WHO Cin (with bits of Apollo) WHEN 18th Jan - 13th March WHAT a very poorly written and rushed sort of catch up scene for the last 2 months. No one really needs to read it, but it was plot stuff I had to cover. WARNINGS see above, plus some casual homophobia
Life had taken an unusual turn for Cin over the last few months, ever since she’d driven a half-drowned man back to his extravagant Manhattan apartment.
She’d gone home that night with six thousand dollars in her hands and an agreement to go out to dinner with him the very next night. It wasn’t a date, but Cin didn’t quite know what it was.
But the six thousand had been put away, after she’d replaced the fridge, the washer, and the dryer, and it was making everything feel a lot safer and less stressful. The day after the first ‘date’, when she’d set out a real dinner feast for her siblings, they’d all sat around talking about Archie and What His Deal Was.
“He’s a sex pest rapist,” Jake had told her in a very self-assured tone, spearing a sausage with his fork and shoving it in his move.
Brody had taken hold of her hand under the table without a word, a thing he did whenever he was anxious. Cin squeezed his hand reassuringly. “Well, if he tries any of that I’m kicking his balls back up through his body. I’m not scared of some rich trust fund baby with soft fag hands.”
Everyone at the table made sounds of approval and all fear of him being a sex pest seemed to pass. Cin was keeping her eye out though.
She had somehow ended up agreeing to continue seeing Archie though, letting him take her out to restaurants she never would even get in the door of otherwise. There was something thrilling about that, and Cin reasoned with herself that she deserved those dinners. Why did rich people get everything when Cin had to exist on scraps? Fuck them! If she had the chance, why not take it? Besides, sometimes she got to take things back to the others and show it off a little. (She'd brought an entire lobster home one time, and everyone had come to the realization that lobster wasn't even that nice.)
When she’d said, before Not Date #3, that she didn’t have anything to wear out, Archie had started sending her clothes. She’d had to give him a budget, because it was too uncomfortable and fucked up for him to spend as much on her as he seemed to want to. They weren’t fucking, and so he shouldn’t be spending Fucking Money on her. Spending a thousand dollars on a dress - like he'd tried to the first time before she'd shut him down - suggested he wanted to get her out of it later on, and that wasn't happening.
“You can spend $300 on an outfit,” she ended up telling him firmly, unwilling to budge as even that seemed like an astronomical amount of money for clothes.
He’d whined, “how am I even supposed to find shoes for that much?”
But he seemed to be sticking to it, and some of the clothes she kept and some she sold. It didn’t suck to look into her closet and see some nice things there.
Whenever she went to see Barek, she didn’t tell him about Archie. It wasn’t because she was being unfaithful – she wasn’t - but she knew Barak would see if that way. If he even understood what she was saying at all. The guy in the hospital bed was still barely a shadow of the man she’d been in love with, and yet still she loved him.
Sometimes he seemed to get angry and agitated that she was there, and one time the nurse had said ‘I don’t know what’s wrong, he’s been so calm all day.’ Cin wasn’t even sure Barak wanted her to visit him, and yet she kept coming. What else was she supposed to do? She couldn’t just give up on him. Even like this, Cin loved him. She had to believe that he would get better and things would be like they were again.
But until then, the only dinners she went on were her once a weeks with Archie. And every week she once again clarified, at some point, that it wasn’t a date. (Usually it was after he'd looked her up at down, his eyes following her curves. She couldn't deny that it felt good to be lusted after, even if she wasn't going to act on it. Cin liked being hot.)
Archie wasn’t terrible company, and she was growing more and more confident around him to speak her mind, and more confident around the rich people in the restaurants. In the dresses and jewellery that Archie bought her, Cin looked just like them. She could pass among them like a spy, and only she had to know where she went back to at the end of the night.
Yesterday night Archie had dropped her off outside the house and as she’d climbed out of the car, he’d called out her name and leaned across to look at her.
“Just checking, because you forgot to say,” he said with a look of false curiosity, “but was this a date?”
Cin tilted her head to the side but she found herself having to bite down the smile at his terrible show of an innocent expression. “This wasn’t a date.”
“Cool,” Archie said with a smug wink, “just making sure.”
He pulled the car door shut and sped out of the Hole, not a single thing about his existence subtle. Cin wondered what it was like to live that loud, that confident, to know that wealth and power cushioned you from everything that sucked.
She watched his car lights disappear to nothing and thought, if that was me, I could do anything.