fic: repetition: a commonly used rhetorical device (rpf au) (2/3)
8.
OCTOBER 14
Kat, despite her waitress salary, plans a long weekend visiting friends out in Los Angeles.
For the first time since her arrival not-that-long-before, the status quo has been resurrected. It’s the three of them again. The three of them and their apartment.
So befitting tradition and standing ceremony, Eddie supposes that’s why the three of them, on a Thursday night, get absolutely plastered. And that is how they three of them wind up piled in his bedroom -- despite their run of the apartment -- Luke at his most puckish and Felicity playing right along.
Luke has always been trouble, always been meddlesome -- always flitting from one manufactured disaster to the next. So it makes sense Eddie and Felicity would fall somewhere in that blast radius at one point or the other.
He doesn’t know it, but this is that point.
In retrospect he will find it fitting that Kat’s parting words to them had been singular and simple (and completely ignored): behave.
It’s nearing two AM when Felicity reenters his bedroom with a generous refill (cheap whiskey and Diet Coke; they’ll feel that come morning) she passes off to Luke and his prone form at the foot of Eddie’s bed.
Felicity hovers there for a beat, her gaze flitting from Luke to Eddie slouching low against the pillows at the head of the bed. She suddenly throws her arms up in the air. “I want to crawl all over the both of you,” she says, all tiny aggression and drunken self-amusement.
And she does. She crawls over the both of them sprawled on Eddie’s bed, slotting in right between them, her stocking feet down near Luke’s face, her head already buried in his pillows, her elbow knocking into Eddie’s hip.
“These smell like you,” she mumbles.
“They are my pillows.”
“What’s he smell like?” Luke asks and Eddie frowns at him.
“Boy,” she says, like an accusation, popping her head up as she says it, her hair mussed and staticky.
Felicity drops her head back down and Eddie watches the way her shoulder blades move under her t-shirt.
“Kat has been here how long?” Luke asks at random.
“Long enough,” Felicity says into the pillow.
“Whatever unit of time that checks out to be,” Eddie says.
“Hmm,” is all Luke says at first. “How is it possible I have yet to see her tits in all their glory.”
“Is that a real question?” Eddie asks.
“Yes, it’s a real fucking question. We have an exemplary member of the female species at our disposal and I’d appreciate the opportunity to appreciate her assets.”
“I’m a female,” Felicity says, still muffled, but Luke waves her off.
“I mean, we finally have a sexy roommate.”
Felicity sits up suddenly. “I can be sexy.”
Eddie laughs despite himself. Her eyes narrow.
“Anyone who insists upon their own sex appeal generally has none,” Luke pronounces from the foot of the bed.
“You’re wrong, and you’re liars, and you’re insulting,” she says. She clambers over Eddie’s legs and stumbles out of the bed and over to his desk where his laptop is open.
“Don’t worry,” she says to him over her shoulder, “I’m not looking for porn.”
“What?” Luke asks.
“Long story,” Eddie says.
She pulls up some Beyonce song in his iTunes and starts giggling to herself. She reaches for the open bottle of gin on his desk (for emergencies of the academic variety) and takes a harsh swig. Then, even with her back to them, it’s clear when she goes entirely serious. Her shoulders go rigid, her back straight, and he has never in his life seen anyone ever consider “Crazy in Love” so seriously.
When she turns around her mouth is very flat even though the corners keep trying to tip upwards. And thus begins the most hilarious and tragic striptease Eddie has ever witnessed.
Her tights get tangled at her knees for a good minute and Luke doesn’t even bother to try and hide his laughter. Eddie doesn’t laugh though. Eddie doesn’t laugh at all. He watches her bend over, inelegantly try to kick the offending tights off, how doing that pushes her arms together, pushes her tits up and almost over her bra, and he doesn’t think there’s anything funny about that, not at all. There are a lot of funny things about all this, but not that, not her or her body or the fact she’s right there, right there and looking at him while she tries to shimmy out of her skirt to a beat that doesn’t match the song at all.
Her bra is nice, the sort he thinks girls wear for events such as this (i.e., stripping for their friends), low-cut and black with a small bow between her breasts, but her pants are just plain black cotton, riding up a bit when she turns around and dances the way he imagines a spastic, overly-sexualized cheerleader might.
And maybe it’s the fact that this is all so funny, crazily unexpected, that she’s not trying that hard to be serious yet there’s not an ounce of self-doubt to her, just confidence, still smiling like she’s in on a dirty secret the two of them would kill to learn, that makes him want her so much.
When the song ends she strikes a dumb pose and Eddie and Luke applaud.
“You don’t clap for strippers!” she says, outraged. “You throw money! You make it rain!”
Luke glances over at Eddie, gives him a quick once-over, and then starts snickering.
“You got Redmayne to pop wood, so consider that higher praise than our formal round of applause.” The song changes over to some Kanye remix he can’t identify from his own music collection and Felicity’s just standing there in her underwear staring at Eddie (and his crotch, he notices; he notices, she notices, they all fucking notice) while Eddie rolls his eyes at Luke but doesn’t bother denying it.
“I’m appreciative of the female form,” he says, finally catching Felicity’s eye. She blushes too easily: her cheeks and the bared expanse of her chest are tinged with pink.
That same bravery from before is still with her, cut with something darker, more dangerous, so it shouldn’t be a surprise when she crawls back up the bed. But it is.
It’s an even greater surprise when she settles herself on his lap.
She smiles, quickly, and it’s that same smile from before -- the one with the secret. He doesn’t sit up and he doesn’t touch her.
“Don’t lap dances go for extra?” he tries to tease. He fails; the question comes out too breathy, too much like he’s actually hoping for a lap dance (truth: he totally is). She bats her hair out of her face and looks at him, her eyes drifting down to his mouth and then back up again.
“Shut up,” she whispers, and it goes straight to his dick.
He’s mostly laying down under her, the pillows barely propping him up, and she’s lording herself over him. Her bra is even nicer this close-up.
Without prelude she runs her fingers over his face. “You’re so odd,” she says quiet, almost reverential. “You have the strangest face.”
He smiles and her finger skids off his lip and over his front teeth. She traces the lines of his cheekbones, a path over the bridge of his nose, down to his jaw, his chin, back up again. He can feel himself getting harder under her, can feel the heat of her between her legs, something hot and heavy settling in him when he puts his hands on the outsides of her thighs. She squeezes them tighter, bracketing his hips, and she settles down firmer against him, making him bite the inside of his cheek, trying hard not to make any incriminating noises (he doesn’t know if he’s more worried that that would make Felicity leave or if that’d give Luke mockery ammunition he’d never tire of; both probably).
Her fingers pass over his right eye, up to his eyebrow and then to his forehead, and he looks up at her, finds her watching him. The way she looks at him makes him feel like the air has been sucked straight out of the room.
Felicity leans in, her fingers gone from his face and now toying with the top button of his shirt. She unbuttons it, slowly, and it’s like every other game the two of them have played at brinkmanship -- seeing how far one can push the other, how much until they go too far. She drags her fingers through the fine patch of hair at the top of his chest, an impish look spreading across her face. There’s a tic at the corner of his jaw as he grits his teeth, swallows hard, his head tipping back despite himself. He shivers when her fingers find his stomach, and then they’re gone. Then she’s not touching him at all.
He raises himself up on his elbows.
She’s got freckles too, scattered right along the bridge of her nose. He likes that it takes getting close to her, right up in her face, to see them clearly.
(What he means is that he likes that he has gotten close to her, gotten right up in her face, to know what those freckles look like).
And just as randomly, just as impulsively as everything that has come before, she leans forward and sucks on his bottom lip.
He grabs at her hip near immediately, his mouth opening to her, kissing her for real.
It’s not the first time they’ve kissed.
It’s not even the second.
Any time before -- they had been drunk.
The very first time had been in the kitchen. Harry still lived with them then, but he’s not a part of this memory. They hadn’t turned any lights on and the only brightness offered came from outside -- the streetlights, passing cars, the moon when the clouds part, the light pollution endemic to their neighborhood.
It was the summer she had cut her hair off because in the memory he can remember what the nape of her neck looked like in the dark blue light of the kitchen -- bare, damp, pale. Exposed.
She kissed him.
One minute they were laughing and the next she was kissing him. She was laughing and kissing him -- like her mouth on his was just a natural extension of already established events, like kissing him was hilarious, but there was nothing cruel to her laugh. He wasn’t hilarious, his mouth wasn’t hilarious; it was the fact they had finally come to this that made her laugh. Or so he thought. It was what made him laugh.
She laughed like they were the dumbest people in the whole world, the first to be this foolish, and he had agreed, so he laughed against and into her mouth, kissed her back, touched the bare nape of her neck, and let them both be complicit.
They’re kissing in earnest now, all tongues and wet heat. A Britney Spears song playing, and he really does have the worst iTunes collection in the history of mankind. She doesn’t seem to notice. She has a hand in his hair jerking his head back, and when he grabs at her ass she starts to moan into his mouth but kisses him instead, grinds herself against him, her sweaty half-naked body pressed against his.
He can feel the mattress dip when Luke plops down beside them.
Felicity leans back from him to look to Luke, a wild bright look to her, her mouth red and wet. When she shifts, her thigh rubs against his dick and he bites back a grunt. The tone of the room has altered, no longer silly, no longer irreverent, but charged, intense.
Luke’s looking at the two of them like this is the least surprising thing he ever could have anticipated.
Luke reaches forward and he kisses Felicity, but she doesn’t move from Eddie. She doesn’t stop touching Eddie. Her fingers in his hair, down his face, in his mouth, and when he starts to suck them she bucks against him, making him buck up in return, his hands grabbing at the flesh of her thighs roughly.
And then Luke is kissing him. Eddie doesn’t even let himself think about it; they’ve entered some strange time-space continuum of sexuality or something where anything seems to go. So he kisses him back, Felicity’s weight still hot against him. It’s a natural conclusion, like they’re closing an open circuit, following the path of electricity, and Felicity watches them before insinuating herself between them, her fingers pulling at Luke’s shirt, unable to go ignored for too long.
Eddie turns back to her, fingers plucking at the strap of her bra while she reaches behind to undo the clasp.
The muscle jumps under her skin when he touches the inside of her thigh. So he touches her again.
Eddie goes down on Felicity, his arm thrown around her hips to hold her steady against his mouth. He holds her open and it hurts when he her heel digs in too hard against his shoulder, but he doesn’t stop. Luke distracts himself between the two of them (his mouth on Felicity’s breasts, his hands dragging down Eddie’s bare back, dragging his mouth, his hands at his belt, dragging down his jeans and his boxers, until all three are naked and Felicity is coming on his fingers and his mouth).
Luke kisses Eddie after, Luke drunker than Eddie but taking the lead all the same, both naked, making out, rubbing against each other, Luke fisting Eddie’s cock, Eddie’s hips jerking forward. It’s like his head has gone fuzzy, shorted out. He can still taste Felicity in his mouth, but he also takes Luke, the pink of his mouth, the stubble itching at his face. And then Felicity’s hands are on both of them; she starts biting at the skin over Eddie’s ribs, and he shudders, tangles a hand in her hair, Felicity suddenly panting, “Fuck me, fuck me.” Luke tells him to do it, to fuck her, his mouth right there as he says it, “fuck her, on her knees, fuck her,” and he does it, silently reeling at how crazy hot it is having a third party tell you how to fuck someone.
Felicity’s knees slip against his sheets and she grabs at the pillows scattered at the head of the bed. There’s no prelude here: he pushes into her and she says his name, all high and a little pained, pushing back onto him whether she means to or not, and he finds it difficult to stay upright, moaning as he readjusts his grip on her hips.
He fucks her, and she sucks Luke off sloppily -- the more lust-addled and fucked Luke gets, the drunker and less coordinated he becomes, his eyes glassy and trained on the two of them -- and the sounds she makes, gasping slipping into near choking, make Eddie shut his eyes.
He can feel a desperation and want building, but it seems bound only between himself and Felicity. Luke almost feels like a facilitator in this, the ring leader -- like he loves them both, but his stake in this is different than theirs. That there will be no consequences for Luke. That in the morning he will walk away, unchanged, unfazed, still sure in the love he carries for the both of them, already in search of another bed to fall into and a body to claim. Because that’s his way: crashing into people and walking away without a scratch.
They’re not like that.
It’s a fraction of a thought in that moment. Eddie’s hips slap against the curve of Felicity’s ass and she says his name -- Eddie -- when she pulls her mouth off of Luke’s cock.
Eddie flips Felicity on her back after Luke comes. He pauses, his hands running up her open thighs, taking her in for just a beat: the dazed look to her, parted lips, dark eyes. The way she reaches for him.
He kisses her even though her mouth still has Luke’s come on it, in it, he can taste it, makes her babble his name -- Eddie Eddie Eddie -- and the word fuck against his lips. He hitches her hips up, fucks her hard.
He thinks he’s wanted this since he met her. Before New York happened to them (or they happened to New York), the back of that smoky pub, the crooked collar of her shirt, her heated face, messy hair, a man’s jacket slung over her shoulders, the hem longer than the skirt underneath it. She made him drink tequila with her, made him laugh, he made her laugh, and all that, the cumulative effect of meeting her, learning her, made him want her.
She comes quickly, easily, and he fucks her through it.
He comes, rolls off of her, and all three lay splayed out on his bed, Kelly Clarkson playing on his laptop.
After --
Luke stumbles off the bed, grabbing at his balls and grumbling about needing a drink. Felicity lays there naked next to Eddie, catching her breath, her hand snaking down suddenly between her legs and cupping herself there. He reaches, his brain on autopilot, and joins her hand. She makes a small pained sound in the back of her throat, but she’s bent her right knee, her heel skidding against the crumpled sheet, as she pushes herself closer to him. He’s barely touching her, but her hips jerk each time she can feel him. But he likes that her fingers are wet against his, that she’s wet with the both of them and that she still wants more.
Luke comes back in, flops down at the head of the bed with a bottle of beer. “As demanding as you’d expect her to be, am I right?”
Eddie doesn’t say anything, but he sits up a little more, his body turned towards hers. She slips her fingers away, wraps them around his wrist, tight and slick, and he grunts quietly.
“Go on then. Get her off again, mate. I wanna go sleep.”
Eddie ignores him.
Before she comes, she mutters in a broken voice, “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t you ever stop.”
She turns her head and bites his shoulder lightly, her face hot against his skin.
The three sleep in Eddie’s bed that night.
“We are tres tres français right now, oui?” Luke says.
“Shut le fuck up,” Felicity says. And then:
“None of you have, like, herpes or anything right?”
“Rude,” Luke says.
Luke’s a kicker, but Eddie’s too drunk and tired to stay awake or do anything about it. He awakens before the sun has come up to find Felicity, naked, tucked against his side. It’s not until this moment that he begins to consider just how terrible of an idea this might have been.
He wakes a couple of hours later, alone.
Felicity’s standing naked beside him trying to find her clothes. She looks at him when he groans and he doesn’t bother to pretend to still be asleep. They don’t say anything for a long beat, and then, he sits up, reaches, and hands Felicity her bra from the end of his bed.
“Thanks,” she says, drawing the word out hesitantly.
And if anything, that thanks will be the first and last word they say about this affair for a long, long time.
9.
The strangest thing about fucking his two best friends is that nothing really changes afterwards.
Yeah, the weirdest part is mainly how not weird it is. Sure, he cracks more dumb jokes than usual, smiles too wide, too much like a grimace, a lot (he even gets called out by Kat for it; she tells him it looks like his mouth is trying to wriggle its way off his face), but that’s mainly with Felicity. With Luke, it is literally like nothing has happened, nothing has changed between them.
So, he’s revising current history. He’s trying to make things match what he wants them to be. Because the thing is, there is some weird shit happening (beyond his terrible attempts at puns and his mouth twisting to the side when he thinks he should be smiling).
Namely, how he can’t seem to stop certain images from popping into his head at random. Images like Felicity with Luke’s cock in her mouth. Images of her and the way her jaw goes slack when you fuck her. The look on her face before she kissed him. It’s like the erotic equivalent of those flashbacks those dudes who fought in Vietnam get. Or he supposes. He doesn’t know any Vietnam vets, though he did watch The Deer Hunter with Luke, but the big takeaway then had been Russian Roulette and not the patterns and trick of memory.
The thing is though, it’s not like he’s never gotten laid before. It’s not like he’s never been in love (he’s not in love, right? he just finds her lovely?) before and it’s not like he has never fantasized about a woman -- friend, foe, acquaintance, stranger, imaginary. The strangeness of it all is rooted in the familiarity of Felicity. He figured this out one morning on the subway, after a beat when the lights flickered and suddenly he was seeing the way her eyelashes fluttered and she sucked in a breath and the way the freckles scattered across her nose and the way he felt inside of her (he’s fucked right? that’s what this means? waxing philosophical and pornographic on the morning commute?), and he realized that for someone he thought he knew so well he had now (irrevocably?) altered the context. No, not just the context, but his very memory, very understanding of her.
He wasn’t sure he liked that thought so he let himself focus on her breasts, if only for a moment.
Andrew has been Eddie’s best friend for basically ever. For the time being, Andrew lives in Manhattan, his girlfriend Emma living with him in custom if not name.
They meet up for karaoke that night, their usual haunt -- a Japanese sushi place within walking distance of Andrew’s apartment that morphs into a karaoke joint after eight o’clock. They’ve become such regulars that the hostess, a girl named Alia Felicity has sort of befriended, rolls her eyes when they show up.
“No Meatloaf,” she tells them when they walk in.
“Who would order meatloaf here!” Eddie calls over his shoulder.
“You know what I mean!”
And he does. Each time they come here, their night unfolds the same way: too many sake bombs and too much fighting over which songs to sing. The staples never vary though: Meatloaf and how he’d do anything for love, Air Supply, Andrew’s odd devotion to Bryan Adams, Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” (strangely Eddie’s pick, even though until clarification everyone thought it was Felicity’s, an assumption she resents), and vintage Celine Dion.
This night follows the pattern set: there are too many sake bombs, and Felicity forgets the words to “Like A Prayer,” but this time she bails on them before midnight to go meet up with Tamsin.
She crouches down on her knees on the booth next to Eddie. “I’m going,” she shouts in his ear, over a drunk Luke belting out “Genie in a Bottle.”
Eddie leans his head back against the seat. “Alright.” He pauses. “You coming home tonight?”
She smiles, like she’s thinking something she shouldn’t, and then shrugs.
And then she’s gone.
Across the table -- and across an acreage of empty bottles and glasses -- Andrew and Emma don’t even bother to act like they weren’t watching. Emma looks like she wants to laugh and Andrew looks perplexed.
“What?” Eddie says, too loudly. “What are you -- what? What are you looking at?”
In unison, the two hold their hands up innocently.
“Absolutely nothing, buddy,” Emma says.
The next day, Eddie camps out on the couch in the family room, research spread out around him, every intention of getting some work done.
Felicity stumbles in from her bedroom two hours later. She has last night’s eye make-up smeared under her eyes and that hunched over gait that means she’s miserably hungover. She grabs an entire carton of orange juice from the fridge and plops down on the couch beside him.
“Don’t turn on the television,” he says, typing as he speaks.
She turns on the television.
He doesn’t say anything but she turns the volume down low, a Law and Order rerun he’s guessing she’s already seen based on her lack of interest and/or sound. She drinks the juice straight from the carton and he pretends that’s not disgusting.
While he thumbs through an outline that’s of little help at the moment he realizes this is probably the first time they’ve been alone (like, alone-alone, alone for a long period of uninterrupted time) since -- he fucked her? they fucked? fucking happened? He doesn’t know how to phrase it in a way that doesn’t make him want to do it again (and that’s the problem, that’s the thing he’s been circling the past few days, and it’s the thing he can feel himself trying to circle away from when he glances over at her).
He catches her staring at him. She has the carton balanced on her bent knee but she’s looking at him instead of Jerry Orbach.
He arches an eyebrow at her. “Yes?”
“Your lips,” she says, slowly, “look as though they’re in a perpetual state of chapstick-needing.”
“I’m pale.”
“And dried out. Like a menopausal woman.”
The corner of his mouth tips upward into a lopsided grin. And she’s just staring at him, but then, he’s sort of staring too.
He kinda wants to tell her that everything is alright, that they’re alright, that nothing has to change. That he needs for things to be alright. But he doesn’t.
He doesn’t say anything, but she smiles, small and hesitant at him all the same before taking another sip of juice.
“Get a fucking glass, you heathen.”
Luke brings home a girl named Natalie that Friday, so if ever there was a cue for resumed normalcy, there it is.
10.
OCTOBER 25
So, Kat catches them “in the act.”
It’s another lazy Sunday afternoon, they’re all in varying states of hungover, and when she finds them -- and by them, he means himself and he means Felicity -- they’re laying in her bed with the shades drawn.
Which sounds incriminating. It’s not that sort of incriminating. In fact, it’s probably worse.
As a joke, he’s reading Romeo and Juliet aloud, trying to talk her into reading the lady parts, but she refuses, groaning and muttering about tequila as she buries herself deeper into the pillows. So he does all the parts and he does all the voices. As he reads, he settles against her stomach and he can feel her fingers play over his forehead. She still smells like cigarettes from the night before, and he imagines that he smells the same.
And that’s when Kat walks in.
“What are . . . what are you guys doing . . . in here. In bed. Together.”
“He’s reading to me,” comes Felicity’s disembodied voice.
“Because you . . . can’t read?”
Felicity yawns. “He has a nice voice. And I never read Shakespeare electively.”
“He’s reading you Shakespeare. He is reading to you. In your bed. He’s reading you Shakespeare in your bed because that’s normal. And you pet him? While he reads?”
Felicity yawns again but doesn’t say anything, her fingers still in his hair.
“For the record?” Kat says as she leaves. “This is not what I feared I’d find in here, so I thank you for that.”
“Did you know,” they can hear her yell at Luke, “they read each other poetry and shit?!”
He knows how it started. He’s just unsure how it became a thing -- this quiet, embarrassing (if only were other people to bear witness) habit of reading aloud to each other.
Everything from Shakespeare to Stoppard to Felicity’s brief Tennessee Williams obsession to his never-ending (her word) addiction to TS Eliot.
“It’s cliche to like this as much as you do,” she says when he has her read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” the fifth time. She rolls her eyes but lays down, her head at his hip, the book held up and open over her head as she begins, while he sits there, finishing up an email proposal to send to a professor.
Maybe it’s not embarrassing so much that they like to read plays aloud with each other or poetry to each other. The embarrassing part is how they do it -- in incredibly close proximity to each other. The way he imagines a pair of lovers would -- faces too close, bodies touching, barricaded and alone, using another’s words against each other.
He came home one night to find her dozing on the couch with a book open on her chest. He had plucked it from her loose grip, asked, “What you reading?” even though he answered the question himself (Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency, he remembers all that). He sat down, half on her feet even though the other couch was empty, and she wriggled them under him, and flipped it open.
“Read to me,” she yawned, so he did. He read until she fell asleep, debated moving her, decided against it, and left her and the book out on the couch.
And then -- it’d happen occasionally. She’d sit at the counter in the kitchen and read aloud from whatever book and author had consumed her interest for the time being and he’d listen while he made dinner or cleaned up dinner or both. She liked to read her favorite passages out loud, and he’d listen, sometimes aware of the context, otherwise blind, no real preference either way.
And then Felicity and Ed broke up. And Felicity was sad, the kind of sad that’s familiar to anyone who has been dumped, and she kept to her room, listened to those sad lady singers who use big words while they warble tearfully over a piano, and he finally went in there one night, found her curled up on her side on her bed. He pulled a book down off her shelf and laid down beside her and read Shel Silverstein poems until he thought she seemed happier and his voice had gone hoarse.
And then he had the flu and was so disgustingly sick he couldn’t keep solid food down for three days. She sat in bed with him (even though she kept reminding him of how gross and contagious he was) and read him all of Matilda and all of The BFG because that was what her mother used to read to her when she was sick.
And then it was just a thing.
11.
OCTOBER 31
Harry returns to them Halloween weekend.
That same weekend, Romola hosts a party.
Felicity has been on a bizarre Valley of the Dolls kick, watching first the original repeatedly before moving on to the sequel (“it’s not a sequel,” she insists, but he’s pretty sure it is). She quotes it at random, adopting a deliberately dated American accent (like she thinks the films are from the 30s rather than the 60s, the era of Katharine instead of Audrey).
On their way to Romola’s, she poses in front of the door.
“‘They drummed you out of Hollywood, so you could come crawling back to Broadway. But Broadway doesn’t go for booze and dope. Now get out of my way, I’ve got a man waiting for me!’”
She’s dressed as a character from the movie, he supposes (he somehow has managed to dodge her repeat viewings over the last couple weeks; he always seems to find her mid-Law and Order), though she looks more like a vintage go-go dancer than anything.
Luke, dressed like a pirate who was robbed at a rave, pushes past her out the door and she scampers off. Eddie locks up, can hear her still chirping away in the stairwell, more lines from the film he thinks, or just, whatever. She’s been like this all week, ever since Harry called and was all, “by the by! coming to the States for the weekend! drinks, yeah?” and Felicity’s excitement hadn’t even abated when Harry told them he'd be staying with Madden, a friend of Eddie’s, and Alfie (a friend of no one’s, if you ask Eddie).
As they walk to the subway Felicity glances between the two of them.
“We should’ve done a theme, right? Themed costumes?”
“We did,” Eddie says. “You failed to participate.”
“You and Luke are not a part of a theme.”
“Sure we are. I am Peter Pan. He is a slutty gay Captain Hook.”
“Sans hook,” Luke adds.
“Sans hook,” Eddie repeats. “What happened, Wendy? Lose the nightdress? Finally grow up?”
She rolls her eyes and skips down the stairs into the subway, navigating them deftly despite the boots.
Romola has an adult apartment to go with her adult lifestyle.
The walls are painted. Her kitchen table was most likely not found abandoned on the street and one better -- the chairs match the table. She has framed photographs on the wall, no clutter mucking up the corners of her apartment. No forgotten boxes from moving day, no cigarette marks on the sofa, none of that.
One thing she does have is a lot of people. Her apartment is nice, but it’s small, stuffed with people. There’s Romola, of course, dressed as a greek goddess or something, and that old dude from work she’s been seeing in secret (Dominic something). And there’s Rose, and there’s Goode. Eddie’s been friends with Goode for a decent stretch. Goode’s trouble, but he’s a different breed of trouble than Eddie is used to. He knows the Treadaway Trouble, and he knows it well. Goode occupies a different, more sophisticated realm. His brand of trouble is bound by the feminine, the women he wanted and the women he hurt.
Tom Hughes and his huge eyes and weird jaw and huge mouth Felicity has definitely kissed a time or two (Eddie knows this because Felicity kissed Tom a time or two in front of him, the venue always Luke’s bar, Felicity’s huge eyes always glassy with gin and her mouth loose and wanting) is there, too.
Felicity races off for Harry the second they’re inside.
By two A.M. most of the party has cleared out. Romola made some sort of rum champagne punch, which after his third healthy serving, Eddie is of the opinion a sign labeled POISON should be provided in front of the bowl.
When Eddie heads to the bathroom he can hear Rose yelling about the roof. When he exits the bathroom, he finds Felicity alone staring at a framed photo of Venice on the wall next to the couch.
“You kick everybody out?” he asks, dropping onto the sofa.
“Ha, ha,” she says, turning to face him. She drains the rest of the punch in her glass and sets it down on the end table, cocking her head to the left as she looks at him.
“‘I don’t need anybody!’” she says suddenly, her hands braced on her hips. “‘I got talent, Edward. Big talent. They love me.”
“What . . the hell are you on about?”
She looks disappointed -- theatrically so, matching her costume and delivery -- and her posture slumps. “The movie!”
And just like that, she drops into his lap, her knee butting into his hip, her weight comfortable against him, and he looks up at her with a look that says how unexpected?
“What happened to your hat?” she asks. He rubs a hand through his hair, his other hand loose on her hip. He shrugs, leans in a little closer. Thinks about biting her neck. Tis the season.
He doesn’t bite her; he thinks about kissing her. The apartment is silent with everyone gone
“Where’s Harry?” he mutters under her jaw.
“On the roof.”
“Jumping?”
She yanks at his hair. “Be nice. He’s our favorite friend in the whole world.”
Our. He doesn’t question it. He doesn’t know if what she means is Eddie and her, or the apartment in general, or if she has embraced America a little too tightly and has started speaking as though she’s a part of the Ayn Randian collective.
He reaches up, his hand covering the nape of her neck, his mouth at the hinge of her jaw and he kisses her there, softly.
“I want you to touch me,” she finally says, and he’s not supposed to find her voice so young, because that’s creepy, right? For someone who always seems to browbeat and barrage her way into things, all that misplaced confidence, she sounds tentative. Like she’s afraid he’ll say no. No, not that she thinks he’ll say no, but that she fears it.
She reaches up and grabs onto the wrist of the hand he has at her neck and drags it down her body.
He complies.
She’s so tiny and her fringe has grown out and gets caught in her eyelashes (the fake ones she had such a hard time applying in the bathroom while he tried to get that ridiculous Peter Pan hat to stay on his head) and she’s got those little rabbit teeth that make her look like the twee lead in a 1960s romp, a low-rent Gidget.
He can hear the wet suction of his fingers when he pushes into her and he mutters under his breath, “oh, fuck.”
(He wonders if she does this with Luke too, realizes he doesn’t want to know, and twists his fingers inside of her, liking the way her mouth drops open but sound sticks in her throat).
She rocks her hips over him and he fucks her with his fingers, occasionally watching the door but mainly just watching her, trying to keep his breath steady, his own hips still.
She starts to come right when he slips a third finger in, her cunt clenching at him; he sucks in a harsh breath through his teeth while she makes a high gasping noise that sounds a lot like begging. Her fingers bite into his shoulders while she clings to him.
“Come here,” he breathes, “come here.” He can feel her heart hammering against his chest as she leans in closer, lowering her head to his. He kisses her while she catches her breath, making it harder for her, his fingers still inside her.
And then he hears the doorknob turn.
Harry finds Eddie alone out on Romola’s fire escape, a freshly lit cigarette shared between them.
“Luke told me,” Harry says, passing the cigarette back to Eddie.
“Told you what.”
“That I moved out too soon. Missed the orgy.”
Eddie stares at Harry a beat before handing off the cigarette.
“Three’s hardly an orgy.”
“No,” Harry exhales noisily, “but it is a crowd.”
12.
NOVEMBER 9
Eddie’s invited to a gallery opening. So he invites Felicity.
“Wanna come?” he asks her, bracing himself against the doorjamb into her bedroom. She has her laptop open in bed and she’s stretching, reaching to touch her toes, still in her pajamas even though it’s almost three in the afternoon. Sometimes he thinks living with her must have been like what Ted Hughes felt when he lived with Sylvia Plath. By that, he means depressing.
“To what?” she asks.
“I just told you. The gallery.”
She looks at him, still bent in half, her hands braced at her ankles. The only word he can think of to describe her face is indescribable, and that’s probably the worst adjective in the book.
“Is that . . . a yes? Or are you stroking out on me.”
“Yes. I will come,” she says formally, sitting back up.
“You don’t have to. Though there’s free drinks. And olives, generally.”
“Oh, olives! Well no way can I miss that, yeah?” she says and he rolls his eyes at her.
At the gallery, Felicity introduces herself as first Eddie’s concubine, then his muse, his sister (only to proceed to grope him, growing bolder the more shocked the art student trying to chat him up gets), his mistress (“his wife thinks I’m the governess”), and his benefactress (“my people invented the internet”).
He won’t admit it to her, but it makes the evening more enjoyable than it has any right being. He still asks her when they leave, en route to Luke and some truly terrible club, “What was that about?”
“They think you’re Prince fucking Harry,” she says, an indirect answer. It’s a cold night and they’re both walking fast to the subway. Her heels echo noisily against the pavement.
“Who is they?”
“Your ladies-in-waiting.”
“They do not,” he says.
“They do too. They want a bite at your bangers and mash, praying it leads to a crown,” she says like Eliza Doolittle with a toothache.
“You won’t be invited to the coronation then.”
“Like I’d want to come. Your Highness.”
They find Luke at a dingy club done up like a lounge from the turn of the last century -- all warped wooden floors that he’s sure whine and creak underfoot if you could hear anything over the bass beat of the music pounding from the speakers. Old dusty chandeliers hang over head, most of the bulbs burnt-out casting odd shadows over the walls and the patrons below.
Eddie loses Felicity once inside, only to find her again after he sprawls out on a velvet sofa next to an already extremely drunk Luke.
Felicity comes over, plops down right between the both of them, a bottle of champagne clutched possessively in both hands, misjudging the space and landing with her thigh on top of Eddie’s. Neither of them moves.
Even though he doesn’t need it, she pours champagne in Luke’s mouth and it spills down his front.
She turns to Eddie. She’s pulled a 180 from the gallery, all bouncing energy and mischief (which, okay, she was certainly mischievous back at the gallery, and he’s already tried to figure out how to explain to his advisor that Felicity is not his concubine -- even though his advisor had seemed to respect it).
“Open up,” she says, all sing-song-y, bright eyes and smudged kohl beneath them. He does, and she presses against his side, pours. He does a better job than Luke, but some still spills over his bottom lip. She wipes at it with her thumb and then licks her thumb.
“What’s the occasion?” he yells over the music. She looks at him, curious, her top teeth showing as she grins.
“What are we celebrating?” he asks, meaning the champagne, leaning in, his mouth at her ear. She’s sweaty from the dance floor, her hair curling damply, wet when he leans too close and his cheek touches it. Her forehead bumps his when she turns to face him.
“I don’t know!” she says, like that’s the best thing in the world. And it sort of is.
She takes a swig from the bottle, her knees tucked up against her chest, a rip in her stockings at her knee, and he worries it with his fingers, her skin smooth under the nylon. She looks at him, all expectant and amused, bumping his forehead with hers.
He takes the bottle from her and drinks, the bubbles tickling down his throat as he swallows, his hand still on her knee, rubbing absentmindedly. He glances over towards Madden, back in New York for a spell, but Madden doesn’t notice him: he’s too busy watching Alfie hit on that tattoo artist Lena from earlier.
“Are you gonna dance with me?” she asks. There’s nothing seductive about her tone -- in fact, for Felicity, it sounds as innocent as she ever gets -- but it still hits him, a low punch to the gut.
“No,” he says, almost shyly, looking down at her. She leans in a little closer, that same gut-punch again.
“That’s a shame,” she says hot against his cheek. She smells like the champagne and the smoke in the club and that perfume she spilled in the bathroom once and ever since has reminded him of her, New York, their home.
She’s too close to see her clearly, in focus, but isn’t that always the case.
“I’m a shit dancer,” he says. Her grin deepens. She’s close enough that her knees bump against his chest.
“I know,” she says. They stare at each other, the parts of each other they can see, fuzzy from lack of distance.
“Gimme that,” he says suddenly, and he starts chugging the champagne, coughing as it goes down, and then grabs her hand.
Three songs later and only mildly humiliated, Eddie finds himself slumped at the bar sharing a pint with Madden.
He supposes he should have seen it coming -- it’s Madden after all -- but he doesn’t.
“Who’s she, hmm?” he asks Eddie.
“Who is who?” Eddie says. He takes a long pull from his pint, trying to wash out the taste of champagne that lingers.
“The girl. With the fringe.” It’s fucking Brooklyn in the 21st century; every other girl has a fucking fringe. But Eddie doesn’t say that. He knows who Richard is talking about, and for that reason alone (okay, not that reason alone, that reason associated with the other reason He Isn’t Going To Talk About) he takes his time in answering.
“I’m going to need more specificity than that, mate.”
“Come off it. The girl with the fringe, the one you were dancing with? Ring a bell? Little red skirt? You fucking know.”
“Felicity?” he says, laying the blandness on a little too thick, but Richard has had as much to drink as him because he doesn’t seem to think anything of it. “My flatmate.”
“That’s her?”
“Indeed.”
In the morning, Felicity will tell Eddie, “He has beautiful hair.” She’ll pause, consider something -- Madden’s hair, he’ll assume -- for a beat. “Beautiful everything, I suppose.”
Eddie will scoff. “If you’re into that.”
“If you’re human.”
He’ll prop his feet up on an empty kitchen chair. “Would you rather -- ”
“That’s my job!”
“ -- behead Madden and take his head to the finest taxidermist money can find and keep his pretty, pretty head on your mantel to adore his beautiful, luscious curls until you too slip from this mortal coil, or -- ”
“No or. There is nothing I’d rather have than Richard Madden’s head on our mantel.”
Our. He’ll pause.
“You’d have to help me sedate him,” she’ll say.
“With pleasure.”
13.
NOVEMBER 18
American Thanksgiving seems to bring out the worst in everyone.
Well, he’d say the worst. Luke would probably say the best.
The weekend before Thanksgiving -- a holiday Felicity is earnestly and treasonously (his word) embracing -- they got to a party Rose gets them into.
And they do E at the party.
It’s a dumb idea Eddie has to be talked into and he repeats himself over and over again that he’s doing this against his better intentions (“this is duress! I am doing this under duress! someone write that down”), until Felicity barrels into his side and tells him that no one gives a fuck about his intentions, before reaching up, placing the blue tablet right on his tongue (he opens his mouth to her) and he swallows.
He wants someone to make a note that Felicity might be the worst thing to ever happen to him.
An hour later he’ll reverse this position, but he doesn’t know that yet.
They dance all night even though he’s terrible (he’s infamous for it, and whenever they’re out, whenever they’re like this, carefree and stupid and pickled, they always try to goad him into exhibiting his innate lack of rhythm; minimal to no effort is needed tonight) and when they get back to the apartment they’re all sticky with sweat and an unholy combination of spilled booze.
So it’s an obvious conclusion then that they all pile into the oversized shower, losing their clothes as they go.
“Where’s the other one?” Felicity asks in a stage whisper while she reaches behind for the clasp of her bra and Luke twists at the spigot and the shower shoots to life.
“The other what?” Eddie asks, his eyes on her now exposed chest.
“Our other roommate,” she hisses, knocking forward into him and pushing him back into the shower. She’s got black flakes of mascara under her eyes and her cheeks are pink and warm and he’s pretty sure that he’s never been happier, that he’s never been more attracted to another human being than in this moment.
He looks over to Luke, who is yelling oh my god up into the shower spray.
He thinks he loves these two so much, so fucking much, they’re perfect, all three of them together.
Luke can’t get enough of the hot water (he keeps collecting some in his cupped hands, staring at it, as it slips out through the cracks of his fingers) and Eddie can feel Felicity’s fingers at his waistband, alternating between skin and wet denim.
“You left your jeans on,” she says, and they’re heavy when they both drag them off, a team effort.
She touches his bare chest again so he touches her waist, and another person’s skin isn’t supposed to feel that good. Your own skin isn’t supposed to feel like this. He thinks it’s probably magic; he thinks that’s the smartest thought he’s had all night.
He keeps touching Felicity and she keeps touching him, turning her around, wanting to feel the stretch of her naked back against him.
Felicity’s not even saying words anymore, just these little moans and pants, her hands running over the tiled wall in front of her -- and wow, they really need to invest in some good grout cleaner or just better habits -- arching her neck, and when he touches her throat, his whole hand covering it, she moans again, and he can feel it, through his hand, through his chest pressed to her naked back, and without thinking (just feeling, it’s all just feeling), hand still at her throat, he bends her over, his free hand pressed to the tile and part of her hand, and grinds against her, his body blanketing hers.
Luke starts laughing under the shower spray. “Jesus Christ. You two.”
He always assumed that the things Felicity did with him, she did with Luke. He had no real reason to ever believe this -- the things he did with Felicity he didn’t do with Luke.
But in his bed, she kissed Eddie first, that brave look of decision and mischief on her face.
Eddie wakes the next day -- at two pm -- naked and alone, his sheets damp and his hair sticking up, having dried while pressed against his still wet pillow.
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