Curfew

Chapter One: Nine-hundred & Seventy-seven

AN

Utterly beautiful trailer by @valuables/ @xchains , give her so much love. Because she did such an amazing job.
Hope you enjoy, this chapter will probably be eventually rewritten because augh.

It tasted like cigarettes.

The Holidays stood on the threshold of the diner as they inhaled the stench of fading smokes, grease, and possibly- maybe Jay imagined it- death.

Jay had kissed a boy who was addicted to Marlboros once. The kid had always had a pack of poison in his back pocket, and when he leaned over and kissed Jay on the lips- Jay would've thought he'd taste an ash-tray.

He didn't.

Maybe the boy was just addicting, or maybe it was the whispers of evidence of a cigarette left on his tongue.

But, to him, Jay had thought the boy tasted like coins and cherry wine. And maybe that was a strange thing for the sixteen year old kid to think ten seconds after they parted from the kiss, to think what the boy he had been pining for for months tasted like. Not about how it felt. But what he discerned between his velvet-warm lips and his own.

And that's how the air tasted.

Like something old and used like coins, but as bitter-sweet as cherry wine.

The AC was off, leaving the diner to the mercy of the summer weather of Louisiana. It could've made the air more pungent- Jay didn't honestly care.

"Jesus Christ, anyone ever heard of air-conditioning?" The second, and only other surviving Holiday let out with a groan. She stuffed her keys back into the back of her faded jeans, passing her younger brother with a look of let's-get-in-and-out-alright?.

Jay nodded, following his older sister with his shoulders down and his hazel eyes on the floor. "Always imagined dad's diner would've been a bit more, uh, y'know..." Jay's words were cut like dry ice, the very mention of ma and pops threatened the atmosphere of the duct-taped glass-bubble of calm that surrounded the young Holidays.

"It was, before they... kicked the bucket- Cosby's was kind of the best thing that happened to this stupid town, Jay," Marty's attention wasn't on her eighteen year old brother though, instead, on finding the switch to the electricity.

It wasn't dark enough not to see inside of the diner, after-all, it would only get dark after Curfew... and that was hours away.

But, out of pure habit, the oldest Holiday found the switch and flipped it on.

Jay was momentarily taken back.

Out of the three years that Jay hadn't even stepped foot back in Louisiana, he had never seen the diner. Instead of spending time with his parents, helping Marty with her divorce, and attending Shore Grove's high school- home of the gladiators- Jay was in the panhandle of Oklahoma with a scholarship to a private academy that catered to his intelligence.

It looked like his father dehumanized down to a diner.

The red and white tiles splayed out on any available counter-space, and rough mahogany took up as table tops. The booths were made from recycled feedbags, and every inch of red wall, vintage signs and pictures that Jay knew his father had been keeping in storage for the past thirty years.

"Damn, definitely dad's place," he whistled lowly. His knuckles scratched over the smooth feel of wood from a table, it reminded him of home. The rusty feeling his father would give anything would be repaired by his mother's finesse, she'd tweak out anything sloppy or too old- even if her husband assured her that another man's trash is another man's treasure. It was evident in the diner.