2019-11-15 - The Spaces in Between

The house was quiet as Sparrow hung up the brilliantly white shirt Yule gave her Wednesday night, the shirt she had worn both days since. It still smelled like him, citrus and musk and that lone floral note. She still smelled like him. The shirt would need washing soon, if she was going to keep wearing it like this, but it could go another few days yet, hold that memory a little longer. Here, in the closet, was the only place that top button ever got done up.

Warped and wavering piano notes cut through the quietude of the half-empty house, the music soft enough to not carry beyond her room and wake Monica across the hall. Corey was in Seattle this weekend. And Alfie was still at work for another couple hours. School nights seemed easier, when she couldn't tempt herself into staying up that late with all her classes starting so early, when she would already be fast asleep by the time he climbed into bed. Next semester, they'd schedule better, but this one...

'Wake up and look me in the eyes again.'

It might've been Yule she'd talked bath time playlists with, but it was always Alfie she thought about when she sunk down chin-deep in the still-steaming water. Hard not to think about him here, where she'd watched him fall through the floor in her dream, swallowed up by darkness and absent for hours. He'd slept in her bed since, almost every night. Who can tell if it actually helped, but it made her feel better. Most mornings, she let him rest; sleep was rare enough for AJ that those precious hours straddling dawn when exhaustion finally claimed him weren't anything she was going to steal away, no matter how much she wanted to.

'And then the silence surrounds you. And haunts you.'

Only a couple hours. Sparrow tried not to fill all that time running through all the things she wanted to tell him, all the conversations that never fit into the in-between moments when they caught each other conscious these days, when all she wanted to do was be close and breathe him in. Still, it didn't hurt to go over the list again, at least once, to keep it fresh in her head: the door in the mural downstairs; the seventeen she wanted inked in her skin for him, with him; why Bax might crash here sometimes; how her feet don't feel like they've touched the ground in two days. It could all wait until break. Right?

'Two minds and all the places they have been.'

August had been nothing but Alfie, filled with poetry and adventure, with remembering and discovering, who they were and who'd they'd become. This was better, now. She knew that. But knowing didn't kill the odd itch for the days when they shared half their classes, when he was her most frequent lab partner. Even if she liked who he was now a million times more than the by-the-books kid he'd been then. It would just be easier if there were more, if they could run away again, shoot down the shore again and camp out where they first confessed. Live in the seaspray for a little while.

Sparrow soaked until the water grew tepid, until her playlist got too somber, until she smelled of nothing much at all. Until it wasn't two whole hours to wait anymore. She was still reading--one of those nerdy comics she'd picked up at One Up's Halloween party--when Alfie crept in, quietly, in case she'd fallen asleep with the light on again. He stopped by the minifridge first, a styrofoam container slotted into the same shelf as the night prior, food for her, for the morning. When did these little routines start to form?

The conversation didn't need to be quite so quiet, so very soft-spoken, but it fit the substance, small as it all was, warm words of welcome and want before collapsing into cuddling. Limbs tangled with limbs, faces pressed to skin, and she just breathed him in for a good long while. Past the fried bar food, the over-sweet liquor, the sweat and stale beer, she smelled him: the familiar lemon haze, the borrowed bodywash, him. Alfie. Her stardust and poetry. Here.

Maybe the waiting wasn't so bad.