Creative writing post: a recluse walks into a bar while I get ready to walk into AO 2007
Well, I let myself doze off while I was reading a book earlier today; Alex and I decided that we weren't gonna go to the play that we were interested in seeing, even though it looked promising and, as she put it, it having somebody like Declan in it is enough to make her want to go. Mostly, I decided not to go because, as much as I wanted to hang out with Alex, Michael, and Zelly, I didn't want it to be a five thirty to nine o'clock affair. I wanted to still be able to come home and start getting ready for the con tomorrow, for which Mom actually agreed that I can skip school. Gaspshock! And then what did I do? I fell asleep and only woke up briefly to talk, half-conscious, to Wakka, and again to talk at greater length to Danica, who ultimately woke me from my stupor and got me walking through the house and my blood moving to my atrophying legs. ^^6 So it's thanks to Danica that here I am! And it's thanks to Alex being willing to drive me back home rather than staying at the play that I got home earlier in the first place, though I wanted more time to hang out with her; I never get to see Alex - or Danica, for that matter - outside school. It's depressing to me. At least we got about half an hour together this evening before we decided to split from the play and part ways to get those four hours for ourselves.
I don't recall promising - that would imply a commitment or a guarantee, and I wasn't quite sure I would have the time to post and remark on my story - to share the most recent Creative Writing product with y'all, but I'm going to do it tonight. I think I've built up to it enough, with talking about the characters a while ago and describing all the feedback I got yesterday in class in yesterday's post (fancy that! A post that happened yesterday, about yesterday! Amazing!). And I am quite proud of it. Even if I didn't like the story, I would recycle the characters again; I've become attached to them and their silly antics and the everyday drama of their lives. They're a little atypical, what with a gay couple, a drag queen, and a slew of other happy, colorful losers who bounce in and out of being meddlesome and being helpful. Of all of them, though, my favorite is still Lawrence, who is still being called Law. (I was surprised when no one complained about that yesterday when we were workshopping the story; I suppose that because it stemmed from Lawrence, everybody accepted it. I got more complaints about Jayne than about Law, if you can believe that! I couldn't!) That's probably because he has the biggest slice of me in him, what with being opposed to an excess of socializing - he takes it one step further and almost always feels like hiding away from other people and committing himself to his computer - and he always drags himself into those situations anyway, trying to please his friends. The story I'm sharing with you, "Hot Date," is what I hope will be the first major story in a series that has been building up to it; it began with a dialogue exercise that I did using almost the entire group, minus Stephen, because he wasn't in the group yet, but he will get his chance now that I'm going to introduce him. It's grown from there, into using these characters for a lot of my warm-up writes in my notebook for the class, some of which could be expanded upon and made into stories, or at least little drabbles and ficlets.
As far as basic plot, when I wrote - Mr. McHenry picked up on this immediately - I had a set beginning and a set end, and I gave myself free range in between, basically letting the narrative wander along with Law's thoughts as he moves through the bar. It's set on Valentine's Day, and like so much of my writing, yes, indeededly, it takes place in the abovementioned bar; I think my only disappointment with this story was that I fell back on putting my characters in a bar and letting them handle that environment. In Law's case, it's an unfamiliar, unwanted environment. I tried to portray him as desperate to distance himself from the other people around him even as he's beginning to be sucked in; as I said last time, I also wanted - I intended to let the metaphor and simile get carried away a bit as part of Law's default voice. The one other thing that I wanted to make clear wasn't even an issue to the kids in my class, probably because they don't have perverted minds like I do, but I worried that Stephen's arrival at the end of the story would make them think Law was on a booty call. (He's not.) I worried that nobody would like Law, but apparently, in his reclusive tendencies and his terse, fake attitude toward people in general, including his friends, he appeals enough to the angst-ridden teenage audience. What a surprise we have there. And finally, as for the song in the story, it's Master and Servant by Depeche Mode, because I think that every good bar - the ones where dancing is a regular occurrence - should play one Depeche Mode song a night. That's my music nerdiness talking, though, so if you don't like me plugging them and Rufus Wainwright, you may not enjoy some of the bits of this story; hell, you may not enjoy it anyway.
Hot Date
by Talyn, a.k.a. Silent Bystander
Summary: Law doesn't want to be here. Instead of romancing some poor fool at the bar, he goes for a bottle and tries to hide away from the friends who got him into this. And then, along comes Stephen.
Fandom: original fiction
Rating: PG-13
The plot and characters within this story are ©2007 Talyn, the "artist" otherwise known as Silent Bystander, and are not to be used or reproduced without my permission.
Warnings: bar!scenery (complete with alcohol abuse, references to casual sex, sweat, and smoke), swearing, thoughts shown in italics, clothing descriptions, and general melancholy on Law's part.
In honor of the occasion, she's wearing a red dress a hue too bright to be called scarlet and a wrinkle too loose to be called slinky; it's the color of the sun at red dawn. It's the color of foil wrappers on chocolates designed for this holiday, the heightened color of glitter even though the dress itself is not sparkly, just eye-gougingly bright, blinding enough that the sun might be jealous.
Next to her, Law shoves his hands in his pockets and shuffles along awkwardly, listening not to the click-clacking heels she wears, but to his dragging old trainers. She is perfectly coiffed, curled, perfumed, painted - she's been crafted and perfected into an object of envy and, dare he think it, of lust, albeit not his. Tonight, Jayne is his date, and as close to white-hot as she is, despite the Day-Glo dress, she is not his date. She is here to inspire awe and give him every appearance of showing off as much as she is, though she could do twelve hundred times better by leaving him at home and flying solo.
I don't belong here. Kicking at a weed sprouting between two cement slabs of sidewalk, Law notices that one of his laces is starting to straggle. Soon, it will be as loose as her grip on his arm, her gleaming scarlet nails, too dark to match her dress, feigning possession even as her face betrays her relaxation. Jayne is going to a party. He isn't giving any appearance of much but feeling like a baby sparrow next to a squawking macaw with its claws done up. I've never belonged, and I have no desire to start now.
"Hey, perky," says Jayne, "wake up. Look like you're into me."
Law strains his face into a smile the consistency of strained split pea soup, limp and sour enough in his mouth to go rancid any second. However, he refuses to pick up his pace, letting her long legs sail them both along as if wings have been attached to her stilettos.
"Now you look like you're about to puke! Come on. Please?"
Dropping the smile like so many bricks about to mortar themselves firmly to his feet, Law slows down, but he manages to make his expression look less fearful, schooling it into a bored look. Mostly, he has to shake his unruly bangs into his eyes and let the thick fringe cover the fact that he finds the sidewalk more interesting than the tall, powerful (Amazonian, even) woman exuding sexy next to him.
Jayne smiles. Her lips, too, are painted a slick, candy-red shade that looks more like it belongs on a snappy convertible than on a mouth about to go guzzle down wine coolers and vodka cocktails till three AM, chatting up every male in the vicinity once Law reaches escape velocity and can get his hands on a Guinness and a barstool. The beer, stout and dark, will describe his less-than-amorous feelings for the murky, smoky club as perfectly as any drink. Sipping at a Coke, sitting at home on his laptop, doesn't count in that. Tonight, Jayne reminded him at least twenty-three times before they left his apartment, he is not allowed to be "asocial" and "lonely," two words she often uses to describe him. When she talks like that, he feels like part of a personals ad.
He feels more like a basketcase right now, to be honest, and he's about ready to be a candidate for drug rehab by the end of the night, if he has his say about the matter. Getting shitfaced sounds more attractive than watching writhing, sweaty bodies under too-dim lighting blurred by smoke and alcohol-fuzzed nerves.
Suddenly, they're at the bar. It looks about as innocuous as an overflowing syringe, complete with the nurse's assurance, "Oh, this'll only hurt a little bit!" as it drives into a vein and evokes a cry of surprise and betrayal. The front door has been plastered with paper hearts very nearly the same shade of red as Jayne's dress, but still too dull to match her supernova glow. It looks very junior high, in keeping with Law's spirits, at about the level of a frightened twelve-year-old entering the first day of seventh grade at a new school. One in a bad neighborhood (Law has to give the bar that; this is a safe part of town, or at least relatively, since no bar is safe when all he wants is a love affair with his keyboard and a Rufus Wainwright CD), with graffiti.
Inside, the coathooks are overflowing. Jayne isn't wearing a coat, despite the chill weather that, as the weatherman chirruped this morning, threatened to bring a Valentine's gift of snow to all those hopeful ladies. She plows right past, barely giving Law the time to extract an old fortune cookie slip from an otherwise lint-laden pocket before hanging up his rumpled faux-suede jacket. "Come on," she says again.
People are dancing or hovering at the fringe, and every table is occupied by at least four people, most of them with legs strewn up on a table or in one another's laps to avoid being targeted with a death glare for clogging up the vacuum that is the dance floor. In Jayne's wake, Law makes his way past bodies that look like hot, flushed versions of glasses in the summer sun, drizzles of condensation cutting down their smooth flesh. He avoids eye contact, but skin contact is a bit harder to dodge. He has a little smear of wetness on his forearm by the time they get to the bar, and another on his cheek that he immediately wipes and paws at like a five-year-old receives an unwanted kiss from an unwanted aunt.
With a flourish of her hand, Jayne flags down a harried bartender and in record time, wheels on Law with a clear glass, needlessly, mistakenly garnished with a lime that looks lonely against the slightly toned-down background of her dress. "A Bud Light; I didn't know what you'd want," she explains. Her voice is garbled with the music from the speakers that pounds through every cell in their bodies, every atom in the air and the thin veil of smoke that drifts through it.
"Thanks," Law says, though he really wanted a Guinness.
Jayne looks perfectly comfortable, wedged between two willowy bodies, each holding their drinks with a grace Law can't summon; he clutches his glass like a thin lifeline. The glass sparkles gently under the garish lights, acting as a beacon that pulls Law to take a sip, then a slurp. He's about to think about getting his dander up to fight for a barstool, but a hand on his shoulder tugs at the too-tight pink t-shirt he was forced into wearing. Jayne hollers, "Hey, I see Andi and Troy!"
If they were outside, her heels would make a knifelike din on the cement as she plows headlong past the crush of bodies perilously close to those perched on stools with drinks perched in their slack fingers. In the oppressive cacophony that is the bar, every noise but the pounding beat, the hum and buzz of conversation, and the occasional strain of lyrics is erased with the ease of a fingertip brushing across a chalkboard.
Everything is so untamed here, except Law; even his hair, usually wild, seems too combed, too styled, though he only ran a brush through it before he pulled his shirt and jacket on, and that seems ages ago. It seems too long, too, since he last talked to the friends they're rushing to see.
Andi gives him a confused look, her false eyelashes, already heavy with rhinestones and plastic play-pretend, dip as she studies his form. "Lawrence?" she says. Only the "Law" is audible, though, and he can act like she knows him well.
"It was so hard to get him here," Jayne is complaining to Troy, whose smile is genuine and hugs Law closer than the two feet from the table that puts him almost on the murderous dance floor. "He's so, so - antisocial!"
"Doesn't seem psychopathic to me, Jay," Troy says, but that's about all he'll say. He's back to winking at Andi, who flutters her eyelashes and slashes through the air with a flippant hand gesture. The dragon-lady talons on her fingers have just killed at least ten million air molecules, and on the upsweep, she's killed another ten.
"You psychology majors," says Jayne. "Anyway, how's it?"
Easy as she pleases, Jayne steals a chair from under Troy's shoes and, giving it the cursory brushing-down, plops herself and her dress into it. The dress is so bright that, like Andi's entire being, it needs its own chair. Law furtively presses a few tentative steps closer to the table, but stays there, prepared to loosen the cables and lift off at any sign of danger. Well, worse danger than the cloying, sticky feeling of being too close to too many other human beings.
Andi's lips form the same dangerous curve as a pair of devil's horns. "My God, I just heard from you'll-never-ever-guess-who!"
"Who? Kyle?"
"Is the Pope a prude? Of course it was His Godliness, in the flesh." If it's possible for an already affected low alto to lighten into a twitter, Andi makes a noise mysteriously like it. "He called me three days ago, and we're going out for lunch tomorrow."
"So -" Jayne leans forward, into the strike zone of Andi's deadly claws.
"Technically, not a date, but like we're going by that system. I've been after Kyle forever and he just got it," says Andi.
Troy is trying to type a text on his cell phone and maneuver an unwieldy cocktail in the other hand, studying his clear-lacquered thumbnail with each button he presses, and Law decides it's time to tune out. I'll never belong, I'll never want to belong here... Moroseness settles in, and he prepares himself to have a positively bleak evening, teetering on lower-than-Morrissey mood levels as he scans the other patrons of the bar. Most of them are leather- and mesh-clad; likely, they were as trussed-up as Jayne is before they sauntered in here in their platforms and heels and started grinding like coffee beans at Starbucks.
"Where are you going?" asks Jayne as Law turns to do more than survey the bar with longing oozing from every pore, depositing his barely-touched beer on the table before her.
"The bar."
In a snap and a step of too-old, too-flat-heeled shoes, he slides neatly into place, with the same grace that sounds like velvet in David Gahan's voice as Master and Servant comes on the speakers. The bartender takes a moment, but is then smiling at him and asking, "So?"
Law says, "Guinness, please," but he can't smile back. When the bottle is in his hand, cold beneath his fingers, the label slick and shiny, the beer cools the tumult roiling inside him and makes Law feel seventeen times better, in spite of the excessive bass on the song that threatens to drown out the melody, now easing over his hurt nerves with the words, "And that's what's appealing, / If you despise that throwaway feeling / From disposable fun, / Then this is the one."
He hates the idea of it, but the sound of the words is beautiful, priceless balm. He wants it to flow over him like a hot bath keeping him from being a cat on a hot tin roof, helping ease his loneliness. As displaced as he feels, sitting here uprooted at the bar, amongst strangers whose bodies are beginning to reek of fresh sweat turning stale, when he knows the song, it helps pull his nerves back together.
"Hey, you saving this for anyone?" calls a voice at his side. Law glances over and sees that his previous neighbor has vacated her post and swished off in her tiny, gaudy dress, and a brunet with an open smile dominating all his other features, already cast in shadow, is standing inches from the stool with his fingertips against it to ward off other takers.
Law shakes his head, and the smile becomes a thankful duck of the head and an, "Appreciate it," from the newcomer. He, like everybody else in the bar, goes back to ignoring Law, calling for the bartender and ordering a bizarre concoction that sounds more like a food-coloring-filled Baskin-Robbin's ice cream flavor than a drink, but then, Law has never understood the appeal of sweetening alcohol into something it's not. For his part, Law returns to studying his bottle and peeling at the slick label, then glancing up over the people packed tighter than sardines - and about as deliciously-scented - in those little square tins that match the relative size of the dance floor.
He's no sooner finished his beer than the bartender gives him another and sweeps away with the empty bottle, half-naked from him half-stripping off the label in his boredom. Law contemplates going to the bathroom to escape some of the pounding beat and the mass exhalations filling the room with hot breath as well as cigarette smoke and the overwhelming odor of too many people in one place. How such a thing is supposed to encourage the traditional romance for which Valentine's Day calls, he can't see for a minute.
It takes Law about five minutes to realize that the brunet beside him is asking for the third time, "'Scuse me, are you in there?" and when he blinks at the man, it takes him a minute to read the lips saying, "Who're you waiting for?"
"My friends," Law says, pointing to the table, easily identifiable by Jayne's dress and Troy's lanky height, dancing, almost slithering upright, beside the table while Andi laughs and claps at the display. "I'm here to appease them, and that's all." He realizes how very abrupt that sounds, like slamming the brakes on any possible conversation, but it doesn't seem to deter the other man one bit. He's still smiling and nursing his fancy, fruit-garnished drink as if Law hasn't said a word to be any more offensive than a kids' cartoon version of a swear word. Well, darn. Dangit. Oh, sugar! thinks Law with a twist of his lips that threatens to become more than the smallest, most undetectable of smirks.
Unfortunately, Law's about as lucky as a cat on its ninth life or a clover with two leaves, the other two ripped off long since. The stranger catches the twitch at the corner of his mouth, and his smile spreads. "I saw that. You're not totally hating this, are you?"
Law shrugs and takes a long drink of his beer. "Why, you waiting for someone?" he asks. "I can vacate."
"Nope," says the stranger, chuckling. "'Vacate,' huh? That's real cute. And nice that someone in here's well-spoken."
With nothing to say to that, Law tries to listen to the words of the new, unfamiliar song booming in his ears and vibrating through his body, shocking his heart to beat faster like a defibrillator in miniature. He finishes his second beer and receives a swiftly-deposited third, the bartender quicker than the average vending machine.
He glances over to check on his friends and sees that Bryce and Julian have arrived and are dancing with Troy, his abandoned glass of Budweiser in Bryce's hand, pressed between his chest and Troy's. They're enjoying themselves without him, Andi's face ecstatic as she and Jayne get to be the first row audience to this private show. Jayne, for her part, is chatting with a man standing beside their table, freshly off the dance floor and none too fresh for it, what with all the sweat dotting and dampening his shirt at the nape of his neck.
A cursory study of the other patrons reveals that the dance floor is as energized as ever, and another group trickles into the room and begins to swim upstream, jumping over numerous dams made of people to get to the bar. A PVC-decked blond and another boy who looks like he's about sixteen are fighting their own way toward the back hall to the bathrooms, the blond surrounded by a halo of smoky light as he passes a sconce on the wall. The smoke blurs the light, though some of that could be Law's low tolerance talking, winding all the colors into the room into fuzzy edges on everything, making the light look like shadow and the pulsating crowd look featureless and pitch dark. He wants to shiver, but can't, in this overheated, oversexed, overwhelming atmosphere. With any luck, he looks about as charming and invigorated as the man chatting it up with Jayne and her brilliant red sky, sailor's delight of a dress. But he doesn't feel like his glands are pouring sweat; rather, he feels as if his brain is about to start vomiting from the sensory deluge overriding his thoughts, even the most morose I don't want to belong ones that have been his echoing companions this whole time.
"So, still interested in appeasing only?"
Startled, Law stares at the stranger, searching for a sprinkle of deviousness sparking the man's smile, but he finds nothing, only genuine amusement. Although it's a bit irritating to think that he's some new form of entertainment, it's a relief to know that not everyone has forgotten about him. "I'm interested in getting out of here," he replies. "I'm interested in staying the night alone, too, if you were going to try to take that as an invitation."
"I understand, and don't worry about it," says the man. "But if you do want to get outta here for at least another hour or so, I wouldn't be averse."
"'Averse'?" says Law. "That's adorable."
Plunking down his drink and holding out a hand, the stranger says, "My name's Stephen. Nice to meet you."
"I'm Lawrence." Taking the offered hand and shaking it, Law can feel warmth, blessedly nothing like sticky and slimy with perspiration, envelop his own bottle-chilled fingers. "Or Law." The handshake is firm, gripping him tightly and holding him still. Although he can't escape, he waves at his friends with a smile on his way to fetch his coat and get a taste of the night air, the snow, and a reminder that this is supposed to be a holiday.
"Law it is," says the man, says Stephen, as Law has to remind himself, as they finish skirting the dancers. His smile is warm, but not intolerably so, and as much as Law questions his motives, he can't help feeling that anything is better than this. Jayne waves back, but his eyes barely catch the flash of red in the corner of his vision, because he catches a glimpse of the outside, of the stars, and he barely chokes down a smile back at the man in front of him. "Let's go?"
As usual, I'm open to comments - more than open, actually, considering the positive response this got in my class; I want to know if I can safely say that it's a general consensus of most people who've read the story. I want to know if my attachment to Law is at all justified, and naturally, I want to know how the figurative language and alliteration and all that other fancy crap worked as well as knowing about the quality of the dialogue and whether or not the narrative moved well. In short, I want to know anything you have to say about the story, anything at all, positive, negative, or neutral.
I need to go paint my fingernails pretty petal-pink, so I'm gonna get occupied with that and bogged down in the details of caring for my dresses before I have to prance about in them at the con tomorrow, Saturday, and on Sunday. And naturally, because I'm not going to be online all those days, possibly not even on Sunday night after I've gotten home and am waxing miserable about missing the environment and camaraderie of the convention, I'm going to be a shithead about comments like I usually am. I'm going to be even worse about posting on the weekend, too! Oh, joy of joys. But I will come back and, I hope, be rejuvenated and craving Livejournal enough that I'll get on and be better about replying and getting into everyone else's journal. In the meantime, I do want to go take care of all the little things I hold so dear. I love and heart you all very much!
"Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing."
I don't recall promising - that would imply a commitment or a guarantee, and I wasn't quite sure I would have the time to post and remark on my story - to share the most recent Creative Writing product with y'all, but I'm going to do it tonight. I think I've built up to it enough, with talking about the characters a while ago and describing all the feedback I got yesterday in class in yesterday's post (fancy that! A post that happened yesterday, about yesterday! Amazing!). And I am quite proud of it. Even if I didn't like the story, I would recycle the characters again; I've become attached to them and their silly antics and the everyday drama of their lives. They're a little atypical, what with a gay couple, a drag queen, and a slew of other happy, colorful losers who bounce in and out of being meddlesome and being helpful. Of all of them, though, my favorite is still Lawrence, who is still being called Law. (I was surprised when no one complained about that yesterday when we were workshopping the story; I suppose that because it stemmed from Lawrence, everybody accepted it. I got more complaints about Jayne than about Law, if you can believe that! I couldn't!) That's probably because he has the biggest slice of me in him, what with being opposed to an excess of socializing - he takes it one step further and almost always feels like hiding away from other people and committing himself to his computer - and he always drags himself into those situations anyway, trying to please his friends. The story I'm sharing with you, "Hot Date," is what I hope will be the first major story in a series that has been building up to it; it began with a dialogue exercise that I did using almost the entire group, minus Stephen, because he wasn't in the group yet, but he will get his chance now that I'm going to introduce him. It's grown from there, into using these characters for a lot of my warm-up writes in my notebook for the class, some of which could be expanded upon and made into stories, or at least little drabbles and ficlets.
As far as basic plot, when I wrote - Mr. McHenry picked up on this immediately - I had a set beginning and a set end, and I gave myself free range in between, basically letting the narrative wander along with Law's thoughts as he moves through the bar. It's set on Valentine's Day, and like so much of my writing, yes, indeededly, it takes place in the abovementioned bar; I think my only disappointment with this story was that I fell back on putting my characters in a bar and letting them handle that environment. In Law's case, it's an unfamiliar, unwanted environment. I tried to portray him as desperate to distance himself from the other people around him even as he's beginning to be sucked in; as I said last time, I also wanted - I intended to let the metaphor and simile get carried away a bit as part of Law's default voice. The one other thing that I wanted to make clear wasn't even an issue to the kids in my class, probably because they don't have perverted minds like I do, but I worried that Stephen's arrival at the end of the story would make them think Law was on a booty call. (He's not.) I worried that nobody would like Law, but apparently, in his reclusive tendencies and his terse, fake attitude toward people in general, including his friends, he appeals enough to the angst-ridden teenage audience. What a surprise we have there. And finally, as for the song in the story, it's Master and Servant by Depeche Mode, because I think that every good bar - the ones where dancing is a regular occurrence - should play one Depeche Mode song a night. That's my music nerdiness talking, though, so if you don't like me plugging them and Rufus Wainwright, you may not enjoy some of the bits of this story; hell, you may not enjoy it anyway.
Hot Date
by Talyn, a.k.a. Silent Bystander
Summary: Law doesn't want to be here. Instead of romancing some poor fool at the bar, he goes for a bottle and tries to hide away from the friends who got him into this. And then, along comes Stephen.
Fandom: original fiction
Rating: PG-13
The plot and characters within this story are ©2007 Talyn, the "artist" otherwise known as Silent Bystander, and are not to be used or reproduced without my permission.
Warnings: bar!scenery (complete with alcohol abuse, references to casual sex, sweat, and smoke), swearing, thoughts shown in italics, clothing descriptions, and general melancholy on Law's part.
In honor of the occasion, she's wearing a red dress a hue too bright to be called scarlet and a wrinkle too loose to be called slinky; it's the color of the sun at red dawn. It's the color of foil wrappers on chocolates designed for this holiday, the heightened color of glitter even though the dress itself is not sparkly, just eye-gougingly bright, blinding enough that the sun might be jealous.
Next to her, Law shoves his hands in his pockets and shuffles along awkwardly, listening not to the click-clacking heels she wears, but to his dragging old trainers. She is perfectly coiffed, curled, perfumed, painted - she's been crafted and perfected into an object of envy and, dare he think it, of lust, albeit not his. Tonight, Jayne is his date, and as close to white-hot as she is, despite the Day-Glo dress, she is not his date. She is here to inspire awe and give him every appearance of showing off as much as she is, though she could do twelve hundred times better by leaving him at home and flying solo.
I don't belong here. Kicking at a weed sprouting between two cement slabs of sidewalk, Law notices that one of his laces is starting to straggle. Soon, it will be as loose as her grip on his arm, her gleaming scarlet nails, too dark to match her dress, feigning possession even as her face betrays her relaxation. Jayne is going to a party. He isn't giving any appearance of much but feeling like a baby sparrow next to a squawking macaw with its claws done up. I've never belonged, and I have no desire to start now.
"Hey, perky," says Jayne, "wake up. Look like you're into me."
Law strains his face into a smile the consistency of strained split pea soup, limp and sour enough in his mouth to go rancid any second. However, he refuses to pick up his pace, letting her long legs sail them both along as if wings have been attached to her stilettos.
"Now you look like you're about to puke! Come on. Please?"
Dropping the smile like so many bricks about to mortar themselves firmly to his feet, Law slows down, but he manages to make his expression look less fearful, schooling it into a bored look. Mostly, he has to shake his unruly bangs into his eyes and let the thick fringe cover the fact that he finds the sidewalk more interesting than the tall, powerful (Amazonian, even) woman exuding sexy next to him.
Jayne smiles. Her lips, too, are painted a slick, candy-red shade that looks more like it belongs on a snappy convertible than on a mouth about to go guzzle down wine coolers and vodka cocktails till three AM, chatting up every male in the vicinity once Law reaches escape velocity and can get his hands on a Guinness and a barstool. The beer, stout and dark, will describe his less-than-amorous feelings for the murky, smoky club as perfectly as any drink. Sipping at a Coke, sitting at home on his laptop, doesn't count in that. Tonight, Jayne reminded him at least twenty-three times before they left his apartment, he is not allowed to be "asocial" and "lonely," two words she often uses to describe him. When she talks like that, he feels like part of a personals ad.
He feels more like a basketcase right now, to be honest, and he's about ready to be a candidate for drug rehab by the end of the night, if he has his say about the matter. Getting shitfaced sounds more attractive than watching writhing, sweaty bodies under too-dim lighting blurred by smoke and alcohol-fuzzed nerves.
Suddenly, they're at the bar. It looks about as innocuous as an overflowing syringe, complete with the nurse's assurance, "Oh, this'll only hurt a little bit!" as it drives into a vein and evokes a cry of surprise and betrayal. The front door has been plastered with paper hearts very nearly the same shade of red as Jayne's dress, but still too dull to match her supernova glow. It looks very junior high, in keeping with Law's spirits, at about the level of a frightened twelve-year-old entering the first day of seventh grade at a new school. One in a bad neighborhood (Law has to give the bar that; this is a safe part of town, or at least relatively, since no bar is safe when all he wants is a love affair with his keyboard and a Rufus Wainwright CD), with graffiti.
Inside, the coathooks are overflowing. Jayne isn't wearing a coat, despite the chill weather that, as the weatherman chirruped this morning, threatened to bring a Valentine's gift of snow to all those hopeful ladies. She plows right past, barely giving Law the time to extract an old fortune cookie slip from an otherwise lint-laden pocket before hanging up his rumpled faux-suede jacket. "Come on," she says again.
People are dancing or hovering at the fringe, and every table is occupied by at least four people, most of them with legs strewn up on a table or in one another's laps to avoid being targeted with a death glare for clogging up the vacuum that is the dance floor. In Jayne's wake, Law makes his way past bodies that look like hot, flushed versions of glasses in the summer sun, drizzles of condensation cutting down their smooth flesh. He avoids eye contact, but skin contact is a bit harder to dodge. He has a little smear of wetness on his forearm by the time they get to the bar, and another on his cheek that he immediately wipes and paws at like a five-year-old receives an unwanted kiss from an unwanted aunt.
With a flourish of her hand, Jayne flags down a harried bartender and in record time, wheels on Law with a clear glass, needlessly, mistakenly garnished with a lime that looks lonely against the slightly toned-down background of her dress. "A Bud Light; I didn't know what you'd want," she explains. Her voice is garbled with the music from the speakers that pounds through every cell in their bodies, every atom in the air and the thin veil of smoke that drifts through it.
"Thanks," Law says, though he really wanted a Guinness.
Jayne looks perfectly comfortable, wedged between two willowy bodies, each holding their drinks with a grace Law can't summon; he clutches his glass like a thin lifeline. The glass sparkles gently under the garish lights, acting as a beacon that pulls Law to take a sip, then a slurp. He's about to think about getting his dander up to fight for a barstool, but a hand on his shoulder tugs at the too-tight pink t-shirt he was forced into wearing. Jayne hollers, "Hey, I see Andi and Troy!"
If they were outside, her heels would make a knifelike din on the cement as she plows headlong past the crush of bodies perilously close to those perched on stools with drinks perched in their slack fingers. In the oppressive cacophony that is the bar, every noise but the pounding beat, the hum and buzz of conversation, and the occasional strain of lyrics is erased with the ease of a fingertip brushing across a chalkboard.
Everything is so untamed here, except Law; even his hair, usually wild, seems too combed, too styled, though he only ran a brush through it before he pulled his shirt and jacket on, and that seems ages ago. It seems too long, too, since he last talked to the friends they're rushing to see.
Andi gives him a confused look, her false eyelashes, already heavy with rhinestones and plastic play-pretend, dip as she studies his form. "Lawrence?" she says. Only the "Law" is audible, though, and he can act like she knows him well.
"It was so hard to get him here," Jayne is complaining to Troy, whose smile is genuine and hugs Law closer than the two feet from the table that puts him almost on the murderous dance floor. "He's so, so - antisocial!"
"Doesn't seem psychopathic to me, Jay," Troy says, but that's about all he'll say. He's back to winking at Andi, who flutters her eyelashes and slashes through the air with a flippant hand gesture. The dragon-lady talons on her fingers have just killed at least ten million air molecules, and on the upsweep, she's killed another ten.
"You psychology majors," says Jayne. "Anyway, how's it?"
Easy as she pleases, Jayne steals a chair from under Troy's shoes and, giving it the cursory brushing-down, plops herself and her dress into it. The dress is so bright that, like Andi's entire being, it needs its own chair. Law furtively presses a few tentative steps closer to the table, but stays there, prepared to loosen the cables and lift off at any sign of danger. Well, worse danger than the cloying, sticky feeling of being too close to too many other human beings.
Andi's lips form the same dangerous curve as a pair of devil's horns. "My God, I just heard from you'll-never-ever-guess-who!"
"Who? Kyle?"
"Is the Pope a prude? Of course it was His Godliness, in the flesh." If it's possible for an already affected low alto to lighten into a twitter, Andi makes a noise mysteriously like it. "He called me three days ago, and we're going out for lunch tomorrow."
"So -" Jayne leans forward, into the strike zone of Andi's deadly claws.
"Technically, not a date, but like we're going by that system. I've been after Kyle forever and he just got it," says Andi.
Troy is trying to type a text on his cell phone and maneuver an unwieldy cocktail in the other hand, studying his clear-lacquered thumbnail with each button he presses, and Law decides it's time to tune out. I'll never belong, I'll never want to belong here... Moroseness settles in, and he prepares himself to have a positively bleak evening, teetering on lower-than-Morrissey mood levels as he scans the other patrons of the bar. Most of them are leather- and mesh-clad; likely, they were as trussed-up as Jayne is before they sauntered in here in their platforms and heels and started grinding like coffee beans at Starbucks.
"Where are you going?" asks Jayne as Law turns to do more than survey the bar with longing oozing from every pore, depositing his barely-touched beer on the table before her.
"The bar."
In a snap and a step of too-old, too-flat-heeled shoes, he slides neatly into place, with the same grace that sounds like velvet in David Gahan's voice as Master and Servant comes on the speakers. The bartender takes a moment, but is then smiling at him and asking, "So?"
Law says, "Guinness, please," but he can't smile back. When the bottle is in his hand, cold beneath his fingers, the label slick and shiny, the beer cools the tumult roiling inside him and makes Law feel seventeen times better, in spite of the excessive bass on the song that threatens to drown out the melody, now easing over his hurt nerves with the words, "And that's what's appealing, / If you despise that throwaway feeling / From disposable fun, / Then this is the one."
He hates the idea of it, but the sound of the words is beautiful, priceless balm. He wants it to flow over him like a hot bath keeping him from being a cat on a hot tin roof, helping ease his loneliness. As displaced as he feels, sitting here uprooted at the bar, amongst strangers whose bodies are beginning to reek of fresh sweat turning stale, when he knows the song, it helps pull his nerves back together.
"Hey, you saving this for anyone?" calls a voice at his side. Law glances over and sees that his previous neighbor has vacated her post and swished off in her tiny, gaudy dress, and a brunet with an open smile dominating all his other features, already cast in shadow, is standing inches from the stool with his fingertips against it to ward off other takers.
Law shakes his head, and the smile becomes a thankful duck of the head and an, "Appreciate it," from the newcomer. He, like everybody else in the bar, goes back to ignoring Law, calling for the bartender and ordering a bizarre concoction that sounds more like a food-coloring-filled Baskin-Robbin's ice cream flavor than a drink, but then, Law has never understood the appeal of sweetening alcohol into something it's not. For his part, Law returns to studying his bottle and peeling at the slick label, then glancing up over the people packed tighter than sardines - and about as deliciously-scented - in those little square tins that match the relative size of the dance floor.
He's no sooner finished his beer than the bartender gives him another and sweeps away with the empty bottle, half-naked from him half-stripping off the label in his boredom. Law contemplates going to the bathroom to escape some of the pounding beat and the mass exhalations filling the room with hot breath as well as cigarette smoke and the overwhelming odor of too many people in one place. How such a thing is supposed to encourage the traditional romance for which Valentine's Day calls, he can't see for a minute.
It takes Law about five minutes to realize that the brunet beside him is asking for the third time, "'Scuse me, are you in there?" and when he blinks at the man, it takes him a minute to read the lips saying, "Who're you waiting for?"
"My friends," Law says, pointing to the table, easily identifiable by Jayne's dress and Troy's lanky height, dancing, almost slithering upright, beside the table while Andi laughs and claps at the display. "I'm here to appease them, and that's all." He realizes how very abrupt that sounds, like slamming the brakes on any possible conversation, but it doesn't seem to deter the other man one bit. He's still smiling and nursing his fancy, fruit-garnished drink as if Law hasn't said a word to be any more offensive than a kids' cartoon version of a swear word. Well, darn. Dangit. Oh, sugar! thinks Law with a twist of his lips that threatens to become more than the smallest, most undetectable of smirks.
Unfortunately, Law's about as lucky as a cat on its ninth life or a clover with two leaves, the other two ripped off long since. The stranger catches the twitch at the corner of his mouth, and his smile spreads. "I saw that. You're not totally hating this, are you?"
Law shrugs and takes a long drink of his beer. "Why, you waiting for someone?" he asks. "I can vacate."
"Nope," says the stranger, chuckling. "'Vacate,' huh? That's real cute. And nice that someone in here's well-spoken."
With nothing to say to that, Law tries to listen to the words of the new, unfamiliar song booming in his ears and vibrating through his body, shocking his heart to beat faster like a defibrillator in miniature. He finishes his second beer and receives a swiftly-deposited third, the bartender quicker than the average vending machine.
He glances over to check on his friends and sees that Bryce and Julian have arrived and are dancing with Troy, his abandoned glass of Budweiser in Bryce's hand, pressed between his chest and Troy's. They're enjoying themselves without him, Andi's face ecstatic as she and Jayne get to be the first row audience to this private show. Jayne, for her part, is chatting with a man standing beside their table, freshly off the dance floor and none too fresh for it, what with all the sweat dotting and dampening his shirt at the nape of his neck.
A cursory study of the other patrons reveals that the dance floor is as energized as ever, and another group trickles into the room and begins to swim upstream, jumping over numerous dams made of people to get to the bar. A PVC-decked blond and another boy who looks like he's about sixteen are fighting their own way toward the back hall to the bathrooms, the blond surrounded by a halo of smoky light as he passes a sconce on the wall. The smoke blurs the light, though some of that could be Law's low tolerance talking, winding all the colors into the room into fuzzy edges on everything, making the light look like shadow and the pulsating crowd look featureless and pitch dark. He wants to shiver, but can't, in this overheated, oversexed, overwhelming atmosphere. With any luck, he looks about as charming and invigorated as the man chatting it up with Jayne and her brilliant red sky, sailor's delight of a dress. But he doesn't feel like his glands are pouring sweat; rather, he feels as if his brain is about to start vomiting from the sensory deluge overriding his thoughts, even the most morose I don't want to belong ones that have been his echoing companions this whole time.
"So, still interested in appeasing only?"
Startled, Law stares at the stranger, searching for a sprinkle of deviousness sparking the man's smile, but he finds nothing, only genuine amusement. Although it's a bit irritating to think that he's some new form of entertainment, it's a relief to know that not everyone has forgotten about him. "I'm interested in getting out of here," he replies. "I'm interested in staying the night alone, too, if you were going to try to take that as an invitation."
"I understand, and don't worry about it," says the man. "But if you do want to get outta here for at least another hour or so, I wouldn't be averse."
"'Averse'?" says Law. "That's adorable."
Plunking down his drink and holding out a hand, the stranger says, "My name's Stephen. Nice to meet you."
"I'm Lawrence." Taking the offered hand and shaking it, Law can feel warmth, blessedly nothing like sticky and slimy with perspiration, envelop his own bottle-chilled fingers. "Or Law." The handshake is firm, gripping him tightly and holding him still. Although he can't escape, he waves at his friends with a smile on his way to fetch his coat and get a taste of the night air, the snow, and a reminder that this is supposed to be a holiday.
"Law it is," says the man, says Stephen, as Law has to remind himself, as they finish skirting the dancers. His smile is warm, but not intolerably so, and as much as Law questions his motives, he can't help feeling that anything is better than this. Jayne waves back, but his eyes barely catch the flash of red in the corner of his vision, because he catches a glimpse of the outside, of the stars, and he barely chokes down a smile back at the man in front of him. "Let's go?"
As usual, I'm open to comments - more than open, actually, considering the positive response this got in my class; I want to know if I can safely say that it's a general consensus of most people who've read the story. I want to know if my attachment to Law is at all justified, and naturally, I want to know how the figurative language and alliteration and all that other fancy crap worked as well as knowing about the quality of the dialogue and whether or not the narrative moved well. In short, I want to know anything you have to say about the story, anything at all, positive, negative, or neutral.
I need to go paint my fingernails pretty petal-pink, so I'm gonna get occupied with that and bogged down in the details of caring for my dresses before I have to prance about in them at the con tomorrow, Saturday, and on Sunday. And naturally, because I'm not going to be online all those days, possibly not even on Sunday night after I've gotten home and am waxing miserable about missing the environment and camaraderie of the convention, I'm going to be a shithead about comments like I usually am. I'm going to be even worse about posting on the weekend, too! Oh, joy of joys. But I will come back and, I hope, be rejuvenated and craving Livejournal enough that I'll get on and be better about replying and getting into everyone else's journal. In the meantime, I do want to go take care of all the little things I hold so dear. I love and heart you all very much!
"Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing."