Avatrice 1930s AU snippet
Easy, Beatrice thought, kissing Ava. Easy, she thought, tasting Ava’s faintly buttery lips. “Easy,” she said aloud, and ever so gently tugged Ava’s shirt up and out from where it had been tucked into her shorts. Her hands slid easily over Ava’s stomach; both of them were hot and damp with sweat from the humidity. The contact did not make Ava shiver, but rather it made her fall further into Beatrice and sigh.
In a move similar to the one she had done in the morning, Beatrice slipped her fingers between the waistband of Ava’s shorts and the skin of Ava’s stomach. Again, Ava felt the hard press of Beatrice’s ring against her flesh, except now it was warm from their shared body heat, when in the morning it had been startlingly cool.
“Easy,” Ava said back, and she smiled against Beatrice’s mouth.
The deep, verdant peace of the greenhouse was abruptly shattered by a voice yodelling through the greenery.
“Yoohoo!”
Beatrice and Ava, in their collective shock, leapt apart like two tightly wound springs.
Beatrice dodged the irises behind her by mere centimetres and only slightly clipped her ankle against the table. With that catastrophe avoided, she then promptly stumbled back into a hanging pot of dangling red hot cat’s tails, whose flopping tendrils slapped directly into her open mouth and made her cough.
Ava did not dodge the irises; she careened back-first into the plant pot behind her, making it rock dangerously on its plate and crumble dirt onto her shirt.
Someone was walking crisply, though cautiously, down the aisle towards them. Ava extracted herself from the plant pot, hastily brushing her shirt free of loose soil and tucking it back in her shorts. She had no time to check on Beatrice because just then Michael appeared, shouldering through the jungle of overhanging flora and smiling broadly.
As soon as she saw him, Ava relaxed her shoulders and practically wheezed out, “Michael. You scared me.” Though Ava realised, belatedly, that it really couldn’t have been anybody else; she didn’t know many people who actually said yoohoo with a serious face –well, apart from Michael, apparently.
“Did I?” Michael’s brows locked together as he gazed from Ava to Beatrice.
Ava had gotten over her shock significantly faster than Beatrice, and so she turned and began tugging at Beatrice’s sleeve to get her attention. “Bea,” she hissed.
“Yes? What?” Beatrice replied absently. She was in the middle of the arduous task of methodically picking little red bits of flower fluff off of her tongue and hadn’t quite noticed what was going on around her.
Ava shot Michael a quick apologetic smile that seemed to say, Oh, typical Beatrice. You know how she is, always grazing on the Acalyphas. Then she turned her back on him to collar Beatrice. “Michael,” she whispered savagely out of the very confines of her mouth, punctuating the two syllables with icy insinuation.
Beatirce’s eyes widened, and she peered over Ava’s shoulder to smile uneasily at Michael, who, entirely unperturbed, waved back at her with a winsome smile. Beatrice hastily spat out a few more bits of flower and moved to stand beside Ava rather than in front.
“Well!” Michael said. “Beatrice and Miss Silva! I’m glad I caught you both.”
Beatrice gulped down a final mouthful of cat's tails and turned a concerning shade of grey. “Caught?” she said waveringly. Her voice had taken on the tremulous quality of an innocent man receiving a guilty sentence.
“I heard noise coming from the greenhouse and noticed that the door was open. I thought the blasted foxes had gotten in again.” Michael, as oblivious and jocular as ever, was bouncing merrily on the balls of his feet, looking pleased to see them.
Beatrice, whose brief fit of terror at the thought of having been caught red-handed spooning behind the curtains had passed, cooled into irony, and she said, dryly, “Our mistake,” which Ava promptly elbowed her in the ribs for.
“Was there anything you needed me for?” Ava asked. “Something about my proposals?”
“Oh, yes,” Michael said, snapping his fingers. “I mean, no. I’ve come to invite you both for drinks this afternoon. We left off so strangely the other day. Besides, you two are jollier company than Koi fish.”
Beatrice blinked aggressively in Michael’s direction, but Ava, taking her to the side again, smiled lopsidedly and said under her breath, “Come on, Bea. Lets.”
Beatrice shot a few more hostile blinks at Michael before inclining her head and saying, “Five O'clock.”
Ava broke out into an irrepressibly glorious smile, and, forgetting herself (or rather, remembering herself and why she liked Beatrice such a tremendous amount), she bounced up and gave Beatrice a smacking kiss on the cheek.
Michael turned from where he had been inspecting a slightly crooked iris and clapped his hands. “Five O’clock,” he said. “Excellent. I’ll tell Gordon to set up the terrace.”
And so Beatrice was left gulping and blinking amidst the cat’s tails, trailing slack-jawed after Ava and Michael as the two of them discussed what cocktails they would mix.
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just to illustrate how the canadian healthcare system works, i have finally been given a date for my appointment with a geneticist. hooray! how long did that take? I was referred in early 2018. my appointment date is in december of 2023. i wouldn't start university for a year at that point. i'm now in the first year of my masters. good thing my suspected condition is, as far as we're aware, not life-threatening.
"but nastywizard," you might say, "wouldn't they prioritize people who have life-threatening conditions? isnt that why your referral took so long?" and to that id say boy i wish they did! could you imagine how many lives they'd save if they didn't run their system like the lottery for fucking. t*ylor sw*ft tickets? i can afford to wait. i'm not happy about it, but i'm still like, alive and relatively well. but i waited the same amount of time as someone with VEDS or SMA waits. anecdotal evidence suggests that my american friends, despite their draconian and life-threatening health care system, spend about a thousand dollars and a couple months to see a geneticist. can you imagine how much money i'd have saved on holding myself together if i didn't have to wait seventy months? or how many people would still be alive?
this is absolutely not an invitation to discuss with me the perils of the american healthcare system, of which we are all aware, or the joke that the canadian healthcare system is turning out to be. this is not the time to play compare and contrast with me, and i will ask you to be aware of the tone i'm trying to convey with this post. i'm very pleased to finally have this appointment. i just wish it didn't take an entire degree of my life to get. sure hope its worth it.
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