Author's Note: I can't even come up with half an explanation for this. Somehow when I need to sleep my brain just supplies me with these ideas. Rated for one or two swearwords but basically just kind of a free flowing fluff thing, the only thing weirder than this is the accompanying art I made for it on my deviantART account.
Comments, thoughts, criticisms, suggestions on how to do better and general thoughts are always appreciated.
It was noon on a sunny spring Sunday, and Mr. Lancer was walking down the street hand in hand with a gorgeous young woman.
No, really. Not a single part of that sentence was sarcastic, and that scared him. Arabelle had looped her arm through his and laced her fingers through his like it was the most natural thing in the world, like they didn't have a twenty year age gap between them, like they weren't supposed to be strictly professional. As they walked she talked, about House Of Leaves and the wordplay in the story and how you never saw bilingualism used like that anymore. Her dark brown hair caught the sunlight and every so often she would turn from admiring the town to look at him when he replied, her sky blue eyes making it hard to remember to concentrate on the author's use of Latin. Arabelle Martin was his student teacher, a recent graduate who managed to retain the tiniest traces of an accent after four years in the United States, and she was slowly but surely undoing him.
The first change she'd made in his life was getting him to eat right. While past student teachers had maybe brought in coffee or said something to the effect of Hemingway being interesting, she brought him whole meals, sometimes (more often than not) from home and they ate while discussing the ending of The Giver and the ways it could be interpreted and whether or not the movie adaptation of Tuck Everlasting did the book justice. Arabelle diligently stocked the teacher's lounge with bananas, apples, oranges and teas, and sought him out at lunch. She would sit on the windowsill, her warm, dark tan skin soaking up the sun, and instead of running down to the Nasty Burger he would work his way through a sandwich and a piece of fruit. It was so sweet and unrelated to teaching it would've been inappropriate if they ever stopped to address it. She was too busy asking for his opinion of Iago in Othello to remember this was weird.
Arabelle actually worked, really took student teaching seriously, explaining in passionate lengthy run on sentences just how The Necklace was a strong example of timeless literature and how Ghosts Of The Balkans managed to paint every single ethnic group it portrayed in a negative light. She made lesson plans, she highlighted time brackets, she reorganized his desk so that she would know where everything was. Diagrams of character names and relationships were drawn. Lengthy breathless optimistic gushing was done over the works of Bruce Coville. And if you had a cell phone she would snatch it out of your hands and casually toss it into a bucket at the front of the room without looking behind her, ignoring the whining of the popular kids.
"If it bothers you so much, write an essay explaining to me why you need it," she told them cheerfully, and then they'd launch back into their lesson. Her total ease around the students and inability to be intimidated by students in the athletics program earned her no praise from the students but also made her the wide eyed idealist among her fellow teachers, an accusation she wore like a badge of honor.
She was proud to be an idealist. She was proud to be an optimist. And the second biggest change she made in his life was that she made him actually leave the house. There was a performance poetry reading in Ashtown, and Arabelle didn't want to go to such a big event alone. There was a David Sedaris book signing he just had to be there for since the mall it was in had a magnificent book store in it. There was a thrift store with books for fifty cents each and he really should come by and see the amazing titles they had. Every couple of days now, it seemed, he found himself out and about, accompanied by the only person on Earth who cared when he spoke. She hung on his words and challenged his views on the books they read, always willing to interpret even the harshest villain sympathetically, seeing misguided attempts at good where he saw rashness, positing that characters were in love when all he saw was irrational behavior. He met her for coffee repeatedly to have these conversations, and eventually, she somehow wrangled him into going to basketball games with her.
Basketball was Arabelle's thing. Not his. He didn't hate the sport, but he also didn't care about it. The fact that he was there to watch a high school game got him about a dozen double takes per quarter, but while all eyes were on the floor and the rapidly moving players, his kept drifting down to where she had her hand on his knee. Somehow he felt warmer than he should have and he slept easily that night without reading, waking up to the comforting thought that oh yeah, they had a class together today. They ate breakfast sitting together on the couch in the teacher's lounge, their silence companionable, and it was at that exact moment, as Arabelle shyly thanked him for coming with her, that he realized he was in love.
That was terrifying. Because love was something he read about. It was something he critiqued from afar. It wasn't something he engaged in. He wrote volumes on how two characters interacting meant this or that, but he couldn't read the actions of someone real and tangible right in front of him. He knew, though, that he wanted her by his side, that the idea of life without her seemed hollow and empty, that he couldn't go back to sitting around his empty house blocking out the world with fiction. He had tasted true companionship and found it not only sweet but life altering. Before her his years of teaching blended into one another, jocks and geeks with great potential and assignments no one ever really tried hard to complete. His own reading material had started to become dull and meaningless to him until she challenged him to rethink it, to side with other characters, to look at things from a new perspective.
He was scared to reach out to her and lose her when his affections were one sided like they always, always had been. When he was younger and a young Literature major he'd chased after love for four straight years of college, chasing the idea of the person who would finally understand. The person who would speak in metaphors and need him like he needed them, the one soul who wouldn't just want to be friends and then gradually lose contact with him. He had desperately wanted that summer rain to come down on him for so long that now, alone in the desert of his own meaningless life, he didn't dare move towards the rain cloud. One wrong move and the pain from her rejection would break him, cut him so deeply he would dive back into apathy and never see the light of day again. He'd been in the dark so long his eyes had adjusted until it was all he could see.
Arabelle leaned her head against his shoulder, smelling faintly of coconut shampoo and something uniquely her own. The incredible thing about reality was how it yanked him out of his own thought. Her touch pulled him out of the dark each time and it was so unprofessional and so unlikely she would ever feel the same way for him he felt for her. Women never did. The few men he'd attempted to woo in college hadn't cared for him either. Love was a reckless roulette he wanted no part of, but the reward if he was right in betting on her was so great he couldn't resist, even if his old heart wanted to. He was old and tired and he just needed something to work out, just once. And just when he had been considering retiring and giving up human contact altogether a short black woman from French Guiana had appeared in his doorway clutching an armful of books.
Everything about this felt like it should be happening even though he knew all the reasons it shouldn't. He knew his already distant and disapproving parents would disown him for getting involved with someone who wasn't white. And she was worth damning himself for, because talking to her was so easy already it was like he'd known her all his life. She was worth all these risks, even the risk of his job, simply because when she smiled the day felt like summer even in winter.
He stopped her where they stood, the trees flowering around them, and tried to find words to express feelings so real any fictional metaphor seemed an insult by comparison to how intense this thing they'd fallen into was. But she reached out and touched his arm, and smiled. They looked at each other. Arabelle's eyes were redeeming, kind, welcoming when he was more vulnerable in the silence than he'd ever been in their endless conversations.
"I..." he started, then trailed off, not knowing how to finish that sentence.
"I know," she replied, voice low and serious, and she stepped forward, closing the distance between them, and embraced him. It was more passionate than any kiss, more meaningful, two bodies pressed together gently and fully, her warmth better than sunshine, his grip on her tight for a moment before he released her so they could look each other in the eyes again, and he knew she understood. They were not living vicariously through the writings of great wordsmiths before them.
They were living ordinary life, together. And that was infinitely more fulfilling.