sunday_reveries what feels like need...
Title: Feels like Need
Note: Based on a quote prompt at sunday_reveries. Zoe and John and mentions of Zoe's mother.
I wish I had a roof over my bed to pull down on my head when I feel damned by wanting you so much it looks like need.
--Marilyn Hacker
Zoe is lying on her bed, naked, and wrapped in blankets, and the cold has finally left her.
John lies beside her.
She thought that he had been lost this past year, thought that for all her hoping that she would never see him again.
People are ripped from you.
People let you down.
People leave you on your table at breakfast, crying while trying to fix your daughter a bowl of cereal.
She is not her mother, but she watched her mother with her need for men, one after the other. None of them ever made her happy for long, but her happiness seemed dependent on the man that she was with.
Eventually, they would leave her. They would let her down.
Zoe remained, and by the time she was a teenager, she was fixing her mother breakfast instead, settling into bed with her for the weekend, and sharing a carton of ice cream with her.
When she wasn't yelling at her for falling into the same traps.
Zoe had a temper when she was a teenager, and she most frequently unleashed it on her male peers and her mother. She would yell. You know what's going to happen! It happens everytime! Stop making excuses for him and end it before it hurts you
Her mother would look off in the distance, not a broken woman (and that's the thing is that her mother wasn't weak) before looking back at Zoe. I need him.
And she would think it and think it until it burned in her head and in her heart.
I will never need anyone.
I will never need a man.
I will always be able to take care of myself and find my own happiness.
For so long, she has done exactly this, but when she looks at John as he lies across from her and he looks at her like that, she has this feeling that bubbles up in her chest, this want that feels so achingly and terrifyingly like need.
A year without him, she was not the same. She was not completely Zoe. She wasn't a broken mess lying in her bed and crying every night with a tub of ice cream. She did not give up on living in the year that he was gone. She stepped out of her room, out of the bar. She took care of herself and of Sonny and of those she loved.
But she was not the same.
Zoe looks at him and reaches for him out of need. He would never let her down like her mother had been let down but life is fragile especially in the city. Something could take him again as easily as he was taken before, but she reaches for him and kisses him with that feeling bubbling up in her chest, he smiles against her lips, rough hands against her neck, and she feels both damned and blessed for the needing.
Note: Based on a quote prompt at sunday_reveries. Zoe and John and mentions of Zoe's mother.
I wish I had a roof over my bed to pull down on my head when I feel damned by wanting you so much it looks like need.
--Marilyn Hacker
Zoe is lying on her bed, naked, and wrapped in blankets, and the cold has finally left her.
John lies beside her.
She thought that he had been lost this past year, thought that for all her hoping that she would never see him again.
People are ripped from you.
People let you down.
People leave you on your table at breakfast, crying while trying to fix your daughter a bowl of cereal.
She is not her mother, but she watched her mother with her need for men, one after the other. None of them ever made her happy for long, but her happiness seemed dependent on the man that she was with.
Eventually, they would leave her. They would let her down.
Zoe remained, and by the time she was a teenager, she was fixing her mother breakfast instead, settling into bed with her for the weekend, and sharing a carton of ice cream with her.
When she wasn't yelling at her for falling into the same traps.
Zoe had a temper when she was a teenager, and she most frequently unleashed it on her male peers and her mother. She would yell. You know what's going to happen! It happens everytime! Stop making excuses for him and end it before it hurts you
Her mother would look off in the distance, not a broken woman (and that's the thing is that her mother wasn't weak) before looking back at Zoe. I need him.
And she would think it and think it until it burned in her head and in her heart.
I will never need anyone.
I will never need a man.
I will always be able to take care of myself and find my own happiness.
For so long, she has done exactly this, but when she looks at John as he lies across from her and he looks at her like that, she has this feeling that bubbles up in her chest, this want that feels so achingly and terrifyingly like need.
A year without him, she was not the same. She was not completely Zoe. She wasn't a broken mess lying in her bed and crying every night with a tub of ice cream. She did not give up on living in the year that he was gone. She stepped out of her room, out of the bar. She took care of herself and of Sonny and of those she loved.
But she was not the same.
Zoe looks at him and reaches for him out of need. He would never let her down like her mother had been let down but life is fragile especially in the city. Something could take him again as easily as he was taken before, but she reaches for him and kisses him with that feeling bubbling up in her chest, he smiles against her lips, rough hands against her neck, and she feels both damned and blessed for the needing.