kimimela & alison, visitedupon.
if alison macclean is a glutton for punishment and kitty briar is his most loyal supplier, she’d only be matched by kim liu. any time he needs his fix of self-hatred and guilt, all he needs to do is make a quick trip to may’s. the disdain in the way she looks at him, it had wounded him as a younger man. now, he’s grown used to curl of her lip and lethal stare. over time, he’s grown to have as much disdain playing over his own features, but it’s for more undefined reasons; mirroring kim so he won’t look so pitiful. right now, he looks smug instead of pitiful. no one inspires pettiness in him more than kim, blinking contently as she pours the coffee, their eye contact unbroken. he can already tell the coffee is lukewarm from the small splatters that land on his hands and forearms on the counter; kim never serves him hot coffee if she can help it, but sonny doesn’t care how the caffeine gets into his bloodstream as long as it does.
really, if he wanted hot coffee, or nicer service, he could just take the extra five minutes to the turquoise star diner. the star is actually closer to his house, but may’s is closer to his job, and truthfully (and he better never let turquoise star fanatic/waitress margie dominguez hear) the all-turquoise interior and exterior can be a bit garish when you’ve just awoken. both restaurants are equally as busy, but may’s less so in the afternoon; the only ones to want breakfast at two thirty in the afternoon are bar staff. besides, where else can he get his daily self-punishment when kitty’s not around? joey ryan, the other half of the turquoise star fanatic/waitress duo, was much more cordial. in fact, his mother, in her rare moments of clarity, had liked joey ryan very much for him. in those rare moments of clarity, her clear mind would imagine the ryan family and the macclean clan merging, two families doused with the pain of a missing family member joining together to wash themselves of that pain, or something. his mother could be quite poetic when she wanted to be, and he liked joey, she had curly blonde hair that reminded him of ramen—in a good way, sonny likes ramen!
his head tilts at the suggestion of the specials, she knows sonny gets nearly the same thing every time he’s in: pancakes, bacon, poached egg with toast if he’s feeling fancy. he guesses kim will never let the opportunity to fill the silence with barbs get away from her; most people that hate him do their best to ignore him, kim acts like she hates him but jumps at the chance to insult him. the topic of rumors always seemed to be one that kim could not resist bringing up every time she was around him, and just like now, it leaves him confused. he doesn’t know rumors she’s talking about, or perhaps he just doesn’t get the joke. she has a habit of referencing things he has no knowledge of. like always, he just scrunches his red brows to almost meet in the middle and ignores it; sonny may be a high school dropout, but he hates to admit when he doesn’t know something. kim has always been smarter than him.
sitting in front her now, even with all the loathing etched upon her face, he still sees what he saw back then, as a teenager. then, he had loved the way her brown eyes shone when direct sunlight hit them, like crystallized caramel. he loved the mole on the side of her right eye, distracting him in class from across the room, a little beacon that captured and captivated his sight. he loved her shiny black hair, long down her back and smooth, but there was something special about it when she wore it up. (mama macclean’s not the only one to occasionally get poetic.) he also loved her wit, the cutting way she spoke to people, until it had been turned on him. sometimes, in his own private moments where the world is quiet and affords him introspection, he wonders what kim had loved about him, or if she ever loved him at all. did she see him poetically, or did she only see white trash with red hair and a pasty face dotted with freckles on nearly every square inch?
“have you ever known me not to tip?” sonny retorts, but boot hill exists in a weird half-world where gratuity is either always expected or entirely forgotten. the bucking horse is a place where people either forget to tip, or they’re offended by sonny’s dour behavior. he’s not so dour in may’s right now, some might even think he’s downright cheerful. kim inspires his pettiness, a jovial sense to tease when he knows kim means every bit of hatred she spews at him. he just wishes he knew why. “you know bev’s just going to steal it anyways.” he says conspiratorially, a quick glance to the other waitress that’s, he’s pretty sure, pretending not to listen to the conversation.
it’s stupid to hold onto things from high school. it’s stupid and petty and kim isn’t the kind of girl who does that sort of thing. she doesn’t care that amy michaels spread a rumor that she was pregnant freshman year, but she does notice that amy always tips bev better. she can’t even keep track of every person who snickered behind her back or called her kim reaper and painted it on her locker or wrote it in sharpie on the bathroom stalls. most of those things are old news, but she can’t help it if every time she sees the one person she’d thought understood her--and actually liked her--she goes right back to that girl’s bathroom with kitty briar and her truths.
for some reason, sonny macclean doesn’t let kim escape him; he mocks her with stubborn macclean indignation, sure to keep up his routine at may’s even if it is her territory. that’s what separates jerks like sonny macclean from kim liu; she doesn’t darken the frame of the bucking horse’s saloon doors even if she thinks it would give her the tiniest smug satisfaction. the more he comes around, the more she’s convinced that the whole thing is just as kitty said it was all those years ago. it’s even worse when he’s around too, because his sense of humor just serves to remind her of the things she likes about him. somehow that makes her more mad than his dour mood or cold shoulder.
it isn’t even that he’s a macclean; that doesn’t even factor into it. aside from a couple of them, the maccleans are actually pretty alright. kim’s still fond of isla, cian, and courtney well enough--though she feels it’s just polite to give them their space. she likes to think that even sonny would have the decency not to be too chummy with her siblings, if she still had any left. it’s mrs. macclean that makes her the most sad. she lives as a time traveler--floating between worlds or realities. kim is fourteen years old, twenty years old, a ghost, a stranger all within a week of visits and yet kim remains in the same time, wishing more than anything she could travel back to that night she slept through and solve her life’s greatest mystery--the origin of all her miseries including why high school sonny macclean would subject her to further ridicule just to ( presumably ) make someone like kitty briar jealous.
“i guess not.” must be a guilty conscious, but she keeps that thought to herself. there’s no way she could stomach that conversation. the one she thinks about anytime he gets under her skin again. the one where she lets him know that his cruel prank, while unsuccessful thanks to kitty, had actually cut pretty deep. deep enough that it had left a scar that she still traces occasionally with masochistic self-indulgence. her favorite past time of revisiting old pains when the guilty conscious about sleeping through the most influential night of her life starts to burn. she can feel her teeth grit against one another as she clenches them, trying not to smirk at the dig at bev. leave it to the bonding over digging on someone else ( especially an obnoxious gossip and layabout like bev ) to make her smirk sneak through.
it’s only a second though, as bev makes a purposeful racket of clear the table she’s been hovering over and stomping into the back. there’s no way she’ll take macclean’s table next time he’s in now. fuck. “the specials, macclean.” she begins again, clearing her throat as a mental reset. “you want to hear ‘em or are you just here to make fun of my coworkers?” as if he doesn’t know that she can’t stand bev and the feeling is mutual. right now, she’s in her own private limbo and her only companion is back in the kitchen frying eggs and sneaking out between orders to smoke a cigarette or two. “cause, like i said, we close at three.”
