. pool party

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Xander knows he should be fighting, but Ellie's steely resolve is so uncharacteristic, so unexpected, that he feels any attempt would be futile. He had never seen her like this and the only way he could rationalise it was to believe that he had blown it for good. Close to her, he can smell her perfume anew and it makes his stomach twist with regret. "Yeah, maybe. I don't think so though." All too quickly she's disappeared into the bedroom, and he's left to occupy himself by stubbing out the joint, taking the crate out to his truck, chucking the still damp wetsuit into the back with it. Returning as she emerges, seeing her in one of his shirts makes him yearn to rip it off her. Instead, he nods. "Come on then," he murmurs, deciding that he won't forfeit his key just yet - not when there are dead plants to water. He returns to the truck, getting in and trying to ignore the rising lump in his throat. "Put your music on if you want," he says, feeling insanely awkward, not knowing how he should be speaking to her anymore.

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Ellie wants to force them to slow down. They're leaving and there's nothing that convince them to stay. She feels the emptiness in the soles of her feet. They're heavy as she moves towards the door. Leaving their home. Leaving them. She can feel every second, but she knows that when the door shuts it will be sudden. When she was little and didn't want to go somewhere, she'd hide under the bed. Part of her wants to crawl under their bed and close her eyes till time has passed. But the hurt and betrayal run deep, and she expects it to follow through. She pulls herself into his truck and hugs the back of stuff to her chest like a shield of armor. She nods at him but doesn't put on any music, and instead looks stoically out the window. As he backs up, she feels a wind of terror pull through her. "Stop," but before he does, she's pulled open the door and jumping from the moving car. Her iron feet slip on loose gravel and her knees kiss the driveway. But she's quick to get up, brushing the dirt from her bloody knees and folding her arms across her chest defiantly. "I don't want to go to Karley's," she says, as though she hadn't been the one to make the choice. Her wavy hair flips as she turns on her heel and heads back to the house.

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She doesn't take up his offer to put her own music on, which is just another uncharacteristic move. Music was one of their most fraught and ongoing points of contention, something they used to piss each other off all the time. Xander would find the most overbearing, repetitive techno tracks from the depths of his Spotify and would play them on repeat, blaring them, whenever Ellie tried to give him the silent treatment. This would have been an easy opportunity for some minor revenge, but she doesn't take it, and he's surprised when that fact makes him feel all the more sad. He's starting to back up, his arm against her chair as he looks over his shoulder to make sure it's all clear. Before he can register what she's doing she's told him to stop, opened the door and stumbled, making him hit the brakes hard. "Ellie, for fuck's sake!" He gets out, furious, staring at her scraped knees. "That's so dangerous, what the hell were you thinking?" He follows her inside, barely daring to engage with the small flicker of hope that her protestations have ignited. Closing the door behind them, he grabs her arm, pulling her round to face him. "Talk to me."

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In love, Ellie had a tendency to tear things apart and see how they worked. She was immature and didn't know how to handle the calm in a relationship. Calm made her feel uneasy, like something was about to happen so she might as well start it. When she lit the match, Xander ignited. They never questioned it, but she was reassured by it. When they made up, she somehow felt they were invincible. But the way Xander ignited without any help from her melodrama, it left everything to be questioned. She ignores him as he calls after her. Her knees are an angry shade of red, gravel stuck to them and a river of blood slowly trickling. When she enters the house her bright eyes dart around like a wild animal seeking for a place to hide. Ellie's flustered when he pulls her arm and a frown is stitches across her forehead. "No," she yanks herself away from him and refolds her arms. "I just don't want to leave, I'm not ready to leave," her cheeks are hot and she feels like she might cry. "You did this."

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It feels good to be angry. He had spent so many days feeling hollow, listlessly moving from this house, to work, to the beach and back again, that just feeling was a welcome change. He's frustrated by her recklessness but he's grateful that there's movement, the stiffness between them giving way to something that wasn't normal but felt closer to it than the stiffness had. He can see how upset she is and he hates that he did this to her. "Ellie. Calm," he says, her arm yanked from his grip. Unlikely to help. "I'm not suggesting otherwise," he says, feeling his own frustration bubble up. He does believe this to be an overreaction, and Ellie was a girl prone to overreacting in general, though for once he thinks she would genuinely disagree. This wasn't an argument for the sake of it, one of the fights they struck up because they were bored or wanted to give themselves an excuse to have makeup sex. She was really hurt. "What are you so offended by? Is it that I didn't tell you where I was, or is it that it's Lily?"

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He asks her to be calm and she looks at him like he's crazy. She can't even register how to be calm. A match was lit and now it felt like her whole body was on fire. She pulls a hand through her hair and looks at the ceiling, breathing dramatically to get air in her lungs. Processing her feelings was terrifying, voicing them felt impossible. He begins to talk things through with her and at first she's offended by how he can't see how she's hurt. Ellie glares at him, "why can't you see?" She wants him to read her, to understand her feelings before she does. She nods at his suggestions. The name Lily makes her feel nauseous. "You snuck around with her. You hid me, you pretended I didn't exist." Embarrassed by how human she is, she stomps off into the bedroom. "Look what you did."

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Watching her, the impact of his actions is written into every tiny little move she makes. He can see that she's frustrated with him, furious, sad, hurt and struggling to put words to all of the above. Watching her, he's surprised by how much she cares, though he doesn't say so. "Ellie, I'm sorry," he starts, though he's cut off by her accusations. Strange to think that once upon a time the shoe was on the other foot, and it was Ellie he was sneaking around with, Lily he hid from her on socials. What a piece of shit. He doesn't know how to soothe her. It wasn't in his nature, he didn't know how to soothe himself nevermind another person and one as headstrong as her. But as she stomps off he follows his impulses, stopping in the kitchen to dampen a paper towel before he follows her into the bedroom. "Here, you're bleeding," he says, awkwardly holding it out to her as blood trickled down her tanned leg. He sits on the bed, thinking hard about what he should say next. "I'm really sorry I hurt you. It wasn't what I set out to do but I can see what it looks like and I'm sorry."

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Her feelings surprise her. Ellie was full of fake drama. Spinning off accusations and stirring the pot, watching so they didn't settle down. Her friends were tired of it, his friends was tired of it. She's overthinking it now, realizing that maybe he was tired of it. Maybe Lily felt more natural and was easier to be around. He was so willing to bend for her needs of drama, maybe she'd finally broken him. Worse, he doesn't seem to realize that she's broken him and follows her. She stops herself from slamming the door in his face, but does swing it gently behind her. Ellie sits on the bed and puts her hands on her face to hold the tears in. But she's unsuccessful and her tears trickle down as he holds out a towel, her fingers reluctantly taking it. She presses the paper to her stinging knees, mopping up the sticky blood from her tan skin. "I hate feeling," she thinks out loud, "I deserve this. Years of faking freak outs and I get this karma." She stares down at her knees and brushes dirt from her cuts, "what did you set out to do?"

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"Me too," he agrees, though actually he was still enjoying not being a total zombie. He was also enjoying seeing genuine emotion from Ellie-- or maybe enjoy was the wrong word. He felt pleased that she cared, that perhaps he wasn't just an accessory to her after all. He watches her mop at her sore knees and it's only then that he realizes he should have offered to do it, or not even offered, just done it. Too late now. "Hey," he says, genuinely pained to see tears rolling down her beautiful face. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen her cry, not properly, not out of genuine sadness rather than frustration. He dares to put a hand on her back, rubbing at it, desperate for her to stop. The question makes him stop dead. He sighs, mulling it over, wanting to give an answer that was honest but one that didn't make her feel worse. "I don't know. Comfort, I guess. She's an old friend," he says, and that was true. Lily was soft and sweet and soothing. Those were not necessarily the adjectives he would associate with Ellie, though it didn't make her any less appealing to him, far from. "Being around her made it easy to pretend like nothing much had changed."

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Ellie pushes tears away. She can't remember the last time she really cried, but it was probably when her mom died. This past week she'd read that the grief of heartbreak was similar to that of death; a similar type of pain. She felt this now. The threat of Xander disappearing was crumbling the walls she'd worked so hard to build up and forcing her to look at who they are. She takes the comfort of his hand, burying her head in her hands and groaning. "God, I'm disgusting," she cries, thankful she didn't bother applying make up that morning. Listening to Xander makes her feel guilty. She peaks behind her hands, "what didn't you want to change?". She pushes tears away and sits up straight, attempting to put herself together. "Why did you want comfort?"

.

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"You're so far from disgusting," he says, and it's true, even with bleary eyes full of tears, she was beautiful. He sighs again, unable to keep himself from exhaling heavily, apparently. He knew his phone would be absolutely blowing up with messages from his friends at this point, all of them demanding to know where he was at, though he was also sure they would have cottoned on to the fact he was with Ellie. He can practically hear them all bitching about it now, praying they were wrong and that this would finally be the end of the two of them. A sentiment they shared with Ellie's friends, though Xander disagreed. He runs a hand over his face, flopping back on to the bed and staring up at the ceiling fan. "Nothing to do with you. I wouldn't change a thing about you," he says. He doesn't want to continue down this line of conversation, his throat starting to feel tight and his chest heavy. "It wasn't sexual or anything like that. I know you don't believe that, or don't believe that I didn't at least want something more than friendship, but her friendship was worth more than the sex, looking back. I wasn't looking for a fuck."

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Ellie gives him side eye, remarking, "I never cry." He knows this though. Years of dating and they've skimmed the important things. The complexity of their individual lives and the bad associated with it was rarely discussed. The distance she felt from home and the shadows that crept in the background of his life, were overtaken by fear of vulnerability. He falls back on the bed and she takes him in. The way his damp hair drifts across his forehead and how his lips hesitate as he speaks. Often she thinks of herself as shallow person and incapable of same comfort that Lily seemed to present. Her chest feels anxious and she wants to crawl under the bed rather than on top, but she ignores that pull to run and settles next to him. "I'm sorry," she says, keeping her distance and rolling onto her back. "I'm sorry I gave you a reason to think you couldn't come to me." She pulls at the fabric of the bedsheets and twists them in her hand, "I don't know why I have trouble connecting. It's so hard."

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This was not Xander nor Ellie's first language. Their relationship was one that involved throwing things at walls, making out excessively in public, blanking each other until one of them relented, and sloping off early together without telling anyone. They were excessively physical, for good and for bad, though it never tipped into outright violence. That worked for them. Tearful encounters were not their speed, as evidenced by her resentment of her own tears and his inability to properly comfort her as she sobbed beside him. "I know. I'm sorry," he repeats, both for causing the tears and for failing to stem them.  Any time they fell out, they never picked the conversation back up again, never interrogated the cause of their argument. They'd simply bury it and move on, no matter how many times it reared up again. As she speaks his stomach twists with guilt, he didn't want to make her feel inadequate. "It's not your fault." He props himself up on one arm, looking down at her as her hair fans across the bed. "I like our dynamic, you offer me plenty of comfort. It's just... different comfort."

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She would hate herself later. Crying was an act that was better done behind a closed door, not in front of the person who inflicted the pain. Her fingers desperately push away tears and her mind feels cloudy and confused. Xander peers over her and she turns away to the side, embarrassed with herself. "That's not true," she stifles her tears and looks up at him. She'd always thought his blue eyes were a second thought. The way they set back behind his broad features made them a sort of secret. But maybe she only thought this because she barely looked at him directly. "I love you, but this is a mess," she sighs, "why would you like this? Sometimes I'm tired and I don't even realize, aren't you?"

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"Hey," he repeats, his voice softening. He finally reaches out to touch her, brushing hair off her damp cheeks as she looks up at him with the saddest eyes he had ever seen. He knows she won't like softness, won't want to feel vulnerable, but she is vulnerable and he feels that it's all his fault. "I love you too," he says, and the words feel unfamiliar in his mouth, so underutilised were they in this relationship. She never asked for reassurance and so he'd never given her any, and now he can see the damage his own carelessness had caused.  "Stop," he says as she asks him why he'd like this. He does like it, the simplicity, the lack of pandering, the physicality, all of it. He has no issues with confrontation and he enjoyed their sex life; papering over problems with lust instead of working through them with words suited him, since he didn't have the vocabulary for the latter. "I'm happy with you, you make me happy. I'm sorry if you don't feel the same way, I didn't know that."