I am really tired, so tired I legit fell asleep on my couch for a short period of time, but nevertheless I had the desire to write some more of the loftverse before bed. I don't even know. Like, yes, if I was going to write it probably should have been on Troped but... I don't have the brain for that. I just don't. I also haven't done anything else in a while and I think I need some variety.
This does not take place IN the loft but it's part of the same universe.
Braven, ~900 words, written in about 30-35 minutes, warnings for just a little bit of explicit content
Previous installments on the tag "loftverse"
*
The second time they sleep together, Raven tells him, "You're a romantic, aren't you?" out of nowhere into a slow-widening gray well of silence, and he almost has to laugh. She's sitting on top of him, and he'd been staring up at her tits, and the shape of her collar bone and the flow of her hair over her shoulders and her silhouette in the dreary winter gloom. But mostly her tits.
"What?" she asks, biting back a smile that's only an answer to his smile, pushing a confused half-bubble of laughter down. Slowly it softens. She touches his nose, the tip of her finger lingering there, then sliding down to bump against his lips. "I've figured that out about you," she says.
The first time was a one-off, the sort of thing good friends just don't discuss, but it opened the door to something that might become habit. He learned what she looked like naked because she brought him to her bedroom once and took her shirt off without warning--impatient as always, skipping over what she did not know how to do by using short cuts and fast tracks--knew the part of his brain that would say bad idea bad idea would be drowned out and shunted aside. And she was right. That was back in the fall after her boyfriend got caught cheating. Seems a lifetime ago now but she's not yet told him if she's over it, if she ever will be.
This one is on him. It's different in ways he can start to name, can't quite pin down. Maybe just that he didn't initiate by immediately stripping.
She'd come over early with this idea they'd go out to breakfast but the temperature had fallen overnight, the sky clouding up and dropping and that heavy, expectant hush in the air, like a storm gathering itself, so they'd stayed inside and eaten the rest of his cereal, then played video games on his couch. The whistle of the wind and the rattle of his windows in the blow and gust of it sounded of winter. He yawned, for real, stretched up his arm and let it rest around her shoulders.
She looked at him like, am I dumb? Do you think I don't notice it?
He gave her a smile that other women would find charming.
But she slid in against his side as she beat his ass six out of ten, threw the controller on the coffee table after and then just turned her face so her nose was crushed in against his t-shirt. He squeezed her arm, gathered her up close and listened to her inhale, and on the rattling long exhale, he slid his hand beneath her shirt.
None of it meant anything except that he was horny and cold and he knew if Raven minded, she'd just shove him away. Tell him to get over himself and shut up.
Now she's talking about romance and he's thinking about her tits, and wondering if she always takes her hair down to fuck.
The question (you're a romantic, aren't you?) is idle and content and hazy with sex, the bedroom small and square and the hour uncertain. His bed, a queen that he doesn't really need, came with the place and barely fits in the room. Around it is a thin border of floor, around and beneath it wall to wall carpet in an ugly gray-green color that always looks dirty, even when it's not. He's been planning to move out of the place for over a year now but hasn't found anything better, and because it was only supposed to be temporary, he never really decorated much: just a single framed painting on the bare white walls, a gift, which he's hung up over the dresser in the corner of the room.
He has two windows, though. That's the best feature of the place: the natural light. Right now they have the overhead light on and the floor lamp by the bed too, because the late afternoon light is the gray-white tone of a storm that just won't break, hazed out and cold. Occasional thin wisps of snow slant by, sometimes. Nothing that will stick; nothing that will stay.
Bellamy can see the snow, and the wintry light just on the verge of tipping into twilight, through the window just behind Raven, the window she's half-framed in. His palms are sliding up and down her legs, steady and warm, and his feet are still tangled up in the sheets of his unmade bed. He's thinking about Raven awash in his sheets and how she'd look if he flipped her right over and landed her on his pillows, and how he'll probably do just that, when he actually wants to come.
For now she's barely moving, only riding him slowly. As she watches him, the smile fades from her face, and she tilts her head and traces the curve of his cheekbone, wafts her fingertips across the freckles over his nose.
"Romantic?" he asks. He means himself, what she'd said, but for a moment she frowns down at him, confused.
Then: "You want a nice girl who will take you home to her parents," she explains, slow and quiet.
He squeezes her leg, feels the strong muscles there, the softness of her skin.
"Why do you say that?"
She shrugs. He wonders if this is the last time, if he should be taking in every detail now, before he tips over an edge, before the storm breaks.
"It's just something," Raven says, "I see in you."
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Bellamy/Raven, ~800 words, in the same universe as this Clarktavia fic.
I wanted to write more in this 'verse and also do some more description practice. I don't like it as much as the other one but, eh, it's something. It's good practice.
*
Bellamy takes over the lease at the tail end of a chilly, wet winter, that part of the season where only certain sunny and bright afternoons feel like spring. At the time, he and Raven are still just friends. Friends who've slept with each other--twice--plus one additional half-time that does not count. They've never lived together, but he knows that she's a morning person, that she's messy, that she never likes to be idle, and so she tends to keep her projects always within arm's reach. He knows she'll sell most of her furniture, because "it's all junk anyway," but bring with her an extensive collection of CDs and a gleaming silver stereo system. He doesn't know if she can cook, but he can, so it's fine. She likes the way he makes omelettes, and scramble eggs with tomato slices on the side, and she has what his mother would call an adventurous palette. That means she's down to try anything, even Filipino dishes whose names she can't pronounce.
She's looking for a place closer to the auto shop and he'll need help with the rent, plus the loft is too big for him anyway. He invites her to take a look at the space. She doesn't say anything, but her eyes flick across the room with curiosity: the gray brick walls and scarred wood floor still shadowed from the gloomy pale-gray of the sky beyond the windows, all the lights off, and most of Kane's old furnishings still in place. He liked leather and steel. There's a TV mounted on the wall between the middle two windows, and a dying plant in the corner, shedding leaves.
She doesn't say anything, and Bellamy can't read the expression on her face. He tells her it'll look different with all of the furniture gone, and reminds her it's a steal for its price: in no other part of town could you find a place this big for rent so low. She says he sounds like a real estate agent, and asks what he needs her to sign.
The TV stays, but the sleek black couch is replaced with a pull out upholstered in worn green corduroy, two overstuffed chairs that don't match, and a large red beanbag, all arrayed around a low wood coffee table, almost perfectly square. Raven sets up her stereo where the dead plant used to be. They curtain off an area near the bathroom for storage, and use bookshelves to create the illusion of rooms. Shelves next to the TV, below the windows, and shelves around the living area, to separate it from the dining area, which is mostly Raven's work table, because they usually eat in the kitchen or sometimes with one of them in the beanbag and the other on the floor. The kitchen is set off in the corner closest to the door: a square space defined by wooden countertops and steel appliances, an island at which they place tall bar stools.
Along the right wall runs a sort of raised stage, which functions as the bedroom: there's no way around it but to share. From a friend of a friend, they acquire a queen-sized mattress and a simple bed frame to rest it on: deep mahogany, with a square headboard. Raven creates a closet for them out of a suspension bar, crates, and several hanging closet organizers, all hidden behind a polka dot shower curtain, discolored at the bottom edge. They use bookshelves as bedside tables. They agree without debate that Raven will take the left side of the bed and Bellamy the right.
He stays up late the first night, wondering if he should have volunteered to take the pull out bed from the couch. But it would be a pain to have to set the thing up every night and then fold it away every morning again. And Raven doesn't care for chivalry, especially when she thinks it's false. Don't be a hero, she'd probably say, or maybe she'd just snort and tell him don't be dumb.
There's a window just beyond his side of the bed, and ambient streetlight shines up through it, the light pollution of the city in yellows and silver and neon. He turns on his side toward it, his back to her, and closes his eyes. He'll have to get some curtains, something--but also better lights, a couple standing lamps for the bedroom or something to put on his bedside table--something to read by--he can see imprints of light on the backs of his eyelids. He can hear Raven breathing quietly next to him. He imagines he feels the warmth of her, trapped with the warmth of him under the covers. She feels miles away, and so unbearably close.
Just a little indulgent thing idk. I like it, though.
*
Octavia's bedroom is set off from the rest of the loft by a beaded curtain. It's in the corner of the space, with a window taking up half the wall behind the bed, the rest of the walls exposed gray brick. She's got a bed, a chest of drawers that she hauled in on her brother's pick-up truck from a garage sale in the suburbs, and a milk crate that she uses as a bedside table. In the corner is an Army bag that she uses for her laundry, and a tall lamp with three opposable bulbs that shine light up to the ceiling, where, at night, it reverberates throughout the corner and flashes back against the glass, creating wide parallelograms of shadow and light.
The bed is a full-sized mattress set low to the floor, on a wooden bed frame made of slats. No headboard. Her sheets are white and her comforter a purple color in the mid-range of the scale, a color almost red, in the poor evening light. A few times, Clarke has found herself alone in the bed, and from that vantage point she has examined the remainder of the room in as much detail as she can without actually breaking confidence and snooping. She's looked through the books that Octavia keeps in the milk cart: trade paperbacks with underlining in them that must have come from Bellamy, and an A6-sized journal held closed with a green rubber band. She's stared at the chest of drawers, finding patterns in the scars on the wood, memorizing the faded stickers on the side. A flower with neon green and pink petals. A smiley face. A peace sign. She's catalogued the items on top of the chest too: toiletries, hair ties, a metal water bottle, a few pieces of jewelry that Octavia never wears. The space is always neat, Clarke supposes because it's so small.
This summer, she has spent a lot of time in the loft, sometimes hanging out with Octavia's brother and his girlfriend, whom she met first, but increasingly with Octavia herself. The first time she stayed over, she bunked on the couch. The second time, the couch was occupied, and Bellamy and Raven's bed didn't fit a third—"Also, gross," as Octavia put it—and so, she crashed in the only available space left. ("Since I don't want to be mean,” Octavia said, “and make you sleep on the floor.”)
In that bed, she has learned Octavia's silences, which mean more somehow than all her smart remarks and little sister commentary—Octavia as herself, no longer performing for her brother or his friends. She'd obviously been doing that for a long time. Clarke watches her now and gets away with it, lazes quietly next to her as the high noon sun floods in, and the little fan Octavia has borrowed from the main loft whirs gently from the top of the milk carton, and causes tendrils of their hair to fly around their faces, and the pages of Clarke's book to rustle and try to flip. She feels it like a whisper against her skin. Octavia is lying on her back and staring up at her journal, held directly above her: not writing, but only skimming idly over past thoughts. Clarke's not close enough to see any of the words. She rests on her side with her head propped up on her fist and just stares, and tries to feel every bit of her body, every bit of her skin: naked, against the worn sheets, warm, in patches of sun, briefly shivering, when grazed by the artificial breeze. She can smell someone cooking in the kitchen on the other side of the loft. She can see all the wrinkles in the bedsheets and the way Octavia's chest rises and falls with the working of her lungs.
The sunlight glints off the beaded curtain, bringing out sharper tones of green and blue from the sea-colored strands.
One night, she brings Octavia a present: a square box, with a ribbon tied around it and a bow on top. The day has been wickedly hot, and her pale blue sundress sticks to her back with a patch of sweat, and her thighs rub together with sweat. Heat rises, so even after dark, the loft still feels warm as if baked in residual sun. Most of the lights are off. Almost no one home.
A familiar glow from the corner.
She parts the beaded curtain gently with just her fingertips, finds Octavia lying diagonally across the center of her bed, frowning deeply down at the pages of one of her books. She's wearing men's boxer shorts and a purple tank-top, also marred with patches of sweat. She looks up at the hint of movement, or sound—whatever clue Clarke gave to her presence that she herself does not discern.
Her frown deepens. "Hey."
"You busy?"
"No." She sets the book down on the floor and gestures with her chin to the box. "What's that?"
"A gift." She sits down lightly at the corner of the bed, next to the pillows, and Octavia pulls herself up and sits cross-legged next to her. She's only a couple years younger than Clarke, but she's got a certain lankiness and long-limbed gangliness that makes her seem, at times, younger than she is, and a habit of being too careless with her body, as if she were not yet aware of its size, which leaves her skin marred with constant, random bruises. Clarke sees one on her upper thigh, turning yellow.
She hands over the box, and Octavia turns it around in her hands suspiciously, without undoing the bow. "I've seen these," she says. "It's a kind of light, isn’t it? Lets you project stars and stuff on the walls?" She hands it back, or tries to, her arms held straight out in front of her and the box between her hands. "You should give it to Raven. She's into space and stuff. I would much rather stay here on Earth, thanks."
Clarke pushes the gift back. "This one's not stars." And, when Octavia still hesitates, "Just turn it on."
She's not sure why she bought the thing, not even if she's just honest within herself. She'd just seen it, in one of the stores she wandered into while trying to think, and simply decided that Octavia should have it.
"You're more stubborn than my roommates," Octavia grumbles, though what she means, Clarke thinks, is more stubborn than me. But she turns on the light anyway, and sets it on top of the chest of drawers. Then, perhaps just to show that she's game, she turns off her lights.
The bedroom, the whole loft, is dark, except for the city light through the window, and the wavering blues and greens from the box. It turns slowly around, sending patterns of waves, starfish, sea creatures, along the brick walls and flickering over the curtain.
Octavia stands still for a moment, between the chest of drawers and the bed, and watches them. Clarke watches her face.
Then, slowly, still not looking down, she climbs back onto her bed, and lies down on her back and looks up, and flicks her eyes across the room. Except for this movement, she is utterly still. She is awash in shades of ocean light. Clarke has never seen her look more beautiful.
