Who: Erin and Colt What: Colt screws up badly Where: Where the recluse lives When: Backdated to before the ball start Warnings: None
Erin wasn’t wearing the dress as she climbed the drive and strode through the Aubade door held open for her by the familiar security guard. She wasn’t wearing any of her strict business attire, either, just one of her sweeping skirts and plain blue tops under her every-where Seattle gray coat. She’d left the dress at home, in its box, and she wasn’t afraid to admit to herself that it had given her a pang to leave it unused. She tried not, however, to let her eyes sting too much when it came to Colt and this dance business. They both knew he didn’t like going out, and he was always in such a foul mood when she suggested anything of a kind that she couldn’t help but think of an angry king behind his castle walls.
She hadn’t thought he would be quite so cruel as to buy her a dress and send her off to an event like that charity ball by herself, though. She supposed that she was taking it too personally, but she felt that was her right, and Erin never did much to excuse her feelings, nor reign them in when they went to extremes. Just because she tended not to express much in the way of throwing china or writing angry emails made people think ice queen for some reason--she had no idea why. Erin’s fits of temper tended to be of the barbed, intentional kind.
She wasn’t planning on having a temper at her erstwhile boss, though. She was just going to get some work done and then go home. God knows who these ‘temp workers’ he’d hired were.
Colt was cranky as all hell. He had wanted to see Erin in the dress, and he’d gotten frustrated as hell when she hadn’t taken the gift for what it was - a gift. She deserved that sort of fabric against her skin, dammit, and she’d intentionally gone and misconstrued the whole damn thing. It was just like a woman, he thought, to take him own unhappiness at being trapped in this nightmare of an apartment and make it about her. Didn’t the damn woman know that if he could he would have taken her to the damn ball, and he would have brought her home after and taken that dress off her his own damn self. Stupid woman.
The door was unlocked, as it always was, but Colt was sitting out on the veranda. He’d wanted air, wanted to get outside the cell he called home. He was feeling mighty sorry for himself, and he’d had a few goodly sized glasses of whisky.
And then he heard the door open. Aw, hell.
Erin thought the apartment looked awfully dim again, but then it was getting on 6:30 and in another hour or so it would be black as pitch. He did like to wallow in his darkness, and it was just like the stubborn man to sit in the dark study and do nothing but drink and practice making sour faces. It made her quite impatient with him, and she wasn’t five feet in the door.
She closed it carefully, just to prove that she wasn’t going to slam it, and she shed her coat and hung it on the rack before venturing within. She hadn’t brought her briefcase, but then, she figured on the fair amount of paperwork left here and the internet connection on the blackberry would get her through a couple hours of work. She’d spent the whole day at home and she felt as bright as she did in the morning, reinforcing Toby’s idea that there was something about being at home that fixed the energy problem.
She didn’t call for him, preferring instead to make her way in the general direction of the study.
He heard her hang up the coat, and he heard her shut the door, and she listened to her footsteps in the wrong direction. He didn’t call for her, though, didn’t let her know where he was, that he was alive, nothing of the sort. He was feeling petty, the sting of admitting he wanted to take her to the stupid excuse for a prom, the sting of admitting he couldn’t take her foremost in her mind. He reached for a cigar from the box on the table beside the chair, and he lit it and took several short puffs, and he waited.
Erin was feeling sour and petty too, and as she went through the apartment she turned on every light she passed, leaving a trail of brightly lit clutter and the vaguely chocolate scent of her passing. She went into the study, spun the globe idly, letting it sit where it would as it slowed, and then fished through the papers on his desk, looking for the ‘temp construction’ he had hired, or for some sign of legality.
The globe slowed with Alaska nearest the desk, gravity falling whim to habit. The desk was cluttered with a locked box of pills, which would rattle if picked up. An envelope from Alaska, handwritten in a child’s hand, rested in the center, completely unobstructed, the letter was missing from within. On the corner of the desk, a stack of paper listed the temp workers and progress made on The Academy, and atop those a list of doctors and specialist in the area with names crossed out and circled.
She found the papers, eventually, but not without rifling through the list of doctors, which she observed with interest but without any understanding. She thought they might be the ones he mentioned, but turned down in favor of Toby. She set it aside, and thinking, set the globe spinning again. Her eye kept on going back to that box. So many little rattling things inside, plastic rattling noises which she recognized to be the sound of pills, since like many other women she carried a bottle of aspirin in her purse. She sat down in his chair and rocked a little bit like a kid on the playground rocking horse, and then she sat up, put her hand over the lock, and made a key for it. She turned the key over in her hand as she picked up the envelope and looked it over with distracted interest, and finally she put that side (on top of the list of doctors) and opened the box.
She didn’t recognize any of the complicated names on the bottles, but she hadn’t really expected that she would. There were so many though, that she turned them all over in her hands and frowned and squinted, and she saw the ones with warnings that it suppressed the appetite. One was a strong painkiller that she did recognize, because one of her nurses had been fond of taking them rather regularly, and she went vague for some hours afterward. Finally, Erin put the disturbing little bottle all back in the little box, and then she locked it with her new key. She put the new key in her pocket and sat back on the chair to ponder--and that was when she saw the top drawer. The top drawer and the top drawer’s lock. She stared at it.
The front of the small top drawer was smooth, the wood worn down in much the same way as the globe. It was a small compartment, dark and not even big enough for a man’s hand. Inside, there were over five years worth of letters. The oldest were written by a woman, the language not English but something foreign and hieroglyphic looking in places. Still, it was clearly a woman’s hand, smooth and feminine. There are only one or two from that time period. The next few years worth are written by a strong male hand, and the letters are short, terse demanding things. And then, the newest ones, which are the most finger-cared and worn, written by tiny fingers and interspersed with English words - dog and mother and today and when and miss.
The woman’s hand did not concern Erin as much as she thought it would. She saw them, and they (to her) appeared rather fond, and she tucked them away almost as soon as she realized that she could not read what they said. She was just flipping through the man’s letters, looking for a name and what was quite so urgent, but then she was distracted by the little zig zag handwriting. Charmed, Erin tried to string together the words she could read, but there were too many she could not. It was such a sweet set of letters, those one’s in the child’s hand, that she wished she had letters like those, too.
Colt had enough of waiting, because that damn woman was likely to stay wherever she was and not come out on purpose, just to vex him. “ERIN,” he bellowed, his voice carrying easily to the study. He’d be damned if he was going to lumber in there like an idiot, not tonight.
Erin jumped and her elbow knocked the box of pills to the floor. It was still locked very well, but it bounced and rattled, and Erin replaced the letters as neatly as she could before locking the top drawer again and pocketing that key, too. She brushed past the globe and put the box back in the approximate place that she left it, and then she appropriated the construction papers and set off in the other part of the apartment. “Why are you shouting?” she asked, sourly, as she appeared behind him on the veranda.
“So you would hear me where you were hiding at,” he told her, turning to look at her. He frowned. “Why the hell aren’t you dressed?” he demanded, because if this woman was standing here, he expected to see her in that dress, dammit.
She blinked and frowned at him, the papers in her hand. “Dressed as what?”
“Don’t play the fool with me, Erin,” he said bluntly. “You know very well what dress.”
She went a bit paler, as she did when she was affected by something unpleasant. “It’s too nice to wear outside for no reason. I won’t be long, I just wanted to get this mess with the construction worked out. Do you want some coffee?” She looked intently at the whiskey.
He didn’t admit that he wanted to see her in it, the dress, that when the door had opened he had assumed she was coming by to show him the damn thing. He didn’t admit to either of those things, however. Instead, he scowled, his gaze falling to the papers in her hand. “Erin,” he said, as much calmness as he could muster infused into the word. “I want you to put those papers down, and I want you to turn around, and I want you to put that DAMN dress on and go to that ball, where you should be.”
Her lips quivered, but she got them under control and pressed them flat. “Why?” she challenged, rising a little forward on her toes. “Since you won’t go, what should I go for? I don’t see how you can order me what to wear and where to go when I’m not working in your interest and I’m not going to go to the ball with somebody else in your dress.”
He was about to argue, to tell her that the thing was made for her, and it wasn’t right for her not to go to the dance just because he couldn’t go without being an embarrassment to them both. He was about to tell her that, but then she mentioned somebody else and his eyes narrowed. There was nothing worse for a jealous man than not being able to claim whatever he felt was his, and the mention of someone else taking her to the ball made him go quiet for a moment, just one. “With who?” he finally growled.
“With anybody!” she just barely saved it from being a shout, and she waved the stack of papers in her fist for emphasis.
He turned away, looked out into the night and away from her and her soft skirt and long hair and too pale skin. He couldn’t take her to her damn ball, and he couldn’t stop her from going with someone else if she wanted, and it made him feel impotent and angry and bitter. “Just go,” he said, not turning back to look at her. She looked healthy and beautiful, and she deserved better than some reclusive pain killer addict like he was. In the moment of clarity, he realized that. “Put on the damn dress and go dance.”
“Stop telling me what to do. And calling me names, and buying me things you won’t talk about, and shouting at me.” Her skirt gave an arrogant little swish. “I haven’t done anything to you but try and help. And now I’m going to go try to fix whatever your gremlins have done to the building, preferably with coffee.” She turned on her heel.
He watched her go, and he made an exasperated sound at the infuriating woman, while admitting to himself that he was glad to see her being her old, impossible self again. “Get BACK here,” he called out to her, already pouring himself another drink because dammit he needed it with her around. “Erin,” he called out again.
She came back around the edge of the veranda, but only at a stomp to come right up next to him and swipe the whiskey bottle and pull it back out of the way with her. Then she turned around and stomped back.
He reached out to grab her. Not the whiskey bottle, her.
He missed, his mobility affected by the uncomfortable chair, his reflexes thrown off by one too many glasses of whiskey, and his hand managed to just close on her skirt, the fabric slipping through his fingers like so much air. He growled with anger, with impotence, with this whole damned embarrassing, infuriating day. “I DON’T WANT YOU HERE, WOMAN,” he yelled, words angry and venom filled. The anger, of course, was directed at himself, but she’d have no way of knowing that. “GO.”
Oblivious to the attempt, Erin turned around and her eyes were dangerously glassy and she didn’t have that lip-quiver as well under control as she thought. “THEN FINE. Just...” she was momentarily silenced by frustration, and then she dropped the bottle off to one side so that it upended and spilled whiskey off the edge of the veranda. “Just stay here all alone and feel sorry for yourself, then!” She gave a wet little sniff, swiped at a cheek with her wrist, and whirled off into the apartment, the edge of the skirt giving a last flash of color before it, too, whisked out of sight.
The door slammed a second later.
He threw the box of cigars after the door slammed, and it didn’t make him feel any better when it splintered to pieces against the veranda floor.