"I'm not calling you a liar, just don't lie to me
I'm not calling you a thief, just don't steal from me
I'm not calling you a ghost, just stop haunting me
And I love you so much, I'm gonna let you kill me"
- "I'm Not Calling You a Liar" by Florence + the Machine
1
Jen hates November. Outwardly, Jen seems like the type of person too complacent to hate anything in such a decisive manner. In reality, to assume that Jen is at peace with every drop of morning dew on the grass would be to assume total inaccuracies. Jen hates lots of things. Like November. Like stupid November rain. Like when the first of November happens to be on a Monday and she has to drive to work rather dreadfully hungover.
Jen hates alcohol too, but Camille had insisted on going to one of her rich friends' Halloween shindigs and of course there was vodka. Lots of lots of vodka. She might like vodka. Right now she hates it.
Right now she also hates Mondays, traffic, and assholes in white Priuses that don't know how to fucking merge. She considers utilizing her car horn, can almost taste the satisfaction of bringing her palm flat down onto the leather steering wheel with all the force she could muster, but doesn't. She doesn't think her brain could stand the noise.
And so Jen is in a rather terrible mood. It isn't uncommon, given the past year and a half.
Not for the first time that day, she thinks of her sister. Jen momentarily tries to be angry, but finds it to be rather trying. Apparently being angry at only a memory is difficult.
"Your faceis difficult," Jen mumbles to no one in particular as she makes a left, and smiles. It's something her sister might have said.
She pulls into the parking lot of Darton & Williams, and settles her car into her usual spot. She gathers her things before opening the car door and making a beeline to the front door of the posh-looking office.
Darton & Williams is the law firm she works at. Not that Jen is a lawyer. She isn't particularly smart enough for arguing like that. She thinks of her sister. Again. Her sister would have been a fucking fantastic lawyer. She punches the "UP" button next to the elevator doors with more force than necessary. In truth, Jen works as a secretary in the office of one of the big-shot guys, Darton or whatever.
She doesn't particularly like secretarying, but she doesn't imagine that anyone does. Still, stapling things and answering phones and managing appointment books isn't hard, and she gets a decent wage, so it's better than nothing.
So she tells herself.
In reality, it's just a boring corporate job and she can't be bothered to look for something with less direct relevance to color coding.
So she works. She goes to the gym. Sometimes. She visits her parents once a month, and then drinks with Camille more times a week than she would care to count.
The elevator pings cheerfully as she steps inside and pings again when she presses the button for the top floor. As the elevator begins its ascend, she nearly topples to the floor. She hates heels, too.
Exhaling, she closes her eyes and tries to calm herself. It's a long elevator ride, so she'll try to savor these few seconds of peace.
Ping!
Irritated, she sees that the elevator doors are opening to let someone in. He's about her age, or a bit older. Dirty blonde, and handsome in a sort of goofy way. Not strange-looking by any means, but rather nice.
He stares at her like she's got a third eye.
"Jen!" he exclaims, obviously recognizing her.
Shit. She, for one, doesn't know who the fuck this guy is.
"Um. Hello. Sorry, you are...?"
"Ch-" he's saying as the elevator pings and starts to close the doors. They halt, stall, and then spread open again. He stands there ruefully, and walks in. "Chase," he says again. "Chase Bingham. We met last night at my party?"
"Your party?" Jen repeats stupidly. Party, she thinks. "Oh! Yes. Party. The one with the vodka. Lots of vodka, ha." She giggles nervously. He only stares. "Yes," she continues, "I mean, yeah, you're Camille's friend, right?"
"Yes," he says, scrutinizing her, and she can't tell if the angle of his head is judgmental or appraising.
She tries to smile at him in the least pathetic drunkard way possible.
0000
Six Months Later
"Eight," declares a girl with long, jet-black braids that contrast heavily with her pale face. She sits on the couch of her sister's apartment, peering out the window at the strange man that stands next to Chase Bingham.
"Pfft! Eight? Kris, he's a bloody eleven!" objects the girl next to her. She is artificially tanned, but has the same hair color as the previous girl, making her look rather ethic. Artificially ethnic, that is.
The first girl shrugs. "Meh. He looks like he's got a stick up his arse. And plus, Jen said he was old, like thirty. Can you imagine being that old?"
"Thirty's not old," says Jen, defensively. "And don't say stuff like that about Darton. He's my boss. And he's not that bad. He's just a tad-"
She pauses, searching for the words.
"...completely hostile to everyone and everything he meets."
The elder of her two youngest sisters turns from the window to fix Jen with a dubious look. "Charming."
Jen sighs. "Are you sure you guys are good for apartment-sitting.?"
The elder shrugs nonchalantly. "Sure. I sit on apartments all the time."
"Funny, Kris," remarks Jen, and grabs her keys off the coffee table. "Try not to break anything. You can raid my fridge and I won't tell Mom if you have a beer. Just don't make a mess, okay?"
Kris nods dutifully.
"Lucy?"
The younger, oranger of the two looks up. "Uh huh," she says, rather unconvincingly, and looks back out the window. "You know what?" she asks, but answers the question before her sisters can articulate an answer. "The more you stare at this Darton guy, the more you start to feel inadequate and fat. I mean just look at him. Why are you even dating Chase when there's a guy as gorgeous as that sitting not ten feet away from you every day?"
"Maybe because I'm pretty sure its illegal or something to be in a relationship with your boss. And it's way too cliched. And I love Chase! I mean, seriously, Lucy?"
Both girls stare at her. "You loveChase?"
Jen pulls at the hem of her blouse. "Well. Maybe not love, love. Like, I don't know, an appreciation for all the things he does for me. Like not judging me when I decide to indulge in tequila and puke on his floor."
"Romantic," snarks Kris.
"I know."
"You should right a screenplay," she suggests.
"Shut up," says Jen before shutting the front door of her flat behind her.
0000
"My date cancelled," announces Darton, cell in hand, as he returns to the table. They're at a frequent favorite joint of theirs. It's posh but has a bar, so it's a win on all sides.
"Aw, shit," says Chase, ever eloquent. "Well, I guess we could be an awkward three way."
"And watch you make eyes at each other all night?" Darton says, clearly unenthusiastic. "I'll pass, if you don't mind."
"But we haven't even gotten drunk yet!" bemoans Jen.
Darton smirks. "I do lovetipsy Jen and her rambling interpretations on the sexual life of Teletubbies, but I'm afraid I have to go." As he turns, he nearly knocks down the waitress behind him. She steadies herself and takes a step back. Darton fixes her with a cold glare. "You should really be more aware of your two feet. Why were you standing there anyway? Don't you have tables to tend?"
The girl's nostrils flare, and she smirks, brushing peroxide-blonde hair out of her eyes. "Sorry, I'm not part of the wait staff."
"Oh." It had been hard to tell, and he'd just automatically assumed she was. With the unremarkable black clothes, bad dye job, and rather ordinary looking features, it hadn't been hard to assume she was a waitress.
The girl rolls her eyes. "Yeah, whatever." Instead of leaving, she turns to face the table.
"I'm sorry, you have something more to say?"
She stops, flashing her eyes back to him. "I'm sorry, is there a particularreason you're being an asshole?"
"Well you're being needlessly clumsy and defensively overly dramatic about it."
"Well maybe you should stop running into people and going batshit at every little annoyance, all right?" With that she turns to Jen, blonde hair swishing. She stretches a hand out across the table to Jen, who just stares at it. Then she looks back to the girl's face.
Shit.
Before the dark of club had obscured any details of the girl's features, but in the limited light of the lamp hanging overhead her face was illuminated clearly. Pale skin, pinkish but very pale. Her eyes were dark, very dark - almost black in contrast to her complexion. She had a upturned nose and rather pouty pink lips. Her hair was very obviously dyed, her roots showing rather unfashionably. She was wearing far too much make-up, with racoon eyes and a startling shade of green eyeshadow.
She looked different, but Jen still recognized her.
"Hey there, sis," says Emelyn Banner, smiling brilliantly. "Guess who's back from the dead?"
0000
"She's your sister?"
The rise and fall of Darton's voice is unmistakable; he only uses that type of tone when he thinks something is particularly offensive. Not like, Oh, look at that, I stepped in some dog shit. No, more like, Oh, look at that, someone just raped my girlfriend. Wanna go bash in their skulls and kill them with fire? Jen has heard it in too many times in meetings, and there's a little alarm in the back of her mind that is screaming: Danger! Danger! There's a strong possibility your boss might go psycho killer very soon! But right now there is a much more larger person at the forefront of her thoughts, and it's your sister is fucking alive shit shit shit why didn't she call she had everyone so worried what happened to her is she okay fucking goddamn you've missed her but what the fuck was all that disappearing off the face of the earth about?
"Yeah, she's my sister. Looks a bit different, though." Jen turns the cold water knob and then the sound of tap water hitting porcelain echoes around the bathroom's tiled walls. "And by a 'bit,' I mean a fucking lot." She runs her hands through the stream of water and then rubs her wet palms against her pink cheeks. She feels Chase place a comforting hand on her back. He and Darton had followed her into the women's room, much to the horror of a conservative-looking college-aged girl who rushed out as soon as she caught sight of the two men.
"I didn't know you had a sister," says Chase quietly, in his approachable guy-next-door way that makes her feel a little bubbly inside. She hates feeling bubbly. It's too much of a girly feeling for her tastes. Especially right now. Why is she thinking girly things? She has too much to think about than to analyze every sweep of his gaze every touch the way he stares at her her eyes her lips.
Stop it, she tells herself. Think, she tells herself. Speak, she tells herself.
"Yeah, um. I never really told anyone," she says, and can't believe she's actually talking about this. It's a strange thing: admitting secrets. A strange little rush, a spark of adrenalin when you voice all those little thoughts you think in your head because they're suddenly real, out there, and for a split seconds it's the scarier than every monster in the closet and every thing going bump in the night.
"Emelyn Banner was officially declared missing two years ago by the Boston Police Department." Jen shifts, turning from the bathroom sink to see her two best friends.
"We called her Millie," she says, awkward. "But she wasn't psycho or anything. She was just, you know, normal. She had just gotten her degree, and she had a boyfriend, and got a job playing piano at a little dinky coffee shop, and everything was just so normal and ordinarywe just never saw it coming. She just disappeared. Gone. She was just...gone, without a trace."
She exhales, voice wavering, on the brink of something, something on the tip of tongue that she'll never say, even to them, her best friends. Like a coward, she retreats to the mirror. But she can't even face her own reflection, and instead gazes unseeingly at the bowl of the sink. "We thought Millie'd been murdered," she whispers. "The boyfriend...he was always a bit sketchy," she chuckles. It all seems very silly now. "But I guess that wasn't true. Guess he's innocent."
"Well, you never know," Darton says, speculative. "She didsay she was back from the dead."
It had been a very long two years for Jen, so it's a bit too morbid of a thought for her to process, however ridiculous or improbable. She stares blankly at her reflection in the bathroom sink before choking uglily on a sob. Chase immediately throws his arms around her, erstwhile glaring at Darton. He shrugs apologetically. He's never been good at reading girls, or people in general.
He stands there, and remembers, in a random surge of self-realization, that he's standing there in a women's public restroom four feet away from his crying secretary and her boyfriend. Thatis a overwhelming, morbid thought for a self-priding bachelor such as he, and he coughs awkwardly before announcing that he's going to check up on the annoying sister.
Jen's screeching rises a half decibel and Chase flails one hand in a weird sort of wave, and Darton figures that is as good as a dismissal as any. He pushes the restroom door open and steps into the warm heat of the bar. He makes his way through the throng of drinking people to the table the trio had been sitting at not twenty minutes before.
She's still there, her fake blonde hair falling like a curtain, hiding her face as she tilts her head down. She's scribbling something onto a scrap of paper; a note. She doesn't notice him arrive.
"Do you really think anything you say in that note's gonna make her feel better?"
The girl looks up, obviously startled. Her expressions falls into a casual irritation when she registers it's him. "I'm not writing anything like that. I'm just giving her my current cell number. We need to talk, but...not here." She stands, rather gracefully for a shit of a little sister, and offers him the folded slip of paper. "Will you give this to her for me? I've gotta run."
"You've been gone a long time."
Her eyes narrow. "I know."
He pauses, evaluating her, predicting her reaction, wondering if he'll challenge her. He decides to go for it. Even if she flips out on him, or gets offended, she deserves it. This sister, 'Millie' or whatever, made Jen cry, and no one makes Jen cry and escape the wrath of Theodore Darton.
"What were you doing?"
"Travelling," she snaps, defensive. "Look, I really gotta go. It's this thing. You can berate me later, okay, but I'm late."
"Two years late," he comments, snide, and she fixes him with a death glare.
"That's it!" She pushes past him, stepping out of the booth. She slams the note onto the faux wood table and then moves rather uncomfortably close to him, staring him down eye-to-eye. "You know nothing about me, or what I've been doing these past two years. All you know is that I made a mistake of not informing anyone of where I was going, and I know I fucked up. I knowthat. So you really don't need to inform me of it every two seconds, and you certainly don't need to judge me when you don't even know who the fuck I am. All right?" She glares at him, a tad breathless from her rant. "Tell Jen to call me," she says as she shrugs a hoodie around her shoulders. "So...goodbye..."
"Dore," he answers quickly, without thinking.
"Dore?" she repeats, surprised. "As in...?"
"Thedore. Theodore Darton." She laughs. "Yeah, yeah, whatever, Emelyn," he sneers.
She smiles again, so wide and joyful and full of life; he's never seen such a smile on anyone but a child. It takes him by surprise, knocking the breath right out of his lungs. "See, the difference between you and me is that you have a normal name and chose to make it stupid, and I have a stupid name and chose to make it normal. It's just Millie, by the way." She pauses, as if confused of why she's saying this. He can tell what she's thinking.
Wasn't I just pissed at him four seconds ago?
"I should go. Goodbye, Dore," she says, her tone almost amused. Her eyes flash and her mouth quirks and his heart falters. Then she turns away from him and disappears into the crowd, leaving the innocent-looking scrap of paper on the restaurant table.
Darton stares at it, the only thing left behind. And it does seem left behind, he seems left behind, all these tables and chairs and people and drinks are all left behind; now that she's left. He can't believe he's the only one that's noticed it: the electricity that flows through the air whenever she's near, that feeling of now now now that is counting ever second so clearly, so distinctly. But now she's not here, and all he can think is then then thenbecause it was then this room had purpose, gravity. Now that gravity is a half block away and he wonders how Jen survived two years of this. Two years without gravity.
He picks up the paper, unfolds it without a thought. Dear Jen, it says,
I'm sorry. I'll tell you everything, but I want us to be alone. Just like old times. Don't tell anyone I've come back just yet, okay? Here's my number: - - -. Call me.
And that's all she wrote.
A/N: Is this the real life? No, it's a modern AU P&P. I'm trying to throw a wrench into the classic P&P format.
Feels good to be back in the fandom. Leave me your thoughts and theories in a review, if you wish.