YULETIDE FIC: Discovering Gravity (Heat, Lauren/Chris/Charlene, R)
TITLE: Discovering Gravity
RATING: R
FANDOM: Heat
CHARACTERS: Lauren Gustafson, Charlene Shiherlis, Chris Shiherlis, Dominick Shiherlis
PAIRING: Charlene Shiherlis/Chris Shiherlis, Charlene Shiherlis/Lauren Gustafson, Lauren Gustafson/Chris Shiherlis, Charlene Shiherlis/Chris Shiherlis/Lauren Gustafson
SUMMARY: Gravity is the relationship between celestial bodies. LA was a long time ago, and Lauren has traveled light-years since then.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Post film. Written for magnetgirl’s 2017 Yuletide. Enormous thanks are due to my wonderful beta reader, E.
PART ONE: Like Heaven
Gravity is the relationship between celestial bodies. It is responsible, therefore, not just for what makes you fall, but also for the things that hold you up.
***
Lauren pulls her hair back into a ponytail. It’s darker now, sleeker, and she grew out her bangs a long time ago. Her face is more angular, her body a woman’s, but still slender. She dresses simply in body-hugging neutrals and wears minimal makeup, a smudge of kohl eyeliner and a light swipe of mascara. She doesn’t wear perfume because perfume leaves a presence, but she carries tools in small, thin leather pouches on her belt, and she always has gloves.
The boys are already working below. Lauren can hear their tools humming as she lowers her toolcase down to Chris, as she climbs down to the subbasement, the temperature dropping ten degrees by the time her feet hit the ground. She walks through the dust of cut concrete, the smelt and the sparks of the tools whirring. They have cut out the safe with a waterjet, and the sides of it still drip. Lauren approaches it, rests her gloved fingertips on the metal face. Hello. Chris hands her the case, and she sets it on the ground and opens it up, pulls out her drill and her borescope. Chris wipes off his thick work gloves, wet with water and dirty with abrasive, on his pants before taking the borescope from her.
Lauren lines up the drill.
“Time?” she asks.
Chris doesn’t even glance at his watch. “Plenty,” he says. “Alarm’s offline, security isn’t due for four hours.” The corner of his mouth quirks up. “Not that you need it.”
Lauren hides her smile under pretense of watching the drill bore true. The smell of metal burning through metal blooms within her the same emotion as the smell of fresh cut Christmas trees, and her hands on the drill are steady. The curls of metal fall away, and Lauren feels the bit cut through to the other side, and pulls it out. She trades Chris the drill for the borescope, and she is peripherally aware of him nestling the drill back into her case as she threads the borescope’s cable through the hole she’s drilled. There’s darkness, and then the familiar shapes of the lock’s working parts. She feels Chris’s presence at her back, but it’s comforting, familiar, like an acrobat’s net. Lauren moves the safe’s lock slowly, watches the pieces turn, like the shining shapes in a kaleidoscope. She had one as a child. She prefers this.
The tumblers turn, clicking into place. Lauren slowly withdraws the borescope. She hands the tool to Chris, and takes the arm of the handle, pulls open the door. The buzzing of construction tools stops as everyone stops what they are doing to watch the contents of the safe revealed.
Chris smiles. “That’s my girl.”
PART TWO: Wish I May, Wish I Might
Lauren meets Chris in the hospital in New York. She is 19 and inpatient again. It’s been a long time since Los Angeles. She is on her third relative since her mother’s divorce from Hanna and her subsequent third marriage. It’s become like a game show, seeing who will come to sign her out of the psych ward, seeing what new room new house new city she’ll be living in. What’s behind door number two? She’s an adult now, so maybe this time no one will come get her when the doctors say she can go home.
The aides are supervising Lauren’s unit in the courtyard, but the medication has made Lauren tired and slow, so she heads for the picnic tables. She sits on the weathered soft, bowed wooden bench, the dew-licked grass soaking through her canvas shoes. She presses her thumbnail into the soft wood of the tabletop, tries to scratch out a design, but she can’t decide on what to draw. She just scratches lines instead, up and down like the scars on her wrists.
It’s a minute before she notices she’s no longer alone. She smells something acrid in the air, and looks up to see a man with a scar by his eye and a cigarette in his hand. He exhales again, blowing out a smooth stream of blue-white smoke, a momentary haze between them.
“You should get your hair done,” he says. “You’d be really pretty cleaned up.”
She frowns, tugs at one of the unwashed strands hanging limply around her face.
“Are you a beautician?” she asks, “Or just a fag?”
His face is impassive. He stubs out his cigarette on the tabletop, takes the pack from his pocket and shakes another one loose.
Lauren holds out her hand. The man raises an eyebrow.
“You sure you want to take candy from a stranger, little girl?”
She hits him dead in the eye with an unpitying look, and he actually smiles. He gives her a cigarette, lights them both. He’s definitely not here for psych, if he’s got a lighter.
“What are you in for?” she asks. The smoke burns pleasantly inside her chest.
“Impulse control,” he says, which Lauren knows is code for rehab. “You?”
Lauren’s mouth twists. There are diagnoses she’s memorized, numbers and definitions and pages in the DSM. She can’t stand the taste of them in her mouth.
“I’m just sad,” she says, and he nods.
“Me too,” he says, and extends his hand. It’s a big hand, strong, but the wrist and fingers are finely shaped, pretty even, and it catches her off guard. “I’m Chris,” he says.
Lauren shakes his hand. “Lauren,” she says.
He nods, releases his hold on her. Her hand feels cold now, shaky. Chris breathes in the smoke of his cigarette.
“It’s nice to meet you,” he says, “and it isn’t.”
She knows what he means.
***
They don’t make plans, but when they’re both in the courtyard, they sit together. It happens more and more often; she knows Chris has a lot more control over his time, but Lauren likes the attention and she likes Chris, so she continues to sit with him when he comes. It turns out Chris isn’t inpatient in rehab; he’s actually doing some mentoring with patients working the program.
“So you’re not an addict anymore?” Lauren asks.
Chris’s mouth twists. “I think you’re always an addict. I’m just an addict who isn’t using right now.”
Lauren rolls her eyes. “Cheerful.”
“Honest. You’ll find truth is often not cheerful.”
“No shit.”
***
“What do you do?” she asks one time.
“Construction,” he says, and it’s a practiced lie, a confident and convincing lie, but Lauren has become an expert at spotting them.
She drags on her cigarette. “Okay,” she says.
***
Chris’s wife is beautiful. He has pictures in his wallet, a beautiful wife, a beautiful child. He lets her take the photos from the sleeves, hold them with her thin, white fingers. Lauren looks at Chris’s beautiful wife, the fine shape of her face, her glossy gold hair, her pretty makeup, and wonders what it’s like to be beautiful like that. She longs for it, an ache in her flesh.
One day, Lauren walks into the courtyard to find the photo in Chris’s wallet come to life. Charlene is even more beautiful in person, and Lauren is filled with the same kind of awe as the first time she saw a dolphin in person after seeing them in picture books and on television. At the table are Chris, and Charlene, and a chocolate cake with icing an inch thick.
Lauren sees Charlene and the cake and slows. There’s nothing worse than a party you’re not invited to. But Chris catches Charlene’s eye and nods at Lauren, and Charlene turns to look at her, smiling radiantly.
“Hi, sweetheart!” she says. “Come sit with us, we’re celebrating.”
Lauren takes her familiar seat across the table. Chris smiles at her, the little upturned lip that would be about a quarter of a smile for anyone else, and Charlene is plating an enormous wedge of chocolate cake on a flimsy paper page, struggling to balance the weight of the pastry on cheap plastic cutlery.
“Lauren,” she says, “looks like you got here just in time. Are they not feeding you in here?” She sets the plate in front of Lauren, sucking a dollop of frosting off her thumb. “Oh God, you’re not one of those anorexia girls, are you? Sorry. I probably shouldn’t have said that.”
Lauren takes the plastic piece of shit fork Chris is offering her instead of a cigarette, and she basks in the golden warmth of Charlene’s attention. “It’s okay. I’m not. What are you celebrating?”
“It’s his birthday,” Charlene says, and carves a hunk of cake for Chris, too. “He told me not to make a fuss, but making a fuss is what I’m good at.”
“There’s lots you’re good at,” Chris says, and there’s no edge to it at all, no lascivious suggestion, and Lauren can tell by the tone of his voice and by the way he’s looking at her that Chris sees every bit of special Charlene is, same as she does. She can see she’s his whole sun, and that he doesn’t want anything from her but an orbit.
***
Lauren is being released. She saw an episode of The Simpsons once where, when someone was allowed to leave the hospital, the doctors stamped his hand SANE. Lauren doesn’t get a stamp. This isn’t like that.
As she suspected, there is no one to come to claim her. She sits in her civilian clothes, sneakers floppy with no laces, in the common room until finally the nurses come and ask is there no one, is there no one else.
She has Chris’s phone number, a piece of paper with his controlled handwriting, and her own sound scrawl under the tongue of her Converse, just in case. Some things you gotta hold on to.
This is a crucible moment, and Lauren’s afraid to ruin it, but sometimes a gamble’s the only play. She gives the nurse Chris’s paper.
***
“I put fresh sheets on the bed, and clean towels in the bathroom. I don’t know what kind of soap you use; we’ll go shopping after you have some time to relax, settle in.”
Charlene talks a mile a minute as she leads the tour through the Coopers’ house, pointing out Dominick’s room on the right and the pictures from their Miami vacation in the foyer. They walk in tandem: Charlene, Lauren, Chris. He hasn’t said much, but he showed up to pick Lauren up from the hospital as soon as he could get there, and he put her things in the trunk of his little black car and held the door for her.
They reach the guest room, which is at the back of the house. Charlene flips on the lights, still tour guiding, and Chris sets Lauren’s bags down at the foot of the bed. It’s a nice room, like the rest of the house, really nice and just outside the city, and Lauren wonders again about Chris’s job but doesn’t say anything. There are fresh cut flowers, white lilies and purple snapdragons, in a vase on the nightstand, and Lauren knows that is just for her.
“Thank you,” she says.
Charlene folds her into a hug, and beyond the soft weight of her and the sweet smell of her perfume, Lauren hears Chris say, “Stay as long as you want.”
***
Dominick is 10, blond and sweet. He likes dinosaurs with the intense focus of a small boy, and at the dinner table, his entire perception of Lauren is as a new person to regale with the height of the brachiosaurus and the purpose of the horn of a parasaurolophus. The four of them sit around the table and eat a meal that Dominick and Chris and Charlene prepared together, and Lauren doesn’t want to be rude by not making much conversation, but it’s so different from any meal she’s ever eaten that she is honestly stunned. Chris refills Charlene’s glass and Charlene rights Dominick’s napkin every time it slips from his lap, and the two of them obviously completely adore their son and are listening to statistics and stories they’ve doubtless heard a hundred times like it’s brand new information, and Lauren isn’t just there in the middle of it, a forgotten observer; all three of them are taking pains to include her, asking things like, “Do you want some more bread?” and, “What’s your favorite dinosaur?”
“I don’t have a favorite dinosaur,” she says, “I don’t know much about them.”
She would have said that, anyway, even if she had, just to see Dominick’s face light up.
Later that night, she takes a shower and shaves her legs with a brand new razor that is among the dozens of toiletries they’ve left in the guest bath for her until Charlene can take her shopping, and then she puts on her pajamas still sticky with fragrant lotion, and sits on the Coopers’ guest bed and prays to whoever there is to pray to that when she wakes up in the morning, she’ll still be here.
PART 3: Cosmic, Seismic
Dominick is at a sleepover, and Chris wants to take them to dinner, somewhere nice. Lauren has not been to a dinner somewhere nice since she still wore barrettes in her hair, and isn’t sure what this means as an adult. She only recalls being bored and itchy in her nice dress, and not wanting anything on the menu.
Charlene takes Lauren into her bedroom as she gets ready. She is wearing a slinky, shimmery, sand-colored dress with a low back, and she has her hair pinned up in gold curls. She looks like the goddess of something, goddess of the dawn-Eos. Lauren learned that name in school a long time ago, remembers the textbook picture of the goddess with her wings and chariot. Like that. Charlene looks like that.
Charlene sits Lauren down in front of her vanity. She curls Lauren’s hair and brushes blush over her cheeks, a light pink, just a touch. Lauren looks at the pretty things on the glass top of Charlene’s vanity, and asks if she can use a lipstick, a glimmery rose in a slender gold tube.
Charlene looks surprised.
“Honey, of course! Anything that’s mine is yours.”
Lauren flushes, her natural blush darker than the cosmetic. She carefully traces her mouth with the lipstick, and smiles at her reflection. She almost doesn’t recognize herself; she looks beautiful.
Charlene stands behind her, places her hands on Lauren’s shoulders.
“Oh, honey, you’re such a beauty. I was in pageants when I was your age, did I ever tell you that? You’d smoke ‘em, girl. You’re a natural.”
She runs her thumb over the muscle connecting Lauren’s shoulder to her neck. Lauren watches Charlene in the mirror, and wonders if she is blushing, too, or if it’s just makeup. Charlene meets her gaze in the mirror, and quirks an eyebrow, smiles.
“Let’s get you a dress,” she says.
She lets Lauren go through her closet. She could spend hours there, but Chris is waiting for them-“Don’t worry about that,” Charlene says. “It’s good to make men wait.”-so she just settles for the first dress she can see herself in. It’s chiffon, deep blue, the skirt full but the bodice fitted. It reminds her of the dress Cinderella wore at the ball in the old Disney movie, but it’s more grownup than a cartoon princess and the little girl who wanted to be her.
“Oh, honey, perfect,” Charlene says.
Lauren thinks maybe she’d going to leave the room while she changes, but she isn’t used to privacy after her time in the hospital, and for the first time in her life, she wants to show someone her body.
“Can you help me try it on?” she asks, and Charlene nods, but her voice is lower now, quieter. “Sure, honey. Of course I can.”
Lauren takes off her shirt carefully to avoid mussing her hair. She realizes she is breathing shallowly as she starts to unzip her jeans. She takes in a deep, slow breath, and steps out of her pants. She stands there in her bra and panties, and it’s the most naked she’s ever been in front of someone just because she wants to, and Charlene is still there, and she’s still looking at her like she’s worth all this, and Lauren wants to tell her everything but she can’t speak. Charlene smiles, and she steps forward, only inches between them, and she says again, “Such a beauty.”
And Charlene is kissing her, and she tastes like lipstick and the Fourth of July. Lauren drops the dress, and she kisses back hard and puts her hands on Charlene’s body: her hips, her neck, her breasts. Everything about her is soft and perfect, and when Charlene touches her the same way, Lauren wonders if Charlene is thinking the same thing about her.
***
Chris called for them, probably, but Lauren never heard; she and Charlene are on the bed with ruined makeup and ruined hair, wearing beautiful jewelry and nothing else, and all of a sudden Chris is standing over them. Lauren feels a frisson of anxiety race through her: she’s never been in this position before, but she pretty sure naked in bed with a man’s wife is a loaded situation.
“So… should I order takeout?” he asks, and Charlene laughs so hard she cries. Lauren’s never seen happy tears in real life.
***
Chris is working in the garage. Some days he seems to do no work at all; other times, he’ll work for a few hours in the garage, or disappear for hours or days to some unspecified business. Today Lauren is bored; Charlene took Dominick to a play date, and Lauren had opted to stay, planning to go for a swim in the pool, but it had started raining not long after Charlene and Dominick left. Lauren has not been told to stay out of the garage when Chris is in there, and so she lets herself in.
“Don’t come in here with bare feet,” Chris says without turning to look at her. As far as get outs go, it doesn’t have much teeth, but then she sees that there are metal shavings on the floor around Chris’s boots as a result of whatever he’s doing at the workbench, so Lauren runs inside to slip on a pair of sneakers, and then comes back.
Lauren leans against the end of the work bench. Chris has a handful of tools she’s never seen before, and a large, gunmetal gray box with moving parts. She waits to speak. Finally, he looks over at her.
“How much do you know about locks?” he asks.
***
Chris explains about how their last name isn’t really Cooper, how a job went bad and they had to start over. Lauren asks why they didn’t just do something else.
“It’s what I’m good at,” he says. “Anyway, there’s a difference between learning a lesson from something-doing something cuz of your head-and running and hiding, doing something cuz you’re scared. You touch a hot stove, get burned, you don’t touch it again because you’ve learned from the experience. But most things in life, especially big things, learning from the experience doesn’t mean running and hiding. It just means getting better at knowing when the stove is hot, you know?” He looks at her. “What else do you want to know?”
Lauren meets his eyes. “I want to know what you’re doing with that,” she says, and nods at the lock on the workbench.
Chris smiles, teeth and everything. “I can show you.”
***
Lauren learns about safes in the Coopers’ garage. Chris takes her to work sites and construction depots and teaches her about explosives. He takes her to the gun range and teaches her to shoot. She doesn’t flinch at the kickback. She’s done flinching.
Chris takes her to meet his crew. She likes them all immediately. The first job they do together is smooth as silk.
And then it’s just a day, a normal day, and Lauren notices Chris is looking at her like he looks at Charlene, and she doesn’t flush and she doesn’t demur. She doesn’t wonder what it’s like to feel beautiful or wanted; she feels calm and grounded. She takes a step towards him.
She steps toward him, and he takes her by the hand and by the waist like they’re going to dance, but instead they are kissing, softly at first but then Lauren is climbing up him or he’s pulling her up, it’s not clear but she’s in his arms and her feet are off the ground and her head isn’t spinning; she’s sober and everything is clear is day, and everything is perfect.
PART FOUR: Terra Firma
Each bar of gold is about the length of Lauren’s palm from the faded scar on her wrist where Charlene dabs perfume on special occasions where the police won’t be called, to the tip of her middle finger, which is longest, but each bar of gold weighs almost 30 pounds, as much as a toddler, so they take two hands to carry, cradled like eggs. It is like an Easter game she played as a fat-cheeked little girl in a purple dress, dyed eggs balanced on spoons, and for a moment Lauren thinks of children. She looks at Chris, taking the bars three at a time, and thinks of the dozens of times as a girl and a teen she thought, “I will never have a baby,” but the pain of that time in her life is healed over like a scar. Charlene loves babies; Dominick could have a little brother or sister. Lauren wonders if it would be blonde.
Not yet. Not never, just not yet.
Angelo takes Lauren’s bar, nestles it away in a black, velvet case inside the wall of his truck.
“How are we lookin’?” she asks.
“You are beautiful as always, my dear,” he says, not looking up from his calculator.
“I mean money, Angel.”
“How does one-point-four sound to you?”
“Million?”
He nods. She frowns. “Sounds light.”
He chuckles. “One-point-four apiece, muñeca.”
She grins. “Better. Much better.”
They pack up the gold in the truck, and they pack up their tools and cases. They still have more than an hour left before security comes, and the gold is gone and they are cruising through the busy streets under the streetlights and what stars can be seen through the smog. Lauren tips her head back on the headrest, and looks up at the sky. She thinks she sees Saturn.
“If Charlene’s your sun,” she says, “what am I?”
Chris answers without thinking, without a pause. “Our moon.”
***
When people think about gravity, they think about falling. Gravity is what kills you when you jump off a bridge, they think. (Lauren knows that jumping is what kills you.) Gravity is more like phone lines-cables of connection. Gravity keeps the Earth in the sun’s orbit. Without gravity, we would fall from the sky.