[ drp ] Little Talks (taymerica)

[lizbot]

Shelter

Sliding forward, she wrapped her arms around his neck and told him he was. Told him she was proud. Too tired and heartsore to joke and tease, her affection still came across in the way she looked at him for a long few minutes before burying her face against his jacket.

Tears burned her eyes at the combined stress of the earlier fight with Konstantin and the way relief still quietly shook her whenever Taym spoke like of himself like this. It took a few breaths but she didn't cry, didn't let on beyond a tightening of limbs.

She wanted to say welcome home, but didn't trust her composure, didn't trust the bitter hurt that was ever lurking. Instead she settled for a different and less loaded truth, "I love you."  

[lizbot]

You're in a car with a boy, and maybe he's not beautiful, but he's beautiful. Your taste has always been questionable.

She wears a breezy sundress and a straw hat with a blue ribbon dangling down. Oversize sunglasses hide her eyes but not her grin, not the small challenge in the way she holds herself that says, Show me a good time, boy.  

[Rejam]

Shelter

He had, sometimes, moments of painful awareness, and he told himself it was the sap that made him rebel and fall back on snark but really it was the fear of how sincere it was.

"If you really loved me," he whispered as he lifted her, aware that it was only partly the strength he'd been granted and partly his own human arms, no longer wasted to frail and shaken bone, that let him perform this small miracle, "you'd burn those ******** shoes."  

[Rejam]

Questionable Taste

He loves this. The car's an old beater, it's a piece of s**t, but it had been a young man's car at some point and it is a manual with two doors and a narrow backseat that you have to crawl into and it still has a radio, half-ripped out of the console with the wires dangling across an ashtray crusted with a few years of someone else's cigarettes, a huge tacky vinyl of a wolf peeling and bubbling off the back windshield.

It seems like a shame that it's going to end its life in a creek bed somewhere, and so it is their duty to give it the send-off its full life merits. He spent eight hundred bucks on it and then spent a hundred and fifty more and an hour under the hood making sure it'd last another fifteen, sixteen hours, told the guy it was cheaper than renting a car for a long-distance road trip, which it was. There's still grease on his forearms where he's rolled up his sleeves, cigarette dangling on his lip, and he'd picked up sunglasses at the gas station, which he now tips down so that he can eye her over the top of them, like she's a stranger and he's enjoying a novel view.

(She likes to play pretend. He likes to indulge her. He's still got a lot of making up to do for a book report that was never read.)

He trots out the drawl on for her, the one that's normally just a hint hanging around behind a voice that's either too angry or too full of laughter to hide it otherwise. The total effect--grease, tattoos, sunglasses, cigarette, drawl--is almost convincing, marred by the shaking of his hands, by the fact that it's him and always will be him, when playing pretend is over.

"You look like you need a ride. Where you headed, baby?" he says as he leans out the window, altogether too poker-faced, "'Cause that's where I'm goin'."  

[lizbot]

Shelter

The only sign of her surprise was in the widening of her eyes and a sudden flush, hidden quickly as she leaned in to drawl quietly against his ragged ear (her declared favorite), "If I do, it'll just be to make room for something worse."  

[lizbot]

Questionable Taste

She loves this. No matter what he wears or act he puts on, Taym is always very much himself making the rest even better. He looks at home in the shitty car, even with the exaggerated cool guy posturing and shameless, straight-faced pickup line, and it occurs to her how long it's been since she went out driving with a boy.

With a swaying walk she approaches, eyeing up both car and driver before leaning down to peer through his window and take in the rest of it with a speculative smile. He smells like a garage and it makes her was to press in close, to get her hands a little dirty on him. Instead, with a coy flip in her voice, she says, "Mmmhmm and I could at that. But I gotta know..." Leaning in close, she looks around the gas station, making sure no one could overhear, before turning to him and asking, "Are you plannin' on gettin' fresh with me once I'm in your car?"

rejam

 

[Rejam]

Questionable Taste

He takes a drag. "As a ********' daisy."  

[Rejam]

Twinkle Toes

He makes good on the offer whether she upholds her end of the bargain or not, and he's half-bored and half-bossy, and he says again that he's going to pay for them and after the second pair starts hiding the price while she tries them on.

"I wanna do something nice for you," he says, quiet and more serious than the occasion warrants. "I know it's not nice sometimes. I know I'm not nice sometimes."  

[lizbot]

Questionable Taste

Her smile widens and she responds by snapping her gum and sashaying to the passenger side. Tossing her hat into the backseat, she slides into the seat, wriggling against the cheap, cracked leather. There is an attempt to adjust the seat that results in a startled yip of surprise and laughter as she tries to get it somewhere between knees-to-ears and laid-out-flat.

The common irritations of old cars are met with pleased nostalgia and it takes a bit for her to settle in, hands exploring the the interior, poking through the glove compartment, reaching to fiddle with the radio. Every other moment, she twists to catch his eye, to make a face, to ask questions about who he'd bought it from and what they were like and what route they were taking.

She does't ask where they were heading, though. This didn't seem a day for destinations, not at all.

xrejam

 

[Rejam]

Apologies

He shivers in his sleep and when he's close to it, on and off, violent little undignified tremors like a tiny dog that's been left out in the rain. It doesn't make sharing a bed with him any more pleasant and he knows it and that's partly what he means when he shivers himself awake and she's there, still, and he says I'm sorry. Only partly, so he says the other half too, drowsy: thank you.  

[lizbot]

Apologies

She kicks him in her sleep and elbows him freely. She clings and not always gently, seeking and latching to human warmth and rhythms like a life raft, even his shivering scarcity. When some measure of comfort is met, sleep falls suddenly and with little warning, leaving him more often than not whispering to himself.

She runs hot and shoves all the blankets off the bed. She feels a chill and steals them for herself. She sprawls. She curls up small. She sleeps the whole night through. She wakes up and leaves without a word for an hour, only to come back smelling like grass and sweat and the island night, reaching out to hold him with cold hands.

She does not apologize.

xrejam

 

[lizbot]

Days

She's never around during meals and that is maybe not so strange though he's never truly voiced the discomfort with her presence at such rituals. When she leaves, it's with a certain sort of cautious hope, a careful anticipation. When she returns, it is with a subdued quiet. She doesn't talk about it.  

[lizbot]

Get in loser

He comes back one day to the combined scents of pot and popcorn and the sight of his bed stripped down to the mattress. A corner of the room has been converted to what is very definitely a blanket fort and from within it, he can hear the opening to what is very definitely Mean Girls.  

[Rejam]

Questionable Taste

He answers her questions, at first in character with a surplus of baby and darlin' thrown in, but the act is dropped a few miles down the flat and featureless highway, leaving in its stead his usual quiet sarcasm laced with affectionate teasing. He's got the windows down (shoulda put your hair up, he comments). He feels young, real young, teenager young, and after blowing through two empty stop signs without even pretending to go for the brake he pauses at the third to lean over and steal her gum, brazen and shameless and immature.

He tells her the best thing about Hunter life is how much it makes little things like this, stupid things--driving a car with the windows down and nowhere to be--seem like an adventure. He snaps her gum and he's good at it.

His hand is ghosting from the stick to her knees and he's looking for a place to pull over, somewhere secluded where the fields give way to stands of sparse autumn trees, and maybe that's an adventure too. While he's looking he asks her if she knows how to drive stick and he asks it like he's already sure the answer is an indignant of course I do.  

[Rejam]

Days

He does, though, finally. He asks her, his voice meticulously neutral, whether she avoids eating with him because she thinks he doesn't want her to or because she's eating with Bashmet.