For the longest time, Emmaline thought that the shadow she saw on the edges of her vision was a trick of the light.

As a child, it had been a demon that dogged her every step, something to be prayed away by her family and church.  Then, during her teenage years, when life seemed to be at its absolute lowest, it was entirely gone from her.

As she grew older, it returned, leaping from a green exit sign to the dull metal of a guard rail while she drove down the interstate.  Emmaline barely gave it a second thought, believing that it was just a bird landing to rest it’s wings.

But when the shadow sat upon her desk, leaned over her shoulder, and whispered into her ear she knew it was no figment.  And she knew that it would no longer tolerate being ignored.

“It will hurt only for a moment and then your eyes will be opened.”  The shadow spoke into her ear, breath barely moving the hair curled there.

Emmaline wondered briefly what it meant before a sickeningly thin arm reached forward, hand curling around her jaw and turning her face towards the speaker.

The black of the shadow’s eyes seemed somehow even more deep than the darkest night and she found that she could not look away. As the sharp agony of knowing swept over her, Emmaline knew her life would never be the same again.

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“Guard Rail” by huminiak is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

“You know it’s sort of morbid that this is how we make our s’mores, right?” Ransom laughed, as he skewered another marshmallow bunny on the stick he’d found in the woods and held it over the fire.

Quill was having a difficult time not collapsing into laughter himself, as he watched the poor marshmallow bunny slowly turning brown and getting crispy along the edges. He reached into the bag for a bunny of his own and skewered it lengthwise on his stick.

Quill much preferred the vaguely burnt taste of marshmallow on his s’mores, so his bunny wasn’t allowed the dignity of a slow, well-toasted death.

No, Quill thrust his marshmallow straight into the flames and waited for the brief moment it took for the bunny to catch fire before pulling it back out and watching as it burned on the end of the stick.

“That is so evil.” Ransom laughed. He was grinning madly, as he watched his best friend staring maniacally at the burning and warping body of the marshmallow bunny.

It was something they had always clashed on, the proper way to toast marshmallows for s’mores, and as they’d grown older it had become less of a fight and more of a mutual disagreement with the other man’s preferred methods.

It was the only time that Ransom thought his normally safety conscious friend might have pyro-maniacal tendencies, when the poor, innocent bunny was casting light up on his face with the flames that were eating away at its body.

“Yep.” Quill agreed.

He blew the flames out and watched as smoke continued to rise from the marshmallow bunny’s corpse. It was sort of sad, now that he thought about it, but Quill wasn’t about to let the guilt get to him. He reached over and picked up his prepared graham cracker with chocolate and smashed the bunny’s corpse right into the middle, grinning as the marshmallow started to ooze over the edges and strung out in the air between the cracker and the stick.

“You might be right, but this? This is the absolute best way to eat a s’more when you’re in the woods with the fire and fresh air. You really need that smoky flavoring, my friend, it makes the whole experience better.”

Ransom could fee his eyebrows raising at his friend’s words. “I think that what you really meant to say is that you need the flavor of charcoal in your diet, isn’t that right?”

“I have no idea what you’re referring to.” Quill responded. He took a bite of his s’more and let the melted chocolate and burned marshmallow ooze from the other side, watching as Ransom only shook his head in exasperation as Quill enjoyed making a mess of his treat.

Anyone who said a little crispiness was bad on a s’more, well, they were so very wrong on all counts.

Step one: Find a ripe piece of soft fruit, such as a plum, apricot, or mango. These fruits are soft and taste good.

It took a few days, but Anisa knew people and she knew how to use her status as a international celebrity to get what she wanted.

According to the information she’d found, a small number of ripe plums were exactly what she needed to perfect her skills. It just wouldn’t do for Anisa Hansen to be inferior in something she should have been well-versed in before she learned to drive. Although, seeing as she still hasn’t learned to drive a motor vehicle at the age of twenty one, Anisa isn’t putting too much faith in that.

She is, however, putting her faith in the fact that she is amazing at studying and coming out at the top of her class regardless of the subject matter. She is going to master this.

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Step two: Bite a small, mouth-sized hole in the fruit.

Anisa ignores the stares as she tries, for the ninth time, to remove a small piece of plum. Really, this is much more difficult than the instructions indicated. The fruit is slightly malleable, and it tastes nothing like she had imagined it would.

Juice runs down her chin as Anisa bites into the plum again, picking delicately at it with her teeth. With the noise of the mess hall bouncing off the walls, she doesn’t hear the choked noise Gabe makes across the table.

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Step three: Use this as the mouth that you’ll practice kissing with.

Anisa places her lips to the fruit, pressing gently and sucking up the juice that wells in the cavity she’s created. She pulls the plum away from her mouth and licks at her fingers, trying to remove the sticky juice from between them.

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Step four: Kiss the fruit mouth gently. Try to establish a rhythm. Kiss the top part of the “mouth,” and then the bottom part of the “mouth.” For goodness’ sake, don’t eat your kissing partner.

She nibbles at the top part of the fruit and then moves her hand and repeats the motions to the bottom of the fruit. Anisa forgets for a moment, that she isn’t supposed to eat the fruit, that the plums are for practicing and the few she managed to obtain need to last. The flavor of the plum isn’t so bad anymore, Anisa thinks, as she runs her tongue along the tear in the fruit’s skin.

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Step five: Use your tongue by gently pushing it into the flesh of the fruit. Remember to use the tongue sparingly. You don’t want to overdo it with the tongue.

She dips her tongue into the fruit, again and again, licking and tasting at it’s flesh and wonders why the kitchen staff hasn’t ever had plums available for them before. These are damned tasty.

Okay, so maybe Anisa gets a little carried away with step five, but who would dare blame her for it anyways? The plum is perfectly ripe, just tangy enough to make her taste buds sing, and Anisa can’t get enough of it.

She moans a little, quietly, under her breath and doesn’t think anyone around their table noticed.

Suddenly, the fruit is snatched from her sticky fingertips and before Anisa can even think to complain, she is being kissed.

Lips are pressed firmly to hers and she can’t form coherent thoughts as those lips nibble at her upper lip, kiss her full on the lips again, before moving and nibbling on her full lower lip.

Anisa pants into the kiss, more turned on in this moment than she can ever remember being before. She is no longer ignoring the stares from the surrounding tables, in fact, the Australian has completely forgotten that anyone else exists in the world.

A hand curls around her neck and pulls her closer, guiding her, and tilting her head a little. There is a hint of tongue running along the seam of Anisa’s lips and she gasps open mouthed, desperate for more. And then there is a tongue inside her mouth, dancing with her own tongue, learning her in ways no one else knows.

When the tongue retreats, Anisa chases it with her own and maps out the warm cavity it came from.

Christ, she is kissing someone! Well he kissed her first but it is, quite frankly, the most amazing thing she’s ever done.

She decides that kissing Gabe is much better than kissing a piece of fruit.

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