strvwberryblcnde:
Perhaps it was selfish, setting up a mouse trap like she’d been trying to, cube of cheese metaphorically manifested as her finger tracked a line down her sternum. She didn’t even realise what she’d been vying for when a licked thumb to her forehead steadily exhaled the breath from her chest, disappointment almost enough to make her cheeks flush. It felt like it’d been a long time since she’d been touched, really touched, by someone that loved her, knew her right down to her marrow. An exaggeration, perhaps – it’d only been a handful of months since she’d moved to Los Angeles but rather unnervingly, in the time she’d been dating Dom, she’d gotten used to it. It was like a stray dog getting by on scraps from strangers for years until it finally got to know what having an owner was like, someone who’d consistently tuck her close at night and kiss the top of her head in the morning. Returning to her usual suspects – rough hands, no attention paid to the words from her mouth – was, in a way, like pulling that same white sheet over her head and playing ghost again, wandering the corridors of her family home without detection. It’d been nice, for a little while. Getting to be alive, like that. Lana smiled at him like he’d given her everything and broke away from his space, jabbing a random button and making a leap to exit the elevator. She tossed a laugh over her shoulder for the cherry on top of the cake. All seamless, red velvet drawn for the theatre production to commence. There wasn’t a point in chasing more. She needed to remember that.
Lana reached out to thumb the pink petals of a passing flower, a hoard funnelled towards her like the trumpets of an orchestra. “I used to call those Lilas,” she told him, hand moving to cup a purple, stouter type, pop of yellow in the centre like it’d attempted to ingest a buttercup, flower-on-flower cannibalism. Lana inhaled as if she’d been handed a perfume tester in a department store, breath of content parting red lips. “Vivians.” Rushed like a bee to a fresh source of honey, Lana approached another that looked like it’d only freshly unfurled, swollen and huge – bigger than any fist Lana could make, that was sure. It stuck out like a sore thumb. So orange it could’ve burnt down an entire forest, reduced Rome to ash. It was difficult to look away. Too much, almost. Staring the sun dead on without glasses. “Lanas,” she greeted with a sift at a long petal, something curdling in the pit of her stomach like week old milk. They had them in their garden when she was little. She could still remember rain splattering them down to a droop as Tommy and Caleb danced with her. Regardless, Lana wore a grin brighter than a football stadium when she turned to look at Gabe. “I’d give them all my own names. Way more fun,” came with a flit of her eyes elsewhere, memory of a shorter recipient of this story rattling around in the back of her brain. Unwanted tenant. “I think, like… everyone should give their own names to everything. The world’s more fun when it’s yours, don’t you think? When you’re friends with it.” There wasn’t a specific meaning in that, as there tended to lack in most of the things Lana rambled about – nothing someone could pick out, anyway, even if she knew what she’d meant. She severed a daisy and slid the stem behind her ear, investigating his expression as she righted it’s position. Then, she did the same. This time, for him. A step drew her closer, reaching to tuck his daisy into place. His left, her right. Opposites. “Which flower’s Gabriel?” she asked fairly nonchalant, pupils drifting to plot out familiar freckles. When she edged him further, she wasn’t sure if she was talking about the flower that represented him or the person she’d known in college – a grasp for a hand in a dark bedroom, something to anchor yourself with in the middle of a bad dream. “Is he here?”
“Yeah. Those?” Gabe pointed at a few weeds that were blooming above the concrete, green and yellowish grass coming up as if the skyscraper they were on was about to be overtaken back by Earth. “My mom, uh, really liked lilacs, I guess. She made everything in my room that color when I was a kid. Isn’t it funny how pretty it is here? On top of a fucking condominium complex in New York City. I miss... trees. Maybe I should become Amish.” He took a finger once again to investigate the daisy atop Lana’s ear, softly plucking petals in a he loves me, he loves me not manner. He tickled the inside of the daisy then brushed the tip of her nose the way she would do to him sometimes, a child’s way of affection. Lana was the only person he felt comfortable with mindlessly touching, twirling, because it was what he did to him -- a scratch to the nape of the neck, a tug on the sleeve. He took his hand to the center of her forehead in between her eyebrows, creating a slight wrinkle so she looked mildly uninterested or unsettled. “There. Now you’re mysterious,” Gabe grinned, quoting the famous scene from Almost Famous.
He moved towards the railing of the edge, lanky upper-half slumped over as he looked down. Cars and taxis and crowds of people were going by constantly, a never-ending cinemagraph. The world was always too big -- it was something both treacherous and comforting to his boy-self, but now he had felt too old for it, like he was meant to stay eternally on some beachside porch for the rest of his life in an old man’s body. He looked down and wondered what it would be like to fall or fly, body hitting the impact of something, whether deathly or otherworldly. Anything that was beyond the mundanity of his current day. His eyebrows furrowed, fixated on a cat below sauntering around the corner of a street alley. He was probably too close to the edge, he figured, but he couldn’t get his eyes off the street so many feet below them. Exhaling, he took a step back and looked at Lana again, almost like a source of comfort. A guardian angel in the flesh. They were quiet together for a big, Lana gazing at the flowers with more curiosity than he had. Gabe took it upon himself to gently braid a strand of her auburn hair like a fixation, then tucked the daisy from his ear into the braid. She now had the appearance of a Dr. Seuss character with the daisy sticking up out of her hair like an extra ear. “Hey. You pick the next place.”
