I have to stop running at point. We’ll make it work. We’re in this together. I don’t wanna lose you. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just trying to protect you. To protect us. You know I’m here for you right? I know. This is where it ends.
when someone says “i love you,” i want to feel it.
Guero’s love had been loud. It had put a target on her back. Brenda’s love had been constant. It smelled like her perfume and followed after her like a trail of dust. She can no longer recall her parent’s love feeling like anything other than a warning. Brief and full of blood. It must have been more than that—she prays it was more than that. But it’s becoming harder and harder for her to remember.
when someone says “i love you,” i want to feel it.
Guero’s love had been loud. It had put a target on her back. Brenda’s love had been constant. It smelled like her perfume and followed after her like a trail of dust. She can no longer recall her parent’s love feeling like anything other than a warning. Brief and full of blood. It must have been more than that—she prays it was more than that. But it’s becoming harder and harder for her to remember.
James’ love never fully arrives. It proceeds slowly and silently; so much so that she fails to notice it’s happening. Remarkably, it doesn’t seem as if it will ever settle in or take its shoes off. Growing and changing all the while right under her nose.
The reality is, she’d more or less deluded herself into thinking that he’d actually said it already. It was only after she heard it that she realized no, not in so many audible, vowel-laden words.
Which is absurd of course—he absolutely had (an innumerable amount). With every bullet and broken bone. Every utterance of, You okay? Every glance from the driver’s seat, the desert rushing behind him in a blur of stars and sand. And really, what does it matter whether he speaks the words or not? She had felt it—had been feeling it all this time, and while it might be important for some, it was less so for her. The woman with the tail of a snake in her mouth, wondering what love is supposed to even taste like anymore.
And what would they even be if not for their silences? His love for her had taken up shop in their silence; it thrived on her careful slowness to speak. Lived in his hands tangled up in her hair. She had barely spared a thought for what it would sound like coming from his mouth until it did. Until he was leaving one morning on some routine errand and her heart had stuttered and stopped and it was like she was just a drug-dealer’s girlfriend again—in love and powerless at the whims of some other man’s violence.
“Love you,” he hummed into her ear with a swift, thoughtless kiss—as if his body had done it without his brain’s permission. Habitual. Maybe, she thought, maybe he was suffering under a similar delusion. “I’ve said it hundreds of times,” she imagines he might have thought, “what’s one more?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says with a smile and a wink, his shoulders loose and relaxed. He slides into the driver’s seat like he has so many times before, and there’s no betrayal in his gait or his gaze of a feeling of panic, as if he has no awareness of what he’s just said.
She doesn’t think for one moment to correct him—to draw attention to what some might consider to be a momentous, cosmic shift in the universe of their relationship. He’s said it before, of course. And love is in the returning.
When she leans into the open window, her forearms burn some from the heat, but she savors it. She wants nothing so much as to remember this; all of it. The way the heat rose from the blacktop beneath her feet; how his hair curled over the top of his ears. How ordinary and infinite.
“I love you, too,” she grins, and seals their silence with a kiss.
I could feel your sadness coming through as I read ur post and I’m sorry for your disappointment. It wasn’t just the rushed pace and massive plot holes that did it for me. I felt like I was watching a Teresa and James I didn’t know. Especially Teresa. She was so completely OOC and I cannot comprehend how writers and show runners can assassinate their characters like this. And then they had the nerve to hype it. Alice and Peter really did an amazing job with what they were given.
u said it! the dialogue and the writing generally was just so stiff and unhelpful it was no wonder they had to put all their acting in the physical stuff and it showed. rip us and our expectations. ✌️😔✌️
Your "harsh" post about S5 wasn't harsh at all. Agreed w/ everything. I feel bad for not being overly hyped about the I love you's. IMO, taken out of context, those scenes work (P & A r fantastic and so is their chemistry), but when surrounded w/ the rest of the show, I was just like...ok. There's been so much plot & so rushed at that. There r plenty of shows that manage 2 tell compelling, well paced stories in 10 eps or less. I just don't think this team is capable.
don’t get me wrong, I am v annoyed, but I’m more sad than anything else. I loved this show and these characters so much, and they just don’t deserve to go out like this. but I totally agree, that sex scene was somehow the only redeeming thing and it was probably only because they didn’t speak.
y’all, it pains me to say this, it really does but... it’s gotta be said. a little bit. spoilers and bummers under the cut, so if ur riding the positivity wagon i would go no further on this one.
i cannot possibly imagine that those of us who’ve been watching this show since S1 would disagree with the notion that it is 100% not the same show it was during S1-S3. the first (3) seasons of this show were absolutely lovely and i would not trade them for the entire world.
as i’ve already admitted, i didn’t fuck with S4, and i have barely fucked with S5. i watched the first couple episodes and skipped straight to last night’s episode and i gotta say, what the fuck. seriously. i love teresa. i love james. i love the two of them together, but when he said “i love you,” i legitimately felt nothing. all the subtle character work that had been done in the first few seasons; the reason why we fell in love with them (and the two of them with each other) in the first place? essentially nowhere to be found. like, we knew we were always gonna get there, but i had never hoped it would be in the midst of the most inane, rushed bullshit. i’ve chatted with @mymostimaginaryfriend about this, but i just can’t imagine why you’d try to wrap up such an involved plot in (10) freaking episodes instead of just enriching ur character work as much as possible. it’s not as if ur gonna get cancelled; the show’s over!
and jeresa aside, what is with the dialogue this season? thanks for telling me word-for-word that the CIA is essentially a cartel, i would never have been able to make the cognitive leap myself. the first three seasons of this show were good because they were challenging and they very much respected the intelligence of the audience. there was just so much to mine in almost every single episode. that was part of what i loved about it, and that energy is just... totally gone.
one final note here, because i’d rather not wade in the muck of this for too long, but are they really expecting us to think that james would legitimately kill her? what are they trying to achieve here? we did the “maybe james is a villain, maybe he isn’t,” bit already, and it was far more nuanced than whatever the fuck the last few minutes of this episode was.
listen. i get that it must have been challenging, having a shortened final season on top of a S4 that was likely totally fucked with by peter gadiot’s departure (and that’s just speculation on my part), but i have a hard time believing they couldn’t have done marginally better than this. there were distant echoes of what the characters used to be, but ultimately almost every gesture has fallen horribly flat. i know there’s one more episode, so maybe i’ll be able to find something redeeming about it, but apparently the only writing team on earth capable of salvaging gold from the mud of early cancellation was for NBC’s life and no one will ever be able to do it again.
Rules: Write the latest line from your WIP and tag as many people as there are words in the line you want!
Tagged by: @mymostimaginaryfriend | Who still believes that I will finish one of my many QOTS WIPs (and who I do owe fic because I told her I would finish one if she called her doctor about getting the vaccine and she did and now she’s invincible).
The last QOTS fic I was working on involved a baby and a winery, so:
She’s particularly enamored with the one they settle on; being so close to the water as it is, quiet and isolated from the summer tourist traffic.
And just for kicks, here’s the James x Javier x Teresa one that I still dream of:
It had, in the end, been what cost him the only true friend he’d had at the time.
Hi love your blog and I'm glad to see you back posting. But there are lots of us who have been here all this time while you were not active trying our best to keep things going, so maybe you can try to show a little patience and respect? Some things you post come across as condescending. TY!
“TY!” is potentially thee most condescending sign-off I’ve experienced and I work with a lot of older men, but just for the record (1) I have never had nor do I currently have any obligation to “keep things going” on Tumblr with regards to fandom at any point in my life, but good for you; (2) I got an objectively INSANE ask that I did admittedly get a little bullish about, but which I acknowledged on this blog and TO that person specifically and apologized; (3) I am sick of strangers trying to mother me, I am a grown ass woman doing my best and am free to say what I like and fuck off when I want
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