Abby and Violet (Yuri Light Novel)

I felt Abby shift her body to look behind her, but she made no attempt to push me away and set herself free. She merely reached and took off my glasses, telling me that I’d bend them out of shape. I didn’t much care about it right now, I just wanted my face buried in her as much as possible.

I had just been through an emotional beatdown of sorts. More accurately, it was actually the reverse of a beatdown, but I still felt very bruised and tired. And thankful too, of course, hence why I was so desperately clinging to Abby.

After I had calmed down at the table, we finished breakfast, or at least, as much of it as we possibly could fit in our stomachs. After that, our family was sent into what could be called a food coma, my Dad passing away on the couch, Sophie retreating to her room, and William doing the same. Abby and I retreated to our own after we put the leftover pancakes in the fridge. As soon as we got in, I dropped my body on the bed, sitting and feeling listless. Abby was doing something, standing in front of me with her back turned, when I felt an impossible urge to just reach out and pull her in. My face was firmly pressed against her rear, something she had done to me a thousand times whenever she got me distracted lying belly down, and I could tell Abby was feeling a bit embarrassed having the same being done to her, but she said and did nothing to stop me for a long while.

“Come on,” she told me, her voice a bit shaky as she tapped my hands. “Let’s get ourselves more comfortable.”

“Just a bit longer,” I asked.

“Pfft! You’re talking with a baby voice,” Abby giggled.

“Am not!” I whined, my ears noticing that she wasn’t lying.

She let out another soft laugh, untangling my arms and turning around to face me. She pulled me by the collar, and I got up, reluctantly. I watched her smiling face as she removed my layers. When it was time for the socks, she asked if I wanted to keep them.

“…Yeah,” I told her after thinking for a bit. “My feet are cold.”

“I could just slide a bit deeper in bed to warm them up.”

“No,” I told her, my face warming up. “I want to have your face levelled with mine.”

She giggled again, teasing me about having become quite honest about my wants and needs over the time we’ve been together, but I was being adorably honest and needy today. When I told her that I was like this today thanks to her, she gave me one of her loving looks as she settled her arms around my neck, pulling me down and herself up until our noses bumped. She told me she loved me to bits, which was all that she needed to say, me telling her that I loved her so much, it made my heart feel cramped in my chest. She gave me a kiss and tapped my chest, telling me to snuggle up and get myself comfortable in bed while she gets ready to join in. I watched her, impatiently waiting for Abby to finally tuck herself in with me. As soon as she was getting into bed, I was already reaching out to her, pulling her in. I settled partially on her, my face on the crook of her neck, my legs hooked over her waist, Abby wrapping her arms around me and tucking my head under hers. I was now in a cocoon of her that I lived for. That, I realised then, being something more literal than I’d expect. I was warm, I was feeling her scent, and I was being embraced in her soft, loving touch. The role reversal was a bit embarrassing, but I was enjoying it too much to care.

“Is my wifey happy now?” she hummed into my ear.

I hummed back, nuzzling her neck and accidentally tickling her, Abby softly squirming and giggling as my nose rubbed a sensitive spot on her neck. I should have fallen more into her indulgence, but it made me perk up my head instead, me looking down at her loving smile and half-lidded eyes.

“Yes?” she asked, her voice coming a bit melodic.

“I’m really sorry for having made things hard for you.”

“It’s fine, I know what sort of girl I got myself married to,” she told me, her voice and eyes gaining a slightly serious edge. “But babe?”

“Yes?”

“…I forbid you from getting a full-time job you hate or that you feel like is stealing too much time and energy from housework.”

“…You forbid?” I echoed those words, sounding very out of place in our vocabulary.

“Yup, I forbid,” she told me, now going full serious and even crossing her arms, even though she was lying down on her back under me. “I can already see it: you getting yourself a job you dislike because we need it, but then ruining your satisfaction in life, or it taking so much time away from me and our home that you feel like you’re not providing me with a good house to come back home to.”

I blinked at her, unable to refute her prediction. I could totally see myself doing just that, getting a job where I had to deal with annoying tasks and even more annoying people, having to work overtime, and then return home to find Abby already there, tired from her own work. The house chores would still be waiting to be done, only to be left for the weekend and stealing away time we could use to do some couple-ly stuff to make up for the rest of the week. Abby is a needy girl, and quite frankly, so am I, just in a different manner, so that’d likely take a toll on us.

“I get that we might need you to get a job of sorts, either for a period of time, or more permanently, but be mindful that it is something you can do for a long while and respects your time, ok?”

I didn’t answer right away. First, I lowered myself down, my torso now practically fully on hers and moved my arms around her neck, hiding my face back in the crook of her neck.

“I promise I’ll be mindful of that,” I told her, feeling again a bit teary-eyed.

Abby huffed a laugh and uncrossed her arms from between us, moving them around me and started playing with my hair.

“…I think I’ll get a part-time job while you study,” I told her. “Just so I don’t use the money Dad saved up for me too fast. “If it’s a full-time job… maybe a library or bookstore?”

“I think those are good picks for you,” she hummed. “Looks like your wifey’s push towards you joining the Library Committee paid off, huh?”

“Pfft, fufu! It looks like it.”

“Hehe! I do have some good ideas from time to time, don’t I?”

“The best ones,” I told her as I started giving her cheeky self little tickles. We wrestled for a bit, teasing each other’s sides, although Abby was the more sensitive one, trying to be quiet so as not to disturb the rest of the family. We were also quite sluggish from the meal she had prepared, which was the next topic we discussed after a bit of delicious, entangled snoozing.

“Maybe just a bit of whipped butter with sugar?” Abby suggested when I asked what we should use for the layers of the pancake cakes we’d be doing later.

“I was thinking more like making some caramel and then adding milk or cream,” I suggested back. “Or maybe even whipping cream and adding some condensed milk and soluble coffee?”

“Wouldn’t the whipped cream start getting runny if left outside the fridge though?”

“We could add some gelatine, so it’d hold.”

During this conversation, I shifted us around, me now being on my back with Abby perched on top, each of her elbows on each side of my head as she held her head up. I had my hands comfortably relaxing on the small of her back, gently stroking her skin with my thumbs, my socked legs wrapped with her bare ones as we chatted about the mundane things. After the family intervention and having decompressed, I was feeling unnervingly light from shedding so much weight off my spirit, so having Abby’s gentle weight on top of me made me feel grounded. I still had some worries about the future, but it was a lot more manageable. Not a “I’ll figure it out when I get there” kind of manageable, but also not a “if I don’t figure this out soon, Abby will divorce me, the rest of our family and friends will disown me, I’ll have to start living under a bridge, and I’ll end up in medical school as a cadaver” kind of very dramatic doom and gloom.

I was also realising just how precious these talks are to me, and I could see in her eyes that they were also very precious to her too. It was one of the reasons that led to Abby having been so firm in her boundaries about my future possible employment.

Our whispered conversation was interrupted by a thud coming from outside and a pained hiss. Someone—my guess being my Dad—was walking around and, in their drowsiness, bumped into something.

“You really did a number on them.”

She stuck her tongue out at me before saying that it was another three hours until lunchtime, and it has already been two hours since we had breakfast.

I looked at the time to confirm that. It was five to nine o’clock yet. It felt both like it hadn’t been two hours since we got in bed, but that it had also been a lifetime.

“If only,” Abby laughed, framing my face with her hands.

I began sitting up, feeling the need to get up and using the toilet, but that could still wait for a bit, as I wasn’t quite ready to detach from my wife. Not for the five minutes it’d take me to reattach to her, that is. As I sat up, Abby hooked up her arms and legs around me into her usual koala-hug while I bent my knees upwards to create a cup with my lap for her to not slide down and keep our faces more levelled.

“You know, that reminded me of a joke.”

“Oh? Do tell.”

“So, a man went to the doctor, and the doctor told him he only had two years of life. ‘Is there anything I can do? I’m still young and have all my life ahead of me’, the man said. The doctor turns to him and says, ‘Marry a woman who nags you all the time and move out with her into the middle of nowhere’. The man asks how that’d cure him, to which the doctor says, ‘It won’t, but it will make those two years feel like a lifetime to you.’”

She laughed at my horrible joke and asked if I had learned that one from one of the boys. As far as I remember, it was from a TV show from many years ago when I was just a small child. It was surprising that I was even able to remember those two things, since most of my memories from back then were a bit of a blur. Rather depressingly, I feel like maybe that’s because there’s not much to remember, as life was pretty dull and monotonous until a certain lovingly pestering shortcake someone popped up.

“Well, sorry for making life interesting,” that shortcake impishly chirped before sinking her teeth into my chin.

Abby, on the other hand, had plenty to remember, but most of it wasn’t worth remembering. Our recent past and current present are far better, and our future? I can’t see into it, but I’m sure it might look a bit different than now, but it will also be just as good.