you're too young & eager to love

I am alive! (I always say that like the old black and white Dr. Frankenstein does.)

It's been so long since I've written anything original rather than fandom-based. I don't know how good this is. I should have written adult!Emere rather than teen!Emere, but whatever, I went with my muse. My untrustworthy muse. 1015 words. Woohoo. I feel like I start adopting the style of whatever author I'm currently reading frequently, so this doesn't seem like my usual writing tone. Or mayheps I have not written in so long that I couldn't find my usual writing tone. Either works as an explanation.

As usual, I'm too lazy for a cut.

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“Do you think mom is pretty?”
Emere turns her head, eyes Brando as they lounge on top of the unwashed sheets of his bed, his small television set flickering from a bad antenna connection. She considers spitting at him but instead she swats at him with her foot. He catches it, strokes a hand not as dark as hers down her skin.
“Desperation is never attractive,” she murmurs, rolling away, onto her back and closing her eyes. The pictures there, in the darkness of her mind, are foggy. She’s still a little stoned from smoking with Maine after school. The pot smell lingers in her hair.
“You shouldn’t hate her so much.” Her brother says after a moment, offering advice in a tone traced with sadness, a grief he had long before she finally paused enough to take notice of it. In some ways, he’s more broken than she will ever be. “Hating her makes you no better than she is.”
For a moment, Emere thinks of climbing over him, ghosting kisses across his face and neck, stroking a hand down his chest, dusky fingers in dark hair. Instead, she stays quiet and rolls off the bed. Quickly, she presses a kiss to his temple, hard, not nearly sweet enough, and she cannot tell him. She hardly thinks herself better than her mother.


Cale must be what happens when a serpent mates with a lion. He has eyes of shifting cunning and a predator’s grin. But his thoughts are simple, if not altogether innocent. Watching Emere smoking a cigarette next to her brother’s old truck, he thinks: she is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. He will never be intuitive enough to know that it is her terror and her grief and her rage that draws him to her. Instead, she must simply be beautiful. If Emere had known, she would have hated him even more. Her thoughts were never so simple.
Brando notices the way Cale watches his sister. All but his eyes are silent.


After their date, Cale walks her back to her home. It’s an awkward word for the rusty trailer, but it’s all she has. Emere’s dress is short, her makeup smudged, and she trembles a little from cold and rage alike. Cale’s voice mocks the shells of her ears while her dark hair covers the scar on her shoulder from where he once pushed her too fiercely against a broken window. When they reach the side of the trailer, he takes her by the wrist, and the touch stops them both. Or it stops her, because he leans forward and captures her mouth, lacking all the necessary warmth. The world is dark, and he pushes her against the old aluminum siding, shoves his hands into her loose curls.
Kissing him has always felt like falling in love. Or being shot.
Emere wraps her legs around his waist; he holds her aloft, struggling with buckles and belts and the easily torn lace between her legs. Her moans sound like butterflies stretching out and dying on the gravel around them.

When she finally stumbles inside, kicking her heels off unceremoniously, she smells of stale sweat and her thighs are sticky. She is a lean shadow in a narrow, confined space. Her mother, blessedly, is not home. Brando is, however. She can hear his music playing. She pours two glasses of gin from the bottle hidden beneath the bathroom sink before carrying them to his room. Emere keeps hers, but pushes her hand through his makeshift door, the curtain parting to reveal her wrist and the jingle and swirl of alcohol and ice shivering in a glass.
Brando looks up once, eyes dark, then turns the volume up on his radio. His boss from the junkyard gave it to him as an early Christmas present; he’s been grateful more than once for the sound.
Emere steps in anyway. She is not the type to depend on invitations. She places the drink down next to him, loudly and with suggestion, before sitting on the edge of his bed. The mattress is small and worn. It’s starting to dip in the middle. She runs her palm over the indention, tracing the curve of space, and swallows her gin until the taste of juniper makes her cringe. “You should sleep with me.”
“Let me guess. Because I’m the only guy in town who hasn’t?” Seventeen years old, but all the anger in his voice makes Brando sound like a man.
His sister laughs. “No. I meant because of your mattress.”
“It’s fine.”
“Fine. Everything to you is fine. Must be your favorite word.” She rolls her eyes, finishes her drink, then curls her body around outline of the dip in the bed. Her dress rides up on her thighs. Her hair spills against the side of her face, brushing over her swollen mouth. Brando’s shoulders are very tight, she realizes, the solid square shape of him far more adult than she would have thought. “Are you going to drink that?”
In response, he pours the drink out his window. The gin trails down the siding, mixing with the marks on the aluminum she made with her back moments before. Brando knows what pain is. But, in a way, he thinks everyone does. Everyone hurts and everyone’s lives are a mess. He knows what pain is. But he thinks there might be a difference between the physical and the emotional, he thinks, but then he watches Emere make another drink and knows it’s all the same.


Still, he falls asleep next to her. She didn’t wash her makeup off and her dress is wrinkled in the morning. When the sun breaks into the room, Emere yawns into his shoulder, already feeling an ache between her legs and a headache near her temples. She rubs at her eyes and the hard curve of Brando’s shoulder moves beneath her open mouth. Still soft with sleep, his hand slips down her side absently.
They are little more than bickering fools, but they can’t seem to keep their legs untangled.

I truly believe that Game of Thrones is the best universe for smutty-minded fandom-writers. There is a plethora of characters to pair together and, subsequently, write about. I am addicted. I have plans upon plans upon plans! I need a white board to keep track of all the characters, though.

-



Jon had never seen Ygritte shake before.
He had seen her stand, longer than most grown men, glaring and strong in the hard winds without even the tips of her fingers trembling. They had walked for days, headed to the Lord of Bones first, and even with the hood of her cloak pulled high the loose strands of her coppery hair had whipped across her cheeks, catching near the corner of her mouth. While his mouth blistered from the merciless frosted air, her mouth was pale and soft and somehow unlike the lips of other women. Noble or baseborn, it made no difference in his mind. He blamed, foolishly, her distinct way of smiling – more like an animal’s taunt than a smile at all. Mostly, he blamed himself for never having stopped to really look at a woman’s lips before. Now hers would be in his thoughts, unceasingly.
Before he had been made a prisoner, and much before he had been offered the choice of freedom behind the Wall, the Old Bear had told him about the wildlings and their King. With his raven chattering for corn in the drafty tower Jon had become so familiar with, Mormont had rubbed his strong jaw and given Ned Stark’s bastard a meaningful stare. “The wildlings, they have too much spirit and not enough pride. They’re likely to sell their first born if it would guarantee saving their head. May The Old Gods and the New grant mercy on the man foolish enough to try to claim one of those women. They’re nothing but ice and forest.”
Honor, Jon thinks now, must be different than pride.
And besides, there are no Gods behind the Wall.