2soft2chew

 there is a pause in time where selene stares straight at a point above jade’s head, like maybe if she stares long enough one of them will disappear. she isn’t sure she cares which one of them it is. there is, for a moment, though, a snippet in her mind of a cartoon jade falling into a comically placed blackhole on the pavement where she stands. she has to bite down on her lips to stifle a laugh. “you’re… strange,” she says, finally, with a certain resolve. she doesn’t want to think about jade’s bruised ass. instead, she shrugs at the suggestion, shakes her head curtly. “no, it’s fine. i can just make some more in my room.” despite her irritability, she’s grateful for the offer. people don’t usually apologize to selene. so, for good measure, she adds, “thanks, though.” whatever part of her demeanor softens at the apology quickly dissipates at the mention of the trap room. or, more specifically, at the mention of a certain person. will’s name kind of makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand upright, and she’s glad that this isn’t noticeable. if it was, she would almost be embarrassed. “yeah. i’m fine. will, uh, took care of me. after the party, i mean. i had a concussion.” her eyes still focus above jade’s head, and not right at her, and the tension she hadn’t realized was built up in her shoulders lessens as she watches a cloud in the sky float above them. “hows your, ah, bruised ass?”

“Thanks,” Jade nods. “I get that a lot.” She’s tongue in cheek, because for some reason, her usual animated self has become replaced with something withered and forlorn, like a favorite stuffed animal stuck in the attic next to dead flowers. She resorts back to age twelve when this happens. In between the chaos comes the valley of guilt, of not wanting to be a bother. Her eyebrows raise at the mention of Will and care in the same sentence that Jade almost scoffs, though she doesn’t because she doesn’t feel like thinking about him for too long. Didn’t know he had it in him, she wants to say. Instead, her brows furrow. “Jesus. Did you go to the clinic at all? Concussions are real serious. That’s why the NFL is a scam, all their football players get their heads knocked and then their brain damage fucks them up. Or maybe they’re like that because they’re men,” she muses, going slightly off topic. “Ha. This bruised ass is... fine. I’m kind of used to hurting myself with skateboarding and fucking around all that. I’m basically indestructible.”

The laptop fan’s steady hum is joined with the sounds of whichever Scream sequel they’ve arrived at by now, forcing the sounds of the room further along the white noise spectrum. Jade is trying to get at his eyes and he bats her away, a fresh wave of irritation washing over him. She’s smirking at him. Last he checked she hated him – he doesn’t know when they graduated to her lingering in his dorm after they fuck, watching movies. “Why do you do the things that you do?” He asks her. “I mean, why the fuck are you here? You don’t wanna be here. You hate me. I hate you. That’s why this works. That was the basis of this goddamn arrangement. I’m willing to accept that sometimes people go a little fuckin’ loopy on halloween but this is really fuckin’ weird.” He sighs and rubs his eyes with his hands as if it might clear his vision even though his vision is already clear. “You– What the fuck you looking for? If it’s anything good, you can’t fuckin’ find it here. Don’t you wanna be happy, Jade? I mean– What, you think this is gonna go somewhere good? It’s not. You’re from the state of goddamn Massachusetts. My family’d never go for it. And–” He runs a hand through his hair. “This is supposed to be nothing. I know I sound like a fuckin’ prick but– You know I’m a fuckin’ prick anyway. Feels like it’s getting all fuckin’ murky on your end.” The sight of her is depressing him – she looks wan and stretched thin, restless and tired simultaneously, and Will can understand that, can even sympathize, which is the only thing that drives him to tack on an addendum that is probably less honest: “Maybe we end up friends someday – I don’t fuckin’ know,” he says. He can’t shake the feeling of– What is it? Pity? Will is so often unsuccessful when it comes to the labelling of his own emotions. “But I mean, what the fuck, Jade. Seriously. I don’t fuckin’ care, but this is… Weird.” It’s so much more than he’d been expecting himself to say.

“Jesus fucking christ, I asked you a question. It could’ve been an easy yes, get the fuck out of my room or not yet, I haven’t squeezed all the cum out of my dick yet,” she hisses. “You are so fucking dramatic. I’m... sorry for bothering you so goddamn much, okay? Is that what you wanna hear? Maybe I thought me sticking around was going to lead us to being... okay. You act like we’re filled with rage all the time. You made me fucking pasta this week. This isn’t the first time we’ve just hung out. You know that you and I are able to just... exist together. If you hated it so goddamn much you could easily cut things off. Whenever you wanted. You have plenty of other people you can fuck and leave for dead around here.” She is confused, and angry, and she can feel her cheeks turning pink and warm because the conflicts between them were never really conflicts, but rather incessant bickering and teasing. She would rather die than have Will know that she cries if she gets very angry. It never helped her as a child and it wasn’t going to help her now. “Ah, you know what? I haven’t been genuinely happy in my entire life, I think. Thanks for asking. And now you’re going to go on some bullshit about how you’re not good for me or something? I already fucking knew that, don’t worry.” She focuses her attention to a loose thread on his sweater instead of his face and clutches a pillow to her chest. An awkward beat passes. She can almost hear his breathing. Her voice is small. “God, what does being from Massachusetts have to do anything with this? Fuck, I get it. It’s not like I was ever good for you either. Or, like good enough. For anyone. Yeah. This is exactly why this fucking works,” she huffs, swallowing a nasty thought, crossing her legs into her chest and watching the screen. Anywhere but his face. “I don’t not want to be your friend, you know. I don’t not want to be someone that... you like. I’m not so much of a cunt that I want to fuck you and ruin your life. Sorry that I let it get so far that I’m just this...” She didn’t have the words to describe what her role is. There was a comfort in being used, sometimes. It was supposed to be nothing, he was right. Her body felt hot -- she was not about to belittle herself in front of him. Not even for the sake of her habit of always wanting more, of drinking someone else dry until this was how they viewed her. Someone to pity. Someone to hate. She wishes he would stop looking at her because she feels like her skin is burning. She finally stares back, blue eyes empty and no longer full of wrath but... soft. Flat. “I know it’s out of character but I don’t feel like fuckin’ fighting with you. I’ll leave you with your peace.”

selene is annoyed. selene is annoyed because she is walking through the quad, tea in one hand and three large textbooks in the other, about to sit down at her favorite bench, when she runs smack into someone else. a low groan rumbles in the back of her throat, but that is the extent to which she complains. actually, she is about to apologize, until she looks up and meets jade’s face. another groan escapes her lips. it’s true that she used to get along much better with jade, but ever since the incident in the trap room, her opinion of the girl has gone regrettably down the drain. selene has low tolerance for irrationality. maybe this is her fatal flaw. she has half a mind to just walk away and leave the other girl standing there, but then she sees that all of her tea has spilled in front of her, and she cannot help herself. “you ask to get pushed into a hole i was trapped in. you wore a fedora, which hurt my eyes. now you knock me over. do you have it out for me? or is this like, an attention thing?” @jadevassr​

“I was kidding! And she did it and it threw me off guard! Clearly if I were to stage a fall I wouldn’t have bruised my ass on purpose. It hurts to sit down, Selene. Your pain is my pain,” Jade throws her hands in the air in surrender. She frowns at the tea stain, which somewhat makes Jade look like she had peed her jeans and makes Selena look like she was sprayed with a light hose. “I’m sorry. I can get you another tea,” she sighs. She isn’t sure if she’s apologizing for the running into Selene or apologizing for being a terror. Regardless, she means it earnestly, which she doesn’t often do, mostly because no one usually takes her seriously anyways. Her guilt is like that of a little kid’s. “Are you... feeling okay after that mess at least? Good on Will and Anna to play Mulder and Scully and find you.”

“So, like,” Lana began, right after pouncing onto the table of a picnic bench she’d spotted Jade at, flaming heart on her tank top straining against the fact it was a size too small, alive and roaring as the one in her chest. “Apparently you hurled yourself down some, like, weird, black chasm at the party, vag first, and landed on Will’s head. Almost swallowed him whole. That totally wouldn’t have been cool, Jade. Will’s my friend, you can’t just gobble him up with your labias. I would’ve been super frowny face about it.” Plucking off her sunglasses – this pair, novelty as many of them tended to be, shaped like flamingos – Lana folded down the arms, lips pressed into a line like she was attempting ‘serious’. It still tended to look like a laugh, with Lana, verging on the brink of grinning with all of her teeth. You could serve a Pornstar Martini in a champagne flute and it wouldn’t change the contents. “What’s the deal? Do you have a 127 Hours kink or something?” @jadevassr​

“That is disgusting imagery, Lana,” Jade replies. She fixes herself onto her back to the picnic bench, putting her head into Lana’s lap as she puffs a cigarette. She frowns. “Reverse birth! How, ummm, Catholic. Or the opposite, really. It wouldn’t be the first time he was headfirst in my vagina, though.” She takes the sunglasses from Lana and puts them on herself, which is a rather comical sight because Jade is wearing all black and going through one of her pseudo-punk phases. She pales in comparison to Lana’s colorful presence despite the fact they are usually on the same wavelength. “No, but I do have a Holes kink. I have plenty of sex dreams about riding Shia Labeouf in a desert hole amongst a crowd of rattlesnakes. Augie fucking pushed me. I was only half-kidding about wanting to throw myself down a hole. If it wasn’t for the barstool I’m sure Will would’ve left me for dead.”

he picks the crumpled paper up, throwing it back at jade with all the force he’s capable of. it misses her by a bare inch because will doesn’t really care enough to aim it properly, bouncing off one of the blank walls – will isn’t much of an interior decorator – with a light thwacking sound. it lands somewhere on the floor but will doesn’t bother looking for it. he’s returned his attention to his textbook already. “who the fuck let you in here again?” neve campbell’s voice wafts gently from the laptop screen at the edge of the bed, or maybe it’s not neve campbell – will may be able to tell the difference between the two most frequently shown faces onscreen, but that doesn’t mean he’s attached names to them. he thinks about pushing jade off the bed. he has a headache. her tapping the bruise on her leg draws his attention back to it, briefly. it doesn’t look that old. must be from the party. “how the fuck,” he says, really piling all the emphasis on the word ‘fuck’, “did you fall in? how’d you fuckin’ manage that?”

“You did,” Jade retorts, throwing daggers at him. She finds that Will is very pretty for someone who seems to be so full of hatred. Well, for her at least. She wonders why she’s there for the first time in a while. She thinks about wrestling him now. Instead, she points her pointer finger and middle finger and attempts to poke his eyes out, though this is not received particularly well. “I was pushed by Augie, obviously,” she smirks. “Maybe I did ask for it but I didn’t think the bitch was going to do it. Otherwise I would’ve braced my fall and prevented this gnarly bruise. Sorry for barging in on your rescue parade and dulling the romance. Christ.” She has been very volatile lately, and the last party didn’t help, and now Jade often feels like she stumbles along people’s rooms for a fuck or a ghostly presence. She’s not really there. There is always a disconnect between the people she spends time with, or lack thereof. Something stirs inside her. She tries not to look at him, instead fixing an intense gaze on the screen. “Do you want me to leave?”

Old white dress shirt soaked with red food-dye as makeshift fake blood, a grossly inebriated Izzy was stumbling through fur and pearls as he was avoiding an imminent altercation, already narrowly dodging a few punches from a guy whose girlfriend he had somehow simultaneously hit on and insulted. Losing his balance, he clutched onto the shoulders of a poor victim of his antics as he stared into their eyes with his bloodshot ones. “Dude, you gotta help me out,” he demanded, his tone so serious you’d think it a life or death situation, and, frankly, to him, it was. “You need to hide me. Like, now. Please. I’ll do anything. Like, you know how Lady Gaga said she’d wash Judas’ feet? Yeah. Something of that equivalent.” @yatesstarters​

“What did you do now?” Jade smirked, amused by the boy’s constant state of trouble and frivolousness, which often mirrored her own, though Izzy was somehow much more talented in taking the role of a cartoon character running from the conflict at hand. Over the years, she’d gotten more aloof with her antics, though whenever they were partners in crime, the results were always explosive. “You need me to put a hit on someone? I got connects,” she said, waving the toy gun in her hand. She was surprised these were allowed at the event and no one had gotten wrongfully arrested yet. “That’ll be twelve grand. And infinite vodka sours from the bar. The drink ticket’s probably over the max now.”

will glances up. his expression hasn’t moved from where it last was; it’s still relatively blank, though that doesn’t change much. he takes in jade’s eyeliner, the fedora she’s holding in her hands, and maybe if he were a better person he might ask why she looks so crestfallen, but he isn’t particularly good, nor is he known for his empathy, and he doesn’t. “wait, but if you’re godfather, and i’m godfather, who’s flying the plane?” he’s trying to figure out what kind of an accent she’s trying to pull off because it’s definitely from somewhere on the east coast but that’s about as far as he can narrow it down. she looks sharp and pallid, the eyeliner upping the contrast of her, and she looks worn. she sounds like she’s quoting something, but he can’t for the life of him figure out what it is. not that that’s surprising – will’s seen a movie or two in his lifetime, but he doesn’t make a habit of it. “what, you wanna fuck? just say let’s fuck,” he says. “it’s simpler. but nah, not right now. you look depressed as shit.” he offers her the rest of his drink. yeah, they fuckin’ hate each other, but he figures it’s the least he can do. it’s a good drink.

“Godparents,” Jade raises an eyebrow, making her face look sharper than before. She looks almost masculine, which is funny because her face always possesses a girlish quality in her cheeks and doll-like nose. Looking back at one other is liking looking in a mirror sometimes, though Jade feels that she is imitating Will in her stoicism. They always share the same fluoride stare. She imagines this is how Will would look at a funeral in a fever dream where he’s a lot more rugged. Despite his temperament she found him to be as delicate at her, physically at least, because he was tall and slender and willowy and... pretty. It was annoying. She rolls her eyes at his comment. “Got that out of my system about an hour ago,” she lies. In reality, she didn’t fuck anyone, but instead entertained a random sophomore to the point of giving the boy emotional blue balls. Maybe it was cruel of her. She didn’t care. She takes his drink and downs the rest of it quickly. “Round two is all yours, I guess. Sorry that I look so desolate, jeez. It’s the makeup and negative effects of all the mafia violence I’ve been through. What, you fuck me because of my sparkling happy-go-lucky energy?”

her hands are suddenly extremely interesting. it is not that selene doesn’t care about what jade is going on about, or even that she isn’t listening, because she does, and she is. it’s just that she doesn’t know what jade is talking about, can’t relate on any level, not literally or even metaphorically. this, admittedly, happens to her a lot. she never felt twelve so she doesn’t know what it’s like to feel twelve again or anything close to it. so she stares at her hands and nods solemnly. the question at the end of the rant surprises her, and she looks up. “what’s my deal with what?” the look in her eyes is kind of bewildered and she can’t really place a finger on it, but there is something about jade that confuses her. selene spends her time observing everyone, and she thinks she’s got most of the yates population down— she’s an expert on their behaviors and habits— but she cannot get a grip on jade and she doesn’t know why. sometimes she seems more like the fragments of a girl than a girl, and maybe this is why her ranting and disconnectedness doesn’t come as a surprise to selene. “i find that becoming okay with yourself helps. with feeling disconnected, i mean. you have to learn to be alone before you can learn to be with people, i think. i don’t know. maybe a psych major would be a better confidant.”

“Sorry. Sort of a rash question, I just realized,” Jade blinks at the bewildered girl. It often occurs to her a bit too late that perhaps she needs a filter, and maybe her speeches of grandiose delusions freak people out. Nothing in her head entirely made sense to her either, though it definitely fit with all the other moving parts inside of her. Jade sees Selene as an opposite at this moment, in which the girl has the coldness of a pristine blade while Jade is the violence that could come from the sharp edge. She puts out the cherry of her cigarette into the dirt from a nearby potted rubber plant, touching a leaf and scoffing at its actual plasticity. Being okay with yourself. Jade sometimes felt okay with herself if the sun’s out, or maybe she feels like God, or maybe she hates herself to the point of driving her body into the nearest train. It all feels quite similar lately. “Thanks for the advice,” Jade nods, swallowing. Her mouth tastes bitter, like pennies and the aftertaste of tobacco. “Mm. Love a good brainpicking by a psych major. One time I fucked one and found out he was actually a TA. Very into Freud, from what I saw on his bookshelf. What’s your major? I’m getting.... neuroscience vibes. Or English. Something cataclysmically big brain. That’s a compliment, by the way.”

Donning one of his father’s hand-me-down suits—which weren’t really hand-me-downs at all, just pieces sent to the Sokolov house by up-and-coming designers that Ivan Sokolov declared inadequate upon arrival—Romeo leaned against a banister with a kill me! expression. It was humbling, really, to become the person you used to laugh at. “Not to be a Debbie Downer or anything, but whoever hired the pianist should go to jail. That man,” Romeo said, jabbing a finger at the figure hunched over the piano. “Looks like he just walked out of a funeral parlor. Should I ask him where he was when the Titanic sunk?”

“Can you do any better?” Jade smirked. “I kind of want to request Bella’s Lullaby. Something to shake the ass to.” She curled her fingers around her champagne flute, which wasn’t nearly enough to fit the amount of alcohol she wanted to consume. She wished the party was actually themed to what she craved -- blood and guts and things that were monstrous. Of course Yates organized another event with opportunity for suits and high heels. Jade wanted to be a zombie. “He looks like Nosferatu. It’s kind of hot. You ever seen that one, Sokolav? You’re a pretty good runner-up to him.”

considering the fact that selene’s whole outfit came as an inspiration from the godfather, she feels a little taken back. there’s no way jade could have known this, of course, but her feet still shift awkwardly beneath her. “how could you not give a shit about the godfather? it’s the godfather,” she frowns, takes a small sip from the lemonade clutched in her hand. in fact, the outfit she’s wearing is a weird interpretation of michael corleone’s first wife. or, at least, it started that way. sometime a week ago she started binge watching the sopranos and then suddenly the fur coat and dark lips got added into the equation. she’s also been playing around with a jersey accent all night. she considers attempting a sicilian one, but she doesn’t think she can do it justice, so she decides to drop the accents entirely. “which cunts? i think you have to be more specific than that.”

“You’re right, actually. I am extremely horny for Al Pacino,” Jade muses, deadpan, lost in thought as her gaze sits unfixed into the air and not at the girl in front of her. She laughs, cackles really, tipping her cigarette as if it was attached to a holder. Her laugh is like a transatlantic femme fatale. Her loose blazer says otherwise. “Anyone! Everyone! Selene, don’t you feel so fucking disconnected from everyone at this godforsaken school? I think that’s the root of all my current evil. I feel alien. I feel twelve again. I want to dance on tables and set shit on fire and I couldn’t really tell you the names of three of my closest friends because everyone here is clique-y and goddamn volatile. Sorry to dump this on you, I’m usually trying to try out this gangster aloofness thing. Tell me -- what’s your deal?”