Of all the places that Elijah could sit down and read, Sera's place didn't seem like it was going to be in the top five. As it turns out, that was an incredibly incorrect statement, because there he was on the front porch, motorcycle parked somewhere inconspicuous and near another vehicle in the hopes of not getting it run over while he's off dallying with people whose company he enjoys.
Maybe it was a new leaf. Maybe he was trying to make good on things, trying to make good on the prospect of being a good student, or maybe he was just trying to avoid being in the middle of an Arbonne party.
That was the truth of the matter: Jenn had been conscripted into hosting a "party" for a friend, which consisted of getting facials and being pressured into purchasing things that she didn't actually want. Elijah had a problem with impulse buying, and there was going to be copious amounts of drinking. The girl selling brought enough booze to keep a small army well lubricated socially. Elijah knew that he tended to do stupid things when he was drinking, and somehow suspected that buying expensive skincare products might be one of them.
Also, he wanted to see Sera. And Dan. And Dee (he actually made a meet! Recently, too. Came with pompoms but was sans-fly away skirt because- well- he was no seamstress. He might have been thin, but he had no hips. Nothing pre bought was going to stay on)
But there he was, backpack slung over his shoulder and helmet deposited by the front door and he knocks- because he always knocks- and makes his way in. "Bonjour! Je errance à travers votre maison. I promise I'm not robbing you!"
SerafíneSome ordinary Wednesday night. Strangers call it hump-day.
Which isn't a saying that has much resonance at 719 Corona Street. No one there has a normal job. Rick is still at the record store and part-time at a comic shop, filling in for a friend who is off trekking in Nepal. Dee's got the bakery, and that's morning work. Sometimes she stays up all night and heads in for a few solid hours of kneading bread. Sometimes she gets a later shift. Regardless: not a normal 9 to 5, which is pretty cool. Gives life a different rhythm, plus she - like Rick, has some hopes of something else, soon.
Dinner-ish time. Or lunch. Breakfast for some folks, like our heroine who tends to sleep until the ass-crack of four p.m. and wander down for a morning libation of tea-and-whiskey, thank you very much. Fasting - more intermittent, now, pressurized and experimental - doesn't really effect that schedule she maintains so assiduously.
Dinner-ish time. The windows are open and there's a breeze blowing through the house and music someone and meat-on-the-grill. Always a guest or three - like Emily, aka Honey Bunches of Chokes, who's dressed up for her evening shift at Saphistry and heading down the hall and out the front door as Elijah comes in.
"Hey hot stuff," Emily grins. Has half-a-sandwich wrapped in wax paper that she's consuming. Is dressed in a neat outfit that fits almost perfectly with Elijah's aesthetic: pinstriped pants, a shortsleeve button-down, bow tie, fucking suspenders, hair loose, finger guns. One-handed finger-guns her greeting as she passes by. "Everyone's out back, I think. Cooking out."
So they are: so he will find them. Dan at the charcoal grill, manning tongs and shit and drinking a beer. Dee in a lawnchair, Sera on her cabana bed with a guitar in hand.
There's something new back here, too.
A tire swing hung from one of the great arms of the big oak that dominates the back yard.
ElijahThey match. Almost, they almost match, because there he is in a pair of slacks and a shirt with three quarter length sleeves pushed up to the elbows, vest unbuttoned, but soon enough ready to be rebut toned- which was what he started doing when he looked at Emily- with her grin and loose hair and the fucking suspenders. He never learned how to tie a bow tie, figures he should ask at some point.
"Great match last week," he tells her, starts to meander outside because Elijah meanders, takes in details of the house, basks in the smell because it always smells fan-fucking-tastic. Can't imagine the place ever smelling like anything other than food or incense or herbs or a party or the various people who lived there. Elijah didn't talk to Rick much, but he had concluded this was a travesty- made note to do it again at some point. It helped to have friends who worked at record stores, he had his eye on a few vinyls. Maria Callas specifically. He had a beginner's guide to Italian shoved in his backpack because of the soprano. "Are they matches or are they meets? I don't know."
But eventually, he would meander again. Eventually, he would find himself in the back yard smelling charcoal and whatever else was on the grill. Resists the urge to hug Dan from behind because Dan isn't fireproof. (Note to self: become fireproof. He's learning a fair bit about Ars Essentiae and, frankly, he's been kicking himself the entire month because if he had fucking learned it first like he was apparently supposed to things would be a lot easier right now.)
"Holy shit, when did you get a tire swing?" Backpack gets shrugged off his shoulders, hung low in one hand. Grin bright and off to the grass with him.
Serafíne"Don't worry your pretty head about it, sweetheart," Emily tells him, a spark in her eyes, a quiet little smirk ghosting across her mouth. "Show up with your pompoms again and you can call them whatever the hell you want."
--
"Fuck if I know," so says Sera, glancing up once as the sliding glass doors open. She is wearing sunglasses and a black Echo and the Bunnymen t-shirt and that appears to be it? The t-shirt is long enough to tuck beneath her ass on the cabana bed and cover the tops of her thighs but her legs are long and bare where they emerge from the bottom head. Criss-cross applesauce, that's how she's seated, body slung forward, not really hunched but the guitar's acoustic and she is, really, so startlingly slight when glimpsed like this: out of context, no heels around, no make-up, hair an "I just got out of bed" sort of mess.
Prettier, maybe, without all the stuff that goes with being Sera. Or perhaps: a different sort of pretty. Still arresting - the spare edge of her jaw, the elfin spike of her ears through the chaos of her hair. The hollow temples, the darting bits of ink as her fingers drift over the fretboard, framing out a chord progression pretty soundlessly - not strumming, not striking over the soundboard. Listening to the something something something somewhere in her head.
The Fuck If I Know from Sera makes Dee roll her eyes.
"Few weeks ago," Dee tells Elijah, "This guy we know is starting a business installing artisan tire swings in the yards of Denver's nostalgic rich assholes, needed a place to put one in to take a picture, and customer reference to add to his quotes. So.
"Tire swing." Quick grin of her red-red mouth.
Sera's eyes are on Elijah though, still. Marked, lingering, assessing.
Dan turns around too, glances at the kid, then back at Dee.
"Hey, guess who's legal now?"
ElijahHe takes in the people around him. There's Dee, with her lips ever-so-red and drawing attention to it, makes him watch the words she's saying before going back to her face and her eyes. There's Dan, who is cooking- because he was accustomed to seeing Dan cook, rather liked watching Dan cook, takes in the way light plays across the various colors etched across his skin. Then? Sera.
Sera, without her makeup. Sera, in a state that is very much her, very much appealing, entrancing, breathtaking, but… it's her. It's just another version of her, another part of her definition, another piece of Serafíne that was not always so edged but still edgy. Something where the corners were softer. She seemed some far creature, something that ruled the summer courts for half a year before giving way to winter. Something who made her bets and bargains for a year and a day.
"Yeah," he says with a smile, something bright and pleased, he's stepping off onto the grass, over to where the bed is so he can park it for a moment. At least give the appearance of someone who was not completely enthralled with the fact that his friends had a swing in their back yard. Let's face it, that was the only acceptable thing to do when you had a strong oak and plenty of space. "I had to get a new wallet, though, I left it at the mall. So! The fake ID has been laid to rest."
He sits down near Sera, leans a little against her for a moment, hi without saying it.
Serafíne"We could make you a new fake-ID," Dan tosses back, turning something over, adjusting something else. In addition to the sturdy tongs he has one of those silicon-based oven-gloves, hanging from a hook beneath the charcoal grill, which he gets out when he really wants to manhandle the corn dressed with lime-butter, maybe, or the new potatoes which will be cooked in foil over the coals and then smashed and then grilled until they are crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside.
In other words, perfection.
"A stand-in, you know. Let you give it a proper funeral, maybe cremate it on the grill or in the firepit. Paper, you know. Don't wanna release toxic whatever-the-fuck fumes from actual plastic."
Sera: has a mug of cooling tea in a neat cup-and-saucer settled on the flagstones beneath the cabana bed. Real china, flowers and shit all over it. Elijah comes close and gives her that little lean and she kinda leans back against him, this side-bump of acknowledgment, awareness, this animal sort of understanding.
"We could just pretend like today's his fucking birthday. Give him a real goddamned party."
Dan: "I thought you were on him to study."
Sera, this not-precisely-abashed little shrug. "All things in moderation, yeah? Or, you know. Excess."
Elijah"I'm down for both of those things, give the ID a proper send off instead of, you know, what actually happened which is probably it, and a bunch of other crap, living in a trash can because I don't carry cash-" which he should really start doing. Curbing the desire to be completely loaded with various illicit substances has really cut back on the need to actually carry anything more than a couple fives- maybe a ten.
"And if it helps make the case for a party- I successfully managed to actually study for the last ten days. That is probably my longest streak of academic excellence since getting here. It's either party or looking through the history of bookbinding and the modern printing press."
He actually sounded a little excited about that.
"I don't think I've had a real party since I was twelve. Pleeaaase can I be a delinquent student for, like, eight hours? Maybe four?"
Serafíne"Four hours?" Dan gives Elijah a bearded smirk. "Do you really think you can get through one of Sera's birthday bashes and make it back to whereever the hell it is you are reading about the history of bookbinding in four hours?"
--
And Sera gives Elijah a banked look with a neat little shake of her head.
No.
--
"Let's have dinner first, at least." That's Dan again.
And so they do.
--
If Sera was fasting tonight, well: she's not anymore. It is Elijah's 21st birthday do-over and first there's the cook-out in the backyard as the edges of the sky sink toward dusk and the flames spark and meat and potatoes and zuccini and corn sizzle on the grill. Corn smothered in chili-lime butter and hand-made sausages from the charcuterie next to Dee's bakery, crusty rolls and whatnot. Makeshift cake (the cinnamon rolls Dee brought home for breakfast tomorrow) hastily done up with fondant and a quick-thrown-together buttercream to write as much of HAPPY BIRTHDAY as she can get on the surface, and 21!! on another one.
Candles, the trick sort that go out and spark back to life again and again and again.
A bottle of red and a bottle of white and a bottle of something sparkling or gin and tonics or whatever the hell it is Elijah would like to have. The night opening up, becoming wider, more expansive as whatever is consumed or smoked blooms wide open.
There's this point where the spare, artless, morning-after creature disappears upstairs to make herself over. Emerges in a cocktail dress with black-rimmed eyes and spikes through her ears and fishnets and combat boots and out they go - somewhere, everywhere, anywhere.
No reason to recall that a couple of weeks ago Elijah nearly died jumping in front of a bullet headed for the guy who had just served him his first legal drink of his life. No mention of that day, or that night, where they went, what came after. No one's looking for them, no one's come asking. The memories of the patrons fuzzed and muddled, their own bodies made-whole.
What matters is here, and now. The little mock funeral for his fake-ID, complete with black umbrella dug out from the left-overs in the foyer. The meal, shared with friends, around a table. The whatever-comes-next of it all.
ElijahThe do over, he concludes, is infinitely better than the actual twenty-first birthday.
There was food, there was food that he actually wanted to eat and he wasn't spending it in a seedy bar with half of his friends phoning it in because of prior engagements or being hungover. It was outside, with the air feeling fresh and there's fucking cinnamon rolls- an odd truth. he adores cupcakes but can't stand actual full-sized cake. There was some sort of care paid with little bite-sized things that didn't go into sheet cakes.
His ID gets a eulogy- a real, honest-to-God eulogy. Something with fond times mentioned (the first time they met at seventeen when a guy with biceps the size of his head asked Elijah in some gravelly voice what he wanted his name to be, and he'd picked Jason Johnson because there was a Friday the Thirteenth poster hanging on the wall in the guy's basement and there were mosquitos and fireflies everywhere.) Some close calls had- a near confiscation more than a couple times back home when the colors didn't seem quite perfect. Goodbye, dear friend, goodbye.
He still tells stories, though, if only because he likes sharing. Gives a recount of the match he'd seen recently and relayed his utter confusion with regards to roller derby. Talks about an operetta he'd wanted to see, which was pretty fucking hilarious for the time frame it was written in. Dances with people even when there isn't music playing because music was playing somewhere.
Doesn't forget to tell Dee he loves the way she blushes. Doesn't forget to tell Dan that he admires how incredibly fucking smart he is. Doesn't forget to tell Sera that she defies fucking words, that he fucking loves that.
Maybe he's just drunk. Falls asleep somewhere, at some point. Dreams of nothing instead of Nothing.
A lot has changed.
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