When I was a younger man, I fell in love. It's not something new, right? I mean…everyone falls in love. Sometime or another we all get the sweaty palms and the butterflies in our stomachs, as if that's not the biggest pile of bullshit I've ever told in my entire life. But when you're seventeen and your hormones are your best friends, love can take on the simplest form and mean next to nothing when compared to the big picture.
At school, I had society eating out of the palm of my hand. I was confident in the mirror image I saw everyday, that it wasn't lying to me when it showed me the big blue eyes and that cocky smirk that the girls seemed to love. I earned my place amongst my fellow peers, having a few choice friends and a whole slew of acquaintances to match. School was a place of refuge…it was home I didn't like nearly as much.
But I step too far into the past. No one likes an ambiguous prick, am I right? No, I was saying I fell in love with a girl then. And when I mean love, I mean the kind that stuck with me through voice changes and college applications and considerations for the future. She wasn't anything real special on the outside….quiet, mousy even, and didn't have a whole lot to offer when it came to countering my big, sarcastic mouth.
Even though I talked the good talk, I craved a little tranquility every once and a while. She lent hers to me for a while, sharing her peanut butter and banana sandwich with me when I had not a dollar to my name to buy food. Sitting in the silence on the swing set during lunch, when my friends could spare me and I had time to kill, was a little slice of heaven for me…a memory I didn't take lightly, and I'm sure she could say the same.
However, not so luckily for me, I fell in love with a girl that was not on the same level with me on the high school social totem pole. I was a baseball grunt, one of the best batters on the team, and made the grades that, if my father wasn't half-drowned in his own pathetic lifestyle, would have made even the most rigid, dead-beat dad proud.
She wasn't the same. She drifted through school like a ghost. Her footsteps were fleeting, they scraped the surface of the concrete but never stayed behind long enough to make an impression. This girl was small, insignificant, a scrawny little mouse that even the cats couldn't bother to take notice of. She was never bullied, never called a cruel name in her entire high school career, at least not to her face…but she never said anything either. The world forgot her. But I didn't.
Now, I'm not a guy that sits at his desk at night, a burning kerosene lamp on his right side and a quill and ink on his left, thinking up little hackneyed sensitivities to feed to the ladies. I don't have time for that bullshit; I've got a full-blown career on my hands and a lot of maniacs to put behind bars.
But when I have a minute to sit down in the quiet dump that is my apartment, a beer in my hand perhaps, to quell the demons for a little while longer, I'll think of her.
Back in good old 1994. When my dreams were still young and I was full to the brim with piss and vinegar…
"Well, well if it isn't the infamous Donnie Flack!"
I rolled my eyes as I shoved a book in my locker. Advanced English with Mrs. Dregan…the most frightening woman I'd ever met. That breathy voice, the pronounced, wide blue eyes that never seemed to linger on anything for more than a millisecond, the erotic perfumes that filled her classroom as she sighed wistfully at her old, worn posters of D.H. Lawrence plastered on her walls…she had to be a closet nymphomaniac. I could practically spell it out from where I sat in the back of the class, as plain as day.
And they said that teenagers were the ones who couldn't get a handle on their berserk libidos?
"What the hell is wrong with you man?" Another voice, this one closer to my ear. I swatted the intruding face away. "I mean, who takes advanced English when they only need a 2.5 GPA to play?"
"The smart ones, that's who." I quipped darkly, slamming my locker shut with an ostentatious bang.
One of the guys clapped me on the back and I nearly lost my hat. "Always with the smart mouth, Flack."
"Hey, fellas…check this out. Mousy brown at five o' clock."
Sure enough, a small, timid looking creature in eccentric Technicolor jeans was walking down the hall, her dull brown hair hanging low over her face and her eyes downcast, focusing on the ground as if to escape the clamor. As she came closer, I realized the jeans were practically dripping with dried paint…and considering how impossible that sounds, I had to give her credit for making them look store bought, or like she'd only picked them up from the local salvation army.
"Hey, you!" I shouted, my voice filling up the entire hall. Her head snapped up and she had these sad, dark brown eyes that seemed to stretch on forever, but you'd only notice if you looked hard enough. Her features were run of the mill, but she had this button nose that looked pixie-like, as if she'd just walked out of Peter Pan and forgotten her little sparkling green dress.
"Yeah…I like your pants."
She didn't say a word, only shuffled along, her tiny feet barely scathing the surface of the scuffed floor. The boys behind me snickered, as if I'd cracked one of my infamous jokes.
But, contrary to popular belief… I was dead serious.
That was the first time we met. Nothing big and flashy, no sparks or fireworks going off in my head. Just a smooth entrance and a quiet exit. And everyone said that love was a battlefield…well, I guess they weren't looking in the right place. Love is more…serene. It doesn't take a bunch of showy gestures to show someone you love them…just a bit of interest and a whole lot of heart goes a long way.
At first, it was just some bizarre masculine compulsion. To dominate that which is easily dominated. After that day in the hall, I found out her name from some random art fanatic and found myself slightly intrigued. Not enough to make me high tail it out of there and run for the hills to shout to the world that I was in love. That I wanted you all to know. That you should know because love is a wonderful thing and yada yada yada…yeah, my upchuck reflex is getting a real work out just thinking about it.
Strangely enough, this mousy little creature was the daughter of a kind, beautiful woman and the shy, uninteresting businessman that fell in love with her. Apparently, her mother had a taste for Greek mythos when she was just a teenager herself and insisted on naming her after the lifelong attraction – Ariadne, after the daughter of some king named Minos or something. I was never into mythology….I can't remember those long ass names for anything.
So Ariadne McKellar became something of a pastime for my active brain. The mousy girl with the outlandish first name and the paint-stained jeans. At first, it was just something I did to keep busy, when I had nothing else to think about and my mind was free to wander. But then, after I saw her on the swing set one day, all alone with only a peanut butter and banana sandwich to keep her company, I decided. What the hell? She won't bite….
"Well, this is just great..."
Grumbling beneath one's breath was never a great sign, but I figured I was entitled to a little frustration after suffering abandonment on account of the people who were supposed to be there through thick, thin…whatever.
I kicked a slice of gravel and it flew off in some random direction, hitting a tree that happened to be in its line of fire. It caught my attention, the dull thud that resounded, and I looked over to survey the damage I'd caused only to see that I'd disturbed the rest of the 'sacred' kissing tree. Just a spitting's distance away from the parking lot of the high school grounds.
Next to the tree was a swing set, old and long since rusted beyond repair. I caught sight of a figure, sitting on one of the seats, held up by two corroded chains that were most likely older than I was. Whoever the person was, I felt the sarcastic urge to applaud them for braving the old dinosaur.
I looked to see who it was, only to see paint-stained pants girl sitting quietly in the swing, picking at a sandwich.
"Hey, now," I said, startling her from her thoughts. "That's a perfectly good sandwich. A lot of kids downtown would scratch your eyes out for a lick of peanut butter."
She said nothing, so I assumed she didn't hear me. My voice wasn't exactly the most avoidable sound in the world….I made it a point, once I reached high school and started developing my man-voice, to be heard wherever I went.
"You're not deaf, right?" I asked. I found myself standing right in front of her, towering over what couldn't have been a half an inch over five feet. At six foot three, I was a giant compared to this frail little thing.
She looked up at me, her eyes the farthest thing from mousy. Her head slowly shook from side to side, indicating that she was, in fact, capable of hearing.
"Cool. Mind if I pop a squat?"
She, again, shook her head. I waited until she gave the green light to sit down; my mother was nothing if not a stickler for gentlemanly behavior. A sigh of relief and a general feeling of well-being and contentment sort of threaded through my afterthought as I took in the beautiful day…behind the smog and the unnaturally tall buildings, there was a gorgeous blue sky to be enjoyed.
"So, what about you?"
She looked at me, unfazed. A lock of thick brown hair, gold-washed in the sunlight, fell from behind her ear and covered her face. I was quick to brush it back.
"None of that…I wanna see your face if we're gonna talk. Capiche?"
She looked at me with wistful eyes, the same sort of dreamy look that Dregan got when someone mentioned her beloved D.H. Lawrence.
"You know, a conversation takes two people's input…that means you actually have to open your mouth and speak."
She looked back at her half-picked sandwich, pensive and distant. I sighed and raked a hand through my shaggy black hair. "Or not. I could always do all the talking, if you'd prefer to ignore me."
She seemed to like it better that way.
It took a long time to coax her into talking with me. Actual conversation seemed unnecessary to her and I found, as I watched her from my post in the rusty old swing, that she really didn't speak with words. Her body language, her eyes, did all the talking.
Yeah, call me crazy. But I swore if I looked hard enough, long enough, I could encounter an entire story, a complete masterpiece, in that girl's deep, dark eyes. I'd always been a man that preferred the impenetrable enigma that brown eyes seemed to have. Blue eyes are too honest, too readable for my taste. But you could get lost forever in a pair of soft doe eyes.
I didn't frequent her spot often. Only when I tired of the conversational world did I venture out into her small haven, underneath the corny kissing tree on that rusted out swing-set. A peanut butter and banana sandwich that she never ate and a sketchpad that contained half drawings. Nothing was ever complete in her sketchbook, not for a long time.
She seemed to expect me on some days, on others she didn't. Today was one of those days were she sat looking at her sketchbook, the one I'd only seen once on account of one lapse in maturity…I'd stolen it from her and stood up to keep it just out of reach from her grasp, if she dared try and retrieve it from me. But she didn't do anything, not even the slightest form of reaction. She just sat there, pensive and distant as always…cold and aloof as a winter chill.
That was a week ago, and I hadn't seen it out since.
"You weren't expecting me today Doe?"
She looked up at me, inquisitive, as if asking me why…I wasn't so attuned to her vernacular then, but now I would have known it by heart and that she'd been asking me why I was there. Why I wasted time on a shy, boring girl like her.
"God, I'm starved. You know, parents are supposed to give you food when your boss is late on the paycheck. Don't you agree?"
I assumed that, as she tore off the unpicked half of her sandwich and handed it to me, she understood exactly what I meant.
"Whoa..thanks. I mean, it's real nice of you."I smiled at her and she looked away, her cheeks flushing a deep red.
She looked away for a moment, shifting only slightly to reach something from her paint-stained bag. That was all it took for the sketchpad, suspended dangerously over the edge of her lap, to fall to the ground.
I picked it up to be gentlemanly. "Hey you uh…" I paused as I looked at the sheet of paper in front of me…my face, painstaking as ever, was scrawled in black ink against the papyrus sheet. "Dropped this."
She never looked at me, taking the sketchbook gently from my hands. I watched her as she buried the secret deep into her bag, still refusing to meet my gaze.
"You finished it, Doe….you never finish anything, from what I can tell."
Then she looked at me, her face just as pale as ever.
"…And the first drawing you manage to finish is of me."
It was safe to say that I was more than a little ruffled by the appearance of my face in the mute girl's sketchbook. But it wasn't disturbance or fear that I found in realizing I was her muse. It was more like pride, and something softer…something I couldn't quite place.
Not for a while, at least.
I'd see her walk down that hall, unnoticed, and think about how it was such a waste. No one even paid attention to her. No one really even knew she existed, save for that one kid I'd talked to about getting her name.
But I knew she existed. I paid attention to her.
And hey…that left more for me.
"Do you know why you're here with me Doe?" I asked, my voice soft. She looked up at me through her dark eyelashes, her eyes even darker. She shook her head.
"You're here because I want you here. You understand what I mean?"
She shook her head again.
"Let me show you what I mean," I said and shifted closer to her. She tried to move away, out of habit, but I gently grabbed her arm, keeping her close to me. "It's okay. I won't hurt you. I'd never hurt you, all right?" I whispered, my free hand closing over her other small, bony shoulder.
She said nothing, only stared at me, unmoving, her lips trembling. I released her shoulder and guided her arms around my neck, crooning soft little notes of console as she seemed to tremble beneath my hands.
Without another word, I leaned into her, pressing my lips against hers. She didn't know what to do, just sort of lingered in my arms and let me have my way with her. After a moment, however, her body relaxed, growing limp against my broad chest, and I deepened the kiss for a fraction of an instant before pulling away.
"I like you, Doe," I said, my forehead resting against hers. I could feel the wisps of her breath dancing over my damp mouth, warm and inviting. "But I'd like you a whole lot more if you told me your name."
For a moment, there was nothing but her labored breathing, her frail chest seeming to throb against me. A light ignited in her deep eyes and I wished I could lose myself in their shadows, if only for a little while.
Her lips parted, a sigh of resignation escaping them.
"Ariadne…"
AN: I love Flack and Mac from CSI: NY, so maybe sometime I'll throw together a little one shot that involves Mac. :) This was more of a practice run, to practice with flashbacks and incorporating them successfully and fluidly into an active narrative. If that makes sense? If it did then...power to you. So, yeah...don't expect my best work from this. My muse is still pretty dormant lately. :/
Anyway. Enjoy.
((By the way...I had Don call her Doe on purpose. He wanted her to tell him her name, he wanted to be gentle with her and slow...so yeah. Hope there's no confusion there. :]))
Disclaimer - I don't own anything CSI. I find myself wishing I owned Flack and Mac, though.