Re: Second Class; Theater - Smoking Room
He didn’t have a swagger. He walked like maybe he had sometime back but a swagger came when you were off a movie-set, doing the kind of tricks with rope that they did at rodeos with trick horses or when you were new enough to start out swaggering and hoping no one would notice the difference. This man walked like he’d done a lot of walking and he walked right on down to where the noise was a swelter, a mingle of voices good and male in amongst the rest and where it smelled like people were doing some living. He took a glance at the theater but watching people do their living on-screen he had no appetite for and there was a room full of people all sitting about smoking like it was going out of style and drinking too. It looked like the drinking was free, there was no one in the place taking out wallets or fussing with money and that was good. He had a wallet someplace, he had it in mind that he’d been meant to be somewhere he was going to need it before he’d come here, but he’d lost it someplace between there and here.
He was a broad man and tall, the look of having lived under the sun and in broad, open spaces to him and the jingle at his heels and at his belt a nothing kind of sound he’d gotten used to living with. There was a holster at his right hip and at his left, and there was something under the blue jeans, at his ankle as it dipped inside his boot, and the toes of his boots were good and scuffed. The hat was broad, and it was beaten up, and the scarf drawn up over his nose and his mouth said maybe he was good and acquainted with the law and it didn’t like him very much.
He gathered up a glass from where everyone else was getting theirs, something dark and smoky-amber in the bottom, and he took another for good measure because who knew when they’d close things up and make people start paying? There were people all over the place and the gunslinger looked around for space and set on following where movement was tracking beneath the thick smoke, because stood to reason they were headed somewhere interesting.
He got close enough up to her heels that he saw her turn toward the alcove or he’d have missed her entirely at all, girl or cat or mixture of the two and he followed because hell, that wasn’t something you saw any day of the year but this one. “Never thought I liked cats much,” he said, as he sat down without asking a thing because if you asked people had a right to say no. “But it looks good on you. You want this? I got a spare. They might shut up the bar without warning,” he offered her the other glass.