Repose

[Locked.]

[...] Hi.

( Damian W )

( Cat C )

( Claire J )

Who: Holly R and Rory B
Where: The strip-joint on the edge of town
Warnings: TBA, probably language.

( Like chips of bone to grate against her elbows, her rib-cage, her hips, scrape-scrape-scrape and the discomfort of being stuck )

The coffee shop wasn't, begging pardon, strictly a tea-shop. There had been one briefly in town, a jazzy sort of outfit but it had been stripped away clean and the town had shuffled back around books and coffee scented with the smell of pages and mildew in the back of the store Jude loved terribly much and combed through like a pickpocket on a Sunday. Which, actually, wasn't far from small boy long since grown up. Did he have the knack these days of pulling a wallet from a coat pocket or the back of a pair of jeans without tipping off the owner? Jude's fingers didn't often itch and he'd gotten used to being a con-man in retirement, one with a back-up job in a bar that hadn't grown old. But the little boy would have looked curly head around the room and itched for thievery.

He wasn't a boy anymore, but man and one clad in last-year's rust wool sweater worn over a plaid shirt that frayed a little at the collar and cuffs with a stack of paperback books pulled from this week's box of new-old books, and perhaps a little of the old yen was banked embers, not yet fully ash because he had Oli to think on. Oli who he hadn't seen since the weather had warmed, now long since cooled and chill and it was easier to play with the mental flexibility of a boy calculating the angle for a pocket than to consider all other parts of the whole in childhood that had conjured a brother as well as a trade.

It wasn't Oli he waited for now. The tea set before the seat opposite as well as his own steamed fragrantly, not Nilgri or oily bergamot, both of which lay inside caddies in the cupboard of the small, warm apartment over the General Store, but chai. The coffee shop frothed milk, sprinkled cinnamon, drizzled honey until it was not tea so much as confection, and he awaited the woman he half-thought of as doll, stitchery-smile and broken-bodied determination for the seat opposite, without trepidation (although he couldn't help, while he waited, flicking through a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex.