#i metaphorically counted all my pores individually 50 times writing this idc. idc i'm posting it.

[widowshill]

Hadestown starters, if I may?: “ lover, you were gone so long ”? please and thank you!

HADESTOWN.

She was different than he'd left her: there was pink gloss at her lips, silk on her skin, and dangled there around her neck diamonds sufficient to weigh her down — to drag her into the sea. Pearls were the Collins jewel of choice for their brides: drug up out of the water with the rest of their profits and purgatories. Not so for Devlin. That expensive throat may as well have been personally adorned by his hand, a foot and a pocketbook in distant mines afield. Roger swept her hair aside and kissed her — delicate, there on the vein beneath the corner of her jaw. 

Lilacs. If he doubted then the scent of petal-skin reminded him, filling the cab of the Pontiac as if she herself had bloomed in the first breath of summer. The herald of warmer days, lilacs; and now Victoria, too, on the first train whistle of the season. The flowers waited for her, the sunshine and the sea breeze, right beside him on that platform. She was here, for a little while; his for a little while. And he buried himself in her, in the skin of her throat perfectly preserved in memory, and made only now and again the idle noise of contentment, or petulant hum at the string of diamonds in his way. 

“Roger, let’s go in.”

He pretended, delightedly, that he hadn’t heard, and reached back to unclasp the necklace, letting it fall to expose the hollow of her throat. Vicki caught it without complaint but gave her half-hearted protests as he kissed her there again, again, as if he hadn’t eaten since she’d gone. Empty stomachs, empty hands: he took her in his arms to lay her back against against the seat and she laughed, beautiful, musical at his ear.

“Not in the car!” 

Odysseus was wrong, he thought, not to listen to it. Rocks be damned. 

He pulled back just enough to look at her — at that smile he had put there, at the flush on her cheeks from the heat of the sun, from the heat of the air. The way she looked at him, the same way she looked at the stars when she first came home. Roger brushed a thumb across her cheek. 

“I missed you,” he confessed, hushed. There was too much packed in the empty syllables, and his words strained. 

“I missed you,” came her echo, equally sparse. 

He leaned down to allow himself just one more, but paused at the first touch to long-awaited mouth. She didn't taste at all like he remembered. She didn’t taste like Vicki. She tasted like Burke. Phantom Lucky Strikes under her tongue, in the back of her throat, on her teeth. Roger’s brow furrowed with the jar of memory misaligned, but he said nothing, giving only a doting kiss to the tip of pert nose before he withdrew. So she’d started smoking. It was cold, even on the asphalt isle, in the winter time — they all of them had their vices to keep the body warm. 

Despite her earlier protests, Mrs. Devlin lingered on the passenger side for a few minutes longer, busying herself with fixing her clasp, with straightening his tie, as though there were anyone to see them on the short walk up the drive, as if perhaps the newness of the house demanded she be equally pristine — fine bright stonework that set off ice blue tailoring, all done in the meticulous sculptor’s hand of the American dollar. She’d grown up since last summer, even: glittering like the jewels at her throat, having been formed in six months of marriage, of Fifth Avenue, of the company of her charming oil tycoon. It wasn’t all that long ago she’d been Miss Eyre in green wool, in his house, not Burke’s; but in the measure of things there was a greater distance between then and now than weeks and days and something so transgressible as time.  

Roger watched her fingers as she smoothed the ends of her hair. Twenty-three. She’d have just turned twenty-three: yes, that’s right – her birthday was in March. He hadn’t sent her anything, he supposed that was cold of him, but he had no doubt that she wanted for very little. She just wanted … 

His fingers curled, then flexed. “I’ll get your luggage,” he announced, and she swallowed down whatever it was she was thinking to say, drowned in the click of heels to fresh pavement, and the slam of the trunk. Roger was as good as his word – better – a cherry Tourister in each hand as far as the threshold, where they waited while she fussed with her keys. He remained still as she pushed the door open; still, even as he felt the brush of her hand.  

“Will you stay for a while?” she asked, all innocence, lip gloss, summertime, Lucky Strikes. Vicki met his eyes again, so directly he'd long forgotten to breathe. “I’ll make you a drink.”