Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
===
The red dress is on the floor. The red bow is half-untied, just barely holding back her hair. Her red lipstick is smeared. Her red fingernails are digging into his shoulders. The angry red marks trailing across his shoulder blades are wet with sweat.
"You can't keep doing this!" Katarina yelled. A glass smashed against the wall. Minako flinched. "Do you know how old he is? He's a man, Minako! You're a girl!"
"I'm not a girl!" Minako threw out her arms. "I chase monsters down the street. I kill the men and women I can't transform back! I'm searching for a princess from another world! No girl does any of those things!"
The reality of the London summer is a humid, sweaty one, and Minako hitches her legs higher on Alan's slender waist, watching the sweat bead down his forehead and drip, drip, drip onto her breasts. The mattress groans and squeals as he leans over her, a steady rhythm as he slides in and out, again and again. The motion is almost repetitive and soothing, like a long boat ride, only it's accompanied with a tickle in her stomach and a pressure in her quivering muscles. She gasps as he shifts and a particularly strong spark of pleasure shoots red-hot through her body; then he shifts again, and it's gone.
"Legally, yes, you are. You're thirteen years old!"
"I'm a thousand years old trapped in a thirteen-year-old body, Katarina! And he sees that!"
"He sees a young, naked body. It's a step above child pornography, Minako!"
"Dammit, doll," he mutters in her ear. The curtains snap in the hot wind that comes in through the windows and she whimpers when his angle shifts one last time and it's a near-constant rub against her clitoris, every motion making her thighs shake and deepest muscles twitch. He feels it and groans, his head lowering. She hears his pants in her ear and closes her eyes. It'll be seconds for her, a minute or two for him, and then, perhaps, they can find a fan. She's so hot. She wonders if this is what suffocation feels like. Heat, from head to toe.
Minako stared at Katarina for a long moment and then looked away. "It's not like that," she finally whispered, looking at the glass shards on the tile kitchen floor.
"It's rape," Katarina told her quietly.
"You can't rape the willing."
When she cries Alan's name and comes, the only thing Minako can think of, strange as it is, is the day they stood together on the bridge above the river - Katarina, Alan, and herself, always last in her mind's eye - and watched a red-painted child's toy boat bob and bump along the current.
"We should save it!" Minako yelled, pointing eagerly at the toy.
Alan chuckled. "It's lost, doll."
"It belongs to someone. A child loved that boat!"
"Minako..." Katarina shook her head.
"Only a child knows a child," Alan teased.
Minako wrinkled her nose. "I'm not a child."
No. She leaned back against the pillows and let the aftershocks run up and down her veins.
She was no child.
