Author's Note: I couldn't think of a good title for this chapter and almost delayed posting it for that reason. But then Lucifae and I were talking about grunge music and Nirvana was mentioned and I was like All Apologies. Done. Whatever.
It's still a bad title. I'm not proud.
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The whole drive back from the tattoo convention, Levi keeps unlocking his phone and re-reading his text messages.
"It's fine. You're fine. Stop apologizing."
He'd texted Erna about fifty times on Friday. After telling her that he loved her and running away he'd passed out in Hanji's car, the emotional turmoil and his lack of sleep knocking him the fuck out for half of the three hour long drive to the convention center. When he'd woken up, they stopped to get food and take a piss. Then he started his texting campaign, begging Erna for forgiveness, admitting that he was an idiot, making himself more and more vulnerable with every message sent and dreading what it meant when she didn't immediately message him back like she normally would.
After the tenth variation of "I'm so fucking sorry" in a span of two hours, she finally responded with:
"It's fine. You're fine. Stop apologizing."
And he couldn't tell if her tone in those three sentences was angry, or just annoyed, or sincerely forgiving. But "Stop apologizing" was an imperative and he respected that. So he stopped.
He would have had to stop anyway, because soon after that he and Hanji got the table at the convention set up, and he had to get to work. He didn't get a chance to check his phone, which isn't a quick, easy thing to do in between tattoos because it means he has to wash his hands after touching it and before touching someone's skin.
He had to wonder about the meaning of that message all night. What, he wondered, did, "It's fine," mean? He didn't get much sleep. Hanji's snoring in the other bed could take some of the blame for that. He finally had to turn his phone off just so that he would stop checking it.
When he woke up and turned it back on, it buzzed immediately with a notification and his heart skipped a beat, but it turned out to just be a message from Ymir asking if he'd grown a pair yet and told the scary angry girl that he had a massive boner for her. He'd groaned in bed and typed back, "I skipped that and went straight to telling her that I love her."
He could feel Ymir staring at her screen on the other end and shaking her head. Then, she texted, "You're hopeless. You know that?"
Yeah, he knows that.
"What'd she say?"
He, unfortunately, had to be honest and tell her, "Nothing. I got in a car right after and I'm at a convention now."
"Fuck you ."
"Yeah, I know."
"Pathetic."
"Yeah, I know."
"You're the worst."
He got five or six more messages along those lines before Ymir left him alone. He can't imagine what she'd have said if he told her the part about the one night stand. She might have gotten in her car and driven all the way there to kick his ass.
On Sunday, around 10am when he and Hanji were treating themselves to free bagels courtesy of the organizers and waiting for potential clients, Levi finally got a new text from Erna that said, "When do you get back?"
Normally he would be able to tease her about being bored without him or not being able to take care of herself or something, but he's lost the right to tease her, so he types, "Sunday, around 11pm."
"I'll be asleep. See you Monday."
At least she still wanted to see him.
From there, Hanji got progressively more irritated with him, because this was supposed to be fun, but he obviously didn't want to be there. He pushed her to break down their table early on Sunday so that they could get home ahead of schedule. Hanji probably wouldn't have been so annoyed if he told them why, but he couldn't stand to tell the story. It was fucking painful to think about what he did. He couldn't wait to get home just to move forward. Even if he just fucked everything up more, at least he'd be fucking up in new ways and not dwelling on the huge mistakes he already made.
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On Friday, after getting kissed on the cheek and watching Levi take off, Erna stood at the bottom of the stairs for minutes in complete bewilderment.
She replayed what he said over and over and it didn't make sense. Loved her? How even? She is literally unlovable. She feels she knows this as a fact.
So, when she was back in her bathroom, making herself vomit while waiting for the bathtub to fill with water, she told herself very convincingly that he meant "as a friend" the same way she convinces herself that she's fat or ugly or monstrous despite contrary evidence, because that fits with the image in her head. It's the only way to make sense of it without shattering her world view.
So in her mind, what happened was: Levi, for whatever reason, fucked some random woman, saw that it upset Erna (despite her best effort to look neutral about it), apologized, and tried to comfort her by telling her that he loved her (as a friend), which makes her feel like the most disgusting, pitiable creature in the world. The worst part is that he felt he had to apologize…that he felt that sorry for her… When he really had nothing to apologize for. It's not like they were anything more than friends, but there she was, sulking over him like a pathetic idiot and being obvious enough about it that he'd felt he had to placate her.
She canceled on Annie for that morning. She called and told her not to come even though she knew she'd lose her deposit. She didn't go to the café all day, too nauseous with suppressed feelings for lattes or croissants or even a lemon square. She spent the day locked in her apartment trying to retrain herself to not feel things.
On Saturday, there's a black hole where her stomach should be. It's been awhile since she went more than twenty four hours without eating. She thinks she can go longer. She doesn't feel cold or shaky yet.
The tricky thing is that she really doesn't want to attract attention to herself. Passing out and needing to be rushed to a hospital wouldn't be conducive to keeping her self-abuse invisible, so she does need to eat at least a little. That's the only reason she gets dressed and gets a few croissants from the café. She takes everything back to her apartment where she gets two sips out of her latte before the caffeine is too much and makes her feel like she can feel her blood pulsing in every vein. She eats half of a croissant slowly and puts the rest in the fridge so that she can give herself breadcrumbs if her body starts giving her signals that it's going to rebel and quit functioning if it doesn't get some food.
She doesn't go out again except for brief intervals to smoke. She indulges herself in a cocoon of self-pity and revulsion at her own weakness in her apartment all by herself. She hopes that, while he's away, Levi will forget about how pathetically she reacted to him bringing a girl home. It hurt like fuck, but that was her own private pain. She shouldn't have put it on him and made him feel like he owed her anything.
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Sunday night, Levi gets back around 11pm despite rushing Hanji to book it home. Relief makes him feel heavy and almost content as he climbs the steps to his apartment. He's looking forward to finally being back in his own space and getting to sleep in his own bed, alone, without Hanji's snoring.
That sense of relief quickly and completely vanishes as soon as he opens the door and remembers that he rushed out of there without having time to clean anything on Friday. The comforter from his bed is still on the floor from when he had to rip it off 'Lissa to wake her up. His sheets are a mess, and there are used condoms on the floor. He just wants to forget what happened, but he can't. He has to put new sheets on the bed and straighten up. Angry at himself, he opens the drawer on the nightstand next to the bed and grabs the box of condoms he'd kept there "just in case" and he throws them out along with the used ones.
He wakes up early Monday morning, even though he has the day off work and he's exhausted enough to actually sleep in for once. As he gets dressed, he mentally coaches himself to get his shit together, go down there, and talk to Erna about what he said. He has no idea what her reaction will be, or what he's going to do from there, but he needs to find out. It's been torture not knowing whether she's angry at him or hurt or happy or whatever. He should never have dropped that bomb on her and then run away for three days.
When he gets downstairs, she's already sitting there on the cement steps, smoking a cigarette, like always. She turns at the sound of the door and he feels like he doesn't deserve to look at her, so he looks at the ground and reaches for a cigarette from the pack in his back pocket, gets one between his lips, and sits down next to her. He thinks about what he's going to say before he blurts out anything stupid, but before he can say anything, she holds out a white cardboard cup from the café and says, "Got your tea."
"Thanks." His heart melts. She shouldn't be so nice to him. Before he can lose the nerve, he blurts out, "I'm sorry about Friday," even though she told him to stop apologizing.
"You didn't do anything wrong," she says so easily.
He doesn't know how to take that. Does she mean that she doesn't care about him fucking that girl he picked up? Or does she mean that it wasn't wrong to tell her that he loved her and then run away? Or all of the above? Her response to his apology doesn't tell him anything about how she feels about him, or whether she thinks he's a fucking idiot or not. Does she still want to be friends? Does she want to admit that she looked so fucking hurt on Friday because she's had a concealed crush on him the way he does on her? Did he hurt her badly enough that she doesn't want his friendship or anything now regardless of whether she'd had a crush on him or not?
These are things he could be asking her frankly, but he's paralyzed with fear at the possible answers she might give him, and since she doesn't seem like she hates him right then, it's easy to just not ask.
She leans back on her elbows and he finally turns to look her in the eye. Her face is expressionless, half-lidded and bored looking. Her black cigarette hangs between her lips. The paper crackles and the cherry throbs with a brighter glow as she takes a long, lazy drag and then exhales out the side of her lips. Then she asks, "How was the convention?"
So she isn't going to talk about it either, he thinks. She's determined that they're just going to go back to normal and smoke together and bust each other's balls and be friends the same as before. He's skeptical about whether or not that's possible, but if that's all she's offering, then he'll take what he can get.
"It was boring as fuck. Same shit, new place." Then, as if he didn't rip her heart out of her chest with an impulsive one night stand and then tell her he loves her in a confusing as fuck move, he teases her just like he would have before everything went to hell, "How bored were you without me?"
"Well, it was quiet at least," she bites back, playfully narrowing her eyes at him. "And the service at the café was better without Bambi jizzing on his apron over you."
"So you want to go to the café without me from now on?"
"Oh god no," she almost laughs. "The stupidity you inspire in the barista might be annoying, but without you there, people might actually try to talk to me, or worse, look at me."
"God forbid."
"I need you to scare them all away."
"You need me for more than that, Princess," he teases.
She smirks at him. "You're right. I nearly starved to death without you."
It's too easy to fall back into the old routine. Levi ashes his cigarette towards the sidewalk. He wants to ask her straight up how she feels about what he said on Friday, but he's afraid that this is his answer. If she isn't going to bring it up, then maybe it's because she doesn't feel the same way. If she's acting like they're still just friends, then that's probably all she wants to be, so, instead of trying to talk about it, he asks if she wants to come over for dinner later.
Erna says she does, though there are a few things she has to do first. Levi says the same. They don't ask each other what they have going on in the interim. Neither of them wonder why they're not going to hang out at the café for a few hours like usual. That would be prying. Normally, they would pry and tease and snark, but it's too soon and too strange to go back to the same level of familiarity.
If Levi were to ask Erna what she had to do today, she would have to lie to him, because the truth is pitiful, and she thinks there isn't anything worse than being pitied. The truth is that she has to go to Sasha and Connie's apartment to pick up more weed, because her appetite is completely gone thanks to biology and the way the human body slows its metabolism to nothing when it's going through starvation. She's okay with the starvation and not being hungry, but it isn't conducive to having dinner with him. If she doesn't smoke and kickstart her appetite again, she'll only barely pick at anything he makes and then probably throw it all up later, which again, she's fine with as a course of action, except that it would result in the whole pity thing and she'll curb that at any cost. She may be pathetically heartbroken and depressed about it, but she has her pride.
She goes over to visit Sasha and Connie around 1pm, except "visit" isn't the right word, because she refuses to go inside. She makes Connie bring her quarter ounce to the door, even though she could probably get a free contact high just from five minutes in their hazy apartment, but it's not worth it to her. It's not like her own apartment is the epitome of cleanliness, but theirs is beyond intolerable. Erna just doesn't like straightening up. Her apartment is a study in clutter and disorganization, but she takes the trash out and does her laundry. There are never dirty dishes in the sink or filth laying around. Sasha and Connie have no such scruples about cleanliness and their apartment reeks of dirty laundry, weed, and the sticky sugar congealed at the bottom of empty soda cans.
When Sasha tries to convince her to go to some show they're putting on after hours at the café later in the month, Erna thinks that the only thing she hates about smoking weed is that it forces her to talk to and be relatively nice to people she otherwise wouldn't. She tells them she has plans so as to not seem too rude, because, after all, they're her only connection now. She acts like she can't come inside and hang out because she has a really busy day ahead of her, which is laughable.
After picking up a latte with a white steamed milk rose on top from Eren, she doesn't actually have anything at all to do but brood and feel sorry for herself for a bit. She does that in the bathtub so that she can feel like she's multitasking. She runs the water uncomfortably hot and drops in a bath bomb. As it fizzes between her legs, she leans back against the tile wall behind the tub and closes her eyes.
Her bath lasts for hours, cooling down until she's almost shivering, heating up when she runs the hot water again… and again… She practices thinking about nothing, banishing any of the sickening feelings that crash their way to the forefront of her mind for only short moments before she can push them back again to the place where she can't hear them consciously. She is pretty successful for someone who is so sensitive and feels so strongly, but every so often, through the black veil over her mind, a feeling stabs through and screams something like, "He never liked you because you're pathetic and hideous." She absorbs that information, but refuses to feel anything about it. She pushes the thought back before it can scream other horrible things that she'll take as truth, and she rationalizes it. He said he loved her. Obviously he meant 'as a friend.' And that's okay. That's what they were. It's ridiculous to feel anything other than 'okay.' So that is what she forces herself to feel.
Underneath the surface, her suppressed feelings still fuck with her, making her nauseous and sore and sleepy. She knows it's severe depression when she feels like she can't possibly get out of bed in the morning or when her toes ache with phantom pain, but nonetheless she prefers the physical symptoms of repressed feelings over allowing herself to feel the things she needs to move on and be actually okay. It's her belief that if she can push the feelings down long enough, then eventually they'll just go away.
She sinks her shoulders beneath the water, now colored a deep, dark opalescent blue from the bath bomb Deirdra sent her. The color is so thick that she can't see her skin under the water. She waves a hand through the bathwater and watches clouds of darker blue puff up, then swirl away under streams of pearly, polychromatic stardust-looking stuff. It's beautiful. She rolls over and submerges her face. When she finally needs to come up for air, she checks her phone resting on the edge of the tub and finds out that she's been in there for almost three hours. It doesn't feel that long. Time gets away from her lately.
Her usual skincare routine gets skipped in favor of drying off quickly and without pampering herself. Denying herself nice things that she needs is another form of self flagellation. Her favorite tin of lip gloss doesn't get opened even though her lips are raw from getting bitten all weekend, sometimes even bleeding under the abuse of her canine teeth. Lately she finds that she likes the chapped lip look and she doesn't mind the tight way her skin feels when it's dry.
She only needs to smoke one joint to get her appetite back, because it's been a while. One more to numb any painful feelings that might surface. A third one just for overkill. It makes her feel calm and almost happy and able to think about him without it hurting.
No longer anxious and over thinking, she simply goes over to Levi's when she hears cooking sounds on the other side of the wall, not feeling like she needs to text first. As soon as he opens the door for her, he flashes her that smirk that makes her feel diminutive and hopelessly submissive.
"You're high?"
"Yeah," she answers, defiantly unapologetic. She crosses her arms defensively at the amused look he's giving her. "What? You've seen me high before."
"It's not that."
As he moves to let her in and gives her space to take her boots off in the skinny entryway he says, "It's just that…" like he's about to laugh.
"What?" she asks, short and clipped, because now that he's hurt her she doesn't like the teasing tone as much as she used to. It still makes her feel small and it turns her on, but now she hates that. She doesn't want to be attracted to him.
"Don't fucking hit me for saying this."
She narrows her eyes, making no promises.
"But you kind of look like a stripper."
Erna looks down. Nope. She didn't somehow wear a cheap bikini and 6 inch platform stilettos today. "What the fuck are you talking about?"
"The body glitter?"
"I don't-" she starts to say, and then stops as she looks at her hands, covered in a fine dust of silver. Slowly she realizes what might have happened and then suddenly she pushes past him and into the bathroom. She makes a beeline for the mirror on the medicine cabinet and shouts, "Fuck!" when she sees herself.
Levi leans in the door frame and watches her still amused, but also curious about how she could have gotten so much glitter all over her without being aware of it.
Erna mutters under her breath, "Going to kill that stupid bitch," as she takes her phone out of her dress pocket.
Levi asks with sarcastic concern, "You okay?" and she holds up a finger as she puts the phone to her ear.
Instead of 'hello' when the other person picks up, she starts with, "You fucking cunt! I told you to never glitter bomb me again!"
Deirdra says calmly, "I didn't? What are you talking about?"
"One of the bath bombs you sent me was filled with silver glitter powder."
Levi fights the urge to laugh, smiling and holding his breath, he goes back to the kitchen and leaves her to her conversation.
"Are you sure? I've been very careful about that since you last expressed your dislike of glitter by calling me a fucking cunt. Did you open an old one? What was it called?"
"I don't fucking know!" Erna yells back in exasperation. "It was, like, really blue."
"That narrows it down to seven that I can think of off the top of my head," Deirdra says without a trace of concern for how serious the situation is. "Oh well. Just read the ingredients on the label next time and be more careful."
"Fuck you! You be more careful."
"Also, take a picture. I bet you look cute all sparkly. I'll put it on the website."
Erna's nostrils flare with rage. "I absolutely will not."
"Oh calm down, Ernie."
"You calm down! I look like fucking Twilight!"
She hears Levi laugh from the kitchen and she hangs up. The phone gets shoved back into the white lace trimmed pocket of her dress as she goes back out to tell Levi to shut the fuck up.
"So you took a bath in glitter?"
He's facing away from her, busy cutting something green on the counter, but she can feel him smirking.
"Not intentionally." She crosses her arms and pouts about it. "My cunty sister sabotaged me with a bath bomb."
Levi stops what he's doing and turns around, hitching his elbows back and leaning on the counter. He watches Erna take her phone back out to flip off the camera as she takes a selfie of her sparkly face and mutters, "Put this on your website, you bitch."
He can't help the warm smile that creeps over his face. He likes the glitter, which doesn't really look much like an exotic dancer's body glitter, but more like a fine silver lustre that gives her skin an otherworldly, iridescent look.
Her pixie-like shiny-ness is adorably incongruent with the narrow-eyed, annoyed look she gives him when she catches him smiling and says, "Quit making fun of me."
"I'm not. It's cute."
She rolls her eyes and makes the most exasperated sighing sound, like 'cute' is the worst thing he could call her, but he doesn't care. He'll stand by those words. She looks past him at the counter and stove and asks, "You just started cooking, right?"
"Yeah, why?"
"Can I use your shower and wash this shit off?"
"What's wrong with your shower that's less than twenty feet away?" he asks. Not that he doesn't like the idea of her using his shower. It just seems so obvious that she would use her own that he wonders if she forgot that she had the option.
She looks down at the floor and mumbles "Nevermind."
"What?"
"I get, like… Don't give me that look again."
"What look?"
"That one where you're sad for me or whatever."
"I won't?" As far as he knows, his face never really changes much from its singular expression.
She takes a deep breath and says all at once, "I get really paranoid in my shower because I can't hear if someone is trying to break in, and I know it's literally crazy, but I get really scared and it just helps for my peace of mind if, like, I know…"
"It's fine, I get it," he assures her to relieve her of the burden of explaining. And he makes a conscious effort to not let his face do anything. Just on the off chance he fails, he turns around and goes back to chopping dill as he tells her, "Towels are in the closet."
"Thanks."
"Try not to get glitter all over my goddamn bathroom."
"Better than getting it all over your goddamn apartment," she replies from behind the closet door. She retrieves a white towel that smells too much like bleach and mutters to herself, "Who the fuck would want a bath bomb with glitter in it anyway? Fucking hippie moves to Oregon and is still a pain in my ass from across the country."
Erna takes a short shower and when she comes back out, she is almost completely glitter free, but otherwise the same. She was careful not to get her hair wet. Levi is disappointed on a few ridiculous levels. First, he had kind of hoped that she would ask to borrow clothes after showering, like 'Lissa had, because he has a thing for seeing her in casual clothes ever since the party and the power outage. Second, deep down, some very stupid part of his brain was hoping she would come back out in a towel and real life would play out like a really terrible, cliche porno. Third, he just liked the glitter, especially the way it made her curse and scrunch up her nose in disgust.
"How much glitter is in my shower?" he deadpans.
"I washed it all down the drain so that we could eat and I wouldn't need to wait for you to sterilize the tiles like a fucking maniac. I'm starving."
"That happens when you smoke."
"I thought we'd be eating by now," she whines.
"Salmon isn't even out of the oven and when it is it'll need ten minutes to rest."
Erna crumples defeated into a chair at the kitchen table and moans, "Why does your stupid healthy food take so long? It takes me five minutes to make ramen."
"Ramen isn't real food."
She lays her forehead on her overlapping hands on the table and pouts quietly, "Tastes like real food."
He can't argue about subjective taste, so Levi leaves it at that and lifts a lid to check on the rice and sees that it also needs a few minutes. He frowns, knowing how hard it is to have the munchies and no snack food. He opens the fridge and asks her over his shoulder, "Can you eat an apple?" like he has to ask because maybe it will kill her, being real food without any sugar or preservatives.
"Ugh. I guess."
He tosses a fuji apple at her head and, surprisingly, she catches it. More surprisingly, instead of complaining further, she takes three huge bites right away. Levi stares at her wet lips as she chews, dumbstruck. He lets himself look at her – actually look at her without cheating and glancing past her or downwards – for the first time since Friday when the look she got when he hurt her broke his fucking heart, and he notices that her normally glossy lips are chapped and the skin under her eyes has a faint blue-grey tint. Her face looks more gaunt, like she is starving literally and not figuratively.
She notices him looking with her red-rimmed eyes and asks with a biting frost to her voice, "What?"
It's on the tip of his tongue, but he bites it back, swallows it, and asks, "You want something to drink?"
"Water," she says tiredly.
Levi takes two bottles out of the fridge and in the three strides back to the table works up the courage to say, "Can we talk about Friday?"
There's a slight spark of recognition in Erna's eyes that widen just slightly before she takes another big bite of apple and answers with feigned apathy before she even finishes chewing, "What is there to talk about?"
He hates when she answers his questions with questions. Hers are so hard to answer.
He sits down again so that they'll be on the same level and he sets the water bottles on the table. "I don't know…" his hand pushes his hair away from his forehead as he leans back and gets comfortable in the hard plastic chair, slumping, subconsciously putting himself in a more vulnerable posture in reaction to how defensive she sounds. "I guess I wanted some kind of closure on the whole thing? Like an answer?"
"I don't recall you asking me anything." She takes another vicious bite of the apple.
It feels like she's torturing him again, which, usually, he can take pretty well, but this is too agonizing. He deadpans, "I told you I love you."
Her jaw locks mid-bite and she retracts her fangs. In what seems like slow motion, she reaches for a water bottle and uncaps it. Only after she makes him wait while she takes a sip does she say hesitantly, "I thought you meant, like, platonically."
In a way he's fucking relieved, because that makes sense of all of her behavior since then. In another way, he's sweating, because it means he needs to explain himself, that he didn't bite the bullet as hard as he thought on Friday and he needs to confess all over again with nowhere to run away to this time. "I mean, yeah, platonically. You're my best friend, but also…"
"But also not…"
"Yeah."
There's more silence than he can stand after that. Maybe one and a half seconds of it. His mouth sprints to fill it. "I mean, you don't owe me anything. If you don't want to talk about it, that's fine. I'm not asking you for anything."
His fingers knot in his hair as he looks down and addresses the rest of this to the table. "It just felt shitty not being honest with you. So now…you know… It's up to you. I'm happy being your friend and I can do that and keep having this crush on you without being a creep about it. Or, if you're not comfortable with that, I can fuck off forever."
"I don't want you to fuck off forever," she says quietly.
He glances up again. She's dropped the defensive shields of apple and water bottle, having surrendered both of them and set them on the table. It feels like there's less between them. There's silence again, but Levi waits patiently and lets it be.
"I…" She stops and shakes her head. Her turn to address the white table. "If you had told me that like a month ago, I would have been really happy."
His heart seizes up and feels calcified. He can't hide it from his face, because when she looks up for his reaction she says, "Don't look like that." Then, "Fuck. I'm not good at this. I don't like talking about feelings."
"I know." He wants to add that she doesn't have to, that he's sorry he made her, but he doesn't remind her that she isn't obligated to tell him how she feels, because he wants to know, badly.
"You really hurt me," she says softly, eyes more bloodshot than before.
"I know." He sucks back his mantra of 'I'm sorry,' because she told him no more apologizing, and he respects her too much to disobey.
"And it kind of reminded me that feelings hurt and I don't like having them and maybe I sort of just don't want to feel so much anymore."
He nods. He remembers what it's like to not want to feel.
"I'm, like, really sensitive," she says like she's ashamed. "Way more sensitive than I pick on you for being," she adds with a sad smirk. "And besides, I've never even been in a real relationship."
"Neither have I," he says, pleadingly, like that commonality means that of course they should try it together.
"And I'm kind of mentally ill…and I don't know how that would work… I don't want you to feel like you have to take care of me and deal with my paranoia and how angry and sad I am all the time."
"I like taking care of you."
"I don't like being taken care of," she says, with a hint of that trademark haughty pride sneaking its way back into her voice.
But this is where he can't make a concession. Darkly, almost angrily, he warns her, "I'm still going to take care of you when you're being a dick to yourself."
"Fine," she says petulantly. Her fingertips rest themselves delicately on the plastic cap of the water bottle and twirl it around slowly. "I'll think about it. Right now, it's just…a lot."
"I get that," he assents. "I just don't want you to think that this changes the way I act around you. I feel the same way I have this whole time we've been friends. The only difference is that now you know about it. I wanted you to know."
"You could have said something forever ago."
"You could have."
"Too scared."
"Me too."
"We're the worst," she says, her nose scrunching up and the corners of her red eyes wrinkling as she smiles.
Levi pushes himself up from the table, like he's bone-tired, and turning towards the kitchen asks, "You still hungry?"
"Not especially."
He gets out two plates anyway and says, "Too bad. I can tell you didn't eat all weekend."
"How do you know?" she asks, not denying it.
"Have you looked in a mirror?"
"Only to check for pixie dust."
"Well, you look like shit."
He hears her slight breath of a laugh from the table and he smiles to himself as he loads her plate up with rice. He sets it in front of her and says more seriously, "And you can use the shower here anytime you want."
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In the days after, they both make it a stubborn as fuck point to not be weird around each other. It's lucky that they both already have a lot of practice being friends and hiding uncomfortably desperate, wanting feelings. To anyone on the outside, it looks like nothing at all has changed between them to the extent that Ymir gives Levi shit about backing out of what he promised to do (until he tells her in great detail what happened).
There is the one difference – they both know now, so they respect the unspoken. Levi doesn't try to flirt with her and Erna stops her overt teasing.
Erna also tries to stop staring at him. That is harder. She can't not find him attractive, though, curiously, she stops having her masochistic fantasies about him. It isn't a conscious decision, they just stop on their own. She doesn't think about him spanking her or hitting her with a riding crop or anything. She figures it's because it's too real now. There's too much pressure there. If she wants to insert him into a sexual fantasy, she has to also think about the relationship that he put on the table and she doesn't want to think about that. That's too hard to think about.
She looks in the mirror more, trying to see what he sees. So far, she's seen nothing likeable or beautiful, but she keeps trying. She figures that if she can start to see whatever he sees, then maybe she's healthy enough to entertain what she thinks he means by a relationship, though the logistics of that whole arrangement are still a mystery to her. How do you do a relationship with someone who is afraid to leave their home and has an aversion to physical contact that isn't violent? She wonders if he's thought about the practicality of it. She wonders why he would want to bother with something that sounds so difficult.
Another thing that changes is the way she treats herself. She takes better care of herself. Not much better than before, still surviving mostly on cigarettes and lattes, but better enough that he won't have to take care of her. She's never liked anyone taking care of her. Not even him, though it feels less patronizing when he tries to do it.
When her sister calls and asks if she's started therapy yet, she doesn't lie, but she promises that she's trying. She takes less than baby steps. One day she forces herself to think about looking up a local therapist for exactly thirty seconds. Another day, she entertains the idea of maybe searching for the nearest reputable doctor on her phone as she's sitting at the café with Levi. She doesn't actually do it. Thinking about doing it is hard enough.
Deirdra says that people do cognitive behavioral therapy over Skype now, and that she should try it. Erna knows that wouldn't work for her. It would be too easy to hang up on a call. Too easy to escape. She needs to be trapped in a room before she'll feel compelled to talk. She's the kind of person who needs feelings forced out of her, sometimes violently.
All that changes for Levi is that he doesn't feel guilty anymore. He'd thought that it would hurt after she said that she only wanted to be friends, but it doesn't. The thing is that he likes being friends with her, and it's easy. He knows how to be a friend. He would still rather be a friend with permission to put his hands around her waist and explore her mouth with his tongue, but for how much he loves her, physical affection seems like a trivial thing to go without. Not having it doesn't outweigh how good it feels to have gotten that secret off of his chest and to know how she honestly feels. Closure is a wonderful thing, even when it doesn't go exactly the way one had hoped.
Everything else stays the same. The cigarette breaks, the sarcasm, and the way he draws her.
Erna is grateful. She has never handled change very well.
On Thursday, they walk back from the café early in the morning, respective caffeinated drinks in hand, and she asks as if it's totally normal, "Do you have time to let me use your shower before you leave?"
He checks his phone and chews at his lip, conflicted. "I have an early appointment. Can you wait until I get back?"
She rolls her eyes at his apprehension about refusing her and says sarcastically, "I don't know. I have so many plans for today. Places to go, people to—" and suddenly she stops mid-sentence.
Levi pulls himself up and turns around, giving her a quizzical look as she stands rooted to the sidewalk, looking past him at their building with wide eyes. She says to herself, "Fuck…"
Before he can turn to try and see what has her so shocked, she cups her free hand to her mouth and yells past him, "Get off my stoop, you cunt!"
The girl standing at the door to the building with a large gym bag over her shoulder and a rolled up sleeping bag at her feet looks up, waves at Erna, and then flips her off, yelling back, "Fuck you, let me inside so I can put my shit down and give you a hug!"
Given the context and the linguistic similarity, Levi assumes the brown-haired woman flipping off his friend is the sister he keeps hearing about. Erna marches past him angrily while he hangs back, wondering if he can sneak past them and get his sketchbook from upstairs without drawing attention, because from what he's seen, Erna's family is kind of fucking terrifying.
"I'm not letting you in," Erna growls, her eyes narrowed dangerously. "Go the fuck home. Nobody asked you to come."
When, in response, the taller woman wraps her arms around Erna in a big hug that lifts her boots off the ground and doesn't get her killed, Levi knows for sure it's her sister. He doesn't want to intrude, but he needs to get his sketches for work or else he may as well not show up today. He approaches the steps and tries to figure out how he can sidestep past them, but the sister drops Erna, locks her hazel eyes on him and asks rhetorically, "And who's this?"
"Jesus Christ," Erna mutters, fixing the black bow at the hem of the white chest panel of her dress. "Nobody."
"Don't lie, I saw you walking together." She ruffles Erna's black curls, making her scrunch her nose and slap at the offending hand. Deirdra avoids getting hit and walks down a couple steps, extending her hand to Levi and asking too sweetly, "Are you Ernie's new friend?"
Levi blinks. "Ernie?"
Erna's voice rises to a shrill tone as she yells, "Oh my god, if I let you in will you stop being so fucking humiliating?!"
"No promises," she says over her shoulder with a wink. She pushes a chunk of long, straight hair behind her ear that Levi notices has been dyed purple to stand out against the rest of her ashy brown color and she shakes his hand. "I'm Deirdra. Ernie's my adorable little sister."
Erna rolls her eyes and mutters as she reaches into her coffin purse for keys.
"Levi."
She looks him up and down, then turns to address Erna who is unlocking the door in a rush, and asks, "Is this the guy you have a huge crush on?"
Levi pinches the bridge of his nose and walks up the steps past Deirdra. Erna gets the door open just in time and lets him in first. As he steps in, he tells her under his breath, "I get it now."
"I wasn't exaggerating when I called her a cunt," Erna responds indignantly.
Levi escapes up the stairs. Erna bars the doorway with her arm when Deirdra goes to follow. She looks pointedly down at her sister's hand and says, "Why do you have a sleeping bag?"
"I'm staying for a few nights, obviously. I figured you don't have a guest bed."
"I don't remember giving you permission to stay?"
"Come on, Ernie," she says, stressing the nickname that Erna has always hated, knowledge of which only made Deirdra want to use it more as they grew up and got closer, "I haven't seen you forever and I worry about you. I flew all the way out here. You can at least put me up for a couple nights."
"One night," Erna says, her teeth clenched.
"We'll see," Deirdra smiles.
Erna sighs and steps out of the way. As Deirdra crosses the threshold she looks up the steps after Levi, who has wisely already disappeared and says, "I thought he would be older."
Erna edges past her up the steps and deadpans, "He's like thirty," assuming that maybe Deirdra thinks he's younger than her, because he certainly doesn't look that old.
"Yeah, but I thought you had a daddy complex, so I expected him to be at least forty-five. "
Erna pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs, "Oh my god." Then she changes the subject. "Did you bring me lip balm?"
"Yeah, I brought your favorite and a new flavor I'm working on. It's got this oaky, merlot scent. I want to name it Delirium Tremens. Is that in poor taste?"
"That depends," her sister answers with a wry smirk. "Are you trying to sell it to alcoholics?"
"Well, they're not my main demographic, but I don't want to exclude them. That's why I figured I'd run it by you first." Which is a smart, thinly veiled dig about Erna being a lush. Deirdra can be as biting and brutal as Erna, except she's sneaky and nice about it, where Erna is straightforward. Deirdra will insult you while leaving you wondering whether you've just received a compliment instead, which is skill that Erna admires, though she would never want to practice it, preferring to instead make people cringe and cry.
She lets Deirdra into her apartment just as Levi is running out of his, sketchbook peeking out of the bag that Erna's sure he threw over his shoulder as quickly as possible, full cup of tea still in his other hand. She shoots him a look that says, 'Can I call you if I need help burying a body?'
He gives her a slight, pained smirk, and mouths, "Good luck."
As he takes the stairs two at a time to get out of there fast, Deirdra looks over Erna's shoulder and says matter of factly, "He's cute. What's his deal?"
"We're friends."
"Yeah?" Deirdra steps back in and sets her things down. "He's very solicitous of you."
Erna shuts the door. "Can we talk about something else?"
Deirdra squints knowingly at her. "So you like him a lot."
Erna's fingers find her temples. When rubbing them doesn't work, she brings the hot cardboard cup in her hand to her forehead, using the heat to soothe a nascent headache.
"Okay, okay," Deirdra smiles. "Let me take a shower and then let's go somewhere."
"I don't feel like going anywhere."
"Why not?" Deirdra asks suspiciously, because Erna's been lying about getting better.
"I have a lot of work to do," Erna says, glancing at her laptop on the desk that she hasn't touched in days, "Can you just entertain yourself?"
"But I came to see you."
"Well, then you can watch me work, I guess," Erna shrugs, hoping that it sounds boring enough to get Deirdra to call up some old friends and go out with them for most of the day.
"That's okay," Deirdra says, calling her bluff. "I brought a book that I didn't finish on the plane. I'll just chill here with you."
Erna tries to hide the disappointment from her face. She goes over and slides her laptop off the desk, cradling it on her hip. "We can at least go to the café. There are people there you can bother who aren't me."
"Don't try to act so tough. I know you love when I bother you."
"Debatable," Erna mutters.
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Levi gets home early in the evening, his fingers almost numb from the constant vibration of his machine. Instead of being greeted as usual by Erna's soft, begrudgingly caring 'Hey', he watches her rub at her closed eyes with thumb and forefinger as her older sister stands over her on the stoop and waves at him.
If he looks for it, he can see the familial resemblance. It's in the high cheekbones and the sharp, intelligent eyes. Everything else is so different. Deirdra dresses in loose, flowing clothes somewhere between bohemian and hipster, wears her hair long and straight, has at least three inches of height on Erna and softer curves, a bigger chest, bigger waist, and thinner hips. She has an easier way about her than Erna. She's relaxed. He doesn't think he's ever seen Erna relaxed unless she's high or coming down from a session with Annie.
"Hey, Levi!" She shouts before he can even tap out a cigarette. "Want to go somewhere with us?"
From behind her, Erna shakes her head at him.
"I can't."
Deirdra fixes him with a frown, narrowing her eyes slightly. He recognizes that look. It must be a family trait. And he's pretty sure he's just been caught colluding with a lie.
"Deirdra, can we just not? I'm not in the mood."
"Not even to go to a bar?"
Erna takes out a cigarette and makes a face before lighting it. "I'm an alcoholic."
That's how Levi knows it's serious. The Erna he knows would rather admit mental illness than ever categorize herself into the ranks of those in recovery. He doesn't take out his own pack of cigarettes, instead staying down on the sidewalk, leaning on the railing until he decides whether or not he's going to stay. He's on the fence. He missed Erna and wants to hang out with her, but the atmosphere is tense and he wants no part of whatever drama might suddenly explode.
"Hookah bar?" Deirdra offers.
"No." Erna exhales a cloud of smoke at her sister. "Full of tourists and hipsters."
"You could say that about literally anything in New York," her sister huffs. "What about that used bookstore you love? The one with no obvious system of organization and so much clutter you could get lost for days?"
Levi almost smiles as he pictures Erna hiding in a maze of bookshelves, knees tucked under her, and her nose in an old, used hardcover.
"That's really far from here, Deirdra," she says tiredly. "Besides, it'll be closed in less than an hour. Can we just smoke a joint and order sushi?"
Deirdra pauses, gives Erna a few seconds to change her mind about giving her the runaround, then when Erna doesn't take the chance, she asks point blank, "When was the last time you left your apartment?"
"When I came down here five minutes ago for a smoke," she answers with bitter sarcasm.
"You know what I mean."
Erna doesn't answer. Levi can hear the paper of her cigarette crackle as she takes a long drag.
Then Deirdra locks her eyes on him, with that same challenging, sharply intelligent look he gets from Erna less lately and she asks him, "When was the last time she went anywhere?"
He keeps his mouth shut and decides he's going to have to smoke later. He avoids eye contact with Deirdra and walks toward the door. Erna keeps looking at the sidewalk and says, "Leave him out of it, Deirdra. Stop being a cunt."
That's the last thing he hears before the door closes behind him. When he gets upstairs, he puts his shit down, gets undressed, and cracks eight out of his ten stiff fingers, pushing down on each middle knuckle with his thumbs until they pop.
Before he gets in the shower, his phone vibrates with a single word from Erna: "Sorry."
He smirks and texts back, "Sorry I couldn't help."
"I'll get her out of here tomorrow. Thanks for not trying to lie for me."
He sets his phone down on the sink in the bathroom and steps into the shower. He goes down for a cigarette later when he can hear murmurs of Erna and her sister talking on the other side of the wall.
One Erna is scary enough. Two of her is terrifying.
He turns off his alarm for the morning, because he's drained. Work has been busy as fuck and he never got a real chance to recover from the emotional hangover he's been feeling since that conversation with Erna on Monday. He planned on sleeping in for once. Instead, he wakes up to frantic banging on his door.
He curses and reaches for his phone to check the time. It tells him that it's 11:30 am, and he has three texts from Erna. Instead of checking them, he wraps the sheet loosely around his naked hips and gets up to check who's knocking. He sees her looking pensive through the peephole and opens the door. "Fuck," he groans sleepily. "What? Why do you look so worried? Did you kill her?"
Her face changes drastically from mild panic to that loose-lipped, liquid-eyed look she used to give him when she thought he wasn't looking and she looks him up and down before saying, "Do you know how hard it is to talk to you like that?"
"If you want to catch me fully clothed, then don't force me out of bed."
"Okay," she says absently, before her thumb starts to gravitate towards her teeth. "Fair."
He gives her a second to see if she's going to snap back into reality, but instead her pupils dilate as she stares at his abs. He asks, "Did you need something?"
"Shit," she says abruptly, like she's suddenly remembered. "Yes. I'm sorry."
"My eyes are up here."
"Sorry!" She finally looks up and focuses. "I need a favor."
"I'm listening." He doesn't want to commit without hearing what it is, though he'd walk through fire for her.
"I need you to babysit Deirdra for an hour."
But he won't do that. "No," he deadpans. Then, "Wait, why?" as he pinches the bridge of his nose. It's too early for this. He hasn't even had his tea yet.
She chews her bottom lip and looks at him with big, pleading eyes. "Because it's Friday."
"Why the fuck should—" and then he remembers what Friday means. "Oh," he grunts in recognition.
"I just…need you to make sure she doesn't come back for at least an hour."
He rolls his eyes. "Can't you just cancel? Tell Annie she can't come."
"I can't," she whines, her voice getting high and shrill. "I'll lose my deposit, and this is the last week before she leaves for vacation, and I haven't found anyone else and…I really need it."
The way those last words come out, desperate and hungry, make his stomach tighten and he slightly curls in on himself as he wills his cock, half-hard already since he woke up, to not react to her for once.
"I'll buy you all of the tea forever. I'll get all your cigarettes. I'll literally never ask you for anything ever again."
"Stop… Just… You don't have to do any of that."
"So you'll do it?" she asks hopefully.
He curses under his breath and then gives in. "Yeah."
She bounces a little on her toes and brings her hands together like he just answered her prayer. "Thank you so much! I would hug you, but…"
"Yeah, don't," he says curtly, then he sighs. "Shit…" he shakes his head. "Can't fucking believe this." This is not what he wanted to do with his day off.
"I know. I'm sorry."
"As soon as she leaves, we're having a long talk about this."
"Whatever you want."
"I'm serious."
She nods solemnly, then asks, "Want to get dressed and come down for a cigarette?"
"Can I take a shit first?" he asks irritably.
"I guess?" she says, trying not to laugh, because he's so not in the mood for laughter.
He notices her eyes tracking downward again and asks before he closes the door, "Are you done staring?"
"Fuck," she says under her breath. "No, yeah, I'm sorry." She pauses as she forces herself to look up at his face again, then says, "You know, I feel like I can say this to you now: you're, like, really hot. Like unreasonably so."
"Yeah, I know," he says bluntly, annoyed that he isn't going to have time to jerk off about the way she stares at him.
Erna finally turns to go back to her apartment with an, "As long as you know," thrown over her shoulder.
He meets them downstairs fifteen minutes later and catches them mid-conversation with Deirdra already giving Erna shit about her suspicious behavior. Levi checks his phone while Erna tries to make the lie about having a Skype meeting with her boss sound believable. He knows Annie usually comes around noon. It's 11:50.
He lights a cigarette and stays the fuck out of their argument. He almost hopes that Deirdra won't give in and he won't have to spend an hour with her. If Erna has to cancel with Annie, it's a bonus for his jealous side. Then, Erna wins with, "Besides, I thought it would be good for my sister and my best friend to get to know each other?"
Levi feels like he's going to gag. Deirdra rolls her eyes, but then looks at him, her eyes narrowing with hidden motives and ideas behind them, and she sighs as if it puts her out still, "Okay, you're probably right, Ernie."
Erna scowls at the nickname, but she doesn't say anything other than a very quick, "Okay, great, see you guys later," as she turns and runs back in the building and upstairs to get ready for Annie.
Deirdra's lips curl up on one side. "What do you want to do?"
"Tea," he answers automatically. "After that, I don't give a shit." He gestures with a nod towards the café and starts walking, not turning to see if she's coming or not.
She catches up with him and starts the interrogation. "She never actually leaves her apartment, does she?"
He sees no point in lying. He doesn't think she would be trusting enough to believe him anyway. "No," he answers, "but you knew that."
"Pretty much. I just wanted her to admit it. She's so frustrating."
"In what way?"
"In the way where she won't ask for help or do anything positive or even think about trying to get better."
As she walks next to him and the wind changes, Levi's hit with the same kind of natural scents that he catches from Erna, only different. He remembers that she gets all her lotion and shampoo and stuff from Deirdra. He can recognize the raw, organic fragrances and the way they catch his attention more than the usual chemical smell of soaps and perfumes, except that Deirdra is more earthy. She smells more like woods and patchouli and pines, where Erna goes for sugary things like honey and vanilla or sweet, cloying flowers and citruses.
"She thinks she doesn't need to get better," Levi says in between drags of his cigarette.
"I miss the old Ernie," Deirdra says sadly.
They stop outside the café entrance so that Levi can finish the last half of his cigarette. He's silent as he wonders if he wants to know. Then, he decides to ask, "What was she like before?"
"She was like…" Deirdra trails off, trying to think of how to put it. "Well... you could never find her."
His eyebrows crease. That doesn't sound like a desirable trait to him.
"When she was little, she was always kind of off hiding somewhere. Then when she was old enough to drive, she would go out for hours and hours. I don't know what she did. It's not like she had friends. I don't even think she would stop anywhere, just drive. I think she liked people not knowing where she was or what she was doing. She's intensely private like that."
"You miss that?"
"I know, it sounds crazy. But it's always been such a part of her, it's scary to see her lose that."
"Anything else?"
"She's so scared now," Deirdra says candidly. "I understand being cautious, but she's a lot more stressed than she needs to be. I keep telling her to get help for the PTSD, but she refuses. It's fucking stupid," she says, with traces of that same posh New England accent that Levi catches in Erna's speech sometimes. "It's not like there isn't a way to fix what her brain is doing, but she acts like it's impossible."
Levi shrugs. He can't really confirm or deny, and he's only ever known one Erna, so he can't sympathize with wanting a different version of her. He puts out the last of his cigarette against the brick wall behind him and asks, "Feel better?"
"A little," she sighs. "I've told her all of that a hundred times, but it always turns into an argument. It's nice to talk to someone sensible."
He snorts. That's definitely the first time anyone's called him that. When they're waiting in line at the café, she tells him out of nowhere, "I can see why she's attracted to you. You seem more like what I would picture her type being."
He wonders if this is genuine or the same small sadistic inclination that Erna has for saying very uncomfortable things to people and watching them squirm. Luckily, because of that inclination, not much makes him squirm anymore. He just raises an eyebrow at her and asks, "How's that?"
"The whole punk thing," she says dismissively. "Like, all the piercings and the neck tattoo."
He looks at her incredulously. "She's constantly telling me that she hates the piercings and tattoos."
Deirdra laughs. "Yeah, well, you can't trust her." She clucks her tongue and pulls out her phone as she says, almost to herself, "She's such a little liar." She opens her photos and starts tapping to dig through folders and folders of pictures before she finally turns the screen towards him and says, "Ernie, circa, hmm, 2000 or 2001."
Levi looks at a picture of a much younger Erna, still pale-skinned with a bob of black wavy hair and straight bangs, leaning against a brick wall in that completely lackadaisical way that only teenagers can pull off believably. Her lowered eyelids are covering half of a death glare at the camera person. Her cheekbones are exactly as high and rounded on her doll-like face as they are now, and for all those similarities, he can still barely believe that it's her, because her black, chunky-but-cutesy platform boots are replaced with army surplus combat boots. The thigh-highs that she only ever wears in white or black are missing, and in their place are ripped fishnets underneath a short and frayed brown corduroy skirt that flares away from her hips, improved with sloppy, asymmetrical bits of lace, zippers, and pointless buckles. Her lean stomach barely peeks out under the bottom hem of a threadbare band tee with the sleeves and collar cut off to reveal her collarbones and slender arms.
"Holy shit," he says in disbelief as he reaches for the phone. Deirdra surrenders it with a smirk.
Levi looks closer and notices the dark, smoky, heroin-chic eye makeup and paler than natural pink lip gloss. Pearl earrings in her earlobes and little, childish baby barrettes scattered randomly through her hair. If he squints, he thinks he can see a smudge of glitter, just on her one cheek. He looks closer at the band tee shirt and recognizes it as a now vintage Bikini Kill design.
"She was a riot grrrl," he says to himself in disbelief.
"Yeah. Devoutly," Deirdra confirms. "I still tease her about wanting to be Courtney Love."
Levi can't say anything but, "Shit."
Deirdra takes her phone back and swipes through some folders. "She only started dressing the way she does now when she was seventeen or eighteen," she says with an upward inflection as she tries to remember. "It was kind of gradual. The babydoll dresses started getting blacker and more Rococo instead of grungy and vintage." She looks back up at him mischievously and says, "I have a lot more of these," waving her phone enticingly.
"Show me everything," he deadpans as if this is a very grave life-or-death matter.
They get a table and sit there for over an hour as Deirdra holds a private clinic on how to embarrass your little sister as much as possible in front of the guy she likes. She shows Levi more pictures of Erna's riot grrrl phase, which was Deirdra's personal favorite, with Erna in a variety of outfits that are a disheveled feminist reclamation of girlish clothes with grunge accents. He gets to see what she looked like as a kid thanks to a Facebook album of childhood pictures Deirdra had put together solely for the purpose of annoying Erna and teasing her about how adorable she used to be (she looks much the same as she does now, short bob of curled black hair, no makeup, and never smiling). He learns things he never even thought to ask, like that her favorite city is Paris, which makes sense of her preference for espresso, cigarettes, croissants, and sweet pastries.
Erna is a mutual favorite subject that breaks the ice between them. Sometime after Deirdra reveals that her little sister's first word was 'No', the conversation finally starts to stray, and they feel more comfortable talking about themselves.
They talk about the benefits of tea and organically grown food. Deirdra tells him about how she gets the ingredients for her products through fair trade networks so that she and her customers can rest assured that her business is ethical, and anything she can, she grows herself. Her most recent project is keeping her own honey bees, which is much harder than goats.
She shows Levi her tattoos, a Libra symbol on her wrist and some lavender flowers on her ankle. They're not bad. They're not that impressive to him, either. He pulls out his phone and shows her why. She looks through his online portfolio and they spend another fifteen minutes talking about art, and he helps Deirdra loosely design her next tattoo, for once without it feeling like a burden or like work.
He gets Erna's midday latte from Eren before they go back to the apartment building, and Deirdra gets too many cookies, knowing that her sister will steal at least half of them.
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After a longer-than-usual session with Annie where Erna gets the most out of her last time for a few weeks, she takes a quick shower and goes downstairs for a cigarette. She does not like what she sees when she gets down there.
Instead of being tense and annoyed and miserable, Deirdra and Levi are there and they're happy. They're smiling like old friends.
They turn around to greet her and do not look immeasurably relieved to not have to suffer each other's company anymore. She scowls as she takes out a cigarette and lights it with quiet anger. "What are you talking about? Why are you smiling? I don't like it."
Deirdra smirks at her like she's being cute and takes a bite from a cookie. She holds up her phone and says, "I'm showing Levi a video from your first ballet recital when you were eight."
Erna frowns and pinches the bridge of her nose. "Why do you even have that?"
"Because you're my adorable baby sister and I love you," she says with her sweet voice laced with undertones of evil that only Erna recognizes.
Sisters are hell.
"Here's your latte," Levi says, holding the cardboard cup from One Shot out to her without looking away from the video of her in her first pink tutu.
Erna takes the cup, drops her barely smoked cigarette into it, then snatches Levi's cigarette from his lips and does the same. When he looks at her with surprise and anger, she feels like she's returned her world to the natural order of things, and, before he can yell at her for wasting one of his cigarettes, she grabs his hand and pulls him toward the door, saying, "We need to talk."
Deirdra smiles at her flustered sister and sing songs casually, "I'll wait out here, then."
Erna drags Levi up to the first landing of stairs, far enough away from the door that Deirdra won't hear if she starts yelling…which she does, with a shrill and horrified, "What do you think you're doing?!"
"What you asked me to?" he narrows his eyes at her, annoyed with the histrionics.
"I didn't want you two to be friends!"
He looks at her like she's insane. Then, Ymir passes them on the stairs on her way to the basement, laundry basket on her hip. She elbows Levi out of the way as she passes and says, "Get a room."
Erna pinches the bridge of her nose again, muttering, "Oh my god." Then she shoots Levi a severe look as he smirks at her like he thinks she's cute when she's angry, just like her annoying sister. She starts up the steps and orders him, "Come on."
He follows her up to her apartment where she unlocks the door and all but shoves him inside. He almost laughs and asks, "Why are you so upset?"
"Because you were just supposed to keep her occupied!"
"I did that."
"You're not supposed to be friends!" She groans. "This is a nightmare."
"So tell me again why you couldn't cancel your thing with Annie," he says smugly.
Erna's shoulders slump. She doesn't like being reminded that this is all her doing in the first place. Her lips pout, and she looks away.
Levi crosses his arms sternly. "You lost the right to not talk about it when you got me out of bed to hide your kink from your sister."
"It's just…" Erna starts, but she doesn't know where to start explaining to someone who doesn't get it. She's never made it a habit to try to talk about BDSM with anyone who isn't already familiar. She thinks he's never going to understand that it's a lot more than a sexual release or even an orgasm. She can't put subspace and the high of pain and humiliation into words that he'll understand, but he stands there, waiting, not willing to let it go, because now she's involved him.
"First of all, it's a lot of money and I lose half of it if I don't cancel with 48 hours notice."
"How much?" he asks severely, with disapproval like asking how much a drug habit costs.
"None of your business."
"You made it my business. And you agreed to have a serious talk about this if I helped you."
There's a long, defiant silence before Erna crosses her arms and mutters, "About twelve hundred an hour…"
Levi's eyebrows rise and his jaw almost drops. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Well it's not—" she starts to explain.
"Twelve hundred?"
"It's—"
"An hour?"
"Yeah, but—"
"How much fucking money do you have?" he asks in disbelief.
Erna looks down at the floor. "Not as much as I'd like to keep this up for a lot longer." She looks back up as her stomach sinks with that admission that she hasn't allowed herself to think about until now. "But I need it."
Levi cards a hand through his hair, and it's his turn to look down.
She hates the way he's making her feel about this, like she's weak, like he pities her, and she tries to explain. "My nerves get too shot without it, and it's not something I can do myself. It doesn't work. And it's not safe enough to find someone who wants to do it for free."
He keeps looking at the floor. She keeps trying to make him understand. "I've tried to just not, but I get depressed and self destructive, and I start acting on this risk-seeking behavior that makes me put myself in bad situations despite how vulnerable I am."
When he still doesn't say anything, she whispers quietly, "So…I just…have to…"
He does finally look up, and she's fearful that he's going to argue, because that's going to be a fight on the level of trying to tell a sensible person that it's a choice to be gay, because this is a part of her, not something she could turn off and not something she would even want to change if she could. Her hackles already rise with the assumption that he would want her to change.
Instead, against all her expectation, he looks right at her and says calmly, "I can do it."
That's not what she was planning a response for in her head. The grinding of the brakes she has to put on the angry tirade that was building up in anticipation makes her need to pause before she can even process what he just said.
Finally, she catches up and formulates a response. "No, you can't."
"Why not?"
"Because it's a lot more complicated than you apparently think."
"Erna… You're spending more money than people do on heroin."
"Yeah, well, I need it more than they need heroin," she bites back defiantly.
"And I'm willing to do it for free because of that. Because I'm your friend."
She stares him down suspiciously, offended that he would deign to think that it's just that easy, like anyone can do it. She wants to explain all the reasons that it's complicated and dangerous, all the ways things can and do go wrong with rough play and inexperienced tops trying things they don't know enough about. She starts thinking of horrific examples and cautionary tales to use, but then she stops. She's sick of it being her responsibility to educate. She's never had any interest in trying to make him understand, and now here she is wasting valuable energy on just that when this is supposed to be her own private thing that she shouldn't have to justify to anyone.
He takes her extended silence personally and says, "You don't trust me."
The opposite is true. She doesn't trust anyone but him. She thinks that if she gave him the opportunity he would try to be as careful and conscientious as possible, and he would realize he got in over his head quickly. She thinks it will make him feel insecure and that he'd torture himself over misgivings about getting it right and trying to delineate that very fine border between hurting her and not hurting her. She thinks the consent issues alone would keep him up at night, because he's careful, he's a perfectionist, and he's a workaholic.
And she's a monster. And for presuming too much, she wants to see him suffer.
"I trust you a lot," she says. "Enough that we're even talking about this."
"At least let me try. If it doesn't work out, then you just go back to paying someone thousands of dollars."
She narrows her eyes at him and crosses her arms. "What do you get out of this?"
"I don't need to get anything. Why are you so suspicious?"
"Because I don't understand what you have to gain."
"Nothing, except maybe you being happier. That's how this friend thing works. You do things without expecting to get anything out of it."
"I don't trust it," she says stubbornly and he rolls his eyes at her. "Fine," she relents, and she crosses the room to her desk, opening the laptop and warning him, "You're going to have a lot of reading to do."
He doesn't want to tell her that he already started reading weeks ago when he started seriously thinking about asking her to go out with him. As he tries to subtly look at the screen over her shoulder, he asks, "What's that?"
She doesn't answer until her printer comes to life and produces the document she just sent it. She holds it out and says, "This is what I would give any new domme. List of medical stuff, hard limits, triggers, safe words, et cetera."
Levi reaches for it, but then she seems to suddenly think of something and retracts it quickly, placing the paper on her desk and reaching for a black sharpie. She mutters, "Hold on," as she uncaps it and starts blacking out parts.
"What are you doing?" he asks, offended, thinking she's censoring something she assumes he won't be able to handle.
"Well," she says casually, scanning the words and making another short, black bar. "I hardly think the parts about strap-ons apply to you."
.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,,..,.,.,.,.,,..,,.
Author's Note: baby feminist riot grrrl Erna listening to Pretty on the Inside is everything to me
Oh, also $1200 is a ridiculous amount for any pro-domme, but I needed the number to be high enough that it would make a dent in Erna's bank account. Artistic license. OR Annie's just that good.