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“There,” Rose says as you slide on her favorite black headband. Your fingers brush her ears, and she sighs and leans into you. “Ready.” Her sweet breath tickles your lips; you dip your head and nuzzle the perfection of her neck for a moment, careful not to smudge your makeup, no matter how good black looks on her pale skin. You shiver with the smell of her. “Do you want to leave first this time?”
You twist your mouth as you’re made to remember your imminent departure. Rather than answering, you say to her, “I wish we could leave together.” Your fingers, now clasped at the small of her back, curl against her warmth. She tips her head against you, blonde hair brushing your bare shoulders. “I know, Kanaya,” she sighs, with just enough unhappiness in her voice that you immediately hate yourself for bringing it up. Not being seen to love each other in public, not being seen leaving your hotel room together - small prices to pay to hold her in your arms every moment you’re alone, and to listen to her play only for you. “It’s hard,” she says. You smile.
“And nobody understands,” you agree, and press just one kiss to her skin, leaving an outline there. One of you will have to clean that up. But for now, she arches against you, away from your hands but closer to your heart. You’ve fulfilled one of your traditions already, her violin resting on the bed like a languid lover, its strings still syrupy with the Vivaldi she plays you before every concert. “Summer,” as far as the two of you are concerned, is your song - an entire movement, a season, written hundreds of Earth years ago. Both of you find it appropriate. Your other obligation, if it can even be called that, dangles like a ripe and tempting fruit in front of you, but once it’s plucked that’s that. You want to draw this out, make her late for her show, a passive-aggressive bid for attention surpassing that which she already lavishes on you. Silly, of course; you know she’ll be right on time as always. But that doesn’t stop you waiting for her to flick her smoky purple eyes up to yours, begging, as close as Rose gets to begging, for a kiss.
You let her ache for a moment longer before you dip your head and press your lips to hers. Her long, low exhalation pushes into your mouth, completely eliminating any possibility of you stifling your moan. You hold her closer, and she rests her (perfect, long, slim) hands on your shoulders. You’re bent enough so she doesn’t have to stretch up to kiss - you wouldn’t have her exerting herself so, when you’re supposed to be easing her nerves before the concert. Your Rose is always such a bundle of anxiety, though she keeps it so tucked away inside her that no one would ever notice. You kiss her so slowly you forget everything around you, forget everything but the warm woman in your arms and her wet black mouth clinging to yours.
She tips her head back, pulling your bottom lip between her teeth for a moment - not enough to leave a mark, just to give the right amount of bee-stung puffiness that all the fashion magazines praise the both of you for. You start to bend further to kiss the pale column of her neck, to match the lip mark already there with a necklace across her perfect throat, but you’re cut off when she speaks - just one word, just the tiniest whisper of “Kanaya.” A year’s romance has taught you exactly what she means when she says your name with that high, wavering voice. You allow yourself one more kiss, nestled into the dip of her collarbone, before you sink to your knees. Your hands start to trail along her waist and down, but she catches them; her fingers lace with yours, and she smiles down at you, her purple irises barely visible from behind her long dark lashes. Your heart is doing all kinds of interesting things in your chest even still.
You start to roll her dress up, slow and careful, so you won’t wrinkle it or ladder it with your horns. You won’t have your Rose looking like anything but the most exquisite fashion plate, of course. The tabloids noted your “friendship” based on the dresses draping her slender body before you ever put in an appearance with her in public. You press your nose against one silk stocking and trace her leg up, so beautifully thick in a way you never would have guessed from her skirts and poured into the prettiest garter belt and nylons money can buy. You run your eyeteeth over the tops of the stockings where her flesh dimples over, and you hear the breathy gasp that means she’s cradling a knuckle under her front teeth. You want to strip them off her, want to tear the fine cloth with your fangs and let her legs wrap around you as you lay her out and slip the soaked length of your bulge inside her, but there’s always time for that later. Plenty of time for that. Now you just...
...lay kisses all over her thighs, losing most of your lipstick to her skin in the process. She’s marked with smears of black in places, perfect outlines of your mouth in others, and as you work up towards the damp lace of the panties she always wears especially for you, you get more and more light-headed with the taste of her heartbeat along your tongue. She muffles another groan into her palm, and when the sound touches your ears, you return the favor into the crease of her thigh and her body, her suspender pressing into your forehead. You need to take a moment, just breathing her in; it’s so, so hard to not want more, to say fuck the concert and run her a bath with her favorite lilac petals and twine your limbs together until both of you are wrinkled from the water. You can already taste the jealous bile in your throat as you imagine her audience looking at her, wanting her... you growl deep in your chest and press your tongue flat to her through her panties, and you revel in her hitched gasp. Good.
Forget the water, you want to bathe in that, feel her heightening moans making the hair all over your body prickle up with need. You get carried away for a split second and then you’re dropping the ripped remains of her panties from your mouth and corkscrewing your tongue into her, whatever’s left of your lipstick transferred from lips to lips. You hear her hand hit the wall, and then feel the other twine into your hair, holding you there, her nails digging into the nape of her neck, and that means - yes, yes, yes, she’s moaning unchecked, your name all over her mouth. Your imp of the perverse sated for the moment, you’re the good girl again even with the grin curling on your lips, slowly slipping your tongue in and out in time with her breaths. You’re not sure which gets faster first, but soon you’re dropping one hand from her dress to wrap around her hips beneath it, holding her to your mouth as she holds you to her body. You’re hungry for breath but hungrier for her, your tongue slicking up her folds (and oh her groan of loss - it’s a good thing you’re already devouring her) to the hard nub of her clit and twisting around it, pressing, swirling. She’s trying so hard to stifle her moans, and every swallowed whimper makes you redouble your efforts. You just barely touch the tip of one fang to the agonizingly sensitive knot under your lips, and all your efforts are rewarded with “oh, fuck, fuck,” as clumsy-tongued as Rose ever gets, sweet splattering on your face before you lick it away.
You keep your face nestled between her legs, awash in warmth and her lazily slowing heartbeat. The two of you have to part, though, even with a few strands of wetness still clinging to your mouth. You lick them away and stand, embracing her again; she cuddles into your arms with an almost smug smile. “I am an absolute mess,” she murmurs. Her hair is absolutely perfect, and, with her dress in place once more, the wreck of her undergarments is invisible. She just needs to reapply her lipstick and wait for her flaming cheeks to return to normal. You, on the other hand, look like you’ve been rubbing your face in the sink for half an hour. You give her one last, quick kiss that threatens to linger before you pluck her lipstick from her dresser. She rolls her eyes and purses her lips with an indulgent sigh; you run the black stick over them, slowly touching up the smudges. She holds in her laughter until you’re done, then lets you see flashes of white teeth and pink tongue, her arms encircling your waist again.
“You are incorrigible,” she says fondly. “You ruined my hair,” you tell her. She smirks and says, “it was all part of a ploy to get you to leave after me anyway. Ah, but before I go - “ You lick your fingertips and wipe the smudge off her neck as she bends to do something, because you know she’s already forgotten about the mess you left. She barely notices, a hand under her dress and - ah. She stands back up with what used to be a perfectly serviceable pair of silk panties in hand. And then she drops them on your strappy-heeled feet. “I won’t be needing these tonight.”
“You’re going on stage without...?”
“No harm in it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an engagement for which I am about to be late.” She smirks and presses a kiss to your cheek, and then she’s out the door and you’re left standing there four hundred and thirteen times as aroused as you already were.
---
Half an hour later you’re settling into your seat in the concert hall just as the curtain starts to open. You adjust your things in your lap as you look at your program, note the songs you’ve heard for hours and hours listening to Rose practice (first is Bach’s “Toccata & Fugue,” something of her signature and an enormous crowd favorite), fiddle with your hair, play with your purse. After about a million years she walks out on stage, violin in hand, and just like always your heart stops to see her shine in the spotlight. There’s no music stand; she’s memorized all her songs, of course. Only the best from Rose. She sits down on the single chair in the middle of the stage and waits a moment for everyone to settle, and then she brings her violin to her chin. When she raises her bow, the entire world holds its breath, and then -
- this isn’t Toccata & Fugue. This isn’t Bach at all. There’s some vague mumbling in the crowd as everyone checks their programs, but you’re staring right at her as your toes slowly curl in your heels. You’re practically melting as her bow sweeps over the strings, far from the sharp jerking strokes of what she’s supposed to be playing. You can see yourself an hour ago, laying in her lap as she plays Summer, just the way she’s playing it now. This is not on the program and you have to put your hand over your mouth to keep from making a sound as your face colors deep, deep jade, down your neck and to the tips of your ears. One of the humans seated adjacent to you is looking at you a bit strangely, you see from the corner of your eye, but you have eyes only for Rose as she sits up there and plays your song and looks right. At. You. You know your kisses are still burning on her thighs. You swallow heavily as her back arches with quavering high notes, and when she launches into juddering cascades of sound she tilts her violin and her body just so and you wonder what she’s doing for just the barest second before she draws the wood of the bow over her lips and then your back arches and oh shit you can get that out of your dress but you’re not so sure about the theater seat. Your hands clench in your lap, ruining the program beyond all hope of repair.
You would excuse yourself to... powder your nose, but you would dangle for nine days and nights from the bluebloods’ bluffs before you’d miss a second of Rose’s playing. When she’s finished with Summer (she finishes like a cat, licking her lips and rolling in her seat as she gives the audience a moment to recover), the performance continues as planned. She doesn’t look at you again; at least, not more than usual. It gives you time to shake in your seat like a dishwasher given life. This is going to be all over the papers in the morning and you’ve just come in public. This is an unmitigated disaster, except for the part where you love her now more than you ever have, you’re practically overflowing with it and you did overflow with it. Oh, god, this is awful. You’re squirming all over the place. Luckily, her performances are never very long - only ever seven or eight songs, unless it’s a special occasion. You discreetly lay down a tissue from your purse on top of your mess and run to the bathroom. Rose can wait a moment or two.
By now you’re great at cleaning jade... mess off of pretty much everything either of you own, and a good number of things you don’t. Your dress is prim and proper once again, but you take a few more minutes in the restroom to catch your breath. You’re still a bit in shock. That was an astounding level of intimacy for something that didn’t even involve any touching. ...well, no, the two of you have done that before. But this time you were across the room from one another. ...no, you did that too. But this was in public! ...ah, no... you’re having a little trouble with this, and your knees are getting wobbly again just thinking about it. You sigh and resolve to let Rose psychoanalyze you later. You know she loves to plant thoughts in your head. Right now, you need to meet her, lest she think you left without her.
Your appointed spot tonight is at an antique shop down an alley nearby: out of the way enough that you can have a bit of privacy to call a cab, and relevant enough to both your interests that if you’re caught together you can explain it away. Rose is very good at evading paparazzi by now, and as you exit the theater you see... Rose surrounded by paparazzi. Oh. They swarm around her like flies on a carcass, and you try to escape before they see you looking for her. ...but then you see her through the crowd, waving to you, beckoning you over? You tilt your head at her, and she smiles at you in that trust me way that still makes you want to topple into the safety of her arms. So you gulp back your surge of anxiety and step through the crowds, taking the hand she offers. The paparazzi don’t stop for a minute, turning their flashbulbs and video cameras on you, blurting questions about your latest designs and your old designs and your next show and the exact nature of your relationship with Rose.
Before you can even answer, Rose’s mouth is on yours. You almost don’t think it’s happening, at first - Rose kissing you in the middle of a crowd is something about as likely to happen as the United States deciding to have an emperor. You’re so startled you almost forget to kiss her back; there’s a long moment before your hand slides against the small of her back and your forehead tips towards hers. You do forget that you’re being photographed. Your brain cannot handle these two things happening at once, the private and the public, mingling achingly like they have all night, like she’s forgotten that you’ve worked so hard to hide your love for a whole year. Nobody cares about a lesbian fashion designer. It’s expected, disgustingly. But a lesbian violinist? Never. Human romance is uncomfortable and confusing and you’re almost glad you can only hold Rose when you’re alone, almost, and then you remember how badly you want to feed her ice cream on a patio or shop for clothes with her or walk her to her concerts. Somehow all of this has time to run through your head as you kiss, and when your thoughts trail off into fizzling happiness with a flick of her tongue, the kiss still isn’t over. There’s still questions, but you can barely hear them for the blood rushing in your ears; still photos, but suddenly you want them pasted over every wall in the city. And then she rocks back on her heels and smiles up at you, only at you, her mouth a little smudged and her fingers laced with yours. She pulls you away from the crowd without saying a word, and you trail after her like a kite.
---
Your first question when you get back to the hotel room is an urgent “what the fuck, Rose?” She looks so hurt that you rephrase, with her warm body nestled against yours barely a step inside the room. “Rose, I... I thought you didn’t...” You worry your lip with your fangs and tug her hairband off as you think; her hair falls loose, and you kiss her behind the ear. “I thought your career was more important than this.”
She glares at you like you’ve opened your mouth only to expel a cloud of horrible swamp gas. “Do you honestly think that?”
“No, I don’t honestly think that! I don’t know what I think!” You wave your arms around a bit; her irritation fades to her familiar expression of fond amusement as she catches your hands and brings them to her face, sliding them down to her neck so she can put your thumbs over her pulse. “Kanaya, calm down. I admit I should have asked you or at the very least warned you before I decided to... very likely run my career into the ground, but I’m sure I’ll still be able to play at coffee shops or something. My thoughts were...” She takes a deep breath. “My thoughts were that I had had enough of hiding the most exquisite woman I’ve ever met from the people I most want to know how well she treats me.” Your face is so deeply jade that you’re compelled to hide your face in her hair, your nose burrowing against her scalp. She still smells like the shampoo you both use.
You mumble something into her hair so muffled you don’t even know what you said. She hums and strokes her fingers over your wrists. “How did you like that first song?” she says, and even though you can’t see her you can hear the drippingly wicked smirk in her voice.
“Uh,” you say. You’re dizzy just to remember it, you and her somehow the only people in the concert hall even as she laid your year bare to everyone else. “More or less I thought it was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to me. Also, I think I ruined my seat.”
“Really,” she says. Before you can tell her how wonderful she is, or describe the indelible perfection of every note birthed from her instrument - why won’t anyone let you talk tonight - her lips are on yours again. One of her long-fingered hands shifts to hold both your wrists above your head, her hips pinning you to the door even as her other hand trails up your thigh under your dress. You moan like the surcease of all your sorrow is borrowed from her sweet lips, and really, it is.
---
Later, when your legs are plaited with hers and you’re licking a smear of jade off the corner of her lips, the two of you laying together in a warm bath, you remember how to say things that aren’t oh god yes and oh oh Rose and please don’t stop. None of them really seem very important, though, so you just tuck your chin into the crook of her neck and smell her.
“I think,” she says ponderously, her toes curling and uncurling in the water, “that maybe this is not such an unmitigated disaster for our public lives after all.” Rose is very eloquent at all times.
"I fail to see how we can avoid disaster," you say into her ear.
“I mean that - mmm, stop that,” and she giggles, the sweetest sound you’ve ever heard by orders of magnitude. Her beauty is ameliorated somewhat by the fact that she’s pulling your hand off her breast. It turns out alright, though, since she’s just moving it to press your palm over her heart. “I mean that we are hardly the first celebrities with a vested interest in those of the same sex, and not all - “
“A vested interest in each other,” you say. She bites you on the shoulder. “Ow!”
“Stop interrupting me, dear. As I was saying, not all of their careers have ended in flaming wreckage.”
“I would have no idea about that. Who specifically are you thinking of? Perhaps I’ve heard of them.”
She’s silent for a while. “I don’t know,” she says quietly, and turns so she’s tucking her head under your chin, her nose nestled against your collarbone. “I was hoping you would know a few.”
“Oh.” You stroke her spine with her fingertips; when you reach the lower part, you cup her bottom and lift your hips against hers. Her long, low intake of breath is immediately gratifying in a way that you weren’t sure anything could be before you met her. “Rose?”
“Mm?”
“I love you, even if we have to liquidate our accounts and flee to the moon. And I love you even if they lambast you in the press. And I would love you even if... you want to go back to how we were.”
She pushes herself up on her hands, lifting part of her body out of the water and herself a bit off of you. You choke your groan; it’s not the place for Rose please I very much like being inside of you when she’s giving you that look. “I would never,” she says, and kisses you so hard your mouth bruises. You pull her down onto you again and kiss her hard, a kiss she won’t forget even if, you suddenly, irrationally fear, you never see each other again. You would die if you never saw her again, but you think she would probably go on, even if she was lessened a bit, and you’d do anything if it meant she would remember you. The fear passes when she smiles at you, your noses side by side, your eyebrows almost a mirror image.
“We are getting very wrinkled, Kanaya. I’m not sure I’m ready to be old with you just yet,” she says. You kiss her again and stand with her in your arms, groaning with imaginary effort. She kicks the stopper out of the bathtub and tilts her hips just so - always just so, with her - away from you. A sudden gush of jade trails out the drain with the rest of the water while you’re clutching the wall and panting. “You’re terrible,” she says as she steps out of the tub, chuckling.
“I can only aspire to your heights of terriblosity, Rose.” You follow her out of the tub and snatch a towel, keeping it away from her with jerks and tugs until she finally stomps on your foot and grabs the fluffy artifact out of your hand while you’re reeling. Once all her more interesting bits are dry she deigns to share the towel with you, and you spend another moment or two enjoying her closeness. And then, as things are wont to do, something beeps from the bedroom. You snort against her neck. “That’s yours,” you say. You’ve configured all your beeping things to a much more pleasant tone.
She grumbles something under her breath as she extricates herself from your arms. “It’s probably my publicist telling me he’s going to roast me and feed me to orphans.” She steps out of the bathroom, and you busy yourself with tidying up - you knocked most everything on the counter over when you had her up there legs spread and perfect lips parted, so it takes a while to set all your conditioners and hair sprays and things upright again.
You’re wiping a particularly stubborn stain from the mirror when you hear “Kanaya?” from the bedroom. You peek your head out; Rose is sitting at the desk (still naked as a jaybeast, bless her) at her laptop, staring at the screen like it’s told her she’s Won A Prize - no, bad analogy, the first time you wrecked her computer by clicking one of those ads she almost literally tanned your hide. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. “Kanaya,” she calls again. You pad over to her and drape your arms over her shoulders. “What?”
She just points to the screen. There’s an email there, entitled “Dear Miss Lalonde.” Typical fan mail - she gets plenty, why is this worthy of distracting you from the very important business of cleaning the hotel bathroom? You read the email, and your eyes grow wider with each word. It is, apparently, mail from a young female fan. The tabloids, working hard to publish other people’s personal information, have already ground up and expelled the footage and photos of your kiss. And this young lady has apparently seen all of it, and she - finds your Rose an inspiration. There are plenty of glowing words about how fantastic the both of you are, about how brave you were to kiss in front of the cameras, about how she’s sure you’ll get more praise than you will condemnation. You get more than a few mentions; apparently she’s a fan of your fashions as well, and had long suspected something was going on between the two of you. The words “jade stockings” figure prominently in some rather dreamy-sounding passages, and your cheeks heat as you remember that fiasco.
“Well,” you say when you’ve finished reading. “That was... unexpected.”
“Quite. Did you even know we had fans like this?”
“I had supposed they were all male.” She elbows you in the side, and you laugh against her neck.
“Incorrigible,” she sighs.
“But surely that’s the only one, right? I mean... no one...” You pause. “...no one really approves of us, right?” You have learned through long and painful experience that if something is too good to be true, it absolutely is. Except for certain things, naturally; you brush your nose against the soft hair at the nape of Rose’s neck.
“Oh ye of little faith,” Rose says. She opens another email, which you read forthwith. It has, more or less, the same content - a different subject line, a different young woman, but still heavy with the air of “thank you so much for loving each other.” You’re left staring at the screen, your mouth hanging open.
Rose reaches up and closes your mouth with a finger on your chin. Her smile spreads over her face as she scrolls down again, moving to a new page in the inbox...
...where there are three pages of freshly-minted emails.
“Ah,” you croak, eyes wide. “I suppose we had better get to answering these, then.”
“Indeed,” she says, and laces her fingers with yours.