Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/1000256.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      F/M
  Fandom:
      Once_Upon_a_Time_(TV)
  Relationship:
      Belle_|_Lacey/Rumplestiltskin_|_Mr._Gold, Lacey/Rumplestiltskin_|_Mr.
      Gold
  Character:
      Belle_|_Lacey, Rumplestiltskin_|_Mr._Gold
  Additional Tags:
      Golden_Lace, Underage_-_Freeform, teenage!lacey
  Series:
      Part 2 of Reckless_Abandon
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-10-11 Words: 5154
****** Swinging In The Backyard ******
by rufeepeach
Summary
     Seventeen-year-old Lacey French is known in Storybrooke as a problem
     child, but despite the rumours no one knows her darkest secret: her
     'relationship' with the town monster, Mr Gold
Notes
     This was inspired by Lana Del Rey's 'Video Games', because I've
     always wanted to write something vaguely rumbelle-related to that
     song. It came out Golden Lace, but oh well, enjoy!
Moe leaves the back door unlocked: Lacey’s out back, sulking, so no one’ll
break in there, and the only place to go is the woods (and Moe knows his
daughter: she’s not the long walk in the woods type). She won’t leave if he
lets her stay out there. She’s not going anywhere.
Lacey hears her father leave, and keeps her eyes firmly on the sky. He’d caught
her drinking again, just a beer or five with the guys, but she’s grounded now.
The serious kind, with the cute Sheriff on high alert and people watching for
her. People are always fucking watching in this town, and it makes her skin
crawl. All those eyes and all those mouths, and every one of them sharp, all of
them watching her.
When she’s old enough they’ll stop watching. She’ll make them stop.
But she’s seventeen and too young to get away with fucking anything, so they
watch.
She’s reading (and there’s something the townspeople don’t know, isn’t it?
Slutty little Lacey French always has a book bumping beside the hipflask and
roll-ups in her bag) spread out on the blanket like a meal, all wrapped up in a
pale red sundress and matching nails and lipstick. She always dresses like
she’s going to be in a magazine, because if people will watch then she’ll give
them a show.
Lacey’s not waiting for Gold to walk by, but when he unlatches the gate and
slips inside, whistling tunelessly to himself, she’s not unhappy to see him.
“Good book?” he asks (he’s the only one who notices, ever, but then Mr Gold
notices everything, just like Lacey).
She chews her gum a moment longer before she answers, turns the page, “Sort
of,” she replies, staring now not up at the page or at the sun but at him. He’s
tall from this angle, his face careworn yet smooth, and no one knows how old he
really is but it’s definitely old enough to be her father. It doesn't matter
much: the looks he gives her in the street her are anything but paternal. “It’s
interesting.”
She sets the worn paperback down on the blanket, but she doesn’t sit up. He
blocks out the sun, from this angle.
“Why’re you outside?” he asks, after a moment (and the smile on his lips is
indulgent, and she can’t tell if it’s patronising or flirtatious or both).
She sighs, “It’s nice out,” she replies, “and dad’s a bastard.”
He chuckles at that (she’s a traitor; she laughs too), “Perhaps I should pay a
call inside?”
She shrugs at that, wriggles on the blanket, and his eyes drip all over her,
lingering in places where the sun’s on her skin, and the fabric falls just
right. “He’s out,” she says, and it shouldn’t sound provocative but she doesn’t
mind when it does.
“Maybe I should still step inside,” he says, thoughtfully. His smile widens,
cruel and cold even in the June sun, “It is my house, after all.”
Lacey snorts, and goes back to her reading, not noticing a word on the page but
knowing the gesture is received: she wants to know what he will do. “Be my
guest.”
He nods, politely, and does just that.
It’s Moe’s house when he’s in it, but Lacey is no guard dog, and if she must
have an old man size her up and dress her down, she’d rather it be one who
notices the newish curve of her hip and breast, who knows she is no little girl
anymore and enjoys it. Her father scolds her short skirts and attitude, but
Gold just grins, his eyes glittering with corrupt approval.
---
She lies outside a lot, that summer: Maine is unseasonably hot this year, and
she’s grounded, after all. Why have a fight with Moe, when trouble will come
right to her back garden gate without her lifting a finger?
And Lacey always did have a love for trouble, a true knack for it, the same
knack she has for quickening an old man’s heart rate with just a look. No one
woman could wrap Gold around her finger, not even Mayor Mills, although Lacey’s
sure the bitch has tried. Gold does what he wants, and apparently that includes
his tenants’ daughters.
She’s not sure if it started when she slipped into his lap in the kitchen (she
slipped, and his thighs are firm but soft like an old leather chair, and he did
catch her, after all), or when she downed the beer he’d stolen from her
father’s refrigerator in three gulps and grinned at him (she can hold her
liquor, Lacey French, and his eyes once more gleam with that same approving
smile), or even when he ransomed her book for a kiss to test how far she’d go
(tongues, and his hand on her arse, and hers in his hair before she grabbed it
back).
Any one of them could have lead them here, in the sunshine with Lacey once more
on her back, once more with the wrong man between her smooth thighs, once more
down to a whisper, the wrong name on her lips. Mr Gold is old enough to be her
father, but he kisses like a demon would, and brands her with his lips, and how
is she to say no?
What’s a kiss, a touch in the back garden, his hand under the waistline of her
lace panties (and really, she was always one for the subtle pun), and her book
skittered across the grass?
She shimmies out of her dress with a sigh, and he paints her body in greedy,
selfish kisses, hotter than the July sunshine and just as likely to burn and
hurt later.
Her father told her no boys, no friends, no leaving the property without him.
But Gold is no boy, and certainly not her friend, and she’s not stepped beyond
that back gate. She’s kept to his rules (and she’s seventeen, not seven, and
what does he expect?) but she knows he’d still be angry.
Mr Gold doesn’t take her there and then, as she expects. Oh, no, he makes her
writhe and moan on his fingers, playing her young body like a virtuoso on his
instrument until she cries out in ecstasy. But then he stands, and sucks his
fingers clean, and leaves her there, wet and naked and far too hot on the
grass, and steals another of her father’s beers on his way out.
---
Lacey is once more allowed out, by the time August rolls around, but the town
still watches.
The one place no one looks, though, is the only place Lacey French can find
herself, on a lazy afternoon. Only an idiot would dare loiter near the
pawnshop, but Lacey’s grades are poor at best. She’s an impressionable young
girl, after all, she reasons: she can’t be blamed, if she finds herself led
astray by someone so much stronger and more experienced than she is (and oh,
Lacey’s no lost lamb in the forest, but Gold’s a wolf and she thinks he enjoys
the imagery).
She wanders in, the place dark and cool and musty in a whole town that smells
like fabric softener and cut grass.  It’s a welcome reprieve, although she
still thinks he cuts the best figure when surrounded by white fences and
sunlight, the one dark shadow in this town’s near-desperate attempt to be
heaven on Earth.
“Are you lost, dear?” he asks, solicitously, as if he has not visited her more
than once this long, hot summer, and taken whatever delight he found in
debauching her on the swing, the blanket, the back porch steps.
She’s never seen more of him than is exposed by his suits, even on the hottest
days, but she doesn’t care: everyone sees everything of her, anyway, and she’s
lost nothing from this tacit agreement.
“If I said no,” she says, archly, “would that make me found?”
“It would depend upon who found you,” he says, slowly, with a grin that borders
again on that predatory, animal gleam. He comes around the counter, hand on
that downright dirty cane of his, and she doesn’t flinch back as he comes to
stand in front of her.
He inhales, and she smiles a little at the pleasure on his face, as he notes
she wears the perfume he once praised, the kind that smells like cinnamon and
raspberry. His eyes linger on the swell of her breasts, exposed by the white
lace and blue cotton of the sleeveless summer dress she wears, before they run
up her collarbone and throat, to the red curve of her lips, and then at last to
her eyes. She shivers: no one looks at her like that, except for him. It’s a
talent the Devil himself likely taught him.
“Mm,” she hums in agreement, and leans in close, almost touching his lips with
hers but not quite, “it’s a shame no one has,” she whispers, and his eyes
flutter closed for just a moment before she darts away, evading his grasping
hands and bounding for the door.
He catches her, of course, a hand at her wrist and oh, her body remembers his
touch with a shiver, even as her mind wants to run, to tease, to make him give
chase (and perhaps that limp of his is the Universe’s way of levelling the
battlefield, because the force of his eyes alone would stop her in her tracks).
“Is that so?” he growls into her face, his breath warm and sweet like
peppermint on her face, and again she shivers.
His kisses are branding and possessive, like the hand covering the small of her
back and the other holding her head in place by her hair. Everything about him
grasps, takes, keeps her close, and she melts into his arms.
After all, she’s just an impressionable little girl, and who could blame her
for stumbling and falling from the straight and narrow? He’s the adult here,
not her, and he’s the one plundering her mouth with his quick, hot tongue, and
grasping up the back of her skirt, his hand finally beneath and cupping her ass
through her panties. The pads of his fingers scorch her skin, and she’s sure if
she checked later there’d be burn marks were his hands have touched.
He hutches her onto the counter, presses against her, spreads her legs and
reduces her to soft, quivering rubble, while he himself, always and forever
composed, shows no more reaction than a quickening of breath, exhaled against
her neck.
“This is where you belong, little Lacey,” he croons, as his hand finally slips
down beneath the waistband of her panties, and he starts to tease and stroke
her in earnest. “Legs spread, arse bare on the counter, this is where you
should be.”
She whimpers, and as he presses deeper she keens and nods, because for now,
this hour, this minute, he’s right: she’s no more than red lips, parted in a
moan, no more than overheated flesh pressed against him, and it’s so much
easier being this than being Lacey French, who thinks too much and drinks to
compensate.
He brings her off (he always does, not out of kindness or generosity, she
knows, but because it shows how much she needs him), and that’s her cue to
leave, as he always does when they lie in her garden or her kitchen table.
But she doesn’t leave; she reaches a hand down (more than just flesh, blood and
bone and nerves too, and a wicked mind desperate to watch him fall as hard as
she did), and cups him through his pants. Of course he’s hard already, after
her display how could he not be? Lacey’s young but she’s not naïve, not stupid.
A man likes to see a young girl whimper and moan and writhe for him, and he’s
never satisfied himself with her.
She kisses him to distract him, and how long has it been for him that a few
rubs of her practiced hand has him coming in his suit pants? His face contorts,
his hand going white where it’s braced on the counter, and she breaks their
kiss when he lets out one low grunt (her name, perhaps, if she’s feeling
hopeful), and his knees seem to go a little weak for a moment.
“There you go,” she whispers, victorious, “tit for tat.”
“That was uncalled for, dear,” he groans back, but he’s not really complaining,
now is he?
“Oh, I think it was,” she giggles, high on the memory of him falling apart for
her, on knowing at last, of all the men in town, what Mr Gold looks like when
he’s lost control. “Thank you,” she chirps, and presses one last kiss to his
still lips, “You’re the best.”
He doesn’t stop her, now, as she flounces from the shop. She turns once to see
him braced, hands on the counter, head bowed. She wonders if that crossed a
line for him, if she broke some rule he’d held to, made something real that he
liked more as fiction.
But then it’s always been real for her, in the hazy way that anything this
long, hot, sun-drenched summer can feel real, and the July sun can never be as
warming as his hands on her skin.
(She’s not to blame, she’s just a little girl, lead astray and hooked and
needing her fix, and no one blames Red Riding Hood for believing the wolf) 
---
This time, Lacey refuses to be grounded. She charges out of the house and slams
the door on her father’s protests and insults, and heads for the park.
She’d march to the Rabbit Hole, were she a better customer than her father. But
the fucking bartender there won’t serve her, for fear her father will take his
custom elsewhere (like there’s anywhere else to go, save the basement with a
six pack and a porno, and lord does Lacey wish she didn’t know that).
It’d be easier to respect Moe, Lacey thinks, if he was worthy of it in the
slightest.
She could go to Ruby’s, she thinks, but the idea of the other girl’s company no
longer appeals. They used to swap war stories, conquests and hearts broken,
virginities taken, but now there’s a Gold-shaped space between them, because
Lacey can tell her best friend any thing but she can’t tell her that. No one
can know about the man who visits her in the garden, who treats her like the
woman she knows she is, not the girl the world insists she has to be.
Ruby’s probably off fucking Billy from the garage, anyway. He’s her stand-in
date when no one else is around, and Billy’s a bit sweet for Lacey’s tastes.
She doesn’t think of going to Gold’s. The idea makes her stomach twist and her
heart race: the shop was one thing, a semi-public space, but his home…
He can invade her territory and make it his with a smirk and a tap of his cane,
but she cannot do the same (and Lacey might be a girl lost in the woods,
impressionable and easily lead astray, but she’s not about to wander into the
dragon’s lair unarmed).
She wanders to the park because it’s her best option. She’ll stay until her dad
will have gone to sleep, and then creep back in and go to bed. 
She seats herself on the Lionel Blanchard Memorial Bench with a sigh, and
before she goes for her flask, book, or cellphone, Lacey finds her stolen pack
of Marlboro Lights and her silver lighter (Gold has one the same, she’s seen
it, and when she saw it in the store she knew she had to have it), and takes a
long drag. The smoke dances in the air before her, and she wonders when she
stopped feeling like a carefree kid, and started feeling so… adult.
She’s only seventeen, she thinks, and the air is hot and sultry, and her
sundress rides up her thighs. Only seventeen, and someone should have found her
by now. Lacey does so hate to smoke and drink alone.
She finishes her cigarette, and stubs it out on the bench. She takes a swig of
the rum in her leather-look hipflask, and it warms her as deeply as the smoke
did before; she keeps it tucked in her lap, as she opens her paperback, and
pulls out her cell phone to aid the light of the streetlamp far above.
That’s something no one will ever know about Lacey French: when she’s stormed
out of the house alone at night, chances are she’ll end up reading in the park
rather than knocking over a liquor store.
That’s because Lacey French has few friends she actually likes, and tonight she
cannot be bothered with those she doesn’t. She’d only made friends with them to
make her dad mad, and he’s already there, tonight. He won’t worry if she
doesn’t come home, tonight. She wonders if it’s worth doing so at all.
“Bit late for a stroll,” a voice comes, a while (and a hundred and eleven pages
and half a bottle) later, and she’s even warmer now and has barely noticed the
dark, since she started drinking.
“Not strolling,” she grins at Gold, because she can’t be bothered scowling.
She’s glad he’s here, why should she be ashamed of that? When he’s around, she
can pretend for five fucking minutes that she’s not the same bored, lonely
child she’s always been. “Sitting. Reading.”
“Good book?” he asks, taking a seat beside her. He always asks, as if he cares
about the answer, as if they’ll sit and take tea and discuss books, as if
either of them is here for that.
“A bit repetitive,” she sighs, her language slipping with the drink. Another
thing no one knows: Lacey becomes a fucking intellectual when she’s wasted.
“Bitch could stop writing Beauty and the fucking Beast for five minutes, and
write something else.”
Gold frowns, puzzled, and takes her book from her unresisting hands. “Ah,” he
nods, “The Bloody Chamber. Should have pegged you for a Carter fan.”
She snorts, “If I went back to your place, there’d likely be dead wives in all
the closets. You’re the type.”
He laughs at that, but it always has a menacing edge, and in vino veritas,
after all. “It’s a big house, dear,” he says, “you’d hardly be bothered by the
ghosts in it.”
She laughs, then, a real laugh, because of course he’d fucking say something
like that, and because that almost sounded like an invitation. Which is
unthinkable: men like Mr Gold don’t invite their dirty secrets back to their
homes. That would almost make it seem as if she’s worth a damn to him, when
they both know she isn’t. She’s not worth fuck all to anyone: she’s made sure
of that.
“I’ll pass,” she says, at last, “it’s not worth the risk.”
He chuckles again, nearly soundlessly, and takes the flask from her lap, taking
a long swig from it without fucking asking (she likes that he doesn’t ask,
likes that he just takes, and she’d have been disappointed by a polite
request). “Strong and cheap,” he murmurs, and his eyes are on her.
“Fitting, right?” she smirks, and then laughs, low and without much humour,
“Strong and cheap, I like that.”
“Why are you out here, Lacey?” he asks, and he doesn’t sound concerned, thank
God, but it’s still a question Lacey doesn’t at all feel like answering.
“Because my dad’s a prick and the bar won’t fucking serve me.”
“What about that tart from the diner?” Gold asks, with his usual tact, “You’re
friendly with her?”
Lacey doesn’t deny the assessment, “Granny’d rat on me, and Ruby’ll busy as
usual. You have to book a slot with her or she gets all booked up, the stupid
whore.”
She’s alienated herself, but Gold is here, and for once it feels like a fair
trade. He’s as alone and destructive and fucked up as she is, and it’s
brilliant: it’s like they’re the only two people in the whole fucking town who
understand.
She downs another two gulps of the rum in her flask, and the world sways
because oh, fuck, she skipped dinner again, and the alcohol is in her
bloodstream in seconds. She giggles, helplessly, and falls against Gold’s side.
He doesn’t wrap an arm around her, but he doesn’t move either.
His hand comes to rest on her bare thigh, thumb playing with but not really
moving the fabric of her skirt. That’s right, she thinks, woozily, that’s
right, that’s what’s meant to happen here.
But he does no more, and after a minute she looks up at him, blinking, “What,
you draw the line at feeling up a drunken teenager?”
“Oh I’m happy to feel, my dear,” he says, and his hand hitches a little higher,
his other arm finally coming to hold her against him, and oh yes, this is nice.
“More than happy.”
“Good,” she murmurs, and shifts, sliding down inadvertently so that her head is
in his lap, and she giggles again because fucking gravity man, it has its own
plans.
“Now this is interesting,” she murmurs, and her hands and fingers are clumsy
but she’s undone enough flies drunk and in the dark before now, and Gold
doesn’t stop her, just strokes the smooth skin of her thigh and the dark curls
on her head with his hands, and lets her do what she will. 
If he were a good man, he’d stop her, Lacey thinks. She’s seventeen, wasted,
and he’s old enough to be her father.
But the world is hazy, and so’s the moral boundary, and fuck everything she
wants to make him need her. so she palms him through his pants, feeling how
hard he’s getting already, and with the other hand she opens his fly and draws
him out. He hisses, when he’s exposed to the balmy night air, but he doesn’t
stop her.
She draws him into her mouth, and his hand is a claw against her leg now, and
she can feel him grow as she sucks, feel how much he likes this, how valuable
she is in just this instant, this moment, when he’s in her mouth and he’d hate
her for stopping.
She hates him anyway, but she likes him too. That’s why she sucks harder,
hollows her cheeks, and adds a hint of teeth that sends him trembling. He
pushes her head down on him, makes her take more, and oh yes is that what she
wants. To be told what to do, directed, to know that he wants her right now,
even just for this, even as nothing more than this.
Especially as nothing more than this.
She’s sucked off plenty of boys before, but she’s never enjoyed it quite so
much. It only takes him a few minutes to be quivering, ready to explode, and
she makes sure her eyes catch his, her head turned at an awkward angle, before
she finishes him off.
She swallows him down, and he watches her with the closest thing to awe she’s
ever seen. She’s managed to impress him, and her drunken, flighty little heart
soars.
Then she stands, slowly, and walks away, staggering but not falling in her high
heels. Ruby will let her stay even if she will be shit company for tonight, but
Lacey can’t stay near Gold another moment. They leave after the sex is over:
that’s the way of it. She wouldn’t change it for the world.
 ---
Lacey does go to school.
Sometimes, rarely admittedly, only enough to get the grades to graduate and
nothing more. It’s not like girls like her (who wear too much make up and drink
all night and cut class and get fucked by older men in their back gardens) are
destined for ivy-covered college walls and a life of success. Lacey knows she’s
headed not five blocks from where she grew up, out of her childhood bedroom and
into a shitty apartment downtown. Storybrooke does have a downtown, after all,
where the rest of the trash end up.
She’ll be clearing tables at Granny’s with Ruby for the rest of her life, if
she doesn’t get pregnant like Ashley first, of course. And why would she need
to go to school to do that?
One week into her senior year, and she’s cut three days already. All she did
was go smoke in the park, but she’s got a particular fondness for a particular
bench now, and she’d rather be there, reading off-curriculum and working
through her stolen cigs, than sat in a stuffy classroom learning about the
antebellum south.
She can understand Scarlett O’Hara’s point of view (and she saw her Rhett
Butler coming, didn’t she?) but she doesn’t need a semester of classes about
cotton-growing and slavery. 
One week into school and her dad’s got a letter summoning Lacey in to see the
guidance counsellor. Ms Merriweather is an elderly lady, matronly with grey
hair and a careworn face, but it’s creased into a frown when she sees Lacey 
Just for a moment, of course, before the classic ‘you can say anything to me,
honey, I’ll not tell a soul’ smile slides into place. But Lacey’d picked her
high-waist shorts and little red crop top with care in preparation, as a test,
and this teacher sees the same as everyone else.
Well, everyone else female. The women see a flighty little tart, to be
disapproved of and warned against her own self-destruction. The men… well, they
see something different, don’t they? Red lips and hips and a push-up bra to
make cleavage where there was none before, and suddenly they make detention
sound so dirty.
“Hey, Lacey,” Ms Merriweather smiles, “have a seat, sugar.”
Lacey sits down, but she doesn’t smile back. Bitch doesn’t know her from Adam,
and she intends to keep it that way.
“Now, do you know why I’m here?”
Lacey simpers, dripping false-sincerity to match the counsellor’s own, “I won a
prize?”
Ms Merriweather gives a false little chuckle, “No, not quite. Some of your
teachers are quite concerned, actually. They hoped maybe you could be convinced
to let a new year be a new start.”
Lacey resists the urge to laugh aloud: fucking hell, what God-awful self-help
manual she’d get that phrase from?
“Am I going to graduate?” Lacey asks, abruptly. Ms Merriweather sighs.
“Just getting the diploma isn’t enough, Lacey, now, you know that.”
“Enough for what?” she asks, pressing a crimson-dipped finger to her cherry-red
lips, clueless as a lamb.
“For college, employment, your future,” Ms Merriweather explains, as if it’s
fucking ground-breaking new information, “you won’t be seventeen forever,
Lacey.”
“Thank God,” Lacey mutters.
“I’m sorry?”
“I said thank fucking God I won’t be seventeen forever,” she sneers back, “I
mean, at some point I have to be old enough not to be lectured like a fucking
child, right?”
“There’s no need to be aggressive here, Lacey,” Ms Merriweather says, in her
placating, ‘we’re all friends here’ voice. The one that always, always comes
right before the phone call home, no matter what school official uses it.
“We’re just concerned about you, is all.”
“Why?” she asks, a note of danger creeping into her tone, “Why’re you all so
concerned?”
“Because it’s sad to see such an intelligent, talented young woman throw her
life away,” Ms Merriweather replies, with surprising sincerity. “We’re here to
stop that from happening.”
“Yeah well, sucks to be her,” Lacey snorts, because she doesn’t give a flying
fuck about her supposed potential, she knows who she is and they can’t change
that.
“You know I’m talking about you,” Ms Merriweather says, sternly, “and I don’t
find this particularly funny.”
“Well I do,” Lacey shrugs, standing up, “Look, I don’t know who this pathetic
girl who desperately needs fucking saving is, but I’m not her. So go evangelise
to someone else.”
“We’re not finished here,” the counsellor calls as Lacey spins on her stiletto
heel out of the door, “Lacey! Come back here!”
Lacey doesn’t respond, and walks as quickly as she can down the hallway, down
the stairs, and out of the double doors. The hallways are silent: everyone else
is in class, preparing for a bright future that isn’t fucking coming.
The sun is still bright and warm, Indian summer in full flush, and she walks
across the quad with her sunglasses pushed up her nose, liking the fact that
people in the classrooms can see her. Let them look. Let them see the bad girl
playing her part.
She sits with her back to the gym wall, not wanting to leave campus just yet.
It’s more fun to know they could find her and don’t. To know they’re too busy
calling the father who couldn’t give less of a damn about her future to get off
their fat, sanctimonious asses and actually come looking for her (but they're
too late anyhow, because when she was lost they had a fighting chance, but
someone else has found her now and she intends to follow him down).
She can see the street from here, the one that borders the woods. Gold’s house
stands ornate and salmon-pink in the sunshine, a long ways off, and she wonders
how he’d feel about her skipping school. He’d approve: for some reason, that
makes her beam.
It’s in his interest that she fall too far from grace to ever recover, isn’t
it? Bad girls give sexy older men blowjobs in public; good girls keep their
legs closed and sermonise about right and wrong. A good girl would have offered
Mr Gold an iced tea, that first long day, and sent him on his merry way. Not
ended up half naked in front of him, with his hands on her breasts, and his
lips over hers.
“This is Gold,” he answers on the fifth ring from her cell phone.
“This is the town skank,” Lacey purrs back, “officially cutting class and
ruining her own life.”
He chuckles, “Wild child,” he murmurs, dryly. “I do hope destruction of public
property was somehow involved.”
She laughs, and stubs her cigarette out on the wall of the gym, “There is now.
Does petty vandalism count?”
“That’s my girl,” he snickers, and she can hear the smile in his voice. Her
face warms, a stupid smile turning her into a lovesick teenager.
Lacey knows who she is: she’s the girl who cares more what the town monster
thinks of her than her guidance counsellor. And he thinks she’s special – he
comes to see her, after all, and answers her calls, and smiles when she speaks
– so everything’s okay (and who needs a future, when the present is this?). 
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