hailey hamilton is better underwater. (mermayd) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-01-27 19:11:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | ! log, hailey hamilton, nathan mitchell |
WHO: Hailey & Nathan
WHAT: Awkward conversations / Hailey being overly aggressive
WHEN: Sunday early evening
WHERE: On the way to the lake
WARNINGS: Sry Damien
STATUS: Completed!
Seeing Hailey bounding towards him could not be a new sight for Nathan. This afternoon they were outside, and sweat had already started to form around Hailey’s hairline and other places she didn’t care to admit. It was January and she was roasting. She’d been roasting in August - there was really no getting used to this climate for the cold-loving Canadian. It made the water nice, but if Hailey was going as deep as she wanted the sun didn’t matter anymore. It was weird coming out of the water and all the water almost instantaneously drying up. Hails was used to bundling up and shivering into a towel. Hailey couldn’t help but see snippets of their last text messages as she slipped her arm through Nathan’s. She wasn’t sure how she felt, she wasn’t sure how Nathan felt, and she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to find out. But then again, she was Hailey and she’d never done too well with the unknown. “How do you survive this? All I want to do is sleep all day. The only time I’m awake is when I’m under water or in the arena twice a week. No punching for me today,” Hailey said with a mischievous grin. ==== “Tasmania is colder,” Nate said. “Not by your standards, I reckon, but a bit.” Not so much this year, with all the bushfires and such, but usually it wasn’t quite as crazy as this part of the country. That was one of the many reasons he missed home. That, his family and the ocean. To mention a few things. They started to walk down towards the lake, almost without thinking. That’s what they’d done the last time, and that’s what they did today. Somehow Hailey and water just belonged together, so it felt natural to do so. “Yeah, let’s stay clear of the punching. I’d rather not go there tonight.” ==== “What, one degree?” Hailey joked back. At least Tasmania was surrounded by water. Hailey had no idea how far away the ocean was here. Back home she’d lived on a bay, which meant it was often windy and cold and damn right frigid in the winter. Australia was the most exotic place she’d ever been, and if this is what it was like everywhere, Hailey didn’t think she cared for travel. “But you’re working on it?” Hailey asked, inching her way into a conversation Nathan probably didn’t want to have. She hadn’t talked to Ashton or Caleb yet, but she’d been thinking that if Nathan refused to let her around, Ashton and Caleb channeling Ashton might be useful. Which worked out perfect since they were all friends already. ==== “Okay, not a lot,” he had to admit. “But enough. It’s not in the desert for one.” A very important part of it. One of the most important, as a matter of fact. But they were here and people like him definitely should be, so it was no use thinking about home. Wishing you were out there. It was safer this way. For everyone. “Do we have to?” he groaned. “Again?” Whatever had gotten into Hailey after she saw him feral, he didn’t like it. He’d never minded her being blunt and saying it like it was before, but it was starting to get old. “I’ll talk to them. I told you. A few days ago.” ==== Most of her time here, Hailey had been happy. Yeah she missed Canada, of course she missed people back home - but it didn’t feel like prison to her. So many people were itching to leave, mistrustful of the IVI, and god knows what else, but not Hailey. It wasn’t that she trusted everyone at the school, but she didn’t have a burning hatred like so many others. She grudgingly accepted some of the worse rules like only three drinks a week and constant school, but it wasn’t so bad. One day she’d go home and miss everyone here. “Okay,” she replied, signalling the end of that conversation. For now. “Does this mean you want to talk about what else we talked about yesterday?” It was a bit of a mouthful, but Nathan would know what she meant. Hails still wasn’t 100% sure she wanted to talk about it, but it had been nagging in the back of her mind and she was truly awful with things ringing around in her head. If she didn’t ask, she was likely to grow more and more agitated. ==== Everyone knew just how bad Hailey was at the casual thing. Nate might not know as much as the girls, but it had been hard to miss her bitterness the other week when they’d briefly talked about it. He didn’t know how Damien thinking they were hooking up had led to a very hypothetical discussion about what was so bad with doing exactly that, but he did know it was what Hailey was referring to. Yeah, she’d never win any prizes for subtlety, this one. “Um,” he said. “Sure. But you know I think it’s a bad idea. Because of, you know. Reasons.” If things had been different he wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But he did. Because someone had to. “Give him one less thing to worry about.” ==== As Nathan brought Damien up, Hailey bristled as if he was talking about her father. She pulled away from him, stopped walking, and crossed her arms. “Oh, that’s right, I forgot. Everything I do depends on what Damien is going to think,” she snapped back. Nate’s remark shouldn’t have made her so aggressive, but it had. And if she’d learned one thing, it was that Nathan would distance himself from her if she kept striking out with her fists instead of her words. “No, I don’t know. What reasons.” Her tone was harsh and nothing like the tone it should be when two people were talking about hooking up. She didn’t like being told ‘I won’t hook up with you because sometimes you lash out with your fists’, and she sure as hell didn’t like being told no because of someone else that wasn’t another girl Nathan was interested in. ==== It took a lot for Nate not to facepalm. “That was a joke, Hails,” he said. “I really don’t care if Damien disapproves of... whatever. That’s not what this is about.” It was true. It wasn’t the disapproval in of itself that made him hesitate. It was the fact that Damien was right. Because he was dangerous. Most girls he hooked up with knew this. They took it seriously. They’d seen the videos and whatever (the amount of women who thought dangerous men were interesting never stopped surprising him; usually they went away when they realised how boring he was), they did what they were supposed to, if needed. Hailey didn’t. Hailey wouldn’t. She’d proved that already. “Do I really have to recount them all?” he asked, a little taken aback by the anger in her voice. He’d never known she cared about him in that way. “You know what they are.” ==== “Yes,” she interjected before he told her that she already knew them. “Oh, okay. Well how about I say them and we’ll see how many I get right, and how many I’m still missing.” She dropped her arms to hold up a hand, but there was still anger in her movements and tone. She shouldn’t be angry, Hailey knew this. But her whole ‘love life’ had been a touchy subject since arriving at IVI, and it was a hell of a lot easier to be angry than hurt. “One,” she started and held up a finger, “you’re full of guilt and don’t think you deserve friends, let alone sex. Two, even if you got over that, I’m likely to get too aggressive and make you turn, or something.” This one almost made her laugh from irony - Hugo had gone elsewhere because he thought she wouldn’t be into dominance or whatever. “How am I doing, get the top two?” ==== Yeah. There it was. Literal facepalming. Because seriously. How could he not? “No,” Nate said. “Yes, the guilt thing is in there somewhere but it’s not number one. And the other one? Are you serious? You really think that’s what I’m worried about?” This whole situation was surreal. He’d never even thought of Hailey this way because first, she was Hailey, second, she was way too busy with her other boy troubles, and third, she got attached way too easily. Which in his case could turn dangerous, rather than annoying. He needed girls who didn’t care. Who were happy to move on, or to come and go. That wasn’t the strangest thing about this conversation, though. The strangest thing was her just anger and how she was pretty much yelling at him for not jumping her. Right there. “Right. So you want me to say it like it is?” He was annoyed now, but unless you knew him, you could hardly tell. “I don’t want to hurt you and before you start yelling again, let me finish. Because the thing is that, yeah, I could hurt you physically. That’s the reality of being around me. It has nothing to do with you. It’s like that for everyone. But –” He saw that she was about to protest and held up a hand. “No. I’m not done.” He didn’t want to tell her this, but he kind of had to. He wasn’t great at being direct, but the situation kind of called for it. “You’re not great at casual sex, Hailey. You’re still bothered by Hugo. I don’t know all the details, but I know you’re not okay with him having moved on and whatever. And that’s not good because it can never be more than that with me. And I know that you can’t handle that. You’ll say that you can, but you can’t.” He winced a little at the words as he said them. He sounded far too full of himself. If it was what took for Hailey to understand it, though... ==== So many times Hailey wanted to interrupt, but Nathan had learned her signs and learned just how to shut her down without inviting anger. Everything she wanted to fire back at him fell away, though. He’d brought up Hugo, and Hailey felt her shoulders and jaw drop. That was quite possibly the last thing she’d expected him to say. Hails had hardly talked to Allegra and Claudia about Hugo, let alone any of her male friends. She wasn’t the type of person to talk about things, but she was the type of person to bottle them up and make it worse. Case and point. “You don’t even -- no one unders --” Hailey’s words rushed out of her mouth before she even had time to put a sentence together. “It wasn’t even -- he hasn’t necessarily --” Her hands balled into fists, but it was more out of frustration than anger. She wasn’t going to strike Nathan. For two reasons - one, he hadn’t done anything wrong or deserving, and two, because if he went feral on her now they’d never get back to this place. “Hugo’s not the first person I’ve had sex with,” Hailey protested, finally stringing something coherent together. “It’s not even about -- it was just everything, okay? He just, we just... it was more than sex. Well, fuck, I thought it was. He wasn’t -- you didn’t see him after.. after the nightmare. He was... he trusted me, he told me about what happened and he didn’t tell so many others and he was so hur-- it was just intense, okay? He’s still not even... UGH,” she groaned and kicked at the sand. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter. I don’t see you being great at casual sex either,” she snapped back at him, hating the fact she felt vulnerable and weak and open standing here right now. ==== He felt bad as Hailey stumbled over her words, hurrying to telling him that she wasn’t a whole lot of things. He hadn’t said any of it to hurt her, but that really didn’t matter in the end. Neither of them were very good at this and it showed. He had no idea how to address any of the things she said either because it really wasn’t his business if it had been her first time or not, what they’d said to each other or whether he’d moved on (although privately he was of the opinion that it was very likely), so he just sidestepped them all, saying nothing until she turned it back at him. Which of course she did. She was Hailey. “No, I’m not,” he admitted, because it wasn’t effortless for him to keep feelings out of it. “And that’s why it would be such a disaster. I mean, it already kind of is.” ==== “I was just curious,” Hailey said quickly and defensively, the same way a scolded child would. Her emotions and rationale for said emotions were now all mixed up and she couldn’t sort through them fast enough. “I wouldn’t take it back, you know. What happened between Hugo and I,” she finally said, we voice having calmed considerably. “Don’t be so quick to think something not working out means you should never try.” Hails had no idea where she was going with this. She had no idea what she wanted from Nathan, and definitely unsure whether or not she wanted to hook up with him. She hadn’t expected this conversation to spiral the way it had, but Hailey also hadn’t thought of where this conversation would go before she brought it up. “I’m not saying that I’d want to or not want to, but if we did - I think we’d be great together.” ==== “I never said you did.” Nate was relieved that she seemed slightly less to explode, although he wasn’t sure exactly what he’d said that had calmed her down. “A lot of stuff are like that. Good at the time, bad later, still worth it in the end.” He sounded like he was about forty-seven. He could hear it himself, which was never a good sign. Nate knew he had a tendency to think like someone twice his age, but he did try to at least pretend he was in his early twenties. He was only vaguely successful, most of the time. “Maybe,” he said. “But we’re pretty great as friends too.” ==== Hailey looked at Nate the same way she’d looked at a lot of the strange fruits she’d seen since being at IVI. Sometimes she really had no idea what to make of him. Not that she knew what to make of a lot of people, and Hailey’s opinions often changed. “Mmmm,” she agreed. “Maybe we’ll revisit this once we get your power under control,” she said while slowing to a stop. They’d made it to the lake and this conversation felt like it was coming to a natural close. Glancing over at Nathan, Hailey paused to look at him for a moment before pulling off her shirt. “For now, let’s swim.” ==== Nathan sighed at her comment about his power (when had that become a ‘we’ anyway?), but didn’t protest. He watched her throw herself into the lake, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Which wasn’t exactly easy. Was it ever easy with her? He didn’t think so. As Hailey disappeared underneath the surface he discarded his shirt, kicked off his shoes and followed her into the water. Swimming he could do without complications. He hoped. |