JEHSTER: WE'LL TAKE THE CAR. WE'LL DRIVE ALL NIGHT.
IT ALWAYS SOUNDS GOOD AT ONE IN THE MORNING, LAID UP IN DRINK WITH A HANDSOME MAN, DOESN'T IT? escape, primarily. but most everything else, too.
if the human condition is to hypothetically remake one's whole life while staring — sleepless — up at the shades of a dark ceiling at midnight, than it's the shared disorder of two people — locked together in the swells of an overlarge party at an even later hour — to do something very similar after staring long enough at one another. that isn't to say that to @jehster's eyes are dark; they are, on the contrary, presumptuously blue; but rather that dove and clark callaway have been looking into one another's eyes for some time now, and subsequently starting to see shapes move within them, the way one does after peering at shadows for too long. forms and frames of something if not better, than at least different. the abyss may gaze back, but so does shangri-la.
it isn't either of their faults, really. in a time that is either before or after this or somewhere in an unclear adjacency, there is a book and a woman in it that will say i like large parties. they're so intimate. and that is as accurate as anything else that could be said. the pair has not so much as been left to their own devices as kept to them purposefully, suspended in a little champagne cabal. above the penthouse they're billeted within, the summer moon is a big paper thing cut out by a child's loving hand. it fits thematically with all the well-dressed people in their well-tailored clothes, dressed as if by a doll-player's hand, and seems particularly appropriate to all the dustings of white powder and greasy spots of spilled liquor ⸺ eraser shavings and juice stains left behind on the edge of the artist's desk. a dream of an evening constructed by a hungry, spoiled infant.
that is, above everything else, what hollywood is.
( and this isn't the city of angels, but i digress, because hollywood is a noun, and therefore can be used to fit the definition as we've written it here tonight ⸺ )
they sit in the same plush chaise that they've occupied for the last two hours, elbows and shoulder-tips overlapping the way casual things do, or in the way that things which are not casual pretend to be.
"mm," is that all that vermont is ⸺ one purposeful night away? it seems very much to dove that a place like that should, by principle, sit somewhere farther out. harder to reach. her gaze rolls away from clark and down to the white crêpe of her gown, along the crest of one foot. with her legs crossed, it hovers very close to clark's shin. the heel, in fact, may be partially submerged under the folds of his trousers, but the angle makes it impossible to tell. "but we wouldn't get very far, would we?
i'd make you pull over at the first roadside marvel for pictures, and then you'd want for the bar," for an implausible whim it's awfully appealing, and that's why dove presses on the lining of the urge carefully, with pearl-tipped fingers, hoping it will shrink ⸺ downsize into something manageable which she can slip back into her purse or clark's pocket. her neck lays against the overstuffed backing of the couch, rested as one might in bed. conspiratorially — or perhaps conciliatorily — her hand moves from the box of the urge to clark's lapel. or is that urge to urge, whim to whim?
"then we'd just be two fools on the side of the road, halfway between here and nowhere."
