four.
title: passport of indiscretions
type: original story
rating: mild r for suggestive content
notes: this is my first story with original characters so I need feedback. It's not a very well worked out piece (it's more of a sketch than anything else,I suppose) but I'd like to know if you think it has potential or not. Also, it isnt for those who shy away from shady corners. There is possibly implied incest.
Also- if dedications are in order then this one is for falseeeyelashes because I finished my story mere minutes after reading some of her work.
Lydia was the sort of child that played with her food. She would arrange it around her plate in pretty patterns, with a meticulous eye for detail and finish. When such proceedings ended, she cast a cursory glance at the table and devoured her meal with the sort of wicked relish that made her mother frown and her father grin.
Lydia was not a messy child. Her room was pristine, things stacked away neatly and dolls adorning corners. She was a child that liked order.
Leave her in someone else’s room, though and she left havoc and destruction in her wake.
*
Lydia likes to sing. Her voice shatters glass before she turns thirteen.
She sings softly, too.
But only in secret and only at night and the stars don’t respond to her wooing voice.
Pity, she thinks but she continues each night and she wipes off the tears with the back of her hand.
She gets quite good at pretending she’s dry.
*
When Lydia is fifteen, a party is thrown. She paints her lips, her cheeks and the lids of her dark eyes. Uncle Sam raises an eyebrow and tells her she’ll break hearts some day.
She’ll break his, too. But he doesn’t know this yet, so he smiles at her laugh and she twirls away.
*
There is a boy.
Its sweet sixteen, first kiss and how fitting- because she likes to do things the way they’re supposed to be done.
It’s sticky and sour and it ends fast. She pushes him into the pool when their lips break away and leaves for her country house summer the next morning.
*
Have a secret. Sam is not her uncle.
But when his grin causes shivers to travel down to her toes, she pretends that he is and let’s leave it that way, shall we?
*
Mother takes her to Paris in the winter. Takes her hand, one morning and sits her down and says “What are you going to do with yourself?”
She’s sixteen and befuddled.
She knows what she likes. She likes Father’s old tweed coats that smell like cigars and she likes Sam and she likes standing with Sam as she wears them and smoking some more to add to the scent.
Mother asks about school and the boy she went to the dance with and what dress would she like for the next one? Lydia breathes a sigh of exquisite relief. It’s a sigh that will become her favorite, very soon.
*
By the time she’s eighteen, her uncle’s prophecy is set in stone and she carries three torn out hearts with her, worn like badges and relished with a smirk.
She leaves a trail of regret everywhere she goes and obsession’s on her scent like a wolfhound.
If Sam were Sherlock, he’d nod his head and go “Elementary,” but these days he acts like he couldn’t care less so she hikes her skirt high and mounts a new stallion at Christmas. The man is in full view.
Excellent.
*
It’s an old lonely bar and she’s twenty years old. She still looks twelve, he thinks, but for the weariness of the eyes and the expert handling of liquor.
He’s waited enough and so has she. Christian is miles away, so he pulls her out into the cold Prague night and plants one on her.
Rough, hard, bruising and he can tell the exact moment that her knees grow weak. His fingers find the fine brown hair and tug. Tug hard and there it is- that moan he’s longed for.
She sings as he fucks her and he thanks God and his old friend Allemande for the girl writhing beneath him.
*
Shall we take a step back?
Samuel Patrick Bowles and Christian Allemande were friends at fourteen and enemies at seventeen.
Mr. Bowles was his best man when they were twenty two and he spoke of their old London days with an uncharacteristic fondness. He also deflowered the bride but this is not relevant because he was drunk, thought the skirt was a pink bridesmaids dress and Grace alone remembers the sordid details.
He sleeps with Lydia, almost twenty years later and he doesn’t remember her mother. But we’ve already gone over this, haven’t we?
*
Allemande is a man of skewed principles. He is a man who blames the small things in life for the larger tragedies and he is a man who will close his eyes to the truth. He will not cry over spilt milk but he won’t clean it up either. He will drag a rug over the top and pretend nothing’s happened.
Allemande is not good at pretending.
Lydia got this from her mother. She got most things from her mother.
A penchant for wolves, too.
*
Lydia Allemande travels to sing, her tiny feet dotting all over the map of the world with more speed than certainty.
Sam follows her when he can. (Business and Allemande is enough of a sap to believe them.)
They prefer her bedroom at home, though. Sneaking in through windows like starry eyed teenagers and sex on her narrow pink bed with his best friend and his wife sipping tea in the rooms in below.
*
He starts calling her Lo when he turns fifty and her fey skin stays dewy as dawn. She tells him to fuck off and her papery dress flutters when she disappears into the chilled Zurich night, a choir boy dangling from her thin arm.
They’ve branched out by this point in time. Hell, she even has a promise ring, by now.
(Ten, actually and ten different men and none of them are ever intimate but this, he thinks, it beside the point. She changes men as often as she changes coats, fur one week and tartan the next. He gave her the choice. The option to move on- he feel magnanimous about it and quells that darn conscience with a tumbler of Scotch.)
*
Her thirtieth birthday is a surprise party in less than pleasant ways. Her mother is tipsy. Very tipsy and Grace Allemande is not a woman who holds her liquor well.
The young soprano is strong and balances her mother's weight, deftly as she leads her to the bathroom.
The drunken confession is from decades past and Lydia is the one who throws up.
“This ends now,” to her lover.
“No, it doesn’t,” he catches her wrist and her blood runs cold- he doesn’t remember, he didn’t know.
*
Lydia isn’t one for dramatics. She isn’t one for theatrics, not off the stage and she doesn’t jump without peering in first.
If this were a novel, she thinks, lazily tracing her fingers over the scars on her waist, taking her life would be the decent thing to do.
It’s not a novel and she doesn’t do decent.
It’s simply not her style. She leafs through the postcards in her case and chucks Sam’s to the back of her closet.
This is enough for now.