Movement Thirteen — Let's All Have Fun Together Today

Sorrel leaned in and kissed me then, unhurried, the particular certainty of someone who has never once needed to rush toward something she already knows is hers. I felt the whole warmth of her settle into it, easy and familiar, the specific tenderness of a woman who no longer needed anything from the kiss itself except the simple pleasure of giving it.

"Well," she said, pulling back just far enough to let her voice carry properly to both of us, a bright, mischievous warmth threaded all through it, "let's all have fun together today."

Iris had already gone, I realized, looking around for her — vanished the way she vanishes, without sound, without ceremony, leaving nothing behind but the faint warm impression of where she'd been leaning a moment before, and a single blade of grass, I noticed, bent slightly out of shape where her hand had rested against it in sleep.

Vesper looked around too, the particular wary glance of someone doing careful, silent arithmetic on every possible direction she might still be able to escape in. I watched her weigh it, watched the whole calculation cross her face — how far the tree line stood, how quickly she might manage to untangle herself from an arm she'd already, once that afternoon, stopped fighting, whether dignity or curiosity would win out if she actually tried. She did not, I think, actually want to be caught here, between the two of us, two foolish plants she'd have sworn, on any other day, she had no interest whatsoever in staying near. And yet I noticed, too, that she hadn't actually moved, not even a fraction, her weight still settled easily against my side, the particular stillness of someone who has already decided, somewhere beneath all her protesting, exactly how the afternoon was going to end.

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I felt Sorrel's fingers lace through mine on one side, unhurried, entirely certain, and felt Vesper's hand, on the other, still resting where it had settled against my sleeve some time before, not pulling away, not any longer. There was a particular quiet, in that last stretch of held gold light, that I don't think either woman would have named out loud if I'd asked them to — not peace exactly, not yet, but the beginning shape of something that might, given enough afternoons like this one, eventually be allowed to become it.

There was no escape. I want to be honest about that much, at least.

What happened after that isn't part of this telling. It isn't needed here, and I don't think either of us would thank you for asking.