the opportunity that was hard to come by | a chilumi fanfiction

[4] funeral for two

Over the course of the next month, Lumine sank so deeply and wholly in denial.

The morning after the fateful hook-up at her apartment, Lumine woke up to kisses on her neck and hands pulling the covers away from her body, and thus began the real start of the friends with benefits arrangement that Childe had so brilliantly proposed. She had thought that she might have still been dreaming, but by the time that he had dragged her into the shower and, after getting her worked up all over again, dropped on his knees in front of her to really wake her up, she knew that none of it was a dream and that it was all, in fact, very real.

Not a day went by after that where she didn't question herself or what they were doing. They had agreed not to broadcast it to their friends to avoid potential lectures or drama, so she couldn't really ask anyone for advice or freak out to anyone about it like she desperately wanted to. Instead, all she could do was act as normal as possible on the outside while slowly and painfully dying on the inside. It was a balancing act that was doomed to fail, but she had a feeling that went for a lot of things those days.

The first week, they saw each other every single night. It was so new and so incredibly fun that they couldn't resist, and if the first night blew her mind, the rest of that week utterly obliterated it. Childe had the filthiest mouth she'd ever heard or even conceived as being possible outside of self-published Internet fiction, and he made it a point to push her to her limits and see what her body was capable of handling. As it turned out, it could handle a lot, and where before she had always been content with just managing to get there once, he liked to keep going and going and going until she was in tears and begging him to stop. She had never known that it was possible to lose one's mind that many consecutive times in one night, and yet the man responsible for it would simply grin and tell her that it had just taken her this long to find someone who knew what they were doing. She couldn't argue there.

After that first week, they both got a bit busier and the nightly routine became more of a twice, or thrice weekly thing. He usually came to her place, saying he preferred her bed although she didn't know how because it was too firm for her liking, but sometimes it was her who would show up at his door and wreck his bed. It wasn't those nights that stressed her out or made her want to rip out her own hair - usually- but group outings with their friends became a lot trickier.

The thing was, Childe had never shied away from touching her or acting anything but comfortable with her, ever since they had first become close friends. They were the kind of friends who would share drinks and dance at bars together without thinking anything of it - or at least Lumine tried not to think anything of it - and playful touches and tickles and even little humorous smacks were the norm. Everybody was used to it, so then when they ended up at a club with the others two weeks into their arrangement, Lumine knew that she needed to act completely normal even though now when Childe touched her, it felt anything but normal.

She sat there with her drink, dying inside as everyone carried on as they always did, including Childe as he sat next to her at their table. He'd elbow her and point out when a guy was checking her out, stretch out his arm on the back of her seat like he always did, steal her drink and down half of it while she protested - all completely normal things that were now almost unbearable since they had crossed a very significant line.

She expected Hutao, the resident know-it-all - as in literally knowing everything about everyone even when there was next to nothing to go on - to pick up on what was happening and immediately corner Lumine later to demand what was wrong with her. But maybe she was a better actress than she thought, because she even kept her cool when, three rounds in and in the midst of a vibrant tablewide conversation, Childe's hand slipped inconspicuously under the table and to her leg.