The Fast Lane [gxg]

Are We...? About To Kiss Right Now...?

Maze's hands didn't always look like this. Until recently, her hands had lived a normal life and she could safely say that her mind was a bit sharper than usual because of it. By the time she had recovered from the surgery that repaired both of her broken hands, university was already in session. This meant that taking notes during lectures was impossible, but she made do.

Now, even though she could write, she was too accustomed to the habits she formed while both of her arms were in casts.

Suffice to say that Maze's hands were, as the kids called it, thoroughly fucked up. Newcomers to the shitshow that was her life reacted in several predictable ways that Maze had come to accept as normal. It wasn't every day that the average Joe saw a pair of hands that looked like they had been wired shut with those dense, black paperclips that held together the fine details of her thesis.

The fine details of a thesis she just nearly passed.

She pinched the metal clip and slipped the stack of papers out. Her dejected sigh was more than an understatement. She was destined to fail her thesis course the second she first stepped foot in class. Her motivation was gone and out the window considering she still had a semester left that she had to forfeit.

Even if she passed this class, it wouldn't change the fact that she'd never graduate.

She stuffed the paperclip into her pocket and dumped the less-than-satisfactory grade into the bin outside of last lecture hall of that semester. She put a hand over her forehead to keep her brains from spilling out.

God, that really was the final straw, wasn't it? Her phone buzzed in her pocket against the paperclip. She let it go on for several long seconds until she was nearly numb to it. Earlier that semester, she might have just let it fade away without an answer, but she was starting to feel a little less distant.

She put her phone to her ear and said, "Hello," in a way that suggested that she would rather die.

"When were you going to tell me you're moving back home?"

Maze pressed her fingers along her brow in a weak attempt to massage the headache away. "Who told you?" she said, but she already knew the answer. 

She was aware that her ma had cut most contact with the McBryans, but their small town politics weren't exactly macrocosmic. Their microcosm spread rumors fast, and the second her ma would tell Declan's parents, it would make its way back around to Bryan's mother, Aunt Rae, in a matter of hours.

"I overheard the Declan's old man this morning," Bryan said. "Why didn't you tell me? What about that internship?"

The internship. Maze couldn't think about it without feeling sick to her stomach.

"I, uh, I decided not to do it," she said, throat tight. She put her hand on her hip and looked towards the ceiling. "Yeah, and my ma's gonna need help back at home and... Yeah, now's not really the time for it."

The half second of silence that followed nearly broke her. It was all she could do to keep from crying right there next to the garbage can containing her thesis paper.

"Okay. Well, it'll be nice to catch up. Been a while since we've hung out."

"Yeah," Maze said with a scoff. Her cheeks hurt the instant she smiled, and it must have been from disuse. "I think it'll be a good break. From everything."

"Do you need someone to pick you up from the station?"

"I was sort of just planning on waiting around in Whiting until my ma's available..."