InsaneJournal

Who: Hunter and Viv
What: Failed scams. Puppy fuzz (literally, not figuratively).
Where: The "Health Smoothie Place"
When: Before the Paris Partaaay.
Warnings/Rating: Maybe language? I can't remember. Faintly mature references?

There was something to be said for Vivienne's psychotic crash test dummy style of driving. It usually consisted of windows down, volume up, and as little attention as possible paid to the road that lay before her. There were more important things to fasten her attention on, after all. She was currently pawing through a stack of mail in her passenger seat, long ashes dripping from the cigarette that drooped from her mouth like an extension of herself. She glanced up every now and then to notice the light had gone green or to veer out of the way of a slowing sedan. It was a noteworthy miracle, that she hadn't killed herself or anyone else yet. But it might not have come as much of a surprise to learn that her license was revoked in Los Angeles County, and she hadn't exactly bothered with getting one yet in Vegas. It was difficult to justify that kind of residency when she lived in a motel. Even if Viv knew that she'd never leave, not while her baby brother was still rotting in prison, she couldn't help the fantasy that burned inside of her when the desert mountains rose on a distant skyline. She could leave, if she wanted to. No point in digging her heels into anything permanent.

Ooo, smoothie coupon! And she knew precisely where the joint was, too. What a beautiful sight trapped between the wanted ads and some publisher's clearing house pamphlets. She dropped her cigarette out the window's vacuum and made a quick swerve across three lanes of traffic. How she'd ended up on the freeway was a bit of a mystery, but frighteningly enough, nothing new in the attention deficit realm of her driving. Taking a hard right off the ramp, she made her way onto the intended street. Now, Viv had seen this particular health food joint before, but never gone in. She didn't imagine her smoking would go over at all, and they didn't look like the kind of establishment that offered cheese fries or french toast sticks, but there was a first time for everything. She strolled through the door like a gunslinger queen, consistently fashionless in her fraying denim cut-offs and tacky espadrille sandals. The unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth was only the first clue she probably didn't belong here.

Neither did Hunter, standing behind the counter in a loose round-neck t-shirt and that absurd green apron complete with carrot stitched in orange embroidery. He had aggressively combed brown hair and a permanent sulk, and he was probably the only man in fifty miles that wasn’t in sneakers. His arms were clean right up to the elbow, having obviously been dunked in the desanitizer sink, and he had a farmer’s tan and the look of someone young who spent a great deal of time in the sun. He gave Viv a look that examined her face and stayed there, a look that no undisciplined straight man would have managed, and then looked at her cigarette. His jaw worked, but not from anger, and he displayed the spade of one eyetooth with his faintly wicked smirk. “You must be lost.”

There was an immediate shift of her mouth, a deadly grimace & squint combination. Viv noticed, because Irene noticed, the way that his attention locked on her face with no stray dog wandering. It was an unfortunate thing, to be pleasantly surprised. It forced her to accept the fact that some men bordered on decency, and she just didn't have the time for that kind of philosophical revisioning. Not today, no sir. "Yeah.. maybe.." There was uncertainty in her analysis of him, as if he threw her off to the point that she wasn't even sure this was Vegas anymore. He looked rugged, despite his carrot apron. Vegas didn't do rugged, they tore buildings down at the first sign of chipped paint. Landmarks barely existed anymore, just ask the hundred foot, light-up cowboy that was now rotting away in some neon graveyard somewhere. "..but since I'm here," she shrugged and advanced to the counter. Fishing that torn coupon out of her pocket, Viv placed it on the counter between them, but kept it covered with her palm. "So, lemme explain.." Deep breath, pretty con artist smile. "I have this neighbor that got cuffed on some trumped up possession charges, right? I say trumped up because I lived next ta tha man for months, and if anything, he was a pimp. Swell guy," she seemed to genuinely think so. "But his mail keeps on comin', and I mean.. what are we going to do? Let this coupon go to waste, even if it expired last month?" She raised an eyebrow, awaiting his agreement. "Hell no, am I right?" Her accent was strange, too round and loose in all the wrong places for such trailer park vernacular.

Hunter could tell that he wasn’t what she was expecting, and he just stood there while she worked it out for herself. He had coin-laundry bleached jeans on to cover the boots, which were his second pair of round-toe working boots rather than westerns, and he was rough in the knuckles and chin, yet still assembled out of bones a bit too sharp for thick potato-nurtured muscle. It looked like he had painted his nails black-blue sometime in the last month or so, and then let them chip off bit by bit. His shirt was untucked and there was a triangle of white hipbone several shades lighter than the rest of him visible under the strings of the apron. He was deadpan while he waited, and when she dug out the coupon, he leaned out over the counter with his boots crossed and his elbow under his weight, listening but obviously not caring to do it with much intensity. “Swell,” he repeated, showing the eyetooth grin again when she paused. “Who’s ‘we’?” he asked, not answering her question.

Her expression fell, and not in a way that eluded to great expectations. Her pretty little dosey doe smile crumbled before his very eyes, giving way to the truth. In the same way a slug melts down into a ghost after being salted. Viv was beginning to get the impression that he wasn't going to cooperate. "Me n' you." Point blank, unlit cigarette still waggling on her lip as she watched on.

Hunter thought the pure brass involved in this was pretty funny, actually. “So you’re telling me you swiped this from somebody last month, and then forgot about it ‘til now, and now you want a free kale green grass smoothie to go with your cigarette?” Hunter opened his mouth and closed it again as if chewing on an imaginary piece of strawberry gum, an incredibly flavorful piece, indeed.

Her back teeth clicked out some secret music as she watched him work his way through the problem. He was focusing on all the wrong details, really. "Yes." The word was murmured with no air of sarcasm or irony, just deadpan linguistics. She didn't see the problem here.

Hunter reared up off the counter and swaggered to the back of the little tiled kitchen that made up half the store beyond the glass divider that was plastered with little dancing strawberries. “Tell you what. You get a free sample of this shit, and if you actually want to eat more of it, that’s your fuckin’ problem.” He had to take a pair of scissors and cut some of the wheatgrass free from its plastic bin and stick it in a grinder. The kale looked like especially green cabbage. He put about four ounces of greenish goo in a little plastic cup and put it on the counter between them, smirking the one-tooth smirk and waiting.

The look she gave him could have whittled skin from bone. The dirty mulch of her eyes fell on the cup of sludge with a twitch of brow and a curl of lip that quite effectively translated into, And just what the fuck is this? His smirk really cemented it, and Viv leaned back from the counter with a little smile that managed not to be a smile at all. "Your customer service sucks," in case he didn't know. And then, just because he seemed to expect her not to, Viv gathered that cup in her fist and knocked back nuclear sludge. Her face said it all a half second later, a cringe against the fucking horror and bitterness.

Hunter laughed. His laugh was all breath, almost the wheeze of an old man, but with the hungry growl that was starving dog and young brass at the end of it. It was a laugh suitable for the misfortunes of others, or even his own. “I bet you feel ten times healthier.”

"Mm," she murmured without a lick of appreciation. It was a sound that said she didn't even want to bother responding, but for some reason she did. Viv was doing a lot of that lately, acting against what she'd grown to believe was her true nature. She'd have likened it to a mid-life crisis, but the idea of living past fifty was depressing enough on its own. Speaking of death, she tucked that cigarette behind an unpierced ear and turned for the door. "Thanks for nothin'."

“Can’t believe you’d waste your fuckin’ time on this place,” Hunter said to her back, not giving a damn whether or not she wanted to continue the conversation, and just irritated enough with the bubblegum pop coming through the speakers overhead that he’d continue on a conversation with anything that wasn’t a blender. “That green cup is gonna set you back four bucks on a good day.” There were two dogs tied to the bench outside with a piece of rope frayed at either side. Neither looked the type to run for it, but both sat up at the sound of his voice coming through the door.

"You're the one working in this shithole," she bit back without a second glance. Viv didn't even bother to wait, and lit her cigarette while she was still two paces inside the door. It might not have been summer yet, but the setting sun in this city didn't mind the calendar. The temperature felt like it was approaching ninety, regardless. She took a sharp drag off the ass end of her cigarette and squinted against the orange glow of a desert sunset. She didn't glance back in his direction, although she knew that he was there, still running his mouth like this was a conversation worth having. Viv could have walked back to her car, and maybe she should have after the assault to the tastebuds she just took, but the dogs gave her pause. She extended a curious hand, all spread fingers toward the closest one to let him smell her. It was the fearless tradition of a girl who'd never been bit.

Over the years, Hunter had many animals that would have gladly chomped down on the offered hand, but he wouldn’t have brought any of those into the city, or let them lounge outside his place of work. He was good at control, and animals listened to him, but if it was him versus instinct, instinct would win every time. These two were mild-tempered, and the puppy would grow out of the exuberance. The little collie, only half-grown, wagged the bit of fluff that passed for a tail and stuck a cold nose into Viv’s palm. The older, uglier mutt only sat back and blinked at her. Both animals turned their heads and stood up to greet Hunter, who left the shop and took out a pack of horrifically cheap cigarettes. They looked hopeful, as if he would drop them something tastier than Viv, but he didn’t, he just lit a cigarette and sat down on the bench next to the mutt. The collie, all floppy ears and wet eyes, sniffed at Viv’s shoes.

For the first time, a smile. It rose only because Viv was mostly turned away from the aproned man, because honesty was always more comfortable when it went unseen. She drew her hand back when the fluffier dog - she didn't know anything about breeds - dropped it's attention to her shoes for a few sniffs. Her nose scrunched, amused. Wiping her newly dampened palm on the back of frayed shorts, she dropped the grin and shifted to give the smoothie operator a cautious eye. "They your's?" She pulled at her cigarette, flicking ash with a chipped cherry-paint fingernail.

The yellow mutt put her chin on Hunter's knee and gave him a soulful look. He took the first drag off the cigarette and rubbed her ears with his first three fingers, watching the progress of the collie. "Collie just joined up couple weeks ago. Picked him up at a truck stop, somebody tied him up, left him there." He said this casually, sucking on the cigarette, leaning back into the bench. They were the worst two advertisers ever. Hunter would count himself lucky if he kept this job longer than a couple weeks.

"That bastard," Viv crooned sweetly at the tongue-baring pant of the Collie. Such babytalk compassion, anyone that knew Viv for more than a day would drop dead of shock. She wasn't really sure how people could abandon animals or children, but then again.. what did she know? She glanced up to him again, noting the dimestore off-brand cigarettes with a smirking exhale. "Here." She was steady eyes, and steadier hands when she extended her own pack to him, wrenching it loose from a back pocket. "You don't want to die smoking those nasty things." At least he could go out in style with her glitzy Marlboros.

Hunter knew just what he was looking at, and he didn’t hesitate before taking one of the offered cancer sticks with appreciation. Like she said; go out in style. But when he was short of cash, he tried not to let himself spend it on cigarettes. Death could come a lot cheaper if he wanted it to. “Thanks,” he said, more ready with his gratitude at such a gesture than almost anything else. He also appreciated her concern over the collie, simply because nobody besides him was concerned about the collie, and everybody could use a little concern one time or another. The collie seemed to sense this and immediately went for puppy exuberance one hundred percent, putting his front paws on her hips and bringing with him a great amount of fuzz. “Get off her,” Hunter said, in a most severe voice. When the collie’s tail continue to whip and he didn’t obey, Hunter reached sideways in a long hip-baring tip, and pushed down on the dog’s shoulder with his palm firmly, almost flattening him to the pavement. White fuzz was sad, but appropriately abashed, like a kid being scolded outside a candy store. “No jumping. Not polite.” The collie decided to go with it, and offered a lolling pink tongue. Hunter sighed. “Young’ins.”

Viv reeled the cigarette pack in with no regard to his thanks, but her silence was without curse or commentary, and that functioned in its stead. Besides, acknowledging a thank you meant acknowledging kindness on one's own part.. and then people could begin to expect things, and everything could get messy. The apocalypse played out in her head in those two seconds and it just seemed safer to say nothing at all. She wasn't expecting the dog's enthusiasm, and while the collie wasn't a large dog, it did send Viv back in a speedy sandaled twostep to keep from landing on her ass. It surprised a laugh out of her, something half-formed and rusty until she straightened, playing witness to the collie when he was scolded down to the asphalt. "It's fine," she interjected while tucking the cigarette on to her mouth again. "I don't mind." She didn't even dust the paw prints off of her front pockets. There was a beat before she made her observation, "You ain't from here." Smoke in her eyes, Viv's squint was a little suspicious. This apparently implied that she - with her unfortunate accent - was somehow from here.

Hunter didn’t think that far into his gratitude. He was as much reaction as the puppy, when it came down to it, but Viv could buy his tolerance, if not his affection, with her treatment of his animals and the offering of free cigarettes. Hunter was not difficult to get along with, he was just difficult to abuse, cheat, or damage. He’d made it that way.

The man righted himself on the bench, squinting out into the Nevada heat, and took another draw off the cigarette. “No. North. Came down for a couple jobs.” Slight pause. “Not this one.” He was not the chattiest man, but he put forth some effort. “Steal yourself another coupon, you let me know. Better do it quick before I get my ass handed to me for health violations, though.” He bared his teeth in a faintly predatory grin.

Viv let him have the bench all to himself, as her cigarette was dwindling to half-mast and she was getting antsy. She wasn't really one for casual chatter either, the only time she really made an effort with such trite shit was to hurt somebody's feelings. That didn't apply to this conversation, but it might soon enough if she stuck around. She screwed her bloodless mouth to one side in an attempt to kill a smirk, but it rose anyway. "Don't worry, there's plenty'a other smoothie shacks in this town." If that was his career path, anyway. Not that she judged. A meth lab caterer like herself didn't really have a leg to stand on there. Drawing a new breath with a swift descent of her attention back to the panting collie, Viv dropped that pack of marlboros onto the bench beside him. There were only a few left in there, it's not like it was a big deal. "Thanks for the nasty health food." And with hands wedged deep in her frayed pockets, she dipped toward the parking lot to escape the itch of more words.