rain check? { emie x cordelia } JB

She doesn't look to phased for a girl who had just been nominated to a game of kill or be killed. Would I have looked the same, poised and unbothered? After years of grooming for this role Emerson Le Roux seemed to be playing it perfectly. She moves closer, sliding onto the table a few feet away biting her lip, looking at me quizzically for a moment. "That's an easy excuse to make when there's a greater than ninety percent chance that I won't be coming home, Cor."

Well, damn, she wasn't wrong. A poorly chosen moment to confess feelings that were nothing but seeds waiting to be planted, watered and nurtured. But as fate had it, we didn't have time, we had nothing but minutes, and I wasn't sure that was long enough to put behind me what could have been. I should have swallowed my fear of rejection, of being hurt the same way Lucinda had hurt me, and knocked on that door. Because know I might never know what it could have been like to be loved by Emerson le Roux, and her by Cordelia Bardot.

And then Emerson is grinning at me, a lopsided smile that has my lips pulling back to mirror her own. "I'm glad you're here though," she says and I close some of the distance between slipping onto the desk beside her. My thigh brushes against her own, the bare skin on my arms touching hers. I try to ignore the warmth coming from her body, warming me from the inside.

"I'm sorry it took so long. You know, I nearly knocked on your door three times. But fled like a bloody idiot each time." I pause, chewing on the inside of my cheek, "and now... Well now, now I owe you a dinner when you come back home." I ignore the implied if

"I'll take you to the most gorgeous restaurant I know down town. We will have a delicious meal, some fucking great wine, and then I will walk you home and kiss you goodnight." A fantasy that we both knew might never become the reality. Sighing, I lean back, the wall cold against the silky material of my dress.

I wondered if next year it might be me in this room, sitting and waiting as my mother fretted, whispering last minute advice into my ear as they prepared to take me away. Would I be scared? Or overwhelmed? I had never really thought of myself as being part of the games. I loved my life. I loved my job, my business and I wouldn't change it for a slim chance of a golden crown instead of my crystal tiara. I'd always thought that gold clashed with my skin.

"It's just as well that you never came over. My mother would have probably eaten you alive."

She probably wasn't lying. I had seen the one and only Eurydice Le Roux, a lioness standing tall in front of a pride that shrunk with each passing year. She was the mayor, and had a fierceness about her that made it hard to look her in the eye for too long. I had never spoken to her personally, but I had watched her at the reaping, each time smiling proudly at her children when their names are called, shoulders back as they took their place on the stage.

Emerson shifts on the table, throwing her legs over mine, trapping them, me, in place. "I bet you say that to all the girls. You're a charmer, you know that?" Her words pull my lips into a wide grin, my shoulders shaking with gentle laughter. My mum always told me I was a charmer, always saying and doing the right things to win everyone onto my side. It was a side effect of being a people pleaser, I think. Or maybe simply because all my life I had been exposed to the public eye, expected to act a certain way, expected to say certain things. Sometimes I got overwhelmed by my role, terrified that I might forget who I really was.

It was times like when I had meet Emerson that reminded me of who I was, saving me from drowning in the personality of who I was expected to be.

"I knew from the moment I saw you, hiding in that room, that there was something about you, Cordelia Bardot. Who would have guessed that you would be a hopeless romantic?"

"Only with those who matter," I mutter quickly, my hands playing with the material of her dress, before going still, resting on her knees. I try to ignore the way my heart raced a little faster in my chest from their proximity, or from the warmth that radiating from all the places where her body touched mine. I quickly glance over to her and I notice the darkness under her eyes, and the redness in the whites. She looked tired, worn down. She wasn't supposed to look like this, not when she was still so young, when she was supposed to still have a lifetime worth of worries.

"Dinner sounds—it sounds nice." She finally says, "You'd pay, obviously."

My eyes return to hers to see her studying me, the grin that had been on my lips slips to something more bashful, "obviously." I pause for a moment, tucking some loose strands of hair behind my ear. As we sit, I become aware of just how quickly time is going, and that within a mater of minutes she will be herded onto a train towards the Capitol. That this might be the last time that I get to see her, talk with her, might be the only chance that I get to hold her the way I might have if her name had not been called. It might have been selfish of me to want those thing, to need those things when we were only so early into whatever this was...

And in this moment I did not care. They could call me selfish, they could call me naive and stupid for chasing something that would only lead to a wounded heart. But I couldn't be selfish, because I wasn't only risking hurting myself.

Sighing, I slip from the table, escaping the entrapment of Emersons leg. "I should go..." I should have left then, I should have walked right out that door, saving both of us some hurt. But I don't move, I just stand there between the door and Emerson, my eyes lock with hers, then drop to her lips for a moment, before darting back to her eyes. "I can't let you go without doing this first." A moment later I close the distance between us, one hand in her hair, the other cupping her cheek I bring my lips to hers.