Fic: "Pacific Standard Time" (West/Claire)
Title: Pacific Standard Time
Author: Steph (andbless_mybaby)
Pairing: West/Claire
Rating: R
Warnings: Consensual sex, language
Spoilers: “The Line”
Summary: AU after “The Line.” Claire has a new life.
Word count:2,200+
A/N: I consider this my vindication of S2 Claire, who, up until “Cautionary Tales,” has had no character development of which to speak. For the record, I am not a West fan - I think he’s neither as cute as Zach, nor as creepy as the writers seem to think he is.
_
Tuesday
Claire has a dentist appointment after school. It’s at three exactly, which means she really needs to hustle to make it on time. In California, getting from Point A to Point B is a matter of elegant choreography, a constant race against the clock. One end of the street to the other could be ten minutes, seriously.
Or so it seems.
The dentist peers with a penlight while Claire’s jaws are frozen in a huge gape. The hygienist hovers nearby with the glinting metal pick and the spit-pan. “Perfect,” he pronounces, beaming. “Just lovely. It’s so nice to see a young person taking care of their teeth appropriately.”
Claire tries to smile, but it hurts - her mouth is already stretched so wide.
“You know,” he comments as he signs her chart. “People your age tend not to understand that good dental health is a lifetime investment.”
Claire just nods at that one. She can’t take much credit; it’s unclear whether her Hollywood-perfect bite is the result of good (normal) genetics or superhuman freakiness.
They give her a free toothbrush on her way out, and she just bites back asking the receptionist if she can have a sticker, too. That’s the thing about being sixteen: no-one is really sure whether you’re a kid or a grown-up.
Wednesday
When she meets West outside his house to go to May’s Halloween party, she frowns slightly. He’s wrapped in a sheet and wearing a crown of laurels. He has a book under his arm and a goblet in his hand.
“I didn’t take you for the toga-party type,” she says, with a cocked eyebrow.
West rolls his eyes.
“I’m Socrates,” he announces grandly, pantomiming a deep drag from his empty cup. “Sentenced to die for speaking the truth.”
“Cheerful.” She drags her gaze up and down, and proclaims: “But you still look like a frat boy.”
“Touché,” he counters. “And you’re going as… a really hot girl? Gee, Claire, could you have been less meta?”
She purses her lips, and shows him the sharpened stake of wood she’s stuck in her purse.
“I’m Season One Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” she informs him, pirouetting to show off her pastel mini-dress and stacked platform heels that she found for ninety-nine cents at the thrift store. “I scream ‘1997.’ God, did you never watch the WB?”
“I was more a Dawson’s Creek fan,” he deadpans, tugging at the collar of her leather jacket. “C’mon. We’ll be late for the ball.”
_
In truth, it’s just another lame high school party in full swing. If Claire squints just right, there’s essentially no difference from any weekend bash back in Texas. Just a bunch of soused teenagers hooking up and acting like morons.
The girls from the squad are clustered together in the center of the room. Each one has a flavored Smirnoff Ice bottle glued to their hand like an accessory, and they are talking animatedly over one another. Claire sidles up to the widest gap between the girls’ bodies, and smiles in silent greeting. It seems that she missed the memo to stock up on fishnets, green pipe cleaners, and itty-bitty crinolines that puff up like tutus.
“Claire!” May shrieks, in what is apparently an abject apology. “Oh my freakin’ god!” She addresses the circle. “Guys! How come no one told Claire about the theme?”
“There was a theme?”
May indicates her ensemble, which is a lurid shade of pink, dotted liberally with oblong black decals.
“We’re fruit,” she declares, her voice breaking just a bit at the higher register under the strain of a bit too much malt beverage. “I’m a watermelon.”
Claire eyeballs her getup.
“Yeah, I totally see it,” she insists.
The other girl makes a pained face, and indicates their cohorts. All the girls are wearing identical getups, in varying shades from the neon end of the Crayola spectrum.
“Grape, lemon, cherry, orange…” her hand drops limply. “You were s’posed to be the blueberry. We thought you’d look hot.”
“It’s really okay,” Claire demurs. “You guys were sweet to think of me.”
As she walks away, May hiccups.
“I totally like your outfit, bee-tee-double-u,” she slurs. “Are you, like, Cher from Clueless?”
West is lurking by the punch bowl. “Is everything okay?”
Claire manages a very straight face.
“Apparently I was supposed to be the blueberry,” she tells him.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Claire’s no wallflower, but she barely knows anyone, and West has no friends, so it’s a bit weird.
She grabs West by the hand, and drags him through the French doors out onto the patio, trying to escape. But there’s a clutch of drunk people in the pool, their cheap costumes bleeding multicolor dye into the water, and they’re shrieking so loudly that it’s probably minutes until someone calls the cops.
They push through the crowd and out the swinging door of the screened-in enclosure, trapped in the darkness between the white plastic privacy fence and the homeowner’s oversized Bayliner cruiser. There’s about two feet of clearance against the stucco wall of the house, which fairly vibrates with the music inside.
“What now?” she wonders.
“Shhh,” West whispers.
And then they are up on the roof, three stories aboveground, sheltered from the street and everything by the high midline arch. The rounded, Spanish-style clay tiles are bumpy underneath, and Claire can’t help a feeling of vertigo from her position on the steeply sloping overhang.
“West…” she starts.
“Hey,” he says, gently cutting her off. “No worries. Won’t let you fall.”
The shadows between their faces darken and then disappear when he leans in to kiss her.
His hand is warm on her thigh as he insinuates it just under the seam of her polyester dress, and she doesn’t move to stop him as he slides it slowly, slowly higher.
“Claire,” he says quietly. “You know we don’t have to…”
“Shhh,” Claire echoes, pulling him down to her.
Thursday
She can’t sleep, and there is nothing on TV.
On the Food Network, an overenthusiastic matron with an ingratiating laugh and pearly, sharp teeth is enthusiastically using a mandoline to julienne baby red potatoes. She’s frying up the perfectly-uniform pieces with some garlic and onion that her assistant obviously prepped before the taping, and brandishing a dish of salsa
With a flourish, she slings a ladle of the stuff into the sauté, and dramatically exclaims, “Picante!”
“Picante!” Claire repeats listlessly, somewhere in the direction of the ceiling.
She douses the whole thing in white wine, and the stove briefly catches fire.
“It’s getting hot in here,” she quips jubilantly, doing a stupid, perky mini-dance. (Who the hell dances when they have a flaming skillet in their hand?) “Let’s go to commercial, and let the smoke clear a bit, okay?”
The audience chuckles politely, the canned sound of the taped broadcast.
“I should learn how to cook,” Claire tells her bedposts. She briefly ponders the choice between a hair-substitute infomercial and reruns of Gilligan’s Island on Nick at Nite, and casts her vote for The Minnow and its stalwart crew.
She must have dozed off some time when Ginger was vamping all up on the Professor. Because when her alarm drones and she wakes up, the sunlight is streaming through her window, and the cutesy preschool cartoon characters are singing a song about bananas.
Friday
The Costa Verde High cheerleaders have just one hour after practice to get ready and on the bus for the away game Friday night, which really isn’t that long. In the locker room, twelve girls buzz about in elaborately orchestrated chaos.
Claire’s the last one left in the showers, because she lost concentration on the steps of their halftime dance for the umpteenth time and got laps around the field. By the time she books it into the locker room, her teammates are applying lipstick and Aquadisiac eye shadow like war paint, and the steam cloud from the now-abandoned stalls is permeated with gossip and hair spray.
The tepid water feels good on her sweaty shoulders, but she soaps up quickly. She impatiently feels for her Venus disposable razor on the upper lip of the stall, and rakes it hastily across her armpits, and her lower legs. In her hurry, the razor blade grabs a chunk of skin on her knee, and filets it like an orange, exposing a thin strip of pulpy flesh underneath. Blood runs watery from the wound and patters down on the cement. For a heart-stopping moment she just stares at the mess she’s made, and the smell of iron permeates the cinderblock rectangle. She thinks of that Stephen King movie about the telekinetic girl who gets her period for the first time and goes whacko, and is disturbed by the realization that Carrie really isn’t that far-fetched.
“Fuck,” she breathes.
She experiences an almost-irresistible urge to grab the shredded edge of the gross skin-strip and pull. Claire has these odd moments of morbid fascination about her body, about its limits. Could she grow a new shin, for instance?
It’s not that she hates herself and wants to hurt herself, or anything, she thinks, checking her very emo thoughts. It’s just that she’s bored. Deeply, critically bored.
It only takes a moment of patching her skin back into place before the edges knit themselves up neatly, leaving only clean, smooth skin behind. She rinses off and grabs a towel, not noticing until she goes to pack her gym bag that the razor looks like a murder weapon.
She wraps it carefully in her sports bra, thanking god for Oxyclean and her mother’s newfound, careful avoidance of discussing Claire’s Freaky Power.
Saturday
On Saturday night, she sleeps with West for the first time.
She lets him strip her down to her petal-pink Vicky’s Secret bra and panties, which she hopes look more cute and less sexy, but not too cute and not sexy at all. She doesn’t say anything, and lifts her hips to help him slide off her skirt, so he knows that she wants it, too.
She can tell that he knows a little about what he’s doing, more than any of the other boys she has let grope her (which admittedly, is not many). And she wonders whether that should bother her, philosophically, but it doesn’t sink in.
It all feels very pleasant, and she’s caught up in the hazy glow of anticipation, letting him kiss and stroke her. He’s inside her, and it’s a bit awkward but doesn’t hurt too much. Just this bizarre sensation of having someone to you closer than skin, closer than practically anything.
He shudders over her, and she lies very still.
“You didn’t…?” he asks tentatively.
“No,” she says simply, refusing to explain how she read in Cosmo that girls pretty much never come their first time, and how she really doesn’t care, and the thought’s a little overwhelming anyway, but…
He is using his mouth on her. Honestly, she tells herself, she could do this much more effectively in private with two of her own fingers, but she doesn’t want to discourage his effort. She keeps her eyes closed, like she doesn’t have to acknowledge it as long as she doesn’t peek. It’s all too weird, after all - the condom is tied off on her nightstand, and she’s in his mouth. She’s thinking about how May would flip out at the news that Claire had been devirginized, which is all rhetorical of course, because she would never tell. This whole thing is a secret, top-drawer classified. It’s so furtive, that it’s not even happening.
Except it’s so warm. The heat is fishing a ribbon up her spine, curling around and then tugging down, into her hips, into her pelvis. His mouth is the warmest thing she’s felt in six months. So warm, and she didn’t even realize how cold she was until this, until this current of eddying sensation covered her like a sunbeam. It’s subtle, too, creeping up on her like a wave in slow motion. Then all of the sudden it’s breaking over her, crashing up around her ears, and she’s coming softly with a low moan that isn’t quite his name.
Afterwards, he kisses her with big, fervent eyes and tells her that he loves her. Claire wants badly to say something in response, but it’s like there’s the world’s largest knot blocking her throat, and the words can’t manage to get around it. West obviously is too intelligent to believe that she’s just a newly-deflowered maid overcome by tender emotion, but he doesn’t make a big deal of it, either. He pulls her against him sweetly, and breathes into her hair while her heartbeat slows.
Sunday
There aren’t many country stations in California.
Claire doesn’t especially like the whole Nashville oeuvre, but being a former Texan, she’s kind of used to having it in the background. Her mom listens to CDs all the time, now, because everything out here is trendy rock or Latin.
She’s trying to finish her SAT vocab drill, and can’t seem to concentrate for all the noise in her head. She pulls up Taylor Swift on her iPod
All the songs are about falling in love at sixteen and happily-ever-after. Claire sings along, but the words sound hackneyed and false to her for the first time.
_
End.