Story: Le Fil Rouge du Destin (chapter 4)

Authors: bleeding.blade

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Chapter 4

Yuumura Kirika sat at the kitchen table of the apartment she and Mireille shared, and allowed herself a moment of peace while the blond Corsican bathed. The impact of seeing Mireille again at the airport after twelve long months had knocked the breath out of her - all the old longing, affection, love and desire coming back a hundred-fold. All the traveling had made Mireille thinner, had bleached her hair a shade of gold lighter so that her sapphire blue eyes appeared all the more haunting and piercing. Kirika had wanted nothing more than to throw herself into those slender arms.

Only that would have unnerved Mireille, and Kirika had no desire to exacerbate what she already knew would be an awkward reunion. After all, so much time had passed and who knew just how much the both of them had changed and grown apart?

Still, despite all the time elapsed, Kirika acutely remembered the agonizing pain that had lanced through her chest when Mireille had suggested their year apart. In so many ways, it had hurt more than the gunshot to her abdomen. But because it was Mireille who was asking - Mireille whom Kirika only desperately wanted to make happy - she had kept her features neutral and said yes, while a million "whys?" ran through her mind.

She didn't doubt though that the older woman cared for her, didn't think for a moment that perhaps Mireille was angry and wanted to punish her. She tacitly assumed that whatever reasons Mireille had for instigating their separation, she was doing it out of a belief that it would further their common good. Never mind if those reasons were incomprehensible to Kirika.

But she was determined to go along with the plan for Mireille's sake, and to make as much of the experience as she possibly could.

And she had learned - much. It was an education she largely owed to one woman, a prodigy of a professor at the university named Renée Deschamps. Kirika had been puzzled at first by the older woman's generous attentions, but it had not taken her long to divine the reasons why. She had done her best, short of rejecting the woman outright, to discourage Renée, but was met by a most implacable persistence. Eventually, Kirika simply gave up. Beyond the fact that she desperately wanted to learn everything that Renée could teach her about "normal" life, it was simply impossible to resist the Frenchwoman's amorous charms.

But of all the things that Renée taught her, it was the realm of interpersonal relations that intrigued Kirika most. Most of her life, all she had known of people were the vagaries that made them vulnerable to death. All the rest of it, all the behaviors relating to life and love were revelations to her. It was from this time that she finally found names and concepts for what she felt for Mireille, and discovered through art and film how these feelings were endlessly and variously expressed. The first time she had seen a man make love to a woman onscreen, she had been appalled. What if somewhere in the world, some man was doing the exact same thing to Mireille? The constriction in her throat, the blurring of her eyes had made her leave the theater, the ache of jealousy and uncertainty keeping her in agony for days, while Renée had puzzled over what exactly had upset her so much.

And later on, when Renée had introduced her to films of women making love to women, she finally understood for the first time the liquid fire in her body on the nights when Mireille accidentally brushed against her in bed, or the mornings when she would catch glimpses of Mireille's naked figure through the bathroom door. 

She had no idea if Mireille felt that way about her, but for the first time, she discovered a subject matter that exercised her more than French landscapes. She spent days and nights and all her free time endlessly creating and recreating Mireille's form in erotic sketches, penciling the long blond hair fanning lustrously across a pillow, the regal spine arched across a bed, or the sensuous lips moistened by some unnamed dew. Inevitably her sketching would end in an agony of trembling desire, her hands clutching the sheets, her heart and soul desperately wishing that she could see the form as she saw them, but as something infinitely more substantial than paper.

What kept her sane during this long and difficult time was her optimism that, aided by her newfound knowledge and understanding of the world, she could woo Mireille upon her return, do it with the surety and finesse that her first trembling love letter had never possessed, and convince Mireille that they should never be parted, that they belonged together, in all the senses that belongingness meant.

And in her single-minded focus on this goal, she failed to appreciate the fact of her own growth - failed to realize that her suddenly active aspirations for the woman she loved signaled a newfound confidence and a newly discovered initiative. For the first time in her life, Kirika found that there were other objectives besides someone's annihilation that she could devote her considerable intelligence too. But although it wasn't death that she was courting this time, the stakes felt just as high, if not higher. After all, what she risked by taking this path was losing Mireille altogether.

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