances are always fun. She’ll gladly play along to whatever her current bit is.
Suddenly, AJ whirls and practically surges forward towards Drift’s bed. Drift has to cover her mouth not to bark out in laughter. Collecting herself, AJ smooths her clothes and knocks lightly at Drift’s bedpost. She smirks, quirking an eyebrow. “I wonder who could possibly be at my door? Come in.”
Once given permission, AJ mimics pulling a door open before slithering over to her bedside. Drift anticipates the dip of her weight on her mattress, but instead she lingers, wafting her hand through the air and bowing deeply. Something bright sparkles in her eyes, starlight twinkling into her endless night sky. It makes Drift’s heart skip a beat, a pleasant warmth growing in her stomach.
“Pardon my intrusion,” AJ grips purposefully at her chest, raising her head loftily as her eyes sparkle with glee and anticipation. Her voice is raised several octaves, accent smooth and dripping with obnoxious sophistication. She sounds so similar to the older nobles Drift remembers from her childhood, figures so supercilious hearing them talk felt like a parody of royalty — Drift has to grip at her bedsheets to resist the urge to cackle. “I hope I am not inconveniencing you, dear noblewoman.”
“Oh my fair lady! You are no bother, no bother at all. Why have you approached me at such an hour?” Drift cooes, twirling her hair between her finger, matching AJ’s ridiculous accent with something equally grandiose and puerile.
AJ grins, posing dramatically against the wall, one hand raised daintily to her forehead again and the other clinging to her hip. “Well, I am simply in much distress! My whole life is deepest turmoil! Turmoil!”
Drift snorts. So dramatic. “Heavens! Such distress! Indulge onto me, fair lady,” Drift reaches her hand out, honey eyes warm and inviting. “What burdens such a beautiful maiden?”
AJ gapes at her. “You think I’m beautiful, miss?”
“The most beautiful in all of the land.” Drift says in earnest, sincerity breaking through her fanciful demeanour and pompous tone. Blush paints AJ’s cheeks, but her vicious smile only grows sharper.
AJ takes Drift’s waiting hand and steps forward, hovering above Drift with pupils dilated, her eyes like two pools of shadow, of the deep warmth of a summer’s night. “Then, I suppose you may be able to assist me in soothing my woes.”
Softly, Drift pulls AJ’s hand to her lips, pressing a delicate kiss to the scarred and dry skin of her knuckles. It doesn’t exactly fit their courting noblewomen story yet, but Drift is eager to advance the plot and get her girlfriend in her arms. Especially in quieter moments like these; Drift soaks up every moment she gets of a softer AJ, her ungloved hands, the sensations of her calloused fingers with their years of strife, of blades and work engraved in her skin held in her grasp. No one else in the academy sees AJ stripped so clean, vulnerable in their shared private spaces, in their silly games and yearning advances.
AJ huffs. “So forward~”
“Pardon my manners, fair lady,” Drift purrs. “I was so overcome with grief at the thought of your misfortunate, I simply had to grant you some comfort.”
Beaming down at her, AJ pulls Drift’s hand to her own lips. Drift feels her coarseness like a spark of electricity across her skin, buzzing and surging through her veins. It’s barely a light peck, but it makes her giggle all the same.
“So forward.” Drift echos cheekily.
“I am simply being polite. How could I not be, when I’m in such… pleasant company,” AJ muses, intertwining their hands. “So lucky I am to have stumbled upon a wonderful woman like you in my time of need. Fate must be smiling down on me.”
Curiosity and wanting bites down hard at Drift’s brain. AJ is a mesmerising storyteller, sewing her troubled noblewoman into Drift’s skin so thoroughly, so passionately. All she wants is to bear witness to this poor woman’s burdens, to trace her hands down the silk of their shared clothes, cream sleeves too long so they tickle at her fingertips. The real world fades into their charade, fades into the folds of eggshell that swallow and pull, a shared smell of something floral and sweet; her troubling AJ, caught in secrets and misdirection, melts away in her polite and gracious fair lady, lingering at her bedside with a grin so soft yet edged with desire, sharp like a dagger.
“Ah, but miss, I am the lucky one to have you enter my bed chambers,” Drift drawls. “For I was wishing on every star that a woman like you would grace me with their presence in my loneliest of moments.”
AJ leans forward, their foreheads centimetres apart. Drift can feel loose strands of her hair against her face like spider’s legs, like butterfly wings.
“Are you lonely, miss?” She whispers. Her voice is low. It takes Drift’s breath away.
“I have been lonely my entire life.” She whispers back.
(And it’s true really, in the way there’s truth to all their games, all their charades enveloped in deception and affection. She has been so, so lonely, trapped in her pretty birdcage, in her life of luxury and prison. She has been lonely in the winding hallways of the academy, retracing the steps of the baker girl she invented, imprinting the streets of Ashford into her footsteps, the taste of bread made with her own hands onto her tongue. Biting back words of hatred, of judgment, watching the way the golden frock of the Queen of the Eternal Summer Realm catches the candlelight and burns her eyes. So often does she want to be vicious, to bite and tear with hardened teeth, attack dog rather than doe. So often does she want a pretty life where every bad thing she dreams of comes true, where monarchies fall and fathers beg for forgiveness, for mercy, never existed at all. No one suffers. They talk. AJ never looks so lost ever again.)
“…So have I.”
(It feels mean sometimes, to feel lonely at the academy. She’s surrounded with a kind of love she’s never had before, with the kind of friends she’s never had before. And they see her, really see her.
But no one quite sees her like AJ).
Drift tugs at their joined hands, pulling AJ forward onto the bed until their lips connect, sweet and caressing. Sugar always tastes so intoxicatingly saccharine when one is made to wait eagerly for their dessert; not kissing AJ is an ordeal that has made her more patient than she has ever been in her life. So when she is graced with the pleasant connection, the ridges and dips of her cupid bow against her own, she savours every second. She smiles, and feels AJ smile back.
“It seems you have figured me out.” AJ murmurs into her lips. Drift hums.
“I knew what irked you the moment you entered my eye-line,” Drift replies, cupping AJ’s cheek. “So, I was being kind and allowing you to make a big song and dance about it.”
“Do you always let women taunt you so?”
Drift snorts. “Just you, AJ.”
Oh dear — Drift has given the game away. AJ suddenly lurches back, gasping loud and dramatic. “AJ? Why, that’s my name! Dear stranger, are you psychic? Wow, I have never met one before! Can you tell me my future? Does it have you in it~?”
Drift, upset at how far away AJ is now from her face and herself for spoiling the tension, pouts. AJ’s face breaks into a grin so big her eyes look like onyx crescent moons, cheeks flush in rose and bubblegum. She looks so dopey, so proud to have ‘won’ their silly game of tug-and-war, of stories of nobles stealing affections and firestorm romances, that Drift cannot bring herself to suppress her own developing matching grin. “You’re so cute.”
Cute is her favourite way to describe AJ. There are many, many adjectives one could use to the describe the elusive and undeniably gorgeous woman snickering on her bedsheets with wild hair, wilder eyes and an even wilder attitude — hot, handsome, attractive comes to mind. But cute? It’s gentler, kinder and softer around the edges in a way AJ is often not. Drift hears the way people speak of her, knows from the slivers she has peeked from AJ’s past what the language her girlfriend has become attuned to. The rambunctious flirt with a silver tongue, made to be fast and loose. She is beautiful in the way a natural disaster is, hypnotic.
But Drift knows better. How could she not? AJ, entrenched in her clothes, swimming in her longer sleeves and trouser legs, playing so earnest as a grandiose and needing fair lady, grinning so wide at Drift’s slip-up. AJ, who recites her poetry, hoards treasures to gift her, holds her so tightly yet so lovingly. Her AJ. Her cute, adorable AJ.
Moreover, it makes her go bright red and turn away from her. Drift loves that aspect of the term in particular.
“Aww, are you embarrassed? That I think you’re so cute and sweet? You know, that just makes you cuter.”
AJ responds with her ‘I-don’t-know-what-I-say’ laugh that she relies on when someone says something that messes with her brain too much. Hearing it often makes Drift’s heart ache with the knowing that she is attempting so furiously to avoid being so exposed, but in quieter moments like these it reminds her of a fact that has become gospel; for all AJ presents the image of someone bold and egoistical, she has so many methods to melt her down into putty in Drift’s careful hands.
And oh, how wonderful it is for her to get to melt AJ away in her palms. How wonderful it is to love so completely, so deeply. To have a woman and love her openly, press her hand against her heart and root herself inside its mantle, dig into and settle in its inner core. It’s something she never thought she’d get, some distant dream kept in fairytales and shared glances. Something to be exchanged only in small moments, coded languages and shady passageways. She learned the loaded terms, the silent questions, how to steer conversation back to safe territory when it became clear Drift had been barking up the wrong tree. Lovers were short-lived. Girls like her didn’t get great love stories; just candid affairs and husbands who would hopefully be willing to turn a blind eye.
When she arrived at the academy, she figured the game would be the same. Then she met AJ, and her whole world turned upside down.
Drift lurches forward and envelopes AJ in a hug, sending the two tumbling back onto her pillows with a surprised yelp from AJ. “There, now I have you all to myself and you don’t have to look at me while you’re falling for me all over again.”
Lifting her head slightly, AJ sends her a look with flustered and sparkly eyes. “You’re a freak.”
“And you like me so much~”
AJ scoffs against her chest. “You’re lucky you’re right.”
And she is right. Drift is the luckiest girl in the whole wide world.