you were on my mind

                                                                                                                     wars are private affairs.

                                                                                                                     they always have been.

        someone has to break the silence first, it’s a very old story, and when daisy does, reece is more than willing to play this one out. “ yeah, ” he says, even though he isn’t. even though he never is anymore. “ i’m starving. ” reece doesn’t make it a habit to lie to her but it’s happening more and more often now. ‘ i didn’t miss you at the party. sorry, a client refused to leave. the war is nearly over. ’

        he turns the key in the ignition and pulls away from the curb, the only things in motion now are the engine and daisy’s pulse. reece hasn’t told her that his new thing is imaging the absent thrum of kristina’s every time he can’t feel his own. “ so this client comes in today, and i swear daise, some people don’t get it. they go ‘oh, so you saw her bite the dust, did you?’ and it’s like—— christ, i know she wasn’t a good person, but she doesn’t deserve the shit from this town. ”

they’ve barely made it two blocks before she’s shifting in her seat, likely pressing the pattern of dirt on the underside of her shoe into her skin as she reaches for the radio. sound floods the car -- disjointed lyrics cutting across each other as the tip of a dark fingernail makes its way restlessly down the line of buttons until she’s reached the last one. she’s run out of options and that is how more decisions than she would admit to are made and she’s slumping back into her seat looking a little petulant that the radio is such a perpetual disappointment.

                      ‘ oh, so you saw her bite the dust, did you? ‘

                                       the radio isn’t the only thing that’s a disappointment.

some anonymous breakout hit that sounds like all of the others draws to a close and the late night dj’s sleazy voice follows. daisy doesn’t hesitate to speak over him. “ fuck, “ she exhales. her patience with the seemingly constant barrage of bullshit surrounding the case is growing thinner by the second. “ the five thousand and one ways that the investigation is interrupting their lives is all that matters, reece -- you know that. “

            ‘ oh. ’ it’s such a useless word, but what else is he supposed to say?

              oh.

                 i’m sorry i yelled at you.

                                       oh. 

                                      i’m sorry i let you walk home alone. 

                                                         oh. 

                                                                                            i’m sorry i didn’t CALL.

         none of those seem like feasible options, so he settles on the one-syllable word before he finds his foot tapping against tile impatiently. let them get on with it — if they want to pin a label and incriminate him before he even opens his mouth, there’s little point in having them wait the night out like sitting ducks. luke can handle it. he doesn’t, however, want to think of the way they’ll push and prod at her until they chip away whatever hope for better days she has left — cornering her at every word until she’s either yelling or curling into herself like if she tries hard enough, she’ll sink into the ground and none of this will have happened. thinking about it is his first mistake. and his second?                   ‘ — you okay? ’

                            she wants him, and that’s different.

“ yeah, ‘course. ” she’s not, but she could be. if she says it enough -- if she believes it enough -- she will be. daisy nods, more to herself than to him, steeling herself for whatever is coming ( whether it be in the interrogation room or the lobby ). two people have been murdered and she is about to walk into a room and be spoken to like she knows something and luke has told her that they are not friends but that’s okay. she’s okay.

                                           and then she makes the mistake of looking at him,

                                           and suddenly she’s really, really not.

                                           “ are you, lou? “

                         JAW LOCKED.

                                 hands slipped. posture straight.

                                                  eyes focused on anything else. anything but her.

     ‘ —— hey. ’ his voice sounds far away, and when rough hands are releasing him and shuffling out of the waiting room, he takes the seat just one away from being right next to her while a silent eeriness clouds the room like a shroud of uncertainty —— would they believe him this time? would they ever believe a criminal? would she be okay? all resounding no’s in his head, like a broken record spinning with all the fears making a home in his chest, his lungs being their resting place.  ‘ —— they find out who it was yet? ’

           and then the door swings open and he is there

           and it hits her all at once that she’d very much like to go home.

green eyes find brown and suddenly it feels a little more difficult to breathe; time seems to slow to a crawl and  her mouth is closed but she’s already said too much. they are not friends. they are not friends. they are not friends but he is her best friend and the space that that empty seat between them occupies feels like a mountain that he’s either unwilling or unable to conquer. “ hi. “ the word comes out more delicately than daisy would like and she hates herself a little bit for it. heat is creeping up her neck and the dirty toe of her left sneaker has quickly become the most fascinating thing in the room and she lets his question hang between them for a moment or two longer than he might have preferred -- though why, daisy isn’t entirely sure. “ i don’t think they know. “

right now, daisy’s house is just a house. it’s late. reece is parked in his usual spot across the street, a few inches off the lava, and he hasn’t got an explanation for being here yet. he has a second theory though, and it’s this: everyone has a compass hidden inside themselves, and instead of north, his points to her. his instincts are stronger than his theories, so he cuts the engine and sends a message from house number 2′s (hacked) wifi router. come outside. he tosses his phone to the passenger side, already creating another obstacle for daisy’s arrival, and tips his head back on the rest. he tries not to think about the crushed tulips or the palms he’s held in his hands. he tries not to think of the woods, or his tongue, or how each of these things has the power to swallow him whole. he tries, and this is reece’s third theory, or rather whimsical hope: trying has to be enough. he isn’t ready to face a reality —— a dream, a universe, a world —— where it’s not. 

// @daisydeluca

          foolishness.

                                                      its name is foolishness.

fingers that still carry traces of yesterday’s eyeliner tug her hair up off of the back of her neck and knot it unceremoniously as she pads back down the hall leaving german numbers in the imprints her feet make in the plush carpet. spanish had been first -- one thousand numerals murmured at the dinner table when dad was late home and mum had had a bad day at work. french had come next; two thousand things to focus on that didn’t involve the threat of divorce. german was an ongoing feature. german was for when girls let you down and boys changed their minds.

     dreihundertdrei.

     dreihundertvier.

     dreihundertfϋnf.

     come outside.

a wave of heat from the cut engine radiates off of the hood as she passes by it and daisy wonders how long reece has been driving and what he’s been looking for out there in road signs and traffic lights. her fingers brush his phone off of her seat into neutral territory as she slides in beside him and it’s quiet for the moment; her methodical counting paused while she waits for reece to say something. anything. nothing. “ slept through dinner. are you hungry? ”

( @daisydeluca. )

‘ look at the stars. look how they shine for you. ’ chris martin’s voice trickled softly from the car radio, and normally, nate would’ve skipped the track. not because it was a poor song lyrically, melodically, or any other way —- this was coldplay in their prime, really —- but it was just too soft a song. soft in every crack and corner that nate had spent years making firm. for some reason, on that particular morning, however, he let it play. the lyrics leaked into every inch of his car and his attitude alike —— and as silly as it seemed, nate could feel it. he felt some shade of y e l l o w. steady though shaky knuckles kept a tight embrace on the steering wheel, and though he was restrained by his seat belt ( thankfully ), nate felt as though he was going to spring from his seat. the drive was a vibrant one; it was so bright that the boy fought & fought to keep his eyes on the road. the only time he could diligently tear his eyes from the scenery that swaddled the road and his car like a newborn in a blanket was to glance down at his phone on his right thigh, just to ensure he hadn’t done enough sightseeing to stray him from the path to daisy’s. ‘ yellow ’ came to a close, and ‘ fix you ’ followed right behind it, and the two immediate thoughts that swam across nate’s mind were somewhere along the lives of ‘ oh, this is a really nice song. i like this one ’ as well as ‘ why do all of the songs on shuffle surround the inevitability of human emotion that i have, semi-successfully, been avoiding. ’ the longer that nathaniel ( god, he hated that name. the formality of it all. ) drove, the more that his nerves began to consume him. nate was a house —- nicely built, pleasing on the outside and inside alike —- and the churning of his stomach not quite unlike a pioneer making butter and the idea that maybe he wasn’t so detached from ‘ feeling things ’ as he thought were steady flames, kissing at every inch of his architecture and catching fire when comfortable enough. droplets of perspiration peppered the wheel, and nate caught himself swiping at the fabric of his khakis every few moments, so the sweat didn’t make him lose his grip more than his mind was already leading him to. what seemed to be a routine glance at google maps on his iphone quickly turned into the kind voice behind the navigation system application alerting nate that ‘ his destination was ahead on the right, ’ and that turned into an impromptu drum solo against the steering wheel : a hopeful-at-best effort at calming nate down. the result ? a failure. a horrible, horrible failure. but, he tried. nate was good at trying.

                                                                                      had she been scared?

these were the questions keeping daisy up at night. she had circles under her eyes that no drugstore concealer seemed up to defeating and the evidence of her inability to keep herself under control ( despite her insistence to the contrary ) was still under her t-shirt; angry purple fingerprints that had initially been badges of honour now felt like reminders inked into her skin of how she would maybe ( probably ) always just be a little too much for anyone to handle.

and so, bearing that in mind, this seemed like a very, very bad idea. even now, watching through her bedroom window as nate attempted to angle his car into what daisy thought was quite an ill-advised parking space along the curb, she wondered how in hell she had managed to orchestrate this. the proposition of ‘a day with me’ was foreign at best, and so in asking whether he had been hoping for a date she hadn’t quite anticipated things taking the turn that they had. no, he wasn’t asking her on a date. he didn’t do dates. but, no, actually, yes he was asking her on a date. daisy wasn’t sure how, in the span of a five minute conversation, she seemed to have prompted this poor, terribly nice boy to completely forsake whatever commitment issues he seemed to be harboring as a means of getting out of dating. a chorus line of all of the things that other boys had ever told her were wrong with her ran through her mind on some sort of fucked up perpetual loop; a filing cupboard’s worth of evidence to refute whatever seemed to have happened here.

                                           maybe he’d been confused.

                                                                                       he’d probably been confused.

“ hi. ” her hand clutched the side of the door like it was her only means of staying above water ( in this scenario, she was definitely jack, not rose ) and daisy felt suddenly self-conscious under his gaze, a familiar blush creeping quietly across her cheeks. nate was talking and it took her a moment to catch up but then she was there, her gaze shifting to the bundle in his hands. flowers. there were flowers. a sweeping sense of shame hit her like a tidal wave -- a girl had died and her best friend had left town and here she was on a date with a boy who, when faced with the uncertainty of his date’s favourite flower thought to buy two of everything.

                              he was too good for her.

                                                                                                                                                                    fuck.

                                                       he was really, truly too good for her.

she caught a few words that had released themselves from the tidy constraints of a sentence to present themselves out of order. water. tlc. probably. nate was looking at her then, waiting for a response of some kind whether it be a nod or a laugh or a ‘nevermind, i’ve changed my mind’.

                                                                                            nevermind, i’ve changed my mind.

something clicks into place at that moment and daisy understands that he is waiting for her to open the door a little wider and invite him inside where they can find a vase or a jug or a fucking bucket for the flowers that he’s bought her with his own money (when was the last time a boy bought her something other than a movie ticket and a packet of twizzlers? daisy would have been happy with twizzlers ).

                                             if one thing was for sure it was that he was not coming inside.