May 12: Tai/Shauna, Night Pt. 1

[kinetic_elaboration]

More of the thing. I sort of started feeling tired and zoning out so it just stops but I want to continue this scene later.

~540 words, 25 minutes

*

Tai takes the train down from New Haven right after her last final and it’s Shauna who picks her up from the station. For a while, after everyone else files off and gets into their cabs or their cars, she’s alone on the platform with her suitcase and her visible wisps of breath. It’s late and it’s dark and it’s cold. She lights a cigarette, holds it between her fingers in their fingerless gloves, and stands completely still except for the movements of her hands and her mouth, blowing out thicker clouds of whiter smoke.

She has an image in her mind of trying to shore up those huts with extra mud and branches, intent on it, in golden fall, with optimism rather than futility, like she’d forgotten what winter really felt like. Van standing next to her. Warning her that she was forgetting. But the image is just that: a flash, a few moments of knowing. And then Van is right: the brain protects itself, and just erases and erases, until only vague outlines of story are left. And that story sounds like it happened to somebody else.

 

The parking lot’s all but empty when Shauna finally pulls up, in her sensible car, which she swings to a halt splayed across two parking spaces. She doesn’t get out but Taissa hears the doors unlock from the inside, with a stiff sort of thwick, and she grinds out the butt of her cigarette and throws her suitcase in the back.

“Sorry I’m late,” Shauna says, when Tai climbs into the passenger seat.

“I’m sure traffic was terrible.”

She ignores the quip, asks, “You still want to stay at my place?” That was the plan, because the train would come in so late, and the Turners always go to bed so early.

“If the offer’s still open.” She claps her hands together. They’re still numb, and the thick, stuffy heat of the inside of the car hasn’t reached her fingers yet. “Cold as balls out there.”

Shauna turns in a wide circle out of the lot. Her jaw’s so tightly set, Tai can see the outline of it in profile, like she’s holding something bitter and angry in. Hard to see what she’s angry about. She wasn’t the one waiting on the platform in freezing weather for half an hour.

Back at her house, she finishes making up the bed in the guest room and talks about how Jeff is out of town. Tai doesn’t pretend to help. She just sits on the desk chair, slumped over and tired. She’s too aware that she and Shauna are the only two people in the house and that it feels like such a big space compared to her tiny apartment, her student life, her one step along in a journey—Shauna’s already here, throwing the pillows in their new pillowcases up to the top of the bed. 

“Do you ever thin about—” she asks suddenly and Tai looks up and finds Shauna staring at her. "About how, I don’t know, we used to be dangerous?”

“I don’t think that’s anything to be proud of,” she answers after a moment.

Shauna just rolls her eyes at her. “I know that’s a lie."