Author: grayglube

Title: Curio Girl

Summary: "She had had the air of remoteness that children, especially impish children, retain for some time after brushing through death" –Nabokov

Rating: M

Warning(s)/Kinks: Language, Sexual Situation, Voyeurism, Drug Use

Spoilers: Nothing specific but an overall for S1.

Disclaimer: I don't own American Horror Story.

A/N: Yes the title is Curio Girl, figured I'd point that out because a certain someone who likes to watch me write decided I had meant curious and there was a sparked debate on whether 'curio' was a word and thank goodness I have a dictionary/thesaurus widget on my desktop and can easily win word debates.

This one is for ScarlettWoman710 who has been patiently waiting for me to get to writing this, she asked for Tate perspective, dark Violet, and smut. Violet is more different that "dark" and it's more plotty than smutty but that's just how it wanted to get written I guess.

"She had had the air of remoteness that children, especially impish children, retain for some time after brushing through death…" –Nabokov

He studies the feeling, detached, observant, there's something in his brain that tells him to decipher it, codify it with words, sequester it in some special niche like a trophy, a picture, and memento moiré. It's more than boredom because it's interesting while taking up the space between drab and dusty, it's something that looks drab and dusty and without the appeal of some aged relic in the window of an antique shop, but isn't. There must be a word to call it. A phrase. Someone, somewhere, must have already named it.

There's some quiet final understanding to it, to their own little secret worlds they've kept to themselves. Both of them, him, her, and neither of them are ever going to be willing to share them with the other. He knows that now.

Those places he knows she has in her, maybe it's just one place, he wouldn't know but he knows when she gets there. It's in the little things. The way she stops looking at the person she's talking too and speak to the room, the wall, the floor, the furniture as if always trying to do more than one thing than just hold a conversation. The way every blink becomes too long and a slow drag of her eyelids back up, the way she turns her head when they're closed and opens them to a new sight every time, with every shift and sway and swivel of her head. The way her nails dig into her palm, relax, contract, over and over in time with her breathing. The way her voice gets lower, rasping, a murmur sometimes. The way she moves, solid and firm and purposeful like she's memorized the steps beforehand, planned them.

She has all the time in world to become the girl she's always wanted to be but that doesn't mean he's going to get to meet her.

But he wants to.

So he does things.

Things to get her attention.

He upsets her chessboard while she plays out strategies with herself, replaces captured pawns and rearranges her knights, topples her king. When she comes into the attic and finds it her eyes move beat by beat like a heart pumping, like doors opening and closing, regarding an invisible audience that's just him but he could be anywhere and when she finally looks back down at the black and white squares she hooks her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans and lifts a foot to raise the board with her booted toe up and over the crate it sits on, scattering pieces and leveling the battlefield.

She doesn't need a board to play chess with herself he realizes after it's done.

He's merely destroyed the hobby he has of watching her while her dainty fingers trail across wooden chess tokens fondly, studying the way her fingernails look now that she's taken to keeping them long and letting her mother paint them for her.

He misses it.

"Can you see it?"

He startles because he's watching her play with her dead baby brother, making loud inane sounds that echo around the whole first floor of the house. "What?"

Moira stands over his shoulder, her ghostly eye trained along with her other one through the glass panes of the sitting room watching Violet blow a raspberry on her brother's cheek, he squeals happily, cooing and kicking his covered feet and knocking her in the mouth, she laughs.

"She's different. Happier," Moira tells him, turning away with her yellow cleaning bucket and a polishing rag over her shoulder, her orthopedics squeaking on the freshly waxed floor.

He sees something.

A flash here and there.

And then it's gone when he blinks or looks too close.

She's stretched out on the couch, reading, highlighting things, circling words she doesn't know and for a moment there's bare leg, painted toes, longer hair and it's as he thinks about how the only time he's touched her skin bare of nylon was when they had sex.

And it's gone after he closes his eyes to will away the image of some other male ghost in the house peeling off her leggings, and tries not to wonder if her body is sweet and sore from sex during her post-coital book consumption, tries not to wonder if the insides of her thighs are sticky with someone's cum, tries not to wonder if someone's mouth has sucked angry red marks into her perky breasts.

She's got gray and black stripped nylons and purple socks and an oversized sweater and loose cotton shorts on after he blinks and her hair is pulled away from her face in a ponytail where it had been long and loose before.

He sees it again. One day, bare legs, painted toes, long hair, but there's also the pale inside of her forearms devoid of silver lines and he's too focused on their absence to consider them until they appear again, as she lowers her stretched arms with a cereal box in her hands. He strides away from the kitchen catching only the sounds of her opening more cabinets and the clinking of a metal spoon against a porcelain bowl as she pours milk.

He realizes he's not just seeing things that aren't there when he passes the open back door. Looking out he sees mother and daughter across from each other but separated by the low brick wall. There's confusion on her mother's face that she doesn't notice because she's blowing out a drag to the side.

"Violet?"

He's too busy watching Vivien to see the difference happen but he knows it does. Her mother stays hunched over, her sun hat drooping and her garden-gloved hand lax on her pruning shears.

"Yeah?"

He knows it does because her mother's face twists into an expression of rapt concentration and her eyes take in her daughter face like she doesn't know who she is or that for a moment she looked like someone else.

Probably because she did.

"Nothing." Her mother waves a hand and Violet takes another puff off her cigarette, "Oh-kay."

"I see it, sometimes," he tells the old woman sweeping up the broken shards of some small delicate thing knocked over by the twins from their haphazard game of house tag.

"See what?" She hands him the dust pan and he disposes of its contents in the garbage can.

"She looks older," he tells her taking his foot off the pedal and watching the lid not quite close, he presses it down and puts the dustpan on the counter. Moira scowls and picks it up.

She puts it away under the sink and rings out a sponge going back to the counter, "She's grown up."

"That's what I said."

There's a squeal outside. For a moment he thinks it's her but it's her mother running passed the window with a salacious smile while Ben aims the water hose and follows.

He scowls; Moira clicks her tongue against her teeth and starts doing dishes. "No, that's not what you said. That's not what I meant."

"…"

Her head bows and she rinses a dish with her old, veiny hands.

"They don't see it."

"She doesn't look older around them," he agrees.

She sighs and picks up a glass, "You think you see it, but you don't either."

The next time he sees it is when his mind is otherwise occupied, only really looking once he's noticed something else is different. Her covers are kicked down to her knees and for all the nights he's ever watched her get herself off like a filthy pervert, and he is, he can concede and admit that much, she's never done it the way she does it then.

Sometimes she'll lie on her back and just let her hand wander aimlessly until she finally decides she really just wants to get off and go to sleep and rolls over onto her stomach and rubs at herself though her panties. Most days she just flops right down and grinds furiously down into the sides of her thumbs without bothering to take off her jeans or shoes and its more habit than anything else, in the same category as having a cigarette.

But it's different because usually she waits a few minutes to get off again, usually he can't see much of anything, usually she's never actually fucking herself, but he shows up halfway in and watches her cum once, watches her breathe and squirm for a handful of moments after, stop and start kicking at her blankets, watches her leg slide up further on the mattress, the inside of her thigh pressed tight to the bed and a hollow of empty space under her pelvis when her hips angle themselves higher on one side from the position, watches the way her hand moves under the elastic and her knuckles tent the fabric of her underwear, watches her decide that it's not good enough.

She doesn't bother taking them off, just slides her panties down to the middle of her splayed thighs, the fabric stretched tight but she sighs and tilts her hips up, and down, and he can imagine the difference the exposure makes, how it must feel to have her cunt completely naked, it's dark but not so dark he can't catch the shine of the strands of wetness threading out of her, thinning and forming slow trailing sticky wet heat down into her underwear and the onto her sheets.

She's every wet dream he's ever had when she lets her fingers slip between her folds, gentle, taking in how wet she is, and he watches her press one shoulder hard into the bed to hold her weight when her other hand comes down too.

He stares at the shape of her bare ass, and he can't help but wonder how it'd look with bite marks on it. She makes a sound and it's a dissatisfied whine, a hand comes back up to her mouth and she licks at her fingertips sloppily before bringing them to her clit, her hips jerk and he watches her other fingers slip inside.

Her knee moves further up and she groans before stopping, body wiggling and her fingers coming back out with a wet squelch, she circles her hips and keeps fluttering her fingers over the swollen nub, she digs the wet fingers of her free hand into the pillow and breathes in tiny heavy huffs.

He's equal parts confused and alert, and hard. Harder than any other time.

Quickly he gets what she doing when her free hand keeps slipping down to trail across her sex; she's trying to get herself wetter. She's playing with herself. It's not something he's watched her do before; it's not something she does. It's not just a habit this time, it's something she's giving her full attention.

And when she slips in three fingers when he knows for a fact the most she's ever used before is two he looks closer. It's not just her longer hair or the lower tone to her rasping groans it's how she moves. She moves like she's being fucked by someone, like she's done it a million times, like she was born adept at sex.

There's a coordination he knows she never had before and she pushes back on her fingers like the way he's imagined she'd push back on his cock if he ever had her on her hands and knees, her hands do nothing, her legs and hips do all the work, they tense and relax and roll and tilt and it's not just a rustle and rasp of blankets and pajama pants like it usually is, it's the suck of her cunt and the slap of wet skin and the slickness of sex.

When she cums she presses her lips together tight and there's a guttural rattling groan, muffled but loud in the silence of the room, she lies still for a long time and just rests. She finds her bones and comes back to her body with her hands fixing her panties back over herself with an elastic snap.

She rolls over and stares at wet lines she leaves when she wipes her fingers across the inside of her bare thigh and then she peers up at the ceiling like she's never noticed it before.

He knows she doesn't see him, and he doubts she can feel him in the room, but when she mumbles a half surprised half weary "Well, fuck…," to herself and laughs low and soft he swears she's talking to him. But she isn't and she reaches down for the blankets, pulls them over herself and closes her eyes.

She goes to sleep and he finds a room to jerk off in and thinks of her surprise after the fact of her own orgasm.

"She's not the same."

Her father doesn't even try to pretend he doesn't know who his least favorite patient is talking about.

"She's transitioned passed her self-pity."

He wonders if Ben ever sees her anymore, if they even talk, or if him and his wife are back on their pattern of selfish self-indulgence, just with each other in tow. Laughing, fucking, cooing over their brand new baby.

"…"

He wants to scream, he wants her father to do something, wants him to pay attention and fix her, but he says nothing and stands awkwardly while her father watches himself shave in the bathroom mirror, tapping off shaving cream and rinsing the razor and finally his face.

Tate watches him hang his head and turns out of the doorway, Ben mumbles to himself so low that he almost doesn't catch it, almost doesn't hear how tired and despondent her father sounds.

"But she's grown up wrong."

There's only so much he can do to feel close to her, he can spy but even that gets boring when he's not really there doing something with her. The novelty is gone in watching her sleep, mostly because she doesn't do so as frequently as she used to.

He finds boxes in the garage, not patient files, old family photos, preschool arts and crafts, a packet of her old report cards. He sifts through and reads the ones from grade school wanting to know what other people thought of her as a child.

The results are illuminating.

Her progress reports are a mess of bad behavior and talking back and violent outbursts. She was banned from taking the school bus for a year when she hit another child in the face with a textbook and knock out his loose tooth, and when they let her back on she was promptly banned for the remainder of her grade-school years because she broke a girl's finger on purpose, 'as a joke' is the exact quote from her nine year old self in the disciplinary report.

But her grades are made up of so many A's that the uniformity makes it look like they came already on the little yellow grade card instead of penned in.

He laughs when he goes further back to see if she was always such a terror to her teachers and finds a note home from her nursery school: 'Violet had a bad day today, she urinated on a classmates stuffed animal, explained to her that this was not proper behavior. Please enforce and follow-up at home with discussion on respect for other people's belongings.'

"I wasn't a nice little girl," she says. He drops the paper to his lap and stares at her shadow on the cement wall, the late afternoon sun making it stand out in stark relief.

"…"

Her shadow leans against the doorframe and crosses its arms, head turned to the side in a perfect profile. He stares down at the arts and crafts of preschool Violet and there's one just like it done with black construction paper. He compares them, and finds little difference beyond size and scale of features, the slope of her nose the pout of her lips.

"I was always bored."

"…"

"I'm always bored now too."

"Why are you talking to me?"

He turns to look at her.

She's lighting a cigarette, "If you don't want me to, leave. Don't act like that about it. It's boring."

He startles when she looks at him, he wants to turn back and see what her shadow looks like. If it's changed.

"You're different Violet."

"It's like being that kid again, because there isn't anything anyone can do about it to make it stop, there aren't any consequences. When you're a kid there are consequences but you don't know about them and by the time the next time comes around you've forgotten about them."

"…"

"Little kids want to take things apart just to see how many pieces there are, how they all fit together, and then never bother to fix them. What makes people so different from things?"

"Do you hate me?"

"No. I like you. Sometimes you're not boring."

She smiles, it's not mean, or half a scowl, or anything besides sweet, honest, but it's wrong because everything else is.

They talk, their typical back and forth, a verbal volley with most of the returns going out of bounds, but they talk and he's glad for it. She's searched him out and finds him in the basement and her question is not one he's expected. He gets spiteful half-way through and she just questions and answers and replies with her tone never anything more than what it starts out as, even, curious, liquid heat crawling over his skin.

"You know one of the biggest differences between guys and girls is?"

"What?"

"Guys don't care whether a girl has slept with another guy; given the chance he'll still fuck her. Girls though, they'll stop having sex with a guy forever if they find out they've had sex with someone else."

"What's your point?"

"Do you know why?"

"No."

"It's about pride. Society says guys have to earn it, do something, prove it and girls just have to keep it, hold out, say 'no,' that's the difference."

"…"

"Guys want to destroy the memory of every other guy that came before him when they fuck a girl. And girls just want to destroy the boy who fucks someone other than them."

"…"

"How'd you like fucking my mom?"

"Those pills she was taking made her pretty eager."

"Does it feel different?"

"Yeah."

"Probably because she had a kid and everything."

"I never saw her naked."

"Did she touch you?"

"Not really. I was already hard."

"Yeah? Who was your fluffer? Hayden? No, she wasn't dead yet. Nora maybe, you like her, don't you? Moira?"

"I went to watch you sleep but you weren't that night, you were touching yourself."

"Was it always going to be my mom you were going to rape?"

"No."

"But I didn't have a boyfriend."

"It was easier for your mom to think I was your dad."

"If I'd been fucking someone would you have crawled into my bed and pretended to be him?"

"Probably."

"Would we be like this if I already had someone?"

"Probably not."

"It's not being stuck in this house that made me this way."

"So that's my fault too?"

"Yes. You only wanted me because I was some angsty little girl looking for something to scare her."

"You're more than just an angsty little girl, Violet."

"You wanted someone to look at you and see some other side that's hidden behind all the things you did."

"What were you hoping I'd see about you?"

"I just wanted you to make me someone else."

"I thought I made you happy, for awhile, at least."

"You did. I'm happy now and I don't need anyone to do it for me anymore."

"You've changed."

"Not really. You wouldn't really know that though, I guess."

"You're different now. You know you are."

"You think I was always the way I was when you met me? I wasn't, I was a lot like this, I grew out of it, I changed. I've just grown back into it."

"Why?"

"I guess I just missed it, maybe being how I was just made me lonely and sad, maybe I did it because you liked me better the way I used to be, or maybe I did it to punish you. I don't know. It doesn't matter. I like being this way."

"Do you forgive me?"

"Why, should I? My mom doesn't, my dad doesn't. I don't think you've ever really been that upset by it either to tell the truth."

"…"

"There's just something about the idea of you cuming inside my mother that bothers me. I really wanted to be the only girl to know what that's like. It's like someone else has played with my toys and the idea makes me want to smash them."

"Is that what you want to do? Hurt me?"

"Do you want me to hurt you, Tate? Do you want anything from me anymore?"

"That's a dumb question and you know it."

"I just don't know what it is you're trying to do. I don't know if you want my attention or if you're just being petty."

"What do you think?"

"I think you're confused."

"I am. Very"

"You don't have to like me anymore, you know?"

"I never just liked you, Violet. I love you."

"Okay."

"But I don't get this; I don't get you, the way you're acting."

"It's just what's happened."

"…"

"It's okay, like I said, you don't have to get it or like it or want it, I just think about it sometimes."

"Think about what?"

"You. I still like you, I guess. I miss you."

"You used to love me."

"Maybe. Because you made me happy, but I can do that myself now soooo…I don't know maybe you need to give me something I can't give myself and I'll know."

"Know what?"

"If I'm just in love you and bitter or if I really changed or something."

"Where are you going?"

"I'm tired, I'm going to go take a nap."

"…"

"Do you still watch me sleep?"

"You don't sleep."

"I feel like I do, sometimes I think I dream."

"What do you dream about?"

"That's a dumb question and you know it."

She's reading again and he sits down on the couch, she gives him a glance over the top of her book and then promptly ignores him. He engages hoping for a counter.

"I think you're taller."

"Maybe."

"How'd you figure it out?"

"Figure what out?"

"Making yourself look older. Is it just around me or does everyone see it?"

She raises her eyes and shifts her book down into her lap.

"When I was alive I always thought of what I'd be like when I got out, got away from my parents, from all this bullshit, what college would be like, what type of guy I'd be fucking, what I'd be going to school for but I never really thought of life after that."

"What do you mean?"

"No one ever imagines what they'll look like when they get old. I never really thought about marriage or kids or having a real job. I spent a lot of time wondering what I'd be like when I was on my own."

"How old do you think you are?"

Because that's what it is, just an older version of her staring back at him.

"I don't know nineteen, twenty, something like that."

"You look good."

"Yeah, I know. I would have been pretty hot," she grins.

"You are now."

"You know what I mean."

Her grin fades, not sadly, just slowly and she picks up her book and starts reading again.

"Guess that makes me the jail bait."

"Seventeen, practically a baby," she agrees with a nod.

"You like younger men?"

"I like you."

"Do you?"

She nods. He stares. She doesn't look up. He leaves.

"There's no point to having sex with someone if you don't want to have sex with them."

His eyes shoot up from across the board, He waits but she doesn't look up so he sighs and goes back to his tiles, "You don't miss it?"

"Sex?"

"Yeah."

He sees her shrug, "Sometimes."

"And so sometimes you have pointless sex is that what you're saying."

He can only imagine who with, probably his mother's piece of twenty something dumbass.

"No, why would I have sex with someone if I didn't want to have sex with them?"

"Because you miss it."

"I wouldn't have sex with someone I don't want to have sex with. I miss sex," she gestures for the bag of letters, "Real sex, not just getting off. I can always get off, I get off a lot," she raises her head when he sucks in a breath before going on "I miss actual sex, sometimes. That's what I meant."

"…"

He stares at her and her expression is blank.

"At least I think I miss it, it was a long time ago. Sometimes I try to remember and it's weird because there are memories and then there are fantasies and I can't remember which are which. We did do it more than once right?"

"Twice," he tells her, his fingers just about ripping the bag out of her hand for his own letters.

"We fooled around a lot, I think."

"Not that much," he grumbles.

"Really? I guess I just wish we did then."

"Stop talking."

"What?"

She looks surprised, he can't tell if it's faked or real because she's looked different since she asked him to play Scrabble with him.

"You know what you're doing and I know what you're doing so quit it."

She ends the game by putting down her last four letters. He looks down at the word and up at her blank face until she says it, out loud, like he can't read it himself.

"Checkmate."

She tells him to come with her without telling him why and her small hand slips into his and pulls him along behind her, he stumbles when she takes the stairs three at a time in long, weird strides and the backs of her pale bare thighs flash into sight from underneath her long skirt.

Her hand trails and glides and flops along the banister like it does when she listens to music and tries to follow the invisible melody with her fingers in the air.

Once there upstairs he can feel it, the mute pumping of music from the attic, weird synthesizer beats and heavy bass, she points up and takes him along with her not bothering with pulling down the ladder, they just show up and the entire space is smoky, hazy, and unbearably warm from too many teenaged bodies in close proximity.

There're ten all together. Three smoking up on the other side of the attic. Two couples dance or hump while standing. Two more are uncapping prescription bottles and emptying Ziploc bags filled with a couple of pills each into a glass bowl, and there's a kid playing with the music settings on the speakers.

"Pill Party."

She sits down near the window and he joins her watching everyone play a cleaner version of Russian roulette at their own pace. When they're finished she takes him by the hand again and crouches down over the bowl, sifting through, putting some in her hand and peering at them carefully. He grabs blindly and cradles half a handful in his palm.

The only ones he recognizes are the Tiffany blue Valiums she's got three of in her own hand, she looks at his random assortment and slaps them back into the bowl, picking through again and placing pills into his hand one by one.

"Here. These. Take these."

"What are they?"

There are only two types, pale yellow with a 'C' in twenty milligrams and little white twenty-fives of what could be rat poison for all he knows.

"Stimulants of various varieties, that's what you like right?"

"What are your's?" She's got four different types, none that he recognizes beyond the downers.

"Ones that make you feel like Caspar."

He decides there isn't much being dead leaves him afraid of; even if he overdoses it won't be so bad. A few hours of nausea and vomiting and fever at worst so he stands up and grins down at her, "Bottoms up." She jerks at the leg of his jeans and stands up too.

"Not yet."

"Why not?"

She takes her handful and walks across the attic to lean back against the wall and watch the activity around them.

"You'll see. We have to wait awhile and then we can watch."

"Watch what?"

He sits back down next to her and shakes his closed fist to hear the pills rattle.

"I want to watch them fuck."

He raises a careful brow and finds no joke on her face. Just careful concentration as the music gets louder and everyone's high starts kicking in and people start stripping off heavier layers, either getting horny or getting tired and mixing pills with the sweet heavy smoke of a shared spliff.

"Okay."

"Good."

Her smile is wide and bright and excited.

When she slaps hers into her mouth and swallows turning and showing him her empty mouth with a joking 'Aaaaah' vibrating out of her throat. He follows suit.

Clothes hit the floor, barely legal teens make-out, cop feels, dance, or try, swaying, grinding, laughing. He's stimulated in more ways than one after a half an hour.

One couple is fucking, sloppily, frantic, enthusiastic and her delicate hand creeps between his legs and her fingers press and rub into the inside of his thigh, he's been fully erect for five minutes without much effort or thought or reason.

He must give her a look because she just laughs close to his throat and breathes into his ear, "Sensitive right?"

"What the fuck was the other pill?"

She laughs and presses into the line of his side, "Boner meds, for old guys who can't get it up."

"Didn't think I'd be able to?"

She rubbing him through his jeans and he all he can hear above the boyish grunts of guys fucking whatever girl is high enough not to care is the thrum of his own blood in his ears.

"No, but that shit keeps you hard for a long time."

Someone moans and he winces because the idea he's ever sounded so ridiculous when they've had sex is embarrassing, to say the least.

"How long?"

"Long enough that, eventually, when you cum it'll be like you're dick dry heaves."

"I hate you."

"Good. You should," She mumbles into his lips, pressing a kiss into them with her.

"Why'd you give me them?"

"Because I want to have sex with you."

His dick twitches.

"Why?"

"Because I'm horny."

His hand slides up her thigh and she's wet when his knuckles brush over the crotch of her panties.

"Why me?"

She purses her lips and pulls away, "If you don't want to then just say so."

"I just don't get it, is what I meant."

What he means is why does she want him, instead of Travis or one of the boys too high to know who she is in large supply around the attic. He waits and she just stares at him, she stands up and brushes off her skirt, swaying a little.

"Nevermind, I'm going to sleep."

She goes to the door to the attic and starts pushing down the stairs. He stands and winces at the persistence of his dick to get into something hot and wet and relieve some of the pressure.

"Wait a fucking second, would you just stop and have a fucking conversation with me? Or just not even bother. Because what you're doing is annoying and you know it and you keep doing it and we never get anywhere."

"Fine. Okay. Whatever." She shrugs and waves a hand in dismissal; he catches her wrist and tugs.

"Where are you going?"

Her eyes are bleary, indistinct, high. He's scared she's going to go looking for someone else besides him when she's riding her high.

"You don't want to talk because I'm not saying what it is you want to hear so I'm going to go to sleep and not bother."

She pulls out of his gone limp grasp and dances down the flimsy stairs, tripping a bit but disappearing from his limited view of the floor below. He sits down and undoes his jeans knowing only one way to take of a hard-on that won't take no for an answer, he licks his hand and thinks about what type of high fuck she'd be if he wasn't such an idiot and asked questions that don't matter.

He bangs his head into the wall while he strokes, "Fuck."

"Hi."

He walks up to where she lies in the sun.

"Hi."

She mimics his deeper pitch.

"You're a bitch."

He tells her.

"You're a rapist."

She counters.

"…"

"And a literal mother fucker."

"…"

"Is that all you had to say?" She raises her sunglass off her eyes and onto her head and looks at him.

"Yes." He turns halfway to go but she still stares and doesn't pull her sunglasses back down.

"…" She waits.

"No," he admits after a long moment.

"…" She waits.

"Do you hate me?"

"Sometimes."

"…"

"Because you're annoying and you just keep waiting around like one day I'll wake up and want to be in love with you. That isn't how it works."

"Why not?"

"Because you're not the boy I thought you were, and I've changed so I'm not the same girl I used to be."

"So what?"

"We can't have the same thing we used to because you were pretending to be someone else and I wasn't like this. We're different. We have to have something different than before otherwise it's never going to change from the way it is now."

He nods and sits down on the grass next to her lawn chair. He looks at her.

"I like it."

"What?" She cocks her head to the side like a curious bird.

"Your hair. Long. Longer. It's nice."

"Thanks."

She reaches behind her hair and pulls something from over her ear. It's a joint. She lights up and sags back into the chair.

"How is it?"

"I can feel it in my lips."

He takes it from her when she extends the neatly rolled joint and just nods, eyes sparkling, lips soft and smiling after she smacks them to feel them tingle.

At his first half drag he tries to hold it in but his lungs refuse, it's been awhile since he's partaken in such habits and he always did prefer uppers anyway so he coughs hard and long and she laughs hard and long.

He tries again and does it slower. Taking four quick puffs and a long full inhale, holds it and releases a white cloud sigh. He watches her watch it drift and disperse and she's about feeling it in the lips, his feel like they're vibrating.

"This is good weed, where'd you get it?"

"Kid's mom smokes it in the bathroom when daddy goes to work."

"Well she's got good taste."

He sprawls back into the grass and puts his arms behind his head while she rolls over onto her stomach, they puff puff pass until the green shade of the trees starts chiming above his head and the blades of grass under her lounger start dancing a waltz with each other.

She flicks away the roach; it plops into the birdbath with a small splash.

"Let's get crunk."

"What's crunk?"

"Crazy drunk."

They do and when he wakes up it's early afternoon again except he's cradling a sharp metallic migraine and his lips are as rough as harsh grit sandpaper. Her small body is flopped over his and they both reek of acidic drunken sweat that comes from too much vodka.

The room is the master and the door to bathroom is open, there's a towel on the floor next to the toilet and he can catch a whiff of puke off her little exhales every so often and he smirks at her low liquor capacity. He can vaguely remember stumbling over her while trying to hold her hair while she was throwing up.

His widening smile hurts his head, makes the space behind his eyes too tight and the room's too bright. Her dirty feet are brown and there're grass clippings all over them and the sheets, it makes his ankles itch, he scratches with his toes and she stirs awake, pulling the sheet up over them both.

He looks down and sees that he's still wearing his boxers and she's still wearing her shirt and underwear and for once he's glad they haven't had sex. He doubts he'd remember if they had and he likes to remember.

"I feel sick."

"Don't puke."

"I've never gotten smashed before."

"It sucks afterwards."

"My head hurts."

"I know."

He strokes her hair, it's not as long as it was the night before. He ghosts his lips over the warmth of it, liking the way it feel across his cheeks and chin.

"You smell," she informs him pressing her face into his bare chest. Her mouth damp against his sternum and her eyes are open, her fingers opening and closing on his ribs, gently.

"So do you."

"My nails are all bloody."

He looks and see's the caked brown lines under her nails and red sheen on her cuticles. Her bare legs rub against his.

"What are you doing?"

"Itchy."

Her pale legs are a mess of picked mosquitoes bites and red lines, she reaches down and scratches, furious and fast making red lines blanch and flare back bright pink before the broken bumps speckle themselves with fresh red.

"Stop it. Come on get up, we'll take a bath."

"I'm not a baby, I can take one myself."

"I want to take one with you."

They do and when they finish still as hung-over and tired as before but smelling less like it he finds his boxers and she finds a robe and they end up eating leftover garlic knots from the family's 'Italian night' her nursing an orange and vodka and him a haphazard bloody mary that has too much Tabasco sauce in it in the backyard, him looking lazy and her like a movie star with a pair of stolen Ray Bans on.

His stomach roils with its burn creeping up his throat, his esophagus raw and she falls asleep in the sun and finds her skin burned in one neat stripe from collar to belly where the robe has gaped open when she wakes up. Later when he takes the ointment tube out of her hand and paints it on with his fingertips her eyes close halfway and he knows he's back in her good graces, knows that when he blows a breath over the shiny slick skin that it's lust in her eyes when she stares at him. She blushes prettily and buttons her shirt, kisses his cheek and bites her bottom lip before leaving the room fast.

Escaping.

He doesn't know what they are now but he decides he kind of likes it.

A/N: So yeah, this was fun to write.

Recs:

All We Are Is All We Are by ScarlettWoman710: Basically hot smut and great plot. My new favorite smut scene is in this.

Drain Me by ScarlettWoman710: I prompted her and she wrote this. And I turned to mush.

I'm not so wordy with the rec descriptions right now because I'm about to fall asleep on my keyboard, so I'm taking a nap as soon as I post this. Go read eveything of this author's she's fucking fantastic.