Chapter Text
Paula Small was a woman of simple passions: writing, wine, and her children.
Paula loved writing. She loved the way different authors' works had different tones, and feelings, how you could know who wrote a book just by the way it was written. She adored the different nuances in the English language, and how personal they felt. Every book was like a different friend.
Paula loved wine. Every night, she would have a glass of wine as a relaxer. Every so often, she would have a few more for recreation, but Paula would deny it was ever too much. It wasn't as though she became aggressive or violent--she just became more loose lipped and left footed. Maybe she laughed too much, or stumbled a bit precariously, but she always kept her tender spirit.
And Paula loved her children. She loved Brendon and Josie with all of her heart, and she couldn't be happier to support Brendon's film making, even if his films were a bit... eclectic. She loved her ever talkative daughter, Josie. She had always babbled as a baby, but now, as a small toddler, she was constantly voicing half-formed sentences. Her children she loved the most fiercely, but that didn't mean they couldn't be little shits and give her hell.
And this is how Paula found herself drunk on her couch, sitting next to her old friend Eric Robbins, discussing the works of her favorite authors, discussing how fun they were to read, and what she liked most about them.
As she looked over at Eric during a lull in her drunkenly-enthused gushing, she took a moment to drink in his features. Two maroon tufts of hair jutted outwards from either side of his head, his goofy hairstyle reflecting his goofy personality. But the man she looked at had a rather serious expression on his face.
"Are you alright?" Paula asked, turning to her friend.
"Yeah," he said, though it seemed mechanic. Eric caught himself, and continued, "Well... No. It's just been hard, being a single parent."
Paula could definitely relate to that. While Eric only had one child, Melissa, she had two. Trying to parent Brendon while keeping track of Josie? Paula thought she had done a fair job at the impossible.
"Yeah, welcome to the club," she said, punctuating her words with a sip of wine. "Here's your card," she mimed, "and what size vest do you want?"
"Oh, actually, I'd like a small, please," Eric played along.
"We're out of the smalls, actually, but we do have an extra small," Paula fake-offered.
"I'll take it, I was planning on losing some weight, anyway," he said dryly.
Paula laughed hard at that. They both knew that neither of them had any plans to start exercising--ever.
"What? Well even if I don't lose weight, I'll squeeze into it and it'll be fine," Eric said, lightly elbowing Paula in the side.
Paula was beside herself with the mental picture that brought on, and she tipsily fell into Eric's side in a fit of laughter. She felt Eric put his arm around her, and she clung to him for stability.
"That's absurd," Paula giggled, and as she tried to right herself, the room began to spin. "Oh, gosh, I may have had one too many..." She closed her eyes and relaxed, laying her head calmly in Eric's lap.
Eric laid a hand on Paula's shoulder. "You alright?" he asked.
"Yeah, can I just lay here for a minute?"
"Yeah, sure, but if you puke in on your own floor, I'm not going to help you clean it up," Eric retorted.
Paula giggled again. "I'm not going the throw up," she replied.
The room was silent after that, and after a few moments where Paula tried only to concentrate on her own breathing and heart rate, she opened her eyes. The room had stopped spinning, and she no longer felt dizzy. She figured it must have been late, because she couldn't hear her Brendon or his friends in the basement, and figured they must have gone to sleep.
Just as Paula was about to pull herself off of Eric's lap, she felt and heard him sigh. His stomach pressed into the back of her head with just slightly more pressure, and he exhaled a long, contented breath of air.
Paula froze. It felt so... intimate. It reminded her of those small moments in life you experience only when you've reached a certain level of comfort around another person, like a sibling, or a partner.
It wasn't necessarily unpleasant, or awkward. Maybe it was the wine, or the late hour, but Paula couldn't help herself to closing her eyes, and feigning her dizziness a little longer than necessary.
After a few moments when she couldn't possibly justify lying there any longer, she righted herself, feeling her face flush with a hint of heat. "Thanks," she said.
"Of course," Eric said, and he smiled. Paula felt her heart give the faintest flutter at the sight, and smiled back.
"Well, it's very late, and I've had a few. I'm going to head to bed now. You're welcome to crash on my couch."
"Thanks, Paula," Eric said. It wasn't the first time Melissa had spent the night, and Eric had got caught up drinking and talking with Paula. Eric knew Paula had a somewhat messier home, but he didn't mind sleeping on a couch, at least a clean one.
"No problem," she said, and left to go to bed.
It wasn't long until she was slipping under the covers, her mind crowded with thoughts of a certain red haired man as she drifted off to sleep.