AN: This is just a fun little drabble to kill some time. Reviews are good for the soul. Don't own, don't ask, don't sue.
She did look a little bit like a fruitcake.
A brown skirt, ruffled and splashed with mosaics of sequins – Angel had always scorned moderation – fluttered at her waist, hugging the contours of her hips. Her sweater was salmon-pink, an almost subdued counterpart to the neon hues she normally wore. Colonies of buttons punctuated the soft fabric, laying across her shoulders and cuffs. Skin, the color of raw brandy in a shot glass, fused the elements together: cake, nut, fruit, liquor.
"He called her a fruitcake," Mimi whispered to him as they watched Angel stomp around in heels that could skewer cinderblocks. "She, uh, didn't take it too well."
A particularly loud outburst from Angel ( " – the fashion police? I bet his mother still dresses him. Aha!) escorted this statement.
Only Angel, Collins mused, would see that remark as an insult to her fashion sense instead of her sexuality.
"Fruitcake?" The very thought of food – dense cake and glossy fruit – made him hungry. "Oh, lover, I'll cover you…with plastic wrap," he chanted to Mimi, who snorted into her palm and then looked around accusingly for said snorter.
As he watched Angel pirouette and toy with her skirt, Collins remembered the afternoon they had chosen buttons for her shirt. They sat in front of the window, sunlight imprinting baroque patterns into their backs, their fingers digging into an old jar and pulling out smooth plastic disks.
Of course, the innocence devolved into something more primal – somehow Angel made even buttons seem erotic. The plastic smell – like paper money, only more humid – stuck to their fingers long afterward.
"Some people just can't understand art," Angel wailed, directing her attention at the full-length mirror. "That skinhead churro wouldn't know his Picasso from…from –"
"Van Gogh?" Collins suggested, grappling with one of the few names he knew. Is that the one who cut off his own ear? Or the one who strangled his wife with a sock? Oh, the irony of being a starving artist and knowing so little about art.
"Yes! From his Van Gogh." She seemed to register Collins' appearance in her doorway for the first time, a wide grin bisecting her face as she shimmied into his dutifully pressed his lips against her cheek, like sandpaper meeting placid water – number 257 out of his promised one thousand sweet kisses.
He had spent enough time with Angel and Mimi – his señoritas bonitas, he often bumbled in half-hearted stabs at Spanglish – to know that his lover had just called someone a fried doughnut. What is this, the spontaneous manifestation of inner cuisine? The id of the belly?
He could taste shampoo – spice and citrus – on his lips as he cushioned his chin in Angel's nest of soft hair. "Lucky."
"Hmm?" She looked up at him expectantly, her muscles responding to his pheromone cues.
A slim curtain of air was all that parted their lips, waiting to lock and unlock. "Lucky for you, I love fruitcake."