thatwaslucky | MCA #1- Friday evening

MCA #1- Friday evening

It had been a while since they'd had a sangria night, and they were pretty much due. This time it was at Rey's apartment, which had her trying to clean up some since she didn't have people over much, and she was doing that despite the fact that she didn't have much of anything. Several years in and the place was still pretty bare bones aside from the mermaid sofa and assorted mismatched furniture.

She'd ordered pizza, and it had occurred to her that she hadn't asked if Summer was bringing the sangria or not, so she'd gotten a couple bottles of something and hoped it was okay, just in case. And if not, someone was going to have to have a party she could donate it to.

[For girls night!]

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Summer was also a little unsure if sangria night at Rey's meant Rey was providing the sangria or if she was because she usually did make the Sangria night sangria, and, yes, she probably could have just asked, but why do that when you could just potentially have extra sangria? So she'd had some chilling in her fridge and brought it with her along with other snacks (pita chips and hummus! Kind of healthy, even!), because, really, it was much better to be stuck with too much booze than ending up with not enough.

And so here she was, knocking on Rey's door and feeling weirdly excited for this, because it really had been a while. She just hoped it didn't turn into one of those things were even plenty of booze somehow managed to still be not enough booze.

Rey was also weirdly excited, which was why she was opening the door pretty quickly after the knock.

"Hi!" And then seeing what Summer had brought, she held out a hand to take anything she might want to pass off to her. "I wasn't sure about the actual sangria situation."

"Yeah," Summer had to laugh a little, as she handed over the bag with the chips and hummus, "me neither? I guess we kind of failed at details there, but, whatever. It's not like I hate making it and better safe than sorry. Why? Did you have some ready, too?"

"I bought some just in case," she said, taking the food and opening the door wider to let her in. "It just means we're very prepared."

"Good," Summer said as she slipped in, and then she wondered if that sounded too ominous. "I mean," she amended, "not to say that we'll need it, but just in a general 'preparation is always a good thing' sort of way, you know?"

"That's what I was thinking." And nobody had to discuss anything they didn't want to, but yeah, Rey had figured it was better to have more than not. "I got pizza, too, if you want to relax while I get glasses."

"I'm really glad that I was actually smelling that pizza, then," Summer noted with a snort as she started to drift over to get comfortable and set up while Rey did that, "like, can you imagine, if the island decided to have a day where everywhere you went, it just smelled like something? Has something like that ever happened before? I mean, probably, right?"

"If it has, I haven't heard of it," Rey said, setting everything down on the coffee table and heading to the kitchen to snag some glasses from the cabinet and coming back. "It sounds like the more annoying version of when everyone tastes like something."

"Right?" Summer agreed, emphatically. "Imagine smelling pizza all day and then probably never even being able to have any. Torture. And I'm shutting up about that now before I give the island any ideas."

"Thank you," Rey said with a smile, and paused when offering her the glass. "Do you want me to pour or do you want to judge how much you want?"

She'd heard that "good" earlier. Summer was a better judge of what that meant than her.

"...I'll pour it," said Summer, after a moment of consideration and then reaching for the pitcher as well. She realized that this probably made it sound like she needed to make sure the glass was being filled as much as she was going to fill it, which made her wonder if that was subconsciously true, but ultimately, at least consciously, she just figured Rey was the type to be conservative with a thing like that. But come on, it was a sangria night, if you weren't threatening your couch with the size of your pours you were just doing it wrong. And besides...

"I am a professional, after all," she added, with a grin, as she poured, to dispel any allegations for any other reason, thank you.

Rey was pretty conservative with her pours, yes. But she also knew how to clean a couch.

"Then I'm also sorry to make you work outside of your scheduled hours," she teased.

"Don't even," Summer insisted with a snort, carefully topping off her glass and passing the sangria on over to Rey. "If I can't even bring my expertise to good use with my friends on nights specifically designated for drinking, then what am I even doing with my life?"

"And we thank you for it," she said, filling her glass and curling up on the mermaid sofa. (See, conservative.) "so how are things?"

Summer's faint smirk went a little wry as she took a nice, big sip that resulted in that mermaid couch being no longer threatened with a new sangria-shaded stain.

"Things are okay," she said, with a particular emphasis on that word before she sighed, a little, with the dropping of pretense.

"But I'm pretty sure there's one thing in particular that you mean..."

"The bantha in the room, yeah," Rey nodded, already sympathetic.

"Yeah," Summer sighed a little, looking into her glass, then shrugged a shoulder and took another drink. "I guess we finally got to the point where people stopped just being weird and awkward about it enough to actually poke at it, which is good, I guess?"

"People were being weird and awkward about it?" Rey might have been one. When it came to Stark, she definitely still was one.

"Not, like, too weird," Summer allowed, "but it did kind of feel like a thing everyone was skirting around and trying to not actually step in. Which is...fair."

She was probably just as guilty as anyone else.

"It's a little awkward when he's still around all the time," Rey admitted. "I haven't known how to respond or if I should outright ask in that setting."

"That seems to be a running theme," Summer murmured into her glass, considering the 'conversation' about it with Jack the other night, too. She took yet another drink and lowered her glass with another sigh. "And the thing is, I don't really know if there's a whole lot to say about it anyway."

"What happened?" Rey wondered, sipping her drink.

Also did she have to be mad at him out of bestie solidarity?

Summer took a moment to think about how to answer that question, even though she'd been mentally workshopping how to answer that question ever since what happened actually did happen.

"An anniversary," she finally decided. "Or I guess you could say an anniversary almost happened, and that made me realize we'd been doing this thing for almost a year...a year, Rey!...and once you hit a year, that's, like, serious, and at this point in my life, that is the last thing I wanted. So I had to, you know..." And here she braced herself, because this was the crux of where she worried things might get divisive. Like, it was one thing with someone like Jack who disliked Stark pretty much right out the gate, but Rey was Stark's friend, too. "...cut it off."

"And he's not the type that could keep things casual," Rey guessed.

He'd talked about her all the time and was still going to Caritas right after the breakup, it said some things. 'Casual' was not it.

"I don't know if he's capable of even conceptualizing the word 'casual,'" Summer admitted, with not quite a 1000-yard stare, but one that had spent her due diligence in examining at least 900 of those yards from various different angles, and then shaking her head. "And honestly, that's probably on me, it's not like I didn't knw that, but I kind of thought the novelty of it would have run out of it sooner or later. But then it was just kind of...I don't know, easy and we were having a good time, and time is a just a bullshit concept, anyway, and has no right to move as fast as it does, what the fuck, time?, but then we just were suddenly at that spot and I just knew if we hit that spot, it was a point of no return. Last exit before the only way of the road was veering straight off it into a fiery destructive crash full of pain and resentment."

"I can't really blame you," Rey told her. "I don't know that there was ever a way that it wouldn't end in hurt feelings, but if you're going to cut things off, sooner is better than later."

"Yeah," said Summer, again, with another big sigh, and she looked for a moment like she might say something more, but instead, she just drank more of her wine. All of it. Whatever was still left in her glass.

Still had it in her! And, oh, look, she seemed to have found what it was she was going to say at the bottom of that glass, pulling it up before reaching for more sangria.

"And it's like...I feel like I've been doing everything I can to make it easier, but nothing seems to help, to the point where I sometimes almost wonder if he's intentionally making it this hard, and then I'm all 'hey, you're not dating anymore, it's not your problem' and then I'm all 'but, yeah, okay, I'm still his friend and also it's kind of a problem of my own making so, yeah, it kind of is still my problem,' so, like, I don't know, damned if I do, damned if I don't, I guess, so I'm just going to focus on doing me, because I'm, like, twenty five," almost, "that is what I should be doing right now anyway."

"That's kind of what I've been wondering about," Rey said slowly. "And all I know is what I've seen from afar and heard on radio, I've been a little worried how you've been doing when you're not getting space."

She didn't think anything was malicious, but Stark wasn't the only person that had a breakup.

"I'm fine," Summer insisted, and genuinely, too, not that dismissive sort of attempt to convince people otherwise. "I have shit to do on the weekends and a therapist and careers to work on, and he...."

She faltered a little in the small rant, once again up against the thing she'd been trying and trying so hard to figure out a more gracious way of saying it, but still kept coming up short, so there was another sigh and a shake of her head as she just said the only thing she did keep coming to:

"Doesn't. It's just...like...me."

Which, like, hell yeah, great for the ego, but man was it exhausting being the center of someone's universe on top of everything else you wanted from the multiverse.

And that was a lot of why Rey had worried. For a while.

"That isn't on you, though. You're not responsible for him. And I don't know that he'll find something else if he's still leaning on you."

Maybe that was her own self-sufficient-to-a-fault bias talking.

Summer gave Rey a slightly withering look and took a big gulp from her glass.

"I know that," she said, and failed to keep some of the bitterness out of her voice. "But you try getting that guy to stand up straight on his own two feet and see how fucking not easy it is."

And then if you stopped, you ended up feeling like you'd just dropped a bag of babies into a volcano, and that wasn't really great, either!

"Can you tell him you need total space for a month? A few weeks?" Rey said, and then added, "Even one week?"

Being realistic here.

Summer snorted faintly. "Not without feeling like I'd just kicked a puppy in the face with nuclear bomb combat boots, probably," she said dryly. "When I suggested that maybe we didn't do anything really special together for my birthday, it was like telling him that all the jello shots had tuna in them."

Actually, maybe an all tuna jello night might be the way to--

--no, no. That was the chugged half glass of sangria talking, clearly.

Rey almost asked if Summer was sure they knew they weren't dating anymore, but she didn't think that would help.

"Do you need someone to talk to him? Or do you want to go somewhere to get space?"

She could help with either.

"I think he needs someone to talk to him," Summer said, "that isn't me. Not even about me, even. Just, like, you know, in general. And I think I'm fine with space. If I needed space, it's not like I don't know how to take it. That's never been an issue for me."

"It's just being made someone's whole world," she said.

"....yeah." That word, accompanied with that drawn out, tired sigh, and a glance into her cup before taking a drink was definitely going to be a theme tonight. Summer was going to take just a small sip, this time, but, after reconsideration, she went in for a longer second one.

"So," she concluded, "that's that, I guess..."

"I'm sorry it took so long for us to do this," Rey said. Because this was pretty needed when things were sucking.

"I mean," said Summer, "you did ask, a while ago, when it first happened. But I just....I don't know, it didn't really feel like there was a whole lot to say about it, and you've just been so busy with all your stuff back home...I just kind of figured you weren't really interested, and I really couldn't blame you, either."

"Never think I'm not interested in what's happening with you. Short of me actively fighting with lightsabers at the time, if you want to talk, I'm there," Rey assured her. "I just didn't want to pry in case you were still working through it."

Also, ex-boyfriend at the bar. That confused a lot of things.

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MCA #1- Friday evening

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