✤ - Moving/putting up their hair, showing off the back of their neck (ACE UR EXAMS ILY XOXO)
✤ — Putting up their hair, showing off the back of their neck
As a person so genuinely genialand pleasant, Carmen Yarelis Wolfe does not entertain assumptions about herselffor very long. There is little doubt in the Shatterdome now that she is a forceto be reckoned with, a hurricane that just couldn’t quit. It’s been that waysince shortly after she arrived.
For most of them, it only tookthe first sparring to chisel her reputation, when the wisp of a woman removedher jacket to reveal the sinuous muscle cording her lean form and proceeded towipe the floor with her first three opponents. And if Gemma were a betterperson, she might even have tried to fib her way into convincing more than herMum that it had been the girl’s charming personality that had first caught hereye, but the truth was far from that honourable.
Truthfully, it hadn’t taken thatlong. And while the first thing that had drawn her in had definitely been thegirl in her sports bra, driving home how very very gay she was, it had been the smug smirk that had caught Gemma,supreme satisfaction sitting oddly easily on the sharp angles of her face.Carmen Wolfe is a force to be reckoned with — and she knows it. Gemma may never get over just how attractive that is, thebucketsful of confidence and strength in a woman so legitimately nice and affable. Even now, officiallypartners and used to the nuances of each other’s thought process, brainsynapses snapping together into formation in their jaeger week after week, Gemmais not used to her.
“And then fucking Chad, the dumb prick, says— did you justget out of the shower?”
Even now, she breaks offmid-rant, eyes widening. Her head, previously resting against her palm, slips alittle.
A soft hum answers her, not that itmatters much. Her brain does not seem to be processing much at that moment,little more than a long buzz of static. Carmen continues deftly twisting herhair up, devil woman that she is, not bothering to turn around and spare her partner’ssanity. “Douchey Chad was asking about you in the shower? Please tell me youdidn’t have to be pulled off of him.”
Gemma blinks, feelingpunch-drunk. “No? Um, what?”
“You were talking about DoucheyChad and the shower. I’m assuming fists got involved at some point.”
“Er, no, he’ll live.” The answercomes a beat too late. Gemma has yet to stop thinking about the sheer artistry she has just seen: a smoothcolumn of skin, flaring into narrow shoulders, revealed by the lift of herhair. It feels like the revelation of something private, this display of anarea that is so rarely seen. Abruptly, absurdly, she wants to kiss it. Sheimagines it might be warm. Smooth. Like a secret she hadn’t been expecting tobe included in, but is positively flushed to be included in.
She thinks it might show in theflush she can feel warming her neck as she moves to one side of the mattresslining the bottom bunk and gestures at the vacated space. “Come sit with me andI’ll tell you more about it?”
The light underlining her tonehovers dangerously close to fond.