River

In honor of the birthday of my favorite actor ever (ever ever ever), Rene Auberjonois, here is a prose piece I wrote last year, inspired by and based on my two favorite characters from DS9, Odo (played by Rene) and Kira (played by Nana Visitor). It's a paradoxically vague yet detailed single-scene short story. I mainly wrote it as a way to practice descriptive imagery. But you can think of it as fanfic if you want.

River

In the dim light of their shared quarters, she drew towards him. His eyes were warm blue beacons, inviting like a clear midday sky beyond a window, when all she'd seen out her window in nearly seven years had been the startling, star-littered blackness of space.

Staring at her with those distant sky-colored eyes, he seemed to absorb what he saw; her naked form, soft, yet infinitely strong, her wide brown eyes, whose depths, wreathed in long lashes, were hidden from everyone... everyone but him.

Her body was inches away from his, and they could feel the sparks shoot between them, like powerful magnets of opposite poles that could never be separated once they were together. Slowly, as if with great care, he brought his hands up to her shoulders in a familiar way, cupping his wide palms around the domes and letting his fingers rest on the long, taught muscles suspended between her neck and the bones of her shoulders.

Her face turned up towards his, and the shadows danced across the delicate ridges on her nose. She noted the impossible brightness of his deep set eyes, surrounded by shadows, and the perfect angles of his nose and jaw.

She was about to lift her arms to embrace him, to finally press her body against his, but a movement from him made her pause. With a slowness that was nearly painful, he moved his face toward her, but instead of a familiar kiss on the mouth, his attention was on the narrow tendons and smooth skin of her neck. Realizing this, she lifted her proud chin to give him access, and closed her eyes, focusing on her sense of touch in anticipation.

The lingering milliseconds seemed like hours to her as she waited in darkness. Shivering slightly, she could feel her nerve endings reaching through her skin, blindly seeking the warmth of his lips. When she thought she could wait no longer, she felt it, and sensation exploded in her skin. With a sharp inhalation, she drew her head back even farther. He could feel the muscles tense and pull backward, but his hands stayed with her, gentle but strong.

His lips slid with the ease of liquid to the front of her neck, moving across the solid arch of her throat. She had been holding her breath, her eyes squeezed shut, but now she released it in a long, shuddering sigh, and suddenly they were together.

Her lips found the sloping junction of his neck and shoulder, and she moved across it with desperate hunger, using lips, teeth, tongue, seeking him, and knowing him for what he was: like a wide river, smooth and calm on the surface, but boiling with unimaginable strength and turbulence beneath.

—Adrienne McKay 2009