Oh my goodness. So many reviews. Wish me luck.
marina2351: I'm so happy to hear that everyone is alright. I hope I continue to save your life!
Imaginativequeen101: I didn't update too terribly soon. I'm so sorry! And after you left such a sweet review.
MiaR: You have said it before but I still love to hear it! It always makes me happy. And yes, that would be so cute! I didn't even think about that.
Volleyball Babe22: I've heard that obsessions are bad but I really can't help being happy about this particular one. And since I'm your supplier, I might as well own up to it. I'm happy that you think I nailed the characters! That's always my main concern.
MicroSpider: Yay, yourself!
Guest: You're amazing!
Nymph Naji: I'm glad that you found it too! And I completely agree that we don't have enough Hyde stories out there.
TieDyeJackson: Lol. That was a good one. Very naughty, Tie Dye. Very naughty.
Guest: I'm so in love with you! (Not in a creepy way, I swear.) Hope this update wasn't too late!
Angiepanda1: Your review made me so happy! I really hope that I continue to impress.
Guest: I'm so happy that this is one of your favorite stories. It means the world that Hyde and Tina seem plausible and lovable.
Chapter Fifteen: The Punk Chick
There was something about working late that always made Tina feel a bit alone. Maybe it was the way that that lights dotting the windows that gave a full view of the alley made her think about big cities and even bigger dreams. Maybe it was the fact that the rusty jukebox in the corner kept playing Janis Joplin back to back. Or maybe it was the fact that the Hub was so devoid of life that she could taste the silence on her tongue.
"We're gonna go have sex."
Tina glanced up from her magazine, taking a moment to absorb the fact that Eric not only had his scrawny butt on her counter but also the fact that Fez was making a series of calls from the payphone beside them. Sitting at the table just in front of her booth, Hyde was glancing through a newspaper. Eric had just stopped by to check on his sister before he went to pick up Donna.
It had been a couple weeks since Jackie and Kelso had decided to openly challenge Hyde and Tina. The former had lost sourly and although Kelso and Hyde seemed to be over the whole event (in the usual weirdly chill way that guys usually were) Tina still caught Jackie giving her little glares across the room. Also under considerable construction was her brother. His sex drive had come back at an alarming rate after his brief stint in abstinence.
"So much sex," her twin brother gushed and Tina's face convulsed in a horrified grimace. The way that he had been acting after he had seen their parents going at it, he would never be able to perform the act of lovemaking again. Her eyes ran over his red cheeks and toothy grin and she frowned. Now look at him. He had that stupid little eyebrow thing going on that he usually got when he thought that he was being cool. Like some scrawny, comic-book obsessed James Bond who could only get a butch redhead.
Sighing, she tossed aside her magazine and looked past him.
Usually on Sunday night's like this one, the Hub was pretty empty. Kids were either getting high or studying up for school the next morning. In fact, besides her idiot brother and Fez and Hyde, the only people that were in here was a guy that she was pretty sure was getting drunk in the corner and a couple that was having sex in the men's room. Tina mumbled incoherently, flicking a stray strand of auburn hair out of her way as she glanced at the cluttered mess behind her cramped cage of kitchen/register, tupperware and hotdog wrappers.
"Like I'm talking a massive amount of sex, Tina-"
"I'm sorry." The auburn haired girl held up a well-manicured finger. Jackie had told her that her nails were starting to get oil grease under them from all the work she had been doing on the car with her dad. Eric stared down at his twin. "Do I look like Kelso? You do realize that I'm your twin sister right?"
The brunette's shoulders wilted as he blinked. "I just thought that you would-"
"Admire your amazingly disgusting horn dog tendencies? Bow down to you in devotion at the sad reminder that you're actually a boy and not an incredibly lanky female with short, shaggy hair?"
"You're - you - I -" Eric's eyes flicked futilely to the ceiling as he sputtered incoherently. Behind him, Hyde glanced back to watch and Fez had put his hand over the receiver of his phone. "Stop being mean to me!"
"Wow, Forman," Hyde said blandly, throwing an arm over the back of his chair as he stared at the twins. "It's like I'm reliving all those days that bunny made you eat worms and road you around like a pony." He smirked suddenly, his eyes flashing behind his sunglasses, his eyes catching Tina's. "Those were fun."
Tina snickered, watching as her brother flashed a hurt look to Hyde. And then defiance straightened his spine and his eyes flashed between the pair. "You are just - I can't take this sort of abuse - Bullies - Mom told you -"
"Oh, Eric," Fez said sadly, shaking his head. "Do not make it worse. It is embarrassing."
Tina stuck her tongue out at her brother, turning away briefly to riffle around in the cabinet's for the schedule.
"Can I have a set of tatter-" A husky, dazed voice said from behind her.
"If I told you once, I've told you a hundred times. No tater tots," Tina snapped, turning to glare at the clearly stoned hippie whose hair was tangled into a band that wrapped around his head. His name was Hippie Tater Tots and he came in almost every day around this time.
"Woah, chicky," he exclaimed, hold up his hands, his wrists too weak and leaving his fingers to flop about. Eric's brows went up beside the man. Behind them both, she saw Hyde watching the exchange closely. "Why don't you take a chill? You're too pretty to-"
"If you don't buy anything in the next five seconds, I'm going to chase you out with a broom," Tina snarled, slamming a hand down on the register to lean closer to the man, her eyes snapping with restrained ice as she glared at him. Dangerously, her hand moved to rest on her hip, her lips thinning.
The first month that she had worked at the Hub, she had taken these kinds of rants. She had even indulged them to a certain extent, creating what she now knew to be an unhealthy banter. She'd soon found out that far from the weekly roasts that Hyde and her brother presided over in her basement, these idiots did it every hour on the hour. They'd fried their brains into mush.
Begrudgingly, the hippie left, mumbling an incoherent stream of what she assumed to be half-baked insults but just sounded like a random list that her mom had for shopping. Tina watched the man leave, her shoulders tense.
Whistling, Eric sat back on the counter, staring at the door.
Frank had been taking more and more nights off from the rat's nest, barely teaching her the ins and outs before he took a million half-days and dropped ehr with most of the labor for a fraction of his income. Unfortunately, these facts were all too apparent to Tina while she was trapped in the Hub. Which made her a living, breathing rattlesnake coiled up behind the tiny counter.
"Get off my counter," Tina snapped, leaning forward to shove her twin to the floor so that she could hop up onto the dusty surface. Sputtering, Eric scrambled to his feet, staring at her for a moment before straightening his clothes and jabbing a finger at her.
"Mom told you to stop being mean to me," he stated, raising his brows at her. It was true. Mom had told Tina that she need to be nicer to her twin brother.
"That's only because you saw them bonking and you're too much of a wimp to get past it," Tina retorted acidically, watching her brother pale and his shoulders wilt. This was also true. The few days after Eric had had the misfortune of seeing his parents going at it like too rabid hyenas had made Eric not only lose three pounds but also break out in a fit of acne. Kitty had feared that if her son was going to recover, Tina's constant jabs were going to need to be controlled.
Tina thought the exact opposite.
"I'm gonna tell mom," Eric hissed and Tina sneered.
"Is that a threat?" Her blue eyes crackled ominously as Eric haltingly nodded, watching in utter horror as a smirk curled her lips. "HYDE! ERIC'S THREATENING ME!"
The punch was so swift and painful that all the brunette could do was give a high squeak and stumble into a table, clutching his leg. Tina clapped gleefully, blowing the curly haired boy a kiss without a second thought as he smirked and snapped his newspaper into attention again.
"Don't threaten the auburn haired bunny behind the counter," Hyde said, his words deceptively devoid of emotion.
"That's not fair!" Eric hissed, rubbing his leg as he hobbled back to the counter. "No using boyfriends to inflict pain on me."
"He's not my boyfriend." The words were pulled from a place of absolute fear - automatic and harsh like a tooth being ripped from the mouth of a child.
In no way was it based in truth. No one inside or outside of the gang would say that Hyde and Tina were completely normal friends in a friendly, non-sexual, completely platonic kind of relationship. In fact, most of the people that attended Point Place High wouldn't have said that since the day that Tina Forman had punched Tracy Burnstein in the face for calling Hyde trailer trash and the son of a dirty whore in the middle of gym. And then promptly started in on a loud, raving rant to the whole assembled group about how any further name calling to Steven Hyde would result in a concussion.
Tracy Burnstein did not go to the hospital for a concussion.
The official reports would read that she had a broken nose and stitches for a busted lip.
More still would say that they had been an item ever since eighth grade when Burt Heidler kissed Tina in the middle of the lunch line and then told her that she tasted "funny." Shocked, Tina hadn't been able to do anything but keep a white-knuckled grip on her lunch tray and stare at the cluster of boys laughing at her.
Hyde had launched himself at the group like a rabid dog, kicking and snarling until pieces of clothing was fluttering through the air and one of the boys was crying in the fetal position a few feet away clutching his nads. Kelso, mindless labrador that he was, had quickly jumped in. Followed by her twin who would later say that his spidey-twin senses had been tingling. In fact, Eric had simply seen a way to redeem himself for crying in the girls locker room a week before after seeing the murder of Gwen Stacy by the hands of the Green Goblin. Spiderman's anguish had obviously affected him.
At this point, even Tina didn't fully understand why she was denying it anymore. It had moved from being a challenge and kind of funny to something that hurt. Maybe the simple truth was that she had been denying it for so long that there was no way that she could look at the blinding truth without it being painful. Maybe that was what she feared: the instant, instinctive pain of realizing that Hyde and her were nevering going to be able to go back to being "just friends."
"We're not going out," Tina said again, blinking rapidly as she stared at her brother who had stilled, his eyes wandering to Hyde who hadn't looked up from his magazine.
"Thanks for reiterating, doll," Hyde snapped, nearly ripping through a page as he turned it.
Fez winced. So did Eric.
The auburn haired girl blinked, swallowing thickly as her heart constricted, her stomach flipping and twisting painfully in an emotion that was hard for her to pin point. She watched Hyde's tense shoulders, his head tipped forward as she stared intently at the paper in his hands. The feeling that she had felt a lot like guilt.
It felt a lot like she had just lied.
"I - I need to -" Eyes burning, Tina hurried to grab up the broom in the corner of her small confines and hurried to the bathroom without looking at any of the boys.
The truth was that she felt awful. She felt cruel and unthinking. Was this how Laurie felt? Tina blanched, shivering as she finally, fully took in the cruddy, sharpie covered bathroom around her. She had thought that the couple would still be in here. It turned out that they had thought it would be more entertaining to shimmy out the window.
"Jesus," Tina whispered harshly, coming to a stop in front of the dirty mirror above the sinks. "What are you doing?"
In the mirror, the blurry figure of a girl with a wild tangle of auburn hair half up in a bun and cascading down her shoulders and back stared back at her.
Tina thought she looked like a nice enough girl. Her mother was pretty. Her father was handsome. Naturally she would be okay too. She had no illusions. It was one of the reasons that she never fully liked books. The protagonists always seemed to want more and she never really wanted anything. She didn't want to changer her figure which bordered on being willowy. She didn't want to change her striking blue eyes that looked like cold shards of ice. She didn't want to change her unnaturally thick, auburn hair.
Tina Forman didn't even want to change her childhood. She didn't want to change how hard things had been the last year or so. Or how complicated things had become.
Unthinking, she pressed a hand to the mirror, the glass underneath her fingers feeling like chilled wax.
Girl's in books were incomplete. They wanted things.
The only thing that Tina Forman wanted right at this moment was sitting out at that table right now in a cozy sweater and sunglasses reading a newspaper.
"You're an idiot," Tina whispered, suddenly furiously. She wanted to cry at how mad she was at herself. If she could have made a clone of herself, she would have given herself a good whack.
"You wanna hop on my Vespa and show me where it is?"
Tina's brows furrowed. That definitely wasn't Eric. And no one in Point Place had a Vespa. Vespa's were for kids that were heading to California. Or New York. Or some other, unattainable place out in the big wide world, far, far away from Wisconsin.
Grabbing up her broom again, she shoved open the door to the restroom to see a leather clad figure standing like the archangel of Vespas and weed. Tina's breath stopped, a sudden, irrational realization gripping her insides like talons as Hyde's eyes slowly met hers. Her fingers convulsed on the broom, splinters digging into her palms.
Flipping her dirty, blond hair away from her face, the archangel raised a brow at the auburn haired girl in her white Oxford button up and black skirt and those ever present yellow platforms.
Her name was Chrissy Gordon and she was so unimpressed by Tina Forman that she actually smirked, her throat constricting in a restrained laugh. Coming from the depressingly murky lakes of Minnesota, Chrissy Gordon had seen enough cheerleaders and jocks to last her an entire lifetime. She had ridden her little blue Vespa through the countryside and small cities too far to be intimidated by a girl that looked like she couldn't even tell off a mouse.
"You were saying…" Tina's head snapped to the side, a sudden unclogging gurgling through her brain like a drain being released. Hyde's eyes had moved idly to the Vespa parked just outside of the front door, his eyes moving once more to meet Tina's.
Chrissy chuckled, turning her attention back to the curly haired boy in front of her. "Wanna get out of this pukehole for the night?"
"Hyde has to go home." Tina didn't know what she was saying. Something desperate and ugly was leading her like she was being dragged by a team of dogs through the bitter cold. "Right, Hyde?"
Hyde's head tipped to the side, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the auburn haired girl. If he was a nicer guy, if he hadn't just felt like the lowest piece of trash in all of Wisconsin from two simple statements made by the girl looking at him like she was about to fall off the side of a cliff, then maybe he would have sent the slutty, guitar girl on her way.
"Oh dear," Fez whispered, his fingers working sullenly in his lap as he watched the three nervously.
"You know what Tina," Hyde said, an angry smile curling his lips as he got up slowly and Tina's heart inflated into a painful tumor in her chest. He grabbed up his jacket, shrugging into it as Chrissy tossed a smug grin over her shoulder. "I don't think I have anything to do tonight. In fact, I'm such a big boy that I might be able to stay out the whole night."
"Hyde-" Tina stepped forward, wanting to tell him how stupid she had been, how much she wanted to-
"Calm down, doll," he said, heading towards the door. His eyes caught hers coldly as he held the door open for Chirssy. "It's not like I'm your boyfriend."
It was a low blow. Tina gulped down a breath, pain searing through her as she watched him leave. Why wasn't she moving? Why wasn't she calling out to him? She was watching him leave and she was just letting him. What was wrong with her?
"HYDE!" By the time that she got out the door, they were already gone.
And she was just the girl standing outside of the Hub with a broom.
In that moment, everything that Chrissy Gordon had thought about Tina Forman at first sight had been proven to be completely and utterly true.
Oh goody. Plot twists are my favorite. Follow/ favorite and review if you wanna see more. So excited.