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Galinda ducked into her room—it was still her room, even if she had an intruder staying there with her—to catch her breath. It was exhausting, being around Elphaba Thropp all day. She was always short of breath, her heart racing, her face flushing and stomach swooping. She was constantly aware of where Elphaba was, and just how close they really were. It seemed like Elphaba was taunting her, really. She couldn’t even close her eyes without seeing her behind them.
Back against the door, Galinda breathed deeply, hugging herself. It was calming, the pressure, but not something to be done where anyone could see. At least in her room, she would have some privacy for a while. Elphaba would be studying right now, she thought. Maybe at the, ugh, library, or out in the field behind Shiz, the one that went all the way to the cliffs, or in the gardens. There was a beautiful bit she’d found out there with a little waterfall fixture in its obsidian rock wall; it seemed like the kind of peaceful place Elphaba might like, a place where she wouldn’t embarrass herself in front of Madam Morrible and gosh, just everyone, trying to one-up Galinda in the most juvenile fashion.
(Really, who did this jumped-up Munchkinlander think she was? Didn’t she know who Galinda was? She did, and she didn’t seem to care, and she didn’t even seem to care what Galinda thought about that. It was so… irritating, Galinda thought. It made her want to tackle Elphaba Thropp to the bed and keep her there.)
She could see Elphaba by that obsidian wall in her mind’s eye, the way that the dim light would refract through the waterfall over her green skin, the way her face would relax and her dark eyes would turn nearly black in the dim. She pressed her hands down, pushed her back hard against the door. If she was there with Elphaba, why, perhaps they would argue—no, of course they would argue, Elphaba was absolutely impossible. And then Galinda would say, oh, she didn’t know, but something incredibly clever, and Elphaba wouldn’t know what to say to that, so she would push Galinda up against the solid black rocks.
Galinda’s hands flexed, and she turned slightly, angling herself against the molding of the door frame: a much better match for the roughness of the cavern.
Elphaba would get right in her face then. She did, sometimes, and it was exhilarating, the rush of adrenaline as her nemesis said something or other that Galinda assumed was very smart and probably very unfair just inches from her own lips, as they breathed the same air. Elphaba would meet her eyes through those thick glasses. Then she’d smile, triumphant, just like she had when she’d rearranged Galinda’s wardrobe into the middle of the room in a pyramid like some kind of ill-constructed dollhouse, completely upsetting the very precise arrangements she had worked very hard to get just so.
Pressure on her chest and stomach wasn’t working as well as it did usually. Rather than her breathing evening out and her nerves returning to normal, she was breathing faster, her nerves falling lower and becoming almost electric. She slipped one hand under the waistband of her skirt, chasing the feeling, trying to put a stop to it.
As she did, thinking still of Elphaba’s face, her voice, even her ghastly pin-striped clothing, she felt herself growing less and less composed, not more. As her lower hand finally reached the point underneath which her nerves had come to settle, she felt nearly undone. She pressed experimentally with the flat of her hand. Despite the tingling, it felt… nice.
She thought it might be even nicer to get closer to the source. With a bit of tugging that, she regretted, would leave her looking a little rumpled and would require some fixing before she could go back out into the world, she managed to arrange pull aside the fabric of her, well, intimates. Slowly, she pressed her fingers into her most private place. When she grazed the place where her nerves had settled, down inside herself, she shuddered.
She had to try again.
She pressed her fingers against it firmly. Despite the intensity, the sharpness, the bite, it was pleasure like she’d never had, not even when Momsie and Popsicle had given her a pony and a vacation to a spa resort on Mount Rouncible for her birthday last year and she’d been massaged by the hot Quadling guy. That had been letting all her worries and troubles fade away into pure relaxed bliss. This was something else entirely, the concentration of her world into just her body and the images behind her closed eyes.
She pressed again, and again, and again against that little nub of nerves she had found inside herself. In her mind, the hand pressing wasn’t hers; it had long, bony fingers, and a strong, sure grip, and emerald-green skin.
As she pressed, the sensation increased, the tension inside her ratcheting up. She felt her chest heaving, like the meltdowns she’d had as a little girl, or the ones she (rarely!) still could not contain. She felt herself overwhelmed and losing control. But unlike when she was young, this overwhelm was something enjoyable, something she found herself craving even as she satisfied it.
As she pressed, the vision of a green hand began to expand; a green hand attached to an arm in a very ugly outfit, broad green lips at her neck, pressure from another warm body pressing her back against the rock wall, her own dress discarded on the ground as she rocked her hips to a rhythm set by their rivalry, that couldn’t exist without the attention they both gave it.
As the sensation grew, biting and hard, and she sped up to meet it, the vision in her mind of Elphaba Thropp cornering her against that garden waterfall burned itself into her psyche. When the pressure finally popped, like an overinflated balloon in midair, like the Gillikin River bursting its dam, transcendental pleasure and relief flooded her. Now this was like the treatment she’d gotten from the Quadling masseur, except it was her mind that felt like it was floating, not her body.
In fact, as the effect wore off, she very quickly became very aware of her body, and all the ways it wasn’t doing exactly what it was supposed to. All the ways she was falling short, being some average girl, not Galinda Upland of the Upland Uplands. Her nethers were weirdly wet and sticky, and her hand would be too. Her clothes were a complete mess, obviously, and so was her hair. She didn’t even want to know what this little moment had done to her nail varnish.
Disentangling herself, she brushed her clothes as flat as they would go and rolled her shoulders back. After cleaning off her hands and reapplying her makeup and perfume at her dressing table, she checked her grandpapa’s timepiece; it was nearly half an hour after she had planned to meet Pfannee and Shenshen outside Ozma Towers! Now she had to come up with a good reason why she wasn’t there.
Oh, she could swear up to the Wizard Himself, she just loathed Elphaba Thropp. This was all her fault.