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 Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2010 11:07 am
Her face curled up almost into a snarl. "That's a goddamned lie if I ever heard one!" she snapped back loudly -- not that they hadn't already drawn the eyes of what few people were in the Starbucks, straining to hear the half of the conversation that Cora wasn't yelling. "You don't get to play dumb and play smart in the same five seconds, Dylan, that's not how it works. You're standing at the bottom of some hill yelling up to me, 'But Cora, what slippery slope?' No, you know exactly what we're talking about."
She pivoted to the side and dumped her Tazo latte straight into the trash can, unsipped. It landed with a wet thump that said whoever had to change that trashbag later would also not list Cora Grant as their favorite customer.
"You are not a bohemian drug chef designing each day's eclectic menu. Switching around between drugs doesn't make you a connoisseur. You have. A problem.
"And do you know why I'm saying you have a problem, Dylan? Because either you have a problem, or else the prospect of being with me, going out to do something pretty damned important is, to you, so fundamentally special and K just like your goddamned detentions that you needed to snort blow off a picture of the Virgin Mary just to get through it."
She turned away and spent a few seconds angrily sorting the sweetener packets at the condiment bar into pink and blue -- then stood there, hands fanned out flat on the formica, hunched over the counter. Cora was quieter now, when she spoke.
"Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me," she suggested, "that I make your life so unbearable. If that's what you need me to understand, Dylan, then tell me that."
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Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 1:34 pm
"You're making a scene." Dylan stirred his latte a little more, watching espresso and milk mix like watercolor. She was making a scene. The baristas were staring at them uncomfortably, one of the customers had looked up, and the others were too absorbed in iPods or Bluetooths to notice. "Cora, I do not want to be having an argument, but I am not going to tell you something," he, on the other hand, was speaking at a normal pitch, "just because you demand that I do, because I know you'll only take it personally and/or hold me to it. Cora. I am not saying this to derail. You're making a scene."
He drank through his straw for a while, half an espresso shot to be certain, and thought about what to say. His girlfriend next to him was stewing again like a volcano. He had to intercept it. He was reaching his daily limit for sandpaper on raw skin, and then he might not speak at an entirely normal pitch, and he couldn't be having with that. "Do you want me to go clean?" he said without thinking about it. "Is that what this is about?"
He really didn't think about it.
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Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 2:51 pm
She did think about it. Had, probably, thought about it -- or so it seemed when you boiled everything down. Cora liked to stew about a lot of things, and could do nothing but stew about them for long stretches of time, requiring creativity to divert from it: if you could plug her into the wall and hand her pork chops, apples and sauce for six hours, and set a lose-lose scenario before her, you'd practically have a Crock-Pot right there. "Yes," she said, addressing herself to the bottle of non-dairy creamer in front of her.
She sounded wary, but wary at a normal speaking volume now. "Would you?"
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Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 3:01 pm
I'd try, was the first answer that came to Dylan's mind. But just as soon as he'd thought it he knew it wouldn't be enough. Cora would not accept try any more than Yoda did, and she probably wouldn't have the good humor to quote the Jedi Master at the moment. Trying to go clean left a margin for error. Trying implied there was some acceptable outcome where he didn't go clean, and that just wasn't true.
Besides -- try wasn't acceptable to him, either. Dylan Rasmussen didn't try to do things. He did them or he didn't do them. He did them or he blew them off for useless. He didn't try to do the mile run. He didn't try to make a mockumentary.
Dylan swirled the ice in his cup again, out of habit. "I would," he said. "If it made you happy."
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Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2010 9:20 am
He saw immediately that this was the right answer, that he had successfully navigated the perilous and booby-trap-riddled labyrinth of Cora Argument -- though where he'd ended up, in doing so, was another kettle of fish. The creases around her mouth smoothed out as she lowered her hackles, her shoulders dropped. "Which it would," she answered, shackling them both to it, whatever outcome.
She didn't say please. She didn't actually ask at all, hadn't really posed it as a request. Cora had her own rules, different from his -- but not always entirely different -- about what she would and wouldn't say, or when she'd deign to say it. She looked like she wanted to say something else, so he waited, even though he doubted she would.
She did. "You know I don't like making demands. You know that," she fidgeted. The face she turned up to him was a faint smile that flickered like candlelight, and more Helen than Cora. "My heart beats after yours," she confided, part of the old bonding-oath mirrored back at him.
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Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2010 10:50 pm
"Your blood is my blood," he echoed. "Your life is my life."
It wasn't the oath that Hector had made to him so long ago, when they were boys and their father had first sworn Hector in as a cavalier, the same oath that their uncle had made to their father, and their great-uncle and grandfather before them. It was a separate oath, a formality that not every cavalier observed to every sailor soldier. He was the Crown Prince of the Earth Kingdom, however, and she was the Queen of the Moon Kingdom -- it was forbidden for two sovereigns to marry, inasmuch as one could forbid anything from sovereigns. It was a terrible idea. They'd both known better than to press it.
But together, between them, they had decided to wed in their own way. Under the crown she was Sailor Selene. Under the crown he was Cavalier Alexandros. So in his father's pavilion with the fountain and the lilies he had nicked his thumb with a knife and raised it to her lips, and there they'd sworn the old bonding oath. It was long ago and it was far away -- and it was so much better than it is today.
"I know. You don't want me to wreck my life," he smiled, ironic, because that was the only spoonful of sugar that ever helped the truth medicine go down, "At least not any worse than I've already wrecked it. I'm nearly out of Sing Sing. I don't want to go back in." Dylan moved his hand to touch hers -- not to take it, yet, that was her decision. "Want me to get you another Tazo?"
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Posted: Thu Apr 22, 2010 9:16 pm
Cora rubbed her thumb in a circle around the perimeter of one of his fingernails before zippering her fingers in the spaces between his own. "Thanks," she took him up on his offer. "The first latte pissed me off. It said something about you being Romeo and me being a scarlet letter. What does that mean, Dylan, what does it even mean."
It was a contest between them, to see which of them could find the most irritatingly stupid song lyrics. Currently Dylan was holding strong with pretty much every lyric from Bad Romance, but it had been a pitched battle for a while now. He'd sometimes get a message that said nothing but, What I deserve is a man that makes me, then takes me and delivers me to a destiny, to infinity and beyond. He had to admit it was hard to outdo Beyoncé's totally unironic use of Buzz Lightyear.
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Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 4:47 pm
"It means that if I cheat on you," Dylan gestured demonstratively with his latte, "I have to stick you to my forehead and wear you everywhere so everybody knows. It's what they had instead of couples counseling back in the day. The Taylor Swift day." He closed his fingers around hers. "All right, let's get back in line."
They did. The baristas blinked, witness to the shortest explosive fight they may have ever seen from two high school juniors. There was only one person ahead of them, though, and that was some poor sucker in a Meadowview boy's uniform, the exactly one thing that Dylan liked better about Hillworth Grammar. Well, there was Jesse Alvarez. One of two. The kid was probably a freshman, but looked like a seventh-grader in those shorts. They let you wear pants at UCLA, right?
"Tazo latte, please, grande, no whip." Dylan smiled winningly at the guy at the counter, or what he felt was pretty winningly, anyway, given as he'd just won. This was somewhat akin to winning Spain and then promptly deciding to go and march into the Russian winter.
She wasn't angry with him any more. She wasn't hurt any more, and that had been the real thing twisting his arm behind his back: though it would kill her dignity if he said so, and he didn't intend to. She was going to get another Tazo not-latte (notte?), and if he was lucky, his parents would be working late again.
Now remaining to him was the pure and simple task of shaking off the effects of recreational heroin use.
Oh, well, what the hell.
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