Title: Cigarette Smoke in September
Series: Kobato
Characters: Sayaka, Okiura (who really needs to get a first name, kthx)
Pairing: Okiura/Sayaka, possible one-sided Sayaka --> Okiura
Rating: PG-13
Warning: None.
Summary: Every where he touched, he left a burn.
Notes: Another de-anon.
I.
They were married in autumn instead of spring or summer, because he’d said that the sky in autumn matched the color of her eyes almost perfectly. And truly the leaves falling were a pretty sight, and it was still fairly warm for the early months in autumn, so it was not as if she minded it.
Their days together were warm, and she watched the leaves change color outside the window and shiver not from cold but because his fingers grazed the back of her neck in just the way she liked, fingers twisting in her hair, pulling it free from the ponytail with a soft you’re much prettier this way.
And if questioned, she would say that, yes, of course she was happy. Happy to turn her head over her shoulder and see him there, smiling at her, leaning against the wall with a cigarette between his fingertips-smile melting to one of apology when she reminded him to go outside for that. She breathed in the second hand smoke not with spite or hatred, but knowing that that smell was him.
II.
Some nights, he would kiss her and it would feel as if he breathed only smoke. She would choke, turning her face away, and disguise the flinch away with removing her glasses and setting them on the bedside table.
When she turned to look at him again, he was always just smiling at her, and reaching out to tuck hair behind her ear.
And she would lean in and kiss him again, trying to ignore the way it choked her lungs.
III.
Years later, she still remembered the way his mouth moved over her body, the way his words-soft, smoky-breezed over her quivering skin, the way his eyes burned like embers in the night. She still remembered the way he seemed to burn her, wherever he touched. She still remembered the way, for just a few moments, just before she lost the strength to keep her eyes open as he ignited every sensory nerve, that his eyes would soften, and that smile of his didn’t seem quite as hard-edged.
IV.
The night before he left, she could sense it-sense that he was pulling away. It didn’t matter what she did, he did not respond-
She pushed him down onto the bed, moved so that she was over him. He smiled up at her. She sat up a little, pulling her hair free of the ponytail, and still all he did was smile.
“Please,” she said, a quiet, soft-spoken plea in the darkening night.
He took a drag from his cigarette and blew it out slowly, a cloud hanging in the air that hazed her vision.
She pulled at the fabric of his clothes, stripping him, refusing to beg. She bit her lip.
He smoked the cigarette down to the filter, eyes never meeting hers.
“Isn’t life grand?” he asked, rhetorically, as she managed to pull off his belt.
She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing, bending down to kiss him before he could blow out the last string of smoke. Her lungs burned.
In the morning, all that was left of him were the wrinkled, dirty sheets and an ashtray on the bedside table.