Sidestory:
e
by Tami
"Oh, ten points for prissiness, Eleanor. Good show."
She turned over in bed, piling up pillows behind her as some kind of bolster to the dreamy-eyed blonde man on the other side of the bed, still scrubbing her nose. Nothing hurt more than a whacked nose, even ages after it'd been hit, and rubbing it just irritated it more until she probably looked like Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer's sister but that wasn't mattering. "I don't like it when you come to bed like this."
"You don't like it when I come to bed, doll, don't think for one delightful minute that I don't know you want me deader than Lennon. One pill, one measly little dose of E, currently about as potent as your mother's Coca-Cola floats. I haven't even gone entertainingly rigid." Derek fidgeted elegantly with a cigarette, rolling it between his fingers, unlit. "I like your mum's Coke floats, actually. I saw her on Friday, she sends her love."
"How can look my mum in the face." Her little quiet voice was filled with loathing and angles, all hardness and edges.
"Actually? Quite easily. Good lord, darling, you make it sound like I killed her kitten." Long perfect arms swung back against the headboard, the cigarette rolling out of slightly twitchy fingers to land on the carpet. "Rosie's getting pretty."
Nell let out a little sob. Derek made a languid noise of halfhearted exasperation.
"You know, baby-girl, there is nothing as unattractive as a hysterical woman."
The sob was followed by a hiccup, and sniffles; he looked around for his hanky in his trousers pocket before he realized that his trousers were somewhere on the nightdark floor. He gave up, tangling one hand in her bleached-colour hair, soft. "Oh, angel, why are you being such a sook?"
"You hurt my nose." It seemed such a tiny crime in the long list, but she was tired, and more than her nose hurt, and the night was too young yet when she wanted it to be already over.
"Get you a nosejob," he offered, thumb caressing the pale strands in his fingers. "You won't have to worry."
"Derek!" It was somewhere between a moan and a wail.
"Well, bugger being a bedroom comedian with you around." He rolled over, flopping his face into the pillow, golden spikes falling all around it until he flopped back up again like a bunny bouncing up out of its warren. "Jesus. Can you turn up the air conditioner, doll? Unless your grievous nose injury cut off flow to the brain?"
She slipped doggedly from the bed, padding over and not bothering with a sheet as she went to slip up the dials of the temperature control. He watched her; the night clouded all around her, her small thin white body with its little bones and little bruises, chill against the warmth of the air. He didn't want to hurt her; she should be celebrating that he popped one, not long-faced. Sometimes he thought that Nell looked miserable just out of practice. "C'mon, sweetie," he coaxed, opening his arms to his tiny cousin. "C'mere."
He pulled the sheets back as she flopped in his arms. They lay naked as the temperature moved down, all limbs and bones. Nell closed her eyes as she buried her face in the hollow of one of his tanned shoulders; he ran his fingers down one of her hips, restless. He felt, to her, like he was a piece of paper on fire, glowing hot sparks slowly consuming his surface.
"Recite me something, doll," he ordered. "Anything you fancy. Have a go. Preferably not something written by any crackfed poet pondering suicide, so don't you dare say anything by Dickinson. Or Plath. Or Sexton."
Nell sighed into his skin, explosive in the silence. Derek was not the sort of man to like poetry; Australian men like him liked rugby and winemaking and business, who the Wallabies had won against, who was going to Sydney for a dry dusty summer. Bjorneby. Karen. He wasn't truly listening; he just liked the sound of her voice, the high thin drone, the way her mouth moved when she concentrated.
"He said, Try red," she muttered, teeth moving over the syllables. "Or dove-smoke grey and wine. He brushed my lips with pearl. In mirrored love and agony his gaze held mine; outlined in kohl - "
The hand was moving up her hip, fingers brushing the side of a breast, turning her skin into churning ice. "Pale flesh, red lips, breasts flushed," she stuttered, and knew with a sickening lurch she'd chosen wrong but couldn't stop - "Two embers waiting one hot breath, we glowed. It's true he stole me. But I..."
"Don't stop." His mouth was at her forehead, tongue tasting her hairline and the sweet caramel curve of her ear.
It was a whisper. "It's true he stole me. But I chose to go."
He laughed against her hair; his fingers stilled against her breast as chuckles rose to a roar. She touched his hand; he locked it in one of his and smiled at her.
"Just those nasty little drugs, my love," he said irreverently. His fingers dug into the soft part of her thigh, nails pressing white crescents until the blood came up like pinpricks. Surprisingly, she made no noise of pain; her bloodless lips curved in what might have been a smile. "Alas, Eleanor. The night is young."
He gave me rubies, his skeleton key -
With rosebuds dyed ash, he crowned me his queen.