Chapter Text
“Lucy,” Quill said, northern twist wringing out her name like a wet flannel. “Just get in the cab.”
“I can take the tube. You don’t have to pay for—”
“I’m paying for it right now, aren’t I?” He exclaimed from the far side of the backseat. The cabbie seemed well content to run up the time while they argued, and she wouldn’t put it past Quill to stalk her all the way to an underground access.
“Fine,” she huffed. She patted down her coat to make sure she had everything—the classic phone-wallet-keys shimmy—and then she trundled into the open maw of the cab.
“Fine,” Quill parroted with a wry twist, and as she wrestled with her seatbelt, he leaned over her to pull the door shut.
Norrie had been blowing up her phone for the last half hour, demanding the skinny on her not-date, so Lucy tossed Norrie’s address over the seat. The cabbie nodded and pulled away from the curb.
“I think that’s the most fun I’ve ever had at an art gallery,” she said, sinking down into her seat.
“Outside an art gallery,” Quill corrected, and she scoffed.
“Don’t be pedantic. You sound like—”
Lucy’s tongue clicked against her hard palette.
“Sound like what?” He had his legs angled towards her, body one long droop as he leaned against the corner of the cab where the seat met the door.
“Do you remember the roommates I was telling you about? My friends?” Lockwood and George had come up in passing a few times. Somehow, there was always enough to say that they hadn’t yet gotten around to the life breakdowns yet. Lucy knew Quill had an uncle and a few blackmailing friends, and he knew she had a few roommates, an aging delinquent, and two lesbians.
“I sound like the nerdy one,” Quill guessed.
“Actually, the posh one. He’s such a dick, particularly about grammar,” Lucy said with a horribly fond quirk to her lips.
Quill was quiet for a moment, whirr of passing traffic taking over their small metal bubble. When she glanced at him, he was squinting at her like a retiree trying to read a price tag without their glasses.
“You have a crush on him,” Quill declared.
Like he reached out to touch her and went right past her skin, digging into blood and sinew.
Lucy froze. She’d always been a freezer. Fighting back never meant anything when everyone was bigger than you, and sometimes running away meant something even worse when you were inevitably caught. So she froze as if hoping he wouldn’t notice she was in the cab.
“Oh wow,” Quill drawled. “You like him that much.”
She’d already heard this kind of thing from Norrie. Years ago, when she was just starting to mutate on the cellular level, Norrie took her temperature and declared her sick for Lockwood.
“It’s not—” She started to say, but she bit off the end.
“Hm, methinks the lady doth lie through her teeth,” Quill said, rolling his head against the corner of the cab to stare out the window.
“There’s just more to it, is all,” Lucy found herself saying.
“Oh, it’s complicated. Even better,” Quill teased.
“Yes, it’s complicated. Because the other one—I mean.” Lucy caught her wine-sour tongue before it ran off and eloped with too much honesty.
His eyes cut across the cab. She was surprised they didn’t separate clean from the front seat like a cartoon.
“Both of them?” He said, one eyebrow pushing up. “Naughty girl.”
That was definitely not what she needed to hear right now. Mortification and arousal both bloomed across her cheeks, and she tried to smother it down, pitching forward, putting her face in her hands.
“They’re just important to me,” Lucy groaned. “It’s not like that.”
Or, at least—
It hadn’t been like that. When they were first working their ways through her bloodstream, a placid IV drip, reviving her from all those long years kept deprived. Like needing sunlight and fruits and vegetables, she needed Norrie then Lockwood then George. With that healthy supply, why shouldn’t she look for the sugar and spice in her life? How would it end if she fell in love with something she needed?
“It’s not there,” Lucy said. Unconvincing and unconvinced.
“Yet,” Quill replied, exploding the t against his teeth.
“Don’t be a dick.”
Quill shrugged. He said, “It’s just a matter of time with these things. You don’t choose when it happens, and you definitely don’t choose who.”
Lucy squinted at the dust-caked floormat, light of the waning afternoon playing across her boots like a zoetrope. Her fingers combed through the fluff of her newest fashion choice.
“Speaking from experience?” She asked.
“Unfortunately.”
She peeked over at him to find his jaw slid forward, teeth tapping together. She ran her tongue over her lips, and she said, “You’ve only been dating for a few weeks.”
She tried to count back the days, but they were all a vitamin D deficient blur.
“Not Tony,” Quill said, edge of his mouth lifting into a sneer. “Someone else. Ages ago. It was a bad idea from the start.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.” She reached over to push at his knee. “You’re not even thirty.”
“I’m thirty in my soul.” He lifted his shoe to half heartedly kick in her direction.
“I think you’re eighty in your soul,” Lucy replied.
“I think I’m twelve.”
“I take it back. You’re so twelve.”
“I think I’m sixty nine.” Kipps stuck out his tongue, but his heart wasn’t in it, so he ended up sort of looking like a cow with a salt lick.
“Which further proves my point that you’re twelve.”
“While you’re so cool and mature,” Quill said, and she hitched her chin.
“As long as I say I’m twenty four, nobody has an opinion on what I’m doing with my life,” she replied, and his brow furrowed.
“That can’t be true.”
It wasn’t.
…
“Um, and then he ravaged you in the back of a cab?” Norrie prompted, fingers twirling in Lucy’s hair where Lucy was pillowed in her lap.
Lucy’s face squished, and she said, “Ew, no. I’m not into that.”
“Okay, kinkshame express. Choo choo!”
“It’s not kinkshaming if I personally don’t want to be witnessed by a strange middle aged man just trying to make ends meet,” Lucy said, and she barrelled on, “And I will remind you that he’s literally dating someone.”
“Ring ring, hello? Oh, the Cretaceous period called to introduce you to the concept of infidelity,” Norrie said, tapping on Lucy’s forehead.
“Seriously? A ring ring joke?”
“Ring ring!” Norrie bent in half to smash her ear into Lucy’s chin. “The Dawn of Time called and wants to know if you’ve heard of polyamory.”
Lucy squealed, trying to fight off her best friend, but Norrie held the offensive advantage. She wrapped her arms around her head and almost smothered Lucy in angora wool.
“You haven’t even shown me what he looks like! How am I supposed to slag off on you properly when I don’t even know how hideous he is?” Norrie wailed directly into Lucy’s squirming ear, and that made her flinch upwards, finally dislodging Norrie.
“I don’t have any pictures of him!” Lucy said truthfully once she rolled away and took up a more fortified position at the base of the bed with all the stuffed animals.
Mostly truthfully.
She thought it was true, anyway, except last week, didn’t he send her a picture on one of their missed connection days—
“Oh, such bollocks.”
“He might have sent me one picture,” Lucy hedged, hand drifting towards her phone.
“Ye Gods, how bad is it? Army buzz? Man bun? Man bun with undercut?” Norrie flopped over and rolled until she was on her stomach, propped up on her elbows to look up at Lucy. She reached back to straighten out her legs like trousers twisted in the wash.
“I think he’s attractive,” Lucy said. At this point, it was acquiesce or to battle. And then surrender but maybe with more of her pride intact.
“You think anything with an Adam’s apple is attractive,” Norrie shot back.
“Nuh uh,” Lucy muttered, swiping through her photos.
George cooking.
George cooking.
Holly’s latest dress she designed because the fabric was really cool.
George’s plating presentation of his escargot de bourgogne. He told her that even in France after the first round of real snail, they usually started stuffing the shells with pork because it was tastier. She couldn’t remember if she sent him the picture or not. She needed to.
The park.
The street.
The perfect foam on her last coffee order.
“I understand now why your phone is always complaining about storage space,” Norrie said, and Lucy swiped to the next stack of photos with her middle finger.
“He sent me this. I was going to turn it into a meme, but I forgot,” Lucy said, flashing Norrie her screen.
Norrie took it like a monk pondering a butterfly. There in technicolor LED, was three quarters of Quill’s face, a somber notch in his brow and the stainless steel sky making his eyes nearly glow. His companion in the photo was a rotund squirrel. Though the squirrel was in the background, he was still obviously fat-cheeked and staring straight at the camera.
“He captioned it I think he saw me,” Lucy explained as if that would make it better that it was now taking up precious megabytes on her phone.
Norrie was quiet for a nerve-stripping amount of time. She zoomed in on Quill’s face until he filled the screen, and then she said, “Dude, I know him.”
“You do?”
“Yeah,” Norrie said, turning the phone back around. “That’s the Queen’s corgi. That’s Pickles.”
Lucy breathed out slowly. She put a fist to the bridge of her nose.
“You are so rude!” Lucy bellowed right in Norrie’s face, and Norrie started cackling like the witch that she was.
“I’m being so serious. C’mon, have you ever seen them in the same room?” She snickered.
“Yeah, well, we can’t all date goth rugby butches,” Lucy snapped. Norrie blinked all too innocently.
“I thought you weren’t dating him?”
“You know that’s not what I meant!” Lucy went for her phone, but Norrie feigned a pull-away. Lucy hesitated, staring down her long time best friend, their hands hanging there in the air like some sort of naked sock puppet showdown. She struck, and Norrie had enough sense to choose her battles. Lucy collected her phone.
“Anyways, Shelbie and I broke up,” Norrie said with a shrug.
“Damn, that sucks. What happened?”
Norrie went through girlfriends like ice lollies on the first day of summer. Languid. Unhurried. Very sexual. But ultimately gone under the inexorable application of Norrie’s appetite. She could go for something other than an ice lolly. She needed a jawbreaker of a woman, but it was always the first day of summer, and she would always reach for the freezer section.
“Meh. Her polycule couldn’t handle me,” Norrie said, flicking her hair over her shoulder.
“There are few that can,” Lucy agreed. Her gaze drifted back to her phone screen where a message from George lit up the display.
Where are you
“Everyone’s in an open relationship nowadays, y’know?”
I just made fhe best Baumkuchen and someone needs to praise me for it
“I bet you could finesse one out of your boy. He literally told you it wasn’t serious.”
I am a God
Lucy smirked, thumbs tapping across her screen.
“Hey, do you want cake? George made some fancy cake, and he needs people to eat it,” Lucy said, already having sent her answer.
“Who do you take me for?”
“Yeah, I know.”
Put some socks on. I’m gunna blow them the fuck off
Lucy snorted out loud, and when she looked up, Norrie had summoned the sun to her palm.
“Jesus! What are you eighty? Why is your screen always so bright?” Lucy squinted, the photo negative relief of a bug eyed corgi burned into the back of her eyelids.
“Tell me I’m wrong, though. They could be twins. Does Park Boy have a brother?”
Norrie didn’t stop listing royal corgis until George literally showed up on her doorstep and shut her up with a forkful of million layer cake.
Lucy wondered what Lockwood was doing.
…
when are you off work?
…
Lucy was this close to falling asleep. All of her dreams were in her grasp, though not necessarily in her control. Like putting on educational reruns in class, her brain slotted an infinite gift shop behind her eyelids, rows on rows of those horribly cheesy shot glasses, and then—
A door, indelicately slammed.
George was breathing slowly underneath her. He breathed so slowly in his sleep that sometimes she stuck her finger under his nose just to make sure he hadn’t croaked. Norrie was in her preferred armchair, pale skin taking on whatever color flickered over the muted telly. And Lucy was pretty sure that she herself was horizontal on the couch, between George’s legs and leaning against him, sharing a blanket with him because he was bitching about the cold.
That left one other person.
“Holly?” Lucy croaked, grasping at the plush back cushions of the couch to struggle upright.
“Lucy? Oh. I—oh,” Holly said.
Lucy blinked.
Maybe she’d fallen into unreality after all. Holly looked like shit.
“What happen?” Lucy’s tongue fumbled against her hard palette as she tried to extricate herself.
Holly’s mascara made skid marks down her cheeks. Her hair was frizzed out at the nape and dry atop her head where she’d smoothed her hands over it so much. Her fashion-forward patchwork corduroy was crooked across her shoulders, and Holly Munro didn’t get on her feet without straightening her outfit. Seriously, it was something she mentioned to her therapist.
“Can we go—?” Holly’s voice wobbled like a flipped coin coming to its result. Lucy leveraged herself out of George’s lap, and when she glanced back to right the blanket over him, his dark eyes were blinking open, glittering in the shifting bluelight. His brow furrowed, his head swaying. Kitten-esque.
Lucy’s heart jerked in her chest, and for some reason, she thought about the defibrillator in the stairwell. Lucy rubbed her knuckles over her chest as George turned into the couch pillows, burrowing back into his dreams. She followed Holly into her bedroom then further, into her little half-bath. When Holly flicked on the overhead, Lucy flinched, eyes squeezing to slits. Lucy felt her way to the closed toilet and sat on the lid. She waited for her eyes and brain to adjust.
Holly sniffled delicately, opening her top drawer to grab a flower patterned makeup wipe dispenser. All of her things were in glass jars or cutesy containers. Lucy was lucky if she managed to keep her toothbrush in its cup.
“I got fired,” Holly led off with, dabbing underneath her eyes. The wipe came away black.
“That sucks,” Lucy said.
“Well, I didn’t get fired. I left,” Holly clarified, and she caught a dribble of snot out of her nose before it touched her lipstick.
“Okay?”
Lucy wasn’t good at this. Frankly, none of them were. Lockwood would start shit talking Rotwell Fashion House in an attempt to make Holly feel better about losing her dream job. Norrie would offer sugar before she remembered all of Holly’s dietary restrictions. George would wryly comment about how Holly’s real talent lay in her own two hands and not stitching for some corporate fast fashion product. Skull would offer something off of his increasingly ridiculous sounding list of street drugs. She swore he made some of them up to fuck with her. And Quill would—
“I mean, that sounds complicated,” Lucy said.
Holly shot her a slightly less raccoonish look that said you are a hero and a dear friend for trying so hard.
Maybe it said less.
“They sacked my whole team, except me,” Holly said. She took out another wipe. “We have a show next week. We’re trying to one up some of the Milan houses, and we’ve had to resew every garment three times because they wanted the thread in seed pearl and not orange cream, and Mahmood pierced his finger with how fast he was going. Broke a needle. My supervisor screamed at him for twenty minutes and then just. The whole team.”
“Except you.”
“Except me. Because I was out getting her coffee,” Holly said. She braced herself on the counter, makeup wipe clenched in her fist until it started dripping.
“That doesn’t sound like an ideal work environment,” Lucy stated. Calmly and professionally.
“It’s not!” Holly burst into fresh tears, and though it made Lucy’s skin fit uncomfortably around her own bones, it was a pretty effective way to speed up the makeup removal.
Lucy wondered if anyone was actually good at this. If there was any good to be had here, or if it was all just damage control. Disaster relief. And it wasn’t the first time that she wondered, if anyone had tried to be nice to her that night—outside the collapsed mill, at the hospital, at the police station—would it have made a difference?
“It’s gunna be alright,” Lucy said, shifting herself off of the toilet to step behind Holly. She took the mangled makeup wipe from Holly’s hand, grabbing a fresh one from the cheery dispenser, and she gave it a truly genuine try.
“Do you know how hard it is to find a job that—” At least Holly cut herself off instead of Lucy having to poke her eye out. Holly pursed her wobbly lips and said, “I guess you do.”
“There’s just too many of us creative types,” Lucy sighed. “I don’t suppose you’d like to go back to school for business?”
“I’d rather see if your place is hiring,” Holly replied with a delicate scrunch to her nose.
“We’re not.”
Being around Holly all day…
Lucy didn’t fancy the idea of needing to find a lawyer for the inevitable murder trial.
“This place is expensive,” Holly said quietly. “It was already like half my paycheck. I don’t know what we’re going to do if I can’t—maybe I’ll just be a temp for the rest of my life.”
Lucy snorted.
“You’re too good to temp.”
Holly’s brow shifted above her slightly less raccoonish face. Her hand came up to still Lucy’s clumsy mopping. She said, “I’m not too good for anything.”
“I didn’t mean it like bad,” Lucy said, dropping her gaze and her efforts to the cloudy swell of Holly’s cheek.
Holly was Ms. Perfect. Lucy could sew up all her rough edges and cover the scars with a thousand bottles of foundation, and she would still never be as flawlessly gorgeous as Holly Munro. She and Lockwood sat in another tier, like angels strumming their harps and smiling down at the dirty mortals. Except when he nicked her biscuit rotation—that was proof the devil was once white winged with the rest of them.
“I meant it like… I dunno,” Lucy said lamely. “You’re you, and everything you do is amazing.”
Holly took the makeup wipe from her, folding it neatly to find an unblotched patch. She tucked her thumb into her cheek, pulling the skin taut as she worked at the more delicate bits around her eyes.
“I was scrubbing floors when we met,” Holly said.
Lucy blinked. These new eyes Holly had just installed into her face were taking a moment to adjust. The slim, stylish creature Holly was when Lockwood first decreed her a missing link in their friend group—were her hands cracked? Did they smell like pine and polish?
“I made all my own clothes, so no one noticed, but—” Holly’s gaze met hers in the mirror. “—a ramen cup is vegan too. You know?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Lucy said, placing her contrition softly on the counter in front of them. Holly actually glanced down as if the pseudo-apology had weight and form and frills.
“I guess I know why you hated me for all those months,” Holly sighed, and Lucy could only hope the past tense meant Holly wasn’t too put out with her. On top of losing her job.
Jesus, Lucy was mucking this up.
“Lockwood might be able to hire you to clean our house,” Lucy offered, if not a full olive branch than an olive seed from which one might grow.
“You need a whole house manager,” Holly said. The twitch of her lips was a good sign.
“We do,” Lucy half-chuckled.
“I don’t know how three people produce so much laundry,” Holly said, on her roll now. “And you’d think it would be the boys who washed so many sheets.”
Lucy promptly shoved any subsequent thoughts down like trying to fit that last pair of jeans into a carry on, sputtering out, “I get sweaty at night!”
“Yeah, my anti-depressants do that to me.”
“Which flavor are you on? Maybe if I start taking it, the sweating will cancel out.”
“I do SSRI,” Holly said, and she was finished de-gothing herself. It was disheartening how gorgeous she was without makeup too. Lucy sighed and tapped on her phone, hoping for a distraction before she took it personally. Hoping Lockwood had texted her back, like always.
“Oh,” Lucy said, thumbing through her recent conversations. “I can ask my other friend if he knows anywhere hiring.”
“I didn’t know you had other friends,” Holly said, and Lucy was proud of herself for not picking up that conversational gauntlet, no matter how unintended its throw.
hey i have a friend looking for a job. fashion major, worked at rotwell’s for a while
She double checked then sent it off.
“How did you meet him?” Holly asked, putting the makeup wipe dispenser back into the drawer. Lucy swallowed when it clacked shut.
“We’re more like workout buddies,” Lucy said. “We do Hyde Park sometimes.”
“You do Hyde Park?”
Lucy panicked, and she typed out three snowman emojis, rushing them off to George. She hoped he was awake, though thinking back; he did say he hadn’t slept well last night. Something about his side gig keeping him up.
“I mean, you know. We walk. In Hyde Park,” Lucy said.
“Walk?”
Lucy’s phone blessedly dinged, and she’d almost forgotten she texted Quill.
Sure, I might know somewhere. Send me their resume? I’ll pass it along
“Send me your resume,” Lucy said, wriggling her phone screen at Holly. “We have a potential fish.”
“I keep it updated, so I’ll just look over it tonight and send it to you in the morning?” Holly tidied her trash and pressed the can’s trim little pedal to open it up for disposal.
“As long as I don’t have to—”
Lucy cut herself off to cock her head at the faint tapping sound. They shared a look before they both realized at once that it was knocking on Holly’s bedroom door. Holly poked her head out of the bathroom, and Lucy stood.
“Yes?” Holly called.
“I have a crick in my neck,” George grumped, muffled through the door. It was George’s roundabout way of saying he was done. Time to go.
“Yeah, we should be getting back before the tube closes. I don’t want to walk to a night station,” Lucy said, and she slipped around Holly to open the bedroom door. George’s hair was mimicking an overgrown sheep again, and she smiled, resisting the urge to pat it back down.
“Okay, and Lucy—”
Lucy turned, eyebrows lifted.
“Thanks,” Holly said softly. She gestured vaguely at her face, and Lucy gave her a thumbs up.
“No problem.”
Norrie was still knocked out in the armchair which was not an unusual sight. George had turned off the telly and draped his blankets over Norrie. He shepherded her to her jacket and boots with a laser focus. He’d already suited up for the gruesome chill of London after dark. She hitched up her fluffy trousers, so she wouldn’t step on the back hem.
“Bye,” Lucy stage whispered, waving at Holly in the door of her bedroom as they left.
Holly waved back, and then they were in the hallway.
It took George all the way to the lobby to ask—
“Three snowmen?”
George had once sent her a total of eighteen, spread out over enough messages her phone almost vibrated off the table. All so that she would come save him from talking anymore to Paul about football.
Not because George couldn’t talk football, but because Paul was a Newcastle man.
“I was being interrogated,” Lucy said.
“About that guy you’ve been seeing?”
Lucy’s heart jerked to a stop and was left a few steps behind them on the cold sidewalk. In its place came a shambling rigidity, a hatchet job clockwork that made her body move out of sync with her limbs.
“What? What guy?” Lucy sputtered out.
“The one Norrie thinks looks like a dog,” George said, glancing at her sidelong.
“He doesn’t look like a dog!”
“I rest my case, your honor.” George slumped, shoving his hands further into his puffer and gathering the excess in a ball in front of him. It sealed the bottom hem closer to his body so the occasional wintry gust couldn’t sneak under his warmest layer.
“I’m not seeing seeing him. We pass each other in the park sometimes and get coffee,” Lucy said.
“Give me his name,” George replied. “I’ll look into him.”
“No.”
“C’mon, you know I’m good at it. I’ll find skeletons in his closet even he doesn’t know about.”
“You’re not going all private eye or whatever it is you do to earn those hundred pound notes you like to break at Arif’s,” Lucy said.
“Don’t complain. It makes you less pretty,” George said, sniffling nose high in the air. She gasped and immediately regretted it when the cold air stormed her lungs.
“Was I complaining? I think I was rejecting you,” Lucy said.
Her shoulder bumped his arm. His answering snicker was buried in his jacket. If they linked their arms, they could put up a united front to the wind’s cavalry, and then their arms would be linked. She wheeled her shoulder as if she’d been struck, turning her chin to crack her neck. All the cold was making her joints stiff.
“You could never reject me,” George muttered.
Lucy first met George in a basic biology class. He was the teaching assistant who managed to be more pedantic than the professor, and he sat with her outside when the formaldehyde preservative on the frogs almost made her sick. She felt like one of those frogs now. Flayed open and prodded at. She was a sick, experimental version, vivisected so all her organs were still squirming, and he’d found that little cap on the bean of a kidney, the little grub of her adrenal gland, and he’d poked it with an electric probe.
She wasn’t cold anymore.
“I wish I could eject you,” she said back, and the breeze burned against her cheeks.
“I would certainly object to that,” George said, and Lucy grasped the game in his tone like it was an ejection button for her sudden fever.
She considered, and then after a moment, she said, “It’s my own pet project. To launch you into the sun.”
“And what did I do to become the subject of all your—your wrath?” George asked, clearly enjoying himself and thinking of his next word instead of listening to hers. She tried to sneak one past him.
“Wrath? Do I seem cross? No, that’s just your conjecture,” she said. The tube stop they were looking for was a beacon of hope up the block.
He cupped his hands over his mouth and bleated out a buzzer noise.
“I win,” he declared. She couldn’t ever sneak anything past him. She was vivisected, after all. He saw all of it.
Both of them? Naughty girl.
Quill’s voice came, whispery and low, to make her almost slip on the stairs to the underground station. If she fell—
If she fell—
“Oh, look. They got rid of that shitty coffee shop,” George commented, and she followed his gesture to a bakery, dark and caged for the night. “I should try their scones.”
“You should write a travel blog,” Lucy said after swallowing thickly. “Review all the scones in London.”
The tube car was empty. They got their pick of seats.
“Sounds like a lot of work.”
He sat next to her.
“Yeah, but then you could get one for me too,” she said, rolling her head to look at him, leading with her eyebrows.
“I’ll get you Arif’s,” George scoffed, and he fought the smile.
“You never take me anywhere,” Lucy sighed.
“You have your own feet.”
“We never do anything nice anymore.”
“Make Lockwood do it.”
He slumped lower in his seat, grinning despite himself, and she matched him, her stiff coat coming up to jab at her jaw. He tucked his chin and burrowed down, his curls swaying over his forehead, until they were two fools nearly eclipsed by their coats on the last train towards Marylebone.
…
Sorry, just got out. What’s up?