So this has been sitting on my hard drive for a very, very long time. I've fiddled and tweaked and re-written and I'm so beyond fine-tuning that I kind of just want to get it out in the open. Also, I haven't uploaded anything of worth in about a year (Full disclosure: I hate about the last three or four chapters of this thing. I hate them with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns all going supernova.) and you guys deserve something cool.
I never did get around to explaining the beginning, so here's the gist:
X and Jinx meet up because they keep finding each other in the same sort of situations - minor Criminal-ish Behavior in the city - and eventually find themselves in a relationship, blah blah. Jinx is best friends with Rachel but Rachel doesn't like X at all because she thinks that X is going to land Jinx in jail through some scheme. Plus he's an asshole and she can't stand assholes. Anyway, they have a falling-out over X, but Jinx tries to ignore it and goes back to her relationship with X. However, when she walks into their apartment and sees X up against the wall with another girl, there are some criminal-ish tendencies inside of her that prove a little harder to ignore...
Pairing: Jinx/X (Yeah, I never thought it was possible, either.)
Genre: AU (Only mild connotations of it, really.)
Rating: T, because I have developed a potty mouth.
How much do I love you guys? Lots :)
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Later, Jinx remembered how she always loved the smell of him: dark and wild, smelling fiercely of gunpowder and deliciously unruly. He had a habit of wearing his sleek leather jacket even when he wasn't riding his motorcycle and she liked the way his hands were rough and callused and dishonored every inch of her skin. Sometimes she stood before the mirror and mussed her hair to match the way his always was after a midnight ride, but she tousled it carefully – with gel – instead of letting the wind do the work for her.
Later, she thought that maybe engaging in a screaming match with Rachel wasn't worth it. She thought that they'd been angry and proud and too alike in their personalities, and that it was stupid to get worked up over a boy, and that maybe she'd let it drag on too long.
Later, when she saw him kissing that girl up against their apartment's wall, she didn't even have the liberty of being shocked. She'd known it was coming for a long time. But she'd be damned if she left without the last word. She broke into his garage that night, using the silver lock picking kit he'd given her as a joke and then, when she kissed him into compliance, taught her to use.
If she'd wanted to be dramatic, she probably could have used the spare gasoline in the jug by the door to start a small fire, or committed mild acts of mayhem with the half-empty cans of spray paint idling on the thick plastic shelves that lined the walls. But scorch marks faded, and spray paint washed away with the rain. No, Jinx wanted to screw with him. She wanted to make as much of an impression on him as he'd made on her – and, more importantly, she wanted him to feel the exact same resentment and helplessness and unbridled fury that she was privy to now.
She took one look at the motorcycle – sleek black, every inch screaming adrenaline – and wheeled it from its careful moorings out onto the blindingly white driveway. It was only fitting, really, that she take this machine as payment for three months of wasted carnival tickets and pay-per-view movies; it would feel so right to smell burned rubber and gasoline as she stole back her days and weeks, time she'd never really wanted to give away. This machine had taken them so far and so fast and stolen her breath and wits at the same time. She wasn't going to let it take anything more from her, ever again.
It was tempting to steal his scuffed black leather jacket from the peg by the door, but she couldn't stand to let it touch her skin. Instead she stripped off her sweater and left it on the floor – it was 100% cashmere and a gift from him: stolen, of course. (Was there any moment in their relationship that didn't have anything to do with burglary, or deceit, or betrayal? She couldn't think of a single one.)
But that was irrelevant. They had no relationship, not anymore.
Jinx took one last look into the garage – filled with shiny tools and stolen gadgets – and swung herself onto the motorcycle, wearing only jeans and a tank top. As she screeched out the driveway, leaving big black scorch marks on his flawless cement, the sun felt like a blessing on her bare shoulders.
She ground their memories into the asphalt as she drove, giving them up to gravel and tar, letting the street reclaim what she no longer wanted.
When she finally coasted to a stop, her shoulders were burned from the sun – now low in the sky – and the fuel tank's arrow was hovering alarmingly close to the vicinity of "If You're Currently Traveling on a Lonely Highway Without Extra Fuel You're Shit Out of Luck".
"Fine," she muttered, and looked up at the bridge in front of her, a graceful arch over a still and silent lake. She didn't need to go any further, because they'd never traveled to this lake together. She'd never sat on the bridge's thick stone walls with him and had no memories of driving by this desolate, beautiful beach.
It was perfect.
The still waters were the cool blue of watered ink, perfectly smooth. Well, hell – they wouldn't be for long.
Jinx wrapped the elastic hair band from her wrist three times around the clutch, slid off the seat, and kicked it into neutral. The engine snarled, as if it could sense what she was planning. She patted it sympathetically. She didn't have anything against it, after all. Just its owner. And the memories it carried with it.
She gunned the engine. The motorcycle roared again, almost jerking out of her hands. She felt its trembling mirrored in her chest.
Ahead of her, the lake was shot through with brilliant gold sunshards, surrounded by evenly-spaced weathered stone pillars. She aimed the nose of the bike to a gap between the columns.
Slowly – so slowly – she pressed the brake, then shifted the bike into first. It juddered underneath her hands.
Somewhere to the left of her, a nightingale began to sing.
Jinx decided that she'd count to four – his least favorite number. Her palms were damp. Her breath rattled up her lungs. His face swam suddenly into her mind, and she pinned the thought to the bike so that when she finally let go, she would be free of him at last.
One. (She'd never liked his lips. They were too full for his face – too feminine to balance out his fine-boned features. She'd be glad to be rid of them.)
Two. (If he was really going to go all the way with that tramp back in the apartment, she'd be overjoyed to be able to laugh in his face when he came down with genital crabs.)
Three. (He'd never thought she was pretty. He thought her elbows were too sharp and her face too pinched and he hated when she wore his clothes. He could go screw himself for all she cared.)
Four –
"Screw you, asshole," she muttered, and then she let everything fly.
It was magnificent, really; that beautiful bike, soaring upwards in a perfect arc before it hurtled to its death, spitting a trail of greasy smoke behind from the tailpipe. Time slowed and stopped for an endless moment – she saw the flawless arch of its flight, the sleek lines of the pitch-black metal, and somewhere in the aerodynamic lines of the bodywork and the well-worn tires, she saw the time she'd spent on it and the memories it carried.
Not for long.
Slowly, so slowly, the nose tipped towards the water – and then it was hurtling down towards the silent waters and all the memories were whipping past, now gone in the breeze, and the catastrophic slap as that beautiful bike hit the lake's surface only made her grin that much wider.
For the next hour or so, Jinx perched on the cool stone pillars by the lakeside, savoring the setting sun against her back and the trembling song of the nightingale to her left. The clear waters in front of her shimmered with the passing of fish beneath the surface, but she couldn't see the bike underneath the gold-tinted water. It was just as well, really.
Her phone rang suddenly – the Beatles ringtone incongruous against the nightingale's lullaby.
She flipped it open. "Yeah?"
"You bitch. Where the hell is my bike?"
His voice was just slightly thinner than she remembered, and perhaps a little higher, too. He was very nearly a tenor. She'd always hated that.
"Are we laboring under the assumption that it's missing?" she asked, ladling enough sarcasm onto her words to infuriate him.
"You took it, goddamn you. Do you understand how expensive that motorcycle is? Do you even have the slightest idea how much the bodywork alone cost, you little slut?"
Jinx looked out across the gorgeous sapphire lake; she felt its desolate beauty as an ache in her skin and heart. Someday, when she'd wiped her memories clean, she'd have to come back to this place. Someday.
He was still ranting furiously in her ear. She cut in with, "It was overdue on its smog emissions exam." The blasé tone of her voice was real. "This is California. We take that kind of stuff seriously."
"What the fu – "
"Excuse me," she said coolly. "I have another call to make."
She hung up on him mid-profanity and, without pausing, speed-dialed Rachel.
"Hello?"
"Hey, can you pick me up?"
There was a long, loaded-revolver silence. Jinx could feel her heartbeat thudding jaggedly in her chest.
Rachel finally answered, her voice cautious. "Why should I?"
Jinx bit her lip. Strange, that this conversation could make her heart race when she'd just broken up with a bastard and sent his motorcycle soaring into a lake. "Because you're my friend." She fiddled with a loose thread in the seam of her jeans. "And I'm a bitch. And because you're the only one who bothers to call me out when I'm being a bitch. And because, um, I'm –" she swallowed "– sorry."
Time got sticky for a few seconds while Jinx's heart hung beatless in her chest.
"I should be royally pissed at you right now."
"Pretty much."
"I think I am royally pissed at you right now."
Jinx felt her fingers tighten, just slightly, on the loose thread of her jeans. She suppressed the urge to bite back with a one-liner. She needed this friendship back, more than she wanted to admit – and what was that stupid saying they had? Pride goeth before the fall?
She and her pride were falling big-time. But this was worth it.
"I don't blame you," she managed to say. Her pride cringed at the words.
Finally Rachel sighed, a long static-rush of breath. "You're still on my shit list, you know. And you're still a bitch."
Jinx heard the words, but her pride somehow forgot to wince and what she was thinking was, She forgives me! "I should be on your shit list until I'm forty."
"We might be able to negotiate your sentence a little." Rachel paused for a second. "I guess I was pretty bitchy myself."
"Birds of a feather."
"Yeah, well." Jinx heard the smallest smirk in her voice before Rachel coughed, unused to any kind of emotional exchange, and asked, "Where are you?"
Jinx finally let herself smile, and it was like the icebergs in her chest had broken up and floated away. "Doesn't matter where I am, just matters who I'm with." She let that sit in the air for a second, and then asked, "If you subtract an asshole from my current company, what does that leave you with?"
She could literally feel Rachel's eyes widening. Her voice betrayed the tiniest hint of hope when she popped the question. "You ditched him?"
"Hell yes. I am flying solo, baby."
There was another pause, heavy with their past arguments and sharp with unspoken regrets.
But Rachel didn't tell her "I told you so," like she'd feared. She didn't laugh and tell her to screw her dysfunctional life. She didn't even pause.
"Where are you, for real?"
"Some lake off Exit 94."
"On my way."
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Yay for cliffhanger endings. :)
Just because I'm a symbolism geek, I chose the nightingale to sing as Jinx was preparing to drive the motorcycle into the lake because, traditionally, nightingales symbolize both melancholy and joy entwined, and also the loss of love. Plus birds in general symbolize freedom. (No, seriously, I have way too much fun with symbolism. It's probably my favorite thing since Regina Spektor came into existence, and believe me, my adoration of her holds no bounds.)
Love you guys lots. Thanks for putting up with the drought.
--Phina
(And hey, guess who just turned 15?)