“The only place I’ve ever seriously considered permanently relocating to is Sheffield.” Saskia bit her lip. “I went to university there, and it’s always been a really happy place for me. But… I was thinking, literally just now while we were watching the film… I don’t want to leave here. I can see myself living here. You know how Judy Garland was singing about an idyllic place? Beyond the rainbow that she kept banging on about?”
Kivi immediately started warbling the song’s outro, and Saskia laughed.
“Yes, I know what you mean,” Kivi confirmed, laughing too.
“That’s how I feel about this place,” Saskia confessed. “Cornwall. Miltree. With you.”
Wow. That simple declaration brought tears to Kivi’s eyes. Saskia noticed them too, and they both laughed again.
“You know we’re making enormous leaps here, don’t you?” Kivi said, in an attempt to reattach their feet to the ground. “We just had our first kiss fifteen minutes ago, and now we’re talking about having a relationship and you moving three-hundred miles south!”
“What can I say?” Saskia shrugged with a hint of a smirk. “Go big or go home, that’s my motto. I’ll call the U-Haul truck, you go down to the rescue centre to get us three cats...”
“Be serious,” Kivi said, even through her chuckles.
“I am serious.” Kivi had to marvel at how quickly Saskia’s demeanour could change. “I know we’re rushing. But the alternative is ‘just a fling’… and you don’t seem the type of person to do romance with a use-by date.”
“I’m not,” Kivi admitted, and Saskia shrugged as if to say ‘there you are then’. The energy between them stopped crackling and fizzing, instead returning to the usual temperate stillness. But Kivi was tired of that. Tired of watching good things pass her by without having the courage to reach for them. Eva was very much of the ‘grab life by the balls and live it to the full’ persuasion. Perhaps it was time she gave it a go. Be more like her sister.
“You’re a very good kisser, though,” Saskia said, touching her lips with another tiny smirk. “For what it’s worth.”
“So are you,” Kivi said, fanning herself. “I’ve never used the phrase‘hot damn’,but this situation kind of warrants it.”
“Makes you sound kind of Ameri-”
Kivi cut off whatever Saskia was about to say by leaning forward and pressing their lips together again. And again, and again. Enough to make her head swirl, and hopefully to derail the banal bullshit that Saskia was sure to use in order to halt the deep conversation. The other woman allowed it for a moment, then pulled back.
“No,” she said. “I can’t kiss you any more. I’ll just get addicted.”
“Would that really be so bad?”
“I can’t become addicted to you!” Saskia snapped. “If I get addicted to you, it’ll hurt all the more when I have to leave here.”
“Wouldn’t that be worth the pain?” Kivi dared to suggest. “Doesn’t that put you in the mind of Winnie-the-Pooh?”
“What?” Saskia spluttered. “Winnie-the-Pooh?”
“How lucky we are,”Kivi quoted,“to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
“A. A. Milne never actually said that.” Saskia gulped. “It’s not in any of the books. Prime example of the Woozle effect. The Woozle effect actuallydoescome from the Winnie-the-Pooh books, but the quote doesn’t, and I wrote an entirearticleon this very thing-”
“What does that have to do with the issue at hand, Saskia?”
“Nothing!” Saskia wrung her hands. “I ramble sometimes when I’m nervous and my guard is down.”
“Why are you nervous?”
“Because I want something more with you and I’ve never wanted this before and it goes against everything I’ve ever wanted and ever thought I was going to have-”
“Okay, calm down,” Kivi murmured, pulling Saskia into a hug because she looked as if she was about to start hyperventilating. Saskia succumbed to the affection. “I’d like that too. An attempt at a relationship. Even if it ends when you leave. I just think that we’ve both earned a little fun, don’t you? Isn’t it okay to live in the present, now and again, and leave the future as a bridge to burn when we come to it?”
“A malaphor,” Saskia muttered.
“A what now?”
“Sorry.” Saskia cleared her throat. “A malaphor. A blend of two idioms. Which is what you just did. It doesn’t have any bearing on the situation. It’s just… another case of no brain-to-mouth filter.”
“You get like that when you’re disarmed, don’t you?”
