savetheearth | You Reject My Advances and Desperate Pleas [February 14]

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You Reject My Advances and Desperate Pleas [February 14]

WHO: Lazarus Lawliet and YOU
WHEN: That loviest of days, February 14, pretty much all day
WHERE: Espresso Yourself
WHAT: Someone higher up on the management ladder saw an ironic valentine and thought it would be awesome if baristas handed out hand-made ones to customers on V-Day. As the shop's resident "writer," L was given some scissors and a magazine and tasked with this. The result... well. Tag this, if you really want to see the result.
WARNINGS: L would rather be detectiving. L's grasps on irony, humor, romance, and valentines are also tenuous at best, especially together. This could get dark.

Since hiring L, Espresso Yourself had been a very accommodating employer. Equal opportunity and largely catering to college-aged hipsters, their customer base and employees consisted predominantly of Millennials, and every stereotype had softly saturated much of the shop's attitude toward the generation. L had enjoyed leaning on crutches in the past, finding ways to pardon himself from the ordeals of living life and interacting with other human beings. He had used and abused diagnoses and disadvantages for this purpose, but Espresso Yourself, as a business, seemed determined not only to accommodate his needs, but to boost his self-esteem by making him feel important and necessary.

A young woman in a higher management position had beckoned him aside the day before, offering him an "important project" to keep such a "talented writer" busy. Following his most recent echoes, L thought he knew what actually comprised an "important project," but it had been awhile since his last echo, and it was beginning to frustrate him. He'd been a child-saver, a detective, and he'd been very good at what he did, and every day another pulse didn't occur was a day he was being denied and held hostage by his own life.

Excitedly, the woman had handed him a stack of magazines, some glue, some construction paper, and a pair of blunted safety scissors, explaining the project. Her over-bright eyes and too-wide smile told L that she knew about him, and had therefore dismissed him on an unforgivable level. The condescension was newly unacceptable to a man who knew that his preincarnation had been great, and he resolved to make the project uniquely his own.

Behind the counter, he has a stack of them next to the cash register. They resemble ransom notes more than valentines, but at least his standard look of utter contempt is dialed back a bit. You might actually feel like you can approach the counter today.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Again, he was fortunate. If she'd not been preoccupied, another reminder about boundaries would have been in his immediate future. That, even if the door WAS open, he was not to come in without knocking, and that he was NOT to eat things he had not prepared himself unless invited to.

As it was. she set her jaw. "Neither of us have work tomorrow, I'd be glad to show you then. For now, I'm on the phone."

Hoping to close the subject, she removed her hand from the receiver to return to the discussion.

"I apologize for that."

"Not a problem. You have company over? I could call back..."

"Not company. My roommate. He had a question about something."

"He." Russell repeated with playful accusation. "Is it serious?"

"No. It's...complicated, actually. I'd prefer not to get into it."

"What? It's not serious?" L asked, lowering his voice somewhat but likely not enough, again, to be completely inaudible to the man on the line. "I thought we were in this for the long haul... you're giving me reasons to live again, remember?"

The hand went over the receiver once again.

"We are not in a session right now, L." she told him firmly. "This is a personal phone call on my personal time. If you can respect that, I'll talk to you when it's over."

"Belle...? Are you sure it's a good time for a call?"

"I--" she adjusted her hand. "...could I possibly call you back in just a bit?"

"Sure. I'll be up late tonight so...you know, whenever."

"Thank you, Russell."

"Yep. Later. I'll hold you to it."

That being said, she set the phone back on the desktop where it had been before.

"That wasn't your toast." she said quietly.

"It was cold... I thought you hadn't wanted it. Who is Russell? Where did you meet him? How tall is he? His picture looks like he'll carry a lot of weight in his midsection in ten short years. His hairline is showing signs of recession already. How old is he?"

"I went to school with him, and he decided to look me up today, that's all." she replied, ignoring the rest of the interrogation. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing more to say on the matter, both because it didn't concern him and because....really, there was nothing more to say.

"On Valentine's Day, of all possible times to do this? Why do you think that's the case? You should be careful, at any rate. There are some very depraved people in the world and often, you can't know who's a psychopath. Not until your feet are cut off so you can't run away and your teeth have been screwed into a mask made of another woman's skin, at least..."

"Lazarus." Her voice was an interesting cocktail of "completely appalled" and "quickly reaching her limit" with just a dash of incredulity.

Her eyes dodged away from the judging benchpress of his stare to collect herself before she looked back at him. "Those are incredibly unreasonable judgments to make about someone you know nothing about, don't you think?"

Edited 2014-02-21 07:06 (UTC)

"If you told me anything, I wouldn't have to make such judgments. His reasons for getting back in touch with you today indicate that his motives are less than pure, and if you're telling him that you aren't serious about me, then... really how am I supposed to take that? Especially after earlier...?"

The irritation was wiped out of her expression as confusion set in.

"After earlier...?"

"You're my therapist, it stands to reason that I have to trust you, and you've been very uncomfortable today. It's like you haven't been considering my feelings at all..."

"...I haven't been trying to make you uncomfortable, L." she began.

"But this is exactly why this living arrangement worries me. I can't be your therapist twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I can give you space to live, I can continue to set aside time to work with you, but you're seeming to expect me to center my spare time entirely around you. That is not healthy for either of us."

"It's not that I expect you to center your time around me. I know you have other patients, and that you need time alone. But why Rufus, there?"

"Russell." she corrected. "And what do you mean, exactly? This is the first time I've heard from him in years..."

"He looks like a Rufus. But again... why now? Good friends don't just go years without talking."

He had, but he'd given up comparing himself to others long ago.

"I'm sure that's something that would have come up in conversation eventually." she said, noting that the chat they'd been having was still open for all to see on her computer screen as she minimized it, for all the good that would do now.

"Sometimes people just assume others need their space and leave them alone while they go on with their own lives. And time gets away from them."

"Yes, I do that all the time," L concurred. "But for like a few hours, not years. Time doesn't get away from people who care about time."

"Time goes very quickly when you spend it studying, shuffling around to classes, and jumping through the hoops that academia sets for you to reach your career goals."

Not that she trusted Russell had spent all of their time apart studying. It just wasn't who he was.

"And sometimes, people just want to be done, L. They meet someone in passing, spend some time together, and then have no desire to spend further time with them when their ways part. I am....frankly? Just as surprised as you are that he contacted me today.

What Belle said about classes, studying and especially career goals seemed to strike a nerve. It was only visible for a moment, swiftly suppressed, but there was something harder about the set of his features from that point forward.

Sometimes, people just want to be done...

"Yeah... I know. It must be nice to just be able to drop in and out of people's lives that way."

"Do you keep contact with every person you've ever spoken to in your past?" she asked him, casting a look over her shoulder at him. The conversation seemed to, likewise, be striking a nerve for her, though she was masking it much better.

"No. And that's for the best. But we are living very different lives."

"That's exactly it, L. We ARE living very different lives, and I truly don't believe he has any ill intent by reaching out again. If it weren't Valentines Day, would it still bother you this badly?"

"Marginally less. But the same things would still be problematic."

"When he asked if it was serious, he was asking whether the two of us were seeing each other." she explained. "There was no way for him to know about the nature of this arrangement, and no way for me to explain it to him without being criticized for how incredibly unprofessional it is.

With that aside, and the fact I sincerely doubt he plans to murder me, I don't find much that's problematic with two friendly acquaintances getting back in touch..."

L really couldn't argue with the wisdom of keeping their cohabitation a secret, since it really was unprofessional... even if he couldn't help but like the idea of her having fewer patients and more time for him, he couldn't be that selfish when he was so fully aware of it.

"But it's not 'friendly.' It's something else, in this case, and you like the idea of that?"

"I'm not sure where you got the idea it wasn't friendly. But yes, I like the idea of getting caught up with someone I've not spoken to in awhile."

This talk was confusing to her...and she found herself put on the defensive by the way he was acting almost possessive of her time. If this was going to start rearing its head about the people she spoke to off-hours, then it might only be a matter of time before he began applying it to her other patients. In other words, this trend could not continue.

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