#punk reader

encino, california. 1985. 

the first thing michael noticed about the small shop around the block from his large, chaotic family house on hayvenhurst was that it had no noticeable name. 

every other storefront on the block loudly announced itself—dry cleaners, a deli, a place that sold picture frames and seemed so inexplicably busy for something so randomly specific. but, that corner shop sat in quiet, unsigned defiance, its window display doing all the talking instead of a large, overstimulatingly bright sign.

and that window display had plenty to say for itself.

he’d first clocked it from the backseat of the car bill was skillfully driving sometime in october, on one of the afternoons when the noise of everything had gotten too loud inside his own head and he’d needed to be moving without any particular destination. the victory tour had wrapped not long before, fifty-five dates across north america, and the silence that followed a tour was always its own particular kind of loud. 

especially one he had no choice of participating in.

he’d been staring out the window the way he did in that silence, watching encino blur past in its palm tree and pavement regularity, and the crazed shop window had caught something in him the way captain hook’s hook caught on things—it was sudden and not entirely comfortable to pull free from.

it had been displaying, during that cold, foggy week, a small forest of hand-lettered signs crowding the glass from the inside; white paint dragged across black cards in thick, uneven strokes; black ink scratched into brown paper in letters that were small and urgent, but purposeful in an artistic way. they were arranged at varying heights as though they’d grown there organically; some were propped, some taped, some were leaning against one another like dominos. some had words on them—full sentences or maybe even motivational slogans—but the car was moving too fast for him to catch more than the shape of the statements.

he caught that others were just images: a fist proudly raised to the sky, fingers tight and deliberate; the kind that meant something specific to whoever had drawn it. another of a bird mid-flight, rendered in a few economical strokes; the wings caught at precise angles that resembled effort and surrender. a clock face with no hands, the numbers still faithfully ringing the dial as if waiting for something to tell them what time it was—or instead it finally decided that it didn’t matter anymore. 

tucked among the signs were stacks of what looked like homemade zines, the stapled photocopied kind that looked like they’d been assembled on someone’s dining room table at two in the morning on a random surge of energy—edges not quite aligned, covers slightly askew, the whole thing held together by determined staples through the spine. 

nearing the edge of the window, record sleeves that had been painted over in broad strokes of muted reds and yellows—the kind of colours that looked like they’d been mixed from memory rather than intention. the original images beneath were still faintly visible, like a ghost under the paint that had been said but then thought better of; not quite erased, just covered over with something the artist had decided mattered more.

despite these intense observations, the car had moved on regardless, swallowed by the copy-and-paste sameness of the rest of the block. michael watched the grey stores blur past with the disinterest of someone who had already seen the only thing worth seeing.

he didn’t tell bill to turn around. not yet.

that had been october. it was now february, 1985, and the world had not gotten any quieter.

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the tour had done something strange to him.

fifty-five shows of the same fifteen songs with the same staging; a version of himself performed at a such a high scale for months, and somewhere in the middle of it he had started to feel the gap between who he was on that stage and who he was in the hours before and after it. thriller had sold more copies than he knew what to do with emotionally, and the tour had confirmed, every single night, just how enormous that number actually was.

he was twenty-six. the next thing—whatever it was going to be—had to come from somewhere, and he couldn’t find that somewhere quick enough. 

he’d sit at the piano for hours, sometimes until the room went dark around him without him noticing, waiting for anything to arrive that felt true. things surely did come—melodies, chord progressions, lines of lyrics that assembled themselves with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing this before he could even properly reach the keys—but they arrived as things that sounded too much like michael jackson, and that was exactly the problem. he’d write lines and hear his name in every syllable, recognize the cadence the way you’d recognize your own handwriting, and he’d set the pen down in sheer frustration. 

that wasn’t it. 

that wasn’t the thing. 

he didn’t want to sound like a version of himself he’d already been—he wanted to find the next one. 

the harder one. 

the one that was still somewhere underneath everything that had already been made and celebrated and sold and swept across a grammy stage, waiting to be pulled out into the light.

as a newfound way of taking breaks from his silent creative turmoil, he started driving himself places whenever he could convince bill that he wanted to take his own car for once. he had gotten his license around four years ago, but before then he told interviewers and even his own mother, katherine, with complete sincerity that he’d simply hire chauffeurs forever; that driving was something regular people did and how he wasn’t granted that normalcy. katherine gave him a specific look only a mother could give, and three weeks later he found himself in a parking lot in encino with an old man for an instructor, some particular freedom waiting at the end of it that he hadn’t anticipated needing.

they were short drives, purposeless, the kind that let him be in his own head without anyone else in the passenger seat needing anything from him. he drove past the uniquely cluttered shop on hayvenhurst three more times before he finally, on a thursday evening with no particular agenda and a growing need to do something that wasn’t sanctioned by a repetitive schedule, pulled over on the curb.

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the bell above the door was the old-fashioned kind, a physical bell tied onto a string which hung loosely from dangling pendant lights offering minimal light, suspended by a continuous, rusting chain. it made a sound that was less a welcoming, light-footed ding! and more of a flat, unapologetic clang, the kind of sound that seemed to be offering whoever had just walked in one last opportunity to reconsider taking another step, as if the shop itself was making clear from the outset that it wasn’t going to meet anyone halfway politely.

michael found that he liked that detail immediately, despite being a little intimidated.

the shop was small. not cramped, but instead densely inhabited, like from a person filling every available surface with things they had actually cared about rather than things that happen to sell. the shelves along the left held records unknown to michael, filed with the spines out, handwritten labels on the shelf edge indicating the sections in impatient handwriting that was small and slightly slanted. the right wall was given over almost entirely to a corkboard of enormous proportions, pinned so heavily with varying sizes of papers, photographs, flyers, and torn-out images that the cork itself had become theoretical, buried somewhere beneath the accumulated evidence of someone’s obsessive attention to the world.

the middle of the shop was a loose arrangement of low tables and wooden crates, displaying the hand-stapled magazines he’d seen from the car months ago. he further observed, noticing the scattered small prints, patches, stickers, and objects that defied easy categorisation. a handful of painted rocks, multiple painted mirrors with some having text scratched into the reflective surface, a small stack of cassette tapes with handwritten labels…

it smelled like paper and something faintly chemical hidden underneath—herbal, maybe, like dried plants. nonetheless, a room that had been lived in with intention. 

michael stood just in front of the door and absorbed it all.

“you can come further in,” said a feminine voice from somewhere to his left. “the things around here don’t bite.”

he turned.

she was behind a low counter he hadn’t noticed yet, half-obscured by a display of postcards. she was leaning over something—a sheet of paper, or a sketchbook—honestly he couldn’t really tell from where he was standing—with the focused inward attention of someone who had been interrupted mid-thought and was deciding whether to resent it. she had paint on her left hand. hair pulled back with what appeared to be a pencil doing structural work. she was wearing an oversized shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, black, with something stencilled across the front that he couldn’t read from his angle.

she glanced up at him fully then, a quick, assessing look, the kind that was measuring but wasn’t unkind.

and then she looked back down at whatever she’d been working on.

no double-take. no flicker of recognition across her face, or if there was one, she’d processed it and moved on so fast it was functionally invisible.

michael didn’t know what to do with that.

“take your time,” she said, attention still on the sheet sprawled in front of her. “i’m not going anywhere.”

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he spent twenty minutes in the shop before he spoke to her again.

he moved through it like it was a space he wasn’t sure of yet—very slowly, attentively, touching things carefully and only when her silence seemed to permit it, which, somehow, it always did. he flipped through the record section and found it organized in a way that made sense to him as a musician: not alphabetically, not by genre, but by something more atmospheric: there was a section labelled teeth, which contained the clash, the buzzcocks, and a wire album. there was another section labelled static, which had television, richard hell and the voidoids, and a single by the dead kennedys that looked like it had been handled frequently with love. there was another section simply labelled necessary that held marvin gaye and stevie wonder and, unexpectedly, a patti smith record he knew he recognized by couldn’t immediately place to his disappointment.

he pulled the patti smith record out and looked at it.

“horses,” she said from behind the counter, catching him off guard. she’d moved, was reorganizing something on the cluttered shelf beside her. “1975. if you haven’t heard it, that’s something you should remedy.”

“i’ve heard of her,” michael said. “i don’t know if i’ve actually—”

“there’s a difference between knowing the existence of someone and genuinely knowing their work,” she interrupted, in a tone that was not quite correcting him and not quite agreeing with him. it occupied a third space that he found unexpectedly comfortable—the space of being spoken to plainly, without anyone checking his expression first. she reached over without looking and produced a small hand-lettered card from a box on the counter—he could see there were many such cards, organized in some system he couldn’t immediately decipher. she held it out.

he crossed the shop swiftly and took it gently.

it read, in that same, small slanted handwriting: patti smith, horses (1975), the official grandmother of punk.

for: people who think they know what punk is. start here.

side two, track one.

“you make these for all the records?” he asked, turning it around. surprisingly blank on the other side.

“the ones that need context,” she answers. “some records explain themselves. some need a door opened first, though.”

he looks up at her, pointing at the card in his hand with his other. “which is this one?”

“that one’s a door,” she glanced at him then, a look that was brief and precise, and he had the sense of being considered by someone who was good at it. “you interested in buying it, or just reading about it?” she slightly lifts one eyebrow.

“buying it,” he says, surprising him as the words slip out before he decided on them. he hadn’t come in here to buy anything, just to indulge in his 4 month long curiosity of what this place could be. “both, maybe.”

something shifted at the corner of her mouth. not a smile, an acknowledgement.

“seven dollars then,” she said, and went back to whatever she was doing.

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he came back the following thursday.

he told himself it was because he’d listened to horses twice in the interim—once through the speakers in his studio sitting in the dark, and once on headphones while lying on the floor, which was how he listened to things when he wanted to get inside properly—and he had questions that the record itself couldn’t answer.

this was inherently true, but it was also not the complete picture.

she was at the back of the shop when he came in, standing on a short stepladder and hanging something on the wall. she was wearing black leggings tucked into a pair of heavy, buckled boots that looked like they had walked a considerable distance and intended to walk considerably more. over that, a loose, paint-streaked dress that fell to mid-thigh, the kind of thing that had probably started its life as one garment and had been worn into something else entirely. a black leather jacket hung off her frame, lazily slipping from her shoulders subconsciously in the warmth of the store—the surface interrupted here and there by small pins and patches that caught the light when she moved. a long, thinly knitted scarf in reds purples and oranges was still looped around her neck despite the indoor temperature, as though she had just come in from outside and simply not bothered unwrapping it. her hair was pinned up, somewhat chaotic, and there was a smudge of what looked like charcoal along her jawline that she appeared entirely unaware of, and paint on her hands that she had long since made peace with.

"door’s open!” she said, without turning around. she must have heard the bell.

“i listened to it,” michael announced.

she turned then, looking down at him from the stepladder with a slightly assessing expression. “and?”

“gloria,” he said. “the opening.”

she came down the ladder. “yeah.”

“i didn’t know a song could sound like that,” he said. it came out more earnest than he’d intended. raw around the edges. he was aware of it immediately and waited for some response to the rawness, which was what usually happened—people got a certain look when he said something unguarded, a look that meant they were recalibrating, reassessing, storing it for later.

she just looked at him steadily and asked, “like what?”

he thought about it. he was standing in the middle of her shop with his hands in the pockets of his jacket and she was standing at the foot of her stepladder, waiting, with no apparent urgency for an answer.

“most songs tell you what something feels like,” he said finally, working it out as he said it. “they describe it and put words to it, point at it from the outside….” he paused. “but that—gloria—it didn't particularly feel like a description of anything. it felt like someone had taken the feeling itself and just… pressed it directly into the music. like there was no distance between the two.” he shook his head slightly. “i didn’t know you could do that. i didn’t know a song could just be the thing instead of being about it.”

she was quiet for a moment, soaking in his words.

“that’s exactly what it is,” she said. and then: “you want to hear something that does the same thing differently?”

he did.

she put a record on the small turntable behind the counter without ceremony—he couldn’t see the sleeve from where he was standing—and the opening bars of something filled the shop. guitar, raw and close, like it had been recorded in the same room he was currently standing in, and then a voice that arrived like it had been waiting impatiently in the wings—urgent and unruly and completely unconcerned with whether you were ready for it.

he stood in the middle of the shop and listened.

she went back to the stepladder and continued what she’d been doing before he had waltzed in, which turned out to be hanging a large piece of her own work—a screenprint, he could see now, black ink on white paper, a figure in motion that he couldn’t entirely resolve into specifics but which was unmistakably alive. she worked with the music, her hands steady and considered, and didn’t perform any awareness of him, and he found, after a moment, that this was the most comfortable he’d felt in a room in some time.

“what is this?” he asked, when the track ended.

“x-ray spex,” she said, stepping back to look at the print. “1978. poly styrene. different kind of door.”

“what’s behind this one?”

“the idea that you’re allowed to sound like nothing that came before you,” she said. she tilted her head at the print, adjusting it a fraction. “poly styrene was twenty when she recorded that,” she said, still looking at the print rather than him. “no formal training and no particular concern for whether what she was doing was correct by anyone else’s measure. she just had something that needed to come out and she found the most direct route between herself and whoever was listening…” she paused, “and took it.” she stepped back from the wall, head tilting back and forth, waging the quiet internal battle of someone deciding whether the print needed another fraction of adjustment or whether she was simply looking for a reason to keep staring at it. michael had gone quietly still without meaning to, and it was only in that stillness that he noticed it.

the way she’d talked about poly styrene was the same way he’d talked about patti smith’s gloria. the same reaching for the right words and the same quality of caring about the thing being described as though getting it wrong would be a small, but genuine injustice. he didn’t name what he noticed. he just stood there and let it settle within him quietly, the way things did when you weren’t expecting them.

he was staring at her when she looked back, level and unhurried. he blinked out of his thoughts.

“do you make music?” he asked.

“i did,” she shrugged. “now i make everything else.” she gestured at the shop with one hand, encompassing it all—the prints, the zines, the organized records, the enormous corkboard, and the small painted objects on the low tables. her hand dropped to the side of her leg. “same impulse, just different material.”

“what was the band?”

“small,” she said. “it was loud. gone though,” the way she said it was matter-of-factly, not sad. “we played for three years. made one record in someone’s garage, and it sounds just like that.”

“but?”

she pulled the pencil from her hair and turned it between her fingers. “but, i fear, it’s the most honest thing i’ve ever made,” she said. “i know what’s in every second of it. every choice, like the tempo, the words, the way a particular line was delivered in that same garage. i know exactly why it’s there and whether it did what we needed it to do.” she paused, tapping the pencil once against the back of her hand. “there’s nothing in it that exists because someone in a room somewhere decided it should. no one told us the chorus needed to be bigger or the lyrics needed to be more accessible or that we should think about what was going to play well on the radio.” a small, dry, almost-smile crosses her lips as she reminisces. “nobody was particularly interested in telling us anything, honestly. which turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.” she looked at the pencil in her hand. “when there’s no one to answer to, you find out very quickly what you actually believe.”

she wasn’t looking at him while she said those words. but michael had the distinct feeling she knew exactly what she was saying and to whom.

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he came back the week after that, and the week after that…

he didn’t always buy something, though more often than not he left with something tucked under his arm. he bought a zine that turned out to be an essay about diy recording techniques written by someone in a london squat in 1977. he bought a cassette tape of a band she recommended with the specific instruction: don’t read about them first, just listen. he bought a small screenprint she’d made—her own work, which she priced without any self-consciousness and wrapped in brown paper without ceremony, as if selling her own art was a transaction like any other.

each visit had its own shape. sometimes they talked for an hour, and sometimes he came in and she was deep in the middle of something—printing, cutting, assembling—and they just existed in the same place with an easy, minimal conversation that didn’t feel like silence so much as a shared working quiet. he found he could think in here, which was not something he could say about most places. there was something about the density of things with purpose—things made and chosen by hand—that quieted the other noise.

he was thinking about the album constantly by this point. not in the productive way, nope, not yet, but in the pressing, circling way of something that needed to be resolved and couldn’t be forced. he’d told quincy in january that he wanted the next thing to be harder and more confrontational. quincy had looked at him with the careful attention of a man who had been in rooms with a lot of people over a long career and could tell real instinct from performance, and said: then you’d better find what you’re actually confronting. 

michael had not had an answer for that at the time.

but now, he was starting to think he might be finding one.

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it was now a thursday afternoon in march, a little over a month since the first visit, and she was silk-screening at the back of the shop when he came in. he could smell it before he saw her—the sharp aliveness of the dark ink, the faint solvent edge underneath.

she had the shop’s back room door propped open and was working at a large flat table, pulling a squeegee across a screen in long deliberate strokes. she was wearing wide-leg black trousers and a sheer black camisole with a lace hem that she’d clearly had for years, both of them partially obscured by an apron so heavily paint-and-ink-stained it had long since become its own abstract work. safety goggles were pushed up onto her forehead, leaving a faint, red mark across her brow that she was unaware of. her wrists were stacked with silver and black bangles that clinked softly whenever she shifted in her seat, a cluster of chains and pendants hanging from her throat to accompany the jewelry. music was coming from a small speaker on the shelf—something that pounded like a building falling down in an interesting, catchy way.

she didn’t stop what she was doing when he came through from the front. by now she knew his particular pattern of footsteps moving through the space—unhurried, attentive, picking things up every now and then to look at them, then tentatively placing it back down. she’d told him once that most people treated the shop like a waiting room for wherever they’re heading to next. he didn’t, which she seemed to find satisfactory in a lowkey way that he’d decided to take as a flattering compliment.

“what are you making?” he asked, coming to the doorway.

“run of twenty-five,” you sighed, her arms starting to get weary. “commission. band posters.” she lifted the screen to reveal the print beneath—a figure, stark and angular, caught mid-movement against a solid black background. the image had an urgency to it that was almost uncomfortable, which was what made her work so interesting.

he looked at it for a long time.

“how do you decide what’s worth twenty-five copies?”

she set the screen down. “i don’t, really. the client decides that.” she glanced at the print. “but i decide whether i want to make it. i turned down three jobs this year already.”

“because they weren’t—”

“because they didn’t have anything in them,” she said simply. “you can tell, usually. someone shows you a brief and you look at it and there’s just. nothing there. no friction, no question it’s trying to ask the viewer.” she pulled the goggles off her forehead and set them on the table. “that’s a waste of good ink.” she dusts her hands.

michael chuckled at the last remark before thinking about what she had said.

“i’ve been writing,” he said. it came out deliberate and careful—their conversations had mostly been about her work, the records, the things he was learning in here—and he’d been fine with that. he was less fine now that he’d started the sentence and had to finish it.

she looked at him. waiting, the way she did, without filling the space between them.

“i’ve been trying to write my next album,” he said. “for about six months. and everything i make sounds like—” he stopped.

“like you,” she finished it for him.

it was so precise that he almost laughed. “yeah.”

“that’s the problem when you’re that recognizable,” she said. it wasn’t unkind, it was just an assessment of him and his life. “the shape of you precedes you. everything you make has to push against the last thing.”

“that’s it exactly!” he agrees, the relief in his own voice becoming evident. “i want to make something harder. something that’s got some–some grit to it. some friction!”

she was watching him with the same quality of attention he’d started to recognize as her version of genuine interest. she wasn’t someone who performed engagement. when she was listening, really listening, there was a stillness to her that had a particular edge—different from boredom, but not necessarily politeness.

“is that what you’ve been doing here?” she said. “looking for that friction?”

he met her eyes and held them. “i think so.”

there was a beat. the record in the shop was still spinning; some distant, angular guitar; and she leaned back against the work table, crossing her arms in a settling manner to think about what she was gonna say next.

“can i tell you something about this kind of music?” she said, nodding toward the speaker. “it won’t be a lesson like all the other times you’ve come in here. its just something i think is relevant to mention.”

“please,” he encouraged.

“it didn’t come from wanting to be confrontational for the sake of it,” she said. “i think people see punk—look at all the clothes and listen to the loud noises of it all—and they think it started with attitude. but… it really didn’t. it started with people who felt like the music they were hearing didn’t tell the truth about what it actually felt like to be alive—and who couldn’t find room for themselves in what existed.” she paused. “the confrontation was just what happened when they tried to make room.”

michael was quiet.

“the reason it sounds the way it sounds,” she continued, “is because they weren’t trying to be palatable. they were trying to be true. that’s the thing that’s scary about it. it wasn’t ever the volume.” she looked at him directly now. “the volume was a byproduct.”

he kept silent for a little while.

the building-falling-down music was swelling to a close from the small speaker on the shelf. the silence heightened his senses—somewhere outside, a car loudly passed as it sped up to pass through the light that had just turned yellow. the smell of ink hung faintly in the room to her, but to him it was sharp and real.

“i worry about being liked,” he admitted, quietly, without emphasis. it was true and felt like it cost thousands of dollars to say.

she didn’t look surprised, and she didn’t look pitying. most importantly, she didn’t look like she was about to say something reassuring. she just looked at him with the level of attention that was, he had come to understand, her way of taking him seriously.

“i know,” she said. “it’s all over your music. not as a flaw—” she added, before he could react. “it’s part of what makes it work. you’re making music for everyone, and you do it without being condescending to anyone, which truly is difficult and most people who try it fail in one direction or the other.” she paused. “you don’t do either of those things. that’s real.”

“but,” he said quietly, expecting something raw to be added to her somewhat soothing words.

“but,” she continued, “the next thing might need to come from somewhere that isn’t thinking about any of that. not trying to be liked, not trying to be unliked either—that’s just the other side of the same problem, people making things difficult just to prove that they can. i’m talking about something that simply doesn’t ask the question at all.” she tilted her head slightly, choosing her next words with the care of someone who meant them. “the music you’ve made so far has always got one ear on the room. listening for how its landing. and that instinct has served you—its why people feel held by it, why it reaches everyone it reaches. but i think the next thing needs to be made with the door closed. no room, no audience. just whatever feels true for you right now, followed all the way to the end without checking whether anyone is still with you.” she looked at him then, directly. “you’ve got something in you that’s harder than what you’ve put on record so far. i can hear it when you talk.”

he looked at her, and the afternoon did what it had been doing for the past twenty minutes while he wasn’t paying attention, arranging its soft, orange glow around her in a way that made everything else peripheral. the light came through the small, high window of the back room at a low, unhurried angle and it had found the side of her face, deciding to stay there—catching the line of her jaw, the curve of her shoulder, the ink on her forearm that she’d been too absorbed to wipe away. she had the ghost of a charcoal smudge along her jaw that had become, over the past month, a detail he’d started to look for without admitting that he was looking. she was watching him without the weight most people brought to it. no performance behind her expression, no agenda underneath it—just her eyes on his face, steady and asking nothing. somehow that, more than anything, was what made him want to give her everything. it was, he thought, one of the more quietly devastating feelings he had ever felt inside of him before. 

he’d been trying for months to find the center of what the next thing was supposed to sound like.

he wasn’t sure when he’d started thinking it might have something to do with the girl standing right in front of him.

the thought sat there for a moment, unexamined, before something smaller and more immediate surfaced through it.

“you’ve heard my music?” he asked.

“yes, i live on a planet called earth,” she said dryly, with a slight roll of her eyes but a tiny smile dusted on her face to remind him that she’s just teasing. she turns away to move the print she had been working on somewhere safely leaning against a wall, “and before you ask—yes, it’s good. some of it is even extraordinary. off the wall is a near perfect record and you know it. i don’t even think i need to speak for thriller,” she said this the way she’d priced her own creations, without performance, just with simple accuracy. “but i think you’ve been making music for an audience. i think the next one needs to be made for yourself. or for something you’re genuinely angry about.” she paused, turning back to him when a question swiftly came to her mind.

“are you angry about anything?”

he thought, for a fraction of a second, about the last two years. hell, the last 20 years of his life. the magnitude of what has happened in his short lifespan so far was intense, with a strange specific loneliness produced alongside it. the way that the larger he got, the more the world decided it knew what he was, and not his own body, not his own soul. that gap between who he was in a room like this and what was printed on a thousand magazine covers. the weight of being an expectation rather than a real, living person.

“yeah,” he said, quietly. “actually. yeah.” confidence replaces restraint.

she looked at him for a moment longer than usual.

“then write from there,” she said. “that’s where the friction is.”

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he didn’t go back the following thursday. he was in the studio for three days without much interruption, which hadn’t happened in months, and which quincy responded to with the specific kind of pleased patience of someone who’d been waiting for this exact thing and had learned not to hover.

the week after, he went back.

she was at the counter this time, doing something with an exacto knife and a large sheet of paper, cutting with the precise, leisured focus of someone who had made this kind of thing too many times to count on your fingers and toes. she’d changed out of the usual apron—wearing high-waisted grey jeans, straight-legged and faded at the knees and ankles. low-heeled leather boots had a particular worn-in quality of something bought second-hand and broken in the rest of the way on her own time. a black and white striped fitted top, and over it another leather article of clothing covered densely in pins that the original surface of it had become beside the point—small hand-drawn images, either made from her or bought at a second-hand store, band names, slogans—they all accumulated evidence of ten years of opinion displayed without hesitation across her shoulders. her hair was down this time, falling across her face at the angle it always did when she was looking at something closely, covering the entirety of her face except the tip of her nose from the angle he sees. she didn’t look up when he came in, though he knew from the past month that she moment she hears that bell, she clocks him in the way she distinguishes everything—without making any production of it, without giving him the satisfaction of knowing he’d been noticed until she was ready to acknowledge it in her own time.

what michael didn’t know was that she’d been waiting for him to come in since his very noticeable absence the week before. she hadn’t named it to herself—hadn’t let herself—but the bell above the door had snagged her attention every time it changed for seven days running, and every time it hadn’t been him she’d gone back to whatever she was doing with the focused composure of someone determined not to have been waiting in the first place. when it finally made its familiar sound with his particular weight behind it, her heart gave one, involuntary thump against her ribs, immediately sending a nauseous whirlwind of butterflies to erupt in her stomach for an instant. she kept her eyes on the exacto knife. kept her breathing even. adamant on giving nothing away.

then he put something on the counter.

she looked at it first—a cassette tape, handwritten label in a handwriting she just realized she’d never seen before. it was rounded and careful, somehow exactly what she would have guessed his handwriting looked like. demo. february–march. she read it twice, slowly, then looked up at him.

they were closer than either of them had planned for, the counter between them doing very little to account for the actual distance, which was not much. she was aware of it immediately, and so was he—she could tell by the way he didn’t move, the way his eyes stayed on hers a half-second past the point where most people would have found somewhere else to look. the shop was very quiet around them. the needle had reached the end of the record on the turntable and was cycling softly through the run-out groove, a faint, rhythmic crackle that neither of them seemed to hear in the moment.

she didn’t budge. not even an inch.

he didn’t either.

it lasted only a few seconds, but it was the kind of ‘few seconds’ that had a heaviness to them than ordinary time. then michael glanced down at the cassette tape on the counter, cleared his throat quietly, pushing it closer toward her. the moment folded itself away and flew out the window into the cold breeze like it had never quite happened.

“i don’t need you to like it,” he said, before she could say something first. “i just thought you might want to hear what i was talking about. with the grit and the friction—all that jazz.” he said the last part with a small, self-conscious gesture of his hand, like he wasn’t entirely sure the phrase had landed the way he’d intended.

she picked the cassette up and looked at it. turned it over in both hands. she looked at the blank b-side label for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, causing michael nervously shift on his feet a bit.

“how many people have heard this?” she asked.

“quincy,” he said. “and me.”

she set it down on the counter beside the exacto knife and the sheet of paper, looking at it for another moment with the particular quality of attention she gave to things she was deciding about. then she looked up at him, and the look went on long enough to feel different from her usual assessments—something in it that he couldn't quite name, except that it wasn’t impersonal. not even slightly.

“okay,” she said.

“okay?”

“i’ll listen to it.” she picked it up carefully, two-handed once again, and slid it into the pocket of her jeans with the same deliberateness with which he’d noticed she handled things she intended to take seriously. “give me a week.” she picked the exacto knife up then, heading back to work.

he nodded, and the grin that crossed his face was wide and immediate and entirely unguarded, the kind that arrived before he could think to moderate it. he was halfway to the door, still wearing it, until she spoke again.

“michael?”

he turned.

she had set the exacto knife down without seeming to notice she’d done it. she was looking at him with an expression that was doing its best to be neutral and not entirely succeeding, and for the first time since he’d been coming in here, she seemed to be choosing her words with something other than deliberate confidence.

the moment came flying back through the window, the wind helping it unfold itself.

“i’ve, um—” she stopped, closing her mouth. then she started up again. “i’ve been making a new print run. something different for me. a lot bigger than anything else i’ve done.” she was trying to hold eye contact and mostly managed it well, though he caught the few moments her gaze drifted sideways, just briefly, just enough to tell him that this was costing her something she didn’t usually spend. she seemed to clock her own restlessness and reached for the exacto knife once more. making one slow, precise cut along the paper’s edge—steadying herself with the familiar motion of it. “i’m doing a small show at a space in silver lake in about three weeks.” another clean cut sliced through the paper. “it’s a really small thing. probably twenty people, maybe even less. but if you wanted to come and see—” she let the sentence end there, which was its own kind of answer about how much she wanted him to fill it in.

he stood in the doorway and looked at her—really looked, like the way he’d learned to observe the things in here; slowly and without any program. the afternoon was behind him now, coming through the open door at his back, haloing him in the same beautiful manner it did to you the last time he was here, with that low, amber falling across her face that turned everything it looked toward into something worth keeping. he wondered, briefly and without quite meaning to, whether she was noticing it.

she was.

she hadn’t meant to—had been focused, very purposefully, on the paper in front of her—but the light coming through the door behind him had caught the sharp line of his jaw and the soft edges of his curls. in it, she noticed for the first time that his hair wasn’t quite the black she’d come to be familiar with. in that particular angle of the afternoon amber, it was something warmer. a very dark, secret brown that only an artist like her could catch, the kind of brown you’d only see if the light hit it just right. she’d noticed before she could stop herself. she made another cut along the paper, and brought her eyes back down.

“i’d like that,” he affirmed, his voice quieter than usual.

she nodded once, not looking up, the pencil turning slowly between her fingers after grabbing it from the table once she was done slicing up the paper.

“good,” she said, and the flatness of it was undone entirely by the very small, very private thing that happened at the corner of her mouth—not quite a smile, but it wasn’t not one either—and by the particular quality of her stillness in the moment after, which he had spent the past month learning to decipher, and which meant, he was fairly sure, that she was pleased in a way she had absolutely no intention of saying out loud.

he pushed the door open and stepped back out into the late-march afternoon, the bell clanging its usual unapologetic goodbye behind him, and the encino air hit him cooler than he remembered it being on the way in.

he sat in the car for a moment without starting it.

through the shop window he could see her, already back at the counter with the exacto knife in hand, bent over a different sheet of paper at that same focused angle he first saw her in in february. as if he’d never been in there. ad if the last ten minutes had been entirely unremarkable.

he started the car.

he went home and sat at the piano.

the first two hours produced nothing he wanted to keep—things that were technically accomplished and emotionally inert, melodies that resolved themselves too quickly and too cleanly, like arguments that hadn’t been allowed to get loud enough to mean anything. he got up twice. made tea that he didn’t touch, going cold even whilst full. stood at the window looking at the dark, encino suburbia for a few minutes each time before sitting back down.

the song that came out of hour three was different.

it arrived the way important things always arrived—suddenly, like a door being kicked open and you have to catch it before it swings shut due to the bolts being too loose. it was hard and direct, carrying something underneath it that felt like genuine anger. a propulsive bass line he’d never tried before anchored it, something insistent and physical, and the melody didn’t soften at the edges the way his usually did. hell, he even started forming a short film about it in his head.

he played it back in the dark with his hands in his lap and thought: there it is. there it finally is. the beginning of something.

on the notepad beside the piano, where he kept the words that arrived before the music or after it or both, he wrote a single line at the top of a clean page—something that had been sitting at the back of his throat for months without finding its way out until now. he wasn’t sure yet whether it would end up in a song or whether it would just stay there on the page, a marker of the night things shifted. he drew a box around it the way he always did with the ones that felt like they were the centre of something, the ones everything else would eventually have to answer to.

he thought about a small shop in encino with no name on the door. the way it smelled like paper and dried plants and something sharp and chemical underneath. a beautifully unique woman who handled things she intended to keep with both hands, like they were worth the extra care. he thought about the way the afternoon light had found the side of her face and decided to stay there that one particular day, and the very small, very private thing that had occurred at the corner of her mouth that she hadn’t managed to hide quick enough.

he thought about what it felt like to make something from the same material as the feeling rather than just pointing at the feeling from a safe distance.

he left the light on and kept writing until the street outside had gone completely quiet. by the time he finally stopped, there were three pages of notes spread across the piano bench in his own careful handwriting, edges soft from being handled.

he flipped back slowly through them until he found the page with the box drawn around it. looked at it for a moment — time after time, i gave you all of my money / no excuses to make / ain't no mountain that i can't climb / all is goin' my way — he tore the page of 26 words out along the edge as cleanly as he could manage, folded it once, twice, and pressed it into his pocket with the flat of his palm—the same way she’d pressed his cassette tape into her jeans earlier that afternoon, he noticed, without really meaning to.

he sat there in the quiet of the room for a long moment after that. the kind of quiet that only arrived when something had genuinely been resolved rather than postponed.

then the exhaustion came—the rare, specific kind that belonged only to nights like this one, when you’d finally stopped searching and started finding. it moved through him slowly, acting more like a relief than tiredness, and he was grateful for it in a way he couldn’t entirely articulate.

he turned the light off and went to bed, finally ending the cycle of lying awake thinking about what came next because he already knew.

Steve threw a quirked brow your way while taking a sip from his half-empty, seashell pink wine glass. "Seriously? Even her voice?"

You gasped at him. "How dare you? Her voice is cute! And just wait ‘til you hear her sing ‘Suddenly, Seymour’, Ellen Greene kills! Just a little taste of that hidden power and then poof! Back to the mousiness. Incredible."

The two of you were lounging on the couch, part of the way through Little Shop of Horrors. At this point, you both had your feet kicked up on your coffee table, still cleared off from pizza work earlier that evening. Steve had gotten up at some point to pop some popcorn, which now sat in a bowl jammed between one of your and one of Steve’s legs, the only thing putting any distance between you. Your arms were still stretched out on the back of the couch, the hand closest to Steve occasionally brushing against his neck or catching a stray hair when he turned to look at you. When it happened the first couple of times, you had thrown apologetic looks his away, but he hadn’t seemed to notice—or if he did, he wasn’t bothered.

Eventually, when it happened again, you had noticed the smallest of smiles twitching at the corners of Steve’s mouth, although he kept looking pointedly forward. After that, you stopped worrying about it.

Steve chuckled and rolled his eyes at you now. "Didn't take you for a musical nerd."

That made you throw your head back in an unapologetic cackle. "What, did the style revolving around a music genre and culture not clue you in? The three years of choir maybe? Music being a big part of film production, which is something I’m a nerd about? Interest in music doesn’t just stop at a different genre of it. Well… maybe for some but—"

"Okay, okay, I get it!" Steve threw his hands up in surrender, but the smile he was wearing was sweet. He could hem and haw and roll his eyes all he damn pleased, but you knew that Steve loved being a confidant of his friends’ interests, even when he didn’t know much about them. Especially when he didn’t know much about them.

A scene of Audrey II popped up on the TV screen, the plant having grown exponentially since its last appearance onscreen. Your eyes lit up as you pointed at it, leaning forward with a giddiness that only punk concerts and explaining about film creation could elicit from you. "Did you know that she’s all puppetry? Onstage and in the film. They made a bunch of different puppets for her—obviously—and there’s a team of puppeteers piloting her. The reason she looks so clean is because they’d shoot shots at different frame rates to make her movements look faster."

Steve leaned forward as well. His was more in confusion, though, as he tilted his head and squinted at the screen. "I don’t see anybody."

"They’re most likely hidden in the set," you explained. "Under the floor, in Twoey’s pot, behind the walls and such. Stuff like fishing line probably helps too. Skinny, transparent, thus harder to see on film after the editing is done."

"Huh." Steve frowned and nodded in a way that gave off severe dad energy—that said he didn’t get it but was glad that you were enjoying yourself. He leaned back into the couch, taking the time to take over the back of it with his arms since yours were no longer there. "Cool."

You grinned at him. It was mostly due to the film talk but, as you looked at him, you were also thoroughly pleased to see him so comfortable and lax in your home. The lighting really did do him justice, casting him in a warm glow that brought out the brown of his hair and eyes, the yellow of his shirt. The stained glass lamps casted various shapes of color around the room, some of which landed across Steve’s form in an incredibly artful way. For a moment you wished you had a camera to take a picture of him before ultimately pushing the thought aside. A camera would never do the scene justice.

A breeze from the cracked window above the TV pulled you out of your reverie with a shiver. Careful not to disturb the mood, you quietly got up and scooted around the other side of the coffee table to avoid Steve having to move his legs. You closed the window by the TV, then moved to shut the small panel window on your front door as well. You felt Steve’s eyes follow you all the while.

You turned to him, waving a hand. "You keep watching, I’ve seen this in theaters and the one from the 60s. Finally cooled off a bit, gonna go grab a jacket."

"Do you just want mine?" Steve asked. Clearly getting comfy to the point of not wanting to move, he stretched out with one lazy arm until a finger could snag the jacket from its place discarded over a nearby chair. He shifted the arm in your direction, holding the article of dark blue clothing out to you.

You raised an eyebrow. "You're not cold?"

Steve shrugged, then nodded to the vest you were wearing. "Trade ya?"

You snorted but found yourself already tugging the denim off your body. "It’s a vest. Not particularly warm."

Steve shrugged again, smiling. He looked so cozy burrowed into your burnt yellow couch. "Can give me one of your hoodies then. What about that one that you did for Halloween last year? You replaced the sleeves with a different one and did a, uh… bleach? Dye? Skull design thing on it?"

"Why don’t you wear your own jacket?" You didn’t know why you were being contrarian. You really wanted to wear his jacket. You really wanted to give him something of yours that you could see him snuggled into. You pulled your vest off.

You hadn’t paid much attention to how the fit of your tank top’s sleeves hung a bit lower on your body than normal, exposing the bit of scarring closest to your underarms. You only noticed when, while your arm was raised to toss the vest aside, Steve’s eyes dropped to stare at them.

You stood there, frozen, gauging him. You could tell right away that there wasn’t a hint of meanness or even judgment in his eyes. It was mostly curiosity, like he didn’t understand why you did it—he’d already said so, he didn’t—although you could see a hint of sadness there too.

"Penny for your thoughts?" You questioned quietly after a few too-silent moments had passed.

Steve’s eyes immediately flicked up to meet yours. He looked like a kid having been caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Still, he nodded toward the scar, still pink and new. "Was it painful?"

You shrugged, rolled your head a bit in thought. In the meantime, you tossed your vest on the chair and snagged Steve’s jacket from him. You pulled it on, the soft fabric immediately encasing your bare arms in warmth and the smell of cologne and hairspray.

You said, "The procedure itself? Nah, I was knocked out. Probably too knocked out, actually. They kept me overnight to make sure I was waking up proper because they had a hard time getting me to wake up to take my meds. The recovery was kinda rough, though. I didn’t do the opiates, just basic painkillers, for obvious reasons. And didn't really have anybody to stay with me, so I—"

"You should’ve called me." Steve’s voice sounded tight. You could tell he was trying to keep sounding nonchalant, but the pain in his eyes was telling. "I would’ve come. Robin too, maybe. Make it a road trip to the city, could’ve been fun."

Your cheeks warmed under his intense, long-lashed stare. You rolled your eyes anyway. "Oh, yeah, have you take a week or so off work and do a six-hour drive just to take care of me. Not just you, Robin too! That would’ve gone over well with your jobs."

"Your safety is more important than my job," Steve said simply, sternly. You weren’t sure he had even blinked in the past few minutes, his dark eyes trained on you as he waved a dismissive hand at the idea of picking his job over being with you. "Especially Family Video. Replaceable. Easy. Wouldn’t even have to think about it. You’re not, you know."

Your next breath came out heavy. Your skin felt itchy and far too warm. The entire trailer felt like it was heating up to the point that you were briefly concerned you had left the stove on. You knew that wasn’t the case, though. It was just you. It was just Steve.

"Yeah, well," you mumbled, "everything turned out okay. Here I am. But… thanks. ‘Ll keep that in mind. Hang tight, I’ll grab that hoodie."

Steve’s eyes burned holes in your back all the way down the hall.

~~~~~

Steve really had no business looking as cute as he did cozied up in one of your sweatshirts. Rumpled hair that he’d given up on as the night has gone on. Nose tucked close to the collar, hands stuffed comfortably into the sleeves. Sleepy, half-lidded eyes, but if he had any desire to go home, he didn’t make you aware of it. 

That sweatshirt in particular was one of your cooler projects, in your humble opinion. Originally an entirely black sweatshirt that you had worn to the point of thinning and fading to an ugly brown over the years, you had broken out the dye and dyed it back to its original rich color. Then, probably counter-intuitively, you had also broken out the bleach and bleach-dyed a messy skull design into the sweatshirt’s front; the back received an anatomically correct skeletal back pattern. The sleeves, too long anyway and beginning to fray, you had decided to replace with those from a soft orange sweater you had thrifted. Any patching needed was done in the rest of the sweater’s material—in a series of fun, Halloween-y shapes, like pumpkins and bones—as well as reinforcing the sweatshirt’s thinning body from the inside. It had been one piece of a last-minute Halloween costume puzzle, black jeans and boots bleach-dyed or painted with similar bony patterns and a cheap skeleton mask Joyce Beyers let you snag from her shop for a single buck as the only sale of the night, after Steve and Robin invited you to party-hop with them. You had quickly gotten bored out of your mind with the parties themselves, but your favorite duo’s company was always a joy. 

You were over at the TV again, popping out Little Shop of Horrors and putting Gremlins in. Echoing Steve’s question about the first movie of the night, you asked, "What’d you think about Little Shop of Horrors?"

"Well, that puppet can sing," Steve said, his response a bit delayed in his lazy state. "You were right, the puppeti-ng is really cool at the end there."

You hummed in agreement as you stood up and shuffled back to the couch, tucking your hands into the pockets of Steve’s jacket. "'Mean Green Mother From Outerspace' and 'Feed Me' are the best songs in it. Levi Stubbs."

"So…" Steve ventured after a moment. His eyes drifted over to you suspiciously, causing you to break out in a sneaky smile. "Gonna tell me what we’re watching now?"

"A Robin recommendation?" You offered.

Steve’s eyes narrowed. "What did she do?"

Your smile widened as Gremlins began to roll. Throwing your hands up in surrender as Steve’s glare turned severe, you said, "Her note said, and I quote, ‘Steve will be crawling all over you’ followed by a cute little heart. I had to know what that means, Stevie. Simply had to."

Steve was now a statue, all taut and stony. 

"Steve," you tried after a moment, "do the weird little fluffballs… make you horny?"

Steve blanched, choked a breath, and you cackled in response. He immediately went onto the defense—"What? No! What the hell?"—before your laughing clued him in and he went back to glaring at you. "You’re joking."

You snorted and pretended to wipe a tear from your eyes. "Yeah, no shit, I’m kidding. So, what, not puppets, clearly, but animatronics get you a little spooked?" 

In his mind, Steve was losing arbitrary cool points by the second, that goofy standard of his that he felt made him worthy of existing in the world. You could see it in the way he was getting increasingly flustered, shaking his head and waving his hands around like he could fight off the—loser allegations? You didn’t know. He was wrong, of course. Cool points didn't count past high school, and Steve Harrington was a dork. There just was no fighting it. He was an awkward, lovable, sometimes-too-handsome-for-his-own-good dork. 

While you looked on like a pleased cat after it had pushed a vase off a shelf, Steve pointed a dangerous finger in your direction. "No, listen, listen—"

Your hands flung up as you laughed again. "I’m listening!"

Steve went on, "I can do no eyes. I can do many eyes. What I cannot do is a singular pair of weirdly human, robotic eyes on a… not… human… thing. Okay?" 

"So it’s the eyes?" 

"Eyes and— and, like… the movements!" Steve continued to flail around, this time trying to mimic a robotic slowness. So, it was animatronics.

"You don’t even like Gizmo?" You moved your hands close together and held them up, peeking at Steve through them. "He’s just a little dude. Looks kinda like a chihuahua. Or a baby."

"I like both dogs and babies!" Steve hunched further into himself as the little Mogwai in question finally made its first appearance onscreen. "That is not a baby."

You were still thoroughly amused—what an incredible fact to learn about Steve, of all people—but you were ultimately sympathetic to his plight. You moved to the edge of the couch, ready to move to action if he willed it. "Want me to turn it off? I have an ass-load of movies in my room we can pick from instead. Or you can head home if you want, it is getting pretty late—"

"No!" Steve said, a little too quickly and a little more desperate than he’d intended. It hung in the air for a moment as the two of you stared at each other, your faces growing progressively redder. It may have been the first time during this entire night that you both acknowledged the tension, albeit nonverbally. 

Steve broke contact first. He took a deep breath and rolled his head and shoulders like he was preparing for a fight, then looked forward to glare at the TV. "I can handle it."

You finally glance up when he huffs, sketchbook forgotten as you catch sight of a new gash along his chest.

He waves off your attempt to look at the area.

"'S fine, luv. Just a scratch."

"Just a - for the love of - ugh!"

You drag him onto the couch as you brush past, a quiet laugh meeting your ears as you rummage through the medicine cabinet around the corner.

"It's really not that 'orrible!"

Even with his protesting, he shrugs his jacket off with a wince, pulling the top of his suit up so you can access the newest wound on his torso.

He can vaguely hear you scolding him, telling him that the city needs him to be less wreck less, but he has one little, uninterrupted train of thought:

This is NOT how he wanted this to go.

The original plan was simple: show if like he'd done a time or twenty, tell you that he trusts you enough for something, then wham! Mask off!

But no. Here he was, shirtless on your couch, shaking in an attempt to stay still for your caring hands to work on him.

Still..

It had to be salvageable.

"-and without you, Osborne would've gotten his filthy grip into our movement, but NO, you were there to stop him -"

"How long are you planning to repeat yourself?"

You sighed, and he winced internally.

Okay. So not like that.

"I'm just worried about you, y'know?"

He nodded gently. "I can tell. Pretty obvious, actually."

You rolled your eyes, going back to work. "Yeah, well. You're our city's hero. Cheesy, yeah, but it's true."

He sucked in a quiet breath. "Yeah? If I'm the city's hero, then you're mine."

You look up at him, speechless. And he grins, hand coming to the bottom of his mask.

Plan - back on track.

"Cheesy, yeah. But it's true."

You're still staring, more in awe now, as he removes his spiked mask. He watches your eyes flicker from his coils to his multiple piercings, lingering momentarily on his lip before meeting his eyes. He's still grinning cheekily as he leans forward, stifling a groan as his newly tended wound shifts.

"Wow.."

He barely hears the word, instead feeling it roll across his chin from where you're kneeling in front of him on the couch, and his smile widens.

"That's what I thought when I saw you."

And he knows you were already hooked - everyone is, he's heard - but now you're just staring, taking him in, and he feels.. loved.

It's odd, after everything he's been through. But he can't help but revel in it, hand coming forward to cradle your cheek.

"Are we.. wow."

He leans forward further, straining against his gash, but sighs when you push him back upright before sitting next to him on the couch.

"Don't strain that."

It's crosser than he expected, but he can't help but chuckle. "Whatever you say."

"Doctors orders."

You lean forward, barely, and he follows suit. The new angle is more comfortable anyways.

"I don't like taking orders."

You know.

"What about.. significant other's suggestion?"

He leans forward further, hand coming back up to hold you.

"I could do that."

-----