Chapter Text
Elliot’s Perspective.
It was Spring, that tender, newly-awakened season — just a handful of days after the young farmer had taken up residence on their old Grandpa's land. A curious soul, this newcomer. And yet... curious in ways I had not entirely anticipated.
For reasons that continued to elude my most earnest attempts at comprehension, they had seen fit to gift me, on more than one occasion, with that most wretched of oceanic offerings. The Sea Cucumber. I shudder even now to recall it. What grim poetry, that something pulled from the very waters I hold so dear could inspire in me such profound... distaste.
And it seemed I was not alone in my suffering. Word reached me by way of Leah, who has a wonderful ear for the village's quieter dramas — that poor Shane had been on the receiving end of an equally baffling campaign. Pickles, apparently. Jar after jar, delivered with what I can only imagine was a perfectly straight face. The aftermath, I'm told, was spectacular. The sound of shattering glass outside Marnie's Ranch. Shane, in his characteristic fashion, making his feelings known to an audience of chickens and fence posts. And every last jar, swept unceremoniously into the trash.
I confess and perhaps this speaks poorly of my character. I would have very much liked to have witnessed it.
The Stardrop Saloon in the evening had a particular warmth to it that I had always found conducive to thought. The amber light, the low murmur of familiar voices, the soft clink of glass against wood — it was, in its own humble way, rather poetic.
I settled onto a stool at the bar, nodded my thanks as Gus slid a glass toward me without needing to be asked, and let out a long, contented breath. It was then that I noticed Shane. He occupied his usual corner with the particular dedication of a man who had claimed it by birthright — slouched over a Pale Ale, staring at nothing in a way that suggested he was, in fact, staring at everything and finding it all deeply unremarkable. A second empty bottle stood nearby. A third, I suspected, was simply a matter of time.
I considered leaving him to it. Shane was not, as a rule, what one might describe as receptive to company.
And yet.
"Rough day?" I asked, settling onto the stool beside him with the careful ease of someone approaching a cat that had not yet decided whether to tolerate them. He slid his eyes sideways. The look was not warm.
"Is there another kind."
It wasn't a question. I received it as the small, blunt offering it was. "I heard," I said, with delicate precision, swirling my glass, "about the pickles." A long silence. Shane's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
"Leah," he said flatly.
"Leah," I confirmed.
He took a slow drink. Set the bottle down with a little more force than was strictly necessary. "Whoever that farmer is," he muttered, "they've got a lot of nerve. Or no nerve at all. Can't figure out which is worse.”
I found, to my mild surprise, that I agreed entirely. I raised my glass in a small, private toast to the sentiment, and the two of us sat in the not-entirely-uncomfortable silence of two men who had both, in their own very different ways, been thoroughly puzzled by the same person.
I had not intended to stay long. I had, in fact, made a quiet promise to myself on the walk over that I would have precisely one drink, allow the sea air to settle out of my hair, and return to the cabin with enough clarity of mind to write at least three worthwhile sentences before bed.
I had been averaging one and a half, lately. Perhaps two, on a generous evening. But I found myself ordering a second drink.
Shane had not moved. Or rather, he had moved only in the incremental, geological way of a man who had no particular intention of going anywhere. A shift of the shoulder. The slow migration of his elbow further along the bar. The quiet, practised motion of signalling Gus for another without once making eye contact or uttering a word.
There was an economy to it that I could not help but observe with a kind of reluctant fascination. He communicated entire sentences through the architecture of his posture alone. Right now, that posture was saying: I am here, I am tired, and I would appreciate it enormously if the universe asked nothing further of me this evening.
I understood the sentiment more than I cared to admit. We did not speak for a while.
The saloon filled and thinned around us in its natural rhythm, Emily drifting past with a luminous sort of energy that always made me feel pleasantly dreamy, Gus murmuring something to a patron at the far end of the bar, the distant clatter of what I believed was someone losing rather badly at the arcade machine in the back. The world continued its business, largely indifferent to the two of us sitting at the bar like a pair of mismatched bookends.
It was Shane who spoke first, which surprised me.
"You actually read all those books on your shelf?"
I turned to look at him. He wasn't looking at me — he was studying his bottle with the forensic attention of a man who had asked the question purely to have something to do with his mouth that wasn't drinking.
"Most of them," I said, after a moment. "Some of them I keep purely for the way they look in the light. Is that dishonest? I've gone back and forth on the matter."
Shane's mouth did something that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one in the way that a closed door is adjacent to a room. "Yeah," he said. "That's a little dishonest."
"I thought as much," I agreed pleasantly, and drank. Another silence settled between us, but it had shifted in character — grown slightly less fortified, I thought, slightly less deliberately constructed. As though some minor weight had been redistributed without either of us quite acknowledging it.
"You're writing a book," Shane said. Still not a question, exactly. More of a fact he was testing the weight of.
"I am," I said. "Or rather — I am in the process of becoming someone who is writing a book. The actual writing, I find, occupies a surprisingly small fraction of the endeavour."
He actually bothered to look up at me, directly, for the first time that evening. His eyes were dark and tired in the way of someone who slept adequately but did not rest well, a distinction I had come to understand intimately during certain difficult stretches of my own.
"What's it about?" he asked. And here was the thing about that question, people asked it often, and I had developed a rather elegant and evasive answer that I deployed like a well-worn coat, comfortable and deflecting in equal measure. Something about the interior landscape of longing. Something about the sea as a metaphor. It usually prompted a polite nod and a change of subject, which was, if I was honest with myself, precisely what I intended. But something about the flat, unadorned directness of the way Shane had asked it — no performance and no particular interest in being charmed, just a man asking a simple question because he happened to be sitting next to me and it was there and that made the elegant answer feel faintly ridiculous.
"I'm not entirely sure yet," I said instead. "I know how it feels. I haven't yet determined what it's about." Shane considered this with the unhurried patience of someone who was not, in fact, in any hurry at all.
"Hm," he said finally. It was not an illuminating response. And yet I found it oddly satisfying, the sense that he had turned my answer over, found it neither impressive nor foolish, and simply set it down.
I watched him signal for another drink and found myself noticing, in a way that I hadn't before, the particular cut of his expression when he wasn't performing indifference for anyone. Which was to say, when he thought no one was paying attention. There was something almost gentle in it. Tired, certainly. Worn at the edges in the way of someone who had been carrying something heavy for long enough that they'd stopped noticing the weight. But still, something gentle, underneath all of it.
I looked back at my glass rather quickly after that. I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the observation, so I did what I always did with things I wasn't sure about. I set it aside, told myself it was merely the novelist's instinct for detail, and took a long, deliberate sip of my drink. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation.
I chose not to examine it further.
"The pickles aside," I said, after a time, "has the farming situation disrupted things much? For you, I mean." He gave a short exhale through his nose that might have been a laugh in a previous life. "I work at Joja," he said. "Everything disrupts things. Nothing changes."
Ignoring the man's negativity, I spoke. "Well," I said, lifting my glass with a small measure of ceremony, "to Spring. And to neighbours who at the very least keep things interesting."
Shane looked at his bottle. Looked at me. And then, with the air of a man making a minor concession to the universe, lifted it an inch off the bar. It was not exactly a toast. But it was not nothing, either. We drank.
Outside, the stars were doing whatever stars do over small valley towns in Spring — shining with that particular excess of sincerity that I had always found both overwhelming and deeply, helplessly moving. I thought about the novel. I thought about the sea. I thought, briefly and without quite meaning to, about how long it had been since I had sat in comfortable silence with another person and not felt the urge to fill it.
I ordered a third drink. Perhaps that was starting to be a mistake.
The promise to myself, I decided, could wait until tomorrow.
It usually did anyway.
Shane’s Perspective.
Spring again.
Everything was wet and bright and aggressively cheerful about it, which I found irritating before I'd even fully opened my eyes. Birds. There were birds. Right outside the window, doing whatever birds do in Spring at an hour that should still be considered the middle of the night by any reasonable measure. I lay there for a moment staring at the ceiling, and then Jas knocked on my door to say good morning, and I told her good morning back, and that was the most functional I was going to be for at least another hour.
Marnie was already up, because Marnie was always already up, moving around the ranch with that relentless early morning energy that I had never once in my life been able to relate to. She said something cheerful about the season. I said mhm. She gave me a look that I ignored. I poured myself a coffee, stood at the window, and watched the farm.
New farmer. Moved in a few days ago. Hadn't formed a strong opinion yet, didn't particularly want to.
That changed.
I don't know what I did. I genuinely, honestly, do not know what I did to deserve it. I was minding my own business, doing my job, living my life — such as it was. And then out of nowhere this farmer decided that what I needed, what would really improve my situation, was pickles.
Not once. Not as a one time thing that I could write off as a misunderstanding or some kind of weird rural welcome gesture. Multiple times. Jar after jar, like they were working through a checklist. Like somewhere on a piece of paper it said Shane — pickles and they were just very committed to the task.
I don't even like pickles. Harvey does.
I stood outside Marnie's Ranch on a perfectly average Tuesday and I looked at the latest jar and something in me just — decided it was done. I'm not proud of it. The chickens watched. Jas, thankfully, was inside. I smashed every last one of them and then stood there in the wreckage of it feeling only marginally better, which was somehow worse, and swept the whole mess into the trash.
Marnie found out, because of course she did. She didn't say much, just gave me the other look — the longer one, the one she'd been giving me for years. I told her it was fine. She said okay. Neither of us believed that, but we'd had enough practice at it that we got through the conversation anyway.
I went to work at Joja.
The fluorescent lights were doing their usual thing. The aisles were doing their usual thing. Everything was exactly the same as every other day and it was going to keep being exactly the same, and I stocked shelves and kept my head down and didn't think about pickles or Spring or farmers or any of it.
I mostly succeeded.
Jas had drawn me a picture when I got home. A chicken, I think, though it could have been a dog. I put it on the windowsill and looked at it for a while and then I got changed and went to the Stardrop because that was what I did, and the day could either get better or it couldn't, and either way I was going to have a drink while it figured itself out.
It had been a long day. Longer than usual, which was saying something, because every day at Joja had a way of stretching itself out like it was doing it on purpose. I'd clocked out, walked straight to the Stardrop, and parked myself at the bar before I'd even fully decided to. Gus had a Pale Ale in front of me before I sat down. Good. I didn't want to talk. I didn't want to think. I just wanted to sit here until the edges of the day went soft and stopped being my problem.
I was halfway through my second bottle when Elliott walked in.
I looked back at my drink.
Elliott was fine. He was fine. He just had that thing about him, that sort of effortless, theatrical ease, like he'd stepped out of a painting and found the whole world charming and slightly beneath him all at once. Always with the perfect hair. Always with the glass held just so. The kind of guy who used the word luminous in regular conversation and expected you to just accept that. Not that I’d actually know, I barely spoke to the man. I'd heard him once describe a sunset to Leah for approximately four minutes. Four minutes. I'd counted. What? Nothing wrong with being a bit nosy.
He sat down a few stools over and I thought, fine. Fine. As long as he stays over there and doesn't —
He moved to the stool next to me.
I stared straight ahead.
He got his drink. Didn't say anything immediately, which was the one thing he did that I had no complaints about. I'd half expected some opening line, something poetic and vaguely exhausting. Instead he just sat there. Drank. Minded his own business.
Okay. Fine.
"Rough day?" he asked, eventually.
"Is there another kind." I said. Flat.
He didn't try to make it one, which surprised me more than I wanted to admit. No oh surely it can't be that bad or you know, sometimes I find a walk along the shore really helps. Just nothing. It was unnerving to say the least.
Then he said he'd heard about the pickles.
My jaw tightened.
"Leah," I said.
"Leah," he confirmed.
Of course. Of course Leah had told him. I'd smashed those jars on a Tuesday afternoon like a complete idiot and apparently the whole town had filed it away for dinner conversation. Great. That was great. I set my bottle down harder than I meant to and said what I thought about the farmer, which wasn't much, and wasn't particularly articulate, but it was honest.
Elliott raised his glass like he agreed.
I didn't say anything to that. But something about the fact that he didn't make it into a whole dramatic moment sat okay with me. Better than okay, maybe. Not that I was going to tell him that. Not ever actually.
We sat quietly for a bit. I was waiting for him to ruin it.
He didn't, for a while.
"You actually read all those books on your shelf?" I asked, and immediately wondered why I'd said anything at all. I didn't particularly care about his books. I think I just wanted to say something that wasn't hostile before the silence got weird. A low bar. I was working with what I had.
He said he kept some of them for how they looked in the light and asked if that was dishonest.
I almost didn't answer. It was such an Elliott thing to say. This little performance of self-reflection, like he was a character in one of those books, pausing to consider his own moral complexity.
But then again. He'd asked it like he actually wanted to know the answer. Not like he was showing off. Just asked it straight.
"Yeah," I said. "That's a little dishonest."
"I thought as much," he said, easy as anything. And drank.
Huh.
He brought up the book after that. I asked what it was about because it seemed like the socially acceptable thing to do, and I was already here, already talking, might as well.
He said he knew how it felt but not yet what it was about.
I turned that over in my head, expecting to find it pretentious. Waiting for the pretension. It didn't come. It just sat there, plain and honest, which mind you, weird as hell because Elliott was the same man talking about the sunset for 4 minutes.
He asked about the farmer situation after a while. Whether it had disrupted things. I told him everything disrupted things and nothing changed, and it came out flatter and heavier than I'd meant it to. I waited for him to do something with that. To pry, or sympathise loudly, or suggest I talk to someone.
He just let it land where it landed and moved on.
I took a drink. Resettled on the stool. The thing that had been sitting in my chest since this morning — since before this morning, honestly, since longer ago than I generally let myself think about, didn't go away.
He raised his glass at some point. Said something about Spring and something about neighbours. I am guilty for not listening, honestly.
I looked at him for a second.
Picked up my bottle. Lifted it off the bar.
He smiled a little. Nothing big. Just a small thing at the corner of his mouth.
I looked away.
We kept drinking. The saloon stayed loud and warm around us and I stopped watching the door the way I usually did, that habit of clocking exits, of keeping one foot already pointed toward leaving.
I still thought he was a little much. The hair. The way he held his glass. All of it.
But he'd sat next to me for the better part of an hour and hadn't once made me feel like a problem to be solved.
That was more than most people managed.
I didn't tell him that either. But I stopped waiting for him to ruin it.
And he didn't.