NaNo 2010 part 7
Vanessa James was not a jealous woman, or at least, she didn’t see herself that way. It had been a long time since the last time she and Matt had even joked about doing the sort of things they used to do when they were wild and younger. She still thought about those days from time to time, but they had both moved on. More or less.
“You’ll just keep making a habit of avoiding each other.” Becker offered her some popcorn, but she was too distracted to accept. One of the good things about being friends with someone who worked at the movie theater was some of the sneaky freebies one could get. Like sitting in on a late night showing of god only knew what with some snacks, alone, where they could talk frankly. The manager knew all about it, but he always conveniently looked the other way about it. As long as Becker continued doing a good job, and nobody knew him to take a job and not do it well or with complaint. “Do you think he still wants you?”
Vanessa scoffed, watching the characters on the screen without any interest. “Only physically.”
“And do you still want him?”
A longer pause that time, and a sigh. If she had to really admit to it… “Only physically.”
“Then so long as you two keep your biological impulses in check, nothing’s going to happen if you two see each other or even talk to each other. I mean, the world’s not going to explode, right? You two aren’t going to go running off somewhere together just because you take his order at Brody’s or say hi to him on the street.” She could see his face lit by the movie on the screen, intent on her. Becker was such a good friend to people, a good listener. Talking to Brody would just not go over very well, feel weird, given that he was her boss. Adam was a fabulous listener and gave good advice, but he didn’t often get very involved, emotionally or physically, since so many people come around the bar talking and musing. Plus, he probably was sick and tired of the old, ongoing drama of Miss James and the young Mr. Young.
“It’s not my fault if he’s avoiding me,” she complained, grabbing a handful of buttery popcorn. “I’d be just fine around him if he even wanted to bother being around me in the first place. I won’t bite him. That hard.”
“So you think it’s all his fault?”
“I don’t know. Not for the whole thing, but he is the one who still gets that deer in the headlights look when I’m around. I can live without him. I just wish he didn’t do that, avoid me.” She shrugged. “He makes it really awkward, like there’s still something between us, and there’s not, really, and there hasn’t been for a long time.”
“Are you sure what that’s about? Are you sure it’s really you? Maybe he’s just not all right in the head, you know. Or maybe he’s just trying not to hurt you and keep Chloe from thinking he might be seeing someone else. It’d be a logical concern for her.”
“Yeah,” she sighed, “I know. I don’t think it’s his bouts of crazy doing it.”
Becker leaned closer. “You know the best way of seeing what’s going on?”
James groaned. “Oh god, please don’t tell me.”
“Talk to him.”
“I said don’t tell me!”
A shrug, and he grinned in his typically shy way. “You needed to hear it, I think. Look, go over, say hi, try and clear the air. Make it clear to him that there’s no problem and that he shouldn’t worry. Chloe won’t worry; she doesn’t hate you. You two aren’t enemies. She’ll understand that you want to make Matt understand. It’s hard to do sometimes, we all know, and her most of all.”
“Seriously?”
“In fact, go tell him soon if it’s bothering you so much. Maybe it’s bothering him, too. Don’t let it keep going on just because you think it’s kind of awkward.”
“Only kind of awkward?” But Vanessa sighed again and reluctantly nodded. “I guess I should. Maybe. Go and talk to him. I guess I could visit him at home, so he doesn’t have a way to avoid me. In the next couple days, I think. If it’ll help.”
“Look, it can’t hurt, anyway, right?” Becker took a loud slurp of soda, down to the bottom already. “If all you do is come over, explain the problem, be amiable and reasonable, and if something unexpected or negative happens, well, sorry, that’s just his problem then that he’ll have to get over himself. But assuming things go over well, then maybe you’ll finally make up and get something back to like normal. One can hope, anyway.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right about that. I should at least try talking a little sense into him. He’s got Chloe, and man, now a kid on the way. It’s the least we could do, put all that past behind us.”
He grinned, leaning back a little farther in the creaky old seat. “That’s the spirit. Now this is a good part, you should see what happens next.”
***
Bodies.
Drawing near, clashing against each other. Fingers and lips and tongues tracing and thus memorizing the lines of skin. Contracting muscles, sharp breaths, heat and sweat and friction.
Bodies connecting with each other, explosions of sticky sweet sensation, and tense bodies exhaust themselves in each other, falling into each other until they are completely used up, destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed all over and over again until they are a tired writhing heap.
***
She couldn’t believe that Becker had actually convinced her to do this. Really, would it really have been so bad to spend the rest of her life with Matt avoiding her? Better than one of her old and excruciatingly clingy boyfriends, right? But she really liked the idea of being part of Matt’s life, of Chloe’s, even of the kid’s. Auntie ‘Nessa, she could practically hear in her head in the voice of a small child, and that one thought made her a little giddy. James shook her head to clear it. She’d end up like Volker at this rate. Best to look more serious about it. To be taken all the more seriously for it.
Chloe was out, she had made sure of that beforehand. Of course Chloe would have accepted her into the house, let her talk to Matt in private, would not have found any reason to make an enemy out of her, but it still made the more irrational part of her that doubted all of that feel better. Besides, it was just between them. It really didn’t involve Chloe at all in the end. It wouldn’t hurt anyone either way no matter how it went, now.
She had, however, been half tempted to invite Matt out someplace more public, just in case, or even invite Becker along to act as a level-headed mediator in case things did go wrong. But that, that was just tension and paranoia talking, and she would not give into it. Their history was complicated, and many roadbumps had been hit along the way, but by god, it’d been, what, at least a year since Matt had finally come home, and a longer time since they’d ever actually fooled around with each other, masses of hormones and impulses as they had been back then. They were different, grown, changed people now. So long as they kept their wits about them, nothing would possibly happen. She had this. She’s got this.
Man, she considered, maybe she was part of the problem after all. But she was already determined and on her way. She couldn’t really back out now. Now or never, do it or chicken out and settle forevermore.
The afternoon was quickly turning into evening, but the sun would still be up for a while yet. She tried to shrug off the heat and the nervousness, hopping up to the door and wiping her sweaty palms on her pant legs before sucking in a breath, schooling her features, and quickly rapping on the door.
When Matt finally opened the door, she nearly recoiled at the strong alcohol breath he gave off that reminded her of the bar she’d be tending and cleaning later on that night. Already not the best impression to make on either side, but she gave a cordial smile and greeting. “Hey, Matt. It’s been a while. Do you mind if I come in?”
It didn’t take very long for things to go wrong from there.
***
Chloe was out. The closer to the due date they got, the more she wanted to shop for things for the baby, even if it was just window shopping for ideas. She said the walking also helped, but Matt was also always quick to jokingly point out that in another month, she wouldn’t be saying that and how she’d be in bed all the time, lucky dog. Jokes and lightheartedness helped ease things between them, and they kept up faces and appearances around everyone in town. But at home, things were still a bit of a battleground. He hadn’t made many good attempts at seeking help, and his attempts at cutting down on his beer guzzling had been a shaky rollercoaster at best. But she stayed. That was the most important part to him. She was still with him, and they were going to have this baby together, and they would have many, many more after that. They could find a way to live happily, even if it killed him.
That probably wasn’t the right or most stable way of thinking about it. But said train of thought persisted nevertheless.
A knock at the door pulled him from his unintended reverie in the nursery that they had fashioned from the old guest room some many months ago. He’d been drinking quite a bit through the day, a bad day full of awful visions. He had to dull all the feeling, and that had required more drinking. It made perfect sense to him at the time. It might have made him just a little tipsy, but he could still function well enough. He wasn’t really drunk. It was not the problem that his father had. Besides, his father only became an alcoholic because of his mother, his father’s wife. To dull the pain of heartache. It wasn’t quite the same, in the end. It wasn’t the same as wasting life mourning until he couldn’t do otherwise about it, much as he loved and respected his father.
He slumped his way to the front door and cracked it open to see who it could have been, thinking about said father, surprised who he eventually saw was visiting. James was never the sort of person he wanted to see, had spent so much effort just trying to avoid her since he really wanted to keep things on the straight and narrow with Chloe, no matter how hard it might have been some times. He didn’t need the temptation or the distraction, and he didn’t want to deal with her frustrations about the missed opportunities, the jokes gone wrong, the flirtations that always bordered somewhere between serious and not. It was just a little too much hassle to want to deal with sometimes.
She had a small false smile and said hi. Entreated entrance. And her smile (as well as a few other things) always made him weak. Besides, it would be a little too rude to just say no and close the door on her face without a decent enough reason. And there really wasn’t a decent enough reason. “Uh. Sure,” he consented inarticulately. Whatever it was about made her uncomfortable, but that wasn’t hard to do when the topic had something to do with him. But still, he pulled the door farther open for her and moved aside. “Yeah, I guess it really has been a while, huh?”
“A long while. And that’s what I wanted to talk about with you, between us.”
“You know, that’s great, but let’s face it, you probably shouldn’t be here,” Matt enunciated clearly to get rid of any possible misconception that he might in fact be drunk. “I mean, what if Chloe comes home?”
While James might not have actually been the jealous sort, she was the quick to anger sort who was unafraid to let you know that she perceived a wrong against her. It was one of those reasons that she had historically never been able to keep the few poor fools who tried to date her, at least as far as he knew. “Then,” she declared, actually attempting to rein herself in with flaring nostrils and glinting eyes, “she’ll see two adults and old friends having a conversation, Matt. Unless you think she’s going to see something else.”
He rubbed at his eyes, feeling like he really didn’t need this right now or ever. “I don’t know, Vaness, she might think we’re seeing each other behind her back or something.”
“But we’re not, and if she thought that, she’d end up as paranoid around me as you are. Let’s sit, and let’s talk. Okay?” She didn’t wait for him before moving farther into his home and making herself comfy on the couch. “Because you skirting around me at every turn is really starting to piss me off, and I miss having you as a friend.” She huffed some of the hair out of her face. “And it makes me feel like I’m unwanted. Am I?”
Matt, defeated, and unable to tell her just plain yes or no, rubbed at his face with a hand again, slumping into the living room, choosing not to be seated and instead stand leaned against the doorway, looking not quite at her blearily. “You know it’s more complicated than that.”
“Bullshit, Matthew. Will you just stop acting like a child and be fucking straight with me? Don’t I deserve any god damn respect from you at this point? Be straight with me! Why is that too much to ask for from you?”
Her voice was too loud. And he was too annoyed at the both of them to keep himself from wincing. “Vanessa, seriously, you’re a great woman, and you’re hot as hell, but you know I shouldn’t be around you, because you make me want to do something stupid.”
“Oh,” she fumed, “so it is all your fault. You know, after a year of marriage, I would’ve thought that maybe you had gained a little bit of fucking maturity, Matt, but it’s nice to be proved wrong about you, again. Maybe you should at least give me a try instead of deciding I’m completely off limits. I want to be around you, but you just keep pushing me away, and if you think I can’t keep you at bay, then I don’t know how Chloe could ever, but the two of you have gotten along just fine. Maybe you are a one woman man somewhere in there. How good for you. I’m glad for you, really damn happy, I swear to god, but if just looking at me or talking to me is going to make you want to drop your pants, then there’s probably something really wrong with you, even more than usual.”
“That’s not fair!” she snapped. “I’m doing this for all of us! Look, every time I saw you around the wedding, I thought you were going to try and get between us and ruin things. And I know better than that now! But I still want to be careful, for her, and I don’t want to hurt you ever again. I messed up. I’m trying to make up for that.”
“Oh, yeah, you fucked up all right, and you’re doing a piss poor job of doing anything about it. Maybe if you just man the fuck up, I wouldn’t be left aside thinking I was trash, and you wouldn’t be so damn paranoid about Chloe, who would love you no matter what you did and would know better than ever expect you to cheat on her with anyone, least of all me. And if you think I’m just going to sit here and take--”
The rest of her words became a blur to him, not there, faded into the background ambient white noise. Nothing was there anymore. She simply ceased to exist in his head in that moment, even though he knew, somewhere, deep in the back part of his mind, that she was still rambling and ranting on angrily at him, even if his conscious self had stopped listening. It wasn’t such a bad thing, suddenly finding himself audibly alone. But it was still in its own right a little distracting. His moments always differed. Sometimes he’d be dizzy, or there would be a tilt to the world, and sometimes they just happened seamlessly. It was always impossible to tell when one began and ended except that suddenly something strange was being seen or heard and then someone would be staring at him like he had just flipped out something awful. Maybe Vanessa would understand, or maybe she’d just blame him for that, too, and accuse him of doing it on purpose to stop listening to her. He shook his head, pinching the bridge of his nose again to try and relieve some of the stress that had built itself up over the afternoon and doubled at least over the past few minutes. And when he looked back up-
When he looked back up, one of them was sitting on the couch, chattering away angrily at him.
Oh, the memory of James was still there, somewhere, a jumble of mixed signals. He could never, ever tell what was real, even when he knew that was he was hallucinating was impossible. He couldn’t help react in the ways he reacted; they were just real to him, in that moment.
It was something he quite frequently hallucinated, like from a distant disturbing memory of a bad science fiction movie or something. Something completely alien in nature. The visions weren’t always of them. Other things came to mind, somethings really innocuous. And sometimes they were crazy science fiction aliens or devices or something or other. These were blue, translucent in flesh. They seemed like catfish greatly evolved in the face, and their noises were chitters and whirrs that held no meaning to him. Their enlongated heads made him shiver, but not as much as their huge oval eyes. Their bodies were stick thin and tall, though they always seemed hunkered over, never fully erect. Their spindly arms and legs seemed like entwined appendages, like perhaps shaped as human bones stripped of flesh and muscle. Sometimes their arms looked like radii and ulnas, humerus attached to it, and they were thin enough to be bones, although he felt like he could see some semblance of light through them. Did they have bones, really, or muscles? They were watery, seemed like big amphibians dyed blue for a crazy Halloween costume, and upon them was something like a cut off wetsuit, clinging to their skinny frames, a silver collar about the collarbone (relatively speaking, on a human), where it looked like tubes and nozzles connected all over for god only knew (or maybe He didn’t) what reason.
Forget unsettling. They were downright disturbing, and he never got used to seeing them. He really didn’t want to get used to the idea. That idea made him think he’d lose something of himself if he got used to alien visions around his head. Who did that, really? Sometimes he struggled to think of where he must have seen them before, or if his mind had simply conjured them up.
Or they were from another universe. Or he was from another universe. Always, always accompanying every feeling, big or small, was the constant niggling that he really didn’t belong here, that there was something inherently false about the life that he lived here, now. That whatever he was seeing from this pulled back veil was more a glimpse of reality, the real reality, than Cloverdale ever did, and he didn’t know how to put that to even make sense, much less how a person could help him even if they could understand him and what he thought and how he felt and what he saw.
Not only did they frighten him into action, he always got a hostile sense from them anyway, like they were going to grab him or attack him or take him away or hurt someone else, something that made him want to take care of them first before anyone else would have to suffer the creatures. But he rarely lashed out, possibly because he only so rarely caught more than a glimpse of them. The lamp a few months ago had been one of the times when he had seen one, tall, menacing, in the imaginary flesh, and had attacked, and it had suffered his wrath.
His wrath was now directed at the alien before him, and it likewise would not meet a very appealing end. The alien stood, made a motion with its stick-like arms. His face screwed up in something like rage, primal urges in him stirring, and he lunged, going for the jaw to sock. The contact was a strange sensation, like skin, like human skin, but the punch had sent the alien back into the edge of the couch, left to nurse the wound, and it looked like the being should have simply shattered against him, but they were more resilient than that, he had learned. It started to struggle up, and he would not allow it. He kicked it in the human ribcage, back onto the floor. It struggled, howling and clicking and trilling, and he grabbed it by a leg that kicked out at him, clocked him similarly and very, very solidly in the jaw. He would not stand for that, and when he regained his balance, he pounced, knocking a few things over on his way just so he could wrap his hands around the neck of the creature. He would not allow it to hurt anyone or do anything to him, or to Chloe, or to …Vanessa… It clawed at his hands and at the floor, bug eyes even wider, but it must have gotten a hold of something large and heavy and clocked him on the side of the head with it (something breaking, he heard it crunch beneath the alien when it scrambled up and stood on it). It blurred his vision, and he could feel hot sticky blood slipping down his temple, and the alien, the creature, it was getting away, outside, and he couldn’t allow it. He struggled, scrambled, followed, dizzy but able, and it was at the door, throwing it open, and he would not let it escape him. He let his feet pound and his body surge forward, tackling into it and onto the concrete of the sidewalk, knocking them both hard. He reeled back to start a new attack, but the creature got to him first, a swift punch into his gut to knock out the air, and he could hear others, a car drifting nearby down a street, maybe a few faraway voices, and more of that infernal noise, until it suddenly became screaming, and he and Vanessa were on the ground sprawled outside of his front steps, and distant sirens, and he couldn’t be bothered to focus himself to figure out what was going on, even if he mumbled a question, even as he slipped off, was shoved, was pulled off. He muttered something about the alien, but he wasn’t sure it made much sense even to himself. But something had definitely just happened, and it was not something he was going to look forward to remembering once his head was cleared up.
“You’ll just keep making a habit of avoiding each other.” Becker offered her some popcorn, but she was too distracted to accept. One of the good things about being friends with someone who worked at the movie theater was some of the sneaky freebies one could get. Like sitting in on a late night showing of god only knew what with some snacks, alone, where they could talk frankly. The manager knew all about it, but he always conveniently looked the other way about it. As long as Becker continued doing a good job, and nobody knew him to take a job and not do it well or with complaint. “Do you think he still wants you?”
Vanessa scoffed, watching the characters on the screen without any interest. “Only physically.”
“And do you still want him?”
A longer pause that time, and a sigh. If she had to really admit to it… “Only physically.”
“Then so long as you two keep your biological impulses in check, nothing’s going to happen if you two see each other or even talk to each other. I mean, the world’s not going to explode, right? You two aren’t going to go running off somewhere together just because you take his order at Brody’s or say hi to him on the street.” She could see his face lit by the movie on the screen, intent on her. Becker was such a good friend to people, a good listener. Talking to Brody would just not go over very well, feel weird, given that he was her boss. Adam was a fabulous listener and gave good advice, but he didn’t often get very involved, emotionally or physically, since so many people come around the bar talking and musing. Plus, he probably was sick and tired of the old, ongoing drama of Miss James and the young Mr. Young.
“It’s not my fault if he’s avoiding me,” she complained, grabbing a handful of buttery popcorn. “I’d be just fine around him if he even wanted to bother being around me in the first place. I won’t bite him. That hard.”
“So you think it’s all his fault?”
“I don’t know. Not for the whole thing, but he is the one who still gets that deer in the headlights look when I’m around. I can live without him. I just wish he didn’t do that, avoid me.” She shrugged. “He makes it really awkward, like there’s still something between us, and there’s not, really, and there hasn’t been for a long time.”
“Are you sure what that’s about? Are you sure it’s really you? Maybe he’s just not all right in the head, you know. Or maybe he’s just trying not to hurt you and keep Chloe from thinking he might be seeing someone else. It’d be a logical concern for her.”
“Yeah,” she sighed, “I know. I don’t think it’s his bouts of crazy doing it.”
Becker leaned closer. “You know the best way of seeing what’s going on?”
James groaned. “Oh god, please don’t tell me.”
“Talk to him.”
“I said don’t tell me!”
A shrug, and he grinned in his typically shy way. “You needed to hear it, I think. Look, go over, say hi, try and clear the air. Make it clear to him that there’s no problem and that he shouldn’t worry. Chloe won’t worry; she doesn’t hate you. You two aren’t enemies. She’ll understand that you want to make Matt understand. It’s hard to do sometimes, we all know, and her most of all.”
“Seriously?”
“In fact, go tell him soon if it’s bothering you so much. Maybe it’s bothering him, too. Don’t let it keep going on just because you think it’s kind of awkward.”
“Only kind of awkward?” But Vanessa sighed again and reluctantly nodded. “I guess I should. Maybe. Go and talk to him. I guess I could visit him at home, so he doesn’t have a way to avoid me. In the next couple days, I think. If it’ll help.”
“Look, it can’t hurt, anyway, right?” Becker took a loud slurp of soda, down to the bottom already. “If all you do is come over, explain the problem, be amiable and reasonable, and if something unexpected or negative happens, well, sorry, that’s just his problem then that he’ll have to get over himself. But assuming things go over well, then maybe you’ll finally make up and get something back to like normal. One can hope, anyway.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right about that. I should at least try talking a little sense into him. He’s got Chloe, and man, now a kid on the way. It’s the least we could do, put all that past behind us.”
He grinned, leaning back a little farther in the creaky old seat. “That’s the spirit. Now this is a good part, you should see what happens next.”
***
Bodies.
Drawing near, clashing against each other. Fingers and lips and tongues tracing and thus memorizing the lines of skin. Contracting muscles, sharp breaths, heat and sweat and friction.
Bodies connecting with each other, explosions of sticky sweet sensation, and tense bodies exhaust themselves in each other, falling into each other until they are completely used up, destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed all over and over again until they are a tired writhing heap.
***
She couldn’t believe that Becker had actually convinced her to do this. Really, would it really have been so bad to spend the rest of her life with Matt avoiding her? Better than one of her old and excruciatingly clingy boyfriends, right? But she really liked the idea of being part of Matt’s life, of Chloe’s, even of the kid’s. Auntie ‘Nessa, she could practically hear in her head in the voice of a small child, and that one thought made her a little giddy. James shook her head to clear it. She’d end up like Volker at this rate. Best to look more serious about it. To be taken all the more seriously for it.
Chloe was out, she had made sure of that beforehand. Of course Chloe would have accepted her into the house, let her talk to Matt in private, would not have found any reason to make an enemy out of her, but it still made the more irrational part of her that doubted all of that feel better. Besides, it was just between them. It really didn’t involve Chloe at all in the end. It wouldn’t hurt anyone either way no matter how it went, now.
She had, however, been half tempted to invite Matt out someplace more public, just in case, or even invite Becker along to act as a level-headed mediator in case things did go wrong. But that, that was just tension and paranoia talking, and she would not give into it. Their history was complicated, and many roadbumps had been hit along the way, but by god, it’d been, what, at least a year since Matt had finally come home, and a longer time since they’d ever actually fooled around with each other, masses of hormones and impulses as they had been back then. They were different, grown, changed people now. So long as they kept their wits about them, nothing would possibly happen. She had this. She’s got this.
Man, she considered, maybe she was part of the problem after all. But she was already determined and on her way. She couldn’t really back out now. Now or never, do it or chicken out and settle forevermore.
The afternoon was quickly turning into evening, but the sun would still be up for a while yet. She tried to shrug off the heat and the nervousness, hopping up to the door and wiping her sweaty palms on her pant legs before sucking in a breath, schooling her features, and quickly rapping on the door.
When Matt finally opened the door, she nearly recoiled at the strong alcohol breath he gave off that reminded her of the bar she’d be tending and cleaning later on that night. Already not the best impression to make on either side, but she gave a cordial smile and greeting. “Hey, Matt. It’s been a while. Do you mind if I come in?”
It didn’t take very long for things to go wrong from there.
***
Chloe was out. The closer to the due date they got, the more she wanted to shop for things for the baby, even if it was just window shopping for ideas. She said the walking also helped, but Matt was also always quick to jokingly point out that in another month, she wouldn’t be saying that and how she’d be in bed all the time, lucky dog. Jokes and lightheartedness helped ease things between them, and they kept up faces and appearances around everyone in town. But at home, things were still a bit of a battleground. He hadn’t made many good attempts at seeking help, and his attempts at cutting down on his beer guzzling had been a shaky rollercoaster at best. But she stayed. That was the most important part to him. She was still with him, and they were going to have this baby together, and they would have many, many more after that. They could find a way to live happily, even if it killed him.
That probably wasn’t the right or most stable way of thinking about it. But said train of thought persisted nevertheless.
A knock at the door pulled him from his unintended reverie in the nursery that they had fashioned from the old guest room some many months ago. He’d been drinking quite a bit through the day, a bad day full of awful visions. He had to dull all the feeling, and that had required more drinking. It made perfect sense to him at the time. It might have made him just a little tipsy, but he could still function well enough. He wasn’t really drunk. It was not the problem that his father had. Besides, his father only became an alcoholic because of his mother, his father’s wife. To dull the pain of heartache. It wasn’t quite the same, in the end. It wasn’t the same as wasting life mourning until he couldn’t do otherwise about it, much as he loved and respected his father.
He slumped his way to the front door and cracked it open to see who it could have been, thinking about said father, surprised who he eventually saw was visiting. James was never the sort of person he wanted to see, had spent so much effort just trying to avoid her since he really wanted to keep things on the straight and narrow with Chloe, no matter how hard it might have been some times. He didn’t need the temptation or the distraction, and he didn’t want to deal with her frustrations about the missed opportunities, the jokes gone wrong, the flirtations that always bordered somewhere between serious and not. It was just a little too much hassle to want to deal with sometimes.
She had a small false smile and said hi. Entreated entrance. And her smile (as well as a few other things) always made him weak. Besides, it would be a little too rude to just say no and close the door on her face without a decent enough reason. And there really wasn’t a decent enough reason. “Uh. Sure,” he consented inarticulately. Whatever it was about made her uncomfortable, but that wasn’t hard to do when the topic had something to do with him. But still, he pulled the door farther open for her and moved aside. “Yeah, I guess it really has been a while, huh?”
“A long while. And that’s what I wanted to talk about with you, between us.”
“You know, that’s great, but let’s face it, you probably shouldn’t be here,” Matt enunciated clearly to get rid of any possible misconception that he might in fact be drunk. “I mean, what if Chloe comes home?”
While James might not have actually been the jealous sort, she was the quick to anger sort who was unafraid to let you know that she perceived a wrong against her. It was one of those reasons that she had historically never been able to keep the few poor fools who tried to date her, at least as far as he knew. “Then,” she declared, actually attempting to rein herself in with flaring nostrils and glinting eyes, “she’ll see two adults and old friends having a conversation, Matt. Unless you think she’s going to see something else.”
He rubbed at his eyes, feeling like he really didn’t need this right now or ever. “I don’t know, Vaness, she might think we’re seeing each other behind her back or something.”
“But we’re not, and if she thought that, she’d end up as paranoid around me as you are. Let’s sit, and let’s talk. Okay?” She didn’t wait for him before moving farther into his home and making herself comfy on the couch. “Because you skirting around me at every turn is really starting to piss me off, and I miss having you as a friend.” She huffed some of the hair out of her face. “And it makes me feel like I’m unwanted. Am I?”
Matt, defeated, and unable to tell her just plain yes or no, rubbed at his face with a hand again, slumping into the living room, choosing not to be seated and instead stand leaned against the doorway, looking not quite at her blearily. “You know it’s more complicated than that.”
“Bullshit, Matthew. Will you just stop acting like a child and be fucking straight with me? Don’t I deserve any god damn respect from you at this point? Be straight with me! Why is that too much to ask for from you?”
Her voice was too loud. And he was too annoyed at the both of them to keep himself from wincing. “Vanessa, seriously, you’re a great woman, and you’re hot as hell, but you know I shouldn’t be around you, because you make me want to do something stupid.”
“Oh,” she fumed, “so it is all your fault. You know, after a year of marriage, I would’ve thought that maybe you had gained a little bit of fucking maturity, Matt, but it’s nice to be proved wrong about you, again. Maybe you should at least give me a try instead of deciding I’m completely off limits. I want to be around you, but you just keep pushing me away, and if you think I can’t keep you at bay, then I don’t know how Chloe could ever, but the two of you have gotten along just fine. Maybe you are a one woman man somewhere in there. How good for you. I’m glad for you, really damn happy, I swear to god, but if just looking at me or talking to me is going to make you want to drop your pants, then there’s probably something really wrong with you, even more than usual.”
“That’s not fair!” she snapped. “I’m doing this for all of us! Look, every time I saw you around the wedding, I thought you were going to try and get between us and ruin things. And I know better than that now! But I still want to be careful, for her, and I don’t want to hurt you ever again. I messed up. I’m trying to make up for that.”
“Oh, yeah, you fucked up all right, and you’re doing a piss poor job of doing anything about it. Maybe if you just man the fuck up, I wouldn’t be left aside thinking I was trash, and you wouldn’t be so damn paranoid about Chloe, who would love you no matter what you did and would know better than ever expect you to cheat on her with anyone, least of all me. And if you think I’m just going to sit here and take--”
The rest of her words became a blur to him, not there, faded into the background ambient white noise. Nothing was there anymore. She simply ceased to exist in his head in that moment, even though he knew, somewhere, deep in the back part of his mind, that she was still rambling and ranting on angrily at him, even if his conscious self had stopped listening. It wasn’t such a bad thing, suddenly finding himself audibly alone. But it was still in its own right a little distracting. His moments always differed. Sometimes he’d be dizzy, or there would be a tilt to the world, and sometimes they just happened seamlessly. It was always impossible to tell when one began and ended except that suddenly something strange was being seen or heard and then someone would be staring at him like he had just flipped out something awful. Maybe Vanessa would understand, or maybe she’d just blame him for that, too, and accuse him of doing it on purpose to stop listening to her. He shook his head, pinching the bridge of his nose again to try and relieve some of the stress that had built itself up over the afternoon and doubled at least over the past few minutes. And when he looked back up-
When he looked back up, one of them was sitting on the couch, chattering away angrily at him.
Oh, the memory of James was still there, somewhere, a jumble of mixed signals. He could never, ever tell what was real, even when he knew that was he was hallucinating was impossible. He couldn’t help react in the ways he reacted; they were just real to him, in that moment.
It was something he quite frequently hallucinated, like from a distant disturbing memory of a bad science fiction movie or something. Something completely alien in nature. The visions weren’t always of them. Other things came to mind, somethings really innocuous. And sometimes they were crazy science fiction aliens or devices or something or other. These were blue, translucent in flesh. They seemed like catfish greatly evolved in the face, and their noises were chitters and whirrs that held no meaning to him. Their enlongated heads made him shiver, but not as much as their huge oval eyes. Their bodies were stick thin and tall, though they always seemed hunkered over, never fully erect. Their spindly arms and legs seemed like entwined appendages, like perhaps shaped as human bones stripped of flesh and muscle. Sometimes their arms looked like radii and ulnas, humerus attached to it, and they were thin enough to be bones, although he felt like he could see some semblance of light through them. Did they have bones, really, or muscles? They were watery, seemed like big amphibians dyed blue for a crazy Halloween costume, and upon them was something like a cut off wetsuit, clinging to their skinny frames, a silver collar about the collarbone (relatively speaking, on a human), where it looked like tubes and nozzles connected all over for god only knew (or maybe He didn’t) what reason.
Forget unsettling. They were downright disturbing, and he never got used to seeing them. He really didn’t want to get used to the idea. That idea made him think he’d lose something of himself if he got used to alien visions around his head. Who did that, really? Sometimes he struggled to think of where he must have seen them before, or if his mind had simply conjured them up.
Or they were from another universe. Or he was from another universe. Always, always accompanying every feeling, big or small, was the constant niggling that he really didn’t belong here, that there was something inherently false about the life that he lived here, now. That whatever he was seeing from this pulled back veil was more a glimpse of reality, the real reality, than Cloverdale ever did, and he didn’t know how to put that to even make sense, much less how a person could help him even if they could understand him and what he thought and how he felt and what he saw.
Not only did they frighten him into action, he always got a hostile sense from them anyway, like they were going to grab him or attack him or take him away or hurt someone else, something that made him want to take care of them first before anyone else would have to suffer the creatures. But he rarely lashed out, possibly because he only so rarely caught more than a glimpse of them. The lamp a few months ago had been one of the times when he had seen one, tall, menacing, in the imaginary flesh, and had attacked, and it had suffered his wrath.
His wrath was now directed at the alien before him, and it likewise would not meet a very appealing end. The alien stood, made a motion with its stick-like arms. His face screwed up in something like rage, primal urges in him stirring, and he lunged, going for the jaw to sock. The contact was a strange sensation, like skin, like human skin, but the punch had sent the alien back into the edge of the couch, left to nurse the wound, and it looked like the being should have simply shattered against him, but they were more resilient than that, he had learned. It started to struggle up, and he would not allow it. He kicked it in the human ribcage, back onto the floor. It struggled, howling and clicking and trilling, and he grabbed it by a leg that kicked out at him, clocked him similarly and very, very solidly in the jaw. He would not stand for that, and when he regained his balance, he pounced, knocking a few things over on his way just so he could wrap his hands around the neck of the creature. He would not allow it to hurt anyone or do anything to him, or to Chloe, or to …Vanessa… It clawed at his hands and at the floor, bug eyes even wider, but it must have gotten a hold of something large and heavy and clocked him on the side of the head with it (something breaking, he heard it crunch beneath the alien when it scrambled up and stood on it). It blurred his vision, and he could feel hot sticky blood slipping down his temple, and the alien, the creature, it was getting away, outside, and he couldn’t allow it. He struggled, scrambled, followed, dizzy but able, and it was at the door, throwing it open, and he would not let it escape him. He let his feet pound and his body surge forward, tackling into it and onto the concrete of the sidewalk, knocking them both hard. He reeled back to start a new attack, but the creature got to him first, a swift punch into his gut to knock out the air, and he could hear others, a car drifting nearby down a street, maybe a few faraway voices, and more of that infernal noise, until it suddenly became screaming, and he and Vanessa were on the ground sprawled outside of his front steps, and distant sirens, and he couldn’t be bothered to focus himself to figure out what was going on, even if he mumbled a question, even as he slipped off, was shoved, was pulled off. He muttered something about the alien, but he wasn’t sure it made much sense even to himself. But something had definitely just happened, and it was not something he was going to look forward to remembering once his head was cleared up.