He was getting pretty accustomed to driving over here.
He liked coming to Sera's place. He liked the house, he liked the general atmosphere, but for the most part he enjoyed the smell. It was a strange thing that he had a hard time putting a finger on. Truth be told, Elijah couldn't think of what it was specifically about the smell. It was something smoky in his mind but not smoky. Something herbal without being herbal. Something comforting without having the accoutrements of the things most people thought were comforting. It wasn't apple pie- Elijah never equated pie with comfort, actually. He did not come from a pie household. He came from a Chinese takeout household, but home wasn't so much comforting as a base of operations. This didn't smell like a base of operations. This smelled like the kind of home he'd want to have if he was setting down roots.
He liked the smell, he liked the feeling of her sofa- she was off doing something. He couldn't remember what, but he remembered, once, laying on her couch with a far off look and feeling like the world was ending and Dan brought him food and Dan brought him tea- was it tea?
Elijah wasn't sure, but he remembered things. He remembered how it felt warm and how it felt like a safe place. LIke the kind of place that would be home if he was laying down roots to call things home. We digress.
he is there, pulling up to the door with a paper bag in hand and it's not the kind of bag that holds liquor. It's not the kind of baggie that holds weed or anything of the sort. There is a delicacy to the way he holds the bag, knocks on the door three times and steps in, because he's never not been invited in, because the door was always metaphorically open. He's wearing khakis. Khakis and a button down and a suspenders and too fucking many clothes because, of course, Elijah wears too fucking many clothes. A half a dozen bracelets on one wrist, a necklace tucked into his shirt for privacy.
"Dan? Sera?" he asks, voice just reaching out because he hasn't checked for them yet. May as well ask first.
SerafíneThe door is always open, not simply metaphorically, but literally. It's a nice little neighborhood, up and coming, young couples in the condos, old families in the houses, trees lining the streets there and back again, but there's not a single fucking neighborhood in Denver where people feel comfortable leaving their doors essentially permanently unlocked.
This place, though: he knocks thrice and steps in. The door opens when he reaches for the knob. Here is familiar chaos: a stranger's foyer, music somewhere, from somewhere, the muted sound of voices, a tumble of boots and rainboots and heels and hippie sandals and whatnot on a tray near the door. The redolent scent of bread breaking and the distinctive, musty scent of pot. A kettle, rattling.
He can follow the thread of voices or music, a trail that loops through entryway, past rooms for living and rooms for dining, past stairs leading up up up past Amelia Earhart and beneath a spiderplant in a macrame planter into darkness and he's headed toward the kitchen but also someone is coming back up that shelf-lined hall to meet him. She is a silhouette against the brightness behind her, frame all in shadow. Broader and taller and wider and rather more voluptuous than Sera and he knows her as Dee: all that milk-cream skin in the shadow.
"Hey. Elijah. Dan and Sera are in the backyard if you're looking for them?"
Maybe there's chitchat. Maybe not. But beyond her the kitchen and bread-baking and a bottle of wine (red) open on the counter and an upended blender with tough little kale stems stuck on its blades and an open box with pot on the table and so on. Outside: Dan and Sera sitting on the cabana bed that dominates the patio in the center of the lovely yard. Edison lights strung through the branches of the tree above. She is cross-legged and he is sprawled out and they have a book of some sort open between them.
Dan reaches up and gives Elijah a supple wave when the sliding glass doors open. Greeting and invitation, all at once. Sera turns and flashes him a ghosting half-smile over her shoulder. She is so spare. Maybe it's summer but does she seem thinner than he remembers? Sharper: honed.
They're still talking as he walks toward them but he cannot hear what they're saying. It happens like that sometimes.
Elijah"Hey Dee," he replies, smile bright eyes alight and all sorts of other things that fall into the rhyming spectrum. Dee is all shadow but he knows she's creamy milky smooth and that the blush travels all up her features when you say the right things and he wonders, briefly, if he should. If he should linger and figure out something to say, because he is ever so interested in finding buttons- not the kind that push but the kind that fasten two pieces together. He's eager to find the corresponding space where it sticks out and gets to be itself. The notable piece that joins two concepts. Something that adds that extra something.
Elijah likes finding buttons. He'd love to find Dee's, maybe has even said as much with lingering bits of attention from time to time when the thought strikes him. He's not the keeping type, but sometimes he can appreciate a woman who is curvaceous and bakes fucking amazing bread. "Still need a cheerleader this season?"
He lingers long enough for that question before moving on, and he does move on to the back yard with a raise of his hand and it's out to the back. Doesn't bring booze, doesn't bring pot, doesn't bring his usual fare like a wise man, like a pilgrim, like something coming to appease the gods. But these are not gods, that much he knows. He knows these are mortals who breathe and live just like he does so there's no need to make a pilgrimage, no need to treat this place like a trek up the mountains and the sharp, honed woman here who is so very spare with her half-smile lingering like the ghosts he knows so well (hears in the distance, at the very edges of his senses, an argument with the self. The sound of some poor soul tearing himself apart. Being brought to his knees by his enemy, his shadow, his self- skewed by some truth because the ache in that sound he hears, that pricks across the distance, is one he's learned. The truth is sometimes worse than any lie you can tell.)
there is an invitation and he comes, sits, doesn't say anything because he can't hear what they're saying. He doesn't prod for what they're saying, doesn't try to reach in where he isn't quite ready to hear. he sits, and retrieves from the bag he'd been so careful with, a chain. It's not a metal chain, but one that is carefully woven and blue flax. and like some crown one goes to Dan and the other to Sera if they'll take them.
"They were going to get mowed over along I twenty-five," he said, "I don't know if you like flowers."
But there they were.
Serafíne"I'd be more inclined to say yes if I thought you'd actually show up for match - " Dee laughs; open-mouthed, open-voiced, without rancor because there isn't much of that in her body but also: darling if you want to lead the cheer, do. She has keys in hand and a mission somewhere and he can sense the flash of her smile as she skims past him. Sun outside but here: all shadow. The center of the house, cocooned as if it were caged by standing ribs, warm as a beating heart.
--
Outside he comes closer. There are instruments here but set aside: an acoustic guitar on the far edge of the bed. A fucking harmonica on the plastic table between the two patio chairs fronting it. Sera is: watching him and also glancing up at Dan and responding to something he said. About something, somewhere. That glassed-in feeling you sometimes get in a familiar place that has an edge of strangeness to it.
Elijah offers them both flower-chains and Sera is sitting up and she reaches for hers and Dan leans forward and reaches for his, holds it neatly where it is braided, gives the younger man a wry look that could verge on a smirk. Sera for her part is smiling. Lifts it over her head and drapes it around her neck, reaching back to lift up her hair to settle the flower-chain beneath it. She's wearing a cropped halter beneath a loose lace vest with fringe and tiny denim cut-offs and opaque thigh-high ivory tights fringed with crocheted lace and the flower-chain fits right in.
"Who doesn't like fucking flowers. They're lovely. Thank you Elijah." so says Sera.
Dan turns his over in his left hand and sits: forward and up and loops it around and instead of draping his over his own head and neck, doubles it and sets it on Sera's curls like a crown.
"Good to see you, man. What've you been up to besides saving dandelions from the Department of Highways?"
ElijahShe smiles, Dan smirks, and he grins and is a polite, beaming little ball of chaos on their back lawn. He's pleased, of course he's fucking pleased there were flowers and he wasn't drunk when he gave them up and didn't even ask Dan if he could plait daisies into his beard because it would be fucking hard and Elijah didn't know how to braid and he had a bit too much respect for Dan's beard to do that.
"I've been learning how to swim," he says. There should be more, but he doesn't give more until he realizes he needs to clarify.
"I mean, like, literally learning how to swim. How to actually put self in water and not drown," a second, "also, I have a harp recital in a couple weeks if you want to come. I have mad skills." Kind of. He kind of had skills. "Anyway. The swimming thing is big, it's kinda something I wanted to do for awhile so I figured I'd do it because there's this fucking badass lake and I want to take people camping- you-" he gestures to them "-would be amongst those I count under "people I want to take camping." So, preemptive invite."
Serafíne"That's so cool," this is Sera, shaking her golden head after Dan crowns her so that the little chain of plaited wildflowers slips askew on her half-shaved head. The shake is deliberate: she courts that moment where everything slides sideways, where perfection unmakes itself. Uncrosses her legs, but only to curl them up again, smiling at Elijah, quietly and - perhaps - still, though somehow as if from a great distance. Maybe that's how she feels when she's relaxing on the bed in her backyard and friends and strangers come to see her: half-way between a goddess and an oracle. That's so cool she says and she means it. Imbues that meaning into her words, warm and forward. She knows: what it means and what he is doing and she is pleased and proud of and by and for him, and finds a way to press all those thoughts and feelings into a few little words.
"And I didn't fucking know you played the harp. Like the Apollo-harp or the angel's harp or the orchestra harp or the mouth-harp? I might be out of town for the recital, but let me know and if we're around, we'll come."
Elijah"Like, the actual legit bigassed orchestral harp," he clarifies. He's smiling like he's proud, like he's pleased, like he could soak in all that pride and he's sharing it with her because he wanted to share the moment. Because he wanted someone to share joy with, wanted to give people fucking chains of blue flax flowers and sit in the grass and effuse like an eight year old who just found some new beetle outside or an astronomer who found a star that rewrote a whole constellation. Somewhere between world altering and- no. No it is all world altering. A beetle no greater than a star, the effect profound and joy-ridden for both of them. And so it is, he's concluded water has a new definition. Concludes that water has always been there, has always been the transitioning point for him so fear it?
"It works a lot like the piano, it just has some places where it's a little different- but I'm rambling. Yes, I can play the harp- I can also play the piano, but I actually kinda like the harp more," he said. No admission there, just fact. "If you guys are in town you are definitely invited. If not, I'll… uh… figure out some way to acquire a harp. Or something."
Yeah, because that was totally a thing. He didn't seem like he was terribly sold on lugging a giant orchestral style harp around but he did seem keen on figuring it out.
Serafíne"Mmm. You can always buy a harp, you know. I'm pretty sure they sell them in stores and shit." Sera murmurs, lifts her dark eyes up to catch Dan's on the honed line of her aw, the delicate framework of her profile. They share a glance, private. The twinge of a smile: also private and graveled with bitter / sweetness, and then Sera's looking back at Elijah, and his childlike enthusiasm. "Text Dan when you know when and where. He'll let me know."
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