Archive | October 12, 2011

Spring and Autumn: Orange Juice

To skysailor‘s prompt “Orange Juice;” this comes after Having Fun.

Stranded Verse has a Landing Page (Lj

“Orange Juice.” Autumn thumped the mugs down on the tiny table in her tiny RV, the noise causing her little sister to cringe. “Patented hangover cure: ghetto mimosas and a big pile of hash browns.”

“You are a cruel, cruel woman,” Spring complained. She was still half in the garb she’d gone out in the day before, hay in her hair and mud on her hem. It had been a long afterparty and a beautiful night – and the man had been beautiful, too, with those leather pants and the wicked way he swung the whip, never mind that he was easily old enough to be her father.

“I am a sensible, sensible woman,” Autumn replied. She had, as far as Spring could tell, quaffed her share and danced just as long as anyone, although Spring had found her alone in her bunk this morning. “Drink your orange juice and know your sister loves you.”

Spring downed the glass in one swallow, barely tasting the fizz and the vodka, the whisper of a Strand-pull tickling the back of her throat. “That’s one hell of a hangover cure,” she complained. “What’s in the potatoes? Dynamite?”

“Tabasco and penicillin,” her sister answered mildly. “I like the mule-skinner as much as the next girl…”

“I’m always careful. Well, except for about the bite marks.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/144476.html. You can comment here or there.

Fill my momentary lack of inspiration

I’m having a moment with 212 words left to fill wordcount for the day and nothing is thrilling.

First person to suggest something – a pairing, a scene, a flavour – will get that 212 words on that topic.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/144296.html. You can comment here or there.

Love and Lovers, Expanded

This story came out of my September Call for Prompts, and was prompted and sponsored by the_vulture. After some discussion, I expanded the original story:

It was easy enough when we were friends. I could lean against him at dinner, and he’d drape his arm over my shoulders, and it was wonderful, this little giddy thrill of being touched. I didn’t have to take it further. I didn’t even really think about taking it further, not then.

I liked him, from the first day we met. I’m not going to deny that. The way his lips looked when he was thinking. The way he talked. The way his brain twisted around problems. His big hands and the way they looked like they’d fit my shoulder perfectly. I was drawn to him, pulled in the way I get. “Moth to a flame,” some people say. My friends call it “sexually attracted to fire.” If he’d been another guy at the gaming group…

…but he was Jay, and it became quickly obvious that he had no interest in me like that. And that, I admit, was even more intriguing (call me arrogant if you want, but I was a non-ugly girl in a gaming club. Men that weren’t interested were generally also unfriendly). Jay was just Jay, like it didn’t occur to him that he should or could or would be interested. Like he was really talking to me, and not to a mobile opportunity for sex.

I didn’t chase after him, but I did go out of my way to talk to him, to make friends with him. “You know what colour my eyes are,” I joked, but the truth was, I just liked being able to talk to him, to be close to him. I liked being talked to, instead of around or past. I liked that we had things in common, other than games. I had games in common with everyone I knew.

He didn’t like being touched by strangers, so I knew we were close when he put his arm around my shoulders for the first time, and I knew I was gone when I couldn’t stand to move away from that warmth. He had no interest in sex, he’d explained (when I, rather awkwardly, asked if he was gay), so I knew something was up when he kissed me the first time.

I was raw and all jagged edges from a badly-ended relationship that time, and the kiss was shaky and awkward, and we both pretended it had been the bad beer and the bad moonlight, and We Shall Never Speak of This Again, patched up the little hole in our friendship and went back to talking about how Dumas had written such better stuff than Three Musketeers.

The kiss, like his arm on my shoulder, had burned its way into my nerves, and I’d wake up with a nagging suggestion in my mind that I ought to have more, or look at him and wonder how I could get him to hold me like that again, kiss me again, teeth or no.

By the time he got around to a second kiss, I’d managed to heal the raw spots in my heart, and had deciding that the normal boys were just not what I wanted. I wanted Jay. I wanted my friend. Sex? I thought I could do without. A small sacrifice to have a relationship that worked. And I loved him. And, to be honest… deep in my heart, I thought he just hadn’t had a girl he clicked with. I thought maybe sex with me would be different.

I’d been looking forward to cuddling, to having someone who liked touching without always wanting sex, to being held, but… I had habits built up from a few years of relationships, and it seemed natural for cuddling to turn into kissing, for kissing to turn into necking, for necking to turn into sex.

I knew better, at least on the surface and the first twenty or thirty times I started, I stopped myself. But I’m not asexual – pretty much the opposite – and, after a while, it started to get to me. I could masturbate, sure. Gods, I did. But playing solo is never the same as playing with a friend, and I wanted to know what he felt like inside me.

More than that. I was starting to get messed up about the whole thing. I knew he loved me, not just from his words, but from the way he held me, from the way he looked at me, but I wanted him to want me, too. I wanted him to touch me, and so I’d kiss, and then push the kissing further, and further, until he would tell me, so patiently, “please don’t.”

Please don’t. I started to wonder if something was wrong with me. I cut my hair, dyed it, bought new clothes. Other boys at the gaming club started flirting with me again, even Jay’s friends. I ate it up, but I wanted more. (I wanted it from him, even though I knew I wasn’t going to get it. Everyone else was just a substitute. Everyone else could be lying to me; I trusted Jay. Everyone else were just mooks; Jay was my partner. It was his opinion that mattered). I tried to replace substance with quantity; I started hanging out with the gaming club more, just to feel the rush of someone noticing I was female and alive. I started staying out late. Letting the boys drive me home. Letting them steal kisses that didn’t taste right, so I could pretend they wanted me. Letting them slide their hands inside my shirt, so I could remember what lust felt like.

I started feeling guilty, and the guilt started making me angry. I justified it to myself at first: I was home for dinner every evening. I came home to Jay every night. I wasn’t giving away anything he wanted – I didn’t even talk Dumas with anyone else, much less Descartes or the more obscure topics we both loved. I was there when he wanted me, to joke about politics and complain about work, to try strange exotic foods with cheap wines. But I don’t think he was fooled, and, sooner or later, I stopped being able to fool myself. I’d stopped giving my all to the relationship. I’d stopped giving much of anything, including a damn. I don’t think either of us were surprised when I moved out. I still loved him, as hurt as I was. But sometimes love really isn’t enough.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/144072.html. You can comment here or there.

Icon Flash – The Pumpkin – Dragons Next Door

New flash series! I’m going to write one flash for every Icon I have, over 4 LJ accounts, 1 DW, and a whole bunch of not-currently-in-use, until I get bored or run out of icons.

Today’s icon:

A creepy black pumpkin and a tree, with my name

Icon by dhamphir

Dragons Next Door has a Landing Page

This follows directly after The Black Tower (LJ), which is after Over the Wall (LJ).

Well, indeed. “That was my mother’s generation, mostly,” I stalled. Here I was, a home-maker in the new millennium, a graduate of The Pumpkin. I wasn’t really the one to ask about that.

But I was the one Zizny was asking.

“It’s always surprised me,” it mused, “that you would try for ‘equality.’ Gender is so important to the differentiated species, isn’t it? It’s why Cxaidin and I have always attempted to approximate a bi-gendered couple.”

Ah, so that had been intentional. I took a moment to feel better about our misread, then got back to the crux of the questioning.

“‘Equal’ has never meant ‘the same,’ at least not to me,” I pondered. “It certainly doesn’t, the way it was taught in The Pumpkin.”

“I was under the impression that Lady Cassidy’s Academy taught home-keeping skills?” Zizny waved one claw vaguely. “Cleaning, cooking, that sort of thing?”

“Well, that’s the impression The Pumpkin likes to give,” I said slowly. Zizny wasn’t human; it wasn’t quite the same as telling secrets out of school. Quite. “But this is the modern era, and most of that is automated; it takes up very little time in a day, especially once your children are in school.” Or gone to the Black Tower.

“Hence the impression of outdatedness, yes. But you said it’s a misimpression?”

“Well,” I smiled, fondly remembering a few of my midnight lessons, “there are things that the Black Tower likes to keep to itself. And The Pumpkin has its secrets, too.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/143459.html. You can comment here or there.

Wednesday, in other people’s stuff

One of the projects this weekend was sorting through boxes of crap stuff crap from the attic spaces in the house. The steamer trunk I posted earlier was part of that – more of a treasure than a crap – as well as a solid-wood kitchen cabinet that had been sitting in our (wet) basement (dealing with the leak in the basement is our Major Home Expense for the year, knock on wood).

But among the piles of stuff were two boxes of fabric. Stash, if you will. Someone in this house had, in the 70’s from the looks of things, been the sort of sewer who saves every little scrap. Of polyester plaid. And polyester denim. Oy.

Most of it was too small, too polyester, or too random-bits to be of any use, but I salvaged a few pieces of cotton flannel, their denim scraps (the real denim), and a few other things. And since I found this little contest, some of those scraps will be getting a new life. 🙂

~~~

Micah has posted to let us know she’s not dead!

[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith has introduced me to the Dreamwidth community [community profile] poetree.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/143302.html. You can comment here or there.