pink lemonade #13 + malt
pink lemonade 13. sleeping beside you
+ malt : after the explosion, things sort of calmed down (nath's trick or treat)
story: second chances ; jigsaw. wordcount: 2000. rating: pg13.
It's December 18th and I haven't made any plans. Wherein Levee hopes for snow, Amber turns the oven into a battlefield and Tony...well, he just puts his foot in his mouth.
notes: I went ahead and dug this out of my unfinished file and well...finished it! This is the same December that Blue Christmas takes place in and involves a plot element I've been dancing around a bit. Rosie, Amber, Levee and Tony are all living in a house together. And "Jigsaw" is just what I've deemed Levee's college story to differentiate it from the other stuff.
It's December 18th and I haven't made any plans.
Rosie and Amber are leaving in the morning. Rosie's been in and out of the kitchen with a phone to her ear, trying to coordinate their ride to the airport while Amber attempts to make a bag of raw chestnuts into an edible snack. She bought them when were at the fruit stand on the way back from handing in our French literature term papers, ignoring the already cooked variety I pointed out. I bought a bundle of rainbow-colored honey straws, one of which I'm eating now, sitting on the sofa and waiting for the weather report to come on.
Tony comes up alongside the sofa, blowing his nose on some Kleenex. He drops down onto the cushion beside me and makes a face at my choice of program. "This is what you're watching?" he asks, reaching for the remote.
I flail to stop him. "Wait! I want to see if it'll drop below freezing this week."
"She's waiting to see if it's going to snow," Amber calls from the kitchen.
"Oh, okay," Tony says. He wipes his nose again, looks at the tissue, then tucks it back into the front pocket of his jeans.
"How're you feeling?" I ask.
"Better," he says. "I'm basically fine. Now. When we don't have practice 'til January."
Tony's still treating his cold with a certain amount of resentment since it's caused him to miss two band rehearsals. When he'd called in sick on Monday, Kevin, Toothpick Tower's drummer came by to hand deliver their last show's write-up from the weekly free paper which heaped praise on both Kevin and Tony but suggested the band lose their lead vocalist if they ever want to go beyond playing local shows. I then spent alternating chunks of time trying to restrain Tony from doing cartwheels down the hallway while he was still in danger of hacking up a lung and playing counselor to his woe's over their frontman, Sean "Shark" Pitt and how he was going to feel.
If I hadn't had my History of Judaism final the next day, I could have been more helpful. At the time drugging him with Nyquil and finishing my reading seemed like the easiest choice. At the end of the day, he hadn't seemed to mind.
I lean into Tony's shoulder. "So you'll have plenty of time to rest this way."
"Yeah," he sighs. "I guess."
I catch a glimpse of Rosie dashing back into the kitchen. "So we can share a cab with Lloyd who's going over at 8 or share a shuttle with Emily and Jeff who're leaving at 9."
"Either or," I hear Amber say, then Rosie, back on the phone, heads for her room once again.
"How are those chestnuts coming?" I call into the kitchen.
"Fine!" Amber calls back.
Tony perks up. "You guys are making chestnuts?"
"Amber is," I say. I hold up my mostly eaten honey-straw. "I'm sticking with the honey."
"You know," Amber calls, "The way they harvest honey is pretty horrific, if you think of how the bees must feel."
I see Tony about to yell back, probably to ask what the hell she's even talking about, but I wave him down. "Don't bother," I mouth. Amber got handed a few PETA pamphlets outside the library last month ago and now she's a millitant vegan.
"Do bees have feelings?" Tony whisper-asks me.
I don't have a good answer for that.
"Finally!" Rosie reappears from the hallway, triumphant. "I finally found us a ride."
"We could have just split a cab!" Amber yells back.
Rosie shakes her head, probably lamenting that no one else appreciates her thriftiness.
She nudges Tony's legs off the coffee table and plops down on the couch beside me.
"You packed?" I ask her.
"Sort of. Not really." She waves a hand at the TV. "Are you still hoping for snow?"
"Yes," say Tony and Amber, in surprising unison.
"Why don't you just go home then?" Rosie asks me.
"No one's asked me to," I say, which is so far true. After I didn't make it home for Thanksgiving (which we don't really celebrate anyway) my father's been treating me with a certain frustrated exasperation which doesn't inspire me to call frequently. I stopped picking up for my mother a while ago. And that leaves my brother, who always means to call, but never quite gets around to it.
Rosie's shaking her head at me. "Your family doesn't have to invite you home."
"How else am I supposed to know if they even want to see me?"
Rosie shakes her head again, like that doesn't even warrant a response. Then she says, "Oh!" and points to the television screen. The weatherman's on. I fumble for the remote.
"...could get below freezing this weekend, but with the low precipitation it looks like we'll get more than a few flakes of snow. But as temperatures continue to drop through the rest of the week..."
I sigh, letting the remote fall from my hand.
"Rats," Tony agrees.
Rosie pats both our heads. "Better luck next time, kids," she says. "And with that, I am going to bed."
"You don't want to wait for the chestnuts?" Amber calls from the kitchen. "I think they're just about done!"
Before Rosie can answer, there's a sudden loud pop from the kitchen, a scream from Amber, then the clatter of the oven door falling open. Rosie gets up first, then Tony and I are on our feet in a mad dash for the kitchen.
"What happened?" Rosie demands as we wedge in the doorway.
Amber's standing with her fist pressed to her mouth, as far back from the oven as our kitchen will allow. Her eyes are huge as she lifts her other hand to point to the pan of chestnuts, "They're exploding," she whispers.
Tony reacts first, as you might expect: "Oh! I want to see!" and then bending over to peer into the open oven. Rosie and I barely have a chance to grab him before another chestnut explodes, this time in front of our eyes, and we all shriek at the bang, the puff of steam.
Rosie presses a hand to her heart. "Well, I'm definitely going to bed now. I don't like it when my food tries to kill me."
Amber opens her mouth and then immediately shuts it again. Very gingerly, Tony steps forward and nudges the oven door closed with his foot. He turns the oven off. Somehow, all is quiet again.
"I think that's why you're supposed to cut X's into them before they go in the oven," he tells Amber.
"You couldn't have told me that sooner?"
I glance between Amber and the oven, half-expecting another explosion. "You okay?" I finally ask her.
She nods. A little color is returning to her face. "I'm just not hungry anymore."
"Well, that's probably for the best," Rosie says. She slaps Amber on the back, "I'll see you in the morning"-then, turning to me and Tony-"And you guys-next year!"
"Have a good trip home," I say.
"See you later, Rosie," Tony says.
With a sigh, Amber winds a piece of her copper-red hair around her finger. "I guess I should probably stay up and clean out the oven."
I glance back at the oven, where things seem to have calmed down. "Um, just take care of the larger chunks," I tell her. The rest will probably burn off. At least the smell of roasted chestnuts is somewhat pleasant.
Tony retrieves the gently-used tissue from his pocket to blow his nose again. "I think I'm going to go bed too," he says. "See if I can sleep off the rest of this cold."
"Please," Amber says. "So the next time I see you, you won't be a petri dish of infection."
I roll my eyes at her. "You're so paranoid. I didn't even get his cold."
"But I have a very delicate immune system," Amber says, tilting her chin in to look haughty in the way she sometimes does.
As eye-roll-worthy as Amber's germ-phobia is, I've kind of enjoyed her keeping her distance from us for a while. I'm also kind of of glad she's leaving tomorrow. I'll have a chance to pretend everything's gone back to normal, to see how that goes.
"I'll go with you," I tell Tony. "To bed. It's been a long week."
Amber glances between us. "Then I guess this is goodbye for now?" She steps towards me and puts one hand under my chin and the other on my head, like she's putting my face in a little box. She kisses me on the mouth.
"See you after break," I say, when she pulls away.
"Bye, guys. You're my favorites." She gives Tony a finger wave. "Sorry for the cold shoulder this week. Nothing personal."
"That's okay," Tony says. "I look forward to you wanting to come near me again."
Back in my room, we crank up the heat and get under the covers. Since the weather turned, I've started this less-than-desirable ritual of falling asleep with the heater on and waking up at 2 am, overheated, to turn it off again. Tony just sleeps through the night.
"Do you want to go home for Christmas?" I ask him. I curl up against his chest, resting my head on the other half of his pillow.
He shrugs under the blanket and reaches over to drape his arm across my shoulders. "Kind of," he says. "I guess."
I hook my fingers in the neck of his undershirt. "If you want to go, you should go."
"I saw everyone at Thanksgiving. Except Lanzo. And Fed." He smiles at me in the dim glow of my bedside IKEA lamp. "If you're staying here, I'll stay here too."
"I don't know what I'm doing yet," I admit.
"That's okay." He pulls away for a second to grab a tissue and blow his nose again. I prop myself up on an elbow.
"Hey, how did you know that you were supposed to cut an X into chestnuts before cooking them?" I ask.
He wipes his nose and tosses the tissue aside. "My sisters tried roasting them last year."
"Which sisters?"
"Gina and Tessa." He yawns then lays his face back on the pillow, pulls me down so we're back where we started. "That's usually who I mean."
"And Lia's the other one?"
"See, you totally remembered." He shifts his weight and the hand he has on my shoulder slips down to squeeze one of my breasts.
"What're you doing?" I ask.
"Nothing, I'm tired...I just like them."
I snort. "Okay then. Should I get the light?"
"Yeah," he says. His eyes are already closed.
I stretch my arm out as far as I can and manage to toggle the light switch. The room goes dark, save the glow from the streetlight outside. Tony rests his chin on my head when I curl back into him.
He makes an "mmm" sound, like he's already half-asleep. Then he says, "I guess we're kind of boring without Amber."
"What?" I pull away, making him let me go. I push myself up to my elbows to glare at him, even though I can barely see him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
He's silent for a second. Then says, "Nothing. I didn't mean anything, I was just being stupid."
I keep glaring at his outline, until something inside me gives and I sigh and flop over onto my stomach, firmly on my own side of the bed.
"Are you pissed at me?" he asks.
"Maybe I won't be in the morning. Go to sleep."
He's silent for a second, then I feel the mattress sink beside me as lies back down. "Okay," he says. "Good night."
I stare at the glowing digital numbers on my clock radio for a long time before I can't keep my eyes open anymore. And I fall asleep too.
...I have a feeling if I let this go another six months, you guys might yell at me. So I'll try not to do that!
+ malt : after the explosion, things sort of calmed down (nath's trick or treat)
story: second chances ; jigsaw. wordcount: 2000. rating: pg13.
It's December 18th and I haven't made any plans. Wherein Levee hopes for snow, Amber turns the oven into a battlefield and Tony...well, he just puts his foot in his mouth.
notes: I went ahead and dug this out of my unfinished file and well...finished it! This is the same December that Blue Christmas takes place in and involves a plot element I've been dancing around a bit. Rosie, Amber, Levee and Tony are all living in a house together. And "Jigsaw" is just what I've deemed Levee's college story to differentiate it from the other stuff.
It's December 18th and I haven't made any plans.
Rosie and Amber are leaving in the morning. Rosie's been in and out of the kitchen with a phone to her ear, trying to coordinate their ride to the airport while Amber attempts to make a bag of raw chestnuts into an edible snack. She bought them when were at the fruit stand on the way back from handing in our French literature term papers, ignoring the already cooked variety I pointed out. I bought a bundle of rainbow-colored honey straws, one of which I'm eating now, sitting on the sofa and waiting for the weather report to come on.
Tony comes up alongside the sofa, blowing his nose on some Kleenex. He drops down onto the cushion beside me and makes a face at my choice of program. "This is what you're watching?" he asks, reaching for the remote.
I flail to stop him. "Wait! I want to see if it'll drop below freezing this week."
"She's waiting to see if it's going to snow," Amber calls from the kitchen.
"Oh, okay," Tony says. He wipes his nose again, looks at the tissue, then tucks it back into the front pocket of his jeans.
"How're you feeling?" I ask.
"Better," he says. "I'm basically fine. Now. When we don't have practice 'til January."
Tony's still treating his cold with a certain amount of resentment since it's caused him to miss two band rehearsals. When he'd called in sick on Monday, Kevin, Toothpick Tower's drummer came by to hand deliver their last show's write-up from the weekly free paper which heaped praise on both Kevin and Tony but suggested the band lose their lead vocalist if they ever want to go beyond playing local shows. I then spent alternating chunks of time trying to restrain Tony from doing cartwheels down the hallway while he was still in danger of hacking up a lung and playing counselor to his woe's over their frontman, Sean "Shark" Pitt and how he was going to feel.
If I hadn't had my History of Judaism final the next day, I could have been more helpful. At the time drugging him with Nyquil and finishing my reading seemed like the easiest choice. At the end of the day, he hadn't seemed to mind.
I lean into Tony's shoulder. "So you'll have plenty of time to rest this way."
"Yeah," he sighs. "I guess."
I catch a glimpse of Rosie dashing back into the kitchen. "So we can share a cab with Lloyd who's going over at 8 or share a shuttle with Emily and Jeff who're leaving at 9."
"Either or," I hear Amber say, then Rosie, back on the phone, heads for her room once again.
"How are those chestnuts coming?" I call into the kitchen.
"Fine!" Amber calls back.
Tony perks up. "You guys are making chestnuts?"
"Amber is," I say. I hold up my mostly eaten honey-straw. "I'm sticking with the honey."
"You know," Amber calls, "The way they harvest honey is pretty horrific, if you think of how the bees must feel."
I see Tony about to yell back, probably to ask what the hell she's even talking about, but I wave him down. "Don't bother," I mouth. Amber got handed a few PETA pamphlets outside the library last month ago and now she's a millitant vegan.
"Do bees have feelings?" Tony whisper-asks me.
I don't have a good answer for that.
"Finally!" Rosie reappears from the hallway, triumphant. "I finally found us a ride."
"We could have just split a cab!" Amber yells back.
Rosie shakes her head, probably lamenting that no one else appreciates her thriftiness.
She nudges Tony's legs off the coffee table and plops down on the couch beside me.
"You packed?" I ask her.
"Sort of. Not really." She waves a hand at the TV. "Are you still hoping for snow?"
"Yes," say Tony and Amber, in surprising unison.
"Why don't you just go home then?" Rosie asks me.
"No one's asked me to," I say, which is so far true. After I didn't make it home for Thanksgiving (which we don't really celebrate anyway) my father's been treating me with a certain frustrated exasperation which doesn't inspire me to call frequently. I stopped picking up for my mother a while ago. And that leaves my brother, who always means to call, but never quite gets around to it.
Rosie's shaking her head at me. "Your family doesn't have to invite you home."
"How else am I supposed to know if they even want to see me?"
Rosie shakes her head again, like that doesn't even warrant a response. Then she says, "Oh!" and points to the television screen. The weatherman's on. I fumble for the remote.
"...could get below freezing this weekend, but with the low precipitation it looks like we'll get more than a few flakes of snow. But as temperatures continue to drop through the rest of the week..."
I sigh, letting the remote fall from my hand.
"Rats," Tony agrees.
Rosie pats both our heads. "Better luck next time, kids," she says. "And with that, I am going to bed."
"You don't want to wait for the chestnuts?" Amber calls from the kitchen. "I think they're just about done!"
Before Rosie can answer, there's a sudden loud pop from the kitchen, a scream from Amber, then the clatter of the oven door falling open. Rosie gets up first, then Tony and I are on our feet in a mad dash for the kitchen.
"What happened?" Rosie demands as we wedge in the doorway.
Amber's standing with her fist pressed to her mouth, as far back from the oven as our kitchen will allow. Her eyes are huge as she lifts her other hand to point to the pan of chestnuts, "They're exploding," she whispers.
Tony reacts first, as you might expect: "Oh! I want to see!" and then bending over to peer into the open oven. Rosie and I barely have a chance to grab him before another chestnut explodes, this time in front of our eyes, and we all shriek at the bang, the puff of steam.
Rosie presses a hand to her heart. "Well, I'm definitely going to bed now. I don't like it when my food tries to kill me."
Amber opens her mouth and then immediately shuts it again. Very gingerly, Tony steps forward and nudges the oven door closed with his foot. He turns the oven off. Somehow, all is quiet again.
"I think that's why you're supposed to cut X's into them before they go in the oven," he tells Amber.
"You couldn't have told me that sooner?"
I glance between Amber and the oven, half-expecting another explosion. "You okay?" I finally ask her.
She nods. A little color is returning to her face. "I'm just not hungry anymore."
"Well, that's probably for the best," Rosie says. She slaps Amber on the back, "I'll see you in the morning"-then, turning to me and Tony-"And you guys-next year!"
"Have a good trip home," I say.
"See you later, Rosie," Tony says.
With a sigh, Amber winds a piece of her copper-red hair around her finger. "I guess I should probably stay up and clean out the oven."
I glance back at the oven, where things seem to have calmed down. "Um, just take care of the larger chunks," I tell her. The rest will probably burn off. At least the smell of roasted chestnuts is somewhat pleasant.
Tony retrieves the gently-used tissue from his pocket to blow his nose again. "I think I'm going to go bed too," he says. "See if I can sleep off the rest of this cold."
"Please," Amber says. "So the next time I see you, you won't be a petri dish of infection."
I roll my eyes at her. "You're so paranoid. I didn't even get his cold."
"But I have a very delicate immune system," Amber says, tilting her chin in to look haughty in the way she sometimes does.
As eye-roll-worthy as Amber's germ-phobia is, I've kind of enjoyed her keeping her distance from us for a while. I'm also kind of of glad she's leaving tomorrow. I'll have a chance to pretend everything's gone back to normal, to see how that goes.
"I'll go with you," I tell Tony. "To bed. It's been a long week."
Amber glances between us. "Then I guess this is goodbye for now?" She steps towards me and puts one hand under my chin and the other on my head, like she's putting my face in a little box. She kisses me on the mouth.
"See you after break," I say, when she pulls away.
"Bye, guys. You're my favorites." She gives Tony a finger wave. "Sorry for the cold shoulder this week. Nothing personal."
"That's okay," Tony says. "I look forward to you wanting to come near me again."
Back in my room, we crank up the heat and get under the covers. Since the weather turned, I've started this less-than-desirable ritual of falling asleep with the heater on and waking up at 2 am, overheated, to turn it off again. Tony just sleeps through the night.
"Do you want to go home for Christmas?" I ask him. I curl up against his chest, resting my head on the other half of his pillow.
He shrugs under the blanket and reaches over to drape his arm across my shoulders. "Kind of," he says. "I guess."
I hook my fingers in the neck of his undershirt. "If you want to go, you should go."
"I saw everyone at Thanksgiving. Except Lanzo. And Fed." He smiles at me in the dim glow of my bedside IKEA lamp. "If you're staying here, I'll stay here too."
"I don't know what I'm doing yet," I admit.
"That's okay." He pulls away for a second to grab a tissue and blow his nose again. I prop myself up on an elbow.
"Hey, how did you know that you were supposed to cut an X into chestnuts before cooking them?" I ask.
He wipes his nose and tosses the tissue aside. "My sisters tried roasting them last year."
"Which sisters?"
"Gina and Tessa." He yawns then lays his face back on the pillow, pulls me down so we're back where we started. "That's usually who I mean."
"And Lia's the other one?"
"See, you totally remembered." He shifts his weight and the hand he has on my shoulder slips down to squeeze one of my breasts.
"What're you doing?" I ask.
"Nothing, I'm tired...I just like them."
I snort. "Okay then. Should I get the light?"
"Yeah," he says. His eyes are already closed.
I stretch my arm out as far as I can and manage to toggle the light switch. The room goes dark, save the glow from the streetlight outside. Tony rests his chin on my head when I curl back into him.
He makes an "mmm" sound, like he's already half-asleep. Then he says, "I guess we're kind of boring without Amber."
"What?" I pull away, making him let me go. I push myself up to my elbows to glare at him, even though I can barely see him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
He's silent for a second. Then says, "Nothing. I didn't mean anything, I was just being stupid."
I keep glaring at his outline, until something inside me gives and I sigh and flop over onto my stomach, firmly on my own side of the bed.
"Are you pissed at me?" he asks.
"Maybe I won't be in the morning. Go to sleep."
He's silent for a second, then I feel the mattress sink beside me as lies back down. "Okay," he says. "Good night."
I stare at the glowing digital numbers on my clock radio for a long time before I can't keep my eyes open anymore. And I fall asleep too.
...I have a feeling if I let this go another six months, you guys might yell at me. So I'll try not to do that!