make sure you outlive me. ruby&ivory
May 17, 2024 16:05:02 GMT -5
Post by ᴥ on May 17, 2024 16:05:02 GMT -5
("This is so stupid!"
"Ugly words, little thumper, how are you going to play music if you cannot move with it?"
"Dancing isn't teaching me anything. Everyone is staring at us."
No one would believe that my father laughed, knelt over where I'd thrown myself upon the floor. He held out his hand, palm upturned toward chandeliers and catching their multicolored motes of light, "Then we best make sure we are something worth watching.")
The couple's first dance is clumsy. A juvenile mimicry of the real thing, so practiced that I can pinpoint every trouble spot. Where toes bump and leather scuffs against itself. For all the effort that has been put into perfecting this day, it seems they will be settling for almost.
Not that I care, it's just a bit boring.
I tap my lower lip with my fingers, chin resting in my palm. Ruby keeps playing pretend with his offered hand, defacing every instrument he can think of in a bid for attention. If I weren't still bitter about being left alone, I might have caved. Instead, I count all the newlywed's mistakes they won't have the decency to be ashamed of.
What a privilege it is to settle for mediocrity. They look so damn happy.
It's not until I'm perfectly brittle, the kind of thing that should not be touched, that I grab his hand. "Have I ever told you I'm fantastic at dancing?"
As if I could be anything else.
(Father only drove when he was angry. Gas pedal to the floor, 'til the world was nonsense and it was just the two of us. I was used to having nowhere to go, it didn't bother me like it did my brother.
He asks me to name the notes car horns play in our wake, I tell him it's G Sharp and A.
"You will never embarrass me like that again, do you understand?"
I rubbed at the blisters on my heels, they wouldn't hurt until the next day but that pain would linger for a while. "Okay. Are you trying to kill us?"
His answer was an engine's roar.)
I'm unaccustomed to being lost in a crowd, a part of an audience instead of above it. The dance floor is flooded by drunken revelers, all swirling tulle and crooked ties as they toast to eternal love. I realize too late that we are alone here, faceless and forgotten. I should not want to perform for nothing, but I want many things I shouldn't.
"Can I have this dance?"
I rest my forearm behind my back and bow low, playing chords backwards. Calling dissonance a harmony. When I kiss the back of his hand again, it feels like salting a wound. Maybe his, maybe mine. My gaze flicks from him to the decorum laying shattered at our feet, I wait with baited breath to see what he'll do with it.
"But only because you asked so nicely." He says, already matching me in a feigned curtsy. Filling the space I had so gleefully abandoned, the show must go on even if my heart stops beating for a measure or two. I can trust him with that, at least for one night.
I make sure the dance is cruel. Twisted up in three-four time, going dead weight in his arms without warning. Every time I fall, I do not check if he is there to catch me. Our steps slow only when my curiosity gets the better of me, catching my bearings in a counter-clockwise turn "Not bad, perhaps we had the same tutors."
Not my father but the ones who came after. When pretending he had time for me lost its novelty.
For how little we belong here among lovers, I'm shocked I don't feel more out of place. Then again, there is nowhere that Ruby can't fit himself and it seems he's dead set on dragging me with him. I tilt my forehead against his, swaying as the music falls into a crooning lullaby, "Shame you didn't bring a real date here, she'd have been very charmed."
"Oh she would, would she?" I'm not expecting a real answer, and I don't get one. "I'm glad I've charmed you." He speaks into the top of my head. Acting like I'm a real person, to have, to hold. Vows are only words, I'd rolled my eyes as the couple had whispered them up on the altar. Treated them as sacred, weighted things.
Ruby speaks in a similar way like he doesn't know he's lying.
"Not what I said." I've seen him breathless a thousand times but never felt his deep measured breathing like this.
Just once, I'll let him catch his breath - "Ask me after the next dance."