♾️ LETS GOOOOOO
— @outpost51
I added a bunch of stuff to my general rock playlist and my first shuffle song was Take It Easy by the Eagles.
I was like, maybe this challenge will help me get going on my Camp NaNo words for Nicea. Instead I wrote more Avis and Sorian, so here you and @vacantgodling go.
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She didn’t want to drink alone, but her options were limited. Sid would be too busy living his life again to even be home, and he probably wouldn’t shut up about Horatio anyway. Leon and Edith were probably fun drunks, but with the same problem of having too much to say about their son, and the added danger of propositioning her. Celia and her two-timer weren’t her speed—and Celia didn’t drink, anyway. She tried to think of literally anyone else on the island she knew well enough to take a shot with, and came up with only one. Maybe she should have just gone to a bar. With a sigh, she packed the bottle of whiskey into her backpack and set out from the dock.
The walk up to the outskirts of the university was mostly paved, but almost always empty, especially at this time of day when the only light was from the streetlamps flanking the sidewalk. This was kind of pathetic. Despite the fact that Sorian was usually a goofy drunk, she didn’t really want to be having a drink with him. He was just the only one around to share her extremely choice liquor. Honestly, who the hell just had a brand new bottle of Salmon Leap in the cabinet? She believed Sid that Horatio hadn’t bought it in advance, but still. It was good shit, and she wasn’t convinced she should have accepted it. Not least because now she was standing on Sorian’s doorstep, banging on the unpainted wood of his door.
Maybe he knew it was her, because he wasn’t wearing sweatpants when he opened the door this time.
“You want a drink?” she asked.
“Ah, I was planning on staying in tonight.”
That was enough of a yes. She pushed past him into his boring little house and put her bag up on the counter at the back before she slipped off her shoes. He just closed the door and drifted over to her. Extracting the flat, rectangular bottle from her bag, she sat it on the counter and tossed her otherwise empty backpack over onto her shoes.
“Wait, is that…?” Sorian asked, taking the bottle in his hands while she looked through his cabinets for glasses. Before she could even answer, he said, “Oh, wow, I’ve been wanting to try this since Leon got Horatio some. He still hasn’t…never mind.” He put the bottle back down and went straight to the next cabinet on her docket to pull out two actual snifter glasses.
“So you’re pretentious about whiskey now?”
“It’s not pretentious. It actually makes it better.” Even with the glasses on the countertop he seemed to be waiting for her to open the bottle. As she went back to it, he added, “But you can have yours in a mug with half a berry slushy if you want.”
Of course he remembered that. She smiled a little despite herself as she tipped the bottle toward the first glass, then paused. “Since your fancy way is so much better, do you wanna pour it?”
“I think you can pour it just fine,” he said, but still took it from her when she offered it to him. He poured it in what looked like a completely normal fashion, then put the cork back in the bottle. Leaning back against the counter, he lifted one glass to his nose. Avis imitated him, not bothering to keep the skepticism off her face. But he was giving the other side of the kitchen a thousand-yard stare.
“Fuck,” he said softly. “Smells like home.”
She’d forgotten that she was actually supposed to be sniffing the stuff. He was right though—the fumes had a clear note of jojum blossom, like the air on Imni during the subtle change from spring to summer. For a second, it felt cozy. Then she was done with this sniff and sip bullshit. She was here to be intoxicated, not to think. While Sorian took a sip, she drank down however much he’d given her. It was enough to get the flavor of it, and enough that everything should stop feeling so serious in a few minutes.
He raised an eyebrow at her as she poured herself the same again.
She waved him away. “Shut up with your eyebrows. I’ll drink this one slower.”
He grinned and took another sip.
Taking stock of his living room, she found that nothing had changed since the last time she was there, which meant his bar stools were absent and there was nowhere to sit that didn’t look gross or busted. “Don’t you have anywhere nice to sit?”
“My truck, I guess.”
She gestured for him to lead her there. He put down his glass to slip on his shoes by the back door, and she did the same. Then he brought her out to the dimly lit silhouette of his shortbed university pickup truck. When he reached for the driver’s side door, he almost immediately turned back toward his house.
“Forgot my keys,” he said.
As he passed her, she unlatched the tailgate, then eased it down and hopped up onto it, letting her legs dangle off the end. “This is fine.”
He looked unconvinced but came to join her, still keeping that careful distance between them. “How is the tailgate of my work truck less dirty than my indoor sofa?”
“Trust me, your sofa wishes it was only as dirty as actual dirt.”
Sorian laughed his soft laugh and she felt like the warm ease of the whiskey was spreading through her faster. Sipping from her glass, she leaned back and drank in the mostly-familiar sky with its white-tinted moon. Even without the smell of jojum blossoms in this sticky Summer Band night, even sitting next to the man she used to call her husband, she had the inexplicable sense that she was already home.
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