#phenocrysticskin

  selfishly, she's needed the support. the companionship.   selfishly, she's wanted to be around someone again.   selfishly, she's wanted it to be someone from westchester   without sacrificing her freedom for the mansion again.   the past few months still weigh on her, a heaviness that   curls her shoulders and brings her back to the girl she   used to be more than anything else has. she can't escape   it, but she's realized -- slowly, then all at once -- that    embracing it isn't the right choice, either. 

  josh infiltrating her apartment suddenly reminds her too   much of the way he used to fill everything else. her room.   the kitchen. the hallways. the porch. every corner of west-   chester whether she wanted it or not. it feels the same and   she can't do it anymore. 

  she begins to understand why he's here. she begins to   notice the absence of who isn't here, and who is. it's the   same as it had been at westchester, now ten years later.    she's done this before. she refuses to do it again. )

( she remembers the date too late, realizes what's passed   in her absence. with guilt sitting heavy in her belly, she   adjusts her bag so that it sits higher on her shoulder and   unlocks the door to her apartment. she doesn't even know   if josh will still be there, or if the apartment will be cooler,   emptier without his presence even when her own is sorely   lacking. 

  she drops her bag by the couch, makes sure she makes   enough noise to announce her presence. there's a bottle   of whiskey tucked under her arm that she doesn't feel right   giving to him, but she realized, standing in the aisle with    roman at her side, that she doesn't know what josh likes so   much anymore. this feels like an olive branch, but a broken one,   somehow. 

  sliding behind him in the kitchen, she places the bottle on the   table in front of him and steps back. )

         I'm late, I know.

Send an “Ѡ” for my muse’s reaction to being sent accidental nudes.

            or, three times josephine lewis packed a bag and left, and one time she didn’t. 

i. 

she can still feel sam’s ashes stuck in her eyelashes,  clinging to the wild curls of her hair, clogging her throat. the door to her bedroom slams open and smacks against the wall hard enough to leave a mark and she stands there  in the narrow doorway with her chest heaving and her eyes burning and she thinks the entire world is crashing down around her, terrifying and broken.

she chokes on what might be a sob and what might be a scream and digs the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to clear them. no matter what she looks at — her bed, unmade; the window, blinds hanging crooked and curtains faded; the  closet, half-open and messy — she can still see sam’s frightened face, the horrified pull of his mouth before he’d simply been  nothing at all. 

with shaking hands, she pulls a suitcase from underneath her bed. on her knees on the floor, she takes the time to suck in a  handful of deep breaths that do nothing but make her feel  dizzy and sick. she stands, knees knocking together, and bile crawls up her throat in hot, acidic licks. she swallows, hand pressed to her mouth, and there is one long moment where she doesn’t know what she plans to do at all until she finds herself throwing things into the suitcase, automatic and mechanical. 

it is ten-thirty at night, which means her mother will be home by eleven, which means she doesn’t have time to linger. the suitcase snaps shut, the latches clasped with a finality that brings tears to her eyes again. josephine swallows, chokes, and gasps, open- mouthed, in the middle of her bedroom with a suitcase in her hand and a dead boy’s ashes in her hair.

by the time the clock strikes ten-thirty-five, she’s out the window,  running.

ii.

she sits in one of the mansion’s many, many rooms, knees curled to her chest like she needs to protect herself from something.  josh is there, hollow-eyed and distant, close but so, so far. she could reach out and touch him if she wanted to, but her hands stay in her lap, hidden; against the soft wool of her sweater, her fingers curl until there are half-moon crescents in the skin of her palms. 

i hate it here, she wants to say. she feels like she’s screaming it at him every time they look at one another and he still doesn’t hear it. sometimes, i think i hate it here more than i’ve ever  hated it anywhere else. 

giselle isn’t here. they don’t know where she is. apathy leaves her feeling empty.

josh doesn’t say anything to her when she stands. she wonders when they got like this, when they became these people who  resented each other as much as they cared for one another.  she needs him and he needs her and she hates him for it because he is the tether and she is the bird trying to get out, to fly away; she wants to be like giselle sometimes, envies her for her ability to  leave in the middle of the night without saying a word. a hand reaches out before she catches herself and draws away. 

he never says a word. 

she decides that neither will she. 

that night, with the door shut tight and locked, she pulls another suitcase from underneath her bed and lays it, open, on the quilt. she has few possessions here; clothes and books, simple gifts from elliot and josh and luz. a sweater, raven’s, that she should never have kept but did. this time, she folds them neatly, sharp corners and straight lines, and places them one by one into the belly of the case before she closes it.

the next morning, she slips into the professor’s study and tells him with wet eyes and a trembling voice that she is sorry but  she can’t stay. his eyes are too blue when he looks at her, too sad, his mouth too thin. he understands. she wishes he didn’t.

it is harder to say goodbye to elliot. her suitcase hits the ground and she throws her arms around his shoulders, squeezes him tight. she hates it here, she hates feeling so trapped, but she  loves them. she loves him, with his summer sky eyes and his aching kindness, and she can say goodbye to many things and many people but she can’t bear doing it to him. i’m sorry, she says, and it isn’t enough; it never will be and she knows it even now, standing where they are. his arms tighten and she can’t see his face because she has hidden hers, can’t stand to look  at him. i’ll miss you. 

she doesn’t promise to come back. it would be too cruel. 

she hugs josh once, tight. giselle still isn’t back but she can’t be the girl he needs her to be, or the one he wants her to be;  the girl she never will be, regardless. they don’t speak.

josephine turns from them, this never quite right life, and walks away.

(her heart breaks, and she’s glad none of them have to see.)

iii.

jack sleeps in the next room over, shoulders curled tight and  angry, mouth set. the silence of the apartment is smothering,  still electric; josephine, standing alone in the dim kitchen,  feels like she is suffocating. she drinks a glass of wine that stains her mouth blood red and then another, hands shaking;  floors and floors below, she can hear the noise of the street, cars and people and the wail of a police siren moving through the heavy dark of night. 

she hates him. she hates it here, hates the artificiality of it, of him. his wolf smile and expensive suits and dinners at restaurants she  doesn’t care for, galas and benefits where he leads her around  with his hand heavy on the small of her back and his voice low in her ear. she hates that she ever allowed herself to be dazzled by something like this. 

there is a familiar cagey feeling growing in the swell of her chest. it’s been weeks since she found kes and although she hasn’t ever really been alone, she’s felt it; it’s been lessened now, dulled by  the familiarity in his eyes, his face. they are not friends but there is a certain amount of relief in just seeing him and knowing that he  knows westchester as she does, that there is a part of her past now in her present. 

her decision is surprisingly easy to come to. easier than it had  been last time, when she’d left another place; it is as simple as turning a light switch on and off. one moment she is standing in  jack’s kitchen and the next she is packing her things, the few that she has here. she doesn’t leave a note. she doesn’t look at him. 

she just goes.

iv.

she thinks of leaving once, in the very beginning. homesickness clogs her throat and settles in the empty space in her chest that she will soon realize will always be there no matter how many times she tries to fill it. she aches for westchester, for the people she knows, even if it means going back to josh’s silence and giselle’s closed door and elliot’s undeserved forgiveness. 

she pulls the same suitcase out from the closet in her bedroom and shoves as much as she can into it. it barely closes; her life is fuller now, brimming with things that are hers and hers alone. standing in the middle of her bedroom, josephine counts to ten, once and then twice.

she can go back. she can.

the suitcase is heavier than it ever has been before. indecision lengthens her steps. she can go back; she can catch a bus as she did before, she can step through the gates and knock on the front door and she can go back. it won’t be home, but it will be somewhere and maybe that is where she belongs.

she makes it to the front door before she stops. the phone in her pocket buzzes and she makes the mistake (a mistake which will, later, not be a mistake at all) of looking at the screen and the name displayed there, right over a photograph of her and kes and caleb. ONE MESSAGE: LANCE ALVERS.

another tether keeping her here, in this new life; here, with this new family.

josephine swallows thickly and realizes, in the front hallway of her apartment, that she can’t go back.

this is where she’s supposed to be.

[ there's an angry bruise purpling along the line of her jaw and a thick piece of gauze taped to her cheek to cover one of the nastier cuts. 

it's going to be hell to explain at work when she decides to go back, but she considers herself lucky, for now. ]

hate u so much :c

claustrophobia 

she wakes up in her own room in her own bed — she is safe. she is happy. she is free. 

kes leaves; giselle leaves; luz leaves. (the house has never felt emptier — the house has never felt smaller.) 

she sits with josh in the empty sitting room on the second floor, washed in warm honey gold. the lamp catches the sharp planes of his face, the terrible, frightening familiarity of his eyes,  the too old tip of his mouth.

i’m sorry, she says, and she shouldn’t because  she has done nothing wrong but sometimes, she thinks she has done everything. josh kisses her and his mouth tastes like whiskey taken from the professor’s liquor cabinet, tastes like regret, tastes like he wishes she were someone else entirely. 

don’t, she says, and she should because she is not the girl he wants her to be and she never will be  and maybe there will be different girls who don’t have frightened eyes and frightened hands and secrets that fester like something rotten in their birdcage ribs. 

don’t, she says, and she doesn’t give josh a chance to  answer her because she pushes away from him, one hard shove, and she’s gone.