#cc week

It’s been seven months since his last book was published.  It came only a year after the first, written in five months and through editing and publishing in four more and then put on hold for three to make a summer release.  But this one... nothing.

He took a vacation.  He went on another vacation.  He went to foreign places and tiny rural towns and big historical cities where everyone spoke a language he couldn’t understand and even back home (which was a mistake-- he may have gotten inspiration for The Land of Stories as a child, but the third part was not lurking in his childhood sheets).  He’s onto Plan F: packing up everything and moving to another city.

New York is where he always thought he’d end up, and even the slushy remnants of winter don’t deter him from going through with his decision.  But inevitably, as in every place he’s gone to chase inspiration, after a couple of weeks he feels like he’s seen every skyscraper and tourist trap and interesting person in the city and still hasn’t written anything of worth.

He wanders into a seedy-looking thrift shop late on a Thursday afternoon, the most promising spot on this block.  It’s just on the cusp of spring, the people on the street still mistrusting, wearing their winter coats, but the sunlight is clear and bright after the flat grey of winter, and Chris is feeling lucky today.

Though the store is stifling and musty, Chris can’t help but think there’s a certain charm.  He spends time in the silky scarves, thinking of royalty and a castle full of finery.  He nearly loses himself running his fingers over the fur coats and stoles that are in the process of being moved back into the farthest reaches of the store, thinking of beasts lurking in the woods.  There’s a broach that looks nearly magical once he rubs most of the dust off, but nothing feels like he has to buy it.

There’s no one behind the glass display case that also serves as the sales counter, and Chris looks around curiously, realizing for the first time that there’s no one working-- the store seems to be deserted except for him.

There’s a shelf full of old cameras, and he wonders if any of them are still working.  They have to be at least thirty years old.  Though the city is beautiful, Chris knows he couldn’t capture it any better than hundreds of thousands of photographers have already done, so he moves on.

He nearly misses it, nestled deep in a display of broken cuckoo clocks and taken-apart toasters.  In a way it feels like he couldn’t have missed it, though, like it was meant to happen all along.

“Oh, yes,” he breathes, moving as close to the glass as he can without smudging it with his nose.  It’s beautiful, really, REMINGTON 5 emblazoned across the back.  The typewriter is probably the one item in the entire shop not covered in dust, and the black lacquer gleams bright among the dull, rusty metal that surrounds it.

He leans over the counter, trying to read the price tag half- hidden under the machine when a crash from the back room makes him scramble back.

“God, these furs are like fifty pounds each! Who the hell would wear them outside of Russia?” a disembodied voice gripes, low-pitched but decidedly female.

“H-hello?” Chris tries, willing down the rapid beat of his heart.

“Welcome to Diamond in the Rough,” the voice says again, and the young woman it belongs to finally emerges from around the full-to-bursting shelves.  “I’m Ashley.”

“Chris,” he says, managing a smile.  She has the air of someone he would not like to be on the bad side of.  “I was wondering… this typewriter?”

“Oh yeah,” she nods, slipping back behind the counter.  “That one hasn’t been here long.  A lady came in here begging for me to take it off her hands, didn’t even try to haggle the price.”

That makes Chris pause.  “Did she… say why?”

Ashley shrugs, bending down to pull the typewriter out and set it heavily on the counter.  “Maybe she had just landed a big book deal, who knows.  If I waited for the story behind every single item that crossed this counter I’d be working 24/7.  So do you want this or not?”

Off-put by her gruff change of subject, Chris quickly checks the price properly and digs for his wallet.

He feels a little silly lugging it down the street, the machine just heavy and bulky enough that there’s no good way to carry it.  But under that timid spring sun, fingers still a little numb in the c hill of the breeze and his shoulders starting to ache, Chris feels the first tickle of potential.

--

It takes googling and several phone calls to find a place that services typewriters, and more than one clerk laughs outright at his question.  But he lugs the big thing into a cab and plunks it on the counter, finds it’s almost in perfect order except for a sticky shift key.

He gets a new ink ribbon and the keys lubricated and a ream of paper sent to his apartment, not trusting the bellhop and instead carefully carrying the typewriter himself up the three flights of stairs to its new permanent home.  It still doesn’t feel right to call it his desk, just like it’s not his apartment and maybe will never be his city, but the desk still seats the best view in the whole space faces the wide, single-pane window that had sold him on the apartment.  And aesthetically, the typewriter definitely evokes a picturesque writing area much more easily than his Macbook did.

Loading up a sheet of paper like the store technician showed him takes four tries, and even typing a simple sentence on the heavy, metallic keys feels like an eternity of torture to someone who once averaged over 100 words a minute.

“What-- the fuck--” Chris huffs in exertion, pulling his hands back in surprise when the bell rings, spooking him.  “Ookay then,” he says under his breath, pushing the carriage back with a scrape like the technician told him.

He types poems and monologues from memory, opens the first Land of Stories and retypes just for practice.  Between bites of take-out from his favorite Indian place he plays with different lines and snippets from characters he’s spent two books exploring, ones he’s still figuring out how to work into his next one, ones that have merely lived in his head for years.

His floor is littered with sheets of paper, some crumpled and most  just flung in irritation without any reason or intention.  There’s half a dozen remnants of scenes he’ll put in order later, but they’re no use to him now.  He always knows most of the main points, the general outcome of the story.  It’s the details he’s missing, the rhythm and melody of words that make it something worth reading and not just bare, hollow bones.

The world outside his window is long dark by the time he gets tired, nodding off right at his desk and jerking awake, stumbling blearily to take out his burning contacts and leaving a half-typed piece of paper still loaded.

Though he’s tucked warmly into bed, the clicking tap of keys, the cheery ding! and mechanical grind of reloading paper ring through his dreams like he was still sitting at the desk.

--

The sunlight is even stronger the next day, and Chris wakes up with the sunrise instead of going to sleep with it for the first time in a while.  It feels good, no artificial noise jarring him awake, a long shower that stays hot longer than usual, drinking a Diet Coke completely naked just because he can.

He tugs on his favorite pair of sweatpants before he walks over to his desk, though, not taking a chance on the early morning runners in the park outside his window seeing more than they bargained for.  Nearly busting his ass slipping on the mess of papers makes him pause to clean them up, laughing at some of the nonsense there.

Jamming them all in his trash can, he goes back with a fresh stack of paper, stopping when he sees a page he missed, stuck in the typewriter.  He turns the knob to roll the paper out and is halfway to the trashcan before the last paragraph makes him stop.

There’s only two things that Darren loves to share with another person more than ideas, and that’s sharing music and bodily fluids.  (The sexy way, that is.) 

He never, ever shares food.

He reads the rest of the page, and it all sounds familiar, but not quite like the paragraph about this Darren character does.  He wrote off a dozen or more little meaningless drafts the night before, and though this one is fresh, it doesn’t sit the same way.  It’s not a character whose story he knows backwards and forwards, like Carson, and not a character for a set purpose but without a clearly defined past or future, like Mrs. Peters.  He can only remember it happening once before, with Froggy, but Darren feels like one of those characters that come fully-formed, patiently ready to tell Chris their story as he types it onto the page.

Chris mulls it over, lets his fingers skitter over the keys.  His agent is always harping on deadlines, but maybe this is why the words just haven’t come like they once did.  Maybe it’s because this story has been fighting for his attention, demanding to be told even as he was trying to force Land of Stories 3 out onto the page.

It’s worth a shot, he thinks.  Even if he wastes a week, two weeks, on this, it’s worth it for a chance to stop feeling like a failure, struggling for what was once so simple.

He gets up, gets another Diet Coke from the fridge, and pulls his stack of blank paper closer.

--

Darren is 29, dealing with the fact that he still hasn’t found any motivation to settle down and become an adult.  Darren’s mom is still on his bank account, gives him $200 every month no matter how much he protests, still does upkeep on the hatchback he drove in high school that’s still parked in his parents’ driveway.  His life feels like a ticking timebomb, the dreaded thirtieth birthday coming all too quickly to crush his dreams of being a performer forever.  Thirty-somethings don’t get record deals, thirty-somethings don’t sell out arenas.  Thirty-somethings don’t break into Broadway.  A few do, Darren knows, but he hasn’t felt much like an exception for a while now.

Darren lives in New York City, his last ditch effort to make something of himself.  His apartment is small.  Sometimes he misses the constant movement and noise of having roommates, but when the ones he’d had since right after college all moved out to start their own families, he didn’t have the heart to find any others.  His neighbors keep him busy though, the family upstairs with the dog that runs back and forth and the couple next door being entirely too loud and reminding him just how lonely he is.

But-- he could never be completely alone, not in this city, and the burgeoning promise of spring is like a new beginning.  Darren feels like he’s coming alive as the seasons change, the trees budding with tiny green leaves and the first flowers opening up.  He takes his winter coat off way too soon and there are goose bumps making his skin crawl deliciously and there’s actual sunshine and he runs full sprint through the park still dressed in his dirty work clothes, not giving a fuck who sees him, smiling for the first time in what feels like a lifetime.

--

Chris starts seeing the sunrise before he goes to bed again, but this time it’s because the words are pouring out of him and he can’t seem to get them down fast enough.

He’s still not quite an expert at using his typewriter, and he has to invest in a wrist brace after a few nights of icing his joints.  There’s mistakes all through the stack of pages he’s managed to make and there’s White-Out all under his fingernails, but the high of creating is too addictive to stop now.

He doesn’t even know where this story he’s winding is going, and instead of terrifying him, it’s exciting.

--

Darren’s friends, the ones who are all married or getting close and constantly use the phrase “When you find someone like I did,” convince him to go to one of their bachelor parties, promising it’ll be an authentic experience.  After the last three had quickly turned into trading stories of girlfriends and partners and though Darren could never admit it to the friends he so dearly loves, he can’t sit through it again.

This one though, brings the promise of bar hopping in a party bus that’s just for them, and the variety on the list that Joey rattles off to him on the phone is impressive.  It’s been entirely too long since he did anything at night besides order in and check the tuning on one or two of the instruments taking over the entire back wall of his living room.

So he goes, not even sure what people wear to a club anymore, fussing over whether to shave or not, whether he should wear jeans or slacks.  Joey practically has to tie his shoes for him just to get him out the door on time, slinging an arm around his shoulders and steering him on the dark bus that’s blaring pop music from a decade ago.

“We’re both gonna hold down the single fort with all these old fogies, dude, I promise,” Joey says, too-loud in his ear as he gets shoved into the dark bus and a sloshing shot glass thrust into his hand.  He knocks it back readily, making a face at the unpleasant burn.

“Who the fuck chose tequila?” Darren yells into the small crowd, smiling when they all yell back, enveloping him in a hug.

It’s easy to find willing dance partners everywhere they go, with no ring on his finger and no restraint.  He takes them as they come and as they go, hard planes of a muscled chest to lean into, then soft shoulders curving into him, hair that smells like hairspray and perfume tickling his nose.  He can ignore most hazards of club dancing, the drinks sloshing, the “accidental” inappropriate touching, but he’s slipping past pleasantly buzzed and into solidly drunk when a guy starts running his hands all over his body without his permission.  Darren pulls away, but the guy comes back, hands even more insistent than before.

“No,” Darren says thickly, grabbing the guy’s wrists and tugging.  “Not cool, man.”

He’s tossed from one body to another, face-first into another chest that smells and feels familiar, now.  “Joey,” he chokes out, clinging tight to his shirt.  “Joey, man.”

“It’s okay, buddy,” Joey says, and it’s not until the blast of cold air hits his face does Darren realize he’s crying uncontrollably.

Joey gets him far enough away from the club and lets him cling and cry and doesn’t ask questions, just rubs Darren’s back, asks if he can call him a cab.

By the time it gets there, Darren is angry, would have thrown a punch at the brick wall of the building if Joey hadn’t stopped him.

“What’s wrong with me?” he can’t stop saying, stomach rolling and head swimming and two seconds from puking in the bushes when Joey waves the cab on, walks him back instead.

--

Chris doesn’t even realize he’s blown off his agent more than once until his phone rings off the hook for half an hour straight.

“H-hello?” he grinds out, clearing his throat.

“Ah, Chris.  Nice to finally hear from you.”

He can’t lie to her, not when she’s given him basically everything.  He half-answers as best he can and just promises her over and over that he’s finally getting somewhere.

Chris looks over at the stack of pages, nearly as thick as a novel now.  He knows most people wouldn’t see it as worth anything, and she probably wouldn’t either, but writing about Darren, learning about him—it’s helping.  So much.

“Trust me,” Chris begs when she’s silent for too long.  “I’m going to make my deadline. I promise.”

“I suppose I have no other choice but to trust you. Don’t let me down.”

Chris could never.

--

Darren finally talks to the girl who studies in the library every night.  He picked up the weekday graveyard shift on a whim when he graduated college at that university, and then he stuck around.  He keeps a brochure for the graduate program in music tucked under the ancient keyboard at his work desk, keeps the online application bookmarked there, but that’s all.

She comes in every night at nine and doesn’t leave until at least two am, bleary-eyed and trudging out to her car.  Darren’s thought more than once about offering to walk her out, but that seemed so forward.

It just feels like taking a little more control of his life, now, asking her about the book she’s checking out, about her senior thesis and her post-grad plans.  It’s not a phone number or anything, and honestly just talking to her makes him feel like a leering creepy uncle or something, but it’s a start. It’s the tiniest step of progress.  That’s always good.

He calls his brother, sends gifts to his nieces just because.  He makes profuse apologies for friends’ birthdays he’s missed over the last three months and dusts off his violin, looks up auditions, thinks about hiring another agent.  He lets himself cry again on the phone with his mother, lets her gentle words take root in his heart where he’d been foolishly deflecting them for months.

Being an adult isn’t in age, he realizes, laughing at some story of his cousin and curling up at the warmth of his mother’s laugh.  Being an adult doesn’t mean he doesn’t need help, or he’s got it all figured out.  Maybe being an adult isn’t as easy as leveling up in a game, maybe it’s just… something he’ll always be working on.  Maybe that’s okay.

--

Chris spends a lot of time watching the park outside his window as the weather gets warmer and warmer, babies strapped into strollers and children in play clothes and teenagers in private school uniforms, walking hand-in-hand after school lets out.

He finds himself looking for someone that reminds him of Darren, as silly as it is.  The image of Darren in his mind is more shape and feeling than it is color and texture, but Chris has this notion that if he just saw Darren, he’d recognize him.

It’s nonsense, but it’s all Chris can think about, looking over the park even as his fingers are still moving restlessly over the typewriter keys.  So, whether it was him influencing the story or just how it was meant to happen all along, Darren starts going to the park.

--

Darren feels a little out of place among the couples and families at the park on a Saturday afternoon, but the weather is gorgeous and the flowers are in full bloom and he couldn’t stay away if he tried.

He decides to lap around the park on the sidewalk, shaking falling tree blossoms out of his too-long hair as he goes.  It’s strange to walk on the outside, with the bustle and grime of the city on one side and the green oasis of the park on the other, but he likes feeling a little on-edge.  The twist in his stomach feels like excitement.

--

Chris nearly misses it, glancing back and forth between the page in front of him and the park out the window, but—there he is.

“Darren,” he half-yells, standing up to get a better look.  Late twenties, curly hair, thick-rimmed glasses, quirky and clean-cut sense of style—he had decided on none of those things until now, looking at the man outside his window, but it’s exactly what he had in mind.  Chris makes a mental note to go back and add to the description at the beginning of this crazy story he’s been writing down.

He can’t stop himself from wishing that in-the-flesh-Darren would walk past his window again, glancing down at his abandoned page and then back out to where he can just barely make him out between the trees.

Sitting down heavily, Chris puts his hands up at the keyboard again, skimming back over his page to get back into the groove and immediately pulling his hands back to cover his mouth.

Darren-in-the-flesh had been doing—exactly what Darren-in-his-story was doing.

“Coincidences happen every day!” Chris says out loud, near-hysteric even to his own ears.  “And god, now I’m talking to myself.  I just wrote what I saw, he must have walked by twenty minutes ago and I saw, subconsciously…”  He trails off, mind reeling.  And then he types again.

--

The signal changes right as he gets to the intersection, and without thought Darren takes the crosswalk, moving away from the park.  This residential section is all smaller apartments, just like the one a few blocks over where he lives.

He stops in front of the building with the painted brick exterior and the revolving door.  He looks curiously into the lobby, reads over the names on the buzzer plate.

--

Chris takes two deep breaths, then another.  He’s gone completely nuts, he’s going to have to find a new psychiatrist and move back in with his parents for this one.

He puts one bracing hand on the window, steels his nerves, looks down— and nearly screams.

That curly head is unmistakably Darren’s.  Darren-one-and-the-same, it would seem.

“This is insane, this is insane,” he whispers, but the image in front of him doesn’t change.  He gets an idea—something just as good as pinching himself, to prove it couldn’t be the impossible, impossible thing he thinks it is—and runs back around his desk.

--

 Darren smiles at the doorman, puts his hands in his pockets, looks back over to the list of resident names.

Colfer, C.  He reads over them one, twice, three times, and still that name sticks out to him, rings familiar.  He wonders if it’s someone he met at one of those holiday parties he got forced into last year.  Yes, that’s probably it.

The doorman is starting to look suspicious, and before Darren can talk himself out of it, he presses the buzzer.

--

Chris does scream when his buzzer goes off, moving quickly to buzz him in the door without even asking who it is.  He doesn’t have any friends here, no one knows he lives here except for his parents and his agent.

He makes it back to the window just in time to see Darren disappear into the building.

--

Fourth floor, the buzzer had Colfer, C. labeled, so up to the fourth floor, apartment B, Darren goes.

He swallows once, still not sure what he’s doing but only knowing that it feels like he must.

He knocks on the door.

--

Chris doesn't scream this time, already poised with a hand on the doorknob when the knock happens, two soft and one louder.

Not letting himself pause to think, Chris opens the door.

Darren is even more beautiful up close, the cut of his jacket and the gleam of his eyes and his wide smile that cuts through Chris, liquid warmth.

“Hi,” Darren says abruptly, one hand half-way raised like he was going to shake Chris’s hand.  “I actually—don’t know what I’m doing here or why I’m doing it, but. Hi.  I’m Darren.”

“Chris,” he replies, and they do shake hands then, Chris looking and looking at those eyes, how they’re crinkled up at the corners.

“I guess I’ll—just—” Darren laughs, hooking a thumb over his shoulder.  “I’m really sorry, I—”

“Please stay,” Chris says in a rush, not even caring that he hasn’t showered in two days and he’s wearing pajama pants in the middle of the afternoon.  “I don’t think I can explain any more than you can, but now that you’re here, just… stay. Please.”

“I really don’t have any right to say so, but I would like to stay. Very, very much.”

Chris takes his outstretched hand, and closes the door.

***

There’s a lot of unexplainable things in life.  Miracles in hospitals, patients getting better against all odds; miracles in natural disasters, whole houses destroyed but the inhabitants untouched; miracles on the ball field, the underdog team making a last-minute coup.

Chris doesn't know how to explain Darren, knows he’ll never find anyone who will believe how they met.  But Darren has told him more than once that it doesn't matter—they can pretend they met in the produce section, he doesn't care, all that matters is that they found each other, some way, somehow.

He never types another word on the typewriter after Darren knocks on his door.  It takes them a long time to come up with what to do with it, way after Chris does make his deadline, after they've moved into their apartment with their bed and the typewriter goes onto a shelf where it never seems to gather any dust.

Chris wants to take it to a random thrift store, to let it work its miracles (he can’t even bring himself to say magic, even though that’s exactly what Darren calls it) on some other lonely writer.  Darren wants to destroy it, insisting that it’s dangerous, adamant that he and Chris would have met eventually without the typewriter conduit.

In the end, they take it back to Ashley, and make her listen when they say it needs to go to someone who needs it dearly, and who knows how to handle it.  Chris threatens her for good measure, says he’ll be back every week reminding her.

They walk back onto the New York streets hand-in-hand, knowing that soon that won’t be enough, and they’ll need gloves to keep the c hill away.

“I still say we should have thrown it off the top of our building,” Darren says lightly, but he’s smiling.

“We probably should have put it into the Hudson, like Jumanji,” Chris agrees, smiling too.  “But at least this way, maybe someone won’t be so unsuspecting.”

“But hopefully, they’ll be just as lucky,” Darren says softly, cupping Chris’s neck with his free hand to pull him close and kiss him soundly.

--------------------------