Fic: Ardra
Ardra
Disclaimer: Not real.
Pairing: Implied past Mikey/Pete, implied future Mikey/Alicia
Rating: G
Summary: Mikey's not sure that he's going to miss this, the breakneck tours and the fact that all his clothes could walk on their own power if he'd let them.
A/N: Beta by thelemic! (Thank you so much, again, seriously.) Written for burgaw as a birthday gift and because she's been having a rough time of late. Continuation of the Hood Rat, though decidedly less angry and more fluffy.
He wears the hoodie to the last bonfire, the last chance for this crowd to hang around together. It's just after midnight, August 15th, and Warped Tour is officially over.
Mikey's not sure that he's going to miss this, the breakneck tours and the fact that all his clothes could walk on their own power if he'd let them. The Avenged Sevenfold hoodie is probably the cleanest thing he owns, and he only really thinks that because it doesn't smell like his sweat and filth. It still stinks, but it's different, strange, with just a hint of girl's deodorant trying to combat the smell. It's not bad comparatively.
He'd be lying if he said he didn't sort of like the smell, though, and it's warmer than most of his own. They're all off the boardwalk and on the beach, waves crashing, and it's windy, sand occasionally stinging his hands. It's cold enough for a sweatshirt, late summer air run cool thanks to the ocean. There's already sand in his chucks, but he doesn't want to risk losing them to last-night hijinks by taking them off.
"Mikeyway," Pete says, coming up from behind him and throwing an arm around his back. It's less intimate than they're used to, more friendly than anything. They haven't talked in three days, too tired and frayed on each other's edges to be able to stand.
"Hi, Pete," he says without smiling. There's still the tired ache behind his eyes, niggling at him to let him know that he should be on the bus with the other guys sleeping off the past two and a half months. It seems a waste though, when they're so close to home and can sleep in real beds after only a few more hours of driving.
Pete drops his arm and steps back. "I can't believe it's over already." He's lying; Mikey doesn't say anything about it. They've been counting the days down together, to when they can breathe again. Pete only had thirteen days left on his bunk calendar last time Mikey saw it. He's sort of jealous, that there's a set time to when Pete knows he'll be able to breathe again. Mikey's not sure if he has that anymore.
He shrugs and smiles, zipping the hoodie up over his shirt. It's a tour shirt, and he's tired enough that he can't read the words on it. He can't even remember what table he conveniently borrowed it from. "Yeah," he says. He pushes sand with his shoes and looks at the firelight flickering on Pete's hands instead of his face.
Pete laughs, and even that sounds worn down and broken. "I'm going to go catch up with Patrick and Joe." There's a lingering Is that okay? or maybe it's Will you be all right?, like he would have said at the end of July.
Mikey makes himself smile again and shrugs. "I'll be around."
He doesn't watch Pete walk back over to the fires, turning instead towards the ocean. The sand is cold, gritty. He's not wearing socks tonight, and he can feel it between his toes as he walks down to the edge of the water. There are boats in the distance, floating red and yellow lights that sort of look like space crafts.
It occurs to him once the water is lapping at his shoes that maybe coming down here, to the party that's twenty yards back and in full force, was sort of stupid, if he's going to hang out at the water alone. He's been this tired for days, tired enough that he can really only feel real things, like the water and the sand, he can't feel anything inside, even when he's up on stage and Gerard looks back at him with clear eyes and the biggest fucking grin he can manage.
Mikey moves back a little, in case the tide comes in. His last pair of mostly clean jeans are going to smell like ocean now, and he'll have to wear them on the ride home. He'll have gritty sheets. He wrinkles his nose. Gritty sheets are worse than the sheets he has now, stiff with sweat and unwashed for months.
He sighs and stretches, arms pillowed behind his head. It's too bright from the boardwalk and the carnival on the pier to see any stars, just blue-black sky, and it reminds him of home so hard that it almost aches inside, same as everything seems to do anymore. It shouldn't, though, because it is home. He could call one of the guys from his old neighborhood and they'd be here in an hour. His parents are at a hotel twenty minutes away. He yawns a little, and he promises himself that he won't fall asleep, not on the beach twenty yards from everyone because it's asking for trouble, especially with Pete here.
This means, of course, that he does, and he does wake up with something slimy on his nose that smells too much like rotting fish. It blocks out the smell of the person next to him; everyone is so gross that you can almost tell what a person does by their smell (drummers tend to smell the worst, followed by the singers and then the techs and guitarists).
He pushes up onto his elbows, craning his neck back to get away from the smell. "Fuck," he says, too loudly.
The person--woman, his brain helpfully supplies--laughs, and she flicks the thing away. He realizes two seconds before it's gone that it's just a clump of seaweed and nothing to get squeamish over.
"Sorry," she says. The fire's died down, and he can't really see anything besides the floating lights. He can see the stars now, the pier closed and the boardwalk turned off. "I tried to wake you up, but you were pretty out of it."
"Okay," he says. His feet aren't wet. He reaches out, to where the ocean used to be, and he only touches wet sand. Tide's going out.
"We're down to the last of the provisions. I wanted to see if you were going to come join us or if you really plan on sleeping by the ocean." She sounds like she's smiling, and she sits closer to him, close enough that he can feel warmth coming off of her but not close enough to be touching. She smells like a tech, maybe a merch girl.
"That was nice of you," he says, because it was. Most of the techs would have rolled him into the ocean to wake him up. Dangling gross sea vegetation is almost a nice thing to do, comparatively.
"Nutrition's important," she says, and she moves again, maybe crouching.
He nods and looks up again. He's not really one for constellations. It's more Gerard and Ray's thing to do, on the quiet nights when they can get far enough away from the carparks to look and try and find shapes, but he can usually find the Big Dipper when it's out. He's pretty sure he can see it now.
"Can you find anything besides the dipper?" he asks the woman.
"Huh?" she says. She sounds familiar, sort of, which is probably because there are only about ten female techs and he's only talked to six or seven merch girls. "I think I can see the bear," she says, finally.
"Really?" He looks squints behind his glasses. He can't ever find the animals because they never actually look like animals. Gerard's excellent at pointing out the swan, but it always, always, always looks like a cross to him.
"Yes." Something in her voice tells him that she's smiling at him. "The dipper's in the bear," she says, and he knows she's smiling now, maybe trying not to laugh.
He snorts a little, looking down. He used to know that, back when he could sleep for more than two hours at a time and hot dogs weren't a major staple in his diet. "Oh. Yeah."
"It's all right." Her shoulder brushes against his, and she takes his hand, so he can feel where she's pointing. "So, that's the Big Dipper there, right?" She's warm and not wet, and Mikey lets his shoulder rest more heavily on hers. "Then if you follow the biggest star, you can find the Little Dipper, which is the little bear." She draws his finger across the sky until he can see it.
"Okay," he says.
She nods. Her hair is long and brushes against the side of his face. He wrinkles his nose again, rubbing it quickly with the heel of his other hand. "And then those big three stars that are sort of a triangle? That's the summer triangle, and the swan, eagle, and lyre are made up with the stars around it. I used to know like the whole shapes when I was little, but I can't tell you now."
"The swan's the cross," he says. He's smiling, pleased that he doesn't look stupid. He still can't see the swan. He wants to go back to the bus and tell Gerard, but this is sort of all right, in its own way.
She laughs, and it sounds embarrassed. Then she turns, and he can almost make out her profile in the low, low light of the dying fire. "I should have remembered that," she says before she's moving his arm again and pointing.
"That one's Cassiopeia." This time she actually traces out the distorted "W" shape. "I remember her because she was put in the sky as punishment, for saying her daughter was more beautiful than Neptune's. She spends half the year flipped over, and when I was really little, I used to think about how much that would suck, to spend eternity paying for one stupid decision." There's something that feels like regret in her voice.
"Yeah, but we still remember her," he says, even though it's not really helpful. He shifts, trying to make the hard sand more comfortable underneath him. The seat of his jeans is soaked through, and he'll have to try to find and steal a pair of Gerard's pajama pants. They'll be home in the morning. It shouldn't be too bad that they're too short and probably dirtier than anything else. He can't sleep in ocean-wet underwear. "Even though she's stuck hanging upside down. And she's not alone, right? She's hanging out with bears and swans." He smiles again, and it isn't forced.
The woman laughs, head brushing against his. It's sort of like flirting in a dark club, going on touch and voice alone, and he pushes a piece of her hair back from her smooth forehead with his other hand. He wishes he hadn't as soon as he does, because she pulls back a little.
"And she's got Sagittarius, over there somewhere." She motions with his hand again dropping it. "And Virgo, though I'm sure that just rubs her the wrong way. I wouldn't want to get stuck up there with a perpetual virgin. It would be like nothing you did was good enough."
The conversation is starting to hinge on things he can't talk about, goddesses and myths that even Gerard shoved to the side in favor of video games and comics, and Mikey doesn't want to look dumb in front of her. The thought makes him blink and shift again, pulling a sea shell out from under his ass and throwing it back into the ocean.
He shrugs, easing back. "Isn't her daughter up there?" It feels sort of like a test, and he doesn't know why.
"Yeah, by Pegasus." Her arm moves like she's motioning again. It's far enough towards the light that he can follow the slope of her skin. "But they're behind the buildings."
"Still? If I had a daughter, I wouldn't want to have to spend all of my eternity hiding in the stars and listening to her, you know?" He smiles, turning his head so she can see. He probably looks stupid, firelight reflecting off his glasses. "I mean, a virgin's fine. She's all the way over there." He motions vaguely even though she can't see it. "But your kid? Will whine about being stuck up there. She can't ever get away from it."
The woman snickers and bumps her shoulder against his again. "I hadn't thought of it that way. Suck," she says, drawing out the "u."
"It's the real reason why you shouldn't piss of the ancient gods. When they want to make your afterlife suck, they can really make it suck." He's really smiling. "Like rolling the stone up the hill, not drinking the wine suck."
"Don't forget harpies." She laughs, and it's a good laugh for a girl, not too high and screeching but not too quiet either, confident maybe. "Nothing quite says 'eternal damnation' like one of those things coming after your liver."
Mikey opens his mouth to maybe say something about how he thought that it was crows that ate out your liver, but then someone's yelling, "Hey, we're rolling out." It sounds like Joe Trohman, and he turns to squint as see if he can tell.
The woman stands. "All right," she calls back. "That's my coach. I'm going to turn into a squash or something if I stay behind."
He gets up too, dusting the legs of his jeans off even though all it does is get more sand caught in the creases of his fingers and under his nails. "Where are you headed back to?"
"Chicago, I think. I've got some offers for tours after that, but there's a bed there waiting for me." She walks slow, and he can see more of her face the closer they get to the fire, the shape of her jaw and the slant of her eyes.
And then he feels like an idiot because she's the tech he helped back in July, the one that he thought was going to curl up and die in front of their bus. Alicia or maybe Alice, the one that Pete wouldn't talk about when he mentioned it. "Oh," he says when he realizes, sticking his hands into his hoodie.
She grins at him. It's a good smile, like her laugh. Her whole face lights up. He remembers that from their afternoon together. "Oh," she says, rolling her eyes. She prods his side. "So you let strange girls come up to you and talk constellations any time, Way?"
Mikey looks at the sand, at the discarded cigarette butts and beer cans. "Only ones that shove seaweed in my face. It's a thing."
Her nose curls up, and she's still smiling, though it goes soft when they've stopped in front of the fire, close enough that his legs are starting to feel warm again. Someone's thrown a new log onto the glowing embers.
She reaches out and brushes some sand from the sleeve. Her hand doesn't linger, but he can feel her fingers after they're gone. "I can't believe you're wearing that. Doesn't it smell gross?"
"It does now." He can still smell ocean better than he can smell bonfire, empty crab shells and rotting fish, and he knows that it's from his hoodie. "But my stuff smells worse."
She shakes her head as Joe comes up behind them, throwing an arm over both their shoulders. "Miss Simmons, your ride is going to leave," he says, cheerful and possibly buzzed. "You don't want to have to go home on the My Chem bus. They keep zombies in their spare bunk."
Alicia laughs and doesn't meet his eyes. "All right, I'm coming." She shrugs out from under Joe's arm and comes closer to Mikey. "So I'm going to be a little forward and ask for your phone number. I mean, I could wait for you to ask for mine, but then I wouldn't be able to tell you about the stars I'll see on my way back to Chicago." Her smile's changed in the firelight, softer, maybe just barely shy.
"I'd probably forget to ask for it anyway," he says, and he's smiling, too, again. "Or I'd remember and I wouldn't be able to find anyone that has it."
She nods and pulls her cellphone out from the pocket of her jeans, hand outstretched for his. "And then you'd have to spend the rest of eternity remembering that you could have had an awesome chick's number and you blew it."
"Would I have to deal with a kid and a virgin?" he asks as he passes over his. He doesn't look at her while he types in his number, entering his name as 'mway.'
"Virgins are sort of hard to come by on rock and roll tours, so maybe you'll have to do with a chronic masturbator or something." She leans in to give him a quick hug, one armed and friendly, before she trades him phones again. "Or Dirty."
Mikey wrinkles his nose. "That? That would suck."
She nods, walking backwards on uneven sand with more grace than he could manage. "Yeah, well. I'll see you around, Mikeyway." She's grinning, and there's something rising in his stomach that feels a lot like being in sixth grade again, when he first looked at Janet Santavicca and realized that she had really, really pretty hair.
He's waving goodbye to her, biting his lip on another smile. He wants to hold the feeling in, so it doesn't slip out and leave him empty like everything else does anymore, just until he's slept and can think again.
Mikey watches Alicia turn and run to catch up with Joe before he sits down on one of the benches, next to one of the guys from Gym Class and steals someone's over-burned marshmallow from the end of the stick. It's gritty from the sand on his fingertips, but he doesn't really mind.
Disclaimer: Not real.
Pairing: Implied past Mikey/Pete, implied future Mikey/Alicia
Rating: G
Summary: Mikey's not sure that he's going to miss this, the breakneck tours and the fact that all his clothes could walk on their own power if he'd let them.
A/N: Beta by thelemic! (Thank you so much, again, seriously.) Written for burgaw as a birthday gift and because she's been having a rough time of late. Continuation of the Hood Rat, though decidedly less angry and more fluffy.
He wears the hoodie to the last bonfire, the last chance for this crowd to hang around together. It's just after midnight, August 15th, and Warped Tour is officially over.
Mikey's not sure that he's going to miss this, the breakneck tours and the fact that all his clothes could walk on their own power if he'd let them. The Avenged Sevenfold hoodie is probably the cleanest thing he owns, and he only really thinks that because it doesn't smell like his sweat and filth. It still stinks, but it's different, strange, with just a hint of girl's deodorant trying to combat the smell. It's not bad comparatively.
He'd be lying if he said he didn't sort of like the smell, though, and it's warmer than most of his own. They're all off the boardwalk and on the beach, waves crashing, and it's windy, sand occasionally stinging his hands. It's cold enough for a sweatshirt, late summer air run cool thanks to the ocean. There's already sand in his chucks, but he doesn't want to risk losing them to last-night hijinks by taking them off.
"Mikeyway," Pete says, coming up from behind him and throwing an arm around his back. It's less intimate than they're used to, more friendly than anything. They haven't talked in three days, too tired and frayed on each other's edges to be able to stand.
"Hi, Pete," he says without smiling. There's still the tired ache behind his eyes, niggling at him to let him know that he should be on the bus with the other guys sleeping off the past two and a half months. It seems a waste though, when they're so close to home and can sleep in real beds after only a few more hours of driving.
Pete drops his arm and steps back. "I can't believe it's over already." He's lying; Mikey doesn't say anything about it. They've been counting the days down together, to when they can breathe again. Pete only had thirteen days left on his bunk calendar last time Mikey saw it. He's sort of jealous, that there's a set time to when Pete knows he'll be able to breathe again. Mikey's not sure if he has that anymore.
He shrugs and smiles, zipping the hoodie up over his shirt. It's a tour shirt, and he's tired enough that he can't read the words on it. He can't even remember what table he conveniently borrowed it from. "Yeah," he says. He pushes sand with his shoes and looks at the firelight flickering on Pete's hands instead of his face.
Pete laughs, and even that sounds worn down and broken. "I'm going to go catch up with Patrick and Joe." There's a lingering Is that okay? or maybe it's Will you be all right?, like he would have said at the end of July.
Mikey makes himself smile again and shrugs. "I'll be around."
He doesn't watch Pete walk back over to the fires, turning instead towards the ocean. The sand is cold, gritty. He's not wearing socks tonight, and he can feel it between his toes as he walks down to the edge of the water. There are boats in the distance, floating red and yellow lights that sort of look like space crafts.
It occurs to him once the water is lapping at his shoes that maybe coming down here, to the party that's twenty yards back and in full force, was sort of stupid, if he's going to hang out at the water alone. He's been this tired for days, tired enough that he can really only feel real things, like the water and the sand, he can't feel anything inside, even when he's up on stage and Gerard looks back at him with clear eyes and the biggest fucking grin he can manage.
Mikey moves back a little, in case the tide comes in. His last pair of mostly clean jeans are going to smell like ocean now, and he'll have to wear them on the ride home. He'll have gritty sheets. He wrinkles his nose. Gritty sheets are worse than the sheets he has now, stiff with sweat and unwashed for months.
He sighs and stretches, arms pillowed behind his head. It's too bright from the boardwalk and the carnival on the pier to see any stars, just blue-black sky, and it reminds him of home so hard that it almost aches inside, same as everything seems to do anymore. It shouldn't, though, because it is home. He could call one of the guys from his old neighborhood and they'd be here in an hour. His parents are at a hotel twenty minutes away. He yawns a little, and he promises himself that he won't fall asleep, not on the beach twenty yards from everyone because it's asking for trouble, especially with Pete here.
This means, of course, that he does, and he does wake up with something slimy on his nose that smells too much like rotting fish. It blocks out the smell of the person next to him; everyone is so gross that you can almost tell what a person does by their smell (drummers tend to smell the worst, followed by the singers and then the techs and guitarists).
He pushes up onto his elbows, craning his neck back to get away from the smell. "Fuck," he says, too loudly.
The person--woman, his brain helpfully supplies--laughs, and she flicks the thing away. He realizes two seconds before it's gone that it's just a clump of seaweed and nothing to get squeamish over.
"Sorry," she says. The fire's died down, and he can't really see anything besides the floating lights. He can see the stars now, the pier closed and the boardwalk turned off. "I tried to wake you up, but you were pretty out of it."
"Okay," he says. His feet aren't wet. He reaches out, to where the ocean used to be, and he only touches wet sand. Tide's going out.
"We're down to the last of the provisions. I wanted to see if you were going to come join us or if you really plan on sleeping by the ocean." She sounds like she's smiling, and she sits closer to him, close enough that he can feel warmth coming off of her but not close enough to be touching. She smells like a tech, maybe a merch girl.
"That was nice of you," he says, because it was. Most of the techs would have rolled him into the ocean to wake him up. Dangling gross sea vegetation is almost a nice thing to do, comparatively.
"Nutrition's important," she says, and she moves again, maybe crouching.
He nods and looks up again. He's not really one for constellations. It's more Gerard and Ray's thing to do, on the quiet nights when they can get far enough away from the carparks to look and try and find shapes, but he can usually find the Big Dipper when it's out. He's pretty sure he can see it now.
"Can you find anything besides the dipper?" he asks the woman.
"Huh?" she says. She sounds familiar, sort of, which is probably because there are only about ten female techs and he's only talked to six or seven merch girls. "I think I can see the bear," she says, finally.
"Really?" He looks squints behind his glasses. He can't ever find the animals because they never actually look like animals. Gerard's excellent at pointing out the swan, but it always, always, always looks like a cross to him.
"Yes." Something in her voice tells him that she's smiling at him. "The dipper's in the bear," she says, and he knows she's smiling now, maybe trying not to laugh.
He snorts a little, looking down. He used to know that, back when he could sleep for more than two hours at a time and hot dogs weren't a major staple in his diet. "Oh. Yeah."
"It's all right." Her shoulder brushes against his, and she takes his hand, so he can feel where she's pointing. "So, that's the Big Dipper there, right?" She's warm and not wet, and Mikey lets his shoulder rest more heavily on hers. "Then if you follow the biggest star, you can find the Little Dipper, which is the little bear." She draws his finger across the sky until he can see it.
"Okay," he says.
She nods. Her hair is long and brushes against the side of his face. He wrinkles his nose again, rubbing it quickly with the heel of his other hand. "And then those big three stars that are sort of a triangle? That's the summer triangle, and the swan, eagle, and lyre are made up with the stars around it. I used to know like the whole shapes when I was little, but I can't tell you now."
"The swan's the cross," he says. He's smiling, pleased that he doesn't look stupid. He still can't see the swan. He wants to go back to the bus and tell Gerard, but this is sort of all right, in its own way.
She laughs, and it sounds embarrassed. Then she turns, and he can almost make out her profile in the low, low light of the dying fire. "I should have remembered that," she says before she's moving his arm again and pointing.
"That one's Cassiopeia." This time she actually traces out the distorted "W" shape. "I remember her because she was put in the sky as punishment, for saying her daughter was more beautiful than Neptune's. She spends half the year flipped over, and when I was really little, I used to think about how much that would suck, to spend eternity paying for one stupid decision." There's something that feels like regret in her voice.
"Yeah, but we still remember her," he says, even though it's not really helpful. He shifts, trying to make the hard sand more comfortable underneath him. The seat of his jeans is soaked through, and he'll have to try to find and steal a pair of Gerard's pajama pants. They'll be home in the morning. It shouldn't be too bad that they're too short and probably dirtier than anything else. He can't sleep in ocean-wet underwear. "Even though she's stuck hanging upside down. And she's not alone, right? She's hanging out with bears and swans." He smiles again, and it isn't forced.
The woman laughs, head brushing against his. It's sort of like flirting in a dark club, going on touch and voice alone, and he pushes a piece of her hair back from her smooth forehead with his other hand. He wishes he hadn't as soon as he does, because she pulls back a little.
"And she's got Sagittarius, over there somewhere." She motions with his hand again dropping it. "And Virgo, though I'm sure that just rubs her the wrong way. I wouldn't want to get stuck up there with a perpetual virgin. It would be like nothing you did was good enough."
The conversation is starting to hinge on things he can't talk about, goddesses and myths that even Gerard shoved to the side in favor of video games and comics, and Mikey doesn't want to look dumb in front of her. The thought makes him blink and shift again, pulling a sea shell out from under his ass and throwing it back into the ocean.
He shrugs, easing back. "Isn't her daughter up there?" It feels sort of like a test, and he doesn't know why.
"Yeah, by Pegasus." Her arm moves like she's motioning again. It's far enough towards the light that he can follow the slope of her skin. "But they're behind the buildings."
"Still? If I had a daughter, I wouldn't want to have to spend all of my eternity hiding in the stars and listening to her, you know?" He smiles, turning his head so she can see. He probably looks stupid, firelight reflecting off his glasses. "I mean, a virgin's fine. She's all the way over there." He motions vaguely even though she can't see it. "But your kid? Will whine about being stuck up there. She can't ever get away from it."
The woman snickers and bumps her shoulder against his again. "I hadn't thought of it that way. Suck," she says, drawing out the "u."
"It's the real reason why you shouldn't piss of the ancient gods. When they want to make your afterlife suck, they can really make it suck." He's really smiling. "Like rolling the stone up the hill, not drinking the wine suck."
"Don't forget harpies." She laughs, and it's a good laugh for a girl, not too high and screeching but not too quiet either, confident maybe. "Nothing quite says 'eternal damnation' like one of those things coming after your liver."
Mikey opens his mouth to maybe say something about how he thought that it was crows that ate out your liver, but then someone's yelling, "Hey, we're rolling out." It sounds like Joe Trohman, and he turns to squint as see if he can tell.
The woman stands. "All right," she calls back. "That's my coach. I'm going to turn into a squash or something if I stay behind."
He gets up too, dusting the legs of his jeans off even though all it does is get more sand caught in the creases of his fingers and under his nails. "Where are you headed back to?"
"Chicago, I think. I've got some offers for tours after that, but there's a bed there waiting for me." She walks slow, and he can see more of her face the closer they get to the fire, the shape of her jaw and the slant of her eyes.
And then he feels like an idiot because she's the tech he helped back in July, the one that he thought was going to curl up and die in front of their bus. Alicia or maybe Alice, the one that Pete wouldn't talk about when he mentioned it. "Oh," he says when he realizes, sticking his hands into his hoodie.
She grins at him. It's a good smile, like her laugh. Her whole face lights up. He remembers that from their afternoon together. "Oh," she says, rolling her eyes. She prods his side. "So you let strange girls come up to you and talk constellations any time, Way?"
Mikey looks at the sand, at the discarded cigarette butts and beer cans. "Only ones that shove seaweed in my face. It's a thing."
Her nose curls up, and she's still smiling, though it goes soft when they've stopped in front of the fire, close enough that his legs are starting to feel warm again. Someone's thrown a new log onto the glowing embers.
She reaches out and brushes some sand from the sleeve. Her hand doesn't linger, but he can feel her fingers after they're gone. "I can't believe you're wearing that. Doesn't it smell gross?"
"It does now." He can still smell ocean better than he can smell bonfire, empty crab shells and rotting fish, and he knows that it's from his hoodie. "But my stuff smells worse."
She shakes her head as Joe comes up behind them, throwing an arm over both their shoulders. "Miss Simmons, your ride is going to leave," he says, cheerful and possibly buzzed. "You don't want to have to go home on the My Chem bus. They keep zombies in their spare bunk."
Alicia laughs and doesn't meet his eyes. "All right, I'm coming." She shrugs out from under Joe's arm and comes closer to Mikey. "So I'm going to be a little forward and ask for your phone number. I mean, I could wait for you to ask for mine, but then I wouldn't be able to tell you about the stars I'll see on my way back to Chicago." Her smile's changed in the firelight, softer, maybe just barely shy.
"I'd probably forget to ask for it anyway," he says, and he's smiling, too, again. "Or I'd remember and I wouldn't be able to find anyone that has it."
She nods and pulls her cellphone out from the pocket of her jeans, hand outstretched for his. "And then you'd have to spend the rest of eternity remembering that you could have had an awesome chick's number and you blew it."
"Would I have to deal with a kid and a virgin?" he asks as he passes over his. He doesn't look at her while he types in his number, entering his name as 'mway.'
"Virgins are sort of hard to come by on rock and roll tours, so maybe you'll have to do with a chronic masturbator or something." She leans in to give him a quick hug, one armed and friendly, before she trades him phones again. "Or Dirty."
Mikey wrinkles his nose. "That? That would suck."
She nods, walking backwards on uneven sand with more grace than he could manage. "Yeah, well. I'll see you around, Mikeyway." She's grinning, and there's something rising in his stomach that feels a lot like being in sixth grade again, when he first looked at Janet Santavicca and realized that she had really, really pretty hair.
He's waving goodbye to her, biting his lip on another smile. He wants to hold the feeling in, so it doesn't slip out and leave him empty like everything else does anymore, just until he's slept and can think again.
Mikey watches Alicia turn and run to catch up with Joe before he sits down on one of the benches, next to one of the guys from Gym Class and steals someone's over-burned marshmallow from the end of the stick. It's gritty from the sand on his fingertips, but he doesn't really mind.