Someone (who is not Sera) has filled the concrete planters flanking the front step and hung paper garlands from the bare limbs of the trees in the front yard and someone (who is not Sera) has slung party lights and Edison bulbs on strings around frames in the backyard and someone (who is not Sera) has scrubbed the patio furniture hauled out the cushions and the pillows and restrung the hammock and swept the front porch and moved that goddamned unicycle from one side of the front door to the other and someone has opened the windows and someone else has made sangria and someone else has dyed eggs and "hidden" them in ABSOLUTELY PLAIN SIGHT around the front yard and some of those eggs are real and are hard-boiled and others of those eggs are plastic and contain treats like chocolates and joints and marijuana-infused chocolates and jelly beans because it is Easter and it is SPRING! and there must be jelly beans and it is Sunday or maybe some other day, and the sun's out.
It's afternoon.
Brunch is a generous name for the basis for the party, which will go on and on and on but it started as an after-lunch brunch so there are Bloody Mary's of all sorts and various fruit-and-liqueur-and-sparkling-or-still-wine drinks and whenever Hawksley comes, however long he takes to make his way through the crowd in the house, he will find Sera in the garden, lounging on the bed she keeps there, with a very, very stoned Dee, curled up, drifting or dreaming, her dark head resting on Sera's belly, Sera's hand in Dee's hair.
Sera's eyes are on Hawksley as soon as he emerges from the house, but he has to know she felt him from god-knows how far away. When he's close she lifts her head for a kiss, inhaling, expectant, and she tastes both sweet and dry, maybe a bit effervescent - champagne - and herbal, because of course, and she tells him,
"Tell Rick to make you a fucking Venetian spritzer, they're amazing."
He just got back from Venice, Rick. Learned how to make them there.
Somehow the rest of us never knew he was gone.
HawksleyIt's Easter, and it's 4/20, and guess which you celebrate when you're friends with a Cultist. Both, of course.
Hawksley is lounging on the bed in the back garden. He wasn't here for after-lunch brunch. He has been smoking or eating THC-laced sour candies for a while now though, and he is staring at his hand, grinning.
Sera saw him emerge from the house whenever ago, must have been a few hours, saw him flop on the bed, and maybe he remembered to stop and kiss her, and she was like Rick something something Venice? He just grinned and flopped.
He nudges her with his elbow. "Look at my hand," he says, grinning, in awe. "My hand is so weird." And laughs.
Serafíne"You're so stoned," Sera says, murmurs, bending over to nuzzle his temple with her nose or something. She's grinning, too. She loves it. Loves this. Loves, undulant, so many goddamned things.
And she looks at his hand, of course. It is so fucking weird. His awe is amazing, infectious enough that she bumps his head with her brow and tips her own head aslant and says, "It's like a starfish without a mouth in the middle."
And she breathes in and contemplates that and breathes out and laughs, " - your toes are fucking weirder, though. Watch. Make them wiggle!"
HawksleyHe's still giggling, and his nose is all wrinkled up and his eyes all wrinkled shut and his teeth prominent and he looks so happy. He laughs again. "I'm so stoned," he agrees with her, notices Dee, brightens, says "Dee!" just like that, and leans over and kisses her mouth long and full and eager, with her right there on Sera's lap.
Comes up for air, nuzzles Sera with a bit of Dee's lipstick on his mouth but he's using his brow and nose to nuzzle her. Then he looks distressed. "Ew, no, my hand's not a starfish."
SerafíneDee is half-drifting but when Hawksley starts on about his hand she lifts her head up and rests her chin rather than her cheek on Sera, watching him sleepily, adoringly right. Kisses him right back, too, rising a bit into the kiss as Sera twirls finger through one of her rockabilly curls.
"Wiggle your toes - !"
Sera insists again. She's nuzzling him back, brow to brow, bending with the curtain of her hair framing them. Her hand not occupied with Dee has come 'round to cup the back of his head.
Hawksley"I can't wiggle my toes, Sera," Hawksley says, with sneering impatience. "They're far away."
Serafíne"I can wiggle mine," Sera boasts; oh, she's so fucking boastful. Dee in her lap and Hawksley at her side. The flash of teeth behind her smile against his skin. She wants to eat him up. "Wanna see?"
HawksleyShe keeps touching him, but he won't be held. He moves around, away from nuzzling, away from her hand, like an errant child. Which is not an unfair comparison, at the moment. "Toes are weird," he says in dismay, and flops backward, hiding his face against her hip.
Serafíne"Everything's weird," Sera sighs back, and the sigh is deep and pleasureable, is gusting, really. She breathes in all rolling and undulant and breathes out the same way and Dee rolls over, not really away but more to the side, as Sera reclines backward. Hawksley evades her; she doesn't chase him with anything but her eyes, this darkling gaze that slants down the line of her body; over the faint swell of her breasts, down the spare plane of her bare stomach, the waistband of her cutoffs, the crown of Hawksley's golden head at her hip. Dee's dark head against her other flank.
Smiles at both of them and if Hawksley is being an errant child and doesn't want her hand in his hair, Dee doesn't mind, Sera brushes her thumb lovingly over Dee's temple, draws a line down Dee's cheek to her mouth, and allows Dee to bite the meat of her thumb, molasses-slow and thoughtful.
"Sky's fucking weird. So far away that I can't remember how far but close enough to punch through me sometimes. I don't get popcorn. Or herringbone. Or the word limelight. Or wildebeest.
"You're weird, too." This slantwise glance, back in his direction. Smiling down at him where he's hiding. Trying to figure out how she smiles. How she makes herself stop. If that's even a possibility right now. "I love you."
HawksleyHe cannot be tied. He was not made to kneel. He shakes off a tether; he thinks gravity is a suggestion. Sera understands. Sera, above most people, he can trust to understand. He curls up there, nuzzling her in his own time and in his own way and in this weird place, because there is something dark and familiar and soothing in the way she smells and the denim fuzz on his nose and all of it, everything.
"Sky's never weird," he mumbles, contrary. He stretches his legs out, bare toes splayed, wiggling in one long wave, then drops them again. "I'm very weird," he agrees, accommodating. He turns his face up and smiles at her, is told he's loved.
Grins. "You said it again," he tells her, like he just won a prize.
Serafíne"Mmmph." Sera makes a noise like her mouth is full of something; feeling or words or smoke or sky or the memory of sky or the feeling of fullness or something, something, and it is wholly affirmative and she lifts her chin and grins back down at him and nods see? this exagerrated yes. Yes, she said it again. Didn't she? Yes, he won a prize.
"Everything's weird," Sera says, now probably simply to be contradictory, except everything is weird isn't it? Always is. She loves that. She loves everything. She also loves: him. And she crows, then, "You wiggled your toes!" like he just unlocked some god's inner sanctum and found the key to all things just laying around. NBD.
Isn't she beaming? Doesn't she look so fucking proud of him, and how absurd is that -
- except there are his toes and they are wiggling. Sera's grinning then; watches him move. Watches him make himself move. Thinks about nerves and sparks and whatever the fuck she understands of electricity, which is that it happens sometimes in the sky and sometimes beneath her skin and so very often when he touches her. She smiles around the thought and stretches through the hip, stretches out one of her own legs and wiggles her toes in an answering sort of wave, and it feels like a wave, too. Connected through a current or an undercurrent. Some moving line of - god, what the fuck ever.
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