Sinister Kid :: [Nino + Uma]
Oct 25, 2014 17:12:48 GMT -5
Post by L△LIA on Oct 25, 2014 17:12:48 GMT -5
She won't even see me and I don't know why.
I slept three straight nights in the alleyway beneath her bedroom window: tossing pebbles at the glass, casually hitting my head against the bricks, and talking to myself, because the only explanations I get are the ones that come from my own mouth. Harper kept bringing me cups of tea while wearing her sweaters and when he hugged me out of pity at one point, I didn't flinch away. I just closed my eyes and buried my face in his shoulder, pretending the softness into her. It's weird, I know. Literally insane. I'm so pathetic Jude can't even bring himself to yell at me over it or lecture me about coming to my senses, he just sighs and gives me a look. I hate that look. It's too much like the expression people gave me after Fitz and Noah's deaths, pitying me as I punched things and lost my mind for all the world to see.
I love her for real this time, I get that now. Before I was just a heartsick teenage kid revved up on hormones and rambling about white whales as if I were on about something other than fiction, but I'm damned close to being something like a man now and I don't miss her pretty face nearly as much as I miss the toiling hum of exasperation that lined her laughter around me. I want to keep all those little moments of us that actually belonged to me. There are a lot of people who have made some pretty convincing arguments over the years about my being a crazy person and okay. I'm a friggin' psycho, whatever. It's official. I lost my mind to Ursula Libertine in one of her deals and I don't know how to get it back because she won't see me or talk to me or acknowledge me in any way and —
I. Don't. Know. Why.
Not all that long ago I'd have lost my temper in an attempt to burn my body to ruins and find rebirth in the ashes. That's what I did after Noah was killed, but not this time. There's an incredibly annoying voice in the back of my head — the insistently squeaking whisper of a loose hinge — that tells me I'm grown now. I'm too old for petty fits. I'm too old to wallow. I'm too old to be this wrecked. Now, I know it's probably a bad idea to listen to strange voices that only exist in the dark, but when it says I should go home and shower so I can turn around and go to work, I do it because that's at least ten thousand times more sane than what I've been doing.
It's only been a couple of weeks since I was hired on as a barback at Bastille Styx's club. In times of depression, I guess it's not out of the ordinary for people to turn to booze and Jude agrees that pouring it into glasses for other people is a better life decision on my part than tipping the bottles into my own mouth. I'm trying to drown my sorrows vicariously through other people this time around, because I'm too exhausted for another round of self-destruction.
Ursula doesn't love me like I love her and that shouldn't hurt any more than it ever has before, because that's one piece of my life that has stayed consistent and unchanged. She never loved me. Ever. Somehow it's different this time though. Maybe she's the same as always, but I'm not. All I can think about is kissing her and her kissing me back and her telling me that I was worth something to her, a Libertine, a girl who truly wouldn't waste her time on anything or anyone she couldn't find value in.
I'm not worth her while anymore, evidently. That little fact puts a harrowed twist in my usual smile as I nod hello to the club bouncer and clock in for my shift at work. I'm almost as low on the totem pole of importance here as I am with Ursula, the new kid with the grand privilege of mopping up last night's vomit and digging crusted glitter out from between the cracks in the floorboards. Iggy Avé blows me a taunting kiss from across the room as I duck behind the bar to avoid her attention, so as to save myself from being sent out on another run to buy tampons for the burlesque dancers, like last week. That girl may have hips with their own gravitational pull, but I aspire to have a sense of pride someday and she's surely turned better men than me into spineless panderers.
Nobody here really seems to think I'm worth my wages yet and seeing as how I'm crouched awkwardly in the shadows, hiding like a child when Uma glances over at me, I suppose that's not the most unfair assessment in the world. I was hired on to be his apprentice so I could learn the bar tending ropes and generally be his right hand man, but I don't think he likes me. All I can do right now is look up at him with a nervously forced grin and gurgle with an unintelligent beat of nonsensical sound. "I was just, um, uh —" I glance left. Nothing. I look to the right. Nothing. The floor is uncharacteristically clean today with a particularly inconvenient lack of excuses for my current behavior. "— er, oh! Wow! Did you get a hair cut? You look so good you totally floored me. Ha... ha." I'm wincing at my own failed cover up, staring up at the ceiling as though waiting to be struck with lightning in retribution for resorting to such a cringe-worthy pun.
If only I were as invisible to Uma as I am to Ursula, but that's obviously not my life. I don't know why.