WHERE: the full moon club.
WHO: @lilidimitrova & noa.
Noa sat at her vanity in the dressing room ignoring the single bulb that had gone out in the very bottom corner of her mirror and fixed her makeup. Dipping her brush into her eyeshadow pallet, she looked up as Lili walked in. She hadn't really gone out of her way to make friends since she'd been back— too tangled up in ancient history to pay attention to what was right in front of her, which was annoying as fuck because yet another thing she was allowing Javi to take away from her.
"Is that handsy prick in the Safari Jack hat still out there?" she asked, mutual suffering tossed out to sea like an olive branch. We're mixing metaphors, it's fine. "I don't know if I'll be able to stop myself from impaling him with the heel of my stilettos and I love the beach too much to spend the rest of my life in prison."
His heart was a rock in his chest, cracking and rolling through his body as it tore him apart from the inside out. There was nothing that Javier regretted more in his life than letting Noa go but he knew it had to be done. For her own safety, she had to get out. After that night, Javier had been jumped, he'd been threatened and beaten up and scared shitless as he tried to find his way out of trouble. His issues had landed him in prison and he was left to wonder what happened to the girl he'd given his heart to and then torn it away with the reckless abandon of a scared kid.
He walked towards her and stopped in front of the woman before she could get away. She looked the same and yet different in a way that made his chest hurt. Javier had missed so much of Noa's life because he was selfish and too proud to admit he couldn't keep her safe. After Ricky, everything felt...wrong. Broken. He was broken. "I don't give a damn what you're here for, you shouldn't be." How could she not see that this place had nothing left to offer her?
Noa smiled, but it held the sharpened edge of a sneer. The lukewarm reception was to be expected, but she couldn't deny that it still stung. It turned out that time couldn't heal all wounds, a little boy looking back at her for the briefest of moments before she blinked to clear it and saw the man he'd become standing before her once more.
She advanced on him in an instant, invading his space. Anyone watching could have easily confused them with lovers, her hands coming up to rest against his chest and plucked at an invisible piece of lint on his shirt. She craned her head towards his, her lips almost brushing his. It affected her, being this close, and that pissed her off. He had no right to hold any kind of power over her. He had made it clear she was nothing to him, so she'd repay the favor in kind. "Oh, yeah? Well, I'd love to see what you plan on doing about it."
starter for: @noadasilva
location: the mixing room
Jazz was fucking annoying music. He hated it. But the drinks at this place were better than anywhere else in town and it was usually less crowded with newly turned twenty one year old girls trying to get fucked up on someone else's dime. Javier sat with his back to the door to the place and ran his finger along the rim of his whiskey glass. He heard the door open but didn't look back, he didn't really give a shit who was walking into this place because he wasn't here to socialize.
Then he heard the voice that had been haunting his fucking dreams for years. His blood ran cold and he immediately felt sick to his stomach. There was no way that Noa was stupid enough to come back here. Not after what he'd said and done to get her to leave. His dark eyes left his glass and moved to where the voice came from and when he saw her, all grown up and looking like a temptress if he'd ever seen one, he swore a little too loudly.
An arm slung through the crooked elbow of the old man from the club, his greedy eyes unable to keep themselves off the slit that ran up her thigh, leaving little to the imagination. Honestly, she wasn't sure why he was so busy undressing her with his eyes when he literally paid to see her dance naked on stage, but who was she to look a wrinkly balled gift horse in the mouth? Since she'd been back to this god forsaken town, she'd been living out of the car she'd boosted, so a little night out was exactly what the doctor ordered.
Bill or Tom or whatever-the-fuck his name was made his way to the bar to order them both some drinks (he was totally banking on getting his dick wet tonight, and it was going to be so delicious to watch him steep in disappointment) while she excused herself to the ladies' room.
But then that voice.
She'd known she was going to run into him eventually — if he was even still here, that was — she just hadn't expected it to be so soon. Her back straightened and her heart went to war with her ribcage. It was such an impossible reconciliation. Once, that boy he used to be had been her home. Now, the man he was was nothing but a stranger. Their synchronicity had once been written into prose. Now it openly mocked her.
You shouldn't be here, he said, and she scoffed, her face a mask of indifference even as that night came roaring back to the forefront of her mind. "Well, it's a good thing I'm not here for you, then, isn't it? You can forget you ever saw me, and I'll— well, would you look at that? I've already long forgotten you."
Noa was born to a single mother who’d been living on the street battling an addiction she ultimately chose over her newborn daughter. Noa wasn’t even five days old when she entered the system, her name the first and only thing her mother ever gave her.
She learned to be scrappy in a home full of no less than five kids at any given time. Over the years, she met a lot of different kids from all kinds of backgrounds and picked up all sorts of little talents.
Why Javi and Ricky were different from the others, Noa never really knew. But the three of them became like their own little family unit. They ran amuck in the streets of Half Moon Bay with sticky fingers and an insatiable appetite for trouble. All her best times were with her boys.
Somewhere along the way, she fell in love. It was a slow, creeping thing. Platonic, familial, and then… something else. She never said anything for fear of ruining their dynamic, choosing to dance at the edge of the line for as long as she could so she could keep them both. And then, one day, Ricky made a move, and it was so nice to know that at least one of her boys had the same idea she did. It created the rift in their group that Noa had always feared, and Javi distanced himself, getting into trouble on his own more and more frequently while their trio became a duo.
Eventually, she grew real fuckin’ tired of the distance and confronted Javi, for once being completely honest about her feelings. Because she had them for him just as the same as she did Ricky. It made things complicated, sure, but they’d always been a unit. Surely they could figure it out. But Noa had never been the type to do anything with tact, everything chaotic and out of order. They kissed. Ricky saw. The boys fought.
And then, the unthinkable happened. It was always an inevitability that their past would come back to haunt them. Shots were fired, Javi throwing himself over Noa to protect her from the onslaught as they both watched Ricky felled by them. Life stuttered to a halt after that, their lives torn apart in ways that could never be mended. Just barely managing to escape, Noa hadn’t even processed the loss when Javi was on her, hurling the sharpest words he had at her, chasing her off until she was cursing his name and his memory, and anything that reminded her of him.
She was lost without her boys. Lost without her town. She had nothing to her name, no one she could turn to. She fled Half Moon Bay, hitchhiking down the coast until she felt like she’d run far enough away from her demons. Eventually she learned she could use her womanly wiles for essentials like food and board. But man, those nights where she was forced to rough it in the cold or the rain or the heat… Ricky and Javi were always there, always reminding her of just how much a person could lose. And she hated them both for it.
The years dragged on. Crime paid and she excelled in it. Boosting cars was a personal favorite, but she’d grown especially talented in the way of pickpocketing. Maybe it was just enough to barely scrape by and maybe she left a string of shitty boyfriends in her wake simply because she needed a place to go and loneliness was a silent killer.
As she made her way back up the coast, she began to wonder why she’d let Javi run her off. A budding need for revenge, to make him hurt the way she hurt, to make him regret the way she regretted, burned in her like a flame until it had become an inferno. She’d had a taste of an aimless life and now she was ready for a little retribution.
So Noa made her way back to the town that had both made and broken her with a singular goal in mind: fuck shit up.
