Original piece
This is a part of something more. Original fic.
This morning the sun bleeds between the slits in the blinds, pours over Lua’s skin, marks it like cracked porcelain. There’s week-old eyeliner thick and desperate beneath lashes and lids and Jonah could sing about the contrast, could write for years about moments like this, about Lua’s glass eyes and plastic heart.
Shadows dance across the far wall and Jonah counts the minutes, breathes numbers into the bedroom and ignores Lua’s shift, the way the mattress rolls and the springs whine.
Jonah’s too tall for this bed and his feet dangle off the end, bare and cool and the fan beats air between his toes. He shivers and Lua’s eyes flicker open like dying light bulbs, pull apart like curtains and her eyes, they’ve always been identical pools of shit-brown.
“Insomnia?” she whispers, and her voice is coarse, sleep-ridden, bidden, but he appreciates the way her hands settle around his waist, the way she moves her head to fall against his chest.
“No,” he says, and he’s clearer, firmer, been awake longer. “Just not tired.”
“’course,” she moves her head, eyes him up through her fringe. “My mistake.”
The silence isn’t so much uncomfortable as it is stifling, not so much tense as it is desperate attempts at alright. Jonah counts the seconds, minutes, watches the cracks in the ceiling and tastes last nights dinner in the back of his throat, biting at his stomach, clawing at his oesophagus.
Somewhere, Lua laughs and its coarse and shallow, enough for her to dig her fingers into his arms, to bury her face in his chest. “Thing about love,” she says, “is that it’s supposed to stick around in the morning.”
“Wasn’t a threesome,” Jonah mumbles and Lua casts him a quirked brow and pursed lips, flashes him brown eyes. “It was Jonah and Lua sex,” he elaborates, “not Jonah, Lua and Love sex.”
“Not a threesome,” Lua agrees. “Sorta was hoping we were making it though, huh?”
Lua’s hair is longer than he remembers, it inches past her shoulders, curls around her collar bone, her breasts and he reaches to tug some of it behind her ears. It’s thick in his fingers, soft and static, threads of chocolate, timber, bark.
“I know about the red-head,” she says. “She’s pretty.”
“It’s not-”
“What I think? Jonah, you don’t know what I’m thinking. You haven’t known what I’ve been thinking for a long time.”
Jonah sighs, breathes out into the stale air and Lua‘s watching him with half-lidded eyes. “That’s not true.”
“Yes it is,” she replies, and it’s forced something between them, makes silence shower down like rain, snow, hail and Jonah can’t get his mouth around the words, can’t bring himself to say anything until Lua rolls onto her back. She stares at the ceilings like it has answers, like it’s goddamn 42.
“Are we gonna talk about it?” he murmurs, when the silence has become too all consuming, stifling, choking.
Lua turns to stare at him again, lips set in a grimace. “Would you listen? Would you care?”
Dishonesty is useless at this stage, pointless, so when he says, “I don’t know,” he means it.
Lua just casts him an amused look, but she sighs still, draws patterns in the sheets with tired fingers and he wonders when she stopped being all he needed.
“Thing is,” she says, “thing is, we’re clinging to different things.”
He doesn’t quite know how to respond to that, what to say, think, feel. “What?”
“I don’t know,” she says, “You’re thinking with your boy-bits, testosterone, everything linked to the part of you that wants to orgasm. I’m thinking with everything else.”
Lua won’t look at him anymore, will only gaze anywhere but and she’s staring at the ceiling, the walls, through the cracks in the blinds and Jonah’s not sure if this makes it easier or harder. “Don’t we even out?”
She laughs at that, but there’s nothing behind it, hollow to the ear and he, his breath catches in the butterfly net of his throat.
“If this was story-book, then maybe,” she says.
“But it’s not.”
“No,” it’s abrupt, it’s a finishing point, an ending and Jonah wishes it was less The End and more Happily Ever After.
“You might want it,” Lua continues, “this, but your dick’s not ready for monogamy.”
“I love you,” and the words tumble out like an overstuffed closet, letters and syllables that overflow, thoughts that can’t quite stay in anymore.
“I know,” she says, “but sometimes that’s not enough.”
Jonah sits up enough to lean over her, to kiss her and Lua lets him, but it’s wrong and he hates that she doesn’t feel like home anymore, that her fingers on his arm, on his chest, head, thighs, that it doesn’t fit like it used to.