Excepting the Professor, of course. No Mary Anne in sight, though.
Alternate universe/short character piece/love story. Onward!
"And when I turned no face I saw For the shadow was my own Death angel's shadow." -- Karl Edward Wagner
The door banged open and some of Boston's cold December curled in, little fairy snowflakes lighting on the doormat that would be their graveyard. Faith glanced up from the magazine, stocking feet tucked comfortably under her on the couch, "Dude... you look rough as fuck."
"I feel, as you so eloquently put it, 'rough as fuck'." Wes tried to shut some of the freezing air out but capricious gusts of wind kept forcing in around his slender frame. The latch clicked homed and Wes's knees clicked, coming down off the landing. He didn't look thirty-three, right now, with the snow accentuating silver strands that had started creeping through is hair like spider-webs. Faith wondered if his pretty, female students flirted with him or thought he was a creepy old man.
The latter was more likely. He sank into the couch beside her, "I see you're managing to survive. Job search not going well?"
"You know that last one wasn't really my fault, man," she uncurled her legs and laid them across his lap, flexed the stiffness from her feet, wondered exactly how absurd the pink rabbit socks were, "guy was seriously pervy. Who the hell thinks they can pinch waitresses like that, anymore?"
"Obviously he did."
"Don't anymore, does he?"
"Good point," he rubbed her ankles absently. They were still swollen from the four month stint as a waitress at Happy John's Sub and Salad Shack that had ended a week or so back, "it might be a lean Christmas, though, without your tips."
"Oh, yah, everyone wants to tip the girl who gets mad and tells their eight year old to go get fucked," she rolled her eyes toward the pitiful tree, and then averted them. Some things just needed to be left to suffer in silent, lonely humiliation.
"Perhaps a job that's not in food service, next time?"
"Secretary?"
"Hmm?"
"You think I'd be a good secretary? I can type. Sort of. Maybe." She flipped through his issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Man. Look at some of these dumbfucks. Can you believe it?"
He smiled in the way she found sexiest, his lips sort of twisted like wires that slow heat had warped. They stood in sharp contrast to the short beard he now affected, even more grayed than his hair, "Sadly I can. Even more sadly some of those dumbfucks make more for delivering a single lecture than I do in an entire year."
"Wow. They must be good."
"Old, mostly."
"Yeah," she giggled, "look at this one guy. He's got chins hanging all the way down to his dick."
He peered at the picture of an aged man, wattle-throated, bleary eyes still burning with a fierce intelligence, the mere accumulation of years unable to damp the fires of inquisitive and analytical power, "That, darling, is my Department's Chairman, Dr. B. Evan Rothman. You met him at the Halloween party, I think. Or did we go to that one?"
"Was that the one where I accidentally sort of kind of set that one lady on fire?"
"Gina?"
"Bad red dye job"
"Indeed."
"Okay, yeah, I know him then," she traced across Dr. Rothman's name and picture, trailing a long and graceful finger across Dr. Rothman's chest. It sagged now, under all the weight 71 years and four doctorates could muster, and Faith wondered if Wes would look like that too, in forty years. She was silent a moment, compared their eyes and decided. If his eyes still burned like that, were still famished blue pinfires set in celestial shadows then, hell yeah, Wes would be way sexy at seventy-one, even if his chins sort of got in the way during sex. It wouldn't matter, she'd move them, those eyes would still kill her and flay her and eat her and bring her back.
Faith heaved a heavy sigh and half covered Dr. Rothman's photograph with her fingers, "Jesus if he don't take a bad picture. I'd sue, if I was him."
"I don't really think he cares. Dr. Rothman's a good man."
"Oh?"
"He did give me a job, you know, even though I never finished my dissertation."
"You got kind of busy, dude," she clipped through the old fart, or alternately Good Man's, article, 'the Weakening of America's Schools as an Anthropological Cycle: We wuz real smart, but now weez dumb,', "Besides, fuck P.h.d.s and ABCs and all that other Sesame Street shit, you are WAY better than those other pansies. Like that one guy, the music teacher you gotta work with all the time."
"Dr. Culnert? The concert violinist?"
"Nah, he's the one fucking those two freshmen... I mean the one fagging around in the furry hat, with the flaps," Faith wiggled her fingers by her ears and and it looked for all the world like two small, naked wings had sprouted from the sides of her head, "you know the one... 'Oh, dear Faith, we don't NEED to clean up the exhibit, no one got SICK on it'."
"You mean Mr. Child. He's an art professor."
She shrugged, "Whatever"
"I'm teaching three sections of ancient humanties with him this semester. Bloody artists. Barely literate," he tugged on her socks.
She drew her feet back, "Uh-uh, Mister. It's too cold for that."
He ran his hand up her leg. Her thigh was still hard muscle under soft, smooth skin, pristine as the snow outside, more like a white star than slushy icy, "Come now..."
Faith giggled and covered his hand with hers, squeezing almost until the bones popped, massaging his knuckles, "Well, duh, yeah, but it's still too damn cold for all that."
He leaned onto her altar and scraped his bearded lips over her sacred hands. It scratched and made a little sandpaper noise. Faith shut her eyes and felt him smiling, against her fingers, "I think I can keep you warm."
They lay on the couch for a long time, after, until Wes was hard and fast asleep, Faith entangled in his arms and legs, enjoying his chest's deep, even rise and fall. The beard had been a good idea. Right now it felt strange and feral and magnificent against her left breast like some animal that lived on her man's face and existed as an aspect of the one that lived inside the ribcage she rested against, snarling behind bony bars, snapping at intruders, an animal that would probably have made Steven Child and Ian Culnert and even B. Evan Rothman piss their pants... maybe not B. Evan Rothman, she amended. His eyes burned too much, ate too much, had too much of the vampire in them. Fath rubbed her foot against Wes's leg and the thick, pink woolen sock made him stir--small victories are victories nonetheless and, hey, her feet were warm feet--nestled into him and drifted into sleep thinking of blue eyes set in a shadowy face, gas fires in a lonely place, burning blue monsters, twisting on stakes, in a lonely place.