The Tomorrow Solution

The Tomorrow Solution_Part 5

Nira sprung from her bed and in two long strides reached her wooden dresser, plunging her hand into her undergarments, which she hadn't room to pack, until her fingers grazed the bottom. She rummaged around, searching for what she had buried and produced from the drawer a necklace made of exquisite white gold like thread and set with diamonds. Nira beckoned Iris, and Iris came to her, leaving the warm comfort of her roommate's bed with happy anxiety fluttering in her heart. Nira turned Iris around to face the vanity mirror and stood behind her; the space between them closed so that with a breath they were touching. Each time Nira's body retracted from Iris's, they shared a mutual sadness, and though Nira wasn't required to breathe, she indulged the habit just to be so near and to ache with a second's longing to be near again. She draped the jewelry around Iris's neck and fastened the clasp, and it fell down Iris's chest, the diamond pendant hanging between her breasts. Nira dropped her hands to her roommate's arms, to her hands at her side, and settling on her naked midriff.

"An old woman gave this to me when I first came to the city. She said it would make me lucky in love. I want you to have it." Nira kissed Iris's neck, and in the mirror, Iris's cheeks and chest flushed a rosy pink. Warmth spread through Nira's lips when she pressed her lips to Iris's skin and faded when she pulled her lips away. A delicate vanilla fragrance clung to Iris's skin, which Nira savoured with each unnecessary breath. "If I had the time, I'd take you to bed."

Iris slid from the frame of the mirror and reappeared over Nira's shoulder, seated on the edge of Nira's bed. "If you make the time, I'll let you."

When Nira turned to Iris, standing in front of her, Iris ran her hands up her roommate's long legs, slipping beneath Nira's shirt, her fingertips flirting with the edge of Nira's underwear. In a single fluid motion, Nira removed her shirt and discarded it onto the floor. With her hands on Nira's hips, Iris kissed the path of Nira's pelvis to where it met the waistband of her underwear, wrapping her arms around Nira to take greedy handfuls on Nira's cotton-clad buttocks, pulling Nira's body to her and opening her mouth to the soft skin as the robotic woman tanged her fingers in Iris's hair. The two women shed their inhibitions like clothing, departing the inhospitable cold-drenched solitude of reticence for the warmth of an embrace. For a single moment, stretched to an eternity within the ether of their memories, they were true and without pretense, unencumbered by fear or shame—serene in the honesty to which they found it impossible to express to anyone but each other, in the intrepid touch, the reckless surrender inherent in a kiss.

"Wait," Nira said, laying on her back, looking up at Iris from her bed, the beautiful fierce-eyed woman straddling her. "Aren't you afraid?"

"For the first time, I'm not. When I'm with you, Em, I can't stop smiling, and I know it's right." Iris's pyjama pants hung off her left foot, splintered moonlight cutting diagonally across her bare legs from between the Venetian blinds she'd lowered. Her tousled dark brown hair framed her face, fell down her shoulders and back.

"I killed someone. Doesn't that—"

"You'd never hurt me." Iris pinned Nira's hands above her blonde head with her fingers laced with Nira's, and leaning in and kissing Nira, Iris inhaled the strawberry scent, the lithe body beneath her arching up to press against her.

"You have no idea," Nira said when Iris took her lips away. "I have no right to be this happy."

"Take the right. Take whatever you want tonight."