281: In Vino Veritas

on September 9, 2008 in Book 10

In Which Mackenzie Wants More Than Sooni Is Willing To Give Her

So… as it turned out… some kinds of wine tasted a lot better than others. We tried a few different… uh… flavors, I guess… just to see.

Most of dinner passed in a blur… and it got blurrier as it went.

I ordered some kind of chicken breast full of cream sauce. Almost everything else on the menu had mushrooms or was some weird kind of meat in the first place and I wasn’t feeling that adventurous… I figured two or three different kinds of wine were enough new things to try. Sooni ended up with the pheasant. She talked non-stop, and more often as the glasses were refilled. She didn’t drink as much as fast as I did, but I think she was feeling it, all the same.

At first I was glad that she was keeping up the conversation all by herself… I really didn’t feel like sharing about my own childhood or dishing about my personal life to her. Long before we got our food, though, I was starting to get sick of hearing about how her mother always hid little surprises for her to find… even doubly when Sooni said that she’d helped her find “her Baby Kai-Kai”.

Maybe it was petty as hell of me to resent Sooni having a mother’s love, but I had a feeling if I ever met the woman I’d want to hit her. Between a father who entertained emperors and bragged about ordering hits on birds on the other side of the world and a mother who apparently never learned to say no, it wasn’t hard to see where Sooni had got her inflated sense of self-worth from.

Sooni was still eating when I was long done with my food… she ate so fucking slowly, it was amazing. She only made these tiny, dainty little movements with her fork and knife and only ate the smallest little bites of food.

“Hey! You made a mess of your dress,” Sooni said when they cleared my plate away. She laughed, snorted, grabbed her nose, and laughed again. “Ow!”

“You weren’t even drinking anything that time,” I said.

“So? My nose is sensitive,” she said, though it sounded more like “my node is sedative.”

I laughed.

“It isn’t funny,” she said in the same voice, and I laughed some more.

“You have cream on your nose,” she said, glaring.

“Anyway, so what if I did make a mess?” I asked, dabbing at my face and then my front with the big cloth napkin. “It’s your dress, really.”

“No!” she said. “It isn’t! I made it for you.”

“You might have sewn a front on the underwear, while you were at it,” I said, giggling.

“No, it’s supposed to be like that. I looked it up on the ethernet,” she said, sitting up extra straight and beaming a very self-satisfied smirk. I had an image of her being called on in a class after having been the only person in the room to actually read the assignment. “That’s what people wear on sexy dates. If you’ve never worn anything like them, then I don’t think you can have gone on any really sexy dates before.”

“Is that what this is?” I asked. As tipsy as I may have been, I wasn’t going to argue the point. I thought my dates had been fairly sexy, but the one with Steff had involved some very unpleasant missteps… and the last one with Ian had climaxed with a beat-down that most people would arguably find unarousing. “A sexy date?”

“Of course,” she said. “We were rivals, and then enemies, and then we became friends, and now we’re going to become… so much more? Right?”

“You don’t sound very sure about that,” I said.

“No… no, I am!” Sooni said, shaking her head. The act of being questioned seemed to have made her more certain. “It’s what happens next, I’m sure… I’m just not… well, we’ll figure it out. I guess you’ll know.” She was getting agitated, playing with the fork in her hand. Her bronzed skin was shinier than normal… she might have been blushing.

More and more, it sounded like the only reason we were here was because Sooni thought we were following some formula from her stupid backwards comic books. Would she actually go through with this, based solely on that? Was it right of me to let her? I felt strangely conflicted. I had good reason to hate Sooni, and I’d never been that interested in her smooth, gorgeous body…. maybe it was just the wine.

I wished Amaranth was there to talk to, though I had a feeling she would have been as conflicted as I was. On the one hand, she’d be all for sex as long as everybody was willing… but on the other hand, she’d disapprove of the alcohol, and even without that it almost felt like I was taking advantage of Sooni.

Maybe it was time to have a little talk… to try to sort things out, and maybe put a stop to the whole thing before it went too far, too fast. One of us had to be responsible… one of us had to be in control… and it looked like it was going to be up to me to be that person.

“I dream about you,” I said. Well, that was as good an opening as anything, right? “Like, all the time…”

“Really?” Sooni asked, leaning forward breathlessly. She jumped and shook like she’d been pinched, or like she’d just remembered something. “They aren’t gross dreams, are they?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You might think so, I guess… they’re mostly about your feet.”

“My feet are not gross!” she said indignantly. “They are beautiful and petite!”

“I know,” I said. I folded my arms on the table and propped my chin on them. My voice sounded dreamy and far away… like it was underwater. Things didn’t count, in the water. Somebody had told me that once, I was pretty sure. “They’re wonderful… I dream about them on my face, or in my mouth.”

“In your mouth?”

“I… uh… yeah,” I said. “One time I was like a footstool and you had your feet up on me. Other times, I kiss them and suck them.” I blushed. “The toes, I mean. And sometimes it’s not really a dream so much as… um… a thought I have.”

“Gross!” Sooni said, diving behind her hands like a little kid watching a scary movie. She peeked out, in the same way. “Is that what you do? With your naked girlfriend? And your other lovers? Suck on their toes?”

“Um, no,” I said. “We do different things… I mean, there’s some overlap, but what Steff likes isn’t the same thing as what Amaranth likes, and what Amaranth likes isn’t the same thing as what Ian likes.”

“How do you know what to do with each one?”

“Well… we kind of figure it out as we go,” I said. “Sometimes they want to do something that I don’t, and we have to talk about it. There are lists.”

“I see,” Sooni said thoughtfully. “Where do you find these lists? I tried gazing around for instructions, but I didn’t find anything that I liked to look at.”

“I didn’t find them, I made them,” I said. “Stuff I’m willing to do.”

“You just… make it up?” she asked. “How do you know you’re doing it right?”

“Sooni, as long as everybody’s happy with it, it’s fine,” I said. “There isn’t any one ‘right way’. I told you.”

“There is!” Sooni said. She frowned, her forehead furrowing with the force of her seriousness. I didn’t like seeing the lines on her face like that. “I just hope we can figure out what it is… but of course we will. We have to.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but luckily, our waitress came back before the silence stretched on too long.

“Have you ladies decided on dessert?” she said.

“I think we are ready to go,” Sooni said.

“Would you like me to call you a cab?”

“No, it is not far,” she said.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes, I am,” Sooni said.

“I kind of want dessert,” I said.

“But I think we should get on with things,” Sooni said. “Don’t you? Time is of the essence! If we keep putting it off, it might be morning before we figure out what we’re supposed to do with each other.”

“I’ll just come back…” the waitress said.

“Sooni, relax,” I said. “I do have a little experience with this sort of thing.”

My wine-soaked brain was working furiously to add that experience up and sort it into something useful. What had I done with Amaranth? It was mostly spanking. I couldn’t picture Sooni doing that… okay, I couldn’t picture anything but Sooni doing that for a little while after the thought crossed my mind, but that didn’t mean she’d actually go for it in real life.

There was the finger thing, though I’d never really paid much attention to what I was doing there. That wouldn’t be a problem as long as Sooni didn’t insist on reciprocating… and I’d kind of prefer that she didn’t, there wasn’t really any point in getting that deep inside my nastiness. There was the bumping-together thing we’d tried, but we hadn’t got very far there and I wasn’t sure I could get the position right. Also again, I wasn’t sure if I wanted Sooni to have to actually touch me there. Her pussy was probably amazing and almost as clean as Amaranth’s… it would probably be best to keep mine out of things entirely.

“Well, alright,” Sooni said. She turned her gaze to the waitress. “We will see the dessert menu, please.”

“Sure, hon,” the waitress said, handing her a card in a black leather frame. “I’ll be back when you’re ready.”

After I’d had a chance to think about it a bit, I realized that waiting and having dessert would give us a chance to sober up a bit. I hadn’t drunk all that much, I thought. Certainly not more than… however much I had drunk. I was in better shape than Sooni, anyway… she was all giggly and fuzzy around the edges.

“What is elven chocolate like?” Sooni asked.

“Well, it’s like regular chocolate, but… elven,” I said. I’d had it a few times, but I couldn’t think how to explain it better than that.

“I like cheesecake, but too much dairy gives me… makes me uncomfortable,” Sooni said. She laid the dessert card around and turned it so that the writing faced me. “Would you like to split a piece of this with me, Miss Mackenzie?” she asked, pointing at the cheesecake with one long red fingernail and fluttering her eyelashes at me.

“Okay,” I said, picking up the card. Something else had caught my eye… several somethings, actually, but there was no sense being greedy. “And I think I’ll get the elven chocolate torte with ice cream.”

Sooni looked at me like I’d just proposed ordering a baby. I really hoped I hadn’t… was the possession thing acting up again?

“Miss Mackenzie!” she said. “I offered to share my dessert with you!”

“I know,” I said. “But I don’t really want half a slice of cheesecake, I want a torte.”

“Are you saying my cheesecake isn’t enough for you?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “It’s only half a slice.”

Fine,” she said. “You order whatever you want. I do not need anything.”

“Do you mind if I order the cheesecake too, then?” I asked, a little disappointed. “Because it kind of sounded good…”

“I don’t care,” she said, turning in her chair and tipping her face up. “Whatever you want.”

“Have you decided on something?” the waitress asked, hurrying over.

“I think Miss Mackenzie is ready to order,” Sooni said haughtily, not looking at the waitress or me.

“What the hell is your problem?” I asked her

“I tried to do something nice and you… you… you don’t even care!” Sooni said, bursting into tears. “You never care!”

“Um… do you two need another minute?” the waitress asked.

“Fine, we’ll get a slice of cheesecake!” I said. “Two forks.”

“It’s too late!” Sooni said. “You ruined it, I don’t want it any more!”

“I’ll leave you two…”

“Oh, just bring it,” I said to the waitress. “It’ll get eaten.”

“I’ll have it out in a moment,” she said, and she scurried away.

“I should have known you were going to ruin things, somehow,” Sooni said, still crying. “How could you help it? You’re so stupid and gross and wrong…”

“Sooni, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize the dessert sharing was important to you.”

“How could you not know that?”

“Sooni,” I said, then paused. It was struggle to even find the words to express what I was thinking… much less the magic words that would penetrate her skull and make her understand. “You have your ideas about stuff, and other people have other ideas. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong…”

“So you are saying that I am wrong?”

“No!” I said quickly. “Nobody’s wrong. That’s the point!”

“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. She scowled at me, but something changed in her face. It softened, and she sort of set her jaw all stoic-like. “I suppose if that is the way you think, then you can’t help being foolish all the time.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “That’s… that’s totally me.”

She sighed.

“As long as the cheesecake has been ordered, I suppose I will have to eat some of it,” she said. “Otherwise I might seem rude.”

“Perish the thought.”


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5 Responses to “281: In Vino Veritas”

  1. pedestrian says:

    perishable goods?

    Current score: 0
  2. MadnessMaiden says:

    Ugh..make this date stop..

    Current score: 5
  3. Rendia says:

    Why is Mackenzie trying so hard to placate Sooni? If she lets Sooni end up hating her again, she won’t have to deal with her so much.

    Current score: 0