A/N: Hey guys! I have summer fever right now so I just wanted to write a short little summery fluff piece for Violet and Tate. This is set in an AUs where Violet is alive and in college and Tate is dead. (maybe TWBK)
I put two fun cameos in here, one fictional and one a lovely writer in this fandom.
Scarlettwoman710 is working on our next Curve chapter and don't anybody worry about that last line in chapter nine!
Enjoy!
Summertime is crisp grass under the shade tree. Summertime is sun-kissed skin. Summertime is wrinkled fingertips and chlorine-soggy hair. It's bare knees and shoulders, and after dark walks. It's smudgy sunglasses and open-window car rides. It's warm cement under your butt and popsicle-blue tongues and teeth. Summertime is breezy good mornings and humid goodnights.
Summertime is now.
The sand is hot between Violet's toes when she walks up the beach to where her parents and her towel are laid out in the sun. Dressed in a dark green bikini and tan boardshorts, her pale skin looks almost golden. Summer-fed freckles have cropped up across her nose and shoulders. Her cheeks are bright and rosy.
"It's fucking hot out," she whines, bending to snag a Snapple from the water cooler and duck down under their faded rainbow sunbrella.
"Hey, watch the language, Vi."
Vivien and Ben are perched in matching fold out chairs with open beers stuffed into each of the four mesh cup holders. Alcoholics, the whole Harmon bunch.
Gifting her mother a dramatic eye roll hidden behind mirrored aviators, Violet uncaps her drink and takes a swig, dropping down to sit cross-legged on her towel.
"Whatever."
The beach is crowded today. It's the first warm weekend of the summer and there are stacks of families all over the sand, crowded beneath pop-up tents or three layers of sunblock. Some kids from campus are playing volleyball down the way, but from the size of their bikinis they've got to be skanks from one of the sororities and she'd rather spend the afternoon with her barely-holding-it-together parents or getting a root canal.
"Aren't you meeting your little friends here later?"
Violet brushes sand from the tops of her feet. "Yeah, somebody from my Psych class is throwing a bonfire party, don't wait up."
The newspaper in Ben's hands rustles, but Violet twists to level whatever he's about to say with a hard eye. His discouraging comment fizzles out and he sighs, tucking the folded paper down between his chair leg and the cooler.
"Just be careful."
She stretches out on her belly and makes a pillow out of her folded arms, hiding her face from the sun and mumbling out a flat, "Yeah, yeah, I promise."
Violet never liked the beach much. It was loud and windy and she always wound up with sand in places she was sure she'd never let touch the shore bare. There was never a shortage of fake-baked trash or muscle-bros. Little kids made shitty sand castles out of plastic pails and pissed in the waves. It just wasn't her scene. Not until she came here with him.
Their first date.
Half-asleep, her phone burns in the pocket of her shorts. Without much fuss, she's able to pull it free and sits up on her elbows to send a text.
Why isn't Halloween in July?
Her palm is buzzing before she can twist off the cap of her Snapple for another sip of tea.
Miss me?
Violet grins down at her lit screen and, hoping her parents miss their daughter's dopey smile, squirms happily in her skin as butterflies tumble through her insides. How could a boy with death under his fingernails make her feel so light?
She'd reply with something longer, maybe a detailed account of which parts she's missing and all the things she'd like to do with them, but then someone's kicking sand at her and laughing and she's only able to send out a quick,You wish, before Kevin, a friend from English Comp., is yanking her up and dragging her down the beach towards the waves.
"Have fun, you two!" Vivien calls out, fanning herself with Ben's forgotten newspaper.
Violet throws her head back to feed her parents a placating thumbs up only to be swept up into a fireman's hold and tossed, flailing, into the cold water, phone forgotten.
The roaring fire at the center of their circle sets everyone's face bright yellows and oranges. One by one, her friends trickled onto the scene and before long the sun had set. People carted driftwood up the shore and out of the beds of trucks along with a few cans of lighter fluid to get a good blaze started for the night.
Bundled up in a friend's navy sweatshirt, Violet's got a watermelon wedge in one hand and a red solo cup in the other. Paige had mixed two jugs of sweet tea vodka and lemonade; it beat lukewarm beer any day.
Someone brought speakers for their iPod and half of the gang had abandoned their seats in favor of kickstarting a dance party in the sand.
Some say love's a burning building
Love's a sinking ship
But I like the heat, I like the noise
"Hey, what time is it?" Violet cups both hands around her mouth, trying to speak over the steady buzz of drunk kids and fast music.
A girl without a name, whose face she barely knows, holds up one finger and bends down to shuffle through her bag.
"Quarter to one, you got somebody waiting for you at home?" Her eyebrows do a suggestive wave and Violet cracks a smile.
"Nah," she says after a beat, "Just my parents."
"Cool, cool."
But it's not her parents she can feel waiting up for her, it's the boy with the dangerous smile. The boy that will never grow up, never turn eighteen or twenty-one or ninety. He'll never get as tall as his genes would have let him or laugh wrinkles into his skin. His handsome will be preserved for always. His every flaw too.
Violet finishes off her drink and, head tipped back, catches Kevin's wave. He's gesturing for her to join him down the beach where kids are on each other's shoulders to play chicken. Kevin's not bad to look at, a slender boy with a face fit for fashion and a jaw that could cut glass. He's got dark eyes like Tate's with dark hair to match.
A part of her wants to leave her chair and chase him out into the dark, to fall in a heap on the sand and strip each other bare, but with her heart at home in the chair by her bed, she doesn't feel a bit sorry when, instead, she mouths an apologetic, "next time," and trudges up the beach towards her car.
"You smell like summertime," Tate grins into her hair when she yanks open the front door and lets him pull her inside. What he means is, 'You smell like sand, not boys.' She knows.
"Jealous?" she teases between kisses, kicking out of her flats, steering them both into the living room. He falls backwards onto the couch cushions, but she's close behind, crawling up to blanket his body with her own, wrestling out of her borrowed sweatshirt already.
"Whose is this?" he asks absently, tossing the tattered thing over the coffee table, fingers working at the back of her neck to loose the bikini bow at her nape.
Rather than answer, she just shrugs, her mind bubbly with want and alcohol. She's shedding sand all over the sofa. It's in her hair and skin and trapped into the folds of her shorts and when they're off it's sprinkling over Tate's newly bared legs.
"I didn't know I'd be boning the fucking Sandman tonight," Tate groans, rolling them both over the edge of the couch and onto the rug, pinning Violet in the brackets of his arms. He brushes off her throat before planting wet kisses there, testing how far he can press his teeth into her flesh before she whines out and grabs at his shoulders.
"Yeah okay, says Dracule."
For once they're all smiles, undressing each other with wild anticipation, without thinking on why he wasn't there at the beach or if she let anyone kiss her in the sun.
Their bodies join with a mutual sigh and Tate sets the pace, borderline lazy, their frantic need turned almost dream-like.
"Your skin's so warm," he murmurs against her temple, one hand pressed against the small of her back to keep her hips close.
She arches up against his chest and circles his waist with her legs so that they're touching everywhere, letting him bask in the start of her sunburn.
They start a slow fire, moving together in quiet swells, relearning what each curve and angle tastes like. Tate traces Violet's lips with his thumb, lets her close her mouth around the ends of each of his fingers, scrapes his prints over the edges of her teeth.
There are 'I Love You's on his tongue but he closes his jaw against them, busies himself with finding her hands and trapping them, tangled in his own, above her head on the rug.
The push of their hips becomes more insistent, until she's meeting him thrust for thrust in the feverish race for release. She drags hot red lines down his shoulder blades and digs her feet into the dimples of his back, demanding his mouth for a kiss. He complies with a groan, pressing crescent-moons between her knuckles as his lips work together with hers, the shift of skin on skin loud between their bodies.
She comes, hides her cry in his kiss, and milks him into bliss soon after, her entire being quivering around and beneath him.
His hips stutter violently and then they stop and when they're both panting in a puddle of limbs and sweat, Violet wipes at Tate's soggy mop of bangs to find dark eyes watching her and winces at the burn setting into her shoulders.
"Why isn't Halloween in July?"