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therenlover · 3 years

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Gimme Swayze (Part 4.5 of Till Forever Falls Apart, A Peter Maximoff/Reader Series)

Synopsis: Now that the issue of Y/N leaving is out of the way, and Peter has finally kissed her, he falls into the motions of learning how to love someone for the first time. It’s easier than he thought it would be.

Tags: Fluff, Dancing, Gratuitous Dirty Dancing References, Love Confessions, Insecure!Reader, Minor Hurt/Comfort

Rating: T

Warnings: Mild Language

Word Count: 2600~

This has been cross posted as the first chapter of the fic Cry To Me on my Ao3!

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“Dance with me, Peter?”

Y/N stood in the middle of the floor holding her hand out to him, hair mussed and wild with cheeks still streaked from tears shed earlier in the night. There, in the lamplight, she looked ethereal. Peter could imagine her as she was then in some grand Viennese ballroom. Every man, woman, and child would want to be seen on her arm, fully disregarding her casual clothes and the unhinged fire in her eyes, but she was choosing him. Something in his heart told him she always would.

With a smile and a groan, he pushed up off the creaky old plush couch and stretched his arms. “Are you gonna put on some music or are we gonna have to make our own?”

Peter didn’t miss the way Y/N’s breath hitched as she rushed over to the record player near the window. Her fingers skimmed over the knee-high stack of records at the base of the machine, searching through for something specific. After a moment she let out a small victorious noise. She pulled out the item she was looking for, a plastic-wrapped vinyl sheath, before holding it out towards Peter with a grin. Outside, the rain had slowed to a gentle pitter-patter on the concrete.

The paper cover was plain white, but it had a large title scrawled across the front in black magic marker: Y/N’s Ultimate Romance Mixtape.

“You put a mixtape… on a record? How much did this thing cost you?” Peter asked, walking to Y/N’s side to give the vinyl a closer look.

“Not just any mixtape,” she groaned, motioning for him to flip it over, “Our mixtape!” There on the back of the record, just as she promised, was a tracklist. Upon first viewing, by any average person, it would look pretty normal. To Peter, though, it was like looking down at a list of the top hits of his life. Time In A Bottle, Strange Magic, Born to Run, Sweet Dreams ...

“How did you-”

“I just started finding the songs I saw you listening to more than once, one day,” Y/N replied. She was staring at the floor again, wringing her hands. Was she… embarrassed? “I know it’s kinda weird and creepy… okay, it’s really weird and creepy, but I didn’t have anything else to do. It was just me in the Paris apartment back then and I still technically wasn’t a real person in the eyes of the government so I couldn’t work. What I’m trying to say is it was a nice way to pass the time, waiting for the newest song on the list to release, sitting patiently in the record shops hoping to hear a snippet of a melody I heard you humming along to in a vision...”

As she spoke, Y/N’s eyes seemed to glaze over. By the time her stream of consciousness had turned into less of a pour and more of a drip she looked halfway caught between the world and a dream. Peter could only imagine that when you’d lived as long as she had sometimes the past could seem like a dream. He’d been around for about 31 years, 67 if you included the years he lost between dimensions, and even he found himself looking back on parts of his childhood as if they were someone else’s. What would it be like in 10 more years? 20? 30? 100 didn’t even seem plausible.

Peter was only snapped from his internal monologue when Y/N snatched the record out of his hands and held it to her chest protectively. Her dreamy look was gone, replaced with one much more defensive.

“What?”

“If you’re just gonna gawk at it, I’m not gonna show you,” she said, carefully setting the record down on top of the closed player before turning her attention back to Peter, “I know it’s a little odd-”

“It’s cute!” Peter was quick to respond. He held up his hands, giving a small gesture of goodwill, before moving in to wrap her in his arms. She accepted, however stiffly. “Really, babe, it’s cute! I promise,”

With what seemed like a great amount of effort, Y/N relaxed into his touch. “Sorry, sorry, I’m just a little nervous… I’ve never done this before,”

“Oh, come on,” Peter’s mouth was almost against her skin now. His hot breath tickled the sensitive curve of her ear as he rocked their bodies back and forth on the balls of his feet, half calming and half comedic. “You don’t have to be nervous, Y/N. It’s just me,”

“That’s the problem!” Y/N was floundering in earnest now, her little heart pounding hard enough that Peter could feel it against his own chest. “With other guys it was easy! I knew they weren’t the end goal, and I knew… well, I thought they’d die long before you ever came into the picture, but now you’re here, and you’re you, and I’m so fucking terrified of messing everything up,”

Peter moved his hands to loosely grip her arms, rubbing calming circles into her flesh. “Babe, newsflash, I really like you. Like, stupidly like you. Head-over-heels type shit,” he paused to laugh, “and hey, I’m not the one who sees the future or anything, but I don’t see this going bad anytime soon. So take a deep breath, put on our mixtape, and just… let go,”

Y/N let her eyes find Peter’s, peering up through heavy lashes. “What if I fall?”

He kissed her softly on the forehead before he answered, “Baby, I have super speed. You can’t fall faster than I can catch you,”

The softest of smiles graced Y/N’s face before she pulled away, turning back to the record player and grabbing the record off the top as she opened it. She paused for a second, pensive, and Peter thought he might have to bolster her again before she turned back to him.

“Side A or Side B?”

Peter shrugged. “Whatever side you like the most,”

“Side B it is…” she smirked as she set the record on the table and got it spinning, dropping the needle gently onto the edge of the vinyl with a practiced hand, “That’s my side,” Under the sounds of the gentle rain and the city, the opening notes to a song halfway familiar began to ring out through the old bones of the apartment. The ancient wood seemed to creak its own melody under Y/N’s feet while she started to sway. Peter tried to follow along as best he could.

“I hope you know I can’t dance,” He mumbled, swinging his hips to and fro as Y/N giggled at him.

“Oh, I know,”

“Then why did you ask me to?”

“Just because you’re bad at dancing doesn’t mean I don’t wanna dance with you,”

“That’s so cheeeeesy, Y/N!”

She threw her head back as she shimmed into Peter’s arms across the floor. “And you love it,”

When she was finally in his arms again, they swayed loosely to the tune. There was no real rhythm to it, all clumsy feet and breathless laughter as they bumped their way through Y/N’s greatest hits, but it came from the heart. There were no doomsday clocks ticking in the background, no expectations of what to was to come. It was just the music around them and the rain in the street and the jerky unnatural movements of Peter Maximoff doing his best to internalize the beat as The Mamas and the Papas slowly drifted into Solomon Burke. Y/N hummed thoughtfully, pulling away from Peter’s arms as it began, bringing her arms up above her head as she shook her hips. Peter just groaned.

“You actually put the song from Dirty Dancing on the mixtape?”

Y/N didn’t respond, instead bopping her head along with the beat.

“I can’t believe it. You’re not even gonna answer me,”

She gave a wink and continued on.

“Really? The silent treatment?”

“I’m not saying another word until you embrace the Swayze, Peter,”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, took a deep inhale, and then stared daggers into Y/N’s eyes as he shrugged his shoulders. “You want Swayze, baby? You really want Swayze?”

“Oh, I wanna see some Swayze, Peter,”

“How’s this for Swayze?”

With a burst of superhuman speed, Peter raced across the floor, snatched Y/N up by her midriff, and lifted her above his head, delighting in her giggles and shrieks while he spun her. He may not have been the best dancer or the best mover, but Peter was good at a few things; things like utilizing his surprising strength and speed.

He kept Y/N aloft for a moment before gently returning her to the floor. There she stood, slightly dazed, as she got her bearings back, gripping the sleeve of Peter’s t-shirt for balance. To put it simply she was a giggling mess.

Peter loved watching her like this, carefree and loose, unbound from the tethers of trauma and time for a few brief moments. It made his heart soar higher to know that he made her like this. He was the one who threatened to toss her in with the seals at Central Park, which made her laugh so hard she almost yakked up her hotdog. It was him who sat with her on the couch throwing popcorn at the fuzzy TV screen whenever she suddenly froze up at the sound of a scream, distracting her enough that she could enjoy the movie till the end. His hands were the ones she grabbed whenever she saw a cute dog on the street and wanted to get close fast enough to pet it. He was a part of her joy, a minuscule blip on her radar making waves in her life for the better. Peter didn’t know if there was anything else he wanted to be in life that could mean more than that.

When Y/N finally got her giggles under control, she looked up at him with wet eyes and whispered. “That was pretty Swayze, babe,”

The second it left her lips she was in stitches again, her knees buckling as she collapsed to the floor, whole body wracked with her laughter. Peter joined her this time, settling himself down by her side and allowing the hysteria to wash over him like a pleasant wave. Once all was said and done, he and Y/N laid shoulder to shoulder on the antique sitting-room rug, staring up at the ceiling with wide eyes and soft smiles. The record, all spun out, sat forgotten on the turntable.

“I know I’ve told you this already,” Y/N said, eyes glued to the rotating fan above her, “but I love you, Peter. I love you and I love who I am when I’m with you. You don’t have to say it back, I mean, I know this has all been ridiculously fast, but… I dunno. Even without the whole fated to cross paths thing, I think I’d love you now anyways, you know?” She bit her bottom lip, groaning, “Sorry, sorry, I know things are moving way too quick-”

Peter shushed her gently, rolling onto his side to look her in the eye. “Babe, you’re talking to the fastest man alive. Quick is literally in my name. Don’t worry about it,”

“Yeah. I guess it is, huh?”

“And for the record,” he took a deep breath, steeling himself, “I love you too, Y/N. I have for a while now. It has to have been since… well all the way back when Dr. Strange had me tied up at your work. I was so sure that I had screwed everything up with you, that you were gonna let him drag me to superhero prison and wash your hands of me, but you didn’t. You came in there guns blazing, even when you knew I had fucked up big time and accidentally tried to steal some real spooky shit, and from that second on I never once felt like you would ever be willing to get rid of me just because I’m annoying,”

She nudged him with her shoulder. Not hard, just enough to jostle him. “You’re not annoying,”

“Have you met me? Annoying is literally my middle name,”

“No,” Y/N’s voice got soft, “No, your middle name is Django. Your favorite color is blue, but specifically bright teal-ish blue like the blue moon ice cream your mom used to buy you on vacation back when you were a little kid. You can’t dance but you have surprisingly good rhythm, and even if you’re not proud of your voice you should be because if you weren’t the world’s fastest man you could be touring as a singer with your guitar. You always sleep on the right side of the bed, your favorite season is the weird limbo between summer and fall, you can’t stand the James Bond movies, and if anybody asked you’d say your favorite food is Twinkies but it’s not. Your favorite food is pierogies, specifically the cheese and potato kind from Nana Dudek’s in Polish town because they remind you of your Nana the few times you remember going to see her. All of that is true, and so is the fact that you love me,”

She went quiet, eyes watching the blades of the ceiling fan in their lazy rotations. Slowly, she reached out her hand, interlocking her pinkie with Peter’s own without even having to look down and find it.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that,” Peter whispered.

Y/N let a huff of air out of her nose, a silent laugh at a joke only she knew.

“You’re not supposed to say anything. I just wanted you to know,”

“Know what?”

“Know that even if you can never build up the courage to tell me you love me again, I’ll be just fine, because I know, and you know, and that’s all that matters,”

Something in Peter’s heart, however small, shattered at just how vulnerable Y/N sounded.

Both of them were jaded in their own ways. They had seen bloodshed and torment and the roots of human suffering. It wasn’t always as simple as saying ‘I love you’. Sometimes the world left you a broken pulp with little faith and saying three little magic words just wasn’t possible. There’s no place for love in the heart of a person at war, nor is there any guarantee that they’ll ever be able to express that forbidden weakness again. It’s a commodity, like hope, that came in rare supply to people like Peter and Y/N. That being said, in the safety and warmth of the sitting room with the cozy couch and the antique rug and the ceiling fan and the record player, neither of them were at war, and Peter would be a damn fool if he didn’t take advantage of that.

He rolled onto his side once again, waiting there in silence until Y/N rolled onto her side to greet him, and then, with all of the feelings he had hidden in his heart since the moment he ran at top speed for the first time he kissed her.

Without hesitation, she kissed him back.

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a/n: Sorry this took so long to get out! It’s short, but I wanted it to be long enough to be it’s own mini chapter, so our minor friends can enjoy the sweetness without having to lose any of the story in the spicy bit. That being said, the spicy bit comes next lol. My shift bar is being fussy, and I need to sleep, so I’m signing off for the night, but thank you for reading! If you enjoyed, let me know!

Please do not post my work to any other sites, thank you ! <3

#peter maximoff #peter maximoff x reader #fanfiction #quicksilver #quicksilver x reader #marvel fanfiction

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literarygoon · 5 years

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Inebriate of air

by Will Johnson

Shane squats to the meal pot, red-lit from the campfire, and dips his pinkie finger into the stew. Shirtless and shoeless, with an ocean-themed full sleeve tattoo on his right arm and a messily scrunched man-bun jutting from he’s skull, he’s the quintessential Victoria hipster: beachy-looking and pseudo-homeless, with a deep Tofino tan and scraggly-looking flannel. He’s the type of white kid who pore-oozes privilege — one percenter progeny — and from where she’s slung her hammock Tanille can watch him finger-slurp, tongue his lips.

“You know I broke my back as a teenager?” Shane asks. “Doctors figured I wasn’t going to walk again. Fell into this off-run crevice in Switzerland, man, like just barely out of bounds, and I ended up in the hospital for two months.”

“Sounds like something you’d do,” says Tanille.

Shane continues, too caught up in the rhythm of his storytelling to acknowledge her voice. “I’m carving down this slope, blissed out, right? Time’ve my life. All of a sudden I’m just falling. Like I know I’m falling and there’s nothing I can do about it, right? Then bam, I’m draped over this cleft like twenty feet down, sprawled out on this rock ledge, and when I look around me I’m in this shimmering cavern.”

Shane likes to hear himself talk, but it’s not normally Tanille that has to listen. He’ll find himself a readier audience with Paisley, but she’s been gone all afternoon. Now she’s stuck with some dipshit musician too drunk on groupie love to realize what a fucking idiot he is.

“I could’ve fallen a lot further. I mean that crevice, right, it must’ve been like hundreds of feet deep. There’s crazy light bouncing, like I’m inside a mirror ball, and here I am drifting in and out of consciousness. The rescuer rappelled down and strapped me to a spine board, got me helicoptered out of there, and in every direction all I could see was a white dream.”

She noisily turns the page of her book.

“I made a promise to myself, right there: I’m not going to waste this miracle. If I get out of here alive, I’m going to do something — I’m going to make music, I’m going to help people, I’m just going to live the shit out of my life.”

Tanille sighs. There’s plenty of proselytizing going on in her vicinity — it’s part of the protest camp package — but there’s something about Shane’s particular brand of self-righteousness that makes her feel like wrenching out his fingernails one by one. It’s not that she hates straight men, or white men. It’s not even that she hates rich people. It’s that Shane thinks he deserves everything he’s received from life, including Paisley’s long-term attention. Tanille’s savvy to his barefoot bullshit; his social posturing and faux humility couldn’t be more transparent. She has no patience for listening to him self-aggrandize while he stinks up his parent-bought clothes and pretends to be an activist.

“I bet undergrad girls eat that shit up,” she says. “Carpe fucking diem, Shane? Your emotional depths awe me.”

She couldn’t help but be fatalistic, cynical, because what did Paisley actually expect to happen here? Did she figure the Mansion-Landers would offer up their luxurious beachside estates, open their condos to the homeless? Just like that they would embrace gender fluidity, communal living and interracial relationships, right? Did she really think people would happily participate in the dismantling of the social hierarchy that had benefited them for generations?

Tanille’s tent is pitched at the base of a granite plinth with veins of moss sprouting from the dark stone. At some point there were words chiseled into its base, but not anymore. It looms phallic above their semicircle of tents, the tarp tied around its midsection, shielding the meal pot from the ocean breeze. Most of their camping chairs are empty at the moment, leaving only Shane stirring the communal soup while her friend Espoir lazes belly-down on an air mattress, wrapped in a sleeping bag and scrolling through her iPhone’s Twitter feed.

“Paisley told me you’re a cynic,” Shane says, taking a soup-slurp from his pinkie. “A Doubting Thomas type.”

“And that makes you what, a believer?”

Shane grins. “I’m John the fucking Baptist.”

***

The year before Tanille started herbology school, she road-tripped out to the Kootenays with some friends for the Shangri-La Music Festival. That’s where she saw Paisley perform for the first time, crowd-crammed against the Treehouse stage as thousands of ravers trampled in. One half of Paisley’s head was shaved, while the other sprouted tangled dreads that coiled over her shoulder like uncoiled pythons. She had Cleopatra-style mascara, her lips looked like they were bleeding, and her elaborate beaded neckpiece sent splashes of light out in all directions. Below that she was wearing a thin white dress with thick woollen leg warmers.

The crowd roiled as she took the stage.

“This is a ditty I call ‘Demons in the pews’,” Paisley said, climbing on to her stool with her banjo. “Wrote this while I was in high school, back on the coast. I grew up in a little town called Garibaldi, up the Sea to Sky Highway, and when I was a teenager we all went to church like good little Christians. Who here went to church growing up?”

The audience answered with one indecipherable voice. She sneered for a moment, looking down. “Jesus loves the little children,” she murmured.

Paisley let her eyes close as she strummed through the intro, her legs hooked around the legs of the stool. She had backup — there was a fiddler, one guy with a stand up bass, another one on percussion — and though Tanille had never had any interest in bluegrass, she was drawn in by the way Paisley whispered and sighed into the mic, cooing the opening lyrics. Eventually the electronic effects built behind her, encompassing them.

“Saved by grace n’ swathed in lace, I came into the chapel,” she sang. “My second life as Jesus’ wife, who wouldn't eat that apple?”

As she neared the chorus, a man carrying a large electronic didgeridoo appeared behind her. She exposed her pale throat to the audience, her voice cherubic yet furious, and as the man let out his first vibrating blast she leapt to her feet and shrieked into her mic.

“In church you showed me God, then fingered me ’til I bled — are the demons in the pews, or are they all inside my head?”

It wasn’t until Tanille was back in Victoria that she got a chance to download Paisley’s album Church Fire and look her up on social media. It didn’t take her long to find Inebriate of Air, her YouTube channel, where she’d posted a capella versions of her songs, interviews with fans and experimental short films. Tanille sat in her residence building and worked her way through the entire playlist, scribbling down choice lyrics in her journal and playing particular music videos over and over again. She felt herself being seduced by the savagery, the feral power in Paisley’s voice, the raw defiance. In one minimalist black and white short, Paisley screams into the camera and claws at her face as images appear of Jesus healing the sick, turning water into wine, walking on water. Tanille had never been especially religious, and didn’t have any particular problem with Christianity, but Paisley’s anger was intoxicating, communal. She was autonomous in a way that Tanille had never seen a woman be.

On one track Paisley’s backed by a children’s choir: “If blackmail’s the price of Heaven, then set me a place in Hell, no matter what you’ve forgiven, this won’t be ending well.”

***

“The cops’re coming tonight,” Shane says. “I can feel it.”

He’s belly-balancing his stew, puffing away at his pipe while his campmates ladle out dinner and gather in the dirt. The sky has gone orange, the horizon burning, while people jostle and gossip. Tanille swabs a crust of bread along the rim of her bowl, reddening it. Paisley still hasn’t returned and she’s still pretending not to care.

“Don’t be such a drama queen. This isn’t Iraq.”

“Not yet.”

“Does it make you feel important, this delusion that you’re in danger?”

“Did you see that guy they arrested last week? Dude was screaming like they were going to break his arms.”

“But did they?”

Shane shrugs.

“Didn’t he bust somebody’s windshield? Right? It’s not like they’re grabbing randoms, this guy was destroying other people’s property.”

“Some rich fucker’s car.”

“You have no idea who’s car that was. It could’ve been a students. Could’ve been mine.”

“You don’t even have a car.”

Tanille takes a long deep breath through her nostrils. Shane’s not here in Tent City because it matters, he’s here because it’s cool. Because this is the sort of person he wants to be. Earlier she’d caught him taking selfies near the entrance, watched him swipe through various filter options before posting it online. His middle name could be Narcissism.

“Did you see the video King Solomon posted last night?” Shane asks. “The shit he was saying about the God-shaped hole, that was basically what I was talking about the other night.”

Espoir snorts. “I want someone to fill my God-shaped hole.”

Shane ignores her. “He was talking about the basic dissatisfaction, you know? Everybody has it — that impulse that drives us towards sex, towards drugs, towards God. It’s that part of us that can never be one hundred per cent happy, no matter what.”

“Cheerful sentiment,” Tanille says.

Shane ignores her.

“Or did you see the one he did about his youth pastor?” Espoir asks.

That’s another topic Tanille knows something about. Apparently the Garibaldi church Neil and Paisley grew up with had a pedophile as a youth pastor, a guy who ended up in a Tijuana prison called El Cuchillo for molesting a teenage boy. His name was Trent Stonehouse and according to Paisley he’d spent over a decade in Mexico before fleeing to the Yukon. On her last album there was one song, “Conflagration”, which was addressed to him: “Though you taught me well / I’m a scorched out shell / When my soul caught fire / That’s when you fell.”

“King Solomon made this good point,” said Shane. “Like about how we label people—criminal, hooker, junkie—and suddenly we don’t have to care about them. Sinner, stuff like that. And it’s like, yeah, this dude Trent did some horrible shit, but that doesn’t negate everything else, right? Nobody’s one hundred per cent black or white.”

“So you’re a pedophilia apologist now?”

“No, see: that’s exactly the attitude he’s talking about. He who is without sin should throw the first stone, all that.”

“I’ve never raped any kids, Shane.”

“I know you get my point but you’re just being a bitch about it.”

***

Tanille isn’t quite sure how to feel about King Solomon, this guy Neil that grew up with Paisley back in Garibaldi. She’s subscribed to his channel, Fellowship, where he releases music videos and meandering pseudo-sermons, never failing to mention the affordable housing crisis or whatever particular social justice cause happens to be most fashionable that week. At first she couldn’t take him seriously: in his videos he wears giant aviator sunglasses and shaggy headgear, black shirts with white-slashed words across the front: “Forgive yourself first”, “All of us are seekers, none of us are found”, “Only one believer”. In one, “Whatever you’re on, I want some”, he monologues about his time living as an addict. In “This is how you talk to strangers” he describes how Paisley has helped him funnel his spiritual pain in a positive direction, how they collaborated for one track on her album Church Fire. Then there’s the one that describes his experiences performing at the Shangri-La Music Festival for the first time — that one’s been shared over 600,000 times.

Solomon’s catchiest track, the one that went viral during Tanille’s undergrad, was called “Wasting Days”. It was upbeat, with ska elements, and an endlessly repetitive chorus. Solomon’s vocals were animalistic, Cobain-esque, tortured-sounding.

“She comes round like a virus, like a hustler on the run — asks me ‘you want to have some fun?’” he sings. “Like a bigtop freak drifter tryin’ to eke a living from this chaos, it’s useless and fruitless and nothing can be done!”

A children’s choir, their voices distorted, then chant: “Useless, fruitless, nothing can be done! Useless, fruitless, nothing can be done! Useless, fruitless, nothing can be done!”

Solomon’s on his knees in front of a silhouetted church, steam rising from his shoulders while the music builds. His eyes meet the viewer’s for a moment, and then he reels into the chorus.

“She can see I’m wasting all my days—my days, my days—all I’m doing is wasting days. I know I’m wasting all my days—my days, my days—all I’m doing is wasting days.”

Eventually Tanille met Neil, at Shane’s apartment in Victoria, shortly after he’d been released from rehab for the third or fourth time. He looked sleepy and defeated, his eyes twitchily scanning the room at all times, and when he hugged Paisley at the end of the night he broke down into hysterics and fled into a nearby bathroom like a tantrum-throwing child. Tanille waited for nearly half an hour while the pair of them barricaded themselves inside, speaking in lowered voices, while Shane smoked pot on the balcony oblivious. She hated herself for how she strained to hear what they were saying, for how much she yearned to be sitting there on the linoleum with Paisley while she consoled her friend, how much she wanted to know about their shame, about their shared trauma. She couldn’t help how she felt: jealous, left out, untrusted.

Eventually she stood up and went home alone.

***

Paisley neck-nuzzles, purring, and nudges Tanille back into semi-consciousness. She’s back, finally. The tent walls are rain-throbbing around them, her sleeping bag is damp, and the world is made of shadows and silhouettes.

They kiss.

“I went swimming in the harbour,” Paisley says. “Apologies for my briny aroma.”

Tanille breathes.

“You awake, princess?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Is my girl in a bad mood?”

Tanille mind-grapples with the urge to engage, to express her frustration, to sob about her stoned loneliness. She doesn’t want to be this person, this pathetic attention suck, this cliche of the needy female. That’s all gay women do: talk about their feelings, having check-ins and sobby convos. But Paisley won’t go there, won’t let herself be that vulnerable, so she’s trying to match her at the emotional distance game.

“Just sleeping,” she says finally. “Shane puked on Espoir’s backpack.”

Paisley snickers.

“I don’t know why you make me put up with him.”

“Shane?”

“How many women do you know that would be okay with having an ex-boyfriend around constantly?”

“I didn’t date Shane.”

“But you fucked him.”

Paisley sighs. “There’s so many things we could be talking about right now.��

“He’s here, right here, now.”

“But so are you. And who’s tent am I in?”

Tanille huffs. How long has she been awake, even? Her neck bristles, and she rises up on her elbows to face her girlfriend.

“This power dynamic doesn’t work for me, Paise.”

“Power dynamic?”

“This whole I-give-everything-and-you-give-nothing thing.”

Paisley crawls towards her. “I give nothing?” She presses her wet nose against Tanille’s cheek, kisses her cheekbone.

“You know what I mean. I don’t know anything about you. Shane knows more about your life than I do.”

“Shane does not know more than you.”

“What about Neil?” she asks. “Or Amber?”

Paisley’s quiet.

“You bring me around like I’m some sort of pet, leave me unattended while you go off n’ live your life, then you come back whenever the fuck you feel like it. It’s like you don’t trust me to be able to engage with what you’re going through, ” Tanille says. Around them the storm winds hiss. “I’m living in Tent City with you, I’m filthy and dead-tired, but I’m here because I want to be with you, right? You used to include me.”

Outside Tent City campers are still playing guitar, undeterred by the weather, banging on drums and shouting at the night sky. This is one of several conversations within earshot, and for a moment strangers’ voices fill the void between Tanille and Paisley. They’re still intertwined, semi-prone, their faces nearly touching.

“I know I’m fucked up,” Paisley says finally. “I get that.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. You always go for self-loathing first.”

Paisley shrugs, sits back. Is she crying? She paws one of her dreadlocks out of her face.

“I just want to be a part of whatever’s going on in your head.”

Paisley retrieves a joint from a small tin in her chest pocket, takes a long moment to light it. Once the air between them is fogged, once she’s let out a lengthy, pained exhale, that’s when she speaks. She takes a piece of Tanille’s hair and finger-tangles it.

“You don’t need to worry about Shane, okay? What we have has nothing to do with him, or anyone else,” Paisley says. Then she lets go. Tanille sits cat-curled in the silence while Paisley begins to monologue, hitting topics she’d only half-known about, starting with her high school relationship with her first girlfriend Amber, a situation she had to keep covert while attending their church, St. Catherine’s, and their summer camp, Evergreen. She talks about shame, about going to her youth pastor Trent for guidance when she was a teenager. She talks about finding her faith, then losing it after his arrest, about touring and performing and always knowing that Quatsino was waiting for her, Eden-like, though she couldn’t bring herself to return.

“I want to believe we can be better than this, that’s why I’m here,” she says. “But I know it’s not true. The Christians were right: we’re all sinners, and we’re doomed to make the same fucking mistakes over and over again. And if there’s no God, there’s nobody around to forgive us for any of this shit.”

“What do you mean?” Tanille asks. “Forgive us for what?”

***

The title of Paisley’s YouTube channel, Inebriate of Air, was from an Emily Dickinson poem. Tanille looked up the poem online and memorized it before their first sushi date, ultimately reciting it over miso soup. That was three years ago.

“I like the idea of being high on air,” Paisley said, booth-sprawled. “That we’re constantly sucking back nostril-shots of pure energy. This is the stuff that makes us run.”

“The Yoda-style diction. A great poet, she is.”

“Sounds classy, right?”

“Like whoah, dude—I’m so high on this breeze. Man, take a toke of that wind.”

They laughed, wasabi-stirred. “And it’s perfectly designed for that purpose. Like to fill our lungs and pump our blood.”

“Right.”

“So how come you don’t believe in God then?” Tanille asked. “How do you figure the air, the world, got here?

Paisley spent some time chewing before saying anything else. For a moment Tanille thought she’d made a verbal misstep, navigated into a conversational no-go zone. Paisley sang extensively about losing her faith on her album —almost every track had a religious overtone, and sometimes her lyrics were even God-directed—so she thought this was a topic that would get some mileage. Religious people had always fascinated and confused Tanille, in pretty much the same way musicians did: she looked at them like shamans or conjurers who channeled elemental energy from the earth and emanated whitish-blue light from their chests.

“I meet people who didn’t grow up religious,” Paisley said, rolling a dread between her fingers. “And I’m jealous, you know? Is there a God, isn’t there—that shit hasn’t even occurred to them.”

“That sounds like such an empty existence, though.”

She shrugged. “Thing is, being a former Christian is kind of like being a former meth addict. Even if you’re not using, you still remember how it tasted, you still crave that high. Because you’ve been high, normal feels low.”

***

Somebody’s angry.

Tanille jolts up in her sleeping bag as the world erupts with sound. Dogs are barking, men shout, and somebody’s rhythmically banging on a resounding gong. It’s bright out, must be early morning, and through the half-open zipper she can see flurries of movement. Paisley’s gone. Ducking into her sports bra and jeans, and jumping into a semi-crouch, she peers past the tent flaps at a human scuffle in progress on the pavement. A uniformed cop is on his back, grappling with a Tent City kid, his muscled arms straining as he tries to regain control of his baton. His sunglasses are cracked, his face pink and trembling, while he spits out macho mono-syllables, grunting.

“Tanille?” Shane appears in front of her. “Tanille, man. It’s happening. The cops’re raiding the place, arresting people.”

“Where’s Paisley?”

“Everyone’s getting together, linking arms. Photographers are here n’ everything. This shit just got real.”

Tanille pushes her feet into unlaced boots and leans into the day. She’s about to say something, about to ask Shane a question, but then she’s gravel-sliding, a lightning storm of pain blossoming in her face and neck as a panicked man body-surfs her across the ground. He’s surrounded by other runners, people fleeing, and a few of them stumble and crash over top of them. Tanille feels a palm rough on her forehead, a boot crushes her hip, a knee rolls across her ribs. People scream. When she rolls to her side she can see the police officer has fought his way to his feet, and he’s clubbing his opponent viciously. The man curls fetal under the blows.

Shane bats at his fellow protesters, taking Tanille by the armpit, and they’re jostled, body-checked, as people careen wildly past. He drags her out of the crowd’s flight path, up a mud-slicked grass slope, and she stumbles, half-upright, then falls to her hands and knees. There’s blood in her eye, stinging, and her cheek feels cheese-gratered. She fingers the wound, gazes dizzy into the canopy of trees above her. Part of her is fully processing the parade of images flash-dancing across her consciousness, but there’s part of her that’s sauntering through the aisles of a calm grocery store, looking for dinner ingredients. This is nothing but a news story in progress, a Facebook post waiting to happen. Somebody else will eventually spot her fuzzed image in the background of some YouTube video, her face crimson and gleaming, while the police officer kneels on the protesters’ neck and struggles to snap his handcuffs shut. She’s an injured bystander, some hipster kid in the background, and already she can’t blame her imaginary audience for how little they care. She’s not even in the foreground.

The Literary Goon

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literarygoon · 7 years

Photo

So,

This story is called “Inebriate of Air”.

That’s the name of Paisley’s YouTube channel, and it’s a reference to “I taste a liquor never brewed” by Emily Dickinson. The story is about a woman named Tanille who’s living in a tent city during an Occupy protest.

This is the 6th story in my novel Whatever you’re on, I want some.

The Kootenay Goon

Inebriate of Air

Will Johnson

SHANE SQUATS over the meal pot, red-lit from the campfire, and dips his pinkie finger into the stew. Shirtless and shoeless, with an ocean-themed full sleeve tattoo on his right arm and a messily scrunched man-bun jutting from he’s skull, he’s the quintessential Victoria hipster: beachy-looking and pseudo-homeless, with a deep Tofino tan and scraggly-looking flannel. He’s the type of white kid who pore-oozes privilege — one percenter progeny — and from where she’s slung her hammock Tanille can watch him finger-slurp, tongue his lips.

“Sounds like you,” says Tanille.

She noisily turns the page of her book.

Tanille sighs. There’s plenty of proselytizing going on — it seems to be part of the protest camp package — but there’s something about Shane’s particular brand of self-righteousness that makes her feel like wrenching out his fingernails one by one. It’s not that she hates straight men, or white men. It’s not even that she hates rich people. It’s that Shane thinks he deserves everything he’s received from life, including Paisley’s long-term attention. Tanille’s savvy to his barefoot bullshit; his social posturing and faux humility couldn’t be more transparent. She has no patience for listening to him self-aggrandize while he stinks up his parent-bought clothes and pretends to be an activist.

“I bet undergrad girls eat that shit up,” she says. “Carpe fucking diem, Shane? Your emotional depths awe me.”

All around them, conversations like this are in progress. People are praying, preaching, singing — hundreds of social justice warriors coming together as part of an affordable housing protest in downtown Victoria. It’s nearing dinnertime and the sky has turn ashy, the ocean wind buffeting the ragged blue tarp overhead. All day long Tanille smells untreated sewage, rotting garbage, cannabis stink. She’s surrounded by dirt-caked feet and unwashed clothes, and she wishes it didn’t disgust her but it does. Princess Tee, that’s what Paisley’s been calling her even since she dared to question their multi-month participation in this little project. She couldn’t help but be fatalistic, cynical, because what did Paisley actually expect to happen here? Did she figure the Mansion-Landers would offer up their luxurious beachside estates, open their condos to the homeless? Just like that they would embrace gender fluidity, communal living and interracial relationships, right? Did she really think people would happily participate in the dismantling of the social hierarchy that had benefited them for generations?

“Paisley told me you’re a cynic,” Shane says, taking a soup-slurp from his pinkie. “A Doubting Thomas type.”

“And that makes you what, a believer?”

Shane grins. “I’m John the fucking Baptist.”

***

The year before Tanille started herbology school, she road-tripped out to the Kootenays with some friends for the Shangri-La Music Festival. That’s where she saw Paisley perform for the first time, crowd-crammed against the Treehouse stage as thousands of ravers trampled the grass behind her. One half of Paisley’s head was shaved, while the other sprouted tangled dreads that coiled over her shoulder like uncoiled pythons. She had Cleopatra-style mascara, her lips looked like they were bleeding, and her elaborate beaded neckpiece sent splashes of light out in all directions. Below that she was wearing a thin white dress with thick woollen leg warmers. The crowd roiled as she took the stage.

The audience answered with one indecipherable voice. She sneered for a moment, looking down. “Jesus loves the little children,” she murmured.

“Saved by grace n’ swathed in lace, I came into the chapel,” she sang. “My second life as Jesus’ wife, who wouldn't eat that apple?”

“In church you showed me God, then fingered me ’til I bled — are the demons in the pews, or are they all inside my head?”

On one track Paisley’s backed by a children’s choir: “If blackmail’s the price of Heaven, then set me a place in Hell, no matter what you’ve forgiven, this won’t be ending well.”

***

“The cops’re coming tonight,” Shane says. “I can feel it.”

“Don’t be such a drama queen. This isn’t Iraq.”

“Not yet.”

“Does it make you feel important, this delusion that you’re in danger?”

“Did you see that guy they arrested last week? Dude was screaming like they were going to break his arms.”

“But did they?”

Shane shrugs.

“Didn’t he bust somebody’s windshield? Right? It’s not like they’re grabbing randoms, this guy was destroying other people’s property.”

“Some rich fucker’s car.”

“You have no idea who’s car that was. It could’ve been a students. Could’ve been mine.”

“You don’t even have a car.”

“Did you see the video King Solomon posted last night?” Shane asks. “The shit he was saying about the God-shaped hole, that was basically what I was talking about the other night.”

Espoir snorts. “I want someone to fill my God-shaped hole.”

“Cheerful sentiment,” Tanille says.

Shane ignores her.

“Or did you see the one he did about his youth pastor?” Espoir asks.

“So you’re a pedophilia apologist now?”

“No, see: that’s exactly the attitude he’s talking about. He who is without sin should throw the first stone, all that.”

“I’ve never raped any kids, Shane.”

“I know you get my point but you’re just being a bitch about it.”

***

A children’s choir, their voices distorted, then chant: “Useless, fruitless, nothing can be done! Useless, fruitless, nothing can be done! Useless, fruitless, nothing can be done!”

Solomon’s on his knees in front of a silhouetted church, steam rising from his shoulders while the music builds. His eyes meet the viewer’s for a moment, and then he reels into the chorus.

“She can see I’m wasting all my days—my days, my days—all I’m doing is wasting days. I know I’m wasting all my days—my days, my days—all I’m doing is wasting days.”

Eventually she stood up and went home alone.

***

They kiss.

“I went swimming in the harbour,” Paisley says. “Apologies for my briny aroma.”

Tanille breathes.

“You awake, princess?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Is my girl in a bad mood?”

“Just sleeping,” she says finally. “Shane puked on Espoir’s backpack.”

Paisley snickers.

“I don’t know why you make me put up with him.”

“Shane?”

“How many women do you know that would be okay with having an ex-boyfriend around constantly?”

“I didn’t date Shane.”

“But you fucked him.”

Paisley sighs. “There’s so many things we could be talking about right now.”

“He’s here, right here, now.”

“But so are you. And who’s tent am I in?”

Tanille huffs. How long has she been awake, even? Her neck bristles, and she rises up on her elbows to face her girlfriend.

“This power dynamic doesn’t work for me, Paise.”

“Power dynamic?”

“This whole I-give-everything-and-you-give-nothing thing.”

Paisley crawls towards her. “I give nothing?” She presses her wet nose against Tanille’s cheek, kisses her cheekbone.

“You know what I mean. I don’t know anything about you. Shane knows more about your life than I do.”

“Shane does not know more than you.”

“What about Neil?” she asks. “Or Amber?”

Paisley’s quiet.

“I know I’m fucked up,” Paisley says finally. “I get that.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. You always go for self-loathing first.”

Paisley shrugs, sits back. Is she crying? She paws one of her dreadlocks out of her face.

“I just want to be a part of whatever’s going on in your head.”

“What do you mean?” Tanille asks. “Forgive us for what?”

***

“I like the idea of being high on air,” Paisley said, booth-sprawled. “That we’re constantly sucking back nostril-shots of pure energy. This is the stuff that makes us run.”

“The Yoda-style diction. A great poet, she is.”

“Sounds classy, right?”

“Like whoah, dude—I’m so high on this breeze. Man, take a toke of that wind.”

They laughed, wasabi-stirred. “And it’s perfectly designed for that purpose. Like to fill our lungs and pump our blood.”

“Right.”

“So how come you don’t believe in God then?” Tanille asked. “How do you figure the air, the world, got here?

“That sounds like such an empty existence, though.”

***

Somebody’s angry.

“Tanille?” Shane appears in front of her. “Tanille, man. It’s happening. The cops’re raiding the place, arresting people.”

“Where’s Paisley?”

“Everyone’s getting together, linking arms. Photographers are here n’ everything. This shit just got real.”

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