#the JL is finally getting somewhere and are starting to feel the dread

[wolfsbanesparks]

Hey y'all! Chapter 21 of Pretty Little Thing is out! And this week Clark is investigating the docks as part of his search for Billy!

Lots of things are falling into place and you get a glimpse of what's to come in the JL side of the story!

[artificialqueens]

Modern Love, 1/12 (Branjie/Scyvie/Ninex) - Ortega

fic summary: Brooke Lynn is a 23 year old graduate writing boring, uninspired pieces for the fashion department of a newspaper and living in a city all her friends have moved away from. Silky is living at her parents’ house and spends her days applying for jobs she’s promptly rejected for. Nina and Monet are struggling through their first year as teachers whilst being sickeningly adorable girlfriends. Akeria is pursuing her dream of being a badass lawyer, even if her master’s degree is slowly crushing her soul. Plastique is acting like the second coming of Paris Hilton, so nothing there has changed. Scarlet is overworked and Yvie is underpaid and their relationship isn’t all it appears from the outside.

And Vanessa? Vanessa is nowhere to be seen.

(A story about a holiday, a breakup, friendships and relationships in a post-graduate world, careers, navigating life after university, figuring out what it means to be an adult, and coming to terms with the fact that we really are not nineteen forever.)

a/n: welcome to the sequel to Not Nineteen Forever!!! i should say it’s not *~ mandatory ~* to have read the original before this but it’s encouraged huehue xo hope u enjoy and please feel free to reblog, like and send love!!

***

Brooke felt the all-encompassing sense of dread wash over her as her alarm went off, the sounds of the radio that were gradually fading in doing nothing to make the experience of waking up for another day of work any more palatable. She groaned loudly as she stretched, her arms flying out to the side and hitting the edge of the double bed. Brooke starfished a little, stretching her legs out as long as they would go and trying to put off getting up and showered for as long as she could.

Rolling over in bed she reached for her phone and stopped when she saw the rose-gold rectangular frame beside her on the bedside table. It caught her by surprise every day, almost a sort of routine in itself. A picture of her and Vanessa from when they first moved in, standing at the doorway having just popped a bottle of champagne. Brooke’s face was in a funny contorted sort of smile as she yanked the cork out of the bottle and Vanessa was clapping her hands in excitement, a brilliant white moonbeam painted across her face. Brooke remembered the day well. Monet had taken the photo with Nina beside her, both of them still in their work clothes after they’d visited straight from a hard day full of teaching. Akeria, Silky, Plastique, Scarlet and Yvie had all been inside, shuffling through the huge variety of Domino’s pizza boxes that had just arrived at their door like a deck of cards. That night had been so special. Whatever had happened since then, Brooke would probably treasure that memory forever.

In spite of herself she smiled as she looked at the photograph, then turned her attention to her phone screen.

No notifications. She didn’t know why she expected anything more.

With a cloud over her head that matched the ones in the uncharacteristically grey June sky, Brooke brushed her teeth and peeled her pyjamas off before stepping into the shower and adjusting the dial to somewhere between tepid and warm. Vanessa’s shower gel sat in the corner, the tropical fruit and mint one with little tiny sloths all over the front. Brooke found herself hurting as she looked at it, still loath to use it as she took her own from the opposite side and splatted a huge dollop into her shower puff. Sometimes she used it indulgently, like a secret she shared with herself. She didn’t know whether she’d buy more when it ran out. That was something she still needed to think about.

Once she was clean Brooke briskly dried herself with a towel, sitting on the edge of the bed wrapped in it as she carefully blow-dried out her hair. She picked out her outfit: smart black work trousers with a fabric belt that pulled her in at the waist, a black and white patterned shirt, black stiletto heels. As she painted some minimal makeup on her face in the hope it would make her look less like a sleep-deprived zombie and more like she had her life together in some way, Brooke checked the clock and cursed as she realised she was running behind.

Leaving lipstick for the moment, she grabbed her bag, shoved her feet in a pair of black pumps, and left hurriedly for the train. Breakfast wasn’t a priority; she knew she could grab an iced coffee and a croissant from the cafe in the station in between changing trains, as it took her two to get into work. It was times such as these that she wished she knew how to drive like Monet, Plastique and Akeria, or had learned since uni like Nina or Scarlet. But then again, cafe food for breakfast was one of the very few perks of public transport.

Brooke eventually arrived at the huge concrete block with windows that held her offices, taking the elevator up to the fifth floor, clocking in, shooting a lacklustre “hi” to the girls she sometimes chatted to and settling herself in at her desk. As office positions went, Brooke supposed it wasn’t awful- it was beside the window looking out onto the streets of the city below and it provided some much-needed light to her day. Logging on to her work laptop, she checked her emails (one from her boss about the article due for Friday, and one from Cheryl about money for flowers for somebody going on maternity leave that she’d never met or heard of and might not even have worked there).

Her working day had started.

University hadn’t prepared Brooke for graduate life. It hadn’t prepared her for the fact that friends moved away for jobs and houses and flats, internships and apprenticeships and postgrads and masters. It hadn’t prepared her for the fact that her group chat, once flooded with about a hundred messages if she so much as left it for five minutes, gathered dust as everyone’s lives took over. It hadn’t prepared Brooke for the feeling of missing out on something…Christ knows what. Perhaps living, making memories instead of simply swiping through ones already made on a Saturday night spent alone in bed with a bottle of wine to herself. It hadn’t prepared her for the yearning, the regret at having taken those days for granted when they were the happiest of her life and she hadn’t even realised it. If Brooke had known how soul-crushingly boring her life would be once she got that rolled-up piece of paper in a little tube she would’ve been dragging the girls out every single night. The all-encompassing sadness and longing for something better hit her harder on days like these, sepia ones with big clouds that hung ominously in the sky but never gave her the satisfaction of raining. She supposed that feeling had only been exacerbated by…

She didn’t need to remind herself of that.

It was ten o’clock in the morning and Brooke was staring out of the small office window stupefied with boredom when her phone vibrated. She jumped, pouncing on it as she always did whenever a notification went off. Her phone hadn’t been on silent for a full month. It hadn’t been the person she’d wanted or expected, but it was a pleasant surprise nonetheless.

Silk: HEY GIRL LONG TIME NO SPEAK! I’M GONNA BE IN TOWN THIS AFTERNOON FOR AN INTERVIEW BUT I’LL BE FREE AFTER AND I’VE GOT A COUPLE HOURS TO KICK ABOUT UNTIL MY TRAIN. YOU WANNA GRAB DINNER? XXXXXXXXX

Brooke frantically made plans as if she was under a time limit, as if the moment would slip through her fingers like sand in an hourglass. She suggested some restaurants that she knew wouldn’t eat into either of their fragile graduate salaries and they settled on an Italian in the city centre, where the portions were big and the meals were tasty.

Brooke spent the rest of the day looking forward to meeting her friend. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Silky. Maybe it had been as long ago as New Year. Brooke smiled as she remembered the occasion; all of them cramming into Scarlet and Yvie’s flat to see in the year. Silky and Akeria had got too drunk off prosecco and screamed along to JLS, Scarlet and Yvie had both made a buffet to rival a hotel’s, and Nina, Monet, Vanessa and Brooke had all been tangled up in an almost relationship-ruining game of Articulate. Plastique had brought her new girlfriend Naomi to introduce to everyone and the girl had looked ever so slightly alarmed by the sheer chaos of everyone put together, but she’d laughed and joined in all the same.

That had been another happy memory. Those seemed to be hard to come by these days.

Work dragged. It always did. Brooke managed to write three sub-par articles that she sent to her editor at the end of the day anyway because hell, it was their job to turn carbon into diamonds. So when she hopped on the train back into the city, Brooke felt a little buzz in her veins that she hadn’t felt in a while.

It took her until she saw Silky standing outside the restaurant- hair in a bun full of flyaways, eyebrows still Sharpied on, in a pair of smart trousers and a floaty top- that Brooke realised that part of the reason she was so excited was because she’d been so lonely for such a long time. Well, only really a month, but it felt like a year. It had taken her living on her own to realise just how boring her life was without all her friends so constantly part of it, and now they all had their own lives and schedules it only served to show Brooke how empty her own was without…

Well. Without her.

As soon as Silky looked up from her phone and spotted Brooke her face lit up, and she fixed her with a smile and a screech that Brooke never thought she would have missed hearing but by God, she had.

“BROOKE LYNN!” she screamed, followed by lots of squealing and babbling as she wrapped the taller girl in a tight hug and refused to let go for at least twenty seconds. Brooke didn’t mind and she found herself clinging back, Silky suddenly the loudest anchor she’d never known she needed. When Silky finally pulled away she grabbed Brooke by both wrists, shaking her back and forth a little. “Oh my God, BITCH! Oh my God. FUCK! It’s so good to see you. How the fuck are you?”

Brooke appreciated that- Silky asking how she was. Yvie tiptoed around Brooke’s feelings when they texted and Brooke tiptoed around her and Scarlet’s perfect domestic bliss, both of the subjects too touchy for Brooke and the pair of them instead choosing to communicate via meme. Nina barely had time to breathe these days let alone text back, and Plastique…well, Plastique wouldn’t get it.

None of them would, she supposed.

“I’m…I’m surviving! I’m being an adult, I guess, and this is what life is now. How’re you?” Brooke swiftly moved the conversation on, and Silky took the hint and dropped both her wrists, pushing open the door.

“I’m on cloud fuckin’ nine girl. C’mon, let’s get some vino an’ I’ll catch you up on the world of Ms. Ganache! Think of it as a free episode of the reality TV show that is my life.”

“Let’s be real, Silk. If anyone’s life’s like a reality TV show right now, it’s mine,” Brooke raised her eyebrows, not quite committing to her own attempt at being lighthearted and instead couldn’t have sounded more bitter if she’d eaten an entire lemon with its rind on.

Silky, for her part, shrugged and let out a small sigh. “You ain’t wrong, girl, you ain’t wrong. But the offer of wine still stands, so let’s get sat. Where the damn hell is a waiter?”

They eventually got shown to their table and the conversation flowed frantically and excitedly, mirroring the wine. Silky filled Brooke in on every last detail of her life- most importantly, Brooke thought, was that Silky’s parents who she was back living with had adopted a cocker spaniel puppy called Pooch. Graduate life had been tough on Silky; she still hadn’t managed to get a job and so therefore couldn’t afford to rent a flat, so she’d moved back to her sleepy and uninspiring hometown. Living with her parents, she’d groaned, was beginning to chip away at her; the constant pressure they put on Silky to find a job, move out, get a boyfriend, and lose weight was beginning to grow wearing in the extreme, and Brooke didn’t blame her for being fed up.

“You know you’re always welcome to come chill at mine, you know. If it’s getting particularly rough,” Brooke suggested not-quite-casually, glad of the fact that loneliness didn’t have a scent because if it did she’d be reeking of it.

Silky gave a bashful smile, looking down at her half-eaten plate of spaghetti bolognaise in front of her. “You’re a doll, B, but you know I can’t do an hour on the train any time my Mama tuts at me buying a size XL of anything. In fact therapy’s probably cheaper than a train ticket here but realistically I don’t got the money for either, so…thanks, but in the words of Simon Cowell, issa no from me.”

“That’s okay. I get it, Mums are simultaneously the worst and the best people,” Brooke pulled a face. Thinking about her Mum made her wonder when the last time she texted her was. She felt a little ashamed for not knowing off the top of her head. “But hey, at least you got that interview, right? How did it go?”

“Alright,” Silky muttered in a non-committal way. It was the most un-Silky response Brooke thought she’d ever seen her friend give. It was weird and unpleasant; the Silky from uni would’ve yelled the place down about how she’d aced it, how they’d make her the chief editor right there and then, how she could write an article for them entirely in Wingdings and it’d still be the best thing they’d read all day.

Seemingly picking up on Brooke’s discomfort, Silky gave a small laugh. “I don’ know, boo…I used to be so sure of myself, I used to be so set in the fact that writing was somethin’ I was good at. When I was a kid I used to write these fuckin’ huge stories…pages an’ pages long that my teachers would pull big overexaggerated smiley faces at an’ squeal over an’ put big glittery star stickers on. I thought I was somethin’ special. An’ then uni, y’know…I was a small fish in a big pond- hell, a big fish in a big pond- but I still thought I was the shit even when I got bad grades. I thought my markers just didn’t get it, that they were the ones that were wrong. But now it’s like…”

Silky heaved a sigh and put her fork and spoon together neatly on top of her half-full plate. “…I can’t even get a job at a fuckin’ local rag, so why the hell am I even tryin’ with the big city offices?”

There was something about it all that made Brooke’s heart break all over again, the way that life after uni had worn Silky down to the extent where she didn’t even know if she was good at anything any more, didn’t have much visible self-worth left. Silky had always been the heart and soul of their group; she, Akeria and Vanessa, and in the time it had taken between now and graduation Akeria had become the polar opposite of Silky- so completely embroiled in her quest to become a barrister that she barely had time to reply to any of them any more.

And Vanessa…well. She knew where Vanessa was. Or rather, she didn’t.

Greece was a big country.

“You’re trying because you’re Big Silky Nutmeg Motherfucking Ganache,” Brooke said with a determination she’d not felt in a while. “Come on Silk, you’re you. If grad life has broken you then what the fuck hope is there for any of us?”

( Any of us sounded better than me , Brooke thought.)

“Kiki’s doin’ okay for herself,” Silky shrugged, her downtrodden tone counteracted by the way she picked up her fork again and twirled a single strand of spaghetti around it, eating it once she was finished speaking.

“Kiki’s vagina-deep in a hellish and all-consuming masters degree that’s probably eating her up from the inside out just as much as everybody else’s jobs are. I mean, are any of us doing anything we actually like?”

“Nina an’ Monet? They’da quit by now if they hated teaching so much.”

“Nina West would join the fucking scientologists and stick it out just so she could say she didn’t give up. She’s the final boss of the term mama didn’t raise a quitter . They’re having a hard time, Silk. We all are. It’s just tough because we’re all so busy and shit at keeping in touch that everybody thinks each others’ lives are perfect but…they’re really not.”

“Yvie and Scarlet seem pretty happy.”

Brooke’s face took on an involuntary look of distaste, so irritated and bitter was she at the image of them and their perfect flat and their perfect jobs and their perfect coupley life. “They’ll have something up, nobody’s life is that perfect. Maybe their relationship’s secretly falling apart or…something, fuck, I don’t know.”

There was a beat of silence in which Brooke finished the last little pocket of tortellini she’d ordered and Silky twirled another mouthful of spaghetti around her fork. She chewed, then shrugged thoughtfully, her head tilting a little. “Y’know we should go on holiday. Fuck all this shit off for a week, get away from it all.”

Brooke’s eyebrows raised in appreciation of the idea. She and the girls had never been away together before and the prospect of lying on a beach doing absolutely nothing under the blazing sun was an inviting one. “What, a girls’ trip? Like in Sex and The City?”

“Mhm. ‘Cept we go on an all-inclusive to the Med ‘stead of Mexico ‘cause ain’t none of us can afford that shit.”

“Except Plastique.”

“True. Fuck that bitch. She could prolly buy Mexico.”

Brooke laughed and for the first time in a good few months she felt a little flicker of excitement lick at her heart, so much so that she could see her pulse race at her wrist. She couldn’t stop the smile that spread across her face. “Oh my God. I’m so in. Let’s do it.”

“We have to get all the girls on board, though. Otherwise there ain’t no point.”

“Definitely. Where should we go? Spain’s always good.”

Silky had her phone out and was typing furiously. She paused as something presumably loaded, then her face lit up. “If we go the week after Nina an’ Monet finish up school for Summer we can get flights to Crete for £20 return.”

“Twenty, what the fuck? That can’t be right,” Brooke screwed up her face in disbelief, and Silky cocked an eyebrow at her as she showed her the proof on her screen. Conceding, Brooke shrugged. “That’s so good. I don’t want to know what that plane’s like though. They probably just stuff you all into a tin can and ping you into the air with a giant rubber band.”

Silky howled with laughter and thumped the table so hard that the wine sloshed about in their glasses, little tiny red tsunamis. As Brooke snorted in response purely to Silky’s own mirth, a small thought set off a little drip of dread that threatened to put out the excitement that had only just begun to burn in her chest.

“Where is Crete again?”

Silky let out an unimpressed breath from her nose. “Bitch, you got all the geography skills of a Love Island contestant. It’s just off the Greek coast. Kinda near Turkey too, but it’s Greece.”

Brooke felt her heart drop, Alton Towers Oblivion all over again. She blinked quickly, tried to hide her discomfort. “Well, we’re not going there.”

Silky gave a small sigh, a little hint of resignation or long-suffering to it that Brooke didn’t appreciate. But when she reached over the table and patted her hand on top of Brooke’s, she felt a little bit more understood, a little bit more validated.

“B, Greece is a big place.”

It was the exact same thing Brooke herself had thought earlier, except now it didn’t seem true. Now, with the prospect of going there, it seemed like the tiniest microcosm of society. The world was simultaneously too big and too small, and Brooke felt the cold drip in her heart get worse. “Silky…”

“Look. We ain’t exactly gonna pick the same place she’s at, are we?”

Brooke put her head in her hands and sighed. “She’s not there anymore.”

“What?”

“I phoned the hotel a week ago to try and speak to her. I was going to fly out, try and talk to her and fix things. They said she didn’t work there anymore. So I don’t even know where she is at all.”

Silky huffed, frowning and concerned. “I’m sorry, Brooke, this shit must’ve been hell.”

“You’ve got no idea.”

There was a pause as Silky pushed her food around her plate. “Crete’s small, but it ain’t that small. We still got a one in a million chance of bumpin’ into her if we go.”

“That’s still too small for my liking. Both the island and the chances.”

“Aight, one in a billion. Trillion. Point is, it ain’t gonna happen. An’ besides…” Silky waggled her eyebrows, flashing her phone screen at Brooke again. “Twenty pounds for the first week of the school holidays. This shit’s like gold dust.”

Brooke smiled slowly in spite of herself. Maybe Silky was right. And maybe it would be fun to swan around Greece, eat seafood and pretend to be in some knockoff version of Mamma Mia. Scratch that, it would be fun. She’d get to spend a week surrounded by her friends in the sun, which was what she badly needed at the moment.

Brooke was nodding before she knew it. “Okay, fine. Crete it is.”

“YES, bitch!” Silky cheered, loud enough to be heard by the entire restaurant and possibly the chefs in the kitchen too. “Now let’s get dessert. All this wine needs soaked up by a big slice of sticky toffee puddin’.”

It was easy to feel optimistic with Silky back being her loud and just-the-right-side-of-obnoxious self, and with a plate of tiramisu in front of her. But after they’d finished up, paid their bill and she’d hugged Silky goodbye at the train station, Brooke found the endorphins wearing off as she got back to her dark flat and into her cold bed. Maybe it was because she was finally coming down from the high of meeting up with a beloved friend, maybe it was because she knew she had another monotonous, greyscale day of work to get through tomorrow.

Or perhaps, Brooke thought as she turned over in bed, caught sight of the familiar rose-gold frame and blew it a kiss, she was simply missing her girlfriend.

If she could even call Vanessa that any more.