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Title: Six Miles of Vegas (Part Two of Three)
Series: the Vegas Saga
Rating: PG13ish
Word Count: series total of 23,000
Summary: When Michelle's car broke down just outside of Las Vegas, Julian stopped to give her a hand. You can see where this is going.
Notes: The second part. There's dancing. It's kind of sickening.
In the sort of coincidence that would toe the line between amusing and terrifying if the parties involved ever found out about it, Michelle, James, and Julian sat down to a breakfast identical to the one Andy had made for herself, though some hours earlier then she had. James' cell phone, this time playing something Michelle recognized vaguely as the Ramones, once again dragged him away looking like he wanted to curse, but he came back fairly quickly, unable to maintain his scowl.
"He'll be here two o'clock on Monday," he told Julian, as he reclaimed his seat. "Bit earlier then expected, but one hopes you won't mind putting up with us a few days longer. He got a better fare, or something."
"I don't mind," Julian assured him and then, conscious of Michelle's confusion, he turned to her and said, "James decided that imposing on my hospitality himself was insufficient. He'd bringing in a friend to help make sure he inconveniences me as much as possible. And, for future reference, an unclarified 'he' almost always refers to this friend."
Michelle nodded sympathetically.
"My fried Andy did that," she said, carefully remaining neutral as she thought of the other girl. "Her friend Viv was always just 'she'. I got used to it pretty fast, but it always bugged Elle."
"This the same Andy who drove cross-country and got you hot to do it, too?" Julian asked, arching an eyebrow at her.
Michelle flushed, slightly, startled that he had remembered what she'd said, startled that he'd even been listening carefully enough to catch the names.
"Yeah, that's her," she said. "And Viv is the girl she went to California with."
"Same Elle that went with her to New York?"
Michelle grinned, a little. "The very same," she said. "Elle loves New York like she invented it. It wouldn't surprise me if she were there now."
Julian blinked hard at her.
"What?" he said. "You mean you don't know?"
Michelle flushed even deeper, and was just opening her mouth to respond, without any real idea of what she was going to say, when James broke in.
"Not everyone is Richard and Jeremy," he said, rising. "Not everyone insists upon tracking the movements of their friends via hourly reports. Some have better things to do. Or, you know, sanity."
He gather their plates as he spoke, his expression a curious mix, somewhere in between affection and irritation. Just as he was about to sit back down, his phone chimed in to tell them all to fuck off, again. James sighed, and looking at them as if to say 'see what I mean?', before grabbing his mug of tea and heading off to answer it.
When he'd gone, Julian turned back to Michelle, eyes questioning. She turned red, again (all this changing back and forth couldn't be good for her complexion) and looked down at her hands.
"Look," he said, "Michelle. This is none of my business. You can tell me to fuck off is you feel the urge. But it seems to me that you don't have to install a tracking device on a friend to know what state she's in. Have you talked to Elle or Andy once since you left?"
There was a pause that seemed to go on forever before Michelle shook her head.
"No," she said, "I haven't."
Julian nodded, slowly.
"How..." He paused, considering. She looked up, for a moment, and met his eyes. Hers were deep and troubled, like the sea before a storm and glossy with what looked frighteningly like tears. But she didn't say anything, just looked at him expectantly. Like she wanted to say something, wanted to talk to him, but she just couldn't find the words. Like she had a story and she wanted to tell it to him but needed him to take the lead.
He swallowed his apprehension and asked, "How long has it been?"
She swallowed her tears and replied, "Six weeks."
"Did they-" Julian was never sure what it was that possessed him to say this, wasn't sure whether some angel whispered it, with a desire to help as heart, or a demon, intending to hurt. He couldn't be sure why he said it, except that it seemed to be the natural progression of things at the time but, in retrospect might not have been.
"They they know you were leaving?" he asked.
Her breath caught, for an instant, they hissed inwards, over her teeth. It sounded awful, now, to hear it aloud, spoken by someone else, someone who didn't know the whole story. It sounded cruel and it sounded petty, as if vanishing, leaving without a word, were something she'd done for fun. For kicks. As if she had had any other choice.
"No," she said. "They didn't."
And then, to the horror of both of them, she began to cry.
Michelle was never sure exactly how long she cried. Longer then she should have and not as long as she felt like but that told her nothing, really, because she felt like crying forever and shouldn't really have cried at all. She was never sure how long it was between her initial outburst and the moment Julian reached out and touched her. She was never sure how long she fought him for, other then not very long at all. She does remember how good it felt, though, once she stopped.
The exquisite pain of feeling, the joy of release, of letting go. It felt like poison was draining from her system. How glorious it was, this sensation of shattering and letting someone else hold it together, for a change. Of letting Julian hold her together.
His arms were strong and secure around her and when she lay her head against his chest he felt solid and smelled nice. Of soap and of a tight summertime sweat, of breakfast time and of something else. Something far off and welcoming. Something like nothing she could describe and that she would later (much, much later, lying in bed at a cheap motel somewhere in Southern California, when she couldn't sleep and needed something to think about so she thought of him) put down as just being the scent of distilled Julian. (That same night, in that same dive in California, she thought absurdly that, if it could be bottled and sold as cologne, that particular scent would do what all those ridiculous 'body sprays' claimed to do, but do it in style.)
She pulled away from him, finally, when the tears had slowed to nothing and her breathing was down to something like normal (and thank God that she hadn't had an asthma attack, because that would be embarrassing and her inhaler was still in the truck) and she met his eyes, slowly, uncertain of what she might see.
He'd pulled his hands away as soon as she showed signs of recovery- quick enough that she didn't feel trapped but not so abruptly that she might be offended. (How many people, she wondered, fleetingly, absurdly, were smooth enough to pull that off?)
His eyes were liquid blue and brilliant, his expression all sympathy and curiosity with none of the condemnation she had more then half expected.
"Sorry," she said, fingering her cross necklace.
"Think nothing of it," he replied, with a smile that all honesty. With trepidation, she believed him.
She said nothing else, for a while. He sat back and studied her, wondering what secrets she might be keeping, what mysteries lay behind her wide blue eyes that expressed so much and yet gave away so little. Her expressions were like quicksilver, flickering from one to the next so quickly it was impossible to tell what she might really be thinking. She watched him watching her, awaiting his next move as he waited for her to realize that it was her turn. They both startled when the piano began to play.
It was something up-beat and sort of happy, but distracted. There was talent in the music, but it was sort of sloppy, like the player was only half-aware of what he was doing, playing because he needed to do something with his hands rather then because of any real desire to do so.
"What-?" Michelle broke off, her eyes questioning.
"James," Julian said with a fond smile. "Homesick."
"Oh," she said, and thought of Elle staring bleakly at Andy's deliciously awful but enthusiastic dancing- at Michelle's deliciously awful but enthusiastic dancing- and of the music they'd ripped out of their parent's generation. She wondered, idly, what it would be like to dance with Julian and mused that he would most likely be a good deal more coordinated then her usual partner. She found herself nodding. "I get that."
James wandered back into the kitchen, some time later, and made a cup of tea. He ignored the damp patches on Julian's shirt and the redness about Michelle's eyes with all the skill and determination of a man who has spend his entire like minding his own business and has no intention of stopping now.
"Jeremy," he said, "would like to let you know that he'll be billing you for any repair work required when he gets Richard and I back."
Julian was amused.
"Repair work?" he echoed. "What, does he think I'm going to break you?"
"Evidently." James ran a hand through his hair, and Michelle noted for the first time that his fingers were long and elegant, positively made for piano playing. His hair fell immediately back into his eyes and Michelle gave her memory of Andy a firm kick back into it's ill-constructed box. "Though how you could possibly do any more damage then he's done," James continued, smirking, "is... worth considering, I suppose."
Julian laughed and then turned his smile back to Michelle. She returned it, with some hesitation.
"Michelle was just telling about her friends back home," Julian said. "Or, she was about to."
"Really?" James said, with a smile so full of comprehension it would have made Michelle nervous, if she'd been able to look away from Julian long enough to see it. "What about?"
"I don't know." Julian met her eyes, again. He held her gaze as he continued, "Whatever she wants to, I guess."
Michelle looked back at him, eyes large and startled. A moment passed, and then another and she got it. Whatever she wanted to tell him. He was asking, wanted to know. Was willing to listen, was willing to take whatever she wanted to give him. She swallowed hard, and nodded.
"My friend Andy," she began, slowly. She wasn't sure what she was going to say... But Andy was a good starting place. A lot of things started with Andy. "She's kind of a hippie, a guess. Purple hair. And she wears flannel. Drives this old station wagon. In our senior year, when Elle got her first Ferrari-"
"Wait," James broke in, startled. "Sorry. But- a Ferrari? In your senior- she'd be what, eighteen?"
"Seventeen," Michelle said, with a smile. "Her parents bought it for her, when she passed her driver's test. What was your first car?"
"Not a Ferrari," James replied, decisively.
She laughed. "Few were," she said. "Mine was this really crappy Taurus from the early 80s. Andy's was a 93' Volvo. Bright orange. She would have killed for that car. And when Elle got her Ferrari, and started sort of lording it over us- like, every time we celebrated the Volvo making it over a steep hill, she talk about how she never had problems like that with her car- yeah, because it's a brand new Ferrari, not an elder statesmen of Volvos. But every time she started with that, Andy would just refuse. She and I would debate which of ours was better until the end of time, but she'd never even address the Ferrari. Something about how the Volvo had a soul and shouldn't have to condescend to the Ferrari's level. It got Elle all freaked out, and she..."
"The Volvo actually won?" Julian said, incredulous. "How the hell-?"
"Language," Michelle said, primly. "And for the last time, is isn't so much that the Volvo won as it is Andy won. She'd been driving longer, and Elle couldn't-"
Her words were cut off short by the phone. It was the normal phone, this time, ringing high and loud without any musical accompaniment. James looked pleased that somebody else's phone was ringing at an inopportune moment.
Julian leaned back in his chair and grabbed the telephone off the wall behind him.
"Hello?"
"Hey, Julian." The voice at the other end was rushed and excited. "This is Adric, from the shop. Is this truck really yours?"
Julian smirked, a little, at the delight in the mechanics voice. "Sorry," he said. "But no. It belongs to a friend of mine. And you can't have it."
"Pity," Adric said.
"Can you tell me what's wrong with it?" Julian asked.
"What?" Adric sounded as though he'd been offered some grave insult. "You have to ask? Do you doubt me?" His voice dropped, then, as though he were letting Julian in on some great secret. "Because you really shouldn't. It hurts my feelings. And I might stop helping you, if my feelings get hurt."
"Just tell me what's wrong with the truck, Adric," Julian said.
Michelle and James- who had been very quietly discussing how one might get enough power into a station wagon that it would beat a Ferrari in a fair race- looked up.
Adric laughed. "Well, that's the bad news," he said. "Let me give you the good, first."
"The good," Julian said, "is that you're in love, that it really is the big one, this time, and that you want to run away to Milan with it and have it's gas-powered babies. Now, the bad. She wants to be able to leave Vegas, eventually, and that's her transport. Focus."
"Jeez, Jules, you're no fun at all when you're in love," Adric said. "Put James on. He'd more reasonable."
"I will not," Julian said. "And he is not. You're just a psycho. And you're going to be an unemployed psycho if you don't just cut to the chase, already. And I am not."
"Pretty weak denial, there, Julian," Adric said. "Is she pretty? I mean, she's obviously got good taste in vehicles, but that's really no solid basis to build a rela-"
"Adric!"
"Okay, okay, fine. You jerk. It's broken."
There was a pause as Julian waited to see if he was going to elaborate. "Broken?" he prompted, when it became clear he wasn't going to. "We knew it was broken. Broken how?"
"This is an elder statesman of pick-up trucks," Adric said. "You know that. I mean, you've seen it, right? It happens, sometimes. Stuff just snaps."
"What snapped?" Julian asked.
"Distributor cap," Adric said.
Julian blinked. "Can you fix it?" he asked.
"Of course I can't fix it," he said. "I could replace it. Wouldn't even cost all that much- maybe twenty bucks? But it would take some time to find one. It would be much quicker to just-"
"You can't have it," Julian said. "How long?"
Adric sighed in a put-upon manner. "Give me a week," he said. "And I'll see what I can do."
"A week?"
"You don't sound all that happy about it, Jules. I thought you'd be thrilled, getting to spend all that time with your lady friend. Hey, when do I get to meet her?"
"Shut up, Adric. Hang on, a minute."
He pressed the receiver to his chest and looked at James, who gazed curiously at him, and Michelle, who appeared vaguely panicked. He addressed her.
"Your distributor cap is broken," he said. "Whatever that is. He says he can replace it, but it'll take some time."
"A week?" she asked.
"Yeah, a week. Is that okay?"
She looked uncomfortable. "Well, I'm not really on a schedule," she said. "But..." She shook her head firmly. "The truck will be okay?"
"Yeah," Julian said. "Nothing else is wrong. Just a week."
Michelle nodded. "Okay. Just so she'll be okay. I love that truck. It was Grandpa's."
Julian nodded, and brought the phone back to his ear.
"Hey, Adric," he said. "You there?"
"For you, Julian, always."
"A week's fine."
"No chance she'll just bypass this whole tiresome business and sell it to me?"
"None. It's an heirloom."
"Pity. I'll call when I track the part down, and tell you the price."
Julian exchanged good-byes, and hung up. When he met Michelle's eyes, again, he smiled. She smiled back, but the worry in her eyes didn't fade.
It was early in the evening, the day before Richard was scheduled to arrive, the next time Michelle heard James play the piano. Little had happened in the intervening time. Michelle had slept and eaten and spent a lot of time holed up in Julian's sun-shine filled kitchen, swapping stories and talking about Nashville, the one city they both has considerable experience with, aside from Chicago, which Michelle had no strong desire to talk about.
James cooked and spent a lot of time locked up him the room he was temporarily inhabiting, taking a lot of ill-timed phone calls that didn't annoy him as much as he claimed It was after he departed to answer one of these and before the time came that he would inevitably reappear to start cooking that he started to play.
In the kitchen, there had been a lull in conversation. Michelle, who had been raised to be helpful, took the mugs they'd been drinking tea from over Julian's protests to rinse them out in the sink. When she shut off the water, music immediately filled in the void it left.
Michelle froze where she stood, just taking a moment to listen. It was something familiar, this melody, almost like something she had heard before and loved, too long ago to be recalled. A lazy, twisting thing was this music, solemn and hopeful like the aftermath of a successful operation when all that's left to do is heal.
A touch on her shoulder, and Michelle jerked. She relaxed just as quickly when the hand nearly moved away.
"Sorry," she muttered.
Julian's breath on her ear was at once foreign and familiar. Both utterly unexpected and long-anticipated. Those flames of desire that had once sprung up within her hadn't been to thoroughly extinguished as Michelle would like to have thought.
"What do you and Andy usually dance to?" he asked.
"Oasis," she said, softly, realizing as she did that she must have told him much more then she meant to over the last few days. "The Beatles. U2. She liked the Divinyls."
"How about this?" he asked.
"What is it?"
The hand on her shoulder tightened and turned her. She wondered, then, how she could ever have mistaken those eyes for something as hard and cold as a sapphire when she was obviously staring into the heart of a flame.
"Does it matter?"
She shook her head, mute and slightly dizzy, and held onto his hand when it reached for hers.
"Dance with me," he said.
"Okay."
And so they danced. Twirling throughout the kitchen with bright, needful abandon. For the third time since they had met, Michelle lost track of time, so deeply immersed was she in the feel of him, in the feelings he aroused in her- feelings so long out of use that she'd almost thought herself incapable, after all these years. She was frightened as much as she was exhilarated by all of this and when their dance finally wound down to a slow stop, she was only vague surprised she find herself outside, under a clear, vivid sky, on the patio that connected with the kitchen. She had only been there once, before, when James had harassed Julian into giving her a formal tour of the house, "since you seem to dead set on moving her in."
Michelle stayed in his arms, his hands moving curl into fisting knotting in the soft cotton of his t-shirt, while she rubbed her cheek between them. For a while there was silence, as she tried desperately to memorize the scent and sensation of it all. One of Julian's arms tightened around her waist while the other hand ran lightly up and down her back, fingers tracing the curve of her spine as though he were doing the same. She shivered.
"Michelle?" he asked, his voice low and hesitant.
"He kicked me out," she said, abruptly, squeezing her eyes shut against the tears that threated to fall. "My dad, I mean. I was- I had been planning this weekend. We were going to stay over in this nice hotel for a couple of night. Andy and Elle and me. We had been planning it forever, it seemed like. Our parents knew, we had permission. It was all set, you know? We were good. We were going. And then Dad said I had to stay home and plow. That I was useless, that I was lazy, that I never did anything, when I did everything. And so I said- I told him no.
"I was real polite about it and everything, but I told him that I'd been working fixing up the attic, and then the bathroom before that, and I hadn't gotten out of the house for weeks and that was all I'd done and now I was going to go hang out with my friends. Because we'd had plans long before he butted in. We were going to a midnight show- oh, it's doesn't matter. He kicked me out. Said that if I left I couldn't come back. So I did. I left, had my weekend- it was great, by the way- and then I went back, thinking he'd have cooled off. But he hadn't, and he said I had fifteen minutes to get my stuff and get out.
"So what could I do, right? I got my stuff and bolted and went to stay with Andy. For- what? Three nights, I guess. And then I just knew that I had to go. Had to leave, you know. To go someplace where I could start fresh. Because I couldn't just stand around and make them put up with my crap for any longer.
"Because- you, Andy loves me and she'd do anything for me, but she'd got a future. A degree she'd about this far from getting and Elle would put me up but she's so far out there she might as well be from a different planet and she's going to want to go back for good, some day, and they don't need me hanging around their necks. They need to get on with it.
"So I just left. I couldn't stand the thought of holding them back. And I never told them. They just... don't know."
She had started crying at some point, and just sort of broke, now, sobbing opening into Julian's chest as the reality of the last seven weeks, of the cruelty what she had done in the name of kindness, finally set in. She waited for Julian to push her away, to condemn her, to be disgusted with her. When the blow never came, she looked up at him, her face flushed and tear-streaked and open. He looked back at her, blue eyes deep and bright and sympathetic. She swallowed hard.
"I shouldn't have done that, should I?" she asked.
"No," he replied, with a smile that was at once amused and compassionate. "Probably not."
"I should go call them, shouldn't I?"
"That would probably be the most appropriate course of action, yes."
"Okay."
Michelle pulled back from him and wiped her eyes with the tissue he produced from a pocket she couldn't see.
"Can I use your phone?" she asked.
It was a pity that her eyes were averted when that hint of a smile blossomed because the force of it could have melted iron, to say nothing a twenty-something woman's heart.
Andy wasn't drunk, when her phone rang. Marty wasn't hanging around, but another of the six members of their graduating class had taken his place, the two of them having apparently decided that pestering her until she fled to the relative safety of Chicago was the best course of action. Though none of them would ever say it aloud, of the six of them- Andy, Marty, Michelle, Elle, Doris, and Teddy- she was the only one who had reached this far past her roots.
Elle's roots were about as far from the place the rest of them had grown up as could be imagined, and for her escape from the town that lay eternally in the shadow of the mountains had been a matter of going back. Marty and Teddy had gone to college in-state and then returned to their home county, immediately after graduating, intending to never leave. Doris, though none of them were particularly concerned with her, was vaguely known to have done pretty much the same thing. While Marty and Teddy had no particular drive to escape the mountains, they found the idea of one of their classmates going on to win a Pulitzer or something appealing, and weren't picky about which one it might be.
Hence their determination to get her back to school, and hence the reason Teddy was invading Andy's space, that day. His very fast, very loud car that was probably compensating for something was parked outside and he had tracked mud on the floor. (Not that Andy was all that particular about the cleanliness of her surroundings, but it was Teddy doing it which made it about a thousand times more annoying then it would have been if, say, Viv or Michelle had done it.)
He turned up just as she was emerging, showered and dressed, from her bedroom, and the two of them argued over movies while Andy cooked hash browns and fought over music while they ate them with plain bread and butter rather then toast because when Teddy tried to redo the settings on the toaster, Andy locked it up in a cabinet and proclaimed that there would be no toast at all until he learned some god damned manners, which meant that she might as well the trade it in for a kitten.
Teddy miraculously took no issue with the quality of hash browns, nor with the organic ketchup. Andy figured he was afraid she'd beat him with the bottle.
She kicked him out of the kitchen, once all the food was gone, and made herself some of what she usually called her 'girly tea', by virtue of being vaguely pinkish, once made, and coming in a pink canister. When she got out of the kitchen, Teddy had taken his ejection as an invitation to camp out on her couch and watch Spike TV. She stole the remote and turned it off, disabusing him of this notion, and so they were left with nothing to do but argue over who had worse taste in television, for a while.
The phone was a welcome distraction, when it rang. Fighting with Teddy, even after all these years of blissful separation, came as naturally as breathing to Andy but it was still damned tiring.
"What?" she snapped, into the receiver.
There was a pause- short but, in her irritable state, almost long enough to make Andy hang up.
And then, "Hey, Andy."
It was her turn, then, to pause, to sit in silence for a long moment and stare without seeing to the space in front of her. Teddy scowled at her, hostile and inquisitive at the same time, and folded his arms over his chest. The voice came, again.
"Andy?"
"You bitch," she heard herself say, as if from far away. "What. The. Fuck?"
Teddy sat up a little straighter and leaned in, arms dropping down to rest on his legs. This was not out of concern so much as morbid curiosity over what could have riled her so, and Andy waved him off.
"How's it going?" Michelle asked, her voice nervous and full of sunshine.
"How's it going?" Andy was baffled. "Are you stoned?"
"No, no." She cleared her throat. "I was just... You know... Wondering how things are going. It's been..." She trailed off uncertainly.
"A while," Andy said, flatly, her pride kicking in just in time to stop her from stating the exact number of days it had been since they had last spoken, since Michelle could have known how things were going.
"Yeah," Michelle agreed. "A while, right. So, what's going on?"
"Teddy's here," Andy said. "You remember Teddy, from high school, right? Like there are that many of us to remember. Marty sent him over to make sure I haven't killed myself, yet."
"Make sure you haven't what?"
"Killed myself," Andy repeated, her voice going low and throaty with fury. Teddy leaned back and the look on his face was close enough to fear that it almost made Andy smile. "Suicidal tendencies sometimes result from over-whelming guilt, you know. It's one of the side effects."
"Guilt?"
"Yeah, guilt. Like, say, the kind of over-whelming guilt that might result from allowing a very close friend to disappear without a trace from under your roof and then remain missing for months on end, with no indication and no possible way to know whether that friend is dead or alive, you bitch."
Teddy's mouth dropped open in dawning comprehension.
"Holy shit," he said. "Is that-?"
Andy nodded impatiently, and waved a silencing hand that, for once, he had no problem with obeying.
"Andy, I-" Michelle began, and then stopped, as though stunned.
"You what?" Andy's voice was almost a growl.
There was another pause. Michelle swallowed hard enough for Andy to hear it a continent away and took morbid satisfaction in her friend's unease.
"I," Michelle began, again, very slowly, "am alive." She pushed on without thinking when she heard the other girl's snort of derision. "And... I'm in Las Vegas."
Andy blinked, startled out of her anger, for a moment.
"What in the name of fuck are you doing in Las Vegas?" she asked.
"Andy, language."
"Your right to rebuke me for profanity is hereby revoked until further notice," she snapped, irritably. "What the fuck, Michelle?"
"I don't know," she said. "I mean... Nothing, really. The truck broke down."
Andy pulled of her glasses and dropped them into her lap as she massaged the bridge of her nose. "Michelle, if you're about to ask me to come and get you, then so help me, I swear on my mother's eternal soul that I will not be responsible..."
"No, no," Michelle said, hurriedly. "I just- Let me explain, okay?"
"Okay, fine. Explain. I'm listening. Asshole."
There was a pause during which Teddy smirked and Michelle most likely grimaced. Andy wondered if she ought to be embarrassed over this final, obviously childish, insult.
"The truck broke down," she repeated, "and this guy stopped to pick me up and it's going to take some time for it to be repaired."
"A guy," Andy said. "In Las Vegas. Michelle, are you trying to tell me you've become a hooker? Cause' if so- just say it, all right?"
"Andy!"
"Well, sorry if I've offended your dignity-" she made it sound more like profanity then any of her casual curses. "but what am I supposed to be thinking, here?"
"That you know me, maybe?"
"Should I? I'm not so sure about that, Shelly, do I? I mean, I had this friend named Michelle once who I though I knew okay, but she would never have fucked me over the way you have, so I don't really think I do know you, any more. And you know what else? I'm not really interested in your life as a Las Vegas call girl. I'm really much more interested in the part where you fucked off for no discernible reason, no forwarding address, no 'thanks for putting me up', no 'gone fishing, don't wait up', not a word for twelve fucking years, it seems like, and then calling me up out the blue, like this. You could have been dead for all I knew- hell, for all anyone knew, aside from your Vegas guy.
"Do you realize that for the past five days Marty had been stalking me so I don't let myself just keel over and die before you make it back? Do you know what that means? That Marty fucking Dawkins has, for past week, been more of a friend to me then you have. Tell me- just as a personal favor, please, just tell me that you realize how screwed up this is.
"And do you realize, also, that I have spent all this time sitting around the house- my parents house, that crappy little apartment, whichever- feeling guilty while you're turning tricks in the desert? Did that ever cross your mind? Did you ever even spare a single thought to what your little disappearing act would do to me, or to anyone, or were you just too busy feeling sorry for yourself to think about it?
"Michelle, this may seem repetitive, and I'm truly, deeply sorry if I'm boring you, but I feel compelled to ask, yet again- what the fuck?"
There was silence from the other end of the line for so long that Andy almost panicked, fearing Michelle had hung up on her and then hating herself for worrying.
"Shell?" she asked. "You there?"
"Yeah," she replied, softly, after a pause. "Yeah, Andy. I'm here. I'm sorry."
Andy didn't speak, right away, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. She relaxed back into the couch and closed her eyes, stretching her legs out in front of her.
"I know you, Michelle," she said. "I'm sorry, too, I guess. Should've known how screwed up you were, before. Or something. I don't know. So what's going on in your head, anyway?"
Andy was all ready for more coaxing, more pushing, more cursing, if necessary, but she needn't have worried. After a couple of deep breaths loud enough she wondered if Michelle might have been verging on an asthma attack, the whole story poured out. It probably surprised both of them just how easily it came. The words came like water down a fall and Andy didn't say a word. She nodded curtly to Teddy, who had been staring blankly since Andy had finished her tirade, when he pulled himself together enough to hiss out a request for confirmation that it was, in fact, Michelle on the phone, and then she watched him with eyes that didn't see as he walked through the open bedroom door and vanished into the bathroom.
Images danced through her head- highly dramatized in all probability, and much more prettily lit then real life ever was.
Michelle, lying sleepless on the floor of the bedroom, blue-gray eyes wide and fixed on the cracked and slowly turning blades of the ceiling fan. The old red truck with which she was almost as familiar as with her own car, as it baked in the Nevada sun and then boiled in a desert storm. A faceless stranger in a sleek black car (her mind filled in the color without help from Michelle, who wasn't going into quite that much detail, and she would have been mildly surprised to hear that this was accurate), holding out a hand to her artfully disheveled friend. More unlikely fantasies of malicious shadows chasing Michelle through New York's less savory districts and unsuspecting friends brushing past her in a crowd somewhere in Chicago. Andy wished, irrationally, that she's kept pictures of Michelle in her dorm, alongside those of John Lennon and Neil Gaiman. Then, maybe, among those masses, someone might have seen her and known her and Andy would have known sooner that she was still breathing.
When the words finally stopped, the pictures remained. They might someday create the basis for a novel, be made into words and immortalized in a best seller or a cult classic, but for that moment, they were all the reality there was in Andy's mind and, for months after they were stored as uncomfortable keepsakes of a voyage through misery- the kind that can't be banished, that won't be forgotten, like things you don't want to look at or remember but can't help taking out and looking over, once in a while.
"Why didn't you call me?" she asked, finally, sounding less angry then wounded, less irritated then plaintive and the voice she spoke with was barely recognizable as her own.
"I wanted to," Michelle said. "I did. I picked up the phone and almost dialed and then I made up all sorts of excuses for why I wasn't and promised I'd do it next time. And then time went on and- okay, you know what? I was just scared. That's it."
"Of what I'd say?" Andy asked. "Where you afraid I'd cuss at you?"
"Well..." Michelle paused. "You did."
"How would you have reacted?"
The harsh words had no bite in them, just the flippant brightness that adorned so many of Andy's remarks. A galaxy away, in Nevada, Michelle grinned and the weight of her heart seemed to lessen, knowing that their friendship wasn't broken- just a bit scuffed, just like everything of theirs. She should have known- Andy's loyalty could be twisted into pretzels and Gordian knots and never even think of breaking. It was a trait that had done her more harm than was her due, but at least it ensured Michelle kept a place in her heart. (Michelle wondered if she ought to feel guilty about this, but ground this thought into the dirt with far more success then she had with her attraction to Julian.)
They said good-bye, a while later, when Andy had wrangled half a dozen promises to call and write and generally keep up communication daily, and Teddy had wandered back in from the bathroom. When he appeared, Andy reminded her one more time that the pressure to keep in contact was all on Michelle as she wasn't the one with no permanent address and phone number and then let her go.
Once the phone was back on the hook, Teddy stared at her with some intensity for so long it made the back of her neck itch.
"What?" she asked, testily, when he didn't get bored and go away.
"You goin' after her?" he asked.
Andy barked out a laugh.
"Like you even have to ask," she said.
He nodded and tossed her a key on a red plastic ring- a duplicate of the one he kept on his personal ring.
"Take my car," he said. "Yours tops out at sixty-three and mine will get up to two hundred. I wouldn't advise it around here, but roads are different out that way."
Andy stared at him.
"Teddy?" she said. "You in there? Or have pod people taken over your brain?"
He shook his head, look bemused.
"You'd think so, huh?" He shrugged. "I just called Marty. He said to give it to you or he'd break my face."
"How is this any different then the last few hundred times he said that?" Andy asked, amused.
"This time he might actually do it."
She grinned.
"So if I don't take your car..." she began.
He cut her off. "Michelle is gone before you can reach the Kentucky state line."
Andy blinked, considering. Her fingers curled tight around the key still resting on her leg. When Teddy started to smirk, she glared.
"You still lose, man," she said.
"Oh, really? How do you figure?"
"I'm going to Las Vegas," she said. "In your car." She stood up and smirked at him. "And you're staying here with no car." She stalked into the bedroom and the door slammed shut behind her.
Series: the Vegas Saga
Rating: PG13ish
Word Count: series total of 23,000
Summary: When Michelle's car broke down just outside of Las Vegas, Julian stopped to give her a hand. You can see where this is going.
Notes: The second part. There's dancing. It's kind of sickening.
In the sort of coincidence that would toe the line between amusing and terrifying if the parties involved ever found out about it, Michelle, James, and Julian sat down to a breakfast identical to the one Andy had made for herself, though some hours earlier then she had. James' cell phone, this time playing something Michelle recognized vaguely as the Ramones, once again dragged him away looking like he wanted to curse, but he came back fairly quickly, unable to maintain his scowl.
"He'll be here two o'clock on Monday," he told Julian, as he reclaimed his seat. "Bit earlier then expected, but one hopes you won't mind putting up with us a few days longer. He got a better fare, or something."
"I don't mind," Julian assured him and then, conscious of Michelle's confusion, he turned to her and said, "James decided that imposing on my hospitality himself was insufficient. He'd bringing in a friend to help make sure he inconveniences me as much as possible. And, for future reference, an unclarified 'he' almost always refers to this friend."
Michelle nodded sympathetically.
"My fried Andy did that," she said, carefully remaining neutral as she thought of the other girl. "Her friend Viv was always just 'she'. I got used to it pretty fast, but it always bugged Elle."
"This the same Andy who drove cross-country and got you hot to do it, too?" Julian asked, arching an eyebrow at her.
Michelle flushed, slightly, startled that he had remembered what she'd said, startled that he'd even been listening carefully enough to catch the names.
"Yeah, that's her," she said. "And Viv is the girl she went to California with."
"Same Elle that went with her to New York?"
Michelle grinned, a little. "The very same," she said. "Elle loves New York like she invented it. It wouldn't surprise me if she were there now."
Julian blinked hard at her.
"What?" he said. "You mean you don't know?"
Michelle flushed even deeper, and was just opening her mouth to respond, without any real idea of what she was going to say, when James broke in.
"Not everyone is Richard and Jeremy," he said, rising. "Not everyone insists upon tracking the movements of their friends via hourly reports. Some have better things to do. Or, you know, sanity."
He gather their plates as he spoke, his expression a curious mix, somewhere in between affection and irritation. Just as he was about to sit back down, his phone chimed in to tell them all to fuck off, again. James sighed, and looking at them as if to say 'see what I mean?', before grabbing his mug of tea and heading off to answer it.
When he'd gone, Julian turned back to Michelle, eyes questioning. She turned red, again (all this changing back and forth couldn't be good for her complexion) and looked down at her hands.
"Look," he said, "Michelle. This is none of my business. You can tell me to fuck off is you feel the urge. But it seems to me that you don't have to install a tracking device on a friend to know what state she's in. Have you talked to Elle or Andy once since you left?"
There was a pause that seemed to go on forever before Michelle shook her head.
"No," she said, "I haven't."
Julian nodded, slowly.
"How..." He paused, considering. She looked up, for a moment, and met his eyes. Hers were deep and troubled, like the sea before a storm and glossy with what looked frighteningly like tears. But she didn't say anything, just looked at him expectantly. Like she wanted to say something, wanted to talk to him, but she just couldn't find the words. Like she had a story and she wanted to tell it to him but needed him to take the lead.
He swallowed his apprehension and asked, "How long has it been?"
She swallowed her tears and replied, "Six weeks."
"Did they-" Julian was never sure what it was that possessed him to say this, wasn't sure whether some angel whispered it, with a desire to help as heart, or a demon, intending to hurt. He couldn't be sure why he said it, except that it seemed to be the natural progression of things at the time but, in retrospect might not have been.
"They they know you were leaving?" he asked.
Her breath caught, for an instant, they hissed inwards, over her teeth. It sounded awful, now, to hear it aloud, spoken by someone else, someone who didn't know the whole story. It sounded cruel and it sounded petty, as if vanishing, leaving without a word, were something she'd done for fun. For kicks. As if she had had any other choice.
"No," she said. "They didn't."
And then, to the horror of both of them, she began to cry.
Michelle was never sure exactly how long she cried. Longer then she should have and not as long as she felt like but that told her nothing, really, because she felt like crying forever and shouldn't really have cried at all. She was never sure how long it was between her initial outburst and the moment Julian reached out and touched her. She was never sure how long she fought him for, other then not very long at all. She does remember how good it felt, though, once she stopped.
The exquisite pain of feeling, the joy of release, of letting go. It felt like poison was draining from her system. How glorious it was, this sensation of shattering and letting someone else hold it together, for a change. Of letting Julian hold her together.
His arms were strong and secure around her and when she lay her head against his chest he felt solid and smelled nice. Of soap and of a tight summertime sweat, of breakfast time and of something else. Something far off and welcoming. Something like nothing she could describe and that she would later (much, much later, lying in bed at a cheap motel somewhere in Southern California, when she couldn't sleep and needed something to think about so she thought of him) put down as just being the scent of distilled Julian. (That same night, in that same dive in California, she thought absurdly that, if it could be bottled and sold as cologne, that particular scent would do what all those ridiculous 'body sprays' claimed to do, but do it in style.)
She pulled away from him, finally, when the tears had slowed to nothing and her breathing was down to something like normal (and thank God that she hadn't had an asthma attack, because that would be embarrassing and her inhaler was still in the truck) and she met his eyes, slowly, uncertain of what she might see.
He'd pulled his hands away as soon as she showed signs of recovery- quick enough that she didn't feel trapped but not so abruptly that she might be offended. (How many people, she wondered, fleetingly, absurdly, were smooth enough to pull that off?)
His eyes were liquid blue and brilliant, his expression all sympathy and curiosity with none of the condemnation she had more then half expected.
"Sorry," she said, fingering her cross necklace.
"Think nothing of it," he replied, with a smile that all honesty. With trepidation, she believed him.
She said nothing else, for a while. He sat back and studied her, wondering what secrets she might be keeping, what mysteries lay behind her wide blue eyes that expressed so much and yet gave away so little. Her expressions were like quicksilver, flickering from one to the next so quickly it was impossible to tell what she might really be thinking. She watched him watching her, awaiting his next move as he waited for her to realize that it was her turn. They both startled when the piano began to play.
It was something up-beat and sort of happy, but distracted. There was talent in the music, but it was sort of sloppy, like the player was only half-aware of what he was doing, playing because he needed to do something with his hands rather then because of any real desire to do so.
"What-?" Michelle broke off, her eyes questioning.
"James," Julian said with a fond smile. "Homesick."
"Oh," she said, and thought of Elle staring bleakly at Andy's deliciously awful but enthusiastic dancing- at Michelle's deliciously awful but enthusiastic dancing- and of the music they'd ripped out of their parent's generation. She wondered, idly, what it would be like to dance with Julian and mused that he would most likely be a good deal more coordinated then her usual partner. She found herself nodding. "I get that."
James wandered back into the kitchen, some time later, and made a cup of tea. He ignored the damp patches on Julian's shirt and the redness about Michelle's eyes with all the skill and determination of a man who has spend his entire like minding his own business and has no intention of stopping now.
"Jeremy," he said, "would like to let you know that he'll be billing you for any repair work required when he gets Richard and I back."
Julian was amused.
"Repair work?" he echoed. "What, does he think I'm going to break you?"
"Evidently." James ran a hand through his hair, and Michelle noted for the first time that his fingers were long and elegant, positively made for piano playing. His hair fell immediately back into his eyes and Michelle gave her memory of Andy a firm kick back into it's ill-constructed box. "Though how you could possibly do any more damage then he's done," James continued, smirking, "is... worth considering, I suppose."
Julian laughed and then turned his smile back to Michelle. She returned it, with some hesitation.
"Michelle was just telling about her friends back home," Julian said. "Or, she was about to."
"Really?" James said, with a smile so full of comprehension it would have made Michelle nervous, if she'd been able to look away from Julian long enough to see it. "What about?"
"I don't know." Julian met her eyes, again. He held her gaze as he continued, "Whatever she wants to, I guess."
Michelle looked back at him, eyes large and startled. A moment passed, and then another and she got it. Whatever she wanted to tell him. He was asking, wanted to know. Was willing to listen, was willing to take whatever she wanted to give him. She swallowed hard, and nodded.
"My friend Andy," she began, slowly. She wasn't sure what she was going to say... But Andy was a good starting place. A lot of things started with Andy. "She's kind of a hippie, a guess. Purple hair. And she wears flannel. Drives this old station wagon. In our senior year, when Elle got her first Ferrari-"
"Wait," James broke in, startled. "Sorry. But- a Ferrari? In your senior- she'd be what, eighteen?"
"Seventeen," Michelle said, with a smile. "Her parents bought it for her, when she passed her driver's test. What was your first car?"
"Not a Ferrari," James replied, decisively.
She laughed. "Few were," she said. "Mine was this really crappy Taurus from the early 80s. Andy's was a 93' Volvo. Bright orange. She would have killed for that car. And when Elle got her Ferrari, and started sort of lording it over us- like, every time we celebrated the Volvo making it over a steep hill, she talk about how she never had problems like that with her car- yeah, because it's a brand new Ferrari, not an elder statesmen of Volvos. But every time she started with that, Andy would just refuse. She and I would debate which of ours was better until the end of time, but she'd never even address the Ferrari. Something about how the Volvo had a soul and shouldn't have to condescend to the Ferrari's level. It got Elle all freaked out, and she..."
"The Volvo actually won?" Julian said, incredulous. "How the hell-?"
"Language," Michelle said, primly. "And for the last time, is isn't so much that the Volvo won as it is Andy won. She'd been driving longer, and Elle couldn't-"
Her words were cut off short by the phone. It was the normal phone, this time, ringing high and loud without any musical accompaniment. James looked pleased that somebody else's phone was ringing at an inopportune moment.
Julian leaned back in his chair and grabbed the telephone off the wall behind him.
"Hello?"
"Hey, Julian." The voice at the other end was rushed and excited. "This is Adric, from the shop. Is this truck really yours?"
Julian smirked, a little, at the delight in the mechanics voice. "Sorry," he said. "But no. It belongs to a friend of mine. And you can't have it."
"Pity," Adric said.
"Can you tell me what's wrong with it?" Julian asked.
"What?" Adric sounded as though he'd been offered some grave insult. "You have to ask? Do you doubt me?" His voice dropped, then, as though he were letting Julian in on some great secret. "Because you really shouldn't. It hurts my feelings. And I might stop helping you, if my feelings get hurt."
"Just tell me what's wrong with the truck, Adric," Julian said.
Michelle and James- who had been very quietly discussing how one might get enough power into a station wagon that it would beat a Ferrari in a fair race- looked up.
Adric laughed. "Well, that's the bad news," he said. "Let me give you the good, first."
"The good," Julian said, "is that you're in love, that it really is the big one, this time, and that you want to run away to Milan with it and have it's gas-powered babies. Now, the bad. She wants to be able to leave Vegas, eventually, and that's her transport. Focus."
"Jeez, Jules, you're no fun at all when you're in love," Adric said. "Put James on. He'd more reasonable."
"I will not," Julian said. "And he is not. You're just a psycho. And you're going to be an unemployed psycho if you don't just cut to the chase, already. And I am not."
"Pretty weak denial, there, Julian," Adric said. "Is she pretty? I mean, she's obviously got good taste in vehicles, but that's really no solid basis to build a rela-"
"Adric!"
"Okay, okay, fine. You jerk. It's broken."
There was a pause as Julian waited to see if he was going to elaborate. "Broken?" he prompted, when it became clear he wasn't going to. "We knew it was broken. Broken how?"
"This is an elder statesman of pick-up trucks," Adric said. "You know that. I mean, you've seen it, right? It happens, sometimes. Stuff just snaps."
"What snapped?" Julian asked.
"Distributor cap," Adric said.
Julian blinked. "Can you fix it?" he asked.
"Of course I can't fix it," he said. "I could replace it. Wouldn't even cost all that much- maybe twenty bucks? But it would take some time to find one. It would be much quicker to just-"
"You can't have it," Julian said. "How long?"
Adric sighed in a put-upon manner. "Give me a week," he said. "And I'll see what I can do."
"A week?"
"You don't sound all that happy about it, Jules. I thought you'd be thrilled, getting to spend all that time with your lady friend. Hey, when do I get to meet her?"
"Shut up, Adric. Hang on, a minute."
He pressed the receiver to his chest and looked at James, who gazed curiously at him, and Michelle, who appeared vaguely panicked. He addressed her.
"Your distributor cap is broken," he said. "Whatever that is. He says he can replace it, but it'll take some time."
"A week?" she asked.
"Yeah, a week. Is that okay?"
She looked uncomfortable. "Well, I'm not really on a schedule," she said. "But..." She shook her head firmly. "The truck will be okay?"
"Yeah," Julian said. "Nothing else is wrong. Just a week."
Michelle nodded. "Okay. Just so she'll be okay. I love that truck. It was Grandpa's."
Julian nodded, and brought the phone back to his ear.
"Hey, Adric," he said. "You there?"
"For you, Julian, always."
"A week's fine."
"No chance she'll just bypass this whole tiresome business and sell it to me?"
"None. It's an heirloom."
"Pity. I'll call when I track the part down, and tell you the price."
Julian exchanged good-byes, and hung up. When he met Michelle's eyes, again, he smiled. She smiled back, but the worry in her eyes didn't fade.
It was early in the evening, the day before Richard was scheduled to arrive, the next time Michelle heard James play the piano. Little had happened in the intervening time. Michelle had slept and eaten and spent a lot of time holed up in Julian's sun-shine filled kitchen, swapping stories and talking about Nashville, the one city they both has considerable experience with, aside from Chicago, which Michelle had no strong desire to talk about.
James cooked and spent a lot of time locked up him the room he was temporarily inhabiting, taking a lot of ill-timed phone calls that didn't annoy him as much as he claimed It was after he departed to answer one of these and before the time came that he would inevitably reappear to start cooking that he started to play.
In the kitchen, there had been a lull in conversation. Michelle, who had been raised to be helpful, took the mugs they'd been drinking tea from over Julian's protests to rinse them out in the sink. When she shut off the water, music immediately filled in the void it left.
Michelle froze where she stood, just taking a moment to listen. It was something familiar, this melody, almost like something she had heard before and loved, too long ago to be recalled. A lazy, twisting thing was this music, solemn and hopeful like the aftermath of a successful operation when all that's left to do is heal.
A touch on her shoulder, and Michelle jerked. She relaxed just as quickly when the hand nearly moved away.
"Sorry," she muttered.
Julian's breath on her ear was at once foreign and familiar. Both utterly unexpected and long-anticipated. Those flames of desire that had once sprung up within her hadn't been to thoroughly extinguished as Michelle would like to have thought.
"What do you and Andy usually dance to?" he asked.
"Oasis," she said, softly, realizing as she did that she must have told him much more then she meant to over the last few days. "The Beatles. U2. She liked the Divinyls."
"How about this?" he asked.
"What is it?"
The hand on her shoulder tightened and turned her. She wondered, then, how she could ever have mistaken those eyes for something as hard and cold as a sapphire when she was obviously staring into the heart of a flame.
"Does it matter?"
She shook her head, mute and slightly dizzy, and held onto his hand when it reached for hers.
"Dance with me," he said.
"Okay."
And so they danced. Twirling throughout the kitchen with bright, needful abandon. For the third time since they had met, Michelle lost track of time, so deeply immersed was she in the feel of him, in the feelings he aroused in her- feelings so long out of use that she'd almost thought herself incapable, after all these years. She was frightened as much as she was exhilarated by all of this and when their dance finally wound down to a slow stop, she was only vague surprised she find herself outside, under a clear, vivid sky, on the patio that connected with the kitchen. She had only been there once, before, when James had harassed Julian into giving her a formal tour of the house, "since you seem to dead set on moving her in."
Michelle stayed in his arms, his hands moving curl into fisting knotting in the soft cotton of his t-shirt, while she rubbed her cheek between them. For a while there was silence, as she tried desperately to memorize the scent and sensation of it all. One of Julian's arms tightened around her waist while the other hand ran lightly up and down her back, fingers tracing the curve of her spine as though he were doing the same. She shivered.
"Michelle?" he asked, his voice low and hesitant.
"He kicked me out," she said, abruptly, squeezing her eyes shut against the tears that threated to fall. "My dad, I mean. I was- I had been planning this weekend. We were going to stay over in this nice hotel for a couple of night. Andy and Elle and me. We had been planning it forever, it seemed like. Our parents knew, we had permission. It was all set, you know? We were good. We were going. And then Dad said I had to stay home and plow. That I was useless, that I was lazy, that I never did anything, when I did everything. And so I said- I told him no.
"I was real polite about it and everything, but I told him that I'd been working fixing up the attic, and then the bathroom before that, and I hadn't gotten out of the house for weeks and that was all I'd done and now I was going to go hang out with my friends. Because we'd had plans long before he butted in. We were going to a midnight show- oh, it's doesn't matter. He kicked me out. Said that if I left I couldn't come back. So I did. I left, had my weekend- it was great, by the way- and then I went back, thinking he'd have cooled off. But he hadn't, and he said I had fifteen minutes to get my stuff and get out.
"So what could I do, right? I got my stuff and bolted and went to stay with Andy. For- what? Three nights, I guess. And then I just knew that I had to go. Had to leave, you know. To go someplace where I could start fresh. Because I couldn't just stand around and make them put up with my crap for any longer.
"Because- you, Andy loves me and she'd do anything for me, but she'd got a future. A degree she'd about this far from getting and Elle would put me up but she's so far out there she might as well be from a different planet and she's going to want to go back for good, some day, and they don't need me hanging around their necks. They need to get on with it.
"So I just left. I couldn't stand the thought of holding them back. And I never told them. They just... don't know."
She had started crying at some point, and just sort of broke, now, sobbing opening into Julian's chest as the reality of the last seven weeks, of the cruelty what she had done in the name of kindness, finally set in. She waited for Julian to push her away, to condemn her, to be disgusted with her. When the blow never came, she looked up at him, her face flushed and tear-streaked and open. He looked back at her, blue eyes deep and bright and sympathetic. She swallowed hard.
"I shouldn't have done that, should I?" she asked.
"No," he replied, with a smile that was at once amused and compassionate. "Probably not."
"I should go call them, shouldn't I?"
"That would probably be the most appropriate course of action, yes."
"Okay."
Michelle pulled back from him and wiped her eyes with the tissue he produced from a pocket she couldn't see.
"Can I use your phone?" she asked.
It was a pity that her eyes were averted when that hint of a smile blossomed because the force of it could have melted iron, to say nothing a twenty-something woman's heart.
Andy wasn't drunk, when her phone rang. Marty wasn't hanging around, but another of the six members of their graduating class had taken his place, the two of them having apparently decided that pestering her until she fled to the relative safety of Chicago was the best course of action. Though none of them would ever say it aloud, of the six of them- Andy, Marty, Michelle, Elle, Doris, and Teddy- she was the only one who had reached this far past her roots.
Elle's roots were about as far from the place the rest of them had grown up as could be imagined, and for her escape from the town that lay eternally in the shadow of the mountains had been a matter of going back. Marty and Teddy had gone to college in-state and then returned to their home county, immediately after graduating, intending to never leave. Doris, though none of them were particularly concerned with her, was vaguely known to have done pretty much the same thing. While Marty and Teddy had no particular drive to escape the mountains, they found the idea of one of their classmates going on to win a Pulitzer or something appealing, and weren't picky about which one it might be.
Hence their determination to get her back to school, and hence the reason Teddy was invading Andy's space, that day. His very fast, very loud car that was probably compensating for something was parked outside and he had tracked mud on the floor. (Not that Andy was all that particular about the cleanliness of her surroundings, but it was Teddy doing it which made it about a thousand times more annoying then it would have been if, say, Viv or Michelle had done it.)
He turned up just as she was emerging, showered and dressed, from her bedroom, and the two of them argued over movies while Andy cooked hash browns and fought over music while they ate them with plain bread and butter rather then toast because when Teddy tried to redo the settings on the toaster, Andy locked it up in a cabinet and proclaimed that there would be no toast at all until he learned some god damned manners, which meant that she might as well the trade it in for a kitten.
Teddy miraculously took no issue with the quality of hash browns, nor with the organic ketchup. Andy figured he was afraid she'd beat him with the bottle.
She kicked him out of the kitchen, once all the food was gone, and made herself some of what she usually called her 'girly tea', by virtue of being vaguely pinkish, once made, and coming in a pink canister. When she got out of the kitchen, Teddy had taken his ejection as an invitation to camp out on her couch and watch Spike TV. She stole the remote and turned it off, disabusing him of this notion, and so they were left with nothing to do but argue over who had worse taste in television, for a while.
The phone was a welcome distraction, when it rang. Fighting with Teddy, even after all these years of blissful separation, came as naturally as breathing to Andy but it was still damned tiring.
"What?" she snapped, into the receiver.
There was a pause- short but, in her irritable state, almost long enough to make Andy hang up.
And then, "Hey, Andy."
It was her turn, then, to pause, to sit in silence for a long moment and stare without seeing to the space in front of her. Teddy scowled at her, hostile and inquisitive at the same time, and folded his arms over his chest. The voice came, again.
"Andy?"
"You bitch," she heard herself say, as if from far away. "What. The. Fuck?"
Teddy sat up a little straighter and leaned in, arms dropping down to rest on his legs. This was not out of concern so much as morbid curiosity over what could have riled her so, and Andy waved him off.
"How's it going?" Michelle asked, her voice nervous and full of sunshine.
"How's it going?" Andy was baffled. "Are you stoned?"
"No, no." She cleared her throat. "I was just... You know... Wondering how things are going. It's been..." She trailed off uncertainly.
"A while," Andy said, flatly, her pride kicking in just in time to stop her from stating the exact number of days it had been since they had last spoken, since Michelle could have known how things were going.
"Yeah," Michelle agreed. "A while, right. So, what's going on?"
"Teddy's here," Andy said. "You remember Teddy, from high school, right? Like there are that many of us to remember. Marty sent him over to make sure I haven't killed myself, yet."
"Make sure you haven't what?"
"Killed myself," Andy repeated, her voice going low and throaty with fury. Teddy leaned back and the look on his face was close enough to fear that it almost made Andy smile. "Suicidal tendencies sometimes result from over-whelming guilt, you know. It's one of the side effects."
"Guilt?"
"Yeah, guilt. Like, say, the kind of over-whelming guilt that might result from allowing a very close friend to disappear without a trace from under your roof and then remain missing for months on end, with no indication and no possible way to know whether that friend is dead or alive, you bitch."
Teddy's mouth dropped open in dawning comprehension.
"Holy shit," he said. "Is that-?"
Andy nodded impatiently, and waved a silencing hand that, for once, he had no problem with obeying.
"Andy, I-" Michelle began, and then stopped, as though stunned.
"You what?" Andy's voice was almost a growl.
There was another pause. Michelle swallowed hard enough for Andy to hear it a continent away and took morbid satisfaction in her friend's unease.
"I," Michelle began, again, very slowly, "am alive." She pushed on without thinking when she heard the other girl's snort of derision. "And... I'm in Las Vegas."
Andy blinked, startled out of her anger, for a moment.
"What in the name of fuck are you doing in Las Vegas?" she asked.
"Andy, language."
"Your right to rebuke me for profanity is hereby revoked until further notice," she snapped, irritably. "What the fuck, Michelle?"
"I don't know," she said. "I mean... Nothing, really. The truck broke down."
Andy pulled of her glasses and dropped them into her lap as she massaged the bridge of her nose. "Michelle, if you're about to ask me to come and get you, then so help me, I swear on my mother's eternal soul that I will not be responsible..."
"No, no," Michelle said, hurriedly. "I just- Let me explain, okay?"
"Okay, fine. Explain. I'm listening. Asshole."
There was a pause during which Teddy smirked and Michelle most likely grimaced. Andy wondered if she ought to be embarrassed over this final, obviously childish, insult.
"The truck broke down," she repeated, "and this guy stopped to pick me up and it's going to take some time for it to be repaired."
"A guy," Andy said. "In Las Vegas. Michelle, are you trying to tell me you've become a hooker? Cause' if so- just say it, all right?"
"Andy!"
"Well, sorry if I've offended your dignity-" she made it sound more like profanity then any of her casual curses. "but what am I supposed to be thinking, here?"
"That you know me, maybe?"
"Should I? I'm not so sure about that, Shelly, do I? I mean, I had this friend named Michelle once who I though I knew okay, but she would never have fucked me over the way you have, so I don't really think I do know you, any more. And you know what else? I'm not really interested in your life as a Las Vegas call girl. I'm really much more interested in the part where you fucked off for no discernible reason, no forwarding address, no 'thanks for putting me up', no 'gone fishing, don't wait up', not a word for twelve fucking years, it seems like, and then calling me up out the blue, like this. You could have been dead for all I knew- hell, for all anyone knew, aside from your Vegas guy.
"Do you realize that for the past five days Marty had been stalking me so I don't let myself just keel over and die before you make it back? Do you know what that means? That Marty fucking Dawkins has, for past week, been more of a friend to me then you have. Tell me- just as a personal favor, please, just tell me that you realize how screwed up this is.
"And do you realize, also, that I have spent all this time sitting around the house- my parents house, that crappy little apartment, whichever- feeling guilty while you're turning tricks in the desert? Did that ever cross your mind? Did you ever even spare a single thought to what your little disappearing act would do to me, or to anyone, or were you just too busy feeling sorry for yourself to think about it?
"Michelle, this may seem repetitive, and I'm truly, deeply sorry if I'm boring you, but I feel compelled to ask, yet again- what the fuck?"
There was silence from the other end of the line for so long that Andy almost panicked, fearing Michelle had hung up on her and then hating herself for worrying.
"Shell?" she asked. "You there?"
"Yeah," she replied, softly, after a pause. "Yeah, Andy. I'm here. I'm sorry."
Andy didn't speak, right away, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. She relaxed back into the couch and closed her eyes, stretching her legs out in front of her.
"I know you, Michelle," she said. "I'm sorry, too, I guess. Should've known how screwed up you were, before. Or something. I don't know. So what's going on in your head, anyway?"
Andy was all ready for more coaxing, more pushing, more cursing, if necessary, but she needn't have worried. After a couple of deep breaths loud enough she wondered if Michelle might have been verging on an asthma attack, the whole story poured out. It probably surprised both of them just how easily it came. The words came like water down a fall and Andy didn't say a word. She nodded curtly to Teddy, who had been staring blankly since Andy had finished her tirade, when he pulled himself together enough to hiss out a request for confirmation that it was, in fact, Michelle on the phone, and then she watched him with eyes that didn't see as he walked through the open bedroom door and vanished into the bathroom.
Images danced through her head- highly dramatized in all probability, and much more prettily lit then real life ever was.
Michelle, lying sleepless on the floor of the bedroom, blue-gray eyes wide and fixed on the cracked and slowly turning blades of the ceiling fan. The old red truck with which she was almost as familiar as with her own car, as it baked in the Nevada sun and then boiled in a desert storm. A faceless stranger in a sleek black car (her mind filled in the color without help from Michelle, who wasn't going into quite that much detail, and she would have been mildly surprised to hear that this was accurate), holding out a hand to her artfully disheveled friend. More unlikely fantasies of malicious shadows chasing Michelle through New York's less savory districts and unsuspecting friends brushing past her in a crowd somewhere in Chicago. Andy wished, irrationally, that she's kept pictures of Michelle in her dorm, alongside those of John Lennon and Neil Gaiman. Then, maybe, among those masses, someone might have seen her and known her and Andy would have known sooner that she was still breathing.
When the words finally stopped, the pictures remained. They might someday create the basis for a novel, be made into words and immortalized in a best seller or a cult classic, but for that moment, they were all the reality there was in Andy's mind and, for months after they were stored as uncomfortable keepsakes of a voyage through misery- the kind that can't be banished, that won't be forgotten, like things you don't want to look at or remember but can't help taking out and looking over, once in a while.
"Why didn't you call me?" she asked, finally, sounding less angry then wounded, less irritated then plaintive and the voice she spoke with was barely recognizable as her own.
"I wanted to," Michelle said. "I did. I picked up the phone and almost dialed and then I made up all sorts of excuses for why I wasn't and promised I'd do it next time. And then time went on and- okay, you know what? I was just scared. That's it."
"Of what I'd say?" Andy asked. "Where you afraid I'd cuss at you?"
"Well..." Michelle paused. "You did."
"How would you have reacted?"
The harsh words had no bite in them, just the flippant brightness that adorned so many of Andy's remarks. A galaxy away, in Nevada, Michelle grinned and the weight of her heart seemed to lessen, knowing that their friendship wasn't broken- just a bit scuffed, just like everything of theirs. She should have known- Andy's loyalty could be twisted into pretzels and Gordian knots and never even think of breaking. It was a trait that had done her more harm than was her due, but at least it ensured Michelle kept a place in her heart. (Michelle wondered if she ought to feel guilty about this, but ground this thought into the dirt with far more success then she had with her attraction to Julian.)
They said good-bye, a while later, when Andy had wrangled half a dozen promises to call and write and generally keep up communication daily, and Teddy had wandered back in from the bathroom. When he appeared, Andy reminded her one more time that the pressure to keep in contact was all on Michelle as she wasn't the one with no permanent address and phone number and then let her go.
Once the phone was back on the hook, Teddy stared at her with some intensity for so long it made the back of her neck itch.
"What?" she asked, testily, when he didn't get bored and go away.
"You goin' after her?" he asked.
Andy barked out a laugh.
"Like you even have to ask," she said.
He nodded and tossed her a key on a red plastic ring- a duplicate of the one he kept on his personal ring.
"Take my car," he said. "Yours tops out at sixty-three and mine will get up to two hundred. I wouldn't advise it around here, but roads are different out that way."
Andy stared at him.
"Teddy?" she said. "You in there? Or have pod people taken over your brain?"
He shook his head, look bemused.
"You'd think so, huh?" He shrugged. "I just called Marty. He said to give it to you or he'd break my face."
"How is this any different then the last few hundred times he said that?" Andy asked, amused.
"This time he might actually do it."
She grinned.
"So if I don't take your car..." she began.
He cut her off. "Michelle is gone before you can reach the Kentucky state line."
Andy blinked, considering. Her fingers curled tight around the key still resting on her leg. When Teddy started to smirk, she glared.
"You still lose, man," she said.
"Oh, really? How do you figure?"
"I'm going to Las Vegas," she said. "In your car." She stood up and smirked at him. "And you're staying here with no car." She stalked into the bedroom and the door slammed shut behind her.