Check it: Ol" Blue Eyes wandering down the road to the inn, thumbs hooked into her beltloops, showing off that fine slice of woman between bellybutton and Yes, Lawd. Got her head tipped back, looking at the clouds like they were telling her stories. She's a dreamer, for sure, but that's all right, you know" Dreamers got faraway eyes. Just ask Mick Jagger.
He's watching her. He watched her for a few days, corner-of-his-eye, quiet-like. Girls like that, they get riled if you get too obvious with that s**t. You got to be sly about it, sneak up on "em when they're not looking. Arms folded, workboot hooked into the rail for balance, the other one flat on the porch stones. Watching her sigh like she didn't like the story the clouds were telling her. Damn, she's got it. Whatever it is, he's feeling it right in his gut.
"Marco!" she sings out as she climbs up the stairs.
His mouth hooks at one end, giving up half a grin. "Don't see any pink-haired dudes hanging around here tonight."
She's got this way about her, he's noticed. When she's still, when she's not moving, she's not moving. She stops being a person, is a thing. Then she moves and breaks the spell. "Maybe not?" She wasn't expecting him. Who'd she calling out to, then"
"Nope." To his own ears he sounds like Americana. Tailfins and apple pie, hell yeah. "Just me." When he searches his memory, he realizes that he doesn't know what "Americana" even f**king is.
"Will." She swings around the post with an arm, smiles a little at him. Pretty dreamer's smile. "You opened my honey."
And oh, s**t, he wants to laugh out loud at that. Opened her honey. Like she even knew. "So to speak." Funniest thing was, he had opened a jar of honey for her, night before last. That was the first sidling up he did. This is part two. "Never got your name."
"I never gave it to you." She's watching him back, now. Sizing him up. Maybe wondering if he'd fit or if he'd bite. "Would you like it?"
"If you're still giving it out, yeah." She gets a quick grin for that, a flash of white teeth.
She taps her fingers against the post, making serious face at him. "Can I trust you with it?"
He looks past her, off at forever. And, s**t, he doesn't even know his own name for sure. How the hell can anybody trust him with theirs" He digs around in that big hole in his head, comes up empty. And he says, "Probably not."
Most women, they wouldn't like that so much. But this one, she's different. She smiles at him. "Honesty," she says. "That's rare."
"Yeah." Her smile starts to make him feel weird. Uncomfortable. Not in a bad way, just"how the f**k do you live up to a smile like that' He squirms. There's a seam slowly unraveling along the ridge of his shoulder, in the blue denim work shirt. He picks idly at it, gives the yellow thread a tug like he thinks he's about to get a present unwrapped. "I get that feeling." Maybe he's talking about the inn's occupants. Maybe he's talking about Rhydin altogether. Maybe he's just talking about himself. Hard to say, even for him. Can't remember s**t, so what does he know"
"It's Aoife." She picks out a patch of railing and leans on it, hands bracing herself. She looks like a skinny little pinup, posed like that.
"Eva?"
"Close. E-fa." That smile again, all secrets and promises. Dreamer's smile.
"Pretty name." He's looking her over. "Pretty eyes, too." Unhooking that one boot, he stretches his other leg out, shifts his weight.
"Thank you." She looks away like she's about to blush, but he can't see any color in her cheeks. She studies the wall, looks at the posters tacked up there. "Are you new here?"
That's the million-dollar question. "Yeah," he guesses. It doesn't feel right. "No." That doesn't either. "I don't know."
"Indecisive?" She looks over her shoulder at him. Coy. Beautiful.
And he's not used to that word in his head, beautiful, and it cuts into his sense, makes him say things he wouldn't. "Can't remember." Saying it, he feels like he just stripped naked and did a little softshoe for her or something. This time when he shows his teeth it isn't a smile, but a snarl. Shouldn't have admitted that. Unfolding his arms, he pushes off the railing. "You want something to drink?"
They go in. He holds the door for her with a shoulder; she pauses and looks up at him like she can smell the cheap soap, river water and amnesia on his skin. The top of her head just clears his chin. He's wearing a frown from the admission. Picked it up somewhere on the way in. Found it lying on the floor, maybe.
"What're you drinking?" Scottish. That's the accent. She's Scottish, Scots, Scotch, whatever. That little look over her shoulder again. Damn.
"Negra Modelo, if they got it. There's a chocolate stout that's almost as good, if they don't." He finds a barstool and sinks down onto it, bracing a forearm on the bar. He moves like his back's speaking to him, and the stories it's telling aren't happy ones. That's because it is, and they aren't. It doesn't stop him from looking up and down the bar at the other people sharing the light with him. He pegs them off, one at a time: old man in a cloak walking up, guy that holds himself like military and has a creepy smile, woman with a head like a dandelion and big brown eyes that just ain't right.
"Well, hello, ladies," military man says, grinning all sharkish and s**t. Aoife's looking at the guy like deer-in-headlights. She keeps looking at him that way, through the old guy asking for water for tea, through handing off the bottle of Modelo. Like she expects him to eat her up. The kettle goes off, shrieking, and she doesn't react.
What the f**k" "Hey." He pitches it low, underhand, for her ears only. "You okay?" Old man picks up on it too, asks her the same question.
"Yes," she says. Then, "No." And frowns.
He sighs and reaches for the bottle. This is the sound of the place where self-carbonation goes to die, with a crack and a hiss. And he waits. She'll tell him, or she won't, and it's okay either way.
She sets the mug on the counter before rounding through the pass. A leg is swung over the stool, oh"the mount was beautiful"and a slide onto it. And she stares at her mug for at least ten seconds before looking at him, Will, and leaning a little closer, voice lowering enough just for his ears. Her dreamer's eyes are wild. "Sorry."
He angles his head toward her, all confidences and dreds just beginning to lock up. "What are you sorry about?"
"For having a moment." She offers him a small smile before she straightens, hands reaching for that mug and pulling it closer.
"So...why?"
"Well...." Her sigh is as big as the world. "I kind of agreed to do something I would never normally do. Ever."
He has a drink. He has another. It's at least as good as the first. Hunching into the bar to work away from the ache, he asks, "What was it?"
She lifts the mug, takes a tentative sip. "Model." She won't look at him, takes another sip instead.
"Model." He loops up an eyebrow. Some redheaded chick hops up onto the bar next to him and shows her knee off. He slides a glance down it"not bad"and takes another sip of cerveza. It tastes like familiarity, like that knee looks. Hello, knee. Where has Will seen you before"
Aoife has a deathgrip on the mug. She nods, stares at the back wall.
"Modeling what?" Keep her talking, he thinks, maybe she'll come down from the ledge. Next door, the knee starts flexing and bending as the redhead starts kicking.
?"Nothing." Aoife's cheeks start to glow.
Right brow joins left brow. "Seriously?" And this is a bad thing"how"
She puts on this expression even he can't find it in him to describe and looks past him to the redhead. "Kate!" she says, and pastes the biggest, most fake smile he"well, that he can remember, onto her face. "Hi!"
"Salve, Aoife," says Redhead. "How are you?"
"Me?" asks Aoife's Big Fake Smile. "I'm great. You?"
"If you changed your mind, say no," he drops into the middle of that, and goes back to drinking.
"That's what I said," says Redhead to him. Then back to Aoife, "I'm good. Busy. Just finished working."
He gestures with the bottle at Redhead, like, 'see?"
"Good." The weird beaming smile goes away. She sits there.
Something about her face just then, something in her eyes as the fright takes over again, it moves him. First there's a freaky little kick in his chest, then a stabbing pain in his head. He winces, digs a knuckle into his temple. Said knuckle is scraped by a wooden crate he lifted earlier in the day. "Why'd you agree in the first place?" he asks over the gong show in his skull. That wooden crate was responsible for the stiff way he was sitting on the barstool.
The crazy skinny with the white-blonde hair speaks in a voice for seers and madwomen, a whisper that is part purr and part squeal. "Perhaps because it is spring, and she is beautiful, and the moon was waxing, and there might have been strong drink involved, as well?"
"Money doesn't grow on trees for everyone in Rhydin." Aoife says it quiet, twitches a sidelong look over to the crazy.
He lowballs a look of his own under the arc of his wrist and hand at the woman. The monster eyes look back at him, unblinking, peeking out from the cave of the tapped-out b***h's hoodie, trapped in a too-small prison of flesh and bone. Aoife earns a desert flower of a smile from her, briefly bloomed and quickly gone. He drinks in the beer, the words, the look, and sighs it all out at the end. One shoulder moves, finally. "I'm selling my body, too, I guess. The only difference is that dirty old men aren't going to rub one out over me afterward." Harsh words. He knows as soon as they come out that she's not going to like them. He doesn't wonder why he said them.
The redhead blinks at him. "Selling your body?"
"I move freight on the docks," he tells her, and knocks back the last of the beer.
But he was right, Aoife doesn't like his honesty as much as she thought she did. She's getting up, putting her mug down fast enough to slop tea over the sides, heading for the door. Taking herself and her freakout and maybe a head of steamy righteous indignation out the door. F**k that. He sits upright, digging his scraped-up knuckles into the small of his back. Then he's starting for the door, too. It's the polite thing to do, you know" Hold the door for the lady. Like that. And she thinks about hitting him. He sees it in the way her eyebrows shut down, her face is all wrinkled up, her elbows are held tense against her sides. She wants to take a shot.
"I'm saying," he says, to stave it off. He's not the enemy. "You don't want to do it, tell him to f**k off."
She takes a few more stiff-legged steps toward the stairs, then tells the night, "It was actually a she. And it's not everything either. Just what I'm comfortable losing." She's got this thing about not looking at him. He's going to have to dig into that, sometime. And it doesn't surprise even his lizard hindbrain that there's going to be a sometime. He's already decided it.
The door bangs shut behind him. He shakes his head at her, though she can't see it. "Okay. Do what you gotta do. I'm not judging. I'm just saying, I'm not the one with the discomfort level cranked up to eleven, here."
Still not looking at him. "There's just...complications involved with the whole thing." She wilts just a little.
And it's late, and he's tired and sorry for her, and there's f**k-all he can do. Dawn comes early in the WestEnd, and it's almost as much of a bastard as he is. So he decides again, and makes his move. "Well, you can walk with me and tell me about it. I need to get to bed."
Lo and behold, she makes eye contact, and asks him, completely randomly, "Do you know where I can get some fresh fish?"
"If there are any all-night fish markets, you're headed in the right direction."
(Adapted from live play with Aoife Duggan, with appearances by MissKate, Artsblood, Victor Kazon and Fenriswulf, with thanks.)
