The fun part about early Seventh Virtue was writing Lonan & Harrison meeting each other for the first time all over again. Here’s an early section where they prove they cannot have a single normal conversation!!!
Their meet-cute is when Harrison gets caught thieving (by Lonan) and they almost kill each other. ❤️ Soooo on brand.
Seventh Virtue, circa 2021.
Text transcript under the cut!
“So you cut me, arrest me, throw me down here, and now you want to dine with me?”
“Yes,” Lonan said. He ripped open his cutlery packet, slipped out the black fork. As he unloaded bouts of fried rice, mounds of glossed orange chicken, and a generous helping of black pepper beef, he added, “And I didn’t cut you. You did that yourself.”
Harrison snorted. Oh god, he was starving. He wasn’t sure how long he could keep up the façade before he started drooling.
“That’s because you were going to stab me in the gut,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to stab you.”
“So what were you going to do with the knife? Use it to play spin the bottle with me?”
Lonan arched a brow. “Would you like to play spin the bottle with me?”
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Midnight re-read of Seventh Virtue to fall asleep and I’m cackling at the drama of this interaction.
Harrison: ya so ur ruining my life
Lonan: my bad???
Text transcript under the cut!
“What’s happening right now?” asks Lonan again. He still touches the zippers on Harrison’s garment bags. “Can I help?”
“Can you help?” Harrison bursts, almost laughing, his fist gripping his hair so tightly that a few strands tug loose. “No, Lonan. Sometimes my body heats up like a fucking oven because you turned me into a fire-breathing dragon.”
The room silences, and then Lonan’s quiet voice: “I’m sorry.”
A cute little sentence in Seventh Virtue (2022) that just about sums up Lonan & Harrison’s relationship.
Adapted from a scene in Moth Work (the iconic EAR PIERCING SCENE!!! who wants it!!!) Circa 2019.
On mornings like this, it was easy to pretend they were the only two men left alive on a scorched earth, that their deaths were so imminent that becoming an extension of the other was all that mattered.
Compilation of some extremely cute Lonan and Harrison quotes. Some are from Moth Work (2019) and some are from Seventh Virtue (2022).
Text transcript under the cut!
1:
At two in the morning stretched across his mattress in a rare blip of sleep, Lonan was an exhale, or the muted rustle of a duvet. In the car, Lonan was the satin circle of his own breath, a second body to heat a wintery sedan. In Harrison’s own reflection, Lonan was a shimmer in his eye, something alive and indisputably a part of him.
2:
How much time had they spent looking at each other? At dusk walking through an open field, their elbows catching switchgrass, or over a pool of persimmons at the supermarket, or in a silent, lightless room, nothing as arresting as the other’s reflection.
3:
They swayed on the tile, music-less, for what felt like hours, movements unplanned but synchronized. Spinning in slow circles as the sun flit through the window above the shower, clutching the other’s face until their reflections merged.
4:
The sun flits through the window above the shower and catches Harrison’s face, and this is his angel, Lonan should tell him he’s his angel.
5:
As Harrison looked up at him, he studied this man who seemed so much like a masterpiece carved of Carrara marble. How did he deserve him? This man who looked at him like heaven unfurled somewhere behind his eyes and if he looked hard enough, he could reach it.
6:
With Lonan, he felt more alive than he’d ever been, more delicate, more loved.
7:
“He is good to me,” Lonan says, tracing the constellation of Harrison’s freckles with his ring finger. The waves frothy just ahead of them, a silver light haloing them both now. “He’s good.”
Is this a shipolution? Lonanasona over 7 years (2015-2022)! <3
Top left: Is this an inkling of a ship? Harrison disagrees. (Resisted, book #3 of Fostered, circa 2015)
Top right: Who else lies on the floor with someone they’ve had an increasingly tense (BUT IN WHAT WAY) relationship with? And what does it mean??? (Hollowed, book #4 of Fostered, circa 2016)
Bottom left: THERE but not quite, and is this the first time Lonan says the “L” word? Yes, lmaoo!! (Moth Work, circa 2020)
Bottom right: Where things stand! (Seventh Virtue, circa like 3 weeks ago lol)
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The closest thing I'll get to normal romance in this book (Feeding Habits 2021/2022)!
The first image is an earlier scene where Harrison asks Lonan a question and the last three is in the final chapter where Lonan (sort of) answers it! <3
Happy Valentine's Day from these unromantic losers (who I love very much ❤️)!
Text transcript under the cut!
Excerpt 1:
“I’ve been trying to figure you out,” Harrison says. He should do as he’s been told to, or at the very least, hold the fork, but his arms remain dulled at his sides. “What’s so different—wrong—about you.”
Lonan arches a brow mid-bite, stares ahead at the night table. “Oh?”
“It’s funny because I can’t even remember what I thought of. But I swear so many things are wrong.” Take the fork, he tells himself. Just pick up the fork.
“You’re different, too,” Lonan says. “Change is natural.”
“But what if it isn’t?” Harrison urges his hand toward the fork, almost gets it to the handle. “Have you ever thought of it—what our lives would have looked like if everything had stayed the exact same?”
Lonan swallows, reaches for his coffee cup. “No.”
Harrison nearly deflates at this answer, whatever progress he made sliding straight back to the floor. And Lonan must notice this because he scoots closer, places a hand atop Harrison’s and guides it to the fork. This close, Harrison can hear, and nearly feel, Lonan’s heartbeat. Steady in his chest, so strange for this man he’s known so well to be hollow.
“It won’t work.” Lonan’s voice is hardly a whisper. “Whatever solution you’re trying to orient by reassessing the past. You’re here now. There’s no alternate way out.”
Excerpt 2:
He doesn’t even know where it goes. Even though he follows its descent into the dead branches of a cedar, at some point, the stone just disappears. He throws another, and the same thing happens. Following its path so attentively, so carefully, and still losing it.
“I thought about something you said.”
The sound of Lonan’s voice spooks Harrison enough to toss another stone. He turns his chin slightly over his shoulder, not enough to even look at him. These are the first words he’s spoken since the haircut, his voice barely above a whisper.
“Oh?” he says, tosses another stone. He’s certain he can follow this one, aims for a plane of driftwood near the shoreline. Still, he loses the path.
He feels the breeze shift as Lonan sits next to him. A shuffle of rocks, and a second later, Lonan tosses one down, too. “You asked me if I ever wondered what our lives would’ve looked like if everything had stayed the same.”
Harrison stiffens. He’d said no, of course. Harrison thinks of that word as he tosses another rock. No. The air has started to smell metallic. Any minute now, it could start to pour.
“Yeah?” Harrison says. He doesn’t really want to hear more. Or maybe he does. This would be the perfect moment for Lonan to reach toward him, his hands firm and not tentative, brave, not scared, and confess his love. A man who looks just like him in a European romcom might do exactly this under twinkling Parisian lights. But in all truths, Harrison doesn’t know if Lonan has love to confess to him, if he himself could do the same.
The waves below simmer against the sand. Harrison clutches a handful of rocks so they indent his skin, then throws them right in. Perhaps Suzanna was right about Lonan’s motives to come back to the east. Perhaps he really was only looking for his sister. And perhaps, she was also wrong. That his return was not about an either or but about a yearning for both. Breeze, strangely warm, laces Harrison’s jaw. Above, a single drop of rain hits his crown. When he reaches into the ground, picks up another clump of stones, and cranes his wrist back to the throw, Lonan touches him. So light that he barely feels it.
At first, he stares at their hands skin to skin, and is distracted by how one’s vein seems to momentarily leap into the other’s. Then he looks up. In that moment, the air open, the birds fleeing south, the trees swimming along the clouds, nothing matters but Lonan. Harrison watches him, his guarded, but gentler face, how he inhales, like he’s on the brink of confession. If their lives had stayed the same as they were a year ago, if they hadn’t strayed onto an uncharted path like a gazelle losing its flock, if they’d gripped each other so surely that one or both disappeared. Harrison looks into Lonan’s eyes, blue as forget-me-nots and replenishing like the waves below. When the wind picks up, circles around their shoulders in a seeming connection, Harrison parts his lips for air, and without hesitation says, “I know.”
There was something inconceivably indissoluble about them—their bond mirror-like, one making a decision, and the other mimicking it with vigour somewhere else, unknowingly inseparable. —Feeding Habits 2021
On my Moth Work re-read, I was shocked to see I’d written a scene that (unbeknownst to me) repeated in Feeding Habits (book 2). The above is a FH line describing exactly what Lonan and Harrison are like: unknowingly inseparable, always on a path toward each other, even if they don’t realize it!
Summary: After 2 separate dinners a year apart, Harrison and Lonan both drop things (lol) when they see each other after extended breaks.
Just so y’all know: ALL of this was completely unintentional. Down to the flowers!
Top 2: Lonan’s POV, Moth Work (2020)
Bottom 2: Harrison’s POV, Feeding Habits (2021)
Text transcript under the cut!
Lonan’s POV:
Lonan brings over glasses, the leftover white wine, undoes the curtain so the moonlight streams in on the table. He brings the first pot over, and then the next, arranging them with his good hand. Eliza and Suzanna are in the middle of talking about the versatility of nutmeg when there’s a knock at the door, so Lonan takes it upon himself to answer it. He wipes his hands on his jeans and brings a rose with him—he doesn’t know why. He undoes the master lock first, then the deadbolt, the flower fit between his knuckles so when he opens the door, it accidentally pricks him.
In the kitchen, Suzanna laughs at Eliza’s joke, something vaguely about Geminis, or maybe she says alibis. He doesn’t quite hear it. He doesn’t mean to drop the rose, but it falls with a muffled thump between them, a floral border easy to penetrate. Lonan blinks many times. He breathes many times. He counts many times. But after all the tests—the blinking, the breathing, the counting, the person at the door doesn’t change. Sunshine hair. Concerned mouth. Semi-crooked nose. Butterfly lashes. Eyes the colour of a kingfisher.
Harrison’s POV:
The apartment is dark when he tracks in. The scent of cinnamon steeps the air like Suzanna’s just pulled a saucepan of papas off the stove. At first he doesn’t hear it, but he should, the voices leafing the kitchen like a flit of moths. He steps out of his shoes but never sets anything down, even after he passes the coffee table. Two plates ringing the centre, streaked with caldeirada and bayleaf. A pitcher of lemonade sweating onto the glass. It is almost like he never left, like he and his mother shared dinner, sipped from each other’s cups, cleaned the tines of each other’s fishbones. And he almost believes it. He never went to the farm. The kittens are where he left them, just a few feet away, not in Brooklyn. He doesn’t have a job to tend to. He never fixed the coffee machine. He didn’t go to the convenience store. He is not slathered in sunscreen, not holding a dog collar or pastries or a bouquet of tulips. He never dove into the ocean like it was some port to asylum and didn’t emerge soaked and walking half-dead to his apartment because he never left. This reality is so easy to believe that he is unfazed by the voices and how they get louder when he reaches the kitchen, when one says, “Were you shopping for the apocalypse?” and the other one chokes on its drink and apologizes for its rudeness and stares at him in daydream, those eyes like forget-me-nots, gas fires, sea-foam, the wing of a starling, the burning ocean, his drop earring.
Harrison is grateful he is soaking wet when he enters that kitchen and Suzanna and Lonan sit at the table sharing a box of petit fours. At least he has an excuse when he drops everything.
