yo readers! been a while. still around? so much as been happening on my side of the globe...
i hope that if you enjoy reading me (or even if you don't) you'll drop a line. doesn't have to be a grand review. shoot. you dont even have to sign in. but i do love hearing your thoughts. tell me what youd like to see more of, what you dont like, what shocked you, etc etc. this is what makes the story! feedback!
all my love and then some - scorpiaux
ps- this chapter is dedicated to britmysta, who - through his/her lovely reviews - inspired me to get my ass back on this site and WRITE. thank you love. you've done more than you know.
She revved the Oldsmobile to life in the dark morning without thinking to wake Suki. She had wanted her companionship – perhaps needed it – but this was her mistake. She assumed responsibility, she thought, like a champ. And if it was pride that prevented her from allowing Suki to witness her failure, Katara did not acknowledge it. She was being big and brave. She was doing this all on her own, though – she would realize in retrospect – it was a foolish thing to do, and Zuko (of anyone she knew) should have joined her. Throwing a few hundred bills at the issue did not make him any more responsible than removing the condom did.
But something else stirred her to leave campus this early. Jet was in town. Back from the city and wishing to repent. After his text, she had succumbed, texted him back. When she assured him things were well with her, he had written, "I never got the chance to apologize for how I played you. I mean, I know we were cool, but I still feel bad about leaving you the way I did. I was a rotten guy. I'm better now and I wanted to say I'm sorry. Can you meet me? Would you be willing to?"
She had foolishly, immediately replied, "Yeah." Jet! But better! Her heart had swooned at the thought; something of a miracle. So she decided she would meet him after her appointment today. And Suki couldn't know. After admitting to her that Jet had hurt her the way he did, she didn't have the courage to admit that a small itch in her heart was yearning for that Jet pain again. Years from now – not many years, but enough – she would recognize her only weakness: being too young and too dumb, too open to new experiences. This was college, after all, and being a beautiful girl in college led to disaster. Being a beautiful, trusting girl in college was worse. That led to demise.
What Katara did not anticipate this morning was catching a glimpse of Aang, the airbender who had avoided her since seeing her with Zuko. "If only he knew," mumbled Katara, slipping on her gloves behind the wheel. "The idiot probably thinks we're together."
Despite some resentment, she was flooded then with trust and love for Aang, a boy she did not know, walking around in circles on the track near her parking spot. She watched him and turned down the lights of the Oldsmobile. There was something so lonely and sacrificial in his walk, as if he was the only person alive in the world, as if he was aware of his own looming solitude. She was reminded of their strange morning together after her fight with Zuko at Rough Rhino's – how he had stayed with her, sacrificing his qualifying exams, keeping his hands to himself the whole night.
She looked at her lap briefly and entertained the memory of him in her room. She flicked her gaze to him again, watching intently as he knocked his fists together and stretched. Despite herself, she contemplated what it would be like to love him, to caress him. Would he hold her differently than her other lovers? Would he want to see her again? What would he say to her at the moment of his climax, when she would offer a release so good for him, he would cry out with gratitude? Would he hurt her? She did not know why she could contemplate the taste of their sex with such ease; perhaps she did this with other men and was not cognizant of it. It turned her stomach to think of how she did this with Zuko when they first started talking almost a year ago. Watching him firebend had made her weak at the knees. She played hard to get for months until he won her over – effortlessly by then, as easy as a cheerleader.
It was very cold outside; the sun still slept beneath the horizon. Only dim lamplights warmed the frigid field. She could easily distinguish Aang's white breath materializing into clouds from her car. She wondered if she should reach out to him, but he looked straight at her in the next moment, as if he had felt her energy there, and knew she was watching him.
They froze like this – Katara behind the wheel of her car, Aang caught mid-stretch. They were out in the open, but there was something so intimate about this connection that Katara felt herself blush deep. It was as if she had caught him in the shower. It was as if he had seen her commit a crime. She tried to analyze how long she had been sitting there like a creep but found she was still not totally awake yet. She had lost track of time.
"Fuck me," she hissed at her own stupidity. Tentatively, she waved.
He jogged over, some hundred feet. He was expressionless under an orange knit hat. She noticed he did not wave back as she anticipated. She rolled down her window and waited for him, turning up the heat and flattening her palms against the small vents behind the wheel.
"Hey," he said. It was monotonous, which provoked her in a way she did not expect.
She attempted, perhaps unsuccessfully, to mask her annoyance. "What's up?"
"Where are you going so early?" He looked at his watch, some cheap drugstore strap. It had cartoons on it. Katara almost laughed but stopped herself. They were skillfully avoiding answering one another. Not this game, she thought.
"Why are you on the track so early?"
He looked at her, incredulous. "To train." As if she did not know. Then he put his elbows on her door and looked inside the car. Katara was suddenly happy to have cleaned it out last month. She pressed her back against the seat so her breasts would arrange themselves near her face. He did not notice.
"Are you cold? Do you want to come in here?"
"I'm not cold." He hesitated, looked at his tennis shoes. Katara recognized them as Sokka's old track sneakers. "But I'll go in there with you." He turned in front of the car and opened the passenger seat. His weight surprised her and the car moved slightly when he sunk into the leather. "Cozy," he half-laughed, turning his neck to take it in. "Cute."
"I bought this car with four summers of work," she said, a coy smile hinting at the pride she felt at this fact.
"That's good for you. I never worked summers. Too hot."
They were silent – each transfixed in their meeting, each somehow already sensing guilt, already anticipating a heavy departure. Katara was not one to wait to find out why things were how they were – she was a loud girl, curious and unashamed. Impulsively, she reached to him, touched his knee and kept her hand there. He looked up to find her face, pleading with his eyes for her to let him go, as if she had kept him in this car for years. For summers.
"Is there… is there a reason you stopped talking to me?" she inquired in a low tone. "What did I do to you? One minute we were starting to be good friends… the next thing I know, you… you just vanish."
He turned from her, peered out the window. In the rearview mirror she could see his eyes darting from his hand-me-down shoes back up to the dashboard. "Do you want the real answer or the answer I would use for your brother?"
"The real one. If you're up to it." She retracted her hand, surprised to find that she still wanted to touch him. In her lap, she played with her thumbs. She waited for him.
"I was… the reason I stopped talking to you is because I –"
He threw his right hand through his hair, bringing the cap down with his arm. In his lap, the orange cap looked stupid, and his voice shook as he decided whether or not to be completely honest with her. He wondered how he would articulate it. He was raised by monks. Good, honest monks, he reminded himself. He blurted in admittance, "I was really starting to like you, okay? Like you a lot. And I couldn't stand to see you with the jerk who made you cry and fight at the bar."
She sat silently without answering him. He took this as encouragement to continue.
"Maybe I was starting to fall in love with you," he clarified carefully. "I was so inspired by you. By every small thing you did. From the first day I saw you… I didn't even really want anything. I was trying to define what I wanted. Every time I saw you, time just stopped for me." She couldn't see it, but he was smiling. "So I realized I just wanted to be near you. But I couldn't be near you so long as he was there. I can't… I can't share you. Okay?" Frustrated, he raised his voice. His eyes stung but he did not cry out or succumb to his numb heart. He was terribly happy and terribly sad at once. "Do you hear me? Katara?"
Still she didn't answer him, and he had never felt more foolish in his life. His palms sweat as he rolled his cap into a tight ball. This was all a ploy to get him to soften up. So she could drop him from the pinnacle of his affection. So she could ridicule him, this love-struck idiot. This sensitive fool.
"Fuck me," he muttered with finality. "Fuck me. I'll show myself out. Sorry to bug you. But you shouldn't have called me over…" With something akin to anger, he touched her shoulder so that she would face him, perhaps so he could understand her sudden stillness, and was stunned to find her in tears. Her blue eyes shimmered in the dim lamplight from the field, resembling dewy neon rings. A little bit of wetness dripped from her nose. Without thinking, he held her face in one hand and wiped her high cheeks with his knit cap. "Oh my God. I'm sorry," he lamented immediately. "I'm sorry. Please don't cry."
"No, no," was all she could manage, and without asking permission or considering his next step, Aang pulled her to him easily over the lever, still marked in "Park." He smelled like morning; through her running nose and stinging eyes, she smelled the sun and clouds in his windbreaker and tee shirt. He smelled like a dusty path. A beginning.
"Don't cry," he repeated, dumb to her reasons for breaking. Just as tentatively as she had waved at him earlier, he stroked her hair – uneasy, but certain she would not fight him or find him odd. The car revved and the lamplights on the field dimmed as a lazy autumn sun climbed, with great difficulty, to the orange heavens. From her bowed position on his chest, she felt so many sensations clash in her heart. At once she felt safe and at her most vulnerable – at once she felt loved and loathed. She wanted comfort the only way she knew how; she wanted to share her body with this anchor, this solid, compassionate boy.
This was all that consumed her, and for a brief moment, she saw how easy it would be. It was almost six in the morning. No one would be up this early on a Friday. Classes did not start until eleven. She could take him to the backseat and undress him… she could kiss him, and he would kiss her, and then she would not have to feel. She would not have to be afraid or crying. If she was giving him her body, and taking his, she could stop thinking for a while. Thoughts of the clinic were as far away as the clinic itself; she could love him, hold him, and never go to the sterile clinic and the doctor with the judgmental lilt in her voice.
When she turned upwards to kiss him, he hesitated at first. She felt him push further into his seat, his chin sharply meeting his neck. But she persisted; he had just admitted to loving her. She knew it would be a hard habit to break. She was a disease.
Erroneously, desperately, he kissed her back. It was sloppy. Unpracticed. She felt the erection in his lap before she sat on it. His window fogged with their open mouths, their haphazard kissing. When she straddled him he was suddenly breathless; he realized since her warm mouth had met his, he had yet to breathe. But he did not reach for her buttons or her ass, tucked perfectly in dark wash jeans. He only hugged her shoulders, grateful enough to be kissing her. He could feel that kissing was helping her. She stopped crying. He continued kissing; he kissed her neck, her clavicles, her upper arms. He kissed her shoulders through her shirt. He kissed her chin and forehead and cheeks, licking the salt of her tears from his lips. Everything else, she began to do - or, rather, undo - herself. Momentarily, and in awe of her, he permitted himself to be carried across the threshold of their friendship. He reclined the passenger seat, taking a long look at the track over her shoulder. It was bright orange now, illuminated to give the illusion of warmth, and so large - so ominous - that the fact that he had jogged around it once already stunned him.