For aimtomiss's birthday:
His parents buy the car well before his sixteenth birthday, so it's no surprise that he doesn't bother with a license. He's always had the desire to push the limits on laws. And even with your father pulling him over he seems to worm his way out of tickets.
Lilly's dumped him again, the third time this month, but she's not around when he asks if you want a ride home so you accept. Lianne is late again and you know you should worry, but it's becoming a theme in your life, now--Dad at work, Mom gone missing for hours at a time. You've been letting yourself in the door of a dark house all school year.
So you climb into the bright yellow tin can he drives with the raw energy of every teenage boy and let him drive you home.
It's a quiet ride, he doesn't even bother with the sound system that cost more than your house, and you know that it's eating at him, this latest break-up. Even Duncan's been giving him the cold shoulder, for no reason that makes sense to you. Not that Duncan been making much sense at all, lately.
He pulls up outside your house and you're half-way out of the car when he asks, "do you think she'll come around?"
"She always does," you remind him. "Give her time."
She talks during movies, at a lick that doesn't bother itself with punctuation or sentence structure. It used to drive him crazy, but he's mostly learned to tune it out, now, and focus instead on the way her breath gusts against the inside of his ear as she leans in close enough to whisper.
Tonight he keeps one ear focused on the words, though, because she's translating for him from Japanese.
He's not sure why they're even at this movie, except that she'd wanted to see it and he'd said yes before he could bother to think about it. She's got that affect on him these days, it seems, a talent for mind control or, at least, the power of suggestion. There aren't even subtitles and sometimes he can't tell which characters are men and which are women. He's not completely sure they're even human.
But she's enjoying it--how he doesn't know because she never seems to be paying attention to the movie (but then she's always been good at multi-tasking, hasn't she?). The translation is pouring out of her with a grin attached and he wonders how she keeps all of those languages in there, packed so tight that the words don't rearrange themselves or co-mingle. So much language crammed into the drawers of her brain.
"Taylor," he says, finally, turning to face her in the near-empty theatre, "shut up." He pulls her face to his with his palm against her jaw and presses their lips together. When he pulls away her eyes are closed like that first time he kissed her. "Just enjoy the movie."