Fic: the suburbs
the suburbs
rpf ; daniel craig/eva green ; 2,500 words ; PG
a guide to keeping professional distance. everybody's a romantic, of course.
notes: for oxymoronassoc! BRITTA. It’s days late but HAPPY BIRTHDAY and I LOVE YOU. It’s appropriate to dive back into rpf after watching Casino Royale several times with different people, IKR. But I hope you enjoy it!
-
They age strangely.
In New York he calls for dinner.
She is inexplicably late.
Eva arrives with her phone. Her French is sharp and soft. The host pulls her chair out nervously. They have already called her the actress at the front.
“I am sorry,” she says. Her hands curl around her napkin. She smiles with a closed mouth. “Silly me, I lost a bit of time.”
His mouth twists. “Unspeakably so,” he says. “It was my fault,” he says too. “I do know how you like to plan things.”
Her eyes narrow. He laughs too. There are menus in front of them both. Her fingers brush against the front but she doesn’t open it. Her hand drops away and she bites her lip, studying him. Daniel reaches for his drink.
“Here I am though,” she says. She looks down and images the expression on his face: that sour mouth, the taste of scotch, all strange, strange facets of how she knows him. But he says nothing.
The restaurant around them drops into heavy conversation. There is the rise and fall of voices, laughter, and she catches a couple nearby, half-bent in blushes. That strange sort of romanticism is something that makes her stomach churn and reduces her to someone unspeakably shy; what people don’t understand is that they are all paid to live half-lies.
Daniel is still handsome and unwise. He chuckles again and she doesn’t answer. Her fingers start to trace patterns over her napkin. She wears silk over her lap and briefly, just briefly, she remembers the things he can do with his mouth.
“And I hear you’re out of love.” He starts abruptly. She looks up and frowns. There’s no reason, but she doesn’t answer. “Word travels fast among friends,” he says dryly and her eyes narrow again.
“Like you?” she asks and smoothes her hands over the cloth in front of her. Her fingers brush over the pieces of silverware. “I hear all sort of sordid things about you,” she tells him, “at parties, cocktail parties, word of mouth, in elevators, with the young girls and older boys - is that what you want me to say?”
“Jealous?” he asks too.
The corners of her mouth turn.
“Not at all,” she says.
He laughs loudly. Her elbow knocks into the menu and she nearly knocks over a mess of silverware and her phone.
They’re two different people, she thinks, always thinks. But this is not the first dinner or the last, and she’s decided, for whatever reason, to continue seeing him. They say old friends are the easiest way of keeping the peace.
“I wanted to catch you.”
He looks at her and leans forward. He reaches for her, but she ducks her head and rests back against her seat.
“You’ve caught me.” Her fingers press against her forehead. “I could very well leave you with just a simple good for you.”
“I want advice,” he says too.
“From me?” And she’s no stranger to disbelief, to pairing him with disbelief, but when he looks at her, she still nearly believes him, nearly wants to. Her stomach twists and her head starts to hurt.
He holds her gaze. “You are better than I am.”
Daniel has a long history. She knows better than to follow his engagements. There is only ever the eternal one, then his daughter, as they’ve all been married and have had kids at one point or another. It’s written in their contracts.
She calls him after dinner. Alone in her room, she stands against the window. New York stands and faces her too.
When Daniel answers the phone, she nearly laughs.
“You are worried,” she says, accuses even. Her eyes close and she drops her head against the glass. It’s cold over her skin and her fingers begin to rap against the glass.
“It’s late,” he says.
“But you are,” she insists. “You are worried and worried about everything and nothing and somehow you’re leaving me to navigate the mess that’s walking through your bloody head.”
“I love her,” he says, and it sounds like he doesn’t believe himself. Eva remembers Nicole. They both played smart.
“Love her?”
There’s a heavy sigh. She turns and leans against the ledge. Her eyes close and she can see him in her head. She falls silent, thinking, listening to his sighs. They come one by one, heavy and spaced. She thinks he’s waiting for her.
There are actors and there is love. This something her mother warned her about, off and on and then again. But she doesn’t know what to say.
“Or so I thought,” he continues. He pauses. “I’m becoming callous.”
“You are playing politics.”
There’s no malice. Politics are politics and this happens often when she falls in love. He knows her well-enough when she speaks from experience. She thinks of home and the empty bedroom too. She sleeps on the right of the bed still.
When he sighs though, she smiles. Her eyes open and she stares into her room. Against the wall, her suitcases rest tall and closed.
“You looked beautiful tonight. I forgot to tell you. It’s easy to forget too. I know how you hate hearing it from me.”
Her breath catches. She shakes her head.
“Be sharp about this,” she warns.
“I’m only here for one more day,” he says. Something drops on the other line. The sound is soft against her ear. “I’m not asking, I promise.”
“You are.”
There is a pause. He is blocks away. She remembers, but doesn’t remember him saying this at dinner.
“I want to,” he says and she remembers those long walks, those weekly stays in exotic locations. She wonders if they had met under different circumstances, it would have been different. She would’ve been angrier to him and he would’ve been nothing more than a ruse.
Instead, she turns back to the window and studies the glare of her bedroom in the reflection. When he sighs again, she sees him in the sheets; there’s that smile too. For him, she wonders if she still tastes like cigarettes. Once, he told her that’s why he really quit. She laughed because she was drunk.
“Then stop it,” she says. She feels tired. “Stop wanting to ask, stop wanting me to answer, what’s done is done and that’s all.”
“You’re horribly French,” he says.
Eva doesn’t laugh. There is nothing funny here.
“You have met my sister,” she says.
Despite all appearances, he follows her home; he always follows her home, in one fashion or another. But she’s in Paris for her mother, and her mother takes her to a small restaurant, blocks away from her home and the small corner gallery where no one cares to her.
They share a salad and some bread, wine that tastes somewhere between tender and bitter as her mother frowns and steals a cigarette.
“I like anonymity,” Eva declares, and she studies the small kitchen in the back. The cook’s head pops out from under a thin window. She smiles a little and feels like she’s somewhere near home.
“You would have made a better teacher,” her mother says. Her nose wrinkles and she picks at a tomato on her plate. “Or a stranger, perhaps,” she says too. Her mouth twists. “A hermit, even.”
“I wish.”
The truth is she always tells people that she likes to get lost, that she’s a recluse and there is nothing lonely to living that way.
When her mother looks at her, she feels ashamed. There is a mold that she doesn’t fit and the other woman lets her know.
“You are trying too hard.”
Her mouth twists. “Mother,” she chides.
“A man is a man,” the other woman says. She pauses and turns, stretching. Her head falls back and the motion is sort of strange and elegant. Her mother always manages to be intimidating.
“I did not say anything. In fact, I’m sure I haven’t said anything at all to you. I love you, mama, but, really?”
She says it to be a brat. Her nose wrinkles and her eyes are wide. She puts her cigarette out over the plate and her mother laughs too. She knows not to think of love here and what it means.
Maybe this is where she starts to think of Daniel, or still thinks of Daniel, in a different time and different places. There’s longing in that, hatred in more; he can never be what she needs and she can never be what he wants, and yet, in the end, they are still standing where they are. He would laugh at her, she thinks.
When her mother leans forward, her mouth is wicked and Eva thinks she looks more like her sister Joy than Joy looks like her. There’s some remorse. It’s an old joke, if anything but.
“He is wearing you like a glove,” her mother says.
The problem with her flat is that there are two many walls, too many details that sit and stare frankly at her. Her sister calls her a gypsy and means the insult. Eva spends a lot of time thinking about curses.
Daniel visits early the day. He brings coffee to spite her. When he steps into her hallway, he thrusts the cup forward and into her hand.
“Here,” he says, and she steps back, further, to let him follow her to the kitchen. She walks briskly and ignores her things. There are books in the hallway, on the stairs that travel up to the bedroom. Paintings lean against the walls and upstairs, her dog is hiding in her closet.
When Daniel laughs, she moves to the stove to turn her teakettle off. She’s polite.
“You still live like an artist,” he says, and says it childishly, almost as if he were trying to prod her.
“Wonderful,” she mutters.
“I missed you terribly.”
His voice is sharp. When she looks up, he sneers. The coffee in her hand is warm. There are bits of spills against the lid, embedded in the caution lettering.
“What if I retired?” he asks, and she snorts.
“I would call you lazy,” she says.
She means it and he shakes his head. Her eyes move over him. He wears a leather jacket and it hangs off of his shoulders, pulling out against his hips. He’s thin, lankier, and there are still sure signs of a beard along his throat.
He was doing a play, she remembers. It feels like that’s been too long ago.
When he shakes his head, there’s still some kind of smile. His mouth is narrow and hard as it tightens. “Of course you would.”
“Well,” she says. She sits at the table and pulls off the lid from the coffee. The smell is abrasive and she narrows her eyes at him. “And I would tell you to start smoking again,” she says too.
He laughs, but doesn’t sit. He walks around the table to her chair, then stretches, resting against the end. It’s obnoxious, she thinks.
“You’re you,” he sneers.
“And you are getting old,” she says.
He lowers his gaze. There’s a change and it’s brief: there are wrinkles in his mouth, over his eyes, and his hands at his sides curl over the edge of the table. She feels guilty, or almost guilty, waiting, watching as the tension colors his knuckles white and she can see the last of some bruising.
“The problem is,” he starts.
She tenses and straightens. From the edge of the table, he pulls himself forward. Their legs press against each other.
“Do not - Don’t do this,” she says, and he ignores her. He frowns too.
“The problem is we can’t avoid each other. You’re here, I’m here. I’m there, you’re there - fuck,” he mutters. He rubs his eyes. “I cannot stop thinking about you.”
“I never asked you to,” she says.
His eyes are bright when she meets his gaze. He looks younger than her, than she feels, and she wonders if she should take this as a sign.
“I never,” she says again. But she stops.
“You started this,” he tells her though.
Another time, another place, she was younger and scared and bold, unwilling to compromise to a moment that didn’t belong to him. He knows. She knows. There were a million other people watching her, breaking down and ripping herself apart and feeling so ashamed. They called her young and fresh without talking about Bertolucci, or remembering.
“I always thought I’d be an obscure reference,” she says suddenly, out loud. Her mouth twists and she reaches for her cigarettes on the table. She’s delighted, suddenly, looking up at him.
“You’re a romantic,” he murmurs. “Always,” he says.
“A classist.”
When she smiles, it’s impulsive. She laughs too and he stares at her with some surprise. There’s a lump in her throat and she remembers not to get too close, as if it were going to change their round of circumstances.
Eva reaches for her cigarettes then. Her fingers are nervous and she twists in her chair, the wood moaning softly. She picks up the pack and stares at it in her hand.
“I don’t know what you want,” she says, and means it, means it in a way that she’s not okay with saying and if she knows him well-enough, he’s not okay with hearing. But her flat is too small and too closed.
She listens to her heart rap in her ears. There’s no smart comment. Slowly, she slides the cigarette into her mouth.
“I mean that,” she tells him. “Truly.”
His fingers pull the cigarette from her mouth. His thumb traces her lip and she watches as his fist swallows cigarette whole.
He leans down to kiss her without another word. The motion is jerky, awkward, and when his mouth brushes over hers, she sighs in turn. Her head starts to spin slowly and she thinks of him as hard and bitter. There’s the sound of a laugh and she swallows instead, rolling her teeth over his lip.
She bites him. There’s a second laugh and then another sigh. There is nothing outwardly romantic about his mouth, about the way it feels familiar and understood. She remembers a tie and remembers how to pull. She remembers soft and hard, wet and sticky and how it stretched over her thigh just after they shivered wet and angry and in a small shower. This is a different place.
There is still a name between them. His tongue slides over hers and she can hear herself moan. When her fingers curl in his shirt, she nearly pulls him over her.
He tries to get her to stand. She doesn’t move from her seat.
Eva sees her sister in June. Joy loses her ring in the bathroom sink, just as the sun hits the roses by the window. This is Italy and there is a Count, like some sort of game that little girls play.
Her sister cuts her fingers. Eva laughs.
rpf ; daniel craig/eva green ; 2,500 words ; PG
a guide to keeping professional distance. everybody's a romantic, of course.
notes: for oxymoronassoc! BRITTA. It’s days late but HAPPY BIRTHDAY and I LOVE YOU. It’s appropriate to dive back into rpf after watching Casino Royale several times with different people, IKR. But I hope you enjoy it!
-
They age strangely.
In New York he calls for dinner.
She is inexplicably late.
Eva arrives with her phone. Her French is sharp and soft. The host pulls her chair out nervously. They have already called her the actress at the front.
“I am sorry,” she says. Her hands curl around her napkin. She smiles with a closed mouth. “Silly me, I lost a bit of time.”
His mouth twists. “Unspeakably so,” he says. “It was my fault,” he says too. “I do know how you like to plan things.”
Her eyes narrow. He laughs too. There are menus in front of them both. Her fingers brush against the front but she doesn’t open it. Her hand drops away and she bites her lip, studying him. Daniel reaches for his drink.
“Here I am though,” she says. She looks down and images the expression on his face: that sour mouth, the taste of scotch, all strange, strange facets of how she knows him. But he says nothing.
The restaurant around them drops into heavy conversation. There is the rise and fall of voices, laughter, and she catches a couple nearby, half-bent in blushes. That strange sort of romanticism is something that makes her stomach churn and reduces her to someone unspeakably shy; what people don’t understand is that they are all paid to live half-lies.
Daniel is still handsome and unwise. He chuckles again and she doesn’t answer. Her fingers start to trace patterns over her napkin. She wears silk over her lap and briefly, just briefly, she remembers the things he can do with his mouth.
“And I hear you’re out of love.” He starts abruptly. She looks up and frowns. There’s no reason, but she doesn’t answer. “Word travels fast among friends,” he says dryly and her eyes narrow again.
“Like you?” she asks and smoothes her hands over the cloth in front of her. Her fingers brush over the pieces of silverware. “I hear all sort of sordid things about you,” she tells him, “at parties, cocktail parties, word of mouth, in elevators, with the young girls and older boys - is that what you want me to say?”
“Jealous?” he asks too.
The corners of her mouth turn.
“Not at all,” she says.
He laughs loudly. Her elbow knocks into the menu and she nearly knocks over a mess of silverware and her phone.
They’re two different people, she thinks, always thinks. But this is not the first dinner or the last, and she’s decided, for whatever reason, to continue seeing him. They say old friends are the easiest way of keeping the peace.
“I wanted to catch you.”
He looks at her and leans forward. He reaches for her, but she ducks her head and rests back against her seat.
“You’ve caught me.” Her fingers press against her forehead. “I could very well leave you with just a simple good for you.”
“I want advice,” he says too.
“From me?” And she’s no stranger to disbelief, to pairing him with disbelief, but when he looks at her, she still nearly believes him, nearly wants to. Her stomach twists and her head starts to hurt.
He holds her gaze. “You are better than I am.”
Daniel has a long history. She knows better than to follow his engagements. There is only ever the eternal one, then his daughter, as they’ve all been married and have had kids at one point or another. It’s written in their contracts.
She calls him after dinner. Alone in her room, she stands against the window. New York stands and faces her too.
When Daniel answers the phone, she nearly laughs.
“You are worried,” she says, accuses even. Her eyes close and she drops her head against the glass. It’s cold over her skin and her fingers begin to rap against the glass.
“It’s late,” he says.
“But you are,” she insists. “You are worried and worried about everything and nothing and somehow you’re leaving me to navigate the mess that’s walking through your bloody head.”
“I love her,” he says, and it sounds like he doesn’t believe himself. Eva remembers Nicole. They both played smart.
“Love her?”
There’s a heavy sigh. She turns and leans against the ledge. Her eyes close and she can see him in her head. She falls silent, thinking, listening to his sighs. They come one by one, heavy and spaced. She thinks he’s waiting for her.
There are actors and there is love. This something her mother warned her about, off and on and then again. But she doesn’t know what to say.
“Or so I thought,” he continues. He pauses. “I’m becoming callous.”
“You are playing politics.”
There’s no malice. Politics are politics and this happens often when she falls in love. He knows her well-enough when she speaks from experience. She thinks of home and the empty bedroom too. She sleeps on the right of the bed still.
When he sighs though, she smiles. Her eyes open and she stares into her room. Against the wall, her suitcases rest tall and closed.
“You looked beautiful tonight. I forgot to tell you. It’s easy to forget too. I know how you hate hearing it from me.”
Her breath catches. She shakes her head.
“Be sharp about this,” she warns.
“I’m only here for one more day,” he says. Something drops on the other line. The sound is soft against her ear. “I’m not asking, I promise.”
“You are.”
There is a pause. He is blocks away. She remembers, but doesn’t remember him saying this at dinner.
“I want to,” he says and she remembers those long walks, those weekly stays in exotic locations. She wonders if they had met under different circumstances, it would have been different. She would’ve been angrier to him and he would’ve been nothing more than a ruse.
Instead, she turns back to the window and studies the glare of her bedroom in the reflection. When he sighs again, she sees him in the sheets; there’s that smile too. For him, she wonders if she still tastes like cigarettes. Once, he told her that’s why he really quit. She laughed because she was drunk.
“Then stop it,” she says. She feels tired. “Stop wanting to ask, stop wanting me to answer, what’s done is done and that’s all.”
“You’re horribly French,” he says.
Eva doesn’t laugh. There is nothing funny here.
“You have met my sister,” she says.
Despite all appearances, he follows her home; he always follows her home, in one fashion or another. But she’s in Paris for her mother, and her mother takes her to a small restaurant, blocks away from her home and the small corner gallery where no one cares to her.
They share a salad and some bread, wine that tastes somewhere between tender and bitter as her mother frowns and steals a cigarette.
“I like anonymity,” Eva declares, and she studies the small kitchen in the back. The cook’s head pops out from under a thin window. She smiles a little and feels like she’s somewhere near home.
“You would have made a better teacher,” her mother says. Her nose wrinkles and she picks at a tomato on her plate. “Or a stranger, perhaps,” she says too. Her mouth twists. “A hermit, even.”
“I wish.”
The truth is she always tells people that she likes to get lost, that she’s a recluse and there is nothing lonely to living that way.
When her mother looks at her, she feels ashamed. There is a mold that she doesn’t fit and the other woman lets her know.
“You are trying too hard.”
Her mouth twists. “Mother,” she chides.
“A man is a man,” the other woman says. She pauses and turns, stretching. Her head falls back and the motion is sort of strange and elegant. Her mother always manages to be intimidating.
“I did not say anything. In fact, I’m sure I haven’t said anything at all to you. I love you, mama, but, really?”
She says it to be a brat. Her nose wrinkles and her eyes are wide. She puts her cigarette out over the plate and her mother laughs too. She knows not to think of love here and what it means.
Maybe this is where she starts to think of Daniel, or still thinks of Daniel, in a different time and different places. There’s longing in that, hatred in more; he can never be what she needs and she can never be what he wants, and yet, in the end, they are still standing where they are. He would laugh at her, she thinks.
When her mother leans forward, her mouth is wicked and Eva thinks she looks more like her sister Joy than Joy looks like her. There’s some remorse. It’s an old joke, if anything but.
“He is wearing you like a glove,” her mother says.
The problem with her flat is that there are two many walls, too many details that sit and stare frankly at her. Her sister calls her a gypsy and means the insult. Eva spends a lot of time thinking about curses.
Daniel visits early the day. He brings coffee to spite her. When he steps into her hallway, he thrusts the cup forward and into her hand.
“Here,” he says, and she steps back, further, to let him follow her to the kitchen. She walks briskly and ignores her things. There are books in the hallway, on the stairs that travel up to the bedroom. Paintings lean against the walls and upstairs, her dog is hiding in her closet.
When Daniel laughs, she moves to the stove to turn her teakettle off. She’s polite.
“You still live like an artist,” he says, and says it childishly, almost as if he were trying to prod her.
“Wonderful,” she mutters.
“I missed you terribly.”
His voice is sharp. When she looks up, he sneers. The coffee in her hand is warm. There are bits of spills against the lid, embedded in the caution lettering.
“What if I retired?” he asks, and she snorts.
“I would call you lazy,” she says.
She means it and he shakes his head. Her eyes move over him. He wears a leather jacket and it hangs off of his shoulders, pulling out against his hips. He’s thin, lankier, and there are still sure signs of a beard along his throat.
He was doing a play, she remembers. It feels like that’s been too long ago.
When he shakes his head, there’s still some kind of smile. His mouth is narrow and hard as it tightens. “Of course you would.”
“Well,” she says. She sits at the table and pulls off the lid from the coffee. The smell is abrasive and she narrows her eyes at him. “And I would tell you to start smoking again,” she says too.
He laughs, but doesn’t sit. He walks around the table to her chair, then stretches, resting against the end. It’s obnoxious, she thinks.
“You’re you,” he sneers.
“And you are getting old,” she says.
He lowers his gaze. There’s a change and it’s brief: there are wrinkles in his mouth, over his eyes, and his hands at his sides curl over the edge of the table. She feels guilty, or almost guilty, waiting, watching as the tension colors his knuckles white and she can see the last of some bruising.
“The problem is,” he starts.
She tenses and straightens. From the edge of the table, he pulls himself forward. Their legs press against each other.
“Do not - Don’t do this,” she says, and he ignores her. He frowns too.
“The problem is we can’t avoid each other. You’re here, I’m here. I’m there, you’re there - fuck,” he mutters. He rubs his eyes. “I cannot stop thinking about you.”
“I never asked you to,” she says.
His eyes are bright when she meets his gaze. He looks younger than her, than she feels, and she wonders if she should take this as a sign.
“I never,” she says again. But she stops.
“You started this,” he tells her though.
Another time, another place, she was younger and scared and bold, unwilling to compromise to a moment that didn’t belong to him. He knows. She knows. There were a million other people watching her, breaking down and ripping herself apart and feeling so ashamed. They called her young and fresh without talking about Bertolucci, or remembering.
“I always thought I’d be an obscure reference,” she says suddenly, out loud. Her mouth twists and she reaches for her cigarettes on the table. She’s delighted, suddenly, looking up at him.
“You’re a romantic,” he murmurs. “Always,” he says.
“A classist.”
When she smiles, it’s impulsive. She laughs too and he stares at her with some surprise. There’s a lump in her throat and she remembers not to get too close, as if it were going to change their round of circumstances.
Eva reaches for her cigarettes then. Her fingers are nervous and she twists in her chair, the wood moaning softly. She picks up the pack and stares at it in her hand.
“I don’t know what you want,” she says, and means it, means it in a way that she’s not okay with saying and if she knows him well-enough, he’s not okay with hearing. But her flat is too small and too closed.
She listens to her heart rap in her ears. There’s no smart comment. Slowly, she slides the cigarette into her mouth.
“I mean that,” she tells him. “Truly.”
His fingers pull the cigarette from her mouth. His thumb traces her lip and she watches as his fist swallows cigarette whole.
He leans down to kiss her without another word. The motion is jerky, awkward, and when his mouth brushes over hers, she sighs in turn. Her head starts to spin slowly and she thinks of him as hard and bitter. There’s the sound of a laugh and she swallows instead, rolling her teeth over his lip.
She bites him. There’s a second laugh and then another sigh. There is nothing outwardly romantic about his mouth, about the way it feels familiar and understood. She remembers a tie and remembers how to pull. She remembers soft and hard, wet and sticky and how it stretched over her thigh just after they shivered wet and angry and in a small shower. This is a different place.
There is still a name between them. His tongue slides over hers and she can hear herself moan. When her fingers curl in his shirt, she nearly pulls him over her.
He tries to get her to stand. She doesn’t move from her seat.
Eva sees her sister in June. Joy loses her ring in the bathroom sink, just as the sun hits the roses by the window. This is Italy and there is a Count, like some sort of game that little girls play.
Her sister cuts her fingers. Eva laughs.