🎡Cometic Cabaret☄️

dynamics: sapphoachillean, saphboys/lesboys [twunk/butch]; toxic/frenemies [love/hate (onidere)]

cw: smoking/tobacco, alcohol/drunkenness, (fantasized) violence/human ashtray

... And yet, I still couldn't make a move.

“I knew you'd be too chickenshit, Gallo,” Wren had said when I accompanied hir outside for hir hourly cigarette. “Fuck you.” I clapped my Zippo shut very loudly in hir face. To hir credit, sie remained unphased. “Oh, I will.... That's another seven years to your postmortem tab.” I wanted to pluck the smoke from hir lips and turn hir smarmy, condescending, handsome lamblike face into a spotted ashtray. “So, we go to Phase Two...?” “Iunno, will you be too chickenshit then too?” I don't think either of us expected me in my drunken fury to lunge at hir, let alone yank hir toward me by the solid purple shirt and kiss hir. That sie dropped hir cig is no surprise... but that hir log-thick arms wrapped around me and that hir cliff-edged palms cupped my face and that sie kissed me back, moss-soft mustache tasting of tobacco... and I know sie kissed me back... (or I think sie kissed me back...??)

We were just another intoxicated, entangled—intoxitangled—messy mass at just another beach house, indistinct from the scattered collection of other massive messes, indistinct from the scattered collection of other crashed parties–

I just started to smell the burning. Wren snuffed hir butt out just before the collection of flames scattered, but the wood had already been distinctly singed.

We silently exchanged glances, almost as a formality. Wren silently lit another stogie with hir own purple lighter. I silently went back inside. We barely saw each other until the next morning, waking up back-to-back and fully-clothed. This seemed somehow satisfactory for both of us. Wren let me light hir first smoke of the day, perhaps as a peace offering. ...