Participants:
| Scene Title | Slip |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | WWFD? |
| Date | September 12, 2009 |
Old Lucy's: Upstairs
Awkward. A lot of the interactions between Abby and Flint start that way, even when they're on decent terms. A lot of standing around and saying nothing. A lot of sitting and watching TV. A lot of sideways glances during commercials. No telling how many hours go by before they get around to touching. At least two. One more until he's on top of her, breathing hard, muttering things into her ear she shouldn't hear. Three hours to get to the sex.
Three minutes to get to him sitting with his legs thrown over the far side of the mattress, head in hand. J'ai besoin de toi, he'd said.
He doesn't speak French.
That's never happened to her - there's a lot of things that have never happened to her and this is no different. I need you. He'd said.. I need you. She's from Louisiana, and there's a fair chunk of people in her neck of the woods that speak french. She's picked up her and there, but nothing that justifies her being able to say 'je parle Francais'. But naked, bedsheet clutched to her and kneeling behind him, eyes worried and cautious is how she finds herself, toes digging into the comfort top of the mattress, her other hand planted widespread to give her balance.
"It's okay" softly spoken to his back. "It's okay Flint. I don't care what you said. It's just words" It's always just words. Words are his shield, his sword, his armor.
Deckard isn't ignoring her. Exactly. He's just not listening or not interested in replying or both, ribs and spine ridged up the lean lines of his back to break up old tattoos and older muscle when he leans over after the empty sit of his boxers on the floor nearby. There's rustling while he drags them on one handed, one leg at a time, and a scuffscuffscuff scratch at the back of his head in the blurry assortment of shadows that constitute the dark bedroom.
The bed and mattress are less than a year old, so there's no creak or noise save for bare knees over two fifty thread count cotton so that she can timidly lay a hand on the back of his shoulder while falling silent. It's not like they weren't enjoying it and hell, she was enjoying the french. But it's the content not the context and with his blatant assertion days before that he doesn't know french.
Well. Libido killer for him, she's sure. The flush across her face and chest recedes and she vainly tries to wrap both her arms around his shoulders, keep him anchored there so she can lay her cheek flush with his back. "Stay. Please"
Leaning up against Deckard's bare back is about as comfortable as leaning up against — a wooden chair someone spilled whiskey on in a bar. Or a dead horse that's been sitting out in the desert long enough to dry out and toughen up into the consistency of fossilized leather. There's no give to wiry, worked over muscle and all of his bones poke. With the sudden hedgehogesque turn in behavior he's displaying, it works out neatly for him that the outside is as unwittingly resistant to Talking About This as the inside.
What libido? His boxers are on after a self-conscious (and maybe slightly pointed) scooch, but she's partway wrapped around him and if he just gets up and walks out like he'd like to she'd fall face first on the floor and then it'd really be a mess. "Sorry."
She's used the bones and muscle, she cares for him whether he's pleasantly solid like he was post Hadley, or whether he's gaunt and in need of being fed pie in bed, or a gratuitous slice of chocolate cake drizzled in ganache and sprinkled with chopped PB bites. But she can take the hint, can read that whatever this evening was supposed to culminate in, it's been derailed and she doesn't quite understand why.
Is 'I need you' worse than 'I love you'?
But she lets him go, letting fingers trail as she retreats back and turns Deckard loose to the wilds of her bedroom. Ever the unselfish woman, and aware, cognizant of other peoples needs and putting them ahead of hers. Back onto her rear she leans, knee's up with the striped sheets crisply pinned between her arms and her legs as her elbows balance precariously and she watches him. "Okay" Okay. Permission to flee. Permission to run. Permission to endure, to go through whatever crisis that J'ai besoin de toi brings about. For once, she wishes he would talk, communicate in more than neanderthal terms.
Slow to get to his feet once he's off the hook, Deckard drifts aimlessly around that side of the bedroom in his underpants like a gloomy and underdressed ghost. Of a neanderthal. He doesn't touch anything or say anything or retreat in full. Just haunts the wall and any furniture pushed up against it, movement distinguishing him where the absence of light threatens to let him blend into invisibility.
Eventually he vanishes into the bathroom. Doesn't turn on the light, but there's the sound of him bumping around blindly and running water to confirm he hasn't crawled out through the window after a few minutes have passed.
When he comes back out again, it's to sit heavily down on the foot of the bed. Which is only better than him walking out if Abby wants six feet of broody non conversation parked there like an overlarge and underfed dog.
Leonard may or may not be home and as such, when Abigail gets out of bed during his ramblings and heads for the kitchen it is with her bathrobe around her to preserve her modesty and dignity in case he is home, and because it's just wrong to her to streak through the upstairs while she raids Leonard's hard liquor stash.
A glass tumbler of whiskey finds it's way under his nose, the amber liquid shifting in it's testimony to the trip from kitchen to bedroom. Good old whiskey, a glass to hide in. She knows Flint and some of what he likes. "Drink it. Drink it, and just come to bed. We'll just lay down. We don't have to talk, don't have to do anything. Can just lay there and get some sleep and in the morning, or whenever, I'll just make you breakfast before you flee. Bacon,e ggs, waffles, what have you."
Take your medicine. Deckard fogs the glass with a sigh, then reaches up under her hand to grasp the underside without more argument than that. He's not actually in a hurry to drink, even with the stink of the same stuff hazed around him in an aura that no amount of showering seems to shake. It's in his hair and under his nails, saturated deep into all of his clothes.
He sips. Then he sips again, and swallows, brow furrowed against the burn of it.
"I think your ability is messing me up." No accusation there, just dreary statement of fact while he adjusts his grip on the glass and frowns down into the contents. He can taste it now. More than he did before.
"And why do you think that?" Comes quietly from beside him keeping a few inches between the two of them. "What's wrong flint? Not that I don't enjoy a clean shaven you or the way you are but-" But something's off. She looks over, then away as she doesn't want to make him more uncomfortable than he obviously already is by virtue of whatever is bothering him. Like her ability.
"I dunno." 'I dunno,' is a crap answer, but it's the only one that seems to fall out of him readily while he tilts his glass slowly over one way. Then the other. Then back again.
The remainder is downed in a single go, and with a scratchy cough, he turns to insinuate himself back onto the side of the bed that is generally his when the entire thing doesn't presumably belong to Abby.
I dunno translates into I don't want to talk about it. A translation and answer that frankly, this moment she is willing to take. The glass is taken from him, put away on a dresser to be run to the kitchen in the morning. Her bedroom door is locked, double checked before robe is shed and she crawls onto her side and below the covers too. "Okay Flint." An arm snakes across his chest and she takes up her customary position, head to concave of shoulder and chest, arm tucked across chest. Some tune softly hummed just under her breath in the vain hopes it will soothe him, relax him a touch.
If he knew what the words were, that might not happen since it came from someone that they both know with the initials F.A.