Susan (solightlythrown) wrote in regulation, @ 2008-03-27 23:50:00 |
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Current music: | "Temporary Dive"- Ane Brun |
Entry tags: | backstory, matt cavanaugh, susan bones |
"Sometimes we wander while looking at the sun..."
Who: Matt Cavanaugh and Susan Bones
What: Celtic and Rangers fans have a showdown and then Sue suggests she and Matt go feed the ducks.
Where: Hackney, London
When: October 2007
Rating: R
Status: Closed; complete
It was oddly silent in the crowded pub when she pushed open the door and slid inside, elbows knocking against the sides of the mostly male crowd inside as she tried to make her way to the counter. Everyone around her seemed to be holding their breath, their eyes wide and round as they stared straight ahead and Susan's head turned to try and figure out what was proving so fascinating to them. When she found it she almost kicked herself. A twenty four inch plasma television showing a football match was kind of hard to miss.
Head shaking, she squeezed in between two stocky figures and nearly tripped over her own feet. Thankfully, her hands grabbed at the bar and hoisted her body up. "Smart, Sue," she murmured under her breath.
Someone beside her hissed something in her ear, which she couldn't make out as at that precise moment the whole pub seemed to have decided to erupt into cheers, voices loud and jubilant as the ball sank into the back of the net. She'd never understood the appeal of watching football in a pub filled with overweight middle-aged men, most of whom smelled worse than the dump around the corner from her flat, and when a number of them raised their arms in unison she had to suck in a breath. God, that was awful.
"Beer, aye?'
"No. Just an...an orange juice please." She was almost sure the bartender snorted but didn't pay any attention, shoving a note in his hand when he passed it over. She'd barely taken a seat when the noise in the bar erupted again, people screaming and yelling at the screen, angry at something or other. There was a man in a black uniform standing in between two of the players and she glanced over just in time to see him flash a red card to the side with the red shirts. Apparently the pub was filled with supporters of both teams and she could almost hear the starts of arguments brewing before the referee blew his whistle.
The best way to get through sporting events was by looking - and being - so over it. Or at least that was the case back home, for a given value of home that included SLC but not Chicago. Apparently it also wasn't the case in England.
But the pause for everyone to stand up and show their support for their respective teams, and possibly to start throwing punches - Matt didn't trust the mood in the pub in the slightest - did mean that the bartender wasn't doing anything.
And Matt's glass was empty.
"Another Macallen, please," he said, money already in his hand as he slid up to the bar, between the balding guy in the shirt with a suspicious stain and the woman with something orange in the glass. "Possibly with a lid," he added to himself, as the first punch got thrown and the bartender was too busy sorting that out to finish pouring.
Matt helped him with that, leaving the money on the bar and - carefully - turning in place, ready to dodge if needed, and hoping this wasn't going to be like that last fight he'd seen, but then it'd been later in the night - a lot later - and people had been a lot drunker, which, he hoped, was the explanation for why he'd suddenly been standing on the curb waiting for an ambulance, watching one of the transient crowd of people he'd come with - most of whom had fucked off -bleed from a glass to the face.
"This country's crazy," he said aloud. On balance, it was more to the woman - there weren't any weird stains on her clothes.
"It's not so bad," Sue said, though she doubted the words were meant for her. "At least we don't go around chopping people's heads off for fun." It was bound to be an improvement on that situation, she was sure.
Edging slightly away from the heavy body pressing into her side, Sue pushed the orange juice away from her, pushing it further across the bar counter and towards the very far edge of it. It could have fell off. Then again, she wasn't sure that the glass wouldn't end up smashing and sending juice all over her if she left it where it was.
Right behind her she could hear the sickening noise of bones cracking and she turned her head just in time to see someone's fist sink into another nose. There was a moment during which there was no reaction from the other man and then blood ran down his face and, blinking, he threw himself at the larger bloke. The other man had nearly half a foot on him and a good three stone and meaty arms shoved him back, making him trip over his large feet and fall straight into Sue.
The air left her lungs and she scowled. "You twat," she scowled, pushing him roughly and barely stopped herself from grabbing the wand shoved down the waistband of her jeans.
Things had gone rapidly from bad to weird, and Matt was caught briefly flat-footed by the violence erupting out of the seat next to him. But when the man she was beating on fell against him, it was a natural reaction to shove the fat bastard away as hard as he can, his knee sinking unpleasantly far into the man's gut.
It knocked him off balance against the bar, and the clatter of glass was weirdly loud when his whiskey hit the floor.
"Fuck," he muttered. "Look, if you're going to kill people, can you do it somewhere else?"
He wasn't touching the comment about beheading people.
"Me? I'm not trying to kill people. I'm a pacifist."
If the slight twist to her mouth hadn't given away the fact that the words were almost a complete lie, her actions a second later did. One of the women wearing a red and white T-shirt kicked her shin which was bad enough on its own but when the woman was wearing heels? It was perhaps one of the most horrid things she'd ever had the misfortune to experience. Perhaps.
Her fingers curled into a fist and her knuckles connected with the underside of the woman's jaw. The woman's head jerked back and she howled, an angry wordless shout ripping itself from her throat. Susan supposed it would have been loud except the whole bar seemed to have decided to get into the fight and between yells, screaming, and the barman's thundering voice in her ear telling everyone to calm the fuck down she couldn't really hear the woman. She was thankful for that, really. The woman seemed to be a Brummie and their accents always made her cringe.
"Sure." The word was tinged with amusement as he grinned at her. "You realise that the cops are going to be coming any minute now and I'd really not like to get arrested. Don't know about you, but maybe, if you're feeling like it, you could punch people away in a generally doorish sort of direction? Then you can hang out if you want. I'm sure there's lots to be done, but I'll pass on spending another night in jail here." The devil-may-care smile on his face gave some of that away as a lie, but he really didn't need police trouble, not when he wasn't a citizen.
The barman was getting really on his nerves, though, and he turned around and gave him a quick, somewhat ineffective punch to the solar plexus. At least his ability to fight had improved over the course of his life.
"Oh, God. Cops." Her face twisted without really meaning to and her fingers curled inwards to her palm, forming a fist as her body turned towards the exit. Elbows ramming into the sides of the few people who stood in her way, Sue was thankful once more for her height. In a bar full of mostly males it was easy to duck and weave in amongst them.
Someone's elbow connected with her cheekbone and she flung an arm out, catching the man around the throat. He choked slightly as her closed fist connected with his windpipe--a place she had never meant for it to go--and staggered backwards, large frame knocking several other punters backwards. Susan took the chance and bolted towards the exit, stopping once to see if the dark-haired man who seemed to enjoy making smart arse comments was anywhere behind her as the flat of her palm pushed against the heavy front door.
Matt knew a good thing when he saw it, and he followed the crazy woman out of the pub like it was going down in a storm and she had the only lifeboat.
Not the finest metaphor of his life, he thought, stopping on the sidewalk and glancing around. No cops yet, but that wasn't likely to last unless there was a lot more brawling going on in other pubs.
He pulled out a cigarette. "Time to look fucking casual," he said. "Do you have a plan, or is run away enough of a fucking plan for you? Also, are you crazy?" The tone was admiring rather than accusing. "Who fucking takes on a pub full of crazy soccer fans - or I guess football fans - with no fucking backup?"
"Run away is always a good plan. Fast and quick and preferably without falling all over your bloody feet but it's never failed me yet." She ignored the fact that they weren't exactly the bravest words she'd ever uttered; they were true, at least. And people had to be crazy to want to stay in a pub packed with tipsy, rowdy football supporters.
"That was a Rangers and Celtic match," Sue said. "You take on a herd of fucking elephants to get the fuck out of a Rangers and Celtic match brawl." She glanced at the man, an eyebrow quirked, as she tried to place the accent and failed. Curiosity spurred the question, "So where're you from?"
"America, Chicago mostly," he added. "Guessing the accent or I just don't look like a crazy Brit?" It was accompanied by the same grin, after a drag off the cigarette.
"Matt Cavanaugh," he added, speaking around the butt, extending a hand. "Come on, let's walk off before the arrests start happening. And if you've got tips of what to avoid in pubs, I'd appreciate it. I just got here. Didn't expect to see this sort of thing. It's
like it's not fucking real, you know? Like Paris doesn't seem real. You go there and it's fucking awesome and full of all the things you've seen a million pictures of, and the fucking stench, and all that, and it's like 'how is this even real?' Because obviously, photos lie. Or not really, clearly, but it just seems like they fucking should, you know? Like it's all exaggeration." He paused. "I may not make any fucking sense. I'd say hit me if I don't but really, I kind of don't want you to. So if you've got plans, tell me to fuck off, but otherwise, I kind of think I might owe you a drink at a less crazy place for getting the fuck out of there and letting me tag along."
"Oh. American," Sue said and the words sounded flat and hardly excited. She'd have winced and apologised but any run ins with Americans she had had in the past had been far from favourable so she did not feel the need to. That and they weren't able to spell apologise right and until they were she'd not do so. "And it was a bit of both, really. I mean, the accent is so bloody different and you look a bit weird. In this neck of the woods, any road."
Eyeing the hand for a moment, Sue hesitated just slightly before clasping it in a firm handshake as she said, "Susan Bones, pleased to meet you" Listening to him talk with her head tilted slightly and hands pushed far into deep pockets, Sue couldn't help her face from twisting slightly, an almost disbelieving expression there. "You didn't right think all that stuff is real, do you? All photographs lie. It's one second in time, after all, and a photographer can't capture emotions or decisions or other events, just one glimpse of it. And there's all this shite they can play around with to make the scene look however they want it. Not to mention they can just forget to photograph a certain part. Like, say, someone taking snaps of London- they're not going to come near the graveyard that looks like it has been left alone for five fucking centuries, or the chippy that was set alight last night by yobs, are they? Well, unless they're those pretentious artists," Sue amended. "And then they deserve to have their cameras shoved up their fucking arses. Showing humanity my arse."
She glanced at the watch on her left wrist and then shook her head. "I have about an hour free before I've to pretend to be working so, aye, a drink'd be lovely." She'd two but an hour was a nice thing to say, she figured. Then if she could feel her patience ebbing she could leave quickly, using work as an excuse. "And you're in Hackney. There's a lot of shitty bloody pubs around here. Look for one's with the word 'the' in them, yeah? And avoid them."
"I'm not talking about that," Matt said mildly, but with a slightly relieved tone to his voice. "Any photo, yeah, it's hardly representative, but it's like - okay, so you see someone on television, right, and then you meet them and it's like 'I thought you'd be taller,' or something. You know, like that. Like it's never really real. Not just that it's only one moment and for all we know in the next moment the Eiffel Tower will turn out to be, like, an alien space craft with a crazy scientist who lives in the top and is just waiting for the chance to blow up Paris. Not like that, just that it's somehow - how is something like Paris - or London, for that matter - even real? The pictures didn't prepare me, at least, from seeing it for really real, you know? You get there and you see all the colours, and they're just as overexposed as they were in the pictures, like really
bright and there and all that, and the light's reflecting off the fucking water, and there's the stench of garbage and flowers everywhere, and there's the fucking traffic that everyone talks about, and it's all completely crazy, and the pictures, it turns out, got it weirdly right. Which they never fucking seem to. But maybe it's because you know somewhere intimately - I don't tend to think that the Mormon Temple in SLC is a big fucking deal - and you see the parts that the tourists and the photographers don't see, you know?"
A pause as he tossed his butt on the ground, and he gestured behind her with his chin. "Pity about the pubs, I was looking forward to that one." The grin was aimed at The Cock and Camel. "But there's a the, so that's out. Somewhere else? Something else?"
"That's why I fucking hate photos, actually," he added, apropros of completely nothing. "They all fucking lie, from that sort of standpoint. They're a
moment but they look like they're always, and a painting - at least you know that a painting's what the artist saw, not what some fucking objective camera - as if we've not enough trouble without fucking cameras being Ayn Rand - saw. So what do you do, or is that not for me to fucking know?"
Her jaw dropped slightly as she stared, a slightly awed expression on her face, at the dark-haired man and despite herself she laughed, her head shaking with amusement. "If there isn't some sap sitting up in the Eiffel Tower waiting to blow up Paris now there will be soon and fucked if I'm not going to go see. Christ, who doesn't want to blow up all the Frogs? I'd be fucking president there just to be able to have the chance to hit a big shiny button and watch the country fucking explode." She paused and then said, "After getting out, of course. I don't want to die with a bunch of French people. It's almost as bad as Jesus dying surrounded by fucking thieves."
Snapping her mouth shut and trying to force herself to pay attention, Susan nodded and worried her bottom lip between her teeth. "I suppose I understand that. I used to go places based on their photographs--if it wasn't bloody pretty looking, or if there wasn't some high cliff I could throw myself off I'd not go. Not to kill myself, mind, don't look like that. I never actually threw myself off one, though I wanted to. Aye, but see standing in the same place a photo you have seen's been taken is a marvellous thing. You see what is there. And it is scarily similar." Sue laughed suddenly and said, "I always used to wish they'd let me take photographs of my area and print them. But then I'd want someone to shove a camera up my fucking arse to stop all the pretentiousness so I'd not think it'd be a bloody good idea.
"I don't drink." Her hands went to her hips and she glanced around, seeing the people passing but not really looking at them, not caring enough to. "Tell you what, let's go feed the bloody ducks and I can tell you what I do while I try to see if I can feed enough bread to one that it fucking pops." She ducked into a corner shop and grabbed a loaf of the shelf, handing a quid to the woman behind the counter and it was only when she was outside again she said, "I've known you all of a few minutes and I think you're a bad influence already."
"Oh, so you're in a fucking pub just to beat people up." He wasn't joking, actually, not with her comments about...well, about everything. The violence inherent in the system had nothing on Susan. At least, in the fifteen minutes he'd known her, it didn't. "Why haven't you been sent to Iraq? I don't know that you're not a secret weapon, fucking hell. Fuck sending the prince, send you. They'd roll over and, like, I guess, fucking explode in a few minutes. If that were," he added, with the decency to look slightly abashed, "to suggest that we had a reason to even fucking be there. Which, you know, we don't."
His mouth was still moving as she led the way to some part of London that Matt didn't even know was there one of those little surprises in life, all green, with a tiny pond and, as promised, ducks, as he said "Anyway, like I'm a bad fucking influence." Another grin. "You're the one wanting to explode ducks at me. You're the best person I've met here. Other than, you know, the part about perfectly innocent ducks dying to feed your bloodlust. Why don't we go back to the fucking pub and feed the bread to some of the fans there? I'd imagine we could do some real damage with Alka-Seltzer or something cleverly hidden in the bread. Test out that old urban legend from the eighties about whether enough Pop Rocks will make your head explode. Even better! Diet Coke and Mentos, if you can get those here."
He settled his slipping sunglasses more firmly on his nose and lit another cigarette. "I don't usually talk this much. I think you pretty much scare the shit out of me more than the fans do, and also, I am so not drunk enough right now."
Fingers fumbling through the bag hanging from one shoulder, Sue laughed as she tucked a cigarette between her teeth and clicked a lighter somewhat desperately a few times. Sighing happily when a flame sprang from it, she lit the fag and said, "Can't send me to Iraq. One of the cunts over there'll say something really stupid to me and it'd be like a nuclear bomb going off. Kinda defeats the whole purpose, really, if I cause something like that Japanese thing, really. You know, the one where the kids now have seven limbs or summat." She shrugged. "God knows what it's called. It's about five million syllabales any road."
A stare and then a bark of almost delighted laughter left her. "Diet Coke and Mentos. Ah, shit, don't tempt me. I used to do that when I was kid. Near put some old bloke's eye out once. Oh, good times, good times." Ripping open the loaf, she tore a piece of bread off and crouched down, balancing herself on the balls of her feet as she tossed the small pieces out at the ducks. The bread hit the water and a few pecked at it curiously and slowly began to eat.
"Fans?" she asked, suddenly curious. "You have fans? What're you? A circus clown or summat? And I'm not scary. I'm tiny and blonde. We're not scary as a general rule."
"I meant the football fans," he said with a laugh. "I might have fans, for all I fucking know, but if I do, they're fucking stealth ninjas, and also, I have no idea why I would. Are you calling me pretty?" The laugh turned into much more of a snorted giggle as he snuck some bread out of the sack to toss to a couple of ducks that hadn't quite gotten the memo about free food.
There was a lot more quacking pretty quickly. "You're really not, like, on the same level of scary as Lindsay Lohan, you know. She'd probably run you down with her fucking huge truck, but you're likely to bite my kneecaps off or something. While ripping my appendix out with a bare hand. I like that in you. One of these things," he sing-songed, "is not like the other. Insofar as complete terror goes. You eating my spleen is a lot scarier than death-by-truck."
"You like people who you think can rip appendixes out with bare hands," Sue repeated, drawing the words out so long they sounded ridiculous. She took a drag of her cigarette, holding the smoke in her lungs for a moment before letting it out slowly through her nose, watching the wisps of it rise on the wind. "You," she started, flicking the cigarette into the pond, the water instantly putting the cigarette out. "Have serious issues."
Standing, her joints popping, Susan grabbed a handful of bread and threw it into the pond. The chorus of quacking got steadily louder and she was almost tempted to vanish the lot of it to see what would happen. "I think the ducks could form an army," she murmured and then snorted. An army of ducks, rising up to protest against their bread being taken away was an image that would be forever imprinted on her brain now. For a moment she considered asking someone to sketch it for her, the next struggling artist she saw on the street corners.
She pushed her hands into her pockets and then glanced at the man beside her, eyes scanning him for a moment before she asked, quite seriously, "Have you ever eaten another person? You don't look pretty, you look like a cannibal. Maybe there's a group who follows cannibals around and starts fights wherever they are? Oh! That's it. One of the fuckers started a fight to see if you'd eat someone who got pushed into you." Sue smiled, happy with her conclusion.
"Oh fucking hell," Matt said, with a mock long-suffering sigh. "Bad enough that I grew up in fucking Utah when I wasn't growing up in fucking Chicago, now you think I'm a fucking cannibal. For your information, Utah's not particularly fucking close to the Donner Pass, where the Donner party found themselves plus bad weather and death and minus food. Anyway," he added, glancing at her and catching her eye, "you started it. I merely," he waved a hand airily, "went along with it when you did. I'mvery keen on keeping up with my meal tickets."
The inadvertent pun made him snort again. "Seriously, what the fuck do you do? It's gotta be something with, like, a lot of death involved, right? You're totally a superhero. Your power is...unusual forms of death, maybe." A raised eyebrow. "You know, you might get further blowing up ducks with bread if you use uncooked dough."
"You know an awful lot about that for someone who isn't a cannibal," Susan said breezily, an almost teasing lilt in her voice. "And I get hired out by the hour. Bitches want my body and I give it to them."
She laughed and kicked at the leaves around the pond, toes pushing them into the water. For a moment one duck who seemed like the particularly slow one hovered around it, beak pushing at it for a moment as the duck tried to figure out whether it was edible or not and Susan's head shook as she watched it. "No, seriously though? I'm a consultant. I--I make people's homes safer. Or properties, rather, for the most part."
Realising how very mundane and boring that sounded, compared to being a superhero with the unusual death power she said, "Sadly, no unusual deaths for me. I hide bodies though--shove a few in the wall every now and again and people are none the wiser." Hunting in her bag for a pen, she scrawled the words uncooked dough and ducks onto her hand and then pulled her sleeve down over them.
Matt gave her a curious glance, but he didn't try to read whatever she'd written. Instead, he ground out his cigarette under his toe and said "Have you ever read...Diary, I think it is, by Chuck Palahniuk? It's kind of about something like that. But maybe you're too busy living it to read it."
"I don't read a lot," she admitted. "What happens in the book? Does someone actually store bodies in the walls?" Susan's face twisted, a mixture of disgust and fascination there.
"God, think of the smell. Nothing could ever mask that."
"Not exactly," Matt said. "More like, okay, so there's this decorator, right?" He took more bread and tossed it to the few ducks that had hung about. "And he does these renovations, except he starts going fucking mental, and he starts...walling up complete rooms. And when people get into the rooms they figure out that he's, like, screaming out his life history and what's going to fucking happen to his family and all of this crazy, crazy shit that he knows is about to happen because it turns out that his wife is, like, the reincarnation of his grandmother or something, and everything's about to go to crap. And I think he does something like shove the family's toothbrushes up his ass as well or something really strange. But mainly it's writing on the walls this entire horror story, except of course it doesn't make sense except to his wife, who's figuring it out too, that and blocking up the rooms. It's a fascinating book, but it's completely bananas. On the other hand, all've Palahniuk's books pretty much are. I love him, but he's a lunatic in the best possible way. So, it's not really people, but it's...well, what's really different between shutting up your life story that you're, like, fucking screaming out and shutting up corpses? Other than the smell, I mean."
Crossing her arms over in front of her chest, Susan leaned forwards slightly as she listened, hands tugging her jacket closed as she worried her bottom lip between her teeth. "How is he screaming out his life story? Is he actually screaming it out at them? That's kind of bizarre. How angry do you have to be to do that? Or do you mean metaphorically?"
Sue sighed. "I've never been good with metaphors. Never fucking understood why people had to hide behind them and why they couldn't just say what they meant. Right hypocritical of me, like as not but fuck it all to hell."
"Screaming in writing, really, but it's all weird, like, he's not using a pen or a brush or something." Matt's hands fidgeted into his pockets after a moment. "All caps and jagged and...there was something else. It wasn't written in fucking blood, but I don't remember quite what it was. And I think it's not angry so much as really fucking doomed and tormented. It's fucking awesome."
He paused again and looked over the water. "Not sure it is a metaphor, actually, with Palahniuk it might not be. He tends to put his metaphors front and centre stage, not just hide behind them. But why does that make you hypocritical?" He turned back to her and studied her eyes. "What're you hiding behind?"
"Words," she said, biting the corner of her thumb nail. "Mannerisms. Routines. My hair, occasionally, though I don't think that's a fucking metaphor. I don't think half of those things are metaphors but fuck. They count, don't they? I never got metaphors because I think they're so pissing stupid. They use them in old romance movies a lot. 'You're like the air to me'. What the fuck? It's so stupid--if anyone was really like the air they'd be invisible. And fucking made up of atoms which had the ability to bounce about like kids on E." Her mouth twisted slightly and she said, "I'm not supposed to think that, am I? I mean, I'm a chick--chicks are supposed to buy into all that. Oh, well. Breaking the mould and what not."
Tugging at the elastic band around her wrist, Susan pulled it back before letting go, the snap of elastic against the tender flesh there making her wince slightly. She did it again, though, a habit and the wince more of a habit than anything too. "What do you hide behind?"
"I'm an American." He grinned. "I've nothing to hide, lady, and pretty much the whole fucking world knows we like to throw our fucking weight around. Isn't that enough? Life totally lived in the open!"
He hadn't answered her question and wondered if she would notice, but he had no good answer, nothing that was comfortable to give, particularly since what he hid behind was being loud and open and crass and very American.
On the other hand, she hadn't necessarily answered his question, but it was possible that was because he'd phrased it poorly. He'd meant to ask what she was hiding, but the woman was, clearly, a bit of a literalist, or else very skilled at hiding herself. But the digression on metaphor had him putting most of his money on the former, with an option on the latter if events warranted.
"Or I hide behind not being what's expected, maybe. It's a bit harder here and the places I've been, but it's easy to fuck with people in the US that way - you know, be all flamboyant in Salt Lake City, be even more extreme in Chicago, just kind of take it to eleven in the way that'll piss everyone else off. Actually," he added, suddenly thoughtful, "that probably works here, too. Being all "American" all over the place, you know."
"If you be all American all over the place here one of two things will happen," Susan said. "Either people will absolutely adore you and ask you loads of questions about everything they've ever heard about America, or they'll absolutely hate you on principle and speak very slowly to you. Because, you know. If you're an American you have to be an idiot. It's kind of a rule over here." She glanced apologetically over at him and said, "Sorry."
Pushing herself up, then, off the bench she started walking back and forth by the edge of the pond, occasionally ripping up what little bread remained. "You could be French, though, so I suppose it's not as bad as it could have been. Jesus, I'd hate to be French in Britain. I'm not a fan of people bloody throwing things at me, you know? It'd be bound to happen.
"And, anyway, eventually people will expect the unexpected, so the only way that works is if you consistently surround yourself by strangers. Which is a bit of a shit deal, I suppose, if you're not into the whole loner thing." Susan shrugged. "Christ Almighty, I sound like I'm thinking. Need to stop that." The last was said with a laugh as she kicked a stone with her foot, then, watching as it broke the surface of the pond and sank to the bottom.
"And what happens if you're Canadian?" He grinned. He'd heard that more than once, and frankly, it was a nice error. "People going to ask me if I fucking put cheese and gravy on my fries or something? Could be worse, I could be Welsh."
"Ew," Susan said, drawing the word out to the point that it almost sounded as if it had several syllables. "They don't actually put cheese and gravy on chips, do they? And order it? You may as well ask someone to vomit on your food, you know?"
Pausing for a second, she said, "And I like the Welsh- well their language. All the people I've met that are Welsh can't fucking speak it and I'd never bloody try but it sounds so damn sexy. You know, it just has to be readable first. I'd so jump on a Welsh person who spoke Welsh to me."
He thought about that for a few seconds, then grinned. "So what you're saying is that the tax code turns you on."
Susan blinked and then started chuckling, the sound at first loud and low. "Oh, damn, for sure. Bar codes too. It's totally a bad idea to drag me into a shop. Most people aren't fond of me, you know, humping random products because they've got a bar code.
It's especially messy with ice-cream, really."
"I wouldn't have pegged that," Matt said thoughtfully, though the hint of mischief to his eyes was a warning. "I would have thought that something like, I don't even know, like fucking...vegetables would be messier. Ice cream would stay nicely in its container."
"Not with the friction. Totally make the container just vanish magically." Susan nodded, expression mostly serious, though she could not quite keep her mouth from twitching upwards at the corners. "The vegetables though...eh, it depends what kind. I mean, carrots? Totally workable and definitely not messy whatsoever."
"Lady, you're crazy." He grinned at her again. "I like that. Enough to ask if you really do fancy a drink some time or maybe just I could escort you to the local grocery story and take you to the ice cream aisle? I'd want to avoid the produce aisle, I think. God knows about grapefruit, and with my luck you'd just decide to chuck it at me, see if you can get my very pointy nose stuck in the damn thing."
"I take genuine offence to that," she said and for a moment her expression showed exactly that, though a smile quickly melted it away, followed by a scowl. "Damn it, one of these days I'll lie with my fucking face too. It will be marvellous thing to behold.
"We should. A drink would be right lovely. Or, you know, you could drink and I could sit there nursing my orange juice and complaining about kids these days or summat. God knows." For a second she was quiet, bottom lip caught between her teeth and then, "Produce shopping just doesn't sound right though, does it? I mean, really, it's not the kind of thing you do with a girl who has the hots for carrots. Maybe something safer like train surfing perhaps."
"I love train surfing. How'd you know? Wait, it's the jacket, isn't it. Totally looks like a trainsurfer's." He held a poker face for a little longer, but in the end lost it as well. "Think we've reached that weird part of the conversation, Susan, so let me give you my number - I'm pleased to note that you have phones here, but I'm not so comfortable with these automobiles, since I grew up riding horses in the Wild West - and you can call me when you would like company, or if you'd like someone to stand lookout for you when you break into an organic farm." His eyebrow arched, but not with sarcasm; it was genuine good humour.
"That, my friend, sounds like a bloody fucking great idea." Her hands smoothed her jeans slightly, a nervous habit, at the same time as patting pockets to see if she'd remembered a pen or anything of the sort. Thankfully, there was. "Give us your number and I'll ring sometime. Promise." Sometimes she was glad that she knew enough about the Muggle world to manage a phone call.
She recited a number, then, without taking a breath. "Likewise, call me any time. I'll be there to scrap your body up from those train tracks and drive you to hospital."
"Haven't had a better offer in a while," he said, putting the number into his phone. The initial 0 confused him for a moment, but he recovered. "I'll take you up on that one. It was the part about blowing up ducks that had me hooked," he added, tucking his phone away. "And this is the part where we both turn into pumpkins, I believe, so don't be a stranger, and I won't be either."