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 Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 5:14 pm
Get in, Loser
He has seen Mean Girls more than once. This becomes apparent within minutes of his intruding on her blanket fort and stealing exactly four pieces of popcorn and half a joint.
"This is disrespecting my property," he informs her, and he reaches to turn it up.
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Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 7:52 pm
Time traveler
The first was found wedged behind a set of shelves and it's not surprising that a book or two survived years of varying destruction, but she recognizes it. It was one of Uncle Malby's favourites, the sort he'd come home to after a night of nosing through other people's dramas and tragedies and nurse a single drink, turning the pages like listening to an old friend.
She almost took it home for the little library but then remembered the times Malby had laughed over some terrible pun he'd read dozens of times before. Without mentioning it, she slipped Callahan's Crosstime Saloon into Taym's bookshelf. It was the first of a number of small offerings.
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Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 8:51 pm
Time traveler
He, on the other hand, didn't have a number of small offerings. He had just one, one he'd been saving for a long time, and he knew where the fresh titles on his shelf came from.
It was harder for him to get it to her, given that he felt like a trespasser in her home and so avoided it. So he left it in her favorite treehouse, the one she was most apt to clamber into, resting in the middle of the floor and waiting for the day that she found it: a slim little glossy-backed volume of a story called Sunbird, a phoenix dancing over a place setting on the front of it.
He'd hesitated, because of the contents of the story. But he'd decided, in the end, that treating her as though she couldn't handle it was an act of private disrespect. And until she found it he made a point of reading her gifts in front of her, of giving them preference for being the books he ignored her in favor of while he curled an arm around her shoulders.
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Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 12:56 am
Questionable Taste
For the first few miles she sits primly upright, knees together and hands in her lap, voice coyly flirtatious. It doesn't last past the third stop sign and she steals one of his smokes as payment for the gum and to distract herself from making the need to pull over dangerously immediate.
Cigarette dangling off her lower lip, she steals ribbon from hat and binds up her hair in a sloppy bun. There is talk of adventures and an urge to kick her feet up and dangle them out the window, letting the wind slip between her toes while she ******** with the radio. A brush across her knees refocuses and fixes her attention back to him but she still ******** with the radio, still has a s**t eating grin when she finds a Nickelback song.
"Course I do," she huffs indignantly, "since I could see above the dash."
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Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 1:19 am
Days
After a number of false starts she admits, "The latter, if he were coming by. He isn't though, but maybe he will tomorrow. It's Olaf's shopping day and he always has a good eye for produce."
She tries to turn the conversation to the system she's set with a group of hunters. How during lighthouse duties, she always took note of the people who regularly bought groceries on their days and just snacks and fast food. The way she'd approached them all and set up a shopping system that ensured fresh groceries twice a week and nobody having to use more than one leave day a month for it.
She was pleased and proud of how well it worked, and enjoyed the results, and did not want to talk about why Kostya wasn't showing up for meals.
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Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 1:52 am
Get In Loser
"I'll disrespect your property alright," is followed by five minutes of obnoxiously trying to use him as the world's least comfortable furniture. He is over dressed and it's Wednesday, so in perfect time with the movie, she explains why he can't sit with her.
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Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 2:25 am
Time Traveler
His shelves gain odd entries, and only the first was because the actual story made her think Taym might enjoy it. There's a copy of the The Little Prince that some bored teenager had rewritten into a sex comedy in the margins, complete with relevant graffiti over the illustrations. Don Quixote appears, remarkable for the many tiny flip books hidden in its girthy form. There's two different styles of handwriting in the margins of The Outsiders, a pair of kids creating their own fictional gangs, the story of their conflict passed back and forth until one finally asks the other out.
Tuck Everlasting contains thorough and concise notes, theories, and even several hand drawn maps detailing the likelihood and location of such a spring, as well as a clear reminder of the island's nature, even back in better days. There is nothing especially out of the ordinary concerning the battered edition of Where the Red Fern Grows, she's simply a bit of a sap with a good memory for conversations.
The Sunbird caught her attention as she knew it would, and the story, when glimpsed, prickled at her attention. It felt relevant. She began it while sunning on the tree house roof and later that night would finish it in his bathtub, expression thoughtful as she closed the cover and dropped her head back to stare at the ceiling.
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Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 11:19 pm
Adventures on the High Seas
His hands arrested, he paused, impressed.
"That's the best description of you I've ever heard," he said. "I wish I'd ********' said it first."
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Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 11:26 pm
Time Traveler
Taym had a weakness for marginalia. Given the choice between two copies of the same novel at a bookstore, one pristine and one littered with some college student's post-it flags, he would opt for the latter every single time. Nearly every book he owned was covered in someone else's notes. The graffiti of interested scholars or, better yet, literary fiends--these were the best. But any marginalia would do, including that of bored students.
She'd catch him laboring over a section written in clumsy, freshman-year French, a French-to-English dictionary in hand that he was only consulting intermittently while he painstakingly transcribed in English the bored "hey what's up with you this weekend" conversations scrawled in the margins of The Things They Carried, as though they were ancient and valuable springs of insight. She'd find him laying out the gang warfare taking place around the edges of The Outsiders into a fresh notebook, enshrining it with care.
If he wondered where those children were now--and of course he must, with a pang of grief for the inevitable answer--he never mentioned it.
"What did you think?" he asked, shy after a moment to search her face.
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Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 11:36 pm
Days
He lets it go, but not without giving her a look that says all too clearly that letting it go is exactly what he's doing. He doesn't want to talk about it either: doesn't want to talk about Kostya and why his chair at America's table is empty, and doesn't want to talk about how he still, even now, sometimes struggles against the roots of a long-plucked urge, dormant but present, that say: it would feel so good to be hungry again; that say, in words he could never understand let alone begin to articulate: you have so little control. He's got a scale in the bathroom and maybe America thinks it's so he can take pleasure in watching the numbers tick up. He's afraid to stand on it. His shoulders fill out all but his loosest T-shirts, now.
He doesn't want to talk about himself, and he doesn't want to talk about Kostya or all the guilt and anger festering there. He asks her to arrange it so that someone can bring him some chevre, some decent beets. It is a tacit acknowledgement that they're both practicing avoidance. Later after she's gone again he texts her and all it says is he'll come around.
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Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 11:38 pm
Questionable Taste
The significance of the Nickleback song is lost on poor oblivious Taym. It's the same as anything else, to his untrained and unappreciative ear, and less pleasant than the sound of her voice, and so he turns it down, just a little, to goad her into talking more.
"You should drive some after," he says, and he doesn't bother to say after what, because they both know and that was half the point. "I'm gonna hang my head out the window like a ********' dog."
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Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2014 12:00 am
Disbelief
Sometimes he tries to hide it and sometimes he doesn't: the moments when some offhand laughter, some sly sleight of hand, some movement or noise under his hands or his mouth yank him out of the aether and into the here-and-now and she is there, giving him that look or saying that thing. In these moments he is equal parts startled and disbelieving and afraid, suddenly punch-drunk and possessive.
He still has nights that he wants to sleep under his desk with the windows open. He still shies away from glances in the streets on leave, still moves through drug stores and gas stations as though he's a trespasser seconds away from being spotted. They're not nearly so often now--they're tics, not heartbeats--and but they're there enough.
When he'd come back with his ear still bristling with stitches, when he'd flinched to peel his shirt away from the raw flesh of his back, he'd treated an entire evening as though it were one long epiphany: this is mine, this is mine, this is mine. He'd spent it telling her every good thing about her, a long and thorough list, his hands violent and full of wonder. Now, with tension still undercutting her absences and her returns, the disbelief flits across his face again as she returns his insincere bitching with an underhanded jab, full of fondness.
This is mine. This is mine. This is mine.
(for now)
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Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2014 12:10 am
Adventures on the High Seas
She beams at him and there is a definite show of preening. "I've been told," she sniffs, proud and haughty, "That I have a talent of narrative." Despite the tone there is a shy sort of pleasure in her expression, a cautious kind of pride. She liked compliments, always and all kinds; he had a knack for unwittingly finding the sort to make her flush and fumble, the sort that had nothing to do with her looks or the more overt bits of her personality.
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Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2014 12:20 am
Reheated
He's sitting at his desk engaged in either work or one of the strange and complicated word games he plays with himself--it can be hard to tell which without peering over his shoulder--and he says it very suddenly, into silence.
"You should revise my HOT notes."
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Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2014 12:22 am
Questionable Taste
"I hope we pass a ******** skunk just to see the look on your face." She grinned at the idea of it and this time it was her hand brushing his leg. "It'll be good to drive, control something like this under me again." The smile shifted and the necessity of finding somewhere to turn off the road became increasingly urgent.
"My first car was actually an old truck, one of those ancient ******** Fords that're like tanks for anyone inside n' ******** monsters to anyone unlucky enough to run into one."
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