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sweetly-yours-and-mine · 1 year ago

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Summary: Sipping from the other's drink

Pairing: Jonathan Levy x Reader

Warnings: author makes certain claims about academia that may or may not be true and are entirely biased because of her own experience with it (and a huge thanks to @pennyserenade for reading this over for me)

Word Count: 2.3k

Jonathan’s brought you to a summer mixer at the Department Head’s family home, designed to maintain connections through the faculty during the slow months of the summer as well as create new ones with the incoming graduate students to the department.

A newly-minted associate professor for the fall term, Jonathan at least doesn’t have to worry about students of his own.

Really, he’s only here for the drinks.

Academics’ pockets, though they don’t usually run deep, are quite generous when it comes to their alcohol, perhaps a sort of defence mechanism when it comes to dealing with the stress of their way of life.

Everyone, however, seems to be at ease. It’s a late afternoon sort of function in order to encourage them to drink as much as they would like without feeling guilty about it, and loosened from the heavy burden of tweeds and thick wools, the faculty are clad instead in linen, cool and airy.

Tongues are loose, smiles are quick to be given. People have forgotten the relentless competition they’re usually in when it comes to funding, to office space, to good class slots.

All in all, he thinks that today has been a good day to introduce you to the people he’s going to passive aggressively work with for the rest of his life.

He gazes across the room and finds the blue of your shirt, sticking out like a sore thumb in a sea of neutrals and whites. You’re talking to one of the faculty spouses, nodding your head and laughing. There’s a glass of pink lemonade in your hands, your hair falls around you as if you’re holding a secret within your chest.

Jonathan yearns for you to be by your side again, to smell the perfume he bought for your six-month anniversary, the one you always spray into the crook of your neck because that’s always where he likes to press his face whenever he’s deep in thought.

As if on cue, the conversation dies down and you drift back to his side.

He marvels at how easily you’ve managed to fit yourself into this new crowd, how you laugh as the department fart tells you some lame joke that he’s probably told millions of others before you. You brush it off with grace and ease, I’ll talk to you soon, alright?

It had taken him almost five years before he’d mastered that skill. The gentle brush off that made the other feel like you were doing them a favour.

He loves you, that much he knows for sure.

After the storm cloud of Mira and the past twenty years of his life had passed, he’d met you. As simple as that, as if the universe was only waiting for him before they let him hold onto the rest of his life like a delicate crystal glass.

��Hi,” you come up close to him and Jonathan can smell your perfume and the strawberries on your breath. He wonders if he’ll be able to taste your drink if he kisses you long enough.

He also wonders, as an addendum, how quickly he would lose his position if he did that. Despite all the shouting the university did about being progressive and open-minded, the tenured faculty members were still dreadfully hard-headed, old-fashioned.

Jonathan supposes that he was too. Maybe he still is, simply by nature of his daily proximity to him on the same floor of the social sciences building, crumbling at the seams since the last of its renovations in the seventies.

“Hi,” he wraps his arm around your waist and pulls you in close to him. There’s a glass of whiskey in his other hand that he doesn’t care much for anymore now that you’re here. He kisses the side of your head, brushes away some of your hair from your temple, “Enjoying yourself?”

You giggle, it rings out like a fairybell. You lean up close to him and murmur in his ear, “You work with some very strange people.”

He can’t help but laugh at that, turning his head to meet your sparkling eyes. “Yeah, I suppose I do.”

“Very strange,” you muse again, looking out across the room. “And I thought you were the strange one.”

That hits him in a funny way he wasn’t planning on it doing. He remembers once in high school his cross country running coach said she’d stepped, wearing thick-soled hiking shoes, on a pebble the wrong way and ended up having to go to physio for six months.

He supposes he feels a little like that pulled muscle.

He hums, tries to push down the blow you’d struck at him without realising it.

“Strange?”

“Mmhm,” your fingers drift around his waist and rest on top of his tummy, the one Ava had pointed out the other day in passing. “Strange, yeah. You got the whole, mysterious, hot, brooding professor thing going for you.”

“And that’s strange to you?”

You shrug. Jonathan feels the heat of your gaze against his face and he doesn’t feel like turning to meet it. Instead, he favours the sharp burn of whiskey. He ended up with a glass in his hand because some snot-nose had offered to pour him a drink and he’d been too much of a pushover and too concerned about what other people thought of him to say he preferred a red wine.

You’re never like that.

You were never like him; either because that’s who you were at your core, or because you’d manage to escape the way academia chipped away at one’s soul, until there was an empty, arthritis-ridden husk of a person by the time they reached tenure.

Opposites did attract, he supposes.

You were different from him. You weren’t afraid to drink the pink lemonade that had been left out for the few kids running around in the back garden, you weren’t afraid to call him weird if that’s what you thought of him.

Jonathan wonders why it took you so long to say it to him.

He’s about to try and pry the answer out of you when someone else approaches the two of you together. A newly-tenured professor whom Jonathan never really did get along with, particularly when he was working his post-doctorate and the guy had picked up an obnoxious habit of hanging around the kitchen coffee-maker and smacking his gum as loud as he could.

There couldn’t have been anyone worse that could have showed up at the time.

“Jonathan!”

Something inside him curls into himself at the thought, and as if you could feel it, your arm wraps around him a little tighter.

The man’s trying to make some small talk, the bare bones of it before he surely starts to boast of himself and his students and the latest hotshot fund he got because of his new tenure.

“Hi,” you smile at him sweetly and make a green little sprout of something bad shoot up inside his stomach, a bitter taste lingering at the back of his throat. You introduce yourself as Jonathan’s partner and are just about to move to go away when he speaks up again, cutting you short.

“I liked Mina more, Levy,” he grins and shows off his teeth like a predator. Against the off-white of his linen suit, they look even whiter, standing out like a sign against his tanned skin. “Shame you two had to end it the way you did.”

Jonathan tries to remind himself that he doesn’t know how things ended with Mira. That it’s just another poke at him and his life to get a rise out of him.

You smile at the guy again, there’s a sharper edge to it. His prickly rose. “Well, if you’ll excuse us.”

Then you’re guiding him away from the stuffy room and towards a bench against the side of the house. There’s a full view of the backyard, the sloping apple tree and whispering aspens all around, the toddlers playing tag in shrill shrieks.

He sits down with a low exhale, you follow beside him, slouching and shucking off your shoes. “Christ,” you mutter under your breath.

It’s probably the most genuine thing he’s heard all afternoon and he can’t help the laugh that escapes him. “Yeah, sorry.”

“You deal with that everyday?” It sounds like you’re pitying him. He wonders if that’s ever what Mira thought of him whenever he took her to these events. If she ever raised her eyebrows in surprise at each precise way you had to deal with everyone in the department.

He swallows back his thoughts and nods, “More or less.”

“Jonathan,” you shift and face him again. Still, he can’t bear to look at you anymore. Strange and Mira have started to float around his head like a crib mobile. “I…and you…” the rest of your words are lost to your breath as you turn around again, swearing quietly before reaching for his drink and taking a sip.

He likes how your lips were on the same place where his was.

The alcohol burns your throat and you grimace at him, “I didn’t know you liked whiskey.”

“I don’t.”

“Huh,” you seemed to have heard something stitched and laced into his words that he hadn’t noticed he’d put there in the first place.

You weren’t much of a drinker. Yet another thing that Jonathan noticed when he started dating you. At New Years’ you had some champagne, small sips whenever you clinked glasses with the people around you before you’d pass your flute onto him to finish.

Now that he thinks about it, that may have been your first sip of whiskey ever.

Quite early on, once he’d taken you out on your fifth date and it was shaping out to be something serious like a marble statue carving, Jonathan had cracked open his ribs and showed you the bleeding insides of him.

You’d taken some steps together quickly, probably too quickly if it meant that he doesn’t know now if you’ve ever had spirits before.

That had been another thing he’d noticed when he’d started dating again, seriously and for real this time. Twenty years with a person leads to a tremendous collection of trivial information that he’s not sure he’ll ever fully be rid of again.

It was strange to sit across from someone at dinner and not know how they took their coffee, what side of the bed they liked to sleep on, what order they unloaded the dishwasher and if they had a dishwasher anyways because the renting market is growing out of control.

“Did you like it?” he asks suddenly, hoping to catch onto a trivial fact of yours, like collecting baseball cards or butterflies with a net.

“Hm? Oh,” you look down at the whiskey glass and shake your head, handing it back to him. “Not really my thing.”

Something still nags at him. Maybe it was a mistake bringing you here. You’re the only sober one out of all the guests. Even the host himself is growing rosy and red. It didn’t really look good to see that all your partner’s coworkers were borderline alcoholics, that they dealt with a tremendous amount of repressed trauma and stress and didn’t seek any help for it because of the size of their egos.

Right then and there he vows to do better for you. He throws the rest of his drink out onto the garden, sets the glass down on the wooden bench with a heavy thud of well made crystal.

“Do you really think me strange?” he asks you suddenly. Finally, after a long while, he meets your eye.

“I…well,” you shrug and take in a slow breath. “Yeah, in certain ways. I think I do.”

“I see.”

Your words imbed themselves into his skin like shrapnel.

“But…I don’t have a PhD, I can’t really…” you let out a breath and look out at the garden and the children playing. “Besides, I haven’t been divorced…I haven’t been in your shoes.”

“I trust your opinion of me.”

“It’s not that I think you’re strange necessarily,” you gesture back to the house and the rattle of chatter that keeps growing louder with each drink getting poured. “I…this is all very new to me. And I’m trying to understand what it’s like for you.”

Jonathan starts to smile, “And how’s that going?”

“Not very well,” you laugh and run your thumb against the rim of your glass. “I just drank whiskey for the first time.”

He starts to laugh as well, and wrapping his arm around you, he pulls you into the side of his body. His other hand comes and takes your lemonade from your hands, sipping from it as well.

It tastes like his childhood and hot summer evenings spent with his mother and his aunt, listening to gossip he shouldn’t have been listening to as their nimble fingers worked away with their knitting needles.

“Do you wanna go home now?”

“You still need to show face,” you muse quietly, tracing the outer seam of his pants with your finger. “They’re probably already starting to wonder where you’ve gone off to, and it’s going to hurt their frail little egos.”

He barks out a laugh, and kisses the crown of your head, “God, I love you.”

“I do too,” he hears the smile in your voice and it goes straight into his chest, wraps a couple pieces of his heart together and puts them back into place. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll entertain myself.”

Jonathan kisses you this time, properly, the way he wanted to. Your fingers run through his beard and trace his jawline all the way around his ears and back down.

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