nullius creaturae expers

this isn't sex, i don't think, it's just extreme empathy

you're lighting a cigarette for frances and there's a cluster of moss just behind her ear, light green and soft, creeping up the tree with an odd grace. you're worried, momentarily, that she'll think you're being weird- but she seems just as uninterested in your face, her own dark eyes somewhere beyond you. through you. you're shaking out the match and thinking of lying down in the moss, becoming forever preserved in a peat bog somewhere. you've got a translation due by thursday, and it's tuesday, and you're tossing a match into the sprawling grass of frances's country house, resting atop the frost-stiff ground in all of your undoing. you're all ditching together, end-of-semester nerves and some strange static, all of you piled into heather's car so late into monday that it had already become tuesday, someone passing around the cigarettes, a solo cup from a shitty party still held in your cold hand.

(all of you except bunny; frances explains, as she's smoking and you're gazing at the moss, that marion -

-you've never met, but you've seen her before; bunny's girlfriend, five-foot-nothing, the two of them like butch-femme salt and pepper shakers-

- wants her studying for the end of term, and it's easy enough to believe were it not for the fluttery way frances says it, cushioned by the dragging on her cigarette, her aborted attempts at french inhales. you don't push it.)

'i'm getting ash on my coat,' she mutters, lip curling in that lazy, snobbish way she has.

charlotte moves to make room for her on the loveseat, the two of them in black and white like chess queens, frances's black tights with a run in the thigh, slices of her pale skin visible when she folds herself into charlotte's edges, her skirt velvet and her jacket corduroy and her eyes shadowed purple-black when they close. she reaches, unseeing, into charlotte's hair and starts to unpin it, the two of them with their same shade of smudged lipstick and slept-in intimacy.

(you ache to see it.)

you wonder how at home you really are here, with your dresses in black-burgandy-wine, thrift store jackets and gold-plated earrings, the familiar skin-too-tight feeling of tucking a men's shirt into women's trousers and thinking of bunny's light tone when she told you about the raids, about hole in the wall bars and the three-article rule, the first spark of fear you'd ever seen in her hound-dog eyes. her rough hands fiddling with her drink and her untailored shirt, buttons on the wrong side, something half-joking about how folks do it in california. something jealous, almost, her and her close-cropped hair, you and your cheap finery. she'd paid for your meal and had a joke in her eyes the whole time.

you walk to the kitchen in your unmatched socks and borrowed bathrobe, your bra somewhere upstairs, your legs unshaven, and cameron and heather greet you over a half-played card game. cameron, at least, has the dignity to look like it's morning, his glasses low on his nose and his hair unwashed and hanging around his jaw.

(they were talking in something that wasn't greek and wasn't latin when you arrived, low and dark and strange, but they quieted when they heard you walk in and you don't know what that means. you're sure it's nothing.)

heather sets down her hand and cameron sighs. 'fuck you,' he murmurs, and you're surprised to see heather grin slightly; the wolfish, sharp-toothed smile she gives you when you're particularly clever.

she looks -

better than you do, which is something you wish you wouldn't notice -

she looks good, not like she's combed her hair or put on foundation but more like she's electric, glowing, something about her more alive than anyone else. her eyes are on fire.

'ramona,' she says, looking like a vegas gambler with her hand of cards and snake-eyes, 'are you familiar with the idea of a bacchanal?'

(cameron mutters, 'jesus christ,' and something in greek about best two out of three, to which heather only runs a hand through her hair and refocuses her gaze on you.)

(you are familiar, for the record, by-the-by- you're a goddamn greek scholar, and you're polishing off a teacup mimosa when heather finally skips the theatrics and asks you straight out, lights your cigarette and explains they've all been sneaking into the woods and getting high without you.)

you want to kiss her with your mouth orange-juice-sweet but she sips her coffee and looks too untouchable, formidable, like a statue. (though, if you tilt your head, you think you can see the antinous mondragone in her marble features, yourself the pseudo-hadrien kissing her with lips cherry red.)

she asks if you know how to tie a chiton and you laugh, out loud, because you're sure she's joking, and she isn't.