Who: Lidia and Gus When: October 25th, Afternoon. Where: 103 Orchid Road. Rating: PG-13. Summary: Washing the car segueways into looking at old photos. Warnings: Language and generic raciness.
While it was nice to have a car, the hybrid in their driveway hadn’t seen much use. The community was small enough that he preferred to just walk everywhere, nevermind the fact that it was a hybrid, which made it substandard in Gus’s eyes. Given, nobody drove the old exclusively fossil-fuel guzzling models anymore, but that didn’t mean he liked wedging himself into some little rollerskate with an engine. A man had his damned pride - at least some hybrids attempted to look like decent cars, even if they didn’t sound or run like one. The Hou Ren vehicles made no such effort.
Much as he disliked the vehicle, Gus couldn’t abide letting any automobile suffer neglect. It was something for him to do on his day off, at any rate, and he’d been able to beg himself some tools for his days off - to be returned during the weekday, and to only be used for the car. He didn’t doubt they’d keep tabs, and Gus wasn’t about to test them, either.
So he’d popped the hood and fiddled around a bit, and he almost felt like he was at home for a little while. He had his music going - old stuff, Metallica and Led Zeppelin, the classics - he had grease on his hands and on his shirt, and he was up to his elbows in the guts of the hybrid. There wasn’t much to do, really, since it was brand new, but he’d never seen this particular model before, and by the time he was finished he had a much better idea of what to expect from it: Boring reliability and not much else.
Like any ritual, of course, there was a final step, and that was washing and waxing and detailing. The smooth lines of the hybrid weren’t going to turn heads, but Gus still took the hose to the thing, getting it good and wet before he started to scrub it down with an oversized sponge, big fluffy suds oozing over the body of the car as he worked. Despite a rocky week, he was feeling pretty good now, singing along to a Foreigner song in a very off-key voice as he scrubbed, even swaying his hips a bit to the beat. This was much better than prison.
It was Lidia’s night off. She couldn’t remember if it was the same for her husband, who was currently her main source of entertainment as she watched out the big glass front door. It hadn’t been her intention, but the music and movement caught her eye as she passed down the stairs on her way to the kitchen for something to drink.
The sight was comical for a number of reasons; the first and foremost being the unnatural size difference between Gus and their ‘car’. Light-weight and plastic-looking, it wasn’t terribly unrealistic to imagine him picking the damn thing up to wash the undercarriage. Also, the fact that he was dancing - or kind of dancing. Moving jointedly to the beat. Whatever--it was funny.
Aleks was always saying Lidia needed more funny in her life.
She pushed through the door without much fanfare, sweeping hair out of her face with one hand and swigging from a newly opened bottle of water with the other. The music pumping from his Helper on the porch was vaguely familiar, recognized as old American, and occasionally pumped into club mixes she remembered in Moscow. Not her favorite, but it wasn’t terrible.
“You missed a spot,” she smirked in the spirit of vague playfulness, settling on the curb in her frayed denim shorts and off-the-shoulder t-shirt.
Gus stopped singing along when Lidia emerged, but he only smiled at her, not the least bit embarrassed. She was looking great, as usual, but he wasn’t particularly used to her spending time with him. Lidia was a private person, and even though he felt a bit more connected to her after their big talk, he hadn’t expected much to change. Whatever her motivation was for joining him, he didn’t mind one bit.
Her comment made him smirk back at her, and the American flicked some suds at her.
“There, got it,” he said mischievously, turning back to scrubbing at the windows, “You could help, you know. And that suggestion has nothing to do with you getting your T-shirt all wet.”
His good mood was definitely making him playful - something she might’ve guessed, if she’d watched him air guitar to Freebird earlier. Really, Gus was a simple guy. It didn’t take very much to make him happy.
He was only a cold beer away from perfection, in fact. Unfortunately, Lidia’s pilfered liquor stash only included the hard stuff. It was actually harder to sneak away with several bottles of beer.
Flinching back a bit didn’t help to escape the flying soap bubbles, which landed on the inside curve of her knee. Her smirk tugged a little more into the center of her cheek, creating one and a half new dimples there, flicking them away with two manicured fingers.
“You want help?” she asked pointedly, pushing up to stand and casually circle around him and his handiwork. “I think you are doing a fine job by yourself.” There was a grin in her voice, on top of the light sarcasm.
Gus slowed in the broad circles he was making with the sponge, watching her do her circuit around the car. It was easy to see over the hood of the thing, that was for damned sure. He dropped the sponge in the bucket and reached for the hose, which had been fitted with a spray nozzle. Really, they’d thought of everything, and he took a few steps back, rinsing the sudsy car off.
“Hey, what’s that on your jeans?” he asked her in a convincingly serious voice, “I think you got some dirt on them from sitting on the curb. Here-”
He flicked the hose at her with a grin - not enough to soak, but definitely enough so that she knew she’d been sprayed.
The amount didn’t really matter-- it was the temperature that really got her attention, and strangled her gasp with a high pitched squeal. Ice cold with a side of frigid, it shot icicles through all the parts of her that were never intended to feel cold, and Lidia’s eyes glazed over. Just for an instant. The next, she launched herself at him with a wolfish (retaliatory) grin and suppressed laugh, holding his jeans open with one hand and dumping her bottled water down them with the other.
Gus belted out a cackle when she squealed, extremely pleased with himself - too pleased to react in a timely fashion to her pounce. Pretty soon, he looked like he’d wet himself, and he was laughing too hard to escape.
Of course, her fatal error was attacking the man holding the hose, and he stuck the spray nozzle down the back of her shirt before squeezing, unleashing a torrent of water that would’ve been better served on the still-sudsy hybrid languishing in the driveway.
“Ебать!” Lidia’s second squeal was much closer to a shriek, her back bowed in an attempt to escape the torrent while grappling at it in his hands, essentially climbing him like a tree.
He wrestled for the hose, unable to keep it spraying while he was trying his damndest not to lose it. Gus glanced around, not because he was concerned they were giving the neighbors an eyeful, but because he knew he had a secret weapon somewhere - yes! The bucket.
The American suddenly relinquished his hold on the hose but grabbed Lidia around her middle, hauling her off her feet and flipping her upside down, dangling her head over the soapy-water filled bucket - the sponge was still floating on the surface.
“Say Uncle!” he laughed, pretty sure he’d won this one.
The instinct to flail, thrash, and kick wildly was pretty well qualmed the second her head hovered over solid ground. After the flare of panic (and a little anger) dissolved in her bloodstream, Lidia realized what she was grappling and clawing at wasn’t Gus’s arm, but the water hose. Which she promptly secured in both hands and aimed up at his face.
The warning shot was quick, but it went right up his nose.
“You want more?” she threatened, unable to hide the amusement in her voice.
Far, far too late Gus realized that she’d kept ahold of the hose instead of letting it drop, and he was soon sputtering and choking on his own laughter.
“I dunno,” he said, “Seems like a standoff to me! I think my grip is slipping a little...”
He made like he was going to drop her head first in the bucket, letting her slide through his arms just a little, her hair brushing the suds. Gus’s grin reached shit-eating proportions as he said, in his very best impression of a melodramatic politician, “I’m from America, gorgeous. These colors don’t run.”
“Oh yes?” Lidia snorted, grinning, and punctuated that challenge with another direct blast of water. The short jerky-drop toward the ground had her tense, though, enough to instinctively realize drowning him on his feet was probably not a good idea. However, the way her legs flexed for hold over his shoulders found an awkward, but definite hold there. She dug her heels in the slots between his arms and squeezed, curling up as much as she could with his arms around her middle. Enough to get away from the bucket.
She’d been hanging by her legs from poles for several years--doing it from a large American’s shoulders wasn’t much of a challenge. Had to be an interesting sight to watch, though.
Gus wasn’t sure how he hadn’t expected a stripper not to pull out some stripper-moves on him, and he was actually so surprised that he almost automatically shifted his grip so she could practically do a sit-up, suddenly over him now instead of dangling and at his mercy.
She’d used him like a damn stripper pole. It was... well, shit, it was sexy. He looked up at her, still grinning, and for a few dizzy seconds he was sure he’d be able to look to his right and it’d be Daisy in the drive, not the hybrid. He’d toss Lidia in the back seat, and one day, they’d gross out their kid by telling them they were conceived in the very spot they were sitting.
It was brief and totally crazy, but he couldn’t help but glance over at the hybrid, leaving himself even more vulnerable to attack.
He also couldn’t help feeling vaguely disappointed that his fantasy fizzled - the hybrid continued to sulk in the drive like the sad lump of fibreglass and plastic that it was.
She noticed the sudden distance in his expression, and briefly wondered if she was squeezing too much breath out of him. A quick flash of water down the back of his shirt should snap him out of it, right?
Lidia arched her brows at him, quite expectantly. She wasn’t going to be able to get down without relinquishing the hose--and she sure as hell wasn’t doing that. They were at a bit of a stalemate.
“Ah, shit!” Gus snapped back to reality with a laugh, hunching his shoulders against the cold, “All right, all right. You win. You cheated, though.”
He moved his hands up in surrender, smiling at her and looking a bit more subdued. That had been fun, but that little daydream was probably a bigger investment than he’d ever intended to make.
Preempting her, he added, “Using Pole Dance-Fu isn’t in the water fight rules. That’s okay, though. You’ll know better next time.”
Her answer was a smirking snort that lasted the whole time taken for her to get down from him and back to her feet. Only then did she give up the hose, and twisted flecks of soap from the ends of her hair.
“You need to know opponent before engaging them,” she said lightly, as if from memory. Someone had definitely said that to her before.
“I think we were technically engaged less than twenty-four hours,” Gus shot back with a smirk of his own. He grabbed up the hose and turned it on the hybrid - she had won, so he didn’t aim it at her again. Gus wasn’t too bothered by the fact that he was soaked through - couldn’t leave a job unfinished, and it was only water.
He wool gathered for a bit, although when it came to Gus, one could practically pick his thoughts from the thick cloud they seemed to form outside of his skull. Gus gave her a measured look, as though he were trying to decide something, and then said, “My mom sent every photo she ever took of me over the other day. You can have a look if you want a laugh.”
He was fairly certain, in his heart of hearts, that he would rather not have Lidia cast her searing gaze through his humble, at times gawky past, but he wasn’t especially opposed to it, either.
She’d been casually making her way back to the house when he called her attention again, and she gave it with a look over her shoulder. In her head, things fit into place, forming a pretty simple picture of what her very-expressive husband was thinking. He, like his mother (from what she gathered) was sharing; reaching out for connections on an emotional level. Her lips pressed with her automatic, bone-deep recoiling from the notion, but newer things in her experience with him kept her rooted to the walk for a second more.
With the situation they were in - which was finally really starting to sink in with Lidia - there were far fewer disadvantages than perks. Plus, she couldn’t deny the curiosity. Lidia tipped her head at him with a similar smile.
“I’ll wait for you,” she said, and started back into the house.
Gus had expected her to blow it off, and surprise registered on his face when she instead agreed to have a look. With him, even. He shook his head once she was inside and finished rinsing the hybrid. Normally this ritual included meticulously drying the car, but he couldn’t be fucked. The shitty hybrid could air dry.
He headed inside and quickly changed into clothes that weren’t soaked through before he settled in front of the main Helper screen, raising an eyebrow at her before opening the file his mother had sent over.
“You’ve got a selection,” he said wryly. The file was divided more or less by age, from ‘Baby’ up through ‘Graduation’. After that, there weren’t as many, sorted more by holiday and events than by formative years - some of them spoke volumes about Mrs. Marshal, however, in so much that there were folders for newsclippings (and Gus was the sort of son that didn’t get in the paper because of the Honor Roll) and even a folder devoted to Gus’s parole officer, whom the older woman may or may not have taken a shine to.
“What’s your poison?” he said. When was the last time he’d looked through these? He honestly couldn’t even remember.
“Surprise me.” Lidia sank back into the grip of the couch, wearing a mild and pleasant version of her usual half-smile. She was definitely curious. “There are no child-pictures of Aleksey or I--this is new thing for me.”
“Lucky you,” Gus said dryly. He looked at her sideways, and with a heavy, resigned sigh, went straight to the baby pictures. It was, in large part, photos of Gus as a child taken by his mother. From the looks of things, he had been a very happy baby - there were hardly any photos where he wasn’t offering the camera (or more specifically, his mother behind it) a big gummy smile. It was sort of weird to look back so far, but amusing as well.
“What happened, right?” he grinned at Lidia, giving her a nudge, “I used to be so cute!”
He was paging through the photos steadily until he came to one that made him pause - it was Gus being held by his father, whom he obviously took after a great deal. The man holding the baby was very large. He had Gus balanced in the crook of one arm, a beer in the other. While Gus looked half asleep, his father (who had very dark eyes) seemed to be staring down the barrel of the camera.
“Mom said she had to talk him into this,” Gus said, scratching his jaw, “He wasn’t super interested in... I don’t know. His family, I guess.”
Lidia had a hard time not smiling at the sprawl of bright, toothless smiles that looked more goofy than anything else; a warmth in her belly similar to that akin to fuzzy kittens and bouncy puppies slowly spread through her system, but it faltered in light of this last photograph. Though her expression cooled a bit, it was only because she’d seen Gus’s go cold, first. At least, in his eyes. She looked at the man in the picture again, nodding vaguely.
“Not exactly an uncommon condition,” she said quietly. Maybe with some camaraderie.
He looked at Lidia and offered her a half-smile. No, not uncommon at all. Gus moved onward, leaving the glaring photo of his father behind. Marching through the photos, as it usually was with photo albums, was like marching steadily through time. He looked like a rambunctious toddler, always bumped and scraped, although there were the odd bruises that seemed out of place with the usual scraped knees.
The photos seemed to dry up a bit, and then jumped to what looked like Halloween. Gus was five, and dressed as a pirate - it was a rare pictures with both Gus and his mother. Without knowing the history of their family, it might’ve been easy to assume they’d been in a car accident because of all the bandages and bruises, but given the position of the bandages on Gus’s face, it was a key moment, a shift in direction for the Marshal’s.
Despite the injuries, there was a sort of glowing relief from Clara as she gave her grinning son a kiss in the temple. There were no lines on her face yet - she had clearly been a very young mother - and she was wearing her brunette hair long. It had a gentle, natural wave in it that (in Gus’s opinion) gave her a sort of classic, timeless look. Bruises aside, she was a woman out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
“The pirate costume was my idea,” he smirked, “Since I was wearing an eye patch anyway. That was probably the best damned Halloween ever.”
There was a distinct cloud of silence and stillness that had settled over Lidia, come that last picture. A distance in her eyes that went without explanation; it had been wrought from similar memories that didn’t involve quite as many bandages, but there were things she still remembered quite vividly that couldn’t be healed under gauze.
It was the obvious perfect affection given by Gus’s mother that coiled something behind her intestines. Lidia focused happily on his words when he split the silence.
“Sounds like a challenge to make this one better, yes?”
“Maybe,” he said, happy to move on. He move steadily forward through the photos, pictures of him turning into a very gangly youngster who towered over his friends. Gus was freckle faced and his hair was always in some messy, mad state from whatever trouble he was getting into at the time - but he always looked genuinely happy.
Another key photograph that he lingered on was him as a teenager. His body had been thrown for a loop by puberty - it had shot him up to his adult height, but there was almost nothing else to him.
Gus started to laugh and put a hand over his face, looking at the gangly young man giving a thumbs up in front of his first car. It was some shitty second hand thing, but he’d been thrilled to get it anyway - he actually had a proper, shaved mohawk in the photo as well.
“I don’t know if you should be looking at these,” he joked. Christ, he’d been a scrawny kid.
Lidia’s brows bounced in an unassuming manner, perfectly combined with a half-shrug. “Just for blackmail purposes--I assure you, no pleasure taken from it.” Everything about that statement was steeped in sarcasm.
“Yeah, I bet,” Gus smirked. He moved onwards, into his twenties. He filled out very gradually in the photos, still not quite to the point he was now, and then he exhaled a wistful sigh when he reached a photo of himself up to his elbows in a black Charger. He wasn’t even looking at the photo, so engrossed was he in the task.
“That’s Daisy,” he said, sounding like he was talking about a cherished family pet, “God, I miss that car.”
Lidia gave him a sideways glance. “You named this car?”
“Hey,” Gus said, poking a finger at Lidia, “Daisy was a classy lady. Don’t talk about her like that.”
Lidia looked more than amused. “You know, we had sayings back home--Americans and their toys.” Maybe she was goading him, but it was friendly - playful. Like the war of water outside.
Gus just grinned at her and shrugged his shoulders.
“I poured everything into that car,” he said, “Shame I can’t give you a ride in her,” he grinned wider, “The back seat was just big enough.”
Shaking his head, he turned back to the photo and heaved one last, longing sigh before he moved on. Gus and Daisy were rarely far apart, at least until they came to a stark mug shot. Gus couldn’t help it - he bust out laughing.
“Christ, I was such a cocky shithead,” he said dryly. His mug shot was indeed cocky, like he was just far too cool to be standing there, being brought up on extremely serious charges that would have him in jail for quite a few years, “Can’t believe mom saved this stuff, either.”
He paged through a few articles with clever bank robbery puns, but predictably, there weren’t too many pictures from that period. It picked up again with a picture of Gus, freshly released from prison, hugging his mother. He looked much more like he did now - his head completely shaved, however - and he rather comically dwarfed his pixie of a mother.
“One of the guards took it,” he said, “She’s got this one on the fridge I think.”
Her shoulders twitched in a soundless, pleasantly amused half-laugh, and she sat back a bit, dropping her hand from her chin to rest in her lap. “In not a single one are you not smiling.”
“Huh?” he grunted, looking at her like she’d said something very strange, “What do you mean?”
Gus paged through a few more photos - all right, so there was a trend.
“Gotta smile for the camera,” he pointed out, “Not everyone looks good no matter what expression’s on their face.”
He gave her a chummy nudge and continued through, slowing down as they approached a more recent Halloween. Gus glanced warily at Lidia all of the sudden.
“This isn’t boring you too much is it?” he asked, “I mean, you don’t have to keep looking if you’re over it.”
They’d been at it a little while, after all. Surely she’d seen enough incriminating photos of him.
“Not bored,” she assured him with a plain shake of her head. “I just-- I have no comparison. Nothing to...” Her hand circled from her wrist, gesturing at words she wasn’t finding, and not just in translation. She looked at him directly with the facial equivalent of an apologetic shrug. It was now starkly, vividly clear how she now knew pretty much every major (and many minor) details about his entire life. And despite the fairly large pieces she’d given him the other day, she hadn’t reciprocated. There were several reasons for that, most of which had nothing to do with Gus as a person. Or Gus at all, for that matter.
Gus looked at her curiously a moment and then waved a hand. After their talk, he had been feeling better, overall, about their peculiar relationship. He’d meant it when he had said he didn’t want her life story - they didn’t need to be holding hands and cooing at each other in public to make a pleasant environment for a child. This, he felt, awkward as it could be at times, was good enough.
It was better than what either of them had gone through, although only at the start for him. His life had begun to improve once his father had left, and hers, he presumed, had been relentlessly awful from start to present.
Gus smiled at her, very softly, before he turned back to the pictures. He wouldn’t ever fully get it, but he was getting a decent idea.
“All right, before we go further,” he paused on a shot of Gus and some other seedy characters having drinks, “I just want to say that a few Halloween’s ago, I lost a bet. This costume was not my idea. All right?”
He gave her a steady, serious look. This was about a trillion times worse than his scrawny teen self, or even his smug mug shot self. Lidia returned it with raised eyebrows that clearly accepted that challenge. She even leaned forward with a new sense of initiative, tapping the screen to move to the next picture.
She cracked; a short chirp of genuine laughter split their luxurious living room before Lidia’s own palm clapped over her mouth.
“Yeah, yeah,” Gus laughed, grinning hugely at her, “Bet you didn’t know I could rock heels and fishnets, huh? It’s like my secret super power.”
There were more pictures than the first one, in which Gus was an extremely surly looking Doctor Frank N. Furter from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. As the night wore on, and the more he drank, the more he seemed to embrace the costume, ending in a picture of a smashed Gus in the midst of twirling a feathery boa and making a kissy-face at the camera.
“Believe it or not, I got laid that night,” he said, “Apparently it was so hot, how confident I was as a cross dresser.”
He nudged her, still sort of amazed by the laugh, “Maybe I should get that costume for this up coming Halloween. I’d have to borrow your make-up, though.”
“Oh- if you get that costume, I will put make-up on for you,” she said to him, completely serious. No, the look wasn’t exactly a turn-on; not her taste. But the idea of what kind of reactions he would get; that was very appealing.
“Yeah?” he rubbed the back of his neck and raised an eyebrow at her, “I’ll talk to my mom, then. See if she’s got it in storage.”
The rest of the photos weren’t nearly as strikingly entertaining, just snap shots of the life of an (until now) eternal bachelor. And, as she’d noticed earlier, there were very few where Gus wasn’t outright grinning at the camera.
“Well, that’s probably more blackmail than you’ll ever need on me,” he shrugged his shoulders at her, chuckling a bit.
Her deep-set smirk was grinnish, and not cold, but Lidia didn’t say anything more on the subject. Instead, she moved on to one that’d been planted in her head over the last few minutes.
“Do you want to see my costume?”
“Hell yeah I do,” Gus said, “If I’m cross dressing, you’re going to have to really pull out all the stops.”
He settled back on the couch and raised his eyebrows at her in challenge. He’d wait right here!
She was gone up the stairs roughly ten minutes. Normally putting something so simple on wasn’t much of a challenge, but the accessories (namely the real feather wings that kept sliding on her back when she reached down to strap on her heels) were making things a little more complicated. In the end, she managed, fueled by the exhibitionist touch to her care-free thought process. Parties were fun, and costumes were fun; Lidia doubted that part of her personality would ever really go away.
She ‘floated’ back down the wooden stairs in a high-cut, maiden sleeved white dress trimmed in sequin and faux white fur. Proud white wings and a string of diamonds and pearls across her brow and hair like a Tzarina’s crown. And of course, a pair of clear glass heels.
Gus waited patiently, trying to imagine what she was wearing. A sexy version of something, he was sure. Devil, maybe? He could see that.
Of course, when she descended his stairs, his jaw dropped and his eyebrows shot up.
“Hoolllyy shit,” he said rather reverently, “Are you serious?”
He wiped both his hands over the top of his head, smoothing back is vaguely damp hair, “How hard am I gonna have to work to make sure you come home with me the night of the party?”
Lidia just smirked, clearly bemused as she settled on the stair landing, and leaned deep over the rail, like it was a bar. “Depends on how many men here are willing to chance with other mens’ wives,” she teased in her usual timbre. Inadvertently, her thoughts shot to Aleks and his known intentions, but her brother didn’t stay in her mind long.
He laughed at her comment, eyes straying away from her face for obvious reasons. It was still pretty bizarre, thinking of Lidia as his wife. He wasn’t so sure it was legal for a wife to be as hot as Lidia was.
“You look gorgeous,” he said, “I mean, you wake up that way, but the white feathers are a really nice touch.”
Gus wasn’t trying to be charming, either. He was just sort of quietly bemused by how attractive she was.
“I know it isn’t like this for you,” he said, his grin sheepish, “But I feel sort of like I won the karmic lottery most mornings.”
Her right brow arched. “Karmic lottery?”
“You know, karma,” Gus leaned forward a bit, giving her a quizzical look back, “That not a thing in Russia? It sure as hell isn’t exclusively American. You really don’t know what I’m talking about?”
Her other brow joined it’s manicured twin, and Lidia pursed her lips. She’d put gloss on them while upstairs. Peach scented and flavored. “Not familiar. But by the context, you say I am a prize.” Her chin dipped a little, tilting like the ghost of her smile. “What was the contest?”
“Huh,” he leaned back again, not sure explaining things would do him many favors. He’d sort of blabbed without thinking, “It’s not a contest, exactly. Karma is... I mean, it’s not real. It’s sort of a goofy pop-culture thing. But the idea is sort of a, uh, cosmic balance. Basically, whenever bad shit happens to you, you’re due some good shit as well.”
He opened his mouth and closed it again, concentrating and frowning a bit. Had he explained that well enough?
“Make sense?”
She was silent for a moment, letting the idea translate itself into her own pre-understood terms. When it clicked, something changed in her eyes, but not necessarily for better or worse. If anything, they sharpened. Like her smile.
“Who says I am ‘good shit’?”
Gus eyeballed her very warily, feeling like she was holding a gun to his head all of the sudden.
Where would she keep it? idled through his head, though it was quickly dismissed.
“I do...?” he tried.
Lidia chuckled low, but not as cruel as her eyes could sometimes be. They hadn’t been that way in a while, but there hadn’t been much reason. Yet.
“Whatever makes you happy,” she finally conceded without much further explanation. “Sometimes a prize is wanted because it is a ‘prize’, yes?”
“Jesus, it was a metaphor for feeling lucky, Lidia,” Gus made a face, clearly taking it the wrong way, “I’m not that big an asshole. I don’t just think of you as a prize.”
He looked vaguely wounded by what he’d perceived she’d said. She, on the other hand, looked the same as she had before the statement had been made.
Inside, however, Lidia was a little confused at his sudden crestfallen look and tone. Maybe she was interpreting - or conveying - herself incorrectly. That’s what happens when you don’t think before you speak she scolded herself, and rolled her lips into themselves, spreading the sweet gloss to the tip of her tongue.
Gus waited for her to say something, but she stayed quiet and he exhaled a weary sigh.
“Look, sorry,” he said, looking away from her and shaking his head, “Don’t take it the wrong way, all right? I just... I don’t know. I don’t want you to think.. I don’t know. That I only get along with you because you’re an eleven on the ten point scale. I guess I’m just prickly because I’m pretty sure that’s all I ever really communicate.”
He was stumbling all over himself, wary of her misreading what he was saying, unaware that he’d started it. At least in this instance.
Lidia squinted a little, like it would actually help see what was going on in Gus’s head, but she knew it wouldn’t help. He was already as plainly read as an open book with an index and cliff-notes.
His sourness was apparently born from him thinking she wasn’t understanding him. But It was he that wasn’t getting it.
“Is it that you believe I think you are only happy with me because I look like this?” Her brows arched again, but less obvious. Though it was formed as a question her tone was more of a statement. Like she was leading him somewhere. “I do not think that.”
“I-” Gus blinked at her, looking at once guilty and surprised, “Uh, you don’t?” She shook her head with a faint smirk.
Relief edged its way into his expression, but he was waiting for the other sexy clear-shoe to drop.
“I just do not think you should be so quick to assume I am your good fortune.”
“Oh,” Gus said, both relieved and vaguely ashamed at himself for jumping to conclusions. And not sure what he thought about her last statement.
“You going to kill me in my sleep or something?” he teased her gently, smirking back at her, “Short of that, Lidia, I’m pretty sure I’m-”
“You are not a stupid man, Angus,” Lidia cut him off in the same low tone of voice. She hadn’t moved, and she hadn’t changed anything about her facial expression. “You know women like me...even if you do not know me. We are not creatures of happiness and luck.” The faintest smile cracked her snow-princess expression, but it wasn’t gleeful or even cruel. It was more sad than anything. “But no, I will not kill you in your sleep.”
He was sort of startled to feel like his heart broke a little at that smile. Gus didn’t dare acknowledge it, though. That was dangerous, and he was still trying to distance himself from the Thing They Would Never Mention Aloud when they’d gone to that class at the community center.
“Good to know,” he said, smiling back, “So I’m Angus now, huh? You been talking to my mom in private?”
Gus didn’t think there was anything else he could safely address - it felt like a total cop-out, but their strange relationship probably couldn’t weather much discussion about said strange relationship.
“It grabs your attention,” she replied, forcibly warming her smile with not a lot of effort. “Besides, I enjoy your full name.”
“That makes two people on the planet,” he shot back dryly. As usual, things had taken a bit of a weird and confusing turn, “You should change out of that before someone ruins it.”
And then, totally on impulse, “Want to have dinner somewhere tonight? I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sick of my cooking.”
He looked vaguely sly, and for Gus, that was never anything sinister. Gus was determined that they end one of their interactions on a relatively high note for goddamn once. A change of scenery might be a good equalizer, and shit, it was their days off. Normal people went out on their days off when the sun went down.
Lidia slid her chin out of her hand and pulled her shoulders back - wings and all. Her smile had returned to it’s original amused state of existence, though there was something deeper in her eyes. The heaviness she’d let him see just a glimpse of combined with something warmer and lighter; not just the mask she was steadily thinning as days went by.
“So long as you promise to ‘ruin’ my costume next time I wear it,” she said in passing, already heading up the stairs.
“I’ll take that deal, so long as you ruin mine, too,” Gus laughed, watching her go upstairs. That settled it, then. Date night. One that didn’t end in awkward disaster - not that their first ‘date’ had, of course.
He made a mental note not to drink - he’d need every resource available to him to pull it off.