Third Kiss (1/1)
Title: Third Kiss
Author: ninamazing, or Nina
Word Count: 1925.
Rating: PG-13.
Spoilers: Through 1x04, "Pigeon."
Characters: Ned/Chuck, Emerson, Olive, OC.
Excerpt: Chuck loved early mornings in the Pie Hole. She loved them almost as much as she loved late nights in Ned's apartment, drinking tea and eating pie and watching old movies, snuggling in adjacent blankets on the couch.
Author's Note: hjea is the speediest beta ever! Also, I adore her.
The piemaker's second kiss was an event he only discussed with Digby - or with particularly finicky clumps of gluten in his dough, on quiet mornings when nobody else had yet opened the doors to the Pie Hole.
His reluctance to speak of it, however, did not prevent it from having happened. The memory of that second kiss haunted him now, more than ever.
The problem, at the time, was this: Young Ned did not quite know how it was that other people made friends. At the Longborough School for Boys, students moved around in mysteriously prearranged groups, trading mysteriously prearranged opinions on teachers and films and girls.
Preoccupied with thoughts of death, Ned found himself unable to join in on this mêlée, so he kept his own company. He spent his time sneaking Digby food, hiding Digby from the headmaster, evading spitballs and broken noses, and reading the odd comic book - paper, at least, did not transform temporarily into trees when he touched it. Keeping his Luke Skywalker action figure underneath his pillow reminded him that good did triumph over evil, and therefore there must be some universal balance, and this gift of his would one day cease to be inexplicable and become benevolent.
For the time being, it was simply disconcerting. Ned had managed to impress someone with the frog-reviving incident, and so for the first time he made a friend at school - and went with this new friend on his first journey across the river, to the Cheltenham School for Girls. Ned was not particularly excited about this, but the memory of his last bloodied nose kept his lips sealed.
And his lips stayed sealed, even when Mary Rooney from Idaho flounced over in a white blouse and purple plaid skirt, flashed a pair of braces at him, and planted a large wet smush on his mouth. It was nothing like the magic Ned had remembered. While, on the way back to the Longborough School for Boys, his not-quite-friend thrilled to the merits of Mary Rooney's giggling companion, Ned wiped his mouth with his hand and concluded that perhaps there was only one person you were ever supposed to kiss.
*
Chuck loved early mornings in the Pie Hole. She loved them almost as much as she loved late nights in Ned's apartment, drinking tea and eating pie and watching old movies, snuggling in adjacent blankets on the couch. Falling asleep after those long nights, and waking up to the sun the next day, made Chuck forget about the hole in her heart that the absence of her aunts had dug out - and mornings in the Pie Hole, more than anything, made her grateful to be alive again.
"Coffee's done," said Ned, poking his head around the elegant stack of desserts in the middle of the room (what they lovingly called the Pie Rotunda). "Do you still take two lumps?"
"If by 'lumps' you mean 'heaping spoonfuls of sugar,' then yes," Chuck replied with a grin, and Ned retreated into the kitchen again. "Can I eat this leftover apple from yesterday?"
"My omelette wasn't enough for you?" Ned asked. Chuck could only see his head and part of his shoulder, blocked as he was by the Pie Rotunda, but she could imagine the beginning of a cheeky little smile that was probably creeping across his face. The smile was still there when he turned, holding two turquoise mugs, and headed for her booth.
"So I've got one," Chuck informed him when they were both settled in.
Ned arched an eyebrow at her. "Got one?"
"You know," she wheedled. "Another scenario. For how we might have met each other again, if I hadn't died."
Ned swallowed and looked at the table. "Oh." Late-night watchings of Casablanca - or rather, the gossip that followed - made him just the slightest bit nervous when it resurfaced the next day.
Unruffled, Chuck began her story: "I would have made it to Tahiti, but then I would have been so bored that I'd have come back two weeks early, and rather than go home to my aunts right away, I would have decided to do some exploring. And then naturally I'd think to visit all the dessert places in the city that I'd never been to, and one night when I was just about to go back to my hotel room or wherever it was that I was sleeping, I'd stumble across the Pie Hole."
"That's good," Ned told her. They were both smiling at each other now. If he had been paying attention, he would have noted that the speed with which his nervousness evaporated was remarkable.
"I'm not finished yet," said Chuck. "You wouldn't be working in the Pie Hole that night. I'd just eat and hobnob with a few other customers and leave. But I would have enjoyed it so much that I'd be back the next morning, for reasons I might not even understand yet, and -"
"And that's when I'd serve you your coffee," Ned finished.
"Nope," said Chuck, and winked. "I'd still be on my traveling budget, so I'd have to take a bus from somewhere, and I'd have to follow the rigid schedule of public transit, so I'd be at the door of the Pie Hole twenty minutes too early and that's when you'd come by to open up. And we'd get to talking, and -"
"No," Ned interrupted. "I'd recognize you instantly." He wanted to reach across the table to her, to hold her hand while they were smiling, or tuck a bit of hair behind her ear, but instead he just stared into her eyes until it got to be too much, and then gazed down at his coffee.
Chuck wrapped a napkin over her palm and placed her hand on top of his. Ned's eyes met hers again, and neither took another sip until their coffee was already cold.
Emerson Cod arrived at the Pie Hole in time to roll his eyes at the two childhood sweethearts, before they got up to clean their dishes and start the day's baking. He was trying something new today - knitting stripes - and he pulled out a half-finished money sack and two needles. There was no breaking murder news yet, but now he had a contact at the county morgue, and that guaranteed him first dibs. He just hoped no one killed anybody before he'd had time to finish his morning frozen yogurt.
"What kind of business do you run with Ned anyway?" questioned Olive Snook, who slipped into the booth next to him and handed him a full bowl and spoon. "Can't be all private investigation. He's a very oblivious man. I don't imagine he'd be much help in any sort of detective work."
She cast dark eyes at the sink, where Chuck was flicking water into Ned's eyes, and as Emerson watched Olive watch Ned watch Chuck, he wondered if he'd been the only one to outgrow his seventh-grade hormones.
"He helps with the paperwork," Emerson informed the lovesick waitress. "Boy's organized - almost too organized. You ever notice how he writes up little labels for the flour and sugar bins?"
"He's very thorough," Olive sighed, resting her chin in her palms. In the kitchen, Chuck slipped in a patch of water and steadied herself against the deep freeze, laughing. Ned held out one yellow-rubber-gloved hand and she took it, spinning slowly into his arms.
Olive breathed very audibly through her nose as the two kids from Coeur d'Coeurs danced their way out the back door. Once, that had been part of her morning routine - going with Ned as he took out the garbage.
Emerson Cod took a hearty spoonful of frozen mango and shut his eyelids.
Accidents, as many people must learn the hard way, occasionally happen. Chuck learned that at the age of five when she spilled orange juice all over her first painting; she learned it again when her father's heart stopped in the side yard three years later; and she learned it still a third time when she dropped her room key into an icemaker on a Tahitian getaway cruise and was strangled to death with a plastic sack. She learned it once more, quite suddenly, when she and Ned sailed out of the back door of his pie shop that morning.
For a reclusive baker, Ned had some impressive dance moves. Chuck had been trained by her aunts, who - as graceful as they were underwater - possessed a certain unpredictability of movement on solid ground. Chuck leaned into Ned's body at the exact moment he was turning toward her, and their faces came so close that the hairs on his chin might have brushed across the fuzz on her forehead and killed her. The piemaker wheeled back around, letting go of her hand and stumbling into the street just as a fresh-blood-colored Hummer H2 raced in a blur across the road.
For an interminable moment, both the piemaker and the Hummer attempted to coexist in the same place at the same time. The Hummer won.
Chuck put a hand to her mouth and was surprised to find that her fingers, her lips, and her heart seemed to have lost all feeling, as if she no longer existed. Which, of course, technically, she didn't. Not quite.
The man who had given her this bonus existence hit the pavement, and he had just enough awareness left to wonder if - when this was over - someone else would wake him, for a minute's worth of chitchat.
The guttural sound of the Hummer's V8 engine grew distant. On feet that felt like cotton balls, Chuck approached the prone figure of the boy who was her first kiss. Her small, shaking hand teetered over his open mouth and determined that he was not breathing. The hand dropped to his chest, and detected no heartbeat.
For the second time in her life (or the first time in her death), Chuck lowered unprotected lips to the piemaker and gently kissed the soft corner of his mouth. When she didn't die, she did it again, this time to the other side of his lips.
Chuck had been kissing him, gently, fully, for about twelve seconds before she realized that somehow and somewhere the piemaker had started to breathe again.
"Chuck," he whispered, eyes wide.
"Shh," she told him, grinning, and nibbled the top of his lip, held both hands to his cheeks, opened her mouth just a little bit more. Ned closed his eyes and thought about the beating of his heart and the warmth of the woman he loved. He counted sixty seconds in his head, and when those were over Chuck kept kissing him (she had moved to his left ear now, drawing light delicious circles with her tongue above his jawbone). He counted another sixty seconds and sat up a little, pavement digging into the small of his back, to rub his hands along her waist and very slowly up to her neck, and nobody died.
"How long have we got?" he asked in an undertone, as Chuck slipped her own hands under the collar of his shirt.
"I don't know," she murmured back, and both of them pulled back for a moment - just so they could gaze at each other and smile.
"If I'd known," Ned said weakly, grinning up at her in that awkward way of his, "I'd have made sure to die a long time ago."
She just kissed him again.
Author: ninamazing, or Nina
Word Count: 1925.
Rating: PG-13.
Spoilers: Through 1x04, "Pigeon."
Characters: Ned/Chuck, Emerson, Olive, OC.
Excerpt: Chuck loved early mornings in the Pie Hole. She loved them almost as much as she loved late nights in Ned's apartment, drinking tea and eating pie and watching old movies, snuggling in adjacent blankets on the couch.
Author's Note: hjea is the speediest beta ever! Also, I adore her.
The piemaker's second kiss was an event he only discussed with Digby - or with particularly finicky clumps of gluten in his dough, on quiet mornings when nobody else had yet opened the doors to the Pie Hole.
His reluctance to speak of it, however, did not prevent it from having happened. The memory of that second kiss haunted him now, more than ever.
The problem, at the time, was this: Young Ned did not quite know how it was that other people made friends. At the Longborough School for Boys, students moved around in mysteriously prearranged groups, trading mysteriously prearranged opinions on teachers and films and girls.
Preoccupied with thoughts of death, Ned found himself unable to join in on this mêlée, so he kept his own company. He spent his time sneaking Digby food, hiding Digby from the headmaster, evading spitballs and broken noses, and reading the odd comic book - paper, at least, did not transform temporarily into trees when he touched it. Keeping his Luke Skywalker action figure underneath his pillow reminded him that good did triumph over evil, and therefore there must be some universal balance, and this gift of his would one day cease to be inexplicable and become benevolent.
For the time being, it was simply disconcerting. Ned had managed to impress someone with the frog-reviving incident, and so for the first time he made a friend at school - and went with this new friend on his first journey across the river, to the Cheltenham School for Girls. Ned was not particularly excited about this, but the memory of his last bloodied nose kept his lips sealed.
And his lips stayed sealed, even when Mary Rooney from Idaho flounced over in a white blouse and purple plaid skirt, flashed a pair of braces at him, and planted a large wet smush on his mouth. It was nothing like the magic Ned had remembered. While, on the way back to the Longborough School for Boys, his not-quite-friend thrilled to the merits of Mary Rooney's giggling companion, Ned wiped his mouth with his hand and concluded that perhaps there was only one person you were ever supposed to kiss.
*
Chuck loved early mornings in the Pie Hole. She loved them almost as much as she loved late nights in Ned's apartment, drinking tea and eating pie and watching old movies, snuggling in adjacent blankets on the couch. Falling asleep after those long nights, and waking up to the sun the next day, made Chuck forget about the hole in her heart that the absence of her aunts had dug out - and mornings in the Pie Hole, more than anything, made her grateful to be alive again.
"Coffee's done," said Ned, poking his head around the elegant stack of desserts in the middle of the room (what they lovingly called the Pie Rotunda). "Do you still take two lumps?"
"If by 'lumps' you mean 'heaping spoonfuls of sugar,' then yes," Chuck replied with a grin, and Ned retreated into the kitchen again. "Can I eat this leftover apple from yesterday?"
"My omelette wasn't enough for you?" Ned asked. Chuck could only see his head and part of his shoulder, blocked as he was by the Pie Rotunda, but she could imagine the beginning of a cheeky little smile that was probably creeping across his face. The smile was still there when he turned, holding two turquoise mugs, and headed for her booth.
"So I've got one," Chuck informed him when they were both settled in.
Ned arched an eyebrow at her. "Got one?"
"You know," she wheedled. "Another scenario. For how we might have met each other again, if I hadn't died."
Ned swallowed and looked at the table. "Oh." Late-night watchings of Casablanca - or rather, the gossip that followed - made him just the slightest bit nervous when it resurfaced the next day.
Unruffled, Chuck began her story: "I would have made it to Tahiti, but then I would have been so bored that I'd have come back two weeks early, and rather than go home to my aunts right away, I would have decided to do some exploring. And then naturally I'd think to visit all the dessert places in the city that I'd never been to, and one night when I was just about to go back to my hotel room or wherever it was that I was sleeping, I'd stumble across the Pie Hole."
"That's good," Ned told her. They were both smiling at each other now. If he had been paying attention, he would have noted that the speed with which his nervousness evaporated was remarkable.
"I'm not finished yet," said Chuck. "You wouldn't be working in the Pie Hole that night. I'd just eat and hobnob with a few other customers and leave. But I would have enjoyed it so much that I'd be back the next morning, for reasons I might not even understand yet, and -"
"And that's when I'd serve you your coffee," Ned finished.
"Nope," said Chuck, and winked. "I'd still be on my traveling budget, so I'd have to take a bus from somewhere, and I'd have to follow the rigid schedule of public transit, so I'd be at the door of the Pie Hole twenty minutes too early and that's when you'd come by to open up. And we'd get to talking, and -"
"No," Ned interrupted. "I'd recognize you instantly." He wanted to reach across the table to her, to hold her hand while they were smiling, or tuck a bit of hair behind her ear, but instead he just stared into her eyes until it got to be too much, and then gazed down at his coffee.
Chuck wrapped a napkin over her palm and placed her hand on top of his. Ned's eyes met hers again, and neither took another sip until their coffee was already cold.
Emerson Cod arrived at the Pie Hole in time to roll his eyes at the two childhood sweethearts, before they got up to clean their dishes and start the day's baking. He was trying something new today - knitting stripes - and he pulled out a half-finished money sack and two needles. There was no breaking murder news yet, but now he had a contact at the county morgue, and that guaranteed him first dibs. He just hoped no one killed anybody before he'd had time to finish his morning frozen yogurt.
"What kind of business do you run with Ned anyway?" questioned Olive Snook, who slipped into the booth next to him and handed him a full bowl and spoon. "Can't be all private investigation. He's a very oblivious man. I don't imagine he'd be much help in any sort of detective work."
She cast dark eyes at the sink, where Chuck was flicking water into Ned's eyes, and as Emerson watched Olive watch Ned watch Chuck, he wondered if he'd been the only one to outgrow his seventh-grade hormones.
"He helps with the paperwork," Emerson informed the lovesick waitress. "Boy's organized - almost too organized. You ever notice how he writes up little labels for the flour and sugar bins?"
"He's very thorough," Olive sighed, resting her chin in her palms. In the kitchen, Chuck slipped in a patch of water and steadied herself against the deep freeze, laughing. Ned held out one yellow-rubber-gloved hand and she took it, spinning slowly into his arms.
Olive breathed very audibly through her nose as the two kids from Coeur d'Coeurs danced their way out the back door. Once, that had been part of her morning routine - going with Ned as he took out the garbage.
Emerson Cod took a hearty spoonful of frozen mango and shut his eyelids.
Accidents, as many people must learn the hard way, occasionally happen. Chuck learned that at the age of five when she spilled orange juice all over her first painting; she learned it again when her father's heart stopped in the side yard three years later; and she learned it still a third time when she dropped her room key into an icemaker on a Tahitian getaway cruise and was strangled to death with a plastic sack. She learned it once more, quite suddenly, when she and Ned sailed out of the back door of his pie shop that morning.
For a reclusive baker, Ned had some impressive dance moves. Chuck had been trained by her aunts, who - as graceful as they were underwater - possessed a certain unpredictability of movement on solid ground. Chuck leaned into Ned's body at the exact moment he was turning toward her, and their faces came so close that the hairs on his chin might have brushed across the fuzz on her forehead and killed her. The piemaker wheeled back around, letting go of her hand and stumbling into the street just as a fresh-blood-colored Hummer H2 raced in a blur across the road.
For an interminable moment, both the piemaker and the Hummer attempted to coexist in the same place at the same time. The Hummer won.
Chuck put a hand to her mouth and was surprised to find that her fingers, her lips, and her heart seemed to have lost all feeling, as if she no longer existed. Which, of course, technically, she didn't. Not quite.
The man who had given her this bonus existence hit the pavement, and he had just enough awareness left to wonder if - when this was over - someone else would wake him, for a minute's worth of chitchat.
The guttural sound of the Hummer's V8 engine grew distant. On feet that felt like cotton balls, Chuck approached the prone figure of the boy who was her first kiss. Her small, shaking hand teetered over his open mouth and determined that he was not breathing. The hand dropped to his chest, and detected no heartbeat.
For the second time in her life (or the first time in her death), Chuck lowered unprotected lips to the piemaker and gently kissed the soft corner of his mouth. When she didn't die, she did it again, this time to the other side of his lips.
Chuck had been kissing him, gently, fully, for about twelve seconds before she realized that somehow and somewhere the piemaker had started to breathe again.
"Chuck," he whispered, eyes wide.
"Shh," she told him, grinning, and nibbled the top of his lip, held both hands to his cheeks, opened her mouth just a little bit more. Ned closed his eyes and thought about the beating of his heart and the warmth of the woman he loved. He counted sixty seconds in his head, and when those were over Chuck kept kissing him (she had moved to his left ear now, drawing light delicious circles with her tongue above his jawbone). He counted another sixty seconds and sat up a little, pavement digging into the small of his back, to rub his hands along her waist and very slowly up to her neck, and nobody died.
"How long have we got?" he asked in an undertone, as Chuck slipped her own hands under the collar of his shirt.
"I don't know," she murmured back, and both of them pulled back for a moment - just so they could gaze at each other and smile.
"If I'd known," Ned said weakly, grinning up at her in that awkward way of his, "I'd have made sure to die a long time ago."
She just kissed him again.