Re: antique store: sam & julia
"I know someone who lives here." It wasn't an explanation. Julia didn't have an explanation for being in Repose that wasn't Nick and it wasn't a half-truth because she did know Cisco. It was inspiration for getting out of the city, a town small enough and near enough that it was not-the-city and also not large enough to be noticeable. She didn't, in front of the birdhouse that had once been eccentricity in cheery-bright paint, want Nick anywhere near Repose. His car was enough and she wished more than once she dared to let it break down far enough away she could only walk.
"Weird shit," she curled her fingertips under her sleeve like buds furling up for winter. A half-smile at her fingernails, "Different kind of weird, isn't it?" She'd seen through the week of remembering things that hadn't happened and forgetting the things you did. "Not city-weird. Weird-weird. It feels," thoughtfully, as she ran the fingernail of her thumb down the birdhouse window, "Close-knit. Like people belong together even if they don't belong at all."
Louis was left alone for a while. She didn't know if she felt like tea-parties and coaxing and reclusive sounded horribly close to wanting to be left alone in the dark and the cool and the still until you could think. Julia knew desire to be alone, it was trees and cold, cold sunshine and the still before the people in the woods roamed through. And she left Alex too, the warm squeeze of a hug enough to tuck it back where it belonged, worry over Alex nagging constant, like a letter folded into an envelope with the warning unraveled no matter how many times you folded it.
"Yeah, I want to meet him," she was clear and decided on that. Sam was happy, she shone with it like butter or sunshine or clean glass. Sam was definition in a dusty shop, all that she was colored in bright. It was a good look. It was a happy look. And Julia didn't mind shit; soft dulled you down until you didn't expect the bite.
"I'm happy," she said now. It was stubborn, but it was warmth running in through the cracks, like the sunshine through the branches in the woods. "I have a place, I go, I'm me." She smiled, plaid and dandelion locks and insistent on happiness. She was, or she would be. You could make something from a seed, you could build it.
"I never lived anywhere but the city before. It's spread out. You have room to breathe." And breathing mattered.