#astoria apartments for rent

[astoriawest]

Life by the River in LIC

If you're looking for Astoria Queens apartments for rent, don't overlook Astoria West Apartments. Go ahead and delete your "save search" of apartments because this hidden gem has everything that you're looking for - a great location, luxurious amenities, and more. Come check out Astoria West today to find your new home and see what specials are currently on offer! If you're located out of state, you can check online for a 3D tour. Astoria West supports the principles of the Standard Operating Procedures, Fair Housing Act, and Equal Housing Opportunity.

If you're looking for apartments in Long Island City, you've probably come across a few dozen (if not more) options. But have you heard of Astoria West? It's just up the river from LIC but offers unrivaled views. This hidden gem is quickly becoming one of the most popular apartment complexes in the area, thanks to its prime location and luxurious amenities. If you're looking for LIC rentals, here's what you need to know about the nearby Astoria West Apartments.

Central Location

One of the best things about Astoria West Apartments is its location. Situated in Astoria, part of the Queens borough, it’s just two miles upriver from Long Island City, NY 11101. Queens provides a central location that's easy to reach the rest of the city. Nearby you'll find Queens Plaza and the elevated Queensboro Plaza and easy access to the Jackson Avenue/Queens Plaza bus station. You’ll be close to all the best restaurants, bars, and shops the neighborhood offers. Plus, the world-famous art gallery Moma PS1 is just around the corner. And if you're someone who loves to be outdoors, you'll be happy to know that Astoria Park is just a short walk away. 

If you feel the need to venture out of LIC or Queens, the N and W lines are a short shuttle bus away. They can take you to Queens, Brooklyn, or Manhattan in record time. Nearby you will also find Sunnyside, Williamsburg, and Woodside. A quick walk towards Center Boulevard will take you to Gantry Park and Hunter's Point South, which has some stellar views.

But if you live at Astoria West, you don't have to go that far to get views like that. The views from the rooftop are out of this world. You can soak up all of the city with sights from Midtown Manhattan and Queens.

Luxurious Amenities

Astoria West Apartments doesn't just offer a great real estate location - it also offers thousands of square feet of luxurious amenities that are sure to make your life easier and make you feel at home. For example, there's a 24-hour doorman on staff so that you always have someone around if you need anything. There's also an on-site fitness center so that you can avoid those pesky gym membership fees. Astoria West is pet-friendly and has a pet spa so your furry friend can enjoy a little pampering.

These luxury apartments have various layouts like studio, one-bedroom, or 2 bedroom floor plans. Regardless of how many bedrooms you need, there is plenty of sqft in each unit. Everything you need is included, like a washer and dryer, luxury finishes, and spacious closets.

Don’t Miss Astoria West

If you're looking for Astoria Queens apartments for rent, don't overlook Astoria West Apartments. Go ahead and delete your "save search" of apartments because this hidden gem has everything that you're looking for - a great location, luxurious amenities, and more. Come check out Astoria West today to find your new home and see what specials are currently on offer! If you're located out of state, you can check online for a 3D tour. Astoria West supports the principles of the Standard Operating Procedures, Fair Housing Act, and Equal Housing Opportunity.

[junedenim]

2007

beneath the boardwalk, part 5 (series masterlist)

my mistakes were made for you

warnings: angst, fluff, smut, robert, etc.

word count: 12.3k

I had my hair cut just above my shoulders but it was not a bob, I am adamant about this. I got a light fringe that I never wore full-frontal on my forehead. I was inclined to pull the two sections apart like a curtain or, regrettably, have them as side bangs.

After New Year's, I returned to London and left many things behind in Wakefield, most notably my journals. I was starting fresh and wanted to claim independence. Stacey gifted me a stack of Moleskine notebooks for Christmas that I wrote in and I began babysitting two girls (5 & 7) who lived in the building with their single mother, Lee, who was 6 years older than me. Georgia and I refused to turn on the heat because we weren't overflowing with cash, especially after my father and I agreed I would start paying rent after the three-month grace period he gave me. 

The other reason was we felt more like struggling artists, piled under blankets, wearing two pairs of socks, and heating meals in the microwave because they had grown too cold too quickly. Georgia would write poetry in her room then meet me in the living room and recite it. I was without an editor since Alex and I's parting. So, I began to share my writing with Georgia.  After we traded pieces, we would crack the window open and smoke cigarettes out of it. 

I was aware I was using Georgia to refill the Alex-shaped hole in my life. What Georgia and I were doing was what I dreamt for Alex and me. I had overwhelming happiness for Alex but I felt disappointed (and certainly jealous) that we didn't experience the struggling artist phase together. But Georgia was what I needed: a friend.

Madeline Critchley, who helped me submit to Granta, got me a position with the University of Greenwich's literary magazine, Anthology. It felt dumb to start at the magazine a few months before I was finished with school but she told me it didn't matter how much time I put into it but what I got out of it. It was cheesy but it ended up being true. I wrote endlessly, trapped inside that building. I was overcome by some being and she never let me stop.

*

I was invited to a secret gig at The Leadmill in February. Arctic Monkeys's tour director emailed the invitation. I thought about going but used the excuse of babysitting and RSVPed no. Georgia, her new girlfriend, Kyle, Dianna, Robert, and I went and saw Amy Winehouse instead. Obviously, I don't regret the decision.

Not speaking of Alex seemed an unspoken rule but I couldn't help but think of him when Amy came on stage. Not because I related her songs to Alex and our relationship but because the bastard got to meet her and didn't fucking introduce me to her!

Robert's place was a close distance from Astoria so we all, except Dianna, went back and crashed at his place instead of taking a 40-minute ride home on the underground late at night. Georgia and Kyle would sleep on the pull-out and Robert would share his bed with me.

Before we went to sleep, Robert and I smoked a joint in his room. It didn't do much for me, only making me tired-eyed. Robert was in a constant state of haziness. He wore leather pants and a turtleneck. His hair was overgrown and every movement he made bounced his curls. 

"Heard about you and Alex." It was the first time we had seen each other this semester. I had only told Georgia, she informed everyone else for me.

"Yep."

"Sorry 'bout that."

I shrugged. It wasn't something I wanted to talk about.

"Sucks we can't get free concert tickets now."

I huffed a laugh. "I didn't think you were much of a fan anyway."

"Well, you know, it's a good place to pick up girls." He eyed me. It was obvious.

"I didn't pay attention to that kind of thing."

"Oh, come on, like you weren't watching every girl there who could steal your man."

I shrugged again. I was never threatened by that idea or maybe I was just uncaring towards it.

"Your ambivalence is a man's greatest dream."

"He never did anything for me to not trust him."

"What about me?"

"Oh," I exaggeratedly rolled my eyes. "I'd never trust you."

We shared a laugh and the joint had reached its butt. He put it down. "So, shall we just get to fucking?"

I pushed off the wall and walked over to what had been deemed my side of the bed. "God, Robert."

"Come on. It's been a long time coming. We're here. We're single. It's our last year. We're never gonna be here again."

"You just want to get yours wet."

"So, you're wet? And hell yeah."

"Shut up."

"Let me kiss you."

"I'm going to bed."

"Fine. Me too."

We laid side-by-side for a minute before I kissed him and then we fucked. I don't remember much. I wasn't that drunk or high. It just wasn't very memorable.

*

Robert and I had a transactional relationship. Before we began hooking up this was the case and now that we were spending our nights together, we shared awful things with one another, none of which were words. Drugs seemed to be the biggest thing. A joint after sex was expected and by March, Robert and I were snorting coke with one another. It was quite enjoyable. For the time.

We ended up in Regent's Park one night. We sprawled across the vast grass. He called people—they weren't friends—on his Motorola Razr and switched between rambling with them and rambling at me. I brought my notebook and thought about writing but he was too loud.

I searched through my bag for something I never found and remembered when I came with Alex. I hated the infection of him but something about that night and picturing him on a bench next to me made me smile. 

I thought of guards changing. My first trip down to London when I was 10 and how Stacey and I stood, faces squeezing through the gates of Buckingham Palace to watch the New Guard replace the Old Guard. I couldn't understand how anyone would want to stand outside on sentry duty for hours. The relief when the New Guard showed up must have been such an enormous relief as their bladders ached and their shoulders begged for mercy. I wondered about the relief Alex felt as the New Guard replaced him. Or did he wish to continue to stand still by the palace's side? But the Old Guard becomes the New Guard eventually. They all just go spinning around. 

I wrote about the places we attribute to people. The corners of the world that just belong to them. (Alex, unbeknownst to me, had already done the same [505]). I left Alex's fingerprint out of the piece but it had him all smeared over it. I wrote about the Guard and Stacey's little head nearly trapped in between the metal bars. It was my favourite piece I wrote for Anthology. 

I sent it to Alex. He responded:

Buckingham Palace still has guards???? Are people still trying to actively kill the Queen?

I responded:

Diana's ghost.

Alex never sent me any of his work. I dreamt of a book one day appearing on my car roof. But my car stayed in Wakefield and Alex stayed nowhere. It was a rotten daydream.

*

In April, days before Favourite Worst Nightmare was released, the band played the Astoria for two nights. I hadn't heard any material yet, besides the recently released single "Brianstorm" and its b-sides, I had heard none of the album. It was unsettling not to know the songs. To not have the entire setlist memorized, front to back. 

My goal was always to be friends with Alex and going to the concert felt like solidifying this notion. Georgia found my need to befriend Alex so quickly after we had ended bizarre and unnecessary. But it had been months and I was ready to rip the Band-Aid. Georgia came with me. Robert insisted too. 

It did end up being bizarre. I was unacquainted with going to an Arctic Monkeys concert and not talking to Alex beforehand. When they came on stage, their appearances were much like when I saw them last. Alex hadn't changed one bit, but his demeanor had. He was stiffer, not in a good or bad way, just an indistinguishable way.

New additions met my ears well with the bass of "Balaclava" ringing through me for days to come. I shifted around "Do Me A Favour" as details became obvious that the subject matter was concerning us and our teary eyes. It made me fidget but I loved it so I couldn't quite complain about the feeling of irk I got. My opinion changed when it was followed by "Mardy Bum" where I knew all of this was a conscious choice. It was an attack on my heart whose walls were still susceptible to incursion.

I found myself relating to songs that weren't written for me like I was the average listener. "Leave Before the Lights Come On" had a different meaning standing next to Robert. I felt ashamed for that and that made me enraged by Alex because without moving a muscle I felt like he was dictating my life through my hippocampus only. 

After the show, we waited outside for the band. Georgia also found this insane. Robert said it was tragic but in a poetic way. I said they could go but both refused. 

Jamie came out first with Katie who wrapped her arms around me which could be deemed as a threat to my life if it wasn't so loving. She did the same to Georgia and I laughed at the way Georgia flailed her arms around.

The rest of the band followed with Alex's eyes wide and looking between the floor and me, unable to process the sight in a simple glance. "Alright! We're heading back to Robert's place!" Matt shouted. His eyes on Alex became clear he was teasing him. 

Regardless, I chuckled and hugged Matt. "No. I was hoping to join wherever you were going if you don't mind the intrusion."

"Never," Nick said, giving me a hug. Nick and I didn't know much about each other other than what Alex told each of us. I liked him because he had always greeted me with a wide smile, welcoming to all. He often seemed like he was just happy to be along for the ride wherever that ride took him. I like that quality very much.

As we walked out further into the street, the paparazzi snapped away, more at the band than the 3 dimwits following them, nevertheless, Robert began a potent rant against the invasion of paparazzi and how it was Big Brother and flexing that he had read 1984 as if it wasn't required reading for everyone in high school. He continued this the whole ride until we arrived at the pub.

It was premier service for a place that felt so unchic but I knew nothing about how the status of celebrity worked. Alex and I didn't go out enough for me to witness it. I had no qualms about using the complimentary service for my drinks. 

In the booth, Robert sat with his arm around me. Our displays were often limited to his flat but when he stood to go use the restroom and kissed my cheek I knew what he was doing. I had to laugh, it was impossibly amusing.  

I left for a cigarette. Alex followed a minute later. My back was against the wall as he approached. "Hi."

"Hi." I unconsciously handed him one. It was second nature.

He blew a puff out and asked, "You got a review for me?" That was also second nature.

I chuckled and shook my head, looking down at the floor. "Excellent as usual."

"Dry as ever, come on, Janie, you've got to give me more here."

I gave what I could. "I liked the new songs."

It seemed less jokey now as his laughter fell but he smiled at me sincerely. "Thanks."

"I'm sure the album will be great." I never doubted that. Even if he wrote the most scathing things about me, I would love it because he’d word it in such a way that I simply could not hate it.

Our conversation was like hitting a tennis ball back and forth but each time one of us hit it the other wouldn't hit it back. I thought about going inside. Then, he asked me, "You and Robert together?"

His bluntness had taken me aback and I focused on my cigarette to process the question. "Does Robert strike you as the boyfriend type?"

It made Alex laugh, which was the only relief in the world I would need. "I suppose not. Kissing you on the cheek and all—I'm sorry, not my business."

He was flustered, which made me laugh. He was small and cute when he was flustered, messing with his hair and shaking his head. "You know, he gets a kick out of making you jealous."

"Really?" Alex chuckled at the idea. I think Alex, for many years, viewed himself as the underdog, even if he was more famous, richer, cuter, and kinder than nearly anyone else I knew. 

"I think you make him feel insufficient. I'm not sure why but he's always felt a need to overcompensate when you're around."

"So, he doesn't do stuff like that usually?"

I never liked lying to Alex. "No. But in full transparency, we are doing the hook-up thing or whatever."

He verged on saying something but closed his mouth and scuffed out his cigarette. I joined him in dropping mine. "Lucky him."

I pushed him light-heartedly. "Shut up."

We returned inside and Robert's arm returned around me. Later, when we were saying our goodbyes for the evening, he was loud in his exclamation that we were leaving together and returning to his flat. I had to hide my laughter. Robert's usual too-cool-for-school conduct faded at the sight of Alex. It made it funnier when Alex pulled me aside while everyone was saying their goodbyes.

"Are you coming to the show tomorrow?"

I shook my head. 

"Come."

"I can't. I've got to babysit."

Matt interjected, "They let you around children?"

Before I could say anything, Alex told him, "Will you shut it, Matthew?"

When Matt moved away, Alex grabbed my hands. "Just come tomorrow. Another night of free drinks if you want."

I giggled at his earnestness. "I would if I could."

"Cancel. Come on."

"Al."

"Look, how many nights am I in town for? Come on, Janie."

His eyes wide, his mouth saying his name for me, and his hands clutching mine. I didn't say no.

*

My arms are crossed and my head is shaking the first time I hear "505" because I don't know what to make of it and I don't know what to make of this. Alex was dressed in a sky-blue Lacoste (this will be more relevant in a few years) and he pressed down on the keys as he pressed down on me.

I was having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I wasn't sure if I should cry or smile. The song left me uneasy and I felt I didn't know what was true anymore. That wavelength between us had been severed and I imagined Alex felt sad about our break-up but I never thought he was rethinking his actions and pining for that hotel room again. I had been the one to lament over our break-up and send it to him. He had stayed reserved in all his opinions and hid away his emotions. It wasn't a new thing by any means. But I did feel a sense of betrayal when I heard the information with 2,000 other people instead of under blankets and sheets, whispered in the dead of winter.

But I didn't want to talk about it so after the show I didn't bring it up. His mannerisms shifted from his awkward movement to more deliberately positioned as he hugged me after the show like he had done so many times before, sweaty.

"Drinks?" I asked him.

He moved back and forth between his left and right foot. "I was thinking I could see this new flat I keep hearing about." 

Everything was intentional and obvious. "It's not very fabulous."

He waved me off. "I'm sure you've gushed the place up."

"Gushed the place up?" I questioned his verbiage.

Alex rolled his eyes and squeezed my upper arm. "Come on. Let me see the grounds."

Off we went on the underground to my flat, just the two of us. He kept jumping in his seat on the way over, citing excitement. "It feels out of place that I haven't seen your place," he said.

"Yeah. I know what you mean."

On our way up the stairs to my flat, Alex tried to challenge me to a race but my feet hurt and I couldn't believe he still had enough energy after performing concert after concert. My back was slumped and Alex was standing up perked as I unlocked the door. 

"Georgia home?" He asked as we made our way through the door.

"With Kyle."

He nodded, tight-lipped. I could see the scene unfolding before him in his mind as we stood in the living room/kitchen hybrid. He looked around the room like he had actual interest in it before his eyes landed on me with a smile.

"Do you do this in every city?" I asked.

"Huh?"

"Al. You're easy to read."

He stuffed his hands in his coat pocket as he tried to fight that grin bursting across his face. "I wanted to see your place."

I rolled my eyes and walked toward my bedroom. "Yeah, sure." He followed behind like an obedient puppy.

He was attentive in looking around the room, nearly all those trinkets he had memorized from my old room had been replaced with new ones. The poster flier from one of Georgia's poetry readings, the Amy Winehouse ticket stub, and the dumb joke from Alex's Christmas cracker were pinned on my mini bulletin board. The paper crown and mini deck of cards sat displayed on my desk. A slight upturn came to Alex's cheeks at the sight.

His gaze moved back to me. "A lot smaller than your room back home."

"Yeah. Rent's expensive and I'm paying rent now."

"Out from under your dad's thumb." Seeing him as pleased with this as I had been was a happy sight. Those long chats in hidden coves where we'd be independent together. But as always Alex was happy for me even without having him as codependence. 

Alex faked looking around my room more as I sat on the edge of my bed. He'd bend down to look at things like he was at a museum. His hands stayed in his pockets the whole time and he examined the corners and details of everything as if he'd be quizzed on it.

"Are you looking to see what you're going to steal from me?" I asked him.

He chuckled. "No, sorry. Just curious." He picked up the mini deck of cards, tossing it in his hands. "Round of Gin?"

"Alex." I wanted to be clear. "You came over here to play cards with me?"

His eyes were stuck on the deck's package, fiddling with the cardboard lid. "I just..." He shrugged multiple times and bounced on his feet. "I guess, I missed you, you know."

"Yeah." It was an easy sentiment to agree to because I feared I'd miss him for the rest of my life.

"We were in Tokyo a few weeks ago and I wanted to go see that Buddha you wrote about that, that, that—"

"Kamakura Daibutsu."

"Yeah." He looked down solemnly. "Wasn't there long enough to do it. I don't know. It just had me thinking about you and I know the relationship thing has sailed." 

I didn't believe that. I didn't want to believe that. I had held on to those hidden beliefs that after all the madness we'd return to each other's side and all would be well. An abyss grew in me that Alex didn't believe that too.

"But," he continued. "But just all that shite that I'd done to make it worse and I vowed I'd never do that and I'm sorry for being a total dickhead."

"I did things too that I knew would hurt you."

"You did nothing."

"I slept with someone in Aruba."

He froze, his stare on me as he processed the information. "Uh, that's fine."

I shook my head. "Don't do that. I don't want to start acting like my parents."

"I don't want tonight to be this depressing," he laughed wetly. 

"What did you want tonight to be?"

"I, I, to be—to hang out, to be with you."

"We could have done that at a pub. Why'd you want to come to my flat?" We looked at each other, both knowing the answer but waiting to see if the other would verbalize it.

He put the deck back on my desk and sat beside me. He stared forward at the wall for a moment before falling on his back. He rubbed his face as if to scrub it off, not wanting me to see the sight of it. My eyes never stopped following him. I was afraid to blink.

"My plan was to be all cute, tha knows."

"Aren't you always?"

The comment seemed to drop his guard a bit as he placed his hands on his chest. He took a deep breath and looked at me. His smile slowly grew as if it was being watered by the sight of me. "If you want to kiss me, you can."

I rolled my eyes and turned away from him but my smile was unavoidable.

"Come on." He tugged on my wrist. "You wouldn't let me endure one of the most embarrassing moments of my life."

I slapped away his hand's grip. "Quit mocking me."

He sat up. "I'm not mocking, Janie. I'm making the bad good." His face was right next to mine and it felt like the best move was to kiss him because kissing Alex could never be wrong even if he was leaving tomorrow and I would be left here.

So, therefore, having sex with Alex could never be an issue even though I slept with Robert the night before and I would sleep with him tomorrow. I wanted relief. The only solution was Alex in me. It was memorable.

*

His excitement worried me. "You're graduating in a few months. You could join us for festival season. It'll be in all those incredible places you want to go with beautiful weather. It'll be perfect. Where do you want to go? We'll go."

Lying in his arms had always been a comfort but now I felt this inevitability of hurting him with the false hope I had given. We lied on our sides, looking at each other, his hand draped over my waist.

"I don't know what kind of job I'll have after school. I might have to stay in London."

"We should hire you. You'll be our on-the-road journalist." His smile was infectious and I wished to have similar sentiments that once the obligation of school was done then we'd be fixed. But I wasn't going to kid myself.

I fell onto my back and clutched the bedsheet to my chest. "I think I'd be a bit biased. I don't want to be a journalist anyway."

"What do you want to be then, Janie?"

I shrugged. "I'll know when it's here."

Alex propped himself up on his elbow and quickly hovered over me. "You can't lie to me, Janie. You're a writer."

"Everybody's a writer," I argued.

He bit back a chuckle and shook his head. "Don't give me that shite for 4 years ago. You're a writer. I've seen it with my own two eyes."

"Well," I bite my lip, "there's this magazine, Granta, that I've submitted pieces to. I don't know if I want to do the whole freelance writer thing but I like writing what I want to write."

"Do it," he urged. "I'm not just saying that because you'll be able to come on the road with us."

I side-eyed him. "Sure."

"Have faith in me. I'm always looking out for the best for you. I'm always in your corner, Jane Cavendish."

It hit me. I knew it was the truth and he had always rallied for me so deeply even when we were far away from each other. "Ditto."

Alex rolled onto his back and looked at the ceiling. "Plus, you'll be able to see us headline Glastonbury."

I laughed but he didn't correct himself. I looked over and that smug bastard smirked at me and slowly nodded his head. "Fuck off. You're joking." He wasn't. Obviously.

*

Alex left for Liverpool at 6:30 AM. He shook me out of sleep saying he'd see me in a few weeks and kissed me.

Hours later, when I woke up, I would've figured I'd dreamt it if he hadn't written a note and placed it on my nightstand.

Come to Leadmill on the 21st & 22nd. I want a formal review. —A.T.

A couple of days later, Favourite Worst Nightmare dropped, including my—to this day—only songwriting credit on "Fluorescent Adolescent." I sent a text to Alex calling him a plagiarist. He told me to look out for the royalties check.

My relationship with Robert had remained unchanged but he gave the impression he knew what I had done with Alex. We never talked about it and when I left for Wakefield on the 20th he told me to tell the band he liked the album. I kissed his cheek. He was an annoying piece of shit but he was my friend. Few people understood it but we related to one another in a way I've never related with anyone. We were twin flames and it's why I couldn't handle him for more than a night at a time. We lit each other's fires but a fire is still a fire even if it keeps you warm on a cold night and burns you the next.

In Wakefield, my parents informed me they were moving. It had little to no effects on me other than sentimentality and having to clean out my childhood room. Stacey, however, would be uprooted and for that, I hurt.

My parents' guilt-tripped generosity allowed Stacey to attend The Leadmill show—her first Arctic Monkeys concert. She was slightly aware of the ambiguity of Alex and I's relationship and over the winter had prodded me for more. No one can claim to be a bigger fan of Alex Turner than Stacey, not even myself.

I wore my Arctic Monkeys tour T-shirt purchased at the London shows and Stacey wore the one I had purchased for her (I bought them at the merch table because it felt too awkward to ask Alex or the band for one. I used to just steal them. I decided to not hold the poor merch girl at gunpoint for a shirt). I drove my car there so Alex couldn't persuade me into drinks after. Stacey's coming eliminated any funny business. I wanted to get through school before starting anything up with Alex again. If I was even going to do that. I wasn't sure yet.

The setlist had a few new inclusions and Stacey jumped around freely. It was a beautiful sight of youth to see. It's the first time I really felt old at the thought that used to be me. Then, I felt stupid. I was a fresh 21, I had no clue how old old would really feel.

After the show, we congratulated the band on a good show and said good night. Alex told me to come to his parents' house before the show tomorrow. I accepted. I missed David and Penny. They would also be a good prevention buffer.

Up in his room, we sat on his bed and talked like the old days. There was much that had happened to talk about. Alex took the news of the house selling harder than me. I guess my sentimentality had rubbed off on him but I never viewed that house in the rose-coloured view that Alex did. But moments in my room I've locked away in my heart for just him and me. Things for only my ears to hear, my eyes to see, and my flesh to feel and vice versa for him.

After the show, we sat in my car.

"I feel like we're back to being 18," I told him.

"Why?"

I laughed to shield the seriousness with which I was speaking. "These trysts of ours."

"I already told Miles so." He had come out and performed "505" with them that night.

I rolled my eyes and chuckled. "Of course you did."

He shrugged helplessly.

"I'm still—well, I continued my thing with Robert. I'm not gonna lie to you."

"I kind of figured."

"I don't know how I feel about starting this again. Always being so far."

Alex sighed and leaned forward on his elbow on the center console. "After you've graduated that might not even be an issue."

"I'm not gonna follow you around like a puppy dog for years, Alex."

"I don't expect you to. But it could be fun this summer. After that, there'll be a break and we'll go wherever you pick. Swear it." He stuck his pinky out.

I bit the inside of my cheek and looked at his sweet face, always seeing so much with those big eyes. I loved him to pieces. Through all the struggles, there was that sweet face. So, I wrapped my pinky around his.

*

Alex was in Orlando when I graduated. He sent me a long email that is too long and personal to be printed in full here but here's an excerpt.

I think you should be a food reviewer that way we get into all the best restaurants that I'm not elegant enough to get into. Or you could just bat your eyelashes. Either would work I'm sure.

Be whatever you want. You'll be the best at it. Unless you want to do my job then stick to your day job otherwise I'll be out of one. Call me after, whenever you can. I wish I was there so imagine I am. It'll make me feel better.

He sounded like a dad. Some version of Atticus Finch morphed into a buffoon. I thought for hours about how to respond to the email. My eyes began to hurt so I just sent him photos from the day that Georgia had taken. 

Georgia hid her discrepancies with me over abandoning the flat to "run off with Alex" as she said every time I brought up my summer plans. I sublet my room with full intentions of returning in September. 

Robert was messier. We mutually seemed to agree that our sexual relationship would come to an end in May when we graduated. Robert held plans of going to New York and being a vagabond and I felt settled in London. Our activity had grown sparse after my trip to Yorkshire but didn't cease.

Two nights before graduation, I told him of my plans for the summer. He nodded along but laughed when I finished. "Whatever, Jane, be a fucking groupie all your life."

"I'm not."

He laughed maliciously at me. "I think you're scared of what comes after uni so you're clinging to this rich, successful ex-boyfriend. Play second fiddle to him. That's fine."

He was jealous. But I worried he was right.

*

I met up with the band in Dublin, which seemed fitting. It was easy to fall into the old habits of 2005 when I joined the band during the summer. However, Alex and I's relationship hadn't returned to what it had been. I slept in his bunk due to lack of space but that wasn't difficult. We struggled more with communication.

Their two shows in Dublin were messy and fanatical in the crowd. I stood backstage and listened to people singing along to a song I wrote. It didn't feel as out-of-body as I imagined and I wondered if Alex felt the same way when he heard the crowd singing along with him. 

In between their first and second show in Dublin, Alex and I escaped to Wicklow, much to the annoyance of his management who worried the whole day that he had ditched the show. We returned in time, although we did cut it close.

We hiked the Glen Beach Cliff where the ocean kissed the mountains and I knew Alex wanted to complain the whole time but he didn't. His shoes were old, the seams nearly ripped open as we hiked the 3 miles. Below us, on the beach, were seals. It felt like a different world compared to the one we had experienced last night.

As we walked downhill, Alex wrapped his arm around me and despite nearly tripping several times and knocking me down with him, I refused to let him remove the arm. 

"Are we dating again?" He asked.

It had been a largely neglected topic, mostly because I hadn't made my mind up about it. It was easy to be with Alex but being with Alex when we weren't actually with each other was frustrating. My biggest worry had always been ruining our friendship over the failure of our romantic relationship. Still, I wasn't sure of anything. "I guess."

He lightly chuckled. "That was enthusiastic."

"I'm sorry. I guess my question remains about what will happen after summer." The wind swirled around us and I tried my best to keep my hair out of my face.

"That's more a question for you than for me. You know what I want but I'm going to be happy for you whatever way you go. You know that right?" Alex has always been insistent on making sure I know he's steadfast in his support of whatever direction I decide to head and he has held true to that (mostly).

"Then, I'll need time to think about that. See what opportunities come my way this summer."

He nodded and tugged me closer. "This is over in December and then I'm all yours. Besides, I've already called you me girlfriend so you can't go back on it now."

In my sarcastic nature, I tossed my head on his shoulder, sounding, "Ugh! Don't be presumptuous, Al."

*

I got my favourite pair of sunglasses stolen at Glastonbury and I will hunt down the thief until the day that I die. Not that sunglasses were required for much of that day. The sky was dim, the ground was muddy, and it rained the whole weekend. We got there a day early to settle and like any night before a big show, it was spent drinking and horsing around late into the night.

Alex and I didn't get to bed until way past midnight and even then we had left Jamie, Matt, and other mates still fucking around. As we got ready for bed Alex had grown quiet, slow in his movements, and shrinking down into the small bed.

We laid down together and silence was awkward and he felt stiff. "You nervous?"

"Yeah," he laughed out in an effort to mask his nerves.

I curled my arm around and hugged him. I did my best to comfort him the way he always did for me. I held him tight and tried to possess a shoulder to cry on the best I could. "You know, I'll still love you even if you make a fool of yourself."

"Thanks." I leaned back to look at him as he struggled with a smile. His hand reached up and pushed my hair behind my ear. He held my cheek and it felt like his muscles had finally relaxed. "I'll try my best not to. I know you don't want to be stuck with a fool." 

"Aren't you already?"

He rolled his eyes and was relieved with a laugh. "Maybe only for you."

"That's so cheesy. You should be put in jail."

"As long as you were there."

I slapped a thunk onto his arm. "Stop it, you. I'll imprison you. Shush!"

He resisted my push away from him, wormed his arm under me, and landed the other over me. He wiggled us close and he felt like a preheated oven as my bones were left out to defrost. "Are you happy? Excited?"

Alex often needed me to reassure him during this period of our lives, especially after we got back together. That summer our relationship was ambiguous and it was easy for Alex to fear that at the first sign of unhappiness, I would ditch him. He wasn't exactly wrong. I wouldn't have left if Glasto sucked but if I became unhappy with Alex, it was an easy out for me. I've always appreciated easy outs.

"Yeah. I wish I had a camera. Then, I could sell them all to The Sun and make a killing."

"Is all this okay with you?" More questions. Another valid one. An undiscussed topic had often been I, an at-the-time unknown, being pulled into the public eye for my attachment to Alex. It's not like he was some tabloid superstar but it didn't leave me as a virtual unknown, especially with the band only getting bigger.

I nodded, my ear rustling against the pillow. "No stalkers. Except maybe you." He hadn't left my side since we arrived. I couldn't complain one bit. For once, I wasn't the clingy one.

He mused, "What can I say? I love you."

"Stop." Too cheesy, too cheesy.

Alex laughed into his pillow. He softened up and inched closer to me on our tiny bed. "Why didn't you bring your camera?" My photograph production had declined since college but I still held onto the habit.

I frowned. "It broke right before graduation."

"The ol’ Canon finally bit the dust,” he joked. It had been the only camera I ever owned. I used my mother’s old cameras when I took that photography class with Matt. I never bothered investing more in it than what I could borrow. “We can pick up another one."

I sighed. "Too much money. I'm an independent woman now."

"Oh, damn, you need me to be your daddy now."

I pushed him off the bed.

*

We mudded up our wellies the following day to see Amy Winehouse before the rain poured in full force again. I think it relaxed everyone to feel like we went to Glasto just to enjoy it and not actually headline it. We nodded our heads along with the songs and stood with our hands stuffed into our pockets. 

Opposing Alex's nerves, I was wracked with excitement. I went off into my own world during Glastonbury and wanted to enjoy the hippie nature and the history. I loved the whole weekend. The nights after watching The Killers and The Who and I'm pissed with Arctic Monkeys to this day for having me miss Björk to watch their stupid headline set.

Dressed in their overcoats and Matt with his Adidas track pants, their set went off without a hitch and I had fun dancing with Katie and briefly with Dizzee Rascal before he joined them onstage for "Temptation Greets You Like A Naughty Friend." The road had and would be lonely but it was eased a little bit by having another girl by my side. When Miles came out and joined the band for "505" I thought of Eva. I hadn't talked or heard about her since The Little Flames disbanded. I shamed myself for it. I had become a person who held onto objects that reminded you of a person as an excuse to no longer see them.  The thought crossed my mind that Georgia was my only friend and I hadn't talked to her since I joined the band on the road. Then, Katie hugged me to her side and I felt a little less lonely.

I had grown desensitized to the meaning behind Alex's songwriting. I never stopped and thought about how he was singing songs that were rooted in our break-up because it no longer seemed important because we were together and how the past could affect the future. But there was this moment during "Do Me A Favour" where he had seemed rather emotional, furiously strumming his guitar and rushed singing close to his microphone. I felt ashamed for not having the same reaction as him. I felt like I was missing a gene by not crying at "Mardy Bum" or not swooning at "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" but I suppose night after night, I just became numb to the meanings of those songs. I wish I hadn't. I wish I enjoyed it more but everything felt fleeting so I made no effort to cherish moments at that age.

When they got off stage the thought had floated away and we were ready for a night of exhausted celebration. The weather was rough and the band had their casual round of press before we enjoyed drinks and party favours in the camper. Alex and I made out against the door of a porta-potty at one point. It was very disgusting.

*

I fulfilled more travel fantasies with this tour. The limitations no longer sat in Great Britain and Ireland as we moved up to Scandinavia, first stopping in Oslo. I was set loose and skipped their concert, instead visiting the Akershus Fortress and seeing "The Scream" at the Munch Museum finally returned to its home after being stolen in 2004 (although, I'm partial to Munch's "Madonna" but that's neither here nor there). In Stockholm, I continued this by going to the Vasa Museum and in the evening hiking up to Skinnarviksberget and watching the sunset, but, sadly, no Northern Lights.

We continued the festival run going through Germany and then Rock Werchter where at this point I should have broken the world record for seeing Lily Allen live as I once again watched her on the Pyramid Marquee before seeing my boys on the Main Stage.

A festival or so later, a day off was given before their Paris show, and, in a way, I finally got my Parisian dream. The hotel was nice and the toilet worked like how a normal toilet works but Alex and I shared a room. Privacy for the first time since his room in Sheffield. We did the obvious, a few times.

It's weird to put it how sex works with Alex and me. It's like a weird recalibrating device. I suspect it's because our relationship started through it that whenever we need to get back on the same page fucking seems to help. It was late and we shared a cigarette after because you can do that then in Paris. I would talk, he would smoke it, then he would talk, I would smoke it.

"You and Katie have become best mates," he said. Katie had returned back to England a few days prior and I once again was the lone girl.

"I like her a lot. She's a calm presence amongst the chaos."

"Yeah, she's done Jamie a world of good. Calmed him a bit." That was undeniably true. Jamie had always been a kind and caring guy but he had an uncontrollable craze at times and a mouth that poured at things that maybe shouldn't have been said. Katie seemed to kick him and keep him in check.

I have always been fascinated with how people change people. Somewhere at our center these people worm their way in and change your hardwiring or maybe they just expose what has always been there. "Have I calmed you?"

Alex chuckled. "Quite the opposite I think."

"Hey!" I became jokingly affronted. "I can be a calm presence. You lot are the ones who are messing around so much."

He continued to laugh at me. Eyes bright and smile light. He reached over and began to pet my hair. "I don't think calm would be the right word." I thought about hitting his chest but that would prove his point. "I just think you've made me more confident."

It was a peculiar thought to me. I didn't feel confident most of the time and I was nowhere near the confidence of going on stage and headlining festivals as a band's frontman. "How?" I asked.

He reached back to stub out the cigarette on the ashtray on the bedside table but he kept his hand steady on the side of my head, rubbing smooth circles. He returned closer and with a soft smile. "In a lot of ways. Your encouragement." I couldn't argue with that. Alex had done the same for me tenfold. "I feel like if you believe in me, even if I fuck up out there, you'll still be here." I wanted to always be there. I hated how life got in the way and people stayed and others went and I just wanted to stay in little corners of the world with Alex forever. But in those early years, it was an impossibility. We tried our best. 

"Plus, you're smoking hot." I rolled my eyes but I was, of course, charmed by the comment (I mean, I wrote it here for a reason. I want everyone to know he finds me smoking hot). "Do you know the power I have by having you as a girlfriend? For god's sake, Robert almost kicked my ass over you."

I pushed away from him. "Ew. Don't talk about Robert when I'm naked."

"Why? You've been naked with him."

Forces froze and I waited to see if he had more to say or if I had anything to say but we both felt chilled by the awkwardness. I slowly sat up more against the headboard and rested back against it. "Were you hurt by that?"

"What?"

"Me having sex with Robert because you don't really have a right to be pissed." I was defensive because I was in the right but I also framed his words as an attack.

Alex was slow in his response, I guess he was trying to find the best way to say what he was thinking without me biting his head off for it. "No. I mean, you're right. There's no reason to be pissed."

I wanted to know his real feelings. I knew he wouldn't shame me for doing it but I wondered if he felt the act of Robert and I's relationship was an attack against him. I played with my fingernails and we didn't make eye contact. We were two planks beside one another. "But were you?"

I peeked over. His shoulders shrugged and he looked down at his hands. We were mirror images of each other. "I don't know. I mean, I don't like the idea of you being with anyone else. Truthfully, Robert annoys me so I guess that confused me or upset me more. But I love you, you know." He looked over. Insistent on this part. "And that's not going away. I figured that out a long time ago. As much as I love the idea that I get to be with you for...you know, I know that I can't get everything I want. But I want you to get all that. I want it more for you than for me. You got that?"

It took me a while to regain control. I was stuck between smiling so wide my face ripped into two and crying until my eyes fell out. I took a shaky breath. "Yeah. But I want all that for you too so you're right back to getting everything you've wanted again because I want that."

"You're always forcing me to take care of myself, Janie."

I hugged him. I needed to touch him. To hold him. I whispered into his neck, "It's 'cause I love you, you know."

*

When the tour went on break I went with Alex to Black Box Studios in Maine-et-Loire, France where he and Miles recorded the first Last Shadow Puppets album. The whole album was recorded in a matter of 2 weeks but nothing about it was rushed. The landscape was lush and the downtime felt like something out of an Eric Rohmer film.

On the last few dates of the tour, we ended up in Sydney. It was the only time during the tour that I got the urge to call my mother. I didn't because my Nokia couldn't call that far but I sent her and my father a postcard and I bought Stacey Uggs, authentic Uggs. We had a day off where we went to Bondi Beach where Matt and I braved the cold water. Afterwards, we visited the zoo where I got to hold a koala. I felt like holding a baby, except with the softest fur imaginable. Afterward, I pouted about not being allowed to own one so Alex bought me a koala stuffed animal.

A week after, the band went to play Summer Sonic in Osaka and Tokyo. I went back home for a week. It wasn't intentional, the dates just lined up that way but it felt best to skip such a rough place. Alex has a habit of embodying the mood of places based on memories. This behavior can likely only exist for a guy who has been to so many places.

I joined The Last Shadow Puppets a few days into recording. When I arrived, Miles and Alex had just returned from riding their bikes together. They looked like twins, shaggy-haired and brown-eyed boys. Alex threw his bike down and tossed his arm over to me like we were two buds, just getting off our shift at work. It filled me with endless excitement. Then, Miles came over and cupped my face, pinching my cheeks. I slapped him away and we went inside and had dinner.

At that dinner table, I could picture a whole future. Ones where Alex and I had Miles over our house, our little stray puppy. Nights where we all went out drinking and he crashed on our couch. Miles and I would both be hungover and Alex would give us painkillers and make us scrambled eggs.

Side-by-side, Alex and I brushed our teeth. It was a greater act of love than a marriage proposal.

*

I had begun to videotape these Shadow Puppets. On the morning of my second day there, Alex and I were lounging around in bed when he told me he had a little present. He came out with a camera, a Pentax 17. 

"For me?" I pointed to myself, holding the delicate thing, cradling it like my baby.

He snorted a laugh. "Who else?" He petted my hair back and he was the sweetest man who ever lived. 

In those two weeks, I didn't have many subjects. Most of the footage and pictures were of Miles and Alex. James Ford, who produced and drummed with the Puppets, made some appearances. I slipped by in a couple too. I began to develop this plan to make a documentary on the band. It fell through, mainly because when they went to do the orchestral parts of the album in December, I couldn't go, and I was also lazy. They used some of it for a 4play documentary but it wasn't the vision I had. Alex says I would have won an NME award (I have desperately wanted to win one solely for the middle finger trophy. Alex has plenty, only one on display for joking sake, but I would beg to win one. It might have been my only chance). It probably would have sucked. I've never worked with actual film to make a movie. I never worked with anything to make a movie because I've never made a movie. I will never make one either. Because I am lazy. But, I guess, I'll get through the rest of this book and stop interrupting the flow of the story by telling you I'm getting ready to write more of this book which you will read now. Or now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now.

Now, I have filmed much more on that camera other than Miles and Alex skipping through great fields and picking daisies, although I still shoot that too. If I could submit home videos for the NME Awards, I would have won one by now.

Most afternoons we rode bikes around the tiny town. I would occasionally drop into the studio out of pure boredom but I spent the majority of my downtime writing or exploring. One afternoon, the trio of us biked by Château d'Armaillé.  It was a lofty manor contrast to the farms and livestock breeders we usually biked by. I stopped and stared as I usually do.

"Can you believe people lived in that thing?" I questioned, completely mesmerised.

Alex laughed, already pleased with his joke. "Yeah, isn't that the size of your family home?" 

*

On our last night there we had a little dinner party with everyone we had come across at Black Box Studios in the two weeks we had been there. Since this was pretty much the middle of nowhere, there were very few people. But it felt celebratory to end this little project with gloriously catered French food and playing dress-up. It was mainly an excuse for me to wear a vintage dress I had found at a used clothing store in Nantes when I was waiting for a car out to Black Box. 

It was a white drop-waist dress with a little bow on the side of my hip and a skirt with a light lace overlay. It was paired with a cloche hat that I regretfully didn't buy, but I still have the dress. Alex wore a button-down and slacks but Miles and I talked him into wearing a stupid top hat that had been lying around Black Box for the 2 weeks we were there. Alex ended up taking it home with him, although he does not still have it. Miles wore shorts, a grey T-shirt, and a bowtie. 

The food and conversations were far more important with the most delicious potatoes I've ever tasted that were mixed with a sauce that I might forever be wondering what it was but my tongue can still feel the taste. The wine was white and Alex dropped his glass on the floor halfway through the dinner, which he doesn't want me to mention, which means I totally will be mentioning it (obviously).

His arm rested on the back of my chair and our plates had long been cleared and the dessert, Gâteau Nantais (a delicious almond pound cake, soaked in rum, and topped with glaze—I really, really liked these meals), had been picked away at. I was still eating the crumbs of my second slice and Alex drank from his new wine glass. I could see futures, but for the first time, I felt like this was the future. Friends, old and mostly new, surrounded us and we drank and ate and talked and laughed and the warmth of Alex radiated on me. I was in love with everything.

"Will Jane be heading back on the road for North America?" James asked Alex. 

He turned to me with his teeth showing, smiling enough for sparks to come off it. Pride radiated off of him; it still makes me want to cry. "As of this morning, Miss Cavendish has a job with Simon & Schuester." 

When I told Alex, I was cautiously concerned that his worries would overshadow the news, but I never doubted he'd be happy for me. I got the call when he was brushing his teeth. I told him when he returned to our room and he grabbed my hands and made me jump on the bed with him. (Shall I avoid the Monkeys Jumping on the Bed joke?).

The table cheered loudly and drunkenly. "Oh, shit, I know those two boys!" Miles, sooooooo drunk, exclaimed. I bashfully tucked my chin down, avoiding the attention. 

Alex's hand skimmed over my left shoulder. He bent down to kiss my downturned cheek and it was like my crush just kissed the spot—my cheeks flushed red and my heart pounded on the gates of my ribs. 

I waved for the noise to quiet down. "It's just an editorial assistant position."

Alex squeezed my shoulder, looking over at me, and rolling his eyes. "Cut it with that rubbish, Janie. It should have been the first thing we cheers to when we sat down."

He reached for his wine glass and I shoved his arm away. "Stop it. You're flustering me." His breath smelled of Chardonnay and his behavior spelled out drunk—his bubbly drunk phase, which is the most flattering phase. He leaned over kissing my cheeks repeatedly making the table erupt in noise again. I took a grip on his face and tried to push him away.

"I've made you all red," he boasted. Alex's face was all red too but it was likely more to do with the alcohol than me. "It's time to cheers, Janie." He motioned toward my almost empty wine glass. I shook my head. "Time to cheers, Janie," he insisted. 

"You sure you aren't going to drop your glass again?" I teased.

"Oh, shut it, you," he said, but he laughed and tugged me close to him. I almost thought he was going to give my head a noogie.

He drank all the wine out of his glass before raising it. "To Jane Cavendish, Simon & Schuester Editorial Assistant."

*

I started on a Wednesday and I did little editing in my editorial position. But Helen, one of the editors, gave me old drafts they hadn't published and the book and told me to pick all the differences out and she would be quizzing me on it the next day. I went out drinking with Lee and Georgia and came in hungover the next day. Helen said I was the first editorial assistant she had that didn't fall for the quiz prank. That endeared her to me and she became my mentor.

Alex was off doing interviews about virginity for the Virgin Fest and I had never been more thankful I didn't lose my virginity to him. I used to wish that and tell Stacey when assuring her not to lose it so young. But it's probably best since I'd associate the time I lost my virginity with an interviewer from AXS Uncut asking Alex to name virgins.

I had moved back in with Georgia and her new girlfriend, Kyle, who was always a sweetheart, even if she didn't do the dishes. They weren't the annoying kind of couple to live with. They weren't loud and I never felt like the third wheel around them. It was easy for my mind to drift to Alex. I would relive the way Black Box felt. While the majority of it felt like a vacation, at its core, we were coming home each night together. The home is what we lacked on the road and the togetherness is what we lacked at home. I just thought of him being in my bed, sleeping. I always liked the way he looked sleeping.

Alex called more than he did on the last tour. I guess he had learned a lesson. Being in North America was a bit easier than when he'd been in the Eastern Hemisphere since he was only 6 hours behind. He'd call me when I got off work before he'd perform his concert and we would talk of the monotony of my day. A couple of hours later, usually while I was sleeping, he'd text me about how the concert went. It was usually only one word: "Good." "Great." "Best." "Sucked." "Wanker." "Drunk." 

We had fallen into a pattern and although it seemed dull, it was successful. My heart still ached and sometimes the sight of Georgia and Kyle made me want to stick my head in the oven, but he was there when I needed him, even though he couldn't be here.

Working felt comfortable and, for once, I eased into that comfort. I got after-work drinks with editors and fellow editorial assistants. I'd joke around with superiors at work and I'd go home to Georgia and Kyle, who had made dinner for me. Georgia was working various gigs, but still heavily focusing on poetry. Kyle worked as a set developer, which meant our living room looked like a craft store had exploded. I didn't mind. I spent most of my off-time in my room and would only venture to the living room when we watched TV together.

However, when the North American leg finished at the beginning of October, Alex dropped by, and with a clicking of his tongue and the shaking of his head, he said, "Oh, Janie. You've got glitter everywhere." He said this in front of Kyle, so I hit the back of his head and dragged him to my bedroom.

Alex's stay at our flat during October was never agreed upon, he just showed up and I'd never turn him away. A week in, however, Georgia asked me when it was just the two of us in our kitchen, early in the morning before I headed off to work, "So, is he like living with us now?"

I shrugged. "No. I mean, he'll be back on the road before the end of the month."

"How do you feel about that?" What a good therapist she would be.

"Better than last time. I'm occupied now. I don't have to worry about lying around all the time thinking of him."

"You're a big girl now, Cavendish. But if he stays past a month, he will have to pay rent."

I laughed out loud. "I doubt he'll be living here with us."

"All I’m saying is rich rockstar can pitch in on groceries."

I told Alex of this conversation and he took me to the store to point out all of Georgia's favourite food goodies and bought them for her. Georgia felt bad after that until she had Jelly Babies. Then, she insisted Alex buy groceries every week.

On Alex's last night at the flat, he bought takeaway for everyone and watched I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! with us. Several jokes were made about Alex doing the show, but I don't think Alex could eat a bug or be stuck with Katie Hopkins for a month. After dinner, Georgia and Kyle left for a "late-night poetry reading" or more likely avoid-the-lovebirds game.

Alex and I showered, changed into pajamas, and brushed our teeth together. In two parentheses, curled to bookend one another, Alex brushed his hand down my side. I told him, "I hope you get a good tan in South America."

"I'm too pale for you, Janie?"

"Maybe your butt," I giggled. It was some form of drunk-in-love. I felt rush through me every time he looked at me. It was like taking a hit.

"Wish you could come with us," he said. He was sober in his tone but his eyes were glazed over.

"Me too, but I'm happy here. I love my job and it sucks to not be with you but—"

He smiled—beamed bright and overwhelming. "But you're happy." He curled into me. My manners had transferred to him as he curled his arms around me and dug his face into my neck. "I'll be back for a week in November."

"And you'd come back here?" I questioned. There was a touch of uncertainty in everything we did that year, mostly because we had never even said we were back together and the other part was the reason for our break-up.

Alex lifted his head, his smile still showing. "Yeah." He sounded so happy and sunny. It was a cocoon of bliss. The young love I had always wanted. His fingers traced over my shoulder, making little finger drawings. His eyes looked down on his creation, avoiding my eyes. "And then we've got two shows here in December and then that last show in Manchester, which I thought maybe you could take off work and come up for. It's on a Monday so understandable if you can't."

I smiled at him but I'm unsure if he saw it due to his shy gaze dodging my face. "I'll try my best. I'll definitely be at the London ones."

His face was aglow but attentive to his finger tracing. "And then I was thinking, maybe—I don't know—maybe I'd come back to London."

I lightly chuckled. "You're not banned from the city. You're always welcome here. Georgia and Kyle like you a lot."

"I like them too but I was thinking we could stay somewhere else."

"What? Like a hotel?"

He finally looked me in the eye. "No, maybe we move in together. Like, get our own place. Maybe. It was just a thought."

It pleased me to no end. The thought wrapped its way around me the first time we slept together and over three years later to encounter the reality of it, I couldn't believe it. "A flat for just the two of us?"

"Yeah. I know you like it here but maybe we could find somewhere that I'm not finding specks of glitter all over my clothes."

I giggled all over him. "Yeah, yeah. I'd like that too. I'd like anywhere as long as you're there."

Alex shook his head with a big smile like he couldn't believe it. He hugged me, kissing my cheek, and then...then we did other stuff, you know.

*

People have asked me if Alex plays songs for me. They've imagined a world in which Alex sings me a lullaby every night. And I guess the answer is "yes" but I'd say more of a "sort of" situation. Alex would often strum his guitar to me but not in a dedicative format. It was something he would have done if I was there or if I wasn't. So, I would say he never did it for me.

Except once.

He was back in London and he had arrived late the night before. I was in my jammies and my slippers when he arrived and he made fun of me for my pajama pants that had Christmas elves printed on them. 

I was waiting on my bed for him to return from the bathroom. He came back, chilly from the lack of heating; Georgia and I weren't turning it on again this winter. He paced around my room before he asked, "Can I play you something?"

I furrowed my brows. "Like a song?"

He nodded and picked up his guitar. "I'm gonna do it on Radio 2 tomorrow. Like a little teaser for what's to come."

"So, this is a song for the next album?"

He shrugged. "Maybe." We never talked about the next thing, which was a problem and not a good choice for our reunited relationship.

Alex adjusted his guitar on his lap and sat in front of me, playing "Fire and the Thud" to me. He had never been that overtly romantic in a song before. Songs on the previous two albums never felt like love songs, but rather songs of longing or infatuation. But it felt like he had written this song for me as he played it for me. 

It would be one of the sweetest things anybody has ever done for me if he didn't go on to do even more songs for me. Not to brag or anything.

After he put his guitar down, I curled my arms around his neck and yanked him down with me to lay back on the bed. "You like it?"

"Loved it. I love everything you write."

"Yeah, but you really loved this one right?"

"Sure."

*

A few weeks later, when Alex and I returned from the final show of the Favourite Worst Nightmare tour, we moved into a new flat. Together. I had picked the flat out. Alex said whatever I liked he'll like and I wasn't going to argue being the sole picker. 

We moved in at a record speed, mainly because I had very little stuff and Alex had nothing, everything still back home in his childhood bedroom. My parents had officially moved down to Bath and I had received scathing phone calls from Stacey. I still feel sorry for that poor teenage girl.

Alex and I got a studio, which I liked because it felt artsy and a total adult thing to share a studio with your boyfriend. Later, it would be the start of many fights between Alex and me because I never had any privacy.

We had our bed in one corner, the kitchen in the other, and a small bathroom down the hall. Plus, it was in Clerkenwell, which was closer to work. We had his record player on the floor and a shared dresser. It was a greater act of love than sex or writing songs. It was his things mixed with mine.

We weren't there for very long. We each went back to our family's homes for Christmas, which suddenly was no longer the same area. Our time apart was short and when we returned we cleaned up the rest of our shared apartment and decided to have a New Year's Eve party.

It was wild debauchery from start to finish. Though we provided liquor, it seemed like every guest came with their own stash. I hadn't realized how many friends Alex had in London. His number of guests heavily outweighed mine but it didn't have much of an issue. Everything was communal and it was truly a night where everyone seemed free. Maybe it was the New Year's part or maybe it was being in the start of our early 20s. When I look back on this time, I forget how young I was. 17 and slutting up the streets at Barnsley and how in 4 years, I had obtained an establishing job and lived in London with my boyfriend. It was a dream book experience and like most things it was a small portion of our lives. But I felt straight out of a movie with this ending to the year I had received. 

Katie and I hid in a corner to talk close together to avoid all the noise. We shared a drink and both drowned in heavy alcohol consumption but we loved each other very much and I knew we'd be friends forever (I was very drunk when I thought this and slurred this to her but time has held this statement to be true. Drunk words are sober futures). "I'm going to marry him," I told her. We were watching Jamie attempt to throw Alex over his shoulder, fireman-style. Alex was a sweet ragdoll, laughing about and swaying.

Jamie was the loyal rescuer. "I'm going to marry him too," she slurred back to me. "We'd be like band sisters-in-law."

"Aw," I cooed. "I don't have a sister-in-law." (I mean, I do, my brother's wife, but I was referring more to Alex being an only child and I was wildly drunk. Forgive me, Cecilia).

"Then I can be yours!"

Before midnight, only a minute or so before, Alex and I huddled up in the kitchen with our closest friends of the bunch. Matt and Jamie were arguing about who had drunk more and we all watched on laughing. I was burrowed under Alex's arm. He was the cave I chose to hibernate in this winter.

"Don't forget the beer you had before coming here," Alex egged Matt on.

"Yes! And the beer I had 'fore coming here!" Matt sloppily shouted to Jamie. 

I pulled on Alex's hand he had thrown over me. "Don't they know I'm the drunkest?"

Alex chuckled. "Yes, with that breath you probably are." He was quite sober compared to the rest of us. Mostly because he knew how drunk I would be getting and somebody had to make sure our new place didn't get destroyed. 

I pulled back, offended. "It is not that bad."

"Yes, it is," he laughed.

"So bad you won't kiss me at midnight?" I hung off of him. You'd think we were in some basement in Wakefield.

He moved his hand down to the arch of my back to steady me. "I could never not kiss you."

My eyes snapped over to him, and I raised my eyebrows with a smirk. "Really? I don't recall that being the truth."

He laughed again. "Fair enough." But then he leaned in and kissed me until way after midnight, making out in the kitchen. It was disgusting and I loved the whole thing.

Nick knocked into us as he moved through the kitchen. "I'd tell you to get a room but we're all in it." He laughed, pleased with his joke, and moved to grab another beer.

Later in the evening, Nick threw up on our bed. Nick was the drunkest. 

Somewhere around one in the morning, I sat on Alex's lap and his arms were around me, holding me close to him as I talked to Georgia on one side of the couch and Alex talked to Miles on the other side of the couch. We held separate conversations about separate lives but he held me to him and he held me tight.

*

a/n: sigh, this is all i can think about writing as of late. i am a series girl after all.

[jeniffercheck]

hot & heavy (underestimated and overprotected)

shivlina paris au: pre-canon, karolina does not yet work at waystar, all shiv canon applies. CWs below the cut.

words: 19k

read here or on ao3

cw: drug abuse for shown/referenced cocaine use throughout the fic, domestic violence is referenced throughout with one conversation that goes into minor details, there is nothing graphic. please let me know if you think i've missed anything!

--

It starts before Karolina’s even realized it has.

Breathless and nameless in the warm-toned bathroom of an old colleague’s brand new speakeasy, a passcode-secured hole in the wall that Karolina thinks is better fit for Astoria than Paris, and her eyes shut tight as her shoulder blades dig deeply into the wall behind her, shoved between a doorframe, a red velvet ottoman that probably costs more than her monthly rent, and a pale-skinned girl with a vicious hunger for Karolina’s lips. Her soft hands grab at Karolina as if they’re the last two women on Earth, and for a second Karolina worries that they actually might be.

Then she remembers that it’s just another Thursday in France.

When they’re finished, it’s lingering eyes with quick hands fixing messed up hair and their displaced clothes, slightly shameful at the sound of a toast happening beyond the thick, dark mahogany of the bathroom door; two wallflowers skipping the party. While washing her hands, Karolina realizes she’s still wearing her ring. Vic had given it to her years ago, something like a promise that neither of them intended to keep, and on a whim, she takes it off. As she dries her hands, she finally asks for the woman's name.

“Shiv.”

“Like a knife?” Karolina asks, unable to contain her surprise.

“Like a shiv,” Shiv corrects, her eyes slightly rolling. She pulls out a small bottle, recognizable white powder filling the inside. She opens it up and brings the spoon to her nose, but she pauses before she does anything. “Want some?”

Karolina waves her off.

“Not my poison,” she says, and Shiv just shrugs, as if it’s her loss. She sort of makes Karolina feel like it is, what with the high society elegance of the silver canister, and Karolina thinks it’s a sort of upper-class gauche; the old money secret that you can be trashy as long as it’s behind closed doors. She briefly thinks if she were a hot, twenty-something spending time in Paris she might keep her blow in a five-thousand-dollar tube as well, and by the time the powder is snorted and the door is open, Karolina realizes Shiv never asked for her name.

  —

  Karolina accepted the job on a whim. Or, at least, that’s what she’d said. In reality, it’d been in the pipeline for months, if not years. It wasn’t her endgame, but it was always in her line of sight, and the only obstacle was in her own home, a sobbing, living person, begging her not to go. She can’t remember now if she even batted an eyelash when she chose the job. In that moment she felt like she’d had nothing left to cry about. Whether it was the dead conversations or the dead bedroom or dead, stale fucking air, she wasn’t sure, but she just knew staying in that place felt like a dead end, and doing this? It felt like the rest of her life could be in front of her.

(That’s what she told herself when she packed up her bags and got a storage unit for nearly ten years’ worth of coexisting with someone, and shipped her cat off to France, and then she wrote in her journal that sometimes things have to fall apart to come back together. A lame excuse for someone who always seems to find things falling apart.)

  —

 She sees Shiv again.

Except this time, it’s not under the cover of a hidden bathroom––it’s a wide-open rooftop, and it’s only a matter of time when she finally lands in Shiv’s line of sight, for the second time in her life. Shiv’s having a hushed argument that Karolina desperately attempts not to eavesdrop on, but with Shiv’s growing volume and Karolina’s growing inability to follow the French in the conversation in front of her, she doesn’t think it’s her fault when she hears Shiv snap, “I don’t want you here.”

It’s then, that Shiv’s eyes land on Karolina’s, and it’s a sharp enough glare that Karolina doesn’t know whether Shiv’s scowling at her, the situation, or if maybe perhaps the entire world, but Karolina tears her eyes away anyway, slightly embarrassed that she’d been caught staring at all. She can’t miss out of her peripheral though, when Shiv all but runs away from the man, nearly clipping Karolina’s shoulder as she escapes. Karolina’s gaze moves back to the man, eyes following Shiv with something wistful in his gaze, and she almost feels bad for him, the way you’d feel bad for a puppy who’s running around without an owner.

It’s the kind of scene she knows, recalling all of the parties she’d dragged Vic to, chatting up businessmen who’d inevitably flirt with her and then Vic would get mad and Karolina would remind her that it doesn’t mean anything if she entertains a little misogyny to get fucking ahead and Vic would make her feel guilty for apparently not having any morals, and they’d end the night early and pissed, Vic in the bedroom and Karolina sleeping on the old couch that she was never allowed to get rid of even though it made her wake up with an aching back and half of her limbs asleep, and she’d slink out of the apartment before the sun was even up just to hide out in a coffee shop until it was reasonable for her to enter the office without getting looks, and she’d let everyone think she was just that dedicated to her job.

The group surrounding her pulls her back in with their laughter at what she assumes was a joke, and she plays along, but she really has no fucking clue what’s going on in this conversation.

She’s halfway through another vodka Red Bull when she can feel her phone vibrate multiple times through her purse, and she’s grateful for the interruption as she’s able to finally sneak away, having had her fill of business talk for the night. That’s when she finds Shiv again, beyond the open bar and the DJ, where the sound is muffled and the view is obstructed. The perfect place for Karolina to answer some e-mails, and for Shiv, the seemingly perfect place for a smoke break. Right in front of a sign that says, interdit de fumer. Karolina’s unable to contain her quiet, “Oh,” and her slight laugh at the sight, and then she recalls the death glare from earlier.

“Sorry—” she starts, a mess of an apology already brimming at the tip of her tongue, but Shiv just quirks one of those perfect eyebrows, and returns her gaze to the skyline.

“It’s fine,” she says, leaning on the railing. “You can stay.”

Karolina sends her a small smile, then realizes she can’t even see it, and she shakes her head at herself, eyeing Shiv one more time before leaning against the wall behind her. She sifts through the emails, skimming through what seems to be a vendor switch-up, meaning she’s going to have to make sure all the logos are swapped on materials they’ve already approved of. Typical.

“Jesus,” she huffs, before she’s even realized she’s speaking. She attempts to look apologetic as Shiv looks back, Karolina picking her eyes up from her phone to apologize for the disturbance. “Sorry—work.”

Work. The dreaded thing she can never escape. Shiv doesn’t say anything though, returning to her cigarette and her fucking demure gaze into the city. Karolina eyes her out of curiosity. She looks so familiar, but Karolina would remember a name like Shiv. Then Shiv’s voice rings out, and she doesn’t have much time to consider it anyway.

“It’s not as impressive as I’d hoped,” Shiv says, looking out into the skyline. “Even with the Eiffel Tower.”

Karolina looks ahead. The Eiffel Tower peaks out above everything, illuminating the city with its lights alone. She remembers a time when Paris was a daydream for her, a small cut-out from a magazine that she kept inside every planner from middle school through college. She realizes she can’t even remember whether her first visit here had been for a work trip or a vacation, but she remembers being disappointed.

“The Eiffel Tower makes everything look smaller,” she says. “The rest of the city kind of pales in comparison.”

Shiv cocks her head at the statement, as if she’s inspecting the balance of the buildings. Once you notice it, it’s hard to look at Paris the same. All the hype for one structure. It’s like going to New York City for the Statue of Liberty. You get there and realize you’re not even allowed to climb to the top, and then you find out that it’s in fucking New Jersey.

“I guess you’re right,” Shiv says. Karolina doesn’t think she’s right, but Shiv says it as if it looks true, so it must be. Or maybe other people don’t have time to sit and think about why the Parisian skyline is so much worse than other cities. They have partners and kids and lives. Karolina has her cat.

“I’m Karolina,” Karolina says, and it causes Shiv to turn around again. “Since you never asked.”

Shiv smirks.

“Who says I wanted to know your name?” she asks, and the words themselves are harsh, but the teasing smile remains.

“I wanted you to know,” Karolina says, bouncing her phone against her palm.

“Okay,” Shiv says. “Karolina.”

It’s then, that Karolina decides she likes the way her name sounds coming out of Shiv’s mouth. For a second, she tries to tell herself that it’s too soon, that she doesn’t need to get involved with anyone else while the corpse of her and Vic is still cold, but then she remembers that too soon would’ve been years ago. That things had been over long before they actually were, that she and Vic were choosing security over happiness. They’d settled. This, Karolina thinks, feels far from settling. It feels like fun.

“Was that your boyfriend?” Karolina asks. She watches the way Shiv’s eyebrows immediately flex at the word boyfriend, but she recovers quickly, that easy smile barely faltering.

“Nope,” Shiv says. “I barely know him.”

Karolina frowns.

“He wasn’t bothering you, was he?” she asks, because even if she’s not looking for trouble, this is still technically her event, and she’s willing to throw someone out if it’s making a guest uncomfortable. She’s chivalrous like that.

“No,” Shiv says again. “He’s just hopeful, and—fucking relentless.”

“That’s a kind way to say desperate,” Karolina jeers, unable to stop the retort. She’s about to apologize for being brash but Shiv laughs, and by God, if it isn’t a glorious sound.

“He is fucking desperate,” Shiv says, taking a drag of her cigarette. It’s on its last life, barely clinging to the butt, and she puts it out, then fully turns to face Karolina, leaning her back against the glass railing. It’s held together by various scraps of metal and bolts, and it makes her skin crawl, watching someone put all their trust into a sheet of glass to stop them from plummeting twelve stories to their death. Shiv looks entirely unconcerned.

“You feeling desperate?” she asks.

“This is a work event,” Karolina immediately says, because it is, but she knows the argument is weak, and it’s possible that she doesn’t really care either. It’s possible that she’s having fun adding in a little chase.

“And the other night wasn’t?”

“That was social,” Karolina says, or so she’s been telling herself.

“Yeah,” Shiv says, sounding very unconvinced by Karolina as well. “Why don’t we go somewhere else and be social, then?”

Karolina’s phone buzzes in her hand again, and she resists the urge to check yet another email that she knows she won’t be able to solve until the morning anyway. She doesn’t consider herself a risk taker, but this doesn’t feel like a risk so much as feeling desired, and she can’t remember the last time anyone desired her. So, she makes a decision that she hopes doesn’t haunt her.

“Your place or mine?”

  —

  The apartment in Paris feels like a breath of fresh air. She hasn’t lived alone since her early twenties, back when she still thought a daily commute from Queens to Manhattan was something she could stand to do every day. Her last apartment had become suffocating. It was a pit of festering resentment that burned like cheap candles, leaving invisible soot on the walls; something you can’t notice until it’s too late and the damage has already been done. Like her childhood home, the scent of cigarettes settled so deep into the carpet that it followed her everywhere, even sometimes thinking she can still smell the residue in her hair if tries hard enough. One day they were happy and the next they were caught in the world’s slowest-acting quicksand, unable to dig themselves out of the trap they’d wandered into.

Karolina often recalls their final fight, her using the word we and Vic always using you.

But this apartment is all hers. She can rearrange the furniture as many times as she wants until it feels right, and she can leave the windows open overnight because there’s nobody there to complain about the noise. She can leave her mugs in the sink or on the coffee table or on the nightstand and she can clean them when she wants. She works into the early hours of the morning, and nobody’s pissed off because it’s what she wants to do. Fucking freedom.

  —

  The calls start.

Karolina had elected to get a new SIM card when she got to the country. For the longest time, her only contacts were from work, the veterinarian, and her mother. Now, Shiv’s name sits clear on the bottom of the list. It was a moment of weakness, trading numbers, because Karolina doesn’t know what Shiv’s intentions are beyond late-night summons, and Karolina knows it’s risky territory, getting involved with someone when she feels hot off the press of emotional encumbrance, but Shiv keeps calling. 11pm on a Tuesday, 3am on a Saturday, an egregious 8pm on a Monday and Karolina knows she’s in trouble because she says yes without a hitch.

“The Americans in Paris,” Shiv jokes, and Karolina wants to tell her that she’s not American, not really, but they don’t know each other beyond what gets them off and even though this is the most intimate she’s been with a new person in years, and because of it, Karolina thinks the rest of it, the things about her that aren’t visible on her body, are far more intimate than taking her shirt off. She almost thinks the whole ordeal lacks intimacy.

It’s procedural. Shiv asks if Karolina’s free, Karolina says yes, and then they decide whose apartment they’re going to. Shiv will offer her a bump that she’ll say no to every time, and Karolina will pretend that it doesn’t unnerve her that this girl does coke every time they fuck, and then Shiv will go down on her and she’ll forget that she was nervous at all. Then, once Shiv’s high has kicked in, they’ll switch, and Karolina will try to be careful, will try to please, and she’ll touch Shiv slowly, asking, “Is this okay?” and Shiv will just grab Karolina’s hand, guiding her to go harder, never having said yes at all.

  —

  Karolina gets attached.

And maybe attached, isn’t the right word, but she starts to like Shiv. She starts to like Shiv a lot more than just wanting to fuck a couple of times a week. At first, Shiv is hesitant.

“Coffee?” Shiv repeats, and she makes it sound like the craziest idea in the world. Karolina wonders if it is a crazy idea, getting involved with some apparent socialite with a coke habit and a penthouse in the middle of Paris.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” Karolina quickly asserts, “I’d just like to know who I’m getting into bed with.”

“Isn’t the mystery part of the thrill?” Shiv asks, but it sounds forced, not at all like her usual pension for teasing foreplay, so Karolina takes a risk.

“Maybe…I like spending time with you,” she says, and she waits, breathlessly for what feels like hours but is really only seconds, for Shiv to say anything, but the line just goes dead.

It stings a little, but Karolina thinks she’s faced worse rejections in her sometimes-sorry life, and she tries to move on. She leaves her phone in work mode the rest of the day, seeing only emails and team chat notifications, and tries to focus on why she’s in Paris at all. Tries not to let it feel like the end of the world, because it’s not, and she isn’t some unlovable creature that was put on this planet to always be within an inch of absolute contentment, no.

When she gets home, she fears her phone like it’s radioactive, and she sits next to Oliver and listens to him purr and she nurses a big glass of wine. She turns off Do Not Disturb in one swift click, eyes nearly closed and hands out in front like preparation can actually stop anything from hurting less, but there’s a notification from Shiv. Delivered nearly two hours ago, and she opens it up, and feels stupid, first and foremost, but also relieved.

Shiv sent one word, when?

That’s how Karolina finds herself at a cafe, morning blocked off with important “meetings” because she’s ahead of schedule with work and Shiv said she’s already busy this weekend. It’s an expensive place, one she wouldn’t tolerate going to for any extended period of time, but it was Shiv’s choice and anyway, Karolina’s never been the best authority on caffeine sources anyway, what, with her war-stock of 5-Hour Energy.

When Shiv arrives, Karolina attempts to not look as surprised as she feels. Shiv looks different in the daytime, hair pin-straight, and accessories purposefully understated, her outfit is a decidedly European collage of neutral tones with an obvious American aftertaste at the comfortability of it all. Big sunglasses cover her eyes, and her purse looks large enough to carry an entire fucking clown car, and Karolina thinks she looks like a walking ad for The Row.

“Long night?” Karolina asks as Shiv sits down, gesturing to the sunglasses. Shiv ignores her, grabbing the coffee cup that had been waiting for her instead.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“What I’m hoping is your usual,” Karolina says.

Shiv looks at the ingredients marked off on the label, and she lets out an amused laugh, “You sneaky little bitch.”

Karolina wouldn’t say that’s not one of her personality traits, but she didn’t have to sneak too hard to figure that one out.

“You have a habit of leaving receipts next to your key bowl,” Karolina says, having half a mind to look a little sheepish. “I might’ve taken a look.”

“Well, remind me not to leave state secrets out on my nightstand,” Shiv says, taking a sip of the coffee.

“Do you have any?” Karolina asks, to which Shiv just leans back in her chair, shrugging slightly.

“Maybe a few,” she smirks.

“Is that what you do for work?” Karolina asks. “State secrets?”

It’s apparently the wrong question, because the smirk falls, and Shiv shifts in her seat like the state secrets are actually real and Karolina’s just caught her sitting on a big one.

“No,” Shiv says, voice tight. “I’m on a sabbatical.”

This doesn’t shock Karolina, given the way Shiv’s eyes are always a little glassy and her nose a little red, the way her hands always shake slightly when she’s not paying attention to what she’s doing, and the way her body is always under a specific amount of control, as if losing control of anything would mean losing control of everything.

Karolina won’t mention it though, not here, not now, and it’s obvious she shouldn’t push the subject further, so she nods. She changes the subject to something that’s been bothering her.

“Are you sure we’ve never met before?”

Karolina tried asking her, a couple of weeks ago when it was late and Shiv had given her at least two glasses of wine, and Karolina just couldn’t put her finger on it. Shiv vehemently denied it then, but Karolina can’t let it go, especially now, seeing her out in the daytime.

“I can guarantee you, we haven’t,” Shiv says, and she sounds so sure.

“Weird,” Karolina mutters, returning to her coffee.

“Shiv isn’t—it’s not my full name,” Shiv says then, almost sounding nervous. “It’s more of a nickname.”

“What’s your full name?” Karolina asks, leaning forward.

“Siobhan.”

Karolina tries to rack her brain for any memories of a Siobhan. She thinks that’s definitely a name she’d remember, but the only Siobhan she can even think of is—wait.

“Siobhan Roy?”

“In the flesh,” Shiv says, sounding especially unenthused.

Karolina wouldn’t say she’s starstruck, because she’s rubbed elbows with billionaires before, but fucking the billionaire heiress of the largest media conglomerate in the United States? That’s a little more than she’s used to.

“Don’t make it a thing,” Shiv says preemptively, like she can see all of the different outcomes of this scenario working their way through Karolina's head.

“I’m not,” Karolina says, even though she’s definitely lying because this most certainly is a thing, but they’re in Paris and everyone who gives a fuck about Siobhan Roy is across the ocean, so she can act calm for however long this date lasts and then murder board herself to death later in case there’s some crazed paparazzi somewhere that’s desperate to get Shiv in tomorrow’s issue of Page 6. “I guess it makes a lot more sense now, knowing your parents didn’t name you after a prison weapon.”

That does crack a small smile out of Shiv, and Karolina’s happy to have eased at least some of the growing tension.

“I still wouldn’t say that wasn’t their intention,” Shiv says.

Karolina thinks it’s supposed to sound like a warning—a slight, careful, now, don’t get cut—but Karolina and warnings are friends. She knows how to heed warnings and navigate through them. Warnings themselves don’t scare her. It’s what comes from the things that have no warnings. The things you can’t see coming.

“So, now that you’ve interrogated me—what are you doing in Paris?” Shiv asks. Shiv can’t ever seem to get away from the topic of herself quickly enough. She figures now, that Shiv is just a Google search away, and Shiv doesn’t have the same luck with Karolina unless she wants to read the most standard LinkedIn profile in existence, so Karolina entertains her.

“I’m leading a PR team for Fashion Week,” Karolina says. “Ad campaigns, interviews, press releases—”

“Wait—a PR team, or the PR team?” Shiv asks, something like impression on her face. Karolina suddenly feels bashful, like bragging in front of a billionaire is some kind of fruitless endeavor that’s just going to leave her embarrassed and humbled, but Shiv looks interested, and she asked Karolina not to make her name a big deal, so that’s exactly what Karolina’s not doing.

“Well, I suppose it’s the PR team, when you put it that way, but it’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” Karolina says. “In my position it’s mostly phone calls and emails, appeasing the higher-ups so they think everything is running smoothly. The boring stuff.”

“I mean, still,” Shiv says, and she seems genuinely impressed. “Didn’t realize I was hooking up with fashion royalty.”

Fashion royalty. She remembers Vic’s, “Are you fucking serious, Karolina? Paris? Really?” and it’d felt more like a curse than anything.

“Paris Fashion Week can’t be the most extravagant thing you’ve been around, Siobhan Roy,” she deflects, and Shiv rolls her eyes at the sentiment.

“I mean, it’s no Met Gala, of course,” Shiv says, playing along.

“Well, I’ve worked the Met Gala too,” Karolina then says. “But I’m sure there’s something.”

“Fuck you,” Shiv says as she laughs, raising her sunglasses back into her hair, and Karolina finally has the opportunity to take all of Shiv in. Beyond the sleek hair and the jewelry that’s worth at least a few months of Karolina’s salary and the perfectly fitted clothing, she understands why Shiv was hiding behind sunglasses, because she can’t control the image of her own eyes. They’re bright and alert but still adorned with that never-ending irritated glimmer, a red ring of death that warns onlookers of her decaying. They also remind her that Shiv is just a person, not the heiress to a crime empire like The Washington Post tries to convey or the untouchable debutante that Karolina’s own publications perpetuate; she’s just a person. Karolina releases a breath.

“Who’s the worst celebrity you’ve met?” Shiv asks, and Karolina smirks.

“I didn’t meet him personally, but I remember a certain Roy was on the cover of GQ some years back and my staff had some choice words about the experience,” Karolina says, and before she has the chance to elaborate, Shiv laughs loudly.

“His alpha male days,” Shiv muses. “That cover was­–”

Karolina quirks an eyebrow, “It was what?”

“It was awful,” Shiv says, throwing her arms up in surrender but still smiling in amusement, “I’m sorry, it was!”

Karolina can’t bite back her own smile, because really, she has no emotional investment in GQ.

“A lot of readers wrote in after that issue thanking us for having a real man on the cover,” Karolina says, and Shiv scoffs.

“That real man is now into the art of microdosing on meditation,” Shiv says, throwing air quotes around the words, and Karolina hums.

“Maybe they should do another cover story,” she says, and Shiv feigns disgust at the thought.

“How long have you been working in fashion anyway?” Shiv then asks.

Too long, is Karolina’s first thought, but even if she’s not totally obsessed with the clothes and the celebrities and the parties, she’s enjoyed the path, and the money.

“My whole career,” Karolina says. “I started at a publication right out of college, and it just stuck. I’ve been working my way up since then.”

“And now you’re here,” Shiv says, smirking into her coffee again.

“Now I’m here,” Karolina laughs. “Having coffee with someone from fucking New York.”

“Not the Parisian romance you were expecting?” Shiv asks.

“This is a romance?” Karolina asks, and Shiv’s eyes narrow slightly.

“I mean, you practically begged me to come,” Shiv says. “Kind of felt like you were asking me on a date.”

Karolina tries not to let her panic show at the word date. It very well could be a date if either of them wanted it to be, but despite Shiv’s pension for flirting, she’s not exactly forthcoming with her feelings, and Karolina has no clue what Shiv could possibly be feeling in this moment.

“I just thought, you know, if we were going to be benefiting from one another—we might as well be friends too,” Karolina says, taking the easy route.

“Friends?” Shiv asks. She says it as if the concept is foreign, like friends is a thing that never quite works out, but Karolina thinks she’s just keeping her cards close to her chest, the same way that fucking in the dark is supposed to somehow make Karolina see her less or the way that wearing sunglasses that block half of her face is supposed to make Karolina understand her less.

“Why not?” Karolina says, knowing she’s won when Shiv just shrugs.

“Fine,” Shiv says. “Friends.”

  —

  “I can’t believe you have a fucking cat.”

Karolina watches in amusement as Shiv and Oliver have a stare-down in her foyer. Stare down is probably the wrong phrase, because it’s more like Oliver is sitting there, looking sickeningly adorable with his short grey fur and his bright green eyes, and Shiv is glaring at him from in front of the doorway, like a tabby that’s just wandered into the wrong alley.

“Shiv, this is Oliver,” Karolina says, picking him up. He meows as she does so, and she can’t help but laugh at what seems like pure disdain on Shiv’s face.

“Oliver?” Shiv asks, bewilderment clear. “You named your cat after a fucking singing orphan?”

“No,” Karolina immediately fires back, not even having it in her heart to distinguish the fact that Oliver Twist was from a book first. “He’s named after an Agatha Christie character.”

Shiv takes a very long breath, like she’s contemplating agreeing to try this friends thing at all, and then she steps forward.

“You’re a dork,” she says, holding her hand out. Karolina turns so that Oliver can see Shiv better, and he sniffs her hand for a second and before retreating, and curls his head back into Karolina’s arms.

“I don’t think he likes it when you insult his mother,” Karolina says, petting him fondly.

“Well, I don’t like when his mother edges me because she forgot to feed him,” Shiv says, and it’s Karolina’s turn to roll her eyes as she heads into the kitchen.

“You can get yourself off, Shiv,” she throws behind her shoulder. “Oliver can’t even open the fridge.”

Shiv follows her, footsteps hurrying.

“You keep his food in the fridge?”

“That’s where cat food is kept,” Karolina says, setting Oliver down on the ground, and Shiv pulls a face when he immediately jumps onto the counter.

“And you let him on the counter?”

Karolina pulls out his wet food, and a bottle of kitchen bleach, making a point to place it in front of Shiv.

“I’ll wipe it down when he’s done, fair?”

Shiv just huffs, a sound of disbelief.

“You’re a crazy cat lady,” she mutters.

“Shiv, I have one cat,” Karolina exclaims, still unable to contain her laughter.

“Yeah, and that’s fucking insane,” Shiv says. “And you brought him to France!”

“Should I have left him in New York?” Karolina asks. “Given him up to the feral cat colony on Rikers Island?”

“The what on Rikers Island?”

“Oh my god, Shiv, here—” Karolina grabs Oliver’s treat bag, pulling one out and handing it to Shiv. “Hold out your hand to him.”

Shiv does as she’s told, and she holds out her palm, a single treat at the center. Oliver rushes over to her and sniffs it inquisitively until he picks it up, Shiv shuddering as he does so.

“What was that?” she asks, clearly disgusted.

“His tongue?” Karolina says, but she’s laughing. “You’re a hopeless case.”

“You’re the hopeless case,” Shiv says, sitting down on a stool. “God.”

They make eye contact and they both start laughing, and Karolina forgets for a moment that they’re just supposed to be fuck buddies. That they’re not dating and this isn’t a normal occurrence, and even though Shiv has agreed to be friends, that comes with limits. Still, Karolina basks in the light, not wanting to let go of what it feels like to share a life with someone again, even if it’s for a small moment, and even if she doesn’t like Karolina’s cat as much as Karolina would like her to. By the time Karolina has finished feeding him and has wiped down the counter with enough bleach to satisfy Shiv, Karolina’s convinced her to stay for wine.

They’re talking about everything and nothing, random books that they’ve both read that Shiv hated and Karolina loved, movies that they’ve both seen that Shiv loved and Karolina despised. Their knees are almost touching, and every time one of them shifts they both bolt into action to separate, as if the fact that their hands have been inside one another is leagues different than the fabric of their pant legs come together. Karolina watches as Shiv, cheeks rosy from the wine and smile easy from a joke that Karolina’s successfully recounted, pulls her hair back, and that’s when Karolina notices a scar, a little pinkish and normally covered by the fall of her side part, poke out from under Shiv’s hairline. It’s barely visible, only moving past the hair by a few centimeters, and she doesn’t think she’d have noticed it at all if she weren’t sitting so close to Shiv.

And in her own wine-drunk nightmare, Karolina can’t stop the question from stumbling out of her mouth.

“How’d that happen?” she asks, and she regrets it instantly as Shiv’s smile falls and her posture stiffens.

“Uh—it’s a childhood scar,” Shiv says. She swallows harshly, and Karolina knows she’s lying. “My brother, uh, Roman, he—he threw one of his toys at me. I don’t remember what it was now. Probably the red Power Ranger or something fucking stupid like that.”

“I’m sorry–” Karolina says. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“You’re fine,” Shiv says, taking a sip of her wine, and then like she flicks a switch somewhere Karolina can’t see, her spunk is back, and she’s cocking an eyebrow, “I showed you mine.”

Karolina wonders if it’s some sort of test and she feels slightly uneasy about the pretense under which it’s falling under, like Shiv didn’t almost just freeze up at the mention of a forehead scar, but Karolina plays along because she bit Shiv, and even if it was an accident, she can handle Shiv biting back.

She rolls up her sleeve, holding out her right forearm to Shiv. There’s a jagged scar along the side of it, one that still makes her previously bolted bones still ache on rainy days.

“Back in high school I did whatever I could to piss off my father,” she explains. “There were these guys at school that liked me, and they had these cool motorcycles so, I’d go riding with them sometimes—I think you can guess how that ended.”

Shiv grimaces.

“I think you have me beat,” she says, and Karolina knows Shiv’s trying to deflect and that Karolina should be trying to let her, but she can’t stand that kind of sentiment.

“It’s not a competition,” she says.

Shiv eyes her, and she can only hold the contact for a few seconds until she looks away. Karolina just pulls her sleeve down, watching as Shiv readjusts her hair, scar no longer in view.

“You should tell Roman that,” Shiv says. “When I started losing my baby teeth the first thing he did was break an arm.”

When Shiv looks back at her, it’s like she’s begging to change the subject, and Karolina complies.

“Roman’s your other brother, right?” she asks, and Shiv nods.

“He’s the middle child,” Shiv says. “So, you know how it is.”

But Karolina doesn’t know how it is. Vic was an older sister, and she would get so mad when Karolina just couldn’t understand that apparent burden. You’re an only child, you don’t get it. She always thought it was a low blow, because, for her, only child wasn’t some sort of crown to claim her spoils with. It meant only successor, only option, only target.

Karolina wonders now if that is a sibling thing, saving your pain for important moments, letting it all blow up at once; breaking an arm when your sister loses her teeth. Maybe Vic did have that part right—Karolina never had to compete for her pain, it was given to her freely. Served with a silent, festering breakfast and a drunkenly belligerent dinner, every day: at least your dad didn’t hit you, Vic. Karolina had thrown up after that argument, the thought that he’d given her some sort of badge to throw in people’s faces when she needed it feeling more like a thorn that was stuck in her side, just so she could rip it out and say—See? I’m bleeding too!—when it felt convenient. That’s what pain is to Karolina. Convenience. To try and compete with it just feels greedy.

“I actually wouldn’t know,” she admits. “I’m an only child.”

She wonders if Shiv can tell that she accidentally bit her back.

“Really?” she says. “You’ve got the feel of, like, an older sister of seven, or something absolutely criminal like that.”

“My parents barely knew what to do with me,” Karolina says, forcing a laugh. “Thank god they never got up to seven.”

Shiv laughs as well, but she eyes Karolina as she does so and it feels not at all dissimilar to the way Karolina so often looks at Shiv, wondering what’s going on beyond the surface of her words. Shiv seems to push past the instinct to dig though, something she’s a lot better at doing than Karolina.

“Well, props to you,” Shiv says raising her wine glass slightly. “I fully would’ve blown my brains out if my brothers didn’t exist, so—congrats.”

Karolina doesn’t say that it’s a miracle she didn’t, and she holds up her glass anyway even though it feels less like a cheers and more like a commiserating tap, but there’s an understanding tone to it. There’s no, “God, you’re lucky.” It’s a, “Damn, that fucking sucks,” and she thinks maybe she’s misjudged Shiv in that moment because she’s not seeing this as a competition, she’s trying to take herself out of the race.

“Parents—they do what they can, right?” Karolina says, but she flashes her eyes sarcastically and Shiv chuckles hollowly.

“Right,” she exaggerates, and it’s then that Oliver jumps up on the couch. Karolina observes as Shiv stills, but she surprisingly doesn’t move away, letting Oliver go where he pleases. “What made you want to become a parent to…this?”

“You mean my cat?”

Karolina watches in amusement as he slowly crawls the small space in between her and Shiv, and he sniffs Shiv’s clothes. Shiv just watches as well, still seemingly frozen in her position, and Karolina stifles a laugh as Oliver picks up a paw, gently pressing it into Shiv’s leg.

“Why is he doing that?” Shiv asks.

“He’s inspecting you,” Karolina says.

“What am I, a fucking bomb threat?” Shiv replies. She slowly brings one of her hands up to him and pokes him in the forehead, and Karolina isn’t quite sure what Shiv’s intentions were, but Oliver takes it as a sign to ram his head into her hand and Shiv pulls it back quickly.

“He wants you to pet him,” Karolina says, and Shiv rolls her eyes.

“I’ve met a cat before,” she says, but the way her hand hesitantly returns to his body and runs across his fur doesn’t have Karolina convinced.

“Are you sure?” she asks, hiding a smile behind her wine.

“I must have,” Shiv says. “Who hasn’t fucking met a cat?”

He seems to like Shiv’s scent or something, because it’s certainly not her energy, and he moves closer to her until he’s lying in her lap. Shiv continues to pet him, and Karolina can hear the loud purrs as they leave his body, and she sneaks a look at Shiv, who’s become solely focused on Oliver. Karolina suddenly wishes she hadn’t left her phone in the kitchen, because she thinks it’s the sort of scene she’d like to look at a million times over, Oliver’s peaceful face and Shiv’s in quiet awe.

“I think he likes you,” Karolina says. Shiv doesn’t look up, but Karolina thinks she can see something of a smile coming out of Shiv, and she doesn’t stop the petting.

“I’m sending you my dry-cleaning bill.”

  —

  She doesn’t see Shiv for a little over a week.

Karolina had gotten a little busy with work and she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t missing Shiv, didn’t miss her sharp glares and the charged banter, and she knows Shiv would never admit to as much, what, with all of her French exploits that Karolina makes explicitly clear she wants to know nothing about, but she thinks she can hear it when Shiv calls her out of the blue, and Karolina can feel the nervousness seep through the phone receiver.

“Do you want to, uh, hang out—again?” Shiv asks. “Like, not what we normally do, um—dinner, maybe?”

And it’s wrong of Karolina to tease, but it feels natural as the words come out.

“You asking me on a date, Roy?”

Her own heart pounds a little as she waits for Shiv’s response.

“Would you want it to be?”

Karolina doesn’t even have to question it.

“I think I’d like that, yeah,” she says.

“Good,” Shiv says. “I’ll send you the details.”

And then Karolina has to wait.

Has to painstakingly wait, and it feels like she’s nineteen again, going on a date with a girl for the very first time, except this time she’s thirty-nine, and it’s probably something like her millionth date with a girl, and she’s fresh off the tail of the longest relationship of her life. She’s not quite sure which thought is worse, but then she remembers going home for college break and facing her father with an un-hidable hickey on her neck, and she decides that she’s overreacting.

And then suddenly they’re on the date and Karolina forgets why she’d been nervous at all. It’s just Shiv. Ridiculously beautiful but indisputably infuriating Shiv.

“You’re sure you can’t get Oliver a pen?”

“The answer hasn’t changed since the last ten times you’ve suggested it,” Karolina says. “And like I said, he’d just jump it.”

“Whatever,” Shiv mumbles, stabbing her salad. “I’m just saying, the cost of one cat pen would surely save you on all of those lint rollers. It’s just basic economics.”

“How about the next time you come over, you try putting Oliver in his carrying case,” Karolina says. “Then let me know how you think he’d feel about a pen.”

Shiv eyes her suspiciously until she narrows her gaze, giving up with a light-lipped sip of scotch. Which, by the way, Karolina said did not impress her.

“That feels vaguely like a threat,” Shiv says, putting down her glass, and Karolina just shrugs.

“Want to find out?”

Shiv has half a mind to give it a rest, still shoving her fork into her meal with the ferocity that could only come from a woman who’s just lost an argument about a cat three separate times in a row, and Karolina tries her own hand at a question that she’s asked before.

“Will you tell me what you actually do for work?” she asks. “When you’re not on a sabbatical?”

Shiv doesn’t look happy to answer the question, but she doesn’t look like she’s going to go running this time either.

“I’m a political strategist,” Shiv says. “I manage election campaigns.”

This catches Karolina off guard. Not that she’d ever been big on keeping up with the Roy dynasty anyway, but she sort of assumed they’d all just have bullshit jobs. Political strategy seems, real, for lack of better words.

“Trying to get in the White House one day?” she asks. She’s half-joking, but Shiv seems to consider the serious side of the question.

“Maybe at one point I would’ve hoped,” Shiv says. “Now…I don’t know.”

The words hand in the air, and Karolina gives them the space settle. Before she can get a word in, Shiv is sharing more.

“I’m thinking of getting out of the business,” Shiv says, meeting Karolina’s eye. “I don’t know if it’s for me anymore.”

“Hence the sabbatical?” Karolina assumes.

Shiv shrugs as if that’s partially it, but Karolina figures she won’t push that line of questioning any further.

“What was the last campaign you worked on?” she asks, but that seems to be the wrong direction as well, Karolina noting the way Shiv’s posture stiffens in the way it always does when Karolina asks something that unsettles her.

“Uh, just—it was a congressional candidate,” she says, her words stilted.

“State secrets?” Karolina asks, and she feels bad as Shiv looks away, knuckles going white as she grips her glass.

“Something like that,” Shiv says.

Karolina sighs. Talking to Shiv sometimes feels like she’s solving dozens of tiny puzzles at once, saving information and storing it for later, pulling out old facts when she finally thinks she’s found the missing piece. She wants to tear the puzzles apart, to tell Shiv that it’s okay to be scattered, that she doesn’t have to keep things so close to her chest, but Karolina knows how hard that can be. Because that’s cheating, right? If you give someone all the answers to your heart? You’ve made it too easy for them, and then they get greedier and greedier until they hold all of your cards and you have nothing.

So, Karolina gets it; trusting is hard. That doesn’t mean she can’t leave the line open.

“You know––there’s a shorthand we use in my line of work—maybe you use it too, but it’s for when you need a filler name, like maybe you can’t say it now, but you might want to say it later,” Karolina explains. “It’s just, TK—to come.”

Shiv nods, just the slightest bit, and Karolina continues.

“Just—if you ever wanted to talk about any, state secrets, or something,” Karolina says. She quirks a teasing eyebrow at the last part as Shiv looks back up, and Shiv reveals a begrudging smirk as she does so. Karolina doesn’t think of it as any kind of battle won, but it does maybe make her feel like somewhere deep down, Shiv can accept more between the two of them. A date is just a first step. Trust is a whole new game.

“What about you?” Shiv asks. “What does a woman do after Fashion Week?”

“I don’t know,” Karolina says honestly. “I only thought as far as taking this job. It was risky, but, it would’ve been stupid to pass up, right?”

“I mean, I for one, am glad you took the job,” Shiv says.

“Oh?” Karolina muses. “And why is that?”

“I guess…I just like having you around,” Shiv smirks, and Karolina can’t help from smiling as well, because Shiv is trying. Maybe she doesn’t want to share the big stuff, not yet, but she wants to share, and that’s more than Karolina thinks she can ask out of her.

“Yeah?” she raises an eyebrow, waiting for Shiv’s inevitable but to drop, because Shiv might be showing earnestness, but Karolina knows that honesty can’t come without a little protection.

“And it’s nice having someone around who can order all of my meals in French,” she adds.

“There it is,” Karolina says, still smiling. “Using me for my services.”

“Trust me,” Shiv says. “Those aren’t the services I use you for.”

Karolina blushes. She fucking blushes.

“And what services are those?”

Shiv gestures to the waiter for their tab.

“You wanna go find out?”

  —

  Karolina doesn’t need to find out. She already knows. That every time they get into bed, tangled limbs with the lights off, Shiv wants her rough and Shiv wants her fast. She wants just enough, never more, and never less. Karolina knows that when they’re finished, she can stay, but not too close, and when they wake up in the morning and Shiv needs to get amped again because the alternative is not leaving her bed for three days, Karolina can’t say anything. She does wonder if this is the only reason that Shiv keeps her around, that for whatever reason, Karolina acts as a bystander to it all. A happy medium disposed to bend at her will.

Karolina obliges, maybe because she’s so lonely that it doesn’t matter, or maybe because she thinks Shiv is so lonely that it does matter. Regardless, she’ll wake up with Shiv in her arms and Karolina will pretend to shift in her sleep, give Shiv enough time to wake up and escape her grasp before she thinks Karolina will even know it’s happened at all.

But that night, after Shiv’s satisfied and Karolina can feel the growing knot in her stomach get even larger, Shiv extends a hand. Karolina takes it, and wakes up the next morning still connected.

  —

  It’s in the small things. The way Shiv texts to ask how work is going, or the way she sends Karolina a delivery from her favorite lunch spot if she knows it’s been a busy day. It’s in the way she invites Karolina shopping with her, asking for her opinion on which top she thinks will piss off the snobby Francophile who lives on the floor below her more and the way Shiv can never help but to smile when Karolina just asks her which top she feels better in. It’s in the way Shiv will pull Karolina behind the curtain when the store associates aren’t lurking, and she’ll kiss her with a giddy look in her eyes because Shiv knows Karolina hates worrying about getting caught but loves how much Shiv enjoys it.

It’s in the small things. Which is why the big things hurt so much more.

The second Karolina is through the door, she can tell something is off. She’s caught off-guard by Shiv’s forwardness, and even though it’s not unwelcome—it’s not like she doesn’t know what Shiv called her over to do––something feels different.

“Can we slow down?” Karolina asks, trying to ignore the sensation of Shiv’s mouth inching up her neck.

“Why?” Shiv asks. “It took you fucking forever to get here.”

“It took—fifteen minutes,” Karolina says through stilted breaths, hands involuntarily gasping at Shiv’s hair. “Shiv—can I fucking take my coat off?”

Shiv sighs and leans away, resting a hand on the wall beside Karolina’s head. Karolina shrugs her coat off, sending Shiv a pointed look, and she lightly presses it into Shiv’s chest.

“Hang it up for me?”

Shiv rolls her eyes as Karolina smirks, but Shiv grabs it anyway, disappearing into the hallway. When Shiv returns, Karolina’s smirk immediately flips into a grimace.

“Shiv, your nose is bleeding,” she says, immediately looking around for tissues or anything. Shiv brings the back of her thumb to her nose, cursing as it comes away coated in fresh blood.

“Fuck,” she says, barreling past Karolina and towards the bathroom. Karolina follows her, watching with worried eyes as Shiv attempts to get the bleeding to stop. Under the bright fluorescent lights, Karolina can actually see how worn-down Shiv looks. The more time she’s spent with Shiv, the more time she’s spent looking at that silver vial. The knowledge of it taunts her now, and she’s starting to regret answering Shiv’s call.

“How much have you taken today?” Karolina asks. She tries to keep her voice even, like it’s curiosity at play and not an accusation, but Shiv’s already high on the defensive.

“Just a little extra,” Shiv says, removing a bloodied tissue from her nose. “That’s all.”

“What’s a little extra, Shiv?”

She watches as Shiv dabs a clean tissue around the area, looking satisfied when no more blood comes away from it.

“Does it matter?” Shiv asks, washing her face.

“Of course, it matters,” Karolina says then, eyes closely following every one of Shiv’s movements. Now that they’re up close, she can see it clear as fucking day. The extra-shaky hands as she dries them, the black of her pupils taking the place of that usual crystal blue, the way she seems extra hungry for Karolina. “You’re acting like a damn rail station.”

“Very funny,” Shiv says. She grabs Karolina’s hand as she exits the bathroom, attempting to lead Karolina toward the bedroom, but Karolina shrugs her off.

“Stop,” she says. “I’m not finding this amusing, Shiv.”

Shiv’s eyebrows furrow then.

“I’m just having a little bit of fun,” she says, her frustration seeping through her voice. “Fuckin—lighten up.”

Karolina rolls her eyes. She thinks it’s a juvenile blow, one that she’s heard too many times before. It’s not so different than the frigid and the anal and the uptight, and sometimes, Karolina thinks, she’ll take those. She’ll take the criticism when it’s necessary or it’s fair, because sure, sometimes Karolina does need to lighten up, but not when Shiv’s version of letting loose is going to the bathroom and doing as many lines of cocaine that her heart can take before trying to fuck Karolina into the next morning.

“What did I tell you when we first started doing this?” Karolina asks, Shiv just rolls her eyes in return as well.

“I’m not even fucked up right now,” Shiv argues, and Karolina takes that as a challenge she needs to prove wrong. She scans the apartment for anything else, and immediately an open liquor bottle hanging out on the coffee table.

“You drinking in between lines?” Karolina asks.

“Jesus Christ,” Shiv mumbles, rubbing her forehead. “I’m fucking fine.”

Karolina thinks it has to be some sort of sick joke, Shiv standing in front of her with God knows what absorbed into her body, bloody and sleep deprived, just begging to be fucked. Karolina isn’t even sure where to begin on the list of reasons why Shiv clearly isn’t fine.

“I can’t know that, Shiv,” Karolina argues, because it’s true. This girl will tear herself inside out, on her knees, bruised and bleeding like some prisoner of her own war, screaming––damnit, I’m fine!––just to keep the truth away from herself.

“Oh my god, Karolina,” Shiv groans. “I’m not gonna go cry rape just because I let you hit it while I’m high.”

The words feel so appallingly harsh that Karolina doesn’t even know where to begin, so she doesn’t. And maybe it is Karolina’s fault, just a little bit, because if she were being truly honest, the consent is only a small part of it. The bare minimum.

If she were being honest, she’d tell Shiv that it makes her feel used. That it makes her feel like she’s some ethical weapon of self-destruction to Shiv, because it’s not self-destruction if it’s coming from a different person, right? Shiv doesn’t only keep her around for moments like these, right? She can hear Vic, somewhere in the back of her mind having the last laugh. Maybe this is Karolina’s penance, for fucking everything else up too.

“I’m going back home,” she says. “Enjoy your fun.”

She doesn’t turn around as Shiv begs her to wait, and doesn’t respond to the texts that begin piling up as soon as she walks out the door. She lasts two days––both of which take everything in her not to behave in a way that would guarantee the entirety of her team quitting by the end of the week––before caving, sending a one-word yes when, for probably the twentieth time, Shiv asks if they can talk. She comes home from work that day to find Shiv waiting outside her apartment, a bag of Karolina’s favorite takeout in her hand.

Karolina approaches her tentatively. She knows the silent treatment was wrong, but Shiv was wrong too. And Karolina’s not big on saying things she’ll regret.

“Hey,” Shiv says.

“Hey,” Karolina echoes.

“Look, Karolina—I’m really sorry about the other night,” Shiv says, cutting right to the chase. She thinks the apology sounds unnatural coming from Shiv, and she knows Shiv must not hand out concessions often.

“Yeah?” Karolina says. “What are you sorry for?”

Because if Shiv wants to act immature, then that’s how Karolina will treat her. She’s surprised when Shiv continues to comply, and she nods to herself as if this is what she deserves. She’d half expected Shiv to fight back, not come running home with her tail in between her legs, and Karolina doesn’t feel any satisfaction. She just feels like shit.

“For being an asshole,” Shiv says, and Karolina raises her eyebrows, as if to say, “That’s all?” and she watches Shiv fight the urge to roll her eyes. At least she still has some bite. “And for—violating your boundaries, or whatever. It wasn’t cool of me, I know that.”

Karolina does think it’s a decent apology, as far as Shiv’s standards go, but she’s still upset, because if she and Shiv don’t have trust then they don’t have anything, and maybe what’s more upsetting is that it showed her the trust still isn’t there. That she’d been building it up in her mind for nothing.

“I had one rule, Shiv,” Karolina says, stepping closer. “One fucking rule—don’t call me over when you’re like that.”

Like that. Karolina knows they’re dancing around words now. Dancing and dancing until they get so tangled up that they both come spinning out. Shiv’s eyes dart around, but the street is empty. The cool weather reminds Karolina of a quiet afternoon back home, when she’d have time to leave work early and get to walk the streets of her neighborhood while all the kids were still in school, and she lived far enough downtown that she never saw any tourists. Then she’d get home and she’d feel like Vic was disappointed to see her. Like she’d ruined the afternoon by just returning to her home.

Enter Shiv, begging Karolina to let her in.

“I just—I wasn’t thinking,” Shiv says.

“Obviously,” Karolina can’t help but fire back, and she doesn’t trust herself to say more. A breeze goes by, and she watches as a chill runs through Shiv. She holds her hand firmly in her pocket, wanting to reach out but fearing what would happen if she did.

“Can we go inside?” Shiv asks.

And Karolina’s still mad, of course she is, but there’s a small part of her that just wants to let it go, wants to say fuck it and just give Shiv another chance. She ignores the scary thought that she’s already given Shiv chances, but she’s not sure if chances are something she likes to quantify anymore. She’s certainly burned through enough chances to last a lifetime.

“Fine,” she says, and Shiv follows her silently into the apartment as Karolina does her best to stay relaxed, to remain calm. When they get inside, she leaves Shiv in the kitchen as she goes to change and tries to breathe through the uncomfortability at being angry with someone she cares about. She hates being angry. It makes her fingers twitch and her skin crawl, and it makes her feel all too close to her father in the way that she can’t be certain if it’s the ghost of his touch grabbing her from behind or inching up from somewhere deep within her. Or if maybe it’s just her, inescapable and lurking in her own mirror.

They’re both silent as she returns, pulling out plates and silverware and the food that Shiv’s brought which, really, does smell fucking amazing even if Karolina is a little upset with herself for falling for a bribe, and Shiv attempts to talk to her, but Karolina just shoots her down with one worded answers until Shiv gives up, crestfallen like a kid who keeps trying to get their voice in at the dinner table until they realize that nobody in the room cares about what they have to say. But Karolina isn’t disinterested. She’s fucking upset. Majorly upset.

“You know––I’m not afraid that you’re going to accuse me of something,” she eventually says. Shiv’s head shoots up at her voice, but quickly falls back down, and Karolina’s shocked when the movement looks something like shame.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Shiv says quietly. “It was fucked up.”

Karolina looks up at her, and her heart pounds a little because she doesn’t want to say what she’s going to, but she needs to say it, because Shiv needs to hear it.

“It felt like—” But Karolina cuts herself off. Shiv’s looking at her again, eagerly awaiting the words, like she’s ready to absorb the critique and the reprimand and the disappointment and carry it with her forever, ready to mold herself into whatever Karolina could possibly ask her to just so long as Karolina doesn’t leave. Karolina pockets the words for a rainy day. “Just—don’t do it again, Shiv. Please.”

And Shiv nods.

“I won’t.”

And then Karolina lets Shiv stay over, because she’s mad but she’s not a monster, and she doesn’t think she’s much of a match against Shiv’s sad fucking eyes anyway.

They’re lying in Karolina’s bed, so close together yet somehow worlds apart, and Karolina’s watching Shiv pet Oliver, his small frame nestled in between them.

“He likes you,” Karolina says, her voice still thick with upset.

“He’s soft,” Shiv says.

“Most cats are,” Karolina tries to joke, but it falls flat between them. Shiv is silent, contemplation swimming through her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, eyes still on the cat. Karolina looks away as well, doesn’t want to see the sadness on Shiv’s face.

“It’s fine, Shiv,” Karolina says. “I already said it was.”

She thinks Shiv might leave it there, and she’s about to close her eyes when she hears Shiv’s voice again.

“What were you going to say earlier?” she asks. “About—how it made you feel?”

Karolina watches Oliver shift, twisting his body so his head lands directly where Shiv’s hand is.

“Like—” she swallows. “Like you were trying to use me to hurt yourself.”

The air in the room quickly becomes thick with the words, and she waits for Shiv to deny it, to pick a fight, cry, to do something, but she just lays her hand near Oliver and settles into the bed, her voice dense with a heaviness that Karolina wishes weren’t real.

“I won’t do it again.”

  —

  They try their best to get back to normal, and whatever normal is, it’s definitely not in the voicemail Karolina receives only days later.

“Hey, Karolina, it’s me, um—I know this is an odd request, like, really fucking odd, but—my dad—he’s coming through on a business trip and wants to get dinner, and, look—say no if this is totally fucking insane, but, I don’t know, do you—do you want to come? Just as friends, obviously, this wouldn’t mean anything, but with your career and his business I think you might have shit to talk about and I—I just don’t know how I can let him see me like—uh, yeah, um—if someone was there to just take the heat off then, I don’t know. Let me know.”

Karolina doesn’t think that she sounds desperate as much as she sounds scared, and while it is an absolutely nutty idea, Karolina feels compelled to help. She’d also be lying if she said she wasn’t a little bit enticed by the idea of getting a personal sit-down in front of Logan Roy, but really, who in their right mind wouldn’t be? So, she says yes.

She ends up at a restaurant with bottles of wine that cost more than her fucking life insurance policy, settled at a small and intimate table with her fuck-buddy, and her fuck-buddy’s dad, who also happens to be the king of Manhattan. He doesn’t seem impressed when Shiv shows up with a stranger, at least not at first, but Karolina’s attractive, and she’s smart, and she knows how to craft a statement, and so she makes a joke about Sky News and the BBC and how she should’ve appreciated traditional American news media when she was still back home, and that cracks him open wide, a prideful man, unable to resist the temptation of competitive praise.

“Dad, Karolina is the Head of PR for Fashion Week,” Shiv says. “Both seasons.”

“Oh?” Logan hums, narrowing his gaze onto Karolina. “They’re working with an agency in the States?”

“No,” Karolina says, gripping the base of her wine glass. “I was previously working with Condé Nast and developed some professional relationships in Europe. One of my previous clients is on the board here, and they had an open position. Lucky timing, maybe.”

She tries to smile at Logan, but his personal demeanor is unflinching. Still, she doesn’t falter.

“Well,” he says, as if that’s that, “It’s good they’re letting women lead these days.”

Karolina sneaks a glance at Shiv, who’s trying to stifle a laugh into her drink as her father continues. It’s a performative politeness, Karolina can tell, but, hey, at least he’s being nice, right?

“You know, I always told Shiv she ought to aim higher,” he says. “It will be good for her to be around a professional.”

“Uh-huh. Sure, Dad,” Shiv says, rolling her eyes.

“And Shiv?” he says. “What are you up to?”

He sounds curious at best, but there’s an edge to his voice, and Shiv certainly doesn’t seem to like the sound of it. Karolina still wonders if for some reason, Shiv purposefully poked the bear.

“You know,” she waves her hand flippantly, “Meetings with different contacts. Keeping my options open.”

Karolina waits for a cue to jump in, to put out the fire that’s surely building in front of her, but Shiv looks determined to keep it under her control.

“And the Washington situation?” he asks, and for a second, it’s as if Karolina isn’t there at all. An intruding third party, eavesdropping as Shiv shifts in her seat, yet still taking the scene in, watching the way Shiv purses her lips and staunchly avoids looking in Karolina’s direction.

“It’s handled,” Shiv says stiffly.

Logan eyes her and Shiv meets his gaze with an unflinching sort of conviction, until Logan nods to himself and suddenly, like he’d cast some spell to lift a dark curse, the table feels light again. He looks at Karolina with a very easy smile, and she suddenly understands where Shiv gets it from, her ability to just switch. To hit some button and transform herself into whatever the situation has called for.

“How do you two know each other?” Logan asks, and Karolina scrambles, because she realizes she has no idea what Shiv had told him.

“Um—through a mutual friend,” Shiv says. “You remember Lisa Arthur, right? She heard we were both in Paris and said we should connect.”

Connect is a good word for it, Karolina thinks.

“Uh-huh,” he says to Shiv, then turning to Karolina gain, “This one staying out of trouble?”

She can’t miss the frantic eyes Shiv throws her as he asks, but it’s a no-brainer.

“Oh, I’m afraid she’s nothing but trouble, sir,” Karolina says, and there’s a slight pause before Logan’s laughing, and Shiv nervously joins in with a slightly relieved laugh of her own, meanwhile Karolina’s just thanking God she wore black so that nobody can see the sweat dripping down her spine.

“This restaurant was a good choice, Siobhan,” Logan says to Shiv, and Karolina can’t be certain, but it seems to her like they’ve won Logan over for the night.

  —

  They’re lying in bed, separated by mere inches, but Karolina can feel the ghost of Shiv’s breath on her bare shoulder. She’s closer than she usually is, and Karolina pushes her luck. It’s not something she likes to test very often, and she doesn’t think the universe looks down kindly on those who take more than their fill, but she can’t but feel like the universe has often given her more than her fill. So, she’ll take, just this once.

“The Washington situation,” Karolina says out loud, “is that about—why you’re taking a break?”

Shiv is quiet, but Karolina’s still keeping the windows open at night, so the room is a little cold, but the moonlight is shining through just enough to illuminate them in the darkness. She can see Shiv’s eyelashes batting as they both lay awake.

“Yeah,” Shiv says. “But it’s nothing. Just a—a low-hanging fruit. Dad shouldn’t have brought it up in front of you.”

Karolina swallows thickly. She has a million more questions that she won’t ask, because that was her push. That’s all the luck she’ll test for tonight.

“Okay,” she says, turning onto her back. “Consider it forgotten.”

Shiv doesn’t respond to that, and it’s quiet for a moment until Karolina hears her voice again.

“When we first met, you asked if my parents named me after a knife,” she says into the darkness.

“I did,” Karolina mutters. She remembers thinking the name Shiv more closely resembled a comic book character than a socialite. Siobhan made a lot more sense. Siobhan Roy made the most sense.

“My dad named me,’ Shiv says. “I don’t think my mom really had a say.”

Karolina tries to check-in to the mental game that she and Shiv always seem to be playing. The reading between lines, the talking in circles, and she thinks maybe she can tell what Shiv is trying to get at. That in some, fucked up way, Shiv’s dad is important to her. Regardless of what Karolina knows, or thinks she knows. Shiv gives a little, so Karolina gives a little as well, because despite whatever Shiv thinks, or thinks she knows, she and Karolina are seeming more alike than not every day that passes.

“My dad always hated my name,” Karolina admits. She breathes out deeply, not having thought about it in a long time, the way it seemed like he’d spit her name every time he had to say it. Like he couldn’t get it out of his mouth fast enough.

“Why?” Shiv asks.

Why. Karolina sighs softly, pondering the same question she’s asked herself so many times before. There’s really only one answer that she ever came down to.

“Maybe because it was mine.”

Shiv doesn’t say anything, but Karolina can feel the bed shake and the sheets rustle, and she realizes that Shiv is moving closer to her, fitting her head in the crook between Karolina’s shoulder and her neck, and wrapping a hesitant arm across her torso. Karolina immediately meets Shiv’s hand with her own, because she doesn’t want Shiv to feel unwelcome in her space for any longer than the half a second of hesitancy Karolina feels as Shiv nestles in, and she feels a special kind of calm wash over her as they both settle into the contact.

When Karolina wakes up, Shiv is still there.

  —

  “What do you think the artist is trying to say?”

Shiv is leaning down, talking lowly into Karolina’s ear. She says it in a teasing tone, clearly making fun of the pretentiousness of it all. They’re at an art gallery opening, another event Karolina’s gained the privilege of attending through her client connections. It’s above her social league, that much is apparent, but Shiv had seemed interested when Karolina mentioned it in passing, and so Karolina RSVP’d herself and a plus one, the thought of Shiv willingly joining her as a date too good to pass up.

Karolina eyes the painting. It’s a minimalist gallery, certainly not Karolina’s favorite for deciphering beyond what would look good on her walls, but she attempts to humor Shiv. The piece they’re in front of is a fully blacked-out canvas with a series of neon orange circles taking up the space inside. She imagines someone who likes this style of art might have something to say about the crispness of the circles or the contrast of the colors, and she thinks the technique must have something to do with why the painting has a charitable price tag of over four hundred thousand, but even still, she actually finds the nature of it pleasing.

“I like this one,” she says. “Something about the way the colors are presented, it’s nice.”

“Sure, it looks nice,” Shiv says, still looking unimpressed. “But it just seems too easy. I’m pretty sure this is what Roman used to make before eating the mac and cheese colored crayon when he was eight.”

Karolina fights against the urge to ask Shiv why her brother was still eating crayons at age eight, and she just marvels at Shiv’s relaxed state, no regard for whether the artist could be lurking behind her, or whether a gallery investor could be in the sea bodies in front of them. She doesn’t have a care in the world, and it’s like Shiv seems to revel in the discomfort of it all. Karolina’s come to realize that Shiv can walk into a room and immediately decide whether the people within it are worth her time, and the moment she walked in, she decided this gallery was bogus and that switch flipped in Shiv. She’s walking around with her hand on the small of Karolina’s back, whispering insulting quips about the guests and the artwork every so often. There’s a mischievous giddiness to her, an American heiress in a room full of French people who have no idea who she is.

“Does it have to prove something?” Karolina asks, turning to Shiv. “To be worth looking at?”

Shiv seems slightly taken by the question, but then she raises her eyebrows, the emotion only fleeting.

“I didn’t take you for a connoisseur,” she says, and then she looks at the painting again. “I guess you’re right.”

Her eyes glaze over the painting, and Karolina wonders if it’s actually doing its job, making her feel. Shiv seems to be someone who is always trying to prove her worth, as if that’s something that needs to be proven at all. Shiv squeezes Karolina’s hand and tells her that she’ll be right back, and Karolina doesn’t have to wonder why the painting suddenly made Shiv so upset, because it’s not about the painting at all. Shiv just needs another fix.

So, Karolina holds Shiv’s champagne and tries to undo the knot in her stomach, but it only grows with every tormenting second that Shiv takes, and Karolina hates that this is a condition of their affair. Hates that she’s just supposed to pretend this is normal, and hates that she feels powerless in stopping it. Shiv eventually comes back from the bathroom with watering eyes that she knows there’s no use in trying to hide anymore, and Karolina meets those eyes with angered ones of her own that she really tries her best to hide, but can’t, because they were having a good night, and now they’re not.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Karolina ends up saying, because it’s true and she means it, but Shiv doesn’t get mad. She just shrugs her shoulders and gazes at the painting again.

“I wish I wouldn’t either.”

  ––

  When they get back to Karolina’s apartment, shoes kicked off and bodies tentatively heading for the bedroom, Karolina waits for an okay that never comes. Shiv’s sitting on Karolina’s bed and Karolina’s lingering in the doorway, and they come to a standstill, Karolina like she’s waiting for permission and Shiv like she’s waiting for an order. Karolina leans against the doorframe as she eyes Shiv. She looks smaller in the yellow light of the room, patiently waiting for Karolina to take the lead. She’d been silent in the car back, and Karolina suddenly worries that Shiv thinks she’s upset with her.

Which, maybe Karolina is, but not in the way that should worry Shiv.

“Want to watch a movie?” Karolina asks, cocking her head slightly. She doesn’t let herself react to Shiv’s surprise, or the hesitancy with which she looks back at Karolina, doesn’t dare give Shiv a reason to believe that Karolina wants anything more than what she’s asking for.

“You’re, um—you’d be fine with that?” she asks. She sounds like she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, like she’s holding her breath because Karolina’s testing her and it wasn’t an exam that she’d had the time to study for; but it’s not a test. Karolina doesn’t need a headboard apology, she just wishes she knew the magic formula to making sure Shiv never has to do anything that she doesn’t want to do, even if that’s despite herself.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Karolina asks.

Shiv looks away, trying to hide the way the question hits her, and Karolina elects to ignore it, grabbing the remote and climbing into her bed, far from the end where Shiv is sitting. When Shiv looks back at her, Karolina holds out the remote as if to say, your pick, and after a moment of hesitation, Shiv grabs it. She scrolls through the options for a while, pausing on a few enlightening selections before absolutely blowing Karolina’s mind with what she does choose.

“Practical Magic?” Karolina asks.

“What,” Shiv snorts, “Karolina Novotney isn’t into Practical Magic?”

She has to feign offense at that, because her DVD collection (currently most likely covered in layers and layers of dust in her storage unit back home) would be highly insulted by the thought.

“I am,” she says. “I just didn’t think you would be.”

“I guess I’m full of surprises,” Shiv says, smiling sweetly.

“You just have the hots for Sandra Bullock,” Karolina says.

“Something tells me you have the hots for Nicole Kidman,” Shiv says, twirling a lock of her hair. “Can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“Shut up,” Karolina says, and she crosses her arms, because fine, maybe she’s always had the hots for Nicole Kidman in Practical Magic. Shiv and her frustratingly beautiful red hair don’t have to have anything to do with it.

She looks over to Shiv and it takes about two seconds before they both burst into laughter, and the tension is broken as Karolina reaches out for Shiv and pulls her into her chest. Shiv collapses into her willingly, and the ever-present graveness of everything feels a little bit lighter.

It can only last for so long though, and it’s not until the credits are rolling and the evil boyfriend is long-dead and they’re just lying there, Karolina running her fingers through Shiv’s hair while thinking way too much about why Shiv would’ve chosen this movie, that Shiv takes charge of the conversation.

“You know when you said that the Eiffel Tower—that it’s so big the rest of the city pales in comparison?”

That feels so long ago now, almost a few months of Shiv filling up Karolina’s mind since that night.

“Yeah,” Karolina says. “I remember.”

“Do you think that can happen to people?” Shiv asks, voice peaking. Karolina looks down, but all she can see is the top of her head and her wringing hands.

“Maybe,” Karolina says. Because people can become consumed by things and never return. They can get chewed up or swallowed whole and be spit out all the same, and it can define them, the thing that took them. But that wouldn’t happen to Shiv. There are already pages and pages of things Karolina can say about Shiv that have nothing to do with the thing that consumes her. Karolina doesn’t even know what that thing is, and it’s then she realizes that there’s something paradoxical to it, because how can Shiv become overshadowed by something that she won’t let exist?

Still, if it did come to light, Karolina doesn’t believe it could tower her. Not when she knows how bright Shiv’s presence is, “But not to you.”

“How can you know that?” she asks.

“Because I’ve seen you in front of the skyline, Shiv,” Karolina says. “All I could see was you.”

She can feel her heart pounding, and she knows Shiv must feel it too, the rhythmic beating vicious from inside her ribcage, but she finds that she doesn’t care. If Shiv doesn’t know how she feels at this point, then it’s a lost cause anyway. Shiv doesn’t immediately respond, and when she does, it’s not what Karolina is expecting.

“I’m sorry that I’m such a mess,” she says, and Karolina’s erratic heartbeat turns to something more like aching, because Shiv actually does sound sorry. Sorry that this is her life, sorry that she’s dragged Karolina into it, sorry that she can’t feel the same way Karolina feels about her.

“You’re just hurting,” Karolina says, and Shiv stills, because Karolina knows it’s not something she was supposed to know, not something she was supposed to figure out, but she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to look at Shiv and not figure it out. Even still, Shiv hasn’t let it consume her. She stands tall among the wreckage.

“Maybe,” Shiv eventually says, confirming weeks of observation in just one word.

  —

  Sometimes, Karolina really just wishes everyone in the world would do her a favor and keel over.

“I don’t care what we have to promise them,” she says, holding up a finger to an expectant Shiv, fresh coffee in hand. “Just put whatever they want in the scope and we’ll deal with it, okay?”

The employee on the other end agrees, some Junior Manager named Jacques—as if it couldn’t get any more fucking French—and she hangs up as fast as she can, setting her phone down roughly onto her kitchen counter.

“Jesus—fucking, Christ,” she huffs sharply, leaning her hands on the counter. She knows setbacks are par for the course in an event like this, but they’ve been dealing with absurd requests from talent and vendors all week, and there’s only so much that she actually has the time to make happen. Not to mention that it’s a Sunday, and she can’t remember a single moment in the last ninety-six hours that she wasn’t either sleeping or putting out a fucking fire.

She takes a deep breath, trying to evaporate the ugly adrenaline of anger that’s forced its way into her system, and then she feels a weight against her back and two arms snaking their way around her torso.

“If only this was London Fashion Week,” Shiv says lightly. “Then you could just call them all wankers and get on with your weekend.”

“I don’t like cursing at my employees,” Karolina says, ignoring the joke.

“Okay,” Shiv says, drawing out the word. “Then how about you just ignore them for an hour so that doesn’t end up happening?”

Shiv squeezes at Karolina’s side a little bit, a reminder that she’s still here, that human life beyond client scopes and emails.

“I have to take care of a few more things,” Karolina says, trying to escape Shiv’s grip.

“It’s nine in the morning on a Sunday,” Shiv says, lightly fighting against her. Karolina gives up, not that she’d been trying very hard anyway, and she turns around, leaning against the counter. Shiv quirks an eyebrow. “I think they’ll survive until ten.”

Karolina isn’t sure that’s so true, since they clearly couldn’t survive until nine, but she relents, leaning forward into Shiv’s chest with a sort of purposeful reluctancy, not all that dissimilar from the way Shiv likes to act when she’s pretending she doesn’t want Karolina around. She wonders if they’re less of a match and more of a reflection, constantly catching each other in the act with nonjudgmental eyes but consequential curiosity all the same.

Shiv brings her arms up higher, swallowing Karolina in her embrace, and for a moment, she lets herself imagine that this is real. That she’s back home and it’s a time in her life where she still knows the Bodega guy’s name and she still keeps cat treats in her purse for the tabby that lives in the pasta aisle at her supermarket, and she hasn’t chosen capitalism over love. She imagines a Shiv that doesn’t scare her, one whose face isn’t so chiseled, and hands aren’t so unsteady, whose cheeks still carry the same, sweet pink but whose eyes don’t look so constantly at odds. One that she met in a way she could tell her mother about—a mix-up at the dry cleaners or a small talk at the crowded DMV—so the dull throb of shame for never having brought home a man might hurt a little less. She wonders if there’s a world where she can have that again. Where she can have Shiv in a way that doesn’t feel like everything is always seconds away from total destruction.

She wraps her arms around Shiv as well, and briefly wonders what would happen if she just never let go.

“You okay?” Shiv asks.

Karolina doesn’t know if there’s a right answer. Things have never been better, but there’s still an emptiness. What are you supposed to do when you think you might be falling in love with someone who doesn’t even seem to understand what love actually is? Karolina’s no expert either, but she knows enough to understand that Shiv’s experience is obscured, and she knows enough to understand that Karolina’s absolutely fucked.

“There’s just a lot going on,” Karolina says, and she tries not to let it sound how she means it, which is that work is a lot, and Karolina’s life is a lot, and Shiv is a lot. She can feel Shiv’s nails lightly graze her back as her hand curls slightly into the fabric of Karolina’s shirt.

“Is it too much?” Shiv asks, and Karolina knows they’re not talking about her job anymore.

“No,” Karolina says. “I’ll handle it.”

Because she will. She’ll get the vendors the extra two partners they’ve requested even though the pre-parties start in five days, and she’ll find twenty extra park benches (that certainly don’t exist) to splatter their logos across even though they’ve never needed that many park-bench signs before because, really, pigeons don’t go to fucking Fashion Week, and if in the middle of all of it, Shiv calls her in the middle of the night skiing down a slippery slope and too drunk to realize that the bed she’s asking for is in Karolina’s apartment, she’ll be there. She’ll handle it.

“You know you don’t have to be perfect around me,” Shiv then says. “You’ve eaten my shit, right?”

And Karolina guesses that she has. That she’s shown up for Shiv night after night and Shiv just wants to return the favor. Because in some sense, Karolina is asking Shiv to trust her. To let down her defenses and believe that Shiv won’t chase her away just because things aren’t currently built for a white picket fence, and Shiv is asking Karolina to do the same. To trust her, just a little bit, to handle some of the hard stuff. Karolina isn’t so sure that the Shiv she knows has that ability, isn’t sure she’d pull the lever on the trolley if it were coming straight for her, but she knows that Shiv must exist somewhere, that at some point she had to, so Karolina gives it to her. Gives her the reigns for just a singular thirty seconds, an inconsequential test trial that can’t result in bodily harm or sudden death.

“Fine,” Karolina says, maybe with a little more attitude than she’d wanted, but Shiv wants to be trusted with the real her, and sometimes the real Karolina is snippy. Shiv’s hand relaxes and Karolina focuses on the pressure of Shiv’s fingers on her body, and it does feel good, letting Shiv be the bigger person.

“I have to run some errands,” Shiv says, grip not loosening, “so, why don’t you go answer those emails and curse out whoever you need to, and I’ll be back with lunch?”

Karolina bites her tongue, not wanting to ask what those errands are, because she’s pretty certain it has something to do with the low stash she saw when Shiv asked Karolina to grab her phone from her purse the night before, and she just nods into Shiv’s chest. Lets Shiv feel like she’s doing something right for once, because in a way, she is, and then she lets Shiv go, trusting her to come back in one piece.

(She only ends up cursing out one person.)

  —

  Karolina continues to pretend. She pretends like Shiv agreeing to be her plus one to the week of events doesn’t make her heart skip a little, and like when Shiv texts her and asks what jewelry Karolina will be wearing to make sure their metals don’t clash it doesn’t feel more romantic than anything else she’s ever experienced before, and that when Shiv is standing next to her, hand on the small of her back, strategizing about all of the ways to maximize the business potential in the room because Karolina still doesn’t have her next job lined up rather than grumbling about the snobby rich people and begging her to leave early, it doesn’t somewhat feel like maybe they’re the two most powerful women in the room. That maybe, she’s met her match.

It’s a double-edged sword though, and Karolina can’t pretend that Shiv’s mood doesn’t shift at the end of each night. That the second the lock clicks in either of their apartments she’s taking off her earrings with a rigid spine and pensive eyes and Karolina can’t ignore what that means, can’t stand the thought of Shiv just playing along to make her happy. So, Karolina pushes again, hoping that it won’t be too much.

Shiv’s standing in front of the mirror, switching out her necklace for her everyday chain.

“You’re beautiful,” Karolina says, hovering in the doorway. She smiles as Shiv meets her gaze through the mirror, and Shiv gives her a small smile of her own, before changing out her earrings. Karolina walks into the bedroom, stopping in between Shiv and the bed, still looking at Shiv through the mirror.

“You know, you really don’t have to keep going to these events,” Karolina says, sitting on the bed, “if you’re tired of the charade.”

Shiv meets her eyes through the mirror and Karolina can see the moment she turns herself back on, as if she’d forgotten was a machine supposed to be willing and able for any bidding.

“I don’t mind,” Shiv says, closing her jewelry boxes. She turns away from the mirror and when she faces Karolina, she’s replaced her face again, this time with something distracting. She moves forward, not stopping until she’s leaning into Karolina, one hand placed precariously over Karolina’s chest. “Besides, it’s kind of hot when you get all, oui m’dame, to your boss.”

Karolina nearly takes the bait, wants to thank Shiv for sticking by her side in the best way she knows how, but it gives her pause, because that’s what it’s about, is it? Karolina doesn’t want Shiv to come just because it’s going to win her points. She wants Shiv to come because she wants to be there,

“Hey, wait—” Karolina says, lightly pushing Shiv back. “I just—I don’t want you to feel obligated, you know? I’m not going to be mad if you want a night off.”

Karolina thinks she’s struck a nerve at the way Shiv’s lips twitch just a little and her eyebrows dig a little deeper into her forehead. She’s touched a sore spot that perhaps had been lingering all along. She wonders about the TK of it all and worries that maybe she has gone too far, but Shiv’s face returns to neutrality almost as quickly as it’d left, and Karolina thinks the attempts at hiding her uncertainty would work if she just didn’t know Shiv better by now.

“I’ll tell you if I don’t want to be there,” Shiv says, brushing Karolina’s stray bang away from her face. “Yeah?”

Karolina wants to take the sentence at face value, but she’s not so sure she can trust that from Shiv. She wants to, but can she?

“Will you?” she asks, and she searches Shiv’s eyes. Shiv stares back, likely going through all the things she can say to dissuade Karolina from the image of Shiv she’s built up in her mind, but it’s no use, Karolina knows who Shiv is, and Shiv knows that. Still, it doesn’t change anything. Shiv nods, and Karolina has to believe her.

“Believe it or not, I sort of enjoy the company,” Shiv says, a small smile returning to her, and Karolina knows that’s her cue to drop it. Knows that’s all Shiv will give her, a promise of honesty that they both know she’s not intent on keeping.

“Sort of?” Karolina says, leaning back expectantly.

“Well,” Shiv says, following her movements, “Maybe a little more than sort of.”

Karolina doesn’t stop her this time, letting Shiv give what she wants to give, and although she can’t shake the feeling that the tender hands and the roaming lips are supposed to be more like compensation than they are desire, she still accepts them, and when they’re finished Shiv lays Karolina’s arms and she remembers that it wasn’t so long ago that Shiv couldn’t even bear to touch her afterward.

“Shiv?” Karolina says, and a quiet, “Hm?” reverberates on her chest. Karolina presses a featherlight kiss into Shiv’s hair and Shiv just burrows herself deeper into Karolina. Karolina imagines this is real.

“I like the company, too.”

  —

  “I’m going to have to go back to New York soon,” Karolina says. Her eyes are half closed, enjoying the warming weather on her balcony as Shiv smokes a cigarette. Their hands are loosely connected, Shiv dragging her thumb lightly across Karolina’s palm. The runways have started, and Karolina’s job is almost complete. Things are slowing down for her, just wrap up meetings and after-action reports.

“Why?” Shiv asks.

“Because it’s where I live,” Karolina jokes, but neither of them laughs.

“Do you know when?” Shiv asks.

“A few weeks,” Karolina says. She opens her eyes, squinting at Shiv in the sun. Shiv taps her cigarette harshly over the ashtray.

“Can you stay longer?” Shiv asks, quietly, and Karolina frowns, because Shiv never asks for anything, not out loud at least, and if she did, Karolina can’t think of anything she wouldn’t do. But this is something she has no control over. Something she can’t deliver on.

“My visa is going to expire,” Karolina says. “They need to kick me out so the next group of tourists can come in and be disappointed by French espresso.”

She fights again to find some amusement on Shiv’s face, but she finds nothing even close to it. Shiv looks away from her then, but her grip on Karolina’s hand becomes tighter.

“I hadn’t realized how long it’s been,” she says.

Karolina hadn’t either. Months of entanglement, from a chance meeting in a random club to this.

“Just because I’m leaving—” Karolina says, “—this doesn’t have to end.”

She watches Shiv’s face for even a hint of what she’s thinking, but Shiv just stares out into the view in front of them, a couple of rooftops that have their own inhabitants enjoying the freak warm weather. Karolina wonders if things for them always feel this grave as well, or if they’ve reached a point in life where everything’s stopped being so dire. She really thought she’d be there by now.

“That’s a pretty long distance,” Shiv eventually says, and Karolina puts down her book and reaches over to grab Shiv’s arm, lightly grazing her thumb across it.

“It doesn’t have to be,” she says.

Shiv looks at her and then looks away again, sighing.

“I’m not going back.”

“Why not?” Karolina asks. Shiv’s bouncing a leg now, and Karolina knows they’re getting into dangerous territory, but they both need to know what’s going to happen after this. Karolina doesn’t know if she’d survive the cold turkey, and Shiv might act like she can, but Karolina doesn’t want to find out whether or not that’s true.

Shiv takes another sharp drag of her cigarette and her eyebrows furrow.

“I can’t,” she admits. Shiv says it like even the thought threatens to break her, but Karolina wonders if it’s too late for that. That despite her best efforts, Shiv is already long shattered.

“What are you afraid will happen?” Karolina asks, her voice calm.

“I don’t know,” Shiv says. “There’s nothing left for me there.”

Karolina knows why Shiv would say that. That her family legacy and the big fancy parties and the distant father who favors her overbearing brothers aren’t anything she’d want to go back for. That whatever happened in Washington carved a wound so deep that she needs uppers to get out of bed and downers to slow her heart enough to get into it, and that it’s easier to ignore and forget than to remember and let go. But Karolina still doesn’t think there’s nothing for Shiv there.

“I’m not nothing,” Karolina says, and Shiv finally looks over again. Karolina thinks she can see a twinge of pink over Shiv’s nose, a little extra glossiness in her eyes, and it’s a gut-wrenching thought, the idea that Shiv is fighting a battle in her mind that she won’t let Karolina into. She’s throwing her own body in front of the archers as if that’ll save either of them from destruction when in reality, it’s the thing that hurts them the most.

“No,” Shiv says. “You’re not.”

Karolina hates seeing Shiv feel so alone, especially when she’s right next to her, touching her, existing with her. She thinks Shiv feels her emotions like she’s the only person on the planet who has ever had them, and Karolina wishes she were more tactful, because anything Shiv is feeling, Karolina’s certain she’s felt before.

“I don’t really have anything to go back to either,” she says, and Shiv immediately shakes her head.

“You have a great life,” Shiv argues, as if it’s supposed to mean that Shiv doesn’t, as if it’s supposed to mean that Shiv is dragging her down, somehow, and Karolina wants to laugh. Her life has become hollow. Hollow work for a shallow industry, distant friends that she doesn’t check up on enough, too many lost lovers to count with the most recent feeling like her culminating failure. She considers that maybe she’s just been hollow from birth, and she wonders if Shiv can feel that shared between them, that absence that can linger in a child forever if parents aren’t careful enough.

She realizes then, that maybe it isn’t about tact at all. If she wants Shiv to give, then she has to continue to give as well.

“I chose Paris over my relationship,” Karolina admits. “Before I left, she gave me an ultimatum—and I chose the job. Nine years, gone.”

“I’m sorry,” Shiv says, and it sounds like she means it. Karolina shrugs, hands still linked with Shiv’s.

“I’m just saying, I don’t have a life to go back to,” Karolina says. “I’m starting over.”

Shiv seems to get that message, the idea that they could start over together, and she roughly wipes at her face, Karolina assuming it to be a tear that she can’t see from where she’s sitting.

“Why’d she give you an ultimatum?” Shiv asks, ignoring the sentiment.

“She thought I loved my career more than I loved her,” Karolina says.

“Did you?”

Karolina will never forget when Vic asked point blank, “Do you?” and Karolina hesitated. She hesitated, and that was it. In that split second, they could both fill in the blank.

“Maybe,” Karolina says instead. “Or, maybe in the end I just wanted to love her more than I actually did.”

She hates the way remembering makes her feel so cold, how instead of comforting each other through the end, Vic had just told her to get out, and she did. She left without a fight. She just gave up.

“Love is fucked anyway,” Shiv says, but Karolina stills, unsure if that’s true. She decides to bite, praying that it doesn’t send Shiv away.

“Were you—you and TK, were you in love?” she asks nervously.

Shiv drops their hands at the mention of the codeword, and she crosses her arms, folding into herself. For a second, Karolina thinks Shiv isn’t going to give her an answer, but she’s surprised when Shiv does.

“I thought we were,” Shiv admits. “But when he—”

She cuts herself off, and Karolina just waits for Shiv to fill the silence again.

“The way it ended,” Shiv eventually says. “It didn’t feel like love.”

Karolina doesn’t let her mind wander. She’s silent as she tries to come up with something to say that doesn’t feel like she ripped it out of a get well soon card in the pharmacy, but then Shiv steals a glance at her, a very quick one, and her voice rings out again.

“What do you think love should feel like?” she asks.

Karolina looks at Shiv, carrying more pain than she’ll ever truly know, yet here she is, being honest with Karolina. Asking her the big questions, letting herself be vulnerable with someone new, and Karolina realizes that maybe she has done something right for once. That love and trust and a career and happiness might not be as far out of reach as she’d thought. She closes her eyes and faces the sun again, letting her body soak up the warmth.

“Maybe like whatever this is.”

  —

  Shiv won’t say it, but Karolina knows they’re exclusive. Knows that Shiv considers Karolina hers and that if Karolina strayed, Shiv would care. That if Karolina left, Shiv would care. That Shiv cares. She also knows it’s too soon for Shiv. That old wounds aren’t yet old, and that she still can’t trust Karolina not to accidentally rip them open, that Shiv just needs time. They both know that they’re running out of time.

What Shiv doesn’t know, is that Karolina is prepared to wait.

  —

  Sometimes, it feels like Karolina is still catching up. Things go well for so long that she forgets exponential growth can stutter and stagnate and sometimes even fall, despite her efforts, despite how much she wills for things to be smooth and perfect. But even in stagnation, there are lessons learned, there are things that change and that still constitutes growth, right?

Shiv calling her panicked and breathless at two in the morning and asking if she can please just come over is horrifying and heartbreaking but also very different than a Shiv who a few months ago couldn’t even hold Karolina’s hand, right?

When she gets there, it’s not quite the scene she’d been expecting. Shiv’s call had her fearing the worst, but the apartment is calm and clean, and she can’t quite figure out what the issue is until she finds Shiv, curled up on the couch, an American news channel on her TV. Shaking hands carry her nail beds to her teeth, and her slightly angered face is partially hidden by the way she has her knees pulled into her chest, listening intently to the soft hum of the television. Karolina’s eyes travel towards the TV; on it is a special report, some greasy bastard with enough pomade in his hair to supply an entire class of pre-tween boys who’ve just discovered the world of manscaping and shifty eyes that look like the secrets he’s sitting on could take his entire campaign down in one fell swoop taking up the screen, and Karolina thinks she puts the final puzzle piece together.

She sets her bag down and walks over to Shiv with cautious legs, cautious arms, and a cautious mouth, and she sits down on the couch, listening to the report. It’s a fluff piece about an after-school meal program in DC.

“Did you work on that initiative?” Karolina tries asking.

Shiv doesn’t move, the only sign that she even heard Karolina’s question being her cheeks sucking in as she shifts her jaw, and her eyes drop from the TV, as if she can’t speak while looking at him.

“Uh—” she sniffs, and digs a hand into her hair for a second before her hand rubs harshly on the back of her neck, “yeah.”

Karolina nods, steeling herself before asking her next question.

“Is that him?”

The silence is suffocating. If she couldn’t see the tight rise and fall of Shiv’s chest, she wouldn’t be sure she was even breathing at all, and Shiv’s face immediately twists, as if the question itself was the last straw in her ability to hold back the tears. She watches as Shiv fights against the instinct to blink, fights against the instinct to let herself cry, to fall apart and to let Karolina see this, and eventually, something gives, because Shiv may be great at pretending, but she’s not superhuman.

She blinks and the tears run down her face slowly, and then, so slightly that Karolina would’ve missed it if Shiv weren’t the entire center of her world currently, Shiv nods.

Karolina releases a deep breath and steals another glance at this man’s smug face, still not even knowing exactly what he’d done, but feeling a familiar rage course through her system. It’s one she keeps on reserve, one she doesn’t often pull out because it’s so red-hot that it feels like she can’t come back from it. The kind she’d used the first time she stood up to her father. It’s then that Karolina notices the small ATN on the corner of the screen, and she knows that if she were anywhere else but alone in an apartment with Shiv, she’d allow the anger to be blinding; but for now she’ll just have to let it be sadness, and protection, and reassurance, and whatever else Shiv could possibly need from her right now.

She doesn’t think she can stomach the sight of him any longer, and doesn’t think Shiv can either, so she grabs the remote and that’s what finally springs Shiv into action, latching onto Karolina’s arm as if it’s the last thing she’ll ever do.

“Wait—” Shiv says, and her eyes tear away from the remote and back to the TV, then to Karolina, and they’re full of such a timid desperation that Karolina wishes she could just open Shiv up and find the faulty wiring, wipe whatever horrible memories seem to be trapping her in this moment and just fucking fix it, but she can’t. What she can do is get this prick’s shadow out of Shiv’s living room before it does consume her. Before it swallows Shiv whole in a way that she feels like she can’t come back from.

Karolina gently brings her hand over where Shiv’s is still latched onto her arm, biting the inside of her cheek when Shiv jumps at the touch, but she doesn’t stop, just guiding Shiv’s fingers to uncurl and then she connects their hands together. She holds on tightly, rubbing her thumb across the top of Shiv’s hand.

“I’m going to turn it off,” Karolina says softly. “Okay?”

She waits for Shiv to react, not daring to break the eye contact Shiv is maintaining until eventually, Shiv is the one to break it, and she nods; hesitantly, but she nods. Karolina immediately turns it off, cutting off his arrogant voice in the middle of some sentence about education reform and the thought of him makes her feel sick, the theatrics of this pedestal he’s posing on when she can see Shiv right in front of her, the consequences of his pedestal in her peripheral, touching her hand. The consequences are real, not some bullshit bill that he’s only getting passed as some sort of mutually beneficial hush deal.

She turns to watch Shiv closely, waiting for any sign of what her next move should be. She doesn’t let go of Shiv’s hand and Shiv doesn’t make a move to let go either, and Karolina is almost ready to speak up again when what little is left of Shiv’s resolve cracks fully open, and Shiv drops her head into her free hand, letting it all out as if this is the first time she’s allowed herself to feel the depth of her emotions since this whole thing had started. Karolina takes deep breaths herself, not wanting to get swept away in her own emotions, and she rests her free hand on Shiv’s back, waiting for any sign that Shiv might not want the contact. Shiv doesn’t react, and Karolina wonders if Shiv even remembers she’s there.

She doesn’t know what to say to even begin trying to make it better, and she feels entirely out of her depth. She just resorts to being there, because Shiv had asked for her, and if this is what Shiv needs, then fuck, Karolina would sit here for months. The French police will have to drag her out of the country kicking before she leaves Shiv, that’s for damn sure.

She draws the same pattern over and over across Shiv’s back until eventually, Shiv leans down, laying her head across Karolina’s lap. As she does so, the tears lessen some, not quite all-encompassing but still burdensome, nonetheless. Karolina is surprised when Shiv speaks, her voice gruff and guarded, and Karolina knows just from the sound alone that she would give anything to take away an ounce of the pain.

“I thought coming here would make things better,” Shiv says. “Like maybe the distance would stop it from feeling like so much.”

“Treating the symptom,” Karolina says, moving her hand to play with Shiv’s hair. Shiv doesn’t say anything to that, and Karolina takes the turn to speak again, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Shiv sighs, her breath shaky.

“He just really hurt me,” Shiv says, her voice cracking slightly, and it’s so simple that it makes Karolina want to scream. She can feel the sting of tears in her own eyes, and she blinks them away. There’s no complexity to it. He hurt her bad enough that she raced to an entirely different continent to numb her days with booze and blow, in a country where she barely speaks the language and nobody would ever notice her, to whittle herself into nothing. To carve herself hollow with sex and drugs until there’d be nothing left to take from her. Nothing left to lose.

Karolina’s fingers move towards Shiv’s hairline, both her and Shiv stilling when she brushes against the scar she’d asked about what feels like so long ago now.

“Did he do that?” she asks, though she isn’t sure she wants the answer. At first, she doesn’t think she’s going to get another one, every question she asks feeling like a deeper hole that she and Shiv might not come out of unscathed, but she has to try, and it seems Shiv does as well.

“The handle of a kitchen cabinet,” Shiv says, clearing her throat. “He said he opened it too fast. That he forgot I was there.”

Karolina hates how clinical the answer is. He said it was an accident. He didn’t see me. He said. He said. He said.

“Is that when you left?” Karolina asks, and she doesn’t want to ask it, doesn’t want the confirmation of whether or not it’s the last scar, if it’s not the only scar—somehow worse if it’s the only visible scar— but it doesn’t look new. It looks old and angry and most of all, it looks sad.

“Uh—no, that was…it was the first time,” Shiv says. “I guess I believed him, or—or, I wanted to, maybe…”

“It’s confusing,” Karolina jumps in. “When you love someone, and they do that.”

“Yeah,” Shiv whispers.

Karolina removes her hand from Shiv’s hair and drapes her arm over Shiv. She’s trying to figure out what her next move should be when Shiv’s fingers run along the surgical scar on her forearm. She remembers she decided to start sharing more. That she owed it to Shiv if she expected the same from her.

“Do you remember when I told you about that?” Karolina asks, and Shiv nods.

“Motorcycle accident,” Shiv says.

Karolina nods even though Shiv can’t see her, and she eyes the scar, less faded than it should be for something almost twenty years old.

“When I broke it, I had to get surgery—a plate and seven screws,” Karolina says. “After it healed, my father, he’d um—grab my arm in that spot. Never hard enough for it to hurt, but just hard enough so that we could both feel the screws under my skin. I don’t know if he even remembered they were there the first time, but every time after that, it was with purpose, you know?”

Shiv grazes the scar again, as if she’s afraid to touch it.

“He wanted to remind you,” Shiv says. “Of your weakness.”

“Yeah,” Karolina says grimly. Not that she needed reminding, and not like she didn’t continue to test him anyway.

“Are they still in there?” Shiv asks. “The screws?”

“No,” Karolina says. “I had them removed once I could afford it. That’s why the scar hasn’t faded so much.”

It was a day of freedom. Something tangible that she could rip out of her body and be rid of, but she knows Shiv doesn’t have that same luxury.

“TK—” Shiv says, even though Karolina knows his name now, “When we got back from the hospital—he told me it was a good thing I wouldn’t be the one on TV, and he held that over me, every time we got into an argument in public or somewhere he couldn’t—somewhere he didn’t have power he’d find a way to say it. And now, every time I look in the mirror he’s just fucking there. He’s always there.”

Shiv’s voice cracks again and Karolina just holds her tighter.

“It’ll fade, Shiv,” Karolina says, because there isn’t anything else Karolina can assure her of.

“I just wish I could erase him,” Shiv says. “Pretend none of this fucking happened.”

Karolina won’t pretend like she knows everything, but she thinks she knows this one thing. She’s banked her entire life on it being true.

“He’ll fade too,” Karolina says. “It won’t always feel like this.”

Shiv just grabs Karolina’s arm and holds it close to her chest, and as Karolina feels Shiv’s heart beat fiercely into her bones, she knows she is telling the truth. She listens to Shiv’s quiet breaths, and looks around the living room, the sweat from the early morning dew on the windows making the glow of the room much warmer than it currently feels. It’s a big apartment, too big for one person, and she doesn’t know how she’s going to leave Shiv in a week. She doesn’t know that she can. Even still, this is bigger than her.

“Shiv?” Karolina asks, hesitantly.

“Yeah?” her small voice croaks out.

“I think––I think maybe you should see someone,” Karolina says, and she can’t stop her own voice from cracking as the words come out. “You can come back with me, and we’ll find someplace private in the city, or maybe somewhere upstate and I––you know, I wouldn’t be that far, then.”

Shiv’s response comes in the form of the smallest, most defeated sound that Karolina thinks she has ever heard, a quiet, “Okay,” with an affliction that Karolina hopes she’ll never have to experience come out of Shiv again.

“Okay,” she whispers back.

“Will you stay tonight?” Shiv asks, and Karolina just runs her free hand soothingly through Shiv’s hair once more.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

[tristanzaire]

HEADCANON: LIVING SPACE

After holding onto his one-bedroom apartment for the first couple years of his leadership, Tristan is now moving into Izaak's (the previous leader)'s old home, and continuing work that he began. It's a carriage house in Astoria, Queens. Carriage houses are houses in NYC that used to be for horses & carriages, but that have now been repurposed. They are spacious, and as the residence of the Brotherhood leader, this one is being used not as simply a home, but much more. It's used to hold intimate Brotherhood meetings, to house people who have nowhere to go or can't meet rent, especially artists and activists who aren't making a lot of income; they usually also become Brotherhood affiliates after staying there and drinking the revolution kool aid. Anyone in the Brotherhood, of course, is also always welcome to the space. If you need help or a good time, Tristan's home is where you'll find it.

[aria-ashryver]

Moving Day

Book: Immortal Desires

Pairing: m!Cas x m!Gabe x nb!MC (Luca O'Rinn)

Ratings/Warnings: Mature - swearing, brief mentions of/references to: biphobia, domestic violence, and homelessness

Words: 1.5K

Summary: As Gabriel and Luca help Cas pack up his apartment in preparation to move out, Cas reflects on the person he became there, the people he loves, and how he feels about his identity as a bisexual man.

A/N: So, I've been far too sick to write much at all lately, so I didn't think I'd get a chance to write something specifically for Bisexual Awareness Week. But as things turned out, the next installment of "Snow in Crimson, Starlight in Gold" has a Cas POV scene where he is reflecting on what it means to him to be bisexual and how grateful he is to have Gabe and Luca in his life. So I thought I'd share this excerpt here as a standalone fic! (It can be read as such without needing to read the full longfic, or the full Chapter 36) 💜

Happy Bisexual Awareness Week lovelies! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

@choicesficwriterscreations

Cas had always hated rain.

Before, when he was still a kid, it’d mean his father had withdrawn to the house, shooed inside by the weather. The drizzle clung to him, an extra layer of irritability slicked on top of an already volatile man. Like a mist of motor oil and gunpowder.

Later, it had meant nights with little sleep, hunched in doorways, or park benches, or, when he was lucky, the cramped space between the men’s shoe store and the thrift shop on 48th. It meant waking with wet shoes and fever sinking into his underfed bones.

Now? Gabriel and Luca warming his apartment with their light and laughter? The rain outside was almost comforting. Homely.

He’d never really thought of himself as being particularly attached to his apartment, but seeing it as it was now, plucked apart around him and gently dismantled by loving hands, Cas saw the echoes of himself spelled out over the years.

The broken, old skateboard he’d bought second-hand when he’d first started going to Crimson Beech High. He'd nearly run Margo over doing kick-flips in the parking lot. She’d shoved him off and snapped it clean in two without ever breaking eye contact, and right then, Cas had known they’d become great friends.

The box of illegal fireworks he’d bought with Rory that one 4th of July weekend. The prick had chased him with a Roman candle, shooting shell after crackling shell of brightly coloured explosion at his ass, cackling like a maniac all the while. Cas had ducked and weaved and laughed his ass off, the vampirism freshly-settled in his cells giving him speed enough to avoid each searing, galaxy burst. The lights had danced against the water over Montworth Bridge; Cas watched on through eyes of silver, knowing he had never seen fireworks even half as beautiful before.

There was a compact of metallic eyeshadow —the first he’d ever bought— far from striking range of his father’s fists and curious about his hitherto quiet and unexplored bisexuality. Nicole Morelli, of all fucking people, had lounged with him in one of the Nexus common rooms and taught him to do a flawless cut-crease.

Cas’s venture into living in an apartment of his own, a place he could fill with stuff of his own, it was an open floor to find out more about himself. Sure, he’d lived in the Nexus in the years immediately after his turning, and he’d gone to ground for a while to let his old self truly die, but he hadn’t ceased to be a Venandi in all the time he’d slept.

The Venandi weekly stipend kept on rolling in. Astoria might be a hard ass at times, but she took damn good care of her kids. Even though he was still leery of relying too heavily on it —old habits die hard and all that— Cas had woken from his years-long slumber to find himself in possession of a damn healthy savings account.

So, he’d done what any young man thrust into sudden means would do, and bought a truly shitty car and paid his first months’ rent for his very own apartment.

Hair band posters. Glam rock and punk on blast. Hot pink eyeliner and fresh piercings that healed as he watched and his first pair of Docs with chains that rattled around his ankles with every swaggering step. Buckles, straps, hardware on every last scrap of clothing he could thrift. Patches and badges and eclectic pieces of fashion like that denim jacket New Kid had creamed their pants over. There was a time before Cas settled on his current aesthetic where his outfits all but screamed his sexuality with a stolen megaphone.

Once, he’d wondered what his old man would say if he could have seen him. He’d promptly decided he didn’t give a shit.

It didn’t matter that his old man didn’t get it. He hated Cas enough already, what did it matter if his son wasn’t straight on top of everything else? Honestly, Cas thought his father would have had less disdain if he’d just come out as gay instead of bi. It seemed to have pissed him off more that his kid was “halfway normal”.

As if Cas had had a girlfriend when he was fourteen, but when they broke up, he just up and decided he liked guys as well.

“Just because”.

Like he’d had a chance to be a “real man”, but he’d up and ruined it by liking guys, too. Because he wanted to act out, be a freak, piss off his old man on purpose.

Cas threw a shirt into a duffel bag with a snarl. Honestly, if his sexuality had been a choice, Cas would have chosen to be bi anyway, for that exact reason. Fucking prick.

He’d gone to Pride for the first time with Val one year, their cheekbones smeared with bi flag glitter, the bomber jacket he wore splattered with vibrant pinks and purples and blues. In the negative space on the back, it bore a giant middle finger.

That was how Cas felt about his bisexuality, sometimes.

He wore it loud, he wore it unapologetic… he wore it shirtless beneath his jacket, save for a harness biting tight across his pecs, and damn but it looked good on him.

He’d hooked up with a guy for the first time, that night. A mutual friend of Val and Remus on coven exchange from Morocco, who he’d gotten to know over shots and several hours grinding at some oversaturated neon club he’d long since forgotten the name of.

Cas swore he was still getting glitter out of his pubes a full year later.

…Totally worth it, though.

Eventually he pulled back from the sheer amount of colour in his wardrobe — it was easier to thrift edgier, streetwear fits in monochrome palettes, and besides, dyeing his hair scratched that particular itch. Now, if he wanted to to wear his sexuality so loud the homophobes choked, he had two fucking flawless boyfriends he could make out with in the middle of the street downtown.

‘What’s got you smirking?’ Luca asked, aiming a kick at his shins as he wandered past to grab the packing tape.

‘Oh, you know.’ Cas shrugged, batting him back with a feral grin. Luca squared up, laughing, bouncing on the balls of his feet. ‘Just thinking about sticking my tongue down your throat.’

‘Do it, coward.’

Luca launched a jab at Cas’s stomach. Cas let it connect, mostly because the butterfly-soft punches Luca threw when they didn’t have vampire blood in their system made him laugh, they were so fucking light. Cas juked to the left, grabbing Luca by the shoulder to tug them into a grapple, the line of their spine warm and fluid against his chest.

‘Keep talking shit and I might!’ Leaning down, Cas grazed his teeth along Luca's neck, nipping sharply, before he pulled them into a kiss.

He loved feeling his boyfriends smile when he kissed them, Cas thought, a satisfied growl warming the back of his throat. It made him want to burn down the world, just to keep them warm.

Cas’s apartment had been a place for him to just be, to become. Choi Taeyong was shoved aside and buried, surfacing only when the nightmares clutched him by the throat and he woke in a cold sweat, thrashing and tangled in his sheets as phantom, uncaring hands wrote the echo of bruises into his skin.

It hadn’t necessarily been a place of healing, Cas supposed, hauling a stack of towels from the storage closet to pad around a framed wall print of a Harley Davidson Gabriel was taking down from the wall. But it had been a place of refuge for him to get to know himself as an adult, with all his scars. Every facet of his identity. A place to find a version of himself he liked.

Gabriel groaned as he eyed the next art piece on the wall. He tugged it down, turning it over in his hands so Cas could read the words on the front of the warped metal.

“Evidence Locker”.

‘Tell me you didn’t steal this from the Sheriff’s Office,’ Gabriel said.

Cas grinned. ‘Alright. “I didn’t steal that from the Sheriff’s Office”.’

‘You’re supposed to tell the truth, not just regurgitate what I say!’

Cas dodged the sign as Gabriel lobbed it at him in exasperation, reaching for him and pulling him into a hug, just because he could.

‘Don’t think you can charm your way out of this,’ Gabriel chided, winding his arms around his waist.

‘I always do,’ Cas said, and bent his head to kiss him. Laughter, sunny and gold, burst against his lips.

Gabriel hummed happily. ‘What was that for?’ he asked. His tone might have been accusing, but Gabriel couldn't keep the smile from his face.

‘Mmm, advance payment for vacuuming later,’ Cas teased, and meant “because I love you”.

‘Menace.’ Chuckling, Gabriel tossed the sign into the trash pile.

Healing would come, Cas knew. And with Gabriel and Luca in his life, especially? He didn’t stand a chance of keeping the fractures in his soul locked up in the dark. Those two motherfuckers poured goodness into everything they touched, made them shine with love.

He’d be no different.

[briamichellewrites]

1

1998. Bria Michelle Johnson was the adopted daughter of investor, Chris Johnson and makeup designer, Rita Johnson. Together, their net worth was in the multi-billions. They spoiled their daughter with whatever she wanted growing up. She went to a boarding school in Switzerland where she was able to participate in their theatre program. They also paid for voice lessons, acting classes, piano and guitar lessons; and dance lessons. She learned ballet, jazz, and hip-hop.

With only three hundred students, the school was quite small. They knew that if given a chance, she would be on stage performing. Whether it was dancing during talent shows or performing in one of their plays or musicals. She often had the lead role because of her talents. Her parents tried to see her performances whenever they could.

At eighteen years old, she learned that her parents were killed in a car accident. A driver under the influence of drugs and alcohol crashed into their car at over a hundred miles an hour. They both died on impact. Because of their deaths, she was given everything. That included their house in Los Angeles, their apartment in Waldorf-Astoria, their car collection, a private plane, a house in the Hamptons, and a house in Middletown, New Jersey.

After graduating, she returned home to LA. She had nothing, as everything had to go through the probate court before it legally became hers. Her family’s attorney allowed her to live in the house until everything was settled. She could then sell or keep whatever she wanted. The house was her childhood home, so she wanted to keep it.

She was introduced to Brad Delson and Mike Shinoda by Jeff Blue, an A&R guy for Warner Music. He heard her demo and he had her come in for an audition. Once she was signed, he had her meet them. They introduced themselves to her. It’s nice to meet you. What kind of music was she looking to play? Indie folk or country. She wanted to tell stories like Bruce Springsteen. Even though she had grown up in Switzerland and LA.

Jeff had her play something for them, so she got a guitar that was lying around and picked it up. When she sang, they heard her voice. It sounded like nineteen-sixties folk rock. Maybe a little Johnny Cash or Joan Baez. When she was done, they clapped for her. Where did she learn how to sing? She had voice lessons in school. What school did she go to? She went to Saint George’s Boarding School in Switzerland. They had a performing arts program.

Boarding school? What was that like? It was an interesting experience. She guessed it was like college, except with more adult supervision. They laughed. What else did she learn? Did she take any music lessons or classes? She took piano lessons, dance classes, and acting classes. For dance, she took jazz, hip-hop, and ballet. It was a great way to work out.

She had to be on stage performing, even when she fell on her ass. They laughed. That happened once during a ballet recital. She got up, bowed, and then went back to the choreography. They wanted to help her with her album, so they invited her to join them. At the moment, they were using Mike’s in-home studio to make demos. They thought she would get along well with their band members. She thought it sounded like a cool idea, so she accepted their invitation.

Mike lived in a rented house with his college roommate, Joe Hahn. Together, they formed a band with Brad, Rob Bourdon, and Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell. They were currently looking for a lead singer after firing Mark Wakefield. He and Brad introduced her when she came over. The guys thought she was beautiful! Joe offered her a coke.

Yeah, thanks. They found she fit in perfectly with them. She could tolerate their sense of humor and she wasn’t afraid of being the only girl. Her long brown hair had been dyed black and cut short to her chin. It was hidden underneath a beanie. She had tights underneath shorts with an oversized Bon Jovi t-shirt and a plaid long-sleeve top. Dave asked if she was going grunge. She was feeling a little Seattle rock at the moment.

She was thinking of piercing the cartilage in her nose and getting a tattoo to honor her parents. What happened to them? They were killed by a driver under the influence of drugs and alcohol. I’m sorry. Thank you. She also wanted to adopt a kitten.

“Decisions. Decisions. What will you decide to do”, Rob joked.

“I don’t know. I’m indecisive. I’ve always wanted a cat but I’ve never been able to. It wouldn’t have been fair because I was at school.”

“Bria, get the cat”, Joe said.

“I might have to give into peer pressure.”

They laughed. Did she get the cat? She did! Woody was an eight-week-old brown and white domestic shorthair kitten. Everything about him was adorable! He meowed at her and pawed at her leg, making her crouch down to him. Hi, human! She said hello to him and scratched his little head. He got excited when he saw he was getting adopted. I’m going home! Meow. Meow.

They went to Petsmart to get everything he needed. He had a collar and a leash, which were required in the store. As they walked around, he looked at everything while in the cart. He was curious about everything! There was so much to see and smell and hear! There were humans everywhere! He wanted to say hello to them. Meow. Meow. Some of the workers stopped to say hello to him. Hi, human! I’m Woody! I got adopted today!

He wanted to play on the belt at the register, but Bria picked him up. She didn’t want his little paws getting smashed. When they got to the car, she put him back into his carrier before putting the purchases in the backseat. Yes, she had an assistant who usually did the shopping for her, but she wanted to do this herself. Nicole was hired by her mother to take over the day-to-day responsibilities.

She was a woman in her twenties who had recently moved to LA from New York. They also had a long-time housekeeper named, Rosita. She and her husband, Miguel immigrated from Mexico in 1990. They both loved Bria and her parents because they were so kind to them. Her parents gave them money when they needed help paying bills or expensive gifts. They were considered family to them. Bria was not a spoiled brat, despite her immense wealth.

She was taught to never look down on anyone and to always be thankful for what she had. Everything could be taken away from her at any moment. Woody had zero knowledge of that. He was involved in watching his human put everything together for him. His water and food bowls went into the kitchen. She filled up the bowl with water before setting it down. His litter box went into the laundry room.

His toys, bed, and cat tree went into the living room. He had everything a kitten could need and want. For the moment, he wanted to play. Bria went into the kitchen and found the takeout menus. She looked through them as she thought about where she wanted to order from. As she made up her mind, the phone rang. It was Dave. She invited him over and gave him her address. After hanging up, she ordered pizza to be delivered. She then went to the living room to play with Woody.

@zoeykaytesmom @feelingsofaithless @alina-dixon @fiickle-nia

[homefindoo]

Find a wide range of houses, apartments, and villas for rent and sale in New York City

Finding a diverse selection of houses, apartments, and villas for rent and sale in New York City can be an exciting yet challenging task. Here’s a guide to help you navigate the NYC real estate market effectively.

Types of Properties Available

Apartments:

Studios and One-Bedroom Apartments: Ideal for singles or couples, often located in vibrant neighborhoods.

Luxury High-Rises: Many offer upscale amenities such as gyms, rooftop terraces, and concierge services.

Co-ops and Condos: These are popular options for those looking to buy in the city, each with its own set of rules and fees.

Houses:

Brownstones: Classic NYC homes, often found in areas like Brooklyn and Manhattan, featuring beautiful architecture and charm.

Townhouses: Available for rent or sale, offering more space and often multiple floors.

Single-Family Homes: Located in outer boroughs like Queens or Staten Island, these homes are suitable for families looking for more room.

Villas: While less common in NYC, some areas, particularly in Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, offer larger homes that can be considered villas, with ample outdoor space.

Where to Search

Online Real Estate Platforms:

Zillow: Comprehensive listings for both rentals and sales, allowing you to filter by price, location, and property type.

Realtor.com: Offers a user-friendly interface to browse listings and find detailed information about properties.

StreetEasy: Specializes in NYC real estate, providing extensive listings and neighborhood insights.

Apartments.com: Focuses on rental listings with robust filtering options.

Local Real Estate Agents: Working with a knowledgeable agent can help you find properties that meet your specific needs and budget. They often have access to listings before they hit the market.

Community Boards and Listings: Check local community boards, Facebook groups, and neighborhood newsletters for rental and sale opportunities that might not be listed on larger platforms.

Popular Neighborhoods to Consider

Manhattan: Known for its iconic skyline, neighborhoods like the Upper West Side, East Village, and Chelsea offer a range of rental and purchase options.

Brooklyn: Areas such as Williamsburg, Park Slope, and DUMBO feature trendy apartments and charming brownstones.

Queens: Astoria and Long Island City are known for more affordable options with great access to Manhattan.

Staten Island: Offers larger homes and more green space, appealing to families looking for a quieter environment.

Conclusion

New York City offers a wide range of houses, apartments, and villas for rent and sale, catering to various lifestyles and budgets. By utilizing online platforms, collaborating with real estate agents, and exploring different neighborhoods, you can find the perfect property to call home. Start your search today and discover the vibrant real estate market that NYC has to offer!

[severingt]

Eddie and Lina

So, this is about my Great Uncle and Aunt, in America, 2810, 36th street Astoria, New York.  My great Uncle, was my grandmother's brother. I'm not sure whether he was half-brother or brother, and he went to New York. I don’t know why he went to New York, make his fortune, I suppose. But he didn't do that. He ended up being ripped off. He jumped ship, that's right, he must been in a navy, so he jumped ship, and he was hiding out with other, so he must’ve jumped ship in America, and he was hiding out with other Maltese. There was a Maltese enclave in Astoria, I found out and he jumped ship and he was living with them and they were ripping him off wholesale, apparently.

Not quite sure how he got together with Aunt Lina, but he was an office cleaner or a window cleaner, one of the other.

My aunt had adopted a boy called Howard. Apparently, when he grew up, he joined the Army and when he came back from his tours of duty, he didn’t want to know Eddie or Lina is video Lina and never heard of him again. We never know him anyway; I think we got a photo in somewhere.

Somewhere along the line, and I don’t know how they managed this on that kind of money; because he can't have been on great money doing window cleaning, but they had a summer place which a lot of New Yorkers did. In the summer, they leave a city and go out to Staten Island and so they had this place I could remember it well in Staten Island. They owned other parts of Staten Island and they must’ve bought it up really cheap at some stage, and other people had places on there and they used to collect rent off of that.

Eddie enjoyed fishing and there were many photos of him and his pals in a small boat out on the water. He gave me a split cane boat rod and reel, although ownership is questioned. Both stayed in M&Ds bedroom collecting dust for decades. Much later, I took it to work where a guy restored the reel. Dad asked for it back and promptly gave it away. Why do that?

Eddie and Lina came to the UK early to mid-60’s with Nancy. I remember dad renting a Ford Zephyr 6 to go get them from the airport which I can’t see was much bigger than the Morris Oxford he then owned but we learned long ago that logic evaded him.

When we went over, in 1968, just after my grandad died, dad wasn't supposed to come with us and they were supposed to look after each other or something. I can't remember exactly what it was. So, in the end he decided to come with us, we went over and stayed at 2810, 36th street for a week, and 2 weeks out of the city in Staten Island. Interestingly, we were in NYC early June 1968 as Bobby Kennedy was laying in state in St. Patricks Cathedral 6-8 June 1968. [PT]

Anyway, coming into JFK but we didn’t really do much in the city. We hung around the apartment in Astoria a lot, we didn’t seem to go anywhere. However, we did go for one evening to my aunts’ Irish friends, the Collins. I can remember them asking if I wanted a drink and I said yes and that was an end to it. I waited for them to get me something and they expected me to do self-service.

They also had a color TV and I remember watching Tarzan [the Ron Ely version] and the color was so bad that Tarzan was running in B&W and behind him running was the color, never actually catching up.

We went into the city for at least a day because we have photos of the UN building, we went up the Empire State building and we visited the big stores. I can remember being in a café or diner when a cop walked in and sat close by. I was transfixed with the gun on his hip. We also went to Radio City Music Hall and watched the Odd Couple with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau which was brand new at that time. There were dancing girls akin to the UK TV show, Sunday Night at the London Palladium. I remember my aunt having a fit as there were a bunch of nuns in the audience. Different times

I do remember buying Captain Action previously in New York City from either JCPenney or one of the other big boys. You know, Macy's somewhere like that. I’ve still got him. Because I was already a fan of the DC comics and Batman and Superman. It was in these comics that I discovered Captain Action as he was advertised in there, that's what I wanted. You couldn’t buy him in England. So I bought him and a Superman costume because he was being able to change between superman, Batman Green Hornet Spider-Man. God knows how it worked with copyright for all the different companies involved.

I remember the rubber band inside that held him together, pinged off so dad had to mend that. It was actually one of the things that he got right because it's been alright ever since it's still upstairs, this is rambling, isn't it?

So, my aunt was a great cook, so mum said, but then anyone who could make a slice of toast without burning it was a great cook to my mum.

At some stage, we went up to Sonny’s farm. Now Sonny’s farm was upstate New York. It was a chicken farm or egg farm whichever, and there is movie of that as well. And he was a big big fellow with a big cigar, he came down to pick us up in, I think, it was a Ford Fairlane, got us all in anyway and drove us back up to the farm. On the way he managed to get in the wrong lane when something was happening ahead and the policeman that was directing traffic told him to turn one way and Sonny said ‘but I don’t wanna go that way, I wanna go over there’. The cop wasn’t having any of it and Sonny had to comply.

Some say his wife was a drunk, I don't know, but anyway he was a big boy. I remember her cooking in this frying pan that which was almost flat with the amount of charred whatever in it. Food tasted ok though to a 10-year-old.

One of the days we were there, Sonny fired up the BBQ and cooked steak. Dad took a [out of focus] photo of the raw meat with a pack of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes to show the size of the meat. Once again there is film of this BBQ

The ranch had a snow sledge in the middle of the green and there is film of us riding one of their horses.

We had fun because his kids had bicycles and they were at school, so me and my brother had to hang out together and we use their bicycles. Of course, we had never come across banana seat bicycles before with cow horn handlebars, classic American bicycle, the Schwinn. The back brake was pedal backwards which locked the rear wheel. We had great fun riding down from the chicken shed, down the slope and getting to the bottom and it was all gravel and we were able to pedal backwards and skid which is also captured on film. It was fun for us at 10 and 8 years old.

Sonny had a trotting track which was curiously American invention where you have buggies and the rider sits on the back and the horses aren't allowed to gallop, they have to trot, so it's a specific thing. So, he's getting the track ready for the new season. He had this ex-military Willy's Jeep that he [I think] attached an old bed spring to the back of the Jeep and dragged it round the track. This was to soften the track and to even it out after the winter, I guess. Also, on film. We weren’t there for any of the races

I can't even remember coming back from there, but we did and someone, maybe Mrs Collins, those were the Irish friends from Astoria.

Astoria was a combination just like our family, really, between Irish and Maltese. Anyway, I am fairly sure they gave us a lift to Staten Island as I remember going by car.

Whilst in Staten Island, my aunt's friend came over, Sally and her kids and 2nd husband. Doug, Sally’s first husband, died just after having a medical examination that showed he was in good health. Her 2nd husband was a typical American, long thin. He shot himself at some stage. I think he was an alcoholic and he shot himself and so as his wife.

They came over with Nancy and the other kids and of course I had a crush on Nancy from previous when they’d come to England. And that was the first we’d seen of Polaroids and instant photos and tape recorders. We’ve got some Polaroids which [mum said] were meant not to last but 55+ years later they’re still around; how long do you want a photo to last? So here we had a fun with them.

My Uncle had a stroke and he wasn't very mobile at all. So, most things were being done around him.

So, I could remember going round with my aunt to these different places. I think as Mrs Messenger or someone, maybe that was in New York can’t remember. I remember going to the garage at this guy’s place. It was a massive garage and it was like the size of downstairs of Jenkins Grove with all the walls knocked down and probably bigger than that. Tools all methodically stored and spotlessly clean anyway, it's beside the point.

Now, as I remember Staten Island it was a wooden building, like a static. Bigger than one of our statics mind you.  It had an outside toilet and there was no drainage. So, you had the outside toilet, a little wooden shack that you could barely turn around in a board across the back end of it with a seat with a hole. I kind of remember blue but god knows; perhaps that would be in one of the films the old man took anyway.

It was a good thing to go take a crap in the morning because the bucket was empty. Basically, a big tin bucket and you go round the back of the outside toilet open this hatch and pull this bucket out which is which by the end of the day, is you know, basically like most Tories full of shit. That's why it's advisable to go to the toilet in the morning. Because the higher it got, and the lower you dangled and the later you leave it, the more chance of the 2 meeting. Lina got dad to dig a pit to throw the contents of the bucket in. Great holiday pastime.

I could remember going over there to open the place up. It had shutters on the windows and we had to take all the shutters down. We had to go over by the Staten Island ferry, there’s photos of me and my brother going over past the Statue of Liberty. We had little knowledge of any of this stuff back in ‘68, you know.

I can remember opening up and the part that was actually Eddie and Linas had a long strip of grass all the way down to the ocean, their own private beach on the ocean and a little pier I remember. It was a little sandy beach and so in the water was these, I don’t know what they’re really called, but we call them horseshoe crabs and they had a big shell on the back and a big spiky tail that if you trod on the shell, the tail went up in the air and your next step that went straight through your foot. Not sure how that would happen, actually, because if you tread on the thing, then you're quite safe as a thing, comes up. Your next step isn't going to be, you know an inch, is it? Anyway, we used to get the drift wood on the beach. One of our jobs when we first got there was to get all the drift wood off of the beach and pile it up and we made a bonfire.

Anyway, me and Pete used to go down to the pier with some of this driftwood and used to kill these bloody crabs through the water, just smash them on the back. We were really environmentalists at the time, you know real nature conservationists and all that crap. It's what kids do isn’t it?

That’s where my hatred of melons came from. My aunt bought some melon, it probably wasn't the melon, but I remember eating melon over there and being sick, you know bad and I didn't eat melon again. Never, even the smell used to make me wretch. So, I didn't eat melon again until I met Althia in 2017 and I don't know what made me then, she just bought it, you know, so I just ate it, and it was fine, took a bit of nerve, but I did it anyway I digress.

I don't remember much about the inside of the place on Staten Island; obviously, there were bedrooms not sure there were enough bedrooms for all of us. There would be a bedroom for me and Pete, Granny, a bedroom for my aunt and Uncle bedroom for mum and dad.

Then we heard that Uncle Eddie had died and Lina went into about a million years’ worth of grief. So, I remember mum getting letters from Lina which were rambling on about how much she missed her Eddie and all that crap.

Lina and our maternal grandmother went on a tour which involved a stay in Malta at some stage, they were both widows by then.

Then we don't know what I'm not sure what happened. Don't know when she died, don’t know what happened after she died. I don't know how we knew that she died, not sure that mum didn't write to Mrs Collins or someone and find out that's as much as I know about them.

with help from Pete

Sept 2024

[holdoncallfailed]

Moving with a partner, we have money saved/ jobs lined up, want to be within an hour public transit commute of Manhattan and am open to living in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, trying not to spend more than 2,500 per month in rent

again, i can't really direct you to a specific neighborhood without more info especially where in manhattan you're going to be working (uptown? downtown? midtown [i'm so sorry]?). look at whichever train stops are closest to your work and then follow those subway lines on streeteasy's map with your budget plugged in until you get to an area with listings that you can afford.

tbh $2500 (assuming you mean in total vs. you and your partner each paying that much) is a little low especially for manhattan. with your budget and an easy commute into downtown manhattan, i would look at bushwick, ridgewood, bed-stuy, crown heights, maybe williamsburg ("east williamsburg") if you get lucky. you could look at sunset park or PLG if you want to be near a big park but i think they can be inconvenient if you are going to be spending a lot of time in other parts of brooklyn. for a commute into uptown manhattan, i would look at yorkville especially if you're willing to live in a studio and neighborhoods like washington heights closer to the manhattan/bronx border, as well as astoria and sunnyside over in queens.

the only real neighborhoods that i would say are a no-go for safety reasons rather than price/commute reasons are brownsville and east new york but even then YMMV. and places like the hole of course lol but i don't think you can even rent an apartment there at this point.

good luck!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ultraheydudemestuff]

The Courtland Building

5403 Detroit Ave.

Cleveland, OH 44102

The Courtland Building, a retail and apartment building located on Detroit Ave. at W. 54th St. in Cleveland, OH, is an extremely popular rental community with stunning retail storefront available. At the gateway of the historic Gordon Square Arts District, this walk-up retail space is turn-key and offers new flooring with spacious, high ceilings, and ample window frontage. This location boasts both strong foot and vehicle traffic along Detroit Avenue and is just steps away from the many amenities the arts district. Street parking is available. Neighboring businesses and development include The Centers, Astoria, Welleon, Old 86, and more.

     The Courtland Building dates back to 1897, when the mixed-used Tudor Revival structure was designed by the architectural firm of Steffens, Searles and Hirsh for owner Ambler J. Rogers. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on November 2, 2000. It underwent a $1.9 million renovation in 2003, which included replacement of the upper part of the north facade. The Ohio Housing Finance Agency approved $962,710 in state loans for the renovation project. The agency's board approved financing under the state's affordable housing loan program, which is designed to assist development of low- and moderate-income housing.

     Proposed by the Detroit Shoreway Community Development Organization, a nonprofit organization on the city's West Side, the Courtland project consists of renovating the three-story building to provide 16 units of affordable housing. Detroit Shoreway bought the Courtland Building after its residential units were boarded up by the city for drug violations on the premises.  Three of the four retail storefronts in the building are rented to tenants who will remain in the building. The nonprofit development group has already lined up loans from the city's Cleveland Housing Trust Fund and other sources to finance the project. Detroit Shoreway will own and continue to manage the building after the renovation is completed. 

[hm-constructions-blog]

Everything you will ever need, all under one roof. HM Astoria redefines luxury and takes it to unprecedented heights!

Let your home be a statement of luxury, to rent HM Astoria.

Talk to our experts at +91 808 822 5555 to find your dream home.

Visit www.hmconstructions.com today

#HMGroup #realestateOffices #nammabengaluru #luxuryhomesales #apartments #highriseapartment #mgroad #HMConstructions #mgroadbengaluru #bangalorerealestateinvestment #amenities #Bangalore #Home #Luxuryliving

[davestone13-blog]

Why Are NYC Rents So High? It’s Complicated

COVID spurred many tenants to vacate city apartments, but changing rent laws and rising interest rates are among factors now encouraging people to stay put — with few new apartments available. Greg David and Sam Rabiyah, The City This article was originally published on Aug 4 5:00am EDT by THE CITY New residential buildings are going up along the waterfront in Astoria, July 25, 2023. | Ben…

[divergent-one-1984]

Organized Crime Ring in Astoria, NY, in a neighborhood under the jurisdiction of 114th PRECINCT and in apartment buildings managed by CENTRAL ASTORIA, LLC. I have been the victim of TARGETED COMMUNITY HARASSMENT SINCE SUMMER 2016 because of my race and gender, I am an African American woman (because of a rumor / gossip mill started by staff at NYC DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION while I was employed there from 2014 to 2016 I was made the victim of TARGETED PSYCHOLOGICAL HARASSMENT). Due to the illegal access and leaking of private, personal, confidential information by wiretapping / cloning / hacking of personal devices and illegal surveillance in my residence. This includes leaking of confidential medical information (HPV, strains that can cause cervical cancer and an Abortion) - Blackberry Messenger (BBM) between DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON and myself in MARCH 2011 - I ENDED OUR CASUAL DATING RELATIONSHIP that began in the BRONX, NY in MAY 2010 (per a blind date hook up by mutual acquaintance SHO CLARK) - POST 2 of 3 - BBM Exchange with DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON MARCH 2011 pages 1 through 2)

DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON'S Blackberry Messenger (BBM) Pin # is 3232520E.

This conversation started out with DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON reaching out to me to get $$ to repair the brand new SONY PLAYSTATION game console I bought him for his birthday in NOVEMBER 2010 and then turned into him asking me for $$ to pay his rent because apparently he had just decided while we were in this conversation to pay to repair the PLAYSTATION with his rent money, which was $140, with the assumption that I would just give him the $$ because I have taken care of him in the past when he needed things.

I did not give him too much $$ maybe $50 on a couple of occassions, but I did send hella care packages of toiletries and basic needs as well as personal items he left in US, paid a speeding ticket he had in NYS, and used calling cards to call him before he had access to Internet.

Based on this history, I guess he felt I would just give him the money but I did not and I ended things with him after this exchange. I believe DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON thought I was his personal ATM after awhile.

PAGE 1 of 5

3232520E: "I got it repaired but I used my rent money to do it"

PAGE 2 of 5

ME: "Ok so wtf is all this about?"

3232520E: "So if I can't my money from denver tomorrow I will have an issue" (denver is the basketball team DEVIN played for in EL SALVADOR, CENTRAL AMERICA)

3232520E: "Hate your shakiness that is what this is all about"

ME: "U making shit up ME: " Now" ME: "U being shakey"

3232520E: "If u can help me please do" 3232520E: "Ummmm no"

ME: "Yes u are" ME: "Wtf u telling me about some shit's that's already repaired"

3232520E: "I just took 140 dollars to fix it because it is cheaper than mailing it and getting it sent back…."

ME: "That's fine but its done already so y r we even talking about it?"

3232520E: "I just fixed it I'm not even powering it on till I get to the new house"

ME: "Ok"

3232520E: "Because I need help in paying for it"

ME: "I can't help u" ME: "Sorry" ME: "U prob won't get money from me until I feel we r in a different kind of place cause all I'm gonna think is ur going to use the money I give you on someother chick"

(At this point I knew about DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON and 19 year old gf, ELISA VELASQUEZ (he is 30 at this point, I think this is a little gross and borderline pee-dough, 19 is still a baby as far as I am concerned even though I know girls tend to mature faster than boys, but anywho)

I found out DEVIN was "in a relationship" by stumbling upon his relationship status accidentally on Facebook instead of him telling me.

DEVIN was up front about his polyamorous lifestyle before he moved which is why I never fully took things seriously especially since we were long distance as well, I was just having fun for these reasons and some others until I did not want to have fun anymore.

DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON stated he would tell me about such things, these were his words I expected him to stand on them but he didn't, I sat on this information for at least a month at this point.

I was waiting and giving him the chance to tell me like he claimed he would, but he never did so this is where my mind was at at this point and eventually at the end of this conversation, which is somewhere on a computer / usb drive, I basically told him, if you are claiming women on FB, ask them for money, don't call on me from another country when you have a gf right there. Don't try to play me because I thought he and I were better than that)

ME: "If you need something tangible"

3232520E: "Was hoping u would at least go half with me in fixing it since I'm not mailing it anymore…."

ME: "For urself" ME: "I can help but actual $" ME: "Feel funny about it" ………………….

3232520E: "Can u phathom all the negative things I want to say to u right now….."

ME: "I'm sure"

3232520E: "I have a contract to sign tomorrow so I can have a place to live since margarito asked me to move out"

3232520E: "And u have the nerve to downplay my needs to that of money going to some chick" 3232520E: "Right" 3232520E: "Thank u"

ME: "y would u use rent $ to repair ps3" ME: "?"

3232520E: "So much for" 3232520E: "Your understanding"

ME: "Because first of all u lied about the ps3" ME: "?" 3232520E: "I what" ME: "U made it seem like it still needed to be repaired"

3232520E: "I never lie" 3232520E: "I'm done" 3232520E: "Fuck u" ………………. 3232520E: "All u do is urk me"

ME: "Did u not just make it seem as if it still neede to b" ME: "Sent back here"

3232520E: "Every fucking time u bleed"

(So, I had to add some context to this just because I think it's utterly ridiculous and laughable and shows how deeply misogynistic DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON is.

This is a tired ass thing for a man to say to a woman; blame us having a disagreement because I have my period? This is like middle school / high school sh!t; most men don't seem to bypass this maturity level anyway so I suppose I should not have been surprised he would say such a stupid thing that is patently false.

First of all, this is a blanket misogynist statement, while I do acknowledge that as women we go through hormonal changes that can alter our moods in different degrees at any point during our menstrual cycle, not just when we are actually bleeding, but whatever that altered state is, if at all, it varies from woman to woman.

When you have been around me longer than a month then we can talk.

For DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON to put that out there as if its true and as if he knows anything about when I bleed is ridiculous.

I don't recall if I actually had my period during the time of this exchange, based on what I guesstimate to be the date of this exchange it's entirely possible I did have my period but DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON has literally only been around me possibly 1 time during my period if I had my period during the month we hung out in NYC before he moved and if I did I may or may not have hung out with him during this time or for at least part of this time.

If we did hangout, I don't recall him saying anything about "my bleeding" during that period of a little over a month that we physically spent together during SUMMER 2010 and we did not hang out everyday, maybe 2 - 4 days each week, after we met in person about a week or so after we started talking on the phone.

Most of the time we were "hanging out" was spent in 2 different countries.

I met DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON in late MAY 2010 in NYC, DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON moved to EL SALVADOR, CENTRAL AMERICA the first week of JULY 2010. I literally spent about 1 month in DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON'S physical presence, including the 3 day weekend I visited him in NOVEMBER 2010 to celebrate our birthdays together.

DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON has not been around me long enough to know how the hell I am when I bleed.

DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON was basically trying to deflect from his poor decision making and throwing a temper tantrum because I wouldn't give him money; antagonize me for no reason, that will certainly get you what you want, sure….lol.

Additionally, to further point out the obsurdity of DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON'S statement, the 2 actual relationships I have had in my life of which I spent more time with each of them than my hanging out with DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON, neither one of them has ever said anything about my period being a catalyst for an argument / disagreement.

Those men had been around me physically for more than 1 instance of my period. The first relationship was with a man I met shortly after graduating college whom I lost my virginity to, he was around me for at least 12 periods, not once did he ever say you know when you bleed you are this or that or you must have your period why are you are being a b…., etc. lol.

The other relationship lasted for 4 years with an additional year and a half of toxic uncoupling (for more details see any post about WILFRED SHAWN KIRKLADY) You will see the receipts of WILFRED SHAWN KIRKALDY saying some pretty sh!tty, disrespectful, emotionally / verbally abusive things to me and generally doing the most with his extreme and erratic thinking / behavior and the tendancy to attempt to tear down my self esteem with some of his comments, however you won't see him saying anything about everytime I bleed yadda yadda yadda.

I don't recall WILFRED SHAWN KIRKALDY stating that in any of those communications, additional communications that I have not posted, or any verbal argument we ever had.

WILFRED had been around me for at least 60 periods, where at least over a dozen were while we lived together under the same roof, so DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON was basically just pulling sh!t out of his ass because of his emotional immaturity and instability.

And for additional TMI, I can be irritable and more impatient than normal, but not angry irritable (and if I sense that because I have been with myself through many periods obviously, I am in my late 40s and hope to be in perimenopause cause I'm over this annoyance and don't want children so pointless, anywho, I will stay to myself, take some aspirin, if available a heating pad, watch youtube videos, and just lay down and rest especially for the first 2 to 3 days.

I literally don't have all the energy for the nonsense DEVIN ELTON THOMPSON is talking about, DEVIN just wanted to blame me for a problem he created.

I am a sleepy / sluggish / lethargic / bloated / sensitive (romantically and generally), withdrawn, quiet, and prone to shed some tears from watching a scene in a movie or some ish like that period girl, so all this "bleeding" agressive, vindictive bitch energy I was supposedly giving him isn't even my style, maybe its some other woman he was with in the past or present, maybe he got us confused since we all / most of us are interchageable and seem to just be a scapegoat, anatomy to achieve sexual pleasure and / or a money / resource tree for him, and not necessarily a fully fleshed out human being, lol)

3232520E: "No dick"

ME: "For"

3232520E: "I was at the place"

ME: "Me to send it back to sony?

3232520E: " Considering what was my best option" (DEVIN ELTON THOMPSPON'S best option would have been to pay his rent instead of using the money to repair a video game console and trying to get me to pay for it as if he is not a grown ass 30 yr old man with an actual girlfriend in EL SALVADOR, that should be able to help him out if being claimed on Facebook, BTW, a girlfriend that he still at this point had no clue that I knew about and had known about for like a month before this exchange. I was waiting to see if he would tell me outright without me having to prompt it out of him or having to spill the tea myself.

I didn't care about the girlfriend because we were not exclusive and because of the non negotiables he told me about before he moved I never took our situation that seriously, I liked him but not enough to overlook the red flags / dealbreakers; I was just there to have fun and have an experience until I felt it was time to move on.

I only cared that he did not tell me like he stated he would. I approach each person I meet as an individual, if the energy matches my energy and you are cool, easy going like myself, and the energy seems to be positive and not negative then I will rock with you until you show me different.

I was willing to help him out still if he needed help with actual things like toothpaste, socks, etc but no money (basically all the basic toiletries and other basic needs shit I sent to him when he first moved because he appeared to have moved to EL SALVADOR, CENTRAL AMERICA with a wing and a prayer, the clothes on his back and maybe a toothbrush, lol; based on all the stuff he asked for, I purchased and mailed him).

If I could help without putting myself out on some friendship sh!t, like I rock with you because you are a human being that I like and we vibe I was willing to do it but since he was not talking about the things he claimed he was going to be honest about then I can't rock with you no more because you just don't respect me on a basic human level and I have no choice but to think that you are just using me.

I just wanted him to stand by his word and he did not and then tried to turn this whole thing around on me as if I owed him anything in life. I was not his mom, family member, his girlfriend, just some chick he got hooked up with through a mutual acquaintaince less than a year ago.

There must have been a number of people of higher priority level above me that could have helped him out in his time of need)

3232520E: "U calling me a liar" 3232520E: "I just fixed it while I was writing u telling u the cost to send it"

ME: "Ok"

3232520E: "I shouldn't have to explain myself any fucking way"

(DEVIN is asking me for money and claims he does not need to explain himself/ I'm sorry but the audacity of some of these mofos, no shame. In general, not even on some man / woman -ish, if someone asks for money there should be some kind of explanation involved, especially with the information I have in my back pocket.

I'm thinking to myself ask your 19 year old gf, don't ask me. If you are claiming you are in a relationship with someone they should have your back and maybe you don't have to explain yourself to them, idk)

3232520E: "U want to doubt me" 3232520E: "And be a biutch saying money is going to some other bitch" 3232520E: "And u wonder why we ain't in a cool place" 3232520E: "Are you fucking kidding me" 3232520E: "U think this is what I want or expect from someone who loves me" 3232520E: "Can't stop thinking about me" 3232520E: "U r the fucking liar not me"

[astoriawest]

Another Beautiful Day on the Water in Long Island City

The residents at Astoria West Apartments in Long Island City, Queens know that when they wake up in the morning and step outside, they're in for a treat. It doesn't matter if it's mid-summer or the dead of winter, there's always something to enjoy just steps from their front door. 

On a sunny day, you can't help but want to spend as much time outdoors as possible. If you work from home, you have the perfect opportunity to take your laptop to the rooftop pool or courtyard garden and get some work done with a view. From Astoria West Long Island City waterfront apartments, you can catch stunning waterfront views of Midtown Manhattan and Queens that are sure to get your creative juices flowing. If you don't mind a long walk, Hunter’s Point South along Center Boulevard also offers stunning vistas. 

And, of course, you can catch a shuttle bus to grab a train to explore some of the other neighborhoods that make up New York City. The N or W line will take you to Queens, Brooklyn, or Manhattan. There’s also the Jackson Avenue/Queens Plaza bus station that can help you move around the city.

If you don't feel like leaving the comfort of your own home today, there's still plenty to do right here in our luxurious building. The lavish piece of real estate is made up of a three-part building. Our state-of-the-art fitness center is always open for residents to use, and our on-site leasing office would be more than happy to give you a tour of our beautiful property. No matter how you choose to spend your day, we know you'll love calling Astoria West Apartments home.

What Our Residents Love About Living Here

One of the reasons our residents love living here so much is that there's always something new to discover about LIC. The area on the map is surrounded by Sunnyside, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Woodside. In just a few short blocks, you can go from exploring world-class art galleries like the Moma PS1 to enjoying a meal at one of the many Michelin-starred restaurants that call this neighborhood home. And with new businesses opening up all the time, there's always something new to check out. 

The apartments themselves also attract many people who are looking for the perfect place to call home. These Long Island City apartments for rent include a studio apartment, 1 bedroom apartment, and 2 bedroom apartment. Regardless of the floor plans you choose, there are tons of sqft to make the home your own. The units come with floor-to-ceiling windows, high ceilings, and huge bedrooms that offer a ton of square feet. The units also come with a washer and dryer, so there is no need to waste time on that laundromat all the way over on Crescent St. Despite all of these incredible amenities, the prices of the units are around average rent for the area.

We offer easy, 3D tours to get an idea of what your new home may look like and if you like what you see (you will!), chat with our leasing office and see if we may have any specials. If you prefer an in-person tour, it’s easy to schedule! We know you'll fall in love with our luxury apartments Queens and stunning waterfront views, just like our current residents have.

[bilbobagginsomebabez]

and who does get employed are restricted by class factors—who can work for free or extremely low pay for extended periods of time.

From Sarah Kendzior's Hiding In Plain Sight:

At twenty-one years old, armed with a liberal arts BA, freelance clips, and experience creating online content—a novel attribute at the time—I landed a job at America’s fifth-largest newspaper, the New York Daily News. It was August 2000, and I’d just endured a summer of being so broke I was eating one bowl of rice per day while pretending I was on Survivor to feel adventurous instead of afraid. I had graduated in May into a fading boom economy that at the time felt daunting but now seems like a bastion of riches and ease. I didn’t know it then, but I had begun my adult life at the tail end of a dream, one that rapidly transformed into a nightmare of dashed expectations and diminished returns. It was the beginning of a millennium rife with collapse.

I am of the last generation to begin work in a creative profession as a member of the middle class. When I tell young people how I got this job, they respond as if I’m telling them a fairy tale. I was hired after sending my résumé through the mail to strangers. I had no connections, no graduate degree, and no summer internships. I had spent my summers working to save money for college, which meant my résumé included positions like “Record Town cashier” and “Dannon water inventory specialist,” a job that consisted of stocking bottled water at supermarkets and did not require the ability to read.

But no one cared back then; the era of elite credentialism was still years ahead. The Daily News liked my clips and my skills and especially my willingness to work from 7 P.M. to 3 A.M. The hours were awful, but I didn’t mind. I had landed a job that paid $40,000 per year and included health insurance, benefits, and three weeks paid vacation. My apartment, in Astoria, Queens, was a spacious one-bedroom for which I paid $900 per month. I could afford to live alone in New York City as a journalist in my early twenties. In 2000, no one thought that was remarkable, including me. Only in retrospect is it recognizable for what it was: a fluke. A fleeting taste of the American Dream, sweet enough that it still lingers.

By 2010, only one of my former coworkers at the Daily News was still working in journalism. I had quit the paper in 2003, but the rest were laid off—casualties of a media recession that began in early 2001 and accelerated with the 2008 financial collapse. The Great Recession that followed led to a massive restructuring in the industry. With the economy tanking, media outlets transformed full-time jobs into contract work and entry-level positions into unpaid internships, and changed worker expectations along the way. Told that advanced degrees would help them keep their jobs, my former coworkers shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for journalism school, where they were taught skills they already knew or that technology would soon render obsolete. In the end, it did not matter—the layoffs came anyway.

By 2010, my old Daily News job had been converted into an unpaid internship. My old Astoria apartment rented for over $2,000 per month. The cost of living in New York had skyrocketed, while wages remained stagnant or even decreased as desperate writers took pay cuts to stay in the profession. Outlets that had paid $1,000 per article while I was a college student in the late 1990s had dropped their rates to $200 per article by 2002, and in 2010 were offering zero dollars, otherwise known as “exposure.”

Journalism was ahead of the curve in terms of the twenty-first-century opportunity collapse, but the downturn was in every field, though the employment crisis was not widely recognized until the 2010s. (This is what happens when you fire the journalists first.) It made no difference whether a worker had a GED or a Ph.D., whether they toiled in a prestigious field like law or a blue-collar field like retail or a public sector field like teaching. Across all fields, management had realized they could stop paying people a living wage and get away with it.

Younger generations had been trained to work for a future that never arrived. By the time they realized the truth, they were too deep in debt to escape. The past came calling every month in the form of a creditor, dead dreams with soaring interest rates. Everyday necessities—housing, health care, child care—became luxuries, and survival became an aspiration. The 2000s ushered in an era of credentialism that prevented ordinary people from rising through the ranks. Jobs that once required a high school degree now required a BA, jobs that required a BA now required an MA, and the choice was pay to play or get locked out. Sometimes you paid and got locked out anyway, as wealthy elites purchased careers for their untalented offspring. But I discuss Jared and Ivanka in the next chapter.

That a significant number of today’s high-profile journalists did know the Trump family personally is cause for concern. We now live in a world where products of nepotism inundate industries like journalism, a field often reporting on other products of nepotism in business and politics. These powerful sectors of society have been overtaken by connections rather than merit, and dynasties rather than unbiased workforces. These conditions do not guarantee that coverage must be terrible. While wealth does not indicate merit, it also does not inherently destroy it. Any person can choose to do a good job and tell the truth. But the domination of nepotistic elites in national media over the past two decades has warped public perception of what “ordinary people” thought of Trump, and of what information about his corruption is thought fit to print. The transformation of the media into an industry for elites who may not recognize white-collar corruption as abnormal—or who may be reluctant to upset their family or social circles by revealing a crime—is described in depth over the next few chapters.

I'm somewhat skeptical about the decline of journalism; I think that journalism probably also had poor standards before the internet, we were all just less likely to notice, and there was nowhere to talk about it. Whenever I read old news articles from the 90s or earlier I'm not exactly blown away, if anything they seem less well-researched, comprehensive, or nuanced than what is published today.

[miss-celestial-being]

Draco x nanny reader but they are only 3 year apart

Reader took sick and could come watch scorpius so Draco and scorpius go over to her house with snacks,medicine, and movies for them to watch together

Alright, I'm a bit mad so hopefully writing this will make me less mad. Thx for the request :)

----------------------

Sick Day

----------------------

1.9k Words

warnings: none ig

pronouns: she/her

house: any

----------------------

Y/n had worked for Draco for a few years. Draco was always in awe of how great Y/n was with Scorpius and it warmed his heart to see his son so happy. After Astoria died, he thought he'd never get to see him smile again. Until Y/n came into their lives.

Y/n always showed up, she never took a day off and even though Draco told her it was alright to take time for herself, she always stayed with scorpius. Weather Draco was at work or at home, she was there. She helped when Draco got sick, even though that wasn't her job, she helped with putting together both Scorpius and Draco's lunch for the day, and she cooked dinner before Draco got home.

So imagine Draco's surprise when Y/n didn't show that day. It was a Saturday so she didn't have to be there, but it was odd for her not to be. Draco thought maybe she had stopped wanting to spend all her time there, which he understood, but a heads up would've been nice.

Suddenly his phone started buzzing on the kitchen counter and Scorpius got to it first. "Hello? Miss Y/n?" His voice was hopeful. His faced Dropped after hearing her voice. It was raspy and broken, then Y/n broke into a coughing fit. It reminded him of when his mother was sick. "C-can you put your father on the phone Scorp?" He handed the phone to Draco with a concerned look.

"Hello?" Draco asked only to hear nonstop coughing in return. "I don't think I'm going to be able to come today, I'm a bit sick. I'll be there on Monday though to get Scorpius ready for school and all." Y/n croaked. "No, no need. Take the week off, get better." A few sneezes passed before Y/n voice came back on. "No I can't take that much time off, that's not fair to you." "I'm serious, I don't want you out of that bed until you're better." Draco spoke in a stern voice as if he was talking to a misbehaving child. A few moments passed before Y/n spoke. "Fine, I'll be there in a week."

The phone hung up and Draco looked to his son who was looking back at him with worry. "She'll be ok bud." He spoke calmly. In reality, the PTSD of his deceased wife was getting to him. "How can you be so sure?! You said the same thing about Mum!" He yelled as tears fell down his cheek. Draco sighed. "How about we go over to her house and check on her, huh? How does that sound?" He asked as he tried to stop himself from crying too. He had to be strong for his son. Scorpius nodded vigorously and ran to get his coat and shoes on, Draco followed quickly after.

They stopped at a few stores on the way to Y/n's house and bought a few things for her to help her get better or just make her smile. They were surprised when they got there, they'd never been there before, they originally thought the got the wrong place, but when Draco looked at the paper, he realized it was right. She lived in the space right above a dirty old convenient store, in a very creepy part of town.

They walked inside and walked up the the steps to get to the door to her flat, Draco keeping Scorpius in his arms in a protective manner the whole time. He knocked on the door and Y/n answered it with a tired expression. "I know, I know, I'll pay rent in a few da- oh... hey." She cut herself off and rubbed the back of her neck. "Uhm.. come on in." She walked over to the living area and cleared some cups and dishes for them to sit. "I, uh, sorry about the mess... I wasn't expecting comapan-" She started coughing again, Draco rushing to her to rub her back.

"Sh sh sh. Put your hands above your head." He took her hands and helped her raise her arms. "Scorp, darling, look for cough drops in the bag." He spoke to his son while he helped Y/n calm down from her coughing fit. "It's alright, it's gonna be alright." He kissed her head lightly when she stopped coughing completely. "I'm sorry." She spoke after a long pause, voice ragged. Draco moved her to the couch. "Why are you here? You could get sick." She said softly. "Scorpius, you need to stay over there. I don't want you getting sick, you still have to go to school." Scorpius frowned and hunched his shoulders. "I-I just wanna help." He whispered as he tried to keep from crying. Y/n coughed a few times before getting up and walking over to him.

She kneeled down to look into his eyes and held his arms. "You have been nothing but help my dear, just you being here has put a smile on my face." She smiled at him lovingly. "You know that I love you right? And you are helping. You're making me a whole lot less sad and lonely." She turned away and sneezed a few times, Scorpius quickly grabbing her a tissue. "Thank you my love."

Draco smiled at the two with pure adoration in his eyes. He cleared his throat and walked over to the brown paper bag on the floor. "Um, we got you a few things. I didn't know what you liked so Scorp here picked most of these." He held up a few of her favorite snacks and a container of soup from her favorite place. Y/n smiled tiredly. "Thank you." She shivered slightly, causing Draco to bounce into action immediately and place a blanket around her. "Here you go, warm up. I'll get the heater running." He went to get up but Y/n stopped him. "No, no need. It's just extra expenses. I've got perfectly good blankets."

Draco frowned. "Scorpius, why don't you go heat this up in the microwave." He told his son before dropping his voice to a whisper. "Am I not paying you enough?" Y/n shook her head with a smile. "You're paying more than you need to, rent's just been going up lately." She looked at her hands placed in her lap, avoiding Draco's eyes. "I'm serious, if it's not enough you can tell me." He lifted her head in concern.

Just then, Scorpius cane into the room with a cup of hot soup. He handed it to Draco and smiled. "Thanks bud." Draco took it over to Y/n. "Drink up." Y/n smiled at them both before shivering and taking a sip. Scorpius tugged on Draco's coat and pulled him into another room.

"Why is she living here?" Draco looked at his son confused. "What do you mean?" Scorpius sighed. "Why is miss Y/n living here? It's gross and cold and dark and I don't like it." Draco let out a breath and looked down at Scorpius. "Do you want to know the truth?" Scorpius nodded. "I honestly think she has problems with money." The little boy thought for a moment. "Then give her more." Draco chuckled. "It's not that easy." Scorpius thought some more. "Why can't she live with us? I mean she's always over, why not have her move in?" Draco hummed. "That might work, great idea dear." He smiled. "Now come on, let's go back and help some more."

When they walked back in, Y/n was done with the soup and shivering to herself, holding the blanket tight. Draco sighed and went closer. "How would you like to stay with us?" Y/n hummed, confused. "Well I mean, we have the space, and you're already over most of the time, so why not just live at the manor?" Y/n smile. "That's a kind offer, but I'm afraid it's one I cannot accept. It's too much." Draco scoffed. "Nonsense! C'mon, Scorp and I will help you pack. We don't want you living here another second." He got up and accio'd a box into his hand. He handed Scorpius another and they got started.

Y/n smiled and grabbed her own box to do as much as she could in her condition. "Y'know, I think this may just be a way to get me to watch Scorpius even on my sick days." She said to Draco. He smiled. "Maybe, but non of that matters now. We can worry about that later." They both laughed.

"Hey, thanks for this. Really, I appreciate it." She smiled thoughtfully at him. "It's really no problem at all, I love having you around anyway. I could use the company sometimes." He laughed out. "I'm serious. Thank you so, so much. I'll never be able to thank you enough-" "Hey. You even being here to help me with Scorp is enough." He smiled at her, his eyes drawing to her lips before he tore them away. I can't be thinking that, it's not fair to Scorpius.

They both blushed. "I- uh, I'll get the kitchen." Draco turned and went to the kitchen to pack up. Y/n stood there, stunned. She took a deep breath before turning and continuing with the bedroom. Scorpius watched the whole interaction with a big smile on his face until his father decided to be chicken and turn away. He rolled his eyes and continued with the living area.

When they finished, they brought all the boxes to the car outside and made them all fit with a few spells. Y/n went to pay the last of her rent, but Draco beat her to it, slapping her hand away lightly. Y/n laughed and shook her head, mumbling something as she walked out to the car with Scorpius.

With Y/n all unpacked, things felt less hectic and everyone could relax. There may have been a few boxes, but those were a project for another day. Y/n sat her sick form down on the comfortable couch and laid her head back. After putting Scorpius to bed, Draco wrapped a blanket around her and started a fire in the fireplace. Y/n finally relaxed with warmth surrounding her and she smiled contently. "There we go, all better?" She nodded. "Great." Draco said as he sat next to her. Their arms touched briefly, making them blush (oh wow, arm touching... you better use protection.). They look forward at the fire in front of them for a few moments.

Draco turned her head to look at Y/n with love filled eyes. Y/n felt his stare and her face reddened, still not meeting his gaze. She coughed a bit, Draco rubbing her back until she stopped. "You ok love?" He asked in concern. Y/n smiled and nodded. She looked up to look in his eyes. She noticed his gaze drop to her lips and let hers drop to his. Her gaze flickered back to his eyes and she smiled. He looked at her intently as he thought. "If you weren't sick right now, I'd ask to kiss you." Y/n smiled. "Why would you ask?" Draco chuckled. "Is that serious the only thing you focused on?" Y/n snorted in laughter, causing Draco to laugh as well. "If I told you I was feeling better would you believe me?" Y/n smiled. Draco laughed louder and shook his head. "I don't really want to get sick, but when you're actually better we can continue this." Y/n smiled down at her lap. "That's fair."

----------------------

Please reblog since tags don't work

----------------------

This was a lot longer than a blurb so... eh?

Pls request a blurb or something in my ask box, I'm bored