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aila took an indulgent sip of white rum and mint leaves, the ice clinking against her lips. This would be her third glass, enough for the languorous haze of alcoholic stupor to set in, causing her to drape her long lean legs across the small bar table.

Such a gesture did not go unnoticed by onlookers and she felt more than a few eyes become magnetised to the opulent display of her golden skin—a hue gifted to her by copious amounts of sun.

“You’re certainly no short of admirers this evening,” Lyra noted over the edge of her glass of sorrel. Malakia’s finest. Her skin, unlike Laila’s, had rebuffed the sun’s enriching rays to maintain its pristine pallor.

Laila crushed the leaves to a pulp with her cocktail stick, wiping her tongue along the crystallised flecks of sugar on her plump bow mouth. “Oh? I hadn’t noticed.”

“That’s certainly not like you.” Lyra set down her own glass and fiddled with her fingers. “Usually when an open buffet makes itself available you’re first in line for pickings.”

“I’m just not feeling that sort of appetite right now, Lyra,” Laila admitted, tilting her chair back onto its hindlegs. “I guess I’d rather let you have your pick of the lot uncontested.”

“How magnanimous!” Lyra exclaimed in mock amusement. “And quite out of character.”

“Oh, come now.” She tilted her chin to reveal violet eyes hidden beneath oversized sunglasses and downed the contents of her glass with a sharp exhale. “I rather would’ve thought you would be grateful for the lack of competition.”

“Implicit humble bragging aside, I happen to enjoy a little healthy competition on these trips of ours. After all, it is our holiday tradition.” Lyra gave one of Laila’s legs a playful nudge. “Come on. Sure I can’t tempt you? You did, after all, promise me fun and sun.”

“I remember.” Did she ever.

It had been the parting vow that had led them further south of the continent to the shores of the tropics—the furthest thing possible from any whiff of winter. Yet while Laila’s intent was to flee the cold it had never quite left her. And it was in her very bed she often felt the draft most of all.

“So, when are we going to talk about what’s really bothering you?” Lyra’s voice lured Laila out of her thoughts and back to the immediacy of Malakia’s molten air.

“Hm?” Laila enchanted a cocktail glass of nearby shrimp to dip into a sauce and levitate towards her waiting fingers.

“The stampeding elephant in the room?” Lyra continued to coax. “You haven’t said his name since we’ve landed here.”

Laila took a large bite of shrimp, the sour-sweet tang of the sauce suddenly ashen in her mouth. “I didn’t think you would’ve wanted to- to talk about it. You know. After. But if that’s what you need, Lyra, then—”

“I wasn’t talking about my uncle, Laila.” Lyra’s interjection was sharp as a dagger point. A pin in the cushion of a subject she had no desire to broach.

“Y-yes, of course,” Laila said, rushing to sip from her glass only to realise it’d become all ice. “I won’t bring him up again.”

“And yet, you knew precisely who I meant.”

Laila met Lyra’s gaze, the full accusatory righteousness of it, and knew she’d need a dozen more drinks if they were to finish this night without coming to blows.

“You have your subject to embargo, Lyra,” Laila said, gesturing for a server to approach them. “And I have mine. Let’s not sour what has the makings to be a pleasant evening, alright?”

The server arrived within moments of her summons. “Is everything to your liking, madame?”

The switch to princess performance triggered with immediate effect and she turned to him armed with her best and brightest smile. “Yes, everything is wonderful. It is only that I believe my guard and I will require something a little more… potent, for the evening. A bottle of your finest starshine, perhaps?”

“Starshine?” That certainly had Lyra’s brow raising, for the liquor was quite infamous for its intoxicating influence.

“Right away, madame,” the server granted, then scurried off to complete his task.

“What are you playing at, Laila?” Lyra asked once the server was out of earshot.

Laila turned the beacon of her smile to her guard next, though it had notably sharpened at the edges. “You wanted fun and sun, didn’t you? Well then, the fun is just getting started.”

In the end it took her three and a half bottles to relieve Laila of her senses.

With the first bottle she had loosened just enough to begin dancing on the tables. With the second came skinny-dipping on the exclusive stretch of azure sea occupied by their resort.

By the time she had reached her fourth Lyra had the good sense to make good on her guardianship duties, and promptly carried a severely drunk and soon to be quite regretful Laila back to the safety of her room.

Lyra nudged the door open with her back as she carried her princess across the threshold and gently laid her to rest upon her myriad of pillows.

Laila flopped onto the lace-edged silk with the limpness of a ragdoll, her arms raising with a catlike languor to shield her face from the light. “Mmph- too bright, too bright.”

“Yes, you’ll certainly be feeling that in the morning,” Lyra sighed, flipping the switch to the amaranthum lamps to darken the room. She unlaced Laila’s sandals and tugged the ribbon straps of her dress, stripping her of both. “The things you make me do for you.”

She shook her head in disapproval as she hooked the dress over the door of Laila’s wardrobe, but her tone stopped short of unkind.

She’d never had a temperament suited to caregiving, that had always been one of her uncler’s natural gifts. Lyra tried to imagine the tone of gentle disapprobation he might have taken with the scene unfolding between niece and charge and wondered, if perhaps, he might have handled tonight a sight better than she had.

She’d begun to wonder that a lot, recently.

Léandre always knew when the time called to be a calm stream to wear away the stone and the strong current to crash through it. But Lyra. Ah. Lyra approached conflict with the subtlety of a tidal wave and blundered through apologies with the same unceasing force.

Calmness was not a virtue that came easily.

Yet there was a tenderness that eased over her in seeing Laila so vulnerable, so undeniably in pain, that she couldn’t help but tug the silk sheets over her unclothed body and smooth them carefully over her shoulders before she turned to leave.

“Lyra…”

The soft slur of her name on Laila’s lips gave Lyra pause. She turned to see that Laila had risen from the pillows, hair mussed and sprouting wild spirals in every direction like yellow dandelions.

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

And though Lyra knew it was likely the result of Laila having drunk herself senseless, she’d be lying to herself if that didn’t make her swallow just a little bit harder.

“Get some rest,” she said, opening the door and closing it behind her. Though they both knew and understood the unspoken reciprocity implied beneath.

🎶 click to play scene track

Laila stretched out on the beach towel, lazy and feline. Above her, the palm trees lulled with a faint surrussus of the leaves, intermingled with the smoothly overlapping skirts of seafoam rolling in from the tide—a soft summer harmony.

Her back was painted gold from the wedges of sunlight that had squeezed their way through the palm’s green canopy, the leaves having formed a valiant shield to prevent her from experiencing the fullest extent of solar fury.

Though she was grateful for the buffer, something in her would always long for fierce climes and passionate temperatures. Thus her body angled towards the heat softening all the strength in her limbs—starting in surprise when instead she was met with the foreign bite of winter chill.

She moaned softly as the cube of ice eased its way along her spine, between the wings of her shoulder blades. Her back arched to the cold, strangely soothing in the mercurial heat.

Darius continued trailing the ice cube perched between his lips across the nape of Laila’s neck until it melted, culminating in a cool kiss pressed into the base of her skull.

“Does that feel nice?”

His voice was like silk along tile. Her stomach clenched in response to it. Though she had heard it in her dreams several times before now she didn’t think the sound of him would ever not hit her.

“Very nice.” She rolled over onto her side and into his waiting arms; the transition seamless. She nuzzled her chin against his bicep as his fingers grazed through her hair. “Why do I keep dreaming of you?”

Darius pulled back a curtain of curls to expose her shoulder to him, kissing it. “Because in the privacy of your own mind there is no longer any place to hide from what you truly feel. What you truly want.”

Laila swallowed thickly as she turned to look at him, drowning in the depthless blue of his stare. That was too much for her, she had to close her eyes. She took his hand in hers and brought it to rest on her cheek, hiding herself in it.

“I miss you,” she whispered meekly into his palm; a secret she couldn’t bear to admit to herself even now. “I tried so hard not to but I just can’t stop.”

“Then don’t,” he said, stroking his thumb down her cheek. “You never have to stop, Laila. I’ll be here for as long as you need me to be.”

She scoffed a bitter laugh. “You’re not even real.”

“I’m real enough.” He reached to tuck her hair behind her ear. “In all the ways that matter.”

She kept her eyes on his hand during the gesture before she inhaled, as if to do just that. Then slowly, she raised her eyes up to look at him. He was just as beautiful as she remembered, every angular plane of his face perfect. She reached out to trace his jawline, trailing her fingers up to his cheekbone’s sharp peak.

He reached up to cover her hand with his own, kiss the inside of her wrist. And that was enough to have her leaning forward to brush their lips together. Cautiously, at first, almost scared to rush it lest he vanish into the ether. But the moment their lips met in earnest it was all over for her.

She slung her arms around his neck to pull him closer, kissing him with all the pain and longing and desperation for touch she’d been mounting up inside her ever since he’d left. She made a timid sound as Darius enclosed his hand around the small of her back, fingers roving down the notches of her spine and curving the underside of her thigh before he tugged her swimming briefs down to her ankles.

She kicked them off to free herself, hooking one leg over his hip to draw him in. Closer. Though he could never be close enough; never be real enough. Not like this. But her loneliness had grown chronic and she was willing to take what she could.

Darius gripped beneath her knee to drape her leg over his, massaging the crook with his thumb, before his hand skirted upwards to slip between her thighs.

Laila cried out in relief the instant he touched her clit, not realising how badly she needed it until then. She kept grinding herself against the flat of his palm as his fingers leisurely explored the slick folds of inner skin.

“So eager,” he marvelled as he teased back and forth with his thumb, circling her entrance. “How long has it been since you’ve been touched like this?”

“Far too long,” she sighed, bringing him back in for a kiss as his fingers slipped inside her and crooked forth, soothing a much neglected ache.

Tangled in the silken sheets of her hotel bed, Laila had begun to overheat. Her skin was inflamed with the emissions of a radioactive fever, little starbursts of white-hot energy dappling her constellated body. Celestial patterns struck their reflection along the ceiling—an enclosed cosmic vault of ever-shifting stars that danced alongside Laila’s writhing limbs.

She clutched the pillow between her legs with a sense of possession, thrashing vigorously against it to chase the release lurking so tantalisingly over the brink. So deep was her yearning and so intense the relief that the moment she crossed the threshold to victory, she experienced a violent expulsion of her astral body. It hovered long enough in suspension to watch the shuddering convulsions and pearlised sheen of sweat signalling the finale of her climax.

She floated back into herself during her awakening in the aftermath, the closing images of her dream dispersing into hazy flecks the moment she opened her eyes.

“No,” she whined in refusal as she squeezed her eyes shut, burrowing her face into the pillow as if this alone would coax her back into her slumbering state. But she was alone.

She had always been alone.

Her throat hiccuped with a sob as hot tears slid down her cheeks. She felt sated but empty, already plummeting from her pleasurable peak, leaving behind a body still touch-starved and a mind aswarm with the heavy smog of alcohol.