that boy's got my heart in a silver cage [carrie]

Ximena once thought that the first chance she got, she'd be out of her house and on to doing Adult things. But a year and many non-Adult like decisions later, she was back in America, and back in New York. While she wasn't living the high life like she'd imagined, she wasn't doing so badly for someone who didn't even graduate. She thought she was fine; she thought she was moving on. Then her sister asked her out to lunch and dropped a major bombshell.

Mariana knew. She's always known– about Mellie's (it felt comforting in this moment to slip back into her old nickname) crush on Connor, about his flickering love for her, about his indecisive love for Ximena and their affair, and finally, about his decision to do the 'right' thing and ask for the 'right' person's hand in marriage in the end. Previously Ximena had been mad at Connor, but now she's mad at her sister too, and a bit afraid. Who sat on something like that for years without saying anything?!

All the resolve she managed to stuff into herself before she left France spilled out, and she suddenly felt very alone and in need of a friend. Friends that she'd single-handedly thrown away because she was an absolute ass.

This was still more or less her first month back in New York, and she'd only just signed the lease for an apartment that she hasn't even thought about buying furniture for, but Ximena felt like she needed to drop all this and reconnect with her old friend. She got Carrie's address from an old acquaintance; oh Carrie, nice, dependable Carrie! She was somewhat anxious to just turn up at her door step. Sure, they'd been best friends all throughout school, but she did drop out of school and pretty much disappear for almost two years without telling anyone, including said best friend(s). She would be absolutely crushed if Carrie slammed the door in her face, but she also can't blame her at all for doing that.

But she opened the door and the tension that'd been building up in her finally found an escape, breaking into a shaky laugh and an overly perky wave. "Hey Carrie", she said, half-laughing and half-almost crying, her tears like fat little pearls threatening to spill over any second, "It's me!"

@Carrie Marshall i swear it's supposed to be funny!

Carrie and Lou’s, Port Angeles, WA, U.S.A. | April 2004

If she’d polled her younger self, she wouldn’t have imagined she’d turn out to be a daily coffee-drinker. Carrie was becoming increasingly fond of the stuff – but she was also becoming increasingly frustrated with burning the roof of her mouth in her eagerness to drink it. She preferred to take it black, and thus really only added milk as a coolant when she was feeling particularly impatient. In the interim, she was still perfecting the strength of her cooling charms to strike that highly-sought-after balance between ‘room-temperature’ and ‘my mouth didn’t really need that layer of skin anyways’. Her early measures had been far too aggressive, one so much so that she’d actually cracked one of the mugs from dropping the temperature of its contents too quickly. She was a quick study, though, and a creative one.

Today she’d left her drink to cool on its own while she watered the plants: a duration she’d previously trialed and determined to be long enough to yield an acceptable drinking temperature upon her return. Then she wrapped her hands around her favorite mug, – which she’d gotten from one of the ONP’s visitor center gift shops – relishing in its pleasant warmth, and was just about to take a sip when there was a knock at the front door.

Were she still in NYC, Carrie wouldn’t have opened that door for anything (except Lou), instead peering through the blinds until whomever it was had left: you never knew what shady business people were plotting. The ‘stranger danger’ advice still stood now, of course – but living in a quieter scene had relaxed her guard marginally. It wasn’t uncommon for neighbors to stop by and drop off some flowers from their garden, honey from their hive, or baked goods from their kitchen.

By now, Carrie recognized most of their neighbors – but when she looked out the peephole now, she was so shocked she’d nearly dropped her coffee. Her memory had recognized the face instantly with a warm flood of familiarity, though it was taking the rest of her brain a bit longer for the penny to drop. Hardly believing her eyes, she cracked open the door about a foot and stared at the girl on her doormat.

“…Mellie?!” she sputtered, incredulous, before a radiant smile split her expression a nanosecond later. Carrie hadn’t heard from her friend since they’d graduated nearly two years ago. How had she found her? What had she been up to?

But the empath zeroed-in on the unshed tears in her friend’s eyes, and her mentally-simulated interrogation evaporated. The former Iron Witch was one to forgive and forget; whatever Mellie’s reasons for not keeping in touch, they hardly mattered at the moment. Emitting a squeak of delight, she hastily turned to set her coffee down onto one of her end-tables before scuttling back to the threshold and flinging both arms around her former Housemate, enveloping her wordlessly and without ceremony in one of her characteristic crushing hugs.