For messily

[therealgansey]

Gansey could count the number of times he'd been to 300 Fox Way alone. In hindsight, this will probably be a huge mistake. However, at the moment he doesn't want to be anywhere else. He can't go back to Monmouth Manufacturing and take the risk that Ronan will defend his honor. He considered, for a brief moment, finding a place to park the Pig and sleeping there. Perhaps it is the fussing that he received at the emergency room or the pain pills they gave him wearing off, but Gansey doesn't want to be alone.

Which is why he finds himself on the front porch of 300 Fox Way, bruised knuckles poised to rap lightly on the door. It is only in the yellow light of the porch that he realizes he still has blood on the persimmon polo and khaki cargo shorts. The hospital bracelet still dangles from his wrist. Perhaps he should have stopped off at Monmouth to clean up first, but that would have required seeing Ronan, which would have prompted Ronan to defend his honor, which would have made this situation even worse. He pulls his hand back, scraping it through his hair, fingertips feeling blindly for the six stitches bisecting his eyebrow. There'll be a scar, he thinks to himself. Somehow that excites him and he nips that thought in the bud. He is entirely aware that his appearance is likely to frighten Blue, or cause some sort of undesirable emotion in her. He is battered and bruised because when it came right down to it, he couldn't make himself hit Adam. Adam has, in his opinion, been hit far too much and Gansey has never had personal experience as a punching bag. Perhaps it'll be character building.

He raises his hand to rap on the door once more then changes his mind. Despite how much he craves everything 300 Fox Way represents, he can't burden Blue with this. He's a quarter of the way turned toward the Pig when the door opens. He freezes, head bowed.

"I suppose I should have realized I couldn't sneak away from a house of psychics."

Comments

[messily]

It isn’t so much psychics that he can’t escape, but nosy women who take far too much interest in Blue’s social life – though Persephone had brushed through the kitchen half an hour before with an odd look on her face and a brush of her fingers against Blue’s shoulders that led to peeking out from between the curtains on the stair’s landing every four or five minutes. She’d tried not to look, and then to be as inconspicuous as possible when curiosity and the gnawing of the unknown became too much to handle.

Judging by Calla’s barking laughter, she isn’t particularly succeeding.

The Pig’s headlights shine across the front of 300 Fox Way like fog lamps, and Blue ducks away from the window, trying to control the sudden lurch of her stomach. If she were expecting a beaten-up car to pull into the drive tonight, it certainly wasn’t Gansey’s. And then there’s silence, the entire house is quiet and a plate of shortbread cookies are silhouetted beneath a spotlight on the kitchen counter. Her heart jumps up into her throat when she tugs open the door.

Then it drops down to her feet, like one of the coasters at the county fair, when she sees him. The dim porch lighting makes the bruises look worse than they are, Blue tells herself, eyebrows furrowed together. There are vague dark patches against the brightness of his clothing, and scrapes across one knuckle – she sees before he can draw away, and reaches out to tug it toward the light spilling forth from the house because she isn’t thinking. Not at all.

She looks up sharply – catches his eye, and the stitches above it, and then glances away. In the darkness, he can’t see that she’s a bit flushed. She hopes. “Not with a car like that,” she says eventually, still peering at his hands.

“There’s a first-aid kit inside,” which is as good as an invitation. “And cookies.”

Maura made something with butter – tonight’s going to be a long one.

[therealgansey]

To Gansey, who lives in a house full of boys and goes to school with boys, they're much the same thing. His breath catches when Blue answers the door and he wants so much to go inside. He wants to sit next to her and let her tell him about the mundane details of life in the odd little house that's too full and yet just full enough at the same time. He wants her to push away everything that is too much and too heavy so that he can relax, so that he feels like he can breath without worrying about Adam or Ronan or Glendower or Noah, or the fact that he needs to give something spectacular to the world. Gansey wants to just be for a little while.

Her hand folds around his scraped one, tugging him closer and he takes a step toward her, coming up with so little space separating them. All at once it seems like far too much space and never enough. His head is bowed in contrition, his eyes unable to meet hers at first. When she looks away, he stares, trying to puzzle out what's going on in her head, trying to decide which words he should use and what effect they will have. Banal banter is better at the moment.

"Ah. Yes. I suppose it does make an entrance." In that it is the loudest thing on the block. He tends to forget that as the grumble of that engine is a comfort to him. He could sing to the Pig's engine, he could sleep and he could breathe to that sound.

"I've been to the hospital," he answers, raising his other hand and jiggling his wrist, hospital band still in place. He realizes too late that it wasn't an offer to fix him so much as it was an invitation. He nods and takes a careful step over the threshold.

"What sort of cookies?"

Because that's an innocent enough question, isn't it?