Jealousy - A Kinda Short Beetlebabes Drabble
Okay, I’m in a serious funk and have been for awhile. Writing has been, and still is, incredibly difficult for me (Inability to focus, headaches, difficulty reading, words are jumbled, all that fun stuff that makes me think I should see a doctor). So I’m trying to push through. In short, I’m sorry that the stuff I’ll be putting out in the near future is all word vomit. I may go back and salvage this. Thank you and enjoy, loves.
“I’m starting to hate that girl.” It’s the truth, and Barbara doesn’t care how blunt and callous it sounds, though it makes Adam nearly drop his glasses. “What? It’s true.”
If the conversation hadn’t dissolved into a tense, awkward silence, Barbara would’ve clarified. The problem isn’t entirely Lydia herself, though there are complaints there. No, most of her grievance is with him.
The name curse has been off the table for three years now (unfortunately), but Barbara refuses to overthink his name for her own mental health.
She hates him. More than she ever hated Delia. More than the cabin fever. More than Jane Butterfield’s “accidental” comments that cut Barbara to her core.
So Barbara doesn’t hate Lydia. She hates what she drags in with her when she decides to grace Winter River with her presence. Like the long lost fifth horse of the apocalypse, she brings her own form of destruction in the form of a loud, crass, moldy trash opossum. A trash opossum that stole away the closest thing she’ll ever have to a child. Projection? Perhaps. But that doesn’t stop it from hurting.
That’s not to say that Lydia is without her own flaws. She never calls and visits even less. Over time, Barbara accepted this as a good thing. For starters, he always tags along, carrying her suitcase and making the foyer smell like a mausoleum. When they sit down for a conversation, it’s a laundry list of all the wild adventures they’ve been on. The now famous Beej and Lyds, seeing the world and running around the Neitherworld. Lydia doesn’t intend to come across as braggy, but how she doesn’t realize how it feels for someone trapped in a house for 125 years to hear about their trip to Japan and look at photographs of places she’ll never get to see, Barbara will never know.
That doesn’t fill her with hate, though. Instead, as she and Adam listen to Lydia excitedly talk about her time in Ireland, Barbara feels something she can’t place. She feels it when she looks at them. While part of her will forever try and deny it, Lydia is crazy about him, and Betelgeuse in return. It’s in the slight smiles and extended eye contact, their constantly entwined hands, the quiet conversations, the constant name dropping when you somehow manage to catch one of them alone. It hit her hard when they came in from the snow last night, Lydia under his arm and wrapped in his coat.
“Got a room? Or are ya gonna make us sleep in the tool shed?”
