An Inexplicable and Useless Urge, Eden/Anne Marie for escritoireazul
Title: An Inexplicable and Useless Urge
Author: thrace_
Recipient: escritoireazul
Fandom: Blue Crush
Pairing: Eden/Anne Marie
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2,230
Summary: Title is from a quote by Matt Warshaw
The mainland is lonelier than Anne Marie ever thought it could be. At least she isn't landlocked in Minnesota with Matt, ten thousand lakes be damned; she reached California and refused to go any further. Her corporate sponsors lease an oceanside apartment for her in Huntington Beach; during the summer she gets down to Newport. She trains, she competes, and she dreams of the end of her contract, when she can go home.
At the time it seemed like a great idea; Penny got a college fund, Eden and Lena could pay a year's rent and maybe put a little aside for Eden's board shop, and Anne Marie got to see the world. Parts of it, anyway. She hasn't even really gone inland, yet. She hugs the coast, traveling down to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego on the odd restless weekend in a rental car. Dutifully, she collects post cards-one each for Penny, Eden, and Lena. She leaves each card blank.
In return, Lena sends her nice letters, usually with a little P.S. by Penny. While Eden only signs her name, Anne Marie notices that Penny's sections are always full of erasures and rewrites, as if someone has gone through and checked them for grammatical errors and misspellings. Eden, with her strange accumulation of learning, cobbled together from PBS, old magazines, and random trips to the library. Eden is at home and there's no one here to push Anne Marie-to really, really push her.
Instead there's the locals, who invite her to a beach party one night after some of them notice her surfing. They have a keg of shitty beer, a pit fire, a little weed, and some raunchy hip hop that apparently has the power to make people grind frantically on whoever happens to be closest. It makes Anne Marie so homesick she trudges down the beach until the music blends with the roaring surf. She takes out her cell phone (also paid for by a sponsor) and calls home, feeling a little buzzed from the alcohol.
This daylight savings thing is a bitch; Anne Marie is still correcting herself about the time difference a dozen phone calls after the changeover. She checks her watch-ten p.m. here, seven p.m. at home. Everyone should be eating dinner.
Lena answers on the second ring. "Hello?"
"It's me," says Anne Marie, surprised to find the pangs of longing for home multiply exponentially. She hears Lena yelling at the other two ("Hey, it's Anne Marie!") and nearly hangs up.
"Girl, you would not believe the shit that happened last weekend," Lena begins. "You know how Drew gets about haoles. There were these tourists from the hotel-oh wait a second, Penny needs to talk to you."
Anne Marie waits as patiently as she can while Lena passes the phone.
"Hey, Anne Marie."
"Hey, Pen," she says as cheerfully as possible.
Penny does not catch on to Anne Marie's tone and immediately tells her in a rush, "You really need to come home. Eden has the biggest bug up her butt and she never comes out of her shed anymore and she-"
Anne Marie hears some scuffling in the background, Penny squeaking out an indignant "Bitch!" and then Eden is on the phone. "Yo, Anne Marie. Don't listen to her. Everything's fine here. You just do your thing and we'll see you at Christmas."
"Yeah, Eden, that's why I called," Anne Marie blurts into the phone. She lowers herself onto the sand, oblivious to the intensifying party to her left or the massive, dark ocean at her feet. "I really miss you guys."
"Your sponsors treating you right?" asks Eden, sounding vaguely curious. There's something in the way she asks it that puts Anne Marie on edge.
"My sponsors are fine. I just-" She's blinded by the sudden glare from a set of headlights, and then she hears a megaphone squawk with that particular piercing quality. "Oh shit, Eden. The cops are here."
"Anne Marie-"
She hangs up and tries to discreetly fade away into the night, but some officer comes jogging through the sand, his flashlight beam hitting her square in the eyes. "I need to see some ID, miss," he says.
She pats her pockets and realizes with a sinking feeling that she left her wallet in her apartment. "I don't have it on me," she says, her stomach starting to churn.
The officer's radio crackles; Anne Marie hears a disembodied voice yell something about marijuana and knows the night has just come to a spectacularly bad end.
*
Fortunately, she didn't have anything to smoke, but the officers still insist on rounding up everyone and carting them all to the station. As if they don't have anything better to do than patrol the beach for an underage drinking party (they probably don't). Anne Marie gets tested for illegal substances and has to blow into a breathalyzer and then give a statement to an officer about how she just mooched a beer off the group, she wasn't really a part of it.
She's stuck in a cell with six of the other party people who are either passed out or are moaning to each other about how their parents are going to kill them. Her time is spent regretting the phone call and catnapping on a bunk, until someone raps on the bars and barks out, "Anne Marie Chadwick!"
She opens her eyes, squints, finds a pasty-faced officer and Eden staring down at her. She sits up, runs a hand through her hair. "Yeah," she says.
"You're free to go." The door opens for her; she steps out quickly, not looking at Eden.
She gets her cell phone and house keys back, and Eden leads her outside, where the sun has just risen.
"What are you doing here?" Anne Marie blurts out.
"What the hell do you think, Anne Marie? You hang up in the middle of a phone call saying cops are here, and then when we try to reach you some officer says you've been arrested?" says Eden brusquely. "Would you rather one of your sponsors had come down here to get you?"
"You flew five hours to bail me out?" asks Anne Marie. She doesn't even mention the money for a plane ticket.
"No bail. They're not pressing charges. Your ID checked out, you tested negative for drugs. End of story," says Eden. She slips on a pair of dark sunglasses and hoists a duffel over her shoulder. "Don't you have some nice little bungalow stashed away or something?"
It's just a couple of miles to Anne Marie's apartment, so they walk, enjoying the mild sunshine and the light breeze. Eden is silent, but Anne Marie can feel her brooding temper building up on itself, sinking deeper and deeper until she's nothing but a dark scowl in a t-shirt and board shorts.
At Anne Marie's home, she tries to start a conversation, but Eden just makes a beeline for the kitchen. She rummages through the fridge, muttering about breakfast and the shitty meal they didn't serve on the flight.
"Eden-"
"You shouldn't have soda. You're in training," says Eden, holding a carton of eggs and some orange juice. She opens up the cabinets one by one, obviously searching for a frying pan.
"Eden, will you stop spazzing and talk to me?" says Anne Marie, slamming the cabinet shut and inserting herself between Eden and the kitchen counter.
Eden shrugs. "What's there to talk about?"
"You. Flying overnight to California. What was Penny talking about, you're 'in the shed' all the time? Are you okay?" asks Anne Marie.
"Are you gonna let me cook us some breakfast, or what?" asks Eden in return.
So Anne Marie watches her scramble some eggs and toast a pile of bread ("You should be eating whole grain, not this white junk.") and cut up some fruit. They sit down to the meal outside, where they can watch the tide come in.
"This place is nice," says Eden a while later, pushing around the last of her eggs.
"Lease runs out when my contract ends," Anne Marie points out.
"I'm just saying, it's nicer than our little shack." Eden stands, stretches. "Feel like training?" she asks.
Anne Marie finally smiles, wide enough to crinkle the corners of her eyes.
*
As soon as their food has settled, Eden sends Anne Marie on a run down the beach. If she's tired from the flight, she doesn't show it. Anne Marie runs harder than she's run in months. Her heart hammers in her chest and she's exhilarated, full of adrenaline-pumped joy with Eden right behind her. For the next few miles nothing else matters. Then they're at the pier, and Anne Marie is desperate for a swim, so she strips down and hits the water with powerful, even strokes. She hears a splash and knows Eden is close by.
She swims out just past the end of the pier, then turns to find Eden a stroke away, treading water and watching her. "Aren't you tired?" she says, feeling the lift and tug of the water, pushing her closer to Eden.
"I'll get tired when you get tired," says Eden.
"I don't believe you," says Anne Marie. She circles Eden slowly. "Race me to the beach. If I win, I want you to tell me what's going on with you."
"And if I win?" asks Eden.
"I'll tell you what I think is going on with you, and you don't have to say a thing."
"Fine," says Eden, already off like a shot.
Anne Marie doesn't even have time to swear; she swims after Eden, all her focus on reaching the beach first. She doesn't realize she's won until her fingers brush sand, and she stumbles ashore. Eden is spare seconds behind her, but she's still behind. She emerges from the ocean, water-sparkling skin a contrast to her scowl, and takes a seat.
Anne Marie sits next to her while they catch their respective breaths, and after a minute, Eden just starts speaking. It's not her way to quibble over a bet. "When you put a lot of effort into something, and then that something is gone, it takes a while to adjust. I'm just finding new ways to spend my energy, Anne Marie."
"My contract is only for a year," says Anne Marie, guilt mixing with a little anger. Didn't she do all this for Eden? Didn't she leave her home and her family to be closer to her sponsors, so Eden could open up her board shop and they could afford more than twinkies at the gas station and Penny could get a real education?
"I'm not blaming you. You just wanted to know what was up in my life," says Eden, shrugging. Now that she's said her piece, she's irritatingly calm.
"Why didn't you ask me not to leave?" asks Anne Marie.
"I didn't know I'd feel this weird about it," Eden retorts.
"Maybe…" Anne Marie pauses, squints at the bright water and the other swimmers. "Maybe I should've asked you to come with me." And she knows now that she's figured it out, what that gut-clenching sense of wrongness has been all this time. She reaches over, takes Eden's hand in hers, and links their fingers. Eden won't look at her, but she squeezes Anne Marie's hand all the same. It's a start, Anne Marie thinks.
*
So Eden stays, and the days blur into a haze of training and competing. Eden knows how to drive her to the crest of perfection and hold her there. She finally wins her first big competition, breaking her streak of placing second or fourth or even not placing at all.
During the day, they train. In the evenings, Eden likes to sit outside and expound on the proper shaping of a quality board, or the kinds of boards she's going to use to open her shop. "That fucker Drew is gonna beg me for a board by the end of the first month," she says with vindictive pleasure, and Anne Marie soaks it all up while she can.
Sometimes they walk along the beach, comparing it to home and sometimes finding it lacking, but mostly enjoying each other's company. Anne Marie misses Lena and Penny too, but Anne Marie is all about surfing right now, and Eden is surfing. They can talk about south swells for an hour and at the end Eden just says, "Let's go back," easy as that.
When Anne Marie ends up kissing Eden, it's in the middle of a diatribe on the waves in New South Wales. They're both lying in the sand, staring up at scudding clouds in the night sky, and Anne Marie knows instinctively it's a good time to roll a quarter turn to her right and plant one on Eden. "My contract is up in two weeks," she says. "Billabong wants me to resign."
"Would you have to stay here?" asks Eden.
"No. There's a bonus if I win Pipeline, so I'd have to go home to train for that," says Anne Marie.
"Home, huh?" says Eden.
"Will you come with me?" asks Anne Marie.
"Shut up," says Eden, and pulls her down for another kiss.
Author: thrace_
Recipient: escritoireazul
Fandom: Blue Crush
Pairing: Eden/Anne Marie
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2,230
Summary: Title is from a quote by Matt Warshaw
The mainland is lonelier than Anne Marie ever thought it could be. At least she isn't landlocked in Minnesota with Matt, ten thousand lakes be damned; she reached California and refused to go any further. Her corporate sponsors lease an oceanside apartment for her in Huntington Beach; during the summer she gets down to Newport. She trains, she competes, and she dreams of the end of her contract, when she can go home.
At the time it seemed like a great idea; Penny got a college fund, Eden and Lena could pay a year's rent and maybe put a little aside for Eden's board shop, and Anne Marie got to see the world. Parts of it, anyway. She hasn't even really gone inland, yet. She hugs the coast, traveling down to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego on the odd restless weekend in a rental car. Dutifully, she collects post cards-one each for Penny, Eden, and Lena. She leaves each card blank.
In return, Lena sends her nice letters, usually with a little P.S. by Penny. While Eden only signs her name, Anne Marie notices that Penny's sections are always full of erasures and rewrites, as if someone has gone through and checked them for grammatical errors and misspellings. Eden, with her strange accumulation of learning, cobbled together from PBS, old magazines, and random trips to the library. Eden is at home and there's no one here to push Anne Marie-to really, really push her.
Instead there's the locals, who invite her to a beach party one night after some of them notice her surfing. They have a keg of shitty beer, a pit fire, a little weed, and some raunchy hip hop that apparently has the power to make people grind frantically on whoever happens to be closest. It makes Anne Marie so homesick she trudges down the beach until the music blends with the roaring surf. She takes out her cell phone (also paid for by a sponsor) and calls home, feeling a little buzzed from the alcohol.
This daylight savings thing is a bitch; Anne Marie is still correcting herself about the time difference a dozen phone calls after the changeover. She checks her watch-ten p.m. here, seven p.m. at home. Everyone should be eating dinner.
Lena answers on the second ring. "Hello?"
"It's me," says Anne Marie, surprised to find the pangs of longing for home multiply exponentially. She hears Lena yelling at the other two ("Hey, it's Anne Marie!") and nearly hangs up.
"Girl, you would not believe the shit that happened last weekend," Lena begins. "You know how Drew gets about haoles. There were these tourists from the hotel-oh wait a second, Penny needs to talk to you."
Anne Marie waits as patiently as she can while Lena passes the phone.
"Hey, Anne Marie."
"Hey, Pen," she says as cheerfully as possible.
Penny does not catch on to Anne Marie's tone and immediately tells her in a rush, "You really need to come home. Eden has the biggest bug up her butt and she never comes out of her shed anymore and she-"
Anne Marie hears some scuffling in the background, Penny squeaking out an indignant "Bitch!" and then Eden is on the phone. "Yo, Anne Marie. Don't listen to her. Everything's fine here. You just do your thing and we'll see you at Christmas."
"Yeah, Eden, that's why I called," Anne Marie blurts into the phone. She lowers herself onto the sand, oblivious to the intensifying party to her left or the massive, dark ocean at her feet. "I really miss you guys."
"Your sponsors treating you right?" asks Eden, sounding vaguely curious. There's something in the way she asks it that puts Anne Marie on edge.
"My sponsors are fine. I just-" She's blinded by the sudden glare from a set of headlights, and then she hears a megaphone squawk with that particular piercing quality. "Oh shit, Eden. The cops are here."
"Anne Marie-"
She hangs up and tries to discreetly fade away into the night, but some officer comes jogging through the sand, his flashlight beam hitting her square in the eyes. "I need to see some ID, miss," he says.
She pats her pockets and realizes with a sinking feeling that she left her wallet in her apartment. "I don't have it on me," she says, her stomach starting to churn.
The officer's radio crackles; Anne Marie hears a disembodied voice yell something about marijuana and knows the night has just come to a spectacularly bad end.
*
Fortunately, she didn't have anything to smoke, but the officers still insist on rounding up everyone and carting them all to the station. As if they don't have anything better to do than patrol the beach for an underage drinking party (they probably don't). Anne Marie gets tested for illegal substances and has to blow into a breathalyzer and then give a statement to an officer about how she just mooched a beer off the group, she wasn't really a part of it.
She's stuck in a cell with six of the other party people who are either passed out or are moaning to each other about how their parents are going to kill them. Her time is spent regretting the phone call and catnapping on a bunk, until someone raps on the bars and barks out, "Anne Marie Chadwick!"
She opens her eyes, squints, finds a pasty-faced officer and Eden staring down at her. She sits up, runs a hand through her hair. "Yeah," she says.
"You're free to go." The door opens for her; she steps out quickly, not looking at Eden.
She gets her cell phone and house keys back, and Eden leads her outside, where the sun has just risen.
"What are you doing here?" Anne Marie blurts out.
"What the hell do you think, Anne Marie? You hang up in the middle of a phone call saying cops are here, and then when we try to reach you some officer says you've been arrested?" says Eden brusquely. "Would you rather one of your sponsors had come down here to get you?"
"You flew five hours to bail me out?" asks Anne Marie. She doesn't even mention the money for a plane ticket.
"No bail. They're not pressing charges. Your ID checked out, you tested negative for drugs. End of story," says Eden. She slips on a pair of dark sunglasses and hoists a duffel over her shoulder. "Don't you have some nice little bungalow stashed away or something?"
It's just a couple of miles to Anne Marie's apartment, so they walk, enjoying the mild sunshine and the light breeze. Eden is silent, but Anne Marie can feel her brooding temper building up on itself, sinking deeper and deeper until she's nothing but a dark scowl in a t-shirt and board shorts.
At Anne Marie's home, she tries to start a conversation, but Eden just makes a beeline for the kitchen. She rummages through the fridge, muttering about breakfast and the shitty meal they didn't serve on the flight.
"Eden-"
"You shouldn't have soda. You're in training," says Eden, holding a carton of eggs and some orange juice. She opens up the cabinets one by one, obviously searching for a frying pan.
"Eden, will you stop spazzing and talk to me?" says Anne Marie, slamming the cabinet shut and inserting herself between Eden and the kitchen counter.
Eden shrugs. "What's there to talk about?"
"You. Flying overnight to California. What was Penny talking about, you're 'in the shed' all the time? Are you okay?" asks Anne Marie.
"Are you gonna let me cook us some breakfast, or what?" asks Eden in return.
So Anne Marie watches her scramble some eggs and toast a pile of bread ("You should be eating whole grain, not this white junk.") and cut up some fruit. They sit down to the meal outside, where they can watch the tide come in.
"This place is nice," says Eden a while later, pushing around the last of her eggs.
"Lease runs out when my contract ends," Anne Marie points out.
"I'm just saying, it's nicer than our little shack." Eden stands, stretches. "Feel like training?" she asks.
Anne Marie finally smiles, wide enough to crinkle the corners of her eyes.
*
As soon as their food has settled, Eden sends Anne Marie on a run down the beach. If she's tired from the flight, she doesn't show it. Anne Marie runs harder than she's run in months. Her heart hammers in her chest and she's exhilarated, full of adrenaline-pumped joy with Eden right behind her. For the next few miles nothing else matters. Then they're at the pier, and Anne Marie is desperate for a swim, so she strips down and hits the water with powerful, even strokes. She hears a splash and knows Eden is close by.
She swims out just past the end of the pier, then turns to find Eden a stroke away, treading water and watching her. "Aren't you tired?" she says, feeling the lift and tug of the water, pushing her closer to Eden.
"I'll get tired when you get tired," says Eden.
"I don't believe you," says Anne Marie. She circles Eden slowly. "Race me to the beach. If I win, I want you to tell me what's going on with you."
"And if I win?" asks Eden.
"I'll tell you what I think is going on with you, and you don't have to say a thing."
"Fine," says Eden, already off like a shot.
Anne Marie doesn't even have time to swear; she swims after Eden, all her focus on reaching the beach first. She doesn't realize she's won until her fingers brush sand, and she stumbles ashore. Eden is spare seconds behind her, but she's still behind. She emerges from the ocean, water-sparkling skin a contrast to her scowl, and takes a seat.
Anne Marie sits next to her while they catch their respective breaths, and after a minute, Eden just starts speaking. It's not her way to quibble over a bet. "When you put a lot of effort into something, and then that something is gone, it takes a while to adjust. I'm just finding new ways to spend my energy, Anne Marie."
"My contract is only for a year," says Anne Marie, guilt mixing with a little anger. Didn't she do all this for Eden? Didn't she leave her home and her family to be closer to her sponsors, so Eden could open up her board shop and they could afford more than twinkies at the gas station and Penny could get a real education?
"I'm not blaming you. You just wanted to know what was up in my life," says Eden, shrugging. Now that she's said her piece, she's irritatingly calm.
"Why didn't you ask me not to leave?" asks Anne Marie.
"I didn't know I'd feel this weird about it," Eden retorts.
"Maybe…" Anne Marie pauses, squints at the bright water and the other swimmers. "Maybe I should've asked you to come with me." And she knows now that she's figured it out, what that gut-clenching sense of wrongness has been all this time. She reaches over, takes Eden's hand in hers, and links their fingers. Eden won't look at her, but she squeezes Anne Marie's hand all the same. It's a start, Anne Marie thinks.
*
So Eden stays, and the days blur into a haze of training and competing. Eden knows how to drive her to the crest of perfection and hold her there. She finally wins her first big competition, breaking her streak of placing second or fourth or even not placing at all.
During the day, they train. In the evenings, Eden likes to sit outside and expound on the proper shaping of a quality board, or the kinds of boards she's going to use to open her shop. "That fucker Drew is gonna beg me for a board by the end of the first month," she says with vindictive pleasure, and Anne Marie soaks it all up while she can.
Sometimes they walk along the beach, comparing it to home and sometimes finding it lacking, but mostly enjoying each other's company. Anne Marie misses Lena and Penny too, but Anne Marie is all about surfing right now, and Eden is surfing. They can talk about south swells for an hour and at the end Eden just says, "Let's go back," easy as that.
When Anne Marie ends up kissing Eden, it's in the middle of a diatribe on the waves in New South Wales. They're both lying in the sand, staring up at scudding clouds in the night sky, and Anne Marie knows instinctively it's a good time to roll a quarter turn to her right and plant one on Eden. "My contract is up in two weeks," she says. "Billabong wants me to resign."
"Would you have to stay here?" asks Eden.
"No. There's a bonus if I win Pipeline, so I'd have to go home to train for that," says Anne Marie.
"Home, huh?" says Eden.
"Will you come with me?" asks Anne Marie.
"Shut up," says Eden, and pulls her down for another kiss.