(dys)functional | bucktommy bonus chapter
an: Everyone else seemed just as enamored of Evelyn Carrini as I was when I made her up, so I thought I'd piece together all the random notes app thoughts I had about her an Tommy in high school into something that wasn't a disorganized half bullet list/half snippet-fest.
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He’s halfway through homeroom when he notices it. The whispers, the side-eyes, the covert little looks shot in his direction when they think he’s not looking. The problem is that Thomas Kinard has spent the first seventeen years of his life hyperaware any time he is the focus of someone’s attention, and now he feels like ants are crawling under his skin.
He spends the next three periods convinced he’s still got toilet paper stuck to his face where he’d nicked himself shaving, but no matter how many times he wipes a too-big hand across his face, under his chin, he’s still being stared at. It’s a weird feeling. He’s been as close to invisible as he can manage since middle school, since the first time a boy had smiled at him and Tom had wanted. Sure, he plays the sports his dad had demanded he play, and sure, he’s — moderately friendly with a few different groups, but he isn’t — he doesn’t —
Evelyn Carrini sidles up to him at the start of lunch with a keyring curling around her middle finger, perfectly manicured French tips and a plethora of plastic bands wrapped around her wrists, eyes assessing, keys jangling in the loose circle of her palm. “Buy me lunch, Kinard,” she says, and Tom — Tom follows her out to her car so she can take them through the nearby Wendy’s drive through.
His dad is ecstatic. Good grades haven’t impressed him, making the right teams hasn’t impressed him — even shedding the weight over the summer that had clung to him for years despite being active as hell hadn’t impressed him — but the first time he catches Evelyn “studying” in Tom’s room, he smacks Tom so hard on the back that he has to scramble on suddenly gangly limbs to keep his balance.
Evelyn is a cheerleader. A firecracker, according to every adult who’s ever met her, an absolute darling of Cliffside Park High, and generally well known as the nicest girl who could possibly gossip about you behind your back. Tom’s a little obsessed with her. Enough to give it a try, enough to roll around with her in the bed of her dads pickup, making out until they’re blue in the face, enough to want to spend every spare fucking moment with her.
They go to movies, and hang out at the mall with all her friends, and drink beer in the carpark behind the Sears that’d gone out of business a year and a half earlier. They hold hands in the hallways at school, and pass notes in the classes they share, and Tom meets her parents at a quiet family dinner where no one asks a single question about his novelist grandfather and his fuckup kids, or his dead mom, or the sister being raised by his aunt a township over.
Tom adores Evelyn. He does. He doesn’t even mind it that much that her nails dig into his skin when she’s got her tongue in his mouth, or that her perfume is always just a little overpowering. Evelyn is great.
Evelyn... has an excellent rack. Top notch, really — round perky breasts with rose colored nipples that are perfectly symmetrical and...right up in his face.
Evelyn squirms in his lap, and Tom knows the game is up.
He’s — maybe at half chub (He’s a teenager, sue him. Sometimes a well aimed breeze gets him hard.) Nothing to write home about, anyway, and Tom can usually explain this away, shift his hips and slow the kissing and suck at Evelyn’s neck until she gets impatient enough to shove his hand down her Spanx and let him get to work.
Tom is aware that no amount of testing the weight of Evie’s tits in his hands or sucking one of those dusky nipples between his teeth is gonna get him there.
“Are you —?” Evelyn asks, and Tom stares at her chest and tries to imagine a scenario where his dad doesn’t find out about this. His — his hands are shaking. He’s pretty sure he hasn’t drawn a breath in about forty-five seconds. “Jesus Christ, Kinard, do you want me to put my shirt back on?”
Evelyn Carrini is just another dumb teenager who has no fucking idea how badly things are about to turn for him.
And then she isn’t.
“Oh my god,” she says, delight in her voice, and Tom cringes, hands curling into fists in Evie’s purple duvet as she swings off of him and scrambles for the shirt she’d tossed over the side of the bed a good twenty minutes before he’d worked up the courage to pop the clasp on her bra. “Oh my god,” she repeats as she stuffs her really very nice breasts back underneath the croptop. “Tom, can you stop having a panic attack for five fucking seconds, I’m not gonna tell anyone.”
Tom blinks, dazed, but it has the intended effect of forcing him to pull in three sharp breaths, drawing him right the fuck out of his swirling thoughts. He can see his own expression in the mirror over her shoulder, and is suddenly incredibly grateful they hadn’t managed to get any further. “You’re the biggest gossip I know,” Tommy snarks back, which is a terrible fucking idea when she’s just discovered the exact weapon she needs to completely obliterate him.
She cocks a hip, rolls her eyes, blows a crinkled lock of hair out of her eyes. “Yeah, dumbass, do you think the biggest gossip you know doesn’t know how to keep a secret?”
Which is a fair point, actually. In between makeouts and actual studying and bland stories about their day, she’s told him a litany of secrets that have never seen the light of day beyond their little bubble of privacy. Jerri Danvers secret abortion. The DUI Travis Evans dad had called in favors to have swept under the rug. Cheryl G cheating on her boyfriend with Cheryl K. Chris Harper selling ritalin and coke out of the mens room in D Hall.
(”What’s the difference?” he’d asked, like Evie had all the answers, and she’d rolled her eyes. Lethal, that eyeroll. “The price, idiot. Snow’s a lot easier to source.”)
It still takes him a while to really believe she won’t tell.
But she doesn’t. Week after week, game after game, party after party. He asks her to Homecoming half convinced there’s a secret plan to Carrie him in the middle of the gym, but instead she drags him into a bathroom stall in the girls room, fucks up the hair he’d spend twenty minutes slicking just right, unbuttons three buttons of his dress shirt and slips the loop of his tie around her own neck while she makes obscene noises and rattles the rickety stall wall. She kisses her bright red lipstick onto his lips and only drags him out once they have a crowd.
He carries her bookbag out to her car from her locker at the end of the day, and listens to her bitch about her older sister in med school, and lets her experiment with perming on his hair, gives the JT ramen noodle look a total of three hours before he attempts to wash it out and, failing that, brings a pair of clippers back to her place she that she can buzz all his hair off.
The make it through the holidays, and Valentines, and Tommy sends her an extravagant bouquet of flowers on her birthday, right in the middle of a pep rally, the delivery guy flummoxed as hell as every upperclassman packed on the bleachers hoots and hollers about it, and it’s not what he wants, not really, not quite, but he’d buy her flowers every day just for existing and allowing him to exist as himself for the few hours of privacy they carve out away from everyone else.
Somewhere in the early hours of dawn, three months before graduation, she finally gets him to admit that basketball star Jason Ledecky with his stupid long legs and his thick heavy Boston drawl is Tom’s exact brand of smokin’.
“You could do so much better than Jason Ledecky,” she tells him, and Tom laughs as he presses his nose into the give of her stomach.
“Also he’d beat the shit out of me for trying,” Tom says, and Evie gets the sad kind of quiet, like she does every time he skids away from talking about his dad, like she does every time he talks about his mother, quiet and soft.
“Someday it’ll be different,” Evie says, carding fingers through the hair that had grown back in time for the class picture, and Tom nods like he believes her. “Some day some guy with legs for days, with the biggest heart and the brightest smile you’ve ever seen is gonna sweep you off your feet and I’m gonna shake his fucking hand.”
Tom hums.
“And maybe show him my tits just to make sure,” she says with a gentle tug on his hair, and Tom laughs until he can’t breathe.
Tom can’t say why he doesn’t tell her The Plan. Prom comes and goes, and as graduation approaches Tom attends all the parties, sneaks up the lattice to curl up next to Evie on her bed on nights that his dad comes home smelling like he bathed in hops, settles the last of his business, packs a bag he hides far enough under his bed that even snoopy Evie wont notice.
His dad’s drunk on the day he graduates, and at the end of the ceremony, after they’ve all made a plan for a bonfire at the quarry, Tom presses a lingering kiss to the crown of Evie’s head, and while her friends all roll their eyes at Evie’s perfect boyfriend, Tom slips away, grabs the bag he’d left in his old gym locker, and he leaves.
_____
“Okay so at eighteen I’m not sure I knew there was even such a thing as bisexuality,” Evie says, sipping at her glass of wine and eyeing the half of Evan’s cheesecake he still hasn’t eaten. “And my tits aren’t what they used to be, anyway.”
Tommy and Evan both shoot her incredulous looks.
“Yeah, they’re still pretty good,” she admits around a laugh, and beneath the table, Evan’s knee knocks into Tommy’s. “You gotta admit, though, Tommy — I fucking nailed your type years before you ever did.”
Evan’s grin goes ear to ear, absolutely proving her point when he shifts to reach for the hand Tommy’s been resting on his knee for the last few minutes.
“That’s what the steak dinner was for,” Tommy tells her, and they share a look Tommy hasn’t shared with anyone in twenty years.
Evan slides the rest of his cheesecake across the table without having to be asked, and tucks himself neatly against Tommy’s side as Evie’s eyes go wide and happy.
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writing patterns
tagged by @herrmannhalsteadproduction @desert--moonchild
Rules: Share the first line of your last ten published works or as many as you are able and see if there are any patterns!
lol I don't even have 5 (I'm just a lil fanfic author baby) but here ya go!:
“Whose genius idea was it to have a backyard ceremony in July?
Ain't That A Kick In The Head (Saltommy big ole Italian American Friends to Lovers Romcom)
“Have I told you lately that your Nonna is one of my favorite people on this planet?”
You Saw The Whole Of The Moon (A Drunken Sal crashes a Bucktommy date night in. It leads to some surprising conversations. Platonic Saltommy only btw)
“Who’s this?” Buck leaned in to look at one of the photos on Tommy’s wall.
In Bocca Al Lupo (Good Luck) (Prequel to prev, Buck meets Tommy's Nonna, Chim and Tommy form the Buckley Parents Support Group)
Dunno if we have any Young Royals fans in the house but here's my little August future fic. Next time I re-binge the series I think I might try and write that August x Sara follow up but who knows.
“I think you were right, Wille.”
That's The Last Time Anyone's Calling Me That
Ok I definitely knew I tended to start with dialogue. I've always preferred starting the story kind of in the middle of a conversation. Didn't realize how often that dialogue was a question though!
I love how every single one of the 911 ones are either about somebody's Nonna or spoken to somebody's Nonna. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I fucking love my old lady characters and you can pry them out of my cold dead hands. I gotta write something for Toni one of these days because I LOVE Marsha Warfield. Mrs. Lee too she's awesome.
I just checked my WIP's and all the rest of the first lines are dialogue too, but not questions.
NP tagging: @evansboyfriend @racerchix21 @cliophilyra
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