#dandelii.writing

Cookingㆍㆍ⊹

⟢ Connor can’t cook. He can follow a recipe to perfection—from grand anniversary dinners to heartfelt breakfasts-in-bed like the perfect boyfriend in those WikiHow tutorials he binged when they started dating—but the taste is always... off. It tastes precise, but it doesn't taste like too much salt stirred in while simmering, or like vegtables left steaming for just a minute too long. His culinary art is flawless, but blank.

⟢ Jolene doesn't tell him. She can't—not when he's standing there, hands clasped behind his back, waiting for approval like a dog who'd just been told to "stay."

Battle for Big Spoonㆍㆍ⊹

⟢ They take turns being the little spoon. It's a rule Jolene established early on.

⟢ "Everything is 50/50," she insisted one night, gesturing to the empty space beside her. "You don't get to be self-sacrificing with me."

⟢ But convincing Connor to just shut up and be held? Infuriating. Every night, he lists off countless "optimal sleeping conditions" and "statistical comfort advantages"—arguments that fail miserably when he's already curling up under her arm.

Birds of a Feather ㆍㆍ⊹

⟢ Personality wise, they're very similar; driven by logic, comforted by expectations, and just a little socially graceless at times.

⟢ Usually, this works in their favor. They're both easily fascinated, so conversations between them run like a smoothly written program.

⟢ Connor noticed increased agitation in the pigeons today? Yes babe, Jolene encourages, tell me more about what increases a pedestrian's likeliehood of being pecked on their way to work. Jolene thinks the decline of Minecraft's popularity is a sign of the recession? Connor’s already running correlation mapping between sandbox game engagement and unemployment rates.

⟢ They never shut each other down. Even when they probably should. Their conversations follow a "yes, and" pattern—each of them riffing off the other's abstractions until they get stuck in an endless Larsen effect. They speak each other's language, even when no one else seems to.

- "Birds of a feather geek together," as Gavin says.

The Coin ㆍㆍ⊹

⟢ Jolene hates silence. She can’t even sleep peacefully without an obnoxiously loud Jerma985 stream blasting from her laptop (because, somehow, he still hasn’t retired).

⟢ Whenever there's an uncomfortable silence—like after she brought him home for Christmas and tried to explain to her parents that, yes, humans and androids date now—Connor will play with his coin just to make noise.

⟢ At first, it was coincidence. Just a mindless habit to "calibrate his physical and cognitive functions" (DBHWiki). But once he realized how calming that simple noise was to her, he started showing off his coin tricks more often.

⟢ “Your heart exhibits less tachycardic behavior with ambiance,” Connor noted. “Would you like me to set up a white noise machine in your bedroom?”

⟢ (Translation: please, no more Jerma.)

⟢ Once, she tried learning his coin tricks herself. He caught her watching a YouTube video titled “Party Tricks With a Quarter To Impress Your Friends!! || LEARN IN 10 MINUTES” and tried to teach her a few basic moves… a sweet, but ultimately futile gesture, especially since she kept dropping the coin all over the place.

Playlists ㆍㆍ⊹

⟢ Jolene may be a grown woman, but her playlists haven't outgrown her teenage years: punk rock, post-grunge, and nu-metal. She can only work peacefully with Three Days Grace blasting through her headphones, or drive with Flyleaf screaming from the car radio.

⟢ For a while, Connor's music taste was just whatever 2000s rock she had on. He was struggling to come up with his own preferences—after all, she had become a sort of anchor for his deviancy. Breaking the rules for her was easy. Being his own person? That was another challenge entirely—one he had no idea how to tackle.

⟢ He spent months silently nodding along to the drum solos, watching her wild air-drumming and headbanging with a dumbfounded curiosity. He didn't get it. Not in the way she so clearly did—with hair tangled fiercely and bottom lip caught between her teeth in a concentration he envied.

⟢ He was waiting outside the gas station bathroom for her one evening, idly flipping his coin in one hand with practiced precision. That's when he heard jazz for the first time. A skillful weave of piano trills and saxophone keys drifted from the cheap overhead speaker—some late-night radio station that only played the classics, the kind most people skipped past while searching the station numbers. The quarter froze against his finger, synthetic hairs rising on his neck with the music's crackling crescendo.

⟢ His world stilled. Absentminded fingers hovered around an invisible saxophone, trying to mimic techniques he'd never learned—skills he didn't know and couldn't preform, yet tested anyway. Incorrectly. Inefficiently.

⟢ Later, he starred the station in her car’s FM presets.

The Rubik’s Cube ㆍㆍ⊹

⟢ Connor is officially banned from giving unsolicited advice whenever Jolene fiddles with her Rubik’s cube.

⟢ It was cute at first. Back in their honeymoon phase, she would let him peek over her shoulder and offer techniques—even feigning struggle just to feel his fingers brush against hers as he guided the moves.

⟢ Then it started irritating her.

⟢ “Oh, so you think I’m just too stupid to solve a kid’s puzzle on my own?” she bit back one afternoon, yanking the cube away.

⟢ “No—!” Connor protested, eyebrows furrowing in confusion. “It’s just that… if you preform a U-prime right now, you’ll reduce your remaining moves by—“

⟢ “Banned. You’re banned.”

⟢ Eventually, she takes pity on him—or maybe she just gets tired of the dramatic breaths and the palpable stress radiating off him every time she turns the cube “wrong”—and buys him his very own Rubik’s cube. A dodecahedron, four times the size and complexity of her little 3×3.

⟢ It takes him 7 seconds.

⟢ “Fucking androids,” she muttered.