tozette-original

[tozette-original]

From chapter 5 of the Clara and Emily story

(this one's a tiny bit NSFW!)

--

In the soft light of the lamps, Clara looked even prettier than usual. The wine made her more relaxed and expressive, but her makeup was still picture-perfect, and the only real blemish was the smudging of her red lipstick over the inviting pout of her mouth.

Emily swallowed hard and looked down at where Clara's hand was resting over hers on the table, amid the demolished snacking plates. "I'll, um, keep that in mind," she said, feeling thick-tongued and a little slow. She did not gasp when Clara twined their fingers together, but it felt like a near thing. She had small, soft, dainty fingers, cool to the touch.

"I don't drink this much usually," Emily admitted, licking her lips. She was at once nervous and sort of sick and dizzy — I'm drunk — and very warm — her boobs look so soft — what is wrong with me, stop staring — and all together these feelings sloshed into an anxious soup deep in her belly. "Um…" Being tipsy just made her indecisive and stupid, too.

Clara extracted her fingers gently. Emily let them go without a fight.

"Come on, let's get you up to bed, then," said Clara in her soft voice, unfolding herself from the couch. "I'll clean up down here. It's my turn."

The stairs were narrow and their creaking path up into the darkness of the upper floors did look a little precarious. She wriggled her socked toes and reached for the banister.

"Lord. Let me help you up. I don't know what I'd tell your mother if you fell down the stairs too."

Like Clara's husband had fallen down the stairs, Emily supposed. She looked up at them and wondered if he had felt like this: just drunk enough that each step was a little bit of an adventure, looking at the narrow steps straight up into the darkness.

Clara's dainty hand settled on Emily's lower back as she guided her up. Her back felt absurdly sensitive there quite suddenly. She was so aware of Clara's warm hand on her back, sliding around her waist so she could snug her smaller body right in beneath Emily's arm. She smelled like woody perfume, expensive cosmetics and, faintly, of sweet wine.

Her hand grazed the edge of Emily's bra under her clothes, and with a twitch Emily felt her nipples bead up tightly in a completely unnecessary response.

She was drunk. No decorum.

"Sorry," she said slowly, although Clara could have no idea what she was apologising for. "I won't drink as much next time."

"It's quite all right. Come on, love, let's go."

She went. Clara guided her with her hand around her waist, and each step had Emily focusing quite hard on the stairs, less because of her drunkenness — which she doubted would have extended to falling, really — and more because of her crazy intense awareness of every brush of Clara's fingers.

The lights were out, but the sky outside was still clear enough that the moon shone brightly through all the windows of the house. Clara deposited Emily gently upon the guest bed and got her a glass of water. "Drink it now," she instructed, "and then I'll get you another for when you get up."

"Uh-huh," said Emily, who probably would have done anything she'd been asked, right then, with Clara looming above her in the dark. She drank, and then she starfished her body out dramatically upon the bed while Clara refilled the glass.

The ceiling above spun, just a little. Yeah, she'd had a bit too much to drink. Emily wondered if it was meant to be embarrassing, to be drunk on dessert wine. She closed her eyes against the gently rotating environment, although it didn't much help the sense that her body was moving without permission.

"Here." Click. The glass was full.

"Thanks."

"Is this yours? But it's so dusty," she heard Clara murmur, and then turned her head to see her peering at the skimpy little nightie hanging from the back of her door.

"Oh," said Emily. "No. It was behind the bed. I thought it was yours, but didn't know how to ask without, like, sexually harassing you."

Instead of provoking laughter, this response made Clara freeze.

Emily was already distracted, staring sleepily at Clara and contemplating the warm tension that had built like static between her thighs.

A bolder person would just ask, she thought. They'd be be rebuffed, and deal with rejection. She did not ask.

Instead Emily admired the still figure of her host in the nocturnal half-light of the moon through the window. Clara seemed to have all the charms any female figure could hope for: heavy, cushy breasts, round thighs, velvety-soft warm skin, and a face like a fine lady who'd already paid off the portraitist. Even her hair, spilling in loose curls and waves over her shoulder, seemed by nature blessed, thick and woollen in the moonlight.

" — Emily?"

She blinked. "Sorry, what?"

"Behind the bed?" Clara repeated.

"Oh, yeah, just on this side, right like… between the bedside table and the bed. It's not yours?"

"No." She sounded distant. "It's not."

"Oh, how… weird?"

"Very weird." And then Clara took it down from the back of the door anyway. "I'll leave you to sleep, darling."

Emily wished she wouldn't.

But since she was much too cowardly to hit on Clara, even with liquid courage burning in her belly, she said nothing about it. "Good night."

"Sleep well."

The door closed behind her with a click, and then only the faint smell of perfume lingered.

Emily listened the quick, confident steps of her retreat down the corridor outside the room. When Clara descended the stairs, one creaking step at a time, she rolled over and smooshed her face in the blanket and groaned.

Oh, what is it gonna hurt, she thought muzzily, and then slid her hand between her own damp thighs, and tried staunchly not to imagine her fingers were slimmer, softer, daintier.

[tozette-original]

My intentions for this blog are basically self-indulgent. It should contain:

Excerpts of original works (and if I ever post original works somewhere in full I'll certainly link that here)

Original writing-related thoughts I'm thinking about

Any original writing-related challenges and exercises I'm doing

Some pretty informal and low-key analyses of my own writing excerpts, and

Occasional world- and character-building posts.

A load of navel gazing, effectively, but all on the topic of original fiction and writing. It might contain occasional NSFW stuff, but it will be text only, I'll label it, and I'll put it under a cut.

[tozette-original]

ONE

--

Emily had never been to a church funeral.

"Well," said Agatha, checking her pale mass of hair in the hallway mirror. "You haven't left the house in a month, so you might consider it a social event. You can't wear that," she added, nodding at the strap of Emily's dress.

"I can't?" It was black, and light enough for the late summer heat. She'd thought it was perfect: no cleavage, no knees, black, and not scooped off the detritus of her bedroom floor.

"You need something that covers your shoulders for the church — get a shawl or something."

Of course, there were no black shawls in Emily's closet. She was nineteen, not a hundred and ninety. She borrowed a shawl from her mother instead, a dove-grey pashmina that was way too heavy for the oppressive heat outside.

"And now we're late. Of course we are." Agatha continued muttering darkly in this vein as she pulled out of the driveway.

Emily sat in tense silence in the passenger seat, certain that nothing she might say would defuse her mother's ire. She applied herself to aimless scrolling through her phone. It was silent, but Agatha still shot the device a disapproving glance.

They merged into the crawling line of vehicles winding its way through their urban neighbourhood, heading further south into the city proper.

"We should just go straight to the church," Agatha sighed eventually, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. "It'll be less embarrassing."

"Who is Michael, anyway?" Emily dared to ask.

"He was Clara's husband. She's my second cousin." She flicked an indicator on and dipped into a back street, which may not have actually gotten her to the church faster than their more direct route but which certainly allowed her to drive at a faster speed. "I only met him a few times, but I'm sure Clara must be distraught."

"What happened to him, then?"

"He fell down the stairs, I think."

"Fell down the stairs?" Emily repeated, bewildered. "Do people really die of that? Like, actually?"

"Apparently."

"Wow. Um. Okay. So Clara's my… third cousin?"

"No." Agatha made a brief, agonised face at this. "She's your second cousin once removed. What do they even teach you in school and how did you graduate?"

"Uh, well, they weren't covering, like, family relative taxonomy in year twelve bio, sorry."

"Genealogy, Emily."

"Okay. So if you don't know Michael, why are we going to his funeral?"

"For Clara, mostly. She's always been a bit… delicate. She's like you that way."

Emily didn't now quite what to say in response to this, so she didn't say anything for a long few seconds, which went on and on unbroken as they waited for a set of lights to change.

"They do think it's, like, genetic," she said, carefully not looking over at her mother. She caught the way Agatha looked sharply over at her anyway, right in her peripheral vision.

"Well. We didn't have mental problems in the seventies," she said after a hanging moment. "She was just weird little cousin Clara. And then I'm afraid she and I rather drifted apart, with her getting married so young. We didn't have much in common. She and Michael must have been together for… oh, surely it's twenty five, thirty years? You know I don't even talk to your father —" (Of this, Emily was very aware.) "— And I still can't imagine what it'd be like for him to die. I can't imagine what she's going through."

Emily nodded, and went back to her social media feed. A friend, presumably having a much better day than Emily was, had posted a photo of her hand holding a giant gelato cone. A streak of lurid blue melt dripped down her fingers. She liked it and kept scrolling.

Messages about mindfulness, productivity hacks and carpe diem drifted by with the same dull feeling as the ads for cosmetics and warnings about dangerous chemicals in tap water. Microplastics. Hitting your protein goals. Scroll, scroll, scroll.

'Balance your hormones,' someone had written. 'Try moon-washed nutrient water. It's perfectly pH neutral!'

Emily chewed her bottom lip.

As they finally got away from the tiny side streets and the traffic and approached a tall, inner-city church, Agatha began nervously reminding Emily of things: she did not know if there'd be communion, but Emily wasn't to take it if there was, being as she wasn't confirmed, and that she should stand and sit only when other people did, not to fidget or talk, to put her phone away, to try not to be inappropriate for once.

Emily let this familiar refrain wash right over her.

The church was well-attended, with a mix of people in dark, formal clothing coming together in twos and threes to chat in the car park before drifting to the old, imposing church. Emily wasn't even the only person wearing a slightly mismatched shawl over her black, summery clothes.

There were plenty of expensive cars in the car park, though. Mercedes, Ferrari, Lambo, about a million BMWs. Agatha's energy-efficient Toyota hybrid looked squat, boxy and distinctly out of place among them.

Emily opened the passenger-side door, misjudged the amount of space she had, and thumped its edge into the car next to them.

"Please tell me you didn't scratch it. That car's probably worth more than you are."

The mark was tiny. They wouldn't even notice. Probably. Almost certainly.

"It's fine," said Emily, with a confidence she didn't feel.

Agatha looked skywards, breathed out, and chose not to argue about it.

The church was cool inside, stuffy and smelling of dust and incense. A veil of silence descended along with the shade, by common consent, at just the moment the threshold was crossed. All sanctioned conversations fell away and there were only footsteps and little whispers. They turned right, and there was the big room with its pointed stained glass windows and long wooden pews on either side. Up at the front was a step up to a raised platform — or a stage, like a performance — and then up there was both the altar and the casket, both curiously similar, draped in their thick fabrics.

The funeral-goers all knelt to the altar at a certain point, each in grim silence after the one before. They walked slowly to give this ceremony the time it needed, and as they approached, Agatha poked her in the ribs, so Emily knelt, too, right in the middle of the centre aisle between pews.

In the silence, her knees went CRACK, echoing up to the roof of a building designed to augment sermons. Heads swivelled towards her, eyebrows raised, glances of confusion.

Agatha gripped her arm around the elbow, creasing her shawl beneath her bony fingers. She didn't say anything, beholden to the same spell of silence as everyone else.

"I can't help my knees, Ma," Emily whispered into her hair as they slid into a pew, scooching right down to the end so Emily was between Agatha and the wall. Agatha looked sideways at her but said nothing.

What followed was a bewildering service. There was of course a lot of religion: in fact, it seemed uncomfortably to Emily as though the priest was kind of hijacking the experience of grief as a marketing opportunity for the afterlife. There were call-and-response style prayers, a lot of mixed murmuring — some people seemed to say 'and with your spirit,' and others murmured 'and also with you,' which made Agatha huff out a short, unimpressed breath.

Phrases that must have been Latin came and passed, and Emily's attention waned. She jiggled her leg until Agatha put one hand on her knee to keep it still and then she chewed on her thumbnail until her dull teeth worked their way through it. It was dim enough in the church that if she tried to check her phone she knew everyone behind them would be able to see the light of the screen, which was pretty rude to the dead guy. Time dilated absurdly before her, though, as it always did when she had to sit still and quiet, unoccupied, for any significant length of time.

"Em, if I have to take you outside like a fussy baby," hissed Agatha, beneath the cover of a group prayer, to which everyone somehow knew the words. "Get your damn hands out of your mouth!"

"How long is this?" Emily whispered back.

"Just speeches. Then we go to the cemetery."

Speeches. Great.

But it appeared Michael had left no children to mourn him, so it was just the priest's comments, and then the wife — Agatha's relative — taking the lectern up there.

Clara did not look much like Emily, or even like Agatha. Where they were tall and colourlessly pale, with dishwater blond hair and sharp faces, Clara was short and had thick, black hair swept back in a riot of curls. She had not borrowed mismatched clothing for the church. Her shirt was black and lacy and buttoned right up to her throat.

Her face was made up immaculately despite her wet eyes and the high pallor of stress. She was almost intimidatingly pretty: soft, lush, lacy and feminine, with painted lips and damp, black, fluttering eyelashes.

It was uncomfortable to hear her talk into the echoing silence with a heartbreaking catch in her husky voice.

Emily paid more attention to how she looked and sounded, rather than what she said. She caught little of the contents of the speech after, "When I married Michael, twenty-seven years ago…"

If that was true, she was probably, like, nearly fifty. Her makeup was really good. Did people get makeup artists in for funerals? It seemed like that might have been in bad taste.

The service at last ended, with everyone's final, murmured 'thanks be to God,' grimly hilarious in the context of its length and Emily's boredom.

Then they all spilled out of the church, blinking and squinting in the dazzling late summer sunlight with everyone talking louder and louder, like noise and colour had been injected back into the world. They piled into their stifling cars out in the broad concrete parking lot and drove to the cemetery for one final graveside benediction.

Despite the stuffy heat, Emily was pleased to get back in her mother's car and wind down the windows so she could feel the artificial breeze of the car's movement. That breeze initially lasted only as long as one lap around the car park. Then, she pulled out her phone as they waited in the long line of luxury sedans and sports cars to exit the car park.

Absolutely nothing cool had happened on social media in the interim. But several people had posted photos of their cats, and one person had reposted a video of an undernourished teenager dancing as a voice-over shared some information about women's health and the dangers of promiscuity.

"That's rubbish," opined Agatha. "Where do people come up with this stuff? I hope they taught you better in school. God knows they bloody charged me for it."

Emily tapped the volume control and scrolled past, but forbore to mention how Agatha had graduated, like, thirty years ago and probably didn't know what she was talking about either.

They followed a car out, finally, and crawled through the three o'clock traffic all the way to the cemetery.

Emily did not spend much time in cemeteries and she was a little surprised by this one. Behind the wrought iron gates it was light-filled, verdant, dotted with flowers and beautifully kept. The mourners were gathered in a black knot around Michael's freshly opened grave site. Emily spotted several shawls now trailing from handbags or hooked over arms, and gratefully left hers behind in the car.

The time at the graveside was mercifully brief. There were tears, and someone poured some home-made spirits over the box they lowered in, and the priest committed it to the ground with a solemn prayer.

Clara, a small, dark figure standing alone in the sunshine, looked stiff and cold and unapproachable. She cried with a dignity Emily could never have achieved. There was no crumple-faced sobbing for Clara. Instead, tears leaked from her shining eyes and her red mouth trembled. She'd even brought a little floral handkerchief that went back into her sleeve after she had gently dabbed it at her eyes.

Emily watched this display until Clara looked directly at her across the grave, and met her stare with her own glossy dark eyes. Emily looked away, then, almost embarrassed to have been caught staring. There wasn't very much else of interest to look at, though. It was a funeral. There was nothing but grief on display, and if she ought not to stare at it, she didn't know where to look.

The headstones weren't close enough for her to make out any inscriptions, and Emily figured that once you'd seen one carefully maintained grave set in pristine greenery upon a manicured, sunlit hill, you'd probably seen them all. It might be a kind of nice place to end up, if you were dead, she guessed, although she didn't give thoughts of death much consequence as a rule.

At the end of all the crying at the graveside, they returned to their cars again. This time, Emily spotted a gleaming Lexus, which was, like, basically the same as her mum's 2000s Prius, really. They wove back through the traffic to the wake. This was the last event of the funeral, which was finally, blissfully, free of the priest, and was at least guaranteed to have little bits of picky finger food to fill her belly.

"City parking," sighed Agatha, as they drove up a ramp and into an off-street garage. The after-hours rate applied, so they got away with only surrendering twenty-six dollars, paid in advance, of which Emily supplied ten dollars when they discovered the credit card reader was broken.

"If we're here more than two hours," Agatha growled, stabbing at the buttons, "I'll stab myself in the eye."

"What happened to supporting Clara?" Emily needled.

"Well, Clara isn't supporting my feet. You wait until you're fifty-five and stumbling around in high heels all afternoon."

Emily did not think this very likely. She felt the time when women wore heels out of obligation was pretty well in the past right now, and would be a distant memory by her fifties.

"You can swap with me if you like," she offered as they got into the elevator and ascended from the car park levels with a dull rattle.

For a moment Agatha looked like she was considering Emily's flat sandals very intently indeed, and then she shook her head. "No. We'll sit down up there. You'll see."

The wake was held in a nineteenth-floor bar with low lighting, masses of greenery and long marble bench tops. It had a terrace balcony, enclosed in heavy wrought iron curlicues, which had been surrendered to the smokers. The air conditioning was turned up so high that Emily wished she'd brought the shawl.

Immediately upon entry, there was a huge photograph of the deceased projected onto the wall. Emily did not recognise his face, although she supposed she might have met him when she was much younger. He was… old? Older than Clara, for sure. But if you really liked smirking older men with roughly symmetrical features and salt and pepper hair, she guessed you could do worse than a guy who looked like that — and he must have been loaded, too, because all his friends were, and the venue was nice and the drinks were free.

Over the next twenty minutes, people trickled in, arranged in hushed knots of two and three, shivering in the air conditioning. Emily quickly lost her mother to the throng.

"How did you know Michael?" people asked again and again, a grim line of black dresses and charcoal suits that blurred together within minutes. Emily heard countless stories of grief from people who cared much more than she did, and nodded sympathetically along. She remembered no names and would not have recognised most of the faces a second time.

At some point — she lost track of the passage of time — Agatha emerged from the blur of low-lit greenery and black outfits and grabbed her arm.

"My daughter — I don't know if you remember — "

And then Emily found herself face to face with Clara. Up close, she was a picture of wounded femininity: a brave face, marked and drawn with recent grief. She licked her lips nervously before she spoke, and Emily watched, curiously compelled by the wet shine of saliva on her red lipstick.

"I was certainly aware of the existence of a daughter. I imagined her rather younger, though," she added. Her dark eyes lingered on the shoulder strap of Emily's dress.

Emily tried to think of something to say. "Time passes faster than you expect, I guess."

Agatha shifted on her uncomfortable heels.

"Oh, yes," Clara said. "It's always right behind you, and you can usually hear it gaining on you."

"We were just discussing how Clara needs help clearing out their country house now, you know, sorting through Michael's things — I've told her you're not doing much and you'd appreciate the chance to get out of the city."

What? Emily blanched, tearing her eyes away from Clara's pretty face to look at her mother instead. She blinked rapidly. "Oh. Um. Well."

"What?" The sound of Agatha's voice was a warning. Her lips thinned. "You should be delighted for a chance to do something a bit useful for a change."

Clara looked between them. "I can see we've sprung the idea on you unexpectedly. I'd appreciate the help, but if you'd rather not, I understand completely."

"Don't be absurd. She's just moping around, here. She works at a juice shop and lives with her mother, for god's sake. She's nearly twenty."

"Agatha."

"What?"

Clara touched Emily's arm, softly, painted fingertips oh-so-gentle on the curve of flesh above her elbow. "You'd be very welcome, and a tremendous help to me personally. I'll be all alone now. But you must think about it for yourself. I'll call you on — on Sunday? Yes."

"Okay," said Emily dumbly. She curled her hands into fists at her sides. Her heart thumped, caged by her ribs.

Clara smiled — like the moon drifting out from behind a cloud — and withdrew.

Emily felt curiously aware of the spot on her arm where she'd been touched for a long time after.

By the time they drove home, it was raining once more, the kind of late summer storm that sent the temperature plummeting and heralded a wet autumn.

"You'll like the countryside," Agatha insisted as they waited for the security arm to let them out of the car park and into the dark street. "Peaceful. No distractions. And Clara's an odd duck. You'll get along just fine."

"I haven't decided if I want to go," Emily said mulishly. "I've got a few days before she calls."

Agatha clicked her tongue as though this was an annoying irrelevancy. "Well, you're not doing anything here. All you do is sit around and stare at your phone. And Clara really needs the help — or, well, probably the company more than the help, if I'm honest. I can only imagine how lonely she is now. She looked terrible."

She'd looked pretty good to Emily, although pale and a little tired. But her husband had died, so she'd had reason to look much worse.

Emily was keen to get away from Agatha, as she always was, but she resented being told instead of asked. She wasn't sure she wanted to go out to the countryside, where she'd be miles from anything and stuck cleaning out the home of a virtual stranger. "You make it sound like I don't even have a job or anything. I help pay the bills."

"It's not about paying the bills, Emily." Agatha sighed.

Emily turned to the window instead. Outside, the street lights flickered by, bright reflections gleaming wetly on the dark bitumen.

"You'll do very well in the country," Agatha insisted, and Emily supposed that, come Sunday, she'd be unlikely to hear the end of it if she declined.