Chapter Text
The night, by all accounts, is going well. Fuelled by two glasses of pre-premiere champagne, with Zosia’s warm hand tucked into her arm, Carol glides easily across the long tongue of red carpet, pausing in front of dozens of photographers when prompted, and another dozen, the two of them steadily crawling their way to the end, where a gaggle of reporters and interviewers eagerly wait to pounce with their questions. Most, she thinks, will be directed at Zosia, as she’s the more famous of the two of them. But there will be some for her, too, being the author behind the book responsible for Zosia’s latest big screen role, and one question is inevitable.
Which man did you have in mind when you created Raban all those years ago?
Only three people on Earth know there never was a man, and one of them is dead.
It was always a woman. It was always going to be Zosia.
They’re moving again. Carol feels rather than sees Zosia lean down to murmur into her ear, “You’re doing very well.”
“The eye candy certainly helps.” She’d nearly had a stroke upon opening her hotel door to Zosia standing easily in its frame, wearing a custom backless, pearl white Vera Wang dress with matching heels, her dark bob inky black against the silk, rich brown eyes impossibly deep and drawing Carol in like riptides in the same way they had the first morning she’d walked on set and froze in her stride to see Zosia, dressed as Raban, in person.
“It certainly does.” There’s a smile in Zosia’s voice. “I forget my nervousness entirely when I see how well the suit cut compliments you.”
Carol had debated, in the forty-eight hours between receiving the invitation on fucking fancy stationery and the deadline to either accept or decline, what she could possibly wear to the red carpet premiere of her own damn movie. In private, she gravitated most to more masculine clothing. It sat easily on her, didn’t make her want to crawl out of her skin and occupy a different one, or vanish all together. When in public, most especially on book tours, she’d chosen more acceptable outfits, and tried not to think about how Helen had looked at her choice with disappointment. Not toward Carol herself, but toward the people who made Carol feel she had to dress palatably to begin with.
Twenty-four hours before the deadline, Carol had called the printed number, told them she accepted, and then called Zosia to tell her, one, she’d be flying out to Los Angeles, and two, needed to speak to whoever the hell her stylist was because “what the fuck do I wear?”
The suit is black on black, bringing out the blonde in her hair and making her blue eyes much more distinctive. The bow tie matches Zosia’s dress. This is, in short, the handsomest Carol has felt in years, strange as it feels to be stepping straight into the heart of the public eye in an outfit she would have only worn in the bedroom.
“I can’t believe you’re nervous,” Carol says, to distract herself from the way Zosia’s compliment has stirred less-than-professional thoughts from their carefully induced slumber. “Aren’t you used to all this?”
Zosia hums, hand in Carol’s elbow adjusting its grip. “To a degree. But it always feels as if, each time, there are more people, and the questions you get asked are no longer about your work, or your process, and instead edge into invasive and personal.” The reporters and interviewers are mere feet away. “Are you ready for that?”
Carol fills her lungs with damp Los Angeles air. Wishes it was laced with vodka, to give her more courage. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
She isn’t surprised to learn Zosia knows some of these people on a first name basis, nor that she greets three of them in each of their mother tongues. Carol catches French first, then Spanish, and Polish. She stands there while Zosia, with a saint’s patience and nun’s grace, answers their questions, her sentences long and thoughtful, her banter with the non-English interviewers displaying every ounce of the generosity Carol has come to know over the last year. Something like pride swells in Carol’s breast, yet is quickly tampered when, after five minutes, the Polish reporter turns to her and asks, in an accent heavier than Zosia’s but no less pleasant on the ears, “And, Ms Sturka, how does it feel to be honoured with a motion picture adaptation of your most known work?”
Carol summons the friendly, professional smile she’d used on her book tours. “It’s the highest of honours, most especially when someone like Zosia is cast to play the leading character and approaches the role, and the material, with such respect and consideration.”
“Do you believe fans—of whom there are so many! —will be pleased with this adaptation?”
“I believe it’s faithful enough to the source material that several will be pleased.” There are at least two that come to mind, who’d met her at every single one of her book signings, that may not be terribly happy. She hopes one of them won’t send his cutlass in the post with a note that says, Did I not say it would look like merde?
“That’s always the hope, isn’t it?” says the reporter, her smile friendly. “There are, in keeping to the subject of your fans, some out there who are dying to know just who you pictured in your mind when working on these novels, and why, with this adaptation, a man was not cast to play Raban.”
She’d known it was coming, yet the question still slips into her heart like a dull knife blade. Zosia’s hand slides from her elbow crook and to the small of Carol’s back, thumb rubbing reassuring circles there, reminding Carol that she doesn’t have to answer. But Helen, who had championed these novels from the beginning, even when she knew they weren’t the ones Carol so desperately wanted to write, would be proud to see Carol standing in this moment, dressed as she is, feeling handsome and achieving a dream so many writers have but so few achieve.
So she says, “I would say George Clooney, but I’d be bullshitting you.” The reporters chuckle. “And as to why a man wasn’t cast, well… It’s because Raban was never meant to be one, and there are already so many stories centring men. And when I saw Zosia in costume striding around the set as if it was her own ship, I just knew we’d found the perfect Raban.”
“And what do you say to the people who aren’t happy with the casting?”
Carol looks right at the nearest camera and gives it her best saccharine smile. “Get the fuck over it.”
—
They break apart, pressed bodily against the suite’s door, breaths dancing irregularly between their faces.
“You were wonderful tonight,” Carol manages. “God, and this fucking dress…” She strokes her thumbs appreciatively over Zosia’s hips, relishing the feel of silk beneath her touch and the shiver that shakes through Zosia’s long limbs.
Zosia smiles, teeth bright, eyes glistening with it. “I wore it for you.”
“What?”
A laugh. “You are adorable when you’re blushing, do you know that?”
“But you’re… serious?” When Zosia hums affirmative, Carol scoffs. “You don’t have to dress up for me.” Zosia could wear a fucking flour sack and she’d still be the most beautiful woman in the whole fucking room.
Zosia says, “I wanted to, Carol. I wanted to feel the weight of your stares and know you were thinking of putting your hands on me but had to restrain yourself. It’s okay,” she adds with a little laugh, because Carol feels her blush deepen further, “I had similar thoughts.”
Carol wets her lips. Clears her throat. “What thoughts?”
“Give me your hand.”
Carol does. Watches as Zosia propels it southward, beneath her dress’ short hem, dragging Carol’s fingers and palm up her silky thigh and presses it, unashamedly, against thin, sodden underwear.
“Jesus, Zosia…” breathes Carol, fingers exploring this familiar territory, watching her lover’s breathing hitch. “All this from seeing me in a suit? The entire evening?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
Yes, Carol nearly replies, but refrains. A memory, unbidden, of a different bedroom resurfaces, and Helen’s reaction to seeing Carol in a dress shirt and boxers and strapped in, the dildo protruding from between her cloth-covered thighs no longer crude when Helen’s cheeks turned cherry red and she whispered hoarsely, “Get the fuck over here, Mr Sturka.”
Carol sighs. Can’t think of anything but sinking to her knees and tasting Zosia’s desire, of letting her tongue and mouth do all the talking until Zosia has to push her away. She kisses Zosia again, pulls her hand from between soft thighs and says, apologetically, “I need a minute.”
The whole of the evening has felt like drinking a drug-laced cocktail. Undoing the bowtie, unbuttoning a few buttons, splashing her face with cool water at the massive sink, Carol can hardly recollect everything that’d happened, and she’d been (mostly) sober throughout it all. Zosia in the dress, Zosia answering questions and laughing with reporters like she wasn’t nervous, Zosia’s hand tucked safely in Carol’s elbow crook, have been permanently etched into her memory. Everything else feels… well, like it’d happened to someone else.
It’s funny how, even without alcohol to dull everything, reality can still slip so easily away.
Carol meets her reflection in the mirror. Sees her own bright blue eyes, her hair glossy and slicked back with pomade, her lips red from Zosia’s lipstick, the undone tie and buttons making her look a little devil-may-care. She whispers to herself, “Be where your feet are.”
Her socked feet carry her back to the bedroom, where Zosia has made herself at home in the plush writing desk chair, dress and heels still on, nursing a glass of ice water. Brown eyes trace Carol’s figure from head to toe, and back up, Zosia’s chest expanding with a breath taken in through her long, lovely nose. Telling Carol, silently, that they can pick up from where they paused, or they’re free to simply undress and go to bed with no other plans than sleeping a whirlwind of a night off.
Zosia doesn’t know Carol has had other thoughts, too.
Carol kneels at Zosia’s front, noting the darkening of both arousal and curiosity in warm eyes. (She’s always liked Carol on her knees.) She cups Zosia’s left ankle in both hands, uses one to slip the heel off, uses that same one to press her thumb into Zosia’s arch.
“Oh.”
“Feel good?”
Zosia only hums, her full lips curling upward in a pleased smile. She teases, after a moment, “Have I discovered something new about you?”
“What? Feet?” scoffs Carol. “Fuck no.” But she can picture it so clearly, leaning to explore the bumps and ridges of Zosia’s ankle with her lips, journeying to the underside of her lovely foot to lick a slow stripe from heel to toe, taking each of the latter in her mouth to see if Zosia will laugh because it tickles, or if she’ll whisper Carol’s name the way she does when she’s unbearably aroused. “I just… You were in those things for hours.”
“Yes.”
Carol takes the bait of the pause. She’d felt handsome. Now, she can feel brave. “I want to make you feel nice.”
Another hum. “You’re off to a good start already.”
Syrupy minutes pass while she massages the tension from Zosia’s left arch. When it’s no longer as stiff beneath her thumb, Carol journeys back northward, hands gliding slowly, surely, to Zosia’s calf, lips following in their wake. She presses lingering kisses to the side of Zosia’s knee, follows them with tongue, never breaking eye contact, arousal sitting heavily in her belly, a throb in her loins. It’s a suggestive enough action that it has Zosia whispering breathy curses in Polish.
Tempting as it is to give them both what they want—Carol ducking beneath Zosia’s tight dress and devouring her shamelessly—Carol retreats from her suggestive position, smiling at the resulting groan.
“You’re the epitome of patience,” says Carol, beginning to give Zosia’s right foot the same massage.
“Would you like me to be impatient?”
It has many perks. Chief among them, Zosia’s strong fingers pulling Carol’s hair like it’s a leash and commanding Carol to fuck her. Or, if she’s on her back, to stay right where she is so Zosia can sit astride her face.
Carol replies, slightly breathless, “Not now.” She mirrors the actions she’d performed on the left leg, kissing the inside of Zosia’s right knee, following the line higher, until she’s mouthing at the strip of thigh just below the dress’ edge.
“Carol…”
And there it is, that oh so telling whisper of her name. It hits better than a shot of vodka. Yet Carol lays her head on Zosia’s upper thigh, the heat of her radiating through the silk dress, heart stuttering at the way Zosia’s hand darts down to tenderly cup her face, thumb stroking her cheek. “Am I in control here?” she whispers.
Zosia asks, “Would you like to be?”
Carol nods.
“Then you are.” The gentle thumb traces Carol’s lower lip. “But come up here and kiss me first.”
She’s never been able to say no.
Carol kisses her deeply, thanking the universe—because fuck God—for the large suite and distinct lack of neighbours; their moans and sighs echo in the expansive space.
Carol runs her nose along the length of Zosia’s. Whispers against those full, petal-soft lips, “Open your legs.”
Zosia obeys.
Together they push the dress up until it’s bunched around Zosia’s hips, revealing lacy black underwear whose floral design leaves very little to the imagination, visibly darker at the centre. Carol’s mouth turns drier than Phoenix in summer at the sight of Zosia’s visible desire, the glimpse of coarse, dark curls through lace. She doesn’t linger long. Fingers hook themselves beneath the waistband, tugging the garment down and off, propping Zosia’s legs on her shoulders moments afterward.
“May I?” she asks.
Zosia’s hand finds her hair. “Please, Carol.”
The first touch of tongue and lips against her never fails to make them both moan aloud. Salt-musk coats Carol’s tongue, heavy breathing and gasped encouragement fall sweeter than music on her ears. She devours with intent, fingers leaving indents in Zosia’s skin, carrying her lover higher, thinking, as Zosia begins to tremble and her moans taper into whines, going down on this woman is an even higher honour than any adaptation of her Wycaro novels.