Scrambled East Eggs
Title: Scrambled East Eggs
Characters: Serena/Tripp
Rating/Word Count: PG-13/570
One-Line Excerpt: All dressed up with no one to fuck.
Serena’s got a thing for Jay Gatsby.
Not the self-made man stuff or the dying in a pool or all that crap about boats beaten ceaselessly against the whatever whatever of history. That she’ll willingly leave to her eighth-grade English teacher. That’s the kind of stuff that gives Dan a literary boner.
But the green light is Serena’s. That flick-flick-flick at the end of the dock and the man who stands and watches and dreams of a blonde with money in her voice. Years and years of dreaming. Years and years of waiting.
That’s fucking hot.
So when he looks at her and his eyes glow with the light of burning cities and torched marriages and snap-crackle-popping political careers in flames, what can she do but follow him out to the east end of Long Island? The Freedom Trail via Land Rover. Shangri-La in a Sag Harbor “farmhouse” with a long, weathered-gray dock stretching to the Bay.
In summer, fireflies light up the water. She remembers warm early evenings on an unrolled Indian blanket, Nate or Blair by her side and the sky alive with twinkling insects, yellow-green lights spanning the length of the lawn. But now it’s November and the bugs are all dead. The tourists are gone, the streets are dark, and the only light she can see from the kitchen window is the reflection of the wrought-iron chandelier hanging over the rustic oak table. She sits with her elbows against the wood, a flashlight on the bench beside her, staring at the door to the basement.
Maybe she should go back to the library. Pick a good book, put on some flannel pjs, curl up in bed and enjoy the rain on the roof.
But the books smell like mildewed paper and Nate’s special chronic and she wouldn’t have brought flannel pjs with her even if she owned a pair, which leaves her curling-up options as either a plunging red-satin camisole (no bottoms) or Tripp’s shirt from the night before.
All dressed up with no one to fuck.
She pushes back from the table, grabs the flashlight, and stands, hoping she’ll hear tires on gravel as she moves. An owl hoots somewhere in the trees. Dry leaves crackle like tissue paper in a Barney’s box. The old house settles with a creak and a hum.
She could be in bed now-they could be in bed now-the nightworld constricted to the borders of the four-post bed and the boundary of the counterpane. The heat of naked bodies fucking, of his eyes scorching her skin with their intensity, could keep the autumn chill at bay.
(A tiny voice wonders if maybe that’s the problem with this whole Gatsby-and-Daisy scenario. It’s a lot easier to stare at green lights when your alternative is sleeping alone. Warm bodies in beds-despite their definite perks-tend to complicate the issue.)
But Serena has now spent four hours in a cold kitchen waiting for Tripp, which is four hours more than she lets herself wait for any man. As she shakes her hair back from her shoulders, flips on the flashlight, and prepares to brave the basement’s mice and rats and hypothetical tarantulas, she’s sure of one thing:
If Jay Gatsby left Daisy all alone in a two-hundred-year-old house for twenty-four hours in the middle of November, he would remember to turn on the fucking boiler before he went.
Characters: Serena/Tripp
Rating/Word Count: PG-13/570
One-Line Excerpt: All dressed up with no one to fuck.
Serena’s got a thing for Jay Gatsby.
Not the self-made man stuff or the dying in a pool or all that crap about boats beaten ceaselessly against the whatever whatever of history. That she’ll willingly leave to her eighth-grade English teacher. That’s the kind of stuff that gives Dan a literary boner.
But the green light is Serena’s. That flick-flick-flick at the end of the dock and the man who stands and watches and dreams of a blonde with money in her voice. Years and years of dreaming. Years and years of waiting.
That’s fucking hot.
So when he looks at her and his eyes glow with the light of burning cities and torched marriages and snap-crackle-popping political careers in flames, what can she do but follow him out to the east end of Long Island? The Freedom Trail via Land Rover. Shangri-La in a Sag Harbor “farmhouse” with a long, weathered-gray dock stretching to the Bay.
In summer, fireflies light up the water. She remembers warm early evenings on an unrolled Indian blanket, Nate or Blair by her side and the sky alive with twinkling insects, yellow-green lights spanning the length of the lawn. But now it’s November and the bugs are all dead. The tourists are gone, the streets are dark, and the only light she can see from the kitchen window is the reflection of the wrought-iron chandelier hanging over the rustic oak table. She sits with her elbows against the wood, a flashlight on the bench beside her, staring at the door to the basement.
Maybe she should go back to the library. Pick a good book, put on some flannel pjs, curl up in bed and enjoy the rain on the roof.
But the books smell like mildewed paper and Nate’s special chronic and she wouldn’t have brought flannel pjs with her even if she owned a pair, which leaves her curling-up options as either a plunging red-satin camisole (no bottoms) or Tripp’s shirt from the night before.
All dressed up with no one to fuck.
She pushes back from the table, grabs the flashlight, and stands, hoping she’ll hear tires on gravel as she moves. An owl hoots somewhere in the trees. Dry leaves crackle like tissue paper in a Barney’s box. The old house settles with a creak and a hum.
She could be in bed now-they could be in bed now-the nightworld constricted to the borders of the four-post bed and the boundary of the counterpane. The heat of naked bodies fucking, of his eyes scorching her skin with their intensity, could keep the autumn chill at bay.
(A tiny voice wonders if maybe that’s the problem with this whole Gatsby-and-Daisy scenario. It’s a lot easier to stare at green lights when your alternative is sleeping alone. Warm bodies in beds-despite their definite perks-tend to complicate the issue.)
But Serena has now spent four hours in a cold kitchen waiting for Tripp, which is four hours more than she lets herself wait for any man. As she shakes her hair back from her shoulders, flips on the flashlight, and prepares to brave the basement’s mice and rats and hypothetical tarantulas, she’s sure of one thing:
If Jay Gatsby left Daisy all alone in a two-hundred-year-old house for twenty-four hours in the middle of November, he would remember to turn on the fucking boiler before he went.