Who: Vivienne & Noah What: A meeting. An amusing one for Viv, an unfortunate one for Noah. Where: Desert Moon Motel, then down Fremont. When: Recently, like everything. Warnings: Viv is a bitch.
Noah’s presence at the Desert Moon Hotel on the far end of Fremont was a coincidence. He’d been looking around town for places cheap enough that he could afford, and he’d circled the wrong location on the map. Instead of finding the cheap apartments he’d been seeking, he found an even seedier hotel. His own apartment with his stepmother was rather abysmal, most of the money in the house going to booze, but this was far worse. He’d walked two blocks from the bus stop, and there was no additional bus until two hours later. He was stuck in the sun, dressed in denim and a plaid shirt which was entirely too warm in the Las Vegas sun. Time, then, to improvise.
He slipped off the plaid shirt, leaving behind a thin white wifebeater with loose jeans, and he mussed his black hair considerably. None of it canceled out his inherently regal bearing, as if he’d been born for far better things, but he was young, and he looked like pretty trouble as he made his way around the two story structure to the back, where the pool awaited. The Vegas heat meant even dive motels had a hole in a ground that they filled with water. The claim of POOL below a vacancy sign went a long way in Las Vegas, no matter the poverty level of the residents.
As suspected, when he rounded the corner of the hotel he encountered a rusted fence and a white, plastic board with rules (No running! No diving!) so old that the letters had long since faded to an almost illegible cream on milk. There were a few people collected around the watering hole, and he approached the fence as if he had every right to make use of the pool itself, which was stained with rust along the corners.
Nobody in their right mind would use that pool. Which might explain why the only people congregating around the oasis were potbellied pond scum with gold chains and a couple of leathery widows sharing the daily gossip over a pack of pall malls and a blender of banana daquiri gone to soup beneath the unforgiving sun. The pool water had a questionable film on it and a scattering of dead leaves despite there being no actual trees nearby. One better be up on their tetanus shots if they planned to go for a dip in this particular pool. Needless to say, it was a freakshow kind of spectacle that didn't come along every day, which is why Viv opted to make the most of it.
She sat on the dented hood of her Datsun, soaking up the sun with a bleach stained beach towel beneath her. The denim cut-offs were more Huckleberry Finn than porn star, as their uneven fray ended just above the knee. White v-neck like a windless sail on her scorched bones while goldilocks were corralled into a knot with a red bandanna. There was a cigarette on her mouth and massive Jackie O sunglasses guarding her eyes when she watched the young man approach the decrepit fence just ahead. It was painfully obvious that he didn't belong here, then again, nobody did. "The hookers come around after dark," she called to him helpfully, inferring the only reason he might be scoping this shithole out.
Noah looked up when he heard the voice, and then he turned around to see where it had come from. It had to be the person on the car, he decided, because there was no one else about that was a candidate. The man on the corner was elderly, his sign indicating he would work for cigarettes. The woman carrying laundry into her room was, he believed, Mexican, and there had been no Spanish accent to accompany the words. He slid his hands into his pockets, the plaid shirt tossed over his shoulder now, and he walked toward her with the gait of a teenager. It wasn’t until he came closer that it was clear he was slightly older - in his twenties, but not by terribly much.
“I’ve no need for a hooker, but thank you,” he said, a duck of his head and a blush in the cheeks that still retained quite a bit of chubby youth. She was older than him, he knew. Not as old as his stepmother, but older. Lovely, he decided, and the blush grew warmer and his black hair flopping into his striking blue eyes. She looked trashy; there was no other way to describe it, but he liked that in a woman. His stepmother was a casino waitress and alcoholic; she wasn’t precisely classy. “I was looking for a way to pass the time until the bus arrived,” he admitted, more security in the approach and statement than ever would have been present before Mycroft’s arrival. “I’m called Noah,” he said, coming to a stop beside the hood of her rather horrific car.
She smiled at the boyish blush, unsure of whether or not he'd taken her seriously about the hookers. Irene immediately perked at the tint of an accent on his tongue, and Viv scrunched her nose in an effort to ignore the questions that Irene immediately wanted answers. It was frustrating, and Viv turned her shaded eyes into the setting sun with a squint, as a way of disguising the flicker of distaste that briefly creased her features. "You're called Noah?" Shielding her line of vision with a lazy, beach blessed arm, Vivienne reclined back against the slope of her windshield to observe him. The glass was pleasantly warm beneath her. "So that's not your name?" Both Irene and herself found the wording curious. She flicked the ashes from a cigarette that seemed to be a cemented extension of her cherry-painted fingers. Her bare feet boasted a matching shade with a splash of Dorothy glitter, and they dangled toward the edge of the recently dented hood.
It wasn’t, actually, but that hadn’t been what he’d intended for her to realize. For the moment, he was a deer caught in headlights. Bright blue eyes gone wide with panic, and it took a moment longer for him to realize she’d merely opted to mock his wording, rather than calling him out on a life spent hiding for a long-since slumbering murder. “It is my name,” he corrected, stepping forward again. “Noah Bailey. I’ve lost my way, I’m afraid,” he added, stopping at the edge of the car, right near those glittering toes. “It seems I’ve found you instead.” Older women were so much easier than girls. He glanced at them, her toes, because his stepmother didn’t do things like paint her toes and fingernails. It seemed a rather young thing to do, adding glitter to paint, and it made him look up at the blonde on the car hood with a quizzical look. “Do you have another?” he asked of her cigarette, nodding toward her mouth with a flop of dark hair into his eyes. “I’d kill for a fag.”
She didn't ask about his name again, and she wouldn't even if they knew one another for days or months past this point. Everyone was entitled to their secrets, she certainly had a cemetery of restless skeletons in her closet, enough that even Irene was leery of disrupting the webbed-over mysteries of dead daughters and lost childhoods. Vivienne raised an eyebrow at the request for a cigarette and leaned forward while nymph limbs folded into indian style. It seemed natural, a cut-out from lost hippie generations, with the desert flint and native beadwork of her antique belt. She extended the pack to him, open and boasting a handful of pale filters. "You sure your mama's not gonna come yell at me?" He barely looked old enough to drink, after all. Her accent was nothing like his, some voodoo hypnotiq cocktail of outback winds and southern swamps.
“I’m quite over twenty-one,” he assured her, because twenty-two certainly was, and she watched him fish out the cigarette and extend the pack with the lazy skip and gaze of someone who was young enough to want to stare too long, while being experienced enough to know precisely where to look to sate his curiosity. “And my mother has no control over my actions,” he assured her, a blush and a head duck joining the claim, which he buried in the lighting of the cigarette, as if it had been suavely intended to work out in precisely that manner. Once the tip of the cigarette burned red and vibrant in the desert sun, he looked back at her pale features. He stared, which he did not strive to hide, and then he moved to lean his hips back against the hood, beside those painted toes of hers. “Your accent. Might as I ask where it’s from?” he asked, squinting over at her.
"You might," she told him, but then silence fell and she offered nothing more on the subject of her accent. A lot of people asked her about the accent, it was too strange to let simmer alone. Sometimes Vivienne tried to see what answers people accepted as gospel. South African seemed the easiest to pass off, very few seemed to know what a Cape Town native was supposed to sound like. "Where's your's from?" She asked to appease Irene, but also because his answer would be the governing factor in how much honesty her own reply would hold. She pitched those massive, glamorous sunglasses up into her hair and shielded her eyes against the sun in order to watch him.
“London, originally, but I’ve been in the States a good long while,” he said, as if he’d lived long enough to have done anything for a good long while. He looked over at her, and there was something in his eyes that was knowledge and appetite, all accompanied by the shy head-duck of a boy. “I’m better off asking you more direct questions, aren’t I?” he asked, because she’d not answered his question, had she? She’d said he could ask, but she’d offered no reply, and he turned and propped his hip against the car hood, the new vantage point making it easier to take in her features beneath the heat of the squint-causing sun. “Somewhere abroad,” he reasoned, thinking through his knowledge of history to find the right combination of sounds, round and flat, oblong and drawn out. “Not Eastern, then, and not European.” She sounded nothing like him, after all. Honestly, the voice in his mind chimed in. Australia, accompanied by a fair bit of the American South.. He didn’t say anything aloud, but his eyes gleamed in a way that said he’d figured it out - even if it hadn’t been quite done on his own.
He's telling the truth, Irene informed her with an all-knowing air that Viv found simultaneously aggravating and comforting. After all, Viv knew very little about accents aside from her mother's drunken slur of Aussie and the southern twangs of all the woman's lovers. Needless to say, it wasn't a very extensive library. She wasn't immediately sure what to make of the proud gleam in his blue eyes, and she flicked her cigarette away before leaning back against the hood once more. "Australia. Sydney, actually." There was no mention of Mississippi. "Do you need a ride?" She doubted that he wanted to roast in the sun all afternoon. Her pale skin was already tinting, collarbones beaded with sweat.
“And somewhere in the South,” he added after her confession about Australia. He might have kept him to himself, and perhaps he should have done, but there was nothing for it. It was hard, not noticing things when the man in his mind noticed nearly everything. Like now, when he was noticing something interesting about the way the woman’s eyes tracked as she thought, as if a conversation was happening behind those eyes somehow. “But Australia’s the bulk of it. You’re quite far from there,” he said unnecessarily, as he was far from London as well. The offer of the ride was unexpected, and his very adolescent interest in the sweat droplets along her collarbone made concentration all the more difficult. “Yes, please, if you would,” he finally managed, pushing away from the dented car and tossing the cigarette aside. His stepmother would disapprove of any woman driving him home, but she was safely at work and hardly needed to be the wiser.
It was really only because Irene didn't approve that Viv made the offer at all. She wanted out of the heat, but could have just as easily abandoned this conversation in pursuit of her motel room. Still, the sun would be going down soon enough, and V enjoyed those dusky drives when the Vegas lights just begin to kick on and the darkness gives way to endless sky. She didn't have any work set up for tonight, and was already planning a long drive through the desert when Noah failed to let her simple answer go. Irene didn't like perceptive people, and Viv was forced to agree that it was an unnerving trait in one so young as himself. She said nothing, but cut into Noah with an unhidden hazel stare that could have made a soldier think twice. Vivienne very nearly took back the offer of a ride, but he said please a moment later and she tongued the edge of her lip before gesturing to the passenger side. "Just get in and shut up." Scooting off the rusty hood, she brought the towel along with her and tossed it into the backseat which was also littered with a couple of empty fast food coffee cups and at least two books checked out from the local library, both about the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Noah smiled at her order to get in and shut up, finding it somewhat endearing in a strange sort of way. He was too entirely easygoing to be troubled by it, and his history of bullying had always come at the hands of men; women held no true fear for him. He opened the passenger’s door while she climbed off the hood, and it was the books that immediately caught his attention. He’d similar copies all over his bedroom now, ordered from Amazon earlier in the week, and he had one open by the time she opened the driver’s side door. He threw her a quizzical look, one that said he’d not taken her for a reader. It was unnecessary, perhaps, because Mycroft said the woman was most certainly not a reader of any sort. He held up a book, and gave her an intelligent look, blue eyes darkly intense. He didn’t look quite so young in that moment. “You’ve a favorite character?” he asked her, which might seem a rather odd way to phrase it, but it was a question within a question - Mycroft did like his riddles.
Pulling open the door, she froze momentarily at the sight of him thumbing through the book because it felt like an absurd invasion of privacy. The sensation came directly from Irene, who was basically pissed that Vivienne would leave some fucked up, ridiculous version of her life story strewn about in perfect view. Sliding into the seat a moment later, Viv plucked the sunglasses off and dropped them into the backseat as well. She bristled at the look of discerning surprise that Noah gave her, knowing all too well what it meant. "Actually, I think I dislike them all equally." She paused before sliding the keys into the ignition, the keychain was a little, fuzzy pink teddy bear that was so beat up it must have been almost as old as she was. She reconsidered at a moment's hesitation. "Except maybe the doctor, he seems alright." Irene scoffed.
“I’ve never been a reader. I’m afraid it’s rather biting me in the arse these days,” Noah admitted with that same sort of easy affability that made him seem harmless to the whole world over - male to female, old to young. “I’ve recently read these though,” he added, motioning to the book in his hand and the one that rested closed on his lap. “I find the doctor to be rather unpleasant,” he said, and that was certainly more Mycroft than Noah, especially in the tight line of his mouth. A second later, that tight line was gone, and Noah sighed and set the book aside. His gaze dropped to the old teddy bear, and it remained there a moment. He considered what it likely meant about the driver (an observation he never would have made in the past), and then he reached out and touched it with two fingers. “The doctor’s q uite decent,” he amended. It wasn’t Watson’s fault that Mycroft had bollocksed up the entire world. “What am I to call you?” he asked.
Neither woman was a firm believer in coincidence, and the fact that Noah had read these books recently struck her as something to consider. They weren't exactly on the best seller's list right now. Noah was correct in suspecting that Vivienne was never much of a reader. Too busy in her adolescence climbing trees, running barefoot through marshes, and getting pregnant. Her utter lack of interest in the activity was made even worse by the subject matter, which Viv found plenty boring. She quirked a brow when Noah's opinion on the doctor flipflopped, but all the vibrancy in those hazel eyes was wiped clean when his fingers reached out for the keychain. Even Irene held her breath because the invasion was so swift, and underestimated, that the whole world stopped for a moment. The keychain swung like a pendulum, inspired by his touch, and Vivienne reached out to still it. Or just to intercede and keep him from touching it again. Her polish-chipped fingers slid up to the ignition, and the Datsun puttered to life. "Viv." Beat. "Where am I taking you?" She shifted in her seat to look at him.
He looked like withered leaves when she reached out the polish-chipped finger, sensing he’d gone too far somehow, and he had the decency of going rather red in the face. He rubbed his (now) sweating palms against the thighs of his trousers, and he ducked his head, floppy dark falling into blue, blue eyes. “The end of Fremont,” he indicated of the rather inauspicious apartment he shared with his stepmother. He hazarded a sidelong look at her and, after a moment of Mycroft complaining loudly in his mind, he smiled. “I can make up for my impertinence with a beer?” he suggested, the invitation perhaps as un-suave as such an invitation could possibly be. Noah was not in the habit of asking a woman around for sex, after all.
Viv drew a bare foot onto her seat, shin pressed into the edge of the steering wheel with an absurd level of comfort that said she most have regularly driven this way. But she wasn't driving yet, and she gave him a quirked glance of autumnal mulch while she tucked an arm around her knee. "Impertinence?" It was difficult to say who was more amused, Irene or herself. Rather than waiting for an answer, Vivienne just shook her head and slid that leg beneath herself as she popped the gear into drive and rolled onto the main street.
“Touching the key chain,” he indicated, pointing at it. It was swinging again, now that the car had begun to move, and he considered hazarding another touch, just to be bold. Granted, before Mycroft’s appearance Noah had been the opposite of bold, but in recent days he was feeling rather more secure about things, the older man’s excessive confidence bleeding over into the way Noah held his shoulders and considered retreats. “Without permission,” he added, which he felt was a rather smooth addition, but with Mycroft thought was unbelievably tacky. He glanced at her leg as it slid beneath her, and then he looked back up at her face. “I was inviting you inside, once we arrived,” he clarified, ruining any suaveness at all with the rather obvious statement.
Viv had rather hoped that he would let it all go at that, and she frowned against the glare of the setting sun in a way that was utterly Irene. As if perplexed over why she cared at all.. but, of course, she knew. "It's just a keychain," she said. The tone was even believable. Making her way onto Fremont, Vivienne regarded Noah easily from the corner of her eye, taking in the surprisingly boyish rake of his attention along her bare leg. "You're inviting me in for a beer?" She had to clarify, tongue tip edging along the seam of her teeth in predatory wait. Viv didn't need much of a reason to skin a man of his dignity.
Mycroft said it was certainly not just a keychain, that the sentimental value was evident, that no one kept such things around without reason, that even things kept in such a manner were generally hidden away safely. Noah just nodded, shrugged his shoulders and agreed. “Of course. I carry a flute with me everywhere,” he said, an obvious attempt to appease that came with the production of a small piccolo from his back pocket. He flipped around in his hand as she asked he question about the beer, and his gaze slid over to that tip of tongue against her teeth. He swallowed nervously, that bit of tongue going right to his groin, and he nodded. “Yes. Or something like that,” he clarified, which wasn’t really clarification, and which came with a groan from Mycroft and a flush of red against pale cheeks.
She naturally assumed that he was joking about carrying a flute around with him, because who the fuck would be serious about a thing like that. But sure enough, he produced it with a flip. Viv had to consciously return her eyes to the road in order to keep from slamming into the back of a Volvo that had stopped at a red light just ahead. That would have been the second fender bender in a week, and she was out of valuables to bribe the other motorists with. You do realize where his intentions lie, Irene said in that same amused and breezy way that she said everything. And yes, Vivienne knew. "You want to fuck me?" The words were soft with thought, and managed to be a question where no question was needed. She watched him while in wait of the traffic light, pale bangs drooping into her cool eyes, cheeks warmed to peach from her time in the sun. There was no clue in her posture or gaze, as if it really was just a genuine question on her part. To pass the time, she reached for another cigarette.
It was rather blunt, and Noah tended to tiptoe around life in delicate ways that never truly addressed anything at all for fear of rejection or retribution. But there was something thrilling about the way she asked, as if it was a perfectly acceptable thing to pose such a question. It was, perhaps, undeniably American. Whatever it was, it was new, and Noah (even the part of him that slept with his stepmother quite regularly) never actually voiced desire in such a blatant manner. Mycroft, in his mind, was rather madly waving a red warning flag, but Noah ignored it all the same, too starstruck by this vulgar woman with her teddy bear keychain and her glittering red toenails. “Quite,” he finally answered, opting to repay her candor with his own, even if his was rather less forceful or graphic. A second later, he ducked his head, and he looked at her from the corner of his eye as a young smile blossomed on his lips. “I’ve never said that quite so bluntly,” he confessed.
Quite. She found his terminology impossible and amusing. Who talked like that? Where indignation and anger should have resided, a fate-tempting grin tugged at her corner of her lips. His smile was young, endearing even, Viv almost felt bad. Her attention pulled away from Noah only long enough to acknowledge that the light had changed and it was time to progress forward once more. "What would you do to me?" She asked this like one might ask what he wanted for dinner. Prying a cigarette from the pack between her thighs, Vivienne punched in the little electronic lighter that lived beneath the ancient, busted tape deck.
His gaze slid immediately to her thighs, to that juncture where the cigarette pack was tucked, and her question made his face redden all the way to the sides of his neck. He wasn’t expecting it, and he’d no experience in actually telling a girl - no, a woman, she was most certainly a woman - what he wanted to do to her. He rubbed his sweaty palms against his own thighs again, and he had to clear his throat to keep his voice from coming out as a pre-pubescent squeak. he was twenty-two, dammit all. It was well enough time to act like it. “I’d rather like to shove you against a counter and-” He stammered. Yes, well, he could picture it vividly, but saying it wasn’t quite as easy. “I’d like to see your tits.” There. That seemed like a good, safe beginning, and his gaze dropped to her shirt as he said it. “I’m rather good in bed, I’m told. I’m just not very good at the words.”
She tilted her head back against the throne's rest, the turpentine and bronze tick of her eyes laying crosshairs to the young man stammering in her passenger seat. Swamp steam eyes fell to half mast, and she regarded him through them with a heavy beat of silence. Viv was actually impressed by what he started off with -- against a counter, really? She lifted the porcelain doll definition of her chin with a bit of admiration. Unspoken compliments always got her so much further. You'd be surprised how a person would believe the discreet approval of her wheatgrass and honeysuckle eyes moreso than a compliment fouled up in words. Or maybe Vivienne was just a person of less talk, more action. She came by it naturally, in some respects. "Take off your pants," dark lashes dropped in a gesture toward said clothing article. The car filled a beat of what was sure to be sudden, stunned silence by popping loose the lighter from it's coiled womb. Kitten claws planted a fresh filter in her lips, and a rendez-vous with that lighter got the glow of a cherry in a slow burn at the end of her mouth.
Noah, like most eager young men of his age, didn’t stop to think that it might be a trick or ploy. His dark blue eyes darkened more as they scraped up to her face, verifying she had indeed said what he thought she’d said, that she was not laughing at him (which would have been an indication something was amiss), and once all of that was done, he began moving. It was awkward, not at all sexy, nothing of a strip tease or commanding man divesting himself of armor. He undid his belt with a fumble or two, the button and zipper of his trousers with a little less difficult (but no less eagerly), and he shoved the fabric to the floor of the car, where he kicked it aside as he fought to get it past his shoes. He was left in his shirt and blue, striped boxers that did little to hide the excitement that had built at her command and his perceived opportunity to see her naked. He watched her light the cigarette, and then he leaned over and took it from her - a hint of the man he’d possibly be some day, after days like this had long passed. He wanted to touch her, but he wasn’t quite ballsy enough for that, not without permission. “I’m rather good with my mouth,” he added, gaze going from her face, to her chest, to between her thighs; it wasn’t a false claim, and it showed.
Her head tilted like a dropped doll, cheek pressing against the pale cut of her shoulder to watch him undress beneath the setting sun glare filtering in through the window. Viv didn't so much as blink when he reached to take the cigarette from her. Her pretty fingers gave way and gave up without a fight, letting him only because it interested her to do so. Her lips almost tugged to a lazy smirk, apparently amused by his confession. "I bet you are.." Hadn't he figured it out yet? She wasn't exactly one to be had. Some had certainly tried, but far fewer succeeded. You're being cruel, Irene whispered, and Vivienne's expression slipped into something different for the first time since acknowledging that keychain. A glimpse of reality in a pit of illusions, she swerved half onto the curb in front of the Golden Nugget casino. The sidewalk was literally teeming with tourists now that the night was on it's cusp. "Get out," she sighed with no further explanation.
It was ice cold water, surprise and the lights of the casino seemingly so bright they made him squint. It was that moment in the classroom as a child, the glass on the floor and the screams of scared children at his back. All the confidence he’d gathered in the past month slid away with the red in his face, and he was left pale and vulnerable as she stopped the car. “I thought-” he began, his blue gaze sharpening with something like hard realization a moment later. “I see,” he said, fumbling as he picked up the trousers at his feet. The flute fell, but he left it, favorite piccolo or not, and he had to try three times to manage the car door. His mouth opened, closed, worked, but no sound came out, and he almost tripped onto the sidewalk. He didn’t waste time slamming the door shut. He just fought to hop into the trousers, even as people around took notice and pointed. In his eyes, there was something unbelievably dangerous just then. Something that had broken when he’d been forced to lick a boy’s shoe.
Viv watched him fumble into his clothes down the sidewalk, and she lit another cigarette. Well, Irene spoke up again once the spectacle was over with, and Viv peeled her car away from the Golden Nugget with a harsh U-turn back into the direction of where she came. "Well, what?!" Viv snapped and glanced in the rearview, as if that made arguing with herself somehow better. You do know that he was reading those books for a reason.. It was said in a way that conveyed Irene's suspicions that Vivienne didn't know anything. Turning off of Fremont on the next convenient street, she closed her eyes briefly. Just coasting along, setting sun at her back, the nowhere child going even further nowhere. "I know," she said finally, a smoke siren exhale out the window before her eyes opened again. A flick of her fingertip against the radio introduced some Jim Morrisson to the situation, and signaled to Irene that this conversation was over.