alice liddell (inquisitive) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-05-15 12:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | alice, robin hood |
WHO: Angie and Russ
WHAT: Hanging out in dreamlandia
WHERE: A beach. A dreamy beach.
WHEN: Dream!plot times
WARNINGS: This is Angie, we’re talking about. Even her dreams are PG-13.
This was… weird. To say the least. Though that thought kept flitting out of Angie’s mind with each step she took, precarious and barefoot, across the wet stones that dotted the tide pool. The ocean breeze swept past her, tangling her hair, blowing the hem of her short white dress until her tan hands pushed it back down, modesty getting the best of her despite wearing a purple swimsuit underneath. She skipped down the rocks easily, cartoonishly so, making her wonder what was preventing her from cracking open her skull and then shrugging, the thought passing just as easily as it came. Her feet planted down on the wet sand and she wiggled her toes, watching the impressions made and then destroyed with each movement. A squack from seagulls had her turning her head to the left, her mother’s tiny house standing on the sand. The fuchsia painted walls and black roof cover the single story dwelling were exactly how she remembered, even though she knew it didn’t belong right there by the water, and that it had been demolished a decade ago. She looked to her right and spied the tall glass building that she called home these days, the hotel doors opening and closing with each approach of the waves, motion sensors going nuts. Tourists and business people spilled out occasionally, seemingly unperturbed that the Vegas strip the should be on was now beach front property. She wasn’t bothered much either, turning back to the rocks and watching as it rose higher and higher, the easy skip downward now suddenly a climb upward. She sighed, the sound carried away with the wind, before reaching for the black rocks with hands and feet, pulling herself up with a huff everytime she found the proper footing. There’d been no damn beaches when Russ had been growing up. No beaches and no ocean, and no pretty little houses stood right close to shoreline. Russ didn’t know enough of shores and beaches and water to dream them but the person on the shoreline stood with his hands shoved down in his pockets and he breathed in clean salt and brine and ozone. Russ dreamed casinos, he dreamed turns of cards and he dreamed the flip of a coin but he didn’t dream the slap of water far off out. He admired it with the unself-conscious appreciation he gave the sleek lines of a particularly well made car or a woman across the room and he looked down at his own feet on the sand. The cuffs of his jeans were saggy, the kind of clothes bought for someone with optimism about ‘growing room’ and the denim bled darker with the damp from the sand. He was young, when he turned to face the woman scrabbling up the rock. Young, in a half-past-seventeen sort of way. The jaw was there, and the shoulders’ breadth too - Russ, even seventeen, had been large - but the muscle was whittled down to what was practical sinew wound around bone, was eating wonderbread and hamburger helper too many nights to count. He watched her, the scrabble up and the rolling back down, with the same calm observation he’d given the sea itself. “Why are you tryin’?” His voice was easy: it was the mellow that Russ managed when three beers in or when he was trying to be pleasant. There was none of the scratch to it that had accumulated in the eighteen years hence. His blue eyes were clear, interested, and the slope of his jaw was bare of anything but the glint of stubble trying to break in. She was an attractive woman and Russ had, by eighteen, been interested in attractive women for at least four years; his eyes lingered on the bathing suit and snapped up to her face when the drifting started to become obvious. She paused in her climb as she spoke, turning effortlessly on the cliff side despite the small space for footing, somehow knowing it was okay to do so. “Why not?” She gave him her most amused smile, hand settling on her hip a moment before a gust of wind whipped through her skirt, making her laugh. It was a beach. Flashing happened. And here was a woman in her element enough that she didn’t care what he saw. She jumped down; it seemed so easy and had spent some time watching through some other blonde’s eyes enough to know this okay. Her feet effortless settled on the sand and she hummed her victory, hands slapping together to wipe the bit of dirt from her hands before strolling up to him. He was handsome, the stranger, something familiar about his face and she almost nervously rubbed the back of her neck, fingers checking to see if the ties of her bikini top were still looped tightly at her neck. “What’s your name, kid?” She couldn’t help the tease. Even taller than her she felt older than him, and it made her grin flash, bright and easy. “Up for a climb?” One bare foot toed snagged playfully at the leg of his jeans. Russ watched her the way small children watch television in department stores: he was there, she was there, the glimmer of interest rose as the wind flirted with the soft cotton of her skirt. It was extremely teenage, the way he tucked his chin down and he looked as though perhaps he shouldn’t have been, and he dug his hands further into his pockets, rocking back on heels until the wet sand gave underneath him. The little motion of her fingers to her neck was a glint in blue eyes: Russ’s smile was an easy thing, real. It was adult, in his face, the same way the jaw and the shoulders were but it was pleasanter than the adult he would be. “I’d let you know,” he said seriously, all post-adolescent charm, and butter-wouldn’t-melt. “I’d be staring, but I’d let you know.” He looked down at her foot, as though the jeans and the solidity of him were something passing, as though he could not quantify the tease but was trying. It moved behind the blue eyes, thoughtful-serious before the grin, as though he had decided it was safe to do so. “I’m Russ,” he said in response to that smile and his own curled across his face like something more sunny and true than perhaps he was prone to give when grown. “Where are you even tryin’ to get to?” He squinted, broad hand over eyes and he looked up past the sheet of black rock. “Russ,” she repeated, pulling back slightly to get a good look at him. “You look different,” she pronounced, though from the way she smiled it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She reached over, as if she had done it a thousand times before, running her fingers over jawline, smooth under her skin with just a hint of stubble. She didn’t prefer him one way or the other, she thought. Beards were nice, but so were easy grins. But soon she shrugged, pulling her hand back before gesturing up to the rock. “Why not?” She turned fully to see it as he did, hand over her eyes as she peered up. “It’s there. And I liked being there earlier. Plus there’s all this baggage.” Her hand waved to the side, to the house, to the hotel, but she didn’t take her eyes off the rock until her green eyes met his gaze. “Is there somewhere better I should be?” “I know you?” He sounded puzzled, he sounded as though he was trying to be polite like maybe somewhere down the line someone had tried raising him and had half-finished the job, work unfinished like wallpaper gone peeling at the edges. He looked at her, eyes filled with the seriousness in all that blue of trying to unknot something, untie a puzzle as she stepped up close, bare feet in sand and Russ’s eyes fell to bared legs and the flutter of her hemline in the sweet-clean ozone of the wind. Perhaps he wasn’t quite yet old enough for the admiration to be completely without attempt to cover it, but it was naked on the young lines of his face and he turned his cheek into her fingertips, bemusement as obvious as the flagrant decision to enjoy the attention. “Lady, that ain’t baggage, that’s a house,” Russ was blunt, but it wasn’t deliberately rude. The words rolled out as though he was economical enough with them that when he gave them over he was sparing with them. “I don’t know,” he said, and that steady blue was unclouded, unworried when it met her green. “I ain’t never been to the ocean. I never have - I never did,” he corrected himself, and he frowned, a moment that was neither peaceful nor youthful. It was an adult’s worry, “I don’t know how I’m here.” She considered his question, watching him try and be sly under her gaze. It really only made her laugh more, soft and unbothered by the blatant attention. But as for her knowing him she shrugged before shaking her head. “Not really,” she offered, the answer probably not as helpful as he hoped, as truthful as it was. His assessment of the house was followed by her sharp bark of a laugh, another shake of her head that came with a sympathetic smile. He didn’t know but, as she had said, he didn’t really know her. “Dead parents are kind of baggage,” she said simply, not trying to be rude or wanting pity. She’d made peace with them and that fact long ago. They simply were. “I don’t know why I’m here either. Or you,” she admitted, her face frowning as his was. Sleeping was her last clear memory, and before that, walking through the door but that itself made little sense. Instead she focused on something that could be fixed, his lack of experience with the water making her slide her hands to his shoulders and spin him around to face the sea. “This calls for some wading. Roll your pants up. Time to scratch an ocean off your bucket list.” There was a minute of relaxation in the shoulders under the thin white tee-shirt: Russ was whippet-thin young, the kind of narrow to his wrists and to his forearms that should have been solid strength but was instead the half-fed, half-grown of someone too tall for his own breadth. Clearly, it did not bother him that a woman older than he (and he’d noticed, the gaze had lingered long enough for it to border on that outright, slow and lazy looking it would become) who did not know him was stepped up close enough to touch - rather that he ought to know her and did not and this now gone, the consternation wiped away as easily as it did for youth. “Shit happens,” it wasn’t apologetic, it wasn’t sympathetic, it was calm - that dead parents perhaps were something that could be clambered over, moved on past. He regarded the building with interest but he moved willingly in her grasp, scuffed boots on sodden sand, but he turned to look at her, a smile that was bemusement moving over his face. Russ had, once, been open book. “I don’t got an ocean on my bucket-list,” he eyed the ocean with some trepidation, all desert-boy of parched, dry earth and dust in that reluctance to go on and wade. “You go on and swim. I’ll stay here.” There was something of the admiration in that, the barely-hidden note of the eighteen year old boy who liked the swim-suit beneath the thin cotton, who smiled at her, warm, sly. He was amused and that was good. Angie didn’t do well with the alternative and his grin was mirrored with her own, even as she knew what he was thinking. “It should be,” she said of bucket lists and ocean waves, standing on her toes to peek over him, lazily looking her arms around shoulders and resting her chin on them. “Everyone should give the ocean a try. Sun’s warm, water’s cool. It’s perfect.” The last came with an almost dreamy sigh as she slid away. She, however, wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip past. Away from him she tugged off her dress, a pile of white fabric soon at her feet. “You’ve got to at least drip your toes,” she insisted, adjusting the purple strap of her bikini top, knowing and hoping to catch his eye. She wasn’t above playing dirty, not when it came to enjoying her precious childhood beaches. Her own fare feet met the water, the pushing sensation racing up her body before, all too soon, she felt the pull of the waves trying to tug her back to sea. “See? As they say, the water’s fine.” She even went as far as splashing some towards him, the drops of seawater darkening the sand at his feet before she turned and waded in further. He was a boy then, even if he was a man dreaming of being boy, and his eyes caught, vivid-blue in the tanned slopes of his face and he grinned, strong and wide and open as if he knew exactly what she was doing but also that it didn’t matter. He stared at the ocean, and he flinched - not a lot but a pin-prick reaction to the seawater that spattered his jeans, caught the sand where he stood - and then he shrugged, a great movement of shoulders and teenage leaving-off of preconceptions, and the shirt was tugged up over his head and the jeans fell in a loose puddle on the shore. He ran - an exuberance in motion that was sunburned arms and legs too white to be out of jeans much at all, and he hit the water with the same enthusiasm but with none of her elegance. Russ reacted the way a dog might; seawater snorted away from him in disgust, and the vague, bewildered splashing of someone not entirely certain as to how to make locomotion in this strange new stuff. He bobbed in the water, blond hair and grin and blue eyes, and he turned to the side and spat, seawater and curled nose at the taste. “You like this?” he said, as the waves bobbed and lapped. “Of course!” Her laugh was loud and clear, cut short as a wave crashed into her, eliciting a squeal of surprise before she wiped her face clean of the water. “How is this not fun?” Granted, she was dipping below waves before settling on her back, feeling the water ebb and carry her as he splashed and spat nearby. Some guys didn’t know fun when it hit them, or soaked them. “You’ve never done this before?” The question was silly, of course, what with him splashing around with no clue what to do and she stopped wondering if they should try surfing. The waves seemed to agree, dying down to soft rolls to the shore. “You’ll have to tell me what you would do otherwise. No swimming, and no climbing I assume.” From their new distance the cliff face still stood, not quite as daunting from afar, and she wondered why he had been so surprised she had tried to scale it. “No,” Russ paddled experimentally, the bob and lap of the water something first fought against and then (skeptically) accepted. He floated because of the demands of the ocean rather than actively giving into it, and he scowled, all teenage ill-humor at being poor at something rather than giving over to the enjoyment. He looked at her, rather than the cliff-face and the confusion as to why precisely, she was bothering was as visible as the consternation and the attempt to mask it. “What gave it away?” “Your legs,” she replied, the nonchalant attempt at a shrug lost as she laid on her back. “It’s like you’ve never even seen sunshine.” As if in response the sun bore down upon the, warmer than before, making Angie dip below the waves for more of the cool depths the water could bring. When she came back up, she was all mischievous grins as she pulled her hair back from her face. “But we can call it quits if you like. You pick the next thing we’re scratching off the to do list.” Russ’s smile was sudden, blatant. It was the self-satisfied, altogether cocky look of a teenage boy; she had been looking at his legs. Cautiously, he began to put together the locomotion through water and the bouyancy of it and stopped thrashing like a sodden labrador and began to look a little less ungainly as he bobbed in the ocean. “I seen sunshine plenty of times,” he told her, “But the dry kind.” In Russ’s opinion, the dry kind was better than the wet. You knew where you were with dust, and with desert. You knew you were real stupid if you wandered off without a bottle of water and your mouth told you and your skin told you, parching out to nothing. You could boil and not know it, in the ocean. He swam a little closer, bared shoulders tanned over by sunshine and the strength in them something to do with work and physicality rather than football or high school sport. Russ didn’t know why the blond woman was much bothering with him, but he liked it: he liked most women fine, and this one had a smile like she knew things he might want to know. “There’s plenty of things I’m good at,” he said, smugly. “Ain’t nothing to do with water.” Angie wrinkled her nose at the notion of dry sunshine. It reminded her of Vegas, and the hotel standing on the shores with tourists still spilling out. Vegas was not always the type of sunshine she preferred, not with all that came with it, like alter egos and long nights at work. But he was distracting her before her thoughts could stray. Turning to face him she swam closer, stopping a scant few inches away, knees brushing his as she paddled. Brows raised, she put her smirk firmly into place. “So let’s hear it.” When Russ dreamed, it was deep enough for Vegas to be forgotten. Vegas was the other side of the pillow, from dust and the bare stretch of desert sky and stars the only lights that lit themselves alive after dark. But Russ wasn’t thinking in the direction of trailers and sun-bleached stone as he paddled. The physicality of cold, wet skin brushing past him startled him and the look in his eyes flickered from certainty to something a great deal less sure of himself - and then the resumed confidence of someone predisposed toward cockiness. The smile was sharp, a gleam of teeth and a glint of something like daring in blue eyes: Russ’s hand dripped as he raised it out of the water, placed it (almost gingerly) on her shoulder and bobbed toward her, a half-way almost kiss that was teenage-boy rushing and the damp clumsiness of the ocean’s pull and push. There was - for a moment - hesitation about it but Russ was considerably old enough to interpret interest for what it was and for a minute, hung there in the water like anchors, the kiss was a warm-hungry slide of tongue and teeth and the curl of strong, young fingers at the back of her neck. It was, Russ supposed in the lazy assumption of his own infallibility, presumptuous - if he’d had such a word in mind. Instead, it was the certainty he had in adulthood in his own attractiveness when he drew back, but a laughing look to it that was not at all carried past twenty. “See?” Eternally smug. It was cute how slow he was taking it, mostly because the Russ that she remembered, fleeting thoughts and memories though they were at the moment, wouldn’t have been so. She met his kisses with equal hunger, her wet hands sliding over his wet shoulders until they draped over the back of his neck as she closed the space between them. When he pulled away her smirk echoed his smugness, and her eyes drank in the sight of him, so different than than the last time they were this close. “Yeah, yeah,” she sighed, the smile tugging at her lips even when she wouldn’t give him so much verbal credit. She slipped away from him and back under the waves, popping up once more with another huff. “So it compares.” She flashed one more cheeky grin over her shoulder before she padded towards the shore, wringing of the water from the ends of her hair and flicking it off her shoulders as she walked on the sand. “Not exactly what comes to mind when someone asks ‘what do you do for fun.’” Russ paddled desperately to stay upright in the water, the wake-trail of ripples in an ocean smoothing out as glass as Angie left smooth footprints in sand: desire pressed against dream limits and for a minute, the ocean stretched out like tepid bath-water, as indulgent as a grand hotel on the Strip. “Not all that much fun where I’m from,” Russ followed her with caution, one minute stable in the water and the next stood on the sand with the cliff at his back, as dry and as clothed as if he’d never gone in at all. “Lot of people call that fun.” He looked at her, cheeky smile and bright blue eyes. “I’m not saying it’s not,” she laughed, slipping her dress back on over her bikini and just like that, the water dried from her skin and the wind breezed through her hair. “But there’s gotta be more to you than just kissing.” She leaned in and pressed a palm to his chest, stealing a quick kiss before settling back on her feet. “And not swimming.” She patted his chest playfully before setting out forward. In their absence the cliffside had shrunk, much less daunting than before, just a quick climb. At its base was a plastic red bucket and blue shovel, made for children and sand castle lovers, and everyone in between. Including, Angie. Half bending to grab both she slung them on her arm as she set up rocks, feet and hands finding purchase and hauling her up. Soon enough she was at the top, peeking over her shoulder to see if he followed or vanished to wherever he came from. Russell stood impassively in wet sand and the wind that rippled her dress, touseled her hair, seemed to be something particular to her world, to her dream: it did not touch him and it did not affect him. He lowered his head almost obediently, to allow her kiss - wasn’t nothing wrong with a woman deciding that - Russ’s smile was lingering, was a look that followed her as she climbed above him, but one vague, shifting. “I think,” he said carefully, “There was. Something. Not much anymore. I don’t know.” He flickered. Someone trying to change the channel, shadow creeping along his jaw, the splay of his hands on his hips broadening, darkening. “Maybe that’s it.” A grin that strove a little toward carefree and fell a touch short. “I don’t do much.” “No?” Bent with her hands on her knees, she frowned down at him, the word and question carried to his ears by her wind. The look she gave him wistful and a touch sad, one hand gesturing for him to come up. “But you can’t want that to be it. You’ve gotta have more. Hobbies. Movies? Books? Music? Dancing?” Angie laughed a little, a memory of their meeting springing forward but she shook her head, no sense bringing it up now. “Can’t all be tongue, can it.” There weren’t a hell of a lot of rock-faces near on by the park and there wasn’t much time to go on climbing them, even if there had been. Russ’s attempt was successful purely because of his sprawl of limbs, the determination of muscles than any kind of strategic effort. It looked entirely difficult, mostly because he threw himself at it the way a puppy might, and by the time he was at the top, he was grinning with the cocky surety of a true master of an art: success had been achieved. He dusted palms off on his jeans, and he looked at her, confusion clear in the sharp blue eyes. “I can want all I like,” Russ was frank, he looked out across the former cliff-edge toward the ocean mildly lapping the sand, “Don’t mean I got anything. I like fixing stuff?” He said it the way one might offer up appeasement, a peace offering that he already knew wasn’t good enough. True, true, he could want whatever he liked and she shrugged in concession, her smile still in place despite the confusion on him. “You don’t have to appease me,” she added, knowing full well what he was doing. It wasn’t good enough but that wasn’t the point. It seemed fine enough for him and she… well. That was her problem, wasn’t it? Still, she was curious. Russ, the Russ she knew, wasn’t this forthcoming (not that this one was very much). He was flirty with her, grouchy with most everyone else she had seen him write to. This was different, somewhere in between, and she couldn’t help but pry with a smile. “Fixing what?” He blinked at her, the collecting together of thought that was not bright waves below or the pretty woman in front of him, “I like,” but Russ sounded hesitant - or his voice was fading, as though a radio was being tuned in and out, the solidity of him flickering. “I like,” Russ tried once again, and he smiled, as though youth and its enjoyment could hold on, grasp tight where dreams did not allow. The wind rippled, all cool-salt on skin and Russ was asleep, tight asleep, somewhere beyond dream walking. |