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Velma was unfortunately no stranger to there being a random sleazy guy with shifting eyes and likely shiftier morals or two somehow managing to take up all the air and space in Doc's tiny, dilapidated shop despite their as of yet underdeveloped frames when she crossed the threshold of its rusted, aged front door to meet with her captivating but not appropriately discerning friend/maybe something more Graziella.
What she wasn't used to was there being far more of them than she could count at a glance, especially with the unsettling quality they had at a first and second impression of almost being one collective, poised entity hellbent on achieving unified goals that she didn't know the specifics of and didn't want to but nevertheless had an almost instinctive understanding of after a lifetime of semi forced, semi willing exposure to the vices and desires of boys and men.
They were milling around in their engagements with various activities: shooting darts like somatic, pent up energy in their arms and bodies wasn't the only kind they were trying to let out, looking her up and down in a way she was entirely too familiar with that meant they were imagining with extreme indulgence what lay underneath her already scant and purposefully provocative dress, thrusting jeering barbs at some increasingly agitated and angered weird girl who was dressed like she was harboring the disillusion that she was one of them and somehow hadn't been forcibly disavowed of that fanciful notion yet.
Despite this, she knew even before the one with his arm draped around Graziella like she was a conquest of his and her looking up at him in a gut-twisting way she never seemed to be able to spare for Velma even after she had skillfully brought her to a way better climax than any of these fucking guys she seemed to fish out of increasingly lower and lower depths of the gutter would ever be capable of whistled to snap them to attention that these guys weren't just an absurdly large assortment of beaus that Graziella had gathered around her, but rather a crowd she had fallen or was falling into.
"Everyone settle down. Velma, your name wa- for the last time, knock it off, Anybodys!"
As the apparent sole object of Graziella's attention even though Velma was right in front of her and she had asked her to meet her here redirected his condescendingly polite gaze from her to the weird girl… Anybodys with a sudden, clearly well trodden anger, Velma did the same and saw one of the guys, impressive in height and build and the power they inherently conferred rather than any arising from his energy or conviction or lack thereof, pulling her off of one of the guys that had been mocking her earlier like this was a routine they had gone through many times before and he didn't need to put any real force behind the gesture.
She looked up at him with an anger that similarly didn't have much force behind it before looking back and forth between the now smug guy she had been fighting and the one who had called off her attack and seemed to be the leader of this group and spitting defiantly at them with a much more real anger, then leaned back against the wall in a poor approximation of ease beside the weary and worn down and icy looking guy who had put a stop to the fight she had clearly started.
Velma couldn't really blame her for getting agitated at the guys riling her up- she wasn't feeling very kindly towards them and their sadly not entirely unexpected intrusion onto what was supposed to have been a private rendezvous between her and Graziella either- but, well... what did she expect dressed and acting like that?
Don't let men get under your skin or they'll never stop digging, that was a lesson Velma knew she would have probably learned before she knew that ten came after nine and the drawn out business meetings her dad but really her mom partook in and tried to eke at least a little advantage for herself and her now fallen company out of usually lasted until around eight if her mom hadn't taught it to her directly, so how come this weird, tomboyish, entirely too effortful and effortless in all the wrong ways girl hadn't yet figured that cold, hard truth out?
Plus she seemed really annoying even from this brief and distraction-filled exposure…
Velma was snapped out of her irritated contemplations by the leader of this little rag-tag group and apparently Graziella's feelings and attention once again addressing her, the anger mostly faded in favor of that skin crawling but all too familiar condescending politeness.
"Sorry about that- I can dig a lot but I'll never dig why ya make us put up with the tranny trailin' afta us like she's in heat, Tony..."
The guy kept on saying stuff to Velma after that aside to the boy- to the man next to him, but suddenly she cared even less about paying attention to what exactly he was saying.
The man next to him… Tony… had been watching her like some of the other guys, she realized, but somehow she didn’t mind it from him even in its underlying similarities to their lecherous gazes.
He was still a man, of course, with all the trappings that entailed, but she knew somehow with the skill she’d developed and started honing early on out of necessity of digging beyond the fronts people presented to the world to get at the true and almost always less palatable, less refined intentions driving them underneath that he was in fact a man in contrast to the overgrown boys and Graziella and Anybodys surrounding him.
The way he was looking at her wasn’t… just unfiltered, carnal, possessive desire, but rather heavily overlain with a genuine yearning for a real connection that she knew without having to second and third guess it and still be disappointed in the end as she usually would that he would really be capable of forming with her instead of just trying to pass stupid little shortsighted games off as the real thing.
Would he still be looking at her like this, like she was the only thing that existed in this shop or in the world at large if she had come in here dressed with no care or thought to the importance of presenting oneself properly and demurely, of walking that fine line between showing too little skin and being a stuck up prude or showing too much and being a teasing, jezebellic whore while her high heels made balancing difficult even with her extensive practice?
Would he still be looking at her like this if she dressed and presented herself like Anybodys?
…She would be a completely different person if she had, one much less aware of her unfortunately irrevocable place in the world and the metaphorical bootstraps that she needed to lift to make it even somewhat, even inconsistently nicer and bigger and less suffocating.
There was no use asking herself if this man… Tony, wow that sounded like such a nice name all of a sudden even though it had never particularly stuck out to her before now, almost like it was praying and music wrapped into one… would be looking at the ‘real’ her underneath all her practiced trappings of what the more sophisticated among men called feminine wiles and what the more straightforward of them called ‘being a slut’ in the same way as he was now.
Her day to day performance that hardly registered to her as a performance anymore and felt more like breathing and walking but more precarious couldn’t be meaningfully separated from the circumstances she had been born into and that surrounded and shaped her now, from her… but maybe this really cute, clearly thoughtful and contemplative and mature but also big and muscular and protective like she liked in guys diamond in the rough could eventually be separated from the circumstances of this rough crowd he and apparently Graziella had fallen into through her efforts…
What was keeping him here as a man among boys, loyalty born out of shared history?
Being dragged back down into the pit they had dug for themselves every time he tried to elevate himself above it, above them?
The simple fact that men like himself, who were capable of looking at her with a quality of eternal reassurance and understanding of the impression of her that, at her best, she hoped to convey rather than purely seeing her as a means to their lowly, lowering, licentious ends, were painfully rare in the oppressive conditions of the West Side where distracting daily matters like the pleasures of the flesh and the exploitations that were often necessary to acquire and maintain access to it, to them were often all the denizens could focus on when higher, loftier goals were so far above the station in life they had been born into?
There seemed to be so few true men like this in the unfortunate place of Velma’s birth that she had never found one amidst the sea of immature little boys like Graziella seemed to find and drape herself around on what felt by now like a near daily basis especially with how interchangeable they all were, even though she had been taught by both her mom and life from very early on that her only shot at getting up to those higher, loftier goals was to find a suitable star to hitch her wagon to.
A diamond in a rough that would become a little less rough once he and her finally fought and clawed her way up there back where her family had been shortly before her time, before the near total collapse of the economy and seemingly with it all things including the chips on their shoulders and their previously successful and dominating car business.
Could this- could he finally be it, the star she could hitch her wagon to amidst a sea of planets poorly masquerading as stars, her long awaited and longed for diamond in the rough?
Would Tony be the name she would never stop saying?
Was he finally someone worthy of being brought back to her mom, capable of withstanding the pressure of her discerning and brilliant gaze without wilting or inappropriately brushing it off?
The seemingly eternal spell between them effortlessly blocking out the rest of time and space and transforming all of it into an unimportant blur in the background was broken not by them finally reaching each other or the tendency of good things in general but especially on the West Side not to last but by the innocuous but strangely piercing sound of the rusted bell above the front door indicating that it had opened.
Like time and space were redoubling onto themselves in a desperate attempt to make up for the temporary but somehow still eternal hold Tony and her had placed on them, the next few seconds or maybe minutes went by in a blur that made Velma’s initial unwilling but sadly not entirely unexpected introduction to this group of lost boys look coherent by comparison.
The group seemed to have fully transformed into one harrowing, domineering entity now, trading progressively faster and more aggressive barbs with the guy who had just come in like two feral dogs circling each other hackles raised and teeth bared… Velma had no idea what was going on except that this was the caliber of behavior she would have expected out of this crowd Graziella had apparently fallen into and the guy she was hanging onto like she had found something special in him that couldn’t be found in practically any guy around here including the others she had had trysts with called the guy who had just come in an Emerald at some point like that was supposed to be an insult?
The room’s quite handsome gravity well sighed slightly like he felt as much weariness and exasperation as her and could barely keep up a front of feeling differently for these guys any more… maybe she had something to do with that, she realized… and then after another eternal but brief moment of eye contact and understanding passing between them he said something to the increasingly puffed up and animated jerk Graziella was hanging onto and backing up the not even clever taunts of about going down to the basement to do something for Doc.
With the shared understanding that had passed between him and Velma, they moved in sync towards a door she hadn’t noticed before, and then they were on an unstable and rickety stairwell made less so by his intoxicatingly muscular and sturdy arm keeping her secure, in a pocket of warmth and metaphorical light surrounded by the cold and darkness of the rest of the basement that was being kept at bay by this connection between them, the sounds of whatever petty bullshit was happening on the other side of that thin door that might as well be the length of the West Side somehow almost entirely muted by the joint sound of their rapidly beating hearts.
Velma knew on an intellectual level that she wasn’t actually seeing the rich, alluring depths of Tony’s deep brown eyes now in the even darker basement, but the faithful recreation of them eternally etched into her mind’s eye made it feel like she was.
Like she always would, now.
There was so much she wanted to say to him, a lifetime of pent up longing for a connection with someone who, like her, dared to hope that there was something better out there coming for them if they would just reach out for it towards the sky, towards the moon instead of keeping their eyes and arms and sights down at the level of the earth and their current circumstances.
Did he know of those heights by proxy from family that had previously been able to sit atop them and then been cast down from them to the ground they had been starting at from high above like her, or was he just imbued with some celestial quality that drove him to seek out his true home among the stars?
Did he dream of achieving something specific for himself, for them now that he had finally found her up there, or would they form a shared dream and a plan to obtain it for themselves together?
Where had he been hiding from her all this time?
What would his lips feel like against hers?
Velma could feel the answers to those questions unfolding in front of her now that the most important thing had finally at long last fallen into its proper place, and the words flowed naturally from her into the shared and unified space they had created, separate from both the earth around them and the sky above them but only temporarily in the latter case.
“What do you dream of when you look up at the sky?”
She felt him closing most of what little physical distance remained between them far more than she saw it, with the sensory capabilities of her whole body and their shared space.
“You, I just didn’t know it til now.”
Then, suddenly, they were sharing a steadfastly tender and increasingly passionate kiss for the first time of many.