billie || billie eilish

7

Landon Orion 

Billie and I piled logs in the centre of the dead forest to make a bonfire. She held her metallic lighter to the stringy kindling and the pile of logs were engulfed by flames. The yellow-red tendrils reaching up towards the glimmering stars. 

My face warned in the glow of the fire, Billie just shadows as she disappeared into the tree house, a papery silhouette against the midnight skyline. Her curvaceous body gliding across the moist forest floor, supple hips swaying. I turned away, wiping my damp palms on my jeans. Fuck. This wasn't okay. I really needed to stop looking at her like that. 

Her friends, the few she explained was coming, quickly grew into a crowd of bodding teenagers and I felt suffocate. 

Billie shoved Vietnamese coffee into a pair of eager hands and the bottles disappeared into the group of party goers. Fleece blankets dotted the forest floor that had dried and cracked during the afternoon. A couple, a gangly boy and a petite girl, laid on their backs on their blankets propped up against a warped sycamore while they gazed up at the stars. There were more clouds than anything. 

The night air was frigid, bribed my fingertips until the skin turned brittle. The log beneath my butt decaying and splintered. 

Billie sat beside me, drinking milk coffee from a stout glass. She looked up into the blue, mesmerised. There was something tender in her seaglass eyes that had me falling into their depths. I swallowed thickly. I wondered if she had ever caught me staring at her... 

"Isn't it beautiful?" The moon, a hard-looking glide nestled between the cotton candy clouds, shined white within her glossed eyes. 

I shrugged, rubbing my palms together. All I could think about was the sordid heat pooling in my lap, the electric tingles racing up my trembling thighs. I shifted in discomfort. 

Billie frowned. Her delicate eyebrows drawing inward. "Are you cold?" she asked, taking my hands in hers. She held our hands to the fire. Tingles erupted on the back of my hands were her skin touched mine. 

I pulled back. "W-what are you doing?" I spluttered. 

My vision blurred—I felt like I was going to a heart attack. Why was she touching me? 

"Am I hurting you?" Her blue hair was airborne in the glacial autumn wind, golden splinters against the fire. The scent of her vanilla shampoo drifting in the air. It reminded me of the vanilla ice-cream cake dad bought me for my birthday every year since I could remember. She smelt tasty. 

"No," I gasped, hiding my trembling hands in my hoodie pockets. "I'm just feeling a little overwhelmed—there's more people here than I thought there would be." 

Firey dust burst out of the bonfire, bubbling up into the black-blue sky and merging into the cotton clouds. 

"I'll go and get us something to drink," she told me, bruised. Her eyes were down casted. She disappeared into the tree house. What did that mean? 

"You're must be the friend Billie was raving about." A boy sat beside me, his facial features sharp and shadowy when illuminated by the sparkling fire. He smelt of the earth after rainfall. "I'm Shay—one of Billie's friends."