#this is not proof read i'll do that when i post on ao3 fr

[bridaltrain]

part one

The carpet up the steps leading to the second floor is stained with  shoe prints and whatever else. Annabeth watches her own sneakers, caked in wet dirt, add onto the collection as she follows Luke. He’s let go of her, but it barely makes a difference. Half-way up the stairs, he quickens his pace and so does she. He pauses at the top and she stills herself at his heels. 

The party isn’t so intimidating from up here. 

Behind her, Luke knocks on what she assumes is either a bedroom or bathroom door. No response.  It creaks as he opens it, though she doesn’t hear his footsteps so she knows he’s watching her, watching the party. 

“You’ll get used to it,” he says. 

“I don’t like being a spectacle, Luke.” 

“You’re not really the kind of girl who can go unnoticed. And that’s even when you’re not dressed like this.” 

She sees Ethan drop onto the couch in the living room, cheeks red and expression wanting. Another boy stands between his knees, feeding him more beer. The girl from earlier has taken off her Bride of Frankenstein wig, dancing between the friends she’d come here with, blending in with the pool of bodies and college Halloween is so different from scary movie night with Percy and Sally. She’d thought the costume was her trick to fitting it. Evidently not. 

No one watches her anymore, but she can’t peel her eyes off them. Girls in tiny dresses and ripped tights and fake blood dripping between their thighs. Bows in their hair and schoolgirl outfits that look nothing like her private school uniform, actually. She spots a Little Bo Peep and Red Riding Hood in the crowd, sporting gingham bloomers and lace and Annabeth is certain her costume plays its part well. It only feels childish on her because she’s a child, and everyone can tell, apparently. 

She steps away. Her top is riding up again, but she doesn’t adjust it. 

In the bedroom, she slips out of her Converses, bare feet making their way to Luke, who stands in front of the TV, frowning as he tries to bring the vintage junkbox to life. Luke’s room, she notes. He’d moved in just last month, and it's about as decorated as his room in his mom’s apartment. 

She shuffles between him and the screen, wrapping her arms around his waist. Immediately, he holds her to him, too, and she feels the remote in his hand brush her shoulder blade. His arms constrict, tighter and tighter, and she wants to take his clothes off him now, if only to feel his skin on hers. 

“Missed you,” she mumbles, nuzzling her face into him, probably ruining her makeup. 

He presses a kiss to her head. “I didn’t go anywhere.” 

This is her cue to do—something. Apologize for breaking things off. Tell him she wants him back, that she regrets it. What else had she spent hours scouring for a costume and even more getting ready tonight for? 

She thinks back to two weeks ago, when she had thought—hoped—she had ended this. Closing the door on him as he stood at her doorstep and Annabeth rushed up to her bedroom and watched him walk away through her window. It was daytime. Sunny, especially for October, and the orange leaves crinkled under his shoes like the breaking bones of summer. It was good, she swears. It was good enough right up until it wasn’t anymore. 

He’d been so angry with her. 

“You pushed me away,” she says, surprising herself when it doesn’t come out like an accusation. 

Luke pinches the skin at the dip of her waist. “I wish I didn’t. You’re all I’ve got.” 

She rests her chin on his chest, watching his Adam's apple. “Not a lot, then?” 

“Enough for me.” He taps her ass with the remote. “Look.” 

The TV is blue static when she turns, straining her neck. “What?” 

He pulls her down onto the floor, crossing his legs and pulling her into the center, carpet scratching her skin. She wonders why they didn’t sit on the bed. And then she sees the DVD collection. 

“You wanna pick this one, bug?” 

She skims over the stack, snug between the carpet and the underside of the old TV stand’s first shelf. Scream and its sequels. Halloween, Carrie, The Exorcist. The Titanic DVD box. 

Frowning, she leans back against his stomach, slumped in horrible posture. “I don’t feel like a movie.” 

His fingers drag up her arms, down her chest and the polyester of her top. Treading to the itchy, lacy hem of her skirt, teasing. “What do you feel like?” he asks, raw and quiet. 

He flicks the little bow that sits at the center of her panties—underwear, really. She’s not sure panties is a word that can be applied to what she wears from a value pack labeled ages nine through twelve. Annabeth breathes with conscious effort and her heart is exhausted. She’d come here for this and worse. That’s what she’d felt like, when she stepped into her clothes and onto the doorstep, missing what it had felt like to be numb beneath him. Exhausted, unburdened, loved. Even if it killed her, she wanted to lose time with him. 

Especially if it killed her. 

She’s caught playing a fruitless game because that isn’t exactly the kind of thing you admit to your ex boyfriend, even if he can see the truth plain as day. She only holds her breath and keeps her thighs firmly together, pointing lazily at a movie with her toe.  “That one.” 

Luke folds forward to reach it and she finds herself sandwiched in him as he makes use of the DVD player. He smells like her old lotion, the one she’d left at his mom’s house, never bothering to return and claim it. Lemon and earthy, and it upsets her because he’s supposed to smell like him— not her.

“I’ve tried to show you this one before,” he comments, fast-forwarding through the beginning commercials until the menu screen animates into bloody graphics. Friday the 13th.  

Annabeth shrugs, immediately tugged back down from the tightness of her sleeve and she wants it off . “I don’t remember.” 

“Yeah, it was a long time ago,” he says.  “We got in a fight during the commercials and you stormed out of the theater before it even started.”

A halo glows around the word play. Luke’s finger hovers over the remote button. Extending her own, she presses down on his nail and the screen gives way to the opening scene. 

She wiggles back into him, trying to find some comfort. “What did we fight about?”

“Me being drunk. You feeling ignored.” 

“Sounds right,” she mumbles, the cool press of his flask against her hip and if she’s more tolerant of it now than she was then, it’s because she’s less of the girl she used to be. That Annabeth would certainly never desecrate something as sacred as Strawberry Shortcake. 

“How do you feel?” His voice is a whisper as the movie crackles through the dodgy speakers. “Now?” 

Annabeth doesn’t say anything, eyes glued on the movie. She always likes the opening kills the best. 

“Your heart’s going crazy,” he muses, hand flat over her top, palm dragging the itchy fabric over her nipples. She shivers, but doesn’t squirm. Luke keeps his hand there, soaking up her pulse. “Still scared?” 

“I wasn’t scared.” 

“So shaking on the kitchen floor was…what?” 

“I just hate being judged.” 

“Because you’re scared of what they’ll think of you.” 

She doesn’t respond to that. Eventually, his hand drops and he leans back on the carpet, holding her up with just his abdomen. On screen, two counselors are sneaking off to have sex while the kids sleep. 

“Annabeth?” 

She slumps down further. “Hm.” 

“You’re never gonna see them again,” he says, like it should make her feel better. 

His fingers crawl up from her heart, tracing the protrusion of her chest bones above the neckline of her top, tracing up her neck. He holds the side of her face, rubbing his thumb behind her jaw, and she remembers he’d held her just like this when they met in the alley. Five fingers and a pulse that beat next to her ear and Annabeth couldn’t stop crying for the life of her, even though she was no longer afraid. Looking back, she thinks she might’ve kept crying so he wouldn’t let go of her. 

“They’re not my friends. You’re my whole life, you know that?” He’s not watching the movie at all. “I don’t give a shit what they think, and neither should you.” 

“Ethan’s your friend.”

“Ethan’s my roommate. That’s not the same.” 

She wants to say she misses when he lived with his mom. That she misses sitting on his front steps, a book splayed on her lap while she waited for him to come home from work. The way the world slowed in his bedroom, the bugs that begged to get in through the window screen, the whir of his old ceiling fan he had to fix every other week. When he was hers and hers alone. 

She doesn’t think he’d appreciate any mention of his mom right now. 

“He was looking at me weird.” 

“There are worse ways for men to look at you.” 

The boy counselor gets stabbed first. Knife to the chest, sputtering blood, and Annabeth imagines the blood pumping under her skin when Luke finds the tender spot of her neck and grazes his teeth. 

“You’re not any better,” she whispers, voice thick. 

He makes sure she’s looking when he grins, teeth sharp and begging to bite. He shuffles her on his lap, shoulder to his, their legs perpendicular. The girl in the movie is crawling back, uselessly fighting for her life and Annabeth’s always heard people liken sex to death, in books and the locker rooms before gym class. An arousal of its own right. 

“No,” he agrees mournfully. “I’m the worst.” 

His kiss, however brief, is hot and consuming, and Annabeth is fast to give it back. A year’s worth of muscle memory, nerves coming to life like this is what she’s meant to do, leaning into him, neck craning back as his height crowds her, and she can’t ever explain how much she’d missed this. His form, over her, overpowering her, dancing under him like a puppet on a string. Her head hits the bed frame and Luke hisses like it hurts him, too. He cups the back of her head, pads of his fingers soothing the spot. 

He pulls away, lips slick in her saliva, and Annabeth watches him work his jaw as he looks away from her. Searching for his alcohol. 

She gets on her feet before he can push her off.