When I Spin Away
By: Strangelittleswirl
"Oh."
It really wasn't even the word, more like a sound of someone being punched in the gut. Zoe couldn't see really well, but she could make out the familiar form of Shane Wolf. Had her eyes not been filled with tears as they were, she would have seen he was holding onto the doorknob with more than just a causal grasp, more of a necessary lean.
The remote was sitting next to her on the couch, where she sat primly, though her face told another story.
"You, uh, you weren't supposed to see that," he said, lamely. The blonde woman continued to stare.
It Christmas break and the whole family was together for the first time since Shane had left, abruptly, two years ago. A note had been left on the fridge, rushed and sprawling, about being needed someplace that he couldn't really say, and that he would call or write as soon as he could. It had been four days until, with baited breath, Julie Plummer had picked up the phone and had started to cry with relief. He was alive, in another country, and unable to talk for much longer, but wanting to let his surrogate mother know he was still (mostly) in one piece had prompted the call.
And now, two years later, Zoe had come home, happy and anxious at the same time from the knowledge that this was her last college winter break before she would be working at the advertising firm where she was interning.
She had sat down on the couch, at that strange hour of the early morning at which all college students prowl, to watch some television, perhaps a movie. Sheer happenstance had led to the discovery of the videotape in a pile of movies from years gone by that were never watched anymore. Nestled between another Land Before Time and one of her Jem VHS tapes, was an unmarked tape. Peter, years before, had gone through a 'tear-every-label-off-of-anything-that-entered-his-grasp' phase, and she thought nothing of it.
When the tape came on, after a second or two of fuzz, she realized that this was a home movie, and settled in to inevitably, in her mind, watch a dance recital or a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles birthday party, perhaps an early family vacation of the entire family somewhere like Disney or New York City or even that time they went to Mexico and she swam with the dolphins. Zoe prepared to pause it, grainy and emitting a high-pitched sound from slightly bad tracking on an frame of her father, squinting in the sun and looking distracted but content. Share the holiday with him, in a way.
But when Shane sat down, nervously, in a chair in what looked to be his apartment, she sat up and waited. Something about the tape made her think this was something very private and that she should, perhaps, turn it off, but her hand never made it to the remote, because Shane had said her name, with a nervous 'hello'.
So here she was, only a few minutes later, and the entire world seemed to have shifted and changed. It was very hard to breathe, suddenly.
"Really?" her voice cracked. "Because you were talking to me."
He turned his back to her and squatted in front of the old VHS player, waiting patiently for it to eject.
"But things didn't-"
"You thought you weren't coming back," she said, and made eye contact with him in the reflection of the dusty television screen. Zoe could feel a gigantic conversation starting.
He turned, still on his haunches. Zoe wanted to scream; he was being entirely too quiet. Instead the carpet, near her bare feet, gained his attention. "Better to be prepared."
"Better to be cowardly?" It was harsh but true, and by the look on his face, he knew it, too.
"I thought, at the time…," he trailed off. With a small shake of his head, he was standing up and starting towards the door. "Just forget you saw that."
"How can you even think I would ever forget that?" Zoe was up and off the couch and standing against the door. Granted, the large difference in height, weight, and strength meant that she really wasn't an obstacle if he wanted to truly leave, but it worked.
"I-I," she thought carefully about what her next words were, because they would be important and this whole new world she was looking out at depended heavily on them. "I just wish you would say that to me in person, Shane."
He was looking over her shoulder. "Don't mock an old man."
"I'm not. If you would have told me, had said something at one point so that I knew I wasn't crazy for feeling that way about you, I wouldn't have been such a serial dater. I wouldn't have dated all of those muscle heads, or…or that one Marine, or that cop-"
"-I hated him," he muttered, darkly.
"Me too," she said quickly. "If you had just said something…I-I wouldn't have been such a mess when you were gone, or-"
"Why didn't you say anything to me?"
Zoe stopped, mid sentence. "I didn't know how to…I thought about it at least a thousand times. But every time I came close, I couldn't."
"I almost did, that one New Years."
She bit her lip, nodding. "We were drunk. I was trying to loosen up at first, to say something to you, too-liquid courage and all that-but then I just ended up wallowing because I didn't think you would take me seriously. And crying. I still never replaced that shirt," she suddenly remembered.
"It all came out," he lied. "Mostly," Shane amended after seeing her wry glance.
A motorized ornament on the tree behind them churned in the following silence, and then Shane was asking her to come sit on the couch, and it was even more awkward.
And then Zoe said 'screw it' to the part of her brain that was quickly listing all the reasons why she shouldn't, and leaned in to kiss him just as he did the same.
A few months later, as Zoe nestled closer to Shane in the crumpled sheets and content silence and the warmth of his apartment, the two tried to figure just exactly how that tape had ended up at the Plummer home in the first place.
"I found a copy of Sound of Music in its case," he said with a low laugh that she could feel rumbling from where her head was perched on his chest.
She smiled, stared out the window, and watched the snow on the branches fell in thick blobs to the ground. A freak, late snowstorm had not only kept them huddled in his apartment, but let to a very unpleasant discussion with her mother on the phone, with Shane on the living room phone and Zoe sitting next to him on the bedroom cordless. It also meant that whenever Zoe got back to work, the ad she had been working on for a liberal politician in the area would have to changed since global warming would be balked at.
"Funny you should say that, since apparently, a year ago, Seth found this interesting video in with his musicals, and refused to tell me what it was. Explains why he was such an ass to live with. He knew before we did."
Seth bent down and whispered into her ear, and Zoe laughed as they rolled together and her back hit the mattress.
"Now I think if he found a videotape of that my mother would kill us both."
Author's Note: I am so sorry, but I had to write this oneshot. I was listening to the Radiohead song "Videotape", (the title comes from the song) and I could just picture Shane doing something like that. To fully understand this I guess you'd have to listen to it, or at least read the lyrics.
I will be updating She's Leaving Home soon.
No, this has nothing to do with SLH.