Lyra snorted softly at the last, bumping her shoulder against Rosario's. "No doy," she said. "Why would I stick 'round anyone isn't treating me right?"
The question was rhetorical, and Lyra didn't give a second thought to the possibly that it could even have an answer, she just smiled in relief at Rosario, and burrowed a little closer to her, finally taking a sip of the vodka.
“His brother’s more than just a jerk,” she continued, cuz now she had the talking stick, and the dam was broken, and there was so much more she wanted Rosario to know. “He’s violent. Real bad. Reconstructive surgery when Avery was a kid bad. His parents ignore it. So… his mom threw a party while we were there, full of people she was tryna suck up too. There was this old creep, said my look was exotic— you know the type, the try-to-stroke-your-hair type. Well, Avery properly backs me up when I'm loudly and ungraciously— to borrow his mom's word— demanding he apologise. Avery’s mom just sweeps in and gets Xander to physically drag him— Avery, not the creep— outta the house and outta sight of the guests, and then he hits him, right in front of me. It was awful, Roz. And the next night, after I’d introduced Xander to the concept of being dumped, his mom was proper ripping into me about it. And he stood up for me then too. And—” she added, lifting a pointed finger to mark this as significant, cuz it was something Lyra hadn’t been able to get out of her head since it happened “—after that, he said that we had to find a way to get me outta there. That he’d stay in that house with his family so long as it meant I could get out.”
That was huge, right? Lyra'd been thinking about it on the flight home, once the hangover had well worn off and some of the second-thoughts were starting to quietly offer themselves to her for her consideration. Lyra had found a plethora of ways to shut them up: Not only had Avery said he'd wanted to be there for her and help her when she'd come out to her family as a saint's kid, and not only had he gone with her to a frat party when he knew his brother was going to be there, but he'd volunteered to stay in that house with his family, for her. If he’d do all that for her, what wouldn’t he do? It might be a little hasty, but if she could trust him with all that she could trust him with her future too, right? And her heart?
She sighed, smiled hopefully, leaning her head against the side of the chair and watching Rosario. "It's just really nice having someone stand up for you, you know?"
Rosario would know. It wore you down, sometimes, the world did. Lyra had loved her job in the hardware store but being dismissed on the daily by people, men usually but absolutely not exclusively, wore you down. Waitressing and fast food wore you down cuz as a whole, no one looked at you like you were more than just a vessel to bring them food, unless they were looking at you with a different kinda hunger. Being a bit of a freak at school wore you down. Growing up as an over-enthusiastic kid (a show off/total spaz) who wanted too badly to make friends (a try-hard, other kids could smell desperation and loneliness on you) wore you down. Trying to break into an industry that was reluctant to accept people that looked like you wore you down.
And look, yeah, Lyra had learned a long time ago to stand up for herself. That was a muscle that was so well-used it came as easy as walking upright. She knew she was worth more than the world thought she was, she knew how to thump a microaggression on the head like a whack-a-mole, even if that mole, that swarm of moles, was always gonna pop right back up, and she knew she was gonna whack it when it did. Needing to stand her ground down in Tennessee hadn't surprised her. Doing it with someone at her side did.
Just cuz she could handle herself didn’t mean she didn’t wanna be taken care of, after all.