When skyrim came out i was in 8th grade and i got it cuz i wanted a new game and some kid in my class said it was cool. Now im a single father of three with a severe coke addiction and skyrim 2 still isnt out thats crazy . Thats crazy
46- A lingering kiss before a long trip apart. for Sol and Julian 😇
grace period
5.3k, 18+
He looks at her over his shoulder—bruised, bandaged, hood up; eyes shining with something Sol will, in the long arc of her unlife, never be entirely sure was love or strategy or both, which is, of course, the answer—and then he is out the door, and the door clicks, and the deadbolt sets itself with that final small consonant.
[masterlist] • [read on ao3]
thanks alex <333 hope it doesn't disappoint, i really had a lot of fun coming up with this one despite how long it took to get it finished. i don't think anyone new looks at these but just in case i recommend reading desert ghosts and humite before or after so certain references make sense :)
•••
December 2020.
•••
The motel is prepaid and sits right at the seam where Tucson dissolves.
Smells of cigarette ash baked into drywall and the chlorinated bite of a pool that hasn't been drained since Bush. Typical, discreet single off the blue tongue of I-19: stucco the color of weak tea, coral-pink doors; a neon flamingo buzzing itself into magenta dementia over the breezeway.
The kind of place that banks on cash and incuriosity.
Sol stares at the TV, which is just audible—Univision originally, turned to a local broadcast, news ticker eating its own tail. Her left arm is wrapped elbow to wrist in QuikClot gauze and a black tactical sleeve, and she is trying not to think about how her vitae is doing something altogether more alien than usual to knit the mess underneath.
How, since the serum, she tastes—even from inside her own body—unfamiliar.
Again.
Julian's repacking his go-bag, shirtless, small bandage across one cheekbone—cotton square anchored with surgical tape, dark in the middle where it's wicked through. She's on the bed, peripherally aware of his circuit: bag, dresser, bag, bathroom, bag. Contained kinetic precision; soft scuff of Jordans on carpet and lino. Charger, encrypted laptop, a second encrypted laptop. Dummy phone, real phone. A roll of hundreds rubber-banded, and his prayer mat folded small. That fucking flash drive gets slipped in a Ziploc tucked into a hard case, hard case bound for a Faraday pouch.
He's humming an old MIDI loop to himself and the room is doing that thing motels do at this hour, where reality thins, and when she glances at him he's rolling a cable around his fist with a focus that'd be disconcerting if she didn't know exactly how much is theatrical avoidance.
The good thing about Julian is that he never stops.
The bad thing about Julian is that he never stops.
He’d washed his hair again after they rose. It air-dries now in open revolt, nothing within thirty miles he'd deign to put in it. He catches her watching and pivots round to the bathroom mirror.
Winces.
"I've made peace with the hair. This, though—" He leans in and presses two fingertips to the dressing on his cheek. "This is going to be annoying for at least another night."
"Stop touching it."
"I can't. It's like when you bite the inside of your cheek and your tongue keeps going back to it. Except a part of the inside of my cheek is currently the outside." He tilts his jaw. Tilts it the other way with forensic scrutiny.
"It's the size of a coin," Sol says. "Try taking a timing belt at full snap. You'll be symmetrical again after one good feed."
His eyes find hers in the mirror.
Sol looks away.
News reel switch—a graphic of downtown Tucson: the Viper club, blurred, captioned with the wrong owner. Investigation ongoing. Carlos in his uniform giving practiced answers to a talking head with very white teeth. The Masquerade already sealing itself like skin over a splinter in real time.
It's smoldering, still—the previous night—in the base of her skull. Donati's charred corpse, smoke, quadcopter dragonfly whine; the wet-iron stink of blood spattering rooftop tar.
Lettow's plane against the sky, receding far up into the dark.
"When," she asks.
Julian doesn't miss a beat. "Hour and ten."
He ducks to a crouch by the bag—unzips the main compartment, loops the carabiner of the hard case to an inside D-ring. His hands move with the unbothered fluency of someone who has prepared to vanish more times than he ever prepared a meal when he was alive.
Clip, check, tuck.
She could have ended it.
That first night in the city, when he strolled into the parking garage like ten years of radio silence was a fucking coffee break; sweeping her setup, cracking jokes, flirting. Telling her, in that reasonable voice, that she'd diablerized Aila of her own free will, as if he hadn't spent the latter half of their entire relationship tuning her toward it.
She could have ripped out his throat the second he dared to bare it and watched him sublimate. Watched two decades' worth of Julian Sim—every laughing capable inch of her Sire, every backdoor he ever wrote her into without telling her—ash on the concrete.
The thought departs same as it has before. Catalogued. Re-shelved.
A little quieter, Julian continues:
"I'm pretty sure Tucson's court won't move in the next forty-eight. Donati's a brisket, but with Lettow gone, the domain's rudderless. It's essentially damage control until an Archon flies in to hold somebody's hand." He shrugs as he secures a karambit in its kydex sheath at the bag's side pocket. "They'll need to be briefed before doing anything stupid. Long enough interim for you to wrap up and roll out with Elena."
"I guess."
She keeps her affect flat, eyes on the TV.
She thinks of him a day ago in a plastic raincoat, neon trim, laying out a hundred-year campaign with all the gravity of a bus schedule. Interregnum priced, contingencies stacked three deep. Serum already metabolizing in her blood.
Now: this pre-cut window of institutional confusion, needed to slip through.
Was he always this far ahead of her from the beginning, and she just hadn't been looking?
Too busy being in love.
"And if anything—"
"Julian."
"—if anything, you ping me, or Nadia, and I can—"
Sol tips her head back to stare at the popcorn ceiling, and lets whatever he's going to say bypass her completely.
Thinks about Lettow.
It surfaces uninvited—the way it has all evening, in small static bursts: Lettow at the warehouse; grey eyes, unfurled. The steady strength behind that final embrace—grace from a man who had every right to put her down and chose, instead, to be…
Her lips part.
She thinks of his mouth, briefly, treacherously—their kiss outside Desert View, dry wind, the dignity of his disappointment.
Was he right?
Sol braces out of habit. Cold sumac and soaring weight, when the past comes up in her like silt at the thought of him—Sol braces for Aila the way you brace for a loose stair in the dark.
Nothing.
Nothing…
She should feel relief. She does feel relief, a vertiginous surplus of it, until the guilt shoves in behind.
It was not enough that she'd already destroyed Aila. Drank her down, sour and overripe, weariness calcified. Felt an Elder shatter in a ballast of centuries, watching nations sharpen themselves into the same blade and fall flat on it.
Has the serum dissolved whatever remained? Is her essence there still, muted and entombed, or is Aila just—nothing now?
Dampened, Julian had said. But Julian has said a lot of things.
There is a category of person she has betrayed inside the last month Sol knows she will dwell on for a long time to come. Lettow is in it. Dove is in it. A version of herself—the one who, six weeks ago, had not yet torched those bridges—is in it.
She's not sure who she is tonight.
Julian's stopped talking.
He zips the bag shut and stands, stretches; arms up, lean musculature of his torso catching bathroom light. He tugs a hoodie over his head and pretends to be interested in what's on screen. Really he is assessing her with a practiced sidelong caution reserved for things he's learning not to startle.
It's worse than his carelessness, being handled gently by Julian.
"Hey. Sol?"
Sol doesn't answer.
He moves to her instead. At the edge of the bed he lowers himself, nudging gingerly between her knees, and she has to either look at him or shut her eyes like a child, so she stares at the part in his hair. Still slightly wet at the roots, drying directionless.
An In-N-Out holiday promo flashes across the TV behind his head.
"Sol."
Not Solona—because he is being careful. He is being deliberately careful tonight.
Her arm gives a single deep pulse.
Julian shifts and lays both palms light on her thighs. Sol lets her good hand fall on top of his—just that—then meets his eyes.
Fuck.
This face used to be the easiest thing in the world to look at. There was a time when she'd fold herself into his lap without thought; nibble his earlobe, kiss him stupid while he coded around her—no charge, no interest accruing. Now, it seems, there is a meter running, and she is so exhausted, so far past lonely she would let him cost her everything all over.
Has.
"I need to ask you something stupid," he murmurs. "And I need you to not do the thing."
"What thing."
"The thing where you go very still and then say fine, Julian in that voice that makes me want to drive my car into a wall."
"What's the question."
"Do you want to come?"
She blinks.
"To Santa Fe," he adds, brows pulling together. "I know I said meet me there. I didn't… ask."
The A/C kicks on, a stuttering compressor; ice machine at the end of the hall grinding out a fresh batch.
She looks him over. Bruised left orbital—nothing serious; would have healed well before the prior dawn on any ordinary night, except their vitae's triaging several aggravated wounds at once. He's tired, which he doesn't allow himself to look if he can help it, and the still-furious part of Sol believes the fact that he's letting her see is a kind of cheating.
"Yes."
Tension drains in his shoulders. She watches him discover this in real time—the small, embarrassed rearrangement of his posture.
"Cool." An entire negotiation scrapped in one word. "Cool. Okay. I'm normal about that."
Sol holds what she really wants to say behind her teeth.
She knows he is trying, in his fucked-up way, to give her things back. Small things. Ceremonial gestures—waiting for her yes on a doorstep he already had the key to. Asking instead of telling.
As if any of it could touch the original sum.
Her hand moves from his. Fingertips drift up to the hurt side of his face, trail the discolored skin near his eye.
He turns to press his mouth to her palm. Kisses the heel of her hand, the soft pad below her thumb. It sets off a motion in her chest Sol does not have the inventory for and she can feel him clock it. That is one of his cruelties: reading her like he reads packets, line-by-line. Every recursion. Every silent dependency. The place at the nape of her neck where, if you press, she begins to come apart. The exact tilt of her chin that means please.
"But it'll be three nights, minimum," she says. "Maybe four."
He absorbs this without comment. Nods, follows the cue.
"Elena needs to flip the pawn shop. I can't leave her holding it."
"Okay. Yeah. Of course."
"And my apartment. I'm kinda fucked while heat's on downtown."
"Just text me the second you're on the road." His lips move against her lifeline. "Codeword."
"Really?"
"Come on."
Sol's tongue finds the back of one fang and presses, light, testing the point.
It's not that she has to dig for it. It lives where everything of his lives, in her. What she's deciding is what saying it costs and what it concedes and whether she's really going to hand him that on top of everything else.
And then: "…Glitchgod."
Julian lifts his eyes and looks at her with an expression that has, historically, talked her into every consequential decision of her unlife. Spark-sharp with hunger and intelligence, cut of him still glib as you please.
Mouth gone soft at the corners.
Hook set clean.
"Good girl."
Sol's fingers curl tight, nails dimpling the cotton around the bandage. He presses into the threat of her despite his wound.
"Don't," she warns. "You don't have time."
The grin arrives under her thumb.
"See, that's the thing. I've been running numbers since I woke up." He says it mild—throwaway Julian, easy Julian, both arms sliding around her hips, hands fitting themselves to the seat of her jeans. "I had a whole—I'm not going to say itinerary. But I had a rough outline."
He begins to draw her off the edge of the bed by degrees. Not pulling; just leaning back until gravity does the rest and she starts to come with it.
"Point is, I made sure I’m ahead. And I wanted…" A tiny twitch at his jaw. His gaze drops to her mouth before returning. "I wanted a minute with you."
The flamingo buzzes through the wall on its dying transformer.
Julian eases her forward another inch.
"Before I have to go be—" He gestures vaguely to the door.
Sol gives him nothing. Flat face, flat eyes; blankness she's perfected over years of holding herself shut.
He waits. She lets him.
He flounders. "You think I pack that fast for fun?"
"I think you pack that fast ‘cause you've had practice leaving."
His hands pause. Then resume—thumbs tracing the waistband of her jeans. Like she didn't just stick a knife in the table between them.
"Fair," he says. Not defensively. That's the Julian that makes her want to scream: the one who takes the hit.
"But I'm not disappearing, Sol. I'm driving to Santa Fe. And then you're going to drive to Santa Fe. And then we're going to be in the same room again." He holds her eyes. "Actually—to you? I'm about to be the most findable I've ever been."
His grip flexes where he holds her. He doesn't glance at the door, or the bag, or assess whatever she knows is running behind his eyes. Every restless watt of him stays aimed at her, idling.
So she lets it happen the way weather happens—stranded in monsoon season; sometimes you just stand still, soaked through, and let the sky have you.
Sol slides off the mattress into his lap. Her bandaged arm folds itself between their chests like a damaged wing. The good one has circled his neck before she's decided to put it there.
Carpet's worn under her knees. On the drywall by the taped-up window, runes he set in vitae glow ambient and phosphorus from below.
He kisses her temple, which isn't fair. The corner of her jaw next, following the thin skin under her ear to where the scar stops.
She turns her face and he closes the rest of the distance in a polite half-inch that lets her be the one to put her mouth on his, and then he's kissing her, and it's—
It's so.
Soft.
She sighs into him, clumsy with overdue. Eyes stinging.
His hand slips under the hem of her shirt, skin to skin, finally; palm dry and cool and known. She feels him hum as he smooths up her spine, stopping at the Pleiades clustered near her shoulder blade. Bookmarked. No pressure. And maybe it's the contact that does it.
Hairline threads, resutured.
Engineering, she thinks, and he sucks gently at her tongue, and engineering, she thinks, and her hips shift toward him, and engineering, she thinks, and gives up.
She becomes aware of herself in pieces. The cool of his cross piercing tipped toward her cheek. The catch of his teeth on her bottom lip and her own answering. This involuntary inhale of him—smoke-and-asphalt off the previous night, residual under motel soap, and beneath that the electric constant of him.
Neither rush. His hand travels vertebrae to ribcage to the underwire of her bra and back; a slow systems check, and Sol hates how her body responds: here, here, still here.
His cheek must be killing him. Tangible restraint in his jaw when he opens wider against her. The favored angle. The minute drag-off when she leans purposefully into the wrong side, and Julian adjusts without breaking contact, flinch folded in.
The reality of him in pain, still seeking her.
Sol breaks the kiss and pulls her shirt over her head.
His gaze drops to her collarbone, lower; the scatter of moles across her chest and shoulders.
He stays quiet.
Not still—his hands chart her waist, bruises and hummingbirds at the jut of her hip—but wordless, and Julian wordless is the loudest he gets.
There is a thought she can't keep out: that she is in every blueprint behind those black eyes.
That he is making her the center of a century.
That somewhere in his dismantling of their world is a foundation built entirely on her, and how shamefully she wants it to be love, not architecture, and how, coming from him, those might be the same thing.
How much it does for her—to be the most important variable. Sick-sweet thrill hitting lower than pride, lower than ego, settling molten and possessive in the pit of her stomach.
Sol lets herself, for a moment, forget all about forgiveness and simply want him.
Drags his hoodie up one-armed; he ducks out of it easy, torso unmarked for the most part, porcelain beneath her palms. There's a hard pearl of vitae under the skin above his heart where the Blood's forcing reconstruction. She presses it with her thumb.
Julian sucks air through his teeth. "That's—yeah, thanks. That's still tender."
"Good."
His eyes narrow—part amusement, part irritation, part something older that briefly fractals the pupils—and that pleases her more than it should.
Her knees slide further apart around his hips.
Friction builds warmth where they're pressed together.
She dips to his jaw, mouth dragging along the pale length of throat above the cord of his choker. He swallows and cartilage moves sleek under her lips. Sol takes an old pilgrimage, up the tendon to his ear, and catches the cross piercing between her teeth before she can correct herself.
His grip relocates—one hand at the back of her thigh, elegant fingers denting the muscle; the other flat between her shoulder blades—and hitches her flush.
Hard line of him at her inseam. Julian makes this sound when she rolls onto him that she hasn't heard since the trailer: needy and uncomplicated.
Satisfaction curdles in the cavity of her chest.
Sol grinds down again and watches his eyes flutter shut.
"Okay—don't be a sadist about it," he mutters. "We shouldn't. Right? I mean. We can. But."
We're empty. I mean dangerously empty—
And suddenly Sol is sitting in the Airstream: swamp-cooler tick, the blue wash of three CRTs.
Two fledglings still new and stupid to it.
"Vampire jerky," she hears herself echo, and feels Julian's split-second glitch. Because it's his line. Some scorched August, half a bottle of unscented lube and please and that's what scares me about you sometimes.
Fifteen years folding flat with an accordion collapse. It passes between them in no language at all.
He laughs, then. Not the charming, infectious usual—but small, a little bewildered, scraped from the back of his throat.
"You remember that."
"I remember everything." She doesn't mean it to sound that way. Or maybe she does.
His arms tighten around her. Sol fists a hand where his hair's gone fluffy and drags him into the kiss like slamming a door.
For a while there's nothing in the room but wet quiet.
Small greedy sounds they've stopped policing. She maps him the way she'd map an engine blind: by heat that isn't there and vibration that is; by where the knock comes from when she leans her weight into him, palm flat over his sternum.
The terrible ease of it.
Motel nowhere, coordinates scrubbed: a room that has been every room. She lets her want and her dread melt to one like they belong together—because they do, with him. There is no version of kissing Julian that isn't also counting exits.
His fingers notch at the clasp of her bra and she arches into the question—and lace falls away.
They were always good at this part.
His mouth to her throat.
His hands on her breasts, thumbs teasing until she's pushing into his touch; every nerve ending she has set alight, fizzing toward him like filings to a magnet. He takes a nipple under the flat of his tongue, then the edge of his teeth, and Sol shudders; claws pricking out on reflex, injured arm buckling when she tries to grip his shoulder. Pain arrives whole-white, articulate. The thought of stopping's worse.
She grinds steady in his lap, right hand cradling the back of his head. Her own jeans seam works her clit against the shape of his cock through denim. Julian groans around her and the sound's resonating in her chest, and the old math starts running unbidden: how much to slick, how much neither of them has to spare.
His mouth leaves her with a noise that makes her thighs clench tight. He climbs her throat again, fangs scraping skin, and she's tugging the hair at his nape to bare his neck in return—this territorial exchange between Beasts.
Hands go to her fly; she lets him pop the button. Knuckles grazing the strip of skin below her navel—
The laptop chimes from the dresser.
"Ignore it," Julian says immediately, mid-kiss to her jaw. "Just a macro."
And she could have him—that's what she's been circling. Push him flat on this carpet right now and say fuck it, expend the Blood, take the hour, take every minute she can gouge out of this night and he'd let her—he wants it, she can feel exactly how much through two layers—and it would be good, it would be so fucking good it would frighten her.
No room to think when he's inside and her vitae has turned toward him.
Walk him to the Fisker after; watch him grin the whole way, like he used to, smug and still hers.
But Sol freezes.
Her flayed arm is tacky beneath the sleeve, weak and throbbing. Grey creeps chronically into Julian's complexion.
On both their bodies, dark hollows bloom where skin is thinnest. Vitae drawn from the wound sites; kisses gone metallic.
Their Blood is already spoken for. Burn it here and they're liabilities; him soon at the state line, starving in a new domain; her alone in a city that just lost its Prince. There is also the meaner truth. If she fucks him now, she will spend the next three nights deciding whether it was deposit or goodbye.
Sol has done a decade of that.
She can lie in this rented dark wanting it worse—and she does want it worse, ache lodged furious—because she has become exceptional at hurting herself, too.
She retreats. Feels him understand, how he reroutes around her—he is, for all his crimes, being careful. He's not naturally careful. He's clinical and he's curious and he's funny. Careful is new and careful is, she suspects, the closest he can manage to an apology.
"You should go," she says.
It surprises them both. Go—sober, adult.
"Do your thing. Feed. Heal, you know." She straightens against him, holding one side of his jaw, fingertips brushing where his lashes throw shadows. "Before the pitch. I’ll fuck up your schedule."
"Sol—" He blinks in rapid succession. What comes next is unvetted, too fast, younger than he's sounded all night: "You could fuck up my schedule a little."
His eyes search hers and for the first time in six weeks she lets him have it easy. Lets him see the exhaustion. Lets him see the want—lets him see the ugly animal of her abandonment that she can never name aloud. Lets him see, and lets him take it to whatever room of himself he keeps these readings in.
"Maybe," she says. "But that's why I'm not gonna."
It isn't hurt that moves across his face, exactly. Comprehension. He gets it—and what's worse, she sees him decide, again, that it's fair.
He reclines. Considers the carpet: dingy beige, a darker burn-mark by the foot of the bed. His jaw works, and she recognizes Julian, a man who is constitutionally good with language, choosing not to fill the silence. Just sitting in the mess with her.
It would be funny if it weren't so fucking unbearable, this in-between and not-yet-gone.
He doesn't kiss her. He pulls her in instead; both arms, her face to his shoulder.
"Can I at least drive you crazy for the next three nights?" he murmurs into her hair.
"You always do."
"No. Specifically. I have a plan. It involves a playlist and several inappropriate photos."
"Since when do you give me a heads-up."
He's quiet long enough that she feels his chest expand against hers.
"I made a commitment to transparency going forward, didn't I? So. Beta test. And—" He stops again. Clears his throat, strips himself of the bit. What's left underneath is so bare she almost asks him to put it back on. "I want you to know I'm thinking about you. The whole time."
Sol snorts before she can clamp down on it, and does not know who, between the two of them, to be angrier at. "Fuck off, Julian."
"Working on it."
He helps refasten her bra with the deftness of some absurd subroutine. Fishes her shirt from the carpet and passes it over, then grabs his own hoodie. When they’re dressed he tugs her hem straight; smooths it; pats her hip twice, brisk and ridiculous, like he's squaring her collar before a job interview.
He used to do up the laces of her chucks in the footwell of the Geo. Used to comb the Sonoran out of her hair on a toilet lid. Those hands are the same hands.
She catches his wrist before it falls away. Holds it, and runs her thumb across the faint blue vein map on the inside. Julian watches, and, slowly, turns his arm in her grip; palm up, splayed open.
Sol threads their fingers together.
He stands, pulling her with him. The air's thick with their injuries and the dull copper burn of overtaxed vitae.
They stay clasped a moment longer.
Slip, knuckle by knuckle, until their pinkies catch.
Let go.
Julian shoulders his bag, and pockets his keys, and does a final circuit of the room. Bathroom light off. Curtain tape pressed at its lifting corner. He checks the seal on the wall with one professional glance; nods.
He begins to cross to the door.
The carpet eats his footsteps and the room flatlines again; goes porous, leaky; and the floor tilts the way a drain drags water, and there is a suspended second where she could just let him walk out clean. Turn back to the muted television and the empty bed and the ghosts. Play it numb until she can carry it.
Sol's on her feet.
His hand at the lock—
parking-lot sodium slats through the gap—
dry cold of an Arizona December crawling in around his ankles.
He turns, and she thinks he's going to be a jackass; defuse it, leave on a one-liner so neither of them has to feel the size of the hole about to open—
He sets the bag down.
Three strides and she's there—of course she's there, fool that she is—gripping the front of his hoodie. Julian catches her face between his hands, and leans in, and it is slow—
closed-mouth—
terminal.
Just the cool seam of him against the cool seam of her.
This is the one they're both going to turn over and over.
Seventy hours from now—Elena's headlights an even quarter mile back, I-25 unspooling at four in the morning somewhere past Truth or Consequences—Sol will not be able to keep her mind off it. How he met her without surprise. How his good cheek slots into her good hand. The whisper of his lips parting under hers—mindful of every angle, no haste in it: just the two of them, fanged, blood-poor, beat to shit.
She is twenty-six and forty-six and infinite at once, and he tastes the same as he's ever tasted: silver-blue, carbonation under her skin—electric and effervescent and fond. Toothpaste and mint gum and faint streaks of iron where vitae's still closing him up from the inside.
She'll think that he tastes of himself the same way he tasted of himself backed against a lime-green hood in '03, sand in his hair, Y Tu Mamá También playing tinny from the Geo's stereo—and the layers will stack: this kiss on top of all the other kisses, strata upon strata; roots rotting and entwined. She'll feel it in the soles of her feet and the resealing meat of her arm and the whole emptying city behind her.
Catastrophic relief.
His thumbs swipe gently across her cheeks. Sol realizes she's crying.
Not much. Two tracks of vitae she can usually kill before they surface. Julian keeps kissing her, and she is grateful for that in a way that will embarrass her later.
She stays in it for as long as she can stand.
When they break he sets his forehead to hers. His eyes stay shut, and Sol watches him not say it. Watches his throat work around the shape and decide, again, against it. That same unfinished sentence he left hanging under a truck's passing headlights—
I should have done a lot of things, Sol…
It sits there in the half-inch between their mouths, fully formed.
His ring finger where the scar tissue ends, below her ear, featherlight. He traces the worst night of her mortal life.
"Glitchgod," Julian says, very small. "Soon as you're rolling."
It takes Sol a moment to stabilize her voice.
"I know." She swallows; blinks the red back. "Now get out of my room."
"Technically I paid for it."
"Don't be cute."
"I am cute." Like an asshole.
He kisses her again before she can say anything else. A second, on her forehead. A third time, home, to the corner of her mouth—lets it linger at the junction of scar and skin, breathing her in.
And he turns.
Hovers at the threshold, outlined in neon glare, adjusting the bag strap across his chest.
He looks at her over his shoulder—bruised, bandaged, hood up; eyes shining with something Sol will, in the long arc of her unlife, never be entirely sure was love or strategy or both, which is, of course, the answer—and then he is out the door, and the door clicks, and the deadbolt sets itself with that final small consonant.
She sits very still after the sound of him is gone.
Watches his seal pulse softly on the wall. Listens to the freeway's sigh of semis, the fainter whine of passenger cars.
A chime sounds once more from his laptop—and she realizes, with a feeling like the floor going liquid all over again, that he left it. The secondary. The one he was rolling cables for. Left it on the dresser, screen dark, charger coiled neat beside it.
Julian doesn't forget things.
She stares at it.
On the muted television, a weather map rotates. Seventy-eight in Phoenix tomorrow—shocker. Heavy snow over the Rockies. Sol closes her eyes and presses the heel of her good hand against her sternum, where something is still trying to assemble itself out of the wreckage of the last six weeks. In the dark behind her lids she can see, perfectly, the I-19 onramp at the south end of the city; the taillight streak of a ridiculous purple Fisker flashing in and out of the underpass.
She thinks of him crossing state lines close to midnight, lo-fi streaming, alone.
Thinks of the laptop. What he wants her to find.
Then Sol lies down on the side of the bed he'd been on, presses her face into the pillow that smells like him, and waits for the sun.
Gay Lawrence, Minnicouja Sioux, wears this stunning Sioux gown of natural leather bedecked with bead work and porcupine quills. Scanned from the magazine Arizona Highways; May 1975
origamiaround
theartofmadeline
areudirty
gummygunk
prguitarman
vaporwave
romaincrisis
