who’s a better kisser
“There really isn’t any competition, dear,” she rasps, knitting diligently away at a very stylish sock. The sock is for him. He’s excited about the sock.
“No?” he asks in reply, putting another log on the fire and puffing on his pipe. His daughter and her niece, and that sarcastic redheaded young thing, are all collected at the Witch House for the afternoon. He’s been told these meetings are crucial for coven-bonding, but even though he isn’t too sure how to understand all that whatnot, he chalks it up to Feminine Matters Beyond The Ken Of Man and lets them figure themselves out.
“None whatsoever,” she says. “I am, of course, the better kisser.”
He lifts his eyebrows a little to hear that, and comes back over to the table once he’s schooled his face.
“I don’t think it’s my place to argue,” he says, “when you’re the only one I’d like to be kissing for quite a while.”
She looks at him with one of those adorable smiles. They shouldn’t be adorable, some part of him knows. The rotted teeth should not appeal to him. The hugeness of her, the age, should not please him.
She’s the loveliest woman he’s ever known, including—God help him—his sweet daughter’s dear mother. She’s the kindest and the most tender-hearted. The strongest and the most clever.
The most beautiful, too. Like a vision, like a nightmare. Beautiful the way pastors warn that the Devil is, bizarre and terrible. (But he knows. The Devil is not beautiful. The Devil is just a dessicated wretch.) She is wracked and old and strange the way he is growing to be wracked and old and strange. She’s a fire in the grate, the culmination of all attainable felicity on the earth, and she makes him laugh, to boot. He can see a happy life with her, the way he hasn’t been able to imagine any kind of life for long, cold years.
She’s as beautiful as a sunrise, and it’s still only just the morning.
“Is that the only reason?” she asks. He knows her voice is tattered, not sweetly husky, but as much as he knows it he simply can’t believe it. “Knowing, as you do, the things I can do with my lips?”
He flushes crimson and feels himself do it. “That does contribute,” he admits, sucking hastily on his pipe and turning his hands back to his whittling.
She laughs at him, giving up on her teasing. He likes it. He likes having her laughter filling up his little wood-bordered cottage.
He wouldn’t mind if it rang out for the rest of their days.