Summary: [OCxOC; het] We are two pit players trying to survive our horrible, wonderful life together. This is a collection of short stories: small pieces detailing particular events. Which lie in the past and which in the future? That is for us to know. Rated more for safety than descriptive content. This is continually updating. It will finish when our lives do.

A/N: Sorry, this chapter contains no mention of band whatsoever. Imagine that we both just finished up our seniour year of high school in it. c; The chapter's a little racier than the others so far, so watch out. Do they make hotel rooms with only one bed? I've never seen one… This story was originally a much longer concept, but it ended up being four times as long as the previous two even after I cut it down. I'll use the rest of my ideas in separate fics. Reviewers receive a special place in my heart. The rest is for him. ;D Happy reading~

[Vignettes of Him] The Other Half

In which we discover that 'the other half' is everything we'd hoped for.

'I can't wait to see what else we can do with our hands. I'm thinking that I'll like the other half. A lot.'

I ran my fingernail along the lines as I read. There was really no need for it, I thought before tossing the letter onto the top of the pile of clothes in my bag. After all, I knew the words by heart.

I carefully placed the lid back on the shoebox that held all of his cards and letters, organised by type and date. The oldest were pushing three years of age, but still looked as though he had penned them yesterday. I always wondered to myself whether he kept my replies, but never asked. I guess I was afraid of finding out that the answer was no, he didn't care enough about what I had written back in sophomore year to keep it stored away forever.

I zipped the small duffle bag closed, my eyes never straying from the folded pieces of notebook paper with the frayed edges that held the highest place on top of all the other contents. I shouldered the bag, turned out the light in my bedroom, and trod pensively down the stairs. Sophomore year. It had comprised the beginning of everything: our first date, our first altercation, our first dance, our first kiss… I almost tripped and fell to the bottom of the staircase thinking about the firsts that would be created in the upcoming days.

As I entered the kitchen, a ridiculously familiar sound assaulted my ears: my sister's ringtone. Biting my teeth, I awaited the onset of the also-familiar urge to stab her. When it did not come, I suspected that it had been repressed by the euphoria of my situation. I shrugged and removed three TV dinners from the freezer; they joined my clothes and his letter in the duffle bag. I had to remember that on average, he ate two times and much as I did, or more. The father unit caught me kneeling on the floor with the freezer door open and a fading smirk on my face.

'Packing light, I see.'

'I can't survive a week on just Pocky and Ramune, Fa—' I tried again. '…Dad.' Finally, years of cultured practice had led to the proper degree of detachment. It was everything I could do to keep from praising myself on the spot, though it wouldn't really have mattered. It was far too late for him or anyone to interfere, now. I was leaving. Leaving.

I hummed something to myself as I snuck a pack of Skittles into my duffle bag. (Unfortunately, this was one food of which I didn't have an addition double portion for him.) I got through several bars before I realised what it was. Our opener from freshman year. It was a wonder I could remember it.

The mother unit joined me in the kitchen as I was standing up and once again pulling the strap of the bag over my shoulder. I almost laughed at the thought that she was the last person I was taller than that I would see for a while. The fact that he had an entire foot on me when it came to our heights often annoyed me, but I would gladly have traded the woman in front of me for him. I was, in fact.

She smiled and tried to kiss me on the forehead—something she had used to have to bend down to do. My skin reeled at her touch. Nonetheless, I mustered a look of agreeable complacency and attempted to don some body language that matched. I ended up giving her an uncharacteristic hug.

'Take care, mi'ja.' I had always found her use of broken Spanish laughable.

'Make good choices.'

She told me this every time I left for an anime convention. If only she knew where I was really going. I suspected that she would have very different words for me.

'I will, Mom.'

I moved toward the front hallway. Placing my hand on the doorknob and pulling outward gave me the greatest sense of freedom I had ever felt. Every step toward the driveway took me one foot farther away from the house and everyone in it. I extracted my keys from the pocket of my shorts. The consoling beep of the car as it unlocked for me drowned out the mother unit's customary call of departure.

'Vaya con Dios!'

More Spanish. The saying meant 'Go with God.'

'I plan to,' I muttered under the sound of the car door opening and slamming closed. I didn't even bother waving goodbye as I set my bag in the passenger seat, stuck the key in the ignition, and pressed the gas pedal. I was sure she was still standing there in the doorway, watching me leave. But I wasn't about to look back. That would be surrender, and I had come too far for that.

I still had a ways to go, however. He lived several miles away. I sat silently with my hands on the wheel, as many familiar places passed by on either side of me. In a few minutes, one of those places would be his house.

He was sitting on his front porch when I pulled up, an old backpack occupying the bricks immediately to his left. He picked this item up and carried it with him to my car. I leaned over and grabbed my duffle bag, relocating it to the floor behind me. He followed suit with his backpack, closed the car door, and kissed me briefly before I drove off.

'Nice to see you, too,' I remarked. His eyes seemed fixated on the rearview mirror, but trained on me as soon as I turned a corner and his house rolled out of sight.

'If you didn't like it, I won't do it again.'

A typical response of mine. I rolled my eyes without looking at him and gave the same negative response he so often did.

'No, no. I wouldn't mind being greeted like that, in the future.' I smiled. 'I could definitely get used to it.'

He grinned at me.

'I thought you would say that.'

His hand found my right arm. I breathed, more heavily and sensually than usual, and allowed his fingers to run up and down it a few times before I stopped him.

'Not while I'm driving,' I warned.

Granted, I had been doing so on my own for a year, now. And the problem wasn't that the tantalizing fantasies of us clouded my mind—no, those had been there since before the day I walked into the DMV to take my learner's permit test. It was that there was something about his presence that made them exceptionally vivid, and all the more real. At the sense of his fingerprints on my arm, my mind reeled and suddenly I was imagining him touching other parts of me. I could as good as feel his hands all over my body.

He must have taken note of my shallow breathing and unfocused stare, because without touching me he softly reminded me of the task at hand.

'The road.'

'Right.'

My eyes snapped upward, and his hands were gone from my skin. I eased up and we continued our journey in near silence. He, I imagined, was projecting forward, into the future. I, however, was thinking in reverse: to the past. The part of my brain that chose to analyze archived situations at the most inopportune of times had kicked on and was running at full speed, asking me to recall the awkward hug I had given the mother unit earlier in the day. At this, the part of my brain that liked to relate everything to him (which was all of it, really) called up a memory of the first person from this state that I had ever hugged. Of course, it was him. I remembered it well: the night of a band concert, and we'd just been given a superiour rating at the district festival. After putting away his clarinet, he had approached and asked me if he could hug me. Of course, I had answered yes, and he'd wrapped his arms around the silky black fabric of my band dress that surrounded my middle. His smell…everything had been so close. Even our heights; the heels I was forced to wear in order to keep my already-hemmed dress from dragging on the ground brought my face closer to his than it had ever been. What I remembered most distinctly about this historic embrace was not wanting it to end.

A voice screamed something into my left ear and I started. Correctly knowing that I wouldn't mind, he had run some of the music he liked through the car stereo. I threw the whole of my focus into the road in front of me. Our exit was coming up, and with all my mind's distractions, it was truly remarkable that thus far I had evaded a devastating crash, let alone stayed on the right road.

For me, the rest of the drive was filled with half-imagined fantasies and topical but distant thoughts. I paid minimal attention to him, occasionally looking over when he changed songs or adjusted his body position. After half an hour of driving, I was greeted with the sight of our hotel. Its sign appeared first, the familiar Marriott logo gazing down upon me like an old friend. We were stopped at a stoplight, but when the light turned green, I pressed the gas pedal with renewed vigor.

Pulling into the parking lot, I allowed myself a moment to reflect upon the circumstances that had brought us here. Throughout high school I had greatly resented his work as a lifeguard, but it was the money from that job, coupled with my meager babysitter's salary, that was paying for the room we were so close to entering. I smiled at him. He was putting on his backpack. I was reminded of my own bag, and removed it from the backseat of the car. We both got out and I closed the door. He did the same, and metal contacted metal with a satisfying slam. The car beeped behind me when I pressed the lock button on my keys, and we started toward the hotel's automatic sliding doors together.

Once inside, I fell back as he approached the main desk.

'We have a reservation.'

I hadn't heard his voice for a while. It was strange to hear him say my last name when he was asked. Well, our last name. It had been a part of my signature for so long that I considered it mine, to a certain extent.

The employee handed him a small white envelope, no doubt containing the keys to our room. From the background, I nodded appreciatively, and then followed him around a corner and halfway down a hallway to the elevators. We didn't have to wait; fortunately one was already at the ground floor. Its gleaming silver doors opened at the push of a button and slid closed behind us after we stepped inside. He pressed the number that would signal the elevator to take us to our floor, and, when he joined me at the back, tentatively took hold of my hand. I wriggled my fingers and squeezed them, pressing my palm to his. My other hand rested on the strap of my bag. The elevator doors opened onto the beige paneled wall of a hallway with clipped green and red carpet. Surprisingly, the employed pattern made it look the least like Christmas as was possible.

In all my wonderment, I found myself being pulled toward the wall at which I had been staring. He had started for our room, and the nature of our current bond caused previously-stationary me to be dragged along behind him. To avoid detachment of my arm, I quickly caught up. The hallway seemingly wound around the entire building. We followed it until we reached Room 101. Go figure one of the shortest, simplest numbers was so far away. Next to me pulling out a key, he laughed—almost as if he had heard my thoughts.

Beep. A green light flashed on as the door unlocked. I placed my free hand on his arm and felt his muscles convulse as he turned the handle and pushed. The door slid open to reveal a quaint, single-bed room with a bathroom off to our left and a window on the far side. It was nine o'clock, and the sun had almost completely disappeared below the horizon, its lingering illumination giving any white object in the unlit room a soft pink glow. I followed him in and sighed quietly, contentedly when I heard the door click shut. I turned around to deadbolt it.

'You're so paranoid.'

I had been called that before.

'I wouldn't put it past the father unit to follow me here.'

He quieted at the mention of my father. I touched my fingers to his temple and ran them down his face to his chin, pulling them away slowly.

'I'm going to change, okay?'

I suddenly felt as helpless as I did when he was in pain and I knew there was nothing I could do for him. He nodded at me, and I stepped around him and into the bathroom. I closed the door behind me and leaned against it. My breath came in shorter and shorter gasps until I was forced to the floor, overwhelmed by the emotion I never struggled to keep inside.

Focus.

I regained control of my senses and heard him walk away from the door and into the main part of the room. My duffle bag, turned on its side, was lying on the floor next to me. I shifted so that I was on my knees in front of it, stood it upright, and zipped it open. His letter was still on top, the comforting handwriting reminding me of just how long the man on the other side of the wall had loved me. I set the pieces of paper to the side and pulled out the next item in the pile: a navy blue camisole. After removing the shirt I was currently wearing, I put it on. The top of the pile was now occupied by red cotton shorts. I took off the pair I had arrived at the hotel in and slid the new one up my legs until it was in place. He often mentioned that I looked good in red.

The final items out of my bag were a mirror and a hairbrush. Almost reluctantly, I grabbed the ponytail holder on my head and pulled on it until it broke free. My straightened hair fell loosely down on my back. I gave it a good brushing before repacking everything into my bag. I replaced the letter on the top of the pile, adjusted my hair one final time, took a deep breath, and opened the door to the bathroom. I set my duffle bag down in the tiny entryway.

He was sitting on the bed, his black shirt and tan complexion contrasted by the stark whiteness of the sheets. By the look of it, he had removed about half of the pillows customarily found on hotel beds, and was leaning against the other half. I watched his eyes follow me to the thermostat mounted on the wall.

'It's freezing in here,' I commented, but decided against altering the temperature of the room, instead of walking over to the bed. I set my knee on the edge of it and used my own weight to push myself up. As I crawled across the sheets toward him, I asked:

'Aren't you going to change?'

'You know what I sleep in,' came back the reply.

I did. My fingers found the bottom edge of his t-shirt.

'Feel like sleeping?'

He glanced over at the clock, as though it were going to help him decide. When his eyes met mine again, he gave me his answer.

'No, but I wouldn't mind being dressed for it. I'm going to have to sleep eventually.'

I was more than happy to oblige. I had his shirt off in seconds and worked the buttons on his shorts easily. Both garments landed atop the discarded pillows around us.

How convenient that he sleeps in only his boxers, I heard myself think. Out loud, I had another inquiry for him.

'Better?' I asked, my mouth dangerously close to his own. He answered by closing the gap between our lips. As we kissed, an acute pain in my hip reminded me just how awkward my position was. I groaned in discomfort and broke away for a second, my lips practically dripping with his saliva, and moved my right leg across both of his so I was straddling him. Much more comfortable then, I put both of my hands on his chest, and we careened toward the mattress until the pillows nearly surrounded us.

I reintroduced my lips to his. Sometime in the middle of our passion-filled kiss, he decided that it was unfair that I was the dominant one of us, and before I knew it he had flipped our positions so that I was the one underneath him. His mouth came crashing down on me, and I was afraid that the rest of his body would follow. It did, but somehow the pillows absorbed some of the pressure and I wasn't crushed under his weight.

We kept each other entertained with our lips for a time. After a while, he branched out into the use of his hands. I suddenly felt them at my hips, where the bottom of my shirt and the waistband of my shorts tightly hugged my body. Somehow, we had ended up leaning against the pillows on our sides. On my upper half, the spaghetti straps had already slid off my shoulders. I slipped my arms completely out of them. The movement attracted his attention.

'What are you doing?' he asked between heavy breaths.

'Making it easier for you,' I told him, and set my hands atop his. I helped him pull the camisole over my head, guiding his hands so that it landed on the floor near the other pillows and his clothing.

He moved in to kiss me, but then pulled back and started to laugh to himself. I have him a look.

'What's so funny?'

'Oh, it's just that…' he paused to succumb to the laughter for a moment. 'Go figure even the clothes people can't see match.'

I was known for my constant choice of colour-coordinated clothing.

'And,' he went on, 'school spirit, much?'

I looked down and laughed. I had forgotten that I was wearing my white bra with the red stars and dark blue piping.

'You're seeing it now, aren't you?' I asked.

'True.'

Without warning his lips hit the line of symmetry of my undergarment and he kissed his way up the exposed part of my chest and across my neck until arriving at my face. Before he could make contact with my mouth, I placed three fingers on his lips.

'Though if you have a problem with that,' I reached up with one hand and pulled his head to me so that my lips were immediately next to his ear. 'I'm sure I could help you resolve it.'

He did have a problem with looking at my bra, apparently, because he reached around to my back with his warm fingers and skillfully unhooked it. I could hear him breathing as he slid it slowly off my body.

'It's okay,' I whispered, giving him a reassuring kiss before sliding further underneath him. The pillows had started to bother my neck. He moved downward to adjust to me, so that our heads were level again. His eyes studied my face.

'I always told you you look beautiful with your hair down.'

One of his hands grabbed a strand of my dark brown hair, and he ran it between his fingers. Finally, he put it back in place, reached around my head, and lifted me to him. The skin on my bare chest molded into his, accepting of his heat. I pressed my lips against him, allowing my tongue to venture only far enough outside of my mouth to rub it against his teeth. He made soft noises in response, still clutching the back of my head with his hand. As the kiss intensified and my tongue continued to make its rounds at the front of his mouth, the sounds became more distressed.

'Stop teasing me,' he hissed, his voice reduced to a harsh whisper.

I knew very well what he wanted; I was no stranger to how much he liked it when my tongue was at the back of his throat. So I finally conceded, and he took me in with enough force to make a vacuum cleaner jealous. His noises morphed into loud moans that increased in frequency until he altogether collapsed in pleasure on top of me. I struggled to breathe, somehow managing to roll us over until I was once again on top of him. Our tongues romped in the cavern created by the combining of our mouths. I moaned and twisted my legs around him. I could feel the fabric of his boxers pressed firmly against the inside of my thigh. I maneuvered my hand down and placed it on the bulge the cotton was covering, rubbing my finger lightly across the top. For some reason, I remembered his prophetic letter, lying peacefully in my bag.

'Someday,' I broke away from him long enough to say, 'I'll show you exactly what else we can do with our hands.'

He thrusted his hips upward a little until the cotton of his underwear was practically underneath that of my shorts. Whether it was involuntary or not, I would never know or ask.

'I'd like that.'

'I thought you might.'

I ran my hands up and down his sides. Our legs were still intertwined. We kissed until we made ourselves tired, and then just lay motionlessly in our position. When I could no longer convince him that my shivering was not something that needed to be attended to, he pulled back the sheets and ushered me underneath. He joined me there, and put his arm around me as we fell back against the mountain of pillows still on the bed. I settled into the crook of his elbow, and then slid my legs across his, both to find warmth and to bring us closer together. We lay there like that, for a while, until he broke the silence by bringing up something I had mentioned much earlier on in the night.

'I'll protect you from him. Your dad.' His voice had a quality in it that I'd never heard before. And I couldn't place it…

I rested a hand on his chest.

'I know you will.'

He leaned down and kissed me gently. When he pulled away, my saliva still glistening on his lips, I saw it in his eyes.

'Caring.' I hadn't meant to say it out loud, but there was no taking back my statement.

True caring.

He didn't appear to notice that I had seemingly spouted the term for a concept of relationships for no reason. In fact, he had already fallen asleep. I placed my head on his shoulder and drifted off, thinking about how lucky I was to have him.