Color Your World | Adult F/F Romance [COMPLETE]

Kieran 3

The problem of colors was manifold. Kieran had been squinting at them for such a long time and with such imagination that seeing them was akin to being blinded. Like staring at a dormant light bulb when somebody flipped the switch. When she saw the filling of her boysenbery tart turn from a medium-deep pinkish-grey to a sumptuous aubergine (Hex code #40080A; an over-ripe cherry before the bite), she had to close her eyes. The same as bleeding--as the body knows its own blood, the soul knows its own colors and Kieran had got them in her eyes.

God, help me.

She was in way over her head.

She had just gotten the hang of not being a colossal disaster, what was she meant to do with somebody else's heart? She stared at the bustling Manhattan street outside the café. So many people, each a combination of colors and patterns, all so alive. One of them was for her. She still found it hard to believe. I have a life a million lesbians would kill for. Her lonely, cautiously optimistic heart throbbed. How do I make a stranger love me? Can I? What if she never does?

Sonny brought her an extra sweet green tea frappe, chilled, just before Kieran's head came near to flying off from anxiety. She had her face in her hands until Sonny's hand came to rest on her shoulder. They'd been friends since Kieran had come to New York and she was never more grateful to have held on to her than she was today.

"How goes the grind, girly?"

"Shit," she replied succinctly. "How goes the lunch hour?"

"Shit as well. I'll bring you an egg and dill sandwich."

Kieran really didn't need another bite. She'd been mainlining sumptuous desserts all morning to sate her sweet tooth and distract her from Googling cheap flights to Knoxville, Tennessee. Mature women did not drop everything to fly across the country on the off chance a random woman they'd never had a full-length conversation with might not mind being her soulmate. Soul bonds were so much more complicated than bringing each other's colors to life. Romantic comedies made it seem simple. You touch someone, you talk to them in the elevator, share a cab, collide on the sidewalk and here's the rest of your life begun. Life wasn't that way. Sometimes you met a hundred people better suited to you than the one who makes the sun yellow in your sky; it was down to every person to choose to let that bond guide them or to throw it away. Kieran didn't know what she was going to do. So she did her usual: she drank her frappe like it was the last in existence. Marvelous as expected.

"Have I told you lately that I love you? Because I really, really do."

Sonny snorted. She got a hundred declarations of love a day; her deserts and frosty beverages were that good. "Don't let the missus hear you say that. You know she likes to scrap." Esme was from Queens and took no shit--unless it was coming from Sonny. She had a soft spot for her soulmate you could see from space.

"I could take her."

Kieran would be dead in minutes.

"In your dreams."

"And only there!" She slurped deep of mint green tea frappuccino (Hex #98ff98; like pea soup but less depressing). It was chilly, smooth, and sweet as she liked. "Thanks, Sonny. You're a star."

"The brightest of them and all, don't you forget it."

+_+

Kieran successfully put the future out of her mind to focus on revisions. Draft two was coming much clearer than the first. She was making more room for advice and anecdotes compared to her previous efforts, which were largely picture-oriented how-tos. She could do more than that nowadays.