Due to the insensate change in the weather a detour of the usual route out from Winnipeg was taken and now you are in some small town Churchill, Canada, most likely bordering Ontario in the east, if you are right.
That’s all you know. That’s all the Captain says anyway. Apart from the nerve wrecking cold, that is.
The captain’s voice resonates again.
Due to the snow blizzard ahead, your flight will be delayed …. And the rest of the words drown, in the snarls and sneers of the passengers. There’s not many of them, but they are still handful.
They are probably cursing, wishing earnestly he gets a can of worms for his Christmas and you can’t really blame them when you are one of them. But at the back of your mind you know, it was hardly the Captain’s fault but putting the blame on someone else somehow helps us deal with it a lot better.
Christmas is day after tomorrow and it’s already somewhere near twilight now. Everyone wants to go home, to be back in the arms and smiles of their family, chiming Christmas Carols way out of tune and chugging hot chocolates, anything rather than be stuck in a clamped metal coffin with absolute strangers.
Anything but that ….
Everyone’s out here for a reason.
It has to be a do or die situation, otherwise no sane person would be here. Not even you, you berate in your own.
You vaguely eye the hustling people. There are some familiar faces you can make out apart from your team, faces you have seen in board meetings of Arcadia Health and Service Centres. There are also men in uniform, their back stiff in ram rod, and their faces docile as ever.
You huff and puff and grit and curse. You shuffle in your seat and open up phone hoping you might catch a signal. You’re even ready to ask Santa for a signal as your Christmas gift. It’s that important.
But there’s no bar. No signal.
You curse.
Fuck you, Jaha.
Fuck you, Santa.
Everyone’s stares deviously, waiting for the door to open, its better than sitting astute doing nothing.
You too.
But your companion doesn’t.
Your companion is an old woman. The wrinkles on her face and the veins jotting out of the hands says she’s around 60, if not younger.
You watch as she stares at the photo in her hand. A young man in uniform. Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Smiling proudly.
The picture’s slight torn around the edges, discoloured a bit too but the smile of the handsome face in the picture is worth a million bucks.
She must be very proud of him, you think. She must be waiting to go home too, you think …. Aloud.
That’s when you hear her voice, wet of unshed tears. It’s so soft that you aren’t sure if you actually heard her or not, but there’s that tear in her eye, which says, yes you heard her right.
You hear her say, that’s my handsome son, Chris. Killed when on active duty. This will be my first Christmas without him.
There’s a weight in her words that weighs you down. There’s a torment in her grip on that photo that shivers your bones.
The pain of losing someone you love, that pain you are familiarised with far too many times. You simply nod, the wedding band swaying on your silver chain. You can’t find it in her heart to say I’m sorry because words won’t be enough. They are never enough.
The warm chambers of your class unceremoniously makes you white cold, the weight of the ring on your chain abounding.
You warp it in your hands.
The cold bites your skin like the sharpness of knives. Even in your woollen overcoat, your teeth clatters. You can even count your frost breathe that hangs mid-air.
The flight’s been delayed by 12 hours until further notice.
It takes 20 hours, if you’re not delayed, from Canada to your home. 20 hours and this additional 12 plunges you like a darkness in the highway. You pick out your phone and for the umpteenth time flick it up and down out for a signal, a bar anything. But the screen’s blank as is your present. Frustrated tears grace your face, as frost liquid creeps down.
You hears the chime of the town hall, from not afar. Perfect twelve.
It’s 24th December, 2016, already.
You are here and Aden is back at Australia. Oceans apart. Christmas is already lost to you.
You sit in some dingy bar above the only available motel that’s nearest in the vicinity to the small airport. It was the closest but it was the shittiest with no workable land network and a rather grim setting. You could go up to your room, but what’s the point. You would sulk there too anyway. So why not sulk with a drink in hand, and reminisce with fellow doctors of far stretched dreams.
You’re still toying with that awfully bitter whiskey, shrugging your head to Dr Sinclair’s new found technique of doing a suture, when a brawl breaks behind you.
The locals are fighting it seems. Fighting, would be an overstatement. The locals are drunk and they are drunkenly beating up a boy half their size.
Three against one. Hardly a fair fight.
You don’t know why the fight’s happening but every other hooded locale around the corner is cheering at the bar battle. The manager stands aghast and appalled at the scene but the terror in his eyes stops his limbs from moving.
And passengers like you themselves are looking at them. Gaping. Almost disgustedly.
They are all cursing under their breath but none of the polished men take a step to stop the fight.
Savages, you hear one of them curse.
They watch and your fingers itch.
You are a doctor, protecting, saving and cherishing life has been on off her oaths.
You hear the fallen man beg and catch the mid-way gore struck phrases that he elites out, murmur something incoherent something Needed money for food ... But they don’t listen. Unknowingly, you stand up from your seat, and bravely take two steps forward past the bristling crowd. You see the rise of an incoming fist in the mountain man’s hand, instantly flick your eyes away, trying to numb the scream that will follow but it doesn’t.
That’s when you see her.
The stranger knees down the attacker and within a blink, she floors the remaining two assailants. You hears her hiss, to stay down to stop fighting, none listen. One of them aggravates and gets up behind her, when she has her back turned to hold up the beaten youth, instantly that big man has her turned around and punches her, gashing her lips open.
You flinch forward to the encircling crowd. And so does the others.
You watch her intently as she steels herself again, before triangulating the man in her clasp until he nearly begs for air. You sees the men lump back their words and shrink in their place right them and there, before scampering away from her view. She helps the boy up and for a brisk second, her eyes stops on you. And you freezes as if she have been caught doing something delinquent.
Darkness was her stare and enigma was her everything.
She skims her bloodied lips and looks away so fast that you are left to wonder if she did ever look at her or was it your mind playing tricks.
The jeering crowd moves away and you watch her admirably from afar only to see her dissipate amidst the cheering pandemonium.
You thrust some money on the table, pulling on her woollen coat and scarfing your neck before retracing her footsteps outside much to the chagrin of your colleagues.
You find her sitting on the stairs of the porch of the bar, head rest up towards whimsical lights dancing in the sky, with the butt of a cigar. She takes in one final inhale before twirling it out to the snow. You debate if you should even approach her but with one final pluck of courage you finally sit down beside her.
She has yet to turn to look at you but the posture of her stance changes nonetheless. It grows more rigid.
“Are you alright?” You ask. “He hit on your face pretty hard and I’m a doctor so …” Her rambling is cut off by her curious shift of pose towards her.
Her eyes shimmers under the moon light and it takes a while for you to overcome the sudden lump in your throat. Her eyes are of soft wash out green, you realize, like the colour of your favourite sweater that had been washed too many times and the marred skin under her eyelids stands prominent.
“I’m alright.” Her voice is coarse somehow complementing her ruddy complexion and curled mane.
Your eyes move up and down her long effigy face, her substantial pointy and well-structured lashes open and shut at yours; confusion and frown bordering her buxom lips emphasizing another prolonged scar inhabiting permanently on her upper one; you wonder how many more she hides under clothed skin.
You move yours eyes up again to her wound, the perimeter of bottom flesh venerable and bloodied a bit.
“Can I see?” The stranger nods lightly in approval and you raise to pull out one of your mittens off and flush your thumb over her roughed edge. The girl closes her eyes when your warmth washes over her bruised skin, inhaling a bit too densely at your touch.
“You are warm.” She rasps out again, the fringes of her lips quivering up in affable gratitude. “So will I live Doctor…?”
“Clarke Griffin.” You clothe her hand again, blushingly. “Just Clarke though and yes, you’ll live …?”
“Sergeant Major Lexa Woods, Ma’am” She nods, “Just Lexa will do too.”
You smile at her formality in her tone, “Ok.”
“Of course, Clarke Griffin.” She says your name enunciating the k in place of the r, making it sound heavenly beautiful even if it wasn’t.
“That was very brave of you, you know.” You say vaguely motioning to the scene that played within even after knowing her occupation.
“Well, I’m a soldier, it’s what we are trained for. It was the right thing to do.” She pauses up and look pasts you to the infinite dance of the sky lights, a smile gracing her face at how atrociously well they mar against your flushed porcelain.
“It’s called the dance of the lights.” Lexa says outwardly. You look up to the colouring hues tangoing on the darkest blues.
“They are breath-taking. This is the first time I have seen them up so close actually.” You muse.
“Are you going back in?” She stands up, asking you.
“I don’t know, it’s pretty late and I don’t wish to freeze so maybe. Why, you aren’t?” You push your coat closer tightening the garter belt against another icicle breeze. You watch her part her lips to ask you something, but she stops herself.
“No. I’ll be bored inside anyway.” She relents instead, giving one final tug at her head mittens. “So I’ll be out walking up a bit… “She motions her eyes up front to the iced white path ahead, “Dad used to say what’s Christmas without lights.” She recoils instantly at the slippage. You watch her almost argue with herrself and with a something of a nod she walks away.
Oh my love we've lived in troubled days Oh my friend we have the strangest ways
Your father’s spelled out lyrics bursts in you, just like yesterday.
“Can I come?” You hastily retrace her footsteps. “I don’t have anything to do either. And I have never seen them up close so.. I can even give you company.” You babble at her wordlessness. “Or not? I just.. never mind.. though I..”
“Ok.” She answers in rosy cheeks and you get a little bit to addict to it.
Lexa’s hand seamlessly clasps into yours tugging you forward up a small snow hill.
No outlandish noise rattles tranquil collectedness of anything. Anything albeit the inhale and exhale of you and her’s breathing. Slow and heavy.
And the lights.
The lights ethereally blaze in the silent sky, moving in great swaying bands of colour like a living organism, resembling the swirl of a nascent rose that had begun to open, redness snaking into its brim slowly vapouring past the legion cerulean and emerald and somewhat mauve cursive lines .
You have never felt this saturated or unflappable before.
You stare. You stare.
And from the fringy edges from your orbs you see her staring at you.
Slow and steady, just like her breathing.
You hum aloud to an unchained melody that graces her lips, on the way back.
Oh my love we've had our share of tears
Oh my friend we've had our hopes and fears
Oh my friends it's been a long hard year
But now it's Christmas
Yes its Christmas
Thank God it's Christmas
She jumps a bit, throws her hands up in the air and sings totally out of tune. It has you laughing under muffed wools and biting lips.
Her urbanity catches you on your blindside.
It gets you irrevocably hooked on a feeling. A feeling or two, definitely.
You think the Christmas tree looks ridiculous in the Grounders Hotel, which you and some of the rest have now shifted too. It’s certainly an improvement from the previous motel but you also think it’s ridiculous to sit on a crappy smelly sofa with a stale black coffee in your hand at 3.30 am in a dark Churchill morning.
The tree, it scrapes stupendous ghastly up to the ceiling as someone, probably the owner, wobbles on a ladder to hang the fairy atop. It truly belongs in a forest, you muse, dominating the moderately sized café cum bar cum restaurant the way it does.
Packets of tinsel lie unopened on the counter, not just the snake kind, but the stuff that's loose strips too.
Lexa looks at the flickering trees with its tiers of lights, and those miniature little stars laying hide and seek in between the curtain of paints, sipping her buttered rum. Her eyes floats from the armchair across stopping shortly into the blue haze of yours.
“Last year Christmas was a drag. We barely even had cake.” She speaks barely up a whisper, thinking of forlorn tales.
“Last year was the most tiring Christmas I ever had. I needed energy drinks to keep up with those 10 year olds.” You flutters your eyes, before squeezing them shut at the growing drench.
If Lexa sees a certain ring dancing on the bosom of yours, if she sees you sedately holding onto to it like a lifeline, she doesn’t say anything.
“What’s wrong?” You hear worry in her voice, as she sits up beside you.
“Nothing.” You nods but when she enfolds her own palms with yours, all of your walled up angst barrels down in long tears.
“I just … Its Christmas and I don’t want to be stuck here but I’m.”
“Your family waiting for you home?”
“Something like that yes.” You reply in mist eyes. “My son, Aden.” You smile through her tears, pulling out a photo of a floppy blonde hair 9 year old, in your phone, gleaming happily at the phone lens with colour reeked hands in a Captain America t-shirt, to Lexa.
She smiles, thumbing her index over the screen. “What happened?”
You shrug, “Winnipeg General Hospital needed a consult about a patient and since it had a tie up with Arcadia Hospital chain, Chief Jaha insisted I go with my team. It was just before the holidays, I didn’t want to but just a two day trip maximum, that’s what he told me. That apparent patient turned out to be a foreign delegate with recurring flu and pain all over and the hospital couldn’t figure out why. Turned he had necrotizing fasciitis.”
“The flesh eating one? Yuck.” She grimaced out and you laughed at the scrunch of her face. “Yeah, that one. He kept crashing on and on and we were fearing multiple organ failure. One of his kidney was damaged beyond repair, his liver barely lived, his intestines twisted, it was bad and to top it all he lost too much blood during the surgery.”
You place the mug a bit too harshly on the table, you see holding Aden’s face. “He was married, 44 years old, had a 15 year old daughter and I had to go tell them I did everything I could but I still couldn’t save him. I mean, I know I have been a shitty mom lately, I didn’t want to be a shitty doctor too but turns out I’m both.”
When you look up to her, she look at you with a havoc of emotions tangoing in her green hues. She smiles ever so gentle. “I know you tried everything you could have to save that man. I know you are nothing of a shitty mom, and I know Aden is lucky to have you.”
“And how is it that you know?”
“Because words mean nothing unless eyes speak them too and yours Clarke, they can move mountains alone.”
You snivel, still tight lipped at her words. The instant you move your eyes up to her, an inexplicable rush only half conscious rush of emotions bind in perfect communion.
“You haven’t said much about yourself.” You say possibly moments or minutes after, stretching your legs over against her thighs. She stuffs her hands deeper into her sides of her fleece coat. “I don’t have much to say.” She curls her lips up in some sort of guarded assurance, and you think it’s a garment perfectly tailored to fit the way she carries it.
In the quietness of a sad smile.
She soughs dimly. “I’m an army brat. No sibling, thank god. From dad, to grand-dad and great granddad everyone has made the US emblem and the pins on their shoulders proud. I was the first girl generations, it didn’t deter me neither did Dad ever let me think otherwise.” She bit her lips and you could almost catch the heartbeat in them. “Been stationed in Bosnia, Nigeria, but mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, these days. And I have in the army for 10 years now, returning from my sixth tour.”
“Coming home after a long time?” You ask.
“Yeah, it’s been a long time indeed.” Lexa proclaims it out sternly as a statement but nostalgia creeps in her voice in waves that sways towards you. Blue eyes looked up at grey ones, empty echoing hollowness grips her still.
“That’s it? You summed up your entirety in no more than 70 words.” You ask her but the twitch in her lips tells you it’s a lost question in itself.
She nods.
You lay further holing yourself, in half lidded eyes you eye her perfect mesh of beautiful chaos barely struggling under the weights of your sleep.
Her sad face brightens even a tab bit.
“You should go up and rest, Clarke. Its late.” She touches your shoulders to waken you but you are too far gone to keep forth fighting the ongoing battle. “I don’t wanna miss the flight.” You somehow say it coherently, her you won’t or I’ll wake you lost to your deaf ears.
You wake to a gentle warm of an arm around your waist, rubbing concentric circles around the exposed skin of your wrist and the press of soft cotton bed underneath you.
You wake to see the end of a hurricane in green eyes and half parted lips.
She moves away from you or at least tries to, when you are on your designated bed until the enmesh knot of your chain tangles against her engraved army pendant.
“I’m sorry, I’ll … ” You bristle out, un-bunned brown locks shadowing in your blonde curls. Gooey greens watch in amazement at your burgundy cheeks, tinting brighter every time you look up at her. “You needn’t have to carry me.”
Finally untangled, she puts it back under her sweater. Hands behind her back, she laughs huskily, “I wanted too and now I think I have twisted my vertebrae, all thanks to you. You are prettily heavy to carry, Doctor Griffin.”
“No, I’m not.” You say with sombrely, in faux spite.
“No you are not.” She replies in still bright eyes. She stares at the door and looks back at your still sleep eluding self, the illuminance in those greens diminishing fader and fader. “I should go and you should rest.”
She gives you a curt nod, gesturing herself out, before you barely screech out a loud enough “Stay” to halt her footings.
You don’t know why. You want to think because its Christmas and you don’t want to be alone. But in the back of your mind, you learn you would do anything to see those brights in her eyes.
And she agrees a bit too eagerly.
She puts some logs in the empty fireplace, then slugs up her dirt armed boots on the edge of the bed, and comforts herself in the arm chair, wrapping a spare blanket above her torso.
“You should sleep.” She says again.
“I don’t think I can. I’m sleepy but I don’t think I can.” You teem out. “We can talk instead, until … I fall asleep?”
She nods.
But none of you say anything.
In the nothingness of the coming dawn and the rollicking of the flames, you hear a soft hum.
Fly me to the moon
Let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like
On a-Jupiter and Mars
She smiles, wording out, against the amber of the fireplace.
“My dad loved that song. Fly me to the moon.” You commemorate. “He had this creaky rocking chair in our house, he would sit and sing Frank Sinatra, even Aretha Franklin. He would even rap and god it felt like someone was hammering in your head, but the house was always with him.” You nip at the tip of your fingers, still memorizing him. “He was a mechanical engineer, loved painting and baking even though whatever he cooked became a health hazard and even after being 22 years married to my mom he used to still look at her, like he did when he first saw her in the college campus, with these heart eyes, you know.”
“He sounds like a great guy.” She says. Even in the dim darkness she doesn’t miss the heavy tears on your eyelashes. “I’m sorry, Clarke.”
You nod. “One day he was sitting in that chair, and the next day he was gone. Heart attack. Just like that.”
The fire still burns with the same vigour so you think much time had passed, until she speaks up.
“My dad, Gustus Woods, had a thing for Diana Ross. Like a serious thing, must be because of the hair.” She smiles light like a child, allowing the underneath pain to surface above. “I never had a mom, everything for me revolved around him. He taught me everything I know, he was my mentor and listener. He also taught love is a weakness we couldn’t afford.”
You sit a little bit straight, but don’t interlude.
“Yes.” She pauses. “I believe my father was a broken man inside after mom left though he never said anything about it. We moved a lot, never staying in one place too long to get attached because when attachments break you bleed.”
You know words are never enough about you want to dissuade the space the space between the two of you, so that she knows. she knows that you understand but you find those right words hard to find.
“Costia Greene made me believe that. I loved her with everything I was and she left me with a note. I couldn’t wait for you anymore, I’m sorry.” Her voice was unwavering but her brokenness suffocated you.
And in a blink you are out of your bed.
The world stops still on its axis when you embrace her. You stroke her long chestnut hair and pulled her into your chest. Stiff shoulders relaxes, Lexa returns the hug clasping the shorter you closer to her bod.
The arms that held you were soft, yet strong placated up forth her back, moulding you further into her skin. Your own hands vocally trespass down the lines to her waist, her own her cracked lips hole against bouncing curls touching faintly the silken skin of you.
You place a soft kiss a little too close to her lips, mumbling out a brave heart against her skin. You feel her smile. You are warm, she rasps out like a few hours ago.
“Go to sleep, Clarke.” She again says, seeing you fight to keep your eyes open. “I’ll be here when morning comes.” She says as she watches you fall asleep in the soft fluttering of stubborn eyes and your long eyelashes.
She dresses herself in her uniform, clasping tight the laces of her boots when her phone vibrates again as remembrance of how late she’s running late to her meeting.
No sunbeam morning ray crashed past the think curtains, only pale palliative flickers instead pirouetted about.
You wriggle your toes in your socks, standing half dazed in beside her sagacious self, eyeing the stars silvering on the blades of her jacket.
“I’ll see you soon?” You ask.
She nods.
You take a long sigh and she’s gone.
When the morning rays seem fuller and less pale than before, you call out a faint come in to the sudden incessant badgering on her room door and Dr. Zoe Monroe pokes in her head.
“You alright there, Clarke?” You narrow your eyes at the orthopaedic surgeon who reconciles. “I meant, we didn’t see ya last night and, we were wondering if you were alright?”
You nod.
“So Sinclair went to speak with the captain,” she begins and you are already cringing. “And he said that the skies aren’t yet clear and just in case another blizzard hits us, he doesn’t want to risk lives so keeping safety on mind, it has been delayed by another day.”
“Oh.”
“Clarke, the airlines are informing everyone’s contacts so you don’t need to worry and Aden’s with Raven. He’ll be alright.” She consoles you.
“Wanna grab some food?” she finally asks at your empty stomach and you are nod.
“Ok, we’ll be downstairs.”
“Yeah.”
You retreat back on your bed, trying to distract yourself with a decent dress to have lunch in.
You try not to look for her in every crook and nook of the hotel, but you do.
You do, against all rationalism.
Sometimes you even catch shy glances of her, talking to one of the men in uniform, moving her head only when necessary in restricted nods and often than not when she catches you staring, she tilts her head a bit, almost bowing hands apart.
She writes love letters to you in infectious dimpled smiles and you imprint them each in your memory.
But still it’s not enough.
You half listen to the conversations of your colleagues, always one foot out. The outside grows impeccably darker as midnight darkness sinks into the Christmas afternoon bliss.
You are sipping along the edges of your eggnog, Harper and Monroe sitting by you when you someone sits in the empty seat beside you.
It’s not until you hear that cemented husky voice order buttered rum, you know it’s her. You feel that feathery brush of your shoulders swatting against her.
“Hello, Clarke.” She says smiling cheekily lulling in your sky blues.
And you don’t conceal giddiness either.
“Hi, Lexa.”
It’s not until some moments later, there’s awkward coughing from behind you and reality slips in.
Her eyes flick from yours to your fellow doctors, who you are pretty sure, are gawking holes behind your head.
“Good Evening, ladies.” Charm oozes out like second skin to her.
And introductions are made.
They leave shortly after, saying not so subtlety how the uphill of romanticism in the Christmas evening was clogging their airways, but not before a playfully squeezing your shoulder, not before Monroe pulling you by the ear and wording you how she couldn’t wait for Raven to flip her shit when she hears about this.
“They are quite the specimen.” Lexa deduces after their dismissal earing a hearty laugh from you. Too long, too free.
You want to blame it on the caffeine you have in taken in your system but everything about her makes you feel addicted even more.
“I hear there will be fireworks soon.” she nods mostly to herself even though her words are directed at you. “We could have dinner afterwards?” She asks you.
You stammer. “What?”
“I wanted to join you for lunch, and since I couldn’t I thought why not dinner unless ..?” She takes your silence for your hesitance.
“No, I would love too.”
In open eyes you wonder what would have happened if you had moved a few inches up and kissed her.
In open eyes she wonders why you haven’t moved a few inches up and kissed her.
The skies burst in hordes of stars in multitude of colours and you watch avalanche break lines in between the northern lights.
Euphoric, it was.
She cloaks you from behind, hands stuffed tightly in her jeans you feel the tinge of her sharped chin brushing agonizing against your shoulders, but still there’s this infinitesimal gap between you.
You take a step back. The gap vanishes in thin air but the swirl of heat flushing your skin at the meagre touch of your back with her front.
She takes a sharp intake of air.
She doesn’t move but her eyes tenderly shift between you and that chain of yours, like you have seen her doing a million times.
You know she won’t ask because she respects the bridge between the two of you, the bridge that you want to burn down.
“It’s Dad’s. Mom didn’t know what to do with it so I took it. It’s like carrying a piece of his heart wherever I go.”
“I have tattoos.” She says. “for the ones I have loved and lost.” You sigh a little too faster.
Underneath the fireworks and the jeers and cheers and clinks of beer glasses, you don’t hear her following words. She nods and you her warm air circumvent your earlobes shivering the blood down your veins. “Do you have a significant other, Clarke Griffin?”
You run her question again, pushing her gently by a few steps to a little secluded area.
“No I don’t.” you say. “I had one, Aden’s father.”
“You cared about him?”
Another rocket wheezes through the sky, before shattering into little diamonds again.
“I did until I didn’t. But he was a good father to Aden.” She eyes you curiously at the use of past tense. You say searching in your bygone memories, “He died before Aden was even 3, on my gurney in a hit and run case.”
Finn Collins, was the guy who swept you off your feet in sweet nothings. The lover whom you loved so much that you had fought your own mother. The man who gave you, your greatest gift, Aden Griffin. The cheater who betrayed you to the bed off another. The coward who shied away from his responsibilities. And that someone who died in your hands in the gurney in a drunk hit and run case, you name holding still on his bloodied lips.
When you still shiver in your warm clothes, she wraps the big overcoat around you, imbibing you in her warmth.
Her hands still stuffed in her coat pockets.
Dinner ends far too fast but your talks doesn’t.
She talks about poetry, soccer and documentaries.
You talk about painting, beer pong and guitar strings.
You both talk about everything and nothing simultaneously, and often than not let meaningless smiles fill in the small gaps in-between.
You fiddle with the US emblem of her jacket strings and Lexa preys on you in blemishing seemingly warm eyes.
She pulls a solitary strand of your place and just lifts up your chin. This time, it’s you preying her in black tint.
You don’t know who started the kiss.
But, the kiss was a rebellion against elements.
You didn’t care if the cold soaked through to numb your skin. She smilingly kisses the remnants of eggnog off your lips sweeping you hair aside to nibble your ears. When you both finally pull back, her face was like every fantasy you ever had about anyone, every moment when you had wished to be enough to someone and now you are.
You tug your hair back behind your ears still reeling from the aftermaths of the kiss.
Her black eyes eye your flushed movements. In a parched throat she finally says the last thing you had in mind. “I should go.”
You are crestfallen, because you want her nowhere else but by you. You barely get a chance to protest when she intervenes again, “but I would very much like to stay.”
And without another words, both of your mouths lash together. A sink to its hook.
Raunchy. Oh god. You think.
Lexa untucks the belt of your coat and you hurriedly unmask her furs over her shirt, both of your mouths tangling one upon the other, inhaling and exhaling into each other’s lungs.
It was feverish, the feeling was running tyrant signals through you.
The storm that wreaked havoc outside the contours of the small placidly warm room was nothing like the thunders plummeting inside you and her.
Lexa unlashes her swollen lips from the plump of your flesh only to breathe in the air that you had deprived her off. She runs her finger marks along the evened out surface of your face, each touch excruciating slow, lengthening them along your chapped lips to the tips of their folding, and stretching them apart with her fingers.
Auburn flames from the low burning fire dance in shadows across her green emeralds that burns deep encore into your light blues. Lexa churns you into ashes by her glance, her eyes steeling you in their enclosure leaving you no escape route.
She parts her mouth as if to say something but she doesn’t. Instead she closes the distances between you and her by planting a long chaste kiss at the corner of her lips again and again.
“I’ll respect it if you don’t want this but if later you say otherwise it will be humanly impossible for me to stop devouring you, Clarke of the Sky.” She mouths softly along thin lips. Your only answer is a languid kiss that you hope will fill in the words that won’t leave you alone.
She pushes you gently against the mattress, lazily kissing along your pale neckline, sucking and mottling the skin in between her teeth whilst her fingers runs devilishly well on the vast expanse over your crunched white blouse.
When your mouth runs dry Lexa swifts her tongue over to moisturize them again.
You pop awkwardly under her weight as she straddles your hips, muscles jeaned thighs tightening your legs under her domain. She palms her iron deft hands massaging your still clothed chest area, drawing circles and pinching your arousing peaked nipples.
You moan louder than ever that echoes in the uninhabited room, resounding back.
Your hands trembles as one of them snake up through Lexa’s flannel shirt cutting claws along every lines when Lexa unbuttons your blouse, licking and palming her tongue up and down the valley between your breasts.
Perfect breasts, as Lexa whispers velvety.
The other one of your hand squeezes the perfect round of her ass over the tight fitness of her jeans. Lexa hums loudly in approval into you, tongue mottling and imprinting the surface of your own when your thigh connects with the tint wetness that surfaces between Lexa’s legs.
You press your thigh harder, and Lexa bites her lips ever harder to control the eruption of an earth shattering moan that ignites the live wire in you. Lexa moves synchronously, humping on your thigh, wide mane tasselled and unsettled and you can see the control of her slipping out.
And it drives you insane. And wetter. Oh so wetter.
You drive your cool fingers manically into her hair, pulling her close and sucking skin along her ear lobe while she grinds on your thigh, creamy wetness rubbing constantly.
“Oh god … Fuck … Oh god ..” She pants as you suck denser into her pulse point purplish skin brimming out, both of your hands now grasping tightly onto Lexa’s arse as you move in harmonic beats with her gracefully messy movements.
“Fuck, Clarke .. I’m near, so near.. faster.” She shrieks into your lobes, her movements fastening against her shrouded wetness.
“Oh God .. I’m coming.” Her screams weren’t at all light, they dotingly loud, ravishingly beautiful. All flustered skin and part breathe engorges your insides into a raging madness for more. More.
No sooner Lexa’s out of her post cum haze, one look of her tarred eyes let you know that she isn’t far off either.
Her gaze is predatory.
“Strip, Clarke.” She says. Within the time span of an eyelash, she’s stands before you in a black bra and equally muscle clenching shorts. Under the burning flames, her sculptured bod standstills time for you.
She’s the ultimate definition of perfection.
The bulgingly shaped packed muscle of her stomach and those never ending legs bereft you of words. The knotted flexed muscles of her arms painted in black hues of tribal tattoos swirling up and against her skin like a black waters had you hooked on like a drug addict.
A soft glow enunciates in her eyes. You run your fingers over the coloured skin enamoured by the scribbles of war peace plastered against the scars.
For the ones you loved and lost, she had told you.
She bends down and folds her tongue coyly tying with your tongued mouth.
“Fuck Lexa.” You exhales. “You are so beautiful.” You runs along the shivering lines upon her skin. “You are the prettiest I have ever seen, will ever see.” You hush out, kissing tangently the marks along her spine and up and down her waist line.
“But I’m not this …” You flicker you almost doubted eyes away from Lexa’s questioning ones, retreating back from her soothing warmness.
“I’m 32… You know I have a son, right? He’s my heartbeat, the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But pregnancy hasn’t exactly been wise to my body. I have stretch marks, I barely have time to work out, I’m not this …. “ You airily gesture at Lexa who silences you with a searing kiss, curling her hands into your mane, wetting your cold lips and totally ruining your panties. Lexa unbuttons your blouse wholly and tucks it overhead. She toys with the buttons of your pants, before pulling you out from their bindings as well. Lexa hovers over your, unclasping the hooks of your white laced bra and letting it fall unruly on the ground.
And she stares at you.
No. Lexa’s not staring.
Lexa stands admiring you.
“Miracles leave marks, Clarke. Never ever be ashamed of them.” She peels your arms that you had held onto to protect your naked chest from view. Lexa’s eyes evokes transparent hunger, watching full breasts of yours bounce down in their stance to rest against your throbbing ribs.
You feels Lexa frost hands encircle around your curvy waist, tightening a touch, pulling you closer.
“Unhook me.” She whispers and you do just that hypnotically. The clippings of Lexa’s bra open and you slide them off her shoulder blades. This time when she pushes you close, there’s no space even for darkness to pass. Perky taunt breasts of Lexa’s gets pressed against the pebbled ones of your, torsos of both of them brush hefty against your respective fabric with bare ones.
“You take my breathe away, you are that beautiful and I would love nothing more than to show you that, if you let me.”
They were meagre words but they were spoken by her. The verity behind them spoke louder than a crowd. You have never felt so vigorously powerful.
Lexa bends down her head and magnetizes her attention on the lump of perfect flesh that are out for display. Your nipples crook steeper under her daunting allured eyes and you are sure they couldn’t be erect now when Lexa started nipping her areola. She brush two of her thumbs against your nipples, pounding the flesh as she kisses you.
You moan when Lexa pulls them outward, and you jerk your hips forward for more friction when she has bended and taken out of the protruding pink ones in her mouth. You feel teeth grease against one, Lexa didn’t derive another of attention either.
Moisture starts to sip amidst the folds of you insides and you are pretty sure she felt it too.
“Please … please .. please.. ” You beg against her lips breathlessly, but all Lexa did was look at you in between breathes. She doesn’t say anything, except she attacks your erect astute nipples again, replacing her grinding hips with her thigh.
“You are so wet” she gasps, thigh pressing with even more vigor into your unholy hole. She bend over the mattress, hovering against your ruddy face before seizing your swollen lips again. You’re flustered beyond the infinity, and when you grinding gains momentum Lexa had coyly retreats them.
You groan at the malignant loss but momentarily it’s replaced by her hands who had welcomingly trespassed through underneath the silk fabric of your panty, circling you more innate part with lavish laziness.
Your hips bolt around her teasing circles, you want to complain but sinisterly they are ebbing lost in Lexa’s swallows.
You feel her smirking against your cheeks.
She’s teasing you.
Your, playfully too, lazed hands find passage to her small firmed off tanned breasts that set benignly well in your palms. This time it’s you who thumbs and pulls the bulbed out nipples, palming them roughly against her flesh and her moans made you even more close to your breaking point. You pull Lexa up against you mouthing each baby pink them till they were red around the corners, biting the ripening sweetness of tanned skin.
She groans in frustration as you continue your ministrations. Stop teasing me. Burnt evergreen speaks out.
“Then stop teasing me and fuck me.” You bellowed.
“Since you asked nicely.” Comes a lost reply.
Her body slithers down along yours, mapping along the necklines and before you can relent out, and you feel a long slender finger slide past into your tightened vaginal hole.
Your hips arch out.
“So tight. You are so fucking tight.”
Your eyes are shut but you feel your muscles stretch when Lexa adds another lithe fingers into your wet folding.
“I’m gonna cum, Lex” You bite out to Lexa’s “Not yet.”, when two fingers glistened out in white glory, strolling up and down your clit.
You moan aloud, biting your lips ever ardently in utter ectasia clasping tightly onto brown scalp when Lexa injects a third one in without a warning.
“Look at me.” She husks out and you open your drooping eyes to meet hers. “Scream for me. Scream, Clarke. I want to hear, scream my name.”
And you do. You scream when three relinquished fingers pump out of you only to rush inside and curl them around the swollen balls of sticky wetness, making your river break out.
But Lexa has yet to let go. You brush off sweat clingy brunette strands up her forehead as you look at her ravishingly riding you out.
“Fuck, Lexa, fuck.”
You scream, rolling your hips when Lexa rips out her panty and tongued generously slowly in and around your bud, your clitoris.
“Oh my god, oh my god.”
You didn’t think you could have screamed any louder when she had pulled out her fingers and replaced them with her long tongue which went deeper into your hole making you roll her eyes back into oblivion. Lexa was buried nose deep in her, a singular thumb pressing against your clitoris whilst the other held tightly around her legs to stops you from clenching the muscles.
“Fuck. I’m near, I’m near … Lexa.” You chorus out curses. “I’m gonna cum, I’m gonna cum ..”
You rock your body against her for another penetration, she rocked in equal opposition. Tongue and fingers of hers mapping out your smallest kinkiness, bringing forth a tightening preparation, like a river building behind the dam.
When the curling of her tongue crossed all barriers, the unsettling river broke free for a third time with her face still plastered against the blonde most intimate parts. Sticky rivulet of immeasurable pleasure rolls you over, Lexa licking you out clean.
“Fuck, you are so pretty, Lexa.” You had cried out blushed, aching backward onto the mattress, not alone, but pulling along Lexa’s weight with her.
“I want taste you.” You declare aroused and didn’t bother waiting for Lexa’s answer. You just push yourself higher and fused your lips together again, and in that instant of post heavenly bliss you both are molten lead.
One together.
You kiss her forehead.
Her nose.
Her eyelids.
Her cheeks.
Her lips.
She tasted like you. Everywhere.
“You taste divine.” In half lidded eyes Lexa says, slumping her body all over yours and you accept her in open arms.
You in dreamy tentative steps trace the footmarks of inks against the back of her skin up to the dimples in her back at the bottom of her spine. You pause over an uncoordinated flesh of skin just down at the back of hips, tracing them slowly. It seemed brutal and you didn’t know how to ask about it. Out aloud at least, but Lexa heard you nonetheless.
“Iraq, 2008. Got knifed. Hostage rescue mission gone askew.”
You then fingered the stitch on her right arm.
“It was a through and through, in Afghanistan, 2012. The terrorist, he first shot it then broke it.” Your breathed shallowed. Lexa turned over and thumbed at your lips. “It was a good day though. We saved a lot of lives that day.”
Your unwilling eyes fall on the one that had somehow eluded her previously. A small gaping stitched hole just at the center of her chest. In cold wistful eyes, you traced it out too.
“Afghanistan, 2015. I was unarmed and got shot by an Afghans saving one of the locales. A 14 year old girl.” Lexa shrugged but tears still welled.
“Hey, I’m alive. See?” Lexa takes your hands and places them against the lingering warmth of her fastening heartbeat, brushing off any unwanted waters off you. “I’m alive. I’m here with you.”
“I know. It’s gets harder losing someone you care about each day.”
“I know.”
“I want to make care of you too.” Words slip before you can catch them, shocking you but in the darkness of the chambers Lexa shifts closer to you, her floating fuzzy smile took away the weight of the said words.
“I’m not going anywhere.” She grabs you by your waist, wrapping her arms around you. Seconds later, her breathes evens out, chest pumping out air slowly. Her heartbeat is gentle and posed, rhythmic.
You fall asleep drawing constellations of the Milky Way on her skin and to the melody of her symphonic heart.
It’s around 7am when you wake up to a cold bed and an even colder self. There’s no sign of another someone, not even a single piece of cloth lying anywhere, to give you empty assurance that she was here. It’s just you wrapped without a stitch of clothing under the wraps.
You don’t know why the surroundings of yours become a tab bit too blurry, not until you feel the unwitting moisture in your eyes.
You don’t hear a faint knock and a turn of the knob when she enters like a silhouette whisking in the dimness towards you.
“Hey, you are awake.” She seats on the side of the bed placing the plate four cups of different morning drinks and pancakes on the bed. She munches on her donut. “I didn’t know what you drink, so I grabbed anything you would want.”
She kisses you in dough sweetness, your bluing lips finally finding its solace. She feels the wetness of your cheeks cling to hers.
You close your eyes licking in the proceeding taste of hers. “I thought you left.”
She answers in leaving tingling kisses on all over your face, nibbling at your bottom lips. When you open your eyes, you see the fuzzy warmness in her eyes that slips from her skin and into your bones.
You push the plate up to the table before seizing her face again. You sketch parallel lines on her cheeks, the fringe of your nose touching hers.
The plane leaves at 2 in the afternoon, her words drown in your I want to take care of you now.
Love isn’t weakness. You assert breathlessly, planting wet kisses her sharpened jawline somewhere in between.
It is. She rebukes your statement, biting against the crook of your collarbone. But what’s life without it?
You lie with your head nuzzled on her chest, tips of your fingers moving brushing and webbing against hers.
“I have a big house up by the beach with too many empty bedrooms and a big backyard. Mom’s gone, dad’s dead. I have no one to come home and when I do, I don’t have a reason to stay.”
The war zones back there doesn’t make me feel alone, she says not so loud, I’m looking for a reason to stay.
But you hear her clearer than daylight.
You stand at the terminal, and she stands beside you, boarding pass in your hands.
The lines shorten in front of you and all you think is how you’ll be going your other way. From her.
But then she holds your wrist, kisses your white knuckles. “See you on the other side?” she asks, but the vulnerability lurking beside her eyes is undeniable.
“See you on the other side.” You parrot back, the paleness in your finds colour again. But still, you manage to steal a pen from one of those baldy nearby officers, scribbling your phone number on her milky skin, much to their scowl.
Just in case, you whisper, pressing a final kiss around her corners.
Until next time.
When you part at the cab stand, when she murmurs a may we meet again against the thudding of your heart, you think that all love stories can’t be this benevolent. This easy.
When you fall asleep to her snores miles across from each other on the phone, in the morning you think maybe yesterday was just another midsummer’s night dream because none of your wishes you have ever hung up on those shooting stars have ever came true. They have always came crashing down.
And when you call her to invite her over to your small New Year’s Eve party, you’ll think that surely enough this is the time when the other shoe falls on the ground.
Because Aden’s has the sugar rush of the century.
Because the first time you are gonna meet you, you are already pushing her to a mad house of your family and friends.
Because the stuffed turkey you had put in the oven churns in flames.
Because in between your son and a time stealing job, you forget to even buy her a decent gift.
And last but not the least, because you get called to a last minute trauma emergency.
(Because honestly, Clarke, you say to your mirror self, what the fuck were you thinking?)
But here she stands at the threshold, her face hidden by a huge bouquet and a little too many gifts.
When you say, I’m such a mess a few feet away from her, she tilts her head to her left, and says heartily, So? I’m a disaster myself and then she hugs you.
And your world looks a little less bleak.
When you are hurrying home that day from the hospital, you bite your lips on how will your son take up the presence of someone new in your life but when you reach home, little legs follows you already, a little apron cloaking his chest and all he says in big doe eyes, Leksa this …. And Leksa that ….
And small sentences, that whirlwind you over,
She’s so cool, I think we should keep her.
And honestly, you definitely want to keep her too.
Your mom however sidetracks her frazzling out, “You are not just her friend.” She accuses, stern eyes singly targeted on green ones. “She’s my daughter.”
Lexa holds her gaze unwavering. “I care about her.”
Abby doesn’t bend, “She’s the only family I have left, don’t you dare hurt her.”
Still Lexa holds her gaze. “I care about her, Dr. Griffin.” Abby back-steps when you enter the kitchen, her eyes still seeking out Lexa.
Oddly enough she isn’t that bad at bending with your friends, you suppose, and least of all with your mother who somewhat softens but yeah maybe it could have gone a little teeny bit better (as per her.)
She doesn’t mind in the least because they care about you though her occasional scowls and too long pouts says otherwise and you laugh, after all she did splendid on her first time.
And when the countdown begins to New Year’s, she encompasses you with her gravity and you never want to let go.
And when it stops to a steel zero, under the scrutinizing eyes of your mother and friends, she kisses you on your lips not caring for anyone, and as the stars stands witness she writes forever on you.
“Go get it, Griffin.” Screams your best friend, Raven only to be poked into silence by your mom.
She’s a prayer on your lips.
“Thank God you came along.” You kiss her soundly.