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 Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 8:58 pm
The staring contest went on and on, and on and on and on -- until at last, finally, the youma turned away and slowly sank back down into the water. Both of the teenagers in the boat were holding a breath they hadn't realised they'd sucked in. The youma slipped into the lake without even a ripple: the seconds ticked on into minutes, minutes into longer minutes, and once those minutes reached about five they began to understand that it was not going to come back.
Franz was staring out over the lake with an expression that Janice knew well: it was the wild, golden-eyed gaze of my God, it's full of stars, it was the expression where his brain was combing over what just happened and separating it down to its bit parts and then destroying that into the cells of what just occurred. He turned to his girlfriend and stood there, mute for once. Absurdly solemn. That was what struck her: he looked absurdly solemn.
He knew what had happened, she thought. Detached. The thought was strangely calm. He could tell. He looked at her, looked at the water, looked at her and then looked at the firework that rolled by the cooling Chinese take-out boxes.
Finally he sat back down in the box and rustled around in a pocket -- collapsed with a whump and pulled a matchbox out of his pocket, striking one up so that it flared with a slight hiss and glowed as an orange speck in the winter cold. When it burnt down, he tossed it over the edge and put the box back in his pocket, strangely somber.
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Posted: Tue Mar 16, 2010 9:53 am
They had sat down somewhat at the same time, the boat wobbling a bit and pushing out a couple shaky pulses of icy water. The momentum was enough to topple over a box of white rice, or maybe that had been her foot, but it wasn't really too big a deal. Takeout rice never reheated well, it always got little hard chewy bits that clumped together. It was one of those things you had to finish the day you bought it or otherwise it would sit forgotten in the back of the fridge for weeks.
Janice sat across from him, laying her oar alongside her lap, took another deep breath -- to chase away unease, her subconscious tried to say, but she pressed down that thought before it could fully surface. She spent a second absentmindedly grinding her teeth, and stared down at the spilled rice at the bottom of the boat before lifting her eyes back up to regard her boyfriend. He'd stuck a match, she watched him watch it burn down.
He wasn't looking at her. The match-flame flared up, died down and was tossed aside in the next instant -- he was staring out at the lake, not saying anything. It was cold out here. The food they'd bought probably wasn't even warm anymore. She could hear the both of them breathing over the stillness of the lake and the chill, ghostly breezes wafting over it.
The firework had rolled over against her foot. One of her hands uncurled itself from around the oar and she bent down, picked it up, unbent herself from the splintery boat seat and stalked the short distance over to where Franz was sitting. It was a narrow space for two people to sit in, but thankfully neither of them took up too much of it: Franz scooted to the side and she sat back down next to him. Janice didn't say anything. Instead she pulled his hand over onto her lap and toyed with it, closing his fingers around the small firecracker and generally avoiding looking at him.
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Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2010 4:53 pm
They didn't talk for a while. Maybe it was taking a long time to settle in the confines of Franz's tightly-wound, overactive brain. Whatever the case was, they were silent -- the water lapped all around them, lapped at the sides of the boat and made hollow sounds. After long moments he discarded the firecracker and held her hand instead, stroking her index finger over and over. That was better but not fixed.
There would be questions. She could hear them welling up in his throat, could even guess what they would be. They'd be questions she couldn't wriggle out of, because he never asked a question like that. He had a reporter's nagging, niggling way of teasing out an answer -- they both had that, they both prided themselves upon it. She waited for all of this. Instead, Franz suddenly bent his head next to hers and simply said:
"What do I do with you, Emma?"
There was no answer for that.
Franz laughed a little, but it didn't break the tension. It was a shaky, unsteady laugh, masking itself with false brightness. He said, "I just littered -- I just littered, didn't I." The dead match was floating in the water. "There goes my carbon credit rating."
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Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2010 9:08 am
This was uncomfortable, and odd because of it. Janice had never really felt this awkward around Franz before -- perhaps she had back in December at the gates to Hillworth's parking lot, but that was a different situation. That was something she'd been able to dispel, to fix up and make better. She could do no such thing with this, she realized, they were at the edges of a rabbit hole and peering down, its depths endless. No turning back, and no covering it up either.
She wouldn't be able to coax his attention away from what he had just seen, any attempts at doing so would just make Franz more persistent. He was too smart, too curious. There would be no distracting him away. Unless she could find some way to erase his memory, but then his mind would be abuzz with the noise of not knowing why there was a five-minute hole in his recollections of one of his dates with Janice. It was only a matter of time, she thought, until the issue was unbearable unresolved and he would start looking for an explanation.
That youma really did wreck their Valentine's Day.
In spite of herself she looped an arm back around his waist and drew herself in a bit more so their heads bumped together, which was honestly a bit foolish, let's ignore the elephant in the room because you love me. This wasn't how they worked, it wasn't how any relationship should work -- and yet they were both engaging in the complicated waltz of trying to smooth things over and make it all normal again even though they were both aware it wasn't.
Though, really, how much would Franz have figured out going on what had happened today? Maybe it would be categorized as a fluke (Franz had a low capacity to believe in flukes unless they were the kind you got from eating raw crab) and they could move on, maybe it would end up not really mattering at all.
"I think your carbon credit rating suffers more because you lit the match, darling," she said, her voice tamed into its typical, darkly calm contralto tone. Coverup conversation, they both knew it, but at least Janice could make herself sound more genuine about it. It didn't help the atmosphere much. "Care to help me move this box of splinters back to the rental house?"
She kind of wanted to get them off this lake, and back home.
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