Re: Nick & Wren: Fortunes
She didn't have a past. Woman like this one in a set-up like this one, Nick was willing to bet that didn't mean she was a blank slate kept somewhere out of the way. He thought small towns were made for people with roots that ran deep, generations in the graveyard out back behind that little church that collected up sinners on Sundays and extracted prayers from them the way Nick had shaken down the machines for change out back as a kid. Small towns that ran on things known between people, instead of the perpetual tide of people rocking in and easing out leaving nothing behind but space instead of bones.
But this small town had, last count, him, his brother and Wren-no-past. Maybe Nick didn't know a fucking thing about small towns. He leaned back in the chair, the spread of shoulders that looked like hours curling weights under faded red cotton, and looked amused.
"My past isn't all that illuminating. A lot of piss-poor choices that felt real good in the moment. Do you have those? Moments when you feel like fuck it, you're gonna go with what your gut says feels good." Nick and fate weren't friends, because Nick didn't know fate from a kick in the ass. Shit happened, for a reason or because of a chain reaction.
She looked troubled and maybe that was part of the set-up, touch a sore spot and flinch yourself, curate intimacy like an experiment or a recipe but Nick didn't incline forward or roll backward, he sat through it. When she started reciting all that she'd seen, his face was ambiguity, the kind that didn't need a hat to find shadow.
"All that, and no crystal ball or holding my hand to read my palm," he wasn't a big roller, he hadn't given her cash but if it was a con, all of that would have been easy to dig out given time and enough patience - hell, even a bored kid paid off to surf the net for half a night. But Wren shook back blond hair and stared him down like the tent and the lights and the woman were conviction.
"What do you see for him? The other guy?" Nick didn't need a crystal ball to know Sloan was in trouble of some kind.