Hugs & Blows

Cheap Kicks.

The heat is sweltering, Odette isn't sure how it's possible to go from damply cold, to sunny heat. Even when she lived in Kentucky she couldn't comprehend it. She had a fan going and was laying down on the thankfully cool hardwood floors. She hiked the front of her dress up around her braline, letting the skin of her stomach and cheek touch the coolness.

The back of her light and flimsy navy blue dress hit the upper backs of her thighs. Her legs were parted slightly. Her feet were bare. She was listening to music, Genesis, an old band she had grown up with her mother listening to. Odette liked to play a silent game with herself.

She would picture various moments from her life as if they were a movie and she would pick and choose which songs would play in those moments and what emotional response they would evoke from the hopefully captivated audience.

She thinks it may be a conceited pastime, why is the story of her life more movie worthy than any one elses, yet that doesn't stop her from doing it. She also thinks that it may be a coping mechanism, a way to distance herself from things. She chooses a lot of Lana Del Rey for the beach scenes, because it makes her feel girly, flirty, and bluesy.

She decides on various, "white-girl-wasted-

drunken-whore" music for the partying. A sprinkling of Sarah McLachlan, the wallflowers, and Chris Isaac. Almost anything angsty, and then mainstream things too.

She is torn on one song/scene though, she continuously skips through tracks on her ipod, while turning it up to listen to Flyleaf's debut album loudly, she has a thing about first albums, they are almost always her favorite of anything made by whatever musician she's thinking about. Or at least, the first album she heard by them.

Ever since highschool she pictured her rape scene to be accompanied by the Jeff Buckley cover of "Hallelujah", but now she thinks Betsy's death is more deserving. Odette isn't very religious, and couldn't tell you much about the bible but she has always loved the song. Found it beautifully tainted with sadness. The sound of the song is exactly how she hears the majority of her life.

Maybe it would be a montage of her finding Betsy's body, screaming and crying, and being numb. With an ending crescendo at the burial scene. She thinks that would be better. She also thinks there is something wrong with her for her cinematic hobby. It gives her a sickly voyeuristic comfort.

She isn't sure which moment with Ethan would be accentuated with "All Around Me" by flyleaf, but she knows one of them would be. Possibly the other day at the beach when it was rainy and she could feel him watching her, any other time he was around would fit too. Which she knows is blatantly blasphemous.

She saw them in concert once, when the original band was wholly together, and they holy too. A christian rock band which she hadn't realized. They mentioned that it was a song about God, and being enlightened with faith in his ever loving existence, a faith Odette never had. She knows that it is widely considered wrong to worship a mortal man instead of any omniscient celestial being, but she did it anyway.

If she were to ever have a religious belief, she would believe in Ethan and his love. Hellfire be damned. The song changed to the runaways' "I wanna be where the boys are." She cranked it louder and all of the sudden was transported back to that night in New York City.

It was so late on a wednesday night, that it was actually thursday morning, but Odette and Betsy didn't care. They were subwaying home and possibly going in the wrong direction, they knew their stop was normally soon. They didn't care, they were too hammered to bother themselves with incidental things like the stress of whether or not they would be arriving at the brownstone they had been calling home for a few grime, art, and illegal substance filled months.

Odette couldn't remember what she had drank at the soriee they had attended, it may have been a hootenanny with numerous shenanigans, she could no longer recall what the host had been referring to it as. She remembered shots, and pills, lots of multicolored pills. It was as if she had been visited by the pharmacist equivalent of the candy man. The guy who had been filling her up like a pez dispenser certainly had left her feeling like the world tasted good.

She looked over towards Betsy who seemed to aware to have been using opiates, or maybe she was just coming down and hyped up on caffeine. Odette could never really tell with Betsy. She wanted her best friend to stop using heroin, but Odette didn't want Betsy to try to force her to eat, or stop slitting into her body with sharp objects, and she was not fond of hippocrisy so she left it an untouched subject. Unless Betsy broached it of course.

Betsy's mouth was moving but Odette couldn't hear her, she removed a headphone and said "what?" but Betsy never repeated herself, she rebutted with "Holy fuck turn it up!"

Odette removed the headphones completely and used the built in speaker. The girls danced around flashing the garters and doing their best impersonations of Joan Jett and Cherie Currie. Singing about how much to the disdain of their mothers, they wanted to be where the boys were.

The girls twirled on the silver, slightly sticky subway poles and their enthralled audience cheered and threw money.

Odette can't remember how they got home that night, she wants to call and ask Betsy. Her chest constricts when she realizes she can't. She was so transfixed in her reminiscing and her pain that she didn't hear the front door open, nor did she hear Ethan walk in and up the stairs.

He leaned against the doorway, with his thumbs hooked into the belt loop of his faded button fly blue jeans. His legs were crossed at the ankles, he couldn't help but lick his lips at the sight of her. He toed off the raggedy black chuck taylor's that he always wore, even though he should have retired them long ago, he just couldn't toss them out, they were perfectly broken in.

Ethan walks over to Odette and sits next to her with a hand brushing her calf, she jumps and yanks away the headphones, startled. She turns her head and sees him and his large smile, she is instantly relaxed.

She mumbles a complaint of "It's too hot."

He flips her skirt up and over her back, revealing her parted thighs, he touches them and says "Too hot for clothes?"

Odette laughs lightly, not fixing her outfit and says "Too hot to breathe."

He raises his eyebrows and counters with a faux-shocked "Erotic asphyxiation?"

"You know what I meant." She says smiling, and temporarily forgetting her sadness. Ethan is the cure for her every woe and all that ails her.

He mindlessly runs a finger around the edge of her underwear, and says "I couldn't stop thinking about you all day."

"Why's that?"

"I just couldn't stop picturing you at the beach last week, climbing the rocks in your little girl dress. You looked exceptionally innocent."

"That sounds perverse."

He realizes that it does in fact sound perverse, and he rues the fact that today she decided to wear plain pink bikini cut panties instead of one of her sexier things. He stills his hand and says "You know what I meant."

"No, I don't actually." she laughs.

"You looked happy and relaxed. Not as pained as you used too. It's like every day I see you, you're better than the last." He says, hoping that by saying it aloud he doesn't jinx it.

"I think that's how recovery is in a way, when it's working." She responds after a few seconds of deliberation.

"I'm glad it is working." He says laying out next to her and kissing her.