Cherry Pie

DROP FOUR

DROP FOUR

“Cherry!” Pickle exclaimed and hugged her, no, squeezed her tight.

“Hi. I’m here. Yay,” Cherry said with a forced smile.

“Finally! I was worried, you never texted back. Nevermind, let me show you around. This is the house, and this is…”

Pickle droned on and on about the place, looking giddy. Cherry didn’t want to sour her mood, but she just wasn’t feeling it. Sure, she trusted her friend, and she was somewhat certain this wasn’t a trap of some kind, but she had been burned too many times already. She couldn’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop.

“This is the kitchen, it’s pretty much our meeting room. This is Hector’s ouzo, there’s a standard supply of it if you can stand it. This cupboard is my pickle pantry, you can have as much as you like.” She snatched an entire pickle jar.

“Gee, thanks…” Cherry chuckled.

“And this is our room. We’ll sleep together for tonight and we’ll go and get you a bed first-thing tomorrow morning, all right?”

Cherry shrugged and left her carry bag at the corner. Pickle was giddy, pointing things left and right. “This is the bathroom, we can use the upstairs one. Hector left it for us alone. And this is the storeroom, don’t ever touch anything in there, it’s all dusty boxes, anyway. This is Hector’s room, and now we go downstairs.” Three steps from the bottom, she sat down and whispered the rest. “This spot is the best to take a peek of Hector while he works without bothering him. It’s a nice view while having a snack.” Pickle bit down on a pickle and watched.

Hector was indeed topless, sweating over his forge. It was a high-tech forge built for precision work that could even make spaceship parts, but it was still hot as f**k. A chimney made of graphene-based metamaterials carried the heat away and outside. He was crafting parts for his armours, doing heavy work at one moment, banging on metal with hammers and pouring molten alloys in moulds, and the next moment he was doing delicate needlework, blending the soft and the tough material in a perfect amalgamation.

Cherry watched too, and absent-mindedly accepted a pickle from the jar and munched on it. Hector looked like Hephaistos, working over his forge. But instead of the short, bulky Olympian CEO, this one was tall, lean, with muscles built for work, nothing like the puffy bodybuilder type. The girls watched as the muscles rippled and contracted, directing each blow of the hammer at the precise location he was aiming for. Cherry could see that there were no do-overs, no missed blows, no waste of material. It was like watching a painter land each brush stroke at the precise angle and placement to end up with a masterpiece. A painter with a hammer and lean, glinting muscles and dark hair and a short beard, and the brush of a hairy chest ending in a line of more dark hair on his lower stomach that went down into his pants… After a long moment, she whispered, “I was totally gonna make fun of you at first, but I can definitely see the appeal.”

They both munched on more pickles, enjoying the view in silence.

“Forgot to get some pads, can you spare any?” Cherry said, getting undressed in their room.

Pickle smirked and pointed at the closet. “Open that one.”

Cherry did so, and as soon as she opened it a pile of pads and tampons and every kind of period-care product fell on the floor around her feet. She yelped, “What?! Oh, you planned that, didn’t you? Haha. Very funny, how mature of you. What’s all this, anyway?” She picked one box from the pile.

Pickle put on some comfy jammies and hugged her legs close to her. “Hector didn’t know what to get me, so he bought two of everything.”

Cherry tsked. “Aww, that’s adorable!”

Pickle chuckled and brought a second pillow.

“So… have you two… you know? Done something?” Cherry asked, going towards the toilet.

“Do what?”

Cherry stopped, then mimicked a finger in the hole, going in and out.

Pickle’s eyes went wide. “No! Unh-uh. Nope.”

Cherry tilted her head to the side. “Really? I thought otherwise.”

“No!” Pickle squealed. “Why would I?” she protested in a high-pitched voice.

Cherry squinted at her. “So… You don’t mind if I…” She moved her finger around, pointing in places.

“All yours.” Pickle shook her head vigorously.

Returning from the bathroom, Cherry found Pickle holding her bag of blow. There was a deep frown on the fleshy side of her face. Cherry tried to shrug it away, “I… uh, wasn’t going to take it. I don’t know what I was thinking, really. I was out there, about to come here, I panicked.”

“You panicked and went to buy drugs?” Pickle said, sighing softly.

“Yes. I thought I was just going into the same situation by a different owner. It was one final act of defiance, you know?”

“Not really, no,” Pickle said simply, placing the bag of drugs back on the dresser.

“It sounds stupid to me as well now that I said it out loud. I know I should have trusted you, you said it was great here, and I wanted to believe it. I still do… It’s just…” Cherry sat on the bed and covered her face.

Pickle hugged her. “I know, Caroline. I know.”

Feeling safe and loved for the first time in ages, held in the arms of a mother-figure, Cherry let the tears fall and sobbed quietly. Pickle just held her there, brushing Cherry’s hair with her fingers, humming softly. She kissed her on the forehead. “You’re safe now. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Cherry then let it all out, bawling her eyes out.

A while later, they both crawled into bed. A giddy Pickle hugged her tight, “I’m the big spoon.”

“Why do you get to be the big spoon?” Cherry complained, not really meaning it.

“’Cause I’m older,” Pickle said, as a matter of fact.

Cherry squirmed around. “Ouch, girl, your exoskeleton is digging into my back. It’s torture.”

“When you get your own bed, you’ll be free of this t*****e. Now shut up and get spooned.”