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1
It’s a hot, sticky summer’s day and Lucy feels positively miserable.
She’s done nothing for the past week but sit and wait around, and she can’t help but feel utterly useless in this state. Well, it’s hard to feel useful at all when your arm is wound up in an uncomfortably taut cast, throbbing with pain every couple of hours.
So here she is, struggling to entertain herself by reading the daily paper, legs crossed and paper strewn across her lap, threatening to fall to the floor every few minutes. The day was getting along at an excruciatingly slow pace, and with George and Lockwood out meeting a potential client, there was no one home to keep her company.
And the sweat. Oh, how powerless she is at the hands of this damned sweat.
It’s caused the innermost strands of her hair to stick to the very back of her neck, an unpleasant sensation that she is incapable of escaping because of her lousy arm injury. It’s days like this where she desperately misses her once-short hair, which has grown out to just slightly under her shoulders due to a lack of attention towards her appearance. They’ve been far too busy for her to care about the way she presents herself, but as soon as this cast was off, she was going to break out a pair of scissors and spend an afternoon in front of the mirror in her bathroom.
The tell-tale creak of a door tells her the boys have arrived home, and she lets out a big sigh of relief knowing that she would be put out of her misery soon.
“Lockwood!” she yells out.
He swaggers into the kitchen, rapier still sheathed by the side of his belt.
“Hey, Luce,” he shoots her a classic Lockwood smirk, the same one that makes Lucy unexplainably warm on the inside. “What’s up?”
“Could you, could you, um,” she shifts around, awkwardly reaching at the table where her elastic lies. “Do you mind tying my hair up for me?”
He grabs it for her, snapping it onto his wrist as he walks up just behind her.
“It’s just that I’ve had the most dismal afternoon sitting here alone in the sun,” she says as he begins to pull her hair up. It feels awfully intimate having him rake his fingers through her long tresses, detangling them in a way that slightly massages the top of her scalp.
“Hmm… missed me, then?” he teases, a smug lilt in his voice.
“I never said that.”
He works his way around the curvature of her head, pulling stray locks into firm grip as he rounds them up into the elastic from his wrist. Lucy thinks he’s about to let go, when he nudges the ponytail up to blow lightly on the back of her neck.
She shivers.
“You’re all sweaty.”
She rolls her eyes as he tugs at the end of the ponytail lightly.
“There, all secure.”
He leaves the kitchen with his trench coat flowing flamboyantly behind him, leaving a red-faced Lucy in his wake.
There, all secure, mocks the Skull. Lucy grows impossibly more red at the realisation that the Skull has just seen all of that .
“Shut up,” she hisses at him.
You look like a tomato!
“Why must the dead be so capable of expressing mirth?” she bemoans, slapping her forehead onto the surface of the table.
You just love playing house, don’t you? That was very boyfriend-like, was it not?
“Once again, we are not together.”
Ah yes, just another instance of an employer taking care of his employee. Totally normal.
”I’m going to lock you shut for a week if you don’t stop.”
2
It’s no secret that George can be a bit of a klutz. Lucy thinks it adds to his charm, but the one thing that is a bit of an issue is that they can never trust him to do the dishes without having to clean up a sad pile of broken porcelain afterwards.
Their busy week had resulted in George taking up a couple of shifts by the kitchen sink, which then had resulted in most of their mug collection ending up as little shards of rubbish in the bin.
Which is why now, they’ve had to improvise with their remaining two mugs until they have a free day to visit the shops and pick up a few new ones. Improvisation means the sharing of mugs as tea is of utmost importance in this household.
George, though the perpetrator of this grievance, is allowed to take a mug for himself, as he likes taking his tea without sugar. The other mug then, has become a communal pot for Lucy and Lockwood. They trade sips back and forth while going over the details of a job they have at a shabby garage tomorrow night, fingers brushing for much longer than they need to as they pass the mug to each other.
There’s a lull in the conversation as they survey the map their client has given them together. Lockwood has his arm loosely hanging around Lucy’s back, palm pressed to the table. She can feel his chest pressing up gently against her back. From another angle, it probably looks like he has her caged in an embrace from the back. The mental image makes Lucy shiver.
She cradles the mug in hand, until Lockwood releases one of his hands from the table to gesture for it. She hands it to him, mesmerised while staring at the movement of his Adam’s apple as he gulps down some tea.
If you were so desperate to exchange saliva you should have just sucked faces. Much more efficient, you know.
She nearly smacks Lockwood in the face, caught off guard by the sound of the Skull’s wry drawl. She jolts instead, losing her balance for a second before Lockwood’s steady hands grasp her by the shoulders.
He gives her an odd look.
“You okay?”
She gives him a shaky nod. She hopes the Skull is ready to be told off once they’re alone.
3
Lockwood is a pedant. There is little that embarrasses her in front of Lockwood at this point, save for her ever inconsistent grammar. (Driven by pure laziness, mind you. She isn’t stupid.)
He is awful about her habitual irreverence towards apostrophes, or the way she liked to scribble down a quick “ur” instead of labouring over a proper “you’re”. It has become routine to see broad splatters of blue ink circling her notes, the tiniest of corrections annotating her own jottings.
—
Lucys tap needs fixing
Lucy’s?
Lockwoods a pedant!
Lockwood’s fixed your tap and your grammar.
—
It doesn’t help that George is a nutter that could qualify as a living, breathing dictionary who would much rather lick the underside of his shoe than write anything with less than perfect punctuation. The good thing with George, however, is that he finds no need to expend the extra energy correcting her, perfectly content with the fact he can at least understand what she’s trying to get at.
Lucy stands alone as the sole common person of 35 Portland Row, and while this is something she pays no mind to, Lockwood’s perennial aversion to her grammar renders her a bit sheepish.
—
ur laundry is done. who wants theres done next
*Your *Who *THEIRS *You’re missing a question mark. (For the love of GOD, Lucy. Punctuate properly. I feel like a primary school teacher.)
yeah …no thx
You drive me mad.
;)
—
However, she has to admit that she does find a slight schadenfreude at Lockwood’s irritation over her lamentable writing habits. That being said, it is likely that she will never own up to the fact that this pleasure comes from how adorable she finds his annotations, or the fact that she’s been slowly making much more egregious errors to get a rise out of him.
She thinks she has probably just committed the worst sin of all, having scribbled down a monstrous entity of a sentence by the edge of the Thinking Cloth the night before. Today, she is incredibly eager to see if she has ruined a perfectly good morning for Lockwood.
The annotation does not disappoint, pronounced rings of blue and haphazard arrows decorating the aforementioned corner of the cloth.
—
Lets have a quick chat tmrw here noon — much things to cover + lockwood dont be late, your late everyday
1. APOSTROPHES, PLEASE!!! *Let’s *Don’t *YOU’RE.
2. MANY, not much. We can count the number of things we must cover, can we not?
3. My name is Lockwood. Please, and thank you.
4. I don’t even want to digest the way you’ve structured this.
I nearly had an aneurysm reading that, Luce. We MUST convene at some point to correct whatever it is that has gone wrong with your writing habits. I will strive to be punctual if you make an effort to write like a FUNCTIONING HUMAN.
—
It’s been a while since I last saw a smile grace your ever-scowling face.
Ah, now that is a snarky little voice she hasn’t missed.
The smile the Skull mentioned drops right off of her face.
“What?” she retorts, arms crossed and refusing to glance at the Skull’s jar, which lay across from her on the kitchen table.
I’m betting it has to do with your precious little boyfriend, Lockwood.
She only sighs, unable to fight his snide comments any longer.
Lucy’s grown tired of reminding the Skull that she and Lockwood are decidedly not together, regardless of what he invariably tries to suggest. She wonders why he’s so insistent that they seem like a “couple”. Sure, Lucy can admit that they move like a synergistic unit, but she would argue that it is the result of living and working together. They are friends. As good of friends as two people can be.
She’s perfectly happy with that. Or at least, that’s what she tells herself.
+1
Lockwood has very soft lips. Pillowy soft lips that will be the subject of Lucy’s dreams day-in and day-out from this day forward. The details on how they ended up here are still a bit murky because at present, Lucy is very much preoccupied getting as much of these soft lips as she can.
They all but gracefully stumble into the kitchen, their lips never leaving each other, with one of Lockwood’s hands cradling her face, while the other wraps around her waist. Lucy lets out a whimper when he hoists her up onto the table. They break away for a quick second to breathe, and Lucy is met with the image of Lockwood’s dark eyes, desire dripping from his expression. All too eager, he moves forward with intent and hungrily catches her lips once more, causing her to lose a bit of balance. She almost falls straight back onto the kitchen table, but Lockwood is able to seize onto her with one of his hands, the other latching onto the lever on Skull’s jar, accidentally pulling it open.
Neither of them realise, and continue on with their heated kisses until Lucy hears a piercing shriek.
My eyes!
“Shit!”