Who: Cass and Max What: Fleeing a play, drinking, and bonding. All without finding out each other's names. Obviously. Where: A theatre, and then a dive bar. When: Last night. Warnings: Swearing, but that's about it.
The only place that Cass regularly visited was the rare bookstore not far from the Aubade. Aside from that, the things he was willing to leave his apartment for were varied - charity functions he was forced to attend, auctions where it wasn’t necessary for him to talk to anyone. Tonight he’d decided to go see a play, something he’d only done once since coming into Humanity. It was one of the few things he did enjoy in coming out of the total seclusion. He’d watched his first theatrical production for 12 years a week after coming to Humanity, and he’d thoroughly enjoyed it, lost in the characters and the actors onstage, and so he came back after firing Wren and feeling thoroughly miserable, looking for a distraction.
Not so with this play. It was a miserable show, one he’d chosen on a whim, an unearthed relic from the 1800s that the director seemed determined to rebury. The acting was subpar, the script nigh indecipherable, and the characters irritating.
He made it through two thirds of it before he couldn’t take any more. He collected his coat and walked out while an actor spouted a florid soliloquy about the relation of roses to the fleeting nature of life, and he didn’t bother to soften the closing of the door as he left.
When Max had encountered the attractive man at the grocery store that morning, she’d assumed his offer of a date at the theater referred to a movie, maybe some drinks after, and maybe something sweaty after that. When he’d picked her up in a suit, she’d known she’d read some signals wrong along the way, and she’d changed her shirt to something more appropriate, while leaving the jeans and high, black heels she wore on.
She’d never been to a play that wasn’t somehow involved in a mission, and she’d never been to one in English at all. Two thirds of the way through, and her date was rubbing the tears from the corners of his eyes with the handkerchief from his pocket, and Max was wishing she was at karaoke.
She’d looked over at him, decided he wasn’t that good looking, and excused herself for eternity (even if he didn’t know as much). She slipped out of the mezzanine (and the atrocious seats they had), and she took the stairs down to the box level and freedom. She saw a man in the hall, and she whistled to him. “Got a smoke?” she asked. She generally didn’t smoke, but after that? Hell, she deserved a cigarette.
He looked over at her. It was almost a comfort to know he wasn’t the only person who couldn’t take another second of the play. “Don’t smoke,” he said. “Sorry.” He studied her face. She looked distinctly relieved. “Fleeing the dross?” he asked. It didn’t even occur to him that she might be leaving for some other reason. Frankly, he didn’t understand why everyone in the crowd hadn’t abandoned ship by now.
“I have no idea what a dross is, but if it’s that piece of shit play, then yes,” she agreed, even as she flagged down one of the ushers and got a cigarette off of him with no trouble at all. The usher’s lighter followed, and she tucked it into the front pocket of her jeans with a wink before turning her attention back to the dark haired man with the striking blue eyes. “You wouldn’t have an impressive car to go with that impressive suit, would you?” she asked.
He couldn't help but smile slightly at that. "Close enough," he said. He watched the short exchange, and decided fairly quickly that more than the play had forced her out of the theatre.
He paused. Really, he should say no and go home on his own. At the same time, however, the idea of going home after such a miserable evening without a thing to show for it seemed a little sad, even to him. The woman had obviously had a rough evening. What could it possibly hurt? "Not so impressive," he said. "But I do have a car. Did you lose your ride?"
“Trying to,” she said, a teasing smile touching her lips. “I’ll let you give me a lift,” she offered, turning her back to him and heading for the main doors, even as a young man starting calling for ‘Maxine’ on the mezzanine level. She didn’t turn around. Hell, she didn’t even slow or run, her hips swaying with utter calm. If it was an escape, she didn’t show it.
Cass heard the call from the next floor, but didn't immediately connect it to the woman a few steps ahead of him. A few moments later he was out the door and out of range of the call. He pulled a ticket from his pocket, handing it to the valet. "Did you pick the play...?" he asked, looking over at her, waiting for her to fill a name in.
She lit her cigarette as he handed the ticket to the valet, and she took a long, leisurely drag off it, a pleasured thing, bluntly so. For all her heels and long hair, left in shining waves for the evening, there was too much confidence in her body to be strictly feminine. She wasn’t on a job, wasn’t playing the elegant spy, wasn’t attempting to go unnoticed and blend into the crowd. She looked over at him with a grin that was all playful tease and banter. “Do I look like the florid poetry type to you?” she asked, and in her plunging shirt (that was just this side of decent) and her tight jeans, she looked more like a bar brawl than anything involving poetry.
“Not exactly,” he admitted dryly, letting the question of her name go for the moment. He was in a suit respectable enough for the theatre but relaxed enough to suggest he didn’t care all that much about appearances - he was willing to meet the minimum, but not to go over the top. There were touches to it that suggested wealth, in the quality of the make, but it was anything but flashy, the coat he’d shrugged on over it plain dark wool against the autumn chill.
He had to admit, there was something intriguing about her supreme self-confidence, enough that his usual distaste for conversation abated. Small talk he couldn’t, and refused to, abide. Talk with someone he found interesting was another matter entirely. He followed the plunge of her neckline with a touch of interest, though not nearly as much as she probably assumed it deserved. When it came down to it, Cass had no interest, and, indeed, a great deal of disgust for people who played games. This woman just didn’t seem the type.
The valet drove up, stepping out of the car, and Cass walked around it. He didn’t really care about the car, nor did he care much for flaunting his wealth in other people’s faces. If he had to drive the thing often enough to be seen in it on a regular basis, odds were he would have bought a used car just to fly better under the radar, and, of course, to really fuck with people when he climbed out of it.
Max wasn’t into playing games, and she wasn’t into trying very hard at all. You either took her the way she was, or you didn’t, and she had an air about her of not caring which you chose to do. She did, of course, care, but not at first, not when she initially met someone. That took time; time to get past her defenses, time for her to like you. Once that happened, then she cared. Before then? Not so much.
The car wasn’t anything to write home about. It was expensive, but the engine didn’t sound like anything out of the ordinary, and Max liked engines that sounded out of the ordinary. She stubbed out her cigarette, the tip of her shiny, black heel grounding it into the concrete, and then she climbed into the passenger’s seat, crossing her legs and looking over at him. “Not a big talker, huh?” she asked him.
“I’m below the average in that regard, yes.” Steady Irish cadence, Dublin city proper if you were looking for it. He started the car, waiting for her to crush out her cigarette and get settled before pulling out. “I don’t like to speak unless I have something to say.” Pointless talk was just so much wasted breath.
The car was clean enough to evidence not getting too much use, and while he seemed fairly comfortable driving it, it obviously wasn’t anything that he derived any particular sort of pleasure from. “Where am I taking you to lay low after that disaster?”
“I think I need a drink,” she told him, and she looked pointedly at the car and suit before quirking a brow at him. “The bar on 108th,” she suggested. It was nearby, middle class with fruity drinks and marble on the bartops. Not her style, but his, she suspected. There was a bit of challenge in the statement, the opening for him to suggest something harder if he was feeling brave. Max was always feeling brave.’
He thought he heard some suggestion of a challenge, but he wasn't sure what to. "I've never been there," he said truthfully. All he could tell from the location mentioned was that it wouldn't be a dive. "Is that your usual choice?" he asked, looking over to see if he'd judged that challenge correctly.
He didn't hang around in bars enough to really have a strong preference. There had been a time when going out and trying everything a city had to offer in its bars and clubs had been the order of the day, from the most expensive to the most hole-in-the-wall. Another life, practically. If he had to choose, however, between the high and middle class bars where being seen was as much the point as drinking, and the dives where you could generally count on enough hostility to ensure you were left alone if you obviously wanted to be, he thought he preferred the latter.
“Not a big drinker?” she asked. “Or not a good judge of women?” The last was asked with a grin that said she was pegging him as both, but that she’d give him the option anyway, just to see how he’d respond. “The corner of 5th, on the docks,” she offered, challenged, threw out like a gauntlet. The docks were dangerous, the crowd there rough. Getting in a car with a man whose name she didn’t know was, Max knew, much more dangerous than going to a dive bar on the docks; she didn’t think this man would feel the same way.
He looked over at her with a small smile, amused for his own reasons. “Both,” he said, affirming her assumption. "Should that lead me to believe you are something of a drinker and a very good judge of men?"
Cass had only been in the city for two months, and he'd never been down to the docks. Considering how little he left the apartment, however, it was something of a wonder that he'd been anywhere at all, least of all the nastiest part of town. On the one hand, his car would make him an easy target. On the other...nothing had been working for him since he'd moved here. He hardly left the apartment, things with Wren were a shambles, and he was miserable nearly ninety nine percent of the time. Who knew? Maybe doing something completely off his usual path might do something for him. At the very least it wouldn't be boring. He turned the car toward the docks. "Does the bar have a name?" Somehow he was guessing that it didn't.
“I like a good beer, and I’m a shit judge of men,” she admitted, rolling down her window and letting the cold night air filter into the car. The breeze gave her goosebumps on her bare arms, and she grinned over at him. “The Docks,” she said, because that’s what the bar was generally called. It had no name, no real name, and she’d found it while looking for Thomas’ graffitti artist. She was surprised when he turned, and she gave him a longer look than she had before. “You realize your hubcaps might be gone by the time we finish a beer, don’t you?” she asked. She wasn’t armed, didn’t have her iTouch, and she still didn’t have a communicator.
"Straightforward," he said, bemused. Then, in reference to the hubcaps, "Might?" He looked over at her, smile turning sardonic. "If they're gone, they're gone," he said. It wasn't as if he couldn't afford to replace them. "I only wish I'd dressed for the occasion," he said wistfully. He was going to stick out like a sore thumb and he knew it, and that didn't really bother him either. He didn't easily fit in anywhere. It wasn't as if it would be a new and strange experience for him. "What qualifies you as a shit judge of men?"
“Sounds like someone who can afford to replace them if they’re gone,” she said about the hubcaps, and it was obvious from the tone that she didn’t care if he had money or not, that it didn’t matter. “Bad relationships makes me an expert,” she said, looking back out the window. The wind was whipping her hair against her cheek, and she didn’t seem particularly worried about her relationship history right then. “Everyone should be straightforward. We spend too much time dancing around things that should just be said outright.” The docks came into view, dark and foggy over the water, and she looked back at him. “Last chance to pull out, Money.”
He didn't address her guess, since it was fairly obvious that she was right. The fact that she didn't seem to care whether she had money or not was a point in her favor. If she'd changed her demeanor when she saw the car or his suit, she wouldn't be here right now. "Amen to that," he said. He had his eyes fixed out the window, on the docks up ahead. "Cass," he corrected - better than her calling him 'Money' for the duration of this excursion. "Well, we've come this far," he said, smiling faintly. The Docks didn't scare him, and he wasn't going to turn around just because this was a stupid idea.
“Maxine,” she said, pointing to the one-story building that was The Docks. She looked over at him, and she grinned. “We should have picked up a box of smokes. I have a feeling it might be that kind of night, Cass,” she said, and she opened the car door while the car was still moving. She waited until he’d almost parked, and she climbed out, her stilettos clicking on loose gravel. Outside, there was a truck, a taxi and a few motorcycles. She walked past them, shooting him a look over her shoulder as she moved.
He parked the car within sight of the bar and climbed out, not hurrying to catch up with her, walking at his own place. This definitely wasn't where he'd planned on spending his evening, but it beat driving home alone fuming about the play by miles. It had been a while since he'd gone drinking. If he expected to get the car home in one piece he couldn't go too far with it, but it had been that sort of week - and might be that kind of night, as she said. "I don't smoke," he said, echoing from earlier, then added, "But I might be convinced, depending on how the night goes."
She pushed open the wooden door, which swung in with a creak that was loud enough to be heard over the old rock playing from a jukebox in the corner. The bar had no pool tables, no darts, no tables. Nothing but one long, wooden bar and another wooden shelf on the opposite side. The glass behind the bar had been shot out years ago and concrete was visible behind the bottles. She stepped up to the bar, running her fingers over a bullet ding in the wood, and she asked for two whiskey shots and the bartender’s pack of smokes. She propped one foot on the leg of the barstool beside her, her heel catching behind the rung, and she leaned forward and grabbed the bartender’s pack of smokes from behind the bar.
Well, no one could say that the place didn't have character. He summoned up confidence he'd thought long dead, and buffered it with apathy toward anyone's opinion of him who might be looking him over as he took a seat next to Max. His eyes fell to the charming bullet dent in the bar. This kind of place brought slumming it to a whole new level, but he kept that charming thought to himself. "Come here often?" he asked, smiling faintly. It was a genuine question masked as a slimy come on, and when the whiskey came in a shot glass smudged around the outside with grime, he muttered something that sounded like a catholic plea to the saint of alcohol for the stuff not to kill him outright, and downed it.
“Just once,” she told him, tipping back the drink and earning herself an appreciative whistle from the bartender when she downed it in one go, exposing a long, long stretch of neck and cleavage as she tipped her head back. She didn’t mention that the once was after the Bat had caught her snooping, because he didn’t need to know that. Instead, she slid up on the barstool, ordered them both a second, and lit up a cigarette. “How about you? Pissing your pants yet, pretty boy?”
His gaze went to the bartender for a moment during that whistle, then back to Max. "Can't imagine why you never came back. It has so much...rustic charm." He didn't down the second whiskey immediately when it came to him, holding the shot in his fingers for the moment. "Hardly. Just imagining what my liver is going to look like tomorrow morning." The whiskey burned with the promise of a cheap buzz and a delightful hangover.
Toward the back of the bar, someone shot a warning shot at the roof, and no one batted an eyelash. Even Max just looked over casually, the whiskey warm and soothing in her belly and her veins. She downed her second, and she slid the shot glass back to the bartender as she took another drag off the cigarette. “Why the hell are you here, Cass?” she asked, as she motioned for refills and a beer chaser for each of them.
Cass' head turned sharply to follow the sound. When no one so much as blinked, however, he turned back to face forward again, looking down at the bullet hole in the bar. After a moment's contemplation, he downed his second shot.
He looked over at her, leaning forward over the bar. "Oh...intrigue. Excitement." He waited for the bartender to bring over their beers and the third set of shots. He was starting to think that driving the car home might not actually happen. "Truthfully, the prospect of going home seemed a little bleak this evening." And cheers to whiskey's power to loosen the tongue, particularly when it was presented in the consistency of gasoline.
She laughed at the sarcasm, and she sobered at the confession. “That’s when you find someone to take home,” he informed him, pointing the beer bottle at him. “Sex keeps you from thinking too much.” She handed him a cigarette and the usher’s stolen lighter. “Who is she?”
He made a sound that might have meant he agreed, and pulled the beer toward him. He didn't just...take people home. Not strangers, at any rate. Then again, he'd made an exception for Wren.
"I might just adopt that strategy," he said, all dry. He took the cigarette, lighting it without even pausing to consider that it might not be the best idea. It had been a long time since he'd last smoked, and he deserved a cigarette, as far as he was concerned.
Who is she? Lovely. He took a long drag, revelling for a moment in the burn of the cigarette and the warmth of the whiskey in his stomach, taking comfort in it. He blew the smoke out his nose, and moved for the beer. "That obvious?"
“Oh, yeah,” she said, because that sort of misery only came from one thing. Max knew it well; she had a long history of that kind of misery. “Fuck someone new and move on,” she recommended, something some woman had told her early on in the military. Women in the military knew one thing about men: men cheated. At every port of call, with every hot female officer, and with every deployed officer’s wife. Military women didn’t have any delusions about the male ability to keep it in their pants. And, honestly, military women weren’t much better. Sex and death went hand in hand, fueled by adrenaline and the need to remind yourself you were alive.
“Does that actually work?” he asked, in a tone that implied he couldn’t imagine that it did aside from offering a momentary distraction. The beer tasted like anything but beer, but he assumed it would assist in the act of getting drunk, so he drank it anyway. The idea of trying to pick someone up in some pathetic, desperate attempt to wipe away the catastrophe he’d made of things since moving here was enough to make him go for another good swallow.
“Not at first,” she admitted, “but eventually someone else comes along, and you fuck up with them instead,” she said, a knowing look in her eyes. This man, who she didn’t think drank very much, wore his unhappiness on his sleeve. She considered coaching him out of that, but she didn’t in the end. She lit another cigarette, and she blew smoke above her head and winked at a man at the back of the bar. She looked back at Cass. “What did you do?” she asked, a passing sort of idle curiosity in the question.
He wanted to believe Max’s positive outlook, that things could be that simple, could work out that way. His experience with dating was, admittedly, limited - he hadn’t dated many girls before Clara, and none after her. He’d never been the sort to randomly pick girls up anyway, but if things kept going the way they were, it might be time for that to change.
He didn’t drink much, or often, railing in his own silent way against the stereotype of his countrymen. His escapes were more mundane, into books and occasionally writing. The pleasant buzz he had going was doing much to persuade him to pick this up as a regular indulgence, however. “I misunderstood our arrangement,” he said, his smirk wry and not a little bitter, and he chased that particular pill with another mouthful of beer, swallowed quickly to render the taste a memory as fast as possible. “Twice.”
He looked over at her. “What about you? Found someone to fuck up with yet?”
She laughed, a warm throaty sound. “I’m trying to avoid fucking up this time around, which means I am fucking up stupendously,” she admitted, asking for one more round; the room wasn’t spinning yet. “I’m not seeing anyone, is what I mean. At least not anyone who thinks they’re seeing me in return.” She downed the drink, and she watched the men in the corner. “Think they worry about the same pointless things we do, Cass?” she asked, looking back at him. “How can you misunderstand an arrangement?”
He pulled back from the beer, taking a drag off the cigarette and looking over to the men in the corner when she did. “Can you see someone without their knowledge?” he asked. “I think that qualifies as stalking.”
“Absolutely,” he said, looking back at her. The question elicited a smile, and he leaned in a little, as if confiding a secret. “You fall in love with a prostitute,” he said, as if this was some grand hidden truth. He straightened again. “And then, even though you know what a bad idea it is, you hire her. Because you want to be around her, and you don't want to be responsible for what she'd have to do with someone else if you didn't. And you manage to do this not once but twice, and she quits, both times, because you don't understand the boundaries she has to lay down, and because she won't just take charity and get out of the business."
He stared at his beer, finished it off, and moved for the second. "I think it takes a special kind of knack to fuck up as badly as I have since I moved here," he said, thoughtful. He felt distant from the whole thing, tired of it but not overly upset. The whiskey and beer combination had taken care of that. He laughed a little. "We've resolved to be friends, though, so it's all fine."
She laughed again, a true and mirthful laugh, and she lit a fresh cigarette for herself and held one out to him. “There are songs about falling in love with hookers, you fool,” she told him, but it was with a smile and the sense that she’d fucked up just as badly in her own life. She exhaled slowly, enjoying the burn and the feeling of the smoke obscuring her blurred vision for a moment. “I’ve never heard of a hooker that didn’t want someone to come along and save her,” she said honestly. “You ask her if she feels anything for you? Or are you expecting her to know you’re agonizing over this?” Then, finally. “Being friends doesn’t work.”
She leaned over to ash the cigarette, and she took another drag. “You can fuck someone and not be seeing them,” she said, in response to his first question.
"I've heard them," he said with a grin that came faster and looser than usual. "I just didn't listen."
He snorted. "She doesn't want anyone to save her. We've argued long and hard about that particular point." He took another drag from the cigarette, letting the smoke drift out his nostrils. "She knows how I feel, more or less. She doesn't feel anything more than friendliness for me, as far as I can tell." He went for the beer again. All of a sudden the emotions tied to the situation didn't seem so distant anymore. He wished they would just disappear. "I doubt it will work," he acknowledged. "But it's that, or I pay her. I'd prefer not to go down that road yet again."
Now that he knew Wren felt nothing for him, paying her to sleep with him would just feel...wrong. Even moreso than before. He could bend his morals to a point, to be sure she was paid and she was comfortable and that she wasn't doing the sort of things for money that made his bile rise in the back of his throat when he imagined them, but when he knew there was likely no chance of her feeling anything more than friendship for him, paying her for sex felt tantamount to rape, and too desperate and despairing to think on. His only hope at this point was to try to get to know her better, to find something that might help him convince her to leave the business. She might never love him, but he could still try to help her, even if she didn't think she needed it.
"Do you want to be seeing them?" he asked, tapping the ashes in the general direction of the ash tray without doing much to aim them.
“Oh, baby, my story is much more complicated than your country song hooker situation,” Max said. “First rule of women, don’t assume shit about them. What do you see when you look at me?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow - he didn't think he was young enough to be called 'baby' by anyone in that tone, but he'd had enough alcohol at this point not to point that out, or to avoid the question. "Pretty," he said, and it almost wasn't a compliment - he seemed to think that it should be self-evident. "Comfortable, but not rich. Confident." He searched for more adjectives, taking one last drag on the cigarette to buy time before crushing it out. "Tough, maybe. It's not exactly easy for me to guess, I've only known you for an hour."
“Tough, right,” she said, and then she shook her head. “Not a fucking bit. Talk to your hooker and make sure you aren’t reading her wrong. There’s no time in this life for dancing around things.” She laughed a little at the pot-kettle of that statement, but hell, she was drunk, she was allowed some hypocrisy at the end of a shot glass. “No one walks the street because they want to, Cass, no matter what the hell they tell you.” That came across a little bitter, a little bit of undercover experience in the words, and she stubbed out her own cigarette. “Call yourself a taxi, rich man. I’m going to introduce myself to the men in the back,” she said, her attention on the corner again.
"Right." It was obvious enough that he didn't believe her. Wren had told him herself a dozen times over that what she did was part of who she was and he had to accept that. She'd told him that every time the subject came up. The furthest she would even go was that she had simply accepted her lot, but that didn't change the fact that she hadn't expressed any desire to change, and had gotten upset when he suggested she should. That seemed irrefutable, as far as he was concerned.
He looked over to the corner. "You're sure?" he asked. It didn't seem like a silly question because he was drunk, end of story. The men in the corner had been shooting off guns - that didn't seem strictly safe.
“I’m sure.” She reached for the cellphone in her pocket, and she called him a cab, as she slipped off the barstool on feet that were used to walking drunk in heels. She started toward the back of the bar, and she looked over her shoulder at him. “Don’t count on your car being there in the morning.”
“I wasn’t,” he said, watching her walk toward the back of the bar. He turned back to face the bartender and found his wallet in his pocket. He paid for their drinks, chanced one more glance back at her to be sure she was alright, and then wandered out to wait for the cab. He could worry about everything else in the morning.