he sleeps in a box now (and we're divorced)
"So what are you doing, Jill? What is all this?"
Brooks was spread out on a chair, his legs long and his elbows hanging out over each scratchy upholstered arm. When he spoke, he angled one hand toward the ceiling without discretion, pointing. The joint had burned toward the tips of his fingers but he clamped the sticky dark end in a pair of silver clips, inhaling without making contact several times and quickly until the drug-smoke expanded in his lungs. His mouth zippered up thin, and in that dimmed down half-light of the living room, he appeared to be half in shade. Broad, sharp cheek bones cutting shadow back toward his cynical eyes.
Rorschach beauty: only the blood red of her lips showed color when her eyelids drooped as low as they had, the spiderweb of shadow that clung to her cheeks before slowly melting away with the lazy upward flutter of her lashes. On him, she pinned a look of cool defiance versus casual indifference, and made him lean forward to pass off the clips. It was twisted around in her fingers idly, and she didn't frown at him but every line along her face refused to be kind. "I wish you wouldn't be such an asshole. You know you don't like me when I'm cruel," flippantly, her mouth hushing off the words when closing to a tiny hole a breath away from the joint, sucking in to draw out the smoke.
He observed her queenly sprawn on the sofa just a foot away from the tip of his chair, head tilted back over a corner pillow and a knee cocked up in such a way that washed the candlelight-ethereal hem of her skirt back away from her thigh. If he had sat in the other chair, he would be at an advantage to see what lay underneath but from his current angle, he could only watch the slow rising of her breath, the pretty longness of her limbs. A black magic voodoo disguised as something less harmful, illegitimate child to streetwise legend; she had all the control, every worthless cent of it. "You're losing your head."
"I should pretend I don't know what the hell you're talking about," her tongue painting out the words in smoke, twisting pink with an outcurl of grey whisper, skin goldenly white when she angled back the crown of her head to look at him from an upside down perspective. "But I do, and I think I'm offended, so say what you have to say." Possessed by those half-lights, she could've been something beautiful and strangely remniscent of those lovely Egyptian girls (bled dry of their poison ivy), her perfectly lined thick kohl, the bruise-flowers of her irises. "It's sweet that you're concerned about him, or me," she continued, tacking on an amusingly patronizing tone, "but really, I think we can each take care of ourselves."
He snorted, kicking up his feet onto the coffee table when she finally gave him back the clips, the ashtray on his knee moved up on his lap and gravitating toward the center from atop his wide palm. After a couple of consecutive hits, he dropped the silver and smoke into its base, moving it down to the floor over the arm. It was three o'clock in the morning, the streets moving silently out the short blocky windows, the room a mess of unsheathed records and half-empty pints of Chinese dishes. "I wouldn't say concerned as much as curious. Curious to see what you think you're doing here, because I don't believe that you do."
"So let my wings break and let me crash," she answered, rolling over onto her stomach with one hand reaching back to make sure the hem of her skirt didn't twist up too high. "It's not as if it hasn't happened before. It's not as if I care what the final results are." Cigarette pack left on the floor, she pried the box-top open with her fingers and wriggled one out before taking the lighter beside it to strike up a flame. It was true, she never lived for the future; she learned once that to shove through life, to cope, she had to live in every day individually and she'd never stopped. Once the cigarette was lit, she tossed the lighter to him where he was taking out one of his own. "I'm not thinking, I'm doing, and I have no problem with that whatsoever."
The lighter had bounced into his lap and he struck flame up with a roll of his thumb, hand cupping while he puffed in hard. His chin cut ceilingward, the smoke pouring out in one long cloud before he threw the lighter to the floor in the general direction of her pack, under-handed. In that perspective, his features were tough as concrete within the lukewarm orange-red glow flickering up past his jaw every time he inhaled. "You're exposed," informatively mild. "I've known you for four years now. You could have anything you desired if you set your mind to it, if you only worked for it just enough. From what I gathered earlier, you don't do much than work with your band or hang out with this new boyfriend of yours. Where's your drive, Jill, that ambition? What of that, 'ay?"
"What exactly do you consider 'working with my band,' isn't that ambitious? It's fun, but it isn't exactly a hobby." An elbow propping up on the sofa pillow, she cradled her chin to a palm while the ringleted jungle of rioted blindly black around the coolly composed angles of her face. The caving slope from her shoulderblades to the small of her sleek back was slitherine, the skinny white blouse draping like magnolia petals peeled away from her shoulders--showing the feminine delicacies of her clavicle, the hollow of her throat where the gothic cross's silver chain sunk in. Her eyes flashing between inhales and exhales: that violet violence, that blue blood bleeding.
Brooks looked over toward the corridor that narrowed away from the living room toward the bedroom, absent-mindedly. "I've never known you to put so much focus into one person before, so that you neglect your usual routine. What about the producer's parties, all the shows and trashy venue soirees, I'm guessing you aren't taking off your dresses for bigwigs at this point? You do all the work, of course, but half of the work is the social scene. You know that. He's not one of you. He doesn't fit. It's your world, not his."
"Fuck you, I never screwed for a step up in the ladder--unless I wanted to screw them besides. And you don't know anything," she retaliated haughtily, curling her lips in show of a moment of silence around the filter of the cigarette she smoked with all the sick love of twining lips around the barrel of a gun. Letting that be absorbed, she slanted her head marginally to the side and let it siphon out. "I still attend those things; it just isn't all the time like it used to be, it isn't every single night. It shouldn't have to be, it's my career but it isn't my whole life. I'm already comfortably established, I don't need to be out there letting everyone know who I am constantly; I just make sure they don't forget." Distantly contemplative, she stopped to indicate that she needed the ashtray wherein he pulled it up from the floor to prop it between them on the edge of the coffee table. Ashing, she finished her knowing little spiel. "I think our worlds collide, beneficially. Not like it's your business."
"It's different this time, is my point. You think your friends can't tell? You think we tell you you're changing because you're cute when you're pissed off? It is cute, maybe, but in a very psychotic way; no offense."
"What's so different?" Patronizingly patient, she leveled her eyes on him with her eyebrows lifted up just far enough to be contrary.
"Your heart."
Jill snorted as if vainly amused by this, but there was something in the way her eyelids crawled low--the color of her eyes slivering off to the lashed corners discreetly.
