Title: A Proper Appreciation
Author: Claire
Rating: K+
Summary: Post Admin. He's never thought of her as middle America. (CJ/T)
Disclaimer: I don't own them. Wow. Major shocker there.
Author's Note: There is nothing more lyrical than well written CJ/T. However, this is not well written. But it is CJ/T. See what you think. All the blame lies with the amazing writers who inspired me to even attempt to write this way.
He's never thought of her as middle America. But Ohio is middle America, and that's where she grew up, long before California came to claim her as their own.
And now she's returned here, to the centre of the country, to her birthplace. How cyclical. The writer in him appreciates the drama of it all, but the man in him hates it. That a woman like her should return to this little place, to grow old in obscurity while caring for a man who will never truly remember who she is and will certainly never appreciate what she has sacrificed for him.
She may no longer wear Vera Wangs or Versaces, but she's still the most glamorous woman in town, clad in old jeans and moth-eaten sweaters. It kills him to make these visits, to see how much she hasn't changed, but how her surroundings have. But he comes anyways, because the agony of not seeing her drives him insane.
She still drives a convertible, despite the impracticality of having to switch to a sedan during the bitter winter months. She still watches CSPAN, all day long, courtesy of the satellite perched on her roof. She still reads four papers every morning, the only person in town to read more than USA Today or the local rag. She still consumes every word he writes, as she had done for twenty years. Except now, instead of writing for others, he writes for himself. He can see his four books peering out from her bookshelves when he visits, taunting him, reminding him that she always has a part of him with her while he has nothing. His letters he knows are in plain black boxes, upstairs in her bedroom. There must be hundreds of them by now. He wrote the first one in 1986 and the most recent last Thursday. Some of them are rants, some of them are love letters, some of them are letters that should never have been sent, that were written in anger or lust or other similarly inappropriate states.
She picks him up when he arrives at the airport, the mere sight of her refreshing him after his trip. He still lives in Washington, despite his promise two years ago to return to New York. His children are there, his friends are there, whereas there is nothing for him in New York. He knows now that he'll never return there, not to live.
They have sex in her convertible, hard and fast and passionately, in a darkened corner of the airport parking lot. How many parking lots have they done this in over the last thirty years? Too many he thinks, yet, at the same time, not enough.
Afterwards, they drive back to her house as the first snow begins to fall. He grumbles about her trying to catch pneumonia but she just throws back her head and laughs at him. The sight of the laugh lines around her eyes tears at his heart a little, a painful reminder of how long they've been doing this, of how old they really are.
The weekend flies by, he spends most of it in an alcohol induced haze, trying to ignore how far her father's health has declined, how little she is noticed. On their last night together she cries onto his shoulder, quietly so not as to wake her father in the next room. She doesn't apologize afterwards, something she would have fallen over herself to do ten years ago. She's stronger now than she was then.
They hug tightly at the airport on Sunday and she whispers in his ear for him to come see her again soon. She sounds desperate and his eyes burn at her request. He blinks several times as she walks away, waiting until she's out of sight before boarding his plane.
He gets drunk on the plane, frightening the wholesome teenage girl beside him. He doesn't care. Later that week, when his friends, her friends too, ask him how she is he lies. He tells them what she would want him to say. She's good. She's happy. He doesn't tell them of what he saw, of the tears, the frustration, the exhaustion. He keeps that pain for himself. It's something private that he can share with her, something that only he appreciates.
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