why do guys like you always look so sad?

He was already thinking about taking a road trip with Ronnie one of these days, and in the blur of those conversations, he’d gotten to know her friend. Gianna was nice. Different from him, sure, but not in a way that put him off. More like in a way that kept things interesting, a little refreshing. Beau already knew what happened when someone was too much like him-- hell, he worked with that someone.

So when Gianna walks through the door, it softens the dead look in his eyes just a little. Maybe even gets a snort out of him.

"I mean, it’s a Thursday," he says, setting the broom aside and gesturing for her to sit anywhere she wants. "If you really wanted, I could flip the sign to ‘Closed’ ‘til you’re done eatin’. Give you the full VIP experience."

He leans his elbows against the counter, tilting his head at her. "Or, y’know, you could sit at the counter and keep me entertained. I’m runnin’ out of things to talk to the dough about."

for:   everyone,   currently   uncapped.

where:   sunset villa beach.

(   @palmviewstarters   )

So he did what he always did-- let the ocean sort him out. Got in that zone where nothing else really existed, just salt water and muscle memory. And sometimes, when he got like this, it took him a second to snap out of it. Which was probably why it took a dry and ultimately unimpressed voice to make him realize he was standing right in front of her, blocking out half the damn sunset like a total idiot.

"Oh, shit, my bad," he muttered, blinking down at her before stepping aside, finally letting the light spill back over her canvas. "Didn’t mean t’hog th’view."

It was an exhausting way to live, to expect from people. But it made the world more than what it pretended to be. It made you pick at the seams, peel back the layers, dig until you hit something real. Until you found the ache in it.

But Beau? Beau likes the nothing moments. The easy ones. The ones that don’t demand some deeper excavation. The way you order the same ice cream flavor without thinking, just like you always did as a kid. The way you pick your braces bands in your favorite color, even if it doesn’t really matter, even if it’s just something to make the whole experience a little less of a drag. The way a boy can look at a girl and think she’s pretty, and a girl can look at a boy and think the same thing.

Does she think Beau is pretty?

His fingers skate across the surface of the water, following its slow rise and fall. It’s warmer now, heat threading up his arms, but the wet fabric clings cold to his skin, keeping him caught between temperatures, between sensations. Between whatever this moment is and whatever she thinks it should be.

"You’re sayin’ it like they’re not important things," he murmurs, voice low, steady, like the thought is only just settling in as he says it. "Like knowin’ why someone decides blue is the best thing they’ve ever seen doesn’t tell you somethin’ about them. Like knowin’ how they take their coffee, whether they start their mornings in silence or with music, whether the one thing in the world they trust ain’t even a person, but a dog that’d stand against the world for them." He tilts his head, his gaze catching hers in the low light, something sharp and thoughtful flickering there. A knowing smile tugs at his mouth, knowing yet confused. Teasing, yet completely serious. "Superficiality lies in thinkin’ you know better than t’care about what other people care about."

A cigarette would hit hard right now, something to steady his fingers, quiet the tremor before it even starts. But instead, he breathes deep, lets the water pull at him, gentle and endless, the tide coaxing him under, whispering that it wouldn’t be so bad to let go. And maybe it wouldn’t. But still, his fingers go still against the water. Still, his body stays here.

Alive.

His eyes drift open, and he turns to look at her, gaze slow and steady, like he’s studying her the way she studies everything else. Like he’s tracing the edges of whatever shape she’s taken tonight. He wonders if she ever speaks plainly. If she knows how to crack a joke, how to gossip excitedly behind her palm, how to say something just because it’s there in her mouth, unburdened by philosophy. Or if she’s the kind of person who makes meaning out of everything, picking apart every moment like it’s a cipher, a divine text waiting to be unraveled. Was it exhausting? Or was it more exhausting to exist the other way-- untethered, unthinking, just letting the world happen to you?

Beau turns his head, and, of course, she’s already watching him. Their gazes snare, and for a moment, he wonders what she would taste like. Moonlight and seawater. If it would burn to kiss her. If it would sink into his lungs like tar, leave him coughing, gasping, aching. If it would be sweet poison. If it would be worth it. He turns away. Looks up. Lets his fingers tangle in the damp weight of his hair, chilled at the ends, something to busy himself with, something to keep his hands from shaking.

"Phaethon," he says, slow, like pulling something loose from his throat. "Son of Helios. Or, well... he thinks he is. ‘Cause people keep talkin’, sayin’ his mom just made that shit up, and he gets all in his head about it. So he goes to Helios, begs him for the truth, and Helios swears on the River Styx that yeah, he’s really his kid. Even says he’ll grant him any wish he wants, just to prove it."

He doesn’t know if she’s really listening. If she hears what he’s actually saying beneath it, if she’s picking apart the words for the bones underneath. Maybe she’s just humoring him. Maybe she already knows how it ends. "So Phaethon, he asks to drive his chariot. The Sun. And Helios can’t take it back, ‘cause he already swore on Styx. So the kid takes the reins." There’s a huff of something... laughter, maybe, but small, subdued, like he’s not really laughing at all. Like it’s just something left over in his chest, something that doesn’t belong.

"He's just a kid, y'know?" His voice is quieter now, heavy as stone, as the water that begs him down into the depths of the pool. "Can’t handle the horses, flies too high, then too low... scorches the sky, burns the earth, sets whole rivers dry. Zeus looks down, sees all this mess, and—" He snaps his fingers. "Shoots him outta the sky. Boom. Done." Beau exhales, rubbing a thumb along his jaw, voice softening just a little. Sympathy for a boy in a story, a boy who wanted to prove something to the world, a boy who wanted an apology, a boy who wanted the truth. And found nothing at the end of his journey. "He falls. Hits the river. Eridanus. And... that’s it. That’s where he dies."

His fingers still against the surface, breaking it just slightly, a ripple that never quite reaches her. The smile on his face had long since faded, and he's quiet for a moment before he adds, almost as an afterthought, "Helios doesn’t even show up to bury him. It’s his sisters that do it. They turn into trees, y’know. Standin’ at the edge of the river, cryin’ so much they turn to amber." Another pause, longer this time, before he finally glances at her, meets that disarming gaze with one made of stone.

It used to be easy.

Back when this place was just a backdrop to a simpler kind of life-- tidepooling and boogie-boarding, sunburnt shoulders and hair stiff with salt. When everything felt urgent and infinite all at once. When love and hate were nothing but quicksilver moods, shifting with the tides, swelling in the space between whispered secrets and bloody-mouthed fights. When no one knew how to smoke properly, but they did it anyway, stealing drags from crushed joints with shaking hands and spit-slick laughter. It was everything. It was nothing. It was the kind of memory that clings, ghostlike, to the edges of him even now.

He exhales, rolling onto his back, letting the water buoy him, his body half-submerged, half-held aloft by the weight of the night sky. His clothes are soaked through, dragging at him, heavy like hands trying to pull him down, but the stars, God, the stars, keep him afloat. Cradle him in their glow, whispering their quiet, distant lullaby.

"Look." His voice is softer now, barely more than breath against the cool hush of the air. One hand lifts, his fingers tracing the open sky, mapping constellations in the darkness. "Eridanus is visible."

His hand drifts back down, coming to rest against his chest, his gaze still fixed upward. The stars shimmer, distant but endless, forming that long celestial river, winding its way across the vast black. A path carved in light, stretching far beyond what the eye can follow. He watches it, lets it seep into him, lets it settle in the spaces expectation used to fill.

So far away.

By the time it clicks in his mind, his eyes are already under attack-- blaring, eye-searing yellow. Like Big Bird prepped and plucked for Thanksgiving. Sure, the cutouts looked great (hey, Beau was not a blind man. Just a stupid one.), but God, if she was looking to impress who he thought she was looking to impress, there was no way that major idiot wasn’t going to immediately think Big Bird Goes to Coachella.

"I thought you were tryna make him think you were hot," he mumbles, cheek smushed against his fist as he leans back in the chair, his brows knit as he watches her little twirl. "That just makes you look like a mustard bottle."

maisie, maisie, maisie. maybe this is why she's kicked up such a storm about milo & teddy. she has her own scandalocious affair that's she's trying to brush under the rug ! if it's not georgia, then beau: heed my warning, if you opened a dictionary to the word ' trouble, ' maisie's photo is sure to pop up !

@dcwnfalls , @beauregard-less , @dcrkcloud

xoxo,

His eyes-- bright, sharp, alive-- follow the way she moves with the ripples of the pool, like the water itself refuses to let her go, clinging to her skin in rivulets, tracing the edges of her as if memorizing her shape. He understands the feeling. But unlike the water, Beau knows when something isn’t his to keep. Knows when something was never his to begin with. Knows when something might never be.

“Why’d you come out here with me tonight, nightingale?” His voice is softer now, threaded with something thoughtful, something full of curiosty. He isn’t sure if he’s asking her, or the moon, or the shadows that stretch long against the cavern walls. His head tilts back, eyes tracing the night sky above, endless and quiet and heavy with things both said and unsaid, there, here, gone. “What did you expect t’find here?” A pause, stretching just long enough to mean something. “What did you expect in me?”

And then his gaze falls back to her, twinkling like the stars above their heads, a look he knows she'll either pick to pieces, or leave to rot.

Axel raised a skeptical eyebrow at the other, not fully convinced someone he thought was stoned out of his mind moments ago was actually catching onto anything he said. But it was either hear him out or cut him off and potentially get stuck in another circular discussion over a plan that was admittedly a bit of a shitshow all because it was a spur of the moment thing that he hadn't put too much genuine thought into. And because this wasn't one of his more well-thought-out, carefully crafted plans, he was more willing to listen to the other's creative input, even if he didn't seem like it.

He folded his arms across his chest and shifted his weight from one foot to the other as if he was really thinking over these changes. "Uh huh." He wasn't opposed to the proposed changes, but he stubbornly didn't want to seem too impressed by them either. "Whatever gets me food at this point. I'm fucking starving." Something that was entirely his own fault now.

Honestly? Beau had twenty bucks. He could just buy them both dinner.

There was a lot of growing up he missed out on with her. They could stay like this forever, elbows hooked, laughing at everything and nothing, but it wouldn’t change the years he wasn’t there, wouldn’t smooth out the sharp edge of adolescence they were supposed to navigate together. He wonders, for a fleeting, curious moment, what it would’ve been like if he had. If they’d figured out the world side by side, all the scraped knees and bad decisions and...

"You look like a frog down there." She ends up muttering, plenty loud enough for him to hear her in the dead of night. She doesn't turn away, but avoids his eyes as she laughs a little at herself. Her life might be going to shit, but at least she has moments like this, even if she doesn't deserve them. "Doesn't it hurt crouching like that with legs that long? Have you ever kneed yourself in the chin?" Maybe it seems like her personality for the night has done a 180, but when has she ever really made sense?

"You should quit that shit, by the way; bad for you." Me too, but don't give up on me just yet, please.

He huffs out a laugh, rolling his eyes up at her. “At least I didn’t hit twelve and decide I was done growin’,” he shoots back, shifting his crouch just enough to exaggerate how much taller he is. His knees pop in protest, but he ignores them. Instead, he takes another slow drag of his cigarette, looking at her through the curl of smoke.

The corner of his mouth twitches as he threatens, just for a second, to blow it in her face— but he relents at the last moment, exhaling away from her with a lazy smirk. “Lotta things are bad for you,” he murmurs, watching the wisps disappear into the air. “Sometimes shit like this just makes the other stuff… easier to deal with.”

His voice, when he speaks, is low, a murmur swallowed by the night. "I think you’re tryin’ t’see if you’ll have a handful of somethin’ if you close your fist around me," he murmurs, "and you won’t know what t’do if you bring your hand back empty."

And then he moves. Not much, not enough to shatter whatever fragile thing is balancing between them, but enough. His fingers find the inside of her wrist, pressing lightly against the pulse point, feeling for something, anything, that might make her real. Does her blood thrum like his does? Does she even feel it, his touch against her pulse, the heat of his fingers against the coolness of her skin?

His eyes stay on hers, unblinking, steady. His touch is light, never caging. Always an open door. "Leads me t’wonder," he muses, voice still quiet, still edged with something unreadable, "how many fistfuls you’ve got in your pocket already. How many chunks of me you’ve hidden from me, how many y’want."

Get it together, Beau. You’re twenty-seven. You pay rent. You have health insurance. Beau swallows hard. A man leading you toward the berry section is not cause for a full physiological shutdown.