#snobrogues

I

❝ i’ve never been in love. ❞ she tells him earnestly on the night they meet, in a tone which hides the influence of the four vodkas she had taken before their exchange. ❝ jenny told you that i’m in love with a new man every week, but that’s not true. i’m OBSESSED with them, sure, but love’s different, isn’t it? ❞

christ knows why she’s asking him. it sounds like a precursor to flirtation, when in reality he is not her type: at parties like this, she collects the lecherous attentions of powerful men she knows will treat her badly, and rarely puts effort into the type she can only categorise as ‘gentle’. he’d be so easy to fall in love with, she thinks, if she had the inclination. maybe he’d prove her wrong. maybe he’d be somewhere down the middle; yes, she can see him being easy to fall in love with, but hard to BE in love with. she’s never been one for hard work. 

but he is an enigma to her, as he always will be. he makes an awkward, clever comment on the butterfly pin she wears in the collar of her dress, and her brain starts its regular hurried, difficult process. she’s so used to knowing where to place the people she meets, establishing how best to work and manipulate them before they use up her own weak resources first. but he - harry, her friend introduced him as, and he does look like a harry - is not like anyone she has met. he gives her no sense that he will use her, and she lowers her defences, needing instead to know why he seems to trust walls more than he does people. by the time they kiss she is none the wiser, but has at least found herself content in her lack of understanding. 

she falls into him when she realises that he won’t take a kiss from her, but he’ll give her one. it’s an important distinction that she’s still learning. fuck it, she thinks as she studies him with a calculated tenderness which betrays her, i might as well. none of her men ( lucy’s men. that’s the kind of reputation she’s building for herself. ) have been kind to her. maybe she’ll like it. maybe she’ll like the feel of a nice man. 

she does. god, she does. lucy has never, ever been kissed like this before - she never will - and she clings to him, deepening the kiss only to lengthen it. it’s far too soon for the alternative, but this is more than an obsession. there’s a single word for him, she decides. indescribable. the word itself is evasion, of course, but if she were braver than she is then it would say all that she intends for him to know.

❝ well, you kiss better than you flirt, bud, ❞ is all she concedes, in the end. for now, anyway.

II

she has introduced him to her hands as she introduced him to her, and by now he must know them as old friends. they’re soft as a general rule - softer than you’d expect of a woman with as harsh a tongue as lucy - but they can tense when she angers, or around his hair when she comes undone. an awful part of her hopes this way is his favourite, though she suspects he loves them best when she’s at the piano, reviving a dormant talent purely because he smiles with his eyes when he hears her play. she’s no maestro, but he doesn’t wince at her mistakes the way that mama does; sometimes, if he hears one, he’ll kiss her cheek instead, and this will usually cause another.

❝ oh, if you’re SO brilliant, why don’t you join me? ❞ she moves to give him space beside her on the stool, with a challenging tone that would hold a threat to it if it wasn’t him receiving it. she is playing the right hand of a piece before he sits down, confident that he knows the left at least in part; she’s right, of course. there’s an intimacy to the art of the duet. it’s like making love; just as beautiful, just as unifying, but lacks the natural awkwardness she felt with every man before him ( maybe it’s just HIM that lacks it. no, she can’t think like that. ). the pretence is not eternal. lucy becomes arrogant in her performance, and when she tries to cross their hands they tangle and the music falls entirely into laughter.

a lithe finger gestures just beside her lips as she leans into him expectantly. ❝ i THINK that counts as a mistake, ❞ she encourages, and when he tries to repeat their ritual she turns into his lips, stealing a kiss he hadn’t offered but, hopefully, won’t mind her taking. it’s sweet at first, with the warm affection she tries to hide that she holds for him, sometimes. but her hand becomes restless as her lips do the work, stroking first his jaw, then nape of his neck, then his hair - oh, that hair. they are breathless by the time they finally part - necessity rather than desire - and her hand dives for his in a single move. faultless, like it’s returning home.

❝ tell me i’m brilliant, harry. do you think i’m brilliant ?? ❞ he kisses her again. she takes it as a yes.

III

❝ i don’t want you to look at me !! ❞ confidence is harsh. she learnt that years before she met him, and supposes that she held an obligation to reveal it to him one day; the knotted guilt in her throat is unfamiliar, but far from enough to block her words. ❝ and i don’t want you to change my mind because you can’t. i STILL know it better than you, you owe me more than that bullshit. ❞

YOU’RE TOO SHARP, LUCY. the thought of her mother is loud, and correct; for a woman so gifted in conflict, lucy is better at proving expectations right than wrong. her own words are secondary to a larger means, an amalgamation of meaningless syllables her cold heart thinks are expected rather than intended ( does he owe her more? does he owe her anything? she wants better, but not FROM him. ). it’s a mask, created from the rubble of her fallen pride, disguising how pathetic she is - she, a grown woman using her own words to perform mummy’s wishes. but mama knows best. this is for the best. A NICE GUY LIKE THAT WON’T EVER LOVE YOU BACK. YOU’LL CUT HIS HANDS WHEN HE TRIES. NO. MY LITTLE GIRL NEEDS A MAN WHO CAN WIELD HER LIKE A BLADE.

she steps back as he steps towards her. never before has she let riches slip from her hands ( he is, by far, the most exquisite thing she has ever held, and only now has she considered that hands like hers can ruin jewels ) and she soon corrects herself; her arms wrap around his waist, a tenderness she reserved for him which never suited her in the first place. she’s an expert at lying with her voice; she’s forgotten what the truth tastes like, but she remembers how it feels. she hides her wounds with precision until they kiss, an overwhelming finality flowing into weakened veins, and she bleeds into his mouth. she knows she can’t say that. she hasn’t said it before, and now is far from the right time. but her lips say stay with me, and it’s hard to argue with them.

hard, but not impossible.  ❝ i don’t wanna see you again.❞

IV

it is hardly ever that she thought of him, she tells him from the rim of a martini glass, though her softening eyes betray her rather blunt lie. she offers him a fabricated excuse that lucy and lucille are different figures, and the events of the years before she added that crucial extra syllable mean nothing to the woman she is today. harry was the lover of lucy ( he comments on her use of the word lover, and anger fails her in return for a light roll of her eyes ) but a stranger to her now, and there’s to be no case of picking up where they left off, so to speak. the name harry hart means nothing to lucille bluth. the name means nothing to her. but she is still the same woman, despite all this. lucy is not concealed, but harry is only person to still see her. christ, she’s wanted to be seen all this time.

lucille considers it a failure to confess the truth, but she’s never been a strong woman, not really; she’s simply kept up the facade. she considers the situation like this: she has little interest in history, but she knows that people will travel thousands of miles to see the ashes and ruins of empires that it was thought would last forever, and look upon them with the same admiration and interest as those who built them. their rawness, their decay, is as crucial to their appeal as their original structure, for the fascination comes not from what had been built, but from what has survived. if she kisses harry now, thirty years after the last, she will not be futilely trying to rebuild something lost, but discovering the beauty she can find in what remains.

quite a lot remains, she discovers, when she pushes her glass away from her and pulls him towards her instead. the kiss the gentlest thing she’s felt in a while, although it’s fraught with the desperation of a woman incapable of apologising with her words, but knowing that she can still speak with her lips. he has changed, wildly, but he doesn’t kiss like a lover: he still kisses like her lover. her lover.

shit.

she closes her eyes involuntarily ( is she dreaming? christ, this is cliche if she is. ) and hears him whisper a name into her lips; a finger reaches up to break them apart. ❝  —  it’s lucille. ❞ she corrects him, a careful murmur into the negligible gap between them. she needs this. everything else - every moment, every kiss, every emotion - must remain untouched. but they are not in the past, and he can love lucy all he likes, as long as he loves the rest of her, too. ❝ harry. call me lucille and kiss me again. ❞

he amazes her. she’s not waiting long.

V

when the weather is harsher than lucille is used to, she finds herself holding him a little tighter, as though she’s aware of some adverse effect the outside world may have on them. it never rains in california, and so london surprises her. god knows how it ever leaves her mind. it’s all the english seem to talk about, the weather, and she doesn’t bother to hide her disdain for a topic which matches its subject in dullness. thank god harry is not one for small talk. he’s not one for talk of many kinds ( though he’s a spectacular listener for a woman who can’t stop. ) so even when they talk in private, exchanging discordant words, his always hold a certain gravity that she’s never matched.

harry returns to her in exhaustion, most nights. what it is about a tailor’s shop that tires him so much she doesn’t know, but he is not george, and the importance of the whole thing is that he returns to her at all. sometimes he’ll sleep within the hour. others, when she questions him on certain topics ( she’s learning those, making up for time they wasted apart. ) he can talk for far longer than that. everyone knows that she’s an expert at feigned interest. but the first and only time her mind wanders that night is when she realises what it means that she has clung to every single word.

absorbed in his own language, he is describing wing structures to her when she cuts him off with a single kiss. whilst it’s gentler than usual - she’s a desperate kisser, but this time she slows herself - it holds a confession of something momentous that she has, shockingly, only just realised she’s felt for a long time. she understands it. now, she understands. he never felt like an obsession, after all. he questions her with a single look; she answers simply with what seems like a contradiction, but he’s always been a clever man, and he’s always known her well. ❝ i wanna hear about your stupid butterflies. ❞