A/N: Before I begin this chapter, there are a few things I must say:
--- Anastasia Athene --- You leave me the best reviews all of the time! I love your little list things; they inspire me! I was having such a writer's block lately, trying to think of what to put into this chapter, and I read your reviews and got all excited! I have also put in another Beatles review plea at the bottom of this chapter. Thanks for being such a faithful reviewer!
--- Shouhei --- You're the best beta a girl could ask for! And so sweet :P Thanks for always thinking my writing is great, even when I am 100% sure that it sucks. This chapter is for you. And everyone, please read Shouhei's "Like Father Like Daughter," it is fabulous and unique and...oh, words don't hold any meaning here :D Go read it! Go on!
--- All reviewers --- to everyone who has reviewed 'O Citadel of Love' so far (Shouhei, Anastasia Athene, naleyfan, sarahl, smile1, Shem, KT, someone5, vintagequeen, ineedajess, KT, M5lvrgrl, jlangblues891, Lilly, AlexiaWarren, Regina Falangi, EAM, Marren, Screamer, & Lunatic Lauren). You are the bestest ever! All of your reviews are wonderful, and I take all of your advice and use it to improve my story. I'm not the greatest at 'suspense' and 'cliffhangers' and those kinds of things, but I will do what I do best and I hope that you continue to enjoy this story.
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THE FOLLOWING MONDAY; 7:30 AM
Jess awoke unhurriedly that morning; although imaginary, the torpid scent of warm rainwater flooded his nose and its moist sensation, an idle quality, landed gently on his back and bowed over his sides. He lay suspended in the liberty between slumber and perception, unwilling to move beyond daybreak's path. The perfume of this sky water, an adjective of a fictional fiction, calmed his mind and burst the pods of tension dispersed throughout his body, allowing for the warmed, filmy, apprehensive liquids inside to spill over onto the mattress. The animated fluid engulfed him in the smarting yet solacing odor of a muted blue rain-morning, pulling him deeper against the sheets...the light rain became a downpour, and the lagoon grew higher, warmer.
Only but one offense at his senses could deplete the basin...a feather depletion, a straw of smoke...rosy smoke. Today it was rosy...tomorrow, there were endless prospects...cerulean, jade, scarlet, bullion, ashen gray...
She was his rosy smoke. A naïve silhouette of truth, mitigating rainwater and being the scent of a cactus flower, worn with time but a graceful epoching of immortality.
"There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapped in perfect unconsciousness." The rosy smoke boiled.
Jess rolled over, the rainwater, its sound, and its sensation far away now, barely visible. This was his drowsy state, and he intended on ongoing his viaje through the terra firma of flitting cactus flowers. So pink.
Rory continued, her voice the suppurate between facets. "...at such times, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space..."
"...when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate." Jess' eyes flippantly opened like the shutter of a camera, and his whites lacked the default white hue. They were a roseate, and they matched the coral of hers. It had been a turbulent night...everything of a hurricane but its eye.
"Hi..." he groaned, eyelids closing again, an allusion to the impression that he was discomfited of his damp eyes, a rouge not often seen in the dark russet orbs. "Oliver Twist."
"Hm, I didn't know you heard me." Rory slid in next to him, the sheets starchy and stiff but still warm from the impression he had made upon them. She smelled his hair, musky and rich, running a finger down the back of his head as she rested her head on his chest. Cheek to torso, she could feel the softened, consistent thumping of his heartbeat, one of the few things that was unswerving nowadays. Rory trusted his heart, and its unending stilled her. Her heart slowly matched his.
"Ah, hm." Jess adjusted himself, pulling an arm from underneath his back. The arm found its way to the small of her back, and moved up to feel the staticy loops of hair encircling her neck. And so the somnolent traveler rested, tempted to ascend farther, but knowing that rest would grant him a farther trek the next morning...he had found her pulse, matching his from all sides, all decibels.
One of the few uniformities now, he thought. She thought. Minds mingle, having been made so carefully. Hearts as of the seemingly artificial connections, the crucial links in a chain of the wraithlike knowledge of beings...that this was meant to be.
There is but one more uniform knowledge, one incessant lingering thought in both preordained benevolences, clinging to one another yet so distant...refutations.
Refutations, every other evening, etched in blue on cold, heartless plastic. Refutations discarded, cursed...the negatory quality of blue is now more thoroughly understood. One cannot understand the depression of inky indigo without seeing this long thin plastic stick...a harsh object for a harsh reality.
The minus, the subtraction, the math of taking away was now a hostility...a resented frosty acquaintance.
But a constant nonetheless............ "-"...............
6:30 PM
Newspapers bothered Jess; they engraved little marks in his assurance every time, curling away tiny shards of it like irregular, agglutinative orange peel. Job advertisements were now another opponent, another adversary to fight with. But like most books, the conflict, the climax, the pinnacle was inevitable, and the fight with the boss was unavoidable. He preferred to think in metaphors, but the far reaches of his imagination were beginning to wean off of his detestation of homelife. The allegory was becoming the fluid correlation between the visible written word and the visual television screen.
Thoroughly agitated with a relentless group of useless career opportunities, he slammed the paper shut, but it refused to symbolize the tense feeling coarsing through his nerves and his blood vessels, liquid aggravation with everything. The negatories, literal and figurative, were slowly taking the place of gentle morning rainwater.
The sound of a faucet always reminds one of something else. The swiftly hollow, glassy, eternal exhalation as coaly blue water streamed onto unkind white ceramic brought his mind to a suicidal genre of literature, to 'Hold On'-type ballads, to the asperous feeling of seemingly-tough body to hard brick wall.
The rip of the paper towel, quiet but brusque, corresponded with the ripping of caterwauling sound-associations from his being.
The adjusting of his misty, wet eyes, eyelashes dripping from the guileless hurling of arctic water against his dry olive face, and the realization that the stick had been unnoticed the past evening was unforeseen, a shock unnoticed.
Like a fierce, brilliant flash of lightning, a caveat signal fizzled throughout his mind, skipping synapses and jumping arbitrarily, a drugged psyche snap, the false peak of hope. Every time she came home with a plastic bag, his neurons began pounding on his skull...Jess assumed that it really was composed of tin, and each time they began to hammer, he could hear a resonant, metallic ringing and felt small, imagined dents throughout his head. Every time she entered the bathroom and the door was left (a permanent fixture, a bodyguard much needed and much used...) open...every time his mind connected something ingenuously chance with the possibility of an irregularity, the banging and clattering began.
The summit of the mountain of artificial hope and false aspirations was simple to reach, but even simpler to slide back down, hitting a massive, brutal army of jagged boulders and merciless pine remnants along the way. It was much like a short-term memory loss, for each time, each moment of knowledge of the contents of the plastic bag, the bloodiness and depression of the consequence was forgotten. Ancient history. If only, he thought, studying the knots in the wooden floor. If only I could remember the sheer awfulness of manmade rejection.
I am rejecting myself, she is rejecting herself. This is.................................pathetic.
Jess averted his eyes to the plastic stick anyway, having full knowledge of its insufferable presence, and in those infinitesimal time measures, he had already reached the peak of the mountain. Now all that was left was sliding down. Hope minus hope equals a rough ride down.
7:00 PM
The sky was gray, an enormous raindrop encompassing the city, the continent, the world. It was a shattered shard of glass, rounded from its former part in the wholeness of a vase, lying deceased on the pavement...black pavement. He felt metal everywhere...this is what life is like in a thermometer; the unsullied draw of the mercury traps you in this suffocating glass tube of eternal ups and downs, pros and cons...hopes and despair...the misery of not knowing how high you will surface and how deep you will sink.
In the end, it is all a slow sinkage, a drowning...only oceans of different depth...different moods.
It had been negative, and he had stupidly looked anyway, stupidly climbed anyway.
"Jess? Jess." Breaking through the entrapping thin glass of the mercury tube was Rory's voice, and he turned, looking through the cloudy translucent piece of vase and out at her, who had turned on the harsh yellow light in the bathroom and was searching the countertop with nimble but ineffective fingers.
As if she had summited the mountain only to, like him, fall back down onto the snowy, muddy earth below, realization washed over her without a gentle touch and she turned away from the counter, closing her eyes and letting the air drain from her lungs.
It was a mechanical effort, the releasing of carbon monoxide, but it was the type of day when the oxygen seemed to leave too, absconding to the draft of other lives.
Jess knew what she had been looking so frantically for; he stepped out from behind the sharp piece of frosted glass.
"Um, I..." he shoved his hands into his pockets perfunctorily, and began to memorize the grains of color in the ceiling for only the pleasure of his short-term memory. Rory opened her eyes and watched him study.
Since the last time a stick had rejected her, she had forced her mind into refusing to climb the mountain, and her voice had followed suit; it was low, solid, a bassoon. A sad truth.
"Jess, did you already...was it..." the sentence ended before it began. Rory mimicked him, and let her hands rest in the cradles of corduroy that were her pockets. She felt frosty; the rain fogged up. "It was negative," he snapped, watching her fade off into a land of mixed emotions. He did not want to cry today, and on the top of the list of things that would blast the valves was his wife.
"Oh, yeah, I figured that." She smiled fakely, a circus clown smile, so goofy that he embraced it with his eyes but feared it with his heart. Jess hoped that he would not be doomed to these counterfeit grins forever. And so the dinner preparations began.
There was PJ Harvey and spinach linguine, which Rory was particularly fond of. For dessert, there was lemon sorbet. Jess picked at the perfectly cylindrical, pale yellow brick with his spoon, and Rory giggled.
They lay nestled on the couch, wrapped up in a moment of utter cliché, laughing and remembering the simplicity of high school. Rory silently cursed the present, wishing for the past to return. In high school, her biggest worries were final exams and the thought of Jess running off again, and the sliver of possibility that Luke's diner would disappear in a whirlwind of charcoal-gray smoke, a Dorothy-type paradox.
There was even the segue between their current predicament of removing the ice from its container and the childish contests between Rory and Lane over who could hold an entire ice in their mouth the longest, gasping and hopping and letting yellow and cherry juices drip down their chins and stain their lips. Now, there was more: her job, the bills, her husband...negatives.
Shaking her head, she continued to watch Jess' fingers, strongly clasped around the spoon handle, and study the faint hint of his velvety dark pink tongue breaking through dry thin lips. There was stubble, but not so much that she could feel the short, stout hairs with her fingers when she ran them over his jaw; his eyes, squinting into burnt chestnuts, made small tan wrinkles in his soft, warm face.
"Somebody should paint you," she said abruptly, stopping him at his work. Jess looked up, searching her eyes for a reason. His lips curved upward into a smile, and he licked them with a warm pinkness that made her irises blaze, become a warmer blue.
Jess could feel the ice melting a little. No longer looking at it, he felt the spoon soften it, dent the grainy surface. Not as cold; not as hard.
"If it were I who was to be always young and picture to grow old, I would give my soul for it," he whispered thinly. Rory smiled. She knew it like she knew his face, but knew that Jess would never become a Dorian Gray. This made the smile broaden. Jess breathed, relieved – he was not doomed to the faux grin for the rest of his time.
"Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray," she whispered back. It was a strained whisper, it lacked something. "Jess..."
"Hm..." he made a moon voice, an echo she would like to store away and keep repeating in her ears, a ringing pleasantness. He straightened himself, shifted, let the container slip from his hands. It was no longer icy, but a watery golden. "Rory..." his breath met her neck, a long, slender bow of the willow tree.
"Rory, can I paint your picture..." it was less of a inquiry and more of a moan, an expression of a desire.
Rory's pallet was one of dragonfruit pinks...the pinks of the petals of daisies before they meld into the yellowness of the center. There was vivid, fierce, startling beryl blue, the blue of the depths of oceans and tips of a cornflower. And white – an orangey-white, the white of liquid vanilla and roseate sunset skies.
And she explored his, with its splintery wooden base coated in thick deep brown, a black forest of deep hues, the color of the shadowy halls of the estate, the silk of an epoch tie. And olive, olive of Venice, olive of brown and tan and green and the coffee she loved so much. She relished the olive...there was bright garnet, a red so blinding it mixed all colors – dahlia, burgundy, cardinal, carmine...one.
So many colors on one white pallet of sheets leaves nothing but a stunning painting.
Art is often not appreciated...
THE NEXT MORNING, 7:30 AM
Rory woke from her slumber to an unnatural sting, a buzzing with no noise but with millions of vibrations pulsating through her lower body. Then, there was a sharper throb in her stomach, and for a split second she could swear on the lukewarm temperature of a tattered Bookers armchair that she was feeling her blood flowing through the veins of her torso. The stinging corresponded with the flashes of burgundy stain flash on her eyelids. There was pain, but a passive kind, for Rory was more interested in the drifting hues on her closed lids than the thought-to-be-imaginary throbbing through her body.
She enjoyed her eyelids; when staring hard enough, she watched lakes of color drift by through the chocolate background – teal, ruby rose, chartreuse.
And crimson...bright, bloody crimson...
"Jess!" he jolted up like a jack-in-the-box, reluctant but willing. An eerie sensation floated over his body and the room became stale, smelly. The sheet fell from his chest, and his skin erupted in goosebumps. Above, the fan whirred, and waves of cold air rushed at him. On his other side Rory lay, eyes swelling with confusion – the pain had been real, as did its painting. Upper body balanced by the backs of her palms, the thin white blanket lay pooled at her feet. Jess' eyes traveled calmly down her pearly skin...and stopped at her thighs, long and lanky and red.
A fierce red, bright and vivid covered her legs and most of the sheet encircling them, manifesting itself slowly. Rory shuddered, her breathing shallow and quick, an irregular idiom of shock and worry.
"Rory." She turned to him, eyes cloudy and constantly moving, running back and forth over his. He pulled her against him, and she held her chest against his, lithe arms on shoulder blades. Moments later she pulled away.
"I have to...oh my God..."she stood up, pulling the tucked-in sheet from under the mattress and wrapped herself messily in it. Rory stomped her feet up and down on the carpet nervously, just staring at the oddly continental shape of the dry, ruddy blood where she had been lying moments before.
Jess rolled out of his side of the bed and pulled the top sheet over the mattress cover, hiding the object of fear. He walked calmly over to her, and put two hands on her shoulders, running his thumbs up and down her upper arms. These were mountains he could climb up and down upon without his heart sinking.
"Jess, what if..."
"Don't say it." So they stood. Then Rory untangled herself from him, and walked shakily into the bathroom. The door closed angrily, the lock clicked, and the sound of a shower spigot filled his ears.
The what if scared his own menace away, leaving him with the shell of himself, and the knowledge that there was no water for him to turn on, no noise to hide behind. He felt useless, even with the information that he knew the technicalities of the blood...that they might have been wrong.
Would it have mattered anyway?
So he did what Rory would have done if there had been no noise to hide behind, and picked up the phone. He knew who would answer...but not why he was calling...
So much blood and he could not understand.
A/N: Okay, here goes: I get by with a little help from reviews, oh, I can try with a little help from reviews, oh, I get high with a little help from REVIEWS...
I tried to bring the wording and prose in this chapter back to the story's 'roots,' so to speak, so let me know if it's better, worse, etc. I love all of my reviewers, and your opinion is so important! I'll try to churn out the next chapter as soon as I can!
Oh, and just a thingy: Anyone who has any sense at all will read Lipton Lee's "The Orange Soda Will Get You Every Time." So funny, so good...ah, just go read it!