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faking it

What he teaches her to make is panna cotta, because it's hard to completely ******** up but easy to tinker with. It lends itself to being tailored to its chef: more of this, less of that, honed down over a couple dozen attempts. He doesn't know that that's exactly what she needs and why she wants it, he just knows that it's why he likes it.

He makes a long list as he reaches around her shoulder for a spoonful (he has been eating more; he's been running longer, on the training fields more often; it's not for her or even for him but for the job he needs to do) of all the things that panna cotta's good with, and meals he's eaten it after. The thing about Taym's uneasy relationship with food is that it's impossible to tell whether everything's vegetarian because he's minding her feelings or because the balance of probability favors it.

It feels normal, for a while, whether he's editing as he talks or not. It almost feels good, somewhere beyond the hum of exhausted apathy. Maybe if neither of them look out the window it won't be a rain-soaked jungle on the other side of the fence but a honeysuckle hedge and a peach tree and a creek bed. Maybe. Maybe.

faking it

She won't be able to clean a houseful of wooden floors when he's gone, won't be able to fix for hours and days on making him a nice home to come back to. Like somehow it'll change things, like somehow it'll help. He doesn't really work that and so they don't work like that and she can pretend to herself only so long.

But she can have this. She can have this every day his voice lingering in her ear with patient instruction and lists and the asides that nearly always accompany these small lessons. She'd told him that she'd practiced the omelet, and she had, but never detailed the near daily attempts that escalated with his absence during missions and when he'd seem to put her aside for reasons that even now were hard for her to grasp.

Bring with him felt normal, but it also felt like the storing up a reserve, something to turn over and over and go through the motions when the drought was upon her.

petty in pink

She uses his bathtub for obscene amounts of time now where once they were simply too long.

She's dug out a pair of 5 inch heels that get more and more wear when she knows they'll be walking somewhere together.

She murmurs against his ear, his neck, his shoulder, his sheets with increasing obscenity and should he so much as frown over it, switches to her treasury of Cute Names for Dirty Deeds.

When he comes down stairs a couple days before he's due to leave, she's lying in the window seat in a tiny pink cut off tee and panties. The floppy little dongle is being waggled over her tummy, complete with sound effects that have Tubadiah, near vibrating from the restraint not to snatch it away, making excited little yipping sounds in accompaniment.

rain

"Good," he says around the smoke, and he rests his fingertips over hers and his palm against the planks, and he turns the page to read another.

reasons

He doesn't talk about it much. When he does it's tired, like he's dragging the words up from somewhere deep and turbulent to lay them in front of her. Sometimes he turns the ring around his finger when he does; other times he rests his forehead in his hand, fingers scrubbing at his hairline like he's fighting off a headache. He'd cried about it, frustration and shame and guilt, when he'd told her about Edith's reaction.

So it's a bit odd when he brings it up out of nowhere, not long before he's due to leave.

"The first one," he says abruptly, without context, "I don't know--maybe it won't take long. There'll be time in between."

glasses day, take two

It was the blackboard that sent her somewhere between pleased giggles and a hot flush of excitement. In turn, when she went to go find him, she was in another small pencil skirt and blouse, her own glasses framing bright hazel eyes, her hair was half prom and half court, and the heels were very much the same pair.

In his room was a box of chocolates exemplifying the combination of things they both very much enjoyed, a small story full of childish drawings and another attempt of the Dread Pirate Georgia on her quest to win the affections of her One True Love, and an obnoxiously large plush lip pillow that made kissing sounds when pushed into. There was also a special set of underthings, but those, of course, she took with her.

petty in pink

He took advantage of her distraction to take himself back into the kitchen in an attempt to collect himself from the sheer effort of not rolling his eyes until they fell out of his head, and he meanders back just in time to hear her apology. He watches Tubadiah's revels in a sort of dull disgust.

"Exactly why are you so bent on getting my dander up, Sugartits?"

excuses

"Well," he murmurs, and he laughs a quiet exhausted laugh that isn't really the right kind of amused, "maybe we can tell them it was me this time. Clean record and all. Partly my fault, wasn't it?"

He's turning the little bag of broken phone parts over in his hand, the broken shards of glass and plastic tumbling over what's left of the battery, and his other arm's making a go of snaking around her waist. He's still not sure she wants it there. The problem with picking fights in general is that it was so often the wrong time for it; the problem with this one in particular is that he'd meant it, and she knew it.