Title: The Calming Affect Part: 1 Author: Lovely Poet Email: Disclaimer: Not mine, don’t sue, I’m broke. Summary: A quiet night leads places that neither Maria nor
Michael expected Category: Michael/Maria Rating: PG-13
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Amy DeLuca was somehow sound asleep despite the hurricane of her
daughter tearing the kitchen apart. A Little Debbie chocolate
cupcake sat on the kitchen table with a single bite missing.
Halfway inside a cabinet, Maria DeLuca rummaged through the
multitude of spices and condiments muttering under her breath.
Packets of soy sauce, BBQ sauce and nearly every other imaginable
sauce from hundreds of take out orders puddled around her.
“Damn it! Damn, damn, damn!.” As she wiggled out of the cabinet
and slouched on the floor, she licked her lips trying to find any
lingering taste of Michael Guerin. “It has to be here somewhere.”
* * * * *
A few hours earlier:
The house was dark when Maria returned home from the Crashdown.
The strong scent of lavender that pervaded the residence told her
that her mother had already retired for the night. Closing the
door behind her, Maria leaned up against it for strength, her
mind replaying the events of the last half-hour repeatedly.
Michael had kissed her, not the kind of kiss that she was to.
There hadn’t been many boys, but their awkward fumbling in the
dark corners of school dances and the eraser room between classes
couldn’t even begin to compare to the confident, intoxicating
kiss that she could still feel.
“That was to calm you down.” She had walked away from him as
soon as he had said those words so that he wouldn’t be able to
see just how wrong he was. With the new taste of Tabasco,
Chocolate and something…distinctly Michael, hanging on her lips,
she had been anything but calm. Now, standing in the safe
confines of her own home, she was still not calm.
//Bed// she thought as she wandered toward her room. //if I can
just go to sleep, I can forget about the stupid kiss. He’s
watched way to many movies if he thinks that was the right way to
calm a girl down. //
In her cotton tank top and boxer shorts pajamas, she wandered
around her room aimlessly stopping in front of her mirror to
stare in disbelief at her lips. They didn’t appear “ravished,”
“bruised” or any of those other clichés that the romance novels
always used after the kiss from the dark, brooding hero. Of
course, that was probably a good thing. As it was, only her
slightly more pronounced than usual skittishness around Michael
and Max could have clued Liz in to the events of the night.
Luckily, or maybe unfortunately, Liz had been far too preoccupied
with her own concerns to notice Maria being jumpy. Exasperated
with her own obsession over the lack of physical proof that her
life was officially turning into a sci-fi soap opera, Maria
finally settled into bed.
Sleep proved impossible. Every time she closed her eyes her
brain betrayed her and projected the irresistible image of
Michael leaning down to capture her lips with his. As soon as
the picture was there, her fertile imagination filled in the rest
of the details easily. She could feel his hands firmly on her
hips holding him close to her, taste the tangy sweetness that was
partially a “sweet and spicy” side effect but mostly him.
“Why me?” She asked her ceiling. “Why couldn’t I just have had
a normal life in- in- Iowa! Nothing weird ever happens in Iowa.”
Creeping down the stairs in the middle of the night for
Chocolate was rare for Maria, usually her mother’s aromatherapy
kits handled the nerves, but this, this called for chocolate.
How infuriating it was then, when the normally satisfying snack
cake seemed desperate lacking in some way. Maria groaned
loudly when she realized what was missing.
* * * *
All the lights in the kitchen were on now. Every drawer, cabinet
and shelf had been thoroughly searched in vain for even a single
serving packet of Tabasco sauce. With a disappointed sigh Maria
pulled herself up off the kitchen floor and stared at the plain
cupcake. Even if she couldn’t recreate the taste that Michael
had placed on her lips, she could at least get a little emotional
comfort from a serious excess of chocolate. Opening the
refrigerator, she reached for the Hershey’s Chocolate sauce.
Thick Chocolate drenched in even more slid down her throat the
sticky sweetness, while still not the taste she had been
searching for, was enough to calm her raw nerves. In the harsh
fluorescent light of the kitchen, it would have been easy to
believe that the last few months of her life had been an
exceedingly strange dream from which she was finally free. Every
time she had almost convinced herself that none of it was real,
that life was still normal and nothing had changed, she suddenly
overwhelmingly needed to have the taste of Tabasco and chocolate
on her lips, to feel Michael’s chest under her hands.
* * * * *
The eerie glow of the half-dead streetlights made the night seem
even more threatening to Michael. There had been a strange car
parked near the trailer, too expensive to be unobtrusive. He had
seen it before its occupants had seen him and high tailed it away
from there. His over active imagination, combined with the
reality of the last few weeks made him unsure if those footsteps
that kept echoing were his alone or his and someone being careful
to walk in step with him.
The question now was where to go? They all knew that Max and
Iz’s house was being watched too carefully for him to crawl in
the window this late. He couldn’t just walk the streets all
night. Someone would eventually see him and with his luck, it
would be one of Valente’s men. He kept coming back to the same
wrong answer.
For the last half-hour of wanderings, he kept trying to remind
himself of all the reasons that he couldn’t end up where his mind
was screaming for him to go. No matter what reasons he came up
with his feet kept dragging him where he denied wanting him to
go.
He could see the lights filtering out from behind the kitchen
curtains as he moved around to the back of the house. The window
on the back door was covered in the same fabric but someone
hadn’t pulled them all the way closed and he was afforded a
cautionary peek to see which of the DeLuca women was awake.
Relief and nervousness, two feelings that he had never considered
complimentary, flooded him as he tapped gently on the window.
* * * *
The radio on the windowsill over the sink was on, softly so as
not to wake her mother, but loud enough that at first she was
sure she really heard the slight rattle of glass in the frame.
The second time it was unmistakable, as the song faded away there
it was. Her heart leapt into her throat fearing the worst and
hoping for something that probably wasn’t for the best.
The cold metal of the door knob burned as she slowly opened the
door only to freeze the moment she saw him standing in the same
thing that he had been wearing those hours earlier.
“What are you doing here?” She hissed.
He pushed past her, his body brushing hers as he entered the
cozy kitchen silently. His eyes took in the scene before him,
the open cabinets and doors, untouched mate to the Hershey’s
slathered cupcake that still sat in cellophane on the table and
finally he reluctantly allowed his eyes to devour her. The
tousled hair that made it obvious that sleep had been denied her,
the short tank top with the wandering straps that left the
expanse of her stomach bare and shorts that revealed no more of
her legs that her uniform but were infinitely more tantalizing
because they touched her in her sleep.
“Michael?”
“I can’t go home tonight.” He couldn’t tear his eyes away from
her bare shoulders, the soft spread of her skin along her
collarbone. He knew he should run, get as far from her as he
could. But here, away from the shadows with no one looking on,
he wanted more than anything else to act once again on his less
rational impulses. His own voice sounded foreign, distant in his
ears and far more unsure than he intended to be. “Can I stay
here? Please, I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Her decision was not a conscious one; she felt her head nod
permission before her mind even got around the request that was
being made. She turned away and allowed the furious blush to
suffuse her face. Attempting to stall before the inevitable
question of “where” came up she began to clear away her midnight
snack.
“Isn’t it a little late for chocolate?” His question startled
her and she struggled for an answer.
“I couldn’t sleep.” She said with no conviction. Her voice
dropped to a whisper and she almost hoped that he wouldn't
comprehend the allusionsof her next words. “It calms me down.”
