Work Text:
Joey doesn’t call her in the morning.
Amber would know. She woke up at an ungodly hour, because she doesn’t know what constitutes the morning, and she doesn’t want to miss it. And she’s been glued to her phone since then. And he doesn’t call. Amber tries not to think about it.
And yet she can’t stop thinking about it.
She thinks about it all the way through a halfhearted breakfast she can’t even really stomach. She thinks about it as she gets dressed for work and she thinks about it all the way there. She thinks about it when she clocks in and she’s thinking about it, currently, at the host stand.
The date had been perfect. And kissing him had been more than perfect, but there is no higher word— they’d have to invent one, something entirely new, to describe the passionate way his lips had pressed against hers.
And he hasn’t called her, so she did something wrong. Right?
Amber can’t even bring herself to think about the possibility he just doesn’t like her anymore and yet it’s so, so overwhelmingly present. The fact she managed to score two dates with him is already abysmal, because she’s Amber, and he’s… ugh, he’s Joey. He could ask out anyone. He could have a woman in his bed in the time it would take Amber to get over herself and text him.
He chooses not to. For her. Which Amber thinks is a stupid choice for him to make and yet spends every waking moment hoping he won’t realize it’s a stupid choice to make, and stop making it. It’s a stupid choice and she needs him to make it so badly.
Because Amber likes him. Amber wants him. Amber needs— to shut up, actually, before these words get any stronger.
And then they fight.
They’ve never fought before and she thinks it might be the scariest thing that’s ever happened to her.
In all honesty it’s funny that Trick is what gets them to fight. Foolishly she reasons it’s almost domestic, the two of them fighting over a son. She says a son because Trick isn’t her son, Trick is Joey’s son, which makes him to her an ambiguous other thing that no one else seems to grasp.
Including Joey.
Amber leans back against the wall of the parking lot. She was meant to go back to the host stand, but Hell if she’s going back up there, not when her heart is hammering inside her chest like this. Logically she knows she’s going to cry.
She doesn’t want to cry over Joey.
Joey, who kissed her so sweetly and rested his hands on the small of her back and said he’d call in the morning and didn’t.
Joey, who she nearly quit her fucking job for, and now won’t even look at her.
Well. An irrational thought crosses her mind that if she gets in her car and drives home in the middle of her shift she’ll lose her job anyway. And that’ll show him, right?
Amber’s walking before she actually comes to a decision.
Every step she takes she gets further from the restaurant. Further from him. And she feels utterly stupid because there is no getting away from him— only further. There’s nowhere to go that won’t carry the thought of him. She’ll leave him in the kitchen and she’ll get in the car she drove home in after their first date, and drive where? To the doorstep he kissed her on? Open the door with the hand he held, fall crying against the sheets she wants him to press her so lovingly against? She can’t go anywhere.
Her palms press flat against her car and she can’t open the door. Because she can’t go anywhere.
She doesn’t even want her fucking car in the parking lot. It’s not supposed to be her car here.
She’s not supposed to have driven it here.
She wants Joey to drive her in the morning.
She wants him to wake her up at whatever ungodly hour he starts getting dressed. She wants to groggily climb out of his bed with his cotton sheets in a shirt too big for her. She wants breakfast in the morning even if it’s just a lazy bowl of cereal because he’ll be cooking all day anyway and he promises he’ll sneak her a fruit tart or something later.
She wants to hop in the shower with him and have bottles of her shampoo and conditioner next to his. She wants her uniform in his dresser drawers. She wants to button that stupid fucking chef’s coat she’s so obsessed with.
She wants to kiss him on the nose and for him to bring her in for a stronger kiss and for them to force themselves through the door every morning like the bed or the couch aren’t where they’d really rather be. She wants to get in the passenger seat of his car with his hand on her thigh and a CD of her favorite songs in his old stereo.
She wants to wait for him to get out of the car so he can open her door and wrap an arm around her waist and kiss her in the parking lot. She wants to see him up at the host stand more than the guests.
And Trick.
She wants Trick, too, though not how Joey believes she does. He wouldn’t believe her otherwise, would he? He wouldn’t believe how she actually wants Trick, because he can’t believe how she wants him.
Amber wants him. In that deep, embarrassing, all-consuming way she doesn’t talk about and hopes he can’t sense. Nicole can look at Trick and see a man, a prospect, a game. Amber looks at Joey wondering how to tell him I wish your son had been mine.
She wonders endlessly, she has wondered endlessly, since she saw the kid— the man. And she always ends up at the same harrowing conclusion, which is that she cannot tell him that. She cannot utter the unspeakable truth lest he come to the inevitable conclusion: that she is insane and not worth his time.
She doesn’t know shit about social norms. She knows, though, that you can’t look at someone who must be near your own age and think about T-ball games and putting bandages on scraped knees.
She knows she can’t crave the unobtainable. She knows she can’t, shouldn’t want as much as she does. If she wants this much now— two dates and maybe a few weeks in— how much will she come to want? Will she want more, or will her want devolve into need, a constant, yearning, craving, ruining need?
Impulsively, Amber kicks her car door. The stupid door of her stupid car that isn’t even supposed to fucking be here. Ruining.
Are they racing down that finish line?
Is it a race, really, or does he only run because he expects to see her there already?
She kicks the car door again.
And then she screams.
And then she’s the crazy girl in the parking lot kicking cars and screaming. And that makes her cry. She’d already been crying but this makes a sob tear deep from her core. It fixes nothing. She wants to scream at him. She wants to scream and she wants to beg.
She wants to beg him. Love the crazy girl kicking and crying and screaming in your parking lot. Love the stupid, crazy girl who can’t stand to look at anyone but you. Love the stupid, crazy, obsessive, delusional girl who loves you, loves you, loves you.
Loves you. Loves you. Like breathing. Until her bones ache. Until her heart is heavy with it. Until she can’t stand it. Until she can’t stand herself. Until it makes her sick. Until she’s driven herself off the deep end and stays afloat merely to see if he’s watching.
And he isn’t, until he is. He isn’t when it fucking counts. He isn’t, until there’s something to feed his self-hatred. And all she does is love him and she just wants to love him more than he hates himself and yet he doesn’t know. Can’t know. Shouldn’t know.
Her shoulders shake with it. He can’t yell at her. He can’t tell her what she’s doing, what she’s feeling. He can’t. What does he know? What will he ever know if he doesn’t fucking listen?
She kicks her car again and yells.
“LISTEN TO ME!”
Silence.
And then—
“Amber.”
She jumps away from the car so quick she nearly falls over. Nearly falls right into—
Fuck.
Joey’s body is, as always, so strong, firm against hers. It’s too easy to curl comfortably into him, and she has to force herself to stand straight again.
Amber can’t meet his gaze. Not when he’d just been ordering her so fiercely far from it not long before.
“Where are you going?” is such a stupid question for him to ask, then. And yet he’s been making a habit of those lately.
It prompts her to glance up at him, trying to will the tears away from the corners of her eyes.
“Well, obviously, I was gonna get in my car, go to your house and fuck your son,” Amber says, voice riddled with sarcasm.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. She can’t talk like that. It’s absolutely out of character for her. She knows it damn well. Joey must know it too because he very visibly tenses. He has to know, too, that she isn’t serious. Or at least she hopes he knows.
“Trick doesn’t live in my house,” he tells her plainly.
“Oh.” Amber sniffs, crossing her arms across her chest. “Yeah. I’d know that if I’d ever been there.”
Joey nods, once, looking away.
She doesn’t like this.
She doesn’t like speaking to him like this and yet with every passing word a weight lifts from her chest. She wonders if she’s needed this.
Then Joey says, “You want to come over?”
“‘Course I wanted to come over.”
She sees the past tense register to him and some unreadable hurt fills his eyes. It hurts her too because she’s lying because she would let him drive her off the edge of a cliff, of course she wants to go home with him. She doesn’t even want to come to his house. She wants it to be their home.
“I would let you move in if I could trust you wouldn’t try to fuck the neighbors.” Joey’s not looking at her.
“You are so fucking delusional,” Amber says without thinking.
And Joey looks at her then.
“I’m serious. You’re crazy.” She steps closer to him, pain in her voice, tears in her eyes, fire in her words. “I could kill your neighbors dead and you’d get mad at me for… smiling when I put the knife in.”
Joey shrugs but his gaze never leaves her.
“I don’t want you putting your knife in other men,” He deadpans.
Lord in fucking Heaven.
“You’re so—,”
“Jealous, Amber. Yeah. No shit.”
“You’re jealous?” Amber snarls. “I have spent the past six months hearing about every woman you’ve fucked and left. You don’t think I get jealous?”
Very quietly, almost a whisper, Joey says, “None of them had six months.”
“What?”
“If I was gonna fuck you ‘n’ leave, I would’ve already. Wouldn’t have given no one time to warn you.” Joey pauses, seems to consider, then adds, “What, do you wish you listened?”
And she can tell from his voice it’s an answer he doesn’t even want to hear.
“I wish you’d listen.”
Amber runs a hand through her hair. She blinks tears away, looking everywhere but him.
“‘Cause you don’t know shit about jealousy, Joey, you really don’t. You think you’re jealous?” She continues. Her breathing quickens, her body heavy with the weight of it. Her heart aches. “You think you’re jealous, Joey? You have a CHILD with another woman!”
“Jesus, Amber, that was before you were born—,”
“Yeah, all the good shit in your life happened before I was born. I know.”
They only meet each other’s eyes then. Neither of them like what they see. Neither of them like what they’re becoming. Nothing stops them. Nothing compels them to stop.
Joey’s not at all quick to respond but when he does it’s a low, spiteful, “Well, it hasn’t been very long since.”
Amber rolls her eyes so hard it almost hurts.
“You don’t think I’m too young.”
“I think,” Joey says, “you’d rather be with a younger guy—,”
“You think I’d be better off with a younger guy,” Amber interrupts. “You don’t care what I’d rather do at all.”
“Okay, Amber.” Joey raises his hands in defeat. “Tell me what you’d rather do, then. Tell me what you want.”
Despite herself, Amber shakes.
She realizes not long after that she’s begun to cry. The trembling of her chest is a sob coursing through her body.
In a voice small and pathetic she tells him, “I want your son to know my name.”
And she doesn’t mean after I’ve told him, after he’s already shown up at our job, with no idea of who’d be greeting him.
She means show me to your family as if I am to be one of them.
“I want to be your girlfriend. I want t—,” Amber chokes back a sob, “I want to talk to you all the time. I want to know you. Y— you told me to… to flirt with some random asshole at the host stand and I can’t think of anything I want less. I think— I think I’m scared I hate everyone that’s not you most of the time, anyway. I hate every guy that even looks at me. I hate every text I get that’s not from you. I hate the stupid doors between us all day because I hate it when you’re not looking at me. And I—,”
Amber looks up at him, teardrops glistening on her cheeks. His hand tenses visibly as if resisting the urge to gently wipe them away.
“And I like you. So much,” she whispers. “Joey, I want you to like me.”
The please is unspoken and yet she couldn’t sound more like she’s begging if she tried.
And Joey grabs her wrist.
Joey grabs her wrist.
Somehow this doesn’t scare her— there’s tenderness, unavoidable, in the larger hand that holds her. Yet she can only look at him, look at the way his lips part and his eyes attempt to conceal the storm of emotion within. She can only look at him, as he takes her palm so gently and brings it to rest against his chest.
Amber feels his heart beating.
Subconsciously her breathing paces itself to the rhythm.
They stand there. Connected.
“You don’t think I like you?” Joey whispers , in a tone so clear yet so soft she can tell it hurts him to even say. The heartbeat under her palm quickens. “I don’t think about anything else.”
Tears spring to her eyes.
“I’m not lyin’ to ya,” Joey says, as if his words could chase them away. “Couldn’t if I tried.”
And there’s a matching thump, thump, thump against her palm to affirm it.
“Yeah? Okay? So listen, Bambi, I do l—,” He looks away from her and yet she can feel his heart racing. It’s not a quickening, it’s an immediate spike, like it’s trying to burst from his chest. He has to grin, self-deprecatingly. “Like you.”
“That’s it?” Amber asks, because she might as well, with her finger practically over the trigger at this point.
“Okay, Amber, guess,” is what he replies. But she can feel how his heart pounds, and so she doesn't have to.
Still, she whispers, “I don’t want to guess. I want you to tell me.”
“Yeah, and I don’t wanna look…” Joey winces. “…more pathetic than I already do tonight.”
Amber sniffs, using the heel of her free hand to brush her face free of tears. Her bottom lip quivers. “You’re such a dick, Joey.”
“I know.”
“You yelled at me.”
“I know, Bambi.”
Her voice breaks. “And I still feel… very pathetic things for you, you know.”
To that, Joey says nothing.
He just breathes in deep. His eyes search hers and though he can’t feel the flutter of her heart he can see the honesty in her eyes, so vulnerable and pure it’s almost brutal. And he shifts, like he wants to pull away from her.
Which is what scares her more than anything.
She can’t grab him. Can’t pull him any closer. Can’t make him resist. Can’t make him listen. Can’t make her believe him.
But she can stay.
If he goes, he goes. She stays.
Amber presses her small hand flat against his chest and he wraps it in his with an unwavering gentleness. She can see him tense with this new sensation— her hand over his heart, his hand over hers. In that moment they both feel it. They have to feel it.
It's inescapable, the way his heart beats for her.
“I know,” Joey tries to say, but pauses. “I mean, I don’t— Amber, you really shouldn’t.”
“You don’t tell me what to do.”
And Joey grins despite himself. His brow furrows. “Yeah. You make me crazy, y’know. I’m not like this. I dunno what I’m doing.”
“You accused me of flirting with your son,” says Amber, matter-of-fact.
“God, I’m sorry. And don’t tell him that. It’ll go to his head.” Joey winces.
Amber raises an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah?”
“And he’ll probably call bullshit on the marriage thing, I dunno. Jesus, Amber, make me shut up.” That’s when he turns away from her, letting go of her hand. He steps back.
And Amber grabs him.
She wraps her arms around him. She lays her head flat on his chest and as quiet as he remains she can still hear the rhythmic thump of his heart against her cheek.
And she holds him tight.
And she doesn’t let go.
And the tears that had been threatening to fall finally do.
Until all she can do is whimper weakly against him. She buries herself in him, so tightly she can hardly hear the world around her.
But Joey holds her. And finally she does have the world around her.
He holds her tight against him, pressing kiss after kiss after kiss into the top of her head, blessing her halo of blonde curls with whispered apologies.
Sobs wrack through her body and yet he holds her steady. She props her head as close to his shoulder as she can reach. She feels childish, looking up at him this way, but he cradles her head so gently without a second thought.
“Why didn’t you call me?” Amber finally asks, through tears. “You said you’d call me in the morning.”
And Joey rests his head against hers. “I wanted to. I couldn’t do it.”
“Why not?” She pouts. And, again, she feels so small this way, God.
(Maybe that’s it. Maybe she feels how she did when she was small, on her knees again, praying to an unreachable nothingness.
And yet Joey does answer her prayers.)
“I thought you liked talking to me,” She says.
“That’s the problem.” Joey laughs. “I really do. I like talkin’ to ya more than a guy should after two dates, Ambs. So I…”
“So you didn’t call me.”
“I didn’t want you to hear it in my voice. And I didn’t want to look at you in the mornin’, in case you’d see it on my face. And I’m scared right now that I’m holdin’ you too tight and you can tell I don’t want to let go.”
Amber presses herself against him even closer. She thinks their hearts must be able to hear each other that way. She thinks maybe they’ll say what their mouths are too afraid of.
He presses another kiss against her forehead. “I told you to make me shut up, Amber.” Another. “I really— fuck, Bambi, I made you cry. I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.” Another. Another. Another. Another.
Amber’s hand rests against the side of his neck. Interestingly enough she can feel his pulse there, too, and she pouts. She’s going to grow attached to that feeling, she thinks. That beat of his heart. That honest, vulnerable, sweet sound.
“And I can’t promise—,” Joey sighs against her. “You know, Bambi, you know I’m gonna fuck up again.”
“I know,” Amber whispers.
“I mean, really, I fuckin’ hate when guys hit on you, I don’t know if I’ll—“
“I want to burn your marriage certificate.”
And Joey laughs. “What?”
“You can throat punch the next guy that talks to me. But I want to burn your marriage certificate.” Amber stares up at him, expecting some sort of protest. She finds none.
“Yeah. Okay, Amber.” He grins, holding her closer. “Do you want the ring, too, so you can melt it over the fire?”
And she does want a ring from him, admittedly. But that’ll have to do. She nods, and again, he laughs, a sound so precious to her she jumps to wrap her arms around his shoulders. Joey lifts her effortlessly.
“I always hate the first fight,” she tells him. “I hate fights, Joey. I hate fights with you.”
“We’re gonna have a lot of them,” Joey reasons. “I mean, just— the trajectory of things, you know. Relationships. In the long run. If we’re… going for the long run.”
“Are you going?” Amber asks. “The long run, I mean.”
“I think I’m…” Joey starts, then looks at her, and the words don’t die on his tongue as much as they’re given new life. “…I’m going wherever you’re going.”
It’s her who kisses him, this time. Soft. And sweet. And inviting and forgiving and promising. And everything she can’t say and shouldn’t feel.
He holds her close to his chest, and the pounding of his heart responds in kind.