Falling Without A Harness - Chapter 4
AU where Tom Ryder is still an asshole, just not a psychotic one. When he starts being less of an asshole, and more of a person, Parker finds that he isn't so bad. Not that she would tell him that, though.
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Parker doesn't get much sleep. Not necessarily because she's so busy that she doesn't have time, and not definitively because of the sleep disorder she has self-diagnosed off of a sketchy website she found while browsing her symptoms one day.
In truth it's because she thinks too much.
She overthinks what her to-do list for the following week should be; overthinks the plot of her favorite tv series and whether or not they are going to kill off her favorite character in the mid-season finale; overthinks whether she should spend more one-on-one time with her brother while they're both in the same city, able bodied (with his career, there was no guarantee), and with the time to waste on stupid memories. On the really bad nights, Parker overthinks whether or not she made a mistake in purchasing an old, dilapidated bookstore that has drained her bank account over the last couple of years. She worries that her life is going nowhere, that she'll soon have failed at her dream venture, and that when she dies, she'll have no accomplishments to her name.
On those nights, she ends up washing down a handful of melatonin gummies with two boiling cups of sleepy time tea.
It helps, but it also leaves her floating in a state between unconsciousness and squirrely dreams that is hard to shake off in the morning.
Harder still to shake off when her phone lights up the room in the middle of the night, the shrill song of her ringtone bleating through the pitch black of her bedroom shocking her awake in delirious fright.
You gotta get up, gotta get out, gotta get home before the...
Parker swings her hand towards the nightstand in such a rush that she ends up knocking her cellphone onto the ground. It bounces on the hardwood floor—she doesn't even care if it breaks, the damn thing—before skidding underneath her bed. The light from it casts shadows in all directions.
What if I'm late? Gotta big date, gotta get home...
It takes her half crawling out of bed, sheets tangled around her bare legs, elbow braced on the cold floor as she blindly grapples for the device to find it. Colt always made fun of her ringtone—if you're going to pick a song, at least pick a good one, he would taunt while listening to Taylor Swift on replay—and while Parker had adamantly told him where to stick his opinion, at the moment, the song blaring in the middle of the night has her half-prepared to scratch out of her own eardrums in frustration.
The stanza continues: before the morning comes...
She grabs the phone and wrenches it—and herself—back onto the bed. The number isn't saved in her phone, and panic wells in her chest. She's gasping as blood rushes back down to her toes. "Hello?"
"Jesus, finally. I thought you weren't going to f*cking answer."
Whether it's the tea, the overdose of melatonin, or the fact that she had just been woken up in the middle of the night, Parker can't seem to make sense of much. The only thing she can think about is how she has a brother who does stupid stuff for money, and has called her from the back of ambulance three times and counting.
Once on her birthday.
"Oh my god," she mutters, a hand already clutching to her chest as she can feel the cavity caving in. Clarity has no place in her spiraling panic. "Oh my god, he's finally dead, isn't he? Oh my god, Colt is dead!"
"What the f*ck are you on about?" the voice interrupts her panic with a modicum of disbelief. It sounds familiar, but Parker is far more focused on regulating her breathing before she throws up than placing a voice through her half-broken speaker. The room, pitch black and without anything to see, is spinning. "I'm not even with Colt."
"f*ck," she curses, before recklessly scrabbling with her nightstand. It's a total f*cking mess, and in her haste, she knocks a lamp and stack of books onto the ground. The least of her problems if her idiot of a brother is already f*cking dead. "f*ck! Where are you? I didn't even know he was on a job right now. Um, what hospital is he at? Wait—sh*t—I need to find a pen and paper..."
"Parker, Jesus, Colt's fine. Stop spinning out for two seconds. Are you on drugs?"
She blinks, unsure if she just heard what she heard, and slowly withdrawals her hand as she tries to compute what is being said.
"He's... not dead?" she croaks hesitantly.
"He's fine. I mean, well, as far as I know," the voice drones on; it's clearly annoyed now. A scoff. "Why in the hell would you assume that he's dead?"
"Because—it's—" she wipes a hand over her face tiredly, sweeping tufts of hair off her forehead to peer at the clock in the corner. Large, red numbers blink at her showing that she had only been asleep for two and a half hours. Worse still when she makes sense of what she's seeing. "It's two thirty in the morning! Why the f*ck would an unknown number be calling me in the middle of the night if it wasn't for Colt?"
"Are you—wait—are seriously his emergency contact?" the voice goads, teasing and judging all in one tone. She hates it. "That's a little pathetic, honestly."
Her left eye twitches. "Who the f*ck is this?"
"It's Tom."
Parker doesn't know a Tom, she's never known a Tom in the entirety of her life, and as she struggles to clear her thoughts, the idea that some asshole with a stupid name like Tom would call her out of the blue at this time of night starts to really piss her off.
"Tom who? I don't know a f*cking Tom!" she shouts into the receiver.
There's a thump against the wall, a muffled call of "shut the f*ck up!" rings out from her roommate's room. Too many things are happening though, and Parker clutches her head between her hands while trying to stay on topic.
"f*cking Tom Ryder, smartass," the voice chides. "Who else?"
And—
f*ck.
Yeah, alright, maybe she did know a Tom, and, yeah, now that she thought about it, he was a raging, grade-A asshole that would call someone up in the middle of the night for no reason other than to ruin the first good sleep she had in a week. All while getting upset at her for her negative response to the impromptu gab-sesh.
You know, in the way that all assholes did.
"Why—?" she starts, before realizing that she is shouting. Parker clears her throat with a glance towards the wall and tries a second time in an angry hiss. "Why the f*ck are you calling me at two in the morning, Ryder?"
"I finished the book and I want to talk about it."
The words don't compute for half a second, but when they do, Parker can feel a migraine spiraling behind her eyes. She sort of feels like she's having a seizure before realizing that it's just pure anger spiking in the bottom of her chest.
She's pretty sure this is how someone feels right before committing a violent crime.
"Are you—? I was f*cking sleeping!" she hisses. "Good—f*cking—bye!"
Hanging up the phone certainly isn't as satisfying as it used to be when flip phones were in fashion, and you could slam the top down to end a conversation. But pressing the big red END button on Tom Ryder does grant her a small moment of satisfaction. Even more so when she imagines the shocked furrow of his eyebrows or the crease of his mouth as he frowns.
Good, she thinks sourly while flopping back onto her pillows with a sharp huff, maybe Tom Ryder could use a few wrinkles in his life.
Her peace lasts all of twenty seconds.
You gotta get up, gotta get out, gotta get home before the morning...
Parker grabs a pillow and smushes it against her face hoping that it will drown out the noise. When it doesn't, she hopes that maybe suffocation will knock her out for a couple hours of sleep. But then there's another thump against the wall and she realizes that if she dies right here and now, the last person she would have ever talked to would be Tom f*cking Ryder, and she's not so sure she's okay with that.
So, she removes the pillow to take a deep breath. Then she answers the phone.
"Did you just hang up on me?" he asks incredulously.
"It is two-thirty in the morning, and you want to talk about a book?"
A huff. "Yes. Why else would I ever call you?"
If she was more awake, Parker might have taken offense at the insult. She's much too groggy to do that, though. Besides, almost everything out of his mouth was some sort of judgement. At this point, she didn't think he would be able to speak without being rude.
"Couldn't you have called me during a normal hour?"
"My audition is on Friday," he said, as if that was any sort of excuse for his behavior. "I still have to read the other two books by then."
"Wait, I'm sorry," Parker interjects with a mean laugh, pausing to pinch the bridge of her nose. "Have you been up all-night reading?"
"You could sound a little less judgmental about it," he snarks. "I do read, you know. Bad scripts and the like."
She huffs. Not quite a laugh, but not just an expression either. It's a little hard to take anything serious when she's sleep-deprived and delirious. And, certainly, he can't be serious. That's her justification for giving up, anyway. "Okay, alright, fine. Which book did you finish?"
"Contact."
"That's a good one to start with," Parker murmurs, shifting on her mattress so she can cradle her PillowPet.
It has lost of all of its stuffing, an eye, and any joy it once had, but the penguin was a gift from Colt that she can't convince herself to trash. It mirrors her frown.
"No, not a good one. I didn't understand it at all."
"What didn't you understand?"
"Any of it, all of it. Why the hell did you tell me that Dune was too complicated and then hand me this sh*t?" he complains. There's something odd in his tone though. Something she can hear creeping through the syllables somewhere between annoyed and confused that reminds her of their conversation weeks prior at Gail's—you don't even sound like yourself, she had said. It's only now that she realizes he hadn't sounded like himself because he was doubting himself, which was the most un-like Tom Ryder thing anyone could ever do. She frowns at the thought as he continues. "It's all about math and pi and something called a transcendental number. I should have just watched Altered Carbon."
Parker sighs. "You're getting yourself all worked up over things that don't matter."
"Don't matter? It's all the book f*cking talks about!"
"That's sci-fi," she says. And while it's a piss poor excuse, it's the truth. A moment later and Parker realizes that if he really had never read anything sci-fi before, he likely wouldn't realize the rules of reading it. Sighing, she takes some pity on him to explain, "okay, look. You know when you watch an action film and there's some ridiculous sequence that makes no sense; like when the ground is crumbling beneath their feet and the character jumps at the last second and is totally okay?"
"Like in the Fast and the Furious."
"Literally every single scene in those movies."
"Okay...?"
"Right, well, you watch those scenes and tell yourself not to take them seriously. They exist because it's an action movie, right? It doesn't have to be realistic."
"Sure," he agreed, but she could tell he still wasn't getting the point.
"It's the same thing when you're reading sci-fi. Okay? All the math and theoretical physics and calculations they do—whatever it is—they throw that stuff in there to build up a universe that feels real. The audience doesn't have to understand quantum mechanics to know that Chris Pine can fly a really big spaceship in Star Trek."
"You really have a hard-on for Chris Pine, huh?"
Parker ignored his comment entirely, barreling on. "The point of the book is not that the audience is stupid and needs to take some math classes even if that's how it feels sometimes. The point is that Ellie is a genius that no one else understands or believes in. When she talks about transcendental numbers and you have no idea what she means, that's exactly how the other characters in the book feel. They don't believe her because they don't understand her."
"So, it's... like an attempt to make the audience sympathize with her but also so the author can explain how everything happens."
Parker smiles. "Right."
"That's stupid," he says, and her smile immediately disappears behind a groan. "I just don' think the author needed to spend so much time trying to sound smart."
"It's a book about interstellar travel and the existence of intelligent life," she deadpans. "It's supposed to sound smart."
Tom mulls that over, and while he does so, Parker shifts once more in bed. The red numbers blink at her are only going up, but now that her heart rate has returned to a normal level, she finds it's far from the worst conversation she's had with Tom. Especially since she gets to talk about one of her favorite books.
Even if he is an ass.
"This would have been better as a movie," he finally settles on. It's not a sophisticated opinion by any means, but it certainly is him.
"Actually, it was originally written to be a screenplay. The movie got cancelled, and Sagan adapted it into a book."
"Seriously?"
"Sure," she shrugs. She spares a glance towards her nightstand where a copy of the book lays in tatters from how often she has read it. "Ironic considering the book became so popular that it got a second movie deal a few years later."
"...you're telling me that I could have watched this instead of reading it after all?" he barks. But, well, his tone isn't so annoyed as it sounds impressed. Parker hears the taping of buttons on a remote, before he's yelling. "Jodie Foster! Seriously?"
She can't help it. Parker laughs. "It's not a bad movie, but the book is way better."
"I have to watch this now."
"I have a copy you can borrow if you don't want to rent it."
"It's three dollars. How poor are you, exactly?"
She scoffs, an eye roll that has become habit when talking to the prick even though he can't see it. Snootily, she tells him, "I just rolled my eyes at you, asshole. In case you were wondering."
A harrumph. "I do think I caught something from your bookstore. I've been sick all day. It's disgusting—it's making my mouth all dry and it practically ruined my breakfast. I couldn't even eat my avocado."
"First the cappuccino, and now the avocado. Is there anything you don't blame me for?"
The teasing got the exact reaction she wanted, and as Tom starts complaining on the other end of the line, Parker smothers a laugh into her penguin. "It was a flat white! And—"
"I'm going to hang up on you now," she sing-songed. "And fair warning: if you call me again before eight am, I'm going to post your phone number on Reddit. Gail can eat sh*t with her lawsuit."
"Don't you f*cking—"
Parker finds a lot more satisfaction in hanging up on Tom Ryder the second time, and when the phone screen stays dark, she plops it down onto her nightstand with an amused hum. It's past three am now, something she will be regretting come morning.
Then again, it seemed that Tom Ryder was all about regrets.
Right?
----
"Do you think I'm cool?" Parker ponders two days later, a glance tossed to her brother as she idly tries on a pair of sunglasses that are in the shape of trout. They're overpriced, but she's also incredibly bored, and about five minutes away from throwing a toddler-style meltdown in the middle of the bait and tackle shop.
"Of course you're cool," he says as he models a rash guard that he's been trying on for the last half hour. He twists in the mirror, left and right, before giving himself two thumbs up. There's something dangerous about the way he grins at her. "You have me for a brother, after all. Coolest kid on the block. Always have been, always will be."
"Right. Didn't they call you sh*tpants in high school?"
A passing employee coughs into their hand to hide their laugh, and Colt turns a bright red.
"She's totally joking. They didn't call me that, my nickname was something totally different," he calls after the retreating sales associate, always attempting to save face but never quite succeeding. A moment later and he's glaring at his sister. "That was one time, and it was an accident. The potato salad was—"
"Bad," Parker finishes for him with an eyeroll. "Yeah, I know. I've heard the story."
"Then why do you insist on bringing it back up all the time?" he hissed.
There isn't much activity in the oceanfront store beside the pair wandering from aisle to aisle. It's a small shack that they've frequented for years. Colt pretends to be good friends with the owner, and Parker never minds because there's a great lemonade stand right down the block. It's usually the first stop of the day when they decide to hang out on the beach. Just a place to buy ice and snacks before moving on to better things.
Which is good considering there being little to no airflow when sitting inside, and the radio seems to be on a constant loop of Justin Bieber in his pre-puberty phase. It's not so good, however, when they spend more than five minutes inside.
Today, it seems to be the first and final stop given how long they've been there. She feels her bones getting weary from all the pandering her brother has done, and she's starting to suspect that his reasons for picking her up that morning weren't as innocent as he initially claimed.
Deprived of breathable air and sleep, Parker isn't all too enthused when she props the kiosk sunglasses onto her head with a pleading look towards her brother. "Because I'm bored!" she whined, in a way that was far too little-sisterly like for someone her age. Decidedly though she doesn't care when he makes no move to leave. "I thought we were just going to buy some sunscreen before heading towards the point. That's what you said, anyway."
"We are!" he says, arms thrown wide in exasperation. Parker doesn't buy that for a second, however, and her brother folds under her stare. "Just... in a minute. I need a new rash guard. Maybe some new board shorts."
"You don't even surf."
"I... do," he argues, his head bobbing up and down as if trying to convince himself of such a bold statement. "It's just been a couple of—"
"Decades?"
"Years," he corrects her with a glare. "It's like riding a bike. You know. Probably."
"Just with water and waves and the possibility of drowning or death by shark."
"You're not helping."
She shrugs. "I never said I was here to help."
Colt's response is a melodramatic pout, pausing in his nervous shifting to wave a hand in her general direction. "Well, this would be a lot quicker if you just helped."
He punctuates the statement by performing a full spin for her, hands stuck out before realizing that's awkward. To fix that, he props them even more awkwardly on his hips, but it only makes him look like he's a Ken doll pretending to be a real person.
Parker elects to keep that to herself sensing his anxiety was getting dangerously close to his own toddler-style meltdown.
"What do you think of this? Cool? Not cool?" he continues on muttering, head bobbing in every direction as he smooths the material down over his puffed-up chest. It deflates just as quickly as he turns back to her to ask, "pink's cool, right? I'm going for a laidback look, you know. But not too laidback. Somewhere right in the middle."
Parker returns the sunglasses to the rotating stand before plopping onto a stack of buckets. He seems awfully concerned with this particular task all of the sudden, despite spending the last three years avoiding the idea altogether. Every time he was offered a chance to get back out on the water by one of his stunt buddies, he miraculously came up with an excuse not to.
It all feels weird. And when her brother got weird, there was usually a girl involved.
Ah.
"You told Jody you still surf, huh?" she puts two and two together.
His peaco*cking in the mirror stopped entirely. A wince. Then a smile. Then a wince again in a ball of pent-up nerves. "That's... maybe one of the—she doesn't—you don't have to hang around here while I try these on. Don't you have something better to be doing?"
"If I had literally anything better to be doing, I would be doing it."
"Okay, ouch."
Parker rolled her eyes at her brother's whining. But really, she didn't have anything better to be doing at the moment than hanging around while her brother tried to impress a girl.
Not to mention she liked this girl.
Sighing, she decided to throw him a bone. Because, what else would she be doing? Parker peered at the rack behind him for a moment before pointing to the top. "Try the blue one instead."
Colt glanced down at his chest with a frown. "But... Jody likes pink."
"Yes, but blue will match your eyes better. Make you look tanner."
"And make me harder to see if I start drowning," he huffed. But, after a moment of consideration, stripped off the pink rash guard to pull on the blue one. Always a f*cking argument with him, she thought with a bemused eyeroll. Especially when a moment later, "oh, this one does look better..."
She laughed as he spun in the mirror, attempting to get a three-sixty perspective of the potential garment. Only for the moment to be interrupted by a buzzing in her back pocket.
You gotta get up, gotta get out, gotta get gone before...
Her phone's ringtone broke through her relative boredom, and as Colt ran a hand through his hair and squared his shoulders in the mirror, she plucked the device out of her back pocket.
"You really got to change that ringtone," he said half-heartedly.
Parker stuck her tongue out at him and swiveled on her bucket, so she now had a view of the empty beach outside. It wasn't even that early—nine in the morning—but this particular spot was far enough removed from LA that people didn't tend to populate it unless it was a holiday weekend.
Phone pressed to her ear, she answered with a casual, "hello?"
"Was it not possible for you to give me a book from this century to read?"
A smile teased her face, and Parker returned her attention to the sunglass rack at her side just for something to do. Testing on an oversized pair of cat-eye sunglasses, she asked, "who is this?"
"Jesus, just save my f*cking contact in your phone, already."
"Why would I do that when you could just stop calling me to talk about books?" she mused, stifling a laugh when there was a load of huffing and cursing from the other end of the line. He deserved it, though. Especially after ruining her sleep the other night and practically giving her a heart attack. "There are reddit forums for that exact purpose, you know. Maybe you could ask the nerds what they think. Go right to the source."
"You're such an asshole."
"Mhm. Takes one to know one, right?"
"Earthlight isn't a movie, is it?" he barreled on. She could tell from his tone that he was annoyed, and selfishly, Parker hoped that she was ruining his morning coffee and avocado toast. "It'd be a short movie."
"No, not a movie. Could be, I guess. You feel like self-funding?"
"You're hilarious," he deadpanned, and through the phone line she could hear the distant whir of a coffee grinder working. Knowing Tom, the thing probably cost more than her car. "Maybe you should quit your little bookstore and go into stand-up comedy. Probably make more money doing that. Granted, you'd have to sacrifice your dignity, but you don't have much to start with, do you?"
Parker tutted, but the overwhelming failure of her bookstore came back to mind full force at the comment, and so rather than keep up the joke, she moved the conversation on. "So, you liked it?"
"Well don't go sounding too smug about it," he chastised. "I liked it better, but still not much. They're both so outdated."
"Too much science for you?"
"This author really f*cking loves the technical bullsh*t just as much as the last one. Pricks, all of them."
"Arthur C. Clarke is a prick?" she snorted. That was definitely a viewpoint she had never heard before. Leave it to Tom to dislike one of the best sci-fi writes in history because he spent too much time writing, well, sci-fi. "That's a hot take. He cowrote 2001 you know."
"A Space Odyssey?" She hummed. There was rattling and banging noises—the image of a hungover Tom stumbling around his kitchen came to mind—before the sound of a milk frother cut across the line. She jerked her phone away from her ear with a wince. Muffled, his voice returned. "Alright, that's not a bad movie. I'll give him that."
"It's only one of the highest-rated films of the genre," she retorted dryly.
More banging continued on the phone and as Parker tried not to let him blow out her eardrum, a hissing sound of its own came from her end of the line. She glanced up at the airshaft above her warily, but, if the sweat pooling on her back was anything to go by, it wasn't working. She glanced around in search of the noise before a rubber pool toy bounced off of the back of her head.
"Hey," the hiss returned. Pool toy in hand, she turned to find her brother waving a hand at her. The blue rash guard had been replaced with a yellow one. Worse still, he was now wearing a matching bucket hat. He gestured to himself as if he hadn't just assaulted her with a whale shaped toy. "What about this?"
She covered the phone speaker with her hand. "What happened to the blue?"
"This one is on sale!"
"Jesus, Colt. No girl has ever been impressed by that logic."
"I—" he started, then paused, and frowned at his sister like she had just burst his bubble. She might have felt bad if she hadn't been brushing off his puppy-dog eyes for the entirety of her life. The lip wobble was a new touch, though. "...is that a no to the bucket hat too?"
Parker responded by chucking the toy back at him. It bounced off his chest with a squeak.
"Yeah, alright..." he muttered, shoulders drooping, as he snatched the hat off of his head. It left his hair sticking up in tufts.
She kept that to herself.
"—are you even listening to me right now?" Tom's voice crackled back to life. If the incredulous lilt of his voice was anything to go by, he was not used to being sidelined for other people nor did he like it. "Who the hell are you talking to?"
"There was a bucket hat situation I had to deal with."
"...are you with Colt right now?"
She laughed. First, at the fact that Tom Ryder equated a bucket hat with her brother. Second because he sounded so disgusted by the fact that she would willingly spend her Sunday morning's helping her brother shop for bucket hats.
"You mean my brother?" she corrected.
"Did you tell him that I'm auditioning for a sci-fi roll? What does he think about it?"
"Why the hell would I tell him I'm talking to you?" she asked, echoing his sentiments from their last phone call. Parker was only teasing though, while she was pretty sure Tom had meant to be mean. Regardless, she moved on as she stood from the bucket to stretch out the kinks in her legs. "A bucket hat is a bad idea, right?"
"Is this seriously more important than what I want to talk about?"
"This may come as a surprise to you, but my world doesn't revolve around things that you want to talk about," she explained exasperatedly. Not necessarily because of what he said, but because she was fairly confident that he actually believed those sentiments. Worse still, she bet no one had ever told him that before. "Particularly not at two in the morning—thanks for that by the way. My roommate is pissed at me for waking her up."
A pause. Then, "you still have a roommate? How old are you?"
"I was serious about posting your phone number online you know," she threatened idly.
Colt disappeared into the changing booth, and Parker slowly started perusing the now abandoned hat rack. Despite her disapproval, she was bored. Plus, it actually had a fairly impressive selection.
Plopping an oversized sunhat atop her head, she ignored his insult to press on more important matters. "But seriously. Bucket hats. They're out of style, right?"
"Bucket hats have never been in style."
"Fashion is all made up anyway."
"That's just what poor people say who can't afford actual fashion."
She tutted, scrunching her nose up. Derisively, she asked, "did Gail tell you that?"
"Alright, that's it. I'm hanging up."
"It was a joke—!"
Joke or not, the dial tone was the only response that she got from Tom. She stared at the phone in her hand for a moment before huffing.
So that's what that feels like, she thought.
Something bright and ugly popped into her line of vision, and Parker glanced in the mirror to find her brother sporting a cheetah print body suit paired with a trucker hat that said Wine Made Me Do It in big, cursive lettering.
"Now, not to step on any middle-aged ladies' toes, but this is fashion," he clapped his hands with a goofy grin on his face. He gestured to the hat with a crooked thumb. "Get it? Two dollars!"
Parker laughed; couldn't not even if she wanted to.
Her brother was so innocent and idiotic and awful that while she once used to be embarrassed in public by him, now she just appreciated the fact that he was, always, unashamedly himself.
"Here, wait," she poked her tongue out of the side of her mouth while angling her camera at him. "Say cheese."
"Asiago," he cooed, making a Blue Steel type face that looked ridiculous when paired with his clothes.
The picture was even better, and Parker felt tears gathering in her eyes as they giggled. The employee from earlier shot them an annoyed look, but he was promptly ignored. If she didn't care about Tom Ryder's opinion, she certainly didn't care about his.
"That was good, right?"
"Oh, definitely. Jody won't know what hit her," she teased. Colt nodded, looking all too smug with himself, despite the fact that she was joking.
This smug version of himself reminded her of someone else that he looked a whole lot like.
An idea struck Parker, and as Colt started putting back the clothes where he found them, she quickly saved Tom's number in her phone before attaching the picture to the contact. Parker hesitated when she saw his name typed out.
Asshole, she typed in big letters. It was funny for half a second, though, before she realized it didn't quite feel right.
She deleted his name. Thought about it. Then replaced it with nothing more than a simple puking face emoji.
"Are you getting that?" Colt asked, drawing her from her reverie, and when she glanced up, she remembered that she was still wearing the ridiculous sunhat. "Because, you know... I'm not so sure that's something a cool person would wear."
Parker shoved her brother towards the cash register with a laugh.
They left the store with a blue rash guard, a pair of sunglasses, and matching bucket hats.
Twenty minutes later they realized they had forgotten to get sunscreen.
---
Paker had heard a lot of stupid and surprising things in her life; things that were so shockingly idiotic that she often wondered if they had been spoken as a joke. Most of the things on that list were quoted from her brother; a man she loved, but that didn't entirely think before he spoke.
When they were kids, he had argued that fish didn't need oxygen to survive. That's why they live under water, dummy, he had said with far too much confidence that she, younger and far less educated, could only blink at him. Then there was the time in his twenties that Colt had brought up the topic of furries at the dinner table in front of their grandparents. They're not, like, really having sex... are they? he had asked while trying to figure out what costume part would go where if they did do the dirty. And of course, there was the infamous baking soda as a cure all for wounds debate, but she tried to block out the sound of his skin literally sizzling as he screamed.
Tom, in the short time that she had known him, had also said some pretty shocking things that wound up on the list. He was, after all, an unapologetic asshole/idiot that didn't care if the world was flat or round so long as it revolved around him.
But out of shocking thing she had ever heard, it was fifteen-year-old California born and bred girl that topped the list.
"I want a job," Melissa proclaimed.
Parker's pen scratched an ugly line across her poor excuse of an accounting notebook as she glanced up wildly, big eyes blinking slow and dumb, as static hummed in between her ears.
"...what?"
"I want to apply for a job," she reiterated.
The bookstore was empty save for a pair of retirees that were slowly perusing her small selection of bird watching books. An oversized fly buzzed overhead, whizzing an uneven path between the two, as an irritable car stuck in traffic laid on the horn outside.
"Like—like here?" Parker asked. There was nothing fun or young or hip about her store. Just dusty bookshelves, a musty smell she could not get rid of no matter how many Bath and Body Works' scent infusers she plugged into the corner, and a ratty reading chair that had a Melissa-sized depression in the middle. She arched a brow. "You want to work... here. In my bookstore."
Melissa rolled her eyes, shrugging. Duh, the gesture said.
"Yeah, sure, obviously," Parker hummed, despite the fact that there was nothing yeah, sure, or obvious about the current conversation. Specifically given that Melissa, on more than occasion, had complained that her store was boring. "Just... why?"
"I need money."
"Suuuuure," she drew out the syllable, wooden stool creaking as she shifted in her seat behind the register. "But wouldn't you prefer to work somewhere a little more, er, fun?"
"This place is plenty fun."
The fly from earlier buzzed between them before smacking into the windowpane. It spiraled to the floor with a depressing zzzz.
Parker raised a second brow.
Melissa, in response, threw her hands up with a huff. "Okay, so, maybe I've been rejected from Jamba Juice and Target already. Which is so, totally crazy."
"That is crazy because I thought Jamba Juice went out of business—"
"And I can get my driver's permit in three months, and I want to get my license as soon as possible. But there's no way that I'm going to have Mom drive me everywhere, so I need to get a car. And to get a car I need to be able to afford a car—which, like, the economy is awful right now if you didn't know—so I need a job. Mom and Dad said they'll match whatever money I can put towards it. And as of today, that is a fat zero."
Woes of teenage girls, Parker thought.
"That's nice of them," she said instead. Not that she envied a teenager in the twenty-first century, but for her sixteenth birthday she had been given a bike. Not even a new one. It had been Colt's old one that he outgrew, and it still had flame stickers and duck tape wrapped all around it. "But, seriously, there has to be at least one other place a kid your age would want to work."
Melissa, having been slowly circling around the center of the room, paused in her ambling to cast Parker a suspicious look. "Do you not want me to work here or something?"
"No, of course I would want you to work here—"
"Great!"
"—but I have no money. Why do you think I'm the only employee here?"
Melissa considered that. "I just always assumed you were a little uptight and didn't like other people messing with your shelves."
"Uptight?" she cried. "Why does everyone keep calling me that?"
But Melissa didn't seem to notice that she had just quoted her celebrity crush, and so she instead turned her attention to the bookstore. She cast a critical eye over everything; though there was no smoke, Parker could smell the wheels turning between her ears, and slumped further onto the counter in preparation for what was to come.
"Don't get me wrong, Park, I love your store," she started. "But it could definitely use some updating."
"Updating?" she deadpanned.
"Some new paint for starters. I think it would be so cute if you painted it, um, maybe a soft blue. Then you could paint the bookshelves in different colors—pastels, definitely—and even some flowers here and there wouldn't hurt."
Parker made a face. Pastels weren't really her thing. "You want to paint the shelves?"
"It's just so brown."
"The natural color of wood, yes."
Melissa rolled her eyes, and with a waft of Vanilla perfume, trotted behind the front desk to examine the string of posters tacked onto the wall. Most of them were salvages from the dollar store, and while Parker thought they gave the store some character, Melissa clearly didn't agree. "These totally need to go too."
"Excuse me—"
"You could still keep them," she huffed half-heartedly. Clearly, she wasn't sold on the idea, but Parker would be damned if she pitched her Jane Austen posters based on the opinion of a teenager. "Just cut them down to a smaller size, put them in some picture frames—you can get them super cheap at the thrift store—and they'll make it look less packrat-like and more eclectic."
Parker glared, an argument on the tip of her tongue.
But, well, when she thought about it, it wasn't such a bad idea. And, well, maybe giving the store a new coat of paint wasn't either. It still looked like it had when she bought it from Larry. She had spent so much money on the loan payment, that she never considered really updating the place—mostly because, duh, she had no money—but paint and some dollar store frames weren't so expensive.
"How do you know all of this?" she asked with a quizzical look.
Melissa smiled, phone waved in hand as she tossed a plait of perfectly curled hair over her shoulder. "I spend a lot of time on Pinterest. What this place needs is a total cottage-core makeover."
"That sounds so made-up."
The girl frowned. "Well, duh. Everything is made up."
Parker opened her mouth, thought it through, and then promptly snapped her mouth shut. When did kids become so philosophical?
"So," said kid leaned onto the front counter with a conniving smile. She was a pretty girl with a clear complexion, bright white teeth beneath blue braces, and a deep closest of cute, but age-appropriate clothing. When she wiggled her eyebrows, Parker couldn't help but notice how well shaped they were. "Can I have a job?"
It was a tempting offer...
She glanced at the balancing worksheet she was doing, scores of numbers and ugly handwriting sprawled across her notebook, before taking a proper look at her empty storefront.
"I'll... have to think about it," she finally hedged.
Melissa's shoulders sank in disappointment.
"I don't have a ton of money right now," she explained, not at all liking how sad she looked. Colt's puppy dog expression had done nothing to prepare her for Melissa Abernathy's professional one. "So, I'll need to look things over first."
"But...?"
A sigh. "Are you free on Sundays?"
"I thought you were closed on Sundays?"
"I am," Parker nodded. "Which means it's about the only day of the week that I could try to paint this place. If you're serious about wanting a job and wanting to help, I'll consider bringing you in on the weekends to start helping me renovate."
A grin broke out on the girl's face, and she started bouncing on her toes. "Really?"
"Just temporarily," Parker threatened with her index finger. She wasn't sure how much was being heard and how much was going over the girl's head, however, and suddenly this was all feeling like a bad idea. "You can help me paint and decorate, and then I'll look at my finances."
"And you'll hire me?"
"If I can afford it, then... yes, we could work something out."
"Yes!"
"Just a few shifts a week!"
"That's perfect."
"And I'm not paying more than minimum wage."
"Totally fair. This rocks!"
"I said if—"
Melissa was already on her phone, texting and typing away as she bounced around. Parker felt a migraine start whirring between her temples, but—well—the kid was so excited that she couldn't feel too miserable about her decision. Tourist traffic was dying down as the season's changed, and she really needed to do something if she still wanted to be in business come the new year.
There was the sound of a camera clicking, and Melissa grinned from her corner of the room. "Oh my god, Park, you're so not going to regret this. We could totally do a beachy palette—blues and greens and, oh, orange—throw some rugs down, add some little details to the bottom of the shelves that you have to look for to see. Like easter egg, stuff. Oh, this is so exciting! I'm going to get Miranda and Abby to come, they have a great eye for detail."
She watched Melissa disappear down the MYSTERY aisle, all the while chatting to whoever she had already gotten on the phone.
Parker steepled her head between her hands with a sigh.
But, well, the enthusiasm was contagious, and after a moment she was laughing to herself. Maybe a fresh coat of paint would cheer her up.
Speaking of, how much did paint cost?
She was in the middle of a google search when her phone started to ring. The caller ID only showed an emoji and a picture of her brother modeling a ridiculous outfit, and she let out a childish snort in response.
A small smile in place, she answered. "Three books in a week. I have to say that I am a little impressed."
"Hm. I'm impressed you finally saved my contact. I was starting to think that basic technology was beyond your skill set."
"Hardy, har, har," she deadpanned, rolling her eyes. Melissa was somewhere in the back of store now, likely scaring off her only customers, and she decided to give up on her accounting for the day. Twisting in her seat so she was watching the street outside, she propped her elbow on her knee. "What did you think of Nemesis?"
He seemed hesitant to answer. "I... liked it."
Parker grinned. "Oh, you did, did you?"
A sound halfway between a groan and a whine. "You're f*cking infuriating, you know that?"
"For recommending you good books?"
"You don't have to be so smug about it."
"I'm not smug," she said smugly.
He scoffed, and Parker couldn't help but grin even further. The idea that Tom Ryder, pain in her ass, was admitting that he liked her recommendation was the metaphorical cherry on the top of her cake. Even better, she got to be smug to him about something.
Parker continued on to say, "I guess I'm just happy that I recommended something you like. Especially since I didn't think you liked anything other than looking in a mirror, hair gel, and hot lattes."
"For f*ck's sake, it was a flat white, and it was one time."
"Was it?" she teased, enjoying the conversation far more than she should be. This was the asshole that drove her brother insane every day at work, after all. But then again, what Colt didn't know, wouldn't hurt him. "You're just so memorable, I guess. Can't stop thinking about it."
"I would hope I'm memorable," he shot back, a whole lot of huffing and puffing from his side of the line that didn't fit the whole "perfect human being" sort of vibe he tried so desperately hard to give off. A dog barked in the distance. A second, more put-off and annoyed huff argued back. "Putain, calme-toi, Jean Claude."
Parker curled an eyebrow, impressed. "Was that French?"
"Impressed?" he said, taking a page out of her book to sound unnecessarily smug.
Catching a glimpse of her reflection in the window—a stupid smile in place, lip pulled between two teeth, eyes twinkling in a way that didn't suit the sleep-deprived bags beneath them—Parker straightened in her seat. "Hardly. It's an ugly language," she said, overcorrecting just a little by insulting what some considered to be the language of love. Not her best move. "Moreso wondering why you're imposing a foreign language on your dog. Seems cruel."
"He's French," Tom said, certainly rolling his eyes.
"Ooh, a French bulldog? I love those."
Something about the insinuation that Tom Ryder would own a bulldog managed to insult him, and she heard the scorn in his voice when he responded with a scathing, "I would never own a f*cking bulldog. They can't breathe and can't run thanks to decades of improper inbreeding. What use are they?"
"...they're cute?"
She heard him mutter something in French, before another bark—as if his dog, the French bastard, was agreeing with whatever complaint he made against her—and Parker was so elegantly reminded of what a pain in the ass he could be.
Chin in hand, she rolled her eyes. "You want to tell me about the book or not?"
There was noise from his side of the line; music in the background kicked up, the sound of dog food being slung into a metal bowl, a faucet running, before things quieted down a bit. "I thought the idea of moon colonization is a little overplayed, plus there's the whole bit about the telepathic organism that is so f*cking stupid," he said.
Despite his tone though, somehow Parker just knew that he was only complaining so he had something to complain about. She didn't wonder how she knew that.
"The book is from the eighties. I don't think moon colonization was overplayed when he wrote it," she protested anyway, sipping on her watered-down cold brew as she did so. "And the bit about the organism is fascinating to me. Everyone always writes about ET-style aliens, but I thought it was brilliant of Asimov to create something new."
"Brilliant is what I do. Not writing a short story about a family being separated in space," he grumbled. A moment later, "you're awfully hot on these writers. You've never called me brilliant before." Sore about it, obviously.
"That's not true. I think you're brilliantly self-centered and egotistical."
"Elle pense qu’elle est une comédienne, celle-ci," he muttered, much to her English-speaking chagrin. He switched back to say, "I'm the reason your brother has a career, you know. You could give me a little credit."
"Are you?" she mused, knowing it was a load of horsesh*t. Self-centered and egotistical horsesh*t that only further proved her point. "Interesting. I thought he introduced you to Gail."
A moment of silence. "He told you that?"
"We tell each other everything," she said. Though, that wasn't exactly true, was it? "Well, mostly everything, anyway."
"Hm. I could argue that's breaking our nondisclosure agreement. I could probably fire him for it, you know," he threatened, idly, though, and without any real heat to his words. There was the sound of water running in the background, and Parker really hoped that he was spontaneously washing some dishes and not talking to her while in the shower.
"Please. We both know that Colt is the best stunt-man out there. And you only work with the best, right?"
His lack of response proved that she was right; Colt was the best at his job, and he just so happened to look a whole lot like Tom Ryder. Not to mention that Tom's entire career was built around bragging how good he was, how talented the people he worked with were, how he didn't settle for anything but excellence. In fact, Parker was half-sure she could break Ryder's nose and the only backlash Colt would get would be a whole lot of bitching.
Granted, she might get arrested, but at least her brother would be relatively fine.
"When's the audition, anyway?" she asked just to be nosy.
"Tomorrow morning."
Parker raised a brow, idly watching as some idiot failed to parallel park out front. "Cutting it a little close, huh?"
"I'm Tom Ryder," he said, in his typical sense of self-importance that she loathed. Though, this time, Parker didn't loathe it as much as she found it amusing. "I know what I'm doing and don't need your f*cking opinion about it."
"Do you have that written on a motivational poster somewhere?"
"No," he said immediately. A little too quickly, in her opinion, and Parker narrowed her eyes with a sneaking suspicion that his house was just plastered with photos of himself. "Whatever. I have to go. Unlike you I don't just have all day to talk."
She scoffed incredulously, reminding him that, "you called me!"
Unsurprisingly, however, he didn't care. "I need to practice some more before the audition. Unless you want me to fail."
"I didn't think Tom Ryder could fail."
"Yeah, well," he hesitated for a moment, all that bravado he'd been displaying moments earlier gone in a flash. Parker wondered if he ever talked to anyone without it, and if he didn't, then what sort of friends he had in his life. He cleared his throat. "It's a big deal. Not just for me, but Colt too. This would be our biggest movie yet. Some extra practice doesn't hurt anyone."
Pride swelled in her chest; her brother had always impressed her with how he built his own career, moving to LA without knowing anyone and not leaving until he accomplished what he wanted. And while she was his biggest fan—number one, as she liked to joke—his success was his alone, not Tom's.
Still, without Tom it may have been less consistent, and without Colt, Tom may have been stuck doing rom coms. Parker kept that to herself.
Instead, she said, almost sensing that he needed to hear it, "yeah, well, I know you don't need it or anything, but—you know—good luck on the audition. I think you'd be really good in a sci-fi film. Despite what Gail seems to think, I might actually want to, er, see that movie. Pirated, of course. I don't go to the theaters for just any asshole."
The sound of water cut off, and for a long moment it was silent. Then, a scoff. "You're right," he said. "I don't need it."
Parker hummed, rolling her eyes, and biting back a smile at his blatant audacity. Gail was right about one thing; there was no one in this world quite like him. Maybe that was a good thing, too.
"Sure. You being Tom Ryder, and all. Guess you're a shoo-in, huh?"
"Well," he cleared his throat, "I do have the blonde hair and blue eyes."
A laugh bubbled up her throat, and she only managed to keep it to herself when the door jingled with the sound of new customers. A pair of teen girls strode inside with sweet, but nonplussed looks on their faces, and mindlessly Parker waved them towards the back where Melissa had disappeared to.
Watching them amble with her phone tucked against her shoulder, she asked, "did you just make a joke? Forget sci-fi, someone should call SNL right now and get you an audition with them."
"You're just as bad as Colt. You know that?"
"And now you're just handing out compliments," she teased. He laughed in response, wasn't quite quick enough to disguise it as a huff or a cough, and Parker bit her lip to keep from smugly grinning like a total idiot. "Just don't forget to send me that agent's fee when you get the part. I accept checks and DutchBros gift cards."
"Jesus Christ, you're pathetic."
"Am I? Because I just so happen to be popular enough to have the one and only Tom Ryder calling me three times in one week."
"Good-f*cking-bye, smartass."
The sound of a dial tone came a second later, and when Parker glanced at her screen she was greeted with her own reflection. She didn't mind that he hung up on her. If anything, she almost wished that he had more time to talk. If only because he seemed to be in a rare, friendly mood.
Not because she almost actually liked talking to him. Asshole-ish tendencies notwithstanding.
"What are you smiling about?"
Parker turned to find Melissa and her two friends staring warily at her across the counter. Clearing her throat, she set her phone aside with pink cheeks.
"Er, nothing."
She harrumphed. Teenagers had never seemed so intimidating before, and with a self-conscious smile, Parker smoothed her hair down as subtly as she could.
"Need something?"
"Do you have any John Green books?" one of the girls asked.
Parker nodded, shaking off the conversation to switch into work mode, and smiled a little more genuinely at them all as she stood. "Sure, loads. Come on, I'll show you," she waved them after her, and as they browsed, they filled her in on what paint colors they thought would look best.
Melissa, she mused two hours later with disheveled hair, sweat-tacked curls on her neck, a stack of notes in one hand, and a long email chain of Pinterest posts on her phone, could rule the world one day.
She just needed a car first.
