you're too young & eager to love (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
impertinences) wrote2022-08-01 03:24 pm
impertinences) wrote2022-08-01 03:24 pm
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3rd writing session piece, and let's just call it a wash. I may be misusing this phrase. The point is that Luke and Haven deserved better from me today, and I did not rise to the occasion. So sorry, my darlings.
Here are two sections of a piece that are crammed together despite not fitting in ANY way. My brain broke.
--
Stay away from the ones you love too much.
These are the ones who will kill you.
- Donna Tartt
“I love you,” she says into his mouth, her fingers against the back of his head with her nails like talons gripping his neck. Luke swallows those words like he swallows her spit and the taste of beer on her tongue.
By the time he’s done kissing her, her lips will be swollen, but it’s the aching bruised feeling between her thighs that Haven will be most proud of. Haven is like that: she appreciates pain, she sees it as a badge, a thing to be carried, and the longer you can carry it the stronger you are. She’s been shouldering a series of sleights and heartaches and grudges since before puberty, so her endurance is impressive. It’s a mental thing, she knows, this ability to persevere and prosper despite hardship, to make lemonade from the world’s most bitter lemons. Not everyone has it. Sometimes, she has even doubted Luke. He’s not as strong as she is, which is why he’s always needed to be coaxed, to be lured, to be quelled.
After they’ve battered each other, pushing the boundaries of their spirit and their bones, she lays across him like snake-skin. Their chests are together, slick with sweat, and she’s still straddling him, her knees on the outsides of his thighs and chafed red from the cheap carpet. There’s that pleasant ocean sound in her ears from her heart and pulsing blood, but there’s his breathing too, mingled with hers. With her face turned into his neck, she can feel each breath he takes. She counts them until she reaches ten.
Haven tilts her head up and bites his earlobe.
It’s too hard, and Luke sucks in a hiss with surprise, jerking his head to the left.
She laughs, her grin like a knife against his jaw when she nestles back into his space. One of his hands strokes the small of her back lazily.
When she turned seven, Sam Elders took a Walmart-brand ice-cream cake from the freezer and sat it in the center of their kitchen table. It was a vanilla flavored dome of white and yellow frosting with rainbow sugar confetti decorating the top, and the summer heat was already causing the edges to melt because that was the year their AC had broken. Haven can still remember how loud the plastic protective shield had been when Sam had broken the sticker seal and pulled apart the cover. It hadn’t seemed right, the loudness of that thin, cheap plastic.
She could smell the cake immediately. Without a working air conditioner, all the unclean smells of the house had seeped to the surface, and the air was thick and stale; the cake was the first fresh thing she had smelled in a week.
“Good girls get cake on their birthday,” her father had told her, his voice only slightly slurred.
“I didn’t get cake last year,” Haven said.
“Well you mustn’t have been very good last year, but this year, this year you were great.”
Brandishing an old butter knife in one hand, Sam eyed a slice then cut out a piece of the cake. It was a thick triangle, much too big for a seven year old, with a solid inch and a half of ice cream between two layers of vanilla cake. Haven watched with a pang of disappointment as he cut the slice in half before flopping both pieces on separate paper plates. He took the larger of the pieces, then he pushed hers towards her across the table, and she ate the cake with her fingers.
“If I’m really good today,” she asked, licking the frosting from the corner of her mouth, “can I have another piece?”
“Two pieces of cake in one day? Nobody’s that good,” he said.
“I’ll have Luke’s piece then. He won’t care.”
“Luke isn’t getting a piece.”
“Why not?”
Sam had eaten his cake in three bites. He’d washed it down with his leftover beer, and he took another swallow before answering his daughter. “It’s not his birthday, for one, and for the other…” he shrugged, leaving the thought unfinished.
Haven eyed the cake. It sat like a beacon, melting in the center of the table. Her mouth was still cold and sweet from her slice. “He wasn’t very good?”
“When is he ever?” her father had responded with a scornful sneer, and even then Haven hadn’t been able to understand Sam’s disapproval of Luke. Luke was nearly two years older than her, still a child himself, but it was Luke who usually made her breakfast and made sure she washed her face and brushed her teeth before they left to wait for the school bus each morning. It was Luke who held her hand when they crossed the street, and Luke who made sure their brown paper bags were full of snacks that they could share during lunch time. If Luke hadn’t been good, then she didn’t know how she could have been.
Haven had wanted to save him a slice anyway (she knew her father wouldn’t remember the cake by the next day, and it would sit in the back of their leaky freezer until it became freezer burned and inedible), but Sam had tossed the whole thing into the trash with a look of disgust. He’d left the kitchen drinking his beer, and Haven couldn’t remember the taste of the cake an hour later. It had felt like something to mourn, but she hadn’t.
Here are two sections of a piece that are crammed together despite not fitting in ANY way. My brain broke.
--
Stay away from the ones you love too much.
These are the ones who will kill you.
- Donna Tartt
“I love you,” she says into his mouth, her fingers against the back of his head with her nails like talons gripping his neck. Luke swallows those words like he swallows her spit and the taste of beer on her tongue.
By the time he’s done kissing her, her lips will be swollen, but it’s the aching bruised feeling between her thighs that Haven will be most proud of. Haven is like that: she appreciates pain, she sees it as a badge, a thing to be carried, and the longer you can carry it the stronger you are. She’s been shouldering a series of sleights and heartaches and grudges since before puberty, so her endurance is impressive. It’s a mental thing, she knows, this ability to persevere and prosper despite hardship, to make lemonade from the world’s most bitter lemons. Not everyone has it. Sometimes, she has even doubted Luke. He’s not as strong as she is, which is why he’s always needed to be coaxed, to be lured, to be quelled.
After they’ve battered each other, pushing the boundaries of their spirit and their bones, she lays across him like snake-skin. Their chests are together, slick with sweat, and she’s still straddling him, her knees on the outsides of his thighs and chafed red from the cheap carpet. There’s that pleasant ocean sound in her ears from her heart and pulsing blood, but there’s his breathing too, mingled with hers. With her face turned into his neck, she can feel each breath he takes. She counts them until she reaches ten.
Haven tilts her head up and bites his earlobe.
It’s too hard, and Luke sucks in a hiss with surprise, jerking his head to the left.
She laughs, her grin like a knife against his jaw when she nestles back into his space. One of his hands strokes the small of her back lazily.
When she turned seven, Sam Elders took a Walmart-brand ice-cream cake from the freezer and sat it in the center of their kitchen table. It was a vanilla flavored dome of white and yellow frosting with rainbow sugar confetti decorating the top, and the summer heat was already causing the edges to melt because that was the year their AC had broken. Haven can still remember how loud the plastic protective shield had been when Sam had broken the sticker seal and pulled apart the cover. It hadn’t seemed right, the loudness of that thin, cheap plastic.
She could smell the cake immediately. Without a working air conditioner, all the unclean smells of the house had seeped to the surface, and the air was thick and stale; the cake was the first fresh thing she had smelled in a week.
“Good girls get cake on their birthday,” her father had told her, his voice only slightly slurred.
“I didn’t get cake last year,” Haven said.
“Well you mustn’t have been very good last year, but this year, this year you were great.”
Brandishing an old butter knife in one hand, Sam eyed a slice then cut out a piece of the cake. It was a thick triangle, much too big for a seven year old, with a solid inch and a half of ice cream between two layers of vanilla cake. Haven watched with a pang of disappointment as he cut the slice in half before flopping both pieces on separate paper plates. He took the larger of the pieces, then he pushed hers towards her across the table, and she ate the cake with her fingers.
“If I’m really good today,” she asked, licking the frosting from the corner of her mouth, “can I have another piece?”
“Two pieces of cake in one day? Nobody’s that good,” he said.
“I’ll have Luke’s piece then. He won’t care.”
“Luke isn’t getting a piece.”
“Why not?”
Sam had eaten his cake in three bites. He’d washed it down with his leftover beer, and he took another swallow before answering his daughter. “It’s not his birthday, for one, and for the other…” he shrugged, leaving the thought unfinished.
Haven eyed the cake. It sat like a beacon, melting in the center of the table. Her mouth was still cold and sweet from her slice. “He wasn’t very good?”
“When is he ever?” her father had responded with a scornful sneer, and even then Haven hadn’t been able to understand Sam’s disapproval of Luke. Luke was nearly two years older than her, still a child himself, but it was Luke who usually made her breakfast and made sure she washed her face and brushed her teeth before they left to wait for the school bus each morning. It was Luke who held her hand when they crossed the street, and Luke who made sure their brown paper bags were full of snacks that they could share during lunch time. If Luke hadn’t been good, then she didn’t know how she could have been.
Haven had wanted to save him a slice anyway (she knew her father wouldn’t remember the cake by the next day, and it would sit in the back of their leaky freezer until it became freezer burned and inedible), but Sam had tossed the whole thing into the trash with a look of disgust. He’d left the kitchen drinking his beer, and Haven couldn’t remember the taste of the cake an hour later. It had felt like something to mourn, but she hadn’t.