Ella Claire Gainsborough {Beauty} (bookshelved) wrote in bellumlogs, @ 2010-06-11 23:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | beast, beauty |
Who: Daniel and Ella
What: Starts and Stops (Completed Doc)
Where: R1 and the grocery store
When: This morning
Warnings: None
Daniel got rid of the empty bottles, kind of (he stashed them under the mess of dead leaves in the garden outside). He washed his mouth out, and he was lucky enough to be fairly sober already, since he’d woken up that way. He wasn’t stupid, he knew she was going to know he’d been drinking, it was probably in his skin as well as the apartment, but he didn’t want her to know how bad off he was; so he got rid of the bottles, opened the windows, and checked on the little herbs. He had to poke at the soil, because he never remembered when he watered it drunk and he watered them all the time: damp.
He looked around the apartment and pushed his fingers through his hair in exasperation. She was coming. Great. Coming. Here. Great. Here.
Ella made him wait.
It wasn’t intentional, exactly. She had to shower, and her long, thick hair took a long time to dry, and she had to change dresses five times before finally settling on one. The ballerina flats she slipped on her feet were soft, and she hesitated just a moment before walking out the door, glancing toward the barren kitchen. She wished she had something here to bring him - tea, something - but she spent no time in the kitchen of 905, and so it was as echo-silent as the rest of the apartment was.
She tucked her hair into a loose chignon, and she took her time climbing the stairs, trying to prepare herself for whatever she would find in R1. The smell of whiskey? Surely. The smell of women? Possibly. She hadn’t had a drink in three days, and she could no longer smell the sick-sweet scent of alcohol in her own pores, and she was glad of it. The scent of flowers clung to her skin and her clothing, and she imagined she could smell the whiskey from outside the door to R1.
She hoped he didn’t have any bottles out.
By the time Ella arrived, Daniel had convinced himself she was not coming. He checked the dumbwaiter for the last time about fifteen minutes previous, and after that he had begun to dig through the books standing on every surface and along every wall, looking for something he cared enough to read with another drink--which, fortunately, he had not fetched down yet by the time he heard her outside.
He dropped the book he was holding (without even knowing what it was) and pulled the door open, hope undisguised.
Daniel wasn’t at his best. There was a faint scent of whiskey on his skin under the soap and the musk, and his eyes were bloodshot and faintly yellowed, but he was also upright, clean, and somewhat clean-shaven. “I didn’t think you were going to come,” he said, clearly pleased he had been wrong.
Despite her best efforts, Ella couldn’t hide her pleasure at seeing him. It was an instant reaction to being around him, and for a moment that was all there was as she looked at his hopeful face. She closed the space between him on soft, quiet feet, and she hugged him with a slow, unhurried grace; a move born of familiarity and intimacy, and then she stepped back.
The scent of whiskey clung to his skin in a way that could not be denied, and she touched the almost-stubble of his cheek with a gentle hand. His eyes, yellowed as they were, worried her, and she let her gaze linger a moment, the worry unhidden.
“Of course I came,” she finally said with a grin that was part caring, part teasing. “There’s no guarantee I’m going to get a chance to force you to read Wuthering Heights aloud to me. again.” She walked past him then, in a press of roses and softness against his arm. “Invite me in?” she asked, even as she entered the apartment.
The return hug was fierce and grateful, a hard squeeze of long pent-up affection. He was reluctant to let her go and wouldn’t entirely even after she stepped back, dropping a hand into hers that slid through her fingers as she walked past. The scent of roses made his stomach knot, but he didn’t say anything except, “I’m not going to read it, I tell you.” He shut the door behind her and herded her along toward the kitchen. “I don’t... really have any groceries,” he said, worriedly.
She looked down at his hand in hers as she moved past him, and then she looked up at his face again. “More reason for you to read it to me, if you’re going to starve me” she said, glancing past him and at the apartment as he herded her along. He’d obviously holed up after she’d gone; the windows were open, but the air that lingered behind was stale and heavy and whiskey-touched. She looked back at him, and then she called for Kat, who had peeked around the couch at her in sleepy curiosity.
She slipped away, and she dropped to her knees in front of the approaching kitten, scratching under her chin. “We’re going to the store,” she told him decidedly, not looking up from the furball demanding her attention as she said it. “If you don’t want to read Wuthering Heights on the way, I recommend choosing another book,” she said, her voice more than a little hopeful.
Daniel scowled, but only out of habit. “If we’re going out, I don’t want to bring a book.” There was a definite emphasis on the ‘we’, and he gave the unrepentant kitten another scowl for taking all of Ella’s attention before she’d been in the apartment for five minutes. “How is the new apartment?” He was secretly hoping that it was completely unlivable and horrific, and then she would come back to where she belonged.
“Can you recite from rote while we walk, or are you going to compose prose as we walk?” she asked, straightening and turning to look at him. She walked toward him, and she smoothed one hand over his shirtfront; he smelled more of musk and soap than alcohol, so she knew he’d woken recently, woken mostly sober, and her hand trailed down to run over the fabric over his stomach. “It’s lonely,” she admitted, looking over her shoulder at the apartment she considered more home than she did 905. “I thought living with Iris would be like living with Leah, Vaughn,” she corrected. “Like living with you.”
He was about to say he wasn’t going to do either, and that he wasn’t feeling literary, and that he just wanted to talk to her. He didn’t because she was talking again, and so close that he didn’t have any hesitation in putting his arms around her just like he always did. “Iris isn’t as pretty as me,” he said, smiling.
It was easy, being in his arms, and she stayed there for a moment, her hands sliding up to his shoulders. “I am certain her doctor would disagree on that front,” she said, thumb brushing the bare skin at the side of his neck.
“Blind,” he replied softly, touching his forehead to hers and closing his eyes so he could inhale the scent of roses.
She sighed softly, sliding her hand down, fingers twining in the fabric at his sleeve. He was obviously hungover, obviously a mess, but being around him still made her feel soothed the way nothing else did. She didn’t know whether to blame it on their tale, her own foolishness, too many romance novels or the fact that she was still only 23. She kissed his cheek softly, and she moved back and stared down at his bare feet (which were covered in fuzzy kitten). “You’ll need to do better than Kat for shoe-wear.”
He looked down too, and made a soft sound of protest. “I have shoes.” Of course he had shoes. He was indignant enough because he knew that he had shoes. He just didn’t know where they were, that’s all.
She laughed the sound warm and carrying through the living room. “Make them materialize then, Mister Webster.”
“Or we could just stand here forever.” The embrace got a little tighter.
She let him hold her tighter for a moment, then she pulled back gently. “If you go to the store with me, talk with me, I’ll stay through lunch,” she promised, and it was a selfish promise. She wanted to talk to someone who cared about her, someone who would listen. Whatever had happened, whatever he’d done, she had no doubt that Daniel cared about her. She smiled softly at the realization. “I’ll even let you garden under my supervision.”
“I’ll come.” His arms yearned for her as she put the distance between them, but he didn’t follow, and let his hands drop. “I can’t garden,” he said, abruptly despondent and letting his eyes fall. “The roses, can you fix them before you go again?” The ones in the boxes outside of the windows. The graying green was worse than it had been, and he didn’t like seeing it.
“We’ll fix them,” she said, nudging his shoulder with her hand. “Shoes,” she repeated, picking Kat up a moment later. She started to tell him about Peter getting in touch with her, but she decided it might be a good idea to actually get him out of the building first, so she waited. Instead, she went into the kitchen, and she dipped her fingers in the soil the herbs were in, and she smiled. “Not bad,” she said softly.
Daniel reappeared again, with shoes and that vague air of uncertainty and hesitation that typically accompanied a trip outside. He seemed willing, however, because he’d got quite a bit of practice over the last few weeks. “You’re not bringing the cat?” He looked down at the furball. “She’ll run off and get lost.” A cat wasn’t a lot to come home to, but she was something, at least.
Ella nuzzled one of Kat’s fuzzy little ears, and then she put her back down on the floor. “We missed each other,” she told him, the smile on her face saying she was talking about more than the cat, her gaze holding his intensely for a moment. Then she walked out his front door, and she waited to see if he followed.
She leaned back against the railing, and she watched the entrance to R1 like a woman who’s waiting to see if she’s pursued, if there’s interest in her, if she should fight for this.
The kitten refused to look forlorn at being left behind, and Daniel refused to look contrite about it. He turned around and moved out the door behind Ella, pulling the door shut behind him. He met her expectant look with one of confusion and uncertainty, not knowing what it meant and whether or not he was supposed to go forward or back.
The look of confusion and uncertainty was one she was familiar with, and so it didn’t worry her the way a look of knowing rejection would have. It just meant he didn’t know yet, she reminded herself, and she took a step back and started down the stairs, looking back over her shoulder at him. “Helena’s ex-husband, the lawyer, got in touch with me about Trenton,” she said as she walked. She had no idea Daniel had been part of those discussions, so she thought it a safer topic to start with than AA meetings or her father.
She pushed the button for the elevator at the Penthouse level, and she peered up at him. “Did he ask you to be on his jury as well?”
He waited beside her and frowned at the empty grate as they waited for the elevator to cooperate. “They think they can make the building a damn commune,” Daniel said, disgusted. “Stay out of it, Ella. You don’t want to be involved in their lunch mob bullshit.” Daniel was angry enough that it came out as an unapologetic command.
She looked over at him, surprised at the fact that he was passionate about this. She attributed it to Vlad, and his best friend’s possible eventual fall into the hands of such a mob. “I don’t, you’re right,” she said honestly. “It’s why I agreed,” she added, entering the elevator as the doors opened and then reaching out for his waistband to tug him in with her, biting her lips as she reached for him. “If we don’t want them to become a mob, we have to be willing to stop it from happening, don’t we? My best friend turns into a vampire when the moon is full; it’s more than a little important to me too.”
Daniel took her arm in a grip above her elbow that was as intense and dark as his expression. Despite her fingers at his waist it wasn’t sex he wanted, not right that second. “Ella. You are not going to put yourself in front of a mob, I don’t care what difference you think you’re going to make. You did that already and you got hurt, and there wasn’t a damn thing either one of us could have done about it. No.”
His dark and intense expression didn’t scare her, and she met those blue eyes with an unwavering gaze of her own. “I’m not going to be scared forever, Daniel. I’ll hide behind you whenever I am, but I’m not going to hide from them,” she explained, not sure if that would make sense to him or not. She was scared now, still. But she wasn’t going to let it control her, even if she was willing to admit that him being close by helped her feel braver. She smiled at him, and she decided to tell him so. “You make me braver,” she said, and when the elevator doors open, she moved toward the doors, counting on his grip on her upper arm to move him along with her.
His hand didn’t loosen. If anything it got tighter. “You’re doing this to prove something to yourself. You don’t need to. It’s not worth it. That moron Trenton isn’t worth it.” Daniel said the name as if he had to spit it out to get the taste from his mouth.
“No, but if we ever want to catch who hurt Nicolas and I, we need this system in place,” she said with a defiant tilt of her chin and a tug to his waistband. “You’re not planning on leaving Bellum, are you?” she asked casually, as if that was important to this discussion somehow in a way not being outwardly stated.
He was surprised by the question, and answered without thinking, releasing her arm and coming forward without resistance. “No.” Blink. “Why?”
She tugged him into the lobby and out into the morning sun, not caring who might see them, and once they were outside, she slid her arm into his and stopped walking altogether. He could lead, she decided, and she gave him a smile that said as much. “Well, if you aren’t leaving, then we’re just going to have to live here for the time being, aren’t we?” she asked with complete casualness. “And if we’re going to live here, then we have to live here.” She squinted up at him in the sunlight, hoping he understood what she was saying. Even if he decided he didn’t want her, she wasn’t going to abandon him to Bellum Letale. She’d made that decision already, you see, and he was going to have to live with it.
He started walking, almost automatically, again without thinking. “We?” he echoed, mystified. He didn’t understand Ella’s combination of steel and softness, and he didn’t understand that she could care and leave at the same time. Jane had done the same thing, and he didn’t understand that, either. Women.
She slowed as they neared her shop, and she hoped her father was already out for the day (they had an agreement where he’d leave in the mornings, and she’d let him back in once the shop closed). Nicolas was behind the counter, and everything looked quiet, and she touched a rose petal outside as they passed. She’d made arrangements to be out of the shop for the morning to see Daniel, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t concerned about the store in her absence. She slowed a little and motioned to the empty space beside the store, where Redhorse Tea used to be. “I’m thinking of seeing if Esme will rent that with me. I can’t very well leave with business expanding, can I?” she asked him. Then, a moment later, she looked down at the sidewalk in front of them, and she smiled softly. “I care about you, Daniel. I’m not leaving,” she said. “Even if you decide you’d rather be with Jane or Boyd, I still care about you, for you. It doesn’t change that you hurt me, or that you were a complete and utter ass about it, but that doesn’t make what I feel for you go away. Hurt doesn’t wipe out love, not for me at least.”
He didn’t reply about the other two women. It didn’t seem smart, and he had nothing to say, anyway. If she was looking for him to compare, then she would be disappointed. Instead he looked at the tea shop. “Are you doing that well, then?” he asked, curious, not at all disbelieving.
She stopped, and she looked at him. “Is that the most important thing about what I just said to you?” she asked, softly but with a touch of determination.
He stopped too. “You don’t want me to ask?” Daniel wasn’t as much of a helpless idiot as he seemed, and while he wasn’t as sharp as he was in his youth (damn, however long ago that was), he was certainly capable of following the conversation. He stalled for time and tried to come up with an answer.
Ella gave him a look that was intelligent and knowing, and she tipped her chin up and slipped her arm from his. She didn’t back away, however. She slid her hand to his sleeve, and she smoothed it down, and then she did the same with the front of his shirt, and then where it tucked in at his waist. Her touch, though light, was possessive, familiar and not entirely chaste, but her gaze didn’t waiver from his through the entire process. Once she was done, she ran her fingers over his lips, and her gaze went from his eyes to his mouth and then back up. “Don’t play dumb, Daniel. It doesn’t suit you,” she said, words blunt, but voice warm.
Daniel didn’t feel safe on the street, didn’t feel he could keep her safe, but that wasn’t why he felt helpless. He had the strange sensation of being petted, like Kat had a moment ago, like a child being sent out to Sunday school. He realized he didn’t like it, being possessed this way. If he didn’t know what he wanted, he did know that he didn’t want that. Surprised at this revelation, so sudden, more sure than anything else had been in a long while, Daniel’s expression changed. He brought his hands up and caught hers.
The change in his expression was so sudden, so unexpected that she actually froze where she was standing, the world still moving around her in an almost surreal manner. There was something cold and hard in the way he’d caught her hand, and she let her fingers fall away from his lips, her own expression changing to something unsure and uncertain; she never knew where she stood with this man, and the look in his eyes said that wasn’t going to be getting better in the next few minutes.
“Can you explain to me how you can stay and leave at the same time? Leave, and yet stay?” The brown eyes were so full of thoughts flickering so fast they were impossible to read.
“With you?” she asked simply, wanting to understand what he was asking her. It seemed important, somehow, this moment, in a way she did not yet comprehend.
“In general. You go but you say you want to stay. Then you leave but... you don’t go.” It wasn’t an accusation. He didn’t understand, and he was trying to clarify.
“I want to stay, Daniel. I want you to drag me back and want me with you. I want to not be hurt again. I want a million things,” she said with complete candor. “You told me, when we first corresponded, that my expectations were too high, if you recall. They aren’t. I want nothing more than to be wanted.”
“I want you.” He didn’t blink, just stared at her. “You know that.”
“Do I?”
He flinched and drew back. “Then you don’t believe me.”
She felt like she was walking into a trap, like no matter what she told him in this conversation, it would be the wrong thing, and so she stopped worrying about saying the right thing altogether. “If you want me, then why, Daniel? Am I supposed to come back, just so you’ll do it again? I don’t know anything. You don’t tell me, you just expect me to read your mind. I can’t do that. I know you want me to come back, but that is all I know. We don’t talk about what you feel; we talk about what I feel, and you ignore it all, as if I never said it.”
He started walking again, but he spoke as he walked, concentrating on his feet without paying attention to where they were going. “I want you. I don’t know why. It might be the tales, and I can’t guarantee it’s not. I feel like I’m sliding, and I want someone to hold onto so I don’t go, but then I realize if I hold on, you’ll slide down with me.” He took a breath, leaned to one side. “You already are.”
She walked quietly beside him, and she listened, and it took her a minute longer to actually manage to reply to him. “It’s my job to stop myself from sliding, Daniel, not yours,” she said, sliding her arm back into his and looking over at him. “I don’t want to be wanted because of some woman in a fairy tale that isn’t me, and I don’t want to be wanted because you need something to hold onto. I want to be wanted because you like my company, and my smile, and my body - that’s how I feel about you. It has nothing to do with a grumbling beast, and you’re no saint, Daniel Webster,” she said, voice breaking a little as she spoke. “I’ll be here to hold onto even if you don’t want me in that way, and I’m not going anywhere.” She paused, and she took a very deep breath (she needed it). “I want you to love me, not to need me. You can need me without loving me, though,” she said, her smile completely sad as she turned brown eyes up to his blue ones. “I just have to find a way to stop loving you, if that’s the way it’s going to be.”
Daniel stared ahead, though his arm through hers was gentle and his warmth was present, his thoughts were elsewhere. The look on his face was familiar, vacant. “Maybe I just can’t love that way. I never have before.”
“You’re always doing that,” she said, “selling yourself short; staying on the shore because it’s safer than trying to swim and failing. Life is about swimming, Daniel, even if you go under a few times,” she said bluntly. “Come to AA meetings with me,” she said, as they neared the store. “You’ll hate every minute; it’ll be good for you.”
“No,” he said, quietly. There was as much steel as he could find behind it. “Just... just no.” A breath. “I don’t want to be that person you want me to be. The one that will drag you off and be the prince in the storybook, or at least try. I don’t want to try.”
“What do you want to be?” she asked, because she realized that was at the bottom of all this; his not knowing. She smiled as she reached for a grocery basket. “I don’t want to be dragged off, Daniel,” she added, voice soft. “I’m entirely too opinionated and pushy for that, in case you haven’t noticed. I don’t want to be taken care of. I want to stand on my own two feet, with someone who adores me at my side. I don’t think life is meant to be lived alone, and I don’t think there’s any shame in that admission.”
It felt good, she realized, being open again. She wondered, in that moment, why she’d stopped. He didn’t like it, a voice in the back of her mind said.
Daniel shrugged a little. “I want to be the man I was. But I know I can’t. So now I guess I don’t know what I want to be.” He turned and smiled at her, sudden affection that was as mercurial as the rest of this conversation. “I know. You were pushy before we met.” Claire was always pointing out this and that about his writing that didn’t fit properly.
She laughed a little, and she put the basket into his hand without asking if it was okay to do so, and she started filling it. “You hated that about me,” she said knowingly, but she didn’t sound angry about it. She examined some fruits, decided they weren’t ripe enough, and she put them back. “I want to be someone who never picked up a bottle, Daniel, but that isn’t me anymore. We can’t go back, and you’re scared to go forward.”
Daniel took a deep breath of oversweet fruit that always hung over this department, and tried to remember when last he had been in a store like this. He couldn’t. “I’m not scared to go forward,” he said. No man liked being told he was scared, it didn’t matter how true it was.
She didn’t counter his denial, untrue as it was. “I’m scared,” she admitted instead. “I have a store I don’t know how to run, and I have employees that count on me to pay the rent. My father is living in the backroom, and my mother wants to run a con. My roommate talks to no one, and she wants no one in the apartment. I love an impossible recluse, and I want a drink,” she told him, dropping two apples into the basket he carried.
“Your mother wants to what?” Daniel said, overwhelmed by this sudden influx of difficulty.
She laughed then, open and happier than she had in weeks, and she kissed his slightly-rough cheek. “That wasn’t the point.”
“What was the point?” he asked, honestly bewildered and finding little help in the dry goods aisle.
She opted for white pasta (she suspected he wouldn’t approve of whole wheat), and she found a sauce that could be easily added to, and she put that in the basket as well. “That change is scary, Daniel. Not just for you,” she said honestly. “My parents aren’t precisely law abiding,” she added, then she laughed a little. “I used a con to pay my way through college, but I don’t think I’d know how to start again,” she admitted. “Because I’m not who I was then. I want different things. I’ve changed,” she said, grabbing a box of thin crackers off the shelf with some hummus. “So have you.”
Daniel didn’t know how to take this new information. He had an extremely difficult time imagining Ella breaking any laws, and con women (to his mind) tended to wear clingy clothing and ask for expensive drinks with long fingernails. Daniel hadn’t been opposed to con women in his time, he just didn’t go to sleep with one in the room and he didn’t drink anything he hadn’t seen poured. This was generally a good policy when abroad, and when you had money, it was just second-nature. He was silent for a time, trying to match these two bizarrely different images in his head, but in the end he gave up. “Yes,” he agreed. “You have.”
She picked up a sample of something sweet with her fingers (instead of with the appropriate plastic tongs), and she popped it into her mouth and gave him a look that was all yes, dear and if you say so, dear, and then she smiled at him warmly, as she normally did. “What are we going to do with ourselves?” she asked softly.
Daniel had no answer for her. He just shook his head slowly and looked away, down the aisle, eyes vacant again. He didn’t know what was ahead, and he wasn’t driven enough to find out. He would wait for it when it came.