DISCLAIMER: I do not own SKINS or JONAS, the characters or the actors playing them.
Summary: While exploring Bristol during their world tour, Joe meets a girl with sea shaded eyes and a gritty voice. She says she isn't broken, but he knows better.
I just randomly thought this up while I was laying in bed, wondering what it would be like if Joe had met Effy after series four (only one episode left! I'm crushed.) and how they'd interact. I thought he'd probably be intrigued by her. Spoilers for Series Four of SKINS if you haven't watched. This is a three-shot, and I promise I'll update quickly. In fact, I already have both other parts thought up and one half-way written. This story is a bit AU and you don't have to watch Skins to get it, since it's basically just a story of their interactions and I'll explain everything in the chapters.
When he first meets her, he's walking down the unfamiliar streets of Bristol alone, the dark night and chill air keeping him alert as he all but runs toward the restaurant that he knows his friends have gone to. He spent some time in a shop looking at old books, partly for the literature and partly because of the beautiful letter bounds he spotted in the display window and fell behind. He contemplates on calling Stella, asking her to stand outside so he can be sure it's that one but he decides not to. Using the phone overseas is a bitch when the bill comes. He reminds himself.
He approaches the grimy brown door, the oak finish wearing off of it. He wonders for a second why the hell his friends would be in there, but he pushes inside anyways. The smell hit him like a brick; beer and cigarettes. He searched for them, two heads of curls and a blonde, along with a tiny brunette. Joe manages to find a brunette, her back turned to him as she hunches over in her seat, reading something. He makes his way over and wonders why Macy is sitting alone.
"Hey Mace," Joe slides himself into the bench across from hers and waits for her to say something, but she keeps reading over a book he isn't familiar with. He rolls his eyes and continues on, "I couldn't find anything for myself to read, thanks for asking."
She looks up at him finally and Joe gulps, because instead of looking into Macy's beautiful hazel eyes, he finds himself gazing into a pair of strikingly blue eyes that are settled on the face of what appears to be a living doll. Her hair is a medium brown, something Joe should've noticed. Macy's is darker, he reminds himself. He feels silly as this girl looks at him blankly, she looks nothing like Macy. Her skin is a pale porcelain dotted with a few freckles here and there, her lips are small and parted. He notices her thin frame and how her clothes seem to hang on her body instead of fit to her form. He gulps.
"I'm sorry," He apologizes hastily before running a hand through his hair. "I was looking for a friend of mine."
The girl's lips purse into a slow curve before she shuts her book and puts it into her bag, cocks her head to the side and then stares at him again. "No shit," He's jarred by her voice. It's husky and low, but still feminine and it's laced with secrets. This time, he blinks at her. She looks a little rough for such a tiny little thing, her eyeliner is smudged and he finally notices the beer placed next to her. She gives him a smug smirk. "Why are you still sitting with me?" Strange girl asks him. He shrugs and makes a move to get up, but he catches something he says as he shifts. "You look older in person." He spins and realizes that he almost forgot who he was, and then he processes that apparently this girl is a fan. He takes a pen out of his pocket and she scoffs. "I don't want your signature on my fucking tit." She spits.
"You're really vulgar for a tiny girl." He points out, not really understanding this strange girl he's stumbled across. "And what's your name?"
"Elizabeth." She answers quickly, almost too quickly. She shuts her eyes and mouthes something, not to him but for herself and he decides not to press. "Stonem. Elizabeth Stonem."
"Pretty name. I'm Joe. Lucas. Joe Lucas." He smiles at her and she just stares at him blankly, not even laughing at his attempt to poke fun at her. He frowns.
"I know." She takes a cigarette from her shirt pocket and slips it between her lips, lighting up. "You're a virgin still?"
Joe is totally caught off guard by this question. He scoffs back at her, crosses his arms and has the mind to turn and walk off, but unlike this strange Elizabeth he isn't rude and pretentious. However, like her, he's good-looking and she seems more entertaining than sitting next to Nick anyways. So he answers. "I don't air out my personal business to fans."
She puffs out a smoke ring. "Pussy." She points to the seat across from her, then says "Sit down again."
He listens, and he finds himself drumming his fingers against the table before reaching for the stale beer nuts and chips in the bowl between them. "Why aren't you in school?" It's tuesday, it seems like a good question. Joe thinks. Yeah, and she just asked me about my fucking virginity, of course I'm allowed to ask her about school.
She breathes out a cloud of smoke right in his face and he feels his eyes burning from it, but he doesn't blink. "It's gone to shit." She tells him, taking the beer and guzzling half of it down. "Why aren't you fucking groupies?"
"Because I'm walking around a city I don't know, or sitting in a bar, actually." He knows he should be annoyed with this girl and her attempts to rile him up, and he knows she wants him to be annoyed with her and the attempts to rile him up. But he likes her. He likes her vulgarity and her pretty blue eyes. "Why has your school uh, gone down to shit as you say?"
"Failed the exams." He wishes she'd answer in full sentences, but something about the way she traces circles on the table tells him she never will. "Friends left, parents fucked up. Usual shit, right?"
"I guess so." Joe doesn't want to argue with her, to trigger something in her and say No, not really. My parents are amazing. Because they are. His phones starts ringing and he suddenly finds himself very self conscious of the tune he's decided to use as his ringtone ("Stella" by Ida Maria, for Stella when they were dating. He always forgot to change it.) She waits for him to answer, but he lets it ring for about ten seconds, annoying her.
"You gonna get that?" She asks, popping a chip into her mouth. Her eyes are trained on his phone, as if she doesn't know what it is. He wonders if she has a phone, and what kind of conversations she has with her friends. He wonders if she's more of a texter than a caller. He wonders if the money for the long distance calls would be worth it if they were with her. He's so caught up his thoughts that he doesn't register what's going on until she says a haste "What the fuck do you want?" into his blackberry. His eyes widen when she laughs a little into the speaker and hands it over to him. "Your brother is callin' you," She tells him, pursing her lips. "The gay one."
Neither of them are gay. He doesn't say it out loud because he doesn't think that Kevin or Nick heard her say it on the other line, and he doesn't want to offend them. He takes the phone and presses it to his ear quickly. "What?" He asks sharply, a little angered that whichever one of his siblings made her laugh before did.
"Who was that?!" Nick's voice rings in his ears, and he rolls his eyes. "Are you with a girl right now?"
"No, I'm with a zebra." He laughs at his own joke and Elizabeth doesn't, making him feel kind of like that geek that somehow winds up at the popular kids table for a class project and tries to join in on that cool rager that they all went to the night before. "Yeah, I'm with a girl. Where are you?"
"Where am I? Where are you?" Nick sighs into the phone, making a staticy sound on the line. "We're at the bookstore and I can't find you. Dude, you better not be at her house right now."
Joe rolls his eyes. "I'm at the bar down the street." He tells Nick matter-of-factly, and nearly puffing up proudly. Then Nick chokes on the other line.
"A bar?!" He hears Kevin say something like "A bar? Why's he at a bar? Who said he could go into a bar?!" Joe shrugs and looks over at Elizabeth, who's smiling a little and he realizes that she can probably hear them. He mouthes out They're idiots. and she replies with I know.
"I thought you guys were in here. Whatever, what do you need?" He asks before reaching for more chips. Elizabeth pushes the bowl towards him and he nods at her, crunching down on some snacks and hoping he annoys Nick in the process. He does.
"Could you not chew that loudly? That's so rude." Joe chuckles a little, and wonders what would happen if Nick ever met the girl he was sitting with. He'd probably die, he figures. "We're coming to get you, we have a photo shoot to get to for some teen magazine."
"We have a photo shoot for a teen magazine everyday." Joe whines. "Can't we skip it?"
"No! We'll be there in five minutes. Bye." Nick clicks off the other line and Joe frowns at his phone, placing it on the table and looking over at his new...acquaintance. She wasn't really a friend. Not yet, anyways.
"Mmm, baby brother bring you down?" She sips her beer in a much more ladylike fashion than when she'd chugged it down before, and Joe smirks back at her. He figures this is her thing, smirking and being cheeky and hip and edgy. He can get down with that.
"Yeah, I gotta go." He tells her, his voice makes him sound a little sad about it and he kind of is. He likes Elizabeth and her attitude. And her pretty eyes.
She sticks out her bottom lip in a mock pout. "I'll miss you." She says, pulling out her own phone and checking the time. She waits for him to leave and watches as he gets up to wait for his friends outside the pub. He doesn't know why, but he decides to reach into his pocket and he thumbs a pair of passes he and his brothers were going to give away at a radio station interview later. He contemplates for a second before shouting a mental Fuck it! and takes them out of his pocket, handing them to her. She stares at him with her sea colored marble eyes, now it's her turn to be confused.
"You can come and hang out at our show tonight, if you want to. Bring someone along; I know you have friends somewhere." He says the last bit with a wink, and before he can reach for his phone he realizes that she'd taken it in her hands as he was getting the passes and was typing something out with the keys of the QWERTY buttons. She hands it back to him when she's finished and examines the laminated passes he's given her, before nodding off at him.
"Alright then, I'll think about it." She tells him dismissively. He sighs and turns on slowly, mumbling a "Nice to meet you, too. " As he treads down the steps of level they're on and makes his way out the door.
He finds Nick and Kevin walking towards him and waves, before running over to meet them in the middle like he always did. He waits for one of them, probably Nick, to scold him for even going near a bar, but they both just roll their eyes when he approaches and Nick only says, "God, Joseph." before dragging him by the sweater sleeve into a boutique that no doubt Stella and Macy were in. Joe decides it's better than getting chewed out, so he willingly follows them into the vintage store.
After a few minutes of 'Ooh'-ing and 'Ahh'-ing at Stella's new finds, they all flag down a taxi and hop in, Nick spits out the name of their stop and before Joe knows it, they're driving away from the quaint little section of town he's grown to like in the past few hours. He stares out the window aimlessly and his eyes land on that tiny little bar, trained on the long glass display window along it and he swears he sees Elizabeth sitting there still, even if the people were blurs through the frosty glass. He remembers she'd been playing with his phone and takes it from his pocket, skimming through his contacts. He finds it then.
Effy. Joe chuckles a little at that, because he doesn't really understand how you get Effy from Elizabeth, but he'll take it regardless.
And then right on time, a new text flashes across the screen and her name is blinking in black and white. He opens it, and rolls his eyes at what he finds.
Pussy.
x E
What do you think? I tried to keep Effy in character, but it's rather hard. If you haven't watched Skins, you can still read this story. As I said before, it's a bit AU and I'll explain things later on.
Review & ConCrit? I'll answer any questions if you have them!
xo April
P.S. -- I'm updating Love is For The Patient tomorrow, so check that out in my profile, please! It's Joe/Macy.
