log: blake and graham, thorne house Who: Blake Thorne and Graham Ross What: A run in at the manor. Where: Thorne house When: Today Warnings/Rating: None so far.
At two in the morning the night following the party, Blake was in the library. There was no fire in the grate, not at this time of year. The lights poured down from the second level, just enough to cast light on the first, but he hadn't touched the switch for the chandelier. Just enough light to see the books by, not enough to blind him after he had wandered in from the darkened kitchen.
He was poring over the spines on the shelves, his left hand slipped through the handle of a coffee mug that smelled like whiskey as much as coffee. He was working on his vices, truly, but what did an irish coffee count on a night like tonight?
The library was, in many ways, the eeriest room in the house. The place smelled like dust, paper, ink and coffee, old wood bookshelves and a whiff of the cold air from outside leaking around the edges of the windows. It should have been a comfort, but it was the titles in front of him, stamped in gilt and embossed into the leather, new volumes bound handsomely and old volumes in cracked bindings, that had made him swallow in strange fear when he'd first come here.
These books, every title, were books his father had owned, books that had belonged to his grandfather, to his friends and siblings. Books he had read himself.
He pressed a thumb into the spine of Leaves of Grass, but didn't take it off the shelf.
And here they all were, in a grand display, like someone had emptied the contents of his skull and filled a musty library with the very little there was to glean.
He had fucked things up. Boy, had he. But he had a hard time holding both hands down over the boiler these days. Sometimes, sometimes.
He was going to have to face those people he'd talked to. He was going to have to put on the face of a good host, for his sister's sake, and pretend he had no idea what anyone was talking about when it came up in conversation. When had he stopped being good at that? When had faking it gone away?
He had visions of cigarettes dancing in his head when he heard a footfall at the door and turned, a little too sharply, nearly sloshing coffee over his fingers. He clasped the mug with his right hand to steady it, and stared at the figure in the doorway.
No, this was good. "Hey." An odd looking person, perhaps - he'd always been a little too pretty for his own good, but with a viciously bitter cant to his full mouth. He was pale, but there were touches of sun at his cheeks. He hadn't seen Amelia long enough for her to notice, he supposed, for her to ask questions. He'd hardly left climate controlled rooms long enough in Vegas to feel his skin warm under the sun, so where had the sheen of sunned color come from? Where the callouses on the hands wrapped around the coffee mug?
He stared. Good start, didn't make it seem obvious at all that something was awkward, that something was strange. "You're Graham," he said, the levers squealing on rusty charm as he got his mouth moving again. The machine was just warming up, hopefully. "Sorry if I startled. I just like hanging around in the dark like a creep." He cleared his throat. "Couldn't sleep."