Participants:
| Scene Title | Forward Momentum |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | While planning the next step forward in her life, Colette solicits advice from Tamara, and asks a loaded question of the sibyl. |
| Date | March 31, 2010 |
Le Rivage: Judah's Apartment
Patient silence is not something Colette Nichols is often known for. There's an unstated reason why the silence between words is often bridged by an awkward fidget or a nervous shift, but that past is better left unspoken. Though she can't abide the quiet because of it, can't abide just having the sound of her own thoughts to keep her company. That's likely why it's so surprising to find her in silence, staring upward at the white painted ceiling above Judah Demsky's leather sofa.
Admittedly Colette isn't alone in the truest sense, because the cordless phone held up to one ear indicates that someone has provoked this silent patience on her part. Legs up and crossed at the ankles with feet resting on the coffee table, if she slouched back against the couch any harder she might as well be laying down.
Her sigh is a consolation to the silence, something to fill the void the empty apartment gives during those scant few hours between daytime and evening when she's come home but Judah hasn't returned from work yet.
"Oh!" Colette exclaims, sititng up straight and uncrossing her ankles, "Hello? Yes, yes I'm still here." There's a nervous tension to her voice as she hurriedly leans forward to pick up a marker and a notepad, pulling the cap off with her teeth and resting the yellow legal pad in her lap before she begins to write.
"Mnhmm," she mumbles with the cap clenched between her teeth, scribbling on the pad, taking the dictation of whomever is on that other line. "Amn— " it's hard to talk with a marker cap between your teeth, so she turns, flicks it with a motion of her tongue down onto the sofa and tries that one more time. "And how much is the security deposit?" Both dark brows lift at the question, and Colette nods her head slowly, scribbling down another line of information. "Awesome— awesome, when— " She hesitates, nods to no one that can see her, "Oh, okay yeah that— I can do that. When do you think I cam come and take a look at it?"
Outside, the skies are clear but the air is frigid, cold enough to make the space by the sliding doors near the couch cold enough to warrant keeping a blanket around. Colette has not had the foresight, she's too focused on this project of her own. "Fantastic, thanks. I'll— wh— oh, yeah, of course. Right, I'll give you a call when I want to, okay? Thanks so much." There's a dip of her head down, a sheepish smile and a nervous brush of her thumb over the end call button, followed briefly thereafter by a self-indulgent hiss of excitement.
Now she just needs to figure out how to afford any of this.
Fortunately for Colette, foresight is someone else's province.
The younger girl's distraction is considerable, and Tamara takes advantage of it to slip in on stocking feet, a conspiratorial gesture for Jupiter's silence possibly having little actual effect; he doesn't always bother to lumber out of his nest and come greet her, especially when the seeress obviously has some other errand at hand. Which she does.
It's her hands that float a blanket over the whole of the couch, including the phone and the youth unfortunate enough to be sitting there, square in the middle of its destination. Dark brown wool, chocolate-colored, with a pattern picked out in the tan-gold of summer-dried grass; not a perfectly soft blanket, its weave a bit too coarse for that, but thick and warm all the same.
Colette wasn't planning on writing anything else, hopefully; it's rather too dark now.
The confused squeak that comes from beneath the blanket is a wholly distracted one. The dark cloth flows up and down with the squirming beneath it, until finally pale fingers reach the edge and pull it down over now considerably messied dark hair. Colette's eyes are wide, staring pointedly in the opposite direction of the source of this most inappropriately timed gift, and only upon realizing that her attack came from behind does she whip around, turning onto her knees to lean over the back of the sofa, green eyes wide and accusing as she spots Tamara standing there behind the sofa. Somewhere in that motion, the legal pad slid off of her lap and the marker falls between the cushions of the sofa.
"You!" Colette practically squeals, slim arms reaching out over the back of the couch to wrap around Tamara's shoulders, and Colette leans precariously over the sofa's back, dark hair swept down to cover one eye with ragged bangs, cold nose rather immediately placed against Tamara's cheek, brushing up and beneath her eye before finding her temple where a kiss is placed. "When did you even— "
On second thought, the when, why and how doesn't even matter. All that matters is the moment, and Colette isn't about to waste any more of it wondering how she does what she does. Instead she just locks her hands behind Tamara's back and leans back towards the sofa, dragging the only slightly older girl towards the back of the couch and then just pulling her weight to drag her bodily over the back of the sofa. It seems Colette's ribs have healed up well.
Tamara smiles at Colette's confusion, blue eyes gleaming; grins, broadly, as she finally figures out which way to look and realizes the cause of her momentary misfortune. The seeress braces her hands against the back of the couch rather than returning the younger girl's embrace; this lack might matter, except for what Colette, in her impulsiveness, does next. Rather than fall over the back of the sofa in an ungainly sprawl, Tamara uses this contact to lever her lower half over, and as a brace against the drag of Colette's weight.
Shaking her own too-long hair out of her face, Tamara folds her feet beneath her and huffs softly at the younger girl, no particular force to the wordless chide. Deft fingers fix the untidy mess that is Colette's hair, simultaneously ignoring her own; she can see, that's good enough. "Too cold for this, kitty," she remarks, pulling an edge of the crumpled blanket back up and folding it around the other girl's shoulder. "Snow wasn't a friend. Maybe when it fell."
Of course, she herself was outside not so long ago; Tamara's hands are still gloved, for all that scarf and coat are nowhere in sight; there's a bit of snow melting from where it's caked on the hems of her jeans, and darkened damp nearly up to her knees, suggesting she was recently slogging through somewhere not well-plowed. Not completely buried — but not cleared, either.
Blankets are to be shared, is what the gesture of Colette's arms pulling that blanket away from herself to invite Tamara in against her before it's wrapped back around the both of them. Melting snow is cold on Colette's bare calves where her jeans bunch of from her squirming. It's warmer now, here, beneath the blanket with two people. "Warner now," Colette offers with a touch of her nose to Tamara's temple, eyes serenely shut, notepad all but forgotten.
Breathing out a warm breath into Tamara's hair, Colette's arms squeeze tightly around the blonde, and much as she slouched against the sofa before, now she's laying back to sprawl out over it, pulling Tamara's weight down atop herself, tangled up in the blanket. "Brooklyn or Queens?" Colette asks in a hushed voice, her nose pressing again into Tamara's temple, lips stroking across the sibyl's skin in the speech. The question is an implicit one, and Colette knows that Tamara knows what it fully means.
"My friend Kaylee's needed a place of her own for a long time now, so I'm going to look at them both and see if she wants to split the rent. I— I've got some money saved up from when I worked at Bit by Bit, but— " Green eyes fall shut again, and Colette uses a kiss as punctuation, "I figured you'd know best. Where should I look?"
In the end, Tamara winds up curled up against the younger girl, her own eyes closed in an inward search that masquerades as calm complacency. The ear pressed against Colette's collarbone listens to the cadence of her heartbeat, a slow deep breath of her own too diffuse to serve as punctuation, for all the soft noise of its drawing-in and subsequent release. Hands loosely curled are tucked against her torso. "Cliffs should never be walked alone," the seeress murmurs, her speech unhurried in its soft ramble. "Easy to fall. You forgot, of course, that sometimes alone is not alone enough; too alone. Weasels have teeth and they use them, too. Green spaces are prettier — grass is good, trees are better — but pretty cost. Nickels and dimes don't feed weasels."
The noise that comes from Colette at that is close to a sigh, though perhaps more playful in its chiding than it sounds. "You're so weird…" she whispers with a laugh, reaching up one hand to thread fingers carefully through Tamara's hair, resting her hand at the back of the blonde's head. Colette turns, subtly, enough for lips to graze against the side of Tamara's head before her own leans back against the arm of the sofa.
"I'd say I'd give you a key to wherever I decide to go…" and from the sounds of it, Colette has difficulties to weigh on both of her choices, "but I have a feeling you'll have a key to it before I do." Green eyes assess Tamara carefully, and Colette lifts her hand from the back of the blonde's head slowly, threading wavy locks of hair between her fingers.
"Tamara…" Colette says in a tone that all but implies a question to come, "What do you want?" There's a whimsical tone to her voice, nose nudging at the blonde's brow inquisitively. It's such an open question, such an odd one that there isn't any singular answer Colette expects, no singular topic she hopes to brooch. She's giving Tamara the opportunity to just— express.
Sometimes, Colette just has to shake the tree to see what falls out.
For her part, the seeress doesn't move. Remains still, quiet, simply listening; eyes closed, she could as easily be unreachably far from this moment as actually experiencing it. She is, though, a calm and waiting tension supporting that inference — the tension of attention, in whatever crooked and splintered manner, of mind's presence. Waiting, until Colette has finished speaking, made her choice and sent forth words that cannot be rethought or unasked.
They present Tamara with a quandary. Lifting her head, the girl looks over at Colette, crease furrowing between drawn-in browns. Silence stretches, pulling taut; she rocks back onto her knees, not so much away as together; hugs her arms about her torso as blue eyes glance aside, taking in the distance somewhere beyond coffee table's edge and carpet's plush weave.
The shallow answer would be simple, easy — and insignificant. But anything else is — hard. Hard to catch, to hold, to assemble into words that have meaning as well as sound.
What does the sybil want?
"Time," Tamara says, soft-edged murmur that manages to be comprehensible, if only just. "Moment by moment. Spring flowers, summer sun, the colored leaves and powdered snow. The breeze beneath the trees, sand's grit and fire's crackle." She pauses, reaching further, for the meaning beneath symbolism and imagery; two words spoken as shoulders slump and dark eyes close, voiced almost breathlessly in her momentary fatigue.
"Shelter. Understanding."
If ever there were an answer that Colette couldn't expect, this was it. Colette shifts her weight to follow Tamara's movements, arms joining the sibyl's in the embrace, chin finding shoulder, nose finding neck. Her answer is a wordless one at first, silent save for the noise in the back of her throat that belies an emotional reaction to that simplest of needs she'd voiced. Patient silence is never something Colette is good for, but in this regard — for Tamara — she can be as patient and as silent as it would take to listen to the sun die. There's a great many things she'd do for Tamara, this the least.
"You can stay there," Colette breathes out the words Tamara had first spoken to her on that bench in Chinatown so long ago, "with me." Colette's arms squeeze around the blonde just a little tighter in reassurance, and her nose moves up to Tamara's jawline, then her ear, and a featherlight kiss presses to where her jaw and earlobe meet.
Colette can't promise understanding, she wont lie in placation of Tamara, but she can do something else. "I can try," she whispers against the sibyl's jaw warmly, "I promise I can try…" because sometimes, as much as she wants to understand Tamara, she can't. But in this effort and this implication, it's exactly the understanding that Colette doesn't realize Tamara meant.
Words. Words are slippery, imprecise things; if they weren't, there wouldn't be so many different lexicons of jargon in the quest for precise and consistent meaning. Tamara accepts the ones she gets in return, knowing from the expanse of possibility their heartfelt sincerity — and the degree by which they missed their mark.
So be it. Sometimes, out of illusion, truth eventually arises. Sometimes.
Eyes closed, the seeress rests her head against Colette's shoulder. Sighs softly, an outrush of breath felt against skin rather than audibly heard, for all the proximity of Tamara's lips to the younger girl's ear. "You tried," she affirms, a quiet reassurance of her own. And if, perhaps, trying is only cold comfort — it is also, in the end, the most that can be asked for.