Shane didn't care to wait around for the gratuitous make-up sex to begin, so she called Eliot. He swore he'd pick her up in her car after completing some back to school shopping for his senior year at Annandale. The operative word here was "car," a device by which one can drive far and fast from rutting roommates and Red Hook. Shane had no small fondness for the town, especially being able to walk across the street to one of the few remaining independent coffee shops that had thus far resisted conglomeratization at the claws of Starbucks. The time would come that a Starbucks moved even into this pastoral outpost of civilization, draining the life blood from this business and inhabiting its empty husk, but that would not happen for a while. Even when it did, Shane vowed she would drink the erratic coffee in the Red Hook Diner for as long as she could stomach it and the two-mile walk from her apartment. One had to keep standards.
Eliot arrived within half an hour. He was still moving into an apartment of his own after having been home in Vale Falls for the last few months, working as a library page. Between that and some sporadic manual labor that kept him on the fit side of scrawny, he could generally make enough over the summer to support his occasional collegiate indiscretions the rest of the year.
He had invited Shane to come up to see him more than once, but she just couldn't face that town again. In another life, a simpler one years before, Vale Falls had been her hometown as well. In fact, family legend claimed the "Vale" in the town's name derived from her last name, Valentine. After the events of last year, after pulling both Eliot and herself out of oblivion, she didn't exactly have need of a last name. She didn't have a mother or a family that would acknowledge her, though some liberal web research revealed that the woman thought of as her mother was a well-respected psychotherapist living just outside of Vale. That was sufficient for Shane and she had no need to upset her former mother's equilibrium by trying to explain the tenuous reasoning by with she should make Shane hot chocolate and call her "Precious Bookworm."
As point of fact, Shane hadn't told anyone what had happened. Roselyn knew only because Roselyn never forgot Shane in the havoc. Through some twisted neurochemistry, somewhere between a seizure disorder and being a psychiatric guinea pig, Roselyn didn't lose a concept of Shane when most of the rest of the world did. Beyond her roommate, there was a half mad, woman named Girl now wandering part unknown for reasons unknown who was instrumental in getting others to know Shane again. Beyond that, anyone human who knew Shane for what she used to be was either dead or as good as dead.
So Eliot, as close as he was to the void, had no idea that the girl he kissed in greeting, the girl to whom he no longer remember he had admitted love, was anything more than a clever sophomore he'd found in the stacks of the Annandale Library. He didn't know their history. He didn't know that, in the original perversion of Shane's world, he'd supposedly drown himself in the pond next to which they'd shared a handful of summer evenings before she even graduated from college. She knew so many secrets of his that he felt he confessed to her the first time. It gave her an opportunity to be an even better girlfriend to him. It also allowed her to feel slightly less guilty that she became a trifle distracted in the arms and lips of the aforementioned Girl. She had thought he was dead, or at least not totally alive, and you couldn't technically still be dating someone you believe has had an autopsy, so it wasn't really cheating.
All Eliot knew, despite her refusal to come visit him at home, only in neutral locations and for road trips, was that he was quite fond of this strange, violet-eyed girl waiting for him at college. He'd had an on campus girlfriend once, a girl named Ashlei who dumped him for not loving Jesus enough whenever she felt particularly righteous. Mentioning that he loved him as much as one could love the fictionalization of a historical hodge-podge of people and myths was likely not the right retort, though he vacillated between the on-again and off-again with Ashlei until he met Shane, an act that pissed Ashlei off to no end. It was one thing for her to dump him for a lack of faith, but unfaithfulness was quite another (even given that they'd been off-again for at least two months before that when he explained that he was only into Christmas for the presents). She had even been willing to excuse his one actual act of cheating when he kissed that drunk dealing skank.
Though he had always valued Ashlei too much as a friend to tell her this, Eliot always thought that what pissed her off was not that he found another girlfriend but that he'd found another girlfriend who made him glow just as much as thoughts of Jesus made her glow. It was an inner fire, someone he knew would be there for him in the darkest moments, but who chased all thoughts of dark moment from his mind. Though he thought these sentiments fairly regularly, especially while parted from Shane for the summer break, he was not about to confess the precise depths of his affection to her quite yet. Ashlei was free to spout off to Jesus about how much she loved him because he wasn't about to rear back and tell her that he didn't quite feel the same way, that he'd died for his sins just because it was fun and didn't want to be too serious. He didn't imagine Shane would say these things, of course, but there was simply so much about her that he knew he didn't know.
Shane had more than inklings. In addition or perhaps in consort with her inability to retain injuries, she had something that bordered on mid reading. It wasn't in words, exactly. More that people said a few sentences to her and suddenly the subtext and their internal reasoning popped into Shane's head fully formed. She knew that he liked her more than he remember having ever liked anyone before, that he was milking the infatuation stage for the last five and a half months, that he was insecure around her now because it had been three weeks since he visited her and had to subtly sniff around to make sure that nothing had really changed between them. She kissed him back hard and whispered, "Don't be stupid, El. Nothing has changed."
"I didn't think it did," he half-lied.
"But you prefer just to know immediately."
He didn't release her from the embrace that was lasting into the minutes to make up for his absence to ask, "Know what, exactly?"
"That I am your girl still, that I didn't go off to snog some strange boy because my lips noted the lack of yours. Particularly the bottom one. Could you stick it out so it could receive appropriate attention?"
He did as requested, pouting it out so Shane could suck on it for a second. It was one of her favorite things to do and had been since she fell for him years ago.
"So you can stop fretting as of now." She pulled back only slightly to look in his blue eyes. "I said now, Mr. Kaspar. We are totally fine."
"And how is the Princess of Darkness?" he asked with a laugh.
"I wish you wouldn't call Roselyn that. She really is very nice."
"I don't doubt it and I really do like her. It is just the pseudo-necrophilia that is creepy." Eliot had been left alone in a room with Dryden exactly once, while both girls got ready in their respect bedrooms for a double date. Neither of the boys took anything remotely approaching a liking to one another and formed something like an agreement of mutual tolerance in person and subtle derision to their respective girlfriends. "I just can't trust a girl that shags someone with fangs."
"Ha! You'd shag me if I had fangs," Shane said immediately, wishing she hadn't. The moment she did, she knew he would completely agree, but it forced this issue of sex between them again. She suspected that he had slept with Ashlei was she had been feeling slightly less than righteous, but he didn't like to talk about "the ex to the current" and she tried not to introduce the issue of sex between them until she was good and ready to do a great deal more than talk.
"Fangs and fur and feathers," he assured her with a kiss. "So, where to?" he continued, opening the car of his reasonably-priced-by-virtue-of-being-third-hand car.
"Away from here and the imminent return for Roselyn and Dryden… Why don't you show me your new place?"
He grimaced. "Because I would really care to keep you around and I don't think that will happen if I let you in there the way it is now."
"What is the worst that could happen? I see that boys moving into new places are sometimes not totally fastidious and dump your messy ass like a cardboard box full of flan?"
"No, you might get eaten. It is 'rustic' and my roommate, Clive, is ungodly… Did you say flan?'
"Flan was the messiest thing I could think of when dropped."
Red Hook is a serialized novel being written by Xen, also known as Thomm Quackenbush. It didn't happen to you, your best friend, or his cousin. Why? Because it didn't happen. All persons, living, dead, undead, or unliving are purely coincidental. Any real persons are used fictiously. What you are about to read is not a news broadcast. No portion of this book may be distributed without the expressed written consent of Xen. Feel free to rope your friends into reading it, though. Do it or I start shooting PuppyOrphans.
He is published by Cave Drawing Ink and syndicated throughout the internet.
