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.
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.
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.
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. 
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Micah has posted to let us know she’s not dead!
![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith has introduced me to the Dreamwidth community ![[community profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
poetree.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/143302.html. You can comment here or there.
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 tower and a pumpkin, with my user name
Icon by dhamphir
Dragons Next Door has a Landing Page.
This follows directly after Over the Wall (LJ).
“What is the Black Tower?” The dragon cocked its head to the side, narrowly missing knocking over the fence.
I blinked. The Tower has such a reputation among our people that it’s hard to remember it’s not that well known outside of the community. Even most other humans wouldn’t know what I was talking about – and I imagine the dragons handled such things in their own way. “The Black Tower is…” I resisted the impulse to end that with “…the Black Tower.” “It’s an academy of magic, considered highly prestigious but also highly dangerous. Sage attended there.”
“Ah, the Sandborn.” Zizny nodded. “We have heard of that place. On rare occasion, a young dragon will study there.”
“Yes, the Sandborn.” I’d forgotten it had a proper name. “I knew they had a wing catering to the non-humans…” I offered carefully.
“You did not attend there, then?” It raised one eyeridge in another gesture I imagine was adopted from humanoids. I flushed, wishing for a slightly less-perceptive neighbor. Maybe I should have been talking to the brownies, instead.
“No.” It would have been rude not to explain further, so I tried. “I went to the Cottage.” Unwillingly, but wanting to be clear, I elaborated. “The Pumpkin, we called it. But it’s…”
“…Lady Cassidy’s Academy for Young Ladies. Yes, I’ve head of it. I’m surprised, quite frankly, that it’s still around. Aren’t you of the generation that was working on that gender-equality project?” She made it sound like a coffee klatch.
“Well…”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/142562.html. You can comment here or there.
This Saturday will be the October Giraffe Call for prompts, the theme sponsored by this icon from dhampir – “Spooks and Creeps, Ghosts and Ghouls.”
After a discussion in Clare_Dragonfly’s journal after her Garden of Prose, I’ve been contemplating donor/comment perks. What sort of thing motivates you to comment/linkback/donate?
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/142190.html. You can comment here or there.
Last night, as we were sitting in our living room with the windows open (yay nice weather), we heard a sound like sticks hitting against each other and a thrashing in the cornfield across the road.
Sooo either there were men mock-swordfighting with sticks in the field, or there were deer fighting. This neighborhood, I’m betting on the deer.
This weekend involved a lot of replanting/repotting of freecycled plants – have you heard of Freecycle?. It’s an awesome way to get rid of stuff you don’t want and get stuff you do want (or just think at the moment “hey, that would be neat!”)
So, T. surfs the lists and sends me stuff that looks interesting, and then I send them e-mails: “I’d love that, I can pick up XXX after 5.” And then they ignore me, or say “sorry, already taken,” or “sure, I live in Ecovillage.”
Ecovillage? The website’s down right now – http://ecovillageithaca.org – but here’s the wiki for the concept.
Guys, this bears an uncomfortably strong resemblance to the community living thing I started in my head 18 (shh, I’m not that old) years ago that has slowly become both Stranded ‘verse and Planners ‘verse. Cross this with some Amish, some Mormons, and some polyamorous hippies, and you have the society that evolved into the Planners in my mind. (This is like when I found out about the prefab bunkers – it’s always neat to see how stuff you’ve imagined has been developed IRL).
So, that a strange moment! But I got aloes out of it – pics to follow – and chives from another trip, and they are now happily in pots and/or the ground.
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Thesilentpoet is having a poetry/writing sale. Clever idea + stuff in the mail! Check it out!
Ysabetwordsmith has posted all of “Restoration,” to my prompt from her August fishbowl
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Another use for player piano scrolls… I worked with a bookbinder who wanted to use those in a book at one point.
and
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/142027.html. You can comment here or there.
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:
Girey
Icon & Art by Djinni
Reiassan has a Landing Page (LJ Link).
Rin was whistling as they left Ossulund, clean, well-fed, and clothed in things that fit, or at least mostly fit. She’d forgotten how fun it was to spend time with her friends, how relaxing it was to be on common ground with the people she was talking to.
Girey was, she noticed, in a better mood, too, although in his case, she had a feeling it had more to do with leaving Ossulund than being there. The crowds of Callanthe had made him tense enough that he’d barely enjoyed the luxuries of civilization he’d been missing so much, although he’d probably be back to missing them soon enough.
She turned to look at him in his custom-tailored Callanthe qitari, sitting comfortably, finally, in the wider saddle. The left-buttoning on the tunic had been her own petty joke, since all he seemed to do was whine, and whining counted as unskilled labor. But talking with Noni during their stay in Ossulund had gotten her thinking.
“He’s pretty enough,” her old friend had agreed, “especially when you clean him up. Dress him up in silks and he’d make you a fine bed-warmer, Rinny. No shame and no harm in that – until you want to get married. Then what are you going to do with your grumpy Bitrani pet prisoner?”
“Plenty of people have both a bed-warmer and a spouse,” she’d argued. She’d already seen the point, but she let Noni say it; she needed to hear it.
“Their bed-warmers aren’t foreign nobility. Yours is.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/141598.html. You can comment here or there.
Three Way came out of Giraffe Call and was sponsored for continuation by Rix_Scadeau. Originally posted here and on LJ, continued here (LJ) and then here (LJ
Ahouva clung to Basalt’s arm, not sure what he was doing or why he was doing it. Give Lolly back to Jeremiah? Was he going to give her back, too? She looked over at Kendon, still sprawled on the floor. He’d been really good to her, gentle and patient. It hadn’t been his fault that she was clumsy and stupid, that she made him…
No, that wasn’t right. That’s what he had said, over and over again. “I’m good to you, and you keep fucking up. I’m so patient with you, sweetie, but even I have my limits. I don’t like punishing you, but you leave me no choice.”
But she was bad. She’d been so slow to learn anything, even magic, which she loved, said all the wrong things around his friends, embarrassed him so much he’d started leaving her at home when he hung out with them…
She swallowed a sob. Why would Basalt want her? “Why?” she whispered softly.
He paused in his slow navigation of the bloody lounge and looked down at her. His smile looked gentler than anything she’d expected to see from him. “Why? It had to be done.”
It was almost what he’d said before, and it didn’t explain anything. “But…”
“I’m sorry,” he interrupted, “but shush for just a couple minutes, okay? Then we can talk about it as much as you want.”
She sealed her lips and nodded mutely. Give Lolly back… And Basalt was, still holding her, kneeling by Jeremiah, who looked so very close to dead. He muttered something – a Working, something to do with kaana, that was air, right? – and then spoke softly to the gutted scarecrow. Gutted. The guy holding her had done that, hadn’t he? Kendon might have, but Kendon was in no better shape.
“I don’t know what you were up to,” Basalt was murmuring softly, “but we both know I’m not up to handling Lolly.”
Ahouva looked up at the petite blonde in the ridiculous little-girl outfit, sucking on a lollypop and watching a pool of blood move towards her toes. She shivered, faintly, when the girl looked up at her, ice-blue eyes dispassionate. She had caught looks like that before, when Lolly happened to meet her eyes, as if wondering what she’d look like opened up on a table, dissected. She’d heard stories of what the other girl was like in Biology class, too, what she was like doing dissections. What would she have been like, if Jeremiah had won Ahouva? Was that why he’d challenged Kendon for her?
“…so let’s make this quick,” Basalt was saying. “As per the terms of the challenge…”
“Lolly, you Belong to Basalt,” Jeremiah croaked.
Lolly nodded, still smiling. “Okay. I’m all yours, Basalt,” she chirped. Ahouva wondered if either of the guys saw the tears leaking down the girl’s face.
“Yes, you are. And now, as per the terms of our agreement, Liliandra cy’Linden, you Belong to Jeremiah the Prophet.”
For the first time since meeting her, Ahouva saw the other girl look startled. “I what? I… you what?” She looked down at Jeremiah with a faintly accusing glare. “That wasn’t…” She shook her head. “I Belong to you, Jeremiah, the Prophet.”
“Yes, yes you do, doll,” he grunted out. “Now go get me Dr. Caitrin, please.”
While she scampered off, Basalt stood, still cradling Ahouva. “Now that that’s done, we can talk.”
She wasn’t certain if he meant that she could talk, so Ahouva nodded, her lips still pressed together. Of everything Kendon had done when he was mad at her, she’d hated being shushed the most. It meant she couldn’t even argue in her own defense.
“I’m going to take you to my room,” he continued. “We’ll get your stuff from Kendon’s room after the doctor is done with him, and then we can work out everything else.”
Everything else? He sounded surprisingly reasonable for a thug, but he was still in public. The worst wouldn’t happen until the doors were closed and the Administration could pretend nothing was going on. Ahouva nodded again, wishing he’d get on with it.
“It’s going to be okay,” he reassured her, as he carried her down the hall like a doll. “He can’t hurt you anymore.”
She stared at him incredulously. Was that was this was all about? Did he think he was rescuing her? Had she seriously just been white-knight-and-the-dragon by a cy’Fridmar monster?
That expression actually got him to stop, and, worse, it got him frowning. “All right, we’re almost there,” he said, almost to himself, and started walking again. Maybe ten steps later, he shifted her weight in his arms, opened the door, and let them in.
His room, Ahouva decided, was very man-cave. Dimly-lit, dark colors, not all that messy but that seemed, in part, to be because there wasn’t that much stuff. The bed and a desk chair were the only places to sit; he put her down on the bed and pulled up a chair.
“Okay. One, I rescind the order to shush, and I apologize for that, but I wanted to deal with Jeremiah while he was still half-knocked out with pain. He’s too smart to deal with normally.”
“It’s okay,” she demurred. Was the blanket on his bed… fur?
“So,” he continued, not really acknowledging her answer, “I don’t know why he was challenging for you. Do you?”
“No?” She shook her head. “I never even talked to him – or to his Kept. I only have one class with him,” she added hurriedly, “and I always sit next to… sat next to Kendon.” Now what was she going to do?
“I don’t think he was going for ‘romantic’ motives,” Basalt assured her. “But I wonder what he was up to.”
“What about you?” she asked. “Did I really look like I needed rescuing? I tried to smile and put a good face on in public, I really did!”
“Hey,” he interjected, surprise and worry clear on his face. “Hey, Ahouva, nobody’s yelling at you. You didn’t do anything wrong. You managed to keep a stiff upper lip so well, it took a long time to notice anything was wrong.”
“Wrong? I mean, Kendon and I had our rough spots, but I was learning how to do better… I didn’t need rescuing,” she blurted, and then slapped her hands over her mouth. He could just give her back, too, right? Kendon couldn’t be too mad at her.
Basalt shook his head, looking at her. “I could really use an empath about now,” he muttered. “Listen, Ahouva. He was abusing you, and the bond – being Kept – was making you accept it. And it looks like maybe some stubbornness on your part, too,” he added in a mutter. Ahouva cringed and didn’t try to contradict him. “But you’re not with him anymore. You’re with me,” he added firmly.
“So…” She tried not to think about Ceinwen crying in the girls’ room. “What do you want me for?”
“Well…” He scooted his chair closer, until his knees were touching hers. “I was hoping you’d be my girlfriend.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/141404.html. You can comment here or there.
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| Steamer Trunk, Oct 08 2011 (open from top) So, there was a steamer trunk in our attic… It had been a little chewed on and a little lived in, but it might might be refurbishable… (more pics here) |
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