orgieA/N: Okay, here goes Chapter 10! One hundred thanks go to all of you
who review; as I have said, they are my "natural high" and I love to get
them! They really help me improve and motivate me to write more, and I
appreciate your thoughts/comments/suggestions/etc. I will try to advance
the plot line a little more now; the last chapter was basically fluff and
written late at night so it wasn't as good as the other ones, I think.
Thank you again, Sara! I love you. AND: smile1, sarahl, Shouhei, thank
you for consistently reviewing. I will try to make this chapter longer and
better!
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TWO MONTHS LATER; EARLY SEPTEMBER
Rory sat inaudibly outside of Jess' work building on an elderly wooden bench, slightly damp and worn with age. It's olive armrests, rough and cold, were rusted on the round sloping end, like frozen burgundy fuzz. She ran a finger over the rust aimlessly, feeling it softly sand the small, flat pads of her fingers. It helped her think...she decided that she liked rust, and that its crimson corrosion of the metallic armrest was a nice September color. Pulling her thumb away, she studied the miniscule white flaps of skin torn by the small gaps in the tarnished patch, like slivers slightly deeper than her skin. She felt deep this late afternoon. So did Sylvia Plath, for her rereading of The Bell Jar was a much more enjoyable experience than the first time.
"Esther." Rory recognized the silken rough resonance of his presence and closed the feathered paperback with one hand, pressing down on her thumb, still sore from the bench and holding the yellow-orange page she was now subconsciously engrossed in...multitasking.
"Hey," she replied, closing her eyes for a few moments and smiling knowingly. A reddish leaf fell from a small maple tree in a plot on the sandy-hued sidewalk, rough like his persona, but substansial...needed. She opened her eyes and watched him watch her, a camera immortalizing itself. "I have never been to an asylum, nor for my health or the health of another."
He was amused. "But I, Buddy Willard, just might make you crazy." He moved closer, reaching his canvas-clad toe out to nuzzle her shoe. She pulled hers back underneath the bench.
"I never liked him one bit," she murmured, trying to sound apt or polished. The words spewed out awkwardly and she giggled at her calamity, looking away. Another leaf fell, and she studied its veins, the life they once gave through thin black pipelines on a field of green.
"Nobody does." Jess' answer was terse now, and his gaze wintry, more sharp. The colors were less blended now, not as much submerged in shallow lukewarm pools of denial and bliss. She could see the ruddiness, and the cerulean, and the hint of glass bottle green glowing like a foggy flourescent sign in the background of this painting.
She witnessed the pallet in his eyes, and she thought of the precedent and felt a chill of sharp shades. "Jess."
"Hm?" his response was too quick, too well rehearsed, too practiced, too vividly multihued.
He had hidden the pallet, thinking she wouldn't notice, and this action connected itself with a mental image of Buddy Willard. I never liked him one bit. "Jess..." It was a long pause, a connecting pause. Finiding the right words was always an arduous task for her, however fluent she could be; finding the right pedal to accelerate was exhausting. Finally. "There's...your eyes." Her mouth collasped. She knew that the difficult task of breaking through his shell of denial was up ahead, and she didn't want to spoil the last days of the leaves, so crimsonly close to death. But September was early and there were twenty-six more days to witness these glossy thin lives pass on, so she cleared her throat.
Jess had been staring at her impassively, trying to translate the fragment, and was internally relieved when she spoke up again. He heard bubbles again...they were richer and lower and thicker than summer's effervescent sound, but just as worried. "Jess, you're upset and you're not telling me."
He grunted emptily, kicking the sidewalk. A fuzzy pang bounced from the rubber of his shoe and into his toe, but he ignored it. "Shit."
"Jess," she moaned back, standing up. Rory smoothed a hand over her shirt, a floaty white material she now thought was not warm enough for the crispness of the brink of autumn. Droplets of cold reverberated on her stomach and shoulders, and she winced as a brisk breeze whipped by, beginning the slow descent of existence as another leaf was caused to snap and fall.
"I lost my job," he snapped, an indifference of calamitous scope rolling lazily off his tongue and hanging, a cogent icicle, in the space between them.
Rory's initial thought was to gasp or to ask why in a hurried fashion, falling all over him, but the shell looked to uncomfortable to embrace now, in this cold wind. There was needless shame bouncing off of the shield he was holding up, but small streams were seeping between the cracks and his face was red. She knew better than to point this out; there would be denial and excuses of the weather's consequences.
"Oh," she replied, looking around for something to study. She never could study things like he could; her brain was too busy bothering and contradicting. He was busy perfecting the art now, gazing, an empty stream of wispy ashen smoke bursting from his eyes.
He was like the eye of a hurricane, "very still and very empty," and Rory's mind could not help but slip back into the memories of the past, of the same look, the same hollow cyclone. Her logical, refuting thoughts pried apart those of misconstruence.
"I...I got a test. Today, I mean, I bought one." She shifted from one foot to the other. Her attempts were starting to feel like the core of a tornado, useless, ineffective.
Jess looked up. His previous ennui for all things of tangibility within a three-mile radius melted like early spring snow, a puddle of wet gray ice ringed with bitter thawed water. He turned, eyes no longer emitting smoke, no longer red and cobalt and glass bottle green. Rory thought she could see pale auburn, bright yellow. His sheild was always becoming heavier, harder to hold up.
"Oh," he replied shortly, eyebrows raised, bottom lip pouting out, studying his shoes. Much like the sheild, his smirk of ignorance was becoming increasingly difficult to show.
"Yeah." She smiled a small smile, an unsure smile. She knew he was happy, but did not know if she should call him on it.
"That's..." he paused, playing picky with the words. He licked his lips; wind made them dry, stiffened the cracks, the small scar on the top one. "It's good, you're happy..." he trailed off.
Rory could feel crimson in her eyes, a sharp, fierce redness. His unsure frontage, this false fascia, it ripped at her confidence, her sureness that this was something good. Jess had never been one to express himself, keeping a tight knot on his mouth, but she could not help but wonder how age had only worsened that habit. Twenty-seven...that was too colossal of a figure to dissipate on silence.
"Jess!" she barked, a fragile but angry terrier. She whirled around, catching him pulling at a leaf, ripping along the seam that was its central vein. He looked up, studying her face, furrowing his brow and smirking.
"What?" It was confused, unaware. This concept in itself caused a flow of deep, rich cobalt to her irises that he took note of...belatedly. Too late.
"Jesus, how long are you going to be like this? Are you going to take your causeless rebel to the grave? This is something I thought you wanted. But I keep doing the same exact thing, don't I? I keep driving over the same road in circles. I can never tell what you want. Because you never say anything." She stopped, eyes blazing like the wickedly hot smoke of a burning cigarette butt, stamped onto flesh.
The biting cold air stung Rory's lungs. She felt her sanguine morning- fresh manner slipping between her fingers, too numb to grasp at it. "I am your goddamn wife, Jess!" she hollered. The sting was raw, poking her throat and flushing her cheekbones with tinted force. "You are supposed to be happy, too. You are supposed...supposed to be..."
She moaned, her hands shaking slightly, cutting at the draft ripping past their twister, their eye of the tornado. "You're supposed to care enough to stop giving me the cold shoulder!" Blind to the reaction of the world, she turned and walked away swiftly, shoulders hunched up underneath her earlobes and arms wrapped firmly around herself, like an angry present, an unwanted present soon to be put in a corner and forgotten.
And as she walked, the rope grew thinner from being stretched so far, and it began to feather, small quills meeting oxygen as they detached from the thickness of the original twine. It extended, and bent around the corners of the impermanent prism houses, and its strength, its fortitude, began to diminish. It never broke, snapped, uncoiled itself into a heap of threads,
But both felt it slowly tapering. Rory only hoped he would follow the rope and tighten it again, and he only hoped he would be able to.
...................................................................................................................................................................................................
10:00 PM
Jess could smell pears when he opened the front door, the translucent cherry type that float in liquid form through a basin of lukewarm water, frothing with shimmery lavender bubbles. He inhaled deeply, savoring the sacrament of Rory's scent, the aroa of her collar and perfume of her persona. Every effective filament in the apartment was burning now, each lightbulb alive with fuzzy yellow glow and orange coronas. Walking past the couch, he trailed his thumb along the heated black leather of the cushions, never softer than her skin, her voice's music. Rory was never a heavy kind of music, always a lighter foam melody. Silence ate away at the sudsy, flute-like frost coating her will, and he cursed himself for scraping so harshly at the spume, the residue so appreciated.
Stopping at the door to the bedroom, he steadied his gaze on the sliver between two woods; no light creeped away from inside and spread, a one- dimensional monochrome rainbow on the oak. It was dark, and the violin of tears reached his ears gradually, melding into his drums and making him wince without a second thought, another feeling, another pang or twinge or regret.
It was the quietest kind of crying...a weep with so much consequence that you could taste it in the molecules barely passing by, feel it on the fingernails lacking in nerves, see it in your eyelids when you squeezed them like bitter lemons.
He pulled on the lock with enough tension to make its noise omniscient, reappearing in another room and away from the hushed whimperings.
The room was dark, the blinds pulled down...and he found that he could not see his palm inches from his face as he groped at nothingness, making his way in the memorized direction of the bed. His legs hit a hard soft – round brown comforter covering rough, dark wood. Jess' ears watched a muted crinkle of skin and bedsheets, then the sharp, high cling of metal and plastic...the lamp turned on and Rory sat, her back stiff as wet straw, against the headboard. Her hair was disheveled slightly, and a shadow hung on a half of her face, a present black-and-white still. Her face had streaks of shine, like long, slight blisters, only water-born. Jess' eyes softened, and their colors merged into pastels. He followed the slope of her body underneath a gray shirt, fragile china curves and slender, pallid arms.
"It." Her voice cracked, and he shook his head, stopping her, landing gently on the bed. He pushed himself back, sitting like a bent cardbaord cutout in her same way...sitting next to his paperdoll.
She rolled her head sideways, watching his face stay still.
"I'm...I'm sorry about what I said," he began, not sure of his own speech, his own pronunciation. She cut him off.
"It was negative." Her voice crackled like television snow, and the dams in her pupils crumbled down. The floods began.
Then he knew what exactly had been negatory. And he could not stop the floods he saw...or the ones he, himself, felt.
"I turned out the light and tried to drop back to sleep, but it's face floated before me, bodiless and smiling..." Sylvia Plath
A/N: OK, I'm not creative today...Please please pretty please review! I will love you forever!
...................................................................................................................................................................................................
TWO MONTHS LATER; EARLY SEPTEMBER
Rory sat inaudibly outside of Jess' work building on an elderly wooden bench, slightly damp and worn with age. It's olive armrests, rough and cold, were rusted on the round sloping end, like frozen burgundy fuzz. She ran a finger over the rust aimlessly, feeling it softly sand the small, flat pads of her fingers. It helped her think...she decided that she liked rust, and that its crimson corrosion of the metallic armrest was a nice September color. Pulling her thumb away, she studied the miniscule white flaps of skin torn by the small gaps in the tarnished patch, like slivers slightly deeper than her skin. She felt deep this late afternoon. So did Sylvia Plath, for her rereading of The Bell Jar was a much more enjoyable experience than the first time.
"Esther." Rory recognized the silken rough resonance of his presence and closed the feathered paperback with one hand, pressing down on her thumb, still sore from the bench and holding the yellow-orange page she was now subconsciously engrossed in...multitasking.
"Hey," she replied, closing her eyes for a few moments and smiling knowingly. A reddish leaf fell from a small maple tree in a plot on the sandy-hued sidewalk, rough like his persona, but substansial...needed. She opened her eyes and watched him watch her, a camera immortalizing itself. "I have never been to an asylum, nor for my health or the health of another."
He was amused. "But I, Buddy Willard, just might make you crazy." He moved closer, reaching his canvas-clad toe out to nuzzle her shoe. She pulled hers back underneath the bench.
"I never liked him one bit," she murmured, trying to sound apt or polished. The words spewed out awkwardly and she giggled at her calamity, looking away. Another leaf fell, and she studied its veins, the life they once gave through thin black pipelines on a field of green.
"Nobody does." Jess' answer was terse now, and his gaze wintry, more sharp. The colors were less blended now, not as much submerged in shallow lukewarm pools of denial and bliss. She could see the ruddiness, and the cerulean, and the hint of glass bottle green glowing like a foggy flourescent sign in the background of this painting.
She witnessed the pallet in his eyes, and she thought of the precedent and felt a chill of sharp shades. "Jess."
"Hm?" his response was too quick, too well rehearsed, too practiced, too vividly multihued.
He had hidden the pallet, thinking she wouldn't notice, and this action connected itself with a mental image of Buddy Willard. I never liked him one bit. "Jess..." It was a long pause, a connecting pause. Finiding the right words was always an arduous task for her, however fluent she could be; finding the right pedal to accelerate was exhausting. Finally. "There's...your eyes." Her mouth collasped. She knew that the difficult task of breaking through his shell of denial was up ahead, and she didn't want to spoil the last days of the leaves, so crimsonly close to death. But September was early and there were twenty-six more days to witness these glossy thin lives pass on, so she cleared her throat.
Jess had been staring at her impassively, trying to translate the fragment, and was internally relieved when she spoke up again. He heard bubbles again...they were richer and lower and thicker than summer's effervescent sound, but just as worried. "Jess, you're upset and you're not telling me."
He grunted emptily, kicking the sidewalk. A fuzzy pang bounced from the rubber of his shoe and into his toe, but he ignored it. "Shit."
"Jess," she moaned back, standing up. Rory smoothed a hand over her shirt, a floaty white material she now thought was not warm enough for the crispness of the brink of autumn. Droplets of cold reverberated on her stomach and shoulders, and she winced as a brisk breeze whipped by, beginning the slow descent of existence as another leaf was caused to snap and fall.
"I lost my job," he snapped, an indifference of calamitous scope rolling lazily off his tongue and hanging, a cogent icicle, in the space between them.
Rory's initial thought was to gasp or to ask why in a hurried fashion, falling all over him, but the shell looked to uncomfortable to embrace now, in this cold wind. There was needless shame bouncing off of the shield he was holding up, but small streams were seeping between the cracks and his face was red. She knew better than to point this out; there would be denial and excuses of the weather's consequences.
"Oh," she replied, looking around for something to study. She never could study things like he could; her brain was too busy bothering and contradicting. He was busy perfecting the art now, gazing, an empty stream of wispy ashen smoke bursting from his eyes.
He was like the eye of a hurricane, "very still and very empty," and Rory's mind could not help but slip back into the memories of the past, of the same look, the same hollow cyclone. Her logical, refuting thoughts pried apart those of misconstruence.
"I...I got a test. Today, I mean, I bought one." She shifted from one foot to the other. Her attempts were starting to feel like the core of a tornado, useless, ineffective.
Jess looked up. His previous ennui for all things of tangibility within a three-mile radius melted like early spring snow, a puddle of wet gray ice ringed with bitter thawed water. He turned, eyes no longer emitting smoke, no longer red and cobalt and glass bottle green. Rory thought she could see pale auburn, bright yellow. His sheild was always becoming heavier, harder to hold up.
"Oh," he replied shortly, eyebrows raised, bottom lip pouting out, studying his shoes. Much like the sheild, his smirk of ignorance was becoming increasingly difficult to show.
"Yeah." She smiled a small smile, an unsure smile. She knew he was happy, but did not know if she should call him on it.
"That's..." he paused, playing picky with the words. He licked his lips; wind made them dry, stiffened the cracks, the small scar on the top one. "It's good, you're happy..." he trailed off.
Rory could feel crimson in her eyes, a sharp, fierce redness. His unsure frontage, this false fascia, it ripped at her confidence, her sureness that this was something good. Jess had never been one to express himself, keeping a tight knot on his mouth, but she could not help but wonder how age had only worsened that habit. Twenty-seven...that was too colossal of a figure to dissipate on silence.
"Jess!" she barked, a fragile but angry terrier. She whirled around, catching him pulling at a leaf, ripping along the seam that was its central vein. He looked up, studying her face, furrowing his brow and smirking.
"What?" It was confused, unaware. This concept in itself caused a flow of deep, rich cobalt to her irises that he took note of...belatedly. Too late.
"Jesus, how long are you going to be like this? Are you going to take your causeless rebel to the grave? This is something I thought you wanted. But I keep doing the same exact thing, don't I? I keep driving over the same road in circles. I can never tell what you want. Because you never say anything." She stopped, eyes blazing like the wickedly hot smoke of a burning cigarette butt, stamped onto flesh.
The biting cold air stung Rory's lungs. She felt her sanguine morning- fresh manner slipping between her fingers, too numb to grasp at it. "I am your goddamn wife, Jess!" she hollered. The sting was raw, poking her throat and flushing her cheekbones with tinted force. "You are supposed to be happy, too. You are supposed...supposed to be..."
She moaned, her hands shaking slightly, cutting at the draft ripping past their twister, their eye of the tornado. "You're supposed to care enough to stop giving me the cold shoulder!" Blind to the reaction of the world, she turned and walked away swiftly, shoulders hunched up underneath her earlobes and arms wrapped firmly around herself, like an angry present, an unwanted present soon to be put in a corner and forgotten.
And as she walked, the rope grew thinner from being stretched so far, and it began to feather, small quills meeting oxygen as they detached from the thickness of the original twine. It extended, and bent around the corners of the impermanent prism houses, and its strength, its fortitude, began to diminish. It never broke, snapped, uncoiled itself into a heap of threads,
But both felt it slowly tapering. Rory only hoped he would follow the rope and tighten it again, and he only hoped he would be able to.
...................................................................................................................................................................................................
10:00 PM
Jess could smell pears when he opened the front door, the translucent cherry type that float in liquid form through a basin of lukewarm water, frothing with shimmery lavender bubbles. He inhaled deeply, savoring the sacrament of Rory's scent, the aroa of her collar and perfume of her persona. Every effective filament in the apartment was burning now, each lightbulb alive with fuzzy yellow glow and orange coronas. Walking past the couch, he trailed his thumb along the heated black leather of the cushions, never softer than her skin, her voice's music. Rory was never a heavy kind of music, always a lighter foam melody. Silence ate away at the sudsy, flute-like frost coating her will, and he cursed himself for scraping so harshly at the spume, the residue so appreciated.
Stopping at the door to the bedroom, he steadied his gaze on the sliver between two woods; no light creeped away from inside and spread, a one- dimensional monochrome rainbow on the oak. It was dark, and the violin of tears reached his ears gradually, melding into his drums and making him wince without a second thought, another feeling, another pang or twinge or regret.
It was the quietest kind of crying...a weep with so much consequence that you could taste it in the molecules barely passing by, feel it on the fingernails lacking in nerves, see it in your eyelids when you squeezed them like bitter lemons.
He pulled on the lock with enough tension to make its noise omniscient, reappearing in another room and away from the hushed whimperings.
The room was dark, the blinds pulled down...and he found that he could not see his palm inches from his face as he groped at nothingness, making his way in the memorized direction of the bed. His legs hit a hard soft – round brown comforter covering rough, dark wood. Jess' ears watched a muted crinkle of skin and bedsheets, then the sharp, high cling of metal and plastic...the lamp turned on and Rory sat, her back stiff as wet straw, against the headboard. Her hair was disheveled slightly, and a shadow hung on a half of her face, a present black-and-white still. Her face had streaks of shine, like long, slight blisters, only water-born. Jess' eyes softened, and their colors merged into pastels. He followed the slope of her body underneath a gray shirt, fragile china curves and slender, pallid arms.
"It." Her voice cracked, and he shook his head, stopping her, landing gently on the bed. He pushed himself back, sitting like a bent cardbaord cutout in her same way...sitting next to his paperdoll.
She rolled her head sideways, watching his face stay still.
"I'm...I'm sorry about what I said," he began, not sure of his own speech, his own pronunciation. She cut him off.
"It was negative." Her voice crackled like television snow, and the dams in her pupils crumbled down. The floods began.
Then he knew what exactly had been negatory. And he could not stop the floods he saw...or the ones he, himself, felt.
"I turned out the light and tried to drop back to sleep, but it's face floated before me, bodiless and smiling..." Sylvia Plath
A/N: OK, I'm not creative today...Please please pretty please review! I will love you forever!