Rumi flips over the back of the couch backwards so her head is hanging off the seat and she is looking at Mira upside down. Mira doesn’t look up from her copy of Vogue Korea but she does raise an eyebrow in silent question. Rumi huffs dramatically but otherwise doesn’t respond. They sit in comfortable silence for a moment but Rumi can't stand it long. She reaches across the small gap between them and lets her hand creep up Mira's thigh slowly.
Mira still doesn’t look at her. "Rumi, baby, you've gotta give me a break. I'm gonna start chaffing."
Rumi whines pitifully and slaps her hand back on her own stomach. "I'm sorry. I'm just so bored."
Mira turns the page in her magazine. "Well sorry, this boredom buster is closed for maintenance."
Rumi pouts and doesn’t even have the grace to blush. "You and Zoey have ruined me. You turned me into a... a... a sex fiend!"
Mira freezes. She completely stops moving, it even seems like she isn't breathing. Rumi glances up at her in mild concern. Had she said something wrong?
Mira's lips are pressed so tightly together that they’ve gone a little white, she is staring at her magazine blankly, and her neck is slowly getting redder and redder until the color reaches her ears.
Rumi, now actually worried, goes back over their conversation. She doesn’t think she said anything rude or otherwise unacceptable.
Before she can spiral too much, Mira brakes the tension with a loud snorting laugh. In fact, she is fully guffaw-ing, slapping her hand on her knee and with tears in her eyes, the whole shebang. "Sex-fiend," she wheezes, struggling to get enough air.
Watching her usually composed girlfriend fall into hysterical laughter because of something she did has Rumi giggling along.
At first.
But when the over-the-top laughter continues past the point that Rumi feels it is truly warranted, she starts to get a little annoyed. Offended maybe. She had been very serious, after all. And sure, maybe the way she said it was a little funny, but really, this is getting excessive.
Rumi puffs up in indignation. Mira, actually, legitimately, crying with laughter, sees Rumi's expression and her puffed up cheeks and just falls deeper into her hysterics. She points at Rumi’s face. Literally points and laughs at her. Wow. Mira collapses on to her side, clutching at her stomach as she cackles.
“I’m going to tell Zoey you’re being mean to me,” Rumi huffs. She kicks her legs up and over to complete her flip, but it ends up being a bit awkward and results in Rumi landing on her knees instead of her feet. She scrabbles quickly on to her feet and looks down her nose at Mira before turning on her heel to march away with a whip of her braid and runs smack into Zoey. She screams. Zoey screams right back and grabs Rumi by the arms so they both don't fall to the floor.
Behind Rumi, she can still hear Mira wheezing things like, “Oh my god,” and “I can’t breathe,” and “I’m gonna pee,” and “sex-fiend.”
Zoey looks over Rumi's shoulder in amusement. "Did you break Mira?"
Rumi rolls her eyes. She glances back at Mira when the laughing gets quieter to see that her wonderful girlfriend has stuffed as much of her fist as she can in her mouth in an effort to muffle the noise. It's ridiculous that Rumi still feels attracted to Mira in this state, red from the neck up, tear tracks running down her cheeks, as she struggles to both stop laughing and breathe.
Zoey starts giggling too.
Rumi puts her face in her hands and tries to hold in a scream.
Mira pulls her hand out of her mouth and tries to explain. "Rumi said," laughter, "Rumi said," more laughter, "she said we," obnoxious cackling, "we turned her...into a sex-fiend."
Zoey offers an amused chuckle and slings an arm around Rumi's wilted shoulders. "Hell yeah, we did." Rumi groans.
Mira rolls on to her back and starts fanning at her face with her hands. She's muttering a string of "sorry"s as she does. She takes a deep breath, a second one, wipes the tears from her cheeks. "It was the way she said it."
Rumi peeks through a gap in her fingers just as Mira looks at her. She feels a dawning horror when Mira makes a motion like she's going to vomit, but instead of their earlier lunch all that spews out of her is more laughter.
Rumi throws her hands in the air. "That's it! I'm converting to Catholicism and moving to Europe and becoming a nun. A demon fighting nun."
Zoey giggles. "I've seen that show."
"It was so good," Mira agrees with a wheeze.
Rumi, left out of the joke (fairly typical) and also the butt of the joke (incredibly rare), isn't sure what to do in this situation. She looks to Zoey, who just shrugs.
"She is being pretty obnoxious."
"I can't help it!"
Zoey ignores Mira's feeble arguments. "Wanna smother her with blankets?"
Rumi snatches the blanket off the back of the couch immediately and grins in a way that she's been told is unsettling. Zoey just returns it with a mischievous grin of her own. They approach Mira in tandem.
Rumi is no longer bored.