@clpdwings | DAMIEN WESTWOOD ( plotted starter )
"I thought this wasn’t happening again.”
She’s being petty. She knows being petty. But she thinks she’s earned it; he keeps showing up here with dates, like their friends’ backyard is the fucking Met Gala and he’s arriving to be looked at. ( She keeps showing up with dates, too, but it’s because she can’t let him think he’s winning this breakup. ) Astoria’s underwear is on the other side of the room, and she’s a little unsteady on her feet when she goes to collect it — she’s learned by now not to wear heels anywhere they could run into each other, for safety’s sake.
The worst of it is that she’s been thinking about this for the past week, since she was invited. They know what happens, every time; they find a room no one else is using. They don’t talk. He keeps his hand over her mouth so no one else will hear them. He looks beautiful like this, hair a mess and face flushed and her lipstick smeared across his throat. She never tells him it’s there. She spends the rest of the night looking at it like she thinks she can rewrite history if she tries hard enough.
She never brings anyone she’s seen before, or plans to see again. She tells herself every time that it isn’t happening this time, that they got it out of their systems. ( But it’s going to keep happening. It has to keep happening. )
( Her parents were relieved when she told them, dispassionate and monotone, that things were over with Damien; as far as they were concerned he was her rebellion, her chance to fuck around on the wrong side of the tracks. The first time it happened, she’d brought the insipid and exhausting self-described entrepreneur her mother had insisted she meet, and when he asked where she’d been on the drive home she’d looked him in the eye and said I was fucking my ex in the bathroom. I’ll drop you off at yours. It was the last time her parents tried to set her up. It was the last time they mentioned Damien, too. She’d taken it as a victory and had almost called him to tell him, before she remembered. )
There’s something impossibly necessary to it. They’re in the same room and her vision starts to blur and her breathing gets uneven and he touches her again and she’s fine. He didn’t bother to cover her mouth this time, and when she said his name he kissed her like he wanted to swallow the sound, and she nearly wept. She never realizes how much she misses him until the night after, when she feels his absence like a wound and she can only occasionally stop herself from dialing the number she deleted from her contacts months ago.
( At least she knows he’s going to think about her tonight, alone in his own bed; she’d seen how he looked at the new tattoos. At least she knows she won’t be alone in missing him so much she can barely breathe. )
She crosses the room to reach him again, shirt still open over a bra he’d picked out back when they were together, nothing but a pair of stockings under her skirt. It’s almost magnetic, the pull that guides her hands to curl against his bare sides and tug him closer, and on a whim she slips her panties into his pocket. He’d picked those out, too. Astoria lets her hands skate up across his chest before curling against the sides of his neck, thumbs brushing along his jaw, and she looks at him with unquestionable want, unquestionable devotion. Then, like a confession, voice soft and carrying an audible note of insecurity — “You were late tonight. I almost thought you weren’t coming.”