1.

characters, homecoming, Kellen reunites with Tansy a little awkwardly.

Tansy Rose Finn had eyes like a kaleidoscope, like Grandpa Callahan’s gold kaleidoscope with the stained-glass and rotating wheels. Her eyes were peridot and bright, crisp and tart like sucking a lime dipped in sugar. Little citrine bursts around the pupils like stars. 

She had this voice like a tepid bath on fevered skin, a laugh that rang loud as a bell, sweet and clear. When she sang, the universe stopped to listen. 

Hair all tangled and wild curls, mermaid waves, rosy auburn. She was pale as cream, too; it always surprised me that she loved being outdoors so much, with skin that fair. 

Tansy entranced, enchanted, enamored people just by existing. Things always seemed to go her way, she always found a means to her end whether she asked for it or not. Tansy never manipulated. She didn’t have to. 

I’d known her awhile, since we were barefoot and gap-toothed little kids. Still, she was a mystery to me. I never really knew why she wanted me around, when she could have had anyone else. I’ve always thought it was because I didn’t have that goo-goo eyed lovesick look on my face when she spoke to me the way everyone else did. 

I kept myself impassive and blank, a pristine sheet of paper ready to absorb the ink of her words and thoughts. She’d steal my sunglasses or my jacket and quirk one eyebrow at me, see how I reacted. Usually I’d shrug or give her my lopsided excuse for a smile. She liked that. 

People saw us as a pair, though, as a package deal. Tansy & Kellen, like a storybook duo or a children’s TV show, like some old time detective agency with PRIVATE EYE INC. on a frosted glass door. 

We shared cigarettes, secrets, wounds, fluids on a few occasions. 

I always imagined she’d ride off in some ’59 toothpaste green convertible with my sunglasses on and a pretty boy drifter in the passengers seat. 

What really happened though, I guess it fits too. 

Tansy always liked surprising people. 

1.

I came back to Harborstown for good after finishing at the University. I majored in Nothing Important and minored in Good Luck Finding a Job, getting my MBA in Wishful Thinking. 

I’d dated two girls in college, one who was artsy and wrote angst-ridden poetry, and one who was only looking to get engaged. Neither lasted long. 

Most of my nights were spent studying or wandering around the grounds, seldom did I attend the loud parties I heard so much about. 

Still, I felt so old and worldly on the greyhound bus back, but college does that to you. It makes you feel like you know about life, puffs you up on your own lofty idealist bullshit. Luckily, Harborstown was waiting with its harpoons and needles to puncture me and watch me deflate. 

When I stepped off the bus, bag over my shoulder, standing right there in a pale pink shift dress and motorcycle boots was none other than Tansy. She saw me and pushed her (my) aviators up onto her head and flashed me one of her megawatt grins. 

I mentally willed myself not to sprint to her. 

Still, I couldn’t help but squeeze her until she squealed and spin her around

“Long time no see, McAllister. Nice hair,” she said, ruffling the mop of sandy blonde that I desperately needed to trim. 

She looked the same as ever; maybe a little more feline, a few new fawn-colored freckles ghosting over her cheeks and nose. She still smelled like berries and the air after summer rain. 

“How did you know I was coming back today?” I resisted the urge to tuck a stray curl behind her ear. That was what her many adoring boyfriends were for. 

She shrugged and grinned again, arms still around my neck. My hands were still on her hips, and I realized how we probably looked to the other people; like sweethearts. 

I ached once, hard, knowing that we weren’t, then banished the thought from my mind. 

“So, we’d better get going. I have to show you my new place,” she glanced up at me again and added, “and we should probably do something about that hair. Come on, babe.” 

She wriggled out of my embrace and laced her fingers with mine before taking off in that graceful, fluid gait of hers. 

I had no choice but to smile and let her take me. 

Tansy’s new place, it turned out, was the formerly-abandoned cottage on the point overlooking the Pebble Strand beach. She’d somehow convinced the deceased owner’s son to sell it to her for just $5,000. It had two bedrooms, a full bath and one powder room, a living room and a kitchenette, and her favorite: the screened sunporch. I wondered vaguely how many of the local boys had helped out with the revamping of Finn Cottage (as Tansy was referring to it) and chuckled at the thought of them elbowing each other out of the way to be the first to fall at her feet. 

It had certainly come a long way; a fresh coat of pale robin’s egg blue paint for the clapboard, a beautiful white stain on the interior walls (except Tansy’s room, which had vintage peach flocked wallpaper) sanded and sealed floors, new tile in the bathrooms. Suddenly and viciously, like a dog biting into flesh, I thought she must have fucked them all to get all that stuff. 

I knew that she hadn’t, she always could get people to do things for her. It was like she had this ridiculous gift, a power of suggestion so strong that all she had to do was think in your direction and you’d be overcome with the urge to please her. 

She’d filled the house with paintings and knickknacks and bits she’d accumulated, some I hadn’t seen before but most that I had. She had a couch and an armchair in the living room, along with a medium-sized TV and a crammed-full bookshelf. There were magazines spread across the coffee table and under it, the kind for teenage girls with glossy lipstick ads and brightly colored quiz pages. 

The walk-in closet in her bedroom was stuffed to bursting with her clothes, as was the dresser. She’d left incense burning on her nightstand, and the room smelled like a cross between a campfire and an ancient Egyptian courtesan’s chambers. 

“Just throw your bag anywhere except in the far left corner. Bad for the chi of the room or whatever.” 

We’d stopped at my parents’ house for all of ten minutes before Tansy whisked me off again, singsonging that she had a room all ready for me at her place. My parents, of course, loved Tansy. My mom would go all soft and buttery when Tansy was sweet with me, like she was imagining little mini-Tansys and mini-Kellens scurrying around. My dad thought she was “sharp as a tack” and that she was “a damn sight better” than the other girls from Harborstown I’d dated. 

It was just as well that I was staying with Tansy; my parents had turned my room into a sewing room for mom, a dedicated quilter. I’m sure they figured I’d move out after college anyway, or that I’d want some privacy. 

Like they’d ever been nosy to begin with. 

“So where exactly am I sleeping?” I grunted, heaving my duffel down on her full-sized bed. There were probably upwards of six pillows on that bed. 

“Don’t be a retard, Kell. You’re sleeping in here. I mean, unless you want the couch. . .”

I didn’t. 

“Fine, fine. You win this time, Finn.” sometimes, like then, my face just wanted to smile at her even if my brain didn’t. “Don’t be a bed-hog though, okay?” 

She rolled her eyes, lashes clumpy with the mascara she didn’t need, and halfheartedly shoved at my stomach. 

“You know that I will be,” she said as she breezed out of the room. “And while you’re at it, take a shower.” 

I emerged from the bathroom in a champaka-scented cloud of steam with damp hair dripping water onto the neck of my white undershirt. Tansy had changed out of the shift dress and into a ratty pair of cut-offs and my Bruce Springsteen shirt, and she was lying on her stomach rhythmically kicking her legs and leafing through TeenVogue. 

“Jeez, what were you doing in there? Like I even want to know,” she rolled over onto her back and sat up. 

It had been a little long in the shower; I’d suddenly felt like there was a layer of travel grime covering me and I needed it off. 

There was something intimate about being naked in a place where Tansy had been naked before, and it sent a little jolt through me when it occurred to me. 

“Come on, let’s get that hair sorted out.” 

She dragged a chair outside and draped my shoulders with a towel, snipping randomly with a shiny silver pair of scissors I didn’t recognize. Bits of my hair fluttered down onto my cheeks and lap, onto the grass around me. Tansy was breathing low and steady, hot puffs of her breath touched my neck every so often. 

It must have been sometime between 3 and 5, but I hadn’t checked a clock. The waves were gently crashing a ways off down at the beach, and there was a sweet breeze cutting the thick humid heat like a slice of wedding cake. I felt the tense emotional constipation that had afflicted me through four years of higher education dissipating rapidly. My shoulders sagged, relaxed.  

“Done.” Tansy declared, after much tousling and mussing. She held a plastic hand mirror in front of my face so I could admire her handiwork; somehow she’d turn my thick, unruly straight hair into an artfully disheveled bad boy coif. She pushed back a lock of hair from my forehead and sighed in a self-satisfied way. 

“I don’t know how you do it, Tans.” I said, which must have been the right thing because her eyes went soft for a minute and she swooped in to press her lips to my forehead. 

Sometimes I wondered if she realized how her touch affected me, but more often than not I figured she must. 

We laid around on her bed for a few hours after that, her asking me questions about college but then interrupting me with stories of her own. I didn’t mind; I could listen to her talk forever.

Our relationship had been less physical before I’d gone away to school. Maybe she’d missed me too. Probably got bored being openly adored by everyone; at least I knew how to tone it down.

“Put on those other jeans I saw in your bag, the faded ones with the rips? We’re going down to the beach at nine for Ryan’s bonfire kegger.” 

Ryan was Ryan Delaney, a former high school football star who graduated the year after us. His dad owned half of Harborstown, and made sure none of us forgot it. It suddenly made sense how Tansy had been able to afford to fix up and furnish the cottage; Ryan had been after her for years, but she’d never needed anything he’d had to offer. 

“Aw, come on. Delaney’s a spoiled pretty boy with a brain like a pea.” I shifted so her leg wouldn’t touch mine, but she lazily flung an arm over my chest. 

“Pretty boy? Look who’s talking. Don’t be like that, we’re not going because it’s his party. We’re going because it’s a party.” 

Tansy loved being at parties and also hated being at parties for the same reason: people. 

Sometimes she liked to just soak in the happy energy radiating in a crowded room; other times she was disgusted to even be in the same vicinity as any other members of the human race and would disappear into the woods or her bedroom. 

I tried not to let my heart quicken when she brushed her thumb across my cheek, when she hoisted herself on top of me and loomed, like some goddess statue. With the rest of the world, with other people, Tansy could be a little tart. She could be forgetful and callous, or intentionally hurtful. 

They didn’t get to see the silky-soft sweet thing she sometimes let me glimpse. She was like some exotic wild cat; beautiful and beguiling, purring on your lap and nuzzling you. The thing was, you couldn’t forget in your wonderment and surprise that she was dangerous and could change her mind at any moment. 

“What are you...?” I couldn’t finish, couldn’t make myself ask. Her thighs squeezed my torso gently and she brushed her mane of curls back over her shoulder. 

“I missed you, Kellen.” she breathed, burying her face in my neck and pressing her body against me. 

That knocked the wind out of me. 

If I’d been standing, my knees would have gone jelly. 

“You’re crazy. I’m the one who missed you.” I murmured against her hair, stroking her back, my calloused fingertips catching on the material of her shirt. 

Maybe she put the words to say on the tip of my tongue, maybe they were already there and she just coaxed them out. 

Regardless, I had said the right thing again and was rewarded. A deep, hungry kiss smack on the lips caught me completely off guard. Tansy bit my lip and giggled into my mouth when I bit hers back. I didn’t want to push too hard, afraid she would snap out of it as quickly as the mood had come. 

When we stopped, Tansy pulled back and sat up, still straddling me and wiping her mouth on her forearm. 

She looked like some feral wood nymph warrior princess. She wriggled experimentally on my groin.

“Whoa. Boner alert, Kellen.” She said matter-of-factly before erupting in a giggle-fit. I would have probably been mortified normally, but she wasn’t being mean. 

I rolled my eyes and wrinkled my nose at her, which only sent her into fresh peals of laughter. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! You look so cute right now, though, Kell. I’d probably have a boner right now if I had a dick.” a few more giggles, a little more sparse though. 

She said strange things like that sometimes. 

“Yeah, well, if you had a dick I would definitely not have a boner right now,” I tried to sound grumpy but it’s hard to be pissy when there’s a living breathing goddess in human form on top of you.

And when she’s your best friend. 

Tansy stuck out her tongue at me, quick as a lizard, and kissed me twice like punctuation marks before getting up to dig around in a dresser drawer. 

I felt myself putting my armor back on, mentally steeling myself against her while she was turned away.

If I got too candy-sweet with her, she’d be gone in a poof of purple smoke and glitter. 

“What do you think of this?” Tansy said, wriggling a black dress with white dots over her head. Fitted around her ribs, sweetheart neck, gently flared skirt. All she needed was a cherry on top. 

“Where’s your Pink Ladies jacket?” she grinned and poked her tongue out at me again. 

The night was balmy and firefly lit, zinging with energy. Teenagers and young adults I’d known forever milled about like ants on a dropped popsicle, holding red cups full of beer or whatever. 

I was fist bumped and hi-fived by guys I maybe once hung out with, or had been on the LAX team with. Girls threw their perfumed arms around me, squealing and breathing hot into my ear, pressing their chests to mine. 

The bonfire was huge, pieces of old furniture along with kindling and newspaper piled high, and music pulsed steadily below the buzzing conversation from some unseen stereo. I wandered aimlessly through, wondering when Tansy would reappear at my side, whispering that it was time to go. 

She’d fluttered away on the wings of two blonde girls, calling to me from over her shoulder that she’d find me later. 

Two hot little hands over my eyes snapped me out of my trance. 

“Guess who!” 

The slight whine in the otherwise silky voice brought back a slew of mildly uncomfortable memories all at once; the hands belonged to Maggie Silverman, my high school girlfriend. 

“Hmm. . .how many guesses do I get?” 

She squealed and withdrew her hands, smacking my shoulder too light to be anything but flirtatious. 

Maggie looked more or less the same, a little more cheekbone and chestnut hair a few inches longer. She dimpled at me like I was casting for the cover of Seventeen, her wide hazel eyes shining in the flickering light of the bonfire. 

“So Kellen, what have you been doing with yourself? How was college?” 

What she was actually asking was “Did you meet any girls at college? Are you single?”

I hoped I didn’t look too disinterested. 

“College was...it was fine. Real change of pace. Looks like I’m back here though for awhile, maybe I’ll substitute teach or something. But what about you? You look great.” 

The words felt so fake as I said them, I wondered if they actually smelled like bullshit. 

Maggie didn’t notice. 

“Oh, stop! I actually went to dental hygienists’ school, I work for Dr. Pappas now?” 

Oh yeah, and she was an up-talker. Everything sounded like a question. 

I nodded as she talked, straining to see Tansy talking a few meters away to Logan Kai, an uber-attractive half-Hawaiian with the most deadpan face I’d ever seen. He didn’t seem quite as deadpan talking to her, though. 

My fingers curled into fists, surprising me. 

She caught my eye and grinned for a second before returning her attention to Logan. 

“So then Kyle and I broke up, and now I’m living with Ashley Sorenson and Therese Jones? Where are you staying?”

I had no idea what she’d been talking about, but I felt a little shiver of pleasure from the roots of my hair to the tips of my feet when I answered

“Ah, well, I’m living with Tansy now.”

Maggie’s smile faltered a bit. 

“Isn’t her place a one-bedroom? Are you like, crashing on her couch or something?”

Hopeful. 

I bit the insides of my cheeks to keep from grinning like a retard. 

“Nah, the couch sucks. We’re sharing a room.” Like it wasn’t a big deal. 

It really wasn’t, we’d been friends for so long. 

Maggie’s eyebrows went way up, breathing got a little huffy. Her voice took on that whine a little less subtly. 

“Soooo you’re like, together? Figures,” she rolled her eyes and fiddled with imaginary lint on her dress. “I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner? All the boys in town are gonna be heartbroken, then they’re gonna want to like, kick your a*s?”

I shrugged and glanced out at the bloody red sun still lingering at the horizon, at the gentle waves rolling up onto the shore. 

When I turned back Maggie was walking away. I didn’t stop her. 

The night went on pretty much the same, being caught in the little eddies of chatter with different groups of people I’d never really liked. 

My best guy friend from high school, Trent Harper, rescued me from a group of oversexed 12th graders. 

“Man, what happened to you? It’s like you’re suddenly not a huge loser.” 

He always had a way with words. 

“I dunno, it’s f****n’ weird though. Maybe Tansy’s rubbing off on me.” 

That got a classic Trent-stoner-hack-laugh. 

“Yeah, maybe. I heard some s**t about Tansy rubbing off on you earlier, eh?” he boxed me in the stomach like we were bros. 

Tansy wouldn’t want me to be an a*s about us. 

Us.

Weird. 

“Don’t believe everything you hear, dude. I’m crashing with her for the summer, maybe longer.” I couldn’t help sighing exasperatedly “And you know it’s not that simple with me and Tansy.” 

One day in Harborstown and my grammar was already in the toilet. I’d tailspun back into the beach bum-townie vernacular I’d tried so hard to lose at college. D****t, I’d probably let the twangy drawl slip back into my speech too. 

Trent gave me a “yeah, sure” kind of look and took a long swig out of his red cup. 

He looked mostly the same, but older in that slight way that was really unsettling. His eyes had tired bags under them, and there were little lines forming around his mouth already. 

He was the same age as me, for chrissake. 

“Man, you and Tansy are ridiculous. She’s fucked everyone in this town but you, practically.” 

Don’t punch him. 

“Shut up,” I said with a half-laugh. Warning. 

He chortled like a stoned hyena again. 

“Nah, it’s true! And once she dumps them, they’re like obsessed with her. The last one was Ryan Delaney. Rumor is, she told him to take a hike when she heard you were coming back.” 

I knew that Tansy had to be doing something to keep the boys of Harborstown so enthralled, but hearing it out of Trent’s idiot mouth was making my blood boil. 

I understood that she needed their adoration in some way, and I was okay with that. 

Well, I was okay with it before she decided to mess with me.

“Whatever. She’s my best friend, dude. Don’t talk about her like she’s the town s**t, kay?” 

He threw his hands up with a look of mock surprise. 

“Whoa! Sorry! Lighten up, Kellen. She’s just a chick.” 

As I watched Trent Harper amble away towards the bigger crowd, I remembered why we hadn’t stayed good friends. 

He was kind of a d****e, and wanted me to be too. 

“Hey you,” came the breathy voice by my ear, and I smelled berries and summer rain. Tansy wrapped her arms around my waist from behind

“This has been...interesting. Talked to Maggie Silverman, she’s still as shallow as a puddle.” 

She laughed and jumped onto my back, wrapping her legs around my waist. I tried not to stagger too much even though she’d caught me off guard. 

“Let’s go home, Kell.” 

And I walked her back to the car like that, trying to absorb the stares and whispers that floated by as we left. 

Author's Note

Tell me what you think, be polite :)

Reviews

[MoriartyMesa]

This had a nice Jane Austin feel and a bit of another titled writer, but he was a Lord. I will keep reading it kept me very mindful and interested.

[Rhiannon]

thank you, slyfox :) I just posted a new chapter

[slyfox]

amazing!! more please :)