Nights Like This One { a joel miller fanfiction }

III.

A.N. hi! happy friday! i've had such an insane week at work - i had to coordinate an event on wednesday with over 200 people, i don't think i sat down from 8am to 11pm and my feet are still killing me. hoping my exhaustion isn't reflected in this chapter. i'm loving writing the banter between these two so so much. i hope you all have a lovely weekend and thanks so much for reading <3

"There's one thing, baby I don't understand, you keep on telling me I ain't your kind of man."

—The Rolling Stones, Beast of Burden

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March 15, 2003

Lily exhaled sharply, staring at her reflection in the mirror, absently fluffing her hair as her gaze remained locked on the piercing blue eyes staring back at her.

Sometimes she didn't really recognize herself, when she caught her reflection in the mirror while walking down the hallway or while passing by the windows in the living room. Her breath would catch, her heart hammering in her chest until she realized that the person staring back at her was her.

She didn't really know what that meant in regard to her mental wellbeing, but it couldn't be good.

She needed to get out of this house. She'd been in Austin for nearly three months and the only place she frequented was the taco joint down the street, where she'd pick up take out most days, not even staying there long enough to really take in the interior. If she was going to stay here... she needed to get out, network, apply to one of the local papers, talk to someone that wasn't the brooding contractor that had become the only person she knew in town.

The only person she knew in town who most certainly did little more than tolerate her presence, though tolerate might be giving him too much credit.

They went back to their usual bickering and bantering after the minor fiasco that resulted from her insulting his parenting skills.

It was enough to distract her a good majority of the week, but as soon as he left, as soon as she was alone in the house for the evening, for the weekend, she felt the walls closing in on her, tight, too tight, suffocating, keeping her prisoner there— on the ratty armchair or the bed— until she finally fell into something like sleep, but still too restless and fidgety to really be considered rest.

She needed to get out, away from the unpacked boxes, the cluttered trinkets, the stifling reminders of her dead mother. She could wait until Monday, head down to a few local papers to drop off her CV, but she knew that if she did that, she'd spend all weekend anxiously ruminating in her mother's shitty armchair just like she had been doing for the past ten weekends...

Networking could be done at a bar... at least that's what she told herself as she squeezed into a denim skirt and looked for the closest one on MapQuest. She wondered what her brooding contractor would think about her printing out directions to a bar rather than looking up the address in a fucking phone book.

He'd probably have an aneurysm.

She'd never met someone so adamantly averse to technology, even her seventy-year-old mother had been more open to using a computer than he was. If he didn't openly loathe her so much, she would've offered to teach him how to use one... though she thought that even if he didn't loathe her, he would probably refuse.

Stubborn luddite of a man.

She tried to shove him to the back of her mind as she pulled herself into her mother's Subaru... her Subaru. It must have been some ingrained part of her mother that made her buy such a Bay Area vehicle. Everyone out here seemed to drive some variation of the same massive pick-up truck, not that she could ever imagine her tiny, elderly mother driving an F-150. Still, the car made her stick out like a sore thumb... not that she wouldn't stick out regardless.