[ continued from here ]If Matthew hadn't been there, or if they hadn't been in so public a place, Anne might well have carried Ariel's attentions forward to where they naturally might go ( Read more... )

Anne took a well-earned break from the garden, after planting an border of red and blue flowers as well as transplanting some cuttings from the main kitchen garden, and lay down on her back on her grass, looking up through the treetops at the blue, blue sky ( Read more... )

Anne practically flew out of the compound and towards the party, keeping her eyes open for Ariel's distinctive hair. There were a lot of people she wanted to talk to, but only one she wanted to talk to right now, and she wasn't going to stop searching till she found her no matter who might've tried to stop her to congratulate her ( Read more... )

Anne woke up almost every morning the same way: with her arms around her wife, snuggled close against her back. This morning was no exception, and because her arms and her body were in the right place when she started to wake, it took her a few moments to realise that they were around the wrong person"Oh no!" she yelped as she skittered out from ( Read more... )

Anne had certainly been kept busy in the wake of the giant waves, when a great number of people had visited the IPD office to learn just what had occured and determine what was to be done about those persons had been temporarily displaced. But as dedicated as she was to her duty, she did not hesitate to abandon her post when she heard that Ariel ( Read more... )

Anne didn't expect the morning to bring anything special, no more than every morning was special when she got to wake up with Ariel beside her, but she turned out to be very, very wrong about that. The first thing she noticed was how warm she was, warm to the point of perspiration. She pushed the top quilt away and opened her eyes only to realise ( Read more... )

There was a well-worn path now, winding from Anne's hut and across the main path through the Hamlet to Ariel's hut. The amount of time Anne spent traversing it, she thought maybe she ought to line it with stones or flowers or something pretty, but that thought always dashed from her head when she saw Ariel and her mind flitted to other things ( Read more... )

Anne discovered, after going swimming with Ariel -- though she'd suspected it long before -- that she really liked to walk barefoot on the beach, to feel the sand between her toes and the waves lap up over her ankles when she walked close to the ocean. She might not go swimming in her underthings where anyone else could see, but she could go ( Read more... )

Anne still hadn't fluffed up her bed to quite the way she liked it, but she could go out in the morning and gather some more leaves and grasses to stuff under her blankets; she didn't need to fix it right that moment. Perhaps she could even figure out how to build a real bedframe, though that was certainly not a priority. Still, the not-quite- ( Read more... )

Normally Anne's picnic basket held all her worldly belongings, ever since she'd fled her home ahead of the storm, but today she'd stowed all of those things beneath Ariel's bed so that she might use the basket for its intended purpose: a picnic. She'd needed to take a trip down to the small waterfall anyway, to determine whether Matthew's apple ( Read more... )