big fan of women

i buried a hatchet ch 7 - maybe we've got all the time to grow (and maybe we don't)

There’s something warm simmering deep in her chest, something both enthralling and terrifying. It’s the same something warm that she thinks might have always been there, maybe, the same something warm she keeps pushing down because she’s not supposed to want it. - But Robin does something to her that Jonathan never has. That even Steve didn’t really do. And as she’s lying in Robin’s bed, both of them bathed in an aurelian morning glow, that warmth that’s bubbling up in her lungs is so intoxicating she could drown in it.  She wants to drown in it.

you want blood and i promised ch 1 - my body is made of crushed little stars

Steve’s eyes immediately flick down to her hands as they anxiously wring each other out. Her hands, which are tainted and covered in black long after she’s scrubbed it all away; stains so deeply ingrained that even though she wants nothing more than to dig her nails into her skin and drag them down the length of her arm and strip it down to the bone (and is her blood black like the dust in the steel mill?) she knows that even if she bled herself dry, she’d never feel clean from it, not really.  It is taking everything in her not to try.

you want blood and i promised ch 2 - if this is a prison, i'm willing to burn my own chain

Steve, still holding her, still rocking her, fucking reaches up with one hand and somehow manages to hug her head in response. Kisses the very top of it, like the thought of someone cracking open her skull and cutting away all the rotten parts of her brain is too much for him to bear.  Maybe he knows, just like her, that the whole thing is ruined. Ripe fruit left out in the sun too long. She keeps scraping the mold off it, pretending it’s fine, but the network’s already seeped into every crevice and taken root. She could hear the flies buzzing weeks ago.  Maybe he knows, just like her, that if they did try and lobotomize her, there wouldn’t be much of anything left.

exit wound

That part of her that aches is on fire, and it’s eating her alive. Flames are licking up her insides, and she’s choking on the ashes of her burnt out ribcage. And she tries so hard to swallow the embers and stamp them out, but sometimes it feels like Hawkins wants to watch her burn, because this godforsaken town keeps tossing fresh coals in and stoking the blaze.  This town is going to suffocate her.  She needs to get out. Operation Croissant, she calls it, because if her desire to leave is dressed up like a tourist in front of the Eiffel Tower and dusted in pastry flakes, then she can pretend it isn’t what it actually is. She can pretend that her flight risk behavior is just the adventurous spirit she’d inherited from her hippie parents, a go-where-the-wind-takes-her mindset, a desire to seek, to learn, to find somewhere she belongs.  Because surely, there’s somewhere she belongs.  And surely, that somewhere isn’t Hawkins, Indiana.  Operation Croissant, she calls it, because if she lays in bed late at night and imagines the breeze that will caress her face when she walks through the open door of the airport and out into the Parisian streets, if she imagines the way the golden evening light will stream through clouds and illuminate the Seine River, the little ripples in the water glimmering like thousands of little diamonds running through the heart of the city of love- Well. It’s far more comforting than the alternative.

leave the light on