Re: log: joey & ella, gatsby
Ian was a shadow under the bed, a memory to haunt bad dreams. She didn't much want to talk about Ian days but there was something about crumpling up the bad times and tossing them aside as if they'd never happened that felt like ripping pages out of a book and the ending making no sense at all. Ian was an end to before, and the beginning of the middle. Iris, faded flower and pale thing she'd been the last time Ella had seen her, was left alone.
"Making plans isn't all about what they're worth." If it was, she wouldn't make a single one. She curled her feet out of the pinching borrowed leather, reached down, her hand skimming over the cotton of his shirt in the stretch, to smudge off a scuff from the tip of the shoe with her free hand. The stockings had a run in them that scuttered from toe-tip to thigh, but nobody noticed. It was like most things in Gatsby, long as it glittered, people were too caught by the gold to much worry about the rest.
She left the shoes sitting on the bottom step, heels together, toes pointed, like they were all ready for the next girl to step into. "You make plans because you want to think it'll get better someday," because emptiness was worse than nothingness. Her fingers were tied up with his, weighted like an anchor. They fell into the wasteland of space between their hips, she watched their twined hands fall like stone. It was wrong, maybe. It was a step away from memory clean of all wrong-doing in between there and now, and besides, Max had said -- except Max wasn't here any more. There was no one.
"I don't believe in nothings anymore," she said, looking at the far wall and remembering how to breathe the way they taught you when you learned to sing. Singing was all about the breathing, and breathing didn't come so easy, feel so natural the minute you started thinking about how you had to go on and open up your mouth and sing with it. It didn't feel so natural now, her thumb notched against unfamiliar callous. Ella drew in smoke from the breaks the girls took, sweat, nervousness, eased it out past ribs that constricted like the corset she wasn't wearing.