losttheright | Entries tagged with stephen meyers

Sometimes, if she really stops to think about it, Molly finds it almost odd how easy this is, how well it works. Her last serious relationship — which is to say, her only other serious relationship — always felt a little like playing house, pretending to be something she wasn't. The words were there, and the idea of the right feeling, but that life never really felt like hers. Maybe it's the history she and Stephen have shared and managed to move past, both back home and here, or maybe it's something else, but that never really seems to be the case with him.

She probably loves him. At least, she thinks that's it, what the word would be for what she feels for him. More than a year since he came knocking on her door remembering having been here before, nine months since she moved in with him, and feeling good about all of that, not bored or restless or anything of the sort, it seems to fit. She doesn't feel odd or panicked about it, either, which seems pretty telling in its own right. That is, when she considers it at all, which mostly, she doesn't. Things feel comfortable enough that she doesn't need to. Besides, she's never been much of a romantic.

Even so, and despite the fact that election season is probably the worst time for it, she's got it in her head that they could both use a break, and she has a plan. Neither of them is typically great at stepping away from their work, but one night off won't kill them. And one night off is what she's decided they should have, or at least a few hours.

"So," she says, half-draped over a chair, as casual as anything, "hypothetically speaking, what would be the chances of me getting you to call it a night early?"

It's strange sometimes, if Molly stops to think about it too much, how easy this has been. Effectively having a second chance with an ex and picking up not quite where they left off but being able to get right what they didn't before probably shouldn't be as straightforward as it's felt. Living with someone shouldn't feel so right after the last time she moved in with a boyfriend, and how much it seemed like she was just playing house. It's been five months or so since she ended the lease on her place and moved into Stephen's, and she hasn't once started to feel restless or like she doesn't fit here.

Granted, her priorities have changed somewhat since the two of them were first sleeping together all those years ago. And for that matter, it isn't like she's disinterested in sex. Her relationship with it — with herself, her body — isn't at all what it was when he was here before, but she and Stephen have always been compatible in that way. It's nice, actually, to know that the years between them haven't altered that, no matter what else might be different.

She's idly thinking about that as she wanders out into the living room half-dressed after a shower, her hair damp and limp around her shoulders and only a bra, red and lacy, paired with her jeans. "You haven't seen my plaid button-down, have you?"

Molly probably should have seen this coming. Granted, she could say the same about this whole damn turn of events, too — her attempting to dissuade her boss and coworkers from letting the Purge happen as planned, her inability to do so, her eventually being unable to play along with it anymore — but while this seems like a surprising twist, she thinks it shouldn't. Of course she would wind up at Stephen's door following this whole debacle. They aren't what they were before, whatever that was, and she doubts they'll ever be, especially with what he knows about her now, but he knows politics better than anyone in this city she knows. And it isn't that she's looking for advice, exactly, having made it this far on her own and being proud of doing so, but the enormity of what she's just done is finally starting to sink in. It may not be official yet, but she has implicitly quit her job, her phone already starting to ring with calls from people who want more of a statement on the matter from her. She's silenced them all. She thinks there might be something a little ironic about that, given where she's currently standing, in front of Stephen's door, in the same hallway of what used to be her own apartment, years ago.

Strange as it may be — as his presence here may still be at all — she doesn't really know where else she could have gone, anyway. She has to talk about this with someone, and he'd find out eventually. Better that he do so now, and from her. Her heart starting to race a little with the rush of all of this, she finds herself strangely nervous when she lifts her hand to knock on his door, teeth pressing into her lower lip when she steps back. It occurs to her that she doesn't know how he'll react to this. She does know damn well that he's taken to the Purge about as kindly as she has, but he might think she's fucking crazy for having reacted like this. Still, while she really is not looking for advice, Molly hasn't got a clue what she's going to do next, where she'll go from here, and there's a chance he might have an idea on that front. He's just been starting out here. Now, she's starting from scratch, too, and it is seriously fucking daunting.

What she's doing, Molly hasn't really got a clue. It's been days, though, days with nothing to do but wait even when she hasn't been sure what she's waiting for, and the only thing she can be certain of is that something's got to give. If that means she has to be the one playing an adult, the one to break the silence, then so fucking be it, she will. This whole thing is completely absurd anyway. Admittedly, it was more so when she and Stephen were stuck in the same church for days on end, steering clear of each other even with the world falling apart around them, but it's been close to two full days now without a word, and it's fucking dumb. He can't just ignore her because she got hurt, because they had a fight. All things considered, speaking strictly as far as the two of them are concerned, they've dealt with worse. Just because she gets it, sort of — and because she's been reluctant to say anything either — doesn't mean she's alright with it. If anything, she's pretty sure she has more of a reason not to speak to him, but that's pointless, too. Were she interested in holding a grudge, there are plenty of other things she could have chosen.

Besides, there's enough else that's too fucked up now for her to want to let go of whatever they have. Sleeping hasn't come easily ever since she showed up here, knowing what she did, but these past nights, it's been impossible. The city's gone back to normal, the sun sets on it and nothing changes, but that doesn't make a bit of difference when she's too worried about what might happen, scared to turn off her lights because she doesn't know what will be in the darkness, kept awake by memories of disfigured grey children with knives. She got lucky and she knows it, but it was a close fucking call, and that doesn't make it any less terrifying, anyway, the sort of thing that should never have been possible but was. By comparison, everything else seems inconsequential, and what's more, she'd rather be beside someone than on her own.

Texting Stephen is a whim, and she doesn't really expect him to answer. That doesn't make it any less disappointing when he doesn't, or at least doesn't seem to. When her phone finally goes off twenty minutes later, she isn't expecting it at all, and one word might not be much in the way of reassurance, but at least it's fucking something. It's enough — enough that she doesn't hesitate before putting on a pair of jeans under the shirt she'd worn to get into bed, tucking a t-shirt for tomorrow and a pair of underwear and a toothbrush in her purse, hoping to God that she isn't being too presumptuous. Better to be prepared, though, than not to be, and she'd stay if he'd let her even without sex. That isn't the point. After almost a week of silence, this is just the only way she has to do something, the best chance she's got at actually getting him to talk to her and therefore worthwhile even when it means leaving her apartment for the first time since they all dispersed on Monday morning. That's the hardest part. That, and the walk to Stephen's place itself, the same as the path she took when she was trying to get to the church, the walk alone enough to make her blood run cold. There's no sense in turning back, once she reaches the place where those fucking kids (if they could even be called that) attacked her, but it nearly makes her wish that she hadn't left in the first place, that she'd tried to coax him over to her building instead. She still could, texting him back intermittently as she goes, but it's probably better this way. She was always going to have to leave eventually, no matter how difficult.

Still, she's more shaken than she was to start by the time she gets to his building, timing she couldn't have planned better if she'd tried, since it's starting to look like he isn't going to answer her last text, like he's about to slip back to ignoring her again. She won't let him. Taking the elevator up, a familiar ride by now, she knocks on his door when she reaches it, gentle, just loud enough to be audible. He's awake, she knows he is, or she wouldn't have bothered coming. Even if he's guessed that it's her, obvious as it probably is, she just hopes he isn't so fucking stubborn that he won't answer. She isn't going to humiliate herself by waiting around for the rest of the night for him.

The route from her apartment to the church is one Molly has taken any number of times since she showed up, one she knows like the back of her hand after close to two months living here. It's never been like this, though, and she's never had to run it before. What's happened to the city, she hasn't got a clue, but if there's one thing that's become more than apparent since the sun went down and those sirens sounded, it's that nothing is really safe. Her apartment sure as fuck wasn't, anyway, tempting as it had been, at first, to fit herself into a small space there and wait it out. The night's too long for that, and if what she saw on her way out through the lobby, after all but stumbling down the stairs in her haste after figuring out that the elevator wasn't working, was any indication — some grotesque, armless man with a giant hole in his chest, the sight absolutely sickening — she'd have been stuck up there before too long.

Now, she isn't sure that stuck wouldn't have been better. The trouble with being out in the open, no matter how quickly she tries to move, is exactly that — it's open, with no shelter to be found, nothing to keep her safe. It makes her wish she weren't on her own, but she's pretty sure it wouldn't make a difference either way. Whatever this shit is, it isn't anything human. Besides, the few times she's tried to use it, she hasn't been able to get a signal on her phone at all, so it isn't as if there's anyone she could call. She'll just have to weather this on her own, and wish she hadn't been alone at her place when the world turned to what seems like a literal definition of hell. If it weren't for the broadcast, she wouldn't even be sure that it wasn't, that she hadn't wound up there after all.

Everything else seems to be straight from there. Almost to the bridge, she thinks she's in the clear, so of course that's when they strike, seeming to come out of nowhere, these grey, fucked-up looking variants on children, a whole group of them and all wielding fucking knives. She never stood a chance for a second. One gets her in the leg as she starts to take off, shallow but painful, and it sets her off-balance, sends her tumbling to the pavement, palms taking nearly all of her weight. If the pain weren't enough to be paralyzing, the fear would be; her heart's beating so hard in her chest that she's certain it's got to be audible, and all she can think is that she's about to fucking die, again, this time for no discernible reason, and she's not ready for that. She won't ever be. The next one's blade drags along her hairline to her temple, another's her arm, and she isn't sure how any of them there are, but she can't do this, she can't. There's no fucking way, after everything, that she goes like this, when she's so goddamn close to where she needs to be, even if the sight and feel of her own blood makes her have to swallow back bile.

How she manages to pull herself to her feet, she doesn't know, but she thinks it might be the self-preservation that she couldn't find in Ohio. It's still slow enough to earn her a couple more wounds, but she does it, and that's all that counts, that and the fact that she doesn't let them stop her this time. Even with tears already burning in her eyes, she has to get there, regardless of what shape she does so in. By the time she does reach the church, she's pretty bad off, too, and she knows it, but it could be worse. At least she's on her feet. At least she's fucking here at all. Throwing open the door without hesitation, as if she hasn't stood outside almost every day unable to bring herself to go inside, she barely moves at all once she's stepped through and let it close behind her. She's supposed to be safe here. Convincing herself of that, though, is more difficult than it has any right to be, too surreal to be made sense of yet.

Molly sticks around as the crowd begins to thin, on her feet and heading towards the door with the rest of them, nodding greetings at those she knew before tonight, but with no intention of actually leaving. Even with this part behind them, there's still plenty to be talked about, and stupid or not, she's signed herself up for this. Whatever happens from here on out, this is hers, too. For all that she knew from the moment Stephen mentioned it that there was no real way she could pass up an opportunity like this one, she's not sure she really let that start to sink in, not even when she told him beforehand that she was in. The meeting's done a little to change that, but it's now, waiting for him as the last of the group gathered tonight leaves, that she thinks she's really starting to feel it, better even than she would have expected. No matter how much there is to work out — and it's a hell of a lot, tonight only preliminary, not actually deciding much at all — they can do this. There isn't a doubt in her mind that they can.

Leaning against the door frame, she watches him for a moment, teeth pressing to her lower lip through a smile. She's done a good job tonight of not letting her expression betray too much, neither how excited nor how nervous she was (save for the few instances where it was all but impossible not to laugh), but now she doesn't bother, fondness tinged with amusement written clear as day on her face. She can't help it, though, that there's something both incredibly fucking hot and strangely adorable about listening to him talk about everything they covered tonight, and that having some new material to tease him with is pretty great, too.

She has the sense not to start with that, though, when she does speak up. There really isn't any way she doesn't get to it sooner or later, and they have other things to talk about before she asks what the bit with the animals was about. "So," she says, "I think that went pretty well."

She doesn't sleep.

Not even for any lack of trying, at least at first, though she suspects a different girl, a more sentimental one, might have stayed awake on purpose, trying to commit every detail to memory in case this winds up being a one-time occurrence. (She's already done that.) Instead, it's hours, or at least it feels like it, that she lies with her head on Stephen's chest, waiting to drift off, never quite letting herself manage it. Eventually, it becomes too futile, and Molly gives up. At least sleeplessness is nicer here, wearing his shirt and with Stephen warm beside her than in her own empty apartment, which she knows from experience after the couple of weeks she's spent here. This isn't anything new. She thinks, though, that what she knows now might just make it worse. Hating Stephen was never easy, but everything else was easier when she thought she'd done what she needed to. Being dead wouldn't have been quite as terrible then. Now, knowing it was for nothing, it's practically fucking unbearable, especially now that she doesn't have Stephen fucking her to distract her from all those uncomfortable truths. All she has is this, whatever that even is, some fragile thing that she can hold onto in the dark but that she's not sure will last until morning. At least she got this, her answers and one pretty great night, but it's only here in the quiet of Stephen's apartment that she thinks that might be disappointing. She'd never want anything more than this, but she thinks she could get used to it even so.

It's for that reason that she considers leaving when the first rays of sunlight filter through his bedroom window. It would be simpler, God knows, easier than waiting for him to ask her to leave, and it's not like he couldn't find her if he wanted to do this again sometime. She thinks she made pretty obvious last night that she's willing enough to put their past behind them to be with him. In the end, though, that's not a risk she can take, and not just because his chest feels too good under her head for her to care to move. If he misinterpreted that, took it as a sign that she'd changed her mind, the fault would be hers, and having underestimated Stephen once, she has no desire to fuck things up again. He came through for her once before, albeit too late. He could prove her wrong now, too.

All there is to do, then, is wait, excruciating as that is, as the sun comes up, to see what he'll do, if he'll write this off as a mistake or if they might have made their peace after all. That, and to hope, but Molly doesn't want to admit that, even to herself.

When he finally does start to wake up, she can tell, feels it by the change in his breathing, but she doesn't do anything, just stays curled against him with her eyes still shut. It's a cheap trick, maybe, but she won't have to keep it up for long. She just wants to see what he does first, too certain of what she wants and of the fact that she shouldn't want it to make the first move herself.

At first, when she sees him, Molly is certain that her eyes are playing tricks on her.

It was one thing when she showed up here, after all, when the world went black and she came to having exchanged one city for another, except this isn't anywhere she's heard of and it's missing a few things a real city would have, like, for example, a way out. That part is just as well, though. Even if there were somewhere else to go, she isn't sure how she would get there or what she would do once she got there. She's dead, she knows she is, or was, or whatever verb could be used to describe someone dying and then waking up having been magically fucking transported to some other world or something. There doesn't need to be anything outside of this because there was never even supposed to be this. Someday, maybe, she might even be able to count herself lucky for that. For now, she's just taking it as she can, doing her best to settle into this completely implausible extension of the life she cut short, trying not to dwell too much on the circumstances that caused her to do so in the first place (though that much is easier said than done). She's far away from that now, from Mike Morris and the rest of his fucking campaign, no one she's spoken to having even heard his name before, at least as much as she's been able to tell.

That is, she was supposed to be. Everything having been uprooted, she actually thought she'd have been okay with that. None of the past was going to have followed her here; she wasn't going to have to be the intern who fucked the married presidential candidate and got an abortion (the latter only applying where getting herself to a doctor has been concerned), like she knows she'd have wound up being back home after the other side got a hold of the story, and she wasn't going to be the girl who killed herself, either, and not even the daughter of the chairman of the DNC. Daunting as some of that has been, the idea is kind of refreshing, too. After all, if there's one thing she's ever been good at — and okay, she's good at a lot of things, including but not limited to fucking and fucking up — it's making sure she seems alright when she's anything but, and that's been the case here. In her own head, she'll never get away from what she did, knowing full well that screwing a married man, getting an abortion and killing oneself is supposed to be a one-way ticket straight to whatever Hell is, but at least she hasn't had to let it define her.

One glimpse of Stephen Meyers, and suddenly, she isn't so sure that's going to remain the case. Whether he's a figment of her imagination or not, or just a face she caught from the wrong angle and jumped to the worst conclusion about, it's like a sign that everything has really followed her after all, making the smile she'd plastered on fade and her stomach drop. Of all people from home she'd have wanted to turn up, he isn't last on the hypothetical list (that would be Morris), but anything else that seeing him might make her feel — and it is him, she's sure of it now, more so with every passing second — gets easily buried by residual fury, the sound of his stupid goddamn voicemail message echoing through her head. Jaw set, she swallows hard, not certain yet if he's seen her. The bar's all but empty, but the corner booth she's inhabited isn't the most visible. Either way, she's not about to slink off into the night. She told him once that she wasn't going away, and whether he even listened to the fucking message or not, she isn't going to do so now, either.

Standing, she stares at him and shakes her head, her own voice almost jarring as it cuts through the relative quiet. "No fucking way."