Birthday
July 28 is Jade's birthday.

She had a rather specific request for said birthday. I found myself hard-pressed to resist. I would like to stress that this little outing is not canon in the least. It is also not safe for any workplace environment, unless your workplace condones telepathic lesbian porn.

But on the plus side, Keiko has a good time for once!

For her birthday, Jade gets Keiko. NC-17 [explicit f/f sex], 4,644.


“Happy birthday to you!” Everyone bursts into cheers at the end of the song. Jade claps along with them—might as well join in the celebration, after all. There are a few “woo!”s thrown in, a couple of whistles, and one “And you’d better have a good time, or else.” (That one’s probably Gramma.)

“Thanks for coming out to celebrate, everyone.” She clasps her hands together right over her heart and smiles as widely as she can. “It means a lot. And your presents all look real nice. Um, is there anything else I oughtta add?”

“It’s your birthday,” Gramma tells her crisply, setting the thickest slice of chocolate cake in front of her. Jade drools just looking at it. It’s got warm chocolate sauce oozing from between the two spongy layers of cocoa-dark batter baked to fluffy perfection and it’s slathered in the thickest white frosting Jade’s ever seen, with delicate little flowers spun from sugar lining the icing. And the smell rising from it…well, it makes her stomach want to try to leap out of her body and swallow the cake whole.

“It looks real good,” she says. “So that’s my present from you?”

“Mostly,” Gramma replies. “I got some new things laid out on your bed for you. Nothing too big.”

“Thanks anyway.” She leans up and kisses Gramma’s leathery cheek.

“Here’s mine.” Nathan shoves a lumpy package wrapped in coarse brown paper across the table to Jade.

“What’s this supposed to be?”

He waves his hand at her. “Open it and see.”

She doesn’t bother opening it carefully, just tears through the rough wrappings until she gets to the beaded journal and elegant fountain pen inside.

“I know you’re not really into writing,” Nathan says, “but it’s useful for just collecting your thoughts. If you want to. Or you can pawn it off as a birthday gift to someone else.” He scratches behind his ear.

“I’m keeping it,” she tells him firmly. “Thanks.” She stretches across the table to give him a hug. “See? You made my scales pop out around my eyes.” Jade taps the golden ridges starting to emerge there. “That only happens when I get real happy.”

“What happens when you get mad?” he asks, grinning for once like he really means it. Not sardonic like it usually is.

“I start spewing smoke out of my nostrils. You know. What you’d expect.” She winks.

“Remind me not to piss you off, then.”

“So Nathan’s present was nice,” she says, resting a hand on her hip. “What did the rest of y’all get?”

“I thought you might like these.” Laura brushes her short black hair back from her face and tosses Jade a lavender-scented bundle. She sniffs deeply; she can pick up undertones of lilac oil and soap, and just the faintest hint of…

“Is that a mint leaf?” She inhales deeply again. “Just one or so crushed up in there.”

“It might be. Go on, open it,” Laura urges her.

“I’m on it, I’m on it.”

Laura got her bath salts. The little pellets look so pretty wrapped up in the purple cloth, almost like sparkling pebbles.

“Oh, thanks!” She closes her eyes and smells them again—the combination’s almost rich enough to make her dizzy. “This looks so good. Smells great, too.”

“I thought you might like them. They’re really fun, and they’re great when you want some relaxation time. And if you want to relax with someone else, they’re good for that, too.” Laura grins, and the two of them break out laughing at around the same time.

Lily balances on her tiptoes with her hand high in the air, her wide patterned sleeve draping around her shoulder. “Jamie and me got you something real nice, Jade!” Next to her, Jamie pushes his sunglasses up his nose (he thinks they make him look mysterious, and she doesn’t have the heart to tell them that he just looks silly when he wears them inside) and grins.

“Toss it over, Lils!” she calls out, and Lily kindly obliges.

Inside is a—she squints. It might be an mp3 player. It kind of looks like one, only it’s not sleek and shiny plastic. She can still see a few loose wires sticking out.

“Jamie made it, and I loaded the songs on and painted it,” Lily says, sticking her chest out and beaming. “We know how expensive they get. But this one works good. We tested it out a lot.”

“I believe y’all.” She hugs it close to her chest and feels her scales pop out along the contours of her eyes like some kind of makeup. They feel warm when they prickle into existence, almost like each scale’s purring. “I love it. I really do.”

Lily beams.

Darin tries to slip her his present without comment, but Sevien grabs his wrist first. “This one’s special. It’s a box—”

“Don’t tell me what it is!” Jade tries to cover her ears.

“I have to, or you won’t know what it is,” Sevien informs her tartly. “Anyway, it shrinks or grows depending on what you put in there, so anything fits inside. Open it and test it out.”

The box is lacquered black, and it fits snugly in Jade’s palm. She flips open the brass catch and tries to put Nathan’s notebook inside—and the box’s joints expand before she can blink, revealing a snug little compartment just big enough for a journal and a pen. “Thanks,” she breathes. “That must be pretty rare.”

“It is,” Sevien agrees cheerfully, and nudges Darin’s shoulder. “You just have to know where to look.”

“Thanks, you two.” She sets that one aside carefully, then holds a slim package wrapped in light pink paper over her head. “Whose is this?”

“Mine,” Cordelia says softly. She looks at her lap. “If you don’t like it, you can return it. I mean, that’s okay with me.”

“I’m sure I’m gonna love it.” Jade tells one of her fingernails to become harder, sharper—more like a claw. With that, she slits open the pink paper carefully to reveal a CD inside.

“Renee Fleming,” Cordelia explains. “She’s…she’s really good. I thought you might like her.”

“I’m gonna put her on real soon.” Jade gives Cordelia her biggest smile yet. “Thanks a ton, honey.”

Cordelia’s pale cheeks flush the same shade of pink as the wrapping paper.

Ro hands her a shirt from a market in Mumbai with gorgeous embroidery around the sleeves and neck, elegant spirals and curls all done in gold. “This musta cost you a fortune,” she breathes.

“Hardly. I traded it for something of no real worth to myself. But I’m glad the bargain appears to have turned out so well.” Ro rests her hand on Jade’s shoulder and smiles.

Everyone else has great stuff, too. Her hand’s going to be sore from writing thank-you notes (Gramma would insist), but it’s worth it. Even Davor and Rey manage to scrape together something nice. Davor gives her a pair of slippers lined with something soft and fluffy—she makes sure her toenails aren’t talons before she puts them on—and Rey hands over an alarm clock with DON’T PANIC written on it in large friendly letters.

“Thanks,” Jade says again. Her throat’s getting tired from the familiar refrain, but it’s an important one to repeat.

At the other end of the table, Phoebe reaches over and nudges the slight Japanese girl sitting next to her. Jade rubs the scales rimming her eyes. She can’t really tell if Keiko’s having a good time or not, but she hasn’t done the thing where she curls up in on herself and looks at a point far off in the distance, so she thinks Keiko’ll be all right.

“Keiko,” Phoebe says. “Give Jade our present.”

She nods once. “I hope it is to your liking,” Keiko says gravely, her small mouth thinner than Jade would like it to be. Keiko’s gorgeous enough as it is, petite and trim with delicate features that make you think she’s less scary than she really is. (When she narrows those deep dark eyes of hers, though, you’re in for it. Jade knows that pretty well.) But if she just smiled once in a while, brushed the fine strands of hair away from her face, she’d be a real knockout.

“I’m sure it’s gonna be great.” She smiles at Keiko with a smile even bigger than the one she gave Cordelia, but Keiko doesn’t really respond, just sort of looks at her.

And it is great. Jade would think it was great even if she wasn’t interested in getting a smile or hell, anything out of Keiko. It’s a shimmering black stone set with little gold vines trailing down the sides on a chain with the tiniest links she’s ever seen. The most dragonish part of her mind purrs in approval. “Wow,” she breathes. “Wow.”

“You are pleased?” Keiko asks.

“Pleased, hell.” She pushes her chair back and bounds to the end of the table, giving Keiko the biggest hug she can muster. Keiko tenses up in Jade’s arms like she’s about to pounce on someone, but Phoebe shoots her a Look and she starts breathing again. “It’s so pretty, Keiko. Just like you,” she decides to add.

Keiko doesn’t blush, exactly, but Jade sees a tiny twitch of a muscle in her jaw. For her, that’s like her whole face turning red. Jade’s sight is pretty good for picking out little things like that, most of the time. And the little things are what’s important with Keiko, since lord knows the girl never brings herself to do anything really big.

“I’m real glad you could all come out,” she says to her guests. She still hasn’t let go of Keiko. “Uh, I guess y’all can just talk and mingle and stuff. Should be fun. Everyone here’s a good person, basically. And everyone has great stories. So share ‘em. It should turn out good.”

The conversation starts back up again, and Jade finally lets go of Keiko. Keiko’s sort of staring half at Jade, half at the ground, with her eyes darting all over the place like ping-pong balls. “I will not trouble you by staying long,” she says.

“Stay as long as you want. You’re no trouble.” Jade smiles at her again, but she doesn’t quite return it.

“Nevertheless,” Keiko counters—and from the way she’s looking around now, her gaze lingering on the windows and doors and corners, Jade could swear she’s mapping out escape routes—“I do not know if this atmosphere suits me.”

“It’s getting kinda crowded,” Jade says, nodding. “You wanna go somewhere else where there aren’t so many people? You still getting headaches from too many thoughts at once entering your head?” Privately, she’s glad that her own telepathic abilities aren’t nearly that strong; she has to really concentrate if she wants to pick up anything deeper than the occasional flitting surface thought.

Keiko shakes her head slowly. “I have learned to filter out the thoughts of others well enough.”

“Do you still hear it when people think things directly at you? Even I can pick up on that. Usually,” she amends. “If they’re thinking it hard enough, anyway.”

“I do,” Keiko says. She keeps her arms crossed, her pale hands resting gently just above her elbows. The girl needs a serious dose of color in her wardrobe, Jade thinks. It would make those cute little cheekbones of hers just glow.

Bits of conversation swirl around them, followed by a few sweet minor chords on a guitar; it looks like Darin’s hauled out Eileen and is just starting to tune her up. Cordelia closes her eyes and starts humming a melody line to the chord progression softly, with Sevien adding a few harmonies on top. Laura and Ro have their heads together over one of Gramma’s old books, and even Rey and Jamie seem to have found something to talk about, judging by the way Jamie’s waving around the screwdriver he usually keeps in his back pocket. Hell, Davor doesn’t even mind that Lily’s braiding his hair. So that’s everyone taken care of except Phoebe and Nathan, and those two are probably off talking somewhere, if she knows them.

And that leaves Keiko. More specifically, that leaves Keiko to Jade.

Keiko’s hugging the wall close and doing her best to blend into the peeling paisley patterns stamped on it, which for obvious reasons isn’t working. “You don’t want to go talk to anyone?” she asks, just to be sure.

“I am content,” Keiko says.

“Well, you can talk to me, you know.”

“You need not do that.”

“I need not, but I want to.” She takes Keiko’s hand, squeezing it a little. Keiko winces. Jade looks down and notices her nails, still sharp and golden, with tiny red beads forming around their points. With a nudge from her mind, they shrink and turn transparent. “Sorry about that.”

“It is fine.”

“I shouldn’t be hurting my guests on my birthday,” she insists. “C’mon. Let’s go into the kitchen and I’ll get something for your hand, okay?”

Keiko looks like she’s about to say something, but holds tight onto her lower lip with her teeth and bites it back. “If you wish.”

“I do,” she says.

Nathan and Phoebe are perched on the rickety old kitchen chairs, a bottle balanced between them.

“Fathers are like that,” Nathan says, patting her on the back like she’s his kid sister. “Mine—” His ears prick up when Jade crosses the threshold, and he stops talking, sniffing the air a little to see who just walked in.

“Just me,” she says. “Well. Me and Keiko. Her hand’s bleeding a little.” She holds Keiko’s wrist up. “Now let’s see if the cabinets are still sticking, I guess.”

“Do they do that a lot?” Phoebe asks. She looks at Keiko a little oddly, with one of her eyebrows cocked at a weird angle, but doesn’t say anything outright.

“All the time. This house is as old as anything.”

The wood hasn’t swelled up too much from the recent rains, so it only takes Jade a few yanks before the cabinet flies open. She has to be careful not to get too frustrated; if she really tugged hard on the handle, about half the kitchen wall might come loose, and Gramma would sell her hide to pay for the repairs.

“Here.” Jade shows the Benadryl and cotton wipes to Keiko. “We can go up to my room to put this on. Less crowded.”

“Up to your room?” Nathan echoes dryly, uncapping the bottle. “Why not here in the kitchen?”

Jade smiles sweetly at him. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Phoebe stomp on his foot. “Well, it looks like you two were having a real nice talk. I’d hate to cut in on that, and I’m sure Keiko wants to give you guys some space, too. Right?”

“I…yes, that might be best,” Keiko says, blinking a little. “That is, if you were in the middle of conversation…”

“If you want to stay, you can—” Phoebe begins, but Jade waves her hand in the air.

“Nah, we’re gonna be fine on our own.” This time, she makes sure her nails are back to human when she squeezes Keiko’s hand. She leads her up the narrow spiraling steps to her room and skips over the ones with the rotted floorboards. “Careful on that one,” she warns Keiko. “It creaks something awful, and if you step in the center, your foot might go clean through it.”

Keiko steps gingerly around the black patch of rot dotting the center.

Jade’s room is a mess, but it always is: a riot of posters with curled edges and fading ink plastered to the walls, a mirror streaked with dust that sits over her three-legged desk, her purple sheets wadded up into a lumpy ball at the end of her bed. She inhales deep and flicks her tongue out in the air to taste the ambience. Stale summer heat and the stickiness of melting sugar. It’s perfect.

“Sit down.” She perches on the bed and shoves enough of the bedclothes off to make room for Keiko, who sits in a way that makes sure as little of her body comes in contact with the actual sheets as possible.

“What’s wrong?”

Keiko looks at a point just to the right of Jade’s head. “Nothing.”

Jade taps the glowing core in her mind, the one connecting her to everyone else’s thoughts and feelings, and searches for the thread that leads to Keiko. It quivers a little when she brushes it with mental fingers. It—that’s the word, it recoils. Through half-lidded eyes, she sees Keiko shiver next to her. “Why’re you nervous?” Jade asks.

“I am not sure. An involuntary response, perhaps. It is irrelevant.” She blinks again.

“Nothing’s irrelevant,” Jade says. She brings the base of Keiko’s injured palm right up to under her eyes. The puncture marks really are small—tiny imperfections, but the red’s so vivid against Keiko’s porcelain skin.

“Hey. It’s gonna be okay. Trust me,” she says. Trust me, she adds mentally, and shapes the words so that they’re a slow ripple of water passing through Keiko’s consciousness, submerging and soaking all the dark knots of tension there. Some of the stiffness in Keiko’s hand goes away.

“I know what I’m doing,” she repeats, and brings Keiko’s palm up so it’s brushing against the tip of her nose. She keeps her words swirling slowly around in Keiko’s head and glides more of her consciousness inside in their wake, keeping her eyes out for any of those curled-in spots. There’s a big one resting right below the surface, so she changes the shape of her mental energies, makes them soft fingers with just the right pressure to massage out knots of worry like that one. Keiko’s breath catches for a second and the threads of her mind seize, but Jade keeps her thoughts moving in lazy circles and eventually Keiko starts to move with her, her breath matching the rhythm Jade’s setting.

“Good,” Jade breathes. “That’s real good.” It’s hard to keep focused on staying human when she’s got this much of her thoughts focused in on Keiko, so she lets some parts slip. Her scales, mostly; she feels the itch that always comes when they start rippling over her skin. It’s a good itch, the kind you get when a happy tingle runs down your spine. After a second of thinking about it, she lets her tongue go, too. It feels a little weird to cram all of it in her human mouth when it’s long and forked at the end like this, but it’s not going to stay there for long. She traces the crimson marks on Keiko’s hand with its tip, licking up the droplets of blood being squeezed from the punctures.

The texture of Keiko’s mind shifts and starts going dark at the corners, but Jade keeps Keiko’s consciousness cradled in hers. This is more hygienic, anyway, Jade says. My mouth’s real clean when it’s like this.

“It feels…” Keiko says out loud, and her mind isn’t the only thing that’s shifted; her voice is a little fainter, a little less sure, and even more gorgeous than it was before.

Yeah? Jade prompts her silently.

…strange, she finishes. Rougher than I expected.

Rough in a bad way?

No. Her thoughts show that she’s not lying; the edges of her mind start to uncurl like the petals of a flower peeking out after the winter. It…

Jade flicks her tongue over the cuts again and pays closer attention to Keiko’s mind this time. A thin shiver runs through it, one that’s the same shade of blue Jade usually associates with anticipation. She sees her own mind flash the same pale blue for a second, and something warm starts to push its way to the base of her spine.

How does this feel? Jade lets Keiko’s hand drop and presses her tongue to Keiko’s neck this time, licking along the curve of her jaw.

“I should not…” Keiko whispers, her breath coming in faster. Wild bursts of color start to trample around in her head.

“Shh.” Jade paints over the frantic spots of light with soothing whiteness until they die down altogether. It’s hard to shape human words when her tongue’s like this, so she sticks to the other method, mostly. Keiko’s skin tastes like tulips beginning to bud and the first light snows of winter, kissed with salt and tinged with an undercurrent of doubt. It’s the last part she has to do something about.

Does this make you feel good? she asks, letting her tongue curl around the shell of Keiko’s ear. She doesn’t even need to check Keiko’s mind for the answer. The way her hand tightens around Jade’s shoulder and she makes a faint high noise in the back of her throat is enough.

It’s with a lot of reluctance that Jade returns her tongue to its human shape, but this part’s easier when it’s just two human mouths, and it’ll probably make Keiko worry less. And this is all about making Keiko feel good, really. Nobody should feel worried or alone on Jade’s birthday.

“You’ll like this even more,” she promises, brushing against Keiko’s lips with her own.

She thinks she hears Keiko say “oh” softly; her lips part in just the right way, so Jade takes the opportunity to flick her tongue inside, teasing the ridges just behind Keiko’s teeth. Her mouth is soft and hot, her tongue heavy when she starts to taste the corners of Jade’s mouth, and when the dizzying currents swirling inside Keiko finally wear down the snarled tangles of worries, Keiko starts to kiss back. She’s not sure how firm to make her lips at first, or when to slide her tongue over Jade’s, so Jade nests her hand in Keiko’s hair and guides her through it as gently as she can. When they finally break apart to breathe, Keiko’s lips are flushed and her eyes are half-closed. The spots of color high on her cheeks confirm what Keiko’s thoughts show: she’s getting into this. There’s a thin little refrain in the back of Keiko’s mind now, one saying please please yes, and it’s starting to get louder than the whispers of bad girl bad bad girl and doesn’t know what she’s doing coming from the black masses in Keiko’s head.

“Let’s sweep those bad thoughts away,” Jade murmurs. She kisses the hollow of Keiko’s throat before she gets to work on her shirt. She doesn’t tear the thing off, even though she wants to, wants to see Keiko’s moon-white skin exposed to her like that, because she doesn’t want to startle the girl. Well. Not more than necessary.

It doesn’t take too long to get her shirt up over her head. Keiko really is enough to take her breath away like this, bits of her black hair standing out sharply against her skin and her chest rising and falling with each shallow breath, moving more than Jade’s ever seen her move before. “You okay like this?” she asks.

“I think so.” Keiko clenches her eyes shut.

Jade presses feather-light kisses to her eyelids. “Don’t be scared. It’s all going to be all right. I promise.” I promise. She shapes her thoughts into gentle sunlight and guides it so that it trickles down to bring warmth to the cold places in Keiko’s consciousness. Beneath her, Keiko sighs.

She sighs again when Jade rolls her thumb over Keiko’s nipple; the pleasure she takes from it rolls back down their connection until it washes over Jade. She stifles a moan when her own breasts start to ache the way Keiko’s must be now. Jade lets tiny scales prickle across her thumb before she caresses her nipple again, and the response Keiko gives is sharper this time. Needier. “You like that?” she whispers.

Yes, says the voice in Keiko’s mind, the one Jade’s trying to keep happy. More please yes…

“More it is,” she whispers before she laves her tongue against Keiko’s breast, lapping until her nipples are teased into peaks by fingers and tongue and just a little bit of teeth for good measure. Keiko’s hand fists in Jade’s braids as she struggles to keep her lips closed, but her mind opens, and oh, how it opens. Yes, it purrs, drawing Jade in. Want this. Want you.

Try this one, she says. She searches for the part of Keiko’s brain that’s the pinkest, the rawest, the one that wants this most, and when she finds it tucked away in the back, she floods it with images: Keiko flat on her back with Jade’s hands settling on top of her, Keiko straddling Jade and exploring the contours of her body with trembling hands, Keiko parting her thighs for Jade, gasping when Jade nudges her in just the right ways and brings her to a sweet conclusion…

Jade feels the twitch run through Keiko, hears the sound that follows it: a soft “ah—”, and that encourages her to add in even more suction. Keiko’s “ah” becomes a drawn-out whimper, one that fades and gets stronger depending on how much heat’s encircling her breast. Keiko’s emotions feel more like shockwaves now. They make Jade tingle all over.

She steadies her hands on Keiko’s hips and kisses her way down her taut stomach until she reaches the downy thatch of hair over her cleft. “Birthday kiss,” she says, and touches her lips to the raised nub right above her folds.

The sound Keiko makes at that is sweet enough to be music, and the tangle of thoughts accompanying it make Jade’s head spin. She checks to make sure that the scales on her fingers aren’t too thick, just a light dusting, before she brushes her knuckles along her folds—light and tiny and fast, she doesn’t need to use any real pressure, not when Keiko’s consciousness is stretching towards hers and twining with it so perfectly, shivering at each pass of their minds and at every twitch of Jade’s fingers. She stops trying to keep her hips from bucking after Jade slips a finger inside, only one at first, but when she curls it she’s sure she’s found the right spot, because Keiko’s actually talking now, actually saying “ah” and “please” and “oh.” Jade rubs her free hand hard against her own clit, because this is just too hot.

She keeps her tongue flicking against the rise, keeps it steady and fast instead of hard (because it doesn’t need to be hard to work, and this is driving Keiko wild enough as it is), and when she really starts moving her finger in and out and slips in another one next to it—well, that must be what really drives Keiko over the edge, and Jade sees the lights exploding behind her eyes when she does. It feels like she’s floating, like everything’s hanging in the air and time’s stopped, but she remembers to keep her other hand moving and then she’s climaxing right after Keiko hits hers, after the aftershocks from Keiko are still echoing in her head, and it’s almost enough to make her crazy.

“Wow,” she says when she remembers how to speak. She kisses Keiko full on the lips, and this time, she doesn’t have to spend any time soothing away the worries before Keiko lets her do it.

“I have never experienced that before,” Keiko says slowly, blinking up at Jade through hazy eyes. “That was…”

“It was good, yeah?” She smiles.

“It was certainly…enjoyable, yes.”

Jade kisses her again, for good measure. “Then that’s the best birthday present I can ask for.”