fic: Life in Mono (Chapter 4, Handshake; Sonny/Portlyn)
Title: Life in Mono
Fandom: Sonny With a Chance
Pairing: Sonny/Portlyn
Status Chapter 4/? (Handshake)
Notes: Usually chapters take me forever to post simply because I'm so busy angsting over writing them. I tried not to be so hard on myself over this one, and as it turned out, I actually enjoyed writing it. (Gasp! Unheard of!) Part of my enthusiasm might have been that I couldn't stand leaving Sonny unhappy in the last chapter, though. :P Yeah, my author's notes scarcely have anything to do with the actual content of the chapters. I just thought I would needlessly take up space.
Chapter 4:
Handshake
The band is called Cherry Bomb, and frankly, Sonny's heard better coming from the trash collector who thrashes around outside her building on Monday mornings. It's possible, though, that maybe that's the bitterness of rejection talking, seeping in through her ears and letting her appreciation for music pour out through the sour hole in her stomach.
In the loud space, Sonny defeatedly plops into a chair at a small round table in a quieter part of of the bar and flings her purse onto the surface like it's nothing more than trash. She considers calling for a cab, but when her eyes slide to her wrist, the face of her watch smiles out 10:10, its little second-hand tongue hanging out in ridicule. Of course, Mom would be waiting up, and Sonny doesn't want to explain the cab or her mood and possibly the need for fifty bucks.
Lights flash, the band plays like two colliding trains ramming through Sonny's ears. She looks through the crowd and right away finds Portlyn. Watching her is kind of like watching stars in the sky, they're so far away, twinkling and rotating and doing other star-things that are all part of a night's work as they effortlessly draw you out to places you'd never think of going just to get a glimpse of their shine.
The rest of the Mackenzie Falls cast is not far from Portlyn, and Sonny sees them orbiting around each other, trying to get their heads close together and it doesn't take long before Sonny realizes she's witnessing a far-away demonstration of frenzied whispering, only without the whooshing, secretive sounds.
And honestly, after being traumatized by Portlyn's surprise rum attack, Sonny feels like she can only hope that a thugged-out master of more blatant illegalities hasn't arrived to provide them all with a pillowcase full of drugs like sweet and sticky Halloween candy.
Sonny should have figured, really, when it turns out that it's worse.
Portlyn and Loraine and Devon and Carter all walk back to the table like they're on display, and when Sonny raises an eyebrow as she slumps back and crosses her arms, Carter informs her of the joyous occasion:
“Chad just texted. He'll be in in a sec.”
*
The cast raises their newly-acquired drinks to Chad Dylan Cooper as soon as he looms from a distance, and all their arms must look like they make up some giant overturned insect with liquid glass feet balanced on skinny legs sticking straight up into the air.
Chad's grinning his expensive, bleached-white smile and thrusting congratulatory fingers toward the fawning faces around the table. Sonny wants to puke condolences to the crowd who genuinely seems to lap up his Congratulations, congratulations! You're in the presence of Chad Dylan Cooper grin.
Sonny sees the moment Chad's pupils fall over her. It's hard to miss, since his eyes look like the pressure built up from the surprise of catching a glimpse of her on 'his' turf, sans his invite, almost has his eyeballs shooting out from his stupid squinty sockets to plop right into her denim lap.
“Well well well,” he says, pulling at his leather racer jacket and slipping casually into the seat next to her. Sonny senses the rest of the cast drawing back into themselves like closing umbrellas as he slips all the way to the right corner of his chair so his left arm drapes along the back like a snake. “I see someone let the Z-list celebrities in here tonight.”
Chad's tone is accusatory, but he doesn't even look to a specific person for placement. Sonny wonders if they're all the same to him - if Portlyn and Loraine and Devon and Carter are just figures that register in his brain as Not Chads.
Sonny sneers his way and uses her toes to push her entire chair away from him.
“I think the bigger question, Chad, is if you had to use an entrance for special cases,” Sonny says sweetly as she feigns interest in even her own question, letting her chin drop into her palm, elbow balancing over the tabletop. “You know, to accommodate actors whose everyday functions need to revolve around accommodating their enormous heads.”
Chad Dylan Cooper's a tool; his jacket is reflecting the streams of lights, and his eyes are shut against the room like he can't be bothered, lips tucked up into a secret, smug grin. Sonny glares.
“Seriously, Munroe,” he says, putting his hands through his hair. “What're you doing in my hangout with my cast, and whose brain did you have to numb with your incessant chattering in order to hijack the social ladder you needed to climb to get in here? ”
Like a forced confession spoken straight from her bones, Sonny turns her head to where Portlyn sits, and like someone's strung a thread through her pupils and stuck the other ends to Portlyn, Sonny stays fixated as Loraine leans into Portlyn, lavishly unfurling a tanned arm and plucking a cigarette from Portlyn's fingers and then bringing it slowly to her own lips.
Loraine doesn't take her eyes off Portlyn, and that makes two of them, because Sonny can't look away either. Watching the two is like watching storm clouds butt up against each other in the sky until everything becomes overcharged and the gray just rips apart from all that tension in a blaze of lightning. Portlyn's smile screams intimacy, and Sonny thinks again about going home. Loraine raises Portlyn a twist of her full red lips, blows out a ring of smoke. Sonny thinks about going home.
Chad laughs. "Now that's rich."
“What's so funny?” Sonny shoots with one of her dirtiest looks. She knows that laugh, can just feel that he's openly scoffing at her and bristles like a drenched cat.
Chad runs his fingers along his unbroken peach face, clearly enjoying her discomfort.
He leans forward, elbows steadied on his knees, his bright eyes beckoning her forward.
In a second of uncertainty, Sonny's eyes wander sidelong to Portlyn, who has her fingers around her own cigarette again as she watches her and Chad with interest.
Sonny quickly squints back toward Chad. “Well?”
“What?" he scoffs, leaning back in his seat. "Geez, I thought you residents of Chuckle City would understand that a guy needs a laugh every now and again.”
His words hit her like they've become tangible in the open air, like Chad or Portlyn have just leaned over to slap her across the face, and just like that, Sonny finally gets it.
He finds you intriguing, infuriatingly adorable even.
The words resonate off her skull, sounding like an echo doing flip-flops from the walls of a cathedral, sounding like the noise a vase makes when you rub your finger around the rim to find out if it's real crystal.
(It's not crystal. It's ordinary glass.)
The whole thing - everything - was nothing but some sneaky, disgusting, should-have-been-totally-transparent Mackenzie Falls ploy to get her out with Chad Dylan Cooper. So the cast of 'The Falls' could laugh at her. Sonny feels so stupid, not just for falling for it, but for falling for it again. This is far from the first time she's been taken in by the cast of Mackenzie Falls.
“Oh my gosh,” Sonny says, standing so fast the backs of her calves bump the chair. “You-” She's looking down at Chad's smug face before she realizes it's more appropriate to be looking toward Portlyn, who has her lips parted in confusion. Loraine, who is smirking at her side, flicks a short string of ash into Carter's coke. “You! You guys set me up!”
“Pardon?” Portlyn asks, leaning forward over the table. Her elbow knocks against a pink-filled glass.
“Don't you pardon me, you - you - oh, you exactly-who-I-thought-you-were, you!” Sonny huffs.
Chad stands, looking befuddled and smug and amused all at once, but that's peripheral to Portlyn, who has her hand gingerly placed over her chest and the nerve to have a look on her face that actually seems a little hurt behind the confused sarcasm.
Sonny turns her back to both of them like a finalized goodbye and walks hurriedly for the entrance.
In her ears are hacked pieces of shouted confusion that drift from the table, riding over the waves of Portlyn's echoic voice crashing to the insides of her skull like the ocean. So maybe I need a laugh, she'd said.
Most of all, Sonny realizes Portlyn had said maybe.
Sonny should have known - the only thing that anybody from Mackenzie Falls ever finds worthy of laughter are other people. Sonny feels like her earlier thoughts - of romance of all things - are burning holes in her and blinding her to where she's treading.
The warm outside air wraps Sonny up tight, only it's when she comes to encounter a brick wall sprayed ugly with a blanket of yellow lamplight that she realizes she's gone out the wrong door. This place looks to be the side or back of the nightclub and a dead end at that, and if that wasn't bad enough, there's a couple to her far left sucking at each other's faces.
This won't lead her anywhere, only the walk back through the club and to the actual exit flashes like a black hole in her mind, complete with transverse images of Chad and Loraine and Portlyn all being poured glasses of amber-colored alcohol while they laugh it up at Sonny's expense. Their lilting faces only dissipate when the latter of the three appears before Sonny in real time, effectively barring the way back into the flashy nightclub.
“So I'm it, huh?” The words are out of Sonny's mouth before she even thinks of them. “I'm the big - the big punch-line of your bored, Mackenzie Falls existence?”
“What?” Portlyn poises herself a little warily, as if she expects Sonny to pounce. She crosses her arms uncomfortably and juts a thumb over her shoulder, opening her mouth to either continue with the bald-faced denial or explain just why Sonny had been such an easy target. It doesn't matter much to Sonny which. She barrels on.
“You know, I actually thought - no, believed - that you were going to turn out to be different somehow, but setting me up with Chad when here I was actually thinking -” And all of a sudden, Sonny can't even say it.
“You know you're talking like a crazy person, right?” Portlyn asks, releasing the words warily but still full of attitude.
"Oh, right," Sonny spits, shifting uncomfortably. "Because I'm clearly the one with the crazy reasoning."
“Well, yeah," Portlyn says, like that was obvious. "Why would I set you up with Chad?”
Sonny laughs without any mirth and maybe a bit maniacally because Portlyn appears as if she wants to step away from Sonny. She doesn't move.
“Come on. The thing about me being 'intriguing,'" she says with air quotes, "and then him just showing up while you share friendship smokes with Loraine?” Sonny makes a frenzied gesture with her hands that's a cross between an electrical plug being being pushed into a power outlet and an out of control water hose - an unfortunate and possibly deadly combination - possibly to distract from what she had just said. Sonny hadn't meant to mention Loraine.
"So?"
"So!" Sonny repeats, but it dies there and drops from existence. Portlyn's looking at her like she's both hopelessly perplexed and vaguely irritated, and Sonny's reasoning suddenly seems weak when she's staring straight into that.
There's a moment where they just stand in mutual evaluation of each other, and Portlyn draws her lips into her mouth, pushing her arms tighter around herself like a blanket even though she couldn't possibly be cold.
“Look," Portlyn says seriously. "Chad's doing this thing where he color-coordinates his dates with the day of the week. Fridays are blondes." As Sonny tries to wrap her head around that bizarre tidbit, Portlyn continues. "He would never let me set him up anyway. I believe you were there when he told me I shouldn't speak if I didn't have my words scripted.”
Sonny does remember. Back then she had even thought it was funny.
Here and now, though, with the yellow light from the streetlamps drenching her and turning her silver blouse to plated gold, Portlyn does looks genuine - like she might mean it. She looks genuine even with the way her mouth is like a stiff strip of metal that's shielding something.
She looks genuine.
Or at least she does until Sonny remembers that Portlyn's an award-winning actress.
“Just.” Sonny starts, already feeling defeated. She drops her arms to her sides. “Look, Chad or no Chad, I really thought I wanted to come out here with you tonight, but right now? I'm not having any fun at all, and if you just brought me along because I'm the sort of joke you like to laugh at, then -”
“You're not.” Portlyn says it so abruptly and with such a clean face that Sonny feels hugely disinclined to believe her. Only more than anything, she wants to.
The silence stares them down.
“Portlyn, are you testing me?”
Portlyn says nothing.
Sonny brings up a hand, ticking off an invisible point on her index finger. “Because first you insult me," she affirms, finding that once she gets started, it's hard to stop. She flicks up her thumb next. "And after that, you ignore me. Oh, and we can't forget the time you decided you were going to poison me with a deceitfully innocent-looking drink. You know, an hour or so ago?”
“That's not how it was.”
“Oh?" Sonny questions sarcastically, folding her arms carefully before her. "Then how was it?”
“You seemed nervous,” Portlyn says, undaunted and as if her answer should have been obvious.
“I'm underaged!” Sonny explains, because that is obvious.
“Look, I know the club owner,” Portlyn replies flippantly, relaxing a bit into the atmosphere and waving a hand. “He doesn't care, because as long as he gets the exposure -”
“I do,” Sonny says. The yellow lights slice through her skull; god, she has a headache. “I care, okay? Before I even came out to California, I cared, and I promised myself, and I promised my mom that I wouldn't become a certain way, and just. Never mind. I'm not like that, okay?”
There's an electric quality to the air, and Sonny sees Portlyn run her thumbnail along the inside of her elbow as her eyelids drop, slow, like stage curtains.
And like Sonny's Ali Baba speaking open sesame, Portlyn slips from the doorway and steps along the outside of the building, stopping a few paces from the doorframe to lean her back against the brick. There is the slightest scratching noise when she lifts her shoulders to her ears very dilatorily in a shrug - Sonny thinks it might be apologetic this time.
“Look,” Portlyn says softly. “I'm kinda buzzed right now.”
“Great,” Sonny answers. As if Portlyn thinks that excuses everything. Sonny takes that as her cue to split and strides decisively toward the door.
“Wait," Portlyn calls as Sonny reaches the doorway. "I need to ask you something.”
Sonny doesn't know why she stops; she should know better. Being lassoed in by Portlyn's words and her eyes and the way she walks and the enigma she is was exactly what got Sonny here in the first place. Portlyn inhales deeply, her shoulders and chest rising like homemade bread dough in a warm plate before she expels a very long breath. It's like Portlyn believes that if she keeps exhaling she won't have to continue with what she was going to say, no matter how much she'll deflate trying to put it off.
“Well?” Sonny demands remorselessly, chin high.
Portlyn turns so her bare shoulder kisses the wall, and Sonny watches the way Portlyn's blouse drapes in the middle and the way her fingertips extending across her stomach from the arm that isn't pressed into the building curl at the craggy spots of brick and wishes she didn't still find Portlyn so mind-blowing. It can't be healthy. If Sonny were a super hero and Portlyn were her arch nemesis, Portlyn would probably defeat her every time.
“Aren't you going to talk to me?” Portlyn asks, possibly louder and more bothered than she had meant it to emerge. Only Sonny's confused, because if Portlyn thinks Sonny hasn't been talking to her, she's either been wearing earplugs all night or her senses are even more selective than Chad's.
“Portlyn, I've been talking your head off all night,” Sonny says, pinching the material of her blouse and tugging a bit at her collar. “Didn't you hear me? I'm like blab blab blab blab blab.” She uses her hand to form a sort-of triangular puppet mouth, opening and closing the fingery jaw with each 'blab' and moving her own head exaggeratedly so she feels her hair swish around her throat and skull.
Portlyn rolls her eyes. “I mean like you talk to those other actors on your show. Like you're having a blast.”
Those other actors?
“They're my friends.”
Once Sonny says it, she realizes it comes out all wrong. And then she realizes what Portlyn's actually asking her.
Portlyn rolls back so her shoulder blades are plugged into the wall, and she pulls her silver lighter from a pocket, but she must have left her endless package of long white cigarettes inside the nightclub, because she doesn't make a move to grab anything else, just flicks the trigger with her thumbnail so it spits a yellow flame like a tiny tongue.
Sonny amends: “I mean, I barely know you.”
Even as it's spoken, Sonny knows it's hardly the reason she's such a nervous wreck around Portlyn lately. It's never taken Sonny long to open up to someone. Portlyn is unconventionally daunting, though Sonny could never explain to her why, especially since Portlyn probably isn't even on the same wavelength over what their interactions mean. Suddenly she feels like something inside of her is being sucked dry. Because Sonny realizes that as of now, she could never really explain it to anybody.
Potlyn's hand comes up to the pink of her mouth, slowly, like she thinks there's a cigarette in her hand and she's about to take one of those long-drawn smoky breaths that are agonizing on Sonny's end. Agonizing for the smear of irresolution across that moment. Smoke like clouds forms in her lungs, and because Sonny can't see inside her, she can't tell yet if they're storm clouds or just the regular shapeless kind. Portlyn inhales, and the world stands still until release comes after a lissome snake made of nicotine.
This time Portlyn doesn't have a cigarette between her fingers, though, and so she just pinches her bottom lip and sort of tugs.
“Tell me why you came out with me,” she finally says, and in that Sonny sees a white flash of the Portlyn who tightroped the wall outside the studio. Calm and resolute. Impalpably reaching.
It kind of unnerves Sonny that the only thing she can think to say is, Well, look at you. Instead, she says, “I thought you issued me a challenge. Something about being misunderstood.”
So far, though, Sonny thinks, nobody is proving anything.
“Look,” Sonny sighs, the part of her which invented the Peace Picnic rising from somewhere behind her ribs. “This night isn't really going so smooth. Maybe we should just start over. Like, just forget about everything and start with a clean slate."
Her stomach is clenched tight as a clam as Portlyn looks her over, tilting her head curiously so her hair falls around her face. For a terrible moment, Sonny's afraid Portlyn's going to tell her 'no' and then sashay right past her and back inside the booming, buzz-worthy nightclub, but then Portlyn sucks a breath in through her lips and shrugs.
“Alright,” she agrees easily.
Instantly, Sonny can breathe again, and propelled by sheer glee, she takes a step forward.
“But,” Portlyn says sternly, halting Sonny's advance. “If you're going to offer to shake my hand and say, 'Nice to meet you, my name's Sonny Munroe. What's your name?' The deal's off.”
Even before she finishes speaking, Sonny's yanking back the hand she began extending toward Portlyn, clutching it as if her fingers were about to grow bicuspids. She laughs nervously, wiping her hands slyly down her pants like it was what she had meant to do forever.
“I was just - ” Sonny laughs carefully, straining through her mind for an explanation and subsequently being whisked off on a quick tangent: "Well, my given name's Allison, actually..."
But Portlyn's lips curl up at the edges, like paper that's burning, and Sonny understands. A joke.
*
“So people like, think you're funny and stuff, right?” Portlyn asks. She's slumped backwards into the wall, her upper back and arms flat against it while her hips jut slightly outward in a lazy angle and her feet brace her from sliding liquid-like onto the floor.
They'd never gone back into the nightclub. No one had come looking for them, the only invitation they'd received being from the inside music that beckoned them like fingers. And even though they had mostly stood in companionable silence and made strange small talk, Sonny wasn't tempted.
“I sure hope so. If not, I'm out of a job,” Sonny says, speaking from the corner of her mouth like it's a secret. She's about a foot from Portlyn, leaning her shoulder and hip into the same wall and looking into the tufts of her own hair which is gathered between her fingertips like a bouquet . “Why?”
Portlyn shrugs and turns her head to the side so her ear is flat against the wall and she's looking straight at Sonny. She lets her eyelids fall until her lashes come darkly against her cheeks.
The air is warm; traffic sounds and thinly-stretched music and the desultory chiming of Portlyn's bangles when she bends her wrists make a cocktail that tastes like a dream on the tips of Sonny's earlobes. It's a taste Sonny would describe as quintessentially and exquisitely summer, only it's barely springtime here in California.
“What is it about all of that?”
Portlyn sounds almost like a kid asking her parents to repeat her favorite bedtime story, and Sonny feels warm with the thought, like the sun is in her tummy, and so she obliges.
“I like making people feel good.”
Shut-eyed, Portlyn smiles. The sun inside Sonny's tummy explodes like a piñata, and she blushes.
“This was fun,” Portlyn says forty minutes later, one hand braced over the elevator doorframe in Sonny's building. She's holding the doors open from the outside like Moses held up the red sea. Sonny stands on the inside of the elevator, amazed that Portlyn could think of tonight as anything but just this close to turning into a disaster. “Monday,” she continues, “You should come out to my gallery again.”
Sonny wants to ask Portlyn why she hangs out by that painted dumpster when the set of The Falls is lush as a king's palace, but before she can say a thing, Portlyn takes her hand from the doorframe. The doors groan shut as Portlyn steps away, and Sonny takes in as much as she can before the walls swallow her like a hungry mouth. Like a clean slate.
Fandom: Sonny With a Chance
Pairing: Sonny/Portlyn
Status Chapter 4/? (Handshake)
Notes: Usually chapters take me forever to post simply because I'm so busy angsting over writing them. I tried not to be so hard on myself over this one, and as it turned out, I actually enjoyed writing it. (Gasp! Unheard of!) Part of my enthusiasm might have been that I couldn't stand leaving Sonny unhappy in the last chapter, though. :P Yeah, my author's notes scarcely have anything to do with the actual content of the chapters. I just thought I would needlessly take up space.
Chapter 4:
Handshake
The band is called Cherry Bomb, and frankly, Sonny's heard better coming from the trash collector who thrashes around outside her building on Monday mornings. It's possible, though, that maybe that's the bitterness of rejection talking, seeping in through her ears and letting her appreciation for music pour out through the sour hole in her stomach.
In the loud space, Sonny defeatedly plops into a chair at a small round table in a quieter part of of the bar and flings her purse onto the surface like it's nothing more than trash. She considers calling for a cab, but when her eyes slide to her wrist, the face of her watch smiles out 10:10, its little second-hand tongue hanging out in ridicule. Of course, Mom would be waiting up, and Sonny doesn't want to explain the cab or her mood and possibly the need for fifty bucks.
Lights flash, the band plays like two colliding trains ramming through Sonny's ears. She looks through the crowd and right away finds Portlyn. Watching her is kind of like watching stars in the sky, they're so far away, twinkling and rotating and doing other star-things that are all part of a night's work as they effortlessly draw you out to places you'd never think of going just to get a glimpse of their shine.
The rest of the Mackenzie Falls cast is not far from Portlyn, and Sonny sees them orbiting around each other, trying to get their heads close together and it doesn't take long before Sonny realizes she's witnessing a far-away demonstration of frenzied whispering, only without the whooshing, secretive sounds.
And honestly, after being traumatized by Portlyn's surprise rum attack, Sonny feels like she can only hope that a thugged-out master of more blatant illegalities hasn't arrived to provide them all with a pillowcase full of drugs like sweet and sticky Halloween candy.
Sonny should have figured, really, when it turns out that it's worse.
Portlyn and Loraine and Devon and Carter all walk back to the table like they're on display, and when Sonny raises an eyebrow as she slumps back and crosses her arms, Carter informs her of the joyous occasion:
“Chad just texted. He'll be in in a sec.”
*
The cast raises their newly-acquired drinks to Chad Dylan Cooper as soon as he looms from a distance, and all their arms must look like they make up some giant overturned insect with liquid glass feet balanced on skinny legs sticking straight up into the air.
Chad's grinning his expensive, bleached-white smile and thrusting congratulatory fingers toward the fawning faces around the table. Sonny wants to puke condolences to the crowd who genuinely seems to lap up his Congratulations, congratulations! You're in the presence of Chad Dylan Cooper grin.
Sonny sees the moment Chad's pupils fall over her. It's hard to miss, since his eyes look like the pressure built up from the surprise of catching a glimpse of her on 'his' turf, sans his invite, almost has his eyeballs shooting out from his stupid squinty sockets to plop right into her denim lap.
“Well well well,” he says, pulling at his leather racer jacket and slipping casually into the seat next to her. Sonny senses the rest of the cast drawing back into themselves like closing umbrellas as he slips all the way to the right corner of his chair so his left arm drapes along the back like a snake. “I see someone let the Z-list celebrities in here tonight.”
Chad's tone is accusatory, but he doesn't even look to a specific person for placement. Sonny wonders if they're all the same to him - if Portlyn and Loraine and Devon and Carter are just figures that register in his brain as Not Chads.
Sonny sneers his way and uses her toes to push her entire chair away from him.
“I think the bigger question, Chad, is if you had to use an entrance for special cases,” Sonny says sweetly as she feigns interest in even her own question, letting her chin drop into her palm, elbow balancing over the tabletop. “You know, to accommodate actors whose everyday functions need to revolve around accommodating their enormous heads.”
Chad Dylan Cooper's a tool; his jacket is reflecting the streams of lights, and his eyes are shut against the room like he can't be bothered, lips tucked up into a secret, smug grin. Sonny glares.
“Seriously, Munroe,” he says, putting his hands through his hair. “What're you doing in my hangout with my cast, and whose brain did you have to numb with your incessant chattering in order to hijack the social ladder you needed to climb to get in here? ”
Like a forced confession spoken straight from her bones, Sonny turns her head to where Portlyn sits, and like someone's strung a thread through her pupils and stuck the other ends to Portlyn, Sonny stays fixated as Loraine leans into Portlyn, lavishly unfurling a tanned arm and plucking a cigarette from Portlyn's fingers and then bringing it slowly to her own lips.
Loraine doesn't take her eyes off Portlyn, and that makes two of them, because Sonny can't look away either. Watching the two is like watching storm clouds butt up against each other in the sky until everything becomes overcharged and the gray just rips apart from all that tension in a blaze of lightning. Portlyn's smile screams intimacy, and Sonny thinks again about going home. Loraine raises Portlyn a twist of her full red lips, blows out a ring of smoke. Sonny thinks about going home.
Chad laughs. "Now that's rich."
“What's so funny?” Sonny shoots with one of her dirtiest looks. She knows that laugh, can just feel that he's openly scoffing at her and bristles like a drenched cat.
Chad runs his fingers along his unbroken peach face, clearly enjoying her discomfort.
He leans forward, elbows steadied on his knees, his bright eyes beckoning her forward.
In a second of uncertainty, Sonny's eyes wander sidelong to Portlyn, who has her fingers around her own cigarette again as she watches her and Chad with interest.
Sonny quickly squints back toward Chad. “Well?”
“What?" he scoffs, leaning back in his seat. "Geez, I thought you residents of Chuckle City would understand that a guy needs a laugh every now and again.”
His words hit her like they've become tangible in the open air, like Chad or Portlyn have just leaned over to slap her across the face, and just like that, Sonny finally gets it.
He finds you intriguing, infuriatingly adorable even.
The words resonate off her skull, sounding like an echo doing flip-flops from the walls of a cathedral, sounding like the noise a vase makes when you rub your finger around the rim to find out if it's real crystal.
(It's not crystal. It's ordinary glass.)
The whole thing - everything - was nothing but some sneaky, disgusting, should-have-been-totally-transparent Mackenzie Falls ploy to get her out with Chad Dylan Cooper. So the cast of 'The Falls' could laugh at her. Sonny feels so stupid, not just for falling for it, but for falling for it again. This is far from the first time she's been taken in by the cast of Mackenzie Falls.
“Oh my gosh,” Sonny says, standing so fast the backs of her calves bump the chair. “You-” She's looking down at Chad's smug face before she realizes it's more appropriate to be looking toward Portlyn, who has her lips parted in confusion. Loraine, who is smirking at her side, flicks a short string of ash into Carter's coke. “You! You guys set me up!”
“Pardon?” Portlyn asks, leaning forward over the table. Her elbow knocks against a pink-filled glass.
“Don't you pardon me, you - you - oh, you exactly-who-I-thought-you-were, you!” Sonny huffs.
Chad stands, looking befuddled and smug and amused all at once, but that's peripheral to Portlyn, who has her hand gingerly placed over her chest and the nerve to have a look on her face that actually seems a little hurt behind the confused sarcasm.
Sonny turns her back to both of them like a finalized goodbye and walks hurriedly for the entrance.
In her ears are hacked pieces of shouted confusion that drift from the table, riding over the waves of Portlyn's echoic voice crashing to the insides of her skull like the ocean. So maybe I need a laugh, she'd said.
Most of all, Sonny realizes Portlyn had said maybe.
Sonny should have known - the only thing that anybody from Mackenzie Falls ever finds worthy of laughter are other people. Sonny feels like her earlier thoughts - of romance of all things - are burning holes in her and blinding her to where she's treading.
The warm outside air wraps Sonny up tight, only it's when she comes to encounter a brick wall sprayed ugly with a blanket of yellow lamplight that she realizes she's gone out the wrong door. This place looks to be the side or back of the nightclub and a dead end at that, and if that wasn't bad enough, there's a couple to her far left sucking at each other's faces.
This won't lead her anywhere, only the walk back through the club and to the actual exit flashes like a black hole in her mind, complete with transverse images of Chad and Loraine and Portlyn all being poured glasses of amber-colored alcohol while they laugh it up at Sonny's expense. Their lilting faces only dissipate when the latter of the three appears before Sonny in real time, effectively barring the way back into the flashy nightclub.
“So I'm it, huh?” The words are out of Sonny's mouth before she even thinks of them. “I'm the big - the big punch-line of your bored, Mackenzie Falls existence?”
“What?” Portlyn poises herself a little warily, as if she expects Sonny to pounce. She crosses her arms uncomfortably and juts a thumb over her shoulder, opening her mouth to either continue with the bald-faced denial or explain just why Sonny had been such an easy target. It doesn't matter much to Sonny which. She barrels on.
“You know, I actually thought - no, believed - that you were going to turn out to be different somehow, but setting me up with Chad when here I was actually thinking -” And all of a sudden, Sonny can't even say it.
“You know you're talking like a crazy person, right?” Portlyn asks, releasing the words warily but still full of attitude.
"Oh, right," Sonny spits, shifting uncomfortably. "Because I'm clearly the one with the crazy reasoning."
“Well, yeah," Portlyn says, like that was obvious. "Why would I set you up with Chad?”
Sonny laughs without any mirth and maybe a bit maniacally because Portlyn appears as if she wants to step away from Sonny. She doesn't move.
“Come on. The thing about me being 'intriguing,'" she says with air quotes, "and then him just showing up while you share friendship smokes with Loraine?” Sonny makes a frenzied gesture with her hands that's a cross between an electrical plug being being pushed into a power outlet and an out of control water hose - an unfortunate and possibly deadly combination - possibly to distract from what she had just said. Sonny hadn't meant to mention Loraine.
"So?"
"So!" Sonny repeats, but it dies there and drops from existence. Portlyn's looking at her like she's both hopelessly perplexed and vaguely irritated, and Sonny's reasoning suddenly seems weak when she's staring straight into that.
There's a moment where they just stand in mutual evaluation of each other, and Portlyn draws her lips into her mouth, pushing her arms tighter around herself like a blanket even though she couldn't possibly be cold.
“Look," Portlyn says seriously. "Chad's doing this thing where he color-coordinates his dates with the day of the week. Fridays are blondes." As Sonny tries to wrap her head around that bizarre tidbit, Portlyn continues. "He would never let me set him up anyway. I believe you were there when he told me I shouldn't speak if I didn't have my words scripted.”
Sonny does remember. Back then she had even thought it was funny.
Here and now, though, with the yellow light from the streetlamps drenching her and turning her silver blouse to plated gold, Portlyn does looks genuine - like she might mean it. She looks genuine even with the way her mouth is like a stiff strip of metal that's shielding something.
She looks genuine.
Or at least she does until Sonny remembers that Portlyn's an award-winning actress.
“Just.” Sonny starts, already feeling defeated. She drops her arms to her sides. “Look, Chad or no Chad, I really thought I wanted to come out here with you tonight, but right now? I'm not having any fun at all, and if you just brought me along because I'm the sort of joke you like to laugh at, then -”
“You're not.” Portlyn says it so abruptly and with such a clean face that Sonny feels hugely disinclined to believe her. Only more than anything, she wants to.
The silence stares them down.
“Portlyn, are you testing me?”
Portlyn says nothing.
Sonny brings up a hand, ticking off an invisible point on her index finger. “Because first you insult me," she affirms, finding that once she gets started, it's hard to stop. She flicks up her thumb next. "And after that, you ignore me. Oh, and we can't forget the time you decided you were going to poison me with a deceitfully innocent-looking drink. You know, an hour or so ago?”
“That's not how it was.”
“Oh?" Sonny questions sarcastically, folding her arms carefully before her. "Then how was it?”
“You seemed nervous,” Portlyn says, undaunted and as if her answer should have been obvious.
“I'm underaged!” Sonny explains, because that is obvious.
“Look, I know the club owner,” Portlyn replies flippantly, relaxing a bit into the atmosphere and waving a hand. “He doesn't care, because as long as he gets the exposure -”
“I do,” Sonny says. The yellow lights slice through her skull; god, she has a headache. “I care, okay? Before I even came out to California, I cared, and I promised myself, and I promised my mom that I wouldn't become a certain way, and just. Never mind. I'm not like that, okay?”
There's an electric quality to the air, and Sonny sees Portlyn run her thumbnail along the inside of her elbow as her eyelids drop, slow, like stage curtains.
And like Sonny's Ali Baba speaking open sesame, Portlyn slips from the doorway and steps along the outside of the building, stopping a few paces from the doorframe to lean her back against the brick. There is the slightest scratching noise when she lifts her shoulders to her ears very dilatorily in a shrug - Sonny thinks it might be apologetic this time.
“Look,” Portlyn says softly. “I'm kinda buzzed right now.”
“Great,” Sonny answers. As if Portlyn thinks that excuses everything. Sonny takes that as her cue to split and strides decisively toward the door.
“Wait," Portlyn calls as Sonny reaches the doorway. "I need to ask you something.”
Sonny doesn't know why she stops; she should know better. Being lassoed in by Portlyn's words and her eyes and the way she walks and the enigma she is was exactly what got Sonny here in the first place. Portlyn inhales deeply, her shoulders and chest rising like homemade bread dough in a warm plate before she expels a very long breath. It's like Portlyn believes that if she keeps exhaling she won't have to continue with what she was going to say, no matter how much she'll deflate trying to put it off.
“Well?” Sonny demands remorselessly, chin high.
Portlyn turns so her bare shoulder kisses the wall, and Sonny watches the way Portlyn's blouse drapes in the middle and the way her fingertips extending across her stomach from the arm that isn't pressed into the building curl at the craggy spots of brick and wishes she didn't still find Portlyn so mind-blowing. It can't be healthy. If Sonny were a super hero and Portlyn were her arch nemesis, Portlyn would probably defeat her every time.
“Aren't you going to talk to me?” Portlyn asks, possibly louder and more bothered than she had meant it to emerge. Only Sonny's confused, because if Portlyn thinks Sonny hasn't been talking to her, she's either been wearing earplugs all night or her senses are even more selective than Chad's.
“Portlyn, I've been talking your head off all night,” Sonny says, pinching the material of her blouse and tugging a bit at her collar. “Didn't you hear me? I'm like blab blab blab blab blab.” She uses her hand to form a sort-of triangular puppet mouth, opening and closing the fingery jaw with each 'blab' and moving her own head exaggeratedly so she feels her hair swish around her throat and skull.
Portlyn rolls her eyes. “I mean like you talk to those other actors on your show. Like you're having a blast.”
Those other actors?
“They're my friends.”
Once Sonny says it, she realizes it comes out all wrong. And then she realizes what Portlyn's actually asking her.
Portlyn rolls back so her shoulder blades are plugged into the wall, and she pulls her silver lighter from a pocket, but she must have left her endless package of long white cigarettes inside the nightclub, because she doesn't make a move to grab anything else, just flicks the trigger with her thumbnail so it spits a yellow flame like a tiny tongue.
Sonny amends: “I mean, I barely know you.”
Even as it's spoken, Sonny knows it's hardly the reason she's such a nervous wreck around Portlyn lately. It's never taken Sonny long to open up to someone. Portlyn is unconventionally daunting, though Sonny could never explain to her why, especially since Portlyn probably isn't even on the same wavelength over what their interactions mean. Suddenly she feels like something inside of her is being sucked dry. Because Sonny realizes that as of now, she could never really explain it to anybody.
Potlyn's hand comes up to the pink of her mouth, slowly, like she thinks there's a cigarette in her hand and she's about to take one of those long-drawn smoky breaths that are agonizing on Sonny's end. Agonizing for the smear of irresolution across that moment. Smoke like clouds forms in her lungs, and because Sonny can't see inside her, she can't tell yet if they're storm clouds or just the regular shapeless kind. Portlyn inhales, and the world stands still until release comes after a lissome snake made of nicotine.
This time Portlyn doesn't have a cigarette between her fingers, though, and so she just pinches her bottom lip and sort of tugs.
“Tell me why you came out with me,” she finally says, and in that Sonny sees a white flash of the Portlyn who tightroped the wall outside the studio. Calm and resolute. Impalpably reaching.
It kind of unnerves Sonny that the only thing she can think to say is, Well, look at you. Instead, she says, “I thought you issued me a challenge. Something about being misunderstood.”
So far, though, Sonny thinks, nobody is proving anything.
“Look,” Sonny sighs, the part of her which invented the Peace Picnic rising from somewhere behind her ribs. “This night isn't really going so smooth. Maybe we should just start over. Like, just forget about everything and start with a clean slate."
Her stomach is clenched tight as a clam as Portlyn looks her over, tilting her head curiously so her hair falls around her face. For a terrible moment, Sonny's afraid Portlyn's going to tell her 'no' and then sashay right past her and back inside the booming, buzz-worthy nightclub, but then Portlyn sucks a breath in through her lips and shrugs.
“Alright,” she agrees easily.
Instantly, Sonny can breathe again, and propelled by sheer glee, she takes a step forward.
“But,” Portlyn says sternly, halting Sonny's advance. “If you're going to offer to shake my hand and say, 'Nice to meet you, my name's Sonny Munroe. What's your name?' The deal's off.”
Even before she finishes speaking, Sonny's yanking back the hand she began extending toward Portlyn, clutching it as if her fingers were about to grow bicuspids. She laughs nervously, wiping her hands slyly down her pants like it was what she had meant to do forever.
“I was just - ” Sonny laughs carefully, straining through her mind for an explanation and subsequently being whisked off on a quick tangent: "Well, my given name's Allison, actually..."
But Portlyn's lips curl up at the edges, like paper that's burning, and Sonny understands. A joke.
*
“So people like, think you're funny and stuff, right?” Portlyn asks. She's slumped backwards into the wall, her upper back and arms flat against it while her hips jut slightly outward in a lazy angle and her feet brace her from sliding liquid-like onto the floor.
They'd never gone back into the nightclub. No one had come looking for them, the only invitation they'd received being from the inside music that beckoned them like fingers. And even though they had mostly stood in companionable silence and made strange small talk, Sonny wasn't tempted.
“I sure hope so. If not, I'm out of a job,” Sonny says, speaking from the corner of her mouth like it's a secret. She's about a foot from Portlyn, leaning her shoulder and hip into the same wall and looking into the tufts of her own hair which is gathered between her fingertips like a bouquet . “Why?”
Portlyn shrugs and turns her head to the side so her ear is flat against the wall and she's looking straight at Sonny. She lets her eyelids fall until her lashes come darkly against her cheeks.
The air is warm; traffic sounds and thinly-stretched music and the desultory chiming of Portlyn's bangles when she bends her wrists make a cocktail that tastes like a dream on the tips of Sonny's earlobes. It's a taste Sonny would describe as quintessentially and exquisitely summer, only it's barely springtime here in California.
“What is it about all of that?”
Portlyn sounds almost like a kid asking her parents to repeat her favorite bedtime story, and Sonny feels warm with the thought, like the sun is in her tummy, and so she obliges.
“I like making people feel good.”
Shut-eyed, Portlyn smiles. The sun inside Sonny's tummy explodes like a piñata, and she blushes.
“This was fun,” Portlyn says forty minutes later, one hand braced over the elevator doorframe in Sonny's building. She's holding the doors open from the outside like Moses held up the red sea. Sonny stands on the inside of the elevator, amazed that Portlyn could think of tonight as anything but just this close to turning into a disaster. “Monday,” she continues, “You should come out to my gallery again.”
Sonny wants to ask Portlyn why she hangs out by that painted dumpster when the set of The Falls is lush as a king's palace, but before she can say a thing, Portlyn takes her hand from the doorframe. The doors groan shut as Portlyn steps away, and Sonny takes in as much as she can before the walls swallow her like a hungry mouth. Like a clean slate.