Summary: The Life and Times of the Heist Wives family, chronicled by things attempted after speaking the timeless declaration, “hold my beer” or Five Times Lou Miller said “hold my beer” before doing something spectacular and stupid, and a couple times someone else did.
I owe this ficlet to a conversation I was having earlier with @smashingmagicklovely about
1. how I wanted a full compilation of everything Lou has ever done after saying "hold my beer"
2. How Lou is badass but Soft on the Inside and Debbie is a non-romantic smartass but Soft For Lou.
and 3. how "my womb says yes but my heart says no" essentially sums up my entire attitude toward writing Heist Wives domestic fluff.
This is the fruits of my labor. Thanks Em for drop kicking my muse at ten o'clock at night.
Tagging @casliyn, @louxdebbie, and @oceansnineball because I feel like Dani and Darcy became ‘a thing’ somewhere between the three of them and an onslaught of adorable Instagram AUs.
Lou sprawls across two separate bar stools in Nine Ball’s pub, watching Debbie beat herself at a game of pool. “I got good in prison,” she had explained the first time she creamed Nine Ball.
“You had a pool table in prison?” Nine Ball asks incredulously, blowing a cloud of smoke over the table.
Debbie shakes her head. “Nope. I had a pen and some paper, and once I finished the Greatest Heist of All Time I calculated the angle of every shot in a standard game of pool and invented new scenarios until I ran out of ink.”
Not for the first time tonight, Lou wonders how she got so lucky as to love a woman as clever as Debbie Ocean. She’s not stupid—Deb is lucky as Hell to have Lou covering her ass, but that’s the magic of it. They click like a hairpin and a padlock, picking their way through barriers and unhinging each other as they go.
Lou turns to Amita, who’s perched demurely beside her with a fucking spectacular cosmo. Lou knows—she made Nine Ball show her the recipe. “Hold my beer,” she instructs Amita, sliding it down the counter to her. She steps on her bar stool, swaying as it spins.
“Holy shit,” she hears Debbie murmur, looking up from her one-sided game. “Lou—”
Lou steps onto the bar and weaves through a line of empty drinks until she’s perched on the corner, in front of Debbie. She fishes through her pocket until she finds the ring. She drops to one knee, knocking over a half-empty margarita in the process. She can feel the tequila soaking into the knee of her jeans.
“Debbie Ocean, darling, m’love, my partner in crime, my favorite felon on the planet, I love you from the bottom of twisted criminal heart. Will you marry me?”
2.
They host the wedding reception at Tammy’s, because unlike the warehouse, Tammy’s place has grass and trees and aesthetic value; no to mention it lacked the warehouse’s air of chaos. It also smells of hydrangeas, rather than takeout Chinese food and expensive perfume—which mattered, apparently. At least, Rose and Daphne seemed to think so, and by that point Debbie and Lou took the backseat in planning their own wedding ceremony. They were perfectly content to marry in a courthouse, surrounded by their friends, but apparently that lacked romantic oomph.
(For her part, Lou found the idea of eloping in secret very romantic, but she can’t deny the feel of grass under her bare feet and the tickle of a breeze through her cream-colored suit.)
Lou and Debbie wander from the small party as the sky darkens. Fireflies drift through their vision like tiny lanterns, and gypsy moths swim in their path, clumsily seeking the porch lights. They stroll hand in hand down Tammy’s endless driveway, buzzed on quality alcohol and the undeniable high of their own marriage. Lou lets her eyes wander down Debbie’s figure, striking in an royal blue dress that whispers sprite-like across her skin.
No white, she told Rose, to the designer’s loud protests.
White is the color of a wedding dress.
No, white is the color of ‘purity’ and has too many connotations attached. It’s not even about virginity—I’m a con artist, for fuck’s sake. You’re an amazing designer, and you have my full confidence, but it feels wrong for me to marry Lou in angel-white.
Lou stops before a shiny object on the ground; squinting in the vanishing daylight; she makes out the outline of a child’s Razor scooter. An idea crosses her mind, too quickly for her to refuse it.
“I know that look,” Debbie warns her, eyeing the scooter.
“Hold my beer, darling” Lou says, handing Debbie her drink—not a beer, in fact, but a flute of champagne—and flips the scooter onto its wheels.
“Lou this feel like a bad idea.”
“Nonsense.” She kicks off, barefoot in her wedding suit, and sails down the driveway. She’s done wheelies on her motorbike before; this has to be easier. She jumps once, twice, then lifts up the front tire—and topples over onto Tammy’s lawn in three awkward, lunging steps.
Debbie cackles. “Not quite a motorbike, is it Lou?”
3.
They honeymoon on Daphne Kluger’s private beach, because of course Daphne Kluger owns a private beach, a tiny tropical place sprung from the Caribbean, half a mile long. Perhaps it’s excessive, extravagant, but they’re not complaining when Daphne offers to let them stay in a fucking gorgeous beach house and have the ocean to themselves for two weeks.
“We should crack open one of those coconuts.” Debbie gazes at a hunched palm, shielding her eyes from the sun. Her skin has warmed and bronzed; her mischievous grin is infectious. Lou can’t say no to those soft brown eyes.
“Want me to knock one down?”
Debbie smirks. “If you can,” pretending she doesn’t know Lou will take it as a dare.
Lou looks up at the palm tree, laden with four coconuts. It doesn’t seem particularly difficult to shimmy up, but the tangerine sunset and her fourth drink of the evening has her seeing the world through a pair of rose-tinted, how-hard-can-it-be glasses. She makes up her mind.
“Hold my beer.”
Lou squeezes the tree trunk between her thighs and begins to climb. The bark scrapes her skin; sure she’s only wearing a bikini and a breezy blouse, but the glint in Debbie’s eye promised a lusty reward for her efforts. She hangs from the top of the tree and kicks a coconut. The palm leaves catch her button-up and scratch along her exposed torso. Her efforts pay off—a massive coconut drops to the sand below with a decisive whack. Debbie whoops. Lou shimmies down the trunk and downs the rest of her drink.
When they relay the story at home, Daphne asks how the hell Lou managed to climb a palm tree in a bikini.
“Drunkenly,” she replies, “having forgotten what thigh chafing feels like.”
4.
A car revs outside the window. Lou looks up from the textbook length Swedish instruction set. “Fuck,” she mutters.
“This isn’t happening today,” says Nine Ball, gazing over the sea of bars and screws that could theoretically build a crib.
Lou groans and sips her beer. “Tammy you’ve built one of these. Help us out?”
Tammy shrugs. “They’ve changed the design since Alicia was born. Sorry.” But she’s made more progress than the rest of them, having managed to fit the bottom boards of the crib together into a solid surface.
“You’re a fence; I thought you knew how this shit worked.”
Tammy crossed her arms and got up from the floor, dusting off her jeans. “Yeah, I don’t build the things I fence.”
“Uh-huh,” says Nine Ball. “I always thought you’re one of those… DIY moms.”
“Only on occasion.”
The front door of the warehouse slams shut. “Where the hell is everyone?” Debbie’s voice echoes from the floor below them.
The group of them, somehow sweating and sore from failing to assemble the worlds’ shittiest IKEA crib, emerge from the room. Lou leans over the railing and smiles at her wife, who at six months pregnant (and beyond over it) has managed to carry four-and-a-half people’s worth of Chinese takeout in her arms while balancing an extra-large 7-11 lemonade between her chin and her baby bump and sucks nonchalantly on the bright red straw.
Sight for sore eyes, Lou thinks fondly, because she’s a fucking sap who loves this woman more every day.
She turns to Nine Ball. “Hold my beer,” and swings her leg over the railing. Nine Ball rolls her eyes as Lou slides down the spiral staircase at breakneck speed. She attempts to flourish as she rounds the final bend, but it quickly becomes an emergency crash landing, as she topples spectacularly onto the warehouse floor. With all the confidence of a clumsy woman who’s convinced the world she’s graceful, she dusts herself off and proceeds to trip over the couch, which has apparently moved three feet since last she saw it. She eats it again and finally stands to meet the half-amused eyes of Debbie Ocean.
In lieu of a greeting, she presses a kiss to Debbie’s lips, then to her neck, then to her belly for Creature (as they’ve insisted upon calling it, to everyone else’s chagrin) and then her lips again for good measure.
“I swear to God, Lou, if you die before this kid is born... ”
“Never,” Lou replies. Her hands curiously search Debbie’s midsection for a kick from Creature. “Just a couple of bruises. Although we might want to move the couch back to wherever it was.”
“No one moved it Lou. Your muscle memory isn’t worth shit.”
5.
Before Darcy is born, they take a vacation. Dani stays with Tammy—the “adult friend,” as Debbie so delicately put it when Constance asked why she couldn’t watch their child for a week. They rent a place along the Baja peninsula, a hidden coastal oasis to themselves, complete with a jacuzzi and an underground spring that bubbled into a natural pool. Overlooking the pool, to Debbie’s delight, a cliff perfect for high dives.
“How are you doing?” Debbie emerges from the house sporting a craft beer and an impressive sunburn.
Lou lifts her sunglasses. “Distracted,” she mutters.
“And how is Nessie doing?” Debbie asks, plopping onto the chaise. Her gaze softens, and pulls Lou into a warm kiss, slipping her hand under Lou’s green button-up to where their second daughter grew.
“Playing me like a fucking marimba,” Lou says softly, resting her hand over Debbie’s, over the taut skin of her belly. It’s funny, she can’t help thinking, the undisguised tenderness with which Debbie touches her. When Debbie was pregnant with Dani, she was all tough shell, and the entire nine months had been a stressful road littered with complications and doctor’s appointments and a couple close calls.
No way in Hell am I doing that again, Debbie swore, and quite understandably. Nope, no way, miracle my ass.
Well then I guess it’s my turn, Lou promised and kissed her against their creaking headboard.
Her turn—an unspeakably weird turn, she realized when first the alien creature moved inside her. Curious, the way it’s spoken on black and white British TV—curious. Weirder, perhaps, Lou woke one more to find Debbie softened like honey, curled around the new-to-them curve of her abdomen and smiling the sweetest thing she’d seen in months. Captivated the way she couldn’t be with Dani, and Lou in turn was bewildered by her.
“No shit,” Debbie whispers now, feeling Nessie (a nickname coined by Rose, of course) press against her hand. “You’re on vacation,” she mutters to the errant alien foot. “Relax.”
Lou tosses back her head and laughs. “Your voice only riles her up,” she says, shooing Debbie away with her hand.
“Her or you?” Debbie retorts, voice full of promise. So far, this vacation has rivaled their honeymoon in terms of good food and better sex.
“Both of us.” She pulls Debbie close and kisses her with fervor, pressing her thumb between Debbie’s thighs to elicit a rewarding groan. “God, you know how hot you are,” Debbie growls, her words slurring into something needy and near-impossible to resist. Debbie pinches the sensitive skin of her breast, and she’s wet already, God help her.
Debbie’s lips are running a full-on expedition of her body, tanned legs straddling her and her hand inside Debbie’s swimsuit, when few sharp sucker punches from the baby force her to break away. Debbie grumbles softly and runs her hand through Lou’s sun-bleached hair.
“More later,” Lou murmurs, low and husky, “when Loch Ness quiets down.” She’s gone on this woman, gone on Debbie Ocean forever. They’re conquering the goddamn world every second they spend in the same room. She doesn’t want Debbie more than three feet away, especially not now.
“Fine,” Debbie acquiesces. It’s playful, frustrated all the same. Debbie stands up at the promise of later. Then, her gaze fixes on the waterfall, and her eyes light up. “Hold my beer.” She shoves her drink into Lou’s hand and races to the pool.
“Fuck you, that’s my line!” Lou calls after her.
“Not anymore!” Debbie clambers up the slick rock, hauling herself onto the rock’s edge. She gets a running start, hurling herself into a front flip that from Lou’s vantage point is executed perfectly. Until it isn’t. Debbie hits the water in what can only be described as the most painful belly flop Lou has ever witnessed. She stands stone-still in the pool for a full minute before making her way to the edge.
“Are you alright, baby?” Lou shouts, half-teasing and half dead serious. Because when Debbie emerges from the water, she is the color of cheap boxed wine from her neck to her knees, pinching her stinging midsection with both hands.
“Fuck off,” Debbie mutters, but she’s chuckling through her pout, an indicator that she’s not severely injured herself.
Lou hands her back the bottle, cocking her eyebrow dangerously. “That’s what happens to people who laugh at me for getting stuck in the jacuzzi.”
6.
It is the twelfth anniversary of the Toussaint heist. Tammy, good friend that she is, offers to host the barbecue. She’s just purchased a backyard trampoline that has automatically made her the “most cool aunt” in the eyes of Dani and Darcy, and really, who can protest?
Debbie the grillmaster is flipping burgers, chatting with Daphne Kluger about her latest endeavor in directing, which is generating a fair amount of Oscar buzz. Amita and Constance are teaching Darcy how to steal jewelry off a person’s body without being caught, and what kind of hypocrite would Lou be o protest that it isn’t a useful life skill? Dani, predictably, has climbed onto the trampoline.
Lou’s heart swells as she watches her daughter bound across the elastic surface. “Hey,” she says to Rose, “hold my beer.”
She strides over to the trampoline and climbs on, shoes and all. She takes a couple steps onto the trampoline. “Hi Ma!” Dani cries enthusiastically.
“Hi Darling, are—” Her feet drop from under her. Apparently, the three-inch stiletto heels on her boots were less than ideal for a sheet of kevlar and rubber, because they’ve split two holes in the trampoline, and the woven strips of it are springing up everywhere, and Lou is flat on her ass beneath it.
Dani peers down at her, howling with laughter. “Ma you broke it!”
Lou scooches out from beneath the gaping hole, ass first, with the shreds of her grace and dignity.
7.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Darcy asks her older sister as Dani straps on her helmet and elbow pads.
“Great idea,” says Dani. She fixes her gaze on the massive pipe she’s rolled into the warehouse parking lot. On the other side of the pipe lies a ramp, and on the other side of that, a curb and chain-link fence she’ll just have to steer away from.
Dani mounts the skateboard and tests its wheels. Sturdy, smooth, waxed.
“You only finished it yesterday,” Darcy says skeptically.
“Yeah but it’s, like, the third prototype. This is the perfect board; trust me.” She’d snatched the old parts from junkyards and the back closets of skate shops and finagled them together into a board all her own.
“You have the camera rolling?” she asks, wiggling her board underfoot. Darcy nods.
“Great.” She quickly tames her hair into a top-knot and adjust the knee-pads on her torn jeans.
“Last chance to back down. If Ma sees you hit that ramp, she’ll read you the riot act,” Darcy warns her.
“Pssssh, have you seen the old photos of her on the motorbike? She used to take it to California and do some crazy shit out in the desert.”
“She still does. Doesn’t mean she’s okay with you hitting that ramp on your skateboard. Don’t be a jackass.”
Dani shrugs. “Takes one to know one, sis,” she says with a grin that her sister quickly returns. “Hold my beer.”
Her drink and camera safely in Darcy’s hands, Dani kicks off down the empty lot. She jumps into the pipe, listening to her wheels rumble on the plastic, then gives herself a boost before hitting the ramp. All of a sudden, she’s flying. It’s fucking fantastic. She flips the board once for good measure and lands beautifully, but before she can gloat the chain link fence is upon her.
Right. This is why you don’t put a ramp near a fence. She collides head on, and damn, she thinks, it’s a good thing this fence is pliable. It spits her back out like a catapult, and she lands on her ass on the concrete.
Darcy runs up to her. “Are you alright?” she repeats, taking Dani’s hand and helping her to her feet.
Dani nods shakily. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, that went great for the first trial. Did you catch me eating it on camera?”
