Declan
The girl that he saw standing at his mothers front door was nothing like he'd expected. Her dark hair fell around the fair skin of her face and licked her cheekbones. Her eyes, which sought his in greeting, were disarming and unusual, grey within a deep blue circumference, and when she smiled at him they crinkled up in support of her mouth. For the next hour he sat with them all in the front room and he watched her charm everyone. She was all genuine, heartfelt warmth and good cheer, and it illuminated her. Even though she had just blown in from the street, with the cold still clinging to her, and the mist shining in her hair, she lit up his mothers front room and her warmth seeped into every corner.
She played subconsciously with her hair as she talked, twisting it up into a large claw clip, exposing her smooth white neck, emphasising the line of her jaw, before letting it spill out over her shoulders and lick at her cheeks again. She did this repeatedly, taming, releasing, taming, releasing. He made himself take his eyes off her. It was quite the effort for him to appear casual. Whilst sharing stories of her travels her eyes would land on him, the sun shone out of them, and he could not bare it in a room full of people. He realised with some disturbance that he wanted her to look at him alone. He was greedy for her attention.
So when she slipped out of the room, he followed at leisure and found her fiddling with the lock on the back door. She turned on that brilliant smile that he knew had convinced a hundred men to do her bidding.
"If you help me open this door I'll make it worth your while."
"What will you give me?"
"Anything you want," she laughed uncomfortably.
"I can't believe you are trying to escape already," he said dryly as he worked the lock.
And she laughed. It made him feel wonderful in a schoolboy kind of way. He had made her laugh.
They tumbled out into the back garden and she regarded him as she dug around in her handbag for her cigarettes. Finding one she lit up and leaned back against the wall, looking around. She was uncomfortable and he could have filled the silence with inane chatter about something. But the tension between them as they stood in the tiny rear yard was entrancing, electric, confronting, and so delicious that he didn't want it to end prematurely. Neither did she it would seem. She had swapped the happy chatter of the front room for something else entirely. He expected her to try to fill the quiet void and make everything easy and companionable, try to disarm his quiet mood, push him into a more relaxed congenial humour. Perhaps they would share a joke and she'd see him laugh. That would make her feel more at ease, and by rights he knew he should give that to her. Then the light in her eyes would shine on him again, and he would bathe in it. But that would come another time.
After a while she glanced sideways at him, looking up from under long lashes.
"So, what is it we are to each other," she half whispered. She had apparently decided that attack was her best form of defence.
"Hmmm... That all depends what you mean." He turned in to her conspiratorially and made a little corner of their bodies against the wall. Though the were not touching it was an intimate gesture. He could see the rise and fall of her breasts as she sucked in some deep breaths, and it excited him that this was the effect that his proximity had on her.
She needed something to distract her and so drew back on her cigarette.
"Can I have a puff," he asked, just to watch her hand, slightly trembling, move towards him through the small space between them. He took it gently, without making contact with her, and held it between his fingers.
"Well....," she really didn't want to have to say it, and now she turned to face him and the light from the window fell fully on her face. A little crease of disapproval had appeared between her eyebrows. "We are...related," she hissed secretively.
And there it was. Everything that had been said between them up to this point could have been an exchange between any two cousins. But now she had given voice to the undercurrent and she was looking for an early resolution, she wanted to know how it would end. So soon? He knew she was probably used to feeling powerful around men and here, in this situation, felt confused by the power shift. But he wasn't going to let her get out of it that easily. He knew what he had to do to keep her balanced on a knifes edge.
He drew back on the cigarette and used the opportunity to take in huge, delicious eye-fulls of her. Being obvious, making sure she was aware of his appreciative gaze. She was so well put together. He ran his eye languidly over those inviting curves, so well proportioned, hourglass. Skin so soft, yielding, young, flawless. The hollow of her throat. The sway of her back. Her stance. Her breasts. He felt like a predator. Even when he had been 25 (her age now) he had never met any girl like this. Which was a good thing because he wouldn't have known what the hell to do with her back then. But now, 10 years later he knew that she was something rare, and this night was something rare. They would never be the same people again and never feel quite the same as they did right in this moment. So tonight they should immerse themselves in it, entwine their lives and bodies and minds so completely that they wouldn't know where one stopped and the other began.
Scenarios of all her secret places that he would go, ran through his head in a giant mosaic. The sweep of her bottom to her thigh, looking up at the underside swell of her breasts, his thumb grazing across her nipple, his mouth on the side of her neck, her head thrown back in passion.
"So we are," he said giving nothing away with his words whilst his gaze painted a different picture for her all together.
Emma
She wanted him to take her. Right then and there in his mothers courtyard. She wanted to surrender herself to him and let him do anything he wanted to. If he had been anyone else, she would have cornered him, propositioned him. She wasn't shy. But this time she found that she was the prey rather than the hunter, and she was in fear. Fear of what he would do to her when he caught her, but an even greater fear than that. The fear that he would leave her, and not bother with her at all.
She believed that he still hadn't made up his mind. There were complications. They had never met before this night but they had both been raised on the same Irish Catholic Values, where guilt was a very large feature of the education system. Now, usually Catholic guilt only goes to improve fucking out of wedlock, making it that little bit more naughty. But cousins, uh uh, cousins, no matter how distant, were still family. And you just didn't fuck family did you! She wondered if this was adding to his allure. Was it the illicit nature of her feelings making her so wet between the legs that it was painfully erotic to move. He had to take her. He had to give it to her. So she did something that she loathe to do and laid her cards on the table. To try to secure the deal as it were.
So when he said, "So we are."
