Title: The Trouble Starts With Checkers
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Seth/Marissa A simple game leads to a revelation.
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or anything to do with the O.C.
Feedback: Please. Always appreciated.
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The trouble starts with checkers. It has never been his game, but it was all that was left on the hospital game cart. During his visits he makes small talk and
tells corny jokes and hopes just to make Marissa laugh, even if it's just a little. It is also the time when he allows himself to look at her.
To really look at Marissa.
It's not her haunted, huge blue eyes nor the way she bites her lip when she's thinking. It isn't even the way her thumb taps against the can of soda in her hand.
It is, strangely enough, her housecoat that draws his attention.
Summer would probably chastize him for calling it that. He shakes his head, imagining that scenario.
Marissa's robe, he corrects, is done up and that may seem perfectly normal until he thinks of the possibility of it becoming undone and that
is when the problem becomes real. Because now it's the only thing he can focus on.
He knows she'd rather he was Ryan or even Summer. Even so, he doesn't stop coming for his daily visits with his wit and guilt in check. His wit amusing
her and his guilt burrowing a hole through his stomach. He could be the first person in history to turn into a giant, pulsing, all-consuming ulcer, that's how
guilty he feels. And he really didn't understand it until today.
"It's your move, Seth," Marissa says so innocently, like he wasn't thinking of undressing her for the past five minutes.
"Oh, yeah, okay," he babbles, focussing on the red and black board and not on the line of Marissa's exposed collarbone. At least he tries. "I suck at this game.
It's too bad you didn't have a t.v., I could hook up a wicked game system in here."
"That's okay, I'll manage." Marissa laughs, pulling her hair behind her ear.
"You sure?"
"Positive," she assures, "but that's really sweet of you to offer. Thanks." She lays her hand over his.
His body snaps to attention even though he knows the touch was not really for him. He shrugs his shoulders, feigning nonchalance. "No...yeah, not a
problem." He feels anything but nonchalant.
"Time for a little check-up on my favourite patient. You don't mind if the residents sit in, do you, Marissa?" An elderly, moth-ball smelling, old-school
doctor, who carries lollipops in his front pocket and distributes them like they're crack, asks.
Seth is thankful for the distraction. It gives him time to get himself together. To figure out what's going on.
"I'll just," he says and points his thumb toward the door.
"You're coming back though, right?"
He smiles...no, glows. "Of course."
The med-students rush past him, crowding around Marissa's bed like she's a smorgasbord and they're a pack of wild dogs who haven't been fed in a week.
"You should just tell her," a voice says behind him.
He turns, spotting five feet, two inches of newly christened adult. Where the hell had she come from and why wasn't she with the others? The girl/woman is
wearing scrubs and faded sketchers on tiny kid feet. Seth quirks an eyebrow as he scans upward. Rings adorn every finger and even the thumb on her right
hand. Her lips are a dark crimson and when she flicks her tongue, he can see a metal bar through the middle. Her nose is pierced as well. Her eyes are green
and her hair is a wild, spiky red.
He all but swallows his tongue from a mixture of confusion and amusement. "What?"
"It's so obvious," Doogie Howser's female equivalent, says.
"What is? What's obvious?" he asks, his back official up.
"That you like her," she replies, smug.
"I do not...Marissa is a friend, just a friend," he says, with what he hopes sounds like conviction. Who the hell was this chick?
"Hmm..." she says, coming to stand next to him, looking into the room. "You stay the night sitting in a hospital chair watching all your friends?"
His face flushes. He doesn't even bother to ask how she knows that. There is nothing to say, but the truth. "No, I guess not."
"You should tell her." With that, she follows the crowd as they make their way down the hall.
And not a second too soon. As brief as the encounter was, he doesn't want a repeat. Little Miss 80's-Madonna-revival-meets-punk-meets-skateboarder-chic
was starting to get on his nerves.
He is so not telling her. There is no way he can. Besides the whole Ryan factor, there is also the laughing in his face and calling him pathetic scenario, that's
not working to boost his self-esteem.
No, he is not going to tell her. He is going to finish his game, say goodbye and sneak in after hours as per usual, without having to waste the breath it would
take to confide his little nightly habits.
"Are you decent?" he jokes from the doorway.
"And if I wasn't?" she teases, her spirits up.
"Oh, boy." Suddenly, his mind goes blank...well, not entirely.
He can hear her giggling and it's so sweet that he holds his breath. It's been a long time since he's heard her do that. "I'm kidding, Seth. It's okay to come in."
He peeks his head around the corner, his limber body bending like a marionette. "You really know how to toy with a man, Marissa."
"A man?" Marissa pretends to look around, lifting the bed sheet and giving him a nice view of her long legs. "I don't see a man around here? All I see is you."
Seth grabs his chest, as if he's been fatally wounded. "Ouch."
They laugh together and it feels natural. A little normalcy in a confusing, jumbled world.
Seth joins her on the bed. He watches her take a sip of pop and that's when it dawns on him. He's jealous of a bloody tin can.
"It's your move, Seth," Marissa says.
Truer words were never spoken.
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end.