fear brings obliteration.

miidnighters won’t you wrap the night around me ?

“Went grocery shopping today. Two blocks over.”

Yeah, that’s a cunty answer too.

Vodka, clear and cold, scours her wound like a little river over a fresh ravine. Feyd tracks the runoff beading by her clavicle, and with a small, reptileish flick, catches the next droplet.

That’s what he is, tonight— a tongue and a mouth, hyperspecialized, mercenary, just a composite of hungers. Her blood is a side channel to whatever lizard thing sits below his ribs, hissing satisfaction.

delivered gently, though the mental image is intrusive enough to knock something slightly askew.

she can’t imagine him eating. or shopping. or doing anything, really— except this. performing. embodying a concept. the thought of feyd being just as pedestrian as anyone else seemed borderline sacrilege. worse: unappealing.

it reads all over her face.

“as long as your dick’s not falling off, i guess it’s fine.”

jackie’s thighs flex; wet and needy at their apex. she lets her weight rest heavy on his lap— considers that he’s lying about everything, that maybe she hopes for as much. her hand collects around his throat. the pain throbs.

ugh.

“roman, i need you to understand that every time you learn a new phrase from a podcast, a kitten gets run over by a dump truck.”

and why was he still pretending that he was above the girlboss bullshit? slap a bun on his head and give him a wellness brand deal and he’d be indistinguishable from every other new mom with an entrepreneurial spirit.

“also, she's not hot-hot. she's rich-person hot. completely different category,” she's hunched forward, elbows on the table, “like a boca do lobo piece. you look at it and go, wow, that's expensive. not wow, i wanna fuck that.”

this is really bothering her.

she snatches the up-until-now unacknowledged menu and pretends to peruse through it.

Real Ari unveils now. And the only thing she can grasp for something common is their reason for both being here and not wanting to be here. Fathers.

She finishes her drink.

❛ It is my father's event. ❜

An Ora invite as the same currency and gravity as a Kennedy's. And she's about nearing the allotted time she should show face. She's got one eye on him and another on the pool in the backyard (or the idea of it, since its far out of guest view).

the noise from the party swells and fades around them, tidal-like. ari glances toward the house, where some cluster of investors were undoubtedly congratulating themselves for existing, then back to hara. he kept up with the papers. knew who she was, mostly by word of mouth. but proximity made her lucent; a knock-out in ways a photo could never do justice.

“no, i don’t want you to leave me alone.”

but he wouldn’t blame her if she did.

the admission seems to annoy him a little.

“i’m sorry. i’m being an asshole.”

he drops the butt of his cigarette into a half-empty flute of champagne.

SUMMER  HAD  BEGUN  BULDOZING  OVER  SPRING,  air  clinging  heavy  to  everything,  muggy  as  sin,  faint  song  of  cicadas  bleeding  through  the  open  garage  door.  fluorescent  lights  buzzed  faintly  overhead,  and  she’s  stewing  in  contemplation,  nearly  all  the  live  long  day  in  fact.  her  choice  in  blame  on  the  matter  walked  back  through  the  bay,  the  business  end  of  a  socket  wrench  pointed  toward  him.  ❛ I  got  a  bone  to  pick  with  you.  ❜ ACCUSATION  DRAWLED  OUT  THICK  AS  HONEY. 

barely a head-lift at first; all manner of envelopes stacked in hand. he cards through them while listening with one ear, the pinch-pull between brows deepening with the reveal of a fresh round of debt to be paid off by summer’s end. six thousand to their regional supplier. another few to fix the hydraulic crusher out back. overdue taxes on the land itself because his brother’s a dumbass who lost the notice. twice.

he sighs. looks up.

“i told junie to keep savin’ her dollars,” he fans hanna jo with the stack, fully focused now on her sugar-lite reprimand. “for when she really needs ‘em … ‘course i told her, by the time she’s big like me, she’ll have cash enough to buy every stuffed animal at the store.” he taps his temple, forward thinker, and flashes a smile, boots scuffing the dirty garage floor. this close, he could count her freckles.

he could do a lotta things.

instead, he slips the socket wrench from her hand.

battle of the egos. roman’s is pin-balling off the walls; she’s already won. the tip of her heel nudges his ankle— gentle once, then jutting at the tendons. there’s something grossly endearing about his worminess; the power he concedes for nothing. it was probably true that his connections were more formidable than her own in a corpo legalese bullshit sort of way, but there was something to be said for the optics of public opinion. being roman roy’s friend was expensive. the least he could do was indulge her.

And then.

I'm not in the mood to talk, he considers saying, but that would be letting her into his thoughts and feelings in a way he's determined is too risky. Admittedly, he enjoys the mysterious older man schtick. It is remarkable that she still attempts to connect with him at all.

Max takes off his glasses. He sets them down gently; they barely make a sound against the table.

fuller. louder, now. bitten off at the end as if she were thinking of something else. this was how it always went. how it would always go.

what was she even doing here?

“is she prettier than me?”

“I mean, you ever met an ‘Agonia’ in the wild?” Snatches the blunt back and licks her teeth, tongue lingering, a pantomime wolf. “It’s a fucking stage name. You think I’d survive grade school with that on my report card?”

She folds a knee up, plants a boot on the table, underlying menace in the tread marks embossing faded Formica.

but he’d met a bullchuck, a temperance, and more than one don pedro, so who’s to say? they were in the land of the weird and wonderful.

“a-go-nia,” he rolls it around, index and thumb still pinched, bereft and deflating. stage name … the concept of pulling a chick who had more than a part-time at the piggly wiggly made both heads swell. he knee-knocks her, grinning.