WIP Amnesty weekend - post the first
So, I decided to participate in wip_amnesty. Which, this year, is a whole weekend.
Let's get the really embarrassing stuff out of the way first, yes?
Yes.
Fandom: nsync
A Dark and Stormy Night
May 22, 2000/Orlando
Emma lay in the dark, feeling his long solid frame against her back. His arm was slung across her body and his hand lightly cupped her breast. She listened to him sleep and wished for the same, to no avail. She tried to match her breathing to his - deep and regular - hoping it would lull her into unconsciousness.
No luck.
“Damn,” she muttered, and fought the urge to fidget and punch her pillow in frustration. He needed to sleep even if she couldn’t. She leaned against him and gently urged him onto his back; his arm fell away as she knew it would. She slipped quietly out of bed and into her discarded clothing before moving down the hall to her study.
xXx
Joey awoke with a start. He’d been dreaming that rats were scrabbling their way around the bedroom and when he heard a faint scratching, he feared for a moment that it hadn’t been a dream after all. Then he recognized the sound for what it was - the scratch of pencil on paper. He rolled over to check the clock. Two a.m. and her side of the bed was empty. He lay back with a sigh and closed his eyes, drifting slowly back to sleep
She slowly became aware of numbness in her left hand and glanced down. She was gripping the pencil tight enough to blanche the tips of her fingers. Using her other hand, she loosened her grip and dropped the pencil onto the three-quarters full legal pad in front of her. Emma shook her head to clear it, then reached into one of the desk drawers and pulled out a pack of clove cigarettes and the Zippo lighter that Joey had given her when her first novel went to the top of the New York Times Best Sellers List. Snapping the sterling silver lighter open expertly, she held the flame to the tip of the cigarette between her lips and inhaled deeply. With a practiced flick of her wrist and an exhaled plume of smoke, the lighter snapped shut and she read the inscription -
Sating the Beast
1995 - 1998
It had taken her three long years to write her first novel, and by the end of it she was cursing herself for not buying stock in Jack Daniels. When the first edition was released under the pseudonym Georgina Stark (an homage to Stephen King and her own bizarre writing style), all of the long, half-drunken nights became worth something. The critics had loved it and had compared her to her idols, calling the book “more disturbing then King…with sex scenes to write Penthouse about.” She had single-handedly added something new to the genre - erotic horror. Good old-fashioned sex and violence: human beings most ancient behaviors.
While she reminisced, she gently flexed her left hand, willing the feeling to return. She welcomed the sharp pins and needles of returning circulation with something between a grimace and a smile. As she leaned back in her soft leather chair, she thought of the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland and spent a few moments perfecting her smoke rings.
“Whoooo….are…yooouuu?” she asked the empty room between puffs of smoke, then chuckled softly and set the burning cigarette aside.
Noting that the tingling pain in her hand had abated, Emma picked up her pencil and paused, her head tilted slightly as if listening. Her eyes became distant, then her hand lowered to the page in front of her and began scratching away.
xXx
He jerked awake, dreaming of rats again. Listening closely he could hear her pencil scratching down the hall. He eyed the clock: three seventeen a.m. He could just picture her, hunched over a yellow legal pad at the huge mahogany desk, raven hair sticking out at odd angles from running her hands through it, her lips pressed together in a thin line as she concentrated on the horrors that flowed from the tip of her Berol Black Beauty pencil. The same brand that guy used in the Stephen King novel about a writer with split personalities. Not the one made into a Jack Nicholson movie but another one, something ‘Half’. She’d insisted he read it; his girl was a huge King fan. Joey remembered commenting on the pencil thing and the creepy smile she’d thrown him. “I know,” she’d replied, giving him the heebie-jeebies.
He shuddered and pushed that memory away then threw back the covers. If he wasn’t going to get any more rest, he might as well get up. He groped in the dark for his jeans and found them lying half under the bed. A grin twitched his mouth as he remembered how they’d gotten there. As he stepped into them and buttoned up he wondered if there was any Chinese left.
xXx
She laid her pencil down and reached for the clove cigarette burning in the antique ashtray. She only smoked when she wrote and even then it was mostly letting the cigarette burn down as it sat waiting. It was almost as if she was a different person when she was writing. As she exhaled she glanced at the Black Forest cuckoo clock on the wall. Three seventeen a.m. Nearly four and a half hours had passed since she’d let the words overtake her. She twisted in her chair, stretched out her back and stubbed out her smoke. The study door opened and Joey popped his head in.
“Emma?” He’d been right about the hair: it surrounded her head in a kind of wild black halo.
“Yeah, babe,” she reached her arms over her head and arched her back, working out the kinks.
He pushed the door open all the way and leaned against the jamb with his arms crossed, watching her stretch. “I was on my way to the kitchen. You hungry?”
“Actually….” She trailed off as she turned and saw him standing shirtless in the doorway. Her gaze slid over his body, coming to rest on the dark thatch of hair visible where his jeans were only half closed. He watched where her eyes settled and grinned. As he crossed the room towards her he buttoned his jeans the rest of the way. She shook her head and laughed the deep, throaty laugh that never failed to send shivers chasing down his spine (her sex laugh, he thought) and raised her eyes to his. “My stomach just started to growl.”
“You mean you just came back to reality long enough to realize your stomach was growling.” He frowned. “I worry about you, Em,” Joey admonished as he moved behind her chair to rub her shoulders and try to peek at what she’d written. She was onto him however and swiftly turned the papers face down.
“You know the rules, Joe. Not until I’m done.”
“Fine,” increasing the pressure of his hands. “Probably give me nightmares anyway,” he mumbled under his breath.
“Probably. By the way, why are you up?” she swiveled her chair around to look up at him quizzically.
“Rats.”
“Ah. Well, I know just the thing for that.” Emma smiled and hooked her fingers through the belt loops of his faded 501s to pull him closer.
“Oh yeah?” his hands slid into her tousled hair as he returned her sly grin.
“Yeah.” she trailed soft kisses across his stomach, waiting for him to relax into her, then pursed her lips and blew a short raspberry on the sensitive skin just below his navel. He jumped back with a surprised yelp and she seized the moment to move swiftly past him into the hall, narrowly escaping his reaching hands. He gave chase and tossed half-empty threats at her retreating form.
“You’re gonna pay for that Emma Jean DeVill!”
She laughed and raced down the back stairs into the kitchen, Joey hot on her heels.
xXx
He stood in front of the closed door to her study. It had been three days since he’d chased her from this room and into the kitchen, where he’d cornered her and had his way with her. He smiled, not that she’d complained. Hell, she’d even offered up suggestions (that reminded him - he needed to pick up more cherries).
He glanced at his watch with a sigh. Sixteen hours ago she’d sequestered herself on the other side of this door, saying that the words were beginning to back up and she needed to get them down on paper. He didn’t understand what that meant, but he did know that she’d be locked away for at least twenty-four hours, smoking and drinking and scribbling away on those legal pads she just couldn’t give up. He’d bought her a computer halfway into her first novel, about a year after they’d met. The fully loaded and expensive machine sat on the corner of her desk gathering dust. He was pretty sure that the only time she turned it on was to download porn and surf the gay chatrooms. She claimed it was for research and it did end up in her writing in some form, so he really couldn’t complain. Joey had asked her over breakfast once if their lovemaking ever ended up on paper. She’d smiled, shrugged, and turned her attention to the sports section of the morning newspaper.
“Come on, Em, tell me. Am I gonna pick up this book and read about that night we spent at Myrtle Beach?”
“I don’t believe this, Joe. The Panthers traded Lowry to San Jose for Kozlov and a fifth-round draft pick.”
“Emma…”
“Kozlov, Joe. Do you know what this means?”
He’d dropped the subject after that, though he never forgot it. When her novel finally came out he’d devoured it, searching for any kind of semblance to the things they had done. Not an easy task, as the story alternately turned him on and turned his stomach so often and so fast that he had begun to question his own sexual appetites. He thought maybe, in one chapter, but couldn’t really be sure; the details of that night were hazy, and he didn’t think that some of what she’d written was anything he would have done. So he’d pushed that worry to the back of his mind, where it lay down for a nap. Every once in a while it would poke it’s head up and take a look around, but he always managed to lull it back to sleep.
A noise from inside her study caught his attention and he moved closer to the door in an effort to hear better. It sounded as if she was speaking to someone, but he knew for a fact that she was alone in there with no connection to the outside world save for the dusty computer. Her muffled voice drifted through the door.
“I don’t think that’ll work………but if he…………well no, but………………what about………………no, no. I just think………………alright, I’ll put it in. But that doesn’t mean I’ll keep it.” She sighed heavily, “Fine, fine.”
It grew quiet once more, the only sound the frenzied scratch of pencil on paper. A chill washed over him and he stepped quickly away from the door. If he stood here much longer he’d believe her friends stories. Although, truth be told, Joey half believed them already. He’d seen first hand that slight shift in her personality when the need to write came over her. The distant look in her eyes. The tilt of her head as if listening to some far-off sound. The way the fingers on her left hand would twitch and tap against any nearby surface until she was able to pick up one of her Black Beauty’s and write. Her friends called it ‘The Georgina Stark Phenomenon’. He called it creepy.
Joey was so lost in his thoughts that he failed to notice the silence emanating from her study. The door swung open and she was before him, her startled expression giving way to drunken suspicion.
“Whater you doin’ here?” she slurred at him.
“I was just…um…” He drew a blank. What was he doing out here? Given his train of thought, her sudden appearance had unnerved him and he rubbed the back of his neck, trying to think of a reason to be standing outside of her study. Her dark blue eyes regarded him, and he noticed that she didn’t appear to be quite herself. He reasoned it could be the alcohol, but still he wondered.
“Emma?” he queried.
“Yeah,” she rolled her eyes. “What, you were expecting my evil twin?” Her eyes suddenly sparkled and she broke into a wide grin. “Or maybe - “
He held up a hand, “Don’t say it Emma.”
She chuckled as she slipped past him and moved - a bit unsteadily - down the hall. “Don’t tell me you believe that story, Joe.”
“Sometimes it’s hard not to, baby,” he called after her.
She rolled her eyes again, waved her hand in dismissal and stepped into the guest bathroom, eager to wash the days writing from her mind and body and the smell of whiskey and cigarettes from her skin and hair.
He waited for the shower to start, then took a cautious step into her study. He glanced around the room and took in the now familiar post-writing clutter: the empty Jack Daniels bottle that lie on its side on the desk; the crumpled sheets of paper scattered across the floor; the pile of worn down pencils needing to be sharpened; the neat stack of legal pads squared on the center of her large desk. Over everything hung the strong scent of her clove cigarettes (Georgina’s clove cigarettes, he corrected himself with a mental shudder).
Joey wrinkled his nose and crossed the room to the window, where he drew back the heavy curtains, flooding the room with late-afternoon sunlight. Before turning to leave he flipped the lock and cracked the window to draw out the smoke and let in some fresh air. Then he left, closing the door behind him.
June 2, 2000/Orlando
Early morning sunlight stole through a small crack in the shutters. It crept stealthily across the floor, scaled the side of the large bed and gently caressed Emma’s face. Her brow creased at the intrusion before she rolled onto her side, away from the offending brightness. She reached out, expecting the warm body she’d curled up against the night before, but found only cooling sheets imprinted with his scent. She sighed and pulled his pillow close then inhaled deeply before blinking awake. She lifted herself into a sitting position and looked around groggily. It took her a moment to realize exactly where she was. There was a bureau against the wall opposite the bed,
I'm more embarrassed by the fandom than the story itself, really. Well, certain parts of the story, anyway, heh. I like the idea behind the story - a writer whose ideas come not from the normal places, but from the voices in her head; voices of the multiple personality variety, that she is completely unaware she even has (if such a thing is possible). I'm not sure if I could ever make it work, but it's an idea I like very much.
Let's get the really embarrassing stuff out of the way first, yes?
Yes.
Fandom: nsync
A Dark and Stormy Night
May 22, 2000/Orlando
Emma lay in the dark, feeling his long solid frame against her back. His arm was slung across her body and his hand lightly cupped her breast. She listened to him sleep and wished for the same, to no avail. She tried to match her breathing to his - deep and regular - hoping it would lull her into unconsciousness.
No luck.
“Damn,” she muttered, and fought the urge to fidget and punch her pillow in frustration. He needed to sleep even if she couldn’t. She leaned against him and gently urged him onto his back; his arm fell away as she knew it would. She slipped quietly out of bed and into her discarded clothing before moving down the hall to her study.
xXx
Joey awoke with a start. He’d been dreaming that rats were scrabbling their way around the bedroom and when he heard a faint scratching, he feared for a moment that it hadn’t been a dream after all. Then he recognized the sound for what it was - the scratch of pencil on paper. He rolled over to check the clock. Two a.m. and her side of the bed was empty. He lay back with a sigh and closed his eyes, drifting slowly back to sleep
She slowly became aware of numbness in her left hand and glanced down. She was gripping the pencil tight enough to blanche the tips of her fingers. Using her other hand, she loosened her grip and dropped the pencil onto the three-quarters full legal pad in front of her. Emma shook her head to clear it, then reached into one of the desk drawers and pulled out a pack of clove cigarettes and the Zippo lighter that Joey had given her when her first novel went to the top of the New York Times Best Sellers List. Snapping the sterling silver lighter open expertly, she held the flame to the tip of the cigarette between her lips and inhaled deeply. With a practiced flick of her wrist and an exhaled plume of smoke, the lighter snapped shut and she read the inscription -
Sating the Beast
1995 - 1998
It had taken her three long years to write her first novel, and by the end of it she was cursing herself for not buying stock in Jack Daniels. When the first edition was released under the pseudonym Georgina Stark (an homage to Stephen King and her own bizarre writing style), all of the long, half-drunken nights became worth something. The critics had loved it and had compared her to her idols, calling the book “more disturbing then King…with sex scenes to write Penthouse about.” She had single-handedly added something new to the genre - erotic horror. Good old-fashioned sex and violence: human beings most ancient behaviors.
While she reminisced, she gently flexed her left hand, willing the feeling to return. She welcomed the sharp pins and needles of returning circulation with something between a grimace and a smile. As she leaned back in her soft leather chair, she thought of the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland and spent a few moments perfecting her smoke rings.
“Whoooo….are…yooouuu?” she asked the empty room between puffs of smoke, then chuckled softly and set the burning cigarette aside.
Noting that the tingling pain in her hand had abated, Emma picked up her pencil and paused, her head tilted slightly as if listening. Her eyes became distant, then her hand lowered to the page in front of her and began scratching away.
xXx
He jerked awake, dreaming of rats again. Listening closely he could hear her pencil scratching down the hall. He eyed the clock: three seventeen a.m. He could just picture her, hunched over a yellow legal pad at the huge mahogany desk, raven hair sticking out at odd angles from running her hands through it, her lips pressed together in a thin line as she concentrated on the horrors that flowed from the tip of her Berol Black Beauty pencil. The same brand that guy used in the Stephen King novel about a writer with split personalities. Not the one made into a Jack Nicholson movie but another one, something ‘Half’. She’d insisted he read it; his girl was a huge King fan. Joey remembered commenting on the pencil thing and the creepy smile she’d thrown him. “I know,” she’d replied, giving him the heebie-jeebies.
He shuddered and pushed that memory away then threw back the covers. If he wasn’t going to get any more rest, he might as well get up. He groped in the dark for his jeans and found them lying half under the bed. A grin twitched his mouth as he remembered how they’d gotten there. As he stepped into them and buttoned up he wondered if there was any Chinese left.
xXx
She laid her pencil down and reached for the clove cigarette burning in the antique ashtray. She only smoked when she wrote and even then it was mostly letting the cigarette burn down as it sat waiting. It was almost as if she was a different person when she was writing. As she exhaled she glanced at the Black Forest cuckoo clock on the wall. Three seventeen a.m. Nearly four and a half hours had passed since she’d let the words overtake her. She twisted in her chair, stretched out her back and stubbed out her smoke. The study door opened and Joey popped his head in.
“Emma?” He’d been right about the hair: it surrounded her head in a kind of wild black halo.
“Yeah, babe,” she reached her arms over her head and arched her back, working out the kinks.
He pushed the door open all the way and leaned against the jamb with his arms crossed, watching her stretch. “I was on my way to the kitchen. You hungry?”
“Actually….” She trailed off as she turned and saw him standing shirtless in the doorway. Her gaze slid over his body, coming to rest on the dark thatch of hair visible where his jeans were only half closed. He watched where her eyes settled and grinned. As he crossed the room towards her he buttoned his jeans the rest of the way. She shook her head and laughed the deep, throaty laugh that never failed to send shivers chasing down his spine (her sex laugh, he thought) and raised her eyes to his. “My stomach just started to growl.”
“You mean you just came back to reality long enough to realize your stomach was growling.” He frowned. “I worry about you, Em,” Joey admonished as he moved behind her chair to rub her shoulders and try to peek at what she’d written. She was onto him however and swiftly turned the papers face down.
“You know the rules, Joe. Not until I’m done.”
“Fine,” increasing the pressure of his hands. “Probably give me nightmares anyway,” he mumbled under his breath.
“Probably. By the way, why are you up?” she swiveled her chair around to look up at him quizzically.
“Rats.”
“Ah. Well, I know just the thing for that.” Emma smiled and hooked her fingers through the belt loops of his faded 501s to pull him closer.
“Oh yeah?” his hands slid into her tousled hair as he returned her sly grin.
“Yeah.” she trailed soft kisses across his stomach, waiting for him to relax into her, then pursed her lips and blew a short raspberry on the sensitive skin just below his navel. He jumped back with a surprised yelp and she seized the moment to move swiftly past him into the hall, narrowly escaping his reaching hands. He gave chase and tossed half-empty threats at her retreating form.
“You’re gonna pay for that Emma Jean DeVill!”
She laughed and raced down the back stairs into the kitchen, Joey hot on her heels.
xXx
He stood in front of the closed door to her study. It had been three days since he’d chased her from this room and into the kitchen, where he’d cornered her and had his way with her. He smiled, not that she’d complained. Hell, she’d even offered up suggestions (that reminded him - he needed to pick up more cherries).
He glanced at his watch with a sigh. Sixteen hours ago she’d sequestered herself on the other side of this door, saying that the words were beginning to back up and she needed to get them down on paper. He didn’t understand what that meant, but he did know that she’d be locked away for at least twenty-four hours, smoking and drinking and scribbling away on those legal pads she just couldn’t give up. He’d bought her a computer halfway into her first novel, about a year after they’d met. The fully loaded and expensive machine sat on the corner of her desk gathering dust. He was pretty sure that the only time she turned it on was to download porn and surf the gay chatrooms. She claimed it was for research and it did end up in her writing in some form, so he really couldn’t complain. Joey had asked her over breakfast once if their lovemaking ever ended up on paper. She’d smiled, shrugged, and turned her attention to the sports section of the morning newspaper.
“Come on, Em, tell me. Am I gonna pick up this book and read about that night we spent at Myrtle Beach?”
“I don’t believe this, Joe. The Panthers traded Lowry to San Jose for Kozlov and a fifth-round draft pick.”
“Emma…”
“Kozlov, Joe. Do you know what this means?”
He’d dropped the subject after that, though he never forgot it. When her novel finally came out he’d devoured it, searching for any kind of semblance to the things they had done. Not an easy task, as the story alternately turned him on and turned his stomach so often and so fast that he had begun to question his own sexual appetites. He thought maybe, in one chapter, but couldn’t really be sure; the details of that night were hazy, and he didn’t think that some of what she’d written was anything he would have done. So he’d pushed that worry to the back of his mind, where it lay down for a nap. Every once in a while it would poke it’s head up and take a look around, but he always managed to lull it back to sleep.
A noise from inside her study caught his attention and he moved closer to the door in an effort to hear better. It sounded as if she was speaking to someone, but he knew for a fact that she was alone in there with no connection to the outside world save for the dusty computer. Her muffled voice drifted through the door.
“I don’t think that’ll work………but if he…………well no, but………………what about………………no, no. I just think………………alright, I’ll put it in. But that doesn’t mean I’ll keep it.” She sighed heavily, “Fine, fine.”
It grew quiet once more, the only sound the frenzied scratch of pencil on paper. A chill washed over him and he stepped quickly away from the door. If he stood here much longer he’d believe her friends stories. Although, truth be told, Joey half believed them already. He’d seen first hand that slight shift in her personality when the need to write came over her. The distant look in her eyes. The tilt of her head as if listening to some far-off sound. The way the fingers on her left hand would twitch and tap against any nearby surface until she was able to pick up one of her Black Beauty’s and write. Her friends called it ‘The Georgina Stark Phenomenon’. He called it creepy.
Joey was so lost in his thoughts that he failed to notice the silence emanating from her study. The door swung open and she was before him, her startled expression giving way to drunken suspicion.
“Whater you doin’ here?” she slurred at him.
“I was just…um…” He drew a blank. What was he doing out here? Given his train of thought, her sudden appearance had unnerved him and he rubbed the back of his neck, trying to think of a reason to be standing outside of her study. Her dark blue eyes regarded him, and he noticed that she didn’t appear to be quite herself. He reasoned it could be the alcohol, but still he wondered.
“Emma?” he queried.
“Yeah,” she rolled her eyes. “What, you were expecting my evil twin?” Her eyes suddenly sparkled and she broke into a wide grin. “Or maybe - “
He held up a hand, “Don’t say it Emma.”
She chuckled as she slipped past him and moved - a bit unsteadily - down the hall. “Don’t tell me you believe that story, Joe.”
“Sometimes it’s hard not to, baby,” he called after her.
She rolled her eyes again, waved her hand in dismissal and stepped into the guest bathroom, eager to wash the days writing from her mind and body and the smell of whiskey and cigarettes from her skin and hair.
He waited for the shower to start, then took a cautious step into her study. He glanced around the room and took in the now familiar post-writing clutter: the empty Jack Daniels bottle that lie on its side on the desk; the crumpled sheets of paper scattered across the floor; the pile of worn down pencils needing to be sharpened; the neat stack of legal pads squared on the center of her large desk. Over everything hung the strong scent of her clove cigarettes (Georgina’s clove cigarettes, he corrected himself with a mental shudder).
Joey wrinkled his nose and crossed the room to the window, where he drew back the heavy curtains, flooding the room with late-afternoon sunlight. Before turning to leave he flipped the lock and cracked the window to draw out the smoke and let in some fresh air. Then he left, closing the door behind him.
June 2, 2000/Orlando
Early morning sunlight stole through a small crack in the shutters. It crept stealthily across the floor, scaled the side of the large bed and gently caressed Emma’s face. Her brow creased at the intrusion before she rolled onto her side, away from the offending brightness. She reached out, expecting the warm body she’d curled up against the night before, but found only cooling sheets imprinted with his scent. She sighed and pulled his pillow close then inhaled deeply before blinking awake. She lifted herself into a sitting position and looked around groggily. It took her a moment to realize exactly where she was. There was a bureau against the wall opposite the bed,
I'm more embarrassed by the fandom than the story itself, really. Well, certain parts of the story, anyway, heh. I like the idea behind the story - a writer whose ideas come not from the normal places, but from the voices in her head; voices of the multiple personality variety, that she is completely unaware she even has (if such a thing is possible). I'm not sure if I could ever make it work, but it's an idea I like very much.