zeke, the gayest model of TĂ…GARP (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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enodia_ic2023-09-06 06:18 pm
bwnedpronouncedboned) wrote in enodia_ic2023-09-06 06:18 pm
Entry tags:
(no subject)
who: Zeke & Crysta
what: Crysta breaks into Zeke's room to do drugs but finds him being a dumb art nerd instead.
where: Zeke'shovel room
when: 9/4, after Annie's party
warnings: Horny art, human emotions, they barely smoke a joint it's pathetic.
what: Crysta breaks into Zeke's room to do drugs but finds him being a dumb art nerd instead.
where: Zeke's
when: 9/4, after Annie's party
warnings: Horny art, human emotions, they barely smoke a joint it's pathetic.
Zeke sits on the floor of his bedroom, hunched over a makeshift workstation made of apple crates and the rotating tray he stole from the microwave. He hadn't anticipated getting back into clay so soon—not when he can move bone so easily, make such delicate structures without even touching a single vertebra—but this was the only way he knew to purge himself of the shapes in his head. The ones that made him think of her, because they reminded him of her smell and her taste and the sound of her laugh.
It feels like a kind of therapy, actually, to take his glasses off and push clay around with his fingers. He can pass the thoughts onto the sculpture while he drinks Skittles-flavored energy drinks and dissociates, and then the thoughts will be gone once he gets rid of it. A perfect plan, the absolute peak of self-care.
"Jesus fuck, my eyes," he mutters and rubs his bloodshot eyes with clay-covered fingers. "Oh Jesus fuck, my eyes, what the fuck." Bad move.
Which is the first thing Crysta witnesses, having wandered into his room without asking. She knew that was a bad idea, but it had felt clever halfway down the fourth-to-third floor stairwell. She wasn’t sure if he would’ve let her in if she asked, and this method bypassed that. She knew he’d been avoiding spending time alone with her, and that was infuriating, because it was so wrong. Whatever he was scared of, she had the immediate need to prove otherwise. If it was just that he didn’t like her anymore, sure, that would be fine. It had happened before. But this felt different, like perhaps he was scared she was developing feelings she wasn’t capable of, which was insulting. She had to show him nothing had changed.
And, of course, the way to do that was probably not necessarily home invasion, but that was the current only recourse she had. And whatever. The door wasn’t locked. All set to explain away her presence with the little baggie of stolen party weed in her hand, she just blinks at his bedroom door, instead, startled into offering assistance. “Uh. Do you need like, water?”
Oh shit. Zeke almost chokes on his spit, and not just because he'd expected it to be Eureka at his door, telling him to open wide for some goop. Not the person whose very existence had invaded his mind and had him making horny shapes on his floor.
"I—no, I think I'll survive," he coughs and grabs for the corner of his bedsheet, also smudged with clay, and scrubs at his eyes. "Don't really need them—did you just break into my place?"
“The door was open.” She shrugs, because Crysta knows the legal definition of burglary, and probably any cop would believe her if she said she was drunk and wandered into his apartment without realizing. Or just wonder at the sheer amount of clay stains in this room. She does feel, suddenly, that she’s wandered accidentally into a murder scene, or something equally as intimate and should leave. He’s sculpting, like, actually, and the shape on the floor is incomprehensible but beautiful. She’s not sure she’s meant to see it. She focuses on the clay-stained bedsheet instead.
“But for like, benevolent reasons. I was at Annie’s birthday. Lou brought all the weed and I stole some.” She proves this by tossing the bag into his lap, since he isn’t wearing his glasses. She should’ve just walked away after that, but hovers in the doorframe instead, stealing glances at his art, trying to wrap her brain around its curves and edges while she can.
Zeke picks up the bag, but he doesn't look away from her. There's something dreamlike about this moment: the way Crysta stands in his doorway, unbidden, her scent and her voice filling the room just as he tries to purge them. Even her bones seem haloed in a soft light... though probably because of the crap in his eyes.
"Well thank you for stealin' from the birthday girl." He clears his throat and wipes his eyes with the inside of his shirt. "I should--"
Zeke stops and finally looks down. He should come up with an excuse not to be alone with Crysta, a situation where he regularly makes decisions that get him further and further into trouble. But maybe this is a dream... and Zeke so rarely has good dreams. "You gonna come in, or you got another engagement?"
“No. I can stay.” is out of her mouth before she can help it. Crysta should leave. She knows that, even as she closes the door behind her, which is not the promise that something private is going to happen. It’s just so they’ll know if another weed fairy happens to break in later. Crysta slips out of her heels and leaves them at the door. She sinks to sit on the floor, across from him, respectfully.
She then wishes she hadn’t, because the floor is absolutely covered in clay, and it immediately gets all over her skirt. He hadn’t been joking about getting into clay. She rubs a little bit off, but that’s a fool’s errand. Every surface is just the same. “Love what you’ve done to the place. …What are you making?” The piece, whatever it is, is still hypnotic, even though it’s by rights only scoops.
He realizes, belatedly, that maybe he should have offered her a seat on the bed, or a pillow, or at least one of the trash bags he used to cover the pieces when he needed a break from them. But this way he can see her, and at least he's not daydreaming about her running her hands through his hair again.
"Well, it's, uh..." Zeke looks down at the twisting sculpture in front of him, his hands smoothing the wet clay automatically. It's more abstract than his clay works in the past, but, to him, it feels like he's putting his entire soul directly on display. In Zeke's eyes, it looks like two figures intertwined but trying not to touch, their curving bodies poised to fall into each other should either one lose their composure. Or maybe it just looks like scoops, which is also probably weirdly telling about him. "Not anything useful. A little embarrassing, though."
Shoving the sculpture out of the way with one very unsafe sweep of his leg, Zeke pops open the bag on his lap and retrieves a joint. Crysta wouldn't want him loading a bowl with these clay-covered hands, even if it's just fine with Zeke if he smokes his art supplies from time to time. "Want I should grab you a lump to continue your artistic journey?"
The sculpture makes her feel lonely, like if she just grabbed out for someone, she’d be miles too far away, still. It’s a familiar emotion. Not an easy one, or maybe the most correct. So she pushes it down. And she doesn’t ask why it’s embarrassing.
And she shouldn’t really be getting high now. She didn’t, at Annie’s party; introducing another substance to her brand new powers feels like a bad idea. But Zeke had asked her to stay, and she wants to. If there were consequences, she’d deal with it. “I do not think clay’s my medium.” She grins in memory of the lumpy vaguely bird-ish shape she’d made the other night. She can’t resist the smile turning a little evil. “...But maybe later. If you’re super inspiring.”
Zeke feels a familiar tingle in his chest. One he keeps trying to stuff down and ignore and pretend isn't getting bigger and stronger and more insistent every time he sees or talks to Crysta. He takes a little longer than usual to light the joint, to give himself a moment and hide any emotions his face might try to betray.
"What would you say is your medium?" he asks. "Like, outta anything in the world, not just art."
That question hits her a little harder than she’d expected, and not only because she’d just been staring at Zeke, thinking how he could make even lighting a joint just like art. She falters around it, shrugging a little. The breezy answers like “hair, obviously,” or the more distracting “sex, obviously” don’t feel quite right.
“I don’t know if I have one.” She answers honestly in the end, grinning wryly at how pathetic that sounds. She isn’t good at much. Not really. Not other than lying, and manipulating everyone to see her in exactly the light she wanted, which isn’t something she can tell him. A medium, art at all like he had mastered, a way to express herself or show the world beauty is something beyond her. But that’s all sad, and she lands on a fake after all, her voice pitching up to something vacant and amused. “Maybe like, being hot. Even Annie said I always look good.”
It hadn't felt like a deep question when Zeke asked it, but he can hear the small shift in Crysta's voice and see the twist of her jaw as she answers it. Something about it sticks to his throat and rattles around his sternum. It felt like every time someone ever asked him what he wants out of life, and he was struck dumb with the realization that he just wanted to get through it.
"Sorry, sorry," he coughs out a lungful of smoke and holds the joint out toward Crysta. "Please don't let me spark an existential crisis. I've been awake for like thirty hours I think, it's weird question time from me."
Important context she won’t provide is that Crysta is arriving fresh from Truth or Shot with Enoch and Parson, a fraught environment where she’d had to scramble to fortify already well-crafted walls, weaving answers with just enough truth to pass the test but no more. She remembers, now, that she’s not there. Her guard can slip a little. Zeke has no magical information vault, she doesn’t think, where he’ll store this information against her until the day she dies. All he wants is to know her. Her shoulderblades slip down her spine, relaxing despite herself. It would be safe, she thinks, to curl up against him and rest her head against his shoulder, and smell the cigarettes and clay on his clothes and just close her eyes. She could breathe there, for a while.
Safe in one way, of course. The equivalent to doing that on a bed of molten lava in another, which is why she settles for crossing her legs and taking the joint from him, inhaling deep to suppress these worst urges. “That’s like. Objectively not enough. You’re gonna shrivel before your time.” She helpfully informs him on the exhale, voice strained against a cough. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”
Zeke throws a glance at his sculpture, an almost-too-intimate depiction of what flashes across his mind when he closes his eyes. The curves that hide his thoughts, the hollowed out valleys of clay where he stashes the desires he can't say out loud, can't let Crysta see or know.
"Just not good at it, I guess," he says, his voice restrained, his eyes still on the clay. "I keep thinkin' maybe if I redirect some energy into this shit, I'll pass out for a fuckin' year when I'm done, but." Zeke looks back to Crysta, so close he could reach out and touch her face and stroke her hair if he really wanted to be the idiot he so proudly claims to be. "Not too sure I can rid myself of this energy."
“Well there’s plenty of ways to do that.” She grins up at him, mischievous, because he’d set it right up, but she didn’t actually come here tonight with seductive intentions, or whatever. She remembers the few nights they slept in the same hotel room on their stupid road trip, and how he’d felt sleeping next to her, the way his heartbeat had fallen from anxious staccato to a low, calming pulse. She couldn’t remember a time she’d slept more easily either. But they weren’t in a hotel room anymore. This room was where he really lived, and it counted in the real world, and she absolutely couldn’t offer to fall asleep here. Besides, his sheets were fucking filthy.
“So maybe let’s just like, get you very high and see what happens.” This seems like a much safer conclusion, and after a final stolen hit, she shoves the joint back at Zeke.
The breath leaves Zeke's lungs for just a second, all that resolve he knows he doesn't have crumbling at the idea of exhausting himself in Crysta's arms. As desperate as he is to prove that he's not just into Crysta for the sex, that they can be friends who platonically sit and talk and joke even when they're not supervised, his art says otherwise. Or at least it does to him.
"You're gonna feel like a damn fool when I get too high 'n' start crying." He twirls the joint between his fingers, the paper all but invisible to him, making the weed look like an unwieldy alfalfa pellet. "But maybe not." Zeke shrugs and puts the joint between his lips again, his eyes traveling back to Crysta's form. "You have a way of evening me out."
The blanket over her worst anxieties and impulse control abilities slips over Crysta’s shoulders far, far too easily. She doesn’t know what to say to that, because she’s not sure it’s true. She has a way, she knows, of encouraging the worst tendencies in people, not better ones. Instead of responding, she slumps into his side and tucks her head onto his shoulder, which is an innocent and relatively platonic move if you looked at it from the outside. Maybe he’ll think so, too. She’s tired. It was a long night of truths. Surely she can give in just this little bit.
“If you cried, I’d only like. Laugh a little bit.” She reassures him, daring him to laugh at her now, too.
Suddenly she's in his space, her hair brushing his neck, her weight pressed up against him. His arm falls around her waist, not holding her but resting comfortably where his fingers could draw little circles on her skin.
"That's fair." He sets the joint aside, resting it precariously on the edge of his nightstand, and lets his head drop against Crysta's. "You gotta toughen me up somehow." Zeke kisses the top of her head, soft enough that she won't even have to feel it if she doesn't want to, and breathes in the smell of her hair. A layer of anxiety sloughs off his mind and drops to the trash bags on the floor. "I'm glad you came over. Sorry if I've been, ya know..." He trails off with a shrug, unable to put to words something Crysta already knows.
She does know, but doesn’t know he knew it consciously enough to acknowledge. They’d been tense over the past week and a half. In the fight to prove she knew what she wasn’t (any kind of clingy girlfriend or a girlfriend at all, or anyone with any sort of expectations for this thing they were doing,) she’d sort of forgotten what they were. Which is this. A breath of relief and moments that don’t need words. Or maybe this is all just the weed.
Crysta does feel his lips, and his fingers, and relaxes against them. They give a rhythm and focus to her thoughts, which are swimming around, searching for an outlet in correct sentence structure. “No, it’s fine. I just.” She tries to flick her eyes up to his, though it hardly matters, “You don’t have to worry. I still don’t… you know.” Because even the words expect anything feel like they add an expectation. “I just like being here.”
Is that what Zeke hoped to hear? Maybe. Maybe all he needed was a little reassurance that there were no expectations, that he didn't have to play the part of a significant other if he didn't want or know how to. That his propensity for disappearing didn't mean he'd ruined another friendship and another living situation just as he'd begun to get comfortable.
"I like having you here," he mutters into her hair, and the little ache in his chest when the individual strands tickle his lips lets him know that he's lying to himself. That he wants Crysta to care when he doesn't text her back and to miss him when he holes up in his room for a week at a time. That he wishes, just a little, that he knew how to love without hurting so he could share that feeling with her. Zeke closes his eyes and continues to draw his little circles on her skin. "You're welcome to stay as long as you want."
A wave of relief washes over her and she bites her lip in response, because she isn’t sure what that means. Surely she couldn’t have feared rejection from him. Not when she knows that even if a bite of bile had sat in her stomach about it, she could twist it a million ways to pretend she was using him in the first place, and this was all a game. She has about fifteen contingency plans to leave this room looking untouched even now; she always does. But he’s not asking her to fight, or to prove herself. He’s asking her to stay. But only as long as she wanted. The freedom of that makes her throat tight.
She reaches out to find his other hand, to play with the bones of his wrist and finds that she missed them. She can’t say that. She can’t promise him that she’d stay forever, or as long as he wanted her to. But she can promise, murmured against his chest, in lieu of literally anything that would betray the way she felt she could breathe again,
“I’d stay for longer if you changed your sheets tonight.”
Oh, shit. His room is kind of a fucking mess, isn't it? He hadn't noticed before, lost in the sauce of artistic mania and just blind enough to ignore the smudges of clay on every surface, empty cans and discarded sketches strewn all over the place. But he can't expect Crysta to put up with all that and dirty sheets. Zeke barely even knows how she puts up with the rest of him, let alone why she would want to.
"I guess you do know your worth." He takes an extra moment, wrapping his arm tighter around her waist and breathing her in, savoring her scent. Just in case something changes in the next three minutes and Crysta realizes he's not actually worth it, that she's too hot and rich and charming for a little freak like him. "I love that."
Zeke drops a kiss on the side of her neck as he pulls away, reluctant to part but there's no way in hell he's letting his gremlin habits scare her off. "I'll be right back."
Crysta almost does regret the command, but if she’s really staying here tonight, it’s going to be necessary. A few minutes alone in his room means she has to entertain herself. It takes all of three seconds to fling the dirty sheets from his bed into the direction of the closet. And that’s all the helping she does. Pretending she doesn’t know what microorganisms go on bare mattresses, she sits on his and squints at the sculpture, tuning in to her cellular vision, like maybe she could understand, if she sees it at its cellular level, why it causes such an ache in her heart. She’s captivated by the hexagonal pattern, trillions of little cells stacking on top of each other, all expertly shaped by Zeke. She gets lost in it, but gently, not like she was scared of, before. It is how Zeke will inevitably find her, three minutes later, smiling at his footsteps when she hears them again.
There's a moment of panic when Zeke comes back to see Crysta staring so intently at his sculpture. Art had long been his preferred language, the way he gave his emotions form and substance when he couldn't put them into words. It may not be straightforward, but that sculpture in progress said things about Crysta he couldn't even admit to himself.
But maybe it's not a bad thing for her to see it. So she can be informed, forewarned, without the need for stumbling words.
Zeke tosses the mismatched sheets on the bed and sits down beside her. "You feeling inspired?" he asks and runs a single finger down the curve of her spine. "Because I sure as fuck am."
She tears her eyes away, turning them to Zeke, very much wishing that he could see what she did, that she could begin to explain the galaxy of cells she’d just visited and returned from. They could switch eyeballs, just for a day. She blinks at him, when he’s suddenly next to her, his hand on the expanse of her back. It takes a little while to zoom her eyes out of cell-o-vision, but as soon as she does, she smiles. And then, one-handed, just spreads out a flat sheet about halfway across the mattress, because she doesn’t want to make a bed right now.
Coming to rest, she imitates his touch, reaching out, rolling her fingers around the very first vertebra she can feel at the back of his neck. He can’t see that, but she imagines what it looks like. She’d like to use his eyes, too.
“...I mean like. You’re the artist.” She grins, physically unable to make everything a challenge, “You’re going to have to show me how to put that to any use.”
"Holy shit, that was so fuckin' cheesy," Zeke laughs and falls into Crysta, his lips finding their way along her jaw and up to her ear. He can feel her smile and her heartbeat and her breathing, and he loves that, too. "You should say it again," he rests his head next to hers, a stupid smirk on his face, "but slap me as hard as you can this time." (And she did.)
It feels like a kind of therapy, actually, to take his glasses off and push clay around with his fingers. He can pass the thoughts onto the sculpture while he drinks Skittles-flavored energy drinks and dissociates, and then the thoughts will be gone once he gets rid of it. A perfect plan, the absolute peak of self-care.
"Jesus fuck, my eyes," he mutters and rubs his bloodshot eyes with clay-covered fingers. "Oh Jesus fuck, my eyes, what the fuck." Bad move.
Which is the first thing Crysta witnesses, having wandered into his room without asking. She knew that was a bad idea, but it had felt clever halfway down the fourth-to-third floor stairwell. She wasn’t sure if he would’ve let her in if she asked, and this method bypassed that. She knew he’d been avoiding spending time alone with her, and that was infuriating, because it was so wrong. Whatever he was scared of, she had the immediate need to prove otherwise. If it was just that he didn’t like her anymore, sure, that would be fine. It had happened before. But this felt different, like perhaps he was scared she was developing feelings she wasn’t capable of, which was insulting. She had to show him nothing had changed.
And, of course, the way to do that was probably not necessarily home invasion, but that was the current only recourse she had. And whatever. The door wasn’t locked. All set to explain away her presence with the little baggie of stolen party weed in her hand, she just blinks at his bedroom door, instead, startled into offering assistance. “Uh. Do you need like, water?”
Oh shit. Zeke almost chokes on his spit, and not just because he'd expected it to be Eureka at his door, telling him to open wide for some goop. Not the person whose very existence had invaded his mind and had him making horny shapes on his floor.
"I—no, I think I'll survive," he coughs and grabs for the corner of his bedsheet, also smudged with clay, and scrubs at his eyes. "Don't really need them—did you just break into my place?"
“The door was open.” She shrugs, because Crysta knows the legal definition of burglary, and probably any cop would believe her if she said she was drunk and wandered into his apartment without realizing. Or just wonder at the sheer amount of clay stains in this room. She does feel, suddenly, that she’s wandered accidentally into a murder scene, or something equally as intimate and should leave. He’s sculpting, like, actually, and the shape on the floor is incomprehensible but beautiful. She’s not sure she’s meant to see it. She focuses on the clay-stained bedsheet instead.
“But for like, benevolent reasons. I was at Annie’s birthday. Lou brought all the weed and I stole some.” She proves this by tossing the bag into his lap, since he isn’t wearing his glasses. She should’ve just walked away after that, but hovers in the doorframe instead, stealing glances at his art, trying to wrap her brain around its curves and edges while she can.
Zeke picks up the bag, but he doesn't look away from her. There's something dreamlike about this moment: the way Crysta stands in his doorway, unbidden, her scent and her voice filling the room just as he tries to purge them. Even her bones seem haloed in a soft light... though probably because of the crap in his eyes.
"Well thank you for stealin' from the birthday girl." He clears his throat and wipes his eyes with the inside of his shirt. "I should--"
Zeke stops and finally looks down. He should come up with an excuse not to be alone with Crysta, a situation where he regularly makes decisions that get him further and further into trouble. But maybe this is a dream... and Zeke so rarely has good dreams. "You gonna come in, or you got another engagement?"
“No. I can stay.” is out of her mouth before she can help it. Crysta should leave. She knows that, even as she closes the door behind her, which is not the promise that something private is going to happen. It’s just so they’ll know if another weed fairy happens to break in later. Crysta slips out of her heels and leaves them at the door. She sinks to sit on the floor, across from him, respectfully.
She then wishes she hadn’t, because the floor is absolutely covered in clay, and it immediately gets all over her skirt. He hadn’t been joking about getting into clay. She rubs a little bit off, but that’s a fool’s errand. Every surface is just the same. “Love what you’ve done to the place. …What are you making?” The piece, whatever it is, is still hypnotic, even though it’s by rights only scoops.
He realizes, belatedly, that maybe he should have offered her a seat on the bed, or a pillow, or at least one of the trash bags he used to cover the pieces when he needed a break from them. But this way he can see her, and at least he's not daydreaming about her running her hands through his hair again.
"Well, it's, uh..." Zeke looks down at the twisting sculpture in front of him, his hands smoothing the wet clay automatically. It's more abstract than his clay works in the past, but, to him, it feels like he's putting his entire soul directly on display. In Zeke's eyes, it looks like two figures intertwined but trying not to touch, their curving bodies poised to fall into each other should either one lose their composure. Or maybe it just looks like scoops, which is also probably weirdly telling about him. "Not anything useful. A little embarrassing, though."
Shoving the sculpture out of the way with one very unsafe sweep of his leg, Zeke pops open the bag on his lap and retrieves a joint. Crysta wouldn't want him loading a bowl with these clay-covered hands, even if it's just fine with Zeke if he smokes his art supplies from time to time. "Want I should grab you a lump to continue your artistic journey?"
The sculpture makes her feel lonely, like if she just grabbed out for someone, she’d be miles too far away, still. It’s a familiar emotion. Not an easy one, or maybe the most correct. So she pushes it down. And she doesn’t ask why it’s embarrassing.
And she shouldn’t really be getting high now. She didn’t, at Annie’s party; introducing another substance to her brand new powers feels like a bad idea. But Zeke had asked her to stay, and she wants to. If there were consequences, she’d deal with it. “I do not think clay’s my medium.” She grins in memory of the lumpy vaguely bird-ish shape she’d made the other night. She can’t resist the smile turning a little evil. “...But maybe later. If you’re super inspiring.”
Zeke feels a familiar tingle in his chest. One he keeps trying to stuff down and ignore and pretend isn't getting bigger and stronger and more insistent every time he sees or talks to Crysta. He takes a little longer than usual to light the joint, to give himself a moment and hide any emotions his face might try to betray.
"What would you say is your medium?" he asks. "Like, outta anything in the world, not just art."
That question hits her a little harder than she’d expected, and not only because she’d just been staring at Zeke, thinking how he could make even lighting a joint just like art. She falters around it, shrugging a little. The breezy answers like “hair, obviously,” or the more distracting “sex, obviously” don’t feel quite right.
“I don’t know if I have one.” She answers honestly in the end, grinning wryly at how pathetic that sounds. She isn’t good at much. Not really. Not other than lying, and manipulating everyone to see her in exactly the light she wanted, which isn’t something she can tell him. A medium, art at all like he had mastered, a way to express herself or show the world beauty is something beyond her. But that’s all sad, and she lands on a fake after all, her voice pitching up to something vacant and amused. “Maybe like, being hot. Even Annie said I always look good.”
It hadn't felt like a deep question when Zeke asked it, but he can hear the small shift in Crysta's voice and see the twist of her jaw as she answers it. Something about it sticks to his throat and rattles around his sternum. It felt like every time someone ever asked him what he wants out of life, and he was struck dumb with the realization that he just wanted to get through it.
"Sorry, sorry," he coughs out a lungful of smoke and holds the joint out toward Crysta. "Please don't let me spark an existential crisis. I've been awake for like thirty hours I think, it's weird question time from me."
Important context she won’t provide is that Crysta is arriving fresh from Truth or Shot with Enoch and Parson, a fraught environment where she’d had to scramble to fortify already well-crafted walls, weaving answers with just enough truth to pass the test but no more. She remembers, now, that she’s not there. Her guard can slip a little. Zeke has no magical information vault, she doesn’t think, where he’ll store this information against her until the day she dies. All he wants is to know her. Her shoulderblades slip down her spine, relaxing despite herself. It would be safe, she thinks, to curl up against him and rest her head against his shoulder, and smell the cigarettes and clay on his clothes and just close her eyes. She could breathe there, for a while.
Safe in one way, of course. The equivalent to doing that on a bed of molten lava in another, which is why she settles for crossing her legs and taking the joint from him, inhaling deep to suppress these worst urges. “That’s like. Objectively not enough. You’re gonna shrivel before your time.” She helpfully informs him on the exhale, voice strained against a cough. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”
Zeke throws a glance at his sculpture, an almost-too-intimate depiction of what flashes across his mind when he closes his eyes. The curves that hide his thoughts, the hollowed out valleys of clay where he stashes the desires he can't say out loud, can't let Crysta see or know.
"Just not good at it, I guess," he says, his voice restrained, his eyes still on the clay. "I keep thinkin' maybe if I redirect some energy into this shit, I'll pass out for a fuckin' year when I'm done, but." Zeke looks back to Crysta, so close he could reach out and touch her face and stroke her hair if he really wanted to be the idiot he so proudly claims to be. "Not too sure I can rid myself of this energy."
“Well there’s plenty of ways to do that.” She grins up at him, mischievous, because he’d set it right up, but she didn’t actually come here tonight with seductive intentions, or whatever. She remembers the few nights they slept in the same hotel room on their stupid road trip, and how he’d felt sleeping next to her, the way his heartbeat had fallen from anxious staccato to a low, calming pulse. She couldn’t remember a time she’d slept more easily either. But they weren’t in a hotel room anymore. This room was where he really lived, and it counted in the real world, and she absolutely couldn’t offer to fall asleep here. Besides, his sheets were fucking filthy.
“So maybe let’s just like, get you very high and see what happens.” This seems like a much safer conclusion, and after a final stolen hit, she shoves the joint back at Zeke.
The breath leaves Zeke's lungs for just a second, all that resolve he knows he doesn't have crumbling at the idea of exhausting himself in Crysta's arms. As desperate as he is to prove that he's not just into Crysta for the sex, that they can be friends who platonically sit and talk and joke even when they're not supervised, his art says otherwise. Or at least it does to him.
"You're gonna feel like a damn fool when I get too high 'n' start crying." He twirls the joint between his fingers, the paper all but invisible to him, making the weed look like an unwieldy alfalfa pellet. "But maybe not." Zeke shrugs and puts the joint between his lips again, his eyes traveling back to Crysta's form. "You have a way of evening me out."
The blanket over her worst anxieties and impulse control abilities slips over Crysta’s shoulders far, far too easily. She doesn’t know what to say to that, because she’s not sure it’s true. She has a way, she knows, of encouraging the worst tendencies in people, not better ones. Instead of responding, she slumps into his side and tucks her head onto his shoulder, which is an innocent and relatively platonic move if you looked at it from the outside. Maybe he’ll think so, too. She’s tired. It was a long night of truths. Surely she can give in just this little bit.
“If you cried, I’d only like. Laugh a little bit.” She reassures him, daring him to laugh at her now, too.
Suddenly she's in his space, her hair brushing his neck, her weight pressed up against him. His arm falls around her waist, not holding her but resting comfortably where his fingers could draw little circles on her skin.
"That's fair." He sets the joint aside, resting it precariously on the edge of his nightstand, and lets his head drop against Crysta's. "You gotta toughen me up somehow." Zeke kisses the top of her head, soft enough that she won't even have to feel it if she doesn't want to, and breathes in the smell of her hair. A layer of anxiety sloughs off his mind and drops to the trash bags on the floor. "I'm glad you came over. Sorry if I've been, ya know..." He trails off with a shrug, unable to put to words something Crysta already knows.
She does know, but doesn’t know he knew it consciously enough to acknowledge. They’d been tense over the past week and a half. In the fight to prove she knew what she wasn’t (any kind of clingy girlfriend or a girlfriend at all, or anyone with any sort of expectations for this thing they were doing,) she’d sort of forgotten what they were. Which is this. A breath of relief and moments that don’t need words. Or maybe this is all just the weed.
Crysta does feel his lips, and his fingers, and relaxes against them. They give a rhythm and focus to her thoughts, which are swimming around, searching for an outlet in correct sentence structure. “No, it’s fine. I just.” She tries to flick her eyes up to his, though it hardly matters, “You don’t have to worry. I still don’t… you know.” Because even the words expect anything feel like they add an expectation. “I just like being here.”
Is that what Zeke hoped to hear? Maybe. Maybe all he needed was a little reassurance that there were no expectations, that he didn't have to play the part of a significant other if he didn't want or know how to. That his propensity for disappearing didn't mean he'd ruined another friendship and another living situation just as he'd begun to get comfortable.
"I like having you here," he mutters into her hair, and the little ache in his chest when the individual strands tickle his lips lets him know that he's lying to himself. That he wants Crysta to care when he doesn't text her back and to miss him when he holes up in his room for a week at a time. That he wishes, just a little, that he knew how to love without hurting so he could share that feeling with her. Zeke closes his eyes and continues to draw his little circles on her skin. "You're welcome to stay as long as you want."
A wave of relief washes over her and she bites her lip in response, because she isn’t sure what that means. Surely she couldn’t have feared rejection from him. Not when she knows that even if a bite of bile had sat in her stomach about it, she could twist it a million ways to pretend she was using him in the first place, and this was all a game. She has about fifteen contingency plans to leave this room looking untouched even now; she always does. But he’s not asking her to fight, or to prove herself. He’s asking her to stay. But only as long as she wanted. The freedom of that makes her throat tight.
She reaches out to find his other hand, to play with the bones of his wrist and finds that she missed them. She can’t say that. She can’t promise him that she’d stay forever, or as long as he wanted her to. But she can promise, murmured against his chest, in lieu of literally anything that would betray the way she felt she could breathe again,
“I’d stay for longer if you changed your sheets tonight.”
Oh, shit. His room is kind of a fucking mess, isn't it? He hadn't noticed before, lost in the sauce of artistic mania and just blind enough to ignore the smudges of clay on every surface, empty cans and discarded sketches strewn all over the place. But he can't expect Crysta to put up with all that and dirty sheets. Zeke barely even knows how she puts up with the rest of him, let alone why she would want to.
"I guess you do know your worth." He takes an extra moment, wrapping his arm tighter around her waist and breathing her in, savoring her scent. Just in case something changes in the next three minutes and Crysta realizes he's not actually worth it, that she's too hot and rich and charming for a little freak like him. "I love that."
Zeke drops a kiss on the side of her neck as he pulls away, reluctant to part but there's no way in hell he's letting his gremlin habits scare her off. "I'll be right back."
Crysta almost does regret the command, but if she’s really staying here tonight, it’s going to be necessary. A few minutes alone in his room means she has to entertain herself. It takes all of three seconds to fling the dirty sheets from his bed into the direction of the closet. And that’s all the helping she does. Pretending she doesn’t know what microorganisms go on bare mattresses, she sits on his and squints at the sculpture, tuning in to her cellular vision, like maybe she could understand, if she sees it at its cellular level, why it causes such an ache in her heart. She’s captivated by the hexagonal pattern, trillions of little cells stacking on top of each other, all expertly shaped by Zeke. She gets lost in it, but gently, not like she was scared of, before. It is how Zeke will inevitably find her, three minutes later, smiling at his footsteps when she hears them again.
There's a moment of panic when Zeke comes back to see Crysta staring so intently at his sculpture. Art had long been his preferred language, the way he gave his emotions form and substance when he couldn't put them into words. It may not be straightforward, but that sculpture in progress said things about Crysta he couldn't even admit to himself.
But maybe it's not a bad thing for her to see it. So she can be informed, forewarned, without the need for stumbling words.
Zeke tosses the mismatched sheets on the bed and sits down beside her. "You feeling inspired?" he asks and runs a single finger down the curve of her spine. "Because I sure as fuck am."
She tears her eyes away, turning them to Zeke, very much wishing that he could see what she did, that she could begin to explain the galaxy of cells she’d just visited and returned from. They could switch eyeballs, just for a day. She blinks at him, when he’s suddenly next to her, his hand on the expanse of her back. It takes a little while to zoom her eyes out of cell-o-vision, but as soon as she does, she smiles. And then, one-handed, just spreads out a flat sheet about halfway across the mattress, because she doesn’t want to make a bed right now.
Coming to rest, she imitates his touch, reaching out, rolling her fingers around the very first vertebra she can feel at the back of his neck. He can’t see that, but she imagines what it looks like. She’d like to use his eyes, too.
“...I mean like. You’re the artist.” She grins, physically unable to make everything a challenge, “You’re going to have to show me how to put that to any use.”
"Holy shit, that was so fuckin' cheesy," Zeke laughs and falls into Crysta, his lips finding their way along her jaw and up to her ear. He can feel her smile and her heartbeat and her breathing, and he loves that, too. "You should say it again," he rests his head next to hers, a stupid smirk on his face, "but slap me as hard as you can this time." (And she did.)