Seven Swans, Seven Swans [Mick & Jeff]

[Mick (DELETED 2915)]

[None of this will ever be in chronological order, so please mind the time stamps!]

June 24th, 2013

She could tell anyone the exact number of freckles across the expanse of Jeff's back, even though she hadn't counted them out in over a year (fourteen, not including the three dotted on his ribs under his arm, which he argued didn't count.) When Mick's bare feet padded across the wooden boards of the porch toward him, she took the seat next to his on the steps.

They could've been reflections of each other, except Mick's feet settled on the direct step below so her knees were drawn up while Jeff's stretched one beyond that. He sat forward, she sat back. With his elbows on his knees and his hands together between his legs in the classic Jeffrey Caulfield pose, Mick stared at the back of his head for a passing moment before looking down the stretch of driveway that was never occupied by vehicles. What was the point of them, anymore?

"You finally come back long enough to shower and say little to nothing before assuming the position out here," she said, stretching her arms across her knees so her wrists draped limp against her shins.

He looked up and glanced over, offered a tiny twitch of movement in his cheek acknowledgement before looking back down at the bottom step and grass beyond it. He finally countered with, "Why don't you ever ask where I've been, or what I've been doing?"

"Why should I?"
"Why shouldn't you?"
"Because you always come back with no wounds," she answered, giving her husband her attention.
Mick stared at the darker tint of his hair with it still damp, just as hers was from their shower. To her, his loose basketball shorts looked out of place on him compared to a pair of slacks, but that was only because it was all he wore, lately. She, on the other hand, completely dressed herself before coming out.

"Because," Mick continued, "you have all of the resources to survive, and I make sure of that."
"You know that's not what I'm talking about," he said.
"How else am I supposed to answer?"
"Honestly."
"I am."
"Why don't you ever ask, McKenna?"
"Because I don't want to know."

Jeff looked over at her, finally turning his head completely so that he caught more than just a glance. "You don't think you have the right?"

She stared, first, at his naked shoulder before lifting her gaze to his face without answering. From the way he stopped asking, she didn't have to answer.

He was the first to look away and, upon seeing Hamlet in the driveway, his shoulders straightened with his spine to sit up. She watched his elbows drag up the top of his thighs and settle there, instead, but she didn't move until Hamlet drew closer.

Mick glanced up under the heavy darkness of her hair and stirred from her place. Moving down the steps, she shifted on the bottom in front of Jeff, making the stairs passable for her Maker who she watched in his entire stride. Her focus fell between Hamlet's face and the width of his shoulders, sometimes as low as his chest, and caught minute glances in his walk up to the cabin. It wasn't until he was close enough to touch that she actually held his steady gaze, showcased by the narrow features of his face. Hamlet's bones, like the cut of his muscles, were all sharp and defined, highlighted by the shadows of his dark facial hair and the cascading strands across his shoulders.

He was as quiet as they were aside from the weight of his boots carrying him up the steps along their sides. Mick was the first to break the stare by glancing at the shape of his ear and, as though to follow suit, Hamlet looked down at Jeff's lowered stature. Though he sat straight with his shoulders squared and his head
Me:‎ turned to look back up, he couldn't match the height of Hamlet's knee, much less hold a candle to his stance.

"Jeff," Hamlet regarded, climbing the last step to the porch with no delay for the front door.
Mick lowered her eyes to the back of his knees, and finally at the heel of his boots before he disappeared.

Jeff watched from over his shoulder, vaguely turning his attention behind before looking up at his wife. After a moment, she met his glance and almost seemed to smile. Almost.

As soon as her foot slid across the wooden plank to climb back up behind Hamlet, Jeff shifted and cleared his throat.
"I don't like the way he looks at you," he said to catch her.
"Which way?" she asked, almost amused in the way her eyebrows lifted a little.
"Are you a woman or a piece of meat?"

Mick followed the set of Jeff's jaw to the lobe of his ear and skipped her gaze up to his eyes. They were locked on her with an intensity that she was quickly becoming used to.

"And you don't look at me like that?" she asked. It wasn't an accusation, and Jeff knew it. He knew she wasn't asking why he did, but rather why he didn't.

Mick followed through in that step up and moved her fingers to Jeff's hair, brushing down the tips the wind licked up in scattered pieces before following Hamlet inside. Jeff, however, relaxed the tensions in his muscles once she was gone.

[Mick (DELETED 2915)]

We came to live in a cabin out by the lake, where we'd laughed and loved our lives away,
In the pine-smelling dusty air.

The crickets outside cued like a thousand musicians playing some sad ballad of a war already lost to the land. In a world seemingly full of infinite possibilities, Mick was becoming completely aware that, in the end, Mother Nature was always the victor.
Survival of the fittest.
Animal instinct.

Occasionally, she caught the rustle of leaves that rabbits dashed through and the soft swing of tree branches that owls pushed off from to give chase. Otherwise? The world seemed put to bed, tucked in under the soft kiss of cool coming in through windows, like their own in the 'living room' of the old cabin.

You wrote your poems curled up in light on the sill, you were streaming your long hair out the window like a flag on the shore where the waters say…
Shhh (we're here to stay).

Maybe the two of them were orchestrating her insanity one finely executed moment at a time, something that was planned from the very beginning. They were at polar ends of the main room, Hamlet moreso in the kitchen at a counter and Jeff skillfully seated just by the back wall as though triangulating her well-being in the center, near a window, with carefree admission.

For every time Jeff flexed his ankle, his bare foot firm on the worn wooden floor, he rocked the old recliner with just enough force to make the back touch the wall behind him. Its aged springs gave out a noticeable click to reach that limit, but he couldn't make the revolution fast enough. Instead, his absentminded push was slow and calculated, timed like Chinese water torture.

When the clicks came, Hamlet answered by thrusting a metal file down against the edge of his blade, making the hard surface scream.

Together, they worked in unison.

Alone in this place- it's alive and so full of dead silence, just hanging in the air
By the light of the afternoon.

His bare back was to her, to Jeff, to the walls, to anything that wasn't his newest blade quickly drawing in potential, but she refused to believe that the rigidity in his muscles was from concentration alone. Maybe it was the nagging urge twining its way around her spinal disks, weaving out to braid with the fibers of her body, that told her so. Maybe it was some caliginous need to be validated, or simply not alone in the tension.

In the end, just like always, it was a lucky guess.
Organic nature.
An animal instinct.

She couldn't have said, with logical reasoning, any true way of her knowing when the point of her focus was the master of facades who, even still in rare moments, sometimes ran her hair through his fingers to lift it away from the shell of her ear just so his 'I love you' wouldn't miss.

You were lit by the candle glow, endless skin as white as snow. But you are more like a summer rose- unfolding all your secrets to me as you whisper
Shhh (I am only yours).

Jeff didn't glance up from his book when Mick started moving until she crossed the room and made it to Hamlet. Even still, he couldn't see her hands flatten themselves like water down a rockface against his shoulder blades.

Contradictory to his warm, sun-kissed complexion responsible for the freckles splashed across his nose and shoulders, to touch him was to feel a cool lick against the fine lines in her palms until she stretched her fingers and enveloped the height of his biceps in her gentle grip. She pulled herself closer and tilted her head around the length of his hair and didn't stop until the stalk of his upper body compressed against her chest, until her stomach filled up the space of his lower back, and the firmness of his backside pressed against her pubic bone.

"Run with me," she mumbled, and Jeff flipped the page while staring at the back of her hips.

I remember your tender voice, a lark singing in the nighttime breeze, and your fingers caressing me,
Beneath the silken sheet of darkness.

Her withdraw was almost as quick and rather than dragging her fingers down the lengths of his arms, at least to his elbows, she completely released him to turn and walk for the door of the cabin. Pushing her hands under the hem of her shirt, Mick hauled it overhead, unclasped her bra, and dropped both to the floor on her way out with Hamlet following in his silence.

Jeff's foot settled when his ankle stopped flexing, the old chair wearing itself out to a stop. He watched long enough for the door to swing close behind Mick's Maker before looking back at the pages in front of him. The words made no sense, and its spine looked broken. He pulled the flipped page back where it had been and re-read all of the words he'd suddenly forgotten.

And when you held me there, a crown of moon beams on your hair, I was never safer, never dearer…to the one who loves me best, so I'll tell you
Shhh (I'll always be near).
- Sarah Loven

[Jeff (DELETED 4203)]

June 27th, 2013. Part 1

Why McKenna picked a deep burgundy for the color of the walls, Jeff still couldn’t figure out. It wasn’t her favorite color, it wasn’t a color that tied into her parents’ house in Michigan, her grandparents’ in Ohio, or her aunt’s house in Tennessee. So far as he could ever remember, she never had a one-eyed teddy bear with a burgundy sweater, none of her schools had burgundy in their colors, and not a single piece of her clothing was quite that burnt reddish-purple color that looked best for hospital sheets or neo-goth footwear. Her birthstone wasn’t even close to being red.

He found it funny that he never thought to ask. “Sweetheart, what are you going to match it with?”, “What colors go well with this?”, and “Where do you want the couch?”, sure. But never, “Why the hell did you pick burgundy?”

His townhouse back home, the first home they ever lived in together once she moved in, had blue walls. Blue walls, gray undertones and faint green accents. Jeffrey Caulfield’s Big Blue Bachelor’s Pad: big enough for only him, Timbo the Rhodesian Ridgeback, and an outdated television set he got for a really sweet price off his cousin.

Of course, she changed all of that. And it got them to burgundy walls he couldn’t even walk between anymore.

What he really would’ve found hilarious was if he knew half of McKenna’s thoughts as she stood in the exact same place he was across the street from the two-story rowhouse stacked neatly between the neighbor’s look-alike houses. It was the only one on the whole block with no lights on, one busted curtain in the front window, and a two week old newspaper tossed by the empty garbage can. And the only one with burgundy walls, he was certain.

Her thoughts gave way to nothing when he’d glimpsed through them. There was nothing really definitive about the area aside from some muted images that skipped by so damn fast he couldn’t keep up. It’d happened when he grabbed her face and kissed her (or made her kiss him, rather). Forcing her mouth over his mouth, their lips and teeth grating against each other, the barrage of memories scared him more than anything. Even later when he sorted through them deeper, slower, with his hand against her soft belly as she slept like the dead, all he could catch was the sight of the house. An upstairs light was on, but nothing else. No words, no certainty.

The rest that he saw, he tried to avoid, but it was getting more impossible to hold onto his own memories, anymore. Inside that godforsaken house was a box of McKenna’s intimate things and about a dozen or so of his, and he couldn’t reach them. Jeff couldn’t even try. He could touch the door, put his hand on the handle, but he couldn’t force himself to go in.

"Yeah, hi! You've reached Julie, Britt, Viv, Jeremiah, and Luke! We're not able to come to the phone right now, so PLEASE leave a message!"
"Julie, it's Jeff. When you get this, call me back."

[Jeff (DELETED 4203)]

June 27th 2013. Part 2

“Uncle Jeff!”
“Heeey, Viv.” He pushed his bicycle back against the light pole and knelt down to catch the ten year old barrel running at him full speed. She started laughing when she smacked into his shoulder and squeezed her thin arms around his neck for a hug. When she pulled back, she shrugged her arms down.
“You’re cold!”
“I rode my bike all night!” he answered, tugging on a lock of her brown hair.
“From where?” Julie asked.
Jeff looked up from his squat and slowly stood, smiling at his sister.
“Across town. Hey, Jules. How’re you?”
Moving in for a hug, she kissed Jeff’s cheek and mumbled, “Oh, you are cold.”
“Thanks for meeting me.”
“Of course. We were getting worried.”


“Why are you only just now trying to get it? – Oh, god. What the **** is that smell, Jeff?” Julie looked back through the door at Jeff on the stoop where he stood with his hands in his pockets and his side against the old wrought iron railing. He tried to stare around her, tried to count the boxes and remember what was in each one.
“I don’t know. I didn’t exactly think to clean up before I moved out, Jules.”
Not that it was coming from old food in the fridge. Unwashed clothes, maybe, but he threw all of the food out as soon as the electricity had been cut. Unwashed clothes and old blood; old enough to smell like a slaughterhouse.
He told her it was bad memories. Bad memories prevented him from going in and getting it himself, or he would. He’d been trying to talk himself into it for the last week, since he’d been back, but she just didn’t know how hard it was for him. He even brought Britt into it, said she’d never gone through anything he and Micky had with Britt, and therefore she couldn’t understand.
God only knew she really couldn’t.
“You didn’t exactly think to take all of this with you, either?”
“I wasn’t in town. I told you that. – Come on, Jules. I just need a few things.”
“Then come get them.”
“I wouldn’t have asked for your help if I just could. Please, stop giving me grief about it. The sooner we get it, the sooner we can leave.”
“You mean the sooner I get it.”
“Julie…”
“What am I even looking for?”
Jeff scratched the bristle of hair on the side of his jaw and turned in place to nudge the small of his back against the edge of the rail. “There’s a uh…a box with a bunch of folders in it. Binders, I mean. There’s also photo albums and stuff that we kept in the spare. Check behind the couch. It’s in one of those.”
“Alright. I think I found it. – Here. Check it and make sure.”


When he moved back up the concrete steps, he told her to find the garbage bag by the staircase with a bunch of clothes in it, the one she had to drag across the hardwood floors, but he easily tossed it down with the other on the sidewalk. He also needed the small box of books that had nothing to do with accounting, the box of keepsakes their mother gave him of their father, and the last box upstairs.
“I can’t see, Jeff!” she snapped, moving back toward the open door.
He knew her enthusiasm had been slipping, but he’d tried not to think about it, tried to ignore it. Hell, he even sacrificed the other belongings for what he thought was the most important just to get it over with before she lost her patience.
“It’s the last one, all right? One more and we’re out of here.”
“Then you go get it! I can’t see. It’s late, Jeff. Vivian and I need to go back ho—“
“Julie, I’m not asking for much. ONE more box. It’s right inside the bedroom. You can’t miss i—“
“No! You asked for my help. You didn’t say anything about me doing all of it for you, Jeff.”
Jeff looked out at the parked car that was still by the sidewalk. Under the cast of the street lamp, he saw his niece with her head bowed and light illuminating her face from the iPod she got for Christmas two years prior. He hoped the music was loud enough that she couldn’t hear.
“I’m done.” Julie finished. “Okay? We’re done for the ni—“
“ONE thing, Julie!” he snapped. “I finally ask you for one ******* thing. I never asked you and Britt for anything, even before all of this ****. Never. Not ONE thing. Get the last box and I won’t ask you for anything else.”
Even in the dark he could see the stern face of their father reflected in his sister’s tense jaw. Regardless, after a minute, she used the screen of her cellphone to find her way up the stairs.


The box clattered against the concrete at his feet with the instant sound of broken glass and Julie made no attempt to pretend like it was an accident. His curse came out as soon as he bent to pick it up before it was kicked down the steps or thrown into the middle of the street while his sister turned to lock the house up behind them.
“Goddamn you, Jeffrey Caulfield,” she said, storming down the steps behind him. “That’s what was so important?! Huh?! You came back for her things?!”
As soon as he put the box with the others on the ground, he turned to face her and moved to block her path to the car.
“Don’t ask me to do this **** again when she fucks you over. AGAIN!” she yelled. “You are my brother and I love you, but I’m not going to condone you being an idiot. You took her back, didn’t you? She’s here, isn’t she? That’s why you didn’t move to Chateau! When were you going to tell me? Huh? Were you just going to wait until the next holiday to bring her over like nothing happened?!”
He didn’t try to stop himself before he caught her face with his hands. The surprise and shock that crossed Julie’s face only pushed him to hold her still, even when she snatched her arms up for his. It didn’t matter what she did. His sister gave him the opening by staring at him, locking her eyes onto his and he refused to break it. In fact, he leaned into it and mumbled lowly, speaking into the negative space that separated them.
“Keep your ******* voice down, Julie Anne.”
“Je—“
“Listen to me,” he commanded, taking just a small step so that his back was toward the car. He hoped…hoped Vivian was still distracted, but he couldn’t risk the look back to make sure. “Listen. To. Me. Everything is going to be okay, Julie. Everything is okay. Do you understand? Mick and I are fine. Yes, we’re living together again, and you’re going to be happy for that. All right? You’re not going to question it, anymore. When Britt asks how tonight went, you’re going to tell him that it went fine, and that you were glad to see me. You’re going to tell him everything that I’m telling you now. Mick and I are working it out.”
Releasing the hold on her cheek, Jeff reached up and pushed a blonde strand of hair behind her ear, its natural curl around the back of it proving that it’d only fallen from its place. Afterward, he kissed her forehead and moved his other hand away.
“It’s getting late, Jules,” he said, pushing up a smile. “Don’t you worry about how I’m moving all of this. You just focus on driving safe and putting Vivian to bed.”
When Julie nodded, Jeff looked behind him at the windshield where his niece sat staring. He smiled for her, too.

[Jeff (DELETED 4203)]

“Mick?” he asked, crunching scattered dead leaves under the heel of his tennis shoe. Even as Jeff drew closer to where she lazily sat by the shore of the lake, she didn’t look up or glance back until he kicked a hefty branch off to the side of the path.
Still, she didn’t say anything. Mick stared at a fold in his jeans, a little rip by his ankle, and the muck coating his clothes before looking back out across the glassy surface of the summer sun-baked water.

“What’re you doing out here?” he tried again, pinching his pantlegs at the knees to pull them up, give himself slack, before squatting beside her.
“It gets too quiet inside, sometimes,” she answered.
“Huh?” he asked. Then, as if a lightbulb went on, he glanced over his shoulder at the dark cabin. “Oh. Yeah. Where’s Hamlet?”
“I don’t know,” she said, tucking her ankle closer to the back of her thighs. As if struck by the thought, she added, “He didn’t come back.”

Of course, Jeff would’ve known that if he’d come back the night before, but after spending himself around those abandoned apartments, he clogged his way up to the second floor and sprawled out across one of those old spring mattresses. It was so thin he could feel the frame of the bed under his weight, but at least there was a bed. At least there was an old dresser to kick his shoes against, and a chair to sit in.

What person didn’t appreciate furniture? It wasn’t the actual furniture that made the difference, really. The three of them had proven well that they could survive with just thick blankets over the windows and nothing else, but ****. Jeff was getting tired of sleeping on the floor. They had an old recliner, now, but it didn’t just magically appear in the cabin. It took grunt work of Jeff hauling it down the driveway, up the porch steps, and in through the narrow door frame, and then it took a minor argument with Hamlet over why they should have it.

He didn’t get why he was so against it, but it was one of the few things that Mick hadn’t needed step in over. One of the very few. Jeff insisted that he hadn’t gone through the trouble of bringing it in for nothing and that it wasn’t going anywhere (only, more politely and more with a ‘please’ tone to it, the pussy). It was just a goddamn chair. And the boxes he’d brought in from home were just boxes, boxes filled with crap.

He’d said it before, to Mick. It wasn’t about the furniture, itself. The material things didn’t really matter, at all. He hated the old smoke-stain brown color of the chair and the little tears in the upholstery in the back didn’t actually give it character more than ‘aged’ and ‘piece of ****.’ ”Why does it matter so much to you?” Mick laughed after Jeff’s rant (again, one of many). ”It’s just the thought behind them, Micky. It’s the damn…” Jeff had shaken his hands around, looking for the right words. ”The idea behind them. It’s a sense of normalcy. Normal people, even fake ones, don’t live without furniture.”

Even the abnormal ones like Gein or Gacy had human-skin lampshades.

“I’m sorry,” he said, picking his eyes up from the sprawl of grass behind them. “What did you say?”
Confused, Mick looked back at him and shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Oh. So, where’s Hamlet?”
“I don’t know, I said. He didn’t come back.”

Jeff nodded, situating his elbows on his knees. That meant it would be a good night, or what was left of it. Possibly even a good start to the next one, but it was hard to depend on Hamlet’s schedule for anything. Sort of like any of theirs, he guessed, since routines weren’t easily formed when it involved factoring in time to feed, kill things that weren’t supposed to exist, and bathe, or do some laundry, because even supernaturals weren’t privy to a lifetime supply of perfectly clean clothes.

Which was something else about the furniture: even vampires needed a washer or dryer to sustain a daily life. The cabin was far out in the woods, put back from the other cabins around so that only quick blinks of light could be seen through the trees at night, but they had running water. The place could sustain a washer and dryer hook-up to the electrical box. Jeffrey Caulfield was no real handyman, but he wasn’t an idiot. He just chalked it up to Hamlet’s preferences again.

Without the Cree there, sleeping on the other side of the room from he and Mick (because, for some reason, Mick insisted on staying in the main room rather than take real advantage of the bedroom, most nights), Jeff would be able to settle into a deeper sleep, much like the one earlier that day. There would be no benevolent presence there to crowd the room and smelling space, just the mint tint in Mick’s hair from the shampoo he’d lather through it. Her skin and the soft lemongrass wash.

Plus, when they were alone, he could get a laugh or two out of her. He noticed that she didn’t do that much around Hamlet, and he didn’t know why. For her sake, he considered that it was more than likely because they’d started in all seriousness, and therefore lived in all seriousness. His wife had been dying when Hamlet came across her, or so she’d told him, and even Jeff could appreciate the gravity of that situation without some snotty undertone. But, when the Cree wasn’t around, like for Jeff’s venting about the lack of furniture, the tension deep set in her brown eyes wasn’t quite as noticeable for him.

”And you think,” she started, already amused, ”that someone else’s old chair is going to make you feel normal?” “Well, yeah!” he shouted. ”Alright! Alright. I’m sorry to be so skeptical.” “It’s not just a chair, Micky!” When she laughed, again, his excitement over the whole topic slowly dwindled and, instead, he only continued to act upset for the sake of keeping her going.

He honestly missed it. Funny how such simple pleasures were so short-lived anymore.

[Mick (DELETED 2915)]

“You know…” Jeff began, hooking his arms around the middle of her body from behind. “If you wanted to rebel, you could’ve just dyed your hair purple instead of getting a tattoo.”

Her smile came up quick and hard when she looked up from the magazine sprawled on the kitchen counter in front of her. Mick tried not to move too much when her husband settled his chin on the height of her shoulder. She, too, looked down at the sleeve tattoo on her left arm.

“Or, I don’t know,” he continued, “taken up knitting. Learned how to ride a unicycle.”
“Shut up,” she laughed, flipping the page.
“Became a mom. Joined the military,” he joked, planting a kiss on the bare skin.

It didn’t look completed to him, but Micky swore it was. It was nothing but black, from her shoulder to her wrist. Just drawings, shapes, and outlines of things all embedded in her skin like a child’s coloring book waiting to be filled in.

He reached up and cradled the underside of her elbow, smoothing the fine hair on her arm down with the pad of his thumb before tucking her hand down over top of his spread on her lower stomach.

---

The knock of Jeff’s foot against the bedroom door made her look up from the floor. Caught red handed, all she could do was stare at him while he stared at the scattered belongings previous in boxes, boxes he’d brought from their home.

He smiled, but she didn’t.

“I didn’t know you were in here,” he said as he moved deeper in the room.
She looked down at the pictures, the papers, and the old books that she’d gone through, thus far. Most of them were actually her things, or things of her: a few of her favorite books, that old Lubitel Jeff bought for her two years ago, a heaping pile of pictures that would make any scrapbookist hard.

Carefully, she moved most off to the side and scooted a box, but Jeff walked closer and minded his steps until he was able to help her nudge. He took a seat to box her in, hold her captive amongst their mutual crap.

“Just looking,” she answered, lowering her gaze to the spine’s edge of The Last Time They Met. How ridiculously ironic.

“Yeah,” Jeff said, unfolding his legs to stretch them out and bridge them over the piles. “I’ve been meaning to come in here and go through all of it.”

But, he hadn’t. But, instead, he’d left them tucked up in the corner of the cabin that they rarely hid away in, preferring the shower for the quick and most efficient ways of multitasking.
Or, maybe that was just her.
Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d done it on purpose; set her up just to knock her down. When Jeff smiled, it had ‘victorious’ written all over it, as though he’d proven something to everyone.

Mick looked away.

---

His wet lips smeared make-up in their wake, but she was only vaguely aware of the sticky feeling when it acted like adhesive between his skin and hers. The heat of his breath flooded the roots of her hair then broke across her cheek and fluttered her eyelashes. Each quick kiss was never in the same place twice, if only marked off by a millimeter of space.

“McKenna,” he paused to mutter, but didn’t break away. Instead, his lips marked the curve of her eyebrow while her swollen, pliant mouth cradled the edge of his clean shaven jaw.

The collar of his shirt dented under the tightening of her grip as her back pressed more firmly into the banister of the staircase. Her thumb slipped out from under his wrist to flatten it against the outside of her leg.

Again, Jeff whispered her name.
“What?” she rushed, searching for the source of the sound, just to crush her lips over his.
When his fingers spread wide to envelope the meat of her thigh, she guided his hand higher under her dress, until his fingertips were riding the curve of her hip and the soft cloth bunched around the invasion of his arm.

“They’re going to be here, soon,” he answered, smiled. She even thought she heard the hints of a laugh slipping into her mouth, so she slipped her fingers in kind through the back of his light hair.
“So what?” she moaned when he hiked her dress up higher and buried his face in the side of her neck. Her hair, thick and long, smothered him.

“I don’t know,” he finally said, hoisting her up the front of his fully clothed body.

---

“Oh. Haha! Do you remember this one?” he asked, holding a picture out to her.
Mick looked over its polaroid edges before finally reaching out to take it. “This was before we moved.”
“Yeah.”

Her eyebrows creased together over the bridge of her nose. Drawing the photo down to her lap, she thumbed the corner and stared at the glasses of champagne they held, half-empty.

“Britt—“ “Yeah.” “Britt took this, back in your old place.”
“Julie was pregnant with Jeremiah,” he added, situating his arm behind her where his elbow locked to hold his weight up from completely crashing into her side.

Mick’s nostrils flared, but she was silent. She’d worn the black, spaghetti strap dress to show off her sleeve tattoo, the one it took hours to finish. She’d been proud of it, for whatever reason. She still had the tattoo, but the dress was long gone from her closet years ago, like a lot of things.

Like Jeff’s arm around her.

Like the need to cross her legs.

Like their smiles.

---

Jeff’s sister was just beginning to show in her fourth month, but it was only painfully obvious when she lugged the diaper bag around every which way.

“Thanks so much for having us over,” Britt said as he hugged Mick, then shook Jeff’s hand when his sister had unlatched herself from around his neck. Vivian, only two then, broke between them and flung herself at Timbo.
“Oh, absolutely,” Jeff laughed, hooking his arm around Mick’s hips. “We invited Tommy and Stasia, too.”

And Yvonne and Katie, but they wouldn’t show up until much later.

And Tommy and Stasia? They couldn’t make it at all due to Tommy working late.

Three glasses of champagne a piece, with Julie sipping on orange juice.

The music had to be played soft by eight o’clock when Vivian was tucked in on the couch.

Julie spoke to Mick in nothing but vague questions and always grinned big at Jeff.

”Smile.”

---

Mick looked up from the old photograph when Jeff leaned away and rummaged through the papers. He tossed a book to the side and she followed it with her eyes before looking back at him.

The picture was nothing, really. It meant nothing, yet it’d been tucked back in the box with the rest of her ****, like their first anniversary photo, like her CD’s, like her cameras.

It meant nothing, yet the glare that caught the lens bothered her when she really stared at it. Yet, the soft smile they both wore looked clumsy and foolish. Yet, the fact that there was no date scrawled on the back of it or bottom of it made her want to scream like the fact that Jeff was the only one in the cabin to make noise.

“…asked Julie to pull them for me,” Jeff prattled, but Mick barely caught on when she looked back up. He didn’t notice in his book distraction.

She stood from her spot and stepped over the piles of **** on the floor, over Jeff’s feet.

“Mick, where’re you going?” Jeff asked, but she didn’t answer. She tossed the polaroid to the side and kept walking out of the room, through the cabin, even though she heard a muttered curse behind her, even though the hard thud of a door being slammed echoed the sturdy walls.

Mick just kept walking, fisting her hair up into a half-assed ponytail.

The old photo stayed where it landed, on the floor and face up.