At long last, I have begun posting Our Own Way 5.
I am going to be painfully honest, as I always try to be, and say that this will not be being updated in a routine fashion, and that I am operating at…less than optimal writing/creative capacity right now, and I really, really wanted to put OOW5 on hold because I do not feel up to this, but ultimately I have decided I’ve put it on hold for too long as it is, and I need to get the ball rolling on it.
So…here it is.
Gabe’s life was about to change.
Again.
This time, at least, he felt a lot more confident about said shift.
They were almost to Krystal and Liz’s place.
Gabe realized that it was completely silent inside the car. On the heels of that realization was a second one: it had been for a couple minutes now.
He looked around. Ellen was in the passenger’s seat. She was looking at him and smiling a somewhat curious smile. He wasn’t quite sure how to interpret it. He glanced in the rearview and saw Holly back there smiling a similar smile.
Maybe it was because Chloe hadn’t joined them for this little roadtrip. She was back home, unhappy but unable to get out of obligations related to her family.
They were getting suspicious. They knew something was up, but he doubted they truly realized the situation. So far, she’d managed to keep them from her old apartment and was still more or less keeping them in the dark.
He knew it wouldn’t last.
Honestly, at some point after they got moved and settled, he had decided he was going to confront her about it. Not because she wasn’t moving at a pace he was happy with, but because it was becoming obvious that she was just avoiding the issue.
A habit they were all going to have to kick.
“Is everything all right?” he asked, returning his attention firmly to the highway.
Yep, just in time too, there was the exit. He hit the blinker and took it.
“Everything’s just fine,” Ellen murmured serenely.
“Are you horny or…?”
“I mean, kind of, but that’s not what’s going on.”
“So something is going on?” he asked.
“Yes. Well,” she glanced back to Holly, “I mean, I think we’re on the same wavelength.”
“I think so, too,” Holly agreed.
“And what wavelength is that?”
“You...are different. In a good way,” Ellen said after a slight, measuring hesitation.
“Like, today?”
“Yes. But also no. You’ve been changing ever since I met you. Sometimes in little ways, sometimes in larger ways. And I suppose now it’s suddenly just very obvious.”
“Do you feel the same way?” he asked, again glancing in the rearview.
“Yes,” Holly replied.
“Interesting.” He thought about it, turning onto another street and bringing them ever closer to their destination.
He waited for one of them to say something else, ask something else, but the silence descended again. The only sound was that of the vehicle and the lo-fi gently playing.
Gabe considered their assertion.
He supposed they had a point: he had changed. He felt different. Ellen was right in that he’d been changing since they had met, and for a couple of months before that, but the first month of the year, he was realizing, had been particularly transformative.
Which was weird, because from his perspective, it had been a quiet month. Busy, sure, but all little stuff. They had big things on the horizon, but they hadn’t really addressed any of them yet beyond some basic preliminary work.
But hadn’t a lot been going on, under the surface?
Certainly he looked different enough right now.
He’d gotten his hair cut in a way he’d often thought of but never tried because he thought he’d look stupid. He’d had them more or less buzz the sides and back of his head and shorten whatever was left. It seemed like a simple cut and honestly it was, but hair was always kind of a blackbox to him. It felt so easy to fuck up without even knowing why or how.
But he had been more or less satisfied with the results, and the others…
Really liked it.
So that was pretty nice.
He’d also realized abruptly this morning that he actually had some definition to his body. Nothing crazy and you did kind of have to really look for it to see it, but he had double-checked a photo of him and Ellen naked they’d taken near the beginning of the relationship and realized that, yeah, he had the tiniest bit of muscle definition now.
Apparently, he had been literally screwing his way to physical fitness.
He doubted it’d provide much more in the way of definition–even with Krystal and especially Liz entering his life–but it provided a shitload of motivation to actually work out. Maybe with Liz here he could stick to it.
But more than that, he felt different.
He just felt...calmer. More in control. His anxiety had been bleeding away and he’d not even realized it. But the girls had. Basically as soon as they had paid, Ellen demanded they go home and fuck immediately.
And so had Chloe and Holly.
That had been a very intense day.
He’d also been listening to them more about how he dressed. They’d gone clothes shopping, like made a day out of it at the mall, a few days ago and so he had a lot more clothes that apparently fit him and sat better on his frame.
Apparently clothes were everything. Well, clothes and hair.
When he’d seen himself in the mirror with his new haircut and new clothes for the first time, his initial reaction had been something like shock.
He almost hadn’t recognized himself.
Looking back, he realized suddenly that it wasn’t just the clothes, the hair, or the barely visible musculature.
It was more just how he…
Was.
It was hard to describe. He thought that perhaps the best phrase would be ‘how he carried himself’. It was different.
He was still figuring this whole thing out.
But right now that didn’t matter. What mattered in this moment was that it was actually a pretty decent day out for the first of February and he was on his way to tip over the first domino in the line of actions that was really beginning to build his new life.
Their new lives.
He saw the apartment complex up ahead and grinned as he pulled into the parking lot.
…
Gabe knocked on the door, though he wasn’t sure why he bothered.
Especially when he heard a shouted: “Just walk in, dipshit!”
He laughed and opened the door. Leading the others into the apartment, he found a disaster zone. The living room was in absolute disarray. Boxes, clothes, dishes, furniture, trash, books, and a completely random assortment of other things lay scattered in a landscape of chaos.
“I know, I know!” Krystal said, facing away from them, down on her knees in a pair of pink jogging shorts and a tanktop, sorting through the mess. “It’s been a busy morning and I promise I’m not going to be this fucking messy–”
Her next word died in her throat as she turned around to look at them. Gabe heard a shutter snap as someone took a picture, and he was very glad, because the look on Krystal’s face was one he was going to want to look back at several times in his life, he was sure.
She stared at him in open shock, her eyes wide, her mouth open but locked into the shape of the next syllable she had been to speak.
And it was very authentic, he could tell that much.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, and then she clumsily got to her feet. “Liz! Liz! Get out here!”
“Oh fuck what’s happening now!?” Liz called from deeper in the apartment. They heard her rapidly approaching. “Did you hurt yourself or some–”
She stepped out into the living room, saw Gabe, and had a milder version of the same reaction.
Another shutter snap sounded and Ellen snorted softly. Gabe was sorely tempted to ask if they’d been told to react like this, because this was a little ridiculous. Both of them knew he’d gotten a hair cut and some new attire, and he had been prepared to send some pics, but Ellen had suddenly told him not to, that she wanted it to be a surprise.
And apparently she was right to do that.
“Holy. Fuck,” Krystal whispered finally.
“Come on, are you being serious right now?” he asked finally, unable to keep it in.
“Yes,” Krystal said flatly.
“You look...different,” Liz murmured.
“Is it really that different?” Gabe asked, looking down at himself. This still felt surreal, even with his newfound confidence.
“Apparently. Also, you have to remember that we’ve been apart for three weeks now,” Liz replied. “And missing you.”
“A lot,” Krystal growled.
“This is still weird,” he said.
“What? Having a pair of girlfriends missing you?” Ellen murmured with a small grin. She looked as pleased as could be about all this.
In fact, when he looked back at her, he would have sworn she was showing him off.
Well...hadn’t he done something similar with her? With Holly? With Chloe? With Krystal? Hell, even with Liz a little? And wouldn’t there be more?
Was it so bad?
No, he decided, so long as everyone was cool with it. And he was quite cool with it.
It felt strange but good to finally, finally be on the ‘Attractive’ side of the scale. Not that he truly believed he was attractive, but he’d given up that debate by now. He thought he was fuckugly, but reality had pretty firmly proved him wrong.
“So this works for you?” Gabe asked, trying to get control of the situation again.
Krystal let out a small, distracted chuckle. “Yes. Yes, it does.” She looked suddenly at Liz. “I…”
Liz sighed heavily. “Yeah, it’s fine. I’m not going to torture you.”
“What’s going on?” Gabe asked as Krystal began making a beeline for him with an almost comical look of determination.
“Krystal needs to fuck you and I want to, too, but something got mixed up with my birth control, so I ran out yesterday, and I’m getting more today, but...I’m not going to risk it,” Liz explained.
“Oh.” Krystal had grabbed his wrist and begun pulling him towards the bedroom, but he stopped. She made an unhappy sound and tugged on his arm. “Just wait,” he said, and she sighed but held her peace. Though she was getting very fidgety. He looked at Liz. “We can still absolutely do sexy things together, or at the very least Krystal can eat you while I pound her from behind.”
“That...is a very good point,” Liz murmured, a smile slowly spreading across her beautiful face.
“I am going to die if I don’t fuck him,” Krystal growled.
Liz laughed. “Well, we can’t have that, now can we?”
And she took his other arm and both of them led him to their bedroom.