Re: Diner: 1AM-ish
Home was Heath cooking up every delicious thing imaginable for snacking. Home was Mother and her perfect place-settings and conversations made for a dining table so wide and long that you couldn't really talk to whoever you had a mind to talk to. Home was setting precedence and never getting to sit next to who you liked. Later, home was sneaking out and going places that would chafe Mother to have associated with any of her beloved and adopted children. Orphans, taken in and given every luxury and opportunity. Home wasn't this diner, however comfortable Shiloh felt sprawled in it across from this young man who had not tumbled down from Heaven, not any more than he himself had.
But he was fine here. He was in Repose for a reason, and this diner was a comfortable place to feed himself. God knew Mal couldn't make a meal worth eating, and he might draw too much attention in the town's nice places. As for the white powder still lingering in traces on his upper lip, that was just to keep the party going. It was a habit born of deliberate annoyance, and now it just kept him from thinking about 12 months in a hospital and on the brink of meeting his maker.
He looked down at himself. "I don't see any fading watercolor, and I'd like to think I'm something more vibrant and pigmented," he said, voice a long-lost marriage of Southern refinement and British colonialism. He didn't slur, and he took his coffee and sipped it without politeness or manners, though he did wink familiarly at the tired looking waitress. "But I'm fond of compliments, so I thank you. And it's a good thing I've no desire to make you bleed. Not that I'm afraid of a little blood, but I don't really care for it in my hashbrowns."
Shiloh thought of names. "Gabriel suits. I'm Shiloh. I think I'm long past being things that aren't what I really am, even on a train in the middle of the night and going nowhere at all." He took another swallow, and he passed the back of his hand beneath his nose and sniffled. "Or are we meant to pretend we weren't ourselves at all last evening? It was my first rodeo, so I'll trust you to enlighten me."