The Ring (Precious)
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<Jesse Fforde> The relief upon opening his eyes was profound. As starved as his fresh body felt, it was real. It was there. It was famished but it felt good, to be in that kind of aching pain. To know that he wanted to sink his teeth into the flesh of some unsuspecting victim, the hot blood gushing…OOC: Backdated to January 17th
… but, he had dragged Rhett back. Before Jesse could indulge in physical pleasures and satisfactions, he had to make sure that Rhett was settled. That he was okay. As much as he wanted to meet Clover there, for her face to be the first that he saw, for her body to be the first that he touched, there were responsibilities that he had to attend to. This was not the first time that Jesse had danced with the darkness and he didn’t need to be taken care of upon his return. This was not the first time he had died when in Clover’s care, either, so she didn’t have to worry. Though he had an inkling that she wanted to be back in his arms as much as he wanted to be back in hers.
Later.
Jesse took his time making sure that Rhett knew what was going on; that he was back on solid ground and that Dhara was near. He did what was necessary to get Rhett back to the only person he seemed to care about. And only afterwards did Jesse make his way back to Circle, trekking through the snow. It wasn’t such a long walk from the Morgue, and it felt good to stretch his limbs; on the outer edge of the city he even snagged himself a lone camper. He got that hot blood he’d been craving. It rushed through his limbs, heat to thaw the dread cold that he still felt, the shadows of the Realm clinging to him like a thin sheen of ice.
There could have been a thin sheen of ice clinging to him, for all he knew; the weather was crisp, but no less enjoyable after the nothingness of death.
In the elevator, back at Third Circle, his fingers ran along the edges of the metal contraption. A familiar space. Home. He wore what he could find at the morgue; there were drawers of clothes there. Whether from the deceased or whether they were kept there by kind-hearted vampires who knew what it was to come back, naked, from the dead, it didn’t matter. They weren’t his clothes, but that didn’t matter. Jeans, a shirt, a jacket, boots - that’s all he needed to get back home without getting too many looks.
The doors slid smoothly open upon the second floor. It didn’t take long for Jesse to spot her. Clover, by the ritual altar. With his hands shoved nonchalantly in his pockets, he sauntered toward her. He couldn’t keep the aching smile from his face, nor the excitable gleam from his eyes.
“Come, now. In public? I thought I’d find you in the bedroom…” he all but purred.
<Clover> Clover had been counting down the days. For once, she refused to let them blur together. On the last day, when she could have been communicating through her thrall and through her sister, she chose to spend whatever free time she had left getting everything put together. Their room on Cerberus had already been filled with play-pit balls. The balls filled the room, from the floor to just over the top of the bed. She’d hinted at the surprise, but he hadn’t been able to guess. Luckily. As childish as the surprise seemed, Clover had a good reason and a good story behind her decision. She’d gone back to her mall trip in the early months of her time as a vampire. While she hadn’t gone for bouncy balls, she’d gone for something similar.
Clo planned on leading Jesse to Cerberus, and then dragging him back to her apartment for the second portion of the surprise. Yes, she’d split his surprise into two parts. She enjoyed spoiling him. She enjoyed seeing the look on his face. The plastic balls were sure to get a good reaction out of him, or so she hoped. The whole plan had taken two days, not counting the third day that it took to find, and order, so many play-pit balls. The second portion--well, the second portion was rather obvious. Clo planned on seducing him and having her way with him. Repeatedly. They’d already established that they missed one another, in a physical sense. She craved his touch.
For hours, she went between the two floors. Cerberus. Limbo. Back and forth. She added finishing touches to his bedroom and tried locating her best lingerie. Jersey had helped her pick out some nice pieces, ones that she had yet to share with Jesse. Clo doubted that Jesse even noticed her attempts at being sexy, which both amused her and disappointed her. On her final trip, Clo retreated to their bedroom on Cerberus. She didn’t know how much longer she had before Jesse finally managed to make his way back to Circle, so she had to change. She had to hide her lingerie beneath her clothing, rearrange some of the plastic balls scattered about the room, and get back upstairs to act nonchalant.
But Clover wanted something more than pajamas. She went looking for something related to Batman, something to make him laugh. Her hands groped through dresser drawers for shirts and shorts and leggings. When her fingers brushed against a tiny, square box, she stopped. Clo closed her hands around the edge of the dresser drawer and pulled the drawer the rest of the way out. Beneath some of Jesse’s clothing, the clothing she’d disturbed during her hunt for her Batman apparel, she saw a ring box, a ring box that didn’t belong to her.
Something told her to rearrange the clothing and pretend as if she’d never discovered his secret hiding spot, but curiosity got the best of her. Clover wanted to know. She wanted to see the ring, if the box even held a ring. She rationalized that the box could have held earrings or a pocket watch--she came up with all sorts of stories and excuses. And when she opened the box, she felt the quick discontinuation of her thoughts. Clover recognized the all-too-familiar radio silence. Jesse kept Grey’s ring. He kept the small, silver ring in a dresser drawer, tucked so neatly beneath his crumpled clothing, the clothing that she’d just crumpled.
When Clover went back to Limbo, she went back without her lingerie. Her ideas for her Batman apparel had taken the place of the ring, the ring she held so tightly in her clenched fist. On Limbo, she stood with her back to the room. Her eyes bore holes into the ritual table, as if she were waiting for him to spawn from the very floorboards. Clo crossed and uncrossed her arms. She shifted her weight between her feet. The sound of his voice broke her inner monologue, a monologue centered around anger, denial, and disappointment.
“I was in the bedroom,” she answered, her voice far too calm for her liking. She turned to face him, and she threw a punch right at his side. Clo had imagined the reasons for him keeping the ring. She imagined lingering emotions, leftover love he held onto, just as he’d held onto the ring. Perhaps it was pure jealousy, or perhaps it was pure paranoia. Clover put a lot of force behind the punch, as if she meant to shove the ring right into his heart, right where he’d wanted. When she pulled back, she made sure to drop the ring box at his feet. “I found that in your dresser. Explain.”
Her demand sounded far too harsh. Her tone was clipped, and she hadn’t had the ability to form a true sentence, one with more feeling, one with more of a view of her own hurt and her own betrayal. Explain. She said the word as if he were on a time limit, and she had little to no patience left.
“Why do you have her ring? And I know it’s her ring, Jesse, because it’s not my ring.” The accusations found a nesting place at the back of her throat. Do you still want her? Are you holding on to some hope that she’ll come back and you can slip the ring right back onto her finger? Do you still love her? Are you still in love with her? Get rid of the ring. Break it into tiny pieces. Melt it down at the forge. Toss it into the river. Sell it to some other man with a connection to a woman all-too-similar to Grey. Throw it away.
<Jesse Fforde> Whatever air was left in Jesse’s lungs left him with a gasped whoosh; then there was the hiss, the husked aaaah as he felt the bones snap. At least two of them. The ribs were nice and loose, now. It was a different kind of sensation, and after a few seconds of putting the pieces together, he knew it wasn’t a special, new kind of foreplay. This wasn’t playful. This was pure anger. Pure hatred.
And yet he still couldn’t help but be turned on by it.
What had happened to him, in the Shadow Realm? Not this time, but the time before. It was as if he were flipped on his head and came out a completely different person. This was who he was supposed to be, though. This was who he was. This was who he was proud to be - this was where the ego lived, where it thrived. Clover’s anger was a welcome balm, this pain only a sign of her affection.
He took a few seconds to regain his composure; to let the dull ache settle in lieu of the sharp, stabbing pain. No, this helped him feel alive. This helped him to throw away the last cobwebs of the Shadow Realm that still clung to him. Straightening, he leaned a little against the ritual table. A small breath was taken in order to reply, except the expansion of his lungs caused him to hiss. Small breaths, Jesse. Only small breaths.
There was a reply on the tip of his tongue. Something teasing. A joke. The expression on Clover’s features, however, heightened only by the clipped tone of her questions, gave him pause. No, it would be all wrong if she chose to take him seriously. If she chose to believe the joke. He wanted to get into her bed, not have a door slammed in his face.
“No. That’s not your ring. That ring is all wrong for you,” he said. He had only seen the box when he was doubled over, clutching at his now-broken ribs. Now, he refused to look at it at all.
“I kept it because… I don’t know why. To sell it, probably,” he said with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders. “The ******* thing cost me a fortune. I want to try to get as much back as I possibly can,” he said. Which was the truth, wasn’t it? The cold truth of getting an engagement ring back… except, he wasn’t in the mood to make any jokes. Not anymore. Clover had managed to dig out the one thing that could dampen his mood and, by god, he didn’t want to let it. There wasn’t much more to say, as he prodded at the skin over his ribs; as he felt the bones move.
“I think you broke a rib. Possibly two…” he mumbled. Though he still didn’t look down.
<Clover> Regret and guilt flashed across her facial features, but something told her to hold onto the rage, to draw the anger back into her herself and nurture it. She wanted to hurt him even more. Even though he mentioned his broken ribs, his joke lingered in her mind. His words weren’t funny, not in the least, and she felt torn between punching him, shooting him, stabbing him, or letting him go. His explanation made perfect sense. If she’d spent so much money on an item, she would have sold it back to the shop and recuperated some of the cost. Except he’d had time to sell the ring. He’d had time to take the tiny box to the nearest shop, to take the ring to the farthest shop, and relieve himself of the piece of jewelry. Clover deduced that he had another reason, a secondary reason, for maintaining possession of the silver ring.
“It’s not funny,” she huffed, looking away from him. Looking at him fueled the guilt, so she had to turn away. The way he leaned against the ritual table made her feel as if she’d gone too far. Clo wondered what sort of fucked-up relationship, or fucked-up cycle, she’d entered. Whether he enjoyed it or not, whether she enjoyed it or not, sometimes she felt a little dirty for having laid her hands on him. But those feelings were fleeing, tamped down by her anger and fed by pleasure.
“You’re ‘probably’ keeping it to sell it, but you’ve had it for long enough that you could have sold it by now. What does that say?”
Clover clenched her fists at her sides. She didn’t have pockets in her leggings or she would have stuffed her hands into the pockets and twisted at the fabric until she tore or shredded the linings. She’d broken his ribs, and she wanted to break his jaw, even before he had an opportunity to answer his questions. Against her better judgement, she’d already turned to look at him. Clo’s eyes scanned over his face and then down toward his side, as if she could inspect the injury through his clothing and through his flesh. While she’d had no issues staring at the cursed ring box, he seemed to have some aversion.
“Did you want me to find it, or did you mean to hide it? And why won’t you pick it up?” Clover crushed all of the questions into a steady stream, like well-constructed word vomit. While the rage remained, festering and rotting away at her insides, her voice had taken on a desperate undertone, as if, at any moment, she would grab the box and storm out. He had the answers she wanted, and he had the answers she loathed.
“If she came back for that, if she showed the ******* incentive you always wanted, would you...would you take her back? Is that why you kept the ring? Just in case? Or how about for the memories? Because you cherish them, don’t you?” She asked the questions she didn’t want answered, because the words kept pouring from her lips. The questions were direct extensions from her heart and her mind, no longer word vomit. Clo resisted the strong urges to stomp the ring into the floorboards. Instead, she ran her hands over her face and tried focusing on her breathing, the breathing uninhibited by broken ribs.
<Jesse Fforde> Jesse closed his eyes. He wanted the joke to be enough. He wanted the excuse to be enough. He wanted this discussion to be over; he wanted for it to never have begun in the first place. He had to close his eyes because the answers to her questions were not on the tip of his tongue. They weren’t at the forefront of his mind because they weren’t questions that he’d thought of. They weren’t things that he’d dwelled on. The past had been shoved messily under a rug and Jesse had hoped he could be happy with the present; he could be happy with what he had, now. Because he was happy.
But how could he tell Clover how happy he was while also trying to explain his own mangled feelings? How could he possibly come out of this conversation with Clover still at his side? Would she understand? Could she?
The first question he had to answer was the most important one. He shook his head.
“No. If she came back now, I wouldn’t take her back,” he said, his eyes still closed. His head bowed, mouth parted just slightly as he finally opened his eyes on the box at his feet. That ******* box that he’d spent so much time trying to find; the ring inside made especially for Grey. Simple, because she didn’t like anything extravagant. Seeing it reminded him of all the things that he had experienced with Grey. It reminded him of how he had loved her; of the reasons why he had, to begin with, asked her to marry him.
In a sudden fit, Jesse lashed out. The ring box was kicked so hard it went hurtling across the room. It slammed into a wall, the ring inside dislodging, the metal clunking, bouncing on the wood as it rolled away. His arm had inadvertently swept vials of liquid from the ritual table; they smashed on the ground. Black feral blood spattered the bottoms of his jeans. The sudden movement sent a wave of pain from his broken ribs; his body jerked with it, as he resisted the urge to double over. As he took a deep breath and revelled in it, possibly made it worse.
“For the first time in my life, I asked a woman to marry me. Me. I never thought I’d ever get married. I never believed there was such a thing as love,” he spat the word, his face twisted with the bitterness of it on his tongue.
“The memories I have of her should be cherished. They should be! But they’re not. They’re all ******* ruined because she walked away. She didn’t even ******* try!” he bellowed, voice barely up to the task. She should have been angry with him. She should have wanted to hurt him, or Clover. If she really loved him, wouldn’t she have fought for him?
“I found the ring when I was cleaning up. I shoved it in the drawer - I wasn’t thinking about you. I wasn’t thinking about hiding it. I was thinking about how much I didn’t want to look at it, because I didn’t want to be reminded,” he said, his voice a little less loud, though it hitched. He drew in a sharp breath, eyes closed again as he shook his head. Why had he kept it, then? Why hadn’t he just flushed it down the toilet, thrown it out with the trash? It was easy to say it was because of how much it had cost, money that he didn’t want to waste. But that, honestly, was not an answer he knew to give.
“Be my guest, Clover. Do what you want with it. I don’t care.”
<Clover> No.
The single word quelled most of her fears and silenced her anxiety. But the peace was temporary. His body language screamed exhaustion, but Clover saw something more. Disappointment, perhaps. Frustration. Even before he finally lost his temper, she understood. She remembered what it felt like to rely so much on another person, to trust and feel so deeply. Clo knew the feeling of being let down, time and time again, and she knew what it felt like to be left wanting, waiting. Instead of rage, guilt resurfaced.
When he lost his temper and lashed out at the ring, she closed her eyes and cringed. The box flew across the room, but she’d expected it to hit her, as if some force of nature were punishing her for being both selfish and insensitive. Instead, she heard the clattering of the ring against the floor. She watched him fall apart, the pieces small and jagged; he fell apart in time with the rolling of the ring. One. Two. Three. The next time he spoke, she had already moved away from him and went to collect the ring. He could have asked her why--anyone could have asked her why--but she didn’t know the answer.
His outburst should have fanned the flames, but his anger reminded her of what it meant to be so blinded by fury. Watching him had her embarrassed for having lost control. And yet, even though she no longer had the urge to scream at him, even though she no longer had the urge to go toe-to-toe with him, she was still angry. Clo plucked the ring from its place on the floor and held it in the palm of her right hand. She turned it around and around, admiring the quality of the metal, the gem, and the inscription.
Moments before, she’d wanted to destroy the ring, to wipe out a physical reminder of Jesse’s past with Grey, but she’d reconsidered.
