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“Hold still,” Mai said. “Seriously, hold still. If you squirm like that, you’re going to look like someone slapped you across the face.”
She stabbed the brush into the blush compact again. Asuza flinched slightly. They’d been sat in the changing room for almost an hour now, and it was freezing and stank like sweat and stale air. Another stupid rehearsal – for a promotional shoot for a magazine, not even for an actual performance. Which meant that they had to do the makeup themselves (and get it right), else there’d be more rehearsals. And then drilling poses and expressions and how to say please and thank you nicely.
“I don’t get why the blush has to look like this! Waaaay too much. It doesn’t look good on me anyway, my face is too round.”
“Uniformity,” Mai snapped back. “You’re the only one with a round face, so you’re the one who gets to suffer for it. It’ll look better when a professional does it, at least.”
Azusa huffed, but remained still. It was annoying, but at least Mai was speaking to her, rather than communicating in nonsense text messages and complaints. She swore that since they’d moved to Osaka Talent, she hadn’t ever had more than five words from her unless they were both speaking to someone else. Maybe things would be better now that the company was trying to drop the entire diva image?
“Azusaaaa-chaaan,” Mai continued, mockingly. “Zoning out over there?”
“Ugh.”
“Eyelashes next! Stay still, or I’ll take your eyes out.”
This time, she tried to focus on Mai. Her hands were really delicate, long and spindly. Her nails were a bit chipped though, and a callus stretched between her thumb and forefinger on the right hand. The false eyelashes were removed from the packet deftly (Azusa always struggled to do it without tearing them), and her elegant hands reached out towards her face. Like that one photoshoot they did last year, the one where Mai was awkwardly stroking her fingers against Azusa’s cheek. It was a mystery how that was the photo which got through to the final cut, because it had taken so long to get a shot where they weren’t laughing that she’d ended up with an imprint of a hand on her face…
The first half of the left eyelashes went on. She flinched, and it fell off again.
“Focus, or I’ll give you a reason to focus-”
Azusa leant forward, and brushed her lips against Mai’s. Mai’s lips were soft, particularly given that she’d spent ages last night scrubbing off any bits of rough skin that were left. They tasted slightly bloody, probably for the same reason.
“You can’t do that just to interrupt me bitching at you, you know?”
“It works.”
She felt slightly smug seeing Mai flushed red, the dark red of her lipstick mixed with her own pale pink. Normally she put so much effort into the image she put off that it was hard to see any real personality underneath. And she’d flip out when Azusa tried to make her take off the mask for a second (she’d like to say that this scared her, or made her feel bad, but honestly it was kind of fun to provoke her).
Mai sighed mockingly, before grabbing Azusa by the back of her head and pulling her towards herself.
They kissed properly this time. That lipstick definitely had a taste – chalky, and weirdly sweet, kind of like fondant. Her mouth had a taste too, the salty-sweet flavour of her favoured brand of electrolyte drink (the first time she’d tasted Mai’s lipstick had been from the neck of a bottle of that drink) and the smell of cigarettes (even though she’d been told time after time that it’d be a bad look if someone photographed her smoking, given that they’d had more than a lifetime’s worth of controversy already). She was close enough that a thick layer of Mai’s body spray (the rose scent, cloyingly sweet) was stuck in her throat.
Her lips were warm and soft and inviting, and she desperately wanted to keep on going, to take this further than they usually did, to prove something. She wouldn’t, but she wanted to. In the next three days, they’d find out if T-Set could even continue to exist. Mai probably wouldn’t even acknowledge her again if things went badly. This could be her last chance.
Mai pulled away and Azusa went to wipe her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Don’t, you’ll smudge your lipstick”.
“We need to reapply it anyway.”
“Horie’ll be mad.”
“He won’t. He never gets mad at anyone.”
“It’ll be obnoxious to get the pink stains off of your lips, you know. This lipstick really leaves a mark.”
“Worth it.”