fic: repetition: a commonly used rhetorical device (rpf au) (3/3)
14.
DECEMBER 1
They have a house party. At Kat’s insistence.
(“Like a Welcome Wagon. You guys do the Welcome Wagon across the pond? No? That mean I can make Welcome Wagon mean whatever I want? That’s what I’m gonna do? Sounds good. We’re having a party, we’re calling it my Welcome Wagon.”)
Cut to the party, and Felicity sitting alone nursing a can of cheap beer in the pantry with the cereal and the washing machine, an unused mop looming in the corner beside her.
“Boo Radley,” he greets with a Southern accent and the tip of an imaginary hat as he stands in the doorway.
“What do you want?”
“Paper towels.”
He looks down at her as though just fully realizing she’s sitting alone in a glorified broom closet during a party.
“What’s . . . going on?”
She looks up at him, like she’s aiming for total and complete cruelty, but instead just looks miserable.
“Nothing,” she says in a quiet voice.
He shuts the pantry door behind him. He sits down, his back at the door, but his legs are too long to spread out, so they wind up crookedly bracketing her bent legs, his feet near her hips. He leans his head back against the door, his chin raised.
“Spill.”
She has her hands clasped neatly in her lap, the beer forgotten next to his ankle. She looks demure, which is usually a word he never wants to use to describe her.
Kat’s friends have terrible taste in music -- ironic or otherwise -- and he can hear the first strains of Dave Matthews’s “Crash” vibrating through the door.
“I’m a fuck-up,” she tells her hands. “I’m a . . . I’m a real dummy.”
His mouth flattens out. “What’d you do?”
She looks up at him. “That’s the point, right? I don’t do anything.”
He nudges her leg with his. “What are you on about?”
“Don’t talk to me like that. Like I’m a sad person.”
“You’re sitting alone in our pantry during a party, sulking. I’d wager that’s mighty sad.”
“Your face is sad.”
He pouts. “It is now.”
She sighs heavily and throws her hands up, holding them over her head.
“I saw Ed. Today. In the Village. He was . . . out and about. Doing Village-y things.”
Eddie’s face goes serious, guarded maybe. “Do you miss him?”
“No? Yes? Not really? I mean,” she stops and averts her gaze from him. “I think. I think I miss who I was with him? Isn’t that pathetic.”
“Not really.”
“I’ve changed since then though, right?”
He studies her face. “Not necessarily for the worse.”
“He was really happy. Today.”
Eddie goes quiet. “Would you rather,” he starts, his mouth threatening to stretch into a smile, and then he stops. She’s looking at him all bright and suspicious. “Be with him again, now,” he doesn’t know why he’s doing this, “or remain as things are, change nothing.”
Her eyes lock with his, their legs still touching, and she doesn’t speak for a beat.
“Did you mean, would I rather . . . cook and eat his heart, Hannibal Lector-style, or, hmmm, disembowel him with a machete and leave him on a nest of his coiled intestines? Because I pick the latter.”
“The latter,” he repeats. Her gaze doesn’t waver.
“Yeah.”
They leave the pantry.
Kat brings them Amanda.
Amanda is very blonde and very pretty and very into Eddie. She’s telling him about the fashion blog for cats she just started and he’s trying to figure out why that would ever be a thing when Felicity sidles up beside him.
He wraps an arm around her.
“I am very happy here, you know," she says, quiet and sure.
His hand reaches up, over her back, and then holds at the nape of her neck while Amanda tells them about cats wearing jumpers.
15.
DECEMBER 10
It all just keeps happening.
A week (and some change) later, he fucks Felicity in the bathroom.
The funny thing: they’re not even drunk this time.
He finds Felicity in her robe just as he’s getting out of the shower.
He wraps a towel around his waist. She’s just standing there, robe loosely tied, gaping at his chest a little.
“Hi,” she finally says. The apartment is quiet for once, all he can hear is the steady drip of the faucet they can never seem to fix and the loosening whine of the pipes.
“Where’s Luke and Kat at?”
Felicity shrugs. He watches her collarbone ripple under her skin.
“I needed a shower,” she says, stating the obvious.
“All yours then.” But neither of them move.
It’s just. So. Awkward.
Even before The Night None Of The Three Speak Of he had seen her naked, and she’d seen him. A casualty of confined living, lax morals, and one bathroom. Maybe the problem now is that he can’t stop thinking about her. Not just naked, but her generally.
Felicity used to be a thing he’d light on occasionally, often slightly weirded out by the direction of his random thoughts about her -- she looked nice at the bar, she smelled good, etc. -- often ignoring them (though sometimes foregoing the reins and letting her takeover in moments of . . . personal, tactile introspection (or, wanking)).
Now, it’s like he’s hyper aware of her.
He’d like to ask her about it. And he thinks it’s dumb that he doesn’t. They talk about everything. Blah blah.
Instead what he starts to say is, “I’m gonna -- ” and he points towards the door.
“Yeah,” she says, still staring at him.
When he moves past her, she grabs his wrist loosely and he freezes.
“You know,” she says, her eyes cast down at the floor. “I’ve been waiting for you to . . . fuck me. Since Halloween.” She says the word fuck like she’s never said it before (which he definitely knows isn’t true).
She casts a nervous eye up at him.
“You never said anything,” he says.
“I’m saying it right now,” she says quietly.
He’s on her in an instant.
He fucks her against the sink. The mirror’s still fogged up from his shower, his skin’s still wet and it sticks to hers. She grips at the porcelain of the sink, knees shaking even before she’s come, and each and every sound they make echoes against the tile.
After, Felicity hunched over the sink and Eddie still at her back, he asks her.
“You fucking Luke?” In his head, he thought the question would come across like in those bad Lifetime movies Felicity sometimes watches, the ones with the bad husbands and their sad unfaithful wives who demand answers or proof of possession or whatever. Instead the question just sounds sad and insecure when said aloud.
“No,” Felicity says, still catching her breath.
“Just you.”
16.
AN INTERLUDE, Felicity II:
Eddie’s got duck lips.
He’s got a real weird mouth, sort of slanted, too wide. Luke once called them dick-sucking lips, and she thinks it’d be kinda hot to see that in action, but she also thinks they’re past a certain point of no return and that’d make her go all possessive and soft. Not that she has any right. She’s kissed too many dudes with weird mouths, that’s what she thinks.
(It’s weird, she thinks, that her mouth’s never been on his cock. All things considered. Not that she thinks about that. Much).
And it’s not just his mouth. Everything about him should add up to something less than he is, something awkward and unwanted. He’s all legs and freckles and red (a color he can’t even see, which, sure, she’s of the firm belief that it robs him of a fundamental touch of self-awareness, and that contributes to a part of his charm, but so not the point) and wrong proportions and his forehead goes on forever and he’s serious when he doesn’t need to be and not serious when she wants him to be, but that’s not physical, that’s just temperament.
He always stands there with his arms crossed, his hands braced under his arms. A nervous stance -- if she was one of those body language readers like in Us Weekly she’d probably assume he’s a nervous, tetchy sort, but he’s not, that’s the odd part. It’s like he doesn’t know what to do with himself, all that length and space he takes up. Like he’s trying to hold himself together.
He’s also the dumbest.
When he sings along with the radio (do people even still listen to radios anymore? saying someone was listening to an iPod or their computer or the television just doesn’t have the same ring to it), if he knows the words, he always sings one beat ahead, his sense of rhythm super off. If he doesn’t know the words -- and there are so many songs that exist in the world he doesn’t know the words to -- he just sort of hums along, his mouth partway open, trying to match the words but always failing, and that’s stupid.
And Eddie likes to watch sad movies and he’ll get all sniffly and sad-eyed and not even try to deny it and he’s so dumb and he’s also basically become her best friend who isn’t Luke.
And he’s kind of a nasty fuck (not nasty disgusting, just, like, dirty, not vanilla or neat or whatever, and that’s dumb too), and she never would have anticipated that.
So here are the things Felicity thinks about: she thinks about him and she thinks about him leaving her and she thinks about telling him that she loves him.
Each terrifies her more than the last. So she doesn’t do any of that.
Instead she harasses Luke. His bedroom looks like the after photo of the effects of a biological contaminant, not just cluttered but dirty, messy, used dinner plates stacked on a desk he doesn’t use, sheets he hasn’t washed in weeks. She scowls when she picks a dingy t-shirt off the broken chair at his desk (it no longer swivels nor adjusts) and sits down.
“Someone’s bored,” he says, eyeing her from his closet. He swaps one shirt for the other and grimaces in the mirror.
“Luke. You love us very much, don’t you?”
He stops, his shirt half-pulled on over his head. He looks at her reflection in the mirror.
“Yes. I do.”
She picks at the hem on the sleeve of her sweater. “Do you think Eddie does?”
“Yes. I think Eddie does. And I think so do you.”
He turns around to face her.
“You’re allowed to love him more than you love me. I’m not offended, love. Grateful, if anything. Like I could handle you.”
“Shut up,” she laughs.
17.
DECEMBER 19
Kat talks too loud.
Eddie is working in his room against a deadline and can sort of hear Kat and Felicity talking out in the main room, but he’s not entirely listening. Not until he hears his name.
“So. Like. Eddie.” That’s what Kat says.
“Yes. Eddie,” Felicity repeats. Even though he can’t see her, he can imagine her distracted. It’s there in her tone. It’s also the hour House Hunters International is on.
He knows this because he knows Felicity.
“You fucking him?” There’s a pause. Eddie hits the mute button on his laptop. “I mean, inquiring minds demand to know. Also, I feel these things are necessary to know, right? To help preserve the fragile ecosystem, the special relationship forged at present, my Bush to your Blair.” Kat snorts. “Heh. Bush.” A longer pause stretches. “So. Are you?”
“At present, clearly no,” Felicity says, flat.
“But you have? I mean, for ecological . . . diorama-building in my brains, need-to-know basis purposes? You wetlands have been penetrated by Redmayne Developers?”
The TV shuts off, the white noise filling the apartment cleared. He imagines Felicity rolling her eyes. He imagines her bored. He imagines her smiling. He doesn’t know how to imagine her.
“Hey! Where are you going?” Kat says.
“To destroy the wetlands.”
“Seriously? I mean, I was kidding. But. Seriously?”
Felicity enters his room, no knocking.
“I’m working,” he says quickly. Too quickly.
“I know,” she says, flopping down on his bed, snatching up a paperback off his bedside table.
She falls asleep about twenty minutes later.
“You just coming to bed now?”
“It’s my bed,” he mumbles, like that somehow answers her question. Dawn is filtering through the blinds over his window.
She snorts, rolls towards him.
He can feel her at his back. First just her hands, and then her chest. She spoons him from behind and that makes him laugh, her body dwarfed by his, trying to wrap around him.
“I was up,” he yawns, “all night. All-nighter. I want,” he yawns again. “Sleep.”
She snakes her hand around him, clutching at his t-shirt against his chest, humming her assent but not moving away. He can feel her knee at his hip as she winds her leg around him.
“How funny you are today New York,” Felicity quotes, her voice soft, her own version of a lullaby, “like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime / and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left.” She swallows and he can hear it, the smack of her lips, the tiny catch as she clears her throat, perhaps trying to remember what comes next. “ -- here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days -- ”
“(I got tired of D-days),” Eddie rumbles, interrupting. He thinks she smiles against his shoulder.
“ -- and blue you there still / accepts me foolish and free,” she trails off.
“Where’s Lana Turner,” he prompts.
“Not yet,” she says. She pauses, the silence stretching between them, punctuated by the rhythm to his breath, her hand idly scratching at his chest; his eyes are still closed and he starts to drift off.
He hears her say, “all I want is a room up there / and you in it . . . ”
He hears her say, “oh god it’s wonderful / to get out of bed / and drink too much coffee / and smoke too many cigarettes . . . ”
And love you so much. He thinks she whispers it. He thinks he dreamt it.
He wakes up alone.
18.
DECEMBER 21
“We’re not talking about it,” Luke says without looking away from the crooked television screen (a product of the rock ‘n roll lifestyle, says Luke; a product of Luke’s bad aim when he decided to learn about basketball, says reality). He’s watching Alien, the part where the baby alien bursts out of that one dude’s stomach.
Luke reacts appropriately.
“Talking about what?” Eddie asks.
“Exactly,” Luke says, pointing at Eddie approvingly.
“No, really. What aren’t we talking about.”
“Whichever episode of Friends you and Felicity are performing for my benefit.”
“I don’t watch enough Friends to be able to tell you.”
“Let’s keep it that way.”
19.
JANUARY 6
He’s back in New York for the new year.
He had flown back to London with Felicity while Luke stayed behind and waited for his brother in New York.
Their flight had been delayed, the two of them slumped by the window at JFK, watching the snow-covered runway, and later spiking their coffees with the whiskey they bought at one of the duty-free stores. They played gin rummy until Felicity accused him of cheating (he wasn’t, but he had it on good authority that she had been) and just as she had started to doze off beside him, their flight was called for boarding.
He left her in Heathrow.
“Happy Christmas,” she whispered, standing on tiptoe as he hugged her.
And now they’re back -- the new year.
Felicity sneaks up behind him and butts her head against his back. And then she doesn’t move, just stands there with her forehead pressed against his back before wrapping her arms around his stomach.
“I got a job,” she mumbles into his back. “Making coffees across the street.”
He starts to laugh and she digs her fingers into his stomach. “Well done, Working Girl. Care to finish this task at hand then?”
She peers around him bleary-eyed at the coffeemaker and then shakes her head, which he feels rather than sees.
She feels good and solid at his back. He covers the hand at his waist with his own and resumes making coffee.
“Here’s hoping you do a better job there than here.”
She butts her head against him again and he spills coffee grounds onto the counter.
20.
JANUARY 25
He knows Felicity writes her own stuff, but she’s as secretive about it as they both are about their “reading sessions.”
“No more Keats,” she declares.
He nudges at her hip. “Read me your stuff then.”
She goes very still, though she doesn’t react the way he had expected (namely, denial).
She springs up and grabs an old spiral notebook and flips through the pages before pausing and then throwing it at him. She stays standing by the side of the bed.
“You read it to me,” she says.
And he does.
Her messy handwriting earns unintended pauses from him as he works to decipher it. She stands the entire time, like even though he’s the one reciting she’s the one performing. An ache starts to build in him as he reads, his voice getting quieter, her words sticking in his mouth, his throat, and when he finishes, he turns the page and starts to read the next.
Felicity sits rigidly on the bed, beside him but not touching him, and when he starts a third, his voice is gravely and low, and she’s watching him with what looks like warmth and terror all at once.
So he kisses her, and she kisses him back. Just the two of them, and he still has her words ringing in his head.
He wants, he thinks, for her words to be his words -- that what she wrote now belongs to him too.
21.
FEBRUARY 18
What happens -- in quick succession -- is this:
There is another dinner party, and Romola is invited yet again;
There is another dinner party and Kat invites Amanda;
There is another dinner party and Felicity gets mind-numbingly drunk before the meal is even served;
There is a dinner party and Felicity overhears Romola mentioning his plans to return to London:
ROMOLA: How goes the housing sitch?
EDDIE: Eh. Crowded.
ROMOLA: A lot for you to suffer here, I gather. [A PAUSE] Are you still planning to move back?
[ENTER FELICITY AND AN EMPTY WINE BOTTLE SLAMMED ON THE COUNTER];
There is a dinner party and Felicity gets drunk and then she gets mad and then Amanda kisses Eddie by their front door.
It is, in a word, a disaster.
“She kissed me,” Eddie says.
“I know,” Felicity says, her arms crossed over her chest.
“It’s not like, you and I, we’re . . . you know,” he says, waving his hands, casting about for whatever word he can’t think of short of you know.
“I know,” she says hotly. She scowls at him. “You are, without a doubt, the fucking worst, Eddie Redmayne.”
He holds himself a little straighter. “And you’re a fucking drunk right now.”
“Fuck off,” she says, and he waits for the slam of her bedroom door.
Luke plops down on Eddie’s bed while Eddie works at his desk.
“Cocked this one up, yeah?”
“Cocked what up.”
Luke giggles -- actually giggles -- to himself. “You daft cunt.”
“Oh, piss off. You either stop the cryptic fucking riddling and just say it or get on out.”
“Our darling Felicity, you cock bandit.”
He frowns at both aspects -- first Felicity, and then being called a cock bandit (whatever that means).
“You’re one to talk,” Eddie says. “You started this whole -- ”
“Stop right there, my friend. I was a bored horny lush who saw an opportunity to fuck his beloved roommates. I had no intentions of . . . this.”
Eddie supposes he can’t fault him that.
The next day he goes to the coffeehouse where Felicity works.
Eddie comes to apologize. That, he thinks, is called being the bigger man.
When she sees him come in through the doorway her eyes go big and dart around as though looking for an escape.
“Hello,” he says at the counter.
“What can I get you?” she asks, looking just askance of his face.
“I don’t,” he pauses, sighs a little. “I came to see you.”
“I already have to see you at home. Isn’t that enough suffering for you.”
His temper begins to snap. “You’re like a child, Jesus. You know that’s not what I meant, you know I -- ”
“I clearly don’t know a bloody fucking thing about you, Eddie. Now order something or leave. Company policy.”
She looks down and he doesn’t move. He watches her, the way her hands nervously flit over the receipts she’s smoothing out, the chipped black nail varnish, the faint tremble to her fingers.
He leaves.
22.
FEBRUARY 20
So Felicity’s mad. Which, obviously. But the thing with Felicity, a lot of times her anger is just a quick flash in the pan. She’s angry, and just as suddenly, she’s fine. Whatever incident sparking her rage, forgotten. The offending party, perhaps forgiven.
If he’s being honest, Eddie thought that’s how this whole thing was going to play out. She got mad and then she got drunk at the dinner party -- he thought that’d be the end of it. When it wasn’t, he thought the scene at the coffee shop would be the end of it.
It wasn’t.
She’s still mad.
She’s listening to Patti Smith, loud, and that’s always a sign. When she first moved here, she read Just Kids on her flight over, and for whatever largely misinformed reason, that was how she colored her anticipation of New York -- the Chelsea Hotel, the drugs, the musicians, the artists, the sex. Glamour in all that squalor, broken hearts a thing to strive for.
Instead what she found was this mostly refurbished “loft” in Brooklyn, a struggling bartender-sometime-musician, a wannabe art historian, and while she found ill-conceived romance -- or fucking, it was mainly fucking -- none of it seemed to match what she had read.
So she was disappointed -- and she should have known that’d be part of the experience as well, it was the part of every experience -- and so Patti Smith became reserved, largely unintentionally, for moments when her ire hit its peak.
He’s heard the opening riff of “Gloria” through his wall five times in the last hour, so she’s there. At her peak.
(She told all of this to Eddie once. Just Kids. The Chelsea Hotel. Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine. That was during Ed. They sat on the floor in front of the couch instead of on it, drinking whiskey from Luke’s collection of cracked novelty mugs (Felicity’s: THE DOCTOR IS IN; Eddie’s: I [PICTOGRAM OF TWO PEOPLE FUCKING DOGGY-STYLE] NY). Like that low to the ground and hidden anything they said could be a secret. So on the floor beside him she blamed Patti Smith for her disappointment instead of Ed, instead of herself, and Eddie listened).
He knocks on her bedroom door.
“I was going to be doing just fine before you decided you wanted me like that.”
It’s the first thing she says to him when she lets him into her room. And that’s not -- that’s not exactly what he expected to hear.
“I decided? I seem to recall you throwing yourself at me.”
Felicity’s face goes hard and flat and that was definitely the wrong thing to say. It’s not that he doesn’t think highly of her and it’s not that he often thinks he underestimates her, but sometimes he forgets. He forgets how much strength she keeps in reserve, how even though she’s spent the better part of the last year floundering about, she still has a spine.
“I’m just a thing to bide your time. Something you endure. Fine, Eddie. That’s fine. Signal received! Loud and clear!”
“What are you talking about? Is this about her? About Amanda? Because . . . nothing is going on there.”
“No!” she shouts. She pauses, like she’s schooling herself. “Not really. Not entirely.” She sighs heavily. “That was badly done on both our parts.”
“Then what?”
“Are you really thinking of leaving?” she finally asks.
He shrugs a little. “I’m considering it.”
“Were you ever going to,” she pauses, like she’s searching for the right word, “mention it? To me?”
“Of course. It wasn’t even, it was a thought, you know? After school after, you know,” he rambles. He doesn’t understand what’s happening here, or why the idea of going back to London would be the worst thing ever. But maybe it is, because Felicity’s face looks sad, so so sad, and he doesn’t get why he can’t seem to say the right thing.
“You know everything about me, Eddie. And that matters. That means something, and I just want -- ” She stops herself. She braces her shoulder back and stands tall (or, well, tall for her) and says, “I want to know everything about you too. I want you to want that. I want to be . . . the only one.” Each thing she says has her more breathless than the last, like she’s a character in one of those Nicholas Sparks movies, and that’s supposed to be terrible, but it’s not, it’s the opposite of terrible; it’s making him want to build her a house and make out in the rain or on a Ferris Wheel or whatever happens in those movies, but he remains still, waiting for her to continue.
“I want you to want to be with me,” she says, quiet, her hands clasped in front of her, “because that’s all I really want. To do. Is be with you. And not have you . . . leave.”
So that’s what this is about, he thinks. So she’s the brave one and so they’ve finally reached the point of no return.
So he does the only thing he can think to do: he kisses her.
20 MINUTES LATER:
“How would you kill her?” he asks her, like a secret.
“Who?” she asks just as quietly.
“Amanda,” he says.
Her lips part, cheeks flushed, and he can see the bottom of her top two teeth peeking out. She drags a hand through his hair, just on this side of too rough, but he likes it. He pushes his hips against her stomach.
“I’d slit her throat,” she whispers. He wants her mouth closer to his but he wants to see her face. “And I’d make you watch. I’d do it real slow. Really slow.”
“How would you kill me?” he breathes. His hand is low on her naked hip, guiding her closer to him. She leans and bites under his jaw and then tilts her head up, eyes hooded.
“With my hands,” she says, and the hand pressed against his chest between their bodies snakes its way up to his collarbone, pausing there, her fingers smoothing along his clavicle and int the dip and valley his bones create, just under his throat. He groans under his breath, his hips knocking into her again.
“I’d strangle you,” she says along his jaw, her tongue hot and wet, “With my hands. I’d wrap them around your throat and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and make you kiss me until your lips went all blue.” She has rolled them so that she’s now pressed on top of him, her knee sliding between his legs, her hair falling over the both of them as her face fills his entire field of vision. “I’d be the very last thing you’d ever see, the very last thing you’d ever breathe.”
“How poetic,” he says, letting the last syllable slip into a gasp. He arches his hips off the bed and into the cradle of hers. She grinds against him, threads a hand in his hair and jerks his head back.
“How would you kill me?” She all but demands the question, but there’s that underlying element of vulnerability she always seems to carry with her, that element that makes him want to shut his eyes. He doesn’t. He takes her in -- the clouded eyes, the mess of dark hair, the length of her neck, the way her chest rises and falls with her rapid breath, her chest, her breasts, the pale pink nipples, her pale pale skin -- and he finally succumbs, shuts his eyes, just for a moment.
“I wouldn’t,” he says as he opens his eyes. He ruins the game.
“I wouldn’t,” he says and he reaches for her face, drags her down to him.
And that’s when she kisses him, kills him, whatever word it is she likes to use.
23.
APRIL 2
Kat moves out. They need a fourth again, but they’re all thinking of leaving New York.
The thought goes unmentioned by each of the remaining three, but they all think it.
Funny how that works. The interior of her, of Luke, that awful apartment, all became a home to him. Strike the apartment. It was Felicity and it was Luke who were home.
Eddie thinks about London when he thinks about Felicity, and if that’s the same thing as thinking of a future that involves her, then it’s the same thing, he won’t deny it.
That’s what she would call a romantic sentiment, and he wouldn’t deny that either.
Felicity publishes some poems.
Her most popular, by far, is one he never read to her.
It’s called “Red.”
24.
Night, in the kitchen.
She plays a new game now.
He rubs at his chin with the back of his hand, and then at his jaw. That’s what catches her attention-- the sound of the palm of his hand rasping over the stubble along his jawline.
“I want you to grow a ginger beard,” she says.
He pops a blueberry in his mouth. “It’d hide my cheekbones,” he says as he chews. “That’s my moneymaker.”
“Whatever. We’ll fatten you up and they’ll be a non-issue.”
“We?”
“Me. I’ll fatten you up. You’re very skinny, you know.”
They’re in the kitchen at 11:30 at night and he’s making flapjacks (“with blueberries!”) with a mix from a box he found in the pantry, and she’s sitting at the counter with a mug of Darjeeling, her legs perched on the neighboring stool, watching him.
“You would grow a ginger beard,” she says, leaning forward while he diverts his attention between pouring batter onto the pan and her, “And you’d be this, this dandy lumberjack and I’d make you a red flannel shirt and we’d run away and live in the woods, off the land, because even though you’d be a dandy you’d also be a lumberjack with a ginger beard and a red flannel shirt and you’d be good at living off the land, and I’d be your . . . insolent milkmaid, saucy but helpful, with the braids and the buckets and everything, and I’d fatten you up with schnitzel and milk from my milkmaiding, and one time you’d have to rescue me because I fell in our well, I was being careless and it rained and I slipped, and you’d be like Lassie but braver, and not a dog, and you’d save me, and one time I’d have to save you too, because there’d be a snake and it’d bite you and you’d almost die, but you would find me in time and I’d suck the venom right out of the bite and all the snakes would be afraid of us, and your beard wouldn’t be too scratchy, I’d like it, I’d like it a lot, and -- ”
Eddie burns the flapjacks.
Don’t stop, he thinks, don’t stop, don’t you ever stop.
25.
JULY 21
APARTMENT FOR RENT
spacious four bedroom sort-of-fixer-upper right near Bushwick-Aberdeen subway
large bathroom
awesome place to live
need new occupants by end of the month!
email ltreads@gmail.com for info
fin ;
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