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We are the reckless / We are the wild youth / Chasing visions of our futures... (Daughter, "Youth")
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Maybe it's something in the cold shuddering-swirling down her arms, making her clench her shoulders against the rush of wind, but Dorcas is feeling restless. Restless and reckless. That might explain why, when she and Marlene are stumbling out of the Muggle cab, laughing loopy dizzy drunk, she grabs Marlene's hand and squeezes it for a second too long. Like "thank you" and like "please don't leave me" and like "I love you more than air." And then when Marlene looks at her with a question perched on her lips, nestled in the dimple by her crooked smile, Dorcas doesn't look away.
She steps closer, moves her body in an exaggerated shiver. "It's cold," she says. Her voice sounds shrill, girlish to her own ears, but Marlene smirks. The lazy cocky surety nearly reaches Marlene's eyes, but there is something like fear there, too. Dorcas recognizes it with the thrill of kindred feeling, and with the busy buzzing blur of drunkenness. It must be the liquor, or else some ferocious wandering spirit that compels her to squeeze Marlene's hand tighter, lift it up to her face, press her lips against it.
She raises her eyes to meet Marlene's, and again: she does not look away.
She watches Marlene swallow, imagines tracing that slender-tender throat with her tongue, and she does not look away.
She lifts her hand toward Marlene's face--but this, this is too much, and so it hovers there, an inch away from the smooth slide of the other girl's cheek. Marlene cocks her head, sucks in her lower lip, and moves, sleepy slow, miracle of angles, to press her cheek against Dorcas's fingertips.
"Hey," she says, softly, and maybe it's a conjuring, because Dorcas finds herself tipping, reaching, and then her mouth is pressed against the jagged smear of Marlene's purple lipstick.
She inhales.
And then Marlene is kissing her back, wondrous fiery warmth and sticky lip gloss, Dorcas's. Dorcas's hands are slipping helplessly up and down the rough wool of Marlene's coat, and Marlene's hand is caught in the nightclub snarls of Dorcas's hair, and then they're both laughing, and kissing, and kissing, and laughing.
Dorcas stumbles and Marlene catches her and it's always been them, hasn't it? Always the velvet vacuum void that only the two of them could ever inhabit, second-year sleepover voices fading into sixth year whispers and slamming into here, now, hoarse mutterings slurred by too many pints and whiskey sours coursing through their blood. But it was always, always going to be them, Dorcas thinks, defiant. All at once she feels so sharp, and so brittle, and so very young. Marlene slings an arm around her shoulder, murmurs something filthy in her ear, and Dorcas laughs, bright and joyful and desperate in the bitter cold.
"Yeah, okay," she says, and it tastes like prophecy on the roof of her mouth, fate like a skein of yarn unraveling around them, with them, through them. Dorcas feels her teeth chattering. She gives a little shake, stretches up to press a kiss to the place where Marlene's cropped hair meets the long line of her neck.
"Hey," she says, "Let's go home, yeah?”
With a pop, they Disappararate.