Re: The Woods: Pesha/Tandy
For his part, Billy wore everything he felt on the outside. Heart on his sleeve, all the nuances of each thought and emotion, they read on his face. He was earnest, and he was playful, and for someone who had spent the last three years making money selling the most intimate lies, he was very honest. It was what his regulars liked about him. He remembered details, asked about their lives. How their kids were doing in school. Whether they got that promotion they’d been up for. The men he brought into his trailer, they weren’t generally anything like the asshats that Tandy had mentioned on the forums. They were just lonely, and Billy knew lonely.
He didn’t suffer any fools, was the crux of it. Even when he went by Pesha, Billy was unapologetically himself. He’d never really been the sort of person to put on a front. “Nice to meet you,” he breezed, over his shoulder still as he dumped his backpack onto the futon couch, cigarette dancing where he’d clamped it between his limps at the corner of his mouth. There was a pot of water atop one of the burners on his little cooking stove, and he flipped the gas on and lit the flame with a prod of his middle finger where a spark came out of the whorl of his fingerprint.
“You want a coffee or something? I think I’ve got some beer in the ice box.” Because he didn’t have a fridge at the moment. They sucked a lot of electricity out of his generator, and he needed to save that for his lights and the music that was pouring out of the speakers hidden in the wooden ceiling panels that ran the length of the bus, originating from the stereo system where his phone was plugged in with an AUX cable. Instead of a fridge, he had a cooler tucked under his little kitchen table. The contents were layered carefully, ordered steak-ice-deli meat-ice-beer-ice from the bottom up, with a charm on the bags of ice so they didn’t melt as fast. His produce sat in a basket next to the table, and he broke off another orange segment where he’d left it on the counter from his snack, popping it in his mouth and working the pith off the fruit with his teeth.
“Thank you,” he grinned at the guy, plucking the cigarette out from his mouth while he ate and grabbing a purple rhinestoned ashtray from a shelf so he could rest his smoke on the edge while he worked. “It’s pretty badass, right? I got it from this wild hippie couple who were going respectable and moving back to the Capital. Got it for a steal. They used to drive it to Burning Man every year, so I keep finding playa dust in the weirdest places.”
Billy gestured with an arm, the one that had a large, hand-shaped burn above his wrist, motioning that the guy could take a seat on the futon if he wanted. He bent down to open the flap of his backpack and started pulling things out: a bundle of rosemary, some dried moss. A vial of water from the lake that was a dark algae-green. The pot on the stove was working up to a low, rolling boil. He grabbed the pewter coffee pot off the counter and cupped his hand against the bottom, flashing a blast of heat so that the contents would start to warm.