Champagne Bubbles and Despair
(ShaneCaitlyn)
author's note: I know I haven't written anything in a really, really long time. This was actually sitting on my computer and gathering dust for like, 3 months. And then the other day I just randomly finished. It's choppy and pointless and rambly and long. Just a warning. So here goes--I hope you like it.
And this wouldn't be what it is without the help of three amazing people: .souvenirs, camirae and applepips.(special thanks to her for the fabulous title!)
Thanks so much!
--
The first thing she realizes when she opens her eyes is that her head is throbbing painfully. That, and the sunlight streaming in through the windows is exceptionally bright. Not to mention yellow.
The second thing she realizes is that the bed she's in isn't the same canopy style in her room. Nor is there a painfully organized desk in front of her which she uses to write her music in. Her mouth is dry and her tongue is oddly heavy inside her mouth. And she's tucked into bed, she thinks almost bemusedly, something she gave up doing years ago. Which clearly means she has no idea where the hell she is.
She tries to sit up and muddle through the confusion at the same time and ends up falling back into the bed on her elbows. She gives up on the trying to sit up part and focuses on muddling through her confusion instead.
Starting from last night is a good idea, except she doesn't remember anything from last night. Well she does, but all she remembers is cloudy skies and booming thunder and a slinky black dress and an A-list party and some wild dancing (grinding) onto people she barely recognized. And throwing up into a toilet with rough hands holding her hair back.
Oh god, she thinks, she's smashed. Or was smashed. Now she's just hung over. (Hopefully the wild dancing was the worst of it.)
She can hear a toaster beeping and a coffee machine whirring off in the distance but it seems like it's too faraway and all she wants to do is just to go back to sleep.
She eventually pushes her weight onto her elbows and lifts her head up. Her mouth is dry and cottony and her tongue feels oddly heavy. She struggles to get the covers off of her and makes her way out of the bed, but not before falling down onto a cold hard floor. Nothing is there to cushion her blow, and the sound she makes is deafening in the distantly silent room. Her head starts thudding again, and it's all she can do not to pass out from the violet dots she's seeing spinning around in front of her eyes.
--
He's trying to concentrate on his toast that by now is charred and black, but all he can think of is last night and her curves and her legs in that black dress and her redred lips and the look in her eyes that spelled desire and the out of the ordinary brokenness that it wasn't for him.
He hears the sound of someone, something falling and oh god, what if that's her rushes in to see what the commotion is all about.
Shane Gray finds Caitlyn Gellar in his bedroom in the morning dappled by the sun sitting down on the floor with her head in her hands and her legs twisted at an oddly awkward angle.
She's trying to get up but it's so hard, and so he peels her hands away from her face and takes them into his, pulling her up along with him. She wants to say something, anything, she's so confused, but before she can he's taking her by the hand and she's being lifted up from the ground.
She's still squinting when she finds herself being plopped down into a chair next to a window in an apartment. She looks around to see bare furnishings (black furniture and a black and white portrait of a woman with oddly the same features as him hung up on the whitewhite wall) and when she looks up, Shane is sitting across from her in his dining room table in his apartment.
Shane, with the jet black straight hair and the rough, calloused hands (not the tight brown curls and the soft, warm hands). Shane, with the blackblack eyes that are so dull, the black eyes that are so different from the comforting brown eyes she used to lose herself in.
He's nervously holding out a cup of coffee in his hands. She's just about to reach for it, when she realizes that he's pushing a plate of scrambled eggs towards her awkwardly. Oh, right. Coffee isn't as good for the hangover as eggs are. She brings the plate closer and she looks up into his dull eyes (ohsodull) uneasily once more.
"S-Shane?" This is not what she expected, not at all. She would have thought Nate or Mitchie or Jason or Peggy or Ella or anyone would have brought her home before Shane.
She doesn't even know Shane that well—she had interacted with him during the brief period that Shane and Mitchie went out, but after they broke up, so did her relationship with him. Not that she really had a relationship with him, but anyways.
"Thanks." She can barely get the word out, it hurts to talk and it hurts to look at him and it hurts to remember.
He waves it away and gestures to the plate of eggs. There's a glass of water sitting next to the eggs, and she thinks that drinking water is a good idea, especially if she hasn't brushed her teeth yet. She picks up her fork and even though she doesn't feel hungry, she spears some of the eggs onto her fork.
"I never really thought that you, of all people, would be the one to help me, but thanks anyways."
She doesn't mean it as an insult, and he doesn't take it as one. After all, they've never really been particularly close.
His darkdark eyes meet hers, and suddenly it becomes a challenge. Somehow his eyes don't look so dull anymore.
"I never really thought that you, of all people, would need my help."
The tone is slightly mocking, and it startles her. She knows what he means though, and in the deafening silence that follows it all comes down crashing onto her.
She can't breathe anymore, just like that, because it's the first time, in a long time, that anyone's brought it up. She tries to give the same generic, cold response she gives everyone else but she can't look up into his eyes and say it, and so he says it for her. (Only it's not the bullshit she feeds everyone else.)
"But you never really got over Nate, did you? You never even tried after he broke up with you. Not even when he told you he wanted to be friends with you again. Not even when you saw the way Mitchie started looking at him, because that's the way you look at him, even now. Not even when you got the news that they were getting married."
She can't look at him, not at his face or his chest or down at the table, because it brings all those memories swirling back to her.
--
(She's always been the one for messy relationships that break her and spill out onto her heart and into her life, but Nate was always too clean cut. She thinks back to a time of smooth faces sprinkled with freckles and quiet silence and tiny hearts beating inside of her--it's a fucking fetus--and sinking her feet into tall grass and biting into redred watermelon and letting the juice dribble down her chin and thinking that she's never enough. And when he breaks up with her, she can't breathe anymore, and it feels like someone is squeezing her heart, it's so painful and it hurts so much and her heart skips a beat—or maybe a few hundred—and he just, he just walks away.)
--
And oh god, he's still talking. His voice is rising now, the volcano he's kept hidden inside him for so long erupting, like maybe if he shouts loud enough, she'll actually listen to the words rumbling out. His dark eyes are blazing fire and burning into her soul and she wonders how he can voice the thoughts she can't even wrap her mind around.
"You didn't even try! You just went back into your dream world where Nate was still with you! Mitchie was my ex, too and Nate was my best friend. Goddamn it, Caitlyn, it's over. It's been over for two fucking years now!"
His voice softens as he looks at her, her eyes brimming with tears. And he stops talking, abruptly, like he just realized what happened, like he just realized that he's hurting her. She looks up at him again.
"No, don't stop. I need to hear it. I needed to hear it for a while now."
But he's not going to say anything, so she just concentrates on the eggs in front of her and shoves a bite into her mouth, chewing slowly so as to fill the stillness that she feels she's brought upon him.
He looks down too, his eyes no longer gazing into hers (thank god) and he reaches down for his cup to take a big gulp of the hot liquid before setting the cup back down.
She takes another bite before swallowing, and when she does, she takes the time to choose her words carefully.
"Shane, what- What exactly happened last night?"
He sighs, like he doesn't want to tell her. He's fumbling for an excuse, any excuse so that he can avoid telling her what she wants to needs to know.
"Well, you had a couple too many drinks. And I think that was you dancing on a table. You kind of, uh, flashed your panties. Not that I was looking or anything," he adds quickly.
(Bullshit. Of course he was looking, just like all the other guys in the room.)
"Um, yeah. I get kind of stupid when I'm around champagne."
(And god, can she get any lamer than that? Champagne? Who the fuck likes champagne? It's sparkling and bubbly and fizzy and ohsofake.)
He laughs, although she's not sure if he's laughing, it sounds so bitter.
"That definitely wasn't a champagne flute you were holding. You looked like you were downing shots of vodka or something."
She can't respond to that, not when he's sitting across the table and he knows. That's when she notices that his eyes are downcast, too, and not looking into hers like they were a couple of minutes ago.
"There's something you're not telling me."
He's still not looking at her. He sighs, and opens his mouth, and for a moment she thinks he's going to open it and tell her what happened, but instead he just closes his mouth, keeping his eyes on the table. She looks down, too, and plays around with the eggs left right left and is just about to put some into her mouth when-
"You uh, you got drunk and told Nate about an abortion. In front of everyone."
The fork drops to the plate, making a loud clang. She doesn't notice.
"He, he didn't know before. He didn't know you were pregnant, didn't know you were carrying a baby inside you."
The unspoken words hang between them, covering the air with their thick, silent fog.
If he did he wouldn't have let you come this far.
And it's getting so heavy, so hard to keep it inside now and the pain that she kept suppressed is finally seeping out.
"What was I supposed to do, Shane?"
It's supposed to come out loud and angry, like an outburst, because she's so damn fed up of having to live with the secret that's gnawing at her insides. It's supposed to be explosive, shattering and crumbling the walls she's worked so hard to keep up. It's supposed to make her feel relieved, because the thing she was trying to keep from everyone is finally out, and there's no going back now. It's supposed to make her comforted, because maybe this means Nate will come back to her.
But all she really feels is tired. And empty, because all this time she's been trying to break up what is really the light of her best friend's life, and now she feels like shit.
And the words come out tired and heavy, and the sob she's been choking back has finally made its way out. She's breaking down in front of an almost stranger, sitting in said stranger's house and eating his food and ohgod she wasn't like this, but the tears that haven't come for years, the tears that didn't come even when Nate broke up with her are coming now and she's bathing, drowning in them.
Her vision is becoming blurry and she can feel the familiar pain of tears stinging at her eyes but she won't let them come can't let them come not now and especially not here. It's too bad for her, the tears roll down her cheeks anyway, and her vision focuses and blurs and clears and clots again in front of her eyes until all she can see is dark hair and darker eyes.
She silently wills him not to move because the last thing she wants is pity, even though it's pity from someone who probably understands the position she's in. She's surprised to think that she actually means enough to him for him to comfort her, and she is even more surprised when he barely shifts from his spot in his chair except to hand her a box of tissues.
"Caitlyn."
His eyes bore into hers and now she knows there's no going back.
She sniffles and tries to get her tears to stop, gingerly fingering the box of tissues and pressing one to her face.
She tries to tell him she's sorry but the words seem stuck in the back of her throat and she can't force them out.
(And the tears dry up and the words go unsaid.)
She hands him back the box of tissues.
(She's sitting there looking up at him, her eyes still shining brightly with tears and he wonders how Nate could have done this to her--torn down the light in her eyes and replaced it with pain. He thinks it's funny how the look in her eyes is just a little too familiar and then he realizes where it comes from.)
She sits back up and his eyes follow her. "I, uh, I guess I should go now.
"Yeah, I guess you should."
She's getting up, trying to find a pair of sunglasses to hide her face when she goes outside. He's scratching his head awkwardly.
She walks to the outside of his door and he follows her. He stands in his doorway, not really knowing what to do (all he knows is that he won't can't let her go just like that).
"Just, um, let me know if you need anything. I'll be there, okay?"
Again, he's the one to start talking. And he knows he's treading on a different path, one unknown and one that he's unsure of. And he knows that he'll get called out for it. Caitlyn's going to start, any second, about how she doesn't need anyone--least of all him--and that she's perfectly responsible enough to take care of herself.
He's waiting for it, but it never comes. She just looks down at her feet, and mutters a little "Sure." (He isn't sure whether she's saying it to him or the ground.)
He's touching her elbow, touching her hand, trying to get through to her, like it's his business. But the thing is, it is his business. This thing that broke her, that shattered her enough so she couldn't put her herself back together--it connects back to everyone around her. And to him. It connects especially to him.
(He wonders when he became the one that could stand through the storm, and she became the one that fell.)
And maybe she understands what it's like, the heartbreak and the pain and what it's for, because she's wrapping her fingers around his. It's like heartbreak and pain all over again, but it's more than that. He doesn't know how to describe it, but realizing that her fingers are drawing little circles on his palm in a comforting kind of way is like looking up at the smooth expanse of the stars in the sky and realizing it's never ending.
And then she turns around to leave.
Only she pushed something into his hand before she left. He looks at it; it's a slip of paper with a phone number and an address on it. He's never called her before, never been to her apartment before, but he knows that both the number and address are hers.
He watches her walk away, her figure growing more and more distant in the bright sun. When her figure gets too small to distinguish from the bushes and the trees, he tears his eyes away from her, and turns around and walks back through his door. And he finally recognizes where the look in her eyes comes from--it's the same look he sees whenever he glances into a mirror.
He knows she doesn't have a car and she'll be walking back to her apartment in last night's clothes, but he can't bring himself to give her a ride. She'll refuse it like she always does. He can picture her saying, "Thanks, but I can get home by myself." And he knows she can. She'll get home. She'll stand up.
Fin.