To Wait For Love: Gift for harborshore

[stuffitmod.livejournal.com]

Title: To Wait For Love
Author: takkatakkatakka
Pairing(s): Annie Monroe/Z Berg
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Word count: 5,951
Summary: “Apparently Annie had the hots for me,” Z tells Ryan, while they’re sitting on his couch. “In high school."



“You always say we didn’t know each other,” Annie says, like she’s replying to a question.

Actually, no one’s spoken for like twenty minutes, so Z has no idea what Annie’s talking about. Everyone is looking at her expectantly though, so she clears her throat and says, “Oh.”

It’s a warm afternoon, especially for November, and Z’s sprawled across the couch next to Tennessee. They’re all pretty tired, because the guy from this little webzine Z nearly said no to wanted to meet at 9 am, for some stupid reason, and then was evidently really bad at taking a hint and closing the interview.

It didn’t help that Z’s body clock’s still fucked from tour. By noon she was blitzed, and going home, she said, to eat cold stir fry and listen to Cate Le Bon or something. To recuperate. Her band sort of invited themselves along. She’d mostly expected it.

Laena’s lying on the floor with her eyes mostly closed now, and her hands folded over her stomach.

Annie’s on the armchair opposite with her knees pulled up, still staring at Z. She looks – mischievous, Z thinks.

“In high school, I mean,” Annie goes on. “You always say we didn’t know each other.”

Z shrugs. “That’s true,” she says. It mostly is. She did recognize Annie, at the audition, although she couldn’t pin from where. Then Annie had started playing and Z had started thinking about other things, but afterwards she caught up with Annie at the door and said, “Do you – we know each other.”

Annie nodded shyly, and held up both hands. “From high school?” she said. “I sat behind you in English, I think.”

“Shut up, no way,” Z said. Annie shrugged and smiled, still holding her hands up awkwardly, and Z just thought oh, let’s pick her.

Anyway, it still means what Z says in interviews is mostly true. It’s a shame, because Annie probably would’ve been good to have around back in school. But then again, Z had Tennessee and Charlotte, and later on Alex and everyone who came with him, so maybe Annie wouldn’t have been necessary.

Z feels mean for thinking that, though, and says, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Annie says, which is when Z realizes she hasn’t, in fact, been thinking aloud.

“I don’t know,” she admits. Annie snorts.

There’s another momentary lull then, where it’s quiet enough that Z can hear the hum of the radio filtering through from another room. She thinks Laena might be asleep. Tennessee has her eyes closed too, but the way she’s breathing means she’s still awake. It’s probably weird that Z knows that. She sighs, and then gets back to what Annie was saying.

“So did we know each other? Did I just forget?” Z hopes not. That would probably make her an asshole.

Annie laughs, a soft and high one that makes her show all her teeth, and she says, “No, not really, but I knew who you were. I actually – I actually had this weird crush on you for like, half a year.”

It takes a second for Z to react. She looks at Annie carefully, and then scratches at her own elbow. “Huh,” she says.

“Yeah,” Annie continues, “you were like this bitchy loner with awesome clothes and then someone told me you were in a band and I was like –” she flaps her hands, looking a little embarrassed, but mostly like she thinks it’s just the funniest. Which it is. The funniest. Z wonders why she isn’t laughing. She looks at Annie some more.

Then she says, “Fuck you, I was not bitchy,” and Annie laughs again, not showing her teeth this time.


-


One of Z’s most pressing problems right now is that she doesn’t know what to do for Christmas this year. Normally if there’s nothing on she goes to hang with her family, but her parents are going on vacation somewhere in Thailand, and her siblings have plans, so. Z’s kind of floating on it. Taking offers from here and there. She’s thinking about spending it alone, maybe.

One time a few years back she went to London with Tennessee. That was nice, the blue white Christmas lights and the ice rink they’d set up along the Embankment. It didn’t snow, too, which Z was relieved about.

“Sometimes it doesn’t til February,” Tennessee had said wisely, and Z was drunk at the time so she didn’t call Tennessee a dork, she called her a genius and got her to say February a couple more times, laughing at how she pronounced it. Februarary. It was a pretty good party, in hindsight.

Z doesn’t much feel like travelling for Christmas, though, not after spending most of the fall in Europe, so London’s not on her list. Ryan’s going to New York with Alex, and Z’s almost tempted to invite herself along to that, but New York is fucking cold in December, and they’re talking about doing the whole thing totally home-cooked this year, which Z just doesn’t want to be a part of.

She ends up thinks about it some more without actually coming up with any solutions, and then thinks about how much easier it was when she lived at home, and then remembers how living at home also sucked, and starts thinking about high school, and starts thinking about Annie.

What Z needs to get out of the way, once and for all, is that Annie is really, devastatingly hot. That feels partly obvious, but partly not; it’s true that Annie models, sometimes, and spends more time on her hair than average girls, and now and then wears these stockings that go up to the middle of her thighs with small lace bows around the tops. Those are all pretty hot things, at least as far as Z is concerned.

But then, she’s also pretty shy, and smiles with too many teeth, and has a thing for military dress which is just weird and silly – and those should really all be turn-offs for Z. They’re not, though. It’s a funny thing.

She follows the line of thought as long as it’s comfortable, and as soon as it’s not she crosses her arms defiantly, even though she’s lying alone in bed. It’s almost two in the morning and cooler than normal, and Z should really go turn the air-con down, but she doesn’t have the energy to get up.

Whatever, she thinks. Fuck Christmas. If all else fails she can just get trashed on Christmas Eve, and then sleep through the whole thing. She’s made worse holiday plans before, in more desperate frames of mind, and things have still mostly turned out alright.

It’ll probably be fine.


-


A few days later, they meet up for band practice. It’s probably their last before Christmas, although Z’s trying not to think of the next few weeks as an actual break, or whatever. She doesn’t like that word, break. It feels too sharp and normal.

Z and Laena spend a couple of minutes lazily tuning, while Annie figures the settings on her keyboard and Tennessee warms herself up, starting with slow beats and then building up to longer, impressive drumrolls with a big cymbal crash to finish each of them. Z runs her hands over the strings of her guitar. She’s thinking of what to start with, maybe that stupid cover they were trying last week, because Z’s been thinking about it this morning and has some plans.

But then, Laena has her violin too and she wants to show them this new thing that might go with that other riff Z was messing with last week, maybe, if that’s cool, and Z says yeah yeah, go, so Laena does.

It does work, sort of, if they could maybe bring in at the end or something. Z’s not really used to thinking about arrangements before the whole song’s mostly done. But the idea is nice, and Z digs Laena’s violin a lot anyway. The introduction of it now is sending a few other ideas skittering through her head, other ways it could work; just these excitable little strands. She nods slowly.

A second later Tennessee looks up and announces that she’s ready to go, and Annie nods and says, “Yeah, from the top.”

Z gives Annie a look, but she seems to ignore it. Then they’re playing, and Z gets distracted again, with sound and time and technique.

They stop for a rest around one. Laena goes out to buy a Coke from the store down the street, and Tennessee goes with her for the walk, and so there’s this weird few minutes where Z and Annie get left alone.

Annie says, “That song worked pretty well. With the violin, it was cool.”

Z hums. “I have high hopes, yeah.” She tilts her head.

“Me too.” Annie raises an eyebrow. “The highest.”

Z laughs lightly, touching at her hair, and says, “I’ll do my best for you.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Annie says. “I actually went to college so, you know. I have a back-up plan.”

That’s something that Z doesn’t think about a lot. With two albums done now, giving up on music seems like something that can’t happen for at least another thirty years, when she and Tennessee have both gone mad with drugs and endless touring and become recluses in Bel Air, with eight cats and an electric fence around the property. Z’s really looking forward to that, actually. She’s going to get a cigarette holder and a floppy sunhat and sunbathe naked in the yard every day. Their neighbours are going to freak.

All she says to Annie is, “That just shows you lack spirit.”

“I don’t lack anything,” Annie says, too slowly for her not to have thought about it, and after a second she smiles at Z wickedly.

“Evil’s a bad look on you,” Z lies, turning around to pretend to fiddle with her pedalboard. Then she gives up, and straightens to face Annie again. She narrows her eyes. “Really. No man will have you.”

Annie doesn’t say anything for a second, shifting a little in her place. Then she lays one hand on the board keys without pressing down, and says, slightly quieter, “I think I could handle that.”

“I was kidding,” Z says.

Annie laughs. “I know.” She gives Z an amused look, and then a mildly concerned one. “What?”

“Nothing,” Z says, and Annie doesn’t stop looking at her so she says, “Shut up, nothing, oh my god,” and turns away again, but it already feels like too late because she can’t stop smiling. Z has this tight feeling in her stomach, suddenly, that she wants to call dread, but it doesn’t sound quite right.


-



“Apparently Annie had the hots for me,” Z tells Ryan, while they’re sitting on his couch. “In high school.”

“Ha,” Ryan says. They’ve been there for long enough that they’re both getting sleepy now, and he looks cutely gone with it, the top buttons of his shirt undone and his sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

“Which is weird,” Z adds, “because I was a loser in high school.”

“I don’t know,” Ryan says. “You probably weren’t that bad.” He attempts to leer at her, but the expression comes out oddly gentle, so Z doesn’t really know what to do about that. She tries to ignore it.

“But I wasn’t great,” she goes on, “and she was like, obsessed with me.”

Annie never actually said that specifically, or even implied it, but it feels good to say and it makes Ryan raise his eyebrows, so Z doesn’t correct herself.

“I just don’t get why she never said anything.”

“Hm,” Ryan says.

“We made them do cover letters for auditions, and everything. And she didn’t even mention.”

Ryan thinks about it. “Wouldn’t that have been kind of weird?”

“Well, yeah,” Z says, “but she told me anyway, so.” She pauses, and looks at Ryan. “So.”

Ryan shrugs, raising his hands, a little too far out and up for it to not be a douchebag move. She allows it anyway, because he’s her friend and Z can be very tolerant when she wants to be.

“Ryan,” she says, after a few moments.

“Z.”

“Inter-band relationships,” Z starts. “No, wait. Is that the right word? Intra-band? In-band. Huh.”

Ryan blinks at her.

She sighs, and throws herself dramatically against his shoulder. “They’re a bad idea, right?”

Ryan hums, and then sighs too. “Mostly bad. I guess.” He points at her, and says, “But then there’s like, Sonic Youth. In-band marriage, right? That worked.”

“Oh yeah.” Z bites her lip thoughtfully. She’s not so into Sonic Youth, but like. They’re okay. In the right mood.

“And Joan Jett,” Ryan goes on, “and, and the blonde girl.”

“Cherie. They didn’t work at all, though,” Z says. “That was the point. She, like, self-destructed.” Z waves her hands at him from the wrists without lifting them from her lap, lazily helpless.

“Okay,” Ryan agrees. “But you could skip that part.”

“Hm,” Z says. She thinks it through. Then she remembers the rest of the conversation and says, “We weren’t talking about me, though. This is hypothetical.”

“I know,” Ryan says airily, and she sort of wants to hit him and hug him, maybe at the same time. He pushes himself up off of the couch slowly, and wanders off somewhere, patting Z’s head on the way out so she gets the idea that their talk is through. That’s okay. She doesn’t normally discuss shit like this with Ryan, and feels fleetingly bad about it.

Then she thinks, shit like what?, and doesn’t know how to answer herself.

When Ryan comes back into the room she’s sitting in the dead centre of the couch with her arms stretched out either side of her, palms up and eyes closed, her legs crossed neatly at the ankle.

“Hey,” Ryan says, coming to sit on the arm of the couch, stretching with his feet mostly in her lap. “Hey, c’mon, it’s not that bad. Z.” He punches her very gently, more of a fist-tap, at the place where her neck meets her ear.

“Z,” he says again.

“No, I know,” she says, opening her eyes. She breathes out slowly, and that at least feels nice.

Ryan peers at her for a moment, and then says, decisively, “Let’s go somewhere they sell cheap beer.”


-


Z doesn’t end up wanting to leave til about four, five in the morning, and then she gets a cab home, and has to drag up all the change from the bottom of her purse to make the fare. Her feet hurt a tiny bit, but other than that she feels okay.

She gets ready for sleep slowly, strangely methodical, pulling her dress off and folding it carefully in the laundry pile, wiping her make up in clear, precise swipes. She even brushes her teeth, and flosses, before finally collapsing into bed.

Her cell phone wakes her up at eleven, and Z isn’t planning on answering but then it’s Tennessee and she feels bad, so she hits the answer button and says, “Darrrrling,” surprised like always at how well the drawl works with her voice.

“You’re creepy,” Tennessee tells her, and then adds, “I found an iPhone on Amazon for like, eighty dollars.”

“No way.” Z starts to sit up in bed a little but decides against it, falling back against the pillows.

Tennessee says, “I know.” Z can just hear the tap tap tap of her fingers on a computer keyboard. “Anyway. Are you free today? We should hang out before I go.”

“We should,” Z says, non-committal, feeling like an ass. She stretches her legs out against the bed, teasing the ache out of her calves, and crosses them over each other. She needs to wax again, soon. She needs to get up.

“Are you okay?” Tennessee asks, not quite hitting genuine concern.

“Sure,” Z says. “I think I’m still kind of –” and then she pauses, because it would be a stupid thing to say. She rubs at her left eye with the back of her hand. “Hey,” she says, “Tenn.”

“Mmm,” Tennessee says, sounding distracted – which is stupid because she called Z – but then not stupid, because Z would never call her stupid, even if she really was. Even though she is, sometimes. That isn’t the point, though. Z’s forgotten the point. She blinks at the ceiling a couple of times, and eventually says,

“Do you think Annie likes Sonic Youth?”

“I don’t know,” Tennessee says, without asking why Z wants to know. “Maybe. In the right mood.”

“Ah,” Z says, like she’s just discovered something of utmost importance. She makes a few clicking noises into the phone. Her tongue feels dry and sour.

“Alright,” Tennessee says finally. “Should I call you later?”

“Maybe,” Z says. “Maybe, yeah, that would be better.”

“Okay. I’m going, now.”

“Bye,” Z says. She doesn’t hang up, waits for Tennessee to give in first, and when she finally does Z chucks the phone back to the other side of the bed. Then she picks it up again and slowly types out a message to Annie, correcting any spelling mistakes and checking her grammar twice. She reads it through a few more times and then deletes it, placing her phone carefully under the bed, and goes to make some coffee.


-


Halfway through December, Z still hasn’t decided what to do for Christmas.

She’s on the way to get her car cleaned because this morning there was bird shit all over it, and Z hates the way that looks and has free time enough to do something about it. There’s a drive-through carwash place about twenty minutes away but the LA traffic is terrible, and after half an hour Z’s still got quite a way to go.

A bunch of people, Laena and her boyfriend amongst them, are going on a trip to some unspecified ski-resort for the holiday. It’s mostly supposed to be ironic, as far as Z can tell, but they’re going to have snowball fights and do Secret Santa and all wear charmingly 70s-style winter clothing. Z’s tempted, almost, but she really does hate the cold. Also it seems like a lot of the people going are in couples, and although Z’s pretty sure she could handle being the token single girl, the whole thing just seems like too much effort for not enough reward.

She’s just made a wrong turning and is being angrily chastised by the GPS when the car phone starts ringing.

“Hey,” Annie says when Z answers. “Hey, Z. Are you busy?”

The GPS chirps something at Z, and then repeats it, threateningly shrill. Z glares at it, and then says, “Not really.”

“Okay, good. I just.” Annie pauses, sounding sheepish, and then seems to shrug it off and go on. “You know how it used to be cool to make mix tapes?”

Z has to think about it, but then says, “Yeah.”

“I just found one of them,” Annie says. “Like, of my own creation. Your car has a tape deck, right? This one has The Poisons on it.”

Z’s GPS is yelling at her again, and she’s only twenty minutes away from the car wash place now. The traffic is easing up, and Z really needs to get this shit cleaned off before it gets, like, sealed on. Z knows from bad experiences that it can happen.

“I’ll be there in ten,” she tells Annie, and turns off at the next crossroad.

She’s actually there in thirty, and Annie’s there waiting outside of her building in her Ray-Bans, shrugging her hands into her coat. Her hair’s gone all shiny in the harsh sunlight and when she sees Z she beams, lightbulb style, and takes the tape out of her bag. She waves it around like a handkerchief.

“Okay,” she says, when she’s settled in the passenger seat. “For the next ninety minutes, you are not allowed to judge me.”

Z eyes the tape warily. “I make no promises.”

She ends up judging Annie pretty hard.

“Smashing Pumpkins.” Z’s speaking in a hushed tone of awe, shaking her head. “Monroe, you badass.”

Annie responds by holding her hand up in a rock salute, sticking her tongue out like a very delicate version of Gene Simmons. It makes her look kind of like a cat, the way her tongue peeks out from between her lips and her eyes widen. A stupid, sexy cat.

They made it to the car wash about ten minutes ago and now they’re in the line to go through the big blue rollers, which has always been Z’s favourite part, the dark and the steady hum and the water. They’re only two cars away, and ten songs into Annie’s mix tape. There are twenty, she says, on each side. Even without a track listing, Z’s looking forward to whatever comes next.

She stretches back up, touching her palms flat against the roof of the car for a second before slumping down again. When she glances around, Annie’s sort of gazing at her. Just absently, like she doesn’t really have anything else to focus on, is zoning out and happens to be facing in Z’s direction. Z likes being looked at, most of the time, so she doesn’t say anything about it, only straightens the lone crease in her dress and shifts in her seat.

The Pumpkins fade out a second later, and get followed by something a little softer but still kind of thrashy, a power ballad Z would maybe like to hear again whilst drunk, or at a pivotal romantic moment in her life. For now though, it feels over the top and dull, so she coughs into the mostly still comfortable silence, and says, “So, what, you just sat down and picked your favourite 90s hits?”

“Not exactly,” Annie laughs, colouring slightly. Z starts to follow the red in her cheeks, but feels too full with it and looks away.

“I had themes,” Annie goes on. “For each tape, I mean.”

It’s Z turn to laugh then. “Like what?”

“Oh,” Annie says. “You know. Sleep songs. Party songs.” She laughs again, softer, and looks at Z evenly. “Z Berg songs.”

Z keeps careful control of her facial expressions. She says, lightly, “Really?”

Annie keeps up the solemn look for a few more seconds and then her eyes widen and she gasps a laugh and splutters it out again, saying, “No, god! Z. Come on.” She narrows her eyes, still giggling. “I was kidding.”

“Huh,” Z says, looking out the windscreen. The car in front of them is edging into the little wash tunnel and she rolls her own car forward slightly. She brakes at the stop line, turning to Annie again.

“I was excited,” she says. “Nobody’s made a tape about me before.” She’s had a couple of tapes made for her, but. She was excited.

“Sorry,” Annie says, not sounding much like she means it. “I did try to make it, once, but none of the songs really –” she waves her hands. “Really fit.”

Z nods, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I am very hard to pin down,” she agrees.

“Oh yeah,” Annie says, not quite laughing again, “you’re totally elusive. Like a butterfly. You’re complex.”

“Was that –” Z starts, leaning into Annie again. “Are you saying I’m not?”

“No,” Annie says quickly, smiling, “I’m not saying anything, I’m just making observations.”

She actually puts her hand up in Z’s face, end-of-story style, and turns her back to look out the window, tossing her hair in the process and giggling. Z catches herself hating Annie, just for a second, in a very strange and important way.

It passes, and it’s their turn to go through the wash, and Z revs her car at the exact same time that Annie goes to turn up the volume and it makes them both laugh again.


-


A week or so before the 25th one of Laena’s friends, who Z doesn’t know, but knows of – one of Laena’s friends is having a party. It gets sprung on Z slightly unexpectedly because Laena says she thought Z already knew or had maybe already been invited by someone else but then she just realized she forgot to check, so here she is calling, hi, and Z says,

“Nope, I didn’t know that was happening.”

Laena laughs. “Well hey,” she says, “guess what you’re doing tonight?”

It’s a pretty nice place for a party, overall, in this big messy house with high ceilings and purple walls, and Z recognizes a couple faces here and there. The music’s coming from speakers now but there’s a group of people in the corner fiddling with a couple of guitars and a keyboard and what looks like a banjo, so Z guesses that might go well.

“I’m gonna go find a drink,” Laena says, squeezing Z’s arm. “Annie’s around somewhere.”

Z watches her go, mostly so she can follow if things out here get dull. Laena’s leaving for her trip in two days and has said, more than once, that the offer still stands for Z to come join. Z keeps coming up with excuses, though, most of them not very good. Tennessee left a few days ago. She’s been messaging them all quite regularly, and Z doesn’t even miss her yet, but there’s more than a week before she’s back, and not much around to act as a distraction.

Z turns it over in her head for a moment, thinking, but quickly shrugs it off and goes over to the music people instead to ask if she can help or anything. Somebody hands her a weird little drum, and then the girl with the keyboard wants help shifting it further out of the corner, and Z does what she can without dropping anything. It gets a little awkward, but they manage. People are laughing and talking and it’s warm, and things smell faintly of cinnamon, and Annie’s around somewhere, Z thinks, so there’s that as well.

She’s pretty good on percussion, it turns out. She messes around with the drum for a bit but then drops it into her lap in favour of hand-claps, and one of the guitarists gives her an irritated look but most of them go along with it, laughing to themselves, and afterwards the keyboard girl brings Z a drink and they talk about LA and music and travelling and not about Christmas.

It’s a pretty good conversation, and after a while other people join in, and somebody brings a few bottles over with them so Z doesn’t even have to get up for a re-fill, just sits with her elbows on her knees and relaxes.

She gets up again at around eleven, eleven thirty maybe. It’s three glasses of wine into the evening by then, and Z doesn’t feel all that drunk, but she can tell that she’s talking a lot and when she gets up, she stumbles, so maybe not. She wanders away from the group without really knowing where she’s going, or what she’s looking for, until she notices that one of the windows on the far side of the room is a lot wider than the rest and, on closer observation, it leads out onto a fire escape.

She enlists a guy standing around nearby to help her climb out, nudging him with her elbow, and afterwards hands him her empty glass in reward. He gives her an odd look, but takes it and lets her go.

The apartment is on a pretty high storey so the climb to the roof takes less than a minute. It’s cold, and the night sky is a dark orange, with a couple of lone stars drifting around in the smog. The roof is pretty nondescript, a couple plant pots and a big tank thing in the corner, but then Z looks on the other side closer to the stairs and Annie’s standing there, leaning against the roof-wall thing with her legs crossed behind her. It feels like all of the air rushes out of Z incredibly quickly, in a frightened rush, and now she can’t leave because Annie’s seen her and is waving her over quietly.

“It was so hot in there,” she says when Z’s close enough, shrugging.

“I know,” Z says. She leans next to Annie carefully, edging her face forward enough that she can catch the street below. She keeps still after that, waiting for Annie to look at her. It takes nine seconds, but they get there, and Annie’s face breaks into a grin at around the same time Z starts breathing almost properly again. After a second she puts her hand over her chest, partly to draw Annie’s eyeline there and partly because of the weird way her heart is beating – not harder but just like, to a slightly different beat. One two three instead of one two one two. Or something similar. God. Z’s so fucked up sometimes.

“Are you okay?” Annie says, after a pause. It’s a proper, friendly, warm kind of concerned, like she really wants to check.

“No, yeah,” Z says. “Yeah. I’m just.” She rubs her hand on her face. “Thinking about Christmas. Where to go.”

“God,” Annie says. “Tell me about it, we’ve had like, no time.” She gives Z a forlorn look. “I haven’t even sat on Santa’s lap yet, this year.”

“I could get a Santa suit,” Z offers, and then feels stupid and unsure of how that sounds.

Annie just laughs, and probably doesn’t get it, which is mostly a good thing. There’s a small silence after that, where Z thinks she sees fireworks off in the distance but is probably just imagining it. Somebody else comes out onto the roof, and then apologizes and goes away again when they see they way Z and Annie are standing.

“I don’t know,” Z says finally. “I’ll probably just sit around listening to like, Herb Alpert. And watching bad Christmas movies.”

“Herb Alpert,” Annie repeats, slow and soft and reverential, and that’s the first time Z considers that Annie might not be completely sober either.

“Ryan has one of his old jackets,” Z tells her. “We found it, in that memorabilia place in Silver Lake? Alex made him get it.”

Annie raises an eyebrow.

“The brown orange one,” Z explains, not sure how to stop talking now she’s started. “The one he wore on the Quiet Tear cover, you know, with the girl in the white dress where she’s holding a pink –”

And Z’s pretty sure she meant to say “flower” but then Annie leans into her a little, curving her spine so that they’re almost level, and it’s such an elegant move that Z is both jealous and charmed, and still has her hand wrapped too tight around the concrete edge of the roof-wall, and Annie’s angle is wrong the first time so their lips barely touch, but then she does it again, and better.

Z can taste the rum punch on Annie’s tongue, and her own wine, and the scented-candle smell of Annie’s hair, and she feels warmer, suddenly, than really she should when she’s outside and it’s late December. She pulls Annie’s bottom lip into her mouth. She wonders if Annie ever thought about this, in high school. If she’s thought about it recently, either.

Annie says, “Oh,” and pushes herself against Z more, so that Z can feel the warm pressure of Annie’s body against her chest. Annie’s licking into her mouth, gently, and Z thinks it’s maybe too deep now to just be a silly drunken thing. She decides to be glad of that. She puts her hand on the back of Annie’s neck and tastes the inside of her lip and decides it’s all good.

The nicest part is how when it ends, it ends well. They both pull back at around the same time so no one’s left awkwardly hanging, but apart from that Annie doesn’t move away at all, so everything still feels warm and close.

When Z checks the clock on her phone it’s almost midnight. She tells Annie, who says, “Okay,” and nods. Z glances back out across the roof. The dirty wilting plant pots are still dotted around, and the tank, and a scattering of old beer cans that Z didn’t see before and kind of wants to go pick up. Or, to order someone else to go pick up. Her lips are tingling in the cold.

“If you wanted,” Annie starts. Z doesn’t turn to look at her. “If you wanted, at Christmas. I mean. Herb Alpert’s awesome, but my parents always cook too much, so.”

“Hm,” Z says, and narrows her eyes at the nothingness. She probably looks pretty funny. She turns to Annie very slowly, with mechanical movements, jarring like she needs to be oiled at the neck. It’s gross, really. Annie laughs.

“I could bring something with me,” Z says carefully. “To like. Make up for not being family. I could bring a condiment.”

“Yes,” Annie says. She takes Z’s hand and shakes it just as slowly and methodically. “Christmas,” she says, decisively. “Condiments. It’s all happening.”

“Fuck yeah,” Z says, and salutes with the hand Annie’s not still holding, because she’s dumb and a loser, but it cracks Annie up again. After a while, on Z’s suggestion, they go further out across the roof and start to pick up all the old discarded cans by the light of her cell phone screen, falling into each other in the dark. It’s a weird thing to do and they miss a couple, but Z is so proud after, and can’t stop giggling for hours.


-


Z actually takes three condiments, in a little set with matching yellow labels and a ribbon tied around them. She’s pretty impressed with herself, feels like she’s gone above and beyond. She couldn’t think of anything Annie herself had mentioned personally wanting recently so she just got a Herb Alpert Greatest Hits CD off of Amazon and picked up a sailor hat from this fancy costume shop in the nearest mall, with a little gold anchor logo on the front of it.

She wrapped them up together a little awkwardly and wrote Annie’s name in capitals on top of the paper, with a star to dot the i. She thought about putting a lipstick kiss on there too, decided it would be lame, and did it anyway.

Annie laughs when Z pulls the packages out just before they eat, touching at the scribbled star delicately.

(They’ve kissed twice since the party; once after waving Laena off on her trip, on the steps outside her building when it was getting dark and they were cold; the second time very briefly when Z arrived today, Annie’s fingers on her wrist in the doorway.)

Annie wears the sailor hat all through dinner and keeps it on after too, when most of her family have dispersed and it’s just the two of them and Annie’s sister and her boyfriend drinking what’s left of the wine. By then it’s fallen out of place a little, set at a jaunty angle. Somebody puts on the Herb Alpert CD and Annie looks at Z and starts laughing, without saying anything, and later when Z’s helping clear plates away Annie comes to stand next to her, tight so that Z can feel her all along the left of her body.

She glances over, raising an eyebrow, but Annie just winks and leans her head against Z’s shoulder.

Comments

[redbrickrose.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is lovely. Your Z pov is just delightful; I love all the little details that reveal her relationships with her friends and bandmates and I love her slowly figuring out what she wants. Wonderful.

[takkatakkatakka.livejournal.com]

yeah, Z is such an interesting character to write! i'm glad i did her justice, haha.