wip update - i've been super busy - and gutted by what's happening, well, everywhere - and haven't had much time to be around tumblr lately, seeing so many wonderful things i need to catch up on. for my own accountability, though, just putting up a couple of snippets from Afterlife ch4, plus a few pics from this place where they've landed and posting as soon as I can. love you guys, and hope everyone's alright💕
He hardly has a chance to get a better look at the length of the bar and the couple of men leaning there before a dark-haired blue-eyed sylph in her underthings perches one hip on the table and smiles generously down at him.
“A new one. My lucky day.”
Glancing up, as if she's stealing a moment for herself, she hikes a leg over his thighs before he has a chance to decline, and he stifles a closed cough.
“You from California?” She weighs almost nothing in his lap. Her weightless fingers swirl and play with the hair at the nape of his neck.
He checks the second story railing, the empty daytime shadows in the main room, and when his hands automatically drift toward her waist he drops them at his sides. “No.” He clears his throat.
She massages his shoulders as if she knows all the symptoms of resistance. “Boys from California pay higher. They ask for more too.”
“They do," she says, wisely, blithely, her face light and sweet and her hips, nothing sweet about them. “Ten dollars and I’ll take you through that door and show you everything else you might want to see. Finer deal than you’d get anywhere east of California.”
She grinds herself against him and he automatically scans the room, the two men minding their business at the bar, but she hooks his face back to her with one finger on his jaw, and he shakes his head. “No, thank you.”
“No?” Before he can try to move her aside, she dips against him again. Like no one here ever stopped digging.
The first few drops of rain fleck his shirt as he climbs the steps to the cabin, toward a jumble of shouts within that weaken immediately when he opens the door to find Jack and Abigail on either end of the table and a bowl still wobbling to a stop on the floor and a tide of stew and biscuits scattered. Up in the loft, quiet sniffling. In front of him, Jack is a seething little bronco, never seen him so upset, and Arthur startles when he kicks the leg of one of the chairs. Abigail stands with a hand on the tabletop, looking pale, fury and shame in her eyes, and before he can say a word, she grits her teeth and stalks out the back door.
Now the cabin is silent, awkward, just him and the two boys in the fading light, and up in the loft there is another sniffle, and down at the table Jack is a sullen powderkeg. They face off a while. It’s strange, squared up with the kid all riled, like meeting himself thirty years ago. Who’d paid for it at the end of a belt more times than he’d ever counted. Carefully, Arthur takes a breath, lets it out, watching this kid burn with feelings he can’t put words to.
As if nothing happened, he starts cleaning up the mess, and sets out three bowls, and calls out to the room in general that food is set out, but won’t force Ten Crow to come down, nor Jack to sit. He gives the boy another biscuit, and sits at the table alone to eat in peace while he nibbles in the corner. Wipes Jack’s small sticky, crumby hands and face with a rag, tucks him into bed, leaving a biscuit on the stand by Ten Crow’s bunk where he lies curled up, facing away. Cleans the table, stokes the little stove and boils water, and plucks a few mint leaves from one of the drying bundles overhead to steep them in a cup.
Out on the back porch, he offers the cup to Abigail with the handle out. She cradles it in her hands rising sproutlike from the bundle of the quilt wrapped around her shoulders, and keeps the steam close to her face, and with an easy groan he sits beside her on the bench as rain sheets off the eaves and the clouds hang low over the mountains.
He sniffs, crosses his boots out in front of him. “Well that’s settled.”
She blows tiny wrinkles on the surface of the tea and stares ahead.
“Can’t I ask how you’re feelin?”
She raises an eyebrow at him, and takes a deep breath and sighs, and straightens her head as if to take in the view of the valley. “And ruin this nice evenin?”
Rain patters in the mud under the eaves and hushes in the young grasses growing long.
He doesn’t know rightly how to say it, but Nell’s expression comes to mind, flatly patient while he gets the hell over being stuck about asking.
“I noticed – uh –” He coughs into his fist. “Supper put you off, last couple nights. The meat –”
In her eyes, she looks younger, a little frightened, a little indignant, and not allowing herself to glance at him fully, as if she would give herself away. He clears his throat.
“Red couldn’t stand it, the stench. Turned her almost green...I didn’t know at the time. Ain’t sure if you knew, she was, uh –”
“I knew.” She squeezes her lips together so tight they’re white around the edges, scowling when her chin quivers.
“She'd chew on mint, said it helped.”
He stares out at the valley. Thinking out there in the world is a man who deserves strangling for doing this a second time. Or maybe he’s the fool, expecting different.
Through the high tone still fading in his left ear and the muddle of his bitter thoughts, she’s asking “How do you feel?” as a low rumble boils in the air, coming from the expanse of low clouds and invisible mountains beyond, quietly booming all around them, slow to fade, never quite silent, instilled in their bodies in pulses and beats, a quiet and relentless agitation, ripples that never come to splashing; nothing released, only gathered.
He blinks up at the gray misty sky, following the sound across the valley, and smirks a bit. “Oh about like that.”
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