Tell Nothing To Anyone

“Your dress is a throwback to the 70s,” she laughs, “like a fucking picnic blanket, that. Look at that fabric. Terrible.” I glare at her, pass her the bowl of figs to shut her up. She cuts one in half and juice spreads across the dark wood of the table, but she doesn’t seem to notice. If she had paid for it, she would notice. She is a girl with rich tastes and poor accounts.
“Really, think about it though – imagine it. Him, and I.”
“He and I.”
“What?”
Her lips, plum colored, are pursed, her eyes shrewd, wrinkles almost visible around them in the young face. I look away. The sun burns the part in my hair. “Nevermind.”
She sniffs, affronted by my interruption. I examine her out of the corner of my eye, watch as she cuts fig after fig, setting the halves in another bowl and leaving me to remove the flesh.
The apricots are next, piled into a bucket that sits on the bench next to me, and I can smell the warmth of their ripe flesh rising through the heat of the summer morning; I can feel their softness bruising, overripe. The thick scent fills my nose and I cannot listen to her the way she demands I listen. Flies land on our arms and we shake them away.
“What do you think?” she asks, her eyes cold and sly, and I don’t know how to answer because the question was lost somewhere in the air between us, carried off by the wind; the coldness in her look is like the dew that has soaked the back of my legs; I am queasy.

Tell Nothing To Anyone

I shrug; the river babbles, and she purses her lips again, draws the knife down at an angle through another fig. This one she presses her fingers into, pries out some of the flesh, holds it up in her hand so that it glints in the sun, sugary-sticky and sparkling. She watches it, and so do I, holding my breath a little as though it might blow away like a dandelion seed. She presses it between her lips, bites down, chews half and hands the other half to me; I take it and eat it, some kind of affirmation.
I wipe my sticky fingers gently on the fabric of my skirt. She laughs again, but quietly, and I just look at her.
"Your dress," she chuckles.
"What about it?"
She just shakes her head.