Work Text:
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
~B~ I know law school is hard but at least you are still in classrooms with desks and teachers and stuff. This whole workplace and being an adult thing I’m doing is scary and confusing. I mean, it’s all stuff I can do with a blindfold on – but it’s also all stuff that I can do with a blindfold on! Like – where is the challenge?! Your professors sound awful and hilarious; please update me all the time. And let Dawnie know that I need to wait another month or so before I can give her the grand tour, but she’s gonna love it. ~Will
(ps – yes, my boss is totally hott. Like unfortunately so. Like: goddess please don’t let her see my obvious drool every time she speaks. lol
Jenny begins to dream in shades of red.
It’s a nice change from the flashing lights of a scanner or the horrible one where she’s still in grad school and having to defend a dissertation she doesn’t remember writing in a field she’s never studied. That one still wakes her up sometimes. She’s learned to laugh.
Even if it isn’t funny.
And then the dreams turn to shades of red; silky, soft, vibrant shades of red that pass over her eyes and slide through her fingers like…
Her father reads her cards over Skype and tells her that it is blood she is seeing. Her own Death. He smiles and says that he remembers when he first started dreaming of his death. He says she’s always been a slow learner. She nods and smiles and asks after her cousins’ many babies and then claims the internet went out again.
Her friend blesses her car for the third time that year and winks at her after they have coffee. She reads her own cards and they tell her nothing.
It’s been like that before.
And every night, more red, dancing like a flame but never flickering out.
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
~B~ I can’t believe that you said that to your professor! And that she turned around to set you up with an internship afterwards! You really are too charming for your own good. I’d love to catch up with you and little D in LA this weekend! I can drive up after work on Friday night. It sounds like just the break I need. I think my boss is losing sleep over this project. I keep telling her it’s going well and that she’s a genius (she really is) but I think that just makes her more worried. I could use a good old-fashioned sleepover with my favorite girls. See you in a couple of days! ~Will
Skin contact is such a strange thing. It starts with a gentle accident – passing a cup of coffee from one hand to another – and then it becomes a stretching, growing, desperate need.
Jenny feels like she’s yearning, her body turning inside out, desperate for a comfort she told herself she could live without.
She tells herself that it’s just general, absent-minded horniness. She goes to a bar and picks up the first nice smile she sees… and then discards him for a girl maybe a bit too young and a bit on the dippy side but her hair is a dark, rich black. She takes the girl home and she covers herself in the warmth and touch of skin.
But her dreams are red.
And she wakes up in the morning starving.
As if she hadn’t feasted the night before.
The girls pouts at her that she was too rough, that her teeth and fingers were cruel.
“As if I was trying to rip her open and expose something different beneath the skin.”
“A UC Santa Barbara Business undergrad told you that post-coital?”
“Not… exactly.”
“Leave your lovers to their own poetics and tell me what really happened you moron.”
Jenny has always had excellent taste in friends. “She… wasn’t what I wanted.”
“Well what do you want?”
“Something I can’t have.”
“Hunny, there ain’t no such thing.”
Her cards tell her an answer is coming. They seem to be laughing at her beneath her fingertips. Her father tells her (not for the first time) that the cards can’t tell her what she doesn’t already know. She shuffles and deals and shuffles and deals and feels something tickling at the back of her mind where she’s not willing to look. She takes her vibrator to bed and she dreams of red.
Just red.
From:<[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>
I officially hate all of you and none of us are friends anymore the end.
(Until this weekend when we all seriously need a beer and possibly some darts.)
ps- Dawnie. Those photos? I’m officially rescinding all invitations to my workplace ever again. That said, when you come down next Wednesday, please bring them with you. There’s one of J I want to put on my desk.
She finds herself throwing temper tantrums in the office and hoping that someone will call her on her bullshit. She finds that there are a lot of things an assistant can get really wrong with coffee. She finds that she’s no longer thinking about her project anymore, because her eyes are filled with red, red, red.
From: <[email protected]>To: <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>
Does this mean Operation “Willow’s gonna bang her boss” is in full effect?
Because if not…
There’s a hint of cinnamon to the air now.
She wants to soak in it.
She buys a cinnamon bath salt and candles. She lays in the warmth of the water and closes her eyes and breathes it in deep and strong. She’s out of the tub in five minutes, annoyed and frustrated.
Her cards laugh at her.
Her books can no longer occupy her.
Her dreams are filled with soft, deep red and a low laugh she pretends not to recognize.
From: <[email protected]>To: <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>
You know… I still have those photos of you and Julio from our trip to New Orleans last year.
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Your hot sexy librarian boss is safe for now.
She absolutely isn’t staring. She absolutely is the most professional person in this goddamn archaic institution.
She definitely isn’t falling for a girl too young and too smart for her own good. She definitely doesn’t hold on to every interaction and play it over in her mind over and over like a teenage girl with a crush on someone desperately out of her league.
She is her own goddamn league.
She is a goddamn adult. She does not have crushes on assistants like a lovesick teenager.
She dreams of red and if there is a shape amidst the layers and shine of red, then she doesn’t admit it to herself.
From: <[email protected]>To: <[email protected]>
They went to New Orleans without you?
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
When we went on that cruise with Uncle Giles and Aunt Olivia after you graduated from high school. They refuse to talk about it.
Bring your laundry by on Thursday – I have a late class but we can do Thai takeout after and Will says he’ll look at that paper you have to write for your poetry class. Love you!
When she was very young, and full of hope – which is not to say that she isn’t still young and not still full of hope – she fell in love with a woman with bright eyes and a crooked smile and soft hair. And it was lovely for the longest time.
Until it wasn’t.
When she was an adult – which is not to say that she isn’t an adult now – she fell in love with a man with grey at his temples and a biting humor that cut only himself and the people who wanted to love him. And it was hard and there were compromises.
Until enough wasn’t enough.
There were more – her life was littered in love – and she loved them all and they were all… all. And everything. And the moment was always good.
And she was happy.
And she was content.
Her cards tell her so.
From: <[email protected]>To: <[email protected]>
Seriously, friend. Good luck.
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Stop being weird. I hate you. We aren’t even friends.
((smooch))
There’s a photo of her on her assistant’s desk. Her hair is falling over her face as if she is in motion and there is a smile on her face like she’s never seen before and she’s looking down at a girl with hair every shade of red and everything about her is exposed.
She pretends to ignore it.
She goes home and looks in the mirror and looks at her face and her body and shakes her hair to cover herself and smiles and she can’t quite grasp that movement for herself. She looks through old photo albums – the graveyards of relationships past – and she looks at her smile.
It is an ephemeral smile. Always on the edge of being formed and being swept away. It speaks of the Romani blood that flows through her veins. It speaks of a girl too terrified to be pinned down and a woman unwilling to capture anything else and hold it too closely to her.
As if her body would break into a million pieces at the thought of being pressed up against something without one foot already out the door.
Her cards reflect, they cannot reveal.
She wonders if that’s how it’s been all along.
From: <[email protected]>To: <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>
Sorry I can’t make it to dinner tonight guys! I’ll try to drive up after this mess at work is cleaned up! Can’t wait to see everyone and catch up!
She thinks at the time that maybe the disaster that called her back to work on a Friday night was all a ploy or a plot. Actually, at the time she was just thinking shitshitshitFUCKshitshitHOWFUCKWHATSHIT but she’d like to think that she’s not all that oblivious.
So when she walked in and found Willow studiously examining all the data that had apparently been transcribed incorrectly and doesn’t say a work to Jenny, there’s really nothing suspicious about it. Her assistant often stays late. Bit of a perfectionist.
There’s hot coffee waiting for her in her favorite mug with the perfect amount of sugar and cream (and just a hint of cinnamon) and she drinks it without a word. They work in silence, shoulders brushing occasionally, hands accidentally colliding, knees tangled up.
Willow kisses her while handing her a book that she nearly – but doesn’t – drop and it’s so sudden that she doesn’t think to even say anything at all except, “Thank you.”
To which the bright-eyed assistant merely responds, “Your welcome.”
As if passing out soft, cinnamon-scented kisses along with medieval manuscripts was all par for the course.
Which maybe it is. What does she really know about her assistant? Except that she has a young friend in the English Department at UC Sunnydale who takes marvelous candid shots of people and then prints them out and frames them. (Also there may be a tattooist and possibly a lawyer and also possibly a poet with a tech sort of day job.) (But she doesn’t pay attention.)
(She really doesn’t.)
An hour later, when the mishap has finally been handled and they are starting to stretch out their limbs and it’s nearing midnight but she feels energized when she should feel tired, she presses a kiss that is maybe more of a nibble onto Willow’s bottom lip and hopes that she isn’t blushing.
“Thank you,” Willow smiles.
“Thank you?” Jenny cocks her head to the side. “I think we’re doing this wrong.”
“Hmm…” Willow seems to ponder this for a minute.
Their third kiss is a mess of tongues and her hand tangled up in Willow’s hair and Willow’s hands grazing the side of her body and gasps and just enough yearning to feel like entrapment – but it goes down smooth like a good wine.
With their foreheads pressed together, trying to catch their breath, Willow laughs softly, “Damn.”
“That’s better.”
From: <[email protected]>To: <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>
Subject: Thanks you guys
Thanks for being so cool with Jenny tonight you guys. I know she was really nervous about meeting you. (It totally helped that you brought your girlfriend, too Dawnie! SHE’S SO CUTE!) Next dinner party is totally at her house.
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Fwd: Subject: Thanks you guys
See? They all loved you!
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>
Fwd: Re: Fwd: Subject: Thanks you guys
You owe me one, Will. And Bell:::
Original Message: From: <[email protected]>
Re: Fwd: Subject: Thanks you guys
I resent being called cute.
The smile in the mirror now may feel the same but it no longer looks as though it may fly off her face at any moment. There are new shoes in her closet and a lingering scent of cinnamon to the air. She’s hosting dinner parties and laughing and doesn’t feel too old or too young. And compromises don’t feel like enough is enough and even the lovely things feel solid.
Her cards are more complicated now, it takes a few passes through before she fully understands. She’s learning how to read herself without expectations.
She’s learning how to read the things she may not want to hear.
She dreams of red and she wakes to cinnamon and smiles.
The whole world is red and she’s swimming in it, laughing, kicking up her heels.
And it feels like being whole.