Roxie (Wren) Maheu (ex_theredlig387) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-09-04 02:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | beast, roxanne |
Who: Wren and Cassidy
What: A meeting
Where: Outside an antique bookshop
When: This morning
Warnings: Mentions of sex (standard warning, given Wren's profession), but nothing significant occurring.
Cass had decided to go out for a while, always a daring feat in his book. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid of being in close quarters with others, more that he didn’t like to be. He liked the quiet, he liked being at home and being able to control his environment, not being forced to talk to people. He’d been alright in face to face conversation before meeting Clara, if a little quiet. Now social situations mostly made him feel awkward and vulnerable. After so long away from people he’d forgotten how to talk to them.
But he wanted to see if he could find the bookstore that the woman on the boards had recommended, so he went out looking for it. There was a rare history book that he’d read about and hoped they might have, and the thought of seeking it out left him distracted enough that he almost forgot how uncomfortable it was to be in a city full of people after twelve years in an isolated house in the Irish countryside.
The bookstore, without a sign and tucked away in a strip of cheap stores, was closed when he arrived, and the sign on the door indicated erratic hours. He gave the nail salon and dry cleaners on either side of it a quick glance before backing up a step and turning toward a fountain about a block away. If he’d come all this way only to be shut out of his intended location, he might as well make the best of it.
Wren had made it to the bookstore before it closed, unlike Cass, and she was sitting on the fountain’s edge, her legs tucked beneath her, an apple in one hand and a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine in the other. She looked up when she heard the approaching footsteps, and she watched the man with the dark hair and blue eyes as he neared. She was young, no more than 21, and her hair was as brown as her eyes were blue. She smiled as he neared, the corners of her lips tugging upward. “You look like you stepped out of a book,” she said, taking a bite of the dark, red apple without taking her eyes off him.
Conversation. Precisely what he'd been hoping to avoid. The book caught his eye and he couldn't quite contain his reaction, surprise and a little interest at her blatant flaunting of her tastes mixed. "I actually stepped away from a bookstore," he said, "One that's closed." He glanced at the book again, pretending not to notice the title this time. "If that copy is as old as it looks, you were already there.".
Oh, the book was old. She hadn’t paid for it, though, not for this book. See, Mal had a love of literature, and she made it a point to get familiar with book sellers in whatever area she was calling home at the time. She put the apple beside her on the fountain ledge, and she licked her lips before opening the book again. She began to read, in perfect French, an excerpt from the novel. If he understood the language, he would recognize the passage as the one where young Justine was forced to become a sex-slave to the monks. When she finished the passage, bawdy and obscene as it was, she closed the book and held it out to him, an angelic smile on her generous lips.
Cass' knowledge of French was extremely rough. He'd traveled there when he was young, and learned it in school, but his understanding of it was really only good enough to pick up every word in three. Still, that was more than enough to figure out where she was in the book. He listened, and he didn't interrupt her, and he waited for her to finish. When she was done, he asked, "Do you read that to every stranger you meet?" He was having a hard time deciding whether to be put off by the forwardness of that or intrigued, because really - who did something like that? "Or just the ones you want to shock?"
“Maybe it’s my way of seeing if you shock.” She was still holding the book out to him. She knew the store he was going to, of course, and she shook the book a little. “Can you tell the year?”
He took the book from her after she shook it, and he opened it up, checking the first few pages. His eyes scanned down the pages, and he frowned a little in concentration. "1803...maybe 1804. Not the original printing, but damn close enough. It must have cost you a fortune."
“I’m only borrowing it,” she admitted, taking it back and setting it beside her on the fountain ledge alongside the apple. She’d watched his gaze go down the page and that, combined with the knowledge of the store in the first place and the quality of his shoes, well, it told her something. “Are you from here?” she asked in smooth Italian; she had noticed French wasn’t his particular drug of choice.
"No," he said. He assumed she didn't mean from Seattle, since his accent should make that plain enough. And that would explain something - it wasn't that only Creations were odd enough to sit on the edges of fountains and read Justine to strangers and speak fluent French and Italian, just that they seemed a more likely set to be quite that level of odd. His Italian was, thankfully, considerably better than his French. He'd made it a project of improving one long year so that he could competently read La Divina Commedia in the original Italian, and it had left him with a fairly good grasp of the language, though he didn't use it often. When he went on, he did so in Italian. "How do you borrow a rare book most people wouldn't let you take out of their line of sight?" Skeptical was an understatement. 'Borrow' sounded like a synonym for 'steal.'
“Exchange of services,” she said simply, patting the fountain edge beside her in invitation. She gave him a smile then, one that was young - too young - and it was an imploring sort of a smile. She seldom met book aficionados that weren’t old enough to be her father, and Creation or not, she was still a 20-year-old girl. “The man who owns the bookstore likes to visit my place of work,” she admitted, slipping her feet to the ground, bare toes resting on the tips of his shiny shoes.
His impression of her went smoothly from one thing to quite another entirely, and he sat down without much thinking about it. He had time to kill anyway, and the fountain had been his destination, after all. "Where's that?" he asked, though he could take a guess.
He watched her settle her foot on one of his shoes and smiled, faintly, almost not there at all. It looked out of place on him, as if smiling wasn't something he was used to doing.
The smile looked like a rusty, unused thing, and she thought it was a shame; he had pretty lips, and he looked like a man who was once confident in a way that ill-fit now. She didn’t answer his question, though she turned to face him when he sat beside her, her knee pressing against his outer thigh. Her attire was conservatively provocative, as if it was intended not to call attention. Unfortunately, her mannerisms were entirely sensual, and they thwarted all the good attempts of the blouse and shirt. “Why did de Sade wrote what he did, do you think?” she asked, reaching a hand out to smooth down the shoulder of his shirt.
He didn't flinch, not exactly, but he did stiffen unconsciously. That was a little too close for comfort, but he wasn't sure how to pull away, so he stayed very still instead. "Because he was a sadist who liked to see women tortured. It brought him pleasure. It's that simple, I think. You can argue themes all day long, but that's what it boils down to." The talking (he hoped) covered how uncomfortable he'd become and how fast, because that was a shameful thing, not something he wanted to own up to.
She knew enough about men to catch his discomfort, and she stilled her fingers, but did not pull them back. “Women like to read him, though. Why do you think this is?” she asked, letting him talk, letting him ease into that safety. It was a shame, a handsome man with as much money as he obviously wielded, to be discomfited by the touch of a hand. The idea crossed her mind about changing all that for him. She had time, didn’t she? She tipped her head to the side, and she smiled invitingly. “Do you have books like these?”
"Exquisite horror," he said, following the thread of the conversation like a lifeline. "Titillation. They want something with the aura of the forbidden, and anything with his name on the cover is plainly stamped as such." She was a lovely girl, and maybe somewhere in the range of fifteen years ago he would have been able to talk to her easily and without discomfort, to take the promise of that touch on to something more.
"I do," he said. "I only brought a few from my collection back home with me, though. I'm working on building it back up again from scratch. Not so easy when the bookstores close at two in the afternoon." And he kept talking. The words hardly meant anything. She probably didn't really care whether he had the library of congress neatly situated in his living room, but it took his mind off his own discomfort.
She made a soft sound of interest as he spoke. “I’d like to see this collection of yours,” she told him, and then she reached for the copy of Justine, slipping her hand from his shoulder and down his arm, and she handed it to him. “Read to me,” she said. “I like your voice.”
He raised an eyebrow slightly, and it occurred to him that she might not be looking at this the way he was. He could just be a job to her, if he'd guessed her profession right. She could have taken in the quality of the clothes he wore and his knowledge of rare books and seen him as money to be had. Just this once, though, he didn't want to believe his own cynical doubts. He took the book from her and opened it, and began reading about Justine and the fire in the prison. His pronunciation was fairly good, though not as good as hers, and still carried his accent.
She listened while he read, honestly interested in the words. Her love for books was true and pure, even if she herself was not. The French, touched with his natural accent, was somehow all the more intriguing, and so she listened. The book was not her favorite, but she enjoyed the themes, and she showed on her face as she listened to him read. Her eyelids heavy, her lips slightly parted, her dark hair slipping over one white-fabric covered shoulder. If she was interested in his money, which she was, she was also interested in the reading. As he neared the end of a passage, she touched her fingers to his lips, as if trying to catch the cadence of the strange accent in the touch.
The book wasn't his favorite either - he'd read it, once, but then again, he'd read a lot of books over his period of self-incarceration. He'd read pretty much anything he could get his hands on, really, because anything was a distraction, anything was something away from this. He glanced over at her while he read and saw that she seemed drawn in in such a way that was hard to fake.
Again, he didn't flinch, just stilled, lips unmoving, looking over at her, expression impossible to read.
“Keep reading,” she coaxed, her voice soft and urging. It wasn’t a command, but it wasn’t quite a request either, and she didn’t move her fingers from his lips. “Or talk. One of the two.”
"Why?" he asked, not to stall, but because he wanted to know. And that was technically talking, one word or no.
“I want to learn the accent,” she said, leaning slightly forward as she said it. It was a new one to her ears, and she’d learned many an accent along the way, along with French and Italian and Spanish. The more interested she looked, the younger she looked, displaying all of a child’s curiosity with all of a woman’s intimate knowledge of men.
The way she said it made him feel strangely covetous of his accent, like it was something she could take from him. But her expression read precisely the opposite, and she looked strangely innocent despite how close she was to him and how conscious of her body. "It's just Dublin standard," he said slowly. "You want something more interesting, you have to go out to the country and talk to the old timers."
“Are you going to take me there?” she asked, her smile widening just a little. She slid her fingers from his lips to his chin, and she held his blue gaze.
He still held very still with her hands on him. "It's not home," he said. It would feel too strange to go to this world's approximation of Ireland, fundamentally the same but not the same at all. "I'm not going back there." He didn't look away from her. There was a level of something more serious in his tone as well. He couldn't go back there the same way he couldn't go back to the city he'd met Clara in. Places that reminded him of her were places he couldn't be.
She wanted to help him, she realized. It wasn’t an entirely strange thing for her. She liked men, when they were chosen by her, when they brought something to the table she wanted. And, honestly, she liked them without any of that at times. “Let me read your books,” she said, letting the reality of what she was offering linger between them.
He said, "Alright," before he had a chance to think it through, and he stood up from the edge of the fountain, offering a hand to her.
She took his hand, and she stepped into the sandals that were discarded beside the fountain. The apple was abandoned, but the book was picked up and tucked beneath her arm. She needed to return it this evening, and she would, but in the meantime she was here and he was here. “Where are you taking me?” she asked.
"The Aubade," he said. "It's not far. Have you been there?" He paused. "You know, you're very trusting. I could be anyone." He could be a psycho killer for all she knew, and yet she was leaping at the chance to follow him back to his apartment.
“I know men,” she said simply, because she did. She slipped her arm through his, her curves warm against his side, and she looked up at him. She expected him to tense, to react poorly. “I’ve never been there.” That was the truth. She generally catered to human clientele, because the abilities of Creations could blindside a girl in her field. She’d learned that the hard way, four years ago.
He did tense, but tried to hide it, yet again, chin lifting up slightly, attempting to salvage his pride. "How long have you been here?" he asked, curiosity edging into his voice at last. He was interested, at the very least. She was strange and unique, youthful curiosity with a woman's surety in all things. And she liked books. Cass had a very limited knowledge of her profession and the sort of things that happened while working in it, but he had little doubt she had probably dealt with some truly terrible things in her time. Maybe it was the maturity, but she seemed as if she'd gone through something, even if he had no idea what. "Do you have a name?"
I”ve been here 15 years, if by here you mean this place where we can all die. In Seattle? Two months.” She noticed the chin tilt, and it was an endearing little boy move. She tightened her hold on his arm, and she pressed a little closer to his side. “I’m more scared of you, than you are of me,” she confessed to him, because there was always a touch of fear with someone new. “Wren, who knows why the caged bird sings. And you?”
"I only got here about a month ago," he confessed, glad to have that out in the open. It was always strange, meeting other Creations in the city at random. It wasn't too hard to pick them out of a crowd, but it was sometimes difficult to be sure when it was appropriate to disclose, or whether the topic should be broached at all.
The comment was surprisingly disarming, and he looked down at her. He wasn't going to admit to being frightened of a girl who didn't even come to his shoulder, but it made him feel a little better. "Cassidy. Why does the caged bird sing?" The Aubade was only another block or so away, and it loomed over both of them in the distance. His apartment was on the top two floors, identifiable from the others by the curtains. Even from a distance, one could see that not a single window in the apartment wasn't covered by a heavy curtain of some kind. A storm was slowly rolling in from the East, and it made the place foreboding, but also allowed for a comforting reassurance that the rain would come, but they'd have more than enough time to get there before it started to pour.
“Because it wants to be free,” she said, slipping her arm from his. She handed him the book, the one that cost more than her Hamartia rent for the entire year, and she walked in front of him trustingly, her back to the world, fully dependent on him to stop her if she was going to walk back into something. “Not free from its cage, but free within itself, in its skin,” she told him. Her voice was softly unaccented, but she sounded sure of her words in a way that was entirely old soul, despite the youthful blue eyes. This man, this Cassidy, he wasn’t free; she already knew that.
He wondered what that meant about her, about the life she was living and her wish to escape it. "You're not free?" he asked, because she seemed that way, at least to him. She was right, he wasn't, not even close. He had all the money in the world at his disposal and he was just as shackled as anyone in chains.
When they reached the front door of the building he reached out and took her hand to stop her, pulling her lightly toward the front door, past the doorman who recognized him and held the door for them both.
“I’m free now,” she said, meaning it.
She barely glanced at the doorman, giving him a passing smile that was all generous lips and twinkling blue eyes. Dressed as she was, she didn’t look particularly young without close perusal, and she didn’t look particularly whorish either. Her shirt was white, soft, and buttoned chastely. The skirt she wore went well past her knees in a soft, whimsical floral pattern. And her sandals were a harmless white. The clothing was expensive enough to look like she was average, middle class. A young woman entering a building with a friend; nothing more than that.
He never would have pinned her for a prostitute if she hadn't made it clear in conversation. He knew that not all women in her profession walked the streets and that some had regular rosters of clients, and he wondered if she was one of those - if she had a group of men at her beck willing to pay any price to spend the night with her. The image was almost romantic, and most likely not the reality.
He walked to the elevator after the man at the front desk took a glance at him and his companion and greeted him politely. He got a brief nod in response, and then Cass stepped onto the waiting elevator. Up to the fifth floor, or the ninth, technically. Alone in the elevator with her, he at first wasn't sure what to say, or whether to say anything at all. Finally he asked, "What was your cage before?" He looked down at her, that look the closest thing to invested he'd been with anyone outside of Bonnie in about twelve years. He wanted to know. He wasn't sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing, but he did.
She leaned back against the elevator’s wall, and she looked at him in the enclosed space. “Life,” she said simply. “Surviving.” It was informative without being so, and the look she gave him said she’d left that cage behind, that he shouldn’t worry about it. And she had to a certain extent. She was still caged, but the door was open, and she could fly out when she chose. Her gaze on his was soft and sure, not particularly seductive in that moment, but something lingered beneath the surface that said she could be anything he wanted, and right now he wanted honesty, and she was giving it to him - free of charge.
He looked back at her, and tried to imagine what that meant for her, specifically. Life had been a prison for him for some time, as had surviving, but not in the way that she meant it, he was fairly sure. She seemed at ease with it, though, as if it had long passed, the time where she'd been a prisoner in a cage. "What kind of books do you like?" he asked, as the elevator doors slid soundlessly open. It had nothing at all to do with his previous question, but it felt important all the same. He walked down the hall to the first door, pulling his keys from his pocket.
She slipped past him into the opulently appointed hall, and she took his key from his hand, her fingers warm as they brushed against his own. She looked at the number on the key, and she turned down the hall with the ease of someone who had spent a great deal of time in other people’s buildings, walking down other people’s hallways. She moved ahead of him, and she slipped her shoes off as she walked, leaving a trail of footwear in the hall behind her.
He looked at her shoes as he passed them, almost walking directly by. Then he stopped, and picked them up, rolling his eyes slightly. Odd, but that little flippant casting off of her shoes and expecting him to pick them up reminded him of a girl he'd known, once. He carried the shoes in one hand, fingers slipped inside the backs, and watched her sidle up to his apartment door as if it was her own.
She slipped the key into the lock, and she pushed open the door. She didn’t go inside immediately, however. Instead, she peeked inside, as if to get a feel for the interior before actually becoming of it. She looked over her shoulder at him, and she took his measure. He didn’t seem particularly weak-willed, and she wasn’t sure he’d be controllable (her gut instinct was no). Once she stepped inside, she knew that she’d only be coming out if he let her, knife skills or no knife skills. She was practical when it came to her profession; it was dangerous, and it always would be. She stared a moment longer, and then she stepped inside on bare feet, taking the book and setting it on a table near the entrance.
She seemed to be appraising him, though for what, exactly, he wasn't sure. Maybe to gauge whether or not he was a threat to her well-being. He didn't want to hurt her, of course, though why he was willing to let her into his apartment was beyond him. He was curious about her, this kind and strange girl.
The apartment was best described as a cave, with dark draperies, dark wood furniture, and heavy drapes over every window. There were a few lights on in the foyer, but many of the rooms were dark, and it was tangibly several degrees colder than the hallway outside.
He shut the door behind them, walking off to the right. "The library's through here," he said, and stopped halfway there. "Do you want anything? To drink, I mean, or to eat?" When was the last time he'd had company anywhere? He couldn't remember. A few friends had visited in his first few years locked in the house, but they'd stopped coming by after a while.
“Where’s the bedroom?” she asked, already walking toward the stairs, assuming it was upstairs as bedrooms generally were. She looked over her shoulder at him, her long brown hair cascading over her shoulder. “Bring me a book and meet me there,” she said. The phrase was a casual thing, but inviting at the same time.
He paused a moment, then nodded. "Alright." He went into the library and and stared at the stacks, trying to imagine what she could possibly like to hear. He wasn’t sure that he owned anything quite on the level of Justine, or what that said about her taste in literature, so he ended up going with something safe, in the end.
A about a minute later he came upstairs looking for her. The second floor was much like the first, with the bedroom, the darkest room in the apartment, down at the end of the hall. The studio door was locked, but everything else was open or slightly ajar, all the rooms furnished, some of them looking like they'd been totally untouched since he moved in.
There was a trail of clothing leading to his bedroom door - skirt, shirt, panties, bra. Inside the room, she was sitting against the headboard in one of his silk shirts, an expensive thing she’d found behind the door, and nothing else. The shirt was white, pale against her skin, and it was parted to reveal the barest sliver of flesh. Her knees, bent up as they were, kept him from seeing anything at all, really, but she leaned forward and smiled like a woman who knew what it felt like to be in his bed, who knew what his clothing smelled like, who knew what he felt against his skin. “What did you bring me?”
Somehow he felt he should have expected that or something like it, but he hadn't. Her state of undress - no, partial dress - in one of his shirts? Left him a little off balance, and it took him a long moment to compose himself enough to respond. He left the overhead lights low as he entered the room, just enough to read by. The bed was in the center of the room, spacious and covered in dark sheets, and the curtains covering the windowed wall were safely drawn. It felt like a cocoon, like a safe, removed place. He spent not a little of his time there, and it showed in light tracks on the carpet and the bedding, which would have been rumpled when she came in, the maid not due until the next day. "The Divine Comedy," he said quietly, sitting down on the edge of the bed, taking her in, dark hair and pretty eyes. Her skin looked soft, and he'd felt the palms of her hands. He caught himself wondering just how soft she could be, and he set the book down between them. "It's what my life feels like, sometimes," he said, skirting close to the edge of honesty, of some admission, the closest he'd been with anyone in a long while, and then away again.
He looked down at the cover of the book. "You got me thinking about it, earlier, when you started speaking Italian. I learned it so I could read it."
If she realized how dangerous it was, sitting there with him, she didn’t show it. It was something she’d learned early, not to show fear in her profession. Too many men fed off fear, got off on it, and it wasn’t something she liked to encourage. She leaned forward more, taking book between fingers with short-clipped nails with clear polish. Her fingers were long, elegant on the cover of the book, and she brought the pages up to her face and she smelled the old, dusty scent of words and ideas. She closed her eyes a moment, letting it seep, and then she dragged them open and looked at him. “Read me your favorite passage,” she said, handing him the book.
He smiled a little when she plunged her nose into the book to smell it, and took the book back when she handed it to him. His favorite passage? It was hard to choose one on its own. He flipped open to the end of Inferno and began to read, about the devil with the three traitors in his mouth, forever devouring them at the center of hell, the darkest and most horrible of places. Then he read about Dante ascending into purgatory, skipping ahead almost to the end, and read of Virgil's departure and Beatrice's arrival, the critical but kind figure of Dante's lost love. He read it in the Italian, and when he was done he looked up at her, the book still open on the bed.
She had settled back against his pillows as he read, her hair fanned along the dark bedding, and she’d plucked at the comforter with her fingers. His voice was gorgeous, and the strange lilt of his accent made her pay more attention to the intonation than to the words themselves. She wanted to tease him, to tell him he was going to read her Justine next, but something in the way he held himself made her refrain. “Why that?” was all she asked, one of her thighs resting over the other and intentionally preserving modesty. It was a tease, her being there in his shirt, but it wasn’t a show.
"Not sure, truthfully," he said. "I love all of it, to tell you the truth, it's hard to pick one piece from it. But his descriptions of hell they're...visceral. You feel them. You don't have to believe in God to understand that the sort of man who had that kind of hell in his mind to put down on paper had a lot to fear from living an unjust life, because that is what was waiting for him. And then Beatrice..." He slid his hand over the comforter. He'd abandoned his shoes by the door, but otherwise he was still fully clothed, which felt a little strange, sitting next to her with just his shirt on. "She was a woman he loved without ever even really knowing. He wrote her poems, helped start this idea of courtly love, and then he was exiled from Florence, and he never saw her again."
She didn’t ask who he’d lost, who he would never see again. Instead, she leaned forward, and she reached for the buttons of his shirt. It was a wordless thing, no permission requested, no uncertainty in her fingers or her touch. Just buttons and buttonholes.
He felt a sudden surge of panic that seemed to come out of nowhere, and he reached out to take her by the wrist. "Don't," he said. His hand wasn't particularly tight on her, but it had come up quick and without warning, as had the sudden spike of something shameful and hateful, though not directed at her.
She slipped her hand from his gasp, and she nodded, but her eyes held a determined glint to them. This once, they said, and she slid off the bed and walked past him into the hallway, her hand skimming over his cheek and shoulder. She was gone a minute, two minutes, and when she came back, she was fully dressed again, her sandals dangling from between her fingers. She had her copy of Justine tucked under her arm, and she leaned over and kissed his cheek. She smelled of warm, musky summers, and she let her fingers trail over the kiss-warmed skin as she straightened. “I’ll bring a book in two days. Midnight,” she said.
He watched her go and didn't know what to say, feeling a strange kind of regret and burning shame. It should be easy to let a beautiful girl take his clothes off in his own bedroom in his own house, but it wasn't. She had a look in her eye when she got up off the bed like she wouldn't always be willing to take no for an answer, and he didn't know what to do about that. It made him feel lost, a too familiar feeling, and he didn't follow her out, waiting to see if she would come back.
When she did, and made that promise to him, he nodded. "Right. Sure," he said, not quite meeting her eyes, as if he hadn't just rejected her, like he didn't wish that she wasn't going.
She trailed delicate fingers beneath his chin, and she stepped away. His shirt, the one she’d worn, was left lying at the foot of the bed, smelling of her entirely, even after she’d gone.