Adult-FanFiction.org : Celebrity

As the Seasons Grey	By : christinecornell Category: Celebrities - Misc > AU - Alternate Universe Views: 261 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: Started life as kinky Christmas-related short stories in 2022 and took on a life of its own shortly thereafter. 100 fiction, none of this is real, and I own nothing except for the character of Christine.

Chapter List
- 56
- 57
Once she had it unlocked, Christine had opened and closed the door with her hip, and all the while she never dropped the books or let the quivering feeling in her arms overcome her for any reason whatsoever. She finally did set them down on the table in the middle of the kitchen floor, to which she let out a low whistle and ran her fingers through her hair. At that point, it was nearly five o’clock in the evening, and the sun had gone down behind the rest of the New York skyline outside of the apartment.
There were some things that she needed to study for, and some things that she needed to merely play out for themselves. She needed to relax for a bit, at least tithe herself over given she had just gotten home from school on top of everything else. However, she left her coat on as she knew that there had to be something else, something more to this evening, and something that warranted another walk out of the building, especially since she didn’t really have a lot to eat on hand there at her apartment.
Christine hovered over the books on her table to which she rested a hand on the cover of the one closest to her, the Dylan Thomas poetry book.
And then she remembered just exactly what she wanted to do right then and that was go and pay Eric a visit. She adjusted the lapels on her green jacket, and then she traded her book bag for her purse, and her Chuck Taylors for her slender black boots with the slight heel underneath. Once she had locked the door, she turned her attention to the solid door across the hallway from her. It was strange hearing that wing of the hallway in utter silence, and it was even more strange to think that her father was in the hospital as well.
She hoped that Wendy would return to her as she doubled back down the hallway to the staircase.
The clouds hung low over the tops of the buildings in her cozy nook of Queens as she strode up the sidewalk to Eric’s apartment building. She rang the button for the buzzer.
“Yeah?” he replied.
“It’s Christine,” she called through the speaker.
“Oh, hey! I’ve been wondering about you. Come on up—”
He pressed the button to unlock the front door for her, and she made her way inside of that cozy front lobby. She remembered his apartment, and she rested a hand on the door panel and gently pushed it open. Eric strode on past the door wrapped in soft-looking black clothes and a glass of water in hand.
“There you are!” she exclaimed, and she threw her arms around Eric’s thick body.
“Yeah, I’m here,” he replied in a muffled voice. She held back and looked on into his round pale slightly disoriented face and those big brown eyes.
“Was there a reason why you weren’t at school today?” she asked him.
“I had to catch up on studying,” he explained with a shrug, and then he moved back and stroked her arm with those long but chubby fingers. “Is it still raining outside?”
“Nah, but there’s lots more coming,” she suggested, and she rested her purse on the back of his tiny couch. Indeed, she noticed the textbooks and the small binder of notes there on the cushion before her. “I was just over at Alex’s place again. He gave me a bunch of books—a couple of art ones and some literature, too. I’m thinking about taking drawing next term.”
“Ooh, that’d be fun!” he chirped. “I should take that with you. My counselor says I can take more art stuff for the winter.”
“By the way, did you finish at all?” she asked him.
“As a matter of fact, I did,” he declared as he rubbed his hands together. “I had my worries, but I managed it, though.”
“Excellent! That’s always a good feeling. It’s like a dead weight off your shoulders or getting an early birthday present.”
He then snapped his fingers.
“I have something for you, by the way,” he told her.
Christine stayed put there at the back of the couch as he doubled back to his bedroom off to her right. It only took a minute, but he returned with something smooth, silver, and rounded on both ends as well as a pale white circle the size of a ping-pong ball.
“Merry early Christmas,” he declared as he handed them to her.
“A pen and a sand dollar?”
“Not just any old pen. It’s one of those pens that the astronauts and the sailors use. You can write it on any surface. And I’ve had that sand dollar for a while now. It was just finding the right person to give it to.”
“Aw, that’s so sweet,” she said, and she put her arms around him again.
Eric’s stubby little body, wrapped up in that black crocheting with those pearly white buttons, and with that long smooth black hair down over his shoulders; something about him drew her closer to him right then, aside from the pen and the sand dollar. Though she had her feelings with Alex, she wondered if Eric would be willing to be a part of things as well, not as an alternative but as part of the whole situation.
She held back to look into that round face again, and especially when those smooth lips curled up into a quaint smile.
“So, what brings you to my humble home once again?” he asked her with a gesture to the room around him.
“I wanted to ask you if you just would like to hang out and do something with me,” she suggested as she tucked the pen and the sand dollar into the safety of her purse.
“You know, I was actually thinking about doing just that,” he said with a wag of his finger. “Like, putting my boots on and going to this cool little retro diner up in Sheepshead.”
“You’re not really dressed, though,” she pointed out.
“I’m dressed!” he insisted as he brushed off the front of his sweater with a chubby little hand.
“You look like you’re in your jammies, though,” she declared with a chuckle.
“This is actually a house outfit,” he corrected her. “But who says you can’t go out in your jammies? Especially when we’re in New York and literally anything can happen.”
“Absolutely true!” she declared. “But I still wanna do something with you, though. I don’t really have much to do, and especially since my dad’s kind of in the hospital right now.”
“Oh, man, I’m so sorry to hear that,” he said with a hand to his chest.
“As far as I know, he’s gonna be okay,” she assured him with a shrug of her shoulders, although she had yet to hear back from her mother about anything. “Plus, you’re done with studying for the time being.”
“Well, um… you wanna go out to eat to that place?” he offered her. “Go out and then go and visit your dad?”
“Yeah, we could do that,” she replied. “Barring visiting hours are still going.”
“Wait, what time is it?”
“Almost five-thirty,” she replied. “I think visiting hours go until seven and my mom still hasn’t called back and told me which hospital they’re at, either.”
Eric sighed through his nose and straightened out the bottom hem of his sweater.
“Well, shit,” he muttered. “Well, what do you think we should do? I don’t know any movies that I want to see.”
“Yeah, there’s nothing I want to see,” she confessed. “I don’t really wanna go out to eat and then do nothing after that.”
“I still do have to ask Alex a few questions about class, though,” Eric pointed out. “Except you said you just came from his place, right?”
“I did. We could do it again, though. I’m sure he’ll be happy to see the both of us.” She showed him a playful little smile, and he squinted his eyes at her.
“You just sayin’ that ‘cause you’ve got something special with him,” he teased her.
“Like you would know the full details of that,” she teased back.
“I feel like I do,” he said with a slight flutter of his eyelashes at her, much to her amusement.
“What’s the matter? You jelly of me and him?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll never tell,” he quipped.
“Unless…” She eyed his stout body, and he hunkered down with his shoulders hunched a bit.
“Unless what?” he asked in a small voice.
“Nothing. It’s—I don’t know if you would be a fan of it.”
He shrugged again, and that time he shook his head. “You can try me.”
“Do you know what polyamory is?”
He stopped.
“I kind of do,” he confessed with a tremble to his bottom lip.
“It’s just a suggestion,” she assured him. “I threw it out to Alex, and he seemed pretty excited by the idea.”
“Let’s just go to his place,” Eric stammered, and he scurried over to the bench next to the front door for his boots. Christine sighed at the idea that she would spook him like that, although she could see it in his eyes, and she could feel it as she lingered closer to his body. He swiped the keys from the bowl in the kitchen, and the two of them headed out to his car parked right outside of the apartment complex.
The sidewalks glistened wet with the new layer of freezing rain upon them, and the feeling of snow lingered in the air around them. The Nor’easter was upon them as they climbed into his car and drove on over to that tree-lined street over in Brooklyn.
When they passed the bus stop, a strange pit emerged in Christine’s stomach. Maybe it was the fact that the lamplight shone through the heavy white canvas curtain and she never saw Alex’s car anywhere on the street, especially as they parked three doors up from his front step.
She climbed out first and stood there on the curb for a second. Eric rounded the hood of the car and stood next to her.
“What’cha looking at?” he asked her.
“The front door,” she answered.
“The light’s on, though,” he pointed out.
“True…”
They walked on up to his front step; Eric lingered back so she could knock on the panel closest to her head.
Silence.
Christine shivered in her coat, and she knocked on the door again.
Still silence. No click of the lock behind the door. No sound of his footsteps on the hardwood floor in there.
It was a crazy idea, but Christine reached down for the doorknob and turned it. She peered over her shoulder back at him and the way that he hunched his shoulders like that of a penguin.
“Door’s unlocked,” she noted in a low voice. He raised an eyebrow at that, and Christine nudged the door open.
The apartment was still warmly lit from before, as he had left the lamp next to the couch switched on. Nothing looked different from the last time before. But the silence was apparent: sometime between the moment that Christine had left there and the moment that she had opened that door, he had gone. And yet, as far as she knew, he had left it unlocked for a reason.
“Hello?” she called out. “Alex?”
“Check this out,” Eric pointed to the coffee table.
There was a small stack of papers on top of the table as well as something that looked like a box for an engagement ring. Christine’s heart sank at the sight of it.
And yet, something about it felt incredibly fishy. As far as she knew, Alex had just gone out and was going to be right back, but he always at least locked his front door. Christine turned back to Eric and the quizzical look on his face as he examined the papers strewn across the table.
“Eric, take your boots off,” she advised him.
“Take my boots off?”
“Yeah.”
He sat down on the couch and nudged his boots off his stubby feet; Christine followed suit, and she picked up both pairs and brought them to the bathroom, right in the shower. She returned to the front room where Eric had taken his seat on the edge of the couch cushions.
“Hey, Chris, d’you bring that pen I gave you?” he asked her as she rounded the coffee table to the couch.
“Yeah, it’s in my purse,” she answered, and she picked her purse from the arm of the couch, and she took out that steely silvery pen. “What do you need it for?”
“Leave a note for Alex,” he explained as he showed her a blank sheet of paper from the bottom of the stack. “I’ll tell him that I swung by with you because we had some questions about school.” He held the tip of the pen over the paper and hesitated. “Here, you have better handwriting than I do.”
Christine’s hand shook a bit as she wrote out the note for him.
“Just sign it ‘dash, Eric and Chris?’” she asked him.
“Yeah.”
As she wrote that down, Eric picked up another piece of paper, that one from the very top of the stack, and he frowned at what was written there.
“What’s that?” Christine asked as she set down the note on the coffee table as well as the pen.
“Read this and tell me what you think,” he stated in a low voice.
“‘He failed at raising sufficient money for the wedding,’” she read aloud, and she ran her tongue along her bottom lip as if she was anticipating a big argument. Eric lingered next to her with his eyebrows knitted at that.
“‘He failed’—she makes it sound like Alex is in the wrong for having a job and working his tail off,” Eric scoffed, and he shook his head and raised his eyebrows back up. “I… have no words for how utterly cruel that is.”
Christine glared at the papers again, that time with a sneer on her face.
“Why doesn’t she just call him a fucking idiot while she’s at it, Jesus Christ,” she muttered. “By the way, what even is all of this?”
“No idea. It all looks legal, I want to say. But I really honestly couldn’t tell you.”
Christine set the paper down on the coffee table next to her pen, to which he shook his head as he delved through the rest of the pile.
“Wow, no wonder why he loves being around us,” Eric remarked.
“It’s almost like… we’re his escape. I mean, never mind the whole thing with me for a second. He probably loves teaching and playing music because it gets him away from her.”
Christine thought about Alex’s nylon guitar, how he had it tucked away in the back of his closet as a safe haven. Suddenly, it made sense. It all made sense, especially with his desire to take Christine down to the Smithsonian on a field trip of sorts. She sat there on the edge of the couch cushion with one hand on that piece of paper.
Her penmanship, so pristine and so picture-perfect, and yet it only made her want to crush her even more.
Eric swallowed out of nerves.
“What are you thinking?” he asked her in a low voice.
Christine never said a word, but the sound of a car door right outside of the apartment caught her attention.
“Who’s here?” she wondered aloud in a low voice; something told her it wasn’t Alex, either. Eric then stood to his feet and walked over to the window for a peek out through the heavy white canvas curtains. He gasped and turned back to her in sheer terror.
“Oh, shit, we got company!” he decreed in a hushed voice. Christine picked up her purse, and she took Eric by the hand and she led him out of the main room of the apartment and into Alex’s bedroom.
“What do we do?” he demanded, worried.
“Get in the closet!” Christine declared, and she opened the door and slid inside first. Alex had finally cleaned out the floor of the closet and hung up some of his clothes on that heavy metallic rung over her head; Eric followed suit right next to her and her purse between the two of them. Lucky for them, their boots were tucked away in the bathroom, away from any prying eyes.
“Keep your feet tucked in and do not make a sound,” she whispered to him. Eric slid the door shut, and the two of them huddled down together against the back wall of the closet. He shivered and shook as if he was cold.
“Shhh…” She put her arms around him; through the shadows, she could see Eric close his eyes. She could feel his racing heartbeat through his shirt. She never moved, she didn’t breathe as Captain Howdy scoured the apartment right outside of that wicker door.
Her footsteps neared the bedroom.
Though it was dark, Christine could see her silhouette on the other side of the slits in the panel. Eric bowed his head a bit, and she closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see her out there. She could feel the light in there switch on and filter through the panel. Eric’s fingers slithered up her back; the soft fabric of his sweater complemented his body to where he felt like a little teddy bear for her.
The footsteps walked on to the door again, and the light switched off.
Eric lifted his head and Christine opened her eyes.p to behold the darkness around them.
The front door closed, and he let out a low whistle.
She let go of him and reached for the closet door next to them; she nudged it open and crawled out of the closet first. She held there as Eric crawled out of there as well with her purse, and then he slid the door closed behind him.
Careful not to make the wooden floorboards creak, she crept along the hallway back to the front room.
Everything was just as they left it, including the note that she had written for Alex, albeit it had moved towards the other corner of the table, which meant that Captain Howdy had moved it to read it herself. Christine also noticed the space pen that Eric had given her was gone from the coffee table. But he beat her to the punch by piping up first.
“Fucking hell, that was close,” he muttered, and he ran his fingers through his black hair.
“It was like hiding from a serial killer,” she added, and she let out a low whistle.
“What do you think we should do now?” he asked her.
“Let’s just pack it in and go,” she replied. “No use in staying here if he’s not here, anyway.”
He sighed through his nose and nodded his head at that.
“You know what’s really strange to me is Alex told me that he had a date with her tonight,” she recalled. “I wonder what she was even doing here, especially when Alex straight up told me he would never lie to me.”
“Would he lie to her, though?” Eric asked her, slightly puzzled.
“I reckon so…” And then it clicked for her right then. She nibbled on her bottom lip as she adjusted the strap on her purse. He picked up on it himself as he adjusted the lapels on his jacket.
“We should probably go,” he quipped.
“Yeah, we should,” she added as she slung her bag over her shoulder. “She could come back as far as you and I both know.” Christine headed on back towards the front room of the apartment when Eric clasped a hand to her shoulder.
“Wait! Our boots!”
“Oh, shit!” she exclaimed, and they hurried back to the bathroom and the shower. Christine handed him his boots when the front door opened again.
“What do we do?” he asked her in a hushed voice.
“Um… shit. You get back in the closet, I’ll hide out here.”
Eric took his boots and skidded back across the hallway to the closet. Christine never moved a muscle as she squatted against the low shelf with Alex’s soap there in the corner. She nestled down there in the shower, with the curtain acting as her sole protection. She kept her gaze fixed on the edge of the curtain, and she hoped that Captain Howdy wouldn’t peek in there.
She pursed her lips and paid attention to her own breathing. Not a sound emerged from the bathroom or from across the hall. She hoped that the darkness of the bathroom would aide her in protecting her.
That is until she heard the footsteps on the hardwood floor of the hallway.
Her knees ached from squatting down and hiding for so long, but Christine tried her best to keep the noise at the absolute minimum as she could do. She could smell something different from the hallway, something artificial, as if Captain Howdy had just eaten something sickly sweet before she came to the apartment. She glanced over at the bottle of soap next to her head. The thing that made Alex’s skin smell good and feel so soft to the touch: she lingered right next to it.
“Where are you, you snake…”
Christine believed that she had only imagined those words, but she wondered if they were real as Captain Howdy stood there in the doorway, a demon of Christine’s worst nightmares, ready to possess Alex and take him down to hell for merely living. He definitely lied to Captain Howdy about the date, especially if Christine hadn’t imagined those words. After what felt like an eternity, she bowed out of the bathroom and back into the hallway.
Christine heard her footsteps near Alex’s bedroom, and she hoped that Eric was keeping his composure in the closet.
Her footsteps then emerged from the bedroom and back down the hallway to the front room.
Once Christine heard the front door close, she parted her lips and let out a low whistle.
The closet door slid open and Eric let out a low grunt. Christine climbed out of the corner: though it was dark, she stood at the edge of the curtain and took a peek in the event of her being there.
When the coast was clear, she stepped out of the shower with her purse over her shoulder: she rested her boots, which were dry at that point, on the bathroom tiles and slipped her feet inside. She surfaced from the bathroom, and Eric did the same with his boots from across the hall.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” she told him with a tremble to her voice. He quickly nodded at her, and then the two of them darted back to the front door. The sidewalk outside was dark except for the amber streetlights which hung over the trees.
A few people walked by but none of them seemed to pay any attention to Christine and Eric. They headed out to the sidewalk and his car parked three doors up from there. The wind was cold and thick with the feeling of snow: the wet sidewalk only served as a prelude.
As Christine ducked into the front seat next to him, the fear faded out once she thought back to the papers on the coffee table. She buckled herself in and nestled her purse in between her legs: her heart pounded in her chest the more that she thought about it. Eric fired up the car, and she peered out the window to the sidewalk.
She hoped to see Captain Howdy out there, just to gather an idea as to what she looked like rather than going by Alex’s description of her. They pulled out of the space and headed down the block, past the trees, and then Eric hung a left turn.
The arrogance. The entitled attitude. The demand for money from Alex’s pocket but also demanding he stay home and be the perfect husband. It made her stomach turn at the mere thought of him being with her, given his sheer sweetness and his kindness and his humility. When she thought about it, she thought about his eyes and their soulfulness.
It made much more sense at that point as to why they seemed so emotional and why he ached so much, and yet he seemed so reticent to share his feelings. If anything, it made the whole situation with her seem so much worse than she had imagined. He couldn’t talk about it, and whatever the reasons that lingered behind it only made her stomach turn even more.
They reached the end of the block, to where the cemetery stood. Not a soul for blocks to be found, and as a result, the right opportunity to roll down the window in the face of those incoming blizzard winds.
“Shut the fuck up, you miserable little snob!” she yelped out, and then she rolled the window back up to keep the warmth and the dryness at the helm. Eric ran his fingers through his black hair once again.
“You should say that to her face,” he suggested as they continued on down the street. It was then Christine remembered they were headed for the diner up the street.
“Definitely plan on it,” she promised him.
They passed by the diner, which had been shrouded in darkness at that point. Of course! Just a breakfast place above everything else. And she knew that they were headed for the heart of Sheepshead Bay and the briny brackish smell of fish there. At least it didn’t reek like the shores near the banks of the East River.
“Also, did you hear her whisper while I was in the shower?” she piped up as they reached the next stoplight.
He shook his head. “No, what’d she say?”
“I could’ve sworn she called me a snake,” Christine recalled. “I don’t know if she actually genuinely said it or not but I heard it, though.”
“A snake?”
“A snake, yeah. Which tells me two things: either she knows about me or she’s doing a little too much snooping on Alex, because she specifically said ‘where are you, you snake’.”
“Yeah, she could’ve been saying that about Alex,” Eric noted. “I couldn’t tell you if she knows about you at all.”
They rolled through the cozy neighborhood that was the Sheepshead Bay portion of Brooklyn. Sprinkles of cold rain spread over the span of the windshield, but neither of them seemed fazed by it.
“A snake—what the hell even,” he said out of the blue.
“Yeah, it’s like—does she even realize that that’s the man whom she supposedly loves?” Christine chided. “Shit, I’ve loved him more the last couple of months than she has the entire time they’ve been together.”
“You should also tell her to get fucked, too,” he added as they reached the diner. “Just for that alone!”
“Tell her to shut up and then get fucked,” she said with a chuckle.
“Exactly!”
Eric tugged on the parking lever and then, after he switched off the engine, he rested his hands on the rim of the steering wheel. They unbuckled their seatbelts at the same time, and they climbed out to the rain which drifted down from the black sky overhead. It was only a few degrees away from that thick snow that never failed to blanket the city in a field of pure white in the mere days before Thanksgiving Day. Eric bowed his head and scurried up towards the front hood of the car; Christine joined him and he put his arm around her as if to protect her as well.
They ducked into the warm, dry, brightly lit diner and took to the nearest booth closest to the window. There was a jukebox tucked in the far corner of the room, right near the big party tables.
He once again ran his hand over the crown of his head.
“Your hair is fine, Eric,” she assured him with another chuckle.
“Oh, yeah. It’s just—kinda out of habit at this point.”
The waitress strolled on over to them, to which they both asked for cups of coffee.
“Couple of college kids,” he quipped once they were alone again, and she snickered at that.
“I really, really hope that he doesn’t notice that we were there,” he confessed.
“Doubt he will,” she said.
“Why is that?”
She smacked her lips and tapped her fingers on the table. “I left the space and sea pen there,” she said in a low voice. “Right on the coffee table. Worse, I don’t remember seeing it when we came out of hiding initially.”
Eric gaped at her.
“You’re shitting me,” he said, and she shook her head.
“So, she treats Alex like complete trash, like drags him around and makes him feel incredibly worthless and useless, and calls him a snake while she’s at it, and she apparently takes whatever she damn well pleases, too,” he remarked in a single breath, and then he shook his head as if he was disappointed. “Captain Howdy, indeed.”
“I was kind of hoping that we’d see her on the sidewalk just to see her for ourselves,” Christine said as she drummed her fingers on the edge of the table some more; “but I’m also glad we didn’t.”
Eric held back in silence as well as the next song came onto the jukebox.
“I used to know a girl,
she had two pierced nipples and a black tattoo.
We’d drink that Mexican beer,
we’d live on Mexican food.
Yeah, I wish I could go back.
Yes, back in time.
Esther used to be the kind of girl that you would
never leave.
She’d do anything to give me what I need for my disease.
She’d do anything…”
- 56
- 57
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As the Seasons Grey