Brigit's Flame week two "loop"

[riotheclown]

I really didn't fit the prompt in here very well.  I always think of the French for wolf when I think of the English "loop"
But the impact of the last sentence would have been diffused.  I felt kind of sick after writing this.

Caught in an Eddy.

 

Mouse was drawing circles, a confluence of bubbles on her paper while the teacher droned on and on at the front of the class. It was geometry and he was talking about how some Greeks believed there were five elemental shapes that could describe everything…

It might have interested her. She liked shapes. She liked geometry but mostly the internal kind:

·        Point. She was aware without having to be anything in particular. In a vast and empty blackness there was just this point of waking up within a vast field of SPACE, the time before knowing what to call yourself, sort of like being in high school.

·        Other. The sudden awareness that there was someone else, another Point in the void. There was a here and a there, a relationship: Mouse and Ivy.

·        Plane. A third point allowing for measured field along a plane, a playing field: Brian Hunter Deloup

Finally the class was over and she spilled out with the other students in to the hall. Since becoming friends with Ivy, the ever popular and semi-famous, she rarely got accosted. Now she moved through the halls of her school in a protective bubble. 

She imagined she was riding on an inner tube along a lazy river. Only a few months ago it was like climbing through brambles.

She stepped out of the door into the unusually hot and humid air.  It was dense and fetid.  Students had thrown their lunches at the garbage bins and missed and now flies were buzzing around. She looked around warily.   

When she saw Brian at the wheel of Ivy’s convertible she felt effervescent, barely held together by skin. 

Brian Hunter Deloup was beautiful. His black hair was a long sheet of silk and his teeth were gleaming white. He had a little dimple on the left side of face. There was tooth missing behind his incisor and it made him look wolfish. The gap could be seen when he really smiled, which was rare.

Ivy, Mouse’s best friend would go on and on about how dangerous and exciting he was, and how she was SO IN LOVE with him.  

Mouse didn’t think she was in-love with him. She suspected she was “in” something. She liked how quiet he was. She liked how a long exhale from him could stop the world as she waited for a smile or a frown. She like how long limbed he was and how every movement on his part seemed more important than everyone else’s. 

She noticed how bored he got when Ivy would talk too much, how he would take Ivy’s arm or leg and start to run his hands up and down it to shut her up. Mouse suspected Ivy knew if she talked his ear off he would do this. Ivy was fucking him and confided to Mouse that “he’s amazing”. 

Once he pushed Ivy when she called him “Loop Dee Loop De Loup” and laughed at him. It looked like he was going to hit her. Instead he had left them both in a bar in the middle of nowhere. For a week Ivy called him every hour and cried and begged him to forgive her and went on and on. It was a couple of weeks before they saw him again and after that he was driving her car.  

He would drive them to and from school.  Ivy would throw her little body over the driver’s side on to his lap and Mouse would squish into the back.

Ivy wasn’t there today. Brian seem to anticipate the question. “She’s at an audition. We’ve got a couple of hours before I pick her up. Get in.” He seemed different.  Mouse wanted to think of something to say to make him smile but she was lost. Ivy always filled the space up with her banter. He turned and looked at her sleepily. “Let’s go to my place.”

They had never been to “his place”. They had always checked into hotels to party, or driven around, or gone to bars. They drove east. They drove and drove until they came to a small bungalow at the end of drive full of broken cars and trucks. There was a planter with some dead flowers on the front porch next to a rocking chair. A row of apple trees lined the walk but half of them looked dead. A big old dog came up to Hunter for a pat on the head.

Inside, he pointed her to the couch which was covered with a blanket. In the corner was a pile of parts for a player piano. He saw her looking at it. 

“I’m putting it together. I’ve got some of the original rolls, old Jelly Roll and others, really rare shit. Sit there. Wait.” 

He disappeared into a back bed room. She could hear him talking in a low voice.

When he came out he told her, “My mom is sick. She’s on a lot of dope for pain, cancer. I had to check to see if she needed anything…” Mouse wondered if that was how he spent his day, looking after a sick mother in this sour smelling house. Ivy would not like it. Ivy told every one Brian was her agent and implied he was some sort of international spy/criminal.

He took her hands and pulled up to standing. He was looking in her eyes. Mouse didn’t look away. She could see her reflection in his dark irises. She felt she was caught in a loop between seeing him and his seeing her and seeing herself in his eyes, over and over, transfixed.

Finally he spoke. “You’re like me. I don’t have to pretend with you.”

He walked her down the hall in the opposite direction to his mother’s bedroom to what was sort of a shed or porch. It was his room. There was a broken lazy-boy chair and a cot in the corner with a bunch of books piled up beside it. There was Coleman lamp hanging from a hook, no electricity.  He sat down in the chair still holding her hands. “Come on. I’m going to teach you how to give a decent blow job.”