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Remix Redux 11: The Eleventh Hour
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Published:
2014-05-04
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3,761
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1/1
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51
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Not Yet Known (The Inconvenient Soulmates Remix)

Summary:

“If you tell anybody we’re soulmates,” Cece said, “I have two people in my phone that will kill you right now. Literally.”

Notes:

This story takes place in a universe where everybody has a soulmate, and you find your soulmate the first time you kiss them.

All my thanks to my beta readers, Care and Ghostcat. Spoilers through mid-season 3.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Cece figured out that Schmidt was her soulmate the third night she stayed over at the loft.

She hadn’t given him much notice, before that. He was pretentious and overly-precise, cute in a Best Friend of the Leading Man sort of way, and he’d been coming onto her since he’d laid eyes on her, dancing up on her like a best hits compilation of 90s dance moves garnished with a generous and only somewhat delightful dash of insecure asshole. While she thought she mostly liked Jess’s new roommates, it wasn’t exactly the hottest action she’d ever seen.

But it was late and she was half-asleep and lonely, and Schmidt had stopped the posturing to act like a normal human being for .2 seconds, so she’d caved, craving touch and human companionship and somebody to be her friend for a few unguarded minutes.

She reached over to take his hand on the bed, acting on some impulse she couldn’t quite explain, and the first time their fingers touched it felt like the universe had just smacked her in the funny bone, like all the bones in her arm had gone hollow and vibrating. Schmidt’s breath stuttered next to her, and a nervous mix of dread and anticipation started to curdle in her stomach as she realized that he’d felt it, too. She was suddenly, painfully wide awake.

He turned so he was facing her, head on the pillow, and breathed, “Can I…?”

Cece nodded.

The kiss was tentative, just his lips pressed up against hers. Cece didn’t feel anything for a split-second and she thought oh, okay, this is fi—

(Cece and Jess used to trade dog-eared romance novels with each other in middle school, bare-chested warriors towering over women with dresses like rose petals and eyes that begged, and there was always That Scene, the first kiss, the soul bonding, the happily ever after. Jess thought it was better than the sex scenes. Cece always told people that she mostly liked the dirty stuff.)

And then.

Schmidt’s hand clenched around her own, crushing her fingers, and the universe ripped itself apart around them, pillows and bedroom and apartment building falling away. Cece gasped, heart racing like a scared rabbit in her chest, thump thump thump, the only thing she could hear above the roaring in her ears. Something slotted inside of her, a feeling of completion, a vague dissatisfaction she’d never realized was loneliness falling away from her, leaving her feeling whole. Warm.

When she opened her eyes again Schmidt was staring at her, slack-jawed, a sweet, dumb look of shock on his face, and she thought, oh. That’s why it’s him.

Then he snapped his jaw shut, worked it a couple times, and when he opened it again he said, “I can’t believe my soulmate is a model. The universe wants you to be the sexual fuse box I solder myself to, Cece. Who am I to say no to that?”

Cece blinked, then narrowed her eyes, because if there was one thing being a model had taught her, it was how to handle douchebags.

“If you tell anybody we’re soulmates,” Cece said, “I have two people in my phone that will kill you right now. Literally.”

—

Still, it turned out that sex with Schmidt was the best sex she’d ever had, and even that was a ridiculous understatement. It was THE BEST SEX SHE’D EVER HAD, all caps, no filler. Sex with your soulmate was overwhelming, a religious experience, a combination of that universe-tearing-itself-apart feeling with orgasms, a pastime which she was already a pretty big fan of. She made the mistake of telling Schmidt the religious experience thing in a moment of drowsy weakness, and he showed up the next night with a white pope hat, a rosary, and a small vial of something he claimed was holy water and asked her if she wanted to do it Vatican-style and, God help her, she said yes so fast she almost bit her tongue.

She wasn’t sure what it meant that Schmidt was her soulmate, though. Soulmates weren’t a guarantee, that’s what everybody said. Your soulmate might be the other half of your soul, sure, but if you hated yourself in the first place it was pretty hard to like somebody else with the same pins and wiring underneath.

Schmidt changed everything about himself to be the person he was now.

Cece started to figure out what that meant the first time he broke up with her.

—

“I don’t get it, Jess,” Cece moaned, and dropped her head on the wooden bar. Her forehead smashed into a lone peanut. “Why Schmidt? What am I-? What is-?” She gestured up and down at herself and Jess nodded drunkenly, her forehead creased in concentration. “Soulmates. What does that even mean?”

“Probably,” Jess started, and stopped to wiggle her nose, then ended up all distracted.

“He white fanged me. He white fanged me, Jess.”

“Schmidt,” Jess said, and poked a righteous finger at the air, “is a scaredy cat. Nick says Schmidt used to be a big old softie. Used to be sweetest guy he knew. Nick says.”

Cece was quiet for a while, staring down into the eclipsed face of her drink, before saying, “Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

Jess shook her head. “No way.”

“But we’re soulmates. Me! Soulmates with Schmidt! And he’s the one who doesn’t want me.”

“Something wrong with Schmidt,” Jess slurred authoritatively. “Best person I know, Cece. That’s you.” Jess leaned forward and tapped Cece on the chest, twice, looking her in the eyes. Her pupils were wide and dilated. Jess was going to be so hungover tomorrow.

Cece frowned, and fiddled with her straw. “I was… I’m not always that nice to him.”

Jess waved a hand. “Schmidt.”

“I make him wait in the car for me when we go places. Like a dog.”

“But… Schmidt.”

Cece’s head snapped back up. “That’s another thing. I don’t even know his real name, Jess! He’s my soulmate and I don’t know his name.”

“It’s probably something awful. Like…” Jess furrowed her brow and licked her lips twice. “…John. Bobby. Frank.”

“Sweetie, those aren’t awful.”

“Would be to Schmidt,” Jess said confidently, and then windmilled sideways off her bar stool in a drunken, flailing blur of polka dots and ribbons.

—

Dating, post-soulmate, was the worst kind of dating that Cece could imagine.

She went to a kissing mixer for Indian singles where everybody touched lips under the watchful eye of the convention staff, and it was just about the least sexy thing ever. There was one soulmate match in the middle of the afternoon, a petite woman from table four and a guy with a dastar from the lower half of the tables who fainted after they kissed, and when he came to again the entire conference room clapped for the two of them. Cece felt slightly sick about everything, afterwards.

She called her parents that night and told them to set her up on a date.

Not everybody married or even met their soulmate in their lifetime, so it wasn’t like being introduced to a family friend through your parents was that weird, even with an unknown soul bond lurking somewhere in the wild. And Shivrang was a nice guy. He seemed a little disappointed after they kissed the first time and the world didn’t crash down around their ears, but recovered quickly enough and gallantly offered to take her to see a movie (which he cried during) and talked about wanting kids (the idea of having kids was an itch in the back of Cece’s mind) and was the first person she talked to after Jess showed up at her door (ranting about kissing Nick or Nick kissing her or Nick being her soulmate or something that Cece couldn’t quite wrap her head around yet).

And somehow it all ended with her, standing at the altar, her soul bond with Schmidt singing to her, pulling her down with fingers tangled in her hair, this great tidal pull in her soul, the salt ocean of her heart slopping messily out onto the shore.

She looked at Shivrang and she looked back to Schmidt and she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t. There was a badger in the ceiling of her wedding. She couldn’t do it.

And for a while after that, she was happy again.

It didn’t last.

—

The universe was shit.

“The universe,” she said, Jess’s fingers moving against her scalp, braiding her hair in a complicated, swirling up-do Jess had found a tutorial for online, “is shit, Jess.”

Jess didn’t say anything, and Cece knew she was thinking about Nick, about the way she went stupid and glowing around him now, but was also too good of a friend to flat out disagree with her.

“We should have been soulmates. The two of us,” Jess said finally, and her fingers swept the ticklish part of the back of Cece’s neck, searching for stray hairs. “We could solve murder mysteries together. Day and Parekh, lady detectives. No crime too small, no murder too heinous.”

“No Nick?” Cece asked, trying to sound neutral. She was increasingly, astoundingly bitter about the whole soulmates thing. She was also getting worse at not letting it show.

“Nick… Nick could be our muscle.”

Cece wrinkled her nose. “Sounds more like a job for Coach.”

“Oh. Yeah. Nick could be… our chauffeur?”

“That’s what you’re going with?”

“I don’t know! Winston… Winston would be our man on the street, our Johnny-go-lightly Baker Street Irregular. With his sidekick extraordinaire, Furguson.”

Neither of them mentioned Schmidt.

“You know, I think you might be my soumate, Jess,” Cece said finally. “So what if I can’t blow my brain apart having sex with you? What did that ever get Schmidt and me? It was all weird sex and stupidly amazing orgasms and maybe that’s all we ever were. You, though, Jess,” she leaned her head back into the cradle of Jess’s hands, “we’ve always had each other.”

“And we always will,” Jess said. “Tilt your head down.”

—

Schmidt cornered her in the hallway outside the loft the next day with a serious expression and a sad bouquet of wilting daisies. He shoved them toward her.

“These are for you,” he said, shortly. “I… These are to apologize. For me. I’m sorry. For… for me. I’m a fool, and a coward, and selfish, and everything else you’ve ever called me. And I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I still wanted to say it, I guess. I’m sorry.”

Cece’s stomach turned over sickly, nauseatingly. She didn’t take the flowers.

He tried to smile at her, but it was crooked and fading before it even started. “I know what you’re thinking. Flowers? So 1992.”

“We broke up because you cheated on me,” she said.

“I know.”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

“I know that. But I…” a strange, terrified expression flickered across his face, “I wanted to say it anyway.”

“How can I feel anything for you?” she asked. “I don’t know you.”

“But we’re soulmates,” he said, staring at her, holding the wilting flowers like a cartoon caricature of a dejected lover.

“I don’t even know what that means,” she said, and left.

—

Winston ended up going through a way too-intense phase where he said he was pretty sure that Furguson was his soulmate, only he couldn’t be sure because there was no way to kiss a cat on the lips, because cat lips (“WHY,” Nick moaned, wide-eyed, as he watched the two of them), and Cece went through a pretty great rebound phase where she made out a lot with Coach, because Coach was hella hot and available and also (most importantly) very much not-Schmidt.

But it didn’t last with Coach, and Cece wasn’t booking much work lately, which was scary and demoralizing in an entirely different way. And then that Christmas, Schmidt gave her an envelope with a picture he’d drawn, an unstudied sketch of a woman with dark, solemn eyes and hair falling in heavy lines around her shoulders. He attached a card that read Even with more talent, I couldn’t do you justice. But this is a start.

He didn’t mention it to her in person. She never thanked him for it.

But Schmidt called her a week later, and, for the first time since the summer, she answered the phone.

—

“I’m really into Michael Bolton,” Schmidt said, on speaker phone as she got ready for work. “He just really understands the soul of a woman, you know? The Bolt’s a playa, son.”

“Women are not another species, Schmidt. Why are we talking about Michael Bolton again?”

“Because I want you to know everything about me,” Schmidt said, his voice suddenly and oddly serious, before launching into a prolonged explanation of his childhood fear of Mr. Potato Head’s many career/costume/facial changes.

He called her again the next morning and told her he used to wear a pink bunny outfit as a kid, only it wasn’t an Easter thing or a Christmas Story thing because he was Jewish, Cece, not all white people are the same, seriously, and somewhere between Schmidt accusing her of some sort of weird reverse-racism thing Cece was pretty sure Schmidt was admitting that, push comes to shove, he just really liked wearing a pink bunny onesie.

“I don’t hate Michael Bolton,” she said, when he was finally done talking. “I mean, I don’t like like Michael Bolton, but I guess I don’t hate him either.”

“I knew it,” Schmidt crowed. “You’re a Boltonhead. It takes one to know one, Cecelia.”

Cece couldn’t help it; she laughed.

Schmidt was silent for a moment before he said, in that quiet tone he’d been using more often lately, “I like it when you laugh.”

She isn’t sure what to say to that. “I like it when I laugh, too.”

“Do you ever think about the way things used to be?”

“What?”

“When we first met. Just you, me, the holy spirit, and a reinforced ten gallon plastic tote of sex toys. Life was simpler back then.”

“We broke up because you cheated on me, Schmidt. You don’t get to be nostalgic for the good old days.” She felt tired all over again as she said the words.

“I’m not… I know. I know that.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“I’m…” A pause. “You said you didn’t know who I was. You said you didn’t understand why we were soulmates. I thought… maybe I could… show you who I am. The dumb parts. It’s like - it would be like the opposite of dating. Instead of all the good stuff I’d show you to impress you, I’m giving you all the weird unpleasantness I’d try to hide.”

And she really didn’t know what to say to that.

“You think you were hiding the weirdness before?”

She could almost imagine his smile at that, teeth white, chin tucked and eyes downcast, more shy and charming than he had a right to be. He didn’t smile like that often.

“Trying.”

“Mmm hmm,” she said.

—

He touched her hand passing her a plate, their fingers brushing, and she felt it again, that crazy rush of utterly right connection, the universe vibrating up the atoms of her skin, up the marrow of her bones, connecting her to the other half of her soul. She almost dropped her plate of spaghetti in shock. It had been so long since they’d touched, she’d forgotten what it felt like. What having a soulmate felt like.

Schmidt did something with his lips that was halfway between a wince and a smile, and mouthed sorry at her. She nodded, only a bit shaky, back at him.

—

Cece wondered what Schmidt had been like, before. Before he’d moved to L.A. with Nick, and Elizabeth had broken up with him the first time around - before he’d changed himself, turned himself over, rearranged the pieces of his soul, inside and out. She’d only ever seen one picture of him, of the before him, a large dude with flapping t-shirts and a toothy, awkward grin who radiated sweetness and eagerness like a dog, tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth. She wondered, sometimes, if that was the guy who was her soulmate, that version of Schmidt she’d never met: the 1.0 version.

Schmidt gave her a stack of photos of him growing up, snapshot after snapshot of this awkward kid she barely recognized. She poured over them for days before showing them to Jess as well.

“I think… sometimes I think that Schmidt the way he used to be - you know, this guy,” Cece pointed to the photo she held, a prom photo, high school Schmidt resembling a large, squat, floral couch like the one Jess’s parents used to have in their basement, “…I think that guy was supposed to be my soulmate. Sometimes I think we’re - we just met each other at the wrong time.”

Jess smiled looking at the picture, a little fondly, and Cece was surprised at the odd stab of jealousy she felt that Jess could still casually treat Schmidt as a friend.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think you could have liked Schmidt? Back then?”

Cece shrugged. “Sure. Why not.”

“I don’t know, Cece. You hooked up with a lot of pretty douchey guys. Remember your Euro DJ phase? That guy with the giant face tattoo?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “That one.”

“I’m just saying, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have looked twice at Schmidt.”

Cece frowned, and looked down at the photo again, running her finger along the side.

—

Buster was young, but he was also cute and sweet and, most importantly, he made her laugh, a crooked grin hooked into the corner of his wide mouth. And he was Australian, which meant an accent, which meant Cece was definitely going to Scrooge McDuck into a pile of that.

When Cece had been twenty, she’d paraded before a lineup of men who had tried to mold her and batter her into a shape they could sell, peddling sex and the belief that hair that took hours with a professional stylist could be achieved with a five dollar bottle of shampoo. When Schmidt had been twenty he’d lived in a tiny dorm room with Nick halfway across the country, the dumbest boys at the school, dorky and big-hearted and insecure. And the two of them had both ended up here, in the same place.

Buster was twenty years old and kissed like a million bucks, and he didn’t seem to care about soulmates. Cece could feel something inside of her start to slowly unknot.

—

“Do you think we can be friends again?”

She was walking to her job at the bar, purse over her shoulder, only half paying attention to Schmidt’s rambling as she ran through the list of cocktail recipes she’d been memorizing one more time. “What?”

“Do you -“

“I heard you.” So they were having this conversation now. Manhattan: whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters, cherry. “Maybe,” she said. “We’re talking again. We talk all the time, actually.”

“We do.”

“I know you cry when you watch the Lion King.”

He sniffed. “I’m a human being, Cece.”

“You’re kind of a freak.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, graciously.

“So maybe we are friends. A little bit.”

Schmidt was quiet for a while, but she felt soothed just knowing he was on the other end of the line, breathing softly into the phone as she skipped cracks on the sidewalk like she used to do with Jess as kids. Sidecar: cognac, triple sec, lemon juice. Or maybe that was supposed to be sour mix?

“Do you think we can be just friends?” She heard the unspoken refrain of soulmates, soulmates, soulmates beating underneath the question.

Cece scuffed the heel of her boot against the curb. Tequila sunrise: tequila, orange juice, grenadine. The afternoon air was muggy and tasted like car exhaust, but the sky was clear and bright over her head and she could smell, distantly, the clean, humid saltiness of the ocean, just out of sight. She wondered what Schmidt was actually asking. She wondered how their life would look like going forward, always intertwined, always two halves of the same whole, even if they never spoke again.

“I think,” she said finally, testing the words as she said them, “that we can be anything we want to be.”

“I think I’d like to try to be your friend,” he said, the most serious she’d ever heard him.

“I think I’d like that,” she said.

—

Jess helped Winston hang streamers to celebrate his and Furguson’s one year cat-iversary while Nick and Coach did the furniture moving and heavy lifting in the living room. Schmidt had been relegated to the kitchen and given directions to make omelets for everybody after pointedly explaining to Winston that he hated cat people. Cece had been assigned sous chef duty and handed a large knife and a seat at the kitchen island.

Jess laughed at something Winston said, crepe paper hung everywhere in rainbow streams, as Nick and Coach had an increasingly intense and loud argument about the proper way to move a couch. Cece chopped green pepper and onion and ham, feeding little chunks of the ham to Furguson when nobody else was looking, who sat on the chair next to her and watched her with a slow, swishing tail and intense eyes.

And Cece thought, suddenly, that this, now, right here, all of them together - maybe this was what the soulmate thing was actually about.

It was a strange, warm thought.

Nick ripped open his button-down shirt in the living room behind her, yelling something incomprehensible about furniture moving strategy. Coach screamed something back even louder and tore off his track pants. Schmidt turned around with an apron around his waist and a fussy mom expression to yell at both of them to TAKE IT DOWN A NOTCH.

And Cece looked at Schmidt, holding court over a sauté pan with a spatula in his hand, the entire loft behind her filled with voices and argument and love, and she felt a rush she hadn’t felt in a long time, a heady, easy glow filling her chest, tinged with only a little bit with ache.

Schmidt caught her eye and blinked, losing focus from the argument behind them. Then he smiled, tentatively, at her. It was a shy, goofy, transparent sort of smile, sincere and painfully hopeful.

Cece smiled back.

Notes:

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