#sugaredrush

A girl’s got to eat ; even if it’s all alone, late night at the office, miserable with the way her career feels stalled, just as she’s getting started. Everyone talks about PAYING YOUR DUES and having to earn your way out from beneath the bitch work, so why was it that it felt as if that despite being one of the pool of interns at investments firm, she was the one left there the latest, made to do the most? It’d once felt like enough to have been a wizard with numbers, but that was only part of it, wasn’t it? 9 pm, and only now able to rise to the growling, empty hunger that pulls at her, trudging through the familiar glass doors of the place down the ways from her squalid apartment.

"For one.” that too, is nostalgic, checking her phone for the messages that have come in. From her parents, who keep asking if she needs anything. From her brother, who tells her he needs her to call him later for help on his homework. Friends, with pictures of the PRE-GAMING they’re doing on a Friday night, and then something weirder from Instagram, that she banishes to the conversation graveyard. Exhaling, as she all but goes concave over the table, needing to find her breath, her spine, her god damn will to live. But by the time James draws closer, the composure’s there, blue eyes that flicker upwards with the quirk of a grin there. “Wow. Been absolute ages hasn’t it?” sarcasm that slips, she was only here yesterday, her accent carrying the charm that she lacks when this exhausted. “Just the usual and - what kind of pie do you have today?”

She hasn’t seen Rory since the BIG INCIDENT. The one that nobody talks about, the one that gets her tossed out of the family in everything but name. How families like theirs operate in close quarters and beyond the public eye, handling their affairs in quiet moments, between each other, and that was all. That was what defined the difference between the newly rich, and those born into it, rules that go unspoken, unsaid, and simply understood. But Rory didn’t a fuck about any of that, did she?

It’s what Faye’s always admired the most from her friend, prep-school roommates amongst bored and idle hallways, their nights spent out and wondering and complaining about the STIFF RIGOUR with which the world had put them up against. You can’t be yourself, you don’t get a choice. Everything is about your family, and the ways that you lean back into it.

But Faye’s on the go, touching down where she hears she lives now. Nobody talks about THAT VIOLENCE of her exit - even though Faye tries to reach out back then, but perhaps for them all, the wound’s too fresh. Faye’s there when it happens, her family there to co-broker the deal in other means ( real estate baby! that’s where the money’s at! ) but it doesn’t unstick the image of it from her mind. The car drops her off, eyes peering as she rings at the buzzer to the address she’s been given, the casual hitch of Chanel over one shoulder as she waited.