Tattoos, body chains, and dark lipstick.
Ina and Amé are two women who rewrite the game.
Follow them into their never ending world.
Written by Ina Seele and Amé Fengári
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She held the blanket up in one hand, and the phone on another. She didn't blink, nor move, as if the moment she allowed herself to exhale, her whole world would fall apart.
"What's wrong?" The man-boy asked, sitting up to kiss her shoulder.
"She–" but the words couldn't escape her flushed lips. They couldn't say a word, for she was terrified, and scared, as she stared at the date of the last message.
Yesterday at 7 pm.
Ina hadn't texted throughout the night or morning. That has only happened once, the night she met Jake and they went to a motel with no reception. But this was different. They were in a city, a city that never sleeps.
She pushed the blanket aside and looked at her arm, at the promise sketched in her skin. This was no matching tattoo, this ran deeper than identical symbols, it was a cypher, a code, a rule: one for another.
There is no Amé without her, vice versa, and Amé lost her. They're each other's responsibilities and she lost her. For a boy who didn't even know how to put on a condom. And she groaned in annoyance because Ina would never leave with a man until she was sure Amé was safe. She was the mature, responsible, motherly one– Amé was just focused.
"She hasn't texted me," Amé spoked. "I need you to get out."
"She'll be fine," he laughed, but with a cold, hard stare directed at him, he shut his mouth and locked his jaw.
"Ina would never–" she shook her head. "Something is wrong." Amé called, but her phone wasn't even on because messages weren't delivering and it went straight to voicemail. "Something is wrong," and her bottom lip quivered, putting her arms around her naked torso, she felt nauseous.
"Amé, Ina is known to be smart and calculative, she's going to be fine."
Amé swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded. She trusted her older sister. "I still need you to get out."
The boy nodded and gathering his shirt and shoes, then left the room. Amé waited with her arms crossed by the time he returned to get his forgotten pants, and left again with a grateful nod.
"By the way, best night of my li–"
"Out."
She trusted Ina, but she didn't trust the world out there, for a girl too kind and small. With one last stare at the phases of the moon and intergalactic stars wrapped around her arm like a second skin, she went into the bathroom to get ready.
–
"I've not seen her," the man said, his eyes doing little shifts to his hands, working on wiping the same glass he's wiped for the past five minutes.
"You lie," and Amé spoke with the anger of a thousand men. She gripped her glass to the point where her hands paled, and her breath hissed. "You lie because, because there's no way you did not see her. Any man, any human, they'd see her a thousand miles away, and never forget that face so you tell me now, what did you see after I left?"
