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semperintrepida · 4 years

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The Sellout, chapter two

two: the big reveal

Kassandra sipped her coffee and surveyed the Portland skyline: the muddy river far below, Mount Hood backlit by sunrise skies as soft and pink as a kitten's tongue, and the laughably light traffic skating along I5. Roofs and trees, then trees in greater and greater numbers until they made a velvety green carpet all the way to the mountains. Portland had to be the smallest big city she'd ever lived in.

She sipped again, letting the coffee's warmth ward off the chill from the polished concrete floor beneath her feet, and she wandered away from the unbroken expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows that formed the eastern wall of her condo, back to the table where her laptop waited for her to put the finishing touches on the Yelp review she'd been dying to write since yesterday afternoon.

After visiting fifty — no, closer to a hundred — coffee shops in the month she'd lived here so far, she'd never experienced one quite like Cliffhanger Coffee. The latte she'd ordered was damn near perfect, but the coffee snob capital of the US was full of near-perfect lattes. It wasn't full of beautiful, dark-haired women with fire in their eyes who could pull espresso shots while throwing volleys of sharp, sharp words at the first sign of a threat.

Despite turning up the dials on her charm and attentiveness, Kassandra had gotten skewered almost as soon as she'd opened her mouth. After two years of living with Pacific Northwest passive aggressiveness, the woman's flat-out, in-your-face aggressiveness had hit Kassandra like the first taste of a sea breeze after years in the desert.

She'd savored every sip of that latte while walking up Belmont back to her car, and later on, she'd fallen asleep thinking about the woman's sharp words, the muscled lines of her forearms, and how they'd disappeared into blackwork tattoos that ran under the rolled-up sleeves of her flannel shirt. Trees on one arm and plants on the other, ferns giving way to some kind of vine, twisting in intricate lines on her skin...

Kassandra shook the thought away and focused on the text she'd written. Come for the delicious drinks, stay if the barista likes you... She tapped a finger against her chin in thought, then typed out one final sentence before she clicked "Post Review."

She examined her handiwork with a satisfied grin, then finished off the last of her coffee. Maybe she could squeeze in a visit to the other side of the river after her one o'clock planning meeting downtown. She picked up her phone.

Dessa answered in the middle of the first ring. "Good morning, Kassandra." She'd been Kassandra's assistant long enough to know her working hours went from seven a.m. to seven p.m. and often beyond.

"Dessa. Good morning. How's my two to four looking this afternoon?"

Quiet click-clicks as Dessa brought up her calendar. "You've got a one-on-one with Trevor Adams from two-thirty to three-thirty."

"Reschedule him to early next week."

"Consider it done."

"Any messages for me?"

"Kevin would like you to call, but he says it's not urgent."

Kassandra snorted. A CEO's not urgent merely meant right now instead of yesterday. "Coordinate a call with Lisa so I can talk to him at his earliest convenience." Lisa, his long-suffering admin assistant, who'd followed him from Microsoft to Juniper and every other stop along the way.

"It'll probably be around eight-thirty."

"That works." She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. "How're things back at the ranch?"

A sigh. "Markos has been looking for you."

Kassandra rolled her eyes. "He can make a calendar request like everyone else."

"I told him that, but you know how he is."

She did, all too well. He liked his meetings with her to be in person and off the record, like he was some big-shot politician instead of a middling marketing executive. "I'll be on site tomorrow morning. If he weasels by again, tell him he can buy me lunch."

"Will do. Anything else you need?"

"That's it for now. Thanks, Dessa."

She gave one last smirking glance at Yelp, then closed the browser tab and pulled up Outlook. The number of messages in her inbox had reached quadruple digits, and she made a mental note to spend some time cleaning it up later. She scrolled around until she found the email she wanted, then picked up her phone again. "Hi, Evelyn. It's Kassandra. Ready to start crunching those square footage numbers on the southeast flagship?"

.oOo.

A little after two o'clock, Kassandra turned her Audi R8 onto the looping ramp that led up to the Morrison Bridge, and just past the apex of the curve, she punched the gas and grinned as the big V10 began to howl. The acceleration shoved her hard into her seat, and it was like sitting in a recliner strapped to a rocket, more than making up for the fact that the car only came with an automatic transmission. No matter. If she wanted to shift gears herself, she had motorcycles for that.

She found a place to park on a side street off Belmont, slung her laptop bag over her shoulder, then backtracked a couple of blocks to the building that housed Cliffanger Coffee. The neighborhood wore its light industrial roots proudly: lots of brick and corrugated metal, and the coffeeshop's building was no exception. The ground floor units had lofted ceilings, but there were two more floors above them that looked like they'd been converted into apartments sometime in the last forty years. Likely rent controlled. Probably what had kept the owner from tearing it all down and putting up a mixed use development in its place.

A development on a street corner like this could net tens of millions.

The corner unit was occupied by a store selling overpriced furniture, and she scanned the price tags through the windows as she passed: five-hundred-dollar end tables and six-thousand-dollar couches. The store had probably been open for less than a year. She wondered what had been in its place a decade ago, when the coffee shop next door had moved in and nudged this neighborhood a little further down the path of gentrification.

A slate-colored sign bearing the words "Cliffhanger Coffee" hung over the door, the bold white lettering in a font that was clean and timeless rather than trendy, set over an angular slash that was more suggestive of a cliff than explicit.

Kassandra pushed the door open and stepped inside. Busier today, with customers dotting the interior tables, and the same three people from yesterday seated at the couches, deep in conversation. The woman — the owner, Kassandra reminded herself — was at the register, smiling as she handed a cup to a customer. At the sound of the door opening, her gaze slid from the man, to Kassandra, then back again.

The woman's smile faded as soon as the customer turned his back to her. She wore a blue and white plaid button-down with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and tight black jeans. The buckle of her belt glinted silver under the menu board's lights. "What do you want?" she asked as Kassandra walked up to the counter, her gaze as opaque as smoked glass, and Kassandra knew she wasn't really asking about a drink.

"I'll take a double shot, bone dry cappuccino, please."

The woman's eyes narrowed a fraction as Kassandra's weaponized order hit its mark. "Four dollars and thirty cents," she said flatly, slamming her fingertip into the register's touchscreen so hard its plastic casing creaked. This time, Kassandra took a good look at the woman's hands: long and slender, implying fine bones within, but her fingers were wrapped with muscles, as were her wrists and forearms, powerful lines disappearing into black foliage and vines that climbed up her arm.

That kind of muscle didn't come from pulling shots at an espresso machine — it came from training and effort. Kassandra knew it well; she wore it herself from her neck to her calves, earned it in the weight room and on the pitch, and, once everyone figured out she'd grow up to be tall instead of fast, on the basketball court. The woman had probably started young at whatever sport it was, but she was too tall and lean to be a gymnast, and no soccer player who wasn't a goalkeeper had wrists like that, and she wasn't tall enough to be a keeper anyway...

Kassandra realized she was staring, and her fingers fumbled at her wallet inside her suit jacket's pocket. It took her two tries to pull a twenty from the cash in her money clip, and she made herself take a slow breath before she pushed it across the counter. "Can you make that drink for here, please?" she asked once she'd regained her poise.

The woman tilted her head and eyed the twenty. Her look could have shattered concrete. Then the twenty disappeared into the cash drawer and a stack of coins and bills took its place. "You might as well have a seat," she said, tossing the words over her shoulder as she moved to the espresso machine.

And just like the day before, the woman's shroud of irritation fell away as soon as she focused her full attention on making the drink, her eyes lighting up with a clean, unburdened joy. This woman was the one Kassandra wanted to talk to. She wanted to ask, Does it feel the same way for you too? It was beating everyone in the paint to a rebound, or hitting a holeshot on the racetrack, that flowing perfection where everything is just so and all is right in the world. Kassandra had spent a lifetime chasing it.

One espresso shot and two full pitchers of steamed milkfoam later, the drink slid across the counter. "Bone dry," the woman said in a voice to match.

Kassandra picked up the cup, murmuring her thanks before she drifted around the perimeter of the shop. Lots of brick and exposed metal, softened by green plants. Real ones. This place would Instagram well. She sipped the drink, the hot espresso tunneling through a thick layer of fluffy foam, completely free of milk and its diluting effects. Yesterday's latte had been near-perfect, but this drink was perfection in every way, its components correctly proportioned, the shot ecstatically good. She needed to find out who the woman's coffee roaster was.

A set of shelves crammed with books occupied much of the back wall, under a small, hand-lettered sign reading take one, leave one. Past the shelves, a bulletin board hung over a small self-service bar that held carafes of cream and a variety of sweeteners. Kassandra's eye lingered on a line of brightly colored stickers running along the edge of the board: Best of Portland 2010, Best of Portland 2011, 2012, 2013... all the way to last year, 2017.

She chose a table against the wall that was mostly hidden from the counter's line of sight, pulled her laptop from her bag, sat down, and pretended to get to work.

A steady stream of customers passed through the doors of the shop, despite the doldrums of the mid-afternoon, and the thread of tension wound tight around the woman's voice began to loosen as she filled orders and chatted with customers. Once, she even laughed, low and round and rich, the sound fuming in the air like a good bourbon. Until that moment, Kassandra wasn't sure the woman was capable of it.

The shop began to empty out as the clock swept past three. Kassandra packed her laptop away and carefully set the empty cup into the bus tub under the self-service bar. She strolled over to the counter, ignoring the hostile glances from the regulars at the couches. There was a jar full of business cards next to the register she hadn't noticed before. Enter to win a ten-pack of drinks written in strong, angular lettering.

The woman turned to her and crossed her arms.

"The drink was perfect," Kassandra said.

Silence.

"I didn't catch your name."

"I didn't give it to you."

Not this way, Kassandra wanted to say. Let's not do it like this. Let's just talk. Tell me about your coffee: who grew it, where it came from, and what drew you to doing this? Because she wanted to see that bright joy return to the woman's eyes instead of the anger living there now. "You don't like me at all, do you?"

"Have you given me a reason to like you?"

"Have I given you a reason not to?" Her brows knit with real confusion. "If I've caused any offense, I'm sorry."

"You seem to think that I have to give you the time of day because you're dropping twenties on drinks."

That stung. "Consider it compensation for wasting your precious time, then." She had tried to be nice from several angles, but had bounced off the mirror finish of the woman's anger every time. Nice didn't work on everyone. She'd keep her interest professional then, and run a different play from the playbook. "I guess you really wanted that fifth star," she said, and then she reached into her laptop bag and fished out one of her business cards, and she smirked as she caught a glimpse of a siren's enigmatic smile looking out from a familiar green circle. She locked eyes with the woman and threw the card into the jar by the till. "See you later."

As she walked out the door and onto the sidewalk, she couldn't help but grin. She would have loved to see the woman's face as she read the words on the card:

Kassandra Agiadis Vice President of International Real Estate Development Starbucks Coffee Company

Chapter two of The Sellout. Continued in chapter three...

#kyssandra #kassandra #ac odyssey #coffee shop au #god this fic is such an indulgence lol #the sellout

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let-it-raines · 5 years

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it’s all an act (until it isn’t) {1/1}

High school drama teacher Killian Jones doesn’t have time for drama off the stage. He’s had enough of it in his life, and no part of him is searching for more. But then the day before his theater class’s modern day interpretation of a fairytale begins its four-week run, his two leads get sick. There are no understudies, no one to fill the roles, but as they say, the show must go on.

With him in it, apparently.

Having Emma Swan, the music teacher and woman who has avoided him since her first day of work at Storybrooke High, fill in as the starring role opposite him is the complete opposite of what he expected.

Rating: Teen

A/N: Shoutout to @shireness-says and @wellhellotragic for giving me the prompts that make up the inspiration behind this story. You two are always bright spots of sunshine and deserve all of the cupcakes 🧁 in the world. I mean that very, very seriously. ❤️

And thank you to @captainsjedi for organizing @csseptembersunshine and making me get my butt in gear to finally write this story when I’d been struggling with my one-shots.

Found on AO3: | Here |

Tag list: @kmomof4 @heavenlyjoycastle @tiganasummertree @galaxyzxstark @thejollyroger-writer @idristardis @snowbellewells @karenfrommisthaven @skyewardolicitycloisdelena91 @scientificapricot @captswanis4vr @a-faekindagirl @emmas-storybook @searchingwardrobes @ultimiflos @jamif @dreameronarooftop15 @nikkiemms @resident-of-storybrooke @wellhellotragic @bmbbcs4evr @onceuponaprincessworld @jennjenn615 @mayquita @captainsjedi @teamhook @ekr032-blog-blog @superchocovian @ultraluckycatnd @cs-forlife @andiirivera @qualitycoffeethings @jonirobinson64 @mariakov81 @spartanguard

-/-

“Where the bloody hell are Ethan and Kate?”

Killian’s voice bellows over the stage, his words echoing off of the walls and seemingly disappearing into the void, which is what happens whenever he talks on some days. He’s got maybe five students who actively listen to him every single day, and every single one of those five are on a field trip to some kind of classical music concert that he did not give approval for. Granted, he’s only the drama teacher, but when they have the opening night of the play they’ve been practicing for coming up tomorrow, he kind of expects his students to be around.

Or to at least be asked if the field trip interferes with anything.

But was he asked? No, no of course he wasn’t. He’s never asked anything because on the school’s totem pole of important faculty, he is at the bottom with all of the other fine arts teachers, which is a damn shame. Reading and writing and arithmetic are important. No one knows this more than him, someone who has spent nearly all of his life in school even when he was in the Navy, but kids can’t be contained at a desk all day. They have to move or create art, whether that be painting, acting, or playing the damn piccolo. They have to be able to broaden their horizons and have an outlet for everything that they’re going through, so he thinks the drama department is pretty damn important.

As well as the art and music departments, even the physical education departments – and that’s not simply because he is also the track and field coach.

And yet, here he is unable to find his two leads for tomorrow, as well as most of his best students, and it’s all because Emma Swan didn’t bother to tell him that she was taking so many of his kids away to go to an all-day music festival outside of town the day before opening night.

Killian would bet that she did it on purpose.

Actually, he knows that she did.

Emma Swan is the bane of his existence. Never will he forget the day that she started at Storybrooke High three years ago. They’d pulled up into the teacher’s parking lot at the same time, and he’d seen her struggling to grab all of her bags and boxes of things, so he’d quickly slung his bag over his shoulder and walked toward her, offering her both a smile and a hand. She’d accepted, a nervous smile on her face, her green eyes very obviously wary of him, and they’d walked in the front doors of the school together.

She was (is) gorgeous. There was no denying that, not that he ever has. She was all toned legs and arms in her red dress that contrasted well against the light, but not too pale, tone of her skin. Her smile was brightened by the red lipstick she was wearing, her full lips accentuated by it, and the blonde of her hair fell down her back in waves that he wanted to run his fingers through.

Obviously, he didn’t. There’s such a thing as human decency and sexual harassment, and he is nothing if not a gentleman (most of the time), but he did notice that she was simply a stunning woman.

The stunning Emma Swan.

There’d been small talk, of course, and he’d asked her about her new position here, what school she was coming from, follow up questions to all of that, and then offered his help for anything and everything that she might need while starting her new job. She’d smiled and said thank you, but then she’d easily navigated to her office, the one just outside of the music classroom and across the hall from his office and the auditorium where he spends his days, and shut the door in his face.

After that, he never quite cracked her code.

During lunch, she seems to have no issue talking to other teachers. She gladly chats with Belle, their librarian, Mary Margaret, the science teacher for grades nine and ten, and occasionally she can be seen talking with other teachers as well. Really, she’s so goddamn friendly with everyone that it makes absolutely zero sense for her to dislike him and not want to be friendly with him. Sure, he’s been disliked by many a woman before – bad dates and relationships and then once for taking the last carton of milk at the grocery store – but he’s always known why. He’s never been left in this state of confusion as to why he’s disliked.

Which is a shame because he quite fancies her from time to time when she’s not yelling at him for taking her students away from practice to work with him on stage or when she’s stealing his students for a last-minute fieldtrip to who knows where on the day of dress rehearsals.

Emma’s got this thing that she does during faculty meetings where whenever she disagrees with what’s being said, she scrunches up her nose and makes it wrinkle. He imagines that she wrinkles her nose when she thinks of him, most likely holding one of her many swan-themed coffee mugs that’s got a fifty-fifty shot of being filled with coffee with vanilla creamer or hot chocolate topped with loads of cinnamon. He can’t even begin to imagine how much she has to work out for how she eats. That, or she has the world’s greatest metabolism.

Damn her for making him notice these things and damn her for stealing his students.

“Seriously, guys,” Killian grumbles again, shifting the canopy bed prop that they rolled onto stage earlier this afternoon. His hands are full of callouses and most likely stained in paint for how much work he’s had to put into making the set. Liam and Elsa have come to the school or his apartment after they get off of work to help out with making sets, and he wonders just how he can repay them for going above and beyond when they already work far more often than him…and he feels like he never stops working. “Why aren’t you listening to me? Where are Kate and Ethan?”

Of the thirty teenagers that he still has with him today, two look up, and neither of them say anything, simply looking at him with pleading eyes, begging him not to make them talk. He loves all of these kids, and even though sometimes it’s hard to garner the attention of all of them, it’s usually much better than this.

He’s a damn good teacher. He can command a room, his five far-too-loyal students aside.

“Bloody hell,” he shouts, clapping his hands together so that the remaining twenty-eight heads look up at him with varying degrees of disgust. “I know that you guys don’t have a lot to do right now when we’re missing our leads, but that doesn’t mean you can just ignore me. Now will someone tell me where Kate and Ethan are? I know they’re not in music, so I know that they’re not on the field trip.”

His eyes scan over the group, looking for someone who’s going to crack, and he finally finds it in Ava.

“They’re sick, Mr. Jones,” she says quietly as her fingers twist around her braid. “That’s what Kate said when she texted me this morning.”

“Are they actually sick or are they skipping classes today while their parents think that they’re at school? And are they going to be better tomorrow?”

He’s met with silence once more until a deep laugh breaks out from Felix, a kid who is great at building sets but not so great at being a part of the team. Honestly, Killian has no idea why he’s even in this class when he could have chosen from several other electives. Deep down, he thinks it might be to torture Killian. Honestly. He’s only ninety percent sure that isn’t the reason he’s in the class.

Maybe eighty percent. It depends on the day.

“They have fucking mono, man,” Felix laughs, propping his feet up on the theater chair in front of him. “They’re not coming to class.”

“Language,” Killian says instinctively while his mind runs over the information he’s just been given. He’s a little loose with his curse words, but Americans seem to be a little more reserved with curses than he and all of his fellow Brits are so this is something he’s had to deal with while teaching in America. “What do you mean they have mono? How do you know this, but I don’t?”

“Group chat,” Felix answers noncommittally. “Ethan went to the doctor a couple days go, then Kate went, and they both got mono because they’re not just making out on stage, you know?”

Yes, he does know about the fact that the two leads in his play are dating. He didn’t when he cast them, but that also wouldn’t have mattered. He knows far too much about each of his students and their personal lives because for some reason, every bit of gossip happens while in this auditorium. The things that he’s heard while trying to paint a tree for set or while attempting to give an actual lesson where his students are supposed to take notes on the history of theater.

No part of him misses when he was a teenager. Every little thing feels like the most important thing, and he cannot imagine having to feel that way again.

“They have mono,” he repeats, testing out the words on his tongue all the while he tries to convince himself that this isn’t real. “Are you kidding me?”

“Nope. You haven’t gotten a note from their parents about it?”

Killian shakes his head before pulling his phone out of his back pocket, ignoring texts from his brother and his mates so that he can login to his school email. There are several messages that he sees that he needs to get to later all involving logistics for the show tomorrow night, and then he sees the emails Felix mentioned.

Bloody buggering fuck.

His leads are sick.

And they didn’t do any understudies because no one else was comfortable enough to sing on stage, and he figured that it’s just a high school play that the kids wanted to put on as a part of the class. It wasn’t a big deal.

Except for the fact that their principal told him that the ticket sales can all go toward fundraising for the drama department, and now he doesn’t have anyone to actually lead the play.

His students wanted to put on a modern-day fairytale, and all of these disasters happening at once make him think that he might very well be living in one.

If a modern-day fairytale is actually a nightmare.

-/-

Killian has been staring at his computer screen in his office for at least two hours when he hears the click of boots against the linoleum floor in the hallway outside of his office. It’s past six, everyone long gone, and he knows that it can only be one person walking out in the hallway.

Emma.

There’s a flash of long legs and blonde hair falling over a red leather jacket, and he’d recognize those three elements of her person anywhere. But as she’s walking into her office, across the hall from him, he definitely knows that it’s her. The fact that she leaves her door open and he can see her sitting at her desk certainly doesn’t help him forget.

How is she so beautiful and infuriating all at once?

“It’s rude to stare, Jones,” Emma shouts from her office like she does whenever they have these kinds of conversations.

He blinks up at her, unaware of how long exactly he has been staring at her. His head is pounding a ridiculous amount, and he wonders why the hell he ever left England and the Royal Navy just to come to America to teach high school drama and yell at kids to keep running around an asphalt track.

(Heartbreak, following his brother, et cetera.)

“It’s rude to take away my students the day before we have a show opening.”

“Their parents signed permission slips. I wasn’t aware I needed approval from you too.”

“Yeah, well, it’s common courtesy to at least let me know. Why isn’t there a school policy about that?”

He can’t quite see, but he knows that she’s rolling those green eyes of hers. She rises from her desk, and while he thinks she’s only getting up to close her office door, she doesn’t. Instead, she walks into the hallway and over to his office, leaning her shoulder up against his doorframe as she crosses her arms over her chest. When did she take her jacket off to leave her in a simple white sweater?

“You okay?” Emma asks, what sounds like genuine concern in her voice.

“Do you actually care?”

She scoffs, and he looks up at her again so that he can see the slightest twitching in her jaw along with a wrinkling of her nose.

“Believe it or not, I’m not a complete and total bitch. You look like you’re freaking out, and I’m genuinely concerned about that.”

“Ah well,” he sighs, reaching up to scratch behind his ear as he plasters a fake smile on his face, “you don’t have to worry about me, love. I’m perfectly fine.”

“You’re a liar is what you are.”

“How would you know?”

“For one, you have the worst poker face in the world, but I also have a little bit of a superpower in being able to tell when someone is lying.”

“Really now?”

“Yep. You don’t teach teenagers for six years without knowing how to tell someone is lying.” She steps further into the room and takes a seat in the cushioned chair that sits in the small space across from his desk. This might be the most pleasant conversation they’ve had in years, and he’s still not entirely sure that it isn’t some kind of fever dream. “So, tell me, Jones, what has you looking like you’d rather have a mug full of rum than coffee this late in the afternoon?”

Sighing, he leans forward on his desk and taps his fingers over the script, large letters typed out to read “Sleeping Beauty.” He’s got the entire script memorized now, mostly because he was the one to write the majority of it – with the help of the actual fairytale, the movie, and then his students when they insisted they do a modern version of a fairytale with a twist – but also because he’s been running lines with these kids for weeks.

And now he has no stars.

“I’m a bloody idiot,” he starts, swallowing his pride and the stress that’s lodged in his throat, “because I didn’t cast understudies for this play. Only two students in the class were comfortable both singing and sharing a kiss on stage, and I figured that it would be fine. It’s not a huge production, but then I was told that ticket sales could go to the theater department so that I can actually have funding. But the joke is on me because my leads have mono and are pretty much out for the entire month that we were going to be doing the show.”

Silence surrounds him as he finishes his rant, wondering why the hell he’s ranting to Emma in the first place, and he swears that he can hear the beating of his heart. Or maybe it’s the ticking of the clock above his door.

“You don’t have any other kids who know the lines?”

“Ava Hanson,” he sighs, looking up at Emma while he runs his hands through his hair, “but she’s not going to feel comfortable on stage. At this point, I’m wondering if we should simply postpone or if maybe I should play the lead role and modify things to make it more appropriate. Honestly, though, I’m not sure if I feel comfortable doing that.”

Emma groans, something deep and annoyed, and he’s just about to snap at her as he wonders what the hell could she possibly be upset about when she gets up from the chair and starts pacing back and forth in the room, her face buried in her hands.

“I’m willing to help you,” Emma huffs, stopping her pacing to look at him with her hands on her hips.

“What, love?”

“Look, I know what it’s like to be a part of the arts department, obviously, and funding is so hard to come by that I wouldn’t want you to miss out on any for those kids. Plus, I’m sure a bunch of the kids were looking forward to it. So, for those two reasons and those two reasons alone, I will read over the script and see if I can act in your play if you’re going to fill in for the other lead role.”

“You’re serious?” Killian questions. There’s no way. Absolutely none. “You realize this is a three-times a week thing for four weeks, it involves singing, extra time for no pay, and you have to spend time with me?”

“I obviously haven’t won the lottery or anything here, but yeah, I got all of that.”

“And you know what play we’re doing, right?”

“Sleeping Beauty.”

“Which involves a kiss.”

Emma’s lips fall into the shape of an “O” and he chuckles at that, thoroughly enjoyed by the blush on Emma’s cheeks and the continual blinking of her eyes.

“Just,” she whines, reaching down onto the desk to pick up the script he was looking at, “brush your teeth beforehand, and don’t think I’m taking my eyes off of you for a second.”

“I would despair if you did.”

-/-

There’s a substitute filling in for all of the theater and music classes the next day as he and Emma run through lines and do the messiest rehearsal in the history of rehearsals. Surprisingly, she knew most of her lines when she walked into the auditorium this morning, and while that did make everything go more smoothly, it was still a mess finding their timing as well as the timing of all of their students. But by the time the lunch bell rings, they’ve got a pretty good handle on it, and he sends Emma off to the closet where they keep the costumes to see if she can fit into Kate’s costumes. He’s sure that she can, especially with how slight Emma is, but then Emma walks up on stage with her breasts practically spilling out of the dress.

“What am I supposed to do about this?”

“To what are you referring?” Emma rolls her eyes and motions her hands around until she’s pointing at her chest, impatiently waiting for him to acknowledge the slight problem. “Well, love, your discomfort is a cross I’m willing to bear.”

Emma laughs, her eyes rolling once more, but he can see the slight smile on her face.

They might just get on, the two of them.

Or kill each other.

Everything for the rest of the day is a blur of him practicing while also dealing with all of the disasters and melodramatic emergencies that his students go through, and he swears the he blinks and people are already filling the auditorium. Liam and Elsa were kind enough to collect tickets for him, as well as buying far more tickets than necessary and forcing all of Elsa’s family to come to the show like he’s a teenager performing tonight and not an adult who screwed up, and he absolutely knows that he’s going to be teased about this until someone else does something equally embarrassing.

Not that being in theater is embarrassing. But being over thirty years old and acting with several sixteen-year-olds is.

Plus, they all know about his slight infatuation with Emma Swan and her definite dislike of him, and Killian just knows that Liam is going to be sitting in the front row recording this to have on file forever. It’ll likely be his Christmas card. Forget a picture of he and Elsa and Elsa’s ever-growing baby bump. It’s going to be Killian walking around on stage.

Closing the curtains he’s peeking out of, Killian turns around to see Emma standing in front of him wearing jeans and a blouse, her feet covered in white sneakers.

“What the bloody hell are you wearing?”

“It’s a modern-day fairytale,” she points out with a smirk, motioning her hands over her. “This is what a modern-day woman wears. Plus, I bent over in that dress and a boob popped out. I’m not flashing some of these dads who already think they can hit on me.”

“Yeah,” Killian gulps, forcing a smile as his stomach twists, “good point. You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

It goes surprisingly well even though everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Felix curses in the middle of the one scene that he’s in, Ava’s microphone goes out which makes her cheeks flame in embarrassment, a tree falls down on top of him during the forest scene, and the bed squeaks when he kneels down on top of it to kiss Emma awake.

And that is something else entirely.

He and Emma had argued for an hour over the scene where Phillip wakes Aurora up with a kiss. She’d agreed that it was written well and followed the original storyline, but she’d protested in how they should actually go about it. How the hell does one kiss their colleague and then everything go back to normal?

How did he ever expect his students to do that as well?

This is nothing like it ever was when he was occasionally in community theater in different parts of his life.

But then the play ends to a hefty smattering of applause, and Killian can finally take a deep breath.

And it starts all over again.

Four weeks. He can do four weeks.

-/-

“This is exhausting,” Emma sighs as she stretches out across the panels on the stage, her body star-fished on the wood.

The two of them have been at the school since seven this morning cleaning up the auditorium so the janitor didn’t have to come in on an extra day. It’s the right thing to do when it’s their fault that there’s extra mess in the school, but he’s really and truly regretting it right now that his head pounds at the lack of caffeine in his system. Emma was smart enough to walk in the school with one of her swan mugs full of coffee, but his mind was not thinking that far ahead this morning.

Damn Kate and Ethan for getting mono.

Can he damn his students?

He probably should not be doing that.

But he kind of wants to because while the past three weeks have been stressful and busy and his personal life has absolutely gone down the drain, it hasn’t been…awful. All of his students are having a grand time, having fun with each other and becoming more comfortable in their roles, and to him, that’s the most important thing. He wants them to know that this can be a fun experience and that they don’t have to worry about being judged. So, that’s been great.

Kissing Emma Swan approximately (exactly) eighteen times has been not so great.

Okay, well, it’s actually been wonderful in a weird sense. Stage kissing and actual kissing are two entirely different things, but once the stiffness of those first few days was gone, it felt more natural.

And his odd, inexplicable crush on Emma only deepened, which is the last thing that he wanted.

(He’s turning into a teenager.)

It only gets worse in the fact that she walked inside the building today in a pair of short black running shorts and a matching black tank top with her hair pulled off of her neck in a ponytail. He doesn’t know when she finds the time to work out, but if the definition in her arms and legs shows anything, it’s that she very much does find the time.

(So working out and a good metabolism is how she eats like she does.)

Plus, well, she’s not all bad.

They bicker more than anyone he’s ever met. If he says black, she says white. If he wants to get Chinese delivery for a late dinner, she wants pizza. If he wants to change the tempo on a song to be faster, Emma wants it to be slower. Every single thing is a battle, and he loves it.

In fact, he hasn’t had this much fun in years. Their bickering is different than their bickering of the past. It’s no longer hostile and falls more into the category of teasing or, if he’s a tad bit presumptuous, flirting. A little thrill of excitement runs through him when Emma picks a fight or teases him about the flip of his hair in the same way that he sees her lips curl up into a smile when he teases her right back for the way that her voice croaked during their third performance.

Fun.

Spending time with her is fun.

And he’s terrified to know what’s going to happen when the show ends its run in a week and they go back to hating each other from across the hallway.

“Aye,” he confirms, using the muscles in his arms to pull himself up to sit on the edge of the stage, his fingers reaching over to mess with the loose bit of Emma’s sock, pulling a bit more when she doesn’t flinch away. “Tis exhausting. I plan on sleeping for a solid week when it’s all over.”

“We have school.”

“I’m thinking of playing hooky. You want to join?”

“Depends,” she mumbles, sitting up and bringing her knees to her chest, “what are we going to do?”

Killian hums in thought, tapping his finger against his chin. “Well, for one, sleeping for at least a day. Then drinking a glass or two of rum without having to worry about waking up early the next morning, which is kind of the same thing. But mostly, in this fantasy world, I’m going to spend days away from teenagers of any and all kinds.”

“Amen to that, Jones. Add in some greasy hangover food after that night of rum drinking, and I am there.”

“Grilled cheese and onion rings?”

“It’s scary how you know that.”

“We share a cafeteria five days a week, love,” he sighs, turning a bit more on the stage so that he can look at her while he talks. “A man picks up on some things. I’m sure you notice these things about me too.”

Her brows furrow, suspicion painted in her features, and he has to bite his tongue to keep from laughing. “This sounds like some kind of trap to stroke your ego, and I am not falling for it.”

“My princess,” he says sarcastically, knowing that she hates it, “whatever shall I do with you? I’d go to the ends of the world or time to make you happy.”

“All you have to do is go to the faculty lounge and make me some more coffee.”

Killian hops down from the stage and bends over in a sarcastic bow that has Emma laughing. “As you wish, milady.”

The show that night goes smoothly, probably their smoothest one yet. Everyone is settled in their roles now, so there’s not much to do but work on vocals and do little tweaks that he’ll need to work on if they also do a spring production. With classes and track and field practice, he’s not entirely sure how he’ll fit one in, especially with every other event that takes up the auditorium near graduation, but it’s simply something to think about.

As well as having understudies. He’s never making this mistake again even if it’s going much better than he ever could have imagined.

Emma is a damn good stage partner, which shouldn’t be surprising given what he knows about her musical ability, but being a musician doesn’t always translate over into being a good actor. At the beginning, he was definitely simply hoping for someone to fill the spot in the most adequate of ways. He was never expecting her to be good.

He also wasn’t expecting them to still have crowds this many shows in. Honestly, when the school set-up this timeline, he expected it to only last two weeks and for them to cancel the rest of the shows, but he managed to get a few retirement homes, elementary schools, and recreational groups to come on different nights so that there’s always someone sitting in the crowd.

If Will, Robin, and Liam are asses who keep coming back simply so that they have more proof of him acting with Emma, that’s beside the point.

If he went to dinner with Elsa three days ago and told her that he’s developed actual feelings for Emma over the past few days, that’s definitely beside the point.

And yet it is also every point on all of his lists written over and over again in permanent marker.

Every logical bone in his body told him not to let his little crush fester and develop into something more, but spending all of this time with her, watching her laugh at his jokes or hum along to their music while cleaning up after the shows has completely endeared her to him. It’s the oldest story in the world – a man falls for a woman – and yet he thinks this has the beginnings to be his favorite tale.

Tonight, though, is their final show, and since Kate and Ethan received the all clear from their doctors two days ago, he and Emma are very gladly stepping down from their roles to let their students close it out. A little bit of fate or good coincidence is playing out here, and when his ever-loyal small group of students tell him to go sit in the audience for once and watch, he listens.

If not with a bit of trepidation as it’s not like him not to be behind the curtains making sure everything goes just right.

“You want some popcorn?” Emma asks him when she plops down in the seat next to him, a red and white striped box in her hands, the smell of salt and butter invading his nostrils. “It’s really good. I’m sure it goes against your healthy eating lifestyle, but you should live a little.”

Killian reaches over to grab a handful, the butter greasy on his fingertips, before popping two pieces in his mouth. “So, you have noticed the way that I eat.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.” She knocks her shoulder into his, and he knocks right back. “It’s going to be weird watching it from down here. I feel like I should be singing to you or gurgling mouthwash or something.”

“I knew you used mouthwash right before we kissed.”

“Well, I wasn’t sure that I could trust you despite me telling you to brush your teeth.”

“Minty and fresh,” he breathes, twisting his head so that he can get that little bit closer to Emma. “And maybe a little buttery now.”

“It’s a good thing you won’t be kissing me tonight then.”

His stomach twists at that, his heart dropping a little bit, and he knows that is shouldn’t. He’s an adult. He knows what happens up on that stage is all an act, literally, and his mind shouldn’t get confused by it. And while his mind likely isn’t confused by the lines that they say on stage, it’s confused by what happens off of it. It’s the lunches together and the way Emma comes into his office when they’re both staying late on non-play nights grading papers. Neither of them close their doors now, those wooden frames always staying open, and while she does still shout at him from across the hallway, very rarely is it cross words. Oftentimes it is simply Emma telling Killian to check his phone because she has sent him yet another meme about being a theater teacher.

Truly, it’s the smiles and small jokes and the way that her steps match up with his in the hallways, the echoes of their shoes blending together so that no one would know who exactly it is that’s walking down the corridors of the school.

It’s the subliminal changes, the ones that only he would notice, and while they are small, much like Emma, they are mighty.

“Yeah,” Killian mumbles a little dejected as he takes another bite of popcorn, “it is a good thing.”

Emma looks at him with parted lips like she’s about to speak, but before she can say anything, the squeak of the curtains opening sounds the beginning of the show.

Because Killian’s been acting in it and consumed with playing many roles both on and off stage, he hasn’t truly been able to appreciate the production. He hasn’t been able to appreciate the sets or the way that the kids easily change them between scenes. Now he’s able to notice that and precisely how much everyone has improved, how confident his students are under the lights and in front of the crowds. He’s always been a fan of pushing comfort zones, of helping his more shy students break out of them, but he also knows that it can’t be forced. Some people simply are not comfortable with that no matter how much time he gives, and that’s okay. They find their roles in other ways.

“Kate’s voice is beautiful,” Emma whispers in his ear, but he has a difficult time focusing on it for how her hand is curled around his forearm. She’s got soft hands, especially considering the callouses he knows should form from playing instruments all day. “Does she play any instruments? Why is she not in one of my music classes?”

“Don’t pilfer my students, Swan.”

Her fingers pinch around his skin, pulling at the hair, and Killian scrunches up his nose while he looks at her, their noses only two or three inches apart. “I wasn’t trying to, thank you very much. I was thinking maybe we could see if some of my students wanted to do a combination with yours. We could do live music with a play. Maybe not one that runs for four weeks, but at least a show.”

“Look at you coming around to me.”

“Yeah, well, like you said, we make quite the team.”

When the play is over, his students doing a bang-up job and giving a better performance than they ever would with he and Emma on stage, the audience rises for a standing ovation that has the grin on his face stretching from ear-to-ear. It looks the same to Emma. Kate and Ethan and the rest of their students insist that he and Emma stand on stage with them all, each of them very obviously going for dramatic effect, so he takes Emma’s hand and walks around the front aisle of the auditorium until they can walk up the side steps and have their thirty seconds of gratification and self-indulgence in doing a good job.

Killian doesn’t let go of Emma’s hand.

More importantly, Emma doesn’t let go of his.

She does eventually when they start cleaning up for the night, parents and students helping out as they all eat the pizza that Liam decided to donate for the night. Attached to the top box was a note telling Killian to stop being a coward and to ask Emma out, and thankfully, he snatched that piece of paper away quickly before stuffing it in his pocket. His older brother never does seem to stop finding ways to embarrass him while also being a good person.

Amazing how that works out.

Eventually the sets are put away yet not dismantled and every pizza but one has been devoured, so Killian grabs it and his car keys before walking out of the auditorium and down the hallway to the exit only to find Emma waiting for him. Or, at least, that’s what he thinks.

“So,” she starts, looking up from her phone to smile at him, the black dress she has on far too distracting, “you want to go get that glass of rum?”

“Swan, are you asking me out on a date?”

“I’m asking you to a bar.”

“Shouldn’t I be the one asking?”

Emma chuckles, shaking her head from side to side as she steps forward so that they’re eye-to-eye, her heels aiding that. “I knew you’d be old-fashioned, so I’ll tell you what, you can pay. And drive.”

“Why, love, you do flatter a man.”

-/-

“Wait, wait, wait,” Emma mumbles, her hand placed on his thigh, innocently and yet distracting all at once, “you were in the Navy in England? How the hell did you get here?”

They’ve been at the Rabbit Hole bar for two hours now, only one drink each somehow, and he swears that they haven’t stopped talking this entire time. Obviously, he’s gotten to know Emma better over the last month of him spending so much time with her, but it wasn’t like this. It wasn’t her sharing stories of the time she spends with her friends or talking about how she knew Mary Margaret through Mary Margaret’s husband. It wasn’t her telling him that she got into music because the foster mom she had as a teenager was a music teacher and taught Emma to play several instruments. It wasn’t him getting to know her on a level more intimate than the pleasantries that all teachers share at school.

It wasn’t this.

And it definitely wasn’t Emma asking him about his life with more interest than she usually shows.

Or the casual touching that precedes flirting. It may have been awhile for him, but he does know flirting when he sees it. Emma Swan flirting with him makes his stomach twist and his heart pound.

“Eh,” he sighs, reaching up to scratch behind his ear out of nerves, “so I joined the Royal Navy at eighteen. It gave me money and purposed and an education. I’d always been interested in the theater as a kid, so I figured I’d study that and possibly become a teacher after I retired. I simply didn’t expect to retire so soon.”

“Well, why did you?”

The age-old question.

“A broken heart. I’d been dating someone, Milah, for a few years, and I bought a ring to propose to her. I did propose, actually, but she turned me down.” He chuckles the words bitterly with a forced smile on his face. “She’d slept with someone else and had hidden it from me, but I guess the ring made her unable to hide it anymore. So, yeah, that wasn’t great, and when my contract ended later that year, I looked into moving here to be with my brother and his wife, who is American. It was a hell of a lot of paperwork and interviews, but I like being here. It’s relaxing.”

The smile on Emma’s face is soft, apologetic, and he can tell that she wants to say that she’s sorry, to show him pity like everyone always does when he shares that story. It’s something he’s grown used to, but he doesn’t want Emma’s pity.

“I was engaged,” she blurts out instead, pulling her hand back from his thigh to grab her wine from the bar top and take a small sip. “Obviously, I’m not anymore, but I was, right before I started to work at Storybrooke. That’s why I transferred. That’s also why I may have been a bit of a bitch to you.”

“You?” he mock gasps. “You being a little rude to me? Never.”

“Shut up. I’m trying to apologize.”

“You’re not very good at it.”

“I will punch you.”

“So aggressive.”

“You like it,” she teases, flipping her hair over her shoulder so that his eyes are drawn to the dip of her clavicle before he looks back at her eyes.

“Perhaps I do,” he admits quietly, the sounds around him quieting for a moment as he begins to lean in, begins to get closer to Emma, but he stops himself halfway and pulls back. He’s not ruining this moment by making a brash decision. He won’t.

“Uh, um, anyways,” Emma stutters while blinking, her fingers tapping against the glass. She uncrosses her legs, and he nearly falls backward when her calf brushes against his. Smooth, Jones, smooth. “So, I was engaged to a guy that I worked with, had the ring on my finger and a wedding date booked, and one day I went to his classroom at lunch to ask him if he wanted to eat the rest of my pasta only to see him making out with the vice principal. Which obviously sucked a lot for me, personally, but also it was super inappropriate. Neal always insisted that we don’t show affection at work. No one even knew it was him I was engaged to, and I guess I didn’t realize why he was that way until I found out he was dating two women at one school, which really took him to a whole new level of shitty.”

“He sounds like a real bastard.”

“Yeah,” Emma laughs, a bitter smile on her face, “yeah he was, but it’s for the best, you know? I’m not glad that it happened, but I’m glad that I found out when I did. I can’t imagine having actually been married to him. So, when I met you and you were all charming and helpful as well as a fellow teacher, I was done with helpful and charming men and kind of took it out on you.”

“You find me charming then?”

“That’s what you got out of that?”

“I do so love a compliment.”

“Stop,” she chuckles, gently slapping his arm. “Don’t be weird about it.”

“Charming and weird are the two words I’d use to describe me, though. But, yeah, Swan, I’m glad you didn’t marry him. I’m glad I didn’t marry Milah. Things tend to work out for the best.” The small, shitty band that’s playing in the corner of the bar shifts tunes to a slower song, one he doesn’t recognize, and an idea pops into Killian’s mind. “So now that feelings have been shared,” he croons, standing up from the stool and holding out his hand toward Emma, “will you do me the honor of allowing me to have this dance?”

Emma arches her brow once more, something she might as well do as often as he does, but the quizzical look doesn’t match the grin on her face. “What if I don’t know how to dance?”

“Well, darling, I know for a fact that’s not true since we just danced in a high school play together for a month, but even if it was, luckily for you, you have a partner who knows what he’s doing. So, come on, let’s go.”

She hesitates, but it’s only for a moment before she’s placing her hand in his and rising from her stool, the two of them going to the half-empty dance floor. It’s more swaying than dancing with how close Emma is standing, one of her hands wrapped around his neck while the other is intertwined with his and resting on his chest. His free hand is on her hip, fingers itching to dip lower, but he doesn’t. He won’t.

Not yet.

Not until Emma steps more into his space, the curves of her body aligned with the lines of his, and he can feel the way her heart is beating in her chest. Or, really, that might simply be his.

“Emma,” he hesitantly whispers. Her lips are close enough to his that he can feel his mouth move over hers when he talks, but it’s not enough. He’s kissed her before, and that definitely wasn’t enough. “Are you sure?”

Instead of answering, she tilts her head up toward his and hesitantly brushes her lips over his, staying still until his mouth responds. In reality, her lips feel the same as they did every single time they had a moment like this on stage, but it’s different. It’s different in the way that she moves against him, in the way that she tugs on his bottom lip and on the way that he tugs on her upper one. It’s different in that there is no acting here, only honesty in the soft and gentle movements that have him sighing into her mouth.

It’s different in that this is truly Emma kissing him, and in the three years that he’s known her, he never could have imagined this. And if he did, reality is so much better.

When they pull back for air, he can feel the smile on Emma’s face as their foreheads press together, and he’s sure that she can feel the giant grin painted on his lips.

“You all good, Emma?”

“Yeah,” she laughs, kissing him again, “except it’s very weird for you to taste like rum instead of toothpaste.”

Killian barks out a laugh before moving his hands to cup her cheeks and smile down at her. “I like you, Emma Swan.”

“Funny thing, I like you too.”

Monday morning, Killian pulls into the parking lot with Emma in his passenger’s seat and her hand resting on his knee.

They never picked up her car on Friday night.

When they get engaged a year later, Belle wins the betting pool on when the two of them would get together. Apparently, both the faculty and students started it on Emma’s fourth day of work at Storybrooke High.

Talk about a modern-day fairytale.

#it's all an act (until it isn't)#cs fic #cs ff #captain swan fic #captain swan #csseptembersunshine

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peter-parkner · 5 years

Note

CONGRATS ON 300!!! can a request a platonic parkner + 84? I feel like that’s the perfect prompt for two people who are the definition of chaotic energy. I can see Peter saying but I’ll leave it up to you!! ⭐️💗

Mischief Managed - Part 1

“We really can’t thank you and Peter enough for doing this tonight.” Pepper’s heels clacked across the wooden floor as she moved through the kitchen, dumping her handbag onto the counter.

“It’s no trouble, really. Besides, there’s at least ten sweet old ladies living in Peter’s neighborhood who are sure to give us extra candy tonight.” Harley was perched atop a stool at the marble breakfast bar. He was on his laptop finishing a last-minute school assignment.

Pepper walked over and kissed him on the head. “Well, we appreciate it anyway.” She stopped and looked around, brows furrowed, “Harley, have you seen my –”

“Lipstick? You left it in the bathroom.” Tony walked into the kitchen waving a small black tube between his fingers. He was dressed in a sleek, black three-piece suit.

Pepper snatched it from her husband’s hand, relief filling her features as she dropped it into her handbag. She gave Tony an appraising look before walking over to him and fiddling with his tie. Between the finger light touches and small smiles, Harley felt like he was invading on something deeply intimate.

He cleared his throat, “Um, I’m gonna go get Peter.”

Pepper nodded but didn’t respond. Harley made his way toward the elevators and down to the lower floors where the labs were. It was Halloween and, of course, Peter Parker was the only person still working through the holiday. The elevator doors dinged open and Harley stepped inside. He pressed the button for the 50th floor, watching as the number lit up a soft yellow.

“Hey Peter, are you almost ready? I just have to change and then…”

His words trailed off as he rounded the corner and entered their shared lab space. Standing in the middle of the lab was Peter, covered in prototype web fluid. Peter’s face and hair were unscathed, but his clothes definitely were not salvageable. The left side of Harley’s mouth quirked upward in a smile at the sight in front of him.

“Is that, uh, what you’re dressing up as tonight?” Harley barely suppressed his laughter behind a wide grin.

“Oh, this isn’t a costume. This is my natural state of being.”

Foam was steadily dripping off of Peter’s clothes and onto the scuffed up tile floors. It landed with a resounding ‘plop.’ Peter grabbed some paper towels in an attempt to mop up the mess, but it was in vain. Harley took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose. He gave the man another once over. Halloween was not going to be ruined by a chemistry experiment gone wrong.

“I can fix this.”

Harley glanced at his Stark watch; they had about fifteen minutes to get ready. He put on his game face and dragged Peter toward the decontamination shower, throwing him inside.

Fifteen minutes to the second hand, Harley and Peter stumbled out of the elevator and into the common room. Pepper and Tony were talking in low voices while they sat waiting on the couch. Well, Pepper sat. Tony was awkwardly leaning over the back of the sectional so the two could still be eye-level. He didn’t want to wrinkle his three-piece suit prematurely.

“We’re ready whenever Little Miss is.” Harley hopped over the back of an armchair while Peter filled himself a glass of water in the kitchen.

“Gotta say Underoos, that’s a bold costume choice,” Tony quipped from where he leaned against the sofa as he took in Peter’s appearance.

“Not my finest work, but I think it’ll do.” Harley also eyed up Peter’s Halloween costume while the man in question continued sipping from his glass of water.

Tony squinted harder at Peter. “Hey, Harls isn’t that the shirt I bought you when you moved to New York?”

“Yup.”

Peter was dressed up as a New York City tourist: the most cliché thing Harley could think of in the moment. He had on white socks the hit his mid-calf, red low-top Converse and Harley’s white ‘I

As if on cue, Morgan called out from behind the kitchen wall, “Are you guys ready!”

“Yeah, Sweetie!” Pepper replied as four pairs of eyes turned toward the arched doorway.

“Drum roll!” Peter started furiously banging on the marble counter top while Harley aided him using the arms of his chair as makeshift drums.

After a beat of silence, Morgan jumped out from behind the partition. She struck a pose and was met by a chorus of praises as everyone stood up.

“A bat? That’s awesome!” Peter leaned down and high-fived Morgan.

She was wearing a black tunic dress over leggings with matching Mary Janes. Black arm bracers attached to a cape turned into magnificent bat wings when Morgan raised her arms. As she smiled, fake fangs glistened in the soft, overhead lighting. A black choker and ruby red hair clips finished off the costume.

Morgan ran over to Pepper, who easily scooped her up. “We both thought she’d want to be a superhero, but nope,” a small laugh escaped her lips, “Their science class finished a section on bats for Halloween and now they’re Morgan’s favorite animal.”

Tony beamed down at his daughter while he fixed her hair clips. Peter was already taking five-hundred pictures of the family with his camera. Pepper and Tony’s million-dollar outfits sharply juxtaposed Morgan’s Halloween costume.

“Oh my God, I get Harley’s costume now.” He paused his picture taking to stare at the other man from where he now leaned against the sofa, in the space Tony previously occupied.

Harley was clad in all black: black jeans, black t-shirt, black Doc Martens and a leather jacket. The only thing that gave away what his costume was supposed to be was the fake blood dripping down his mouth and vampire fangs that peeked out when he smiled. They also matched Morgan’s pair.

“Why do you get to wear a cool costume?” Peter pouted while Morgan giggled.

“Because I’m a cool person, duh.” Harley brushed past Peter with Morgan’s pumpkin shaped, trick-or-treat bucket in hand.

After two more trips upstairs from Pepper, another round of photos and multiple phone calls from Happy, who waited impatiently in the parking garage downstairs, the quintet made their way toward the elevators.

“You have both of our personal numbers, right?”

“Yes, Pepper.”

“And you have Happy’s?”

“Yes, Pepper.” Harley’s voice was exasperated but his smile was fond.

“Peter, you have your web-shooters on, right?”

“Yes ma’am!” Peter rolled back the sleeves of his long-sleeve shirt to expose his gadgets.

“Tony, are we forgetting anything else?” Pepper turned to her husband, brows furrowed.

After a moment of contemplation, Tony spoke: “Save some candy for us, okay?”

Pepper elbowed him in the ribs with her left arm while the right held tightly onto Morgan’s hand. Tony discreetly rubbed his side when the five of them exited the elevator upon reaching the parking garage level. Mr. and Mrs. Stark kissed their daughter goodbye, hugged Harley and Peter in turn and made their way toward Happy’s Audi.

“Have fun, kids!”

After the Audi drove off, Harley, Peter and Morgan got into Aunt May’s Toyota. Peter made sure everyone was buckled in and then started their drive over to Queens.

By the time they pulled into May’s building, it was seven pm. Peter swiftly parked and the trio crossed the street, eager to start trick-or-treating. They had meticulously planned a route through the safest residential area by May’s apartment. The sounds of Halloween floated through the air as the trio neared their destination. Harley’s grip on Morgan’s hand tightened when they started encountering more and more adults with their children.

Goblins, ghouls and superheroes flew by the trio while children ran rampant in the streets. Darkness had settled over Queens with only lampposts and the neon glow of front porch decorations to light their way. Harley looked down at Morgan as she happily skipped beside him in her bat costume.

“You ready to get some candy?”

Morgan shook her head eagerly and Harley let go of her hand, urging her toward the house in front of them. He and Peter followed closely behind. The front porch light was on and two large, carved pumpkins with candles inside of them sat on the steps leading up to the door. Morgan stood on her tiptoes and rang the doorbell, a wide grin on her face.

“Trick-or-treat!” Morgan exclaimed as soon as the door fully opened, revealing a young woman in her mid-thirties.

She looked down and grinned at Morgan. “And what are you supposed to be young lady?”

“A bat!” She spread her arms to put her faux-wings on display.

“Wow! That’s so cool!” The woman presented a large bowl of candy to Morgan. Her eyes lit up as her small hands eagerly dug around for Hershey’s bars, Morgan’s favorite. “You might want to take a few extras for your brothers.” She looked up and winked at Harley and Peter.

Peter beamed back at the woman when she gave a final wave before closing her front door. Morgan turned and skipped ahead of the two toward the next house, pumpkin bucket swinging back and forth. Their next destination had a front yard littered with fake tombstones. A green spotlight cast an eerie glow on the domicile as well. Harley made Morgan hang back while they patiently waited for another family to finish conversing with the elderly couple who owned the residence.

Once they left, Morgan eagerly ran to the front door and the trick-or-treat cycle started all over again.

The rest of the night flew by seamlessly as Morgan enchanted couple after couple into giving her extra candy without even trying. Her bucket was overflowing by the time the trio made it back to May’s apartment building; even Harley and Peter had to stuff some sweets into their pockets for her. Peter’s Nikon was filled with pictures of the three of them throughout the night and he couldn’t wait to show Pepper and Tony in the morning.

Though the night had started off a little rocky, Peter couldn’t help but break into a smile as he looked over at his best friend next to him and his self-appointed little sister strapped into the backseat. Morgan was counting her spoils of war inside the pumpkin bucket. Tonight was definitely a Halloween for the history books.

Part 2

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pretty-well-funded · 5 years

Text

Principal Stark, pt 2

continued from here. still no porn, but we’re getting warmer, lol

The final bell rings at 2:30 that afternoon, and Penny takes every last one of the 15 minutes Mr. Stark gave her to get to his office.

"Ms. Parker. You're thirty seconds late," he says when she arrives. Penny gapes for a moment, trying to come up with a defense that isn't just her saying, You're insane, but then he smirks. "I'm just messing with you. Come in and sit down, I'm sure you have homework. I cleared a spot for you."

He nods to the empty spot on the right side of his desk. Penny settles there, ignoring the acute discomfort of his proximity as she digs through her backpack. She can feel his eyes on her, and when she looks up, he gives her a little smile before turning back to his monitor.

They work in uneasy silence until 4pm, when he drives her home in his Audi.

(Aren't teachers supposed to be…like, poor?)

When Penny wakes up the next morning, Aunt May is awake and waiting for her with breakfast. That's not typical – depending on how hard her hospital shift was, Penny either gets a kiss on the forehead and some small talk, or May is passed out before she's out of bed.

"Woah. What's the occasion?"

"Come sit, sweetie. I got a call from your new principal yesterday."

Penny slides into her seat, eyes on her plate. "I'm sorry – I know he probably woke you up."

"I'm not worried about that." May pauses long enough that Penny has to look up, try to catch some idea of what she's thinking. "I'll be honest, kiddo, I was kind of happy to hear someone looking out for you. He made a lot of good points about your behavior lately. I've been letting a lot of things slide, but – "

"May, I'm fine, I swear. He's overreacting."

"Is he? Because sometimes I call to check in at night, and you're not here."

Penny's eyes drop again, guilty. She doesn't make excuses for herself, because whatever they were, they'd be lies. She hates lying to May.

"And I can't do much about that. We need to money from overnights too much. But if there's another adult who wants to be a presence in your life, a resource… I'm inclined to agree that you need it."

Fuck.

"What I need to know first is, what kind of man is Mr. Stark?"

"Um. Like what?"

"Does he make you uncomfortable?"

He sets off my extrasensory superhuman danger-predictor and I don't know why isn't really a thing she can say. She's still getting the hang of that shit – false positives all the time, and sometimes it doesn't go off when there <i>is</i> danger.

The fact is, he's never done anything improper. A little too frank, maybe, but he was 'trying to relate' or whatever.

"No."

"Okay, that pause was a little too long for my liking," May says. "What's the deal, really?"

"I mean, he's fine, I just don't think I need a babysitter."

"Don't think of it as a babysitter, sweetie. It's…we all need help to get through stuff, sometimes. Can you give it a try? Just for a week. And you'll tell me immediately if he makes you uncomfortable in any way. Can we do that?"

Penny's gut sinks, but she knows what she has to say. "Okay, yeah. Sure."

"Okay. But honey, if he tries anything inappropriate, you knee him in the balls first and let me ask questions for you, later."

Penny has to grin. "Yes, ma'am."

On Penny's third afternoon with Mr. Stark, she gets stuck on a physics question and takes out her phone to ask Ned his answer.

"You're supposed to be doing your homework, not Snapchatting or whatever. Turn it off."

"I am doing my homework. I'm asking a friend for help with Physics."

Mr. Stark rolls his desk back and comes to stand behind Penny, one hand on the desk and one on her chair. "This one, here?"

"Yeah."

His body heat makes her skin prickle all over as he leans in to explain.

The next day, the drama kids are using the hallway near the offices for some weird… motion activity.

Penny's senses scream when Mr. Stark closes the office door.

When he catches her watching him, he explains, "Can't hear myself think with that racket. But I can open it if you're more comfortable."

Penny shrugs, because anything else would be insulting, right? and Mr. Stark returns to his computer.

Nothing bad happens. It's fine.

On day five, Penny has Decathalon practice, so she doesn't show up in the office until almost four. She half-expects they'll head home right after she arrives, but she's wrong.

Mr. Stark nods her into her chair. Penny spends two and a half hours heavy with dread.

She does her homework. He does his…principal work, whatever that is. At 6:30, they get in his car and he drives her home.

The good thing about May working nights is, even with this stupid Mr. Stark thing, she can still go patrolling. Today, she's so antsy for it, she bolts down some dinner, throws on her costume, and pokes her head out her window, checking the other fire escapes for other residents.

Normally, she goes down to the alley in street clothes, jogs to one of the less-trafficked spots, and changes there, just in case. But right now, almost everyone should be eating dinner, and she's already later than she'd like, thanks to Principal Helicopter-Parent.

It looks like the coast is clear, but there's no telling when someone might come outside for a smoke, so Penny crawls out the window and cheats the descent by jumping off the fifth story platform and using webs to slow her descent for a landing.

"You know, I've seen footage of you swinging off of buildings six times this height, but watching it in person gives you a hell of an adrenaline rush. For a second, I was half-convinced you'd splat on the pavement."

Feeling ill, Penny turns around and finds Mr. Stark leaning against the alley wall, clad in his too-nice suit. She should speak, but she can't. Is there even a shot for plausible deniability, or…?

"Penny, I know it's you, kid. Pull the hoodie off and get in my car. You don't want the neighbors to overhear this."

#not on ao3

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noorhelmcliche · 6 years

Text

more incantava fanfics!

just a disclaimer: this post is going to be super long, i didn’t write these AGAIN I AM NOT CLAIMING THESE ARE MINE, and yeah click ‘keep reading,’ to continue...

eleonora was having a shitty day. She got messaged again by some dude on Instagram named alessandro who just couldn't take a hint. He had been messaging her non stop for 2 weeks now which made sense to her because while edoardo's instagram was full of pics of them she decided to keep her relationship on a lower profile which was hard with a guy like edoardo. silvia wouldn't stop talking about some new guy in school named alessandro who had just transferred halfway through the year to this school. According to her sources, he wanted to join the villa and he was super hot. sana was the only one who had seen the guy and thought " he was just like the others". She showed them a picture and sure enough it was him. Her Instagram stalker. federica gave her opinion on him and soon enough so did eva. When eva was done talking she noticed a change in her friend's mood so she drifted the conversation from alessandro to silvia's new cat and her developed baking skills ( silvia’s not the cat’s). Soon the bell rang and they went to class. eva stayed behind and asked eleonora if she was okay. eleonora couldn’t tell her. eva already had enough on her plate after what happened with gio and fede, she was just trying to move on and study with no distractions. eleonora just shrugged and said “ I’m fine just didn’t sleep well last night”. Though eva didn’t seem to believe it she realized if eleonora wanted to tell their group of friends she would of. “ Ok just remember if you need anything I’m here for you.” eva said. ele nodded and they hugged before they went separate ways. Eleonora walked to her next and last class, chemistry. She got there just before class started and just her luck alessandro was in this class as well. The teacher told him to introduce himself and he happily stood up. She tuned him out and sat down on the only seat left in class the one next to his. She usually loved chemistry and actually excelled in the subject but today she couldn’t even concentrate on what the teacher was saying. Soon eleonora was snapped out of her gaze by the teacher herself. “Eleonora Sava!” she yelled, making ele stop and actually listen. “As I was saying, you will be showing the new kid about how our class works.”, she said and continued on with her lesson. “hi gorgeous , just letting you know that you can call me ale .” said alessandro in a flirtatious tone. “ ok let’s just get started” ele responded completely ignoring his advances. “ come on! you really don’t recognize me?!” he exclaimed. ele rolled her eyes and said “ ok alessandro , let me tell you this, I don’t want you and i just want to do what the teacher said and leave , ok stalker?” she didn’t wait for him to respond and started to explain to him all the material her chemistry class has done. soon there were only 10 minutes left of their class and she felt a cool unfamiliar hand start to creep up her thigh. as soon as ele realized what was actually going on, she spanked his hand and gave him a glare. he seemed to be grinning as she angrily said “ what the fuck do you think you are doing?!” “oh I’m just giving you a sneak peek of what’s to come.” suddenly ele felt sick remembering what happened with edo’s brother. she got up and asked the teacher to go to the nurse because she really felt bad and excused herself because it was her last period. before the teacher even finished her goodbyes , she gathered her stuff and bolted without a second glance. she rushed to the bathroom feeling a panic attack coming on. as she calmed herself down in a stall, two girls came in thinking they were alone. “ so did you see edoardo’s new Instagram post ?” one started. “ of course Valentina the one where he is at that expensive ice cream shop looking hot as always , everyone has already.” the other responded. “ well stella apparently he was getting his new girlfriend some you know that uptight bitch eleonora.” said valentina. “ she is so lucky I mean imagine being able to have the Edoardo Incanti at anytime.” said stella dreamily. “ well she isn’t good enough for him. he deserves someone who can satisfy him and his needs and keep him popular. she clearly can’t , have you seen her ? anyway i’m not the only one who thinks so.” said Valentina arrogantly full of jealousy. “ don’t waste your breath on her and we have to go , my parents want me home early.” responded stella. as they left , ele got out and was trying to process all that has happened. So people thought she wasn’t good enough for her boyfriend , no big deal. but suddenly ele started to feel bad, something she hasn’t felt in a long time , insecure. maybe they were right she wasn’t right for edo , a gorgeous rich boy should have a just as perfect girl next to him.so why did he pick her ? these feelings were feelings she always kept deep down inside because she had worked hard for where she is now. she wipes her tears and made her self look presentable then got out of the bathroom to meet up with the girls. they were all talking about their days when a car interrupted them. edo said hi to all the girls and then ele bid goodbyes to all her friends and walked into his car. he kissed her cheek and said “ hey bellisima”. she responded shyly not really believing him for once and let out a small hey. as they were driving to thier place it was quiet. all of a sudden edo pulls over a new street with nice houses but one seemed to have new people moving in. so he drives the car into the alleyway next to the houses so they can’t be seen. when they finally had some privacy, edo turned to her and asked her “ what is wrong bella donna”. “ please stop calling me that”she responded. “ why not it’s true” he said confused by her behavior. “ why did you pick me?” ele said tears clouding up her eyes. suddenly she is pulled in to his lap from her seat so she is straddling him. “ what? what do you mean? I love you and your whole self. I love the way you help your friends and fight for them when you need to. I love how you can be silly and funny when you want to be. I love your gorgeous emerald eyes with sleek dark brown hair that I love to run my fingers through so much and your oh so red lips. I love the way you are so perfect for me, putting me in my place when I need it . I just love you ele.” he said meaningfully while looking into her eyes. “ but others don’t think so. according to them , you deserve someone better who can satisfy your needs.” ele said touched by his words. “ you do and you are all I need eleonora francesca sava.” he responded to her lovingly. he leaned in for a short sweet kiss but ele wanted to prove the demons wrong so she made the kiss passionate and deeper. soon enough they were making out in edo’s car in an alleyway where anyone could see them but they didn’t care. Hips were colliding together and ele was just in a state of pleasure letting out occasional moans and soft gasps. as edo’s mouth was sucking harder on her neck , she hit her hand on the window and that snapped her out of her daze , remembering where they are. “edo, we have to stop” she forced herself to say. their foreheads touched and eleonora looked around and saw no one but them . “we should go home” he said with a suggestive glint in his eyes. that car ride was the quickest one she’s ever had and the moment they walked into the apartment , a night of complete bliss started. the next day when she walked into class with her head held and a hickey on her neck , mouths were wide open with shock and alessandro took a hint.

Eleonora ruefully wakes up at four fifty-five in the morning. She grumbles as she climbs out of bed, knowing she can't go back to sleep. She curses Edoardo's name as she searches for the light switch. It was his awful idea to leave for Endine Gaiano at five-thirty, since it's a six and a half hour drive. They easily could've left a few hours later, Eleonora had argued. Not wanting to get up so early.

But no, Mr. Incanti refused to. Said she had to see the villa in the morning, because it's just so beautiful. And he didn't want to waste half of their day driving.

Eleonora knows Edoardo is coming to pick her up soon, and she refuses to be unready when he arrives. She has packed all her stuff the night before, all she needs to do now is shower, eat, and get dressed.

The shower is quick, about ten minutes, and she pulls her wet hair into a bun. A lose white shirt is pulled over her head, and she slips on a pair of jean shorts.

Eleonora finishes just in time. Her phone lights up with Edoardo's message, telling her he's here.

She grabs her bags, and tiptoes from her room. Not wanting to wakeup her aunt and cousins. She gently opens and shuts the front door, making sure to lock it.

She looks for cars, and darts across the street to his Audi. She gives him a quick kiss, and fastens her seatbelt.

"Ciao." He kisses her again.

"Ciao." She says as she hooks up the AUX cord to his car. Edoardo groans,

"Please spare me from Baby K." Eleonora playfully hits his shoulder.

"No, it's not Baby K." She sticks out her tongue and hits play. Britney Spears's voice fills the car. Edoardo lets out another groan,

"This is worse." He complains. Eleonora kisses him again.

"Drive." She tells him with a laugh.

"I'm at your command, Senora." He winks at her.

The arrive at the Incanti family Villa at eleven-thirty. Eleonora has played Britney Spears for the whole drive as payback for Edoardo making her get up so early.

As they drive up the driveway, she sees the beautiful lake Endine not too far away. The sun’s beams shine across it, making it look more even beautiful.

"We'll go to the water once we've unpacked everything." Edoardo says as he parks his car.

"How long have you been visiting here?" She asks as she pulls her bags out of his backseat.

"Since I was little. My Nonna was from here. When my parents still lived together, we'd come here when school ended. I'm the only one that comes here now." Edoardo opens the front door, and they walk in. "And maybe after a swim, we can go for a hike?" He suggests. Eleonora gives him a quick peck on the lips.

"I'd love that."

She changes into a dark yellow one piece, with little flowers all over it. Edoardo removes his shirt, and puts on a pair of black swimming shorts.

They climb into the water, and Eleonora dunks her head. When she comes up for air, she sees Edoardo has gotten closer. A mischievous smile on his face.

She splashes water on him. "Whatever you're planning. Don't do it." She warns.

"Or what, you'll splash me more?" He teases. He wet curls clinging to his head.

"Shut up." She tells him, and tries to swim away. Edoardo grabs her by the waist,

"Who said you could leave?" He asks, teasingly.

"I did." She tries to wiggle out of his grasp.

"Too bad." He says and lifts her into the air.

"Put me down!" She yells. Edoardo listens, and drops her. She flounders for a moment, before coming back up. She lungs at him in retaliation, and he laughs.

She wraps her legs around him, and messes with his hair. He dunks them both underwater and kisses her. Eleonora kisses him back, and he lifts them back up.

Edoardo's hand slips into her bathing suit, and runs a hand down her back. She pulls away.

"Not here." She says, gasping for breath. They pull apart, and race out of the water. Only stopping to grab their towels.

Edoardo presses her against the back of the front door once they're inside. Her hands run through his curls, and he peppers her neck with hot kisses.

She moans with pleasure as he slips off one of her straps and nips at her shoulder.

He slips out of his shorts, and picks her up again. Taking her to the bedroom.

—

They lay in bed for hours. Wrapped in each other.

"So, want to go for that hike now?" Edoardo asks. Eleonora hits him with a pillow.

"You've tired me out too much to even think about exercise." Edoardo smirks.

"Then I've done my job." She kisses him.

"I think you have." He kisses her back, and runs a hand through her hair.

They spend of the rest of the day, and most of their vacation in bed. Not wanting to be out of each other's arms.

The hike never happens.

lol i think that’s about it for some reason i thought i had a lot more. sorry, but always feel free to send me any links to any new noorhelm fanfics! (not gonna lie i am not really a fan of skam nl or skam belgium/wtfock so yeah that’s why i don’t really post about them or read their fanfic)

#incantava

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an-ephemeral-blog · 5 years

Text

What’s standing in the way of women’s soccer?

When chants of ‘equal pay!’ ring through soccer stadiums, men jump on Twitter to explain why, despite performing better internationally than the men’s team, women soccer players don’t deserve equal pay because they don’t earn as much revenue.

Over the past two months I’ve become a big NWSL fan. It’s very different from being an MLB fan, my only previous experience of passionate sports fandom. There are a lot of things I take for granted that a professional sports team has, which NWSL teams do not have. These things absolutely affect revenue, either directly, or by lowering the quality of play or the experience of watching games. Here’s a list.

1. NWSL stadiums are less accessible than MLS and other stadiums.

My local team, the Washington Spirit, plays at the Maryland SoccerPlex. To get to the Plex, if you don’t have a car, requires an hour-plus train ride to the end of the metro and then either a 25+ minute car ride or a 45+ bus ride. I have multiple friends who’ve expressed interested in going to a game but balked when they found out how long it would take to get there. Another friend had to cancel because she was working late and couldn’t finish by 5:30pm, which was the time she’d have to leave to make it to a 7:30pm game.

As a trial run, the Spirit are playing a game tomorrow at Audi Field, home field of the MLS team DC United. Audi Field is about 30 minutes away from downtown and is easily accessible via Metro. Correspondingly, the Spirit is on track to more than triple their season record at the Plex. They may even sell out Audi Field. Surely if they can sell out Audi Field, they deserve to play in it?

Which brings me to the next item on the list...

2. NWSL stadiums are smaller than MLS stadiums.

The Spirit’s plex sells out at around 5,500 tickets. For tomorrow’s Audi Field game, they’ve currently sold over 16,000 tickets.

Sky Blue’s regular park also holds about 5,000 fans. When they played a game last weekend at Red Bull Arena, aka the stadium of their local MLS team, they nearly doubled attendance at 9,000+ tickets sold.

I don’t know the breakdown for every team in the league. I do know that Orlando Pride, despite having access to a great stadium, tends to draw fewer fans do to their lower quality of play. (They’re second to last in the league.) On the other hand, the Portland Thorns already share a stadium with their MLS neighbor team, the Timbers, and also boast the biggest and loudest fanbase in the NWSL. Portland recently set a league record with 25,000+ tickets sold to a game.

Items #1 and #2 combine to make clear that to grow as a league, NWSL teams need to play in larger stadiums that are easier to access. (This doesn’t even take into account how stadium facilities might impact quality of play. Some NWSL teams don’t even have showers in their locker rooms!) Owners and league managers need to invest in securing these spaces for teams, even if they might not be profitable at first. The experience of Sky Blue and Spirit suggests that managers won’t have to wait to reap the benefits.

3. NWSL games are often scheduled simultaneously, decreasing viewership.

With only nine teams in the NWSL, there are four to six NWSL games each week. Given this small number, you’d think they’d all be on at different times, right?

Nope. Every week, there’s at least one pair of games scheduled against each other. Often there’s two. If you don’t have the ability to tape games, you’re forced to miss at least one game every week. As I have taken to tweeting despairingly at the NWSL each time this happens: whyyyyyyyy.

Schedule creation is complicated, and there are more factors that go into it than I know of. But one key element is when teams even have their field available. Most teams don’t own their own fields, and have to work within a restricted subset of dates and times. To the extent that this contributed to overlapping games, it’s yet another way that issues securing good stadiums get in the way of fans supporting their teams.

4. NWSL teams have a lower quality of commentating.

Complaining about the announcers/commentators on NWSL matches is a sport of its own. Announcers regularly mispronounce players’ names and sometimes misidentify them. They repeat facts and stories, and use the same turns of phrase over and over until you can’t help but twitch every time you hear them say “she sprays the ball out wide” or “the ball found it’s way to...” The last Spirit game I attended, I sat in front of a woman who, after Elise Kellond-Knight left with a pulled hamstring, briefly explained to her friends why women were more likely than men to have hamstring injuries. (It has something to do with women having more developed quad muscles, which puts the opposing muscles, the hamstrings, at greater risk. This also leads to increased ACL injuries among women.) This random stranger had more interesting commentary than any of the people I’d heard on TV. But why are these announcers so bad? The answer’s easy: NWSL announcers are barely paid. They make $300-$400 a game, with no travel or lodging expenses paid, which means unless you live in Fort Lauderdale where the announcing is recorded, you have to pay to announce. I don’t know how much MLS announcers make, but I bet it’s better than that.

5. NWSL teams have a lower quality of refereeing.

Oh boy. Okay. There have been some issues with NWSL refereeing lately. As national team star Ali Krieger put it:

We’re putting a good product out on the field and every year we’re getting better and the referees seem like they are not. So, I beg the NWSL — just the standard needs to be higher. It’s just unfortunate that you feel like the referee is ruining the game. They are taking the fun out of the game because they are not good enough.

How could we raise the standards of referees? Well, they could stop treating the NWSL like a training ground for MLS:

There are five tiers in the U.S. Soccer refereeing program. The top-level, called “FIFA,” is the highest tier. These referees can officiate in FIFA-sanctioned matches.

”The second tier is “P.R.O.” These referees can officiate MLS matches and are selected by the Professional Referee Organization.

The next tier down is called “National,” and these officials are certified by U.S. Soccer. These referees can officiate USL Championship and NWSL matches. And therein lies the problem.

The NWSL will never have officiating as good as the MLS as long as this remains US Soccer’s official policy. It doesn’t get any clearer than that.

6. NWSL games are not marketed as well as they could be.

I won’t pretend to understand marketing, but I know that it’s hard for people to go to games they don’t even know about:

[Portland Thorns defender Meghan Klingenberg ] couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed when she saw Fox discuss the U.S. Men’s National Team’s run at the CONCACAF Gold Cup during halftime of the Women’s World Cup final Sunday, rather than preview the upcoming games in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL).

“I love Fox. I think they did a great job. They gave the Women’s World Cup the attention that it deserves, but I wish we mentioned the NWSL more. [...] We need that to be put into the consciousness of the general public. We need ESPN to talk about the NWSL year-round. We need beat reporters in every single city that has an NWSL team. We need investment in advertising and marketing, in ground support, in make sure that people know that there’s a freaking team in their area.” [source]

It seems that marketing is another area in which US Soccer is underinvesting in women:

[Soccer United Marketing, the commercial arm of Major League Soccer] handles deals for MLS and the U.S. Soccer Federation but not the NWSL, even though U.S. Soccer runs the NWSL. This fact has long been lamented by the women’s soccer community.

The NWSL marketing team needs the resources to at least let people know that their teams exist and their games are happening. But beyond that... the NWSL is full of charismatic stars, both current and potential. Let’s give them the spotlight.

7. NWSL salaries are, for all but the biggest stars, below average income.

No one goes into women’s soccer for the money, even if a few of the game’s biggest stars have managed to get some lucrative sponsorships. The league guarantees a minimum salary of $16,538, barely above the poverty line, and caps max salary at $46,200, a bit belong the mean American income.

Talented young women who are making decisions about where to go to college and what to do after college need to take this into account. If they have dependents, family members with health issues, or significant debt, they simply may not be able to afford to play soccer professionally.

This impacts the number of women available to play professionally as well as their ability to nurture their own talent by investing in themselves via special camps and training. For every Megan Rapinoe or Alex Morgan or Crystal Dunn who has made it to the NWSL there’s someone equally talented who stopped playing in high school or college because law school or medical school or learning to code seemed like a more financially viable career path.

In other words, for all the strides women’s soccer has made over the last twenty to thirty years, the NWSL still selecting from only a fraction of the potential talent pool.

I’ve been an NWSL fan for less than two months, so I’m surely missing other ways that women’s soccer has been under-invested in. But the seven issues outlined above should be enough to convince you there’s a problem.

Saying that people just don’t want to watch women’s soccer isn’t merely an oversimplification - it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The whole point of investment is you take a risk now to reap a payoff later. The NWSL needs US Soccer and the wider sports community to invest in them, and given time, everyone will benefit.

You know what keeps ringing in my ears? Research that shows that men are judged on their potential, while women are only judged on their performance. The NWSL has the potential to be a thriving league with the revenues and fan enthusiasm of the MLS. The question is whether women’s soccer will be given the support they need to deliver on that potential.

#soccer #nwsl

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bluboothalassophile · 6 years

Text

Devil’s Deal

Bruce stood in a nice townhouse, staring out at the dreary Gotham weather, his hands shoved in his pockets as he waited patiently for his business partner to get here. It had been many years since he’d been forced into a corner like this, but he was never one to turn back on a debt.

And what Lucifer Morningstar had done for him could never truly be repaid, however he was here.

“Relax, you’re too tense,” his wife said behind him. Bruce glanced at the mother of four of his elven children, her finger slid into his and he pulled her closer as he kissed her temple. He was thankful for Cat since he was twelve years old, even if they had an overly complicated relationship that had always been solid and shaky at the same time.

“We’ll hear him out, he’s a good man,” Selina said as she rested her chin on his shoulder.

“And if I can’t give him what he wants?” Bruce asked her. He feared Lucifer had come, come for one of his children, and that was something that terrified Bruce to no end.

“He’s not taking the kids,” Cat growled lowly. He squeezed her hand and watched as a black Audi pulled up. An older man, with white hair got out when a young woman with a scarred face got the car door for him. Bruce released Selina and walked to his study where he waited. It took five minutes before his eldest daughter walked in with the Devil himself behind her.

“Mr. Morningstar,” he acknowledged as Cass slipped out of the room.

“I’ve come to collect your debt Mr. Wayne,” Lucifer said as he sat. The old man stared him in the eye with dark eyes, and Bruce frowned.

“And what do you want?”

“I want you to find my granddaughter.”

~~~*~*~*~~~

Jason was scrolling through his texts, from Dickhead, Roy, Arty, Rose, Cass, Tim, Chris, Tiger, Artemis, demon spawn I, demon spawn II, Eddie, Connor, B, Cat, Joey, he sighed and shut off his phone as he stuffed it in his pocket before walking into the café. It wasn’t that important of a thing, and yeah, there was a big shipment to move, and logistics to coordinate, also subordinates to deal with, but Jason just wanted his fucking coffee!

Anyone who thought being a crime lord meant he was an entity who did not require sleep or coffee, they were wrong. He might not have been as needy about his caffeine as Tim, but he needed the caffeine. And it was six in the fucking morning, he wasn’t dealing with this shit! Not without coffee.

Jason came to his favorite café, the one with the best coffee he had ever had, and walked in. He kept his cap low, so as to not attract attention of people, he didn’t like people staring at his face, it made him uncomfortable.

He nodded at a regular who looked up at him.

Her black hair was short and messy her large dark eyes were showing signs of sleeplessness, her pale skin looked rather grey and he thought she needed the coffee more than he did.

“No sleep?” he asked.

“Deadline,” she answered.

“Ah,” he nodded as they shuffled in the crowd towards the register.

“What about you?” she yawned hugely.

“Big project,” he answered. Also Rose was in town, which had lead romp in the sheets.

“No sleep for the wicked then,” the girl sighed.

“Guess not,” he chuckled as they continued shuffling forward.

She and he had been regulars here for as long as he had been coming to this café. Which was since he had come to the NYC branch of the Bats. And he was guessing she was here before him. Mentally he had dubbed her little bird, she reminded him of one, and she was of his morning routine. They always showed up, at six on the weekdays, eight on the weekends, had a polite conversation as they muscled their way to the counter for their orders. She would order one for sure, sometimes three, rarely more than four. Hers was a simple order: vanilla latte, heavy on the vanilla, no expense spared on her vanilla. Weekends, she ordered tea, a London Fog, whatever that was.

Then they’d get their orders, he’d hold the door open as she left, and they’d part ways.

It was routine.

The small talk was nice, something he looked forward to, since she didn’t stare at his scar or tremble in fear like everyone else. It was just small talk, off handed comments about sleep, or books, a conversation about a tv show she was engrossed in, or a drama with a friend, all vague and personable. It was nice, something he liked, he could even bitch about his brothers and sisters to her and not worry about it getting back to them, as it was all vague and personable small talk.

It was a twenty minute, standing routine he carved out of his days for his morning caffeine fix and daily dose of small talk.

It was pleasant.

Impersonal.

Routine.

“How’s the cat?” he asked.

“You remember?”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t shut up about it,” he yawned.

“I named him, officially,” she smiled tiredly.

“No shit?”

“Yeah, Sylvester,” she chuckled softly.

“Damn.”

“He’s the devil incarnated,” she swore. Then they were at the counter, she put her orders in, three today, her other two regular orders. A caramel coma inducing coffee with milk instead of cream, then a four shot expresso macchiato with enough caramel and chocolate to have him recoiling. He didn’t know who those were for, but he had a feeling it had to do with her friends. “How’s your dad?”

“Stressing, big project at work,” he replied after he place his order; coffee black with a shot of expresso.

“That’s not good,” she decided as she shouldered her bag; it wasn’t a purse really, so much as a Mary Poppin’s bag, the woman seemed to have everything in there.

“It’ll work out, mom’s good at getting him out of his head,” he admitted.

“That’s good. You have a mark on your… oh, it’s a hickey,” she blurted out, and her face pinkened.

“Damn it,” he muttered. “Is it bad?”

“No, just uh… use the collar up,” she said and gestured on herself as she motioned lifting the collar up. He sighed and did as she suggested, he waited until she nodded and smiled a bit. “Better, You look better for your job now.”

“More presentable for the meetings,” he countered, and made a note to pay Rose back for the hickey. Her order and his were called out simultaneously and he watched as she grabbed the drink carrier, he followed as they made it to the door.

“See you tomorrow! Good luck in your meetings!” she smiled slightly.

“See ya, good luck with work,” he added as he got the door for her and she slipped out under his arm and they parted ways. It was all too familiar, impersonal, and routine, it was also the only welcomed interaction of his day. His phone rang as he took a sipp of the hot coffee and walked through the autumn spitting shower.

“What is it?” he asked noting it was Dickhead’s number.

“Dad’s calling us back to Gotham.”

“Can’t I got that shipment coming in from Cobblepot,” he said.

“Get Artemis to cover, this is a family emergency,” Dick said.

“Next time, start with he family emergency, I’ll be in Gotham by noon,” he said looking at his watch.

~~~*~*~*~~~

Raven had long since been going to that café, and as long as it was open she’d be going. They were the only ones to ever get her order right; that’s right, Starbucks had fucked her simple order up so much that she stuck to a small, out of her way café that made her leave her house at five thirty to get there at six to get to work by six thirty, which was perfect. It was a half an hour walk from her apartment, but it was a ten minute walk to her job.

The café might have been slower at serving people, crowded, stuffy, and filled with staff that she didn’t always want to deal with, but five years of going there through college and she had never had better coffee. Even three years ago when Jay had started showing up.

She had long since dubbed Mr. Sexy Muscles Jay, and part of it did have to do with the J carved into his right cheek. But she wasn’t about to call him Mr. Sexy Muscles, despite being incredibly handsome. Though she would admit the scar had been intimidating when she had first seen him, but three years of this impersonal, personal relationship they had standing and she could admit he was nothing if not a gentleman. And a complete mystery.

Raven loved it!

She liked having an impersonal stranger she could talk to, who didn’t know her and she didn’t know him, and she didn’t have to deal with all the drama of actually being friends with him. It was also nice that he was brutally honest with her, like about her situation about liking Garth but being unable to actually act on it because it was Garth and he was so beyond her league.

“I have the coffee,” she announce walking into Lantern’s Comics. She was a writer here, and she was a freelance ghost writer, but as Kyle and Jessica worked here this was where she tried to keep her main job. Though Hal wasn’t on about hiring as a full on writer for his comics about Oa, they were a huge hit with this generation. She had grown up on Oa comics.

“Thank the gods! You are the best Rae,” Kyle sighed as he grabbed his.

“I pulled another all nighter, I don’t want coffee, I was sleep and my pokemon,” Jessica whimpered into her desk.

“We finish this, then we’re set,” Raven predicted as she sat down and they got to work on finishing their deadline. The three of them were a team, Kyle the color artist, Jessica the line art artist, and Raven the writer/editor for their little comic. They had met in college, Jessica had been Raven’s roommate and Kyle had joined their group for an art project, things had never parted them and they just sort of kept working together. They no longer lived together but they met up Kyle’s bar, Warrior a lot. Raven lived over a bookstore, and Jessica lived over a garage where her mechanic neighbor drove her nuts. But it was that or live with her sister, so Jessica picked the apartment she was in.

“Raven!” Hal shouted.

“On it!” Raven hurried up to the boss’ office then.

~~~*~*~*~~~

Jason sat in the Gotham townhouse his many siblings there and he stared dumbfoundedly at his father, and mother. His mom’s hand was clasping his shoulder tightly as she lounged on the armrest beside him.

“You want us to find a unicorn,” Dick deduced flippantly.

“Why?” he whispered.

“What?”

“Why would you ask him?” Jason asked.

“The Joker had you,” Bruce stated icily.

“But the madman was worth making a deal with him!?” Jason roared surging to his feet. Lucifer Morningstar, the most ruthless, powerful, mobster in Europe! And Africa! Also having ties in Asia! The man’s global enterprise was a well oiled, never ceasing beast of a machine! Something built in the after math ruins of World War II and thrived in the Cold War, bloomed in the conflicts of Desert Storm and the hells of the recent wars. Lucifer, nicknamed the Devil, had never been more accurately nicknamed. A man with more power than the President or Lex Luthor, he was the most powerful crime lord ever to come into power.

“Yes! Jason! You were offering him anything he wanted!” Bruce roared back.

“So how are we to find his grandchild?” Tim asked.

“We start with Slade’s wife as Slade killed Ddrez Skath Morningstar for Arella,” Cat said. “We start, with Arella.”

“What exactly did Lucifer want?” Jason grounded out.

“He wants an heir, whoever finds the heir will have his alliance.” Bruce stated.

#bluboothalassophile #fanfic #one shot #raven #jason todd #bruce wayne #selina kyle #kyle rayner #jessica cruz #batcat #jayrae #redrae #raex #crime lord au

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redhooverwriter-blog · 6 years

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Ferry Ride to Avalon

The sea breeze licked the morning air. A welcome change from mom’s Audi. I thought. Moments ago, we had said our farewells, it was only going to be for a few days, but for a nineteen year old with an overbearing mother, that freedom was endlessly exciting.

A red-eyed little boy ran to and fro around the whorf before an old couple in tropical floral shirts told him off. I guessed that these were the other passengers. Slim pickings for conversation. I pondered. Just as well, I’d prefer to stick to my book anyways. A whistle and announcement from the intercom signaled us to board. The kid dodged on board as well, but I didn’t pay any notice and found the seat as far away from the other passengers as possible. Settling down onto the faded upholstery of the bench, I cracked open The Great Gatsby. Lost in the pages I didn’t see the little kid sit behind me.

The ferry lurched into motion and it wasn’t long before it began to rock back and forth, as is normal for a boat to. Normal for my consideration at least, but for the kid behind me, it certainly wasn’t. He moaned and sighed with every shift. A particularly nasty lurch pulled my head up from Gatsby, a second had me close the book. Lunch was dangerously close to coming up. Music instead. I thought, and I bent forward, reaching down into my pack for my headphones. I heard a groan from behind, but it was too late. A mass of pure, unadulterated wetness found its home on my back, slowly dribbling down my jacket and into my hair. I should have known better than to touch it, but I guess instinct kicked in.

Yeah… that’s vomit. I concluded upon inspection of my puke-covered fingers. The stench was about as horrid as you could imagine, and I could clearly see what the owner had had for breakfast. Honestly, I’m surprised that I didn’t hurl myself because it was certainly on my mind. I whirled around, expecting to explode, and from what I saw on the little boy’s face, he was expecting the same. Tears were welling up in his eyes and the front of his little Spiderman hoodie was puke-stained. My anger vanished at the sight of him.

“Hey now…” I said calmly, “ Don’t cry.” That didn’t help at all and the boy broke down into full on ugly crying. When you’re nineteen you really don’t know what to do in these sorts of situations, parenting was still, hopefully, years off.

Shoot, well I need to do something. I thought. Tell him that it’s OK, or that’s what they do in the movies.

“Hey…” I said. “Everything is going to be OK, don’t cry.” The kid looked at me, I guess surprised that I didn’t go off on him. He looked down at his hoodie, I could tell that it was his favorite, when I was little I felt the same way about my Ninja Turtles sweater.

“Let’s go get cleaned up, OK?” I suggested. He nodded and held out his hand. I took it into my own, noth the vomit soaked one mind you. The ferry a a small, unoccupied, washroom with a proper sink and everything. I rinsed off our hands and his mouth first with wet paper towels, wiping him up as best as I could. I probably wasted about ten more than I needed to, the trashcan was full when I finished wiping up his hoodie. Thankfully, it seemed to do the trick. He had stopped crying.

“So… you got a name?” I asked hesitantly.

“Timmy.” He whispered back. He does speak! I thought to myself, relieved.

“And your mom? Is she on board?” I asked. Of course she wasn’t, I had seen the only passengers and the others were too old to be his parents. He shook his head. Thought so. “But do you know where she is?” I asked, he gave another shake. OK, well I have no idea what I’m supposed to do now. I was feeling pretty sick myself, I owed that to mopping up vomit.

“Hey! I’m going to get a soda!” I said remembering that there was a snack bar onboard. “Do you want one?” I asked, trying my best to sound cheery. He nodded with unrestrained enthusiasm. Upstairs, at the snack bar, I ordered two Sprites, remembering the old folk remedy for stomach pains. We sat there for awhile, drinking our soda, not arousing any suspicion from the disinterested bartender. I guess it’s too early for him. I thought. Timmy slurped up his with gusto, but didn’t say much of anything. Too scared I guess, I would have been the same at his age, four or five I guessed. I needed a plan, I needed help, as much as I didn’t want to admit it. I looked at the bartender. I don’t think that he’s gonna be much help. I admitted.

I looked at my watch, quarter past nine, only fifteen minutes until we dock in Avalon. Okay. I thought. I’ll keep Timmy busy for fifteen minutes and go to the first officer I see when we land. I can do this, I can do this! I looked to my left, for Timmy, but he was gone.

“Shit!” I screamed. The bartender gave me a dirty look. “Hey! Did you see the kid run out?” I asked in panic. He shook his head. “Oh why do I even bother.” I muttered running down the steps from the bar into the seating area below. Crap, I don’t need this right now! Some relaxing trip this turned out to be! A million thoughts rushed my mind. What if he fell off the boat? What if he drowned? No! That’s ridiculous, the crew would have stopped the ferry! The old couple! I remembered. Maybe they have seen him.With hesitant confidence, I went out on the deck looking for them, or Timmy.

The couple were standing out at the front of the ferry, holding the railing like something out of Titanic and gazing at the growing Catalina. I bet that I surprised them when I ran up, probably wild-eyed.

“Hey!” I shouted, from the look they gave me after they whirled around, I’m surprised that they didn’t smack me. But they didn’t. “Have you seen a little kid in a red Spiderman hoodie run by?” I asked.

“Why?” They asked, obviously suspicious of this random stranger. I should have guessed that they would have been like that, they had never seen us together and I’m sure that I came across as kinda creepy.

I guess their one-word question confused my nineteen year old brain, because the next thing I did was garble a incomprehensible apology and stumble away. Yeah. I thought. I definitely seemed like a mega-creep right then. I booked it back to the seating area looking around frantically. The room was empty.

“We have landed at Catalina Island, Avalon.” The intercom buzzed as the ferry came to a halt. “Passengers please remember all your belongings before departing the ferry.”

My stuff! I remembered. I had completely forgotten about my pack. I heard the toilet flush as I ran by the restroom to the far-side of the sitting area. There, I found my pack and giving the area one more glance for Timmy, I left for the boarding area. Lo and behold Timmy was out, in line behind the older couple. When they saw me they pointed at Timmy mouthing Is this him? I nodded vigorously and rushed to Timmy giving him the biggest hug I could.

“Timmy!” I shouted. “You had me so worried!”

“Um…” A new voice said. “Who are you? And why are you hugging my son?” I looked up and a woman, who I figured was Timmy’s mother, had come up the boarding ramp to stand over us.

In a nervous panic, I scrambled away from Timmy trying to choke up an explanation. What came up was a few ums and a mention of vomit.

“Mommy this is my new friend Colin!” Timmy exclaimed. Saved by a four year old. I thought. “He cleaned me up when I went bleah and got me soda!” Timmy continued.

“Oh!” She said. “Thank you for watching my son, his father was supposed to be riding with him, but I guess he was too busy for his son.” I could sense that Timmy’s dad would be getting an angry phone call soon.

I waved goodbye to Timmy and his mother after she invited me over for dinner that night. As I embarked to my hotel I thought to myself. I need a nap, nine-thirty and I’m already exhausted. What a trip this is turning out to be.

#long post #long reads #short story #avalon #catalina #boat #writing #story #stories

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chiseler · 6 years

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THE GREATEST FILM COMPOSER NO ONE’S EVER HEARD OF

Over the course of roughly two decades, from the early Fifties to the late Sixties, Herman Stein composed the music for nearly two hundred films and television shows. If you’re of a certain mindset, he wrote some of the most memorable music for some of the greatest films ever made, including Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man. You’d never know it, though, as he only received credit on about half a dozen of the pictures he worked on. Trying to find a complete filmography can be a daunting task. Even his IMDb page is sorely incomplete and rife with inaccuracies.

In the mid-Nineties, while planning to launch a small record label devoted to releasing soundtracks from forgotten sci-fi and horror films from the Forties and Fifties, David Schecter set himself the task of tracking down some of the composers who’d worked on those pictures. Fully understanding most of these composers would have been in their eighties or nineties, at the very least he would contact their families or estates in hopes of gaining access to their written scores. One of the first he tried to find was Herman Stein.

“I don’t remember where I found the information,” Schecter recalls. “But Herman Stein had apparently died in 1984. His obituary was in Variety. So I began placing calls around town to every Stein I could find. Given there are a lot of Jewish people in Hollywood, I think this took up about a month of my life. I left messages all over town saying, ‘If you are a child of Herman Stein, please call me back. I’m trying to find out where his archives are.’ Then I moved on to other composers. One day the phone rang and my wife Katy came up to me and her face was white, and she said ‘That dead guy is on the phone.’ And I said, ‘Which dead guy?’ And she said ‘Herman Stein.’”

When Schecter picked up the phone, Stein, who had a reputation for being a bit cantankerous, demanded to know why Schecter was trying to get in touch with him.

“I said, ‘You’re THE Herman Stein?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but how could you have heard of me? No one’s heard of me.’ I explained that he had four cuts on that Dick Jacobs record, Themes from Horror Movies, from 1959, and I’d always loved his music. He seemed really suspicious and curmudgeonly. I explained we were thinking of starting a label and wanted to record some of his film music. He wanted to know what titles, and I told him his science fiction stuff—It Came from Outer Space, This Island Earth, Tarantula and on and on. And he said, ‘Why would you want to do that crap? Do my Westerns.’ And I said, ’Nobody cares about your Westerns.’ I mean, he scored dozens of these Audie Murphy Westerns, Rock Hudson Westerns, and you have to remember those were the prestige pictures back then. Those were the ones the composers were proud of. The science fiction stuff was just disposable. So I tried to convince him people still knew who the Creature from the Black Lagoon was, and he didn’t believe me.”

Upon leaving the movie business two decades earlier, Stein and his wife Anita retreated to their home in the Hollywood Hills. He didn’t go to the movies, he didn’t read about movies, and if one came on the television he’d snap it off. That was all part of his past life, and it didn’t interest him anymore. In fact, Schecter says, he was happy to hear about that Variety obituary, as it meant he had an excuse for not dealing with people anymore.

“I remember one thing that was really interesting to me and kind of put things in perspective,” says Schecter. “I told him I wanted to record some of the music from The Mole People, and he said, ’Did I do that picture?’ Even though every time that movie came on when I was growing up, whether it was five in the afternoon or four-thirty in the morning, I’d be up watching it. For Herman, it was a job he worked on for three ore four days in between a Ma and Pa Kettle movie and a swashbuckler, and that was it. And he probably only saw the part of the movie he scored—the opening scene. It would be like me asking you, ‘What did you do on July 17th, 1984?’ Chances are you have no idea, and Herman didn’t remember it at all. It made me realize I was coming from a very different perspective than the people who actually wrote that stuff. For them it was just product they were cranking out. It doesn’t mean they weren’t doing brilliant work, just that they didn’t obsess about this stuff.”

At the time Schecter contacted him, the only bits of Stein’s music to be recorded and released on an album appeared on that legendary 1959 Dick Jacobs record. Truth Be Told, it was a pretty shabby recording, performed by what was probably a seventeen-piece ensemble which, lacking a harp, substituted an organ instead. Schecter wanted to record his music properly and faithfully. As gruff as he was, it seems Stein still had some interest in the proposition.

“So he said he wanted to give me a test. I asked him what sort of test, and he said basically ‘to see if I can trust you with my music.’ I thought, oh boy, I’ve chosen the wrong composer. Bernard Herrmann had a reputation for being difficult, and Herman Stein was difficult in his own way. Anyway, he sent me a cassette with three pieces of music on it. The instructions were to listen to it, then call him up and talk to him about it. I had no idea what I was supposed to talk to him about, but I listened to it, then called him up and just gave him my two cents worth. Apparently, and I still don’t know to this day why, I passed the test with flying colors, and he said ‘Okay, tell me what you want and I’ll get it.’”

Stein began coming over to Schecter’s home with music, Schecter began releasing Stein’s scores on his Monstrous Movie Music label, and the two remained friends for the next dozen years, until Stein’s death at age 93.

Herman Stein, born in Philadelphia in 1915, had been an astounding child prodigy. He began playing piano at age two, and first performed with an orchestra at age six. In his teens he was selling compositions to jazz ensembles, orchestrating for the likes of Count Basie, and through his twenties was composing and arranging music for the radio.

“How he learned music was, he went to the library, and he’d look at the classical scores there. Just study them,” Schecter says. “He was entirely self-taught until he came to Hollywood, and he was already in his mid-thirties by then.”

After scoring an industrial film called Career for Two, Stein took a job with Universal’s music department in 1951. His first assignment involved arranging some classical pieces for the Boris Karloff picture The Strange Door. The first things he actually scored himself were a few musical cues for a 1952 Ozzie and Harriet vehicle, Here Come the Nelsons.

“Thing about Herman, he was…different,” Schecter admits. “He had a brilliant, brilliant mind. People talk about perfect pitch, but he said perfect pitch isn’t important. If you’re a composer what’s important is having relative pitch. He would hear everything orchestrally in his head before he wrote it. Most of the great composers couldn’t do that. They would sit at the piano, hit a note, write the note down, hit another note, and so on. Herman would just sit out in his car in the parking lot at Universal and write the scores out.{Fellow Universal film composer} Irving Gertz said he and Henry Mancini would walk by, and they could see Herman in the car transcribing the music he heard in his mind. They would just shake their heads. He was taught by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who taught everyone in Hollywood how to score films—Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams, so many others. Castelnuovo-Tedesco taught Herman to think everything out before he wrote it, and to write his scores in ink. You see sketches written by other composers and they’re in pencil and there are a million cross-outs and erasures, and that was just normal. It’s like being a writer like you and I are, you need to edit things. Herman wrote things out in ink, and apparently did not need to change them.”

The other thing about Herman, Schecter says, was that he was, even into his eighties, something akin to a human computer.

“I remember one day when I was doing some research on something. Herman had all his cue sheets and musical manuscripts in a closet at his home in Hollywood. I called him up one night and asked him about a piece of music he’d written for a Western in 1954. And I said, ‘It’s a piece called ‘On to Socorro’ or something like that. I told him I was wondering about why he did something the way he did there. And he said ‘Hmm, let me think about that for a second.’ He went over to the piano, and all of a sudden I heard this full orchestral version coming out of the piano. He’s not just hitting the notes with one finger, he was playing with flourishes and everything. You could hear the brass the way he was playing. It was about a two minute piece, and he’d played it perfectly, so far as I could tell because I’d been watching the film version. He got done with it, and I asked how he’d found the music so quickly. He said ‘Didn’t—I did it from memory.’ I asked him when he’d last heard the music, and he said ‘Only at the recording session.’ He’d written literally thousands of pieces of music, he’d written this one back in 1954. It was performed once, put away in his closet, and that was it. But he could play every single nuance of it fifty years later. He could do that with anything he’d written.”

In the early Fifties, Joe Gershenson was the head of Universal’s music department, and his second in command was composer Milt Rosen. Stein, Irving Gertz, Henry Mancini and others were mere contract composers. When a new picture was finished, it was determined how much time was left before the scheduled release, and how much money was left in the budget for music. Then Rosen, a couple of the composers, and the music editor would get together for a screening.

“They would decide which parts needed music and which didn’t,” Schecter explained. “They’d be doing that with the music editor, who’d be writing all these things down. Then depending on how much time they had and what the budget was. They would decide which parts needed new music, because that would take more time given the composer would have to write it, as they’d have to derive parts for the orchestra to play. All that versus how much older music they could use, maybe re-writing it slightly, or just re-using it as is. I’m not talking about using original recordings. But the written music. They already had the scores and the parts there, and wouldn’t have to spend the money on the copyist, and they wouldn’t have to spend the time. Some films would be completely scored, others would be a mix of new and old music, some would have nothing but older music. Then one or more of the composers would rearrange that older music to make it fit with the new music.

“Let’s say a few composers—Mancini, Gertz and Stein—were working together on a picture like The Monolith Monsters. For some reason, Irving Gertz scored most of The Monolith Monsters. Eighty percent of it. Some of the music came from earlier pictures, but the majority of it was written for that picture. And The Deadly Mantis, too—they were both the same score, so to speak, written at the same time. But then there were a few pieces Mancini wrote. Maybe Irving was running out of time, or maybe he had to work on something else. I have no idea. But someone told Mancini ‘Here are your three pieces,’ and they’d give Herman his three pieces. Sometimes the composers would talk to each other, sometimes they would play each other the themes they were using, so they’d have some kind of continuity. Sometimes the scenes a certain composer would be writing were so discreet from what the other composers were doing—maybe they just had to do with a certain subplot—so they could score their own things and it wouldn’t conflict with the rest of the picture. That’s one of the appeals of the Universal scores from the Forties and Fifties—there’s so much musical material in them. It wasn’t just one composer writing a couple themes and then doing endless variations on them. You listen to Creature from the Black Lagoon, even though the Creature theme is in there, Hans Salter’s music sounds like Hans Salter, Herman Stein’s music sounds like Herman Stein. Henry Mancini’s music sounds like Henry Mancini. Then there’s some older music by Milt Rosen that sounds completely different because it came from other pictures. There’s also a cue by Robert Emmett Dolan from Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, which had nothing to do with any of the other pictures that provided music. You end up with an incredible wealth of musical material from these grade-B horror films.”

In the end, however, particularly if there were multiple composers involved in scoring a picture, as music director it was Joe Gershenson who got the sole screen credit. This explains why Stein’s contributions went uncredited for roughly ninety-five percent of the films he worked on. So maybe it’s easy to comprehend why Stein would be a bit cantankerous.

“Herman was really something,” Schecter says. “Unfortunately he was his own worst enemy. He was a curmudgeon, and he had reason to be. Some really terrible things happened to him over his life that probably would have destroyed many a weaker man. So Herman could be bitter at times, and I understood that. But he was also very funny and incredibly smart. He should have done so much better in terms of his career, but again he was his own worst enemy. He was very opinionated, and very ethical. In Hollywood, there are not a lot of people with ethics, and Herman would call you on it. That’s why we got along so great, because I’m honest all the time, and Herman knew he could trust me. But he burned a lot of bridges, unfortunately. After the music department was taken down in 1958, Joe Gershenson wanted him to score John Huston’s Freud. I won’t tell you what Herman said, but it was very insulting to Gershenson . It was also very true, but he shouldn’t have said it. Gershenson told him, ‘you’re never gonna work on another film again,’ and Herman didn’t, except for {Roger Corman’s 1962 feature} The Intruder. Maybe that’s one of the reasons he liked The Intruder so much.

When the music department was dissolved, Stein, Irving Gertz, Hans Salter, Mancini and the others suddenly found themselves out of work. Gertz moved over to 20th Century Fox, and managed to bring a few others with him, including Stein. For the next decade, Stein would compose the music for TV shows like Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. A young Jerry Goldsmith, meanwhile, snagged his first high-profile job by scoring Freud back at Universal.

“Mancini was and unbelievably talented composer,” Schecter says. “Herman was also unbelievably talented. I think Herman could have had a much better career than he did. Mancini early on had the reputation for being the tunesmith. Whenever there was a song, they would ask Henry to write it, or they’d bring in one of their staff songwriters, or they would go to a freelance person. But Herman could write some really, really, beautiful melodies that he had hoped would be turned into a record so he could have a hit. But Universal didn’t allow him to do that. He got kinda bitter over that, and I can understand why, because I’ve heard some of his tunes. Just listen to ‘Sand Rock,’ the cue that opens It Came From Outer Space right after the main titles. Just absolutely gorgeous music, and you could have easily thrown lyrics on that and had a hit song, but they weren’t going to do that for Herman.”

Stein and his wife lived quietly for two decades, Herman focused on his commodities investments, until Schecter lured him back out into the world by calling attention to his music.

“It was both good and bad,” he says. “He always let you know how much you were putting him out, but you could tell how much he liked it beneath the rough exterior. When someone would call him up from a TV or radio show, he’d just light up. He felt he’d been forgotten, as a lot of these composers did. It was kind of difficult at the beginning. And I think there was a little resentment there—‘Oh NOW they’re discovering me, now that I’m too old to get jobs out of it.’ You can understand that, you don’t want to be recognized when you’re on your death bed, you want to be recognized when you can still produce. Herman was well aware of the career he could have had. I’m glad he lived long enough that I could show him books that make reference to him and his music.

“He still did amazing things,” Schecter went on. “To my mind he was the sound of 1950s science fiction. As wonderful as the other composers were. Herman was involved with a lot of the bigger, more important films. The scenes that he scored and the way he scored them, that’s what you think of when you think of the science fiction films of that era. One thing about Herman’s style that set it apart from the others, he could use dissonance to his advantage. He didn’t write atonal things like Alex North, where sometimes you don’t want to listen to them because they’re so harsh. But he could push the envelope, especially with the brass, to where it bordered on being dissonant, but it wasn’t. So he could create these sounds that sounded like horror and monsters, but were also fun to listen to. They didn’t repel you, they didn’t hurt your ear drums. I think that was his strength. You listen to the cue ‘Visitors from Space’ from It Came From Outer Space, and you can hear him pushing it so close to where it’s gonna hurt, but in the end it’s beautiful. You could probably slow dance to that piece, but it’s definitely strident. When you listen to all his music from all those movies, you say, ‘Yup, that’s 1950s horror.’”

by Jim Knipfel

#Jim Knipfel #The Chiseler #Herman Stein #The Creature From The Black Lagoon #It Came From Outer Space #Horror Music

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unsettlingshortstories · 4 years

Text

The Road Virus Heads North

Stephen King (1999)

Richard Kinnell wasn't frightened when he first saw the picture at the yard sale in Rosewood.

He was fascinated by it, and he felt he'd had the good luck to find something which might be very special, but fright? No. It didn't occur to him until later ("not until it was too late," as he might have written in one of his own numbingly successful novels) that he had felt much the same way about certain illegal drugs as a young man.

He had gone down to Boston to participate in a PEN/New England conference tided "The Threat of Popularity." You could count on PEN to come up with such subjects, Kinnell had found; it was actually sort of comforting. He drove the two hundred and sixty miles from Derry rather than flying because he'd come to a plot impasse on his latest book and wanted some quiet time to try to work it out.

At the conference, he sat on a panel where people who should have known better asked him where he got his ideas and if he ever scared himself. He left the city by way of the Tobin Bridge, then got on Route 1. He never took the turnpike when he was trying to work out problems; the turnpike lulled him into a state that was like dreamless, waking sleep. It was restful, but not very creative. The stop-and-go traffic on the coast road, however, acted like grit inside an oyster-it created a fair amount of mental activity ... and sometimes even a pearl.

Not, he supposed, that his critics would use that word. In an issue of Esquire last year, Bradley Simons had begun his review of Nightmare City this way: "Richard Kinnell, who writes like Jeffery Dahmer cooks, has suffered a fresh bout of projectile vomiting. He has tided this most recent mass of ejecta Nightmare City."

Route 1 took him through Revere, Malden, Everett, and up the coast to Newburyport. Beyond Newburyport and just south of the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border was the tidy little town of Rosewood. A mile or so beyond the town center, he saw an array of cheap-looking goods spread out on the lawn of a two-story Cape. Propped against an avocado-colored electric stove was a sign reading YARD SALE. Cars were parked on both sides of the road, creating one of those bottlenecks which travelers unaffected by the yard sale mystique curse their way through. Kinnell liked yard sales, particularly the boxes of old books you sometimes found at them. He drove through the bottleneck, parked his Audi at the head of the line of cars pointed toward Maine and New Hampshire, then walked back.

A dozen or so people were circulating on the littered front lawn of the blue-and-gray Cape Cod. A large television stood to the left of the cement walk, its feet planted on four paper ashtrays that were doing absolutely nothing to protect the lawn. On top was a sign reading MAKE AN OFFER-YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED. An electrical cord, augmented by an extension, mailed back from the TV and through the open front door. A fat woman sat in a lawn chair before it, shaded by an umbrella with CINZANO printed on the colorful scalloped flaps. There was a card table beside her with a cigar box, a pad of paper, and another handlettered sign on it. This sign read ALL SALES CASH, ALL SALES FINAL. The TV was on, turned to an afternoon soap opera where two beautiful young people looked on the verge of having deeply unsafe sex. The fat

woman glanced at Kinnell, then back at the TV. She looked at it for a moment, then looked back at him again. This time her mouth was slightly sprung.

Ah, Kinnell thought, looking around for the liquor box fined with paperbacks that was sure to be here someplace, a fan.

He didn't see any paperbacks, but he saw the picture, leaning against an ironing board and held in place by a couple of plastic laundry baskets, and his breath stopped in his throat. He wanted it at once.

He walked over with a casualness that felt exaggerated and dropped to one knee in front of it. The painting was a watercolor, and technically very good. Kinnell didn't care about that; technique didn't interest him (a fact the critics of his own work had duly noted). What he liked in works of art was content, and the more unsettling the better. This picture scored high in that department. He knelt between the two laundry baskets, which had been filled with a jumble of small appliances, and let his fingers slip over the glass facing of the picture. He glanced around briefly, looking for others like it, and saw none - only the usual yard sale art collection of Little Bo Peeps, praying hands, and gambling dogs.

He looked back at the framed watercolor, and in his mind he was already moving his suitcase into the backseat of the Audi so he could slip the picture comfortably into the trunk.

It showed a young man behind the wheel of a muscle car-maybe a Grand Am, maybe a GTX, something with a T-top, anyway - crossing the Tobin Bridge at sunset. The T-top was off, turning the black car into a half-assed convertible. The young man's left arm. was cocked on the door, his right wrist was draped casually over the wheel. Behind him, the sky was a bruise-colored mass of yellows and grays, streaked with veins of pink. The young man had lank blond hair that spilled over his low forehead. He was grinning, and his parted lips revealed teeth which were not teeth at all but fangs.

Or maybe they're filed to points, Kinnell thought. Maybe he's supposed to be a cannibal.

He liked that; liked the idea of a cannibal crossing the Tobin Bridge at sunset. In a Grand Am. He knew what most of the audience at the PEN panel discussion would have thought - Oh, yes, great picture for Rich Kinnell he probably wants it for inspiration, a feather to tickle his tired old gorge into one more fit of projectile vomiting-but most of those folks were ignoramuses, at least as far as his work went, and what was more, they treasured their ignorance, cossetted it the way some people inexplicably treasured and cossetted those stupid, mean-spirited little dogs that yapped at visitors and sometimes bit the paperboy's ankles. He hadn't been attracted to this painting because he wrote horror stories; he wrote horror stories because he was attracted to things like this painting. His fans sent him stuff - pictures, mostly - and he threw most of them away, not because they were bad art but because they were tiresome and predictable. One fan from Omaha had sent him a little ceramic sculpture of a screaming, horrified monkey's head poking out of a refrigerator door, however, and that one he had kept. It was unskillfully executed, but there was an unexpected juxtaposition there that lit UP his dials. This painting had some of the same quality, but it was even better. Much better.

As he was reaching for it, wanting to pick it up right now, this second, wanting to tuck it under his arm and proclaim his intentions, a voice spoke up behind him: "Aren't you Richard Kinnell?"

He jumped, then turned. The fat woman was standing directly behind him, blotting out most of the immediate landscape. She had put on fresh lipstick before approaching, and now her mouth had been transformed into a bleeding grin.

"Yes, I am," he said, smiling back.

Her eyes dropped to the picture. "I should have known you'd go right to that," she said, simpering. "It's so You."

"It is, isn't it?" he said, and smiled his best celebrity smile. "How much would you need for it?"

"Forty-five dollars," she said. "I'll be honest with you, I started it at seventy, but nobody likes it, so now it's marked down. If you come back tomorrow, you can probably have it for thirty." The simper had grown to frightening proportions. Kinnell could see little gray spit-buds in the dimples at the comers of her stretched mouth.

"I don't think I want to take that chance," he said. "I'll write you a check right now."

The simper continued to stretch; the woman now looked like some grotesque John Waters parody. Divine does Shirley Temple. "I'm really not supposed to take checks, but all right," she said, her tone that of a teenage girl finally consenting to have sex with her boyfriend. "Only while you have your pen out, could you write an autograph for my daughter? Her name is Michela?"

"What a beautiful name," Kinnell said automatically. He took the picture and followed the fat woman back to the card table. On the TV next to it, the lustful young people had been temporarily displaced by an elderly woman gobbling bran flakes.

" Michela reads all your books," the fat woman said. "Where in the world do you get all those crazy ideas?"

"I don't know," Kinnell said, smiling more widely than ever. "They just come to me. Isn't that amazing?. "

The yard sale minder's name was Judy Diment, and she lived in the house next door. When Kinnell asked her if she knew who the artist happened to be, she said she certainly did; Bobby Hastings had done it, and Bobby Hastings was the reason she was selling off the Hastings' things. "That's the only painting he didn't bum," she said. "Poor Iris! She's the one I really feel sorry for. I don't think George cared much, really. And I know he didn't understand why she wants to sell the house." She rolled her eyes in her large, sweaty face - the old can-you-imagine-that look. She took Kinnell's check when he tore it off, then gave him the pad where she had written down all the items she'd sold and the prices she'd obtained for them. "Just make it out to Michela," she said. "Pretty please with sugar on it?" The simper reappeared, like an old acquaintance you'd hoped was dead.

"Uh-huh," Kinnell said, and wrote his standard thanks-for-being-a-fan message. He didn't have to watch his hands or even think about it anymore, not after twenty-five years of writing autographs. "Tell me about the picture, and the Hastingses."

Judy Diment folded her pudgy hands in the manner of a woman about to recite a favorite story.

"Bobby was just twenty-three when he killed himself this spring. Can you believe that? He was the tortured genius type, you know, but still living at home." Her eyes rolled, again asking Kinnell if he could imagine it. "He must have had seventy, eighty paintings, plus all his sketchbooks. Down in the basement, they were." She pointed her chin at the Cape Cod, then looked at the picture of the fiendish young man driving across the Tobin Bridge at sunset. "Iris-that's Bobby's mother - said most of them were real bad, lots worse'n this. Stuff that'd curl your hair." She lowered her voice to a whisper, glancing at a woman who was looking at the Hastings' mismatched silverware and a pretty good collection of old McDonald's plastic glasses in a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids motif. "Most of them had sex stuff in them."

"Oh no," Kinnell said.

"He did the worst ones after he got on drugs," Judy Diment continued. "After he was dead-he hung himself down in the basement, where he used to paint-they found over a hundred of those little bottles they sell crack cocaine in. Aren't drugs awful, Mr. Kinnell?"

"They sure are."

"Anyway, I guess he finally just got to the end of his rope, no pun intended. He took all of his sketches and paintings out into the back yard-except for that one, I guess - and burned them. Then he hung himself down in the basement. He pinned a note to his shirt. It said, 'I can't stand what's happening to me.' Isn't that awful, Mr. Kinnell? Isn't that just the awfulest thing you ever heard?"

'Yes," Kinnell said, sincerely enough. "It just about is."

'Like I say, I think George would go right on living in the house if he had his druthers, " Judy Diment said. She took the sheet of paper with Michela's autograph on it, held it up next to Kinnell's check, and shook her head, as if the similarity of the signatures amazed her. "But men are different."

"Are they?"

"Oh, yes, much less sensitive. By the end of his life, Bobby Hastings was just skin and bone, dirty all the time-you could smell him - and he wore the same T-shirt, day in and day out. It had a picture of the Led Zeppelins on it. His eyes were red, he had a scraggle on his cheeks that you couldn't quite call a beard, and his pimples were coming back, like he was a teenager again. But she loved him, because a mother's love sees past all those things."

The woman who had been looking at the silverware and the glasses came over with a set of Star Wars placemats. Mrs. Diment took five I dollars for them, wrote the sale carefully down on her pad below "ONE DOZ. ASSORTED POTHOLDERS & HOTPADS," then turned back to Kinnell.

They went out to Arizona," she said, "to stay with Iris's folks. I know George is looking for work out there in Flagstaff-he's a draftsman-but I don't know if he's found any yet. If he has, I suppose we might not ever see them again here in Rosewood. She marked out all the stuff she wanted me to sell-Iris did - and told me I could keep twenty percent for my trouble. I'll send a check for the rest. There won't be much." She sighed.

"The picture is great," Kinnell said.

"Yeah, too bad he burned the rest, because most of this other stuff is your standard yard sale crap, pardon my French. What's that?"

Kinnell had turned the picture around. There was a length of Dymotape pasted to the back.

"A tide, I think."

"What does it say?"

He grabbed the picture by the sides and held it up so she could read it for herself This put the picture at eye level to him, and he studied it eagerly, once again taken by the simpleminded weirdness of the subject., kid behind the wheel of a muscle car, a kid with a nasty, knowing grin that revealed the filed points of an even nastier set of teeth.

It fits, he thought. If ever a title futted a painting, this one does.

" The Road Virus Heads North," she read. "I never noticed that when my boys were lugging stuff out. Is it the tide, do you think?"

"Must be." Kinnell couldn't take his eyes off the blond kid's grin. I know something, the grin said. I know something you never will.

"Well, I guess you'd have to believe the fella who did this was high on drugs," she said, sounding upset - authentically upset, Kinnell thought. "No wonder he could kill himself and break his mamma's heart."

"I've got to be heading north myself," Kinnell said, tucking the picture under his arm. "Thanks for-"

" Mr. Kinnell?"

"Yes?"

"Can I see your driver's license?" She apparently found nothing ironic or even amusing in this request. "I ought to write the number on the back of your check."

Kinnell put the picture down so he could dig for his wallet. "Sure. You bet."

The woman who'd bought the Star Wars placemats had paused on her way back to her car to watch some of the soap opera playing on the lawn TV. Now she glanced at the picture, which Kinnell had propped against his shins.

"Ag," she said. "Who'd want an ugly old thing like that? I'd think about it every time I turned the lights out."

"What's wrong with that?" Kinnell asked.

Kinnell's Aunt Trudy lived in Wells, which is about six miles north of the Maine - New Hampshire border. Kinnell pulled off at the exit which circled the bright green Wells water tower, the one with the comic sign on it (KEEP MAINE GREEN, BRING MONEY in letters four feet high), and five minutes later he was turning into the driveway of her neat little saltbox house. No TV sinking into the lawn on paper ashtrays here, only Aunt Trudy's amiable masses of flowers. Kinnell needed to pee and hadn't wanted to take care of that in a roadside rest stop when he could come here, but he also wanted an update on all the family gossip. Aunt Trudy retailed the best; she was to gossip what Zabar's is to deli. Also, of course, he wanted to show her his new acquisition.

She came out to meet him, gave him a hug, and covered his face with her patented little birdy-kisses, the ones that had made him shiver all over as a kid.

"Want to see something?" he asked her. "It'll blow your pantyhose off."

"What a charming thought," Aunt Trudy said, clasping her elbows in her palms and looking at him with amusement.

He opened the trunk and took out his new picture. It affected her, all right, but not in the way he had expected. The color fell out of her face in a sheet-he had never seen anything quite like it in his entire life. "It's horrible," she said in a tight, controlled voice. "I hate it. I suppose I can see what attracted you to it, Richie, but what you play at, it does for, real. Put it back in your trunk, like a good boy. And when you get to the Saco River, why don't you pull over into the breakdown lane and throw it in?"

He gaped at her. Aunt Trudy's lips were pressed tightly together to stop them trembling, and now her long, thin hands were not just clasping her elbows but clutching them, as if to keep her from flying away. At that moment she looked not sixty-one but ninety-one.

" Auntie?" Kinnell spoke tentatively, not sure what was going on here. "Auntie, what's wrong?"

"That." she said, unlocking her right hand and pointing at the picture. "I'm surprised you don't feel it more strongly yourself, an imaginative guy like you."

Well, he felt something, obviously he had, or he never would have unlimbered his checkbook in the first place. Aunt Trudy was feeling something else, though ... or something more. He turned the picture around so he could see it (he had been holding it out for her, so the side with the Dymotaped title faced him), and looked at it again. What he saw hit him in the chest and belly like a one-two punch.

The picture had changed, that was punch number one. Not much, but it had dearly changed. The young blond man's smile was wider, revealing more of those filed cannibal-teeth. His eyes were squinted down more, too, giving his face a look which was more knowing and nastier than ever.

The degree of a smile ... the vista of sharpened teeth widening slightly ... the tilt and squint of the eyes ... all pretty subjective stuff. A person could be mistaken about things like that, and of course he hadn't really studied the painting before buying it. Also, there had been the distraction of Mrs. Diment, who could probably talk the cock off a brass monkey.

But there was also punch number two, and that wasn't subjective. In the darkness of the Audi's trunk, the blond young man had turned his left arm, the one cocked on the door, so that Kinnell could now see a tattoo which had been hidden before. It was a vine-wrapped dagger with a bloody tip. Below it were words. Kinnell could make Out DEATH BEFORE, and he supposed you didn't have to be a big best-selling novelist to figure out the word that was still hidden. DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR was, after all, just the sort of a thing a hoodoo traveling man like this was apt to have on his arm. And an ace of spades or a pot plant on the other one, Kinnell thought.

"You hate it, don't you, Auntie?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, and now he saw an even more amazing thing: she had turned away from him, pretending to look out at the street (which was dozing and deserted in the hot afternoon sunlight), so she wouldn't have to look at the picture. "In fact, Auntie loathes it. Now put it away and come on into the house. I'll bet you need to use the bathroom."

Aunt Trudy recovered her savoir faire almost as soon as the watercolor was back in the trunk. They talked about Kinnell's mother (Pasadena), his sister (Baton Rouge), and his ex-wife, Sally (Nashua). Sally was a space-case who ran an animal shelter out of a double-wide trailer and published two newsletters each month. Survivors was filled with astral info and supposedly true tales of the spirit world; Visitors contained the reports of people who'd had close encounters with space aliens. Kinnell no longer went to fan conventions which specialized in fantasy and horror. One Sally in a lifetime, he sometimes told people, was enough.

When Aunt Trudy walked him back out to the car, it was fourthirty and he'd turned down the obligatory dinner invitation. "I can get most of the way back to Derry in daylight, if I leave now."

"Okay," she said. "And I'm sorry I was so mean about your picture. Of course you like it, you've always liked your ... your oddities. It just hit me the wrong way. That awful face. " She shuddered. "As if we were looking at him . . . and he was looking right back."

Kinnell grinned and kissed the tip of her nose. "You've got quite an imagination yourself, sweetheart."

"Of course, it runs in the family. Are you sure you don't want to use the facility again before you go?"

He shook his head. "That's not why I stop, anyway, not really."

"Oh? Why do you?"

He grinned. "Because you know who's being naughty and who's being nice. And you're not afraid to share what you know."

"Go on, get going," she said, pushing at his shoulder but clearly pleased. "If I were you, I'd want to get home quick. I wouldn't want that nasty guy riding along behind me in the dark, even in the trunk. I mean, did you see his teeth? Ag!"

He got on the turnpike, trading scenery for speed, and made it as far as the Gray service area before deciding to have another look at the picture. Some of his aunt's unease had transmitted itself to him like a germ, but he didn't think that was really the problem. The. problem was his perception that the picture had changed.

The service area featured the usual gourmet chow - burgers by Roy Rogers, cones by TCBY - and had a small, littered picnic and dogwalking area at the rear. Kinnell parked next to a van with Missouri plates, drew in a deep breath, let it out. He'd driven to Boston in order to kill some plot gremlins in the new book, which was pretty ironic. He'd spent the ride down working out what he'd say on the panel if certain tough questions were tossed at him, but none had been-once they'd found out he didn't know where he got his ideas, and yes, he did sometimes scare himself, they'd only wanted to know how you got an agent.

And now, heading back, he couldn't think of anything but the damned picture.

Had it changed? If it had, if the blond kid's arm had moved enough so he, Kinnell, could read a tattoo which had been partly hidden before, then he could write a column for one of Sally's magazines. Hell, a fourpart series. If, on the other hand, it wasn't changing, then ... what? He was suffering a hallucination? Having a breakdown? That was crap. His life was pretty much in order, and he felt good. Had, anyway, until his fascination with the picture had begun to waver into something else, something darker.

"Ah, fuck, you just saw it wrong the first time," he said out loud as he got out of the car. Well, maybe. Maybe. It wouldn't be the first time his head had screwed with his perceptions. That was also a part of what he did. Sometimes his imagination got a little ... well ...

"Feisty," Kinnell said, and opened the trunk. He took the picture out of the trunk and looked at it, and it was during the space of the ten seconds when he looked at it without remembering to breathe that he became authentically afraid of the thing, afraid the way you were afraid of a sudden dry rattle in the bushes, afraid the way you were when you saw an insect that would probably sting if you provoked it.

The blond driver was grinning insanely at him now-yes, at him, Kinnell was sure of it-with those filed cannibal-teeth exposed all the way to the gumlines. His eyes simultaneously glared and laughed. And the Tobin Bridge was gone. So was the Boston skyline. So was the sunset. It was almost dark in the painting now, the car and its wild rider illuminated by a single streetlamp that ran a buttery glow across the road and the car's chrome. It looked to Kinnell as if the car (he was pretty sure it was a Grand Am) was on the edge of a small town on Route 1, and he was pretty sure he knew what town it was-he had driven through it himself only a few hours ago.

"Rosewood," he muttered. "That's Rosewood. I'm pretty sure."

The Road Virus was heading north, all right, coming up Route 1 just as he had. The blond's left arm was still cocked out the window, but it had rotated enough back toward its original position so that Kinnell could no longer see the tattoo. But he knew it was there, didn't he? Yes, you bet.

The blond kid looked like a Metallica fan who had escaped from a mental asylum for the criminally insane.

"Jesus," Kinnell whispered, and the word seemed to come from someplace else, not from him. The strength suddenly ran out of his body, ran out like water from a bucket with a hole in the bottom, and he sat down heavily on the curb separating the parking lot from the dog-walking zone. He suddenly understood that this was the truth he'd missed in all his fiction, this was how people really reacted when they came face-to-face with something which made no rational sense. You felt as if you were bleeding to death, only inside your head.

"No wonder the guy who painted it killed himself," he croaked, still staring at the picture, at the ferocious grin, at the eyes that were both shrewd and stupid.

There was a note pinned to his shirt, Mrs. Diment had said. "I can't stand what's happening to me. " Isn't that awful, Mr. Kinnell?

Yes, it was awful, all right.

Really awful.

He got up, gripping the picture by its top, then strode across the dog-walking area. He kept his eyes trained strictly in front of him, looking for canine land mines. He did not look down at the picture. His legs felt trembly and untrustworthy, but they seemed to support him all right. just ahead, close to the belt of trees at the rear of the service area, was a pretty young thing in white shorts and a red halter. She was walking a cocker spaniel. She began to smile at Kinnell, then saw something in his face that straightened her lips out in a hurry. She headed left, and fast. The cocker didn't want to go that fast so she dragged it, coughing, in her wake.

The scrubby pines behind the service area sloped down to a boggy area that stank of plant and animal decomposition. The carpet of pine needles was a road litter fallout zone: burger wrappers, paper soft drink cups, TCBY napkins, beer cans, empty wine-cooler bottles, cigarette butts. He saw a used condom lying like a dead snail next to a torn pair of panties with the word TUESDAY stitched on them in cursive girly-girl script.

Now that he was here, he chanced another look down at the picture. He steeled himself for further changes even for the possibility that the painting would be in motion, like a movie in a frame - but there was none. There didn't have to be, Kinnell realized; the blond kid's face was enough. That stone-crazy grin. Those pointed teeth. The face said, Hey, old man, guess what? I'm done fucking with civilization. I'm a representative of the real generation X, the next millennium is tight here behind the wheel of this fine, high-steppin' mo-sheen.

Aunt Trudy's initial reaction to the painting had been to advise Kinnell that he should throw it into the Saco River. Auntie had been right. The Saco was now almost twenty miles behind him, but . .

"This'll do," he said. "I think this'll do just fine."

He raised the picture over his head like a guy holding up some kind of sports trophy for the postgame photographers and then heaved it down the slope. It flipped over twice, the frame caching winks of hazy late-day sun, then struck a tree. The glass facing shattered. The picture fell to the ground and then slid down the dry, needle-carpeted slope, as if down a chute. It landed in the bog, one comer of the frame protruding from a thick stand of reeds. Otherwise, there was nothing visible but the strew of broken glass, and Kinnell thought that went very well with the rest of the litter.

He turned and went back to his car, already picking up his mental trowel. He would wall this incident off in its own special niche, he thought ... and it occurred to him that that was probably what most people did when they ran into stuff like this. Liars and wannabees (or maybe in this case they were wannasees) wrote up their fantasies for publications like Survivors and called them truth; those who blundered into authentic occult phenomena kept their mouths shut and used those trowels. Because when cracks like this appeared in your life, you had to do something about them; if you didn't, they were apt to widen and sooner or later everything would fall in.

Kinnell glanced up and saw the pretty young thing watching him apprehensively from what she probably hoped was a safe distance. When she saw him looking at her, she turned around and started toward the restaurant building, once more dragging the cocker spaniel behind her and trying to keep as much sway Out of her hips as possible.

You think I'm crazy, don't you pretty girl? Kinnell thought. He saw he had left his trunk lid up. It gaped like a mouth. He slammed it shut. You and half the fiction-reading population of America, I guess. But I'm not crazy. Absolutely not. I just made a little mistake, that's all. Stopped at a yard sale I should have passed up. Anyone could have done it. You could have done it. And that picture

" What picture?" Rich Kinnell asked the hot summer evening, and tried on a smile. "I don't see any picture."

He slid behind the wheel of his Audi and started the engine. He looked at the fuel gauge and saw it had dropped under a half. He was going to need gas before he got home, but he thought he'd fill the tank a little further up the line. Right now all he wanted to do was to put a belt of miles - as thick a one as possible - between him and the discarded painting.

Once outside the city limits of Derry, Kansas Street becomes Kansas Road. As it approaches the incorporated town limits (an area that is actually open countryside), it becomes Kansas Lane. Not long after,, Kansas Lane passes between two fieldstone posts. Tar gives way to' gravel. What is one of Derry's busiest downtown streets eight miles east of here has become a driveway leading up a shallow hill, and on moonlit summer nights it glimmers like something out of an Alfred Noyes poem. At the top of the hill stands an angular, handsome barn-board structure with reflectorized windows, a stable that is actually a garage, and a satellite dish tilted at the stars. A waggish reporter from the Derry News once called it the House that Gore Built ... not meaning the vice president of the United States. Richard Kinnell simply called it home, and he parked in front of it that night with a sense of weary satisfaction. He felt as if he had lived through a week's worth of time since getting up in the Boston Harbor hotel that morning at nine o'clock.

No more yard sales, he thought, looking up at the moon. No more yard sales ever.

I "Amen," he said, and started toward the house. He probably should stick the car in the garage, but the hell with it. What he wanted right now was a drink, a light meal - something microwaveable - and then sleep. Preferably the kind without dreams. He couldn't wait to put this day behind him.

He stuck his key in the lock, turned it, and punched 3817 to silence the warning bleep from the burglar alarm panel. He turned on the front hall light, stepped through the door, pushed it shut behind him, began to turn, saw what was on the wall where his collection of framed book covers had been just two days ago, and screamed. In his head he screamed. Nothing actually came out of his mouth but a harsh exhalation of air. He heard a thump and a tuneless little jingle as his keys fell out of his relaxing hand and dropped to the carpet between his feet.

The Road Virus Heads North was no longer in the puckerbrush behind the Gray turnpike service area.

It was mounted on his entry wall.

It had changed yet again. The car was now parked in the driveway of the yard sale yard. The goods were still spread out everywhereglassware and furniture and ceramic knickknacks (Scottie dogs smoking pipes, bare-assed toddlers, winking fish), but now they gleamed beneath the light of the same skullface moon that rode in the sky above Kinnell's house. The TV was still there, too, and it was still on, casting its own pallid radiance onto the grass, and what lay in front of it, next to an overturned lawn chair. Judy Diment was on her back, and she was no longer all there. After a moment, Kinnell saw the rest. It was on the ironing board, dead eyes glowing like fifty-cent pieces in the moonlight.

The Grand Am's taillights were a blur of red-pink watercolor paint. It was Kinnell's first look at the car's back deck. Written across it in Old English letters were three words: THE ROAD VIRUS.

Makes perfect sense, Kinnell thought numbly. Not him, his car. Except for a guy like this, there's probably not much difference.

"This isn't happening," he whispered, except it was. Maybe it wouldn't have happened to someone a little less open to such things, but it was happening. And as he stared at the painting he found himself remembering the little sign on Judy Diment's card table. ALL SALES CASH, it had said (although she had taken his check, only adding his driver's license ID number for safety's sake). And it had said something else, too.

ALL SALES FINAL.

Kinnell walked past the picture and into the living room. He felt like a stranger inside his own body, and he sensed part of his mind groping for the trowel he had used earlier. He seemed to have misplaced it.

He turned on the TV, then the Toshiba satellite tuner which sat on top of it. He turned to V-14, and all the time he could feel the picture out there in the hall, pushing at the back of his head. The picture that had somehow beaten him here.

"Must have known a shortcut," Kinnell said, and laughed.

He hadn't been able to see much of the blond in this version of the picture, but there had been a blur behind the wheel which Kinnell assumed had been him. The Road Virus had finished his business in Rosewood. It was time to move north. Next stop

He brought a heavy steel door down on that thought, cutting it off before he could see all of it. "After all, I could still be imagining all this," he told the empty living room. Instead of comforting him, the hoarse, shaky quality of his voice frightened him even more. "This could be ... But he couldn't finish. All that came to him was an old song, belted out in the pseudo-hip style of some early '50s Sinatra done: This could be the start of something BIG ...

The tune oozing from the TV's stereo speakers wasn't Sinatra but Paul Simon, arranged for strings. The white computer type on the blue screen said WELCOME TO NEW ENGLAND NEWSWIRE. There were ordering instructions below this, but Kinnell didn't have to read them; he was a Newswire junkie and knew the drill by heart. He dialed, punched in his Mastercard number, then 508.

"You have ordered Newswire for [slight pause] central and northem Massachusetts," the robot voice said. "Thank you very m--"

Kinnell dropped the phone back into the cradle and stood looking at the New England Newswire logo, snapping his fingers nervously. "Come on," he said. "Come on, come on."

The screen flickered then, and the blue background became green. Words began scrolling up, something about a house fire in Taunton. This was followed by the latest on a dog-racing scandal, then tonight's weather - clear and mild. Kinnell was starting to relax, starting to wonder if he'd really seen what he thought he'd seen on the entryway wall or if it had been a bit of travel-induced fugue, when the TV beeped shrilly and the words BREAKING NEWS appeared. He stood watching the caps scroll up.

NENphAUG19/8:40P A ROSEWOOD WOMAN HAS BEEN BRUTALLY MURDER-ED WHILE DOING A FAVOR FOR AN ABSENT FRIEND. 38-YEAR-OLD JUDITH DIMENT WAS SAVAGELY HACKED TO DEATH ON THE LAWN OF HER NEIGHBOR'S HOUSE, WHERE SHE HAD BEEN CONDUCTING A YARD SALE. NO SCREAMS WERE HEARD AND MRS. DIMENT WAS NOT FOUND UNTIL EIGHT O'CLOCK, WHEN A NEIGHBOR ACROSS THE STREET CAME OVER TO COMPLAIN ABOUT LOUD TELEVISION NOISE. THE NEIGHBOR, DAVID GRAVES, SAID THAT MRS. DIMENT HAD BEEN DECAPITATED. "HER HEAD WAS ON THE IRONING BOARD," HE SAID. "IT WAS THE MOST AWFUL THING I'VE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE." GRAVES SAID HE HEARD NO SIGNS OF A STRUGGLE, ONLY THE TV AND, SHORTLY BEFORE FINDING THE BODY, A LOUD CAR, POSSIBLY EQUIPPED WITH A GLASSPACK MUFFLER, ACCELERATING AWAY FROM THE VICINITY ALONG ROUTE ONE. SPECULATION THAT THIS VEHICLE MAY HAVE BELONGED TO THE KILLER

Except that wasn't speculation; that was a simple fact.

Breathing hard, not quite panting, Kinnell hurried back into the entryway. The picture was still there, but it had changed once more. Now it showed two glaring white circles - headlights - with the dark shape of the car hulking behind them.

He's on the move again, Kinnell thought, and Aunt Trudy was on top of his mind now - sweet Aunt Trudy, who always knew who had been naughty and who had been nice. Aunt Trudy, who lived in Wells, no more than forty miles from Rosewood.

" God, please God, please send him by the coast road," Kinnell said, reaching for the picture. Was it his imagination or were the headlights farther apart now, as if the car were actually moving before his eyes ... but stealthily, the way the minute hand moved on a Pocket watch? "Send him by the coast road, please."

He tore the picture off the wall and ran back into the living room with it. The screen was in place before the fireplace, of course; it would be at least two months before a fire was wanted in here. Kinnell batted it aside and threw the painting in, breaking the glass fronting-which he had already broken once, at the Gray service area - against the firedogs. Then he pelted for the kitchen, wondering what he would do if this didn't work either.

It has to, he thought. It will because it has to, and that's A there is to it.

He opened the kitchen cabinets and pawed through them, spilling the oatmeal, spilling a canister of salt, spilling the vinegar. The bottle broken open on the counter and assaulted his nose and eyes with the high stink.

Not there. What he wanted wasn't there.

He raced into the pantry, looked behind the door - nothing but a plastic bucket and an 0 Cedar - and then on the shelf by the dryer. There it was, next to the briquets.

Lighter fluid.

He grabbed it and ran back, glancing at the telephone on the kitchen wall as he hurried by. He wanted to stop, wanted to call Aunt Trudy. Credibility wasn't an issue with her; if her favorite nephew called and told her to get out of the house, to get out light now, she would do it ... but what if the blond kid followed her? Chased her?

And he would. Kinnell knew he would.

He hurried across the living room and stopped in front of the fireplace.

"Jesus," he whispered. "Jesus, no."

The picture beneath the splintered glass no longer showed oncoming headlights. Now it showed the Grand Am on a sharply curving piece of road that could only be an exit ramp. Moonlight shone like liquid satin on the car's dark flank. In the background was a water tower, and the words on it were easily readable in the moonlight. KEEP MAINE GREEN, they said. BRING MONEY.

Kinnell didn't hit the picture with the first squeeze of lighter fluid; his hands were shaking badly and the aromatic liquid simply ran down the unbroken part of the glass, blurring the Road Virus's back deck. He took a deep breath, aimed, then squeezed again. This time the lighter fluid squirted in through the jagged hole made by one of the firedogs and ran down the picture, cutting through the paint, making it run, turning a Goodyear Wide Oval into a sooty teardrop.

Kinnell took one of the ornamental matches from the jar on the mantel, struck it on the hearth, and poked it in through the hole in the glass. The painting caught at once, fire billowing up and down across the Grand Am and the water tower. The remaining glass in the frame turned black, then broke outward in a shower of flaming pieces. Kinnell crunched them under his sneakers, putting them out before they could set the rug on fire.

He went to the phone and punched in Aunt Trudy's number, unaware that he was crying. On the third ring, his aunt's answering machine picked up. "Hello," Aunt Trudy said, "I know it encourages the burglars to say things like this, but I've gone up to Kennebunk to watch the new Harrison Ford movie. If you intend to break in, please don't take my china pigs. If you want to leave a message, do so at the beep."

Kinnell waited, then, keeping his voice as steady as possible, he said:

"It's Richie, Aunt Trudy. Call me when you get back, okay? No matter how late."

He hung up, looked at the TV, then dialed Newswire again, this time punching in the Maine area code. While the computers on the other end processed his order, he went back and used a poker to jab at the blackened, twisted thing in the fireplace. The stench was ghastly - it made the spilled vinegar smell like a flowerpatch in comparison-but Kinnell found he didn't mind. The picture was entirely gone, reduced to ash, and that made it worthwhile.

Mat if it comes back again?

"It won't," he said, putting the poker back and returning to the TV. "I'm sure it won't."

But every time the news scroll started to recycle, he got up to check. The picture was just ashes on the hearth ... and there was no word of elderly women being murdered in the Wells-Saco-Kennebunk area of the state. Kinnell kept watching, almost expecting to see A GRAND AM MOVING AT HIGH SPEED CRASHED INTO A KENNEBUNK MOVIE THEATER TONIGHT, KILLING AT LEAST TEN, but nothing of the sort showed up.

At a quarter of eleven the telephone rang. Kinnell snatched it up. "Hello?"

"It's Trudy, dear. Are you all right?"

"Yes, fine."

"You don't sound fine," she said. "Your voice sounds trembly and funny. What's wrong? What is it?" And then, chilling him but not really surprising him: "It's that picture you were so pleased with, isn't it? That goddamned picture!"

It calmed him somehow, that she should guess so much ... and, of course, there was the relief of knowing she was safe.

"Well, maybe," he said. "I had the heebie-jeebies all the way back here, so I burned it. In the fireplace."

She's going to find out about Judy Diment, you know, a voice inside warned. She doesn't have a twenty-thousand-dollar satellite hookup, but she does subscribe to the Union-Leader and this'll be on the front page. She'll put two and two together. She's far from stupid.

Yes, that was undoubtedly true, but further explanations could wait until the morning, when he might be a little less freaked ... when he might've found a way to think about the Road Virus without losing his mind ... and when he'd begun to be sure it was really over.

"Good!" she said emphatically. "You ought to scatter the ashes, too!" She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was lower. "You were worried about me, weren't you? Because you showed it to me.

"A little, yes."

"But you feel better now?"

He leaned back and closed his eyes. It was true, he did. "Uh-huh. How was the movie?"

"Good. Harrison Ford looks wonderful in a uniform. Now, if he'd just get rid of that little bump on his chin . . ."

"Good night, Aunt Trudy. We'll talk tomorrow."

"Will we?"

"Yes," he said. "I think so."

He hung up, went over to the fireplace again, and stirred the ashes with the poker. He could see a scrap of fender and a ragged little flap of road, but that was it. Fire was what it had needed all along, apparently. Wasn't that how you usually killed supernatural emissaries of evil? Of course it was. He'd used it a few times himself, most notably in The Departing, his haunted train station novel.

"Yes, indeed," he said. "Bum, baby, bum."

He thought about getting the drink he'd promised himself, then remembered the spilled bottle of vinegar (which by now would probably be soaking into the spilled oatmeal-what a thought). He decided he would simply go on upstairs instead. In a book-one by Richard Kinnell, for instance - sleep would be out of the question after the sort of thing which had just happened to him.

In real life, he thought he might sleep just fine.

He actually dozed off in the shower, leaning against the back wall with his hair full of shampoo and the water beating on his chest. He was at the yard sale again, and the TV standing on the paper ashtrays was broadcasting Judy Diment. Her head was back on, but Kinnell could see the medical examiner's primitive industrial stitchwork; it circled her throat like a grisly necklace. "Now this New England Newswire update," she said, and Kinnell, who had always been a vivid dreamer, could actually see the stitches on her neck stretch and relax as she spoke. "Bobby Hastings took all his paintings and burned them, including yours, Mr. Kinnell ... and it is yours, as I'm sure you know. All sales are final, you saw the sign. Why, you just ought to be glad I took your check."

Burned all his paintings, yes, of course he did, Kinnell thought in his watery dream. He couldn't stand what was happening to him, that's what the note said, and when you get to that point in the festivities, you don't pause to see if you want to except one special piece of work from the bonfire. It's just that you got something special into The Road Virus Heads North, didn't you, Bobby? And probably completely by accident. You were talented, I could see that right away, but talent has nothing to do with what's going on in that picture.

"Some things are just good at survival," Judy Diment said on the TV. "They keep coming back no matter how hard you try to get rid of them. They keep coming back like viruses."

Kinnell reached out and changed the channel, but apparently there was nothing on all the way around the dial except for The Judy Diment Show.

" You might say he opened a hole into the basement of the universe," she was saying now. "Bobby Hastings, I mean. And this is what drove out. Nice, isn't it?"

Kinnell's feet slid then, not enough to go out from under him completely, but enough to snap him to.

He opened his eyes, winced at the immediate sting of the soap (Prell had run down his face in thick white rivulets while he had been dozing), and cupped his hands under the shower-spray to splash it away. He did this once and was reaching out to do it again when he heard something. A ragged rumbling sound.

Don't be stupid, he told himself. All you hear is the shower. The rest is only imagination.

Except it wasn't.

Kinnell reached out and turned off the water.

The rumbling sound continued. Low and powerful. Coming from outside.

He got out of the shower and walked, dripping, across his bedroom on the second floor. There was still enough shampoo in his hair to make him look as if it had turned white while he was dozing-as if his dream of Judy Diment had turned it white.

My did I ever stop at that yard sale? he asked himself, but for this he had no answer. He supposed no one ever did.

The rumbling sound grew louder as he approached the window overlooking the driveway-the driveway that glimmered in the summer moonlight like something out of an Alfred Noyes poem.

As he brushed aside the curtain and looked out, he found himself thinking of his ex-wife, Sally, whom he had met at the World Fantasy Convention in 1978. Sally, who now published two magazines out of

her trailer home, one called Survivors, one called Visitors. Looking down at the driveway, these two tides came together in Kinnell's mind like a double image in a stereopticon.

He had a visitor who was definitely a survivor.

The Grand Am idled in front of the house, the white haze from its twin chromed tailpipes rising in the still night air. The Old English letters on the back deck were perfectly readable. The driver's side door stood open, and that wasn't all; the light spilling down the porch steps suggested that Kinnell's front door was also open.

Forgot to lock it, Kinnell thought, wiping soap off his forehead with a hand he could no longer feel. Forgot to reset the burglar alarm, too . not that it would have made much difference to this guy.

Well, he might have caused it to detour around Aunt Trudy, and that was something, but just now the thought brought him no comfort.

Survivors.

The soft rumble of the big engine, probably at least a 442 with a four-barrel carb, reground valves, fuel injection.

He turned slowly on legs that had lost all feeling, a naked man with a headful of soap, and saw the picture over his bed, just as he'd known he would. In it, the Grand Am stood in his driveway with the driver's door open and two plumes of exhaust rising from the chromed tailpipes. From this angle he could also see his own front door, standing open, and a long man-shaped shadow stretching down the hall.

Survivors.

Survivors and visitors.

Now he could hear feet ascending the stairs. It was a heavy tread, and he knew without having to see that the blond kid was wearing motorcycle boots. People with DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR tattooed on their arms always wore motorcycle boots, just as they always smoked unfiltered Camels. These things were like a national law.

And the knife. He would be carrying a long, sharp knife - more of a machete, actually, the sort of knife that could strike off a person's head in a single sweeping stroke.

And he would be grinning, showing those filed cannibal-teeth.

Kinnell knew these things. He was an imaginative guy, after all.

He didn't need anyone to draw him a picture.

"No," he whispered, suddenly conscious of his global nakedness, suddenly freezing all the way around his skin. "No, please, go away." But the footfalls kept coming, of course they did. You couldn't tell a guy like this to go away. It didn't work; it wasn't the way the story was supposed to end.

Kinnell could hear him nearing the top of the stairs. Outside the Grand Am went on rumbling in the moonlight.

The feet coming down the hall now, worn bootheels rapping on polished hardwood.

A terrible paralysis had gripped Kinnell. He threw it off with an effort and bolted toward the bedroom door, wanting to lock it before the thing could get in here, but he slipped in a puddle of soapy water and this time he did go down, flat on his back on the oak planks, and what he saw as the door clicked open and the motorcycle boots crossed the room toward where he lay, naked and with his hair full of Prell, was the picture hanging on the wall over his bed, the picture of the Road Virus idling in front of his house with the driver's side door open.

The driver's side bucket seat, he saw, was full of blood. I'm going outside, I think, Kinnell thought, and closed his eyes.

0 notes

micahblissd · 5 years

Text

The Legend of Bunny Strayed

Earlier that week, Erica had handed Micah a portfolio of a woman named Bunny Strayed professionally. Erica wouldn’t explain exactly why it was so important that he do this project with her — Johnny Fuck, a parody on the life of the late Johnny Cash. Apparently, the project had been shelved after Cash had passed, where enough time could pass before the Pleasure Company continued it.

While he wasn’t with the Pleasure Company anymore, he decided he’d look into it at the very least, as a favor to Erica. She was pushier than usual with the project, especially after who would play the parodied role of June Carter Cash was chosen.

He pulled into the airport, waiting for Miss Bunny Strayed’s plane to land. She took a flight from Seattle to Los Angeles. There had been bad weather in Seattle; it was early in the year, and United Airlines didn’t want to risk taking off with six inches of snow and ice on the runway. It was two in the morning; Micah flipped through the stations in his silver Audi R8. He was supposed to get Sirius set up, but there never seemed to be enough time in the day.

A brunette was out smoking out the side door. She had a coat hanging off one arm, and was still in winter boots. At that, he got out of the car. The glass doors opened as he passed them. “Bunny Strayed?” He asked, closing the space between them.

The woman nodded, pulling her luggage behind her. “That’s me,” she said, laughing off her nerves. “You look taller in real life.” He snorted. People naturally went to flattery when they had no idea what to say. He shrugged instead, and took the handle of her luggage for her.

“Hope you don’t mind a messy car. I’ve been mostly slamming big macs while reading the script,” he said, and walked back with her to his car. This scene was commonplace: typically, if he and his co stars had a shoot the next day, he tended to have them over since his place wasn’t far from the studio. Because Bunny was from Seattle, she showed up two days early in an attempt to recoup before they got started.

“I can deal,” she said, getting in the passenger side. He noted that Bunny immediately began moving her hands over the interior. Micah figured it had something to do with her portfolio, or lack thereof; the leather seats didn’t strike him the same way anymore. His movie count was well into the hundreds then, while if he recalled correctly, Johnny Fuck was maybe Bunny’s fiftieth. And yeah, it absolutely did matter in terms of comfort in front of the camera or in the passenger seat of a luxury vehicle.

If she hadn’t somehow caught Erica’s attention, Micah knew deep down that Bunny would still be in Seattle, doing whatever she did there. If Erica hadn’t made a point to keep throwing Bunny’s papers in his face, he wouldn’t even know she existed. It felt queer to him to think that way about the woman in his car… But it was the truth.

He got in the driver’s seat, and shifted out of the parking space. “So, Bunny. What’s your real name?”

“My name is Sarah,” she replied, her hands wringing in her lap. “Sarah Marquardt. I’m originally from LA.”

Micah pursed his lips, nodding, making his way toward the seven lane highway. “Erica seemed to make you a special case,” he said, glancing at her nonchalantly for a second. “She seemed to really think I needed to meet you.” While his tone was on the more accusatory side, Erica had started trying to set him up on blind dates. Not usually with actresses, though.

“I —“ Bunny began, but shrugged. “She knew my mom,” she finished.

Micah wasn’t convinced. Erica’s actions regarding this girl were weird. It wasn’t like her to be so emotionally invested; he sussed that she was only going to give him half the story.

His phone dinged with a tell tale text message: Call me tomorrow after you get her home. He sighed, resigned to the sensation that he was getting conned somehow, apart from the contract agreements. He knew basically, in a vague sense, that Bunny Strayed was going to spend a couple days before they began production on Johnny Fuck. “You like music?”

Bunny snorted. “Who doesn’t like music?”

Micah began messing with the radio again, but decided to hand her the aux cord instead. He burst into a grin as the sound leveled out to the first chords of “Sex and Candy” by Marcy Playground. Bunny let out a little laugh. “I thought it was fitting.”

“I see you’re a romantic,” he answered, shifting into a lower gear to get off the highway toward the PCH. His apartment complex ran right next to an exit just outside of LA. “I don’t know about you, but I think you should get some sleep. Sitting in an airport for twelve hours is exhausting.”

Bunny’s hand moved toward his inner thigh; underneath the black shorts he wore, there was a black dragon her hand rubbed. “I thought we’d spend some time getting to know each other,” she murmured, soft, relaxed. “We do have a shoot to do and all.”

Micah glanced at her hand, then let his own eyes meet hers. “I — don’t know if — Erica said, but I do things my own way.” His voice broke, not in fear, but in surprise. “Naturally.” He didn’t move her hand, though — she was attractive. But this just wasn’t how he operated.

“You don’t fuck your co stars before you work with them?” She laughed, moving her hand. “I’ve heard tons of men and women have spent the night with you before a shoot. What do you do if you don’t have sex?”

He bleated a shocked laugh. “I’m not a machine, dude. Sometimes I just want to literally get to know people.” He watched her face in the mirror, still watching the road. There was a childlike quality to her features; not by age, as she was twenty-four, but it didn’t look like she understood who he was, either.

“I’m sorry,” she said, running a hand through chestnut colored hair. “I don’t really know why I jumped the gun. I just — assumed, I guess.”

He slowed, taking some back ways to his apartment. It occurred to him how strange it must’ve been to be in a car with a man she didn’t know and he didn’t just immediately want to have sex. He wondered how many women would get into cars today expecting something similar, but getting much worse.

“There’s no easy way for me to say this,” he started, getting to the parts of the area where speeds were much lower than highway. “It isn’t that you’re not attractive, or I don’t understand exactly the kind of animals you’ve been exposed to, or the kinds of things you expect. But nights like these, I don’t fuck. Sex work is stupid taxing, and at least I personally need to get into the right mindset anymore. It’s insane I used to do thirty-five to forty movies a year, the first ten years of my career. I’ve gotten the chance to dwindle it down to just ten.”

“You can afford it,” she answered. “But — I’m not you. At this point, it’s kind of embarrassing that I asked Erica for help.”

He drove into a complex of modest buildings, updated with grey roofs and blue exteriors. He pulled into a spot, and looked at her. “You wanted to do it on your own,” he told her. It might’ve been a question once. Maybe it was formed that way in the back of his mind. Micah had a tendency to state things, rather than ask them.

She neither confirmed nor denied it, but they just sat staring at one another. It was dark, the outlines of their features colored blue by the dash lights. “Who is she to you? Really?” He questioned. He didn’t like it when people wouldn’t just outright say things; he didn’t like the fronts people wore.

“Can we go inside, Micah?” She answered. She pulled the pink, unzipped hoodie closer to her stomach.

He nodded, and got out. He pulled her luggage from the backseat. She followed. On his way up to the second floor of the complex, he locked his car from the stairs. He could feel his eyes on her the entire way. Her eyes, maybe a few shades lighter than his, felt like coals at the base of his spine. Micah didn’t like knowing he was in the same room as someone just as secretive as him.

Inside his apartment, the space was clean. He liked it warm, a near scalding seventy-eight degrees. He couldn’t sleep in the cold. The faux fireplace in the corner left the living room a soft glow orange. Letting the luggage slump against the wall next to the door, he pulled the shades closed and flicked on a lamp at the desk underneath the windows.

“You like it dark,” she said.

“Fluorescents hurt my eyes. Contrary to what people probably think of as a typical socal boy, I’ve never liked bright lights. I also prefer the beach right around this time. I usually only go during the day if I’m depressed to shower and lay at the very edge of the water,” he answered, letting himself relax. He slipped off his shoes, and shrugged off the short sleeve button up to reveal a green tank.

With his phone, he texted Erica: You should probably tell me what’s going on when I call.

Micah couldn’t shake this sensation that something was terribly wrong in Bunny’s life. Sarah. Whatever. She was quiet. She sat on the couch, and leaned back, putting her boots on the carpet. “Are you hungry?” he asked.

Bunny nodded, and took off her hoodie, letting it slide easily off her shoulders. He held out a hand to her. “Come sit with me and I’ll make you something. I’ve got some leftovers from dinner.”

She took his hand. They went down the hall to a small kitchen; she yelped when he picked her up and put her on the counter. He leaned over and opened the fridge, and pulled out a bag of steak and a container of mashed red skin potatoes. “What’re you about, Bunny?” he asked, putting it on a plate, and turning on the counter toaster oven. He slid the plate inside. “What makes you happy?” He licked cold potatoes off his thumb. “What hurts you?”

She seemed unsure of any answer she was thinking of. “I… Like men,” she said. “Cars. Music. Freedom. Money.”

Micah snorted. “Tell me something real, Sarah.” He rested a hand against her outer thigh. The velour of her tracksuit bottoms was soft against his hands. “If at no other point in our acquaintance, just do that for me this one time.”

“I’m not being fake,” she laughed. “What if the greatest part of me is what we’ll be doing tomorrow? And even if it was, what’s wrong with that?” She smiled, but her eyes were cold. Distinctly, he got the notion that Bunny just wanted to survive.

“I’ve had sex with just under four hundred and fifty women, not including the ones I fucked before I got into films. I can remember the titles of maybe thirty of my own works, but I know I’m somewhere past five hundred movies at this stage in my career. But you know what I don’t do? Bullshit people. I would fucking kill myself if porn was all I lived for,” he replied, keeping his voice low, and removing his hand. “So what is your damage?”

“Why are you prying so hard for my life story? You like to jack off about it when girls like me go to sleep or something?” She scoffed.

He was impressed. He lifted his brows and closed his eyes. “I just want to know why I’m taking my dick out tomorrow,” he answered, laughing. He was exhausted. “I just want to understand why Erica fucking Caine called me every day for a month. Why I had to shut down filming for a stupid flick, and pick up her script. Not that I don’t love her. Not that I wouldn’t do it again. But she’s not like that. She runs her own shit.”

Micah didn’t notice, but Bunny’s eyes were wet. “I’m the daughter she gave up to be an alcoholic stripper,” Bunny blurted, almost choking herself on the words. “I haven’t been able to stop drinking on my own, and I was doing shit jobs for little pay! But she’s my fuckin’ mom!” Her shoulders shook. Anger marred her features. All Micah could do was stand there. “She told me I could trust you, asshole.”

His hand moved to rest over his mouth. “Oh shit,” he whispered, and blocked her when she tried to run. “I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, I’m sorry,” he kept saying, reaching for the wall next to her. “I just got really paranoid. She never said anything — I assumed she was trying to set me up, or something else — I didn’t think —”

Bunny let a few more tears to escape, her eyes boring a hole into Micah’s. She looked disgusted. “Can you just be nice? Please?”

“I’m sorry that I wasn’t,” he answered, pulling back. “I just didn’t know what was going on, and I didn’t like it.”

“Okay,” she said. “Move. The toaster just beeped.” Micah did as she said, and she grabbed the plate. “Will you just watch some TV with me, like a normal fucking person?” Micah nodded, shocked again. Erica Caine, trusting him with her own child, whom she never once mentioned? He did the math in his head. Erica was twenty-one when Sarah was born. That’s the year she did her first triple featurette. It was called Fairy Godfucker.

Micah sat next to her. Over the course of the night, they scooted closer to one another. Laughed here and there. But they couldn’t quite look at one another the same after that.

#is... CASUALLY CRYING AGAIN #sp #don't #at #me

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themaninflannel · 8 years

Text

Hunters Life part 5 of The Inevitable

Summary: Y/N has her first hunt and she introduces the boys to an old friend in a bar

Warning: swearing, drinking

word count: ~1950

part one, part two, part three, part four

“So, get this, there are demon signs outside of Bloomington,” I heard Sam say, I had spent the last however-many-hours asleep in the back of the Impala with my head on a pile of sweatshirts-mostly mine- and I woke up under what looked like Dean’s leather jacket, I knew I didn't fall asleep under it so someone must have put in on me while i was sleeping.. I turned over so I was facing the front seat and kept listening to the boys conversation.

“What signs? Is it worth the drive?” Dean asked turning to sam, somehow he never got into wrecks even though he never looked at the road.

“Freak storms, crop circles, blackouts,” Sam listed.

“So, we going to Bloomington?” I asked as I sat up, scaring the boys.

“Holy shit! How long have you been awake?!” Sam shouted with his shoulders up by his ears, his knee hitting the underside of the dash board, and his hands flying up making me laugh in a very sleepy manner.

“Hey! You're up. Welcome back to the world of the living, sleepyhead,” Dean chuckled from his spot in the driver's seat before continuing, “it sounds like there might be a case so we’ll head there in the morning, there’s a motel coming up and we’ll crash there for a few hours.”

“Sounds like a plan. I have an old friend in Bloomington, I might try to meet up with her while we’re there, if I can find time,” I said as I flopped back down onto the seat. Dean drove for another few hours until he pulled into a parking lot and bought a room.

“Bed! Finally! I’ve missed you, my old friend!” I said, falling onto one of the two beds face down in a star.

“Alright, shove over. We gotta share tonight, I only got one room.” Dean shoved me over and got under his side of the covers, he was passed out in a heartbeat. Sam crashed on the bed next to us and we slept like the dead until the sun came up.

“Time to go, come on Sammy! Rise and shine!” Dean pulled the blankets off of his younger brother, only to be answered with a grunt.

“Sam, you can crash in the back seat so you can keep sleeping,” I crouched next to his bed, slowly pulling on his arm until he was sitting. Thankfully he fell asleep in his clothes and shoes so all we had to do was get him up.

“So, does that mean you’re sitting next to me for the drive?” Dean winked.

“Ok come on, don’t make it pervy.” I smacked him on the shoulder on my way to the car. I couldn't let him know how much his flirting really affected me. I knew he flirted with everyone and that it meant nothing, but secretly, it still made me happy.

When we got to Bloomington, Indiana Sam and I set up in a coffee shop so go over all of the news reports while Dean went to go get us a couple motel rooms. We went through all of the evidence and decided that it was a crossroads demon cashing in deals before their time.

“Ok, so we need: holy water, spray paint, exorcisms on a loop...anything else?” I started to make a list of all the things we needed to get together.

“That loop thing is a good idea, ummm, we need to get you an anti-possession tattoo soon, but i don't think we have to do it right now, cause this is gonna be the first hunt where you’re actually going to be hunting with us and not just doing research,” he smiled at me knowingly.

“Wait. you guys are gonna let me hunt!” I had been begging for months to be a real part of the adventure, they didn't like that I called it adventure but too bad for them!

“Yeah, Dean finally said yes. This is what you’ve worked for. You feel ready?” I was bouncing in my chair as we packed up all our stuff.

I burst through the motel room door and threw my bag down on the bed and hopped onto the other one where Dean was sleeping, effectively waking him up,

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I chanted, attacking him with a hug, knocking him back onto the bed.

“Uh….for what? Tell me so I can do it again,” he laughed blearily, bringing his arm around my back, pushing us both into a sitting position.

“You said I could hunt! You did say that right?” I pulled away from the embrace, I really didn't want to though, I could see myself snuggled into his chest way into old age.

“I said that you could hunt, if you were careful. And I mean it. You gotta be careful out there.” I could tell he was in full-on lecture mode.

“Ok. ok! I know the drill. I will be very cautious. No heroic moves for me. Promise,” I reassured him.

“Good.” he pulled me back into a hug, a very very tight-almost desperate-hug, like it was the last time he would see me.

_____________

The demon swung her arm and sent the boys flying against the wall of the abandoned warehouse we tracked her to. She had been taking attractive men in their mid-thirties, all from the same bar, so we used Dean as bait and then find him. But she turned out to be much stronger than we thought, and the boys were no match for her powers. Thankfully the empath thing kicked in.

“Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica. Ergo, omnis legio diabolica, adiuramus te...cessa decipere humanas creaturas, eisque æternæ perditionìs venenum propinare...Vade, Santana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciæ, hostis humanæ salutis...Humiliare sub potenti manu Dei; contremisce et effuge, invocato a nobis sancto et terribili nomine...quem inferi tremunt...Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine. Ut Ecclesiam tuam secura tibi facias libertate servire, te rogamus, audi nos!” i shouted, standing behind the demon watching the black smoke billow out from her mouth. As i finished the exorcism her hold on the boys weakened and they were released from their places on the wall. When the demon was gone i rushed over to the boys,

“Are you guys ok? She was a bitch,” I was worried that they were gonna be hurt, she threw them against the wall pretty hard.

“Yeah, we’re ok. Why didn’t she throw you too?” Dean asked pushing himself up with his hands on his knee.

“Maybe it’s the empath thing? Like, Castiel didn't have any power over me so maybe that kinda thing just doesn’t work on me?” i offered sam a hand, he was still on the floor kinda holding his head.

“That’s gonna come in handy, nice exorcism by the way” dean congratulated me on my first hunt with a huge high-five and a big hug.

“Ok boys, let’s make sure you don’t have a concussion and then go celebrate with drinks? My friend Mel told us her favorite bar…” I said very leadingly as we walked back to the impala. When we got in the car i texted Mel to meet us there in an hour,

We sat around one of the tall bar tables drinking and talking until Mel got there. Once she was settled with a drink we found a pool table and got a game started. The boys didn't know that I had practically grown up in a bar and was actually really good at pool, so of course i decided to see if Mel and i could hustle them.

“You start,” i handed Dean the pool cue so that he could break. “But, i bet you $20 that Mel and i will win….”

“Deal. you girls are gonna regret that,” he took his shot, immediately sinking three striped balls, “ok, you guys work on the solids,”

“Oh, i haven't played this in forever,” i said looking at Mel, and i utterly failed my turn: the ball spun off to the side and i got no points. “Crap, eh, your turn again” it went on like that until the game was over, with us epically failing.

“Ok ok! One more chance! Double or nothing….. Please?” i did the whole puppy dog eye flirt thing with my hand on Dean’s arm so that he wouldn't catch on to the hustle. Once he agreed and set up the balls i pulled out all the stops to beat them, including shamelessly showing off my butt to distract them from my perfect shots.

“Where did you learn how to play like that?” dean asked from behind me as i won, i could tell he was staring at my skinny jean clad ass. And i knew i should have had a problem with that but it was dean- it was the only man i actually wanted to notice my ass.

“Between my dad and my mom’s boyfriends, i spent a lot of time in bars. a nd i got really bored, so i got good at pool and i learned how to pour a beer with barely any head,” i explained while gathering the cash off of them. When we were back at our table the four of us starting talking.

“So how did you guys meet? Did you grow up in Ohio like Y/N?” dean asked.

“No, our parents were friends from high school, so we naturally liked each other.” Mel answered, finishing her drink.

“We’ve known each other since we were little. Man, we’ve had some fun in our time,” i said making Mel snort into her Vodka tonic, telling the boys more about our past than i did.

“What does that reaction mean?” sam asked Mel, he had been paying attention to her since the moment she walked in. i could tell he thought she was hot, and she was: mile-long legs gorgeous blonde hair, practically supermodel type.

“Wouldn't you like to know!” she laughed.

“Oh come on, we should tell them. They would love it! I mean they’re gonna make it all pervy, but that will make funny,” i corrected her.

“We might need a few more drinks before we tell that particular story!” she said as she ordered shots for us.

“I'm very interested now,” dean teased as we pounded shots.

“Ok ok! So one night, she was in town and she crashed at my place, my roommates were out of town that night……” I started.

“and i brought some pot and booze, and we got very drunk, and sad-” she continued

“Cause we were watching sappy romance movies-” i interjected

“Right, yeah. We we were sad and drunk and at the end of Sixteen Candles i leaned in…….”

“And i met her halfway…. And we ended up doing it on my couch-”

“Well… we almost did it on the couch, her roommate walked in and we never actually got to the best part.” by this time our words had started to slur and we were very giggly.

“Well, hot damn.” dean sounded impressed.

“Did you guys ever actually hook up?” sam asked.

“Nah, it would have been a baaadd ideaa…” i slurred.

“Ok, i think it’s time that we all went home, you ladies are a little inebriated,” Sam commented, standing up and handing all of our coats to us before leading us to the Impala. Dean dropped Mel and I off at her apartment and said he would pick me up the next day to we could find another hunt.

tag list: @jchona, @aoise-fandom-clover, @barricade-ghost, @lilsunshine44, acreativelydifferentlove, @p4labras-0cultas,

#dean x reader #dean imagine #dean #dean one shot #dean winchester fic #dean winchester imagine #dean winchester #drunk!dean #supernatural fic #supernatural imagine #supernatural oneshot #supernatural

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theliterateape · 5 years

Text

Muffled in German Luxury

By Paul Teodo & Tom Myers

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming novel Call Me Z by Paul Teodo and Tom Myers.

I HAD NOTHING TO REPORT, AND NO ONE TO REPORT IT TO. It was barely noon. I lived alone. I hadn’t spoken to my ex in twelve years. My two boys were gone, one in Fiji teaching yoga and meditation, the other living in the city at a job he’d just started. They didn’t need my grief. My dog loved me, but lately I bored him. Most likely when I got home I’d find a pile on the floor to welcome me.

I’d clean out the office later. I found my car in the visitor lot where I always parked. I pressed my fob. Nothing, not a twitch or honk or anything. Again. Nothing. Dead. Just like me. I stabbed the key into the door and twisted the lock open. I slid into the seat. My soggy suit stuck to my chilled skin.

And yes, Rebecca was gone. After four years she left the ring on the nightstand and shut the door. She had pushed for that ring. But we never set the date. Never called me her fiancé. Walked out with a sad look on her face, but not enough sadness to get her to stay. Maybe we weren’t a good fit either. I don’t think it was the drinking. I kept that from her pretty good. And the few times I didn’t she joined in. Her reasons were just as clear as Greta’s. “We’re going nowhere. We don’t communicate. You’re far away and we have no future.” Stuff I knew was more true than not. So instead of fighting for us, I let us drift away.

A triple Dewar’s White Label with a splash of water would go good right now, but I almost had a year. The last time I had that drink I woke up in Mexico, lying on a cot embracing a bearded goat. Turns out I’m not a farm animal kind of guy. So I wouldn’t let Rebecca’s rejection and the evisceration by Greta with all its accompanying humiliation drive me to the bottle.

I could hear Tommy telling me, “Cunning, baffling, powerful.” He talked like that. He worried too much. He was my sponsor.

I should call him. I always felt better when I did. He’d chew my ass. But I was sixty, not a kid. And I just got fired.

I started the car. Cold air blasted my legs. I was jumpy, rubbing my hands together, waiting for the warmth. Some idiot was barking on sports talk radio. I didn’t need his big mouth yelling at me. He was trying to make everything sound important or profound, but like he was from the neighborhood. He probably was a media-wise shill from an Ivy League school knocking down a couple hundred K a year selling Viagra to guys who didn’t have anything better to do in the middle of the day. Now I was one of them. How long before I started calling in?

I’ll call Tommy instead. He’d give me his crap, and I’d listen, then feel better, and then he’d throw in, “Let’s go to a meeting.” A meeting was his answer for everything. Sometimes, you know, it’s not. Sometimes, you have to hit the problem between the eyes. He’d always say, “Pause, pray, proceed.” Sometimes, it was just too much. I threw on Puccini’ instead. Tosca. Depressing as hell, full of torture, murder, and suicide, but the music was beautiful.

I backed up my Audi. The white Crown Vic patrol car I signed a requisition for just a few months ago edged closer. For Christ sake, what did Greta think? I was going to go nuts? Randy, the old guy, sat behind the wheel, Brylcreemed hair and weird handlebar mustache. Junior, his sidekick, a steroid pumped, over-caffeinated, blonde kid coiled next to him, ready to jump out of the car. Both carefully watching to make sure I left without incident. Security. Highlands’ finest.

I threw it into gear. Randy and Junior in pursuit. What the hell, give them something to do, I’d liven up their day, and make them earn their money. I drove slowly around the campus heading towards Greta’s office. Would they just follow me or flip on their lights? Training would indicate caution, but no lights. I shouldn’t be doing this. One was old, near retirement, and the other’s juice-strained mind was totally unpredictable. As I exited the campus they looked relieved, staring between the wipers on the Crown Vic. With a nod they each saluted, acknowledging my final departure. I was touched by their deference and disappointed in my behavior.

My phone buzzed. It was stuck inside my wet pants. I yanked it out, ripping my pocket. I flipped it open. “Boss, Joe. What the hell happened?”

“Just wasn’t working out, Joe.”

“You get canned?”

“Did you talk to Jenna?” Joe and Jenna got along. He said he had a daughter that reminded him of her. Gullible and kind of quiet. She and her three kids lived with Joe and his wife. The kids were all under seven. Joe joked that he’d take any overtime he could get just to stay away from the nut-house.

I took a deep breath. Why make it worse for Joe? I was his guy and his misplaced loyalty could screw up his job. He only had three years left to retirement. “Mutual understanding, Joe. Not my kinda place and Greta agreed. I’ll land on my feet, and things will keep going at The Highlands.”

Joe cleared his throat hard and coughed. He quit smoking years ago but he was still paying for his vice.

“Okay boss, wish you well. Keep in touch. You always had my back.”

“Joe.”

“Yeah?“

“Get that temp down in the OR for our good friend.”

He hacked again. I could see his neck turning red. “Fuck him, boss. And fuck his cold dead wife.”

“Take care, buddy.”

“Keep in touch.”

Nobody keeps in touch.

“I will.”

✶

I DROVE AROUND AIMLESSLY, THE SCOTCH CREEPING BACK INTO MY HEAD. I was done with Puccini. I put “Sona Andati,” the death aria from LaBoheme, into the CD player, trying to distract myself. It didn’t work. I shut it off before I looked for an oven to stick my head in. No real taverns in this town. I needed to call Tommy before I settled on a cocktail lounge attached to a sushi bar. It was noon and the streets were jammed with stylized fashionistas in hybrid SUVs driving their car-seated darlings who’d been born in our Taj Mahal Birthing Center to ballet, voice, or parent-toddler yoga. Having taken advantage of our Women’s Self Improvement Center, they wore their expensive yoga pants with great pride, bejeweled hands wrapped around a caramel low-fat macchiato, designer water bottle at the ready.

I couldn’t drive and dial. Even with this damn flip phone. I pulled into the parking lot of a dog groomer. An eight inch miniature something or other, tethered to a blue spring-loaded leash with a black satin harness, led its mistress towards an Audi A-8.

I pecked at the buttons like a hooded hawk. I could never remember his number. I had it stored in my phone but any attempt at technology made me sweat. First attempt got me a bakery, the next a Chinese woman, and the third an old guy who wanted to talk and didn’t care if it was the wrong number. Finally Tommy picked up. ”State your business.” His usual greeting.

“Tommy.”

“What’s up?”

“You got a minute?”

“You drinkin’?” Every time. Every single time.

“No.”

“Good.”

“It’s not just about drinking.”

“It is with us. We drink. We got no chance. So it’s all about drinking or not drinking. What’s up?”

I felt like throwing the phone out the window. Aiming at the miniature mutt whose shrill bark penetrated like a police whistle.

“What’s that?”

“Dog. Sort of. One of those squawkers.”

“Sounds like it’s being tortured.”

“I wish.” Its mistress lifted the horrible creature into her Audi. It spun in circles on the back seat. She closed the door on its high pitched yap, muffling it in German luxury.

“What happened? Did you shoot it?”

“I got fired.”

“Good. You didn’t belong there. I’m surprised you lasted as long as you did.”

Asshole. He didn’t even take a breath.

“Okay meet me at the 2 p.m. meeting at the firehouse.”

“No.”

“Really, what you got better to do?”

“No meeting.”

“I’ll meet you at Nina’s Coffee Shop at two.”

“That’s in the city.”

“That’s where you belong.”

Tommy clicked off his phone never giving me a chance to respond to his invite. It wasn’t an invite, it was an order. That’s how he operated. I hated it, and it was good for me. I was soaked. I should change. But if I went home and put on dry clothes I’d never make it by two. It was miles of busted up black top, potholes, trucks, smoke, and congestion. Two hours travel time, minimum. What the hell. I felt like a bum, just getting fired, might as well look like one. I’d fit in fine at Nina’s.

People snaking along this God-forsaken, cruelly misnamed expressway looked like zombies propped up behind the wheel in their seats. How the fuck did they do this every day?

For once the weather-guessers had been right. It had gotten colder and the drizzle turned to sleet. My teeth chattered. I banged on the vent, no evidence of warmth appeared. And my swollen prostate needed a place to piss.

I drove east. The gorilla inside me calling Tommy every vile name it could conjure. Traffic was surprisingly clear when I caught the 355 extension towards the Stevenson. You never let yourself think that in Chicago. The hell started as the ramp merged. First with the orange signs. Construction. Down to one lane. Forty-five miles-per-hour speed limit. And nobody, not one goddamn person around. Not a hard hat or yellow vest. Everything blocked off and not a soul carrying out construction.

A bearded, leather-jacketed asshole on a Harley, replete in red bandanna, shades and cigar swept by on the left claiming that all-important extra six feet of travel time, forcing me to jam on my brakes, skid and miss him by only inches. He raised his leather-gloved middle finger as I regained control.

Only thirty miles left.

We crawled through the deserted construction zone never topping fifteen miles-per-hour. My windows fogged. My suit grew musty. Forty minutes later traffic cleared slightly and we reached the breakneck speed of twenty-five miles-per-hour. People snaking along this God-forsaken, cruelly misnamed expressway looked like zombies propped up behind the wheel in their seats. How the fuck did they do this every day?

Eventually the construction cleared, I gunned it and shot between two semis belching smoke. As I passed the Harley, he saluted again. I didn’t wave goodbye. Then a jolt rattled the right side of my car, the vibration like an electrical shock through my hands. Pothole. Shit. The front end continued to shake. The steering wheel danced like it had a mind of its own and was happy with what just happened.

Pull off? Here, in the middle of semi-hell? The shoulders on this road were invitations for death. All I could do was slow down, and proceed. At best I’d wobble into Nina’s with a bent rim and malfunctioning suspension.

I exited at California near the Cook County Jail and immediately came to a stop behind a dirty green articulated bus. Four miles left. Inside the car was now a steam room. Droplets of foul smelling sweat dampened my seat. My disfigured vehicle no longer moved in a straight line, I relaxed my hands on the steering wheel, and tried to catch my breath. I unhinged my jaw which had been locked shut for the past ninety minutes. Just miles from my destination, I was trapped behind the world’s slowest moving vehicle and flanked by a continuous parade of broken cars dragging bumpers, tailpipes, and trailers overflowing with decrepit furniture, soon to be delivered to a home instead of the dumpster where it belonged. I loved this city despite its infamous traffic.

Thank you, Tommy, yeah, this is exactly what I needed.

The bus was a permanent fixture. It wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe it was housing for the homeless. It was definitely a stretch to call it transportation.

I saw an opening, snapped the steering wheel to the left and shot around the bus. The car responded angrily shaking and shimmying as if the front wheels were pointed in different directions.

Proud of myself, I looked in the rear view mirror to see how much distance I had put between me and the bus. My eyes were distracted by blue swirling lights following me. I didn’t need this crap. “Pull over, sir.” The cop’s loudspeaker blared. At least he gave me due respect. It’d been a long time since I’d been called sir by anyone.

I needed a drink. In a real tavern with a sticky stinking bar, dirt on the floor, and people who served you by just nodding their head. I could pull over, slide in, and drift away for days talking with construction workers, the homeless, and hangers on. Or I could be left alone. Those places knew how to leave you the fuck alone.

I momentarily thought of making a run for it. But with a wobbly front end, a foggy windshield, and congested streets I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. I put the bar on hold and adhered to the cop’s order. I slowly guided my damaged car into a lot that serviced a small strip mall containing a currency exchange, a cigarette store, and a beauty salon featuring nails, weaves, and extensions. A crowd of about a dozen young punks dressed in black, saggy pants defying gravity, some with braided hair, but mostly bald, shuffled about, music blaring, passing joints and bottles in brown paper bags.

Now I was grateful that the squad followed me in.

A freckle-faced redheaded cop exited his vehicle, hand at his side gripping his pistol. The crowd taunting, pointing back and forth between the two of us. The cop’s eyes constantly shifted between me and the group. I rolled down my window “License, registration, and insurance,” he said, eyes on the kids. “Slowly,” he emphasized as I rummaged through my glove box.

Methodically, I pulled the documents from the box and placed each, one by one, into the redhead’s hand. He didn’t belong here, nor did I. His eyes kept a constant scan on the parking lot. The music pounded louder. The wind chilled my still damp body through the open window. “Wait here.” He turned and walked back to his car.

Fucking Tommy. He drags me forty miles from home to a parking lot full of gangbangers. What the hell was I doing?

The young cop returned after running my stuff. He handed me an orange and white citation. “You can show up in court, or…” both our backs stiffened as the blaring music somehow grew more threatening, “or pay direct. Your choice.”

“Thanks.” I said. My window swiftly rising, providing a false sense of security.

He began to leave. He turned, “and your front end is out of whack. If you’re gonna be driving around here, you need a car that works.”

No shit. I acknowledged his advice with a wave through my closed window.

I studied the ticket. Improper lane use. $125. Do not send cash. Lucky me.

I eased slowly through the lot to return to the street. The kids didn’t move. My car wobbled even more. “Better get that fixed.” One of them laughed and kicked at the front end. I hit the gas and sped out of the lot.

Finally I pulled up to Nina’s. Soaked from the elements and my own fear. I exited my damaged vehicle spotting Tommy through the dirty window sitting alone at a table, his starched white collar peeking from under his gray hooded sweat shirt, his foot tapping to the beat of Wilson Pickett. He was fidgeting with the menu, his gnarled hands scarred from years in the ring.

I rushed in, the bell above the door jingling, my prostate screaming for a bathroom. I made a bee-line for the toilet. He looked up. “Any trouble getting here?”

#sobriety #Sobriety #South Side #Fiction #Chicago Fiction

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