AnCatKatie
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
This was amazingly fun to write at the end, for some reason 
Well, actually, overall. I figured, it's chapter 10, let's make it interesting.
PG13 available by email or PM!
As for who you're probably wondering about, yes, he is who you think. And...that took a while
***
Despite the uplifting sweeping clouds in the blue expanse of sky above, the day was dark. Eve had fallen asleep on the porch, not in the house or in her own bed. She had a painful raw indent of brick against her legs, and grass in her hair. Ruth still hadn’t come home. A big ominous shadow filled Eve with nervous worry; she couldn’t appreciate the day around her. She stared out into the street, hoping with every hard heartbeat that Ruth would be back. Where the hell was she?
The porch was really, really uncomfortable to sit on for a long period of time alone, she thought. She thought longingly of inside but worry for Ruth squashed that quickly.
She fell asleep again, looking far for her sister. Warm fingers on the back of her neck woke her up. “Hey,” Larry said, tilting her head up to see her expression. He came and sat beside her. He looked tenser, more worried than Eve even, and the tight fist of worry for Ruth immediately transferred to worry for him. He wore what he had been wearing yesterday. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face roughened, his hair sticking up oddly. He looked like he would collapse into tears. She hugged him tightly and he breathed out.
“What is it, Lar?” she asked him. He closed his eyes for a moment; Eve cooled across him like water, soothing his mind. But the seeds of yesterday’s turmoil were still there.
“It’s not all about Ruth,” he said, probably guessing what she thought. “I love you, Eve. I’m just afraid for her. Do you want to know what happened last night?”
He didn’t wait for her to respond. “My mate, the singer, Bono—you probably haven’t met him, but he knows what Ruth looks like—he was in a bar yesterday and saw her and a fellow with her who didn’t much like the looks of him. Bono tried to talk to her and got into a huge fight. He said she looked troubled by something, but hadn’t had time to say much of anything. He assumed since I was spending so much time teaching her to drum that meant something else, and realized that apparently that was not the problem.”
He wiped his eyes with his knuckles, and looking very small, said “He came to find me this morning and explained what had happened and that he had no idea what was going on. He ended up yelling at me after telling me to be careful. I’m worried about Ruth, worried about staying in the band, worried that something will happen to you if something happened to her…it’s so much at once.”
He rested the side of his head against hers, man enough not to cry again, though his face was hot with the brief tears, slightly damp, and he trembled. He stilled with the contact. Even the presence of Eve reached through him and washed away the troubles. He sighed, and forgot as much as he could of what was wrong. He could figure everything out some other day.
“Eve,” Larry said, “let’s worry about Ruth later. Hopefully she can take care of herself. If not, we won’t be the ones able to find her. Can we forget, just for a little while?”
She nodded, her fingers gently falling over his, her lips pressing against his cheek light as butterfly wings. He caught her hand and her other hand and let them fall, his hands breathing warmth over and up her arms to her shoulders until they rested there, and he smiled, brushing her hair away from her face, leaning forward and kissing her, an expression enough of emotion that he could pass from her to him and expel his sadness away. Her hands rested on the side of his face and inadvertently pressed a little harder than she meant as the kiss deepened; he felt little sunspots. The air around them became deeper too around them, cool as her skin, thick with secrets.
He could feel her heartbeat strong against his chest, the pressure of her body, the lightness and the insistence, the dampness of her hair ghosting across his hands and his face. She looked at his eyes right there before hers, their vision becoming suns in the limited, dizzying sky.
“Eve,” Larry breathed, pulling her away and making a face. “Sorry.” He deliberately held his body away from hers, looking embarrassed, a flush coming across his cheeks, but he could not look away from her. Something in her eyes held him in thrall.
“Larry,” Eve said pointedly at him, “there’s nothing to be sorry about.”
“Well, ehm, I…” She realized his predicament and laughed. “Oh, Lar,” she said, falling closer to him. That was answer enough. The shadows of the trees and the hush of the wind fell across them and seemed to fall away, become meaningless. Larry’s heart raced. His skin charged with the feeling of Ruth, and it seemed his eyes opened in a different way: he closed his eyes, they were so close together, only the heat of lips and promises, and that closed distance between them held its own landscape, its own reality, electric with the weight of the change between them. He was blind, and she opened sight in sparks behind his eyelids, a sight of scent and feeling and the sharp deep sense of running water, her body slowly bringing deeper sight to his. He caught her arms and opened his eyes, the world around him nothing. Her heart had moved at the pace of his, and now slowed, waiting like her gateway eyes. She caught his hand and somehow helped him not to stumble over the porch steps. He wasn’t aware of walking through the front door of the silent house. His eyes were still blinded, saw only the brilliance of her eyes sparkling, and his body felt more deeply the shocks of sight. Their touching skin was like lightning, a heat haze and the cool eye of the storm at once. They fell into each other.
The sun had sunk a little in the sky, burning brilliantly over the edges of her body, her hand trailing over his face, her eyes smiling in wonderment at his, green depth sharpened with red where the sun hit them. He was staring at her in amazement, unable to move his arms from where they clutched around her, and kissed that thin opalescent skin between her shoulder and her collarbone, letting his head rest next to hers. They saw only the landscape of each others’ faces; the sky and the earth had disappeared, turned upside down and inside out and raced away, the world different. They spoke their lives softly, that collided in that space between their faces, and were lost for a long clear moment that hung in the middle of the day forgotten as it passed into night.
*
Ruth looked up, the passing light of a car from outside flickering over her face briefly, where a sort of sadness or deep hurt rested, and a confusion, a desire to understand what had changed so utterly.
“Last time I’m going to ever see this place again,” Aodan said softly; his words had not hardened with that barrier he had between his thoughts and the world. They were alone. The way things usually were did not apply. She felt a sudden deep sadness for him, he looking at the inside of his broken-down house like it was all that mattered and the world would be displaced when he was gone. His expression wavered, and he looked down, his eyes briefly fragile with sharp pain.
“I don’t know where I’m going to go,” he said, his voice strengthened a little. He was coming back to himself, wincing, rubbing a hand over his eyes. It wasn’t drink, it was loss of something he knew so well. It was drifting, displaced, the pain of that sudden unexpected change. His dad didn’t actually give a shit if he lived or died; why had he assumed he did? It had been obvious the last time he’d seen the man, when he actually spoke to Aodan seriously instead of yelling. That had been chilling and utterly final.
“Aodan,” his father had begun, and he had looked up despite himself, ignoring the fact that he’d slept outside last night to avoid his da, that Ruth was confused and it wasn’t her fault, that there was some man looking for her, and—“Isaac,” his da continued. In an unraised voice.
Shit. He was doing that full name thing—he meant what he was saying. Aodan glared at him, but listened. He gave a weary sigh, as if to say “what is it?”
“You’re not staying in this house any longer,” he said just as finally as if he had shouted.
Only fragments, what happened afterwards. He’d asked if he really meant that, was met only with a serious stare, pushed him and asked what the hell he meant, what the reason was. Oh, and the reasons were valid, though he didn’t remember what they had been. And now his father wasn’t in the house, briefly. Maybe he was calling the cops. Not like the cops would trust that man…but Aodan wasn’t sure.
“Find somewhere,” Ruth said, her eyes going hard to protect that sadness she felt for him. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”
Aodan gave a shark sigh and leaned forward, resting his head on his hands. He hadn’t been able to wash, or to change. His face was tight and strained, his clothes were faintly dirty. He looked at the edge of reason. Everything was slipping away. Well…there was Ruth. He’d find somewhere to go, something to do to support himself, and maybe she’d accept him. She was a light against the growing darkness of the world around him, revealing at the same time everything he couldn’t help, couldn’t change.
He wished he was some other man. That he belonged somewhere, and he didn’t live with the fear that someone would find him and assume all the wrong things, that his father was on the side of the law, that Ruth didn’t understand he was changing, or trying hard as he could. He wished he had at least somewhere he was rooted to, even being chased out of the house at least with a change of clothing or some purpose in the day, that he had some reason that Ruth connected with, some basic component of his being that she understood. He saw in his imagination, for a brief instant, a man who was not him, could not be him, who had had a better life, kneeling and offering this woman something he could not.
“Ruth,” he began, something slipping into his voice. She looked up, and briefly she saw. What it was, she was not sure but for some basic wordless part of herself. It was the boy who had escaped into her arms, the man who hid his life from the people around him, who was on the brink of falling down into despair she could not ease. She couldn’t solve his problems. She did—for a moment—understand him, felt a wild connection to him, as she had when he had inexplicably cried after lovemaking and not turned away but let her hold him in silence.
A connection that whispered and faded away with the realization that he could not go back and change himself, the way things were going. She was the answer to that, it seemed he thought, but she didn’t know if she could be. It was so much to have on her shoulders, so much she would have to face and admit. To look into his eyes and explain everything she thought to him, and wonder if he even knew what he was thinking, if he understood the ways their feeling differed.
She blinked, realizing her eyes had been briefly bright with that moment before tears. In that moment, there was possibility, before she remembered. In that moment, the imagined future could rest safely, but that man was not Aodan and that woman was not Ruth. It wasn’t possible.
She was deathly sure of what he would ask, and froze where she was, hopeful and fearful all at once.
I can’t, Aodan. I can’t.
Her heart was at some unsure place. But that man she had seen when he let his guard down, that was what made her have the sudden urge to try for him—and her response would have been:
Yes.
Because he would change. Because she loved part of him, the part he seemed to be losing.
That moment passed, though, and his eyes changed again, and he said, still softly despite himself, “let’s go.” He took her hand and left the home that was not a home.
Perhaps the only reason she stayed with him that day was he was broken beyond his own repair, and the man she had come to love was back again, the one who apologized, creating warmth in the freezing oppressive Dublin air.
“I’m sorry, Ruth. I didn’t mean what happened to happen last night. I thought for a moment…something completely unrelated, that that man was my father, in my eyes, and…it makes no sense, now that I realize it.” He caught her face in his hands, and that honest look for a moment gave her hope. “Ruth, if there was any of this you didn’t want, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done everything I did.” He looked at her shocked, open face. There was something in her eyes that seemed, just then, happy. Forgiving, perhaps. Like a dead man looks to life, he searched there, words falling away for a moment, and came back wondering.
“I love you, Ruth,” he said very quietly, voice still a little rough with the pain of this sudden change in his life. “I just hope that…everything that’s gone wrong will go to right again.”
She hoped as well. But she knew him too well, and part of her knew that Isaac would never really recover from everything that happened around when he met her.
That part of her, the part that had looked on shocked last night at his actions, and had known of worse than that, knew enough to in the back of her mind be afraid.
Well, actually, overall. I figured, it's chapter 10, let's make it interesting.PG13 available by email or PM!
As for who you're probably wondering about, yes, he is who you think. And...that took a while
***
1978
Despite the uplifting sweeping clouds in the blue expanse of sky above, the day was dark. Eve had fallen asleep on the porch, not in the house or in her own bed. She had a painful raw indent of brick against her legs, and grass in her hair. Ruth still hadn’t come home. A big ominous shadow filled Eve with nervous worry; she couldn’t appreciate the day around her. She stared out into the street, hoping with every hard heartbeat that Ruth would be back. Where the hell was she?
The porch was really, really uncomfortable to sit on for a long period of time alone, she thought. She thought longingly of inside but worry for Ruth squashed that quickly.
She fell asleep again, looking far for her sister. Warm fingers on the back of her neck woke her up. “Hey,” Larry said, tilting her head up to see her expression. He came and sat beside her. He looked tenser, more worried than Eve even, and the tight fist of worry for Ruth immediately transferred to worry for him. He wore what he had been wearing yesterday. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face roughened, his hair sticking up oddly. He looked like he would collapse into tears. She hugged him tightly and he breathed out.
“What is it, Lar?” she asked him. He closed his eyes for a moment; Eve cooled across him like water, soothing his mind. But the seeds of yesterday’s turmoil were still there.
“It’s not all about Ruth,” he said, probably guessing what she thought. “I love you, Eve. I’m just afraid for her. Do you want to know what happened last night?”
He didn’t wait for her to respond. “My mate, the singer, Bono—you probably haven’t met him, but he knows what Ruth looks like—he was in a bar yesterday and saw her and a fellow with her who didn’t much like the looks of him. Bono tried to talk to her and got into a huge fight. He said she looked troubled by something, but hadn’t had time to say much of anything. He assumed since I was spending so much time teaching her to drum that meant something else, and realized that apparently that was not the problem.”
He wiped his eyes with his knuckles, and looking very small, said “He came to find me this morning and explained what had happened and that he had no idea what was going on. He ended up yelling at me after telling me to be careful. I’m worried about Ruth, worried about staying in the band, worried that something will happen to you if something happened to her…it’s so much at once.”
He rested the side of his head against hers, man enough not to cry again, though his face was hot with the brief tears, slightly damp, and he trembled. He stilled with the contact. Even the presence of Eve reached through him and washed away the troubles. He sighed, and forgot as much as he could of what was wrong. He could figure everything out some other day.
“Eve,” Larry said, “let’s worry about Ruth later. Hopefully she can take care of herself. If not, we won’t be the ones able to find her. Can we forget, just for a little while?”
She nodded, her fingers gently falling over his, her lips pressing against his cheek light as butterfly wings. He caught her hand and her other hand and let them fall, his hands breathing warmth over and up her arms to her shoulders until they rested there, and he smiled, brushing her hair away from her face, leaning forward and kissing her, an expression enough of emotion that he could pass from her to him and expel his sadness away. Her hands rested on the side of his face and inadvertently pressed a little harder than she meant as the kiss deepened; he felt little sunspots. The air around them became deeper too around them, cool as her skin, thick with secrets.
He could feel her heartbeat strong against his chest, the pressure of her body, the lightness and the insistence, the dampness of her hair ghosting across his hands and his face. She looked at his eyes right there before hers, their vision becoming suns in the limited, dizzying sky.
“Eve,” Larry breathed, pulling her away and making a face. “Sorry.” He deliberately held his body away from hers, looking embarrassed, a flush coming across his cheeks, but he could not look away from her. Something in her eyes held him in thrall.
“Larry,” Eve said pointedly at him, “there’s nothing to be sorry about.”
“Well, ehm, I…” She realized his predicament and laughed. “Oh, Lar,” she said, falling closer to him. That was answer enough. The shadows of the trees and the hush of the wind fell across them and seemed to fall away, become meaningless. Larry’s heart raced. His skin charged with the feeling of Ruth, and it seemed his eyes opened in a different way: he closed his eyes, they were so close together, only the heat of lips and promises, and that closed distance between them held its own landscape, its own reality, electric with the weight of the change between them. He was blind, and she opened sight in sparks behind his eyelids, a sight of scent and feeling and the sharp deep sense of running water, her body slowly bringing deeper sight to his. He caught her arms and opened his eyes, the world around him nothing. Her heart had moved at the pace of his, and now slowed, waiting like her gateway eyes. She caught his hand and somehow helped him not to stumble over the porch steps. He wasn’t aware of walking through the front door of the silent house. His eyes were still blinded, saw only the brilliance of her eyes sparkling, and his body felt more deeply the shocks of sight. Their touching skin was like lightning, a heat haze and the cool eye of the storm at once. They fell into each other.
The sun had sunk a little in the sky, burning brilliantly over the edges of her body, her hand trailing over his face, her eyes smiling in wonderment at his, green depth sharpened with red where the sun hit them. He was staring at her in amazement, unable to move his arms from where they clutched around her, and kissed that thin opalescent skin between her shoulder and her collarbone, letting his head rest next to hers. They saw only the landscape of each others’ faces; the sky and the earth had disappeared, turned upside down and inside out and raced away, the world different. They spoke their lives softly, that collided in that space between their faces, and were lost for a long clear moment that hung in the middle of the day forgotten as it passed into night.
*
Ruth looked up, the passing light of a car from outside flickering over her face briefly, where a sort of sadness or deep hurt rested, and a confusion, a desire to understand what had changed so utterly.
“Last time I’m going to ever see this place again,” Aodan said softly; his words had not hardened with that barrier he had between his thoughts and the world. They were alone. The way things usually were did not apply. She felt a sudden deep sadness for him, he looking at the inside of his broken-down house like it was all that mattered and the world would be displaced when he was gone. His expression wavered, and he looked down, his eyes briefly fragile with sharp pain.
“I don’t know where I’m going to go,” he said, his voice strengthened a little. He was coming back to himself, wincing, rubbing a hand over his eyes. It wasn’t drink, it was loss of something he knew so well. It was drifting, displaced, the pain of that sudden unexpected change. His dad didn’t actually give a shit if he lived or died; why had he assumed he did? It had been obvious the last time he’d seen the man, when he actually spoke to Aodan seriously instead of yelling. That had been chilling and utterly final.
“Aodan,” his father had begun, and he had looked up despite himself, ignoring the fact that he’d slept outside last night to avoid his da, that Ruth was confused and it wasn’t her fault, that there was some man looking for her, and—“Isaac,” his da continued. In an unraised voice.
Shit. He was doing that full name thing—he meant what he was saying. Aodan glared at him, but listened. He gave a weary sigh, as if to say “what is it?”
“You’re not staying in this house any longer,” he said just as finally as if he had shouted.
Only fragments, what happened afterwards. He’d asked if he really meant that, was met only with a serious stare, pushed him and asked what the hell he meant, what the reason was. Oh, and the reasons were valid, though he didn’t remember what they had been. And now his father wasn’t in the house, briefly. Maybe he was calling the cops. Not like the cops would trust that man…but Aodan wasn’t sure.
“Find somewhere,” Ruth said, her eyes going hard to protect that sadness she felt for him. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”
Aodan gave a shark sigh and leaned forward, resting his head on his hands. He hadn’t been able to wash, or to change. His face was tight and strained, his clothes were faintly dirty. He looked at the edge of reason. Everything was slipping away. Well…there was Ruth. He’d find somewhere to go, something to do to support himself, and maybe she’d accept him. She was a light against the growing darkness of the world around him, revealing at the same time everything he couldn’t help, couldn’t change.
He wished he was some other man. That he belonged somewhere, and he didn’t live with the fear that someone would find him and assume all the wrong things, that his father was on the side of the law, that Ruth didn’t understand he was changing, or trying hard as he could. He wished he had at least somewhere he was rooted to, even being chased out of the house at least with a change of clothing or some purpose in the day, that he had some reason that Ruth connected with, some basic component of his being that she understood. He saw in his imagination, for a brief instant, a man who was not him, could not be him, who had had a better life, kneeling and offering this woman something he could not.
“Ruth,” he began, something slipping into his voice. She looked up, and briefly she saw. What it was, she was not sure but for some basic wordless part of herself. It was the boy who had escaped into her arms, the man who hid his life from the people around him, who was on the brink of falling down into despair she could not ease. She couldn’t solve his problems. She did—for a moment—understand him, felt a wild connection to him, as she had when he had inexplicably cried after lovemaking and not turned away but let her hold him in silence.
A connection that whispered and faded away with the realization that he could not go back and change himself, the way things were going. She was the answer to that, it seemed he thought, but she didn’t know if she could be. It was so much to have on her shoulders, so much she would have to face and admit. To look into his eyes and explain everything she thought to him, and wonder if he even knew what he was thinking, if he understood the ways their feeling differed.
She blinked, realizing her eyes had been briefly bright with that moment before tears. In that moment, there was possibility, before she remembered. In that moment, the imagined future could rest safely, but that man was not Aodan and that woman was not Ruth. It wasn’t possible.
She was deathly sure of what he would ask, and froze where she was, hopeful and fearful all at once.
I can’t, Aodan. I can’t.
Her heart was at some unsure place. But that man she had seen when he let his guard down, that was what made her have the sudden urge to try for him—and her response would have been:
Yes.
Because he would change. Because she loved part of him, the part he seemed to be losing.
That moment passed, though, and his eyes changed again, and he said, still softly despite himself, “let’s go.” He took her hand and left the home that was not a home.
Perhaps the only reason she stayed with him that day was he was broken beyond his own repair, and the man she had come to love was back again, the one who apologized, creating warmth in the freezing oppressive Dublin air.
“I’m sorry, Ruth. I didn’t mean what happened to happen last night. I thought for a moment…something completely unrelated, that that man was my father, in my eyes, and…it makes no sense, now that I realize it.” He caught her face in his hands, and that honest look for a moment gave her hope. “Ruth, if there was any of this you didn’t want, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done everything I did.” He looked at her shocked, open face. There was something in her eyes that seemed, just then, happy. Forgiving, perhaps. Like a dead man looks to life, he searched there, words falling away for a moment, and came back wondering.
“I love you, Ruth,” he said very quietly, voice still a little rough with the pain of this sudden change in his life. “I just hope that…everything that’s gone wrong will go to right again.”
She hoped as well. But she knew him too well, and part of her knew that Isaac would never really recover from everything that happened around when he met her.
That part of her, the part that had looked on shocked last night at his actions, and had known of worse than that, knew enough to in the back of her mind be afraid.
And Eve...
. 
They're a lot of fun to write!
