Yay! Finally got this up.
And I know that there is probably going to be some people confused about the title but it will at make sense soon enough. Omfg I'm so pumped for this.
So, for anyone who has not read my story Fading, this is one of the three stories there's going to be. Each story can be read as a standalone, and in no particular order, though you might understand better if you did read Fading, because this is with the same version, we'll say, of Clary and Jace, that I created in Fading, just in high school. You know, before (I'm not going to spoil anything here, just in case) everything happened.
And it would seem that I'm out of things to say.
She looks so different—so much…older, I think as I watch Isabelle from across the room. With her hair hanging down he back in a smooth, sleek waterfall of ink and black liner rimming her eyes, framed by voluminous lashes, she really looks like she belongs here with these high school kids. It funny, really, that I'll be one of them in a few measly weeks.
The air is hot and heavy with cigarette smoke and the stench of alcohol, the humidity bleeding in from outside isn't helping all that much, either.
I've never been an overly social person, but I thought that maybe when Izzy invited me to this party that, according to one of the girls she used to dance with, I would have fun. You know, let loose a little. Yeah, well that hasn't happened yet and I'm not anticipating that it will.
Simon pushes up his glasses back up the bridge of his nose beside me. It must be annoying to constantly have to do that. Maybe when his new pair comes in he won't have to do it as often.
"Fun party, right?" Simon gives me a tentative grin, and I nearly have to do a double take—I don't know why, but I'm still not used to Simon without his braces. I'm not used to the relatively white, straight-toothed smile he flashes my way every morning on our walk to school.
"Yeah, totally."
Cheers emanate from a table at the other end of the crowd. Through the gaps between the gyrating bodies, I can see a ping pong table with solo cups set up all over it. I don't fight my eye roll, like I might usually. Beer pong.
Among the cheering crowd surrounding the table is my brother, his white hair painfully prominent among the blondes and brunettes. Then again, so is my bright red hair.
I watch through the gaps in the thick crowd as a hand launches a small white ball at the solo cups. The skin of the hand is tan, and I watch in something akin to awe as the owner of said tan-skinned hand comes into view.
Gold, gold, gold, is all I can see—all I can think. Gold eyes framed by golden curls atop his golden head. Self-consciously, I begin twirling a strand of my horribly dry hair, though it isn't like he can see me through the ever-growing crowd closing in on him around the ping pong table.
And, despite myself, I keep an eye out for the golden boy who had been the star of the beer pong table all night, even after I leave the party.
Two years later...
He's not worth all this time, energy, I remind myself even as I seethe with my hand gripped impossibly tight around the edge of my locker door. I hate him. Hate him, hate him, hate him.
Hate. Hate. Hate.
"What crawled up your pants?"
I spin on my heel at the voice, a little of the anger and frustration seems to seep away. "Si," I release my poor locker door from the death grip I had had it in. "Hey. What's up?"
He frowns at me, his glasses sliding a few millimetres down his nose. "Don't tell me he's at it this early in the morning."
I nod my expression surely a surly mixture of bitterness and anger that my mother would not approve of. There's a word for people like Jace Herondale: "Asshole," Simon mutters with about as much severity as someone as easy going and goofy as Simon can muster.
"Tell me about it," I sigh, closing my locker door softly and leaning into the cold, blue-painted metal, feeling the dents in the door against my back. The coolness of the metal melts through my clothes, and I hope, somewhere in the back of my mind, that my cheeks won't be so red by the time Simon and I get to class.
"I would, but we're going to be late for homeroom." And with that, Simon and I walk side by side to homeroom. Of course not without Jace yelling from within the protective barrier of his expansive friend group: "See you in class, Bloody Clary!"
Homeroom was Hell, what with Jace and his friends murmuring in low voices to each other every few seconds before looking over at me and then proceeding to either chuckle lowly, or howl in sort of quiet hyena-like laughter.
And don't even get me started on math class or my European history class.
But it's all okay, I remind myself as I toss my bag into the back room of my Mom's gallery. Even the break room—a place usually depicted as a bland, white room with a possibly-working coffee maker and maybe a microwave that makes a funny noise as it cooks your food—has pieces of art, little decorations that make the room bright, strung about; on the walls, on the counter, atop the fridge.
"Mom?" I call out to the rather empty gallery.
"Oh, Clary," she smiles, sliding smoothly past me—to the storage room. "It's been nearly dead today, but I do have an appointment coming in—about now. Can you watch the store while I go and get the paintings out of the—"
"Yeah, Mom, I got it," I tell her and she nods in appreciation, passing by me with a swift, light kiss to my temple.
My mom's gallery is, and has always been, one of my favourite places in Westchester. Not that I like a whole lot here. I've been living off the idea of moving to New York when I graduate since I was eleven or twelve, I think. And considering that the dream is still living and breathing, unlike my dream to become a mermaid like Ariel when I was six, I think it's safe to say that I'll follow through with it. Unless, you know, I do actually figure out I can sprout a tail and rock a seashell bra sometime soon—which is about as likely to happen as Jace falling head over heels for me. So, yeah, I think I'll start applying to colleges and or universities in New York sometime next year.
The bell attached to the front door of the studio chimes just as I settle myself behind the long, rectangle desk stacked high with art catalogs and receipts and paint brushes and sample work my mom has done.
I look up, prepared to plaster on my customer-designated smile that my mother tends to roll her eyes at (the customers eat it all up, though, so I don't particularly care what she thinks), when a familiar face, cold and ever regal, appears in my line of sight.
Maryse Lightwood: wife of esteemed business man, and my dad's colleague of sorts, Robert Lightwood, and mother to Alec and Isabelle Lightwood. Though, much to my disappointment, it is not Isabelle following her mother in through the front door, but Jace, her adoptive brother and the bane of my existence.
"Clarissa, lovely to see you," is her choice of greeting. A devilish smirk is shot at me through his blond curls, and I force a smile for Maryse, glaring heatedly at Jace once she passes by.
"Yes, Clarissa"—my name rolls terribly smooth off of his tongue and it makes my insides jump up into my throat. I want to hurl—"lovely to see you. What has it been? One…two hours?"
"Perhaps," I say to him as Maryse gazes appreciatively at one of my mom's best paintings, hung up on the wall farthest from Jace and I. "But every second away from you is one spent in paradise."
A flicker of something like surprise passes in his eyes, before his lips curl back into that customary smirk that promises nothing good. "Is that honestly the best you've got in your arsenal, Gingerbread?"
I wrinkle my nose at his newest choice of name-slash-insult for me.
"What? You don't like it?"
I choose to ignore him, returning to flipping through the art catalog, admiring the full-page print of a "new, up and coming" artist's painting. Not to come off cocky or egotistical or full of myself—like a certain someone standing opposite me—but I'm nearly positive I could do better if I had the sort of life where I could fully devote myself to my art. But, alas, school and too much homework prevents me from doing so.
"Oh, come on, Freckles," Jace twirls a strand of my hair around his long finger, grinning—slightly sadistically if you ask me—when I jerk back furiously from his touch. Not that he really touched me. He touched my hair, but still. If there's at least one thing I might have hoped he learnt from the girls hanging off of his arm at every opportunity, it's that you simply do not touch a girl's hair.
Apparently, though, he's learned nothing from being surrounded by girls every day.
Shooting Jace a parting glare, I head over to Maryse, hoping to escape Jace—even if that means discussing how well her new paintings will fit in with the marble desks at the Lightwood Building that her husband owns—and did she mention how her husband owns the building?—the entire thing?
So that's what I do—I make incredibly boring small talk with Maryse about what paintings she might next purchase from my mom. I hate to admit it, but Jace's company might have been more stimulating than this. Not by much, but I'm almost sure I'd prefer his company to that of his adoptive-mother's.
It's when Maryse begins to ramble on about some charity gala she and Isabelle are to attend, and that I should come along with them and Jace that my Mom makes an appearance from whatever had managed to distract her for so long in that boxy little storage room of ours.
"Jocelyn," Maryse smiles as warmly as possible for a cold-hearted woman like herself. She hugs my mother as I stand off to the side, leaning my right shoulder against the wall between two paintings.
"Unsettling, isn't it?" Jace asks from behind me.
"What?" I pivot to look at him, feeling a few of my curls spill over my shoulder to hang down my back. I definitely need a trim, I think as I observe my split ends dejectedly.
The blond nods his head in my Mom and Maryse's general direction before focusing his stare back onto me. "Her…showing affection. Even if it is feigned, it's unnatural. Can you even believe she's managed to raise kids who didn't turn out completely shitty?" As he finishes his sentence, Jace rolls his shoulders—backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards, repeat.
"I mean…she raised you, didn't she? And you're not all that great." I say casually, tracing the seam of my jeans absent-mindedly.
"I'm wounded, really, terribly wounded," Jace deadpans, looking up to the ceiling as if praying for the strength not to wrap his hands around my neck and strangle me where I stand.
"I try," I give him my best smile. "And I'd love to stay here and chat it up with you, but I've got better things to do with my time. Like watch paint dry." With that, I walk to the back room, where I hope to spend a few hours lost in the colours and brushstrokes and the semi-smooth surface of the canvas as my brush glides across it.
The time that it takes my mom to finish up with Maryse Lightwood is nearly the same amount of time it takes for me to finish up my painting. Except it isn't me that goes over time. It's my mom, with Maryse.
And I can't innocently say that I'm not laughing my everything off when she comes into the backroom, faintly flushed, a few more hairs out of place than before, and murmuring under her breath—though it is what she is murmuring under her breath that really sets me off.
She's mocking both mother and son.
"'Your work is so beautiful. Simply divine, Jocelyn. Divine.'" Her face, at this point, is very close to matching her hair. But I don't stop her just yet. "'I aspire to one day have a daughter in-law as beautiful and talented as your own daughter, Jocelyn. She is simply the sweetest thing—and stunning. Clarissa must have the boys lining up out the door.'" She speaks in such a high, nasally tone that I can't help myself; I begin to laugh, and soon enough, I can't stop for the life of me.
I'm in fits, but I somehow manage to get out: "She did not say that."
My mom turns to me, her cheeks rivaling the red on my canvas for the brightest thing in the room, her hands up by the either side of her head. "She did. And you should have heard Jace, he seemed to be attempting to flatter me with his words, please Maryse with them, and mock her at the same time! It was a train-wreck, absolutely horrendous, Clary! How could you think to leave me out there alone with them for so long?"
My stomach is sore, like a coil wound tight from laughing so hard. I wouldn't be surprised if I peeled up my shirt to find abs under it—okay, I totally would be surprised, but I'd also be ecstatic, because, if I had abs, I wouldn't have to worry about eating so much junk food all the time. And god knows I've eaten more than my fair share of the world supply.
"I already had to deal with Jace today, it seemed only fair that you had to go through the same torture I did." I shrug. My reply is true enough, but then again, I really don't think my mom whipped out her best insults and flung them at one of our top customers.
I can only imagine if Maryse Lightwood found out the things Jace and I call each other. I think she might have a heart attack. Not that anyone would complain.
But morbid thoughts of bad things happening to not so great people are for other days—the days when you're just so ticked off at everything in general that even the floor is worth glaring at, as Simon once said to me.
I head home with the odd feeling of Jace having invaded of sacred space of mine, and I can't shake the feeling, even as I finally sink into bed after suffering through a few hours of homework. And though I feel completely exerted, my mind won't stop going on and on about absolutely nothing.
How was it? Should I keep going? Drop me a review and we'll see what you all think