distant sorrow

The photos land in the group chat.

Bus. Bench. The rolled-back eyes. The wrap open in a place that is clearly not a bedroom. Sandra sends them with the same unashamed energy she has been wearing all week. The volley that comes back is thinner than last time.

Not because the sisters do not find it hot. Not because they do not support it. Sadie still types jesus christ the public one. Maya still reacts to the picture of Sandra looking fucked-to-shit in daylight. Lila still tells her to hydrate. The heat is there. It is just sitting under something heavier.

The perverse pictures are forgotten in a flash.

Sandra is already typing with both thumbs, sitting on the hallway floor in the ruined wrap, your hand on her knee. You take the phone when she tilts it toward you and add your own line.

There is not much else you can do for them from this hallway. The chat goes quieter after that. Affection without a toolkit. Four people staring at a problem that does not care how much they care.

Sandra sets the phone down and leans into you, the exhibitionist high fully gone, replaced by the ordinary ache of watching friends hurt.

The grief of your friends puts a lid on her libido for once.

It is almost startling. The girl who tackled you over a leash hypothetical is quiet now, washed, dressed in one of your shirts again, and she picks a romance movie without a single filthy addendum. You drape into each other on the couch like the shape of it might travel—two people holding on as if love could help anyone remotely, Sadie and Maya and Lila included. The film is soft and a little silly. Neither of you is really watching the plot. You are watching the fact of being allowed to sit still.

Halfway through she speaks into your chest.

“Don’t you dare do that.”

You look down.

“Do what.”

“What he’s doing. Their brother. Taking the whole house on your back and calling it fine. If something happens—if we get the baby, if money gets ugly, if my parents lose it about the shed and the rest of it—you don’t get to be stupid and try to fix all of it by yourself so I’m not burdened.”
Her fingers twist in your shirt.
“I mean it. I didn’t wait my whole life to have you and then watch you go stale at a table.”

You try to promise.

The words come out. You both hear the lie in them. You would do the same. You do not want her burdened.
If you can take it on instead, some ugly loyal part of you will try. She knows that.
She has known you since you were small enough to share a juice box.

She makes you promise anyway.

She climbs up and kisses you, slow and sealing, and speaks it against your mouth.

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“You’re lying.”

“I know. I’m will still try to keep it.”

“keep what? being stuborn”

“No dummy, the promise”

She accepts that as the best version she is going to get tonight and settles back down, eyes wet, not from the movie. You look at this angelic demon you cannot say no to—the same face that screamed into a field three hours ago, now soft and warning you about the future like a wife already—and the joke slips out because the tenderness needs a crack or it will crack you.

“You’ve gotten so girly,”
you murmur into her hair.
“Ever since we’re together. Romance movies. cuddleing.Making me promise things with kisses. being cuteness incarnate. Who are you.”

The pout arrives on schedule.

Sandra’s head lifts. Her eyes narrow. The grief-lid does not break back into sex; it breaks into retaliation.

“Oh, you want to start a fight, mister?”

Her fingers find your ribs.

She knows every weak spot from years of being allowed to use them, and she uses them now, tickling with vicious precision while you try not to kick the remote off the couch. She is laughing. You are laughing. The movie keeps playing to an empty audience. For a few minutes the friends’ grey brother and the unkept promise and the three days left on the holiday all sit outside the joke, and there is only this: your girl, pouty and girly and deadly at close range, asking if you want to start a fight.

You do. You always do.

The tickling does not stay tickling.

It slides, the way most things do with her now, toward wanting more skin. Sandra tries to wriggle into the same shirt as you—one piece, two people, no room for breathing. It almost works until her breasts get in the way. There is simply not enough fabric and too much of her. She abandons the idea with a huff, gives up on the shirt, glueing herself to your side instead in a full bear hug, chest to your ribs, face tucked under your jaw.

The movie is still going. Neither of you could name a character.

After a while she asks it coy, voice small against your skin, the standard girlfriend debacle dressed up as curiosity.

“Would you love me less? If I got more girly. Or less. If I went back to being all elbows and no romance movies. Or if I went the other way and became… this. All the time.”

You do not step into the trap the way it is built.

You turn it before she can climb on top of the answer and be smug about having made you squirm.

“Sandra, I’d love you, even if you became a worm.”

Sandra goes still. Then she leans back just far enough to give you the look.
The look she gives you when you were not slick.
She knows you saw the follow-up coming—the but which do you prefer, the so you like the girly one better, the little courtroom she was preparing in her mouth—and you flattened the whole thing with a worm. No correct setting.
Just the stupid, total version of the feeling.

She is annoyed that it worked.

She kisses you anyway.

the kind that says fine, you win, I still like you. Her mouth is warm. Her body stays heavy against yours, breasts and all, the failed shirt experiment forgotten on your ribs. When she pulls back she flicks your forehead with one finger.

“A worm.”

“A very pretty worm.”

“You’re lucky I love you.”

“I know. Very fortunate.”

She settles again, bear hug restored, and mutters into your chest that she is keeping the girly for now and the elbows for later and the worm option is off the table.
You hold her through the rest of the credits you are not watching, having answered the question she wanted and the one she did not get to ask.

For those who asked:
this takes place in direct parallel to chapter 8 "The burden of the family" in the story "The Devilish Sisters and Their Breeding Bull"