holden has a birthday (@loveshard)
Pandora is nervous. It’s a strange look on her— hesitation, like she is still weighing the outcome of a big spell, but instead it’s just Holden, standing at the edge of her roof, observing her instead of the space. It had taken time, the candles, string lights— a screen, with some old film he’d insisted was a necessary part of her education, queued up and waiting. The roof is already covered in flowers, most medicinal, but she added some more for effect, created a secret garden, and hoisted (floated, really— magic was terribly useful that way) a daybed up the stairs. The entire space is warm, and the sounds of the outside world are almost completely muted— a testament to more magic, that it defied the odds of the season. It’s all so unbearably romantic, that she almost resented herself for doing it, had chastised herself as she dressed.
There is a speaker too, soft jazz— playing miles davis softly. It’s a live record she’d chased after, one for its rarity, but also because it’s one of the first jazz records she’d heard him play, a different pressing but the same song. “Uh— Happy birthday. The record is your gift but I…thought you might like to hear it.” She’d grown up without birthdays, mostly— at least until Marie’s house, her aunt had relished them, had made each one obsessively special for each of her daughters. The first one had felt a little like sitting in a bath, when the water was too hot. It took a second to get used to care like that— especially when you were unused to it. Her fingers grip the hem of her dress, toy with it in some attempt to release the tension she’s holding, the panic she’d been living with since she insisted he come over tonight. “…Too much?” Between the silver slip dress, scandalously short and completely backless, and the roof set up, she may have tipped her hand, put too much weight on the fragile thing that bound them. “We can just go inside, actually if this isn’t really— your thing.”