Prompt: 48. Stammer
Character(s): Jackson/Lydia
Word Count: 419
Rating: PG-13
Warning(s): unwarranted fondling
Sometimes it happens, the sensation around his throat. Constriction, like tiny hands pressing on his trachea that cuts off his words mid-consonant.
A stammer is not like a stutter, it isn't inappropriate repetition of sounds it's just those tiny hands with a ligature around his neck.
It was worse once, no one really remembers because he's changed a lot from the kid that couldn't get through a single sentence in a read aloud in Junior High English when they went through books about the holocaust and runaway slaves and Elizabethan culture ripe with vengeance and tragic love.
They thought he was dumb because he would have to say he didn't know what a word was if he knew it would trigger a chokehold halfway through.
Of all the things he could say about what Lydia was he couldn't say cruel it was like the difference between a stammer and a stutter, persistence and cruelness.
He thinks the stammer is what made her fascinated with him, what got them started, she never did buy his line about not knowing a word, she'd call him a liar and smile a challenge at him until he yelled the truth at her, furious in his embarrassment.
Irritated with her drawing it out of him he didn't speak to her for weeks despite her verbal volleys in his direction in class and the halls.
He'd glare and she'd toss her hair.
It was during gym class and a round of hand ball with her on the opposite team that she shoved him, stole the ball and at his exhaling grunt turned to look at him with a blush high on her cheeks and a pout on her plump glossy lips, and threw the ball back into his hands while studying him with a look reserved for things pinned under glass; like butterflies and lab specimens.
He thought about it and didn't get it.
She mentioned that day once early in their pre-dating comingling amongst various friends they had in common that when he stammered it sounded like someone was surprising him, like during that game, the suddenness of his word drop-off, like he just came, like someone just grabbed the front of his pants.
He told her she was disgusting. Her hand cupped him through the denim of his jeans and he'd be damned if she wasn't right and that she didn't enjoy being right just as much as he liked the feel of her hand, the heat of her palm.
"Liar," she laughed.