Work Text:
Because it goes something like this:
Late August, tips of the trees just beginning to be brushed with gold, if you know where to look and aren't fooled by the sunset sweeping everything golden at this time of the afternoon-evening. And with three years of Boston tucked under her belt, even her Southern California eyes know how to read the landscape.
And it's easier, windows down and sunroof open on her new-old car, the one she drove to her apartment from the dealership a week ago, pockets lighter without the check from her fancy New York summer internship, hands unfamiliar on the wheel.
She wanted to kiss goodbye for real to the green junker she left in the lot. Like, actually press her lips to the hood, but. The salesperson seemed judgemental and Rava is, well, never one to make much of a scene.
Nevertheless, it was the car she learned to drive in, puttering around high school parking lots with her mother white-knuckled in the passenger seat - the car that carried her across desert and mountains and cornfields and rivers to here, and so when the salesperson had their back turned to her for the slightest of moments, she pressed her lips to her fingers and tapped the windshield just the littlest bit.
She's a little sentimental about her cars.
A million years from now, she will wake up bleary-eyed and heavy-hooded the morning after she sends the divorce papers, and her dream car will be waiting in front of her building, the model she talked about for so long on their first date that she was sure he'd never want to see her again, brand new and perfect with a dozen roses inside, and she will have another dozen missed calls from him on her phone, and she will cry and she will make the kids breakfast and she will never once touch the wheel.
But that is then, and this is now, and right now she is pulling up in front of Kendall's frat house in her own car that she bought with her own money wearing sunglasses from the dollar store and the smile of a college student with one week of summer left.
There's a Polaroid of them - her, with eyes squinted shut from laughing at - Ken, pulling a face at the camera - and she's tucked it under the folding mirror-sunshield-felt-thing on the passenger side, and she can't wait for Kendall to flip it open because she can already see the big, dopey grin he'll try to hide once it falls into his lap and he turns it over, and the anticipation tingles all the way to her toes -
Frankly it's embarrassing, how much she's missed him.
It's been weeks since they've seen each other, properly. He was away when she moved back into Boston, and when she was in New York, well.
Kendall loves New York.
Kendall hates New York.
(She has not yet met his father.)
Late August, and shiny new car, and innocence, and she pulls up on the street in front of the driveway, empty beer cans crunching under her tires.
He's waiting, legs swinging as he's perched on the railing of the porch, bobbing his head to the music coming in from his headphones in that self-oblivious way that she's so incredibly fond of.
His hair's grown longer since the last time she saw him.
Unbuckled, she leans across to unlock the passenger side door, yells out through the open window-
"Looking for a ride?"
He looks up, and-
She's forgotten how much she's missed his smile.
She tilts the sunglasses down her nose, pretending to leer at him, and then she's grateful for the relative quiet of the frat neighborhood street because that means she can hear him laughing from the very top of the driveway as his sneakers crunch down the gravel.
The birds chirp, leaves rustle, August heat sitting warm on the arm she has slung out her open window.
She'd complete the act, get out and open his door and tip an imaginary hat to him in the way that she knows makes him laugh, but she doesn't, for the same reason that she's in park with the engine running on the street and not leaning against the hood up in the driveway, the same reason they're going to a secluded beach instead of her favorite restaurant, the same -
The sharp sound of a window opening, the shout reaching them before she sees the frat brother leaning out -
She can't hear what he says, but it's enough to sour Ken's expression.
They've tried the whole boyfriend-girlfriend thing the proper way before, with a suit and a sundress, eating fucking salads at a country club, her clutched at his elbow, but it makes Ken's hands sweat and it makes her self-conscious and itchy, so they do this wink-in-the-mirror charade instead,
Consequences be damned.
Like the way Ken won't look up from his lap until they're two blocks away.
August, Boston heat, and a lump heavy in her throat.
They sit quiet, Joni Mitchell on the radio, until a stoplight, and blessedly, by the time she looks over to Ken, he's melted and relaxed, hand hanging out the side, and seeing him with that blissed, content smile almost immediately makes the tension in her own chest dissipate with the light breeze.
In a dash, Kendall, seeing her smile, sits up to pluck the sunglasses off her face with deft fingers, flicking her gently in the nose as he does, then keeping them far out of her reach as she scrambles at him, trying to take them back, until they’re both shaking with laughter.
He perches them on his nose, makes a face at her that she knows he knows will make her crack an even wider grin, flips up the mirror to check himself out -
The picture falls into his lap.
And it's like she knew the choreography ahead of time, the way it takes a beat for him to turn over the picture and another beat to register and then he's looking at her and she's still laughing and then he's leaning over to turn his head and kiss her on the lips, awkward and perfect,
A horn honks insistently behind them.
She starts to pull away, places a steady hand on his shoulder, but he wraps his own hand around hers, with another at her waist, and well,
His hands are still shaking, slightly, but she can feel him laughing against her lips when the car revs and roars around them.
His hair, which she'd always seen military-grade short until this summer, is soft under her fingers, and she marvels at how it feels to smooth it in the little curve behind his left ear.
Her own hair is cut short, shorter than his now, (short like it's been ever since her prom date stood her up senior year of high school and she cut it with her dad's kitchen scissors, makeup running down her face) -
A million years from now, headlines in a magazine that his father owns will plaster her face and hair in gloss and ink and call her names she hasn't heard since grade school, and she will quietly grow her hair out and buy a curling iron and learn to walk in heels, for real this time, and she will clean out her closet and stop shopping in the men's section of stores, even when they're not in New York.
But then is then, and this is now, and right now she isn't thinking of anything except for the feeling of Kendall's fingers in the short hair on the back of her head and his mouth on her neck, brushing against the collar of the blue and white striped collared shirt she bought in a seaside shop back home, rolled up roughly at the sleeves.
The rest of the way to the Atlantic, his eyes are on her as she drives. Even when the seagulls start to caw, even when the salt breeze pushes in, even when the sunset starts to blaze glorious in the cloudless sky-
He is the heir to an empire and she is from a nothing town in the middle of the desert and when he looks at her like this she feels like they’re the only two people in the entire world.
A million years from now, she will find him face-down in the kitchen, and then she will drive him home from the hospital in a shiny black car that she did not pay for, and they will not look at each other once.
But that is then, and this is now, and now, the only time she can't feel his gaze on her face is when he looks down to where he has her fingers intertwined with his, lazily tangled on top of the center console.
In a month, they will be drunk and she will paint his nails white, and he will cry.
She pulls off the road when they get to the spot and he laughs at her parking job but there's not even a shade of malice hidden in his voice. They haven't learned resentment with each other yet, much less how to disguise it.
And on the beach, he listens.
Like, actually listens to her as they sit solitary on the shoreline, blanket beneath them and sand between their toes, in a way that she does not yet know will increasingly become rare.
He listens, and holds her hand in his as the conversation threads around their irresponsible landlords, her brother's wedding back home, the seashells she used to collect as a kid -
He knows, because he listens, that she likes to watch the exact moment the last sliver of the sun disappears from view, and that it's because the thing that makes the sunset so beautiful is also so painful to look at, and that it's also because of the way the beauty lingers in the rest of the sky and in the reflection on the water and in the heat in the air even after the beautiful thing is gone.
And so they wait.
She finds wildflowers, purple and white, braids them into his hair. Fashions a rough crown for her own head and declares herself king.
He talks in his roundabout way about his father. They sit together silent, nothing but the ocean roar, after he asks about her mother,
He finds a tiny intact-but-empty clam shell in the shallows, the two identical shells still connected at the base. When he crouches down in the water, he doesn’t seem to mind the waves splashing up onto the linen of his shorts, and she watches him gently wash the rough grains of sand away into the ocean.
He places it in her hand. Water droplets shine in the last fading light. Pale pink and tan bands curve elegantly on the smooth surface of the shell and she turns it over with her fingers, looking at each side, and he looks at her with those eyes and she understands what he's trying to say.
They sit, shoulders leaning against each other and his hand tracing loose, lazy circles on her arm, and he waits until the sun is completely out of view and then some before he dips his head and his eyelashes brush against her and his nose bumps hers, cracking her mouth into a smile, and that's when he kisses her.
-
A million years from now it will be August again and the beautiful thing will be gone.
He will be coked up and delirious and she will have bags under her eyes and they will be fighting at four in the morning on the balcony of their beautiful empty ugly heartless penthouse, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, whispering so the kids won't wake up before their first day of school.
And he will rant, not waiting for an answer, about how she only wanted him for his father and for his name and his money and she will suddenly think of this moment so clearly that she could swear she smelled salt in the air. And for just a second the only thing she will want in the entire world is for his hand to be on her cheek like it is now.
And for him to look at her like he is now. And for the sun to be slipping under the horizon behind them and the sky spanning above them and life stretching out in front of them-
But it is not then.
And she does not yet have those years heavy on her shoulders.
And for now they are in love, and the world is beautiful around them, and the dark is holding them, and they are happy.
-
Fall in love with me how our parents fell in love
Fall in love with me and lie
Say it will last forever and our youth further still
Fall in love with me on a bar crawl at the back end of a dirty city
Fall in love with me at the edge of a needle and be the one moment in my life that wasn't sad
Fall in love with me out of sympathy and discover all too late that you weren't kidding
Fall in love with me out of spite and learn I'm just as jealous as you were trying to make him
Fall in love with me on a dare
And don't you ever look back
Hurt me after years of passion
Replace our love with fury
And let's both be surprised when we finally notice the difference
Fall in love with me how our parents fell in love
I'll let you be my lesson that good things come to an end
- D. C. Walker, How Our Parents Fell in Love