#99% of this was written in 2016 and by GOD is it difficult to mesh my current writing style with it

[evilkitten42]

I was put on this earth to make content for myself and absolutely no one else, so here’s a tiny excerpt of the Easy Virtue fic I started writing in 2016 and have only started looking at again this week

“It was amicable.” Sarah says, two weeks after John and Larita’s surprise return from Paris; she sits on the back porch with Larita while the Whittaker’s squabble near the rose garden. Marion is trying to play mediator. It isn’t working. “John and I separating.”

“I heard.” Larita smiles. She smiles a lot, which is not something Sarah had expected. She’d honestly thought, sometimes angrily, that John would marry someone completely opposite to Sarah since he found something about her so lacking. “He told me a lot about you two, when you were younger.”

Sarah thinks that’s a funny way to say ‘less than four months ago’, but she’s not going to rock the boat on this one.

“In fact,” Larita leans in close, as if telling a secret. “John pressed the point so much that I began to think he was lying for the sake of his pride.” She giggles. “He is not a man who likes to admit when he is wrong.”

“I don’t think he’s ever admitted to being wrong in his whole life.” Sarah sniggers. She can ignore the fact she’s also lying to Larita if she simply focuses on the fact that John was too proud for his own good, would always apologise as vaguely as possible so he could stop an argument without admitting fault. It was one of his most infuriating habits. Sarah had fallen for it constantly.

“Well,” Larita scrunches her nose up when she’s truly happy, a tiny detail Sarah’d noticed in the two weeks since John and Larita had arrived. It made her look younger, in only the way genuine happiness can. “With a face like his, he can afford a few personal failings.”

Sarah barely restrains herself from snorting. John looks up from his spot in the centre of the chaos that is his family and smiles at the two of them, face softly lit by the glowing lights of the porch and the dying sun.

(‘Wine makes it easier’ Sarah thinks, which is painfully true. Sometimes, stone sober, she can barely stand looking at John, can barely be near him without wanting to reach out and curl her fingers through his hair, wanting to slap him in the face and scream, wanting to cry until her heart stopped feeling like it weighed a tonne. At least with alcohol she can pretend that he’s not looking at her, that his soft gaze is nothing more than a wine-tinted dream, that she met Larita any way other than the way they met in real life, that their friendship doesn’t occasionally feel like ripping herself apart at the seams.)

“See what I mean?” Larita pats Sarah’s shoulder gently and Sarah laughs because the other option is to walk up to John and his ridiculous, soft, happy face and scream ‘I loved you! I loved you until I couldn’t breathe and you left me to choke on it! How dare you think I was ever going to survive that!’