Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

i want you the same way you want me

mo fẹ ọ ni ọna kanna ti o fẹ mi

[fexi]

1

Lexi is running her nails up and down his arm, soft and sweet. Marilyn Monroe's eyelashes flutter on the TV. Up and down. Up and down. Fezco tips his head back onto the sofa. 

He watches the movie. Lexi watches him.

His hands lay next to him. He can touch Lexi’s thigh if he stretches his pinky, just a little bit. He knows that, and he knows that she knows that too.

The evening settles heavy in the room. Lexi's nails migrate to the fold of his collar. He looks at her. She looks at him looking at her. 

They sit, very very still. Whatever it is that they've been progressing towards slips and shifts between them. 

What do you want?

I want you the same way you want me. 

The words are his, but they're also hers. Neither of them have said anything, but they might as well have.

What do you want?

Everything.

The room stays silent. Fezco closes the distance between them, slowly. Not necessarily out of doubt, or caution. Just because he can. 

They never break eye contact.

He stops when he can feel her breath on his face.  

Her eyes briefly dart down to his lips. She smiles, small enough that if he wasn't this close he wouldn't be able to see it. 

How are you? 

I am satisfied.

She closes the gap. Everything swirls and condenses. 

You want me?

Yes.

not eat with you? i'd rather starve

لا تأكل معك؟ أفضل أن أموت جوعًا

2

Lexi has always talked like she's dying of thirst. 

Words are salt in her mouth, he knows. Her tongue is made of sand and brine. She pours the words into his ear until she runs out of them. If they're too much for his ears, she pours them into his mouth. 

Her buttons are pearls. Her chin is a soft curve and her voice is sweet. Passerine, he thinks, when he looks at her. 

Are you hungry?

What?

He looks at her. She looks at him, looking at her. Taps her finger to his nose and smiles wide. 

The summer air wafts in and out of the house. Both their collars are unbuttoned. He looks at the expanse of her sternum. Lays his hand on it and feels the slight ridges.

You're beautiful.

You're beautiful.

that's just how I feel

đó chỉ là cảm giác của tôi

3

Why do you want me? 

Why not? 

Her nose wrinkles. She taps her pen against her textbook. The sun bounces off the windowsill, onto his stacked rings and into her eyes. 

That's not a good answer.

That's not a good question.

move baby, move baby, i'm in love 

दिल आशना है

4

These kinds of parties are where dignity goes to die. 

Maddy is on top of a table, her dress soaked with vodka. She's smiling though, dimples on full display, so Lexi decides to not think about it too hard. It's just very messy, and Lexi hates mess. 

But Cassie is here, and Maddy is here, and so is Nate, so Lexi came to this funeral anyway, because Cassie needed someone who had at least some of her best interests at heart.

Halfway through the night, Lexi begins to feel the weight of it, like Cassie is sitting on her shoulders, instead of on Nate's lap, deliberately in a spot Maddy will eventually see. 

It's just very messy. Lexi can feel the grime between her fingers.

Lexi looks at them, and then looks away. 

Fezco is on a couch in the living room, glittering as he tends to do. He's beautiful, in a way that makes Lexi want to become an artist instead of a writer. A picture of him is worth a thousand of Lexi's words. 

He hasn't seen her yet, so she looks at him some more. She likes doing this, watching him, despite how creepy she feels. 

Someone crashes into the pool. Someone else starts an argument. The noise startles him, and turns towards it. They lock eyes.

Why are you so far away?

She makes her way over to him. He's done selling today, she knows. It's evident in how rumpled he is, softened and blurred around the edges. 

She sits next to him, twines her fingers with his. They're joined from shoulder to knee. 

He slants his eyes to her over the smoke from his joint. They're crinkled at the edges in a smile he reserves only for her. 

How are you?

I'm tired.

He takes a hit from his joint. She licks the smoke from his mouth as he exhales.

It's too much, and it's not enough. Random, clashing bits of EDM bounce off the walls. Maddy has discovered Cassie and Nate. They all scream at each other while everyone else gets drunker and watches. It's just very messy.

Fezco looks at the twist and tangle of people, and back at her. 

Let's go.

Let's go.

He leads her out of the house just as a bottle flies out of the living room and shatters by the pool. 

The car is already running, Ash in the front seat. The boy scowls as he relinquishes it to Lexi. She smiles back.

John Lennon is playing, on the drive home. He is singing about the child he had with his mistress. And also about war, but whatever. 

i feel God in the room

(quand on baise)

5

Sometimes his hands come up to cradle her face when he kisses her. Those types of kisses that have her bending backwards, one of his hands slipping down to her waist to steady her. She can feel each of his rings, pressing cold into her cheek. 

She likes his rings. Likes how they glimmer in the sunlight, how he mixes some silver into mostly gold. She likes the way they clink onto the dish on his bedside table, the methodical way he removes them before they go to sleep. Likes twisting them around his fingers when she's bored and he's not. Likes to kiss them, one by one, before twining her fingers with his.  

She gives him one of hers, one with a little butterfly carved into the silver metal. Watches him slide it onto his pinky, sandwiched between two thick gold bands. Kisses it, then kisses him. 

Chapter Text

where did you come from? 

(e não me vais levar lá?)

6

All the parties blend together, but something about this one feels different. 

It might be the fact that Cassie isn't talking to her, and so there's no goodwill that can be used to guilt trip Lexi into being DD. Maybe it's the dress she's in, borrowed from Maddy, something that straddles the edge of what Lexi is comfortable in without quite tipping over. 

Time is syrupy and it moves without consequence. The sense of audacity she's been building since she started writing the play is stacking up in her throat; she needs to let it out. 

She feels–not free, but something adjacent. Less outshinable, maybe. The tightness of being the little sister is loosening, and so is she. 

“You look good, Lexi,” Maddy had said, when she first arrived. “Very good.”

And she feels it too. Good.

Feels even better when Fezco sees her, looks her up and down and up again, slowly, sweetly.  

Takes her hand as gently as he always does and it feels warm, clean.

____

She's thirsty. She tells him so. He gets up to find her a lemonade, but that's not what she wants. The dress is new, and the night is new, and this thing between them is new, so she can't just up and tell him: My throat is dry and hoarse. I want to sip at you until it stops. 

i read your diary, every line 

(je veux boire tes mots comme du vin)

7

He's addicted to the peace. 

Lexi is asleep on his chest. The sky is grey-blue with rain. Ash is fucking around on his computer in down the hall. 

He'll have a migraine by tomorrow. He can feel it creeping, feel its fingers starting to dig into the back of his skull. But by the time they sink in, Lexi will have gone home. Ash will be at the store. The sun will be high in the sky, and he will survive.

Next to his head, Lexi has left her notebook. For him. 

Her play is nearing the ending stages and she wants him to go over it and tell her what he thinks. 

He doesn't know what she wants, not really. She's too smart, and her words are too clean; he doesn't want to touch them. He doesn't want to touch her, really. He feels as if he'll see a smudge of his fingerprint when he removes his hand. He shouldn't touch her. 

He wants to touch her. He’d dip his hands in holy water just to touch her. 

She doesn't hesitate, not with him. He feels like he shouldn't touch her, but that doesn't matter much when she reaches for him anyway. When she strokes her finger down his jaw, when she kisses him hello and goodbye. When she comes to his house after a trying day and falls asleep on his chest. 

He's addicted to the peace. He breathes in and waits for the sun to set.

ga-li-le-o

(anyanwụ bụ etiti eluigwe na ala)

8

Summer wafts in and the sun swells white in the blue of the sky. Lexi swaps out her turtlenecks and cardigans for floaty sundresses, wispy things that flirt with the middle of her thighs. 

The auburn of her hair, the blue of the sky, the yellow of the dandelions. Red, blue, yellow. Condensing and expanding. The fission and fusion of colour.

__

It's too fucking hot, he thinks, snagging a bottle of lemonade from the freezer to press against his forehead. Too fucking hot.

It's one of those days that's so hot everyone steals indoors to nap and sit next to an open fridge. One of those days that he just knows will leave him with sunburns if he even thinks about stepping outside. One of those weeks, really.

“It wasn't this hot last year,” he'd told Lexi last night. They'd been lying on his bed in their underwear, splayed out, because it was too fucking hot to cuddle.

And Lexi had giggled, and then she'd laughed, and he'd laughed, and, still smiling, she'd gone off on a tangent about global warming. He doesn't remember too much about it, because her skin had tanned in a way his couldn't, and her eyes had been so brown in the late sun. And randomly, he'd thought, Wow. This could be forever.

Pinched her cheek as she smiled and felt the splotches of leftover baby fat and remembered, We are the same age, but you are still a child.

yeah, my boyfriend's pretty cool

(mais il n'est pas aussi cool que moi)

9

There's a blade of grass stuck to her tights. A revolving stream of streetlights, throbbing through her head as the Caddy drifts down the street. 

She turns her head away at a particularly bright one, stares at the slope of Fez’s nose, at the way his eyes sparkle warm and cool and blue in the low light. Fuck, he looks good. 

And she could float away, she really could, such a fuckin’ lightweight, he said softly, amused, when he picked her up from Maddy's. But his hand is on her knee, holding her down, and fuck. She wants to be closer to him, needs to be closer to him, cups his hand in both of hers and it's still not enough. She needs to press his nose to his neck, breathe him in, inhale all his exhales. She could crawl into the space between his heart and lungs, pull his ribcage tight around her, feel the ebb and flow of his diaphragm and it still wouldn't be enough. 

Would he be scared, if she told him that? Would he shake and quiver and run away? Would everything he's seen, addicts and chaos and smoke and noise, pale in comparison to a girl who wants to be couched in his skin?

são fantasmas, 

somos fantasmas

10 

There is a girl sitting on the ledge of the pool. Her feet slowly kick the water, up and down. Next to her, a boy crosses his legs so he doesn't touch the water. She is Lexi, he is Fezco. They are in love.

Time is syrupy and it moves without consequence. The water reflects blue off her dress and into his eyes.

He takes her hand loosely in his. Tries not to marvel at the fact that he can do that now. 

Somewhere behind them, a girl is whispering to her friend about how some guy brought her here on a date and just abandoned her when his ex showed up. She's distraught, so she's not whispering very well. Her friend pats her back, bored. Lexi feels bad for her. She tells Fezco so. 

“Mm,” he says. “Shit’s always so damn messy at these parties. Hate ‘em.”

“I can see why,” she says. Sidles closer to him. Tips her head onto his shoulder. He watches a curl waterfall down his chest.

“But, at least, we got together at one of these messy parties. Has to count for something in their favor.”

He smiles, slow and sweet.