Re: Loitering: Cat C & Reece E
To be fair to Cat, everyone was intimidating to Reece. He wasn't frightened of her. Saying she was 'scary' just meant he was intimidated, because she was older and cool and didn't care about what people thought (or so it seemed; usually, anyway), and he thought that was cool, and Reece had never, ever been cool. Especially not in front of people he admired. Or..., maybe there wasn't any history attached and it was programming? But, either way, it was how he was. It didn't mean he wanted her to be someone else. "...Was...Were they real people? Or were the bodies, like, grown?" He guessed it was the former, which was sad. When Cat said he could download her into her, Reece made a sort of uncomfortable face that had to do more with him than anything Cat said. He could probably be downloaded too. Ugh. "Okay. Will I know where the body is? How do you extract the data?" It seemed a cold word to use for a person, but that's what it was.
Recce had mostly been joking by calling Cat Lev, but he nodded when she told him he could call her Cat. "I mean, I was going to. It'd be weird to change your name now." He smiled a little. Like, see? A joke? "I'm... glad you're not pretending." Was that an okay thing to say?—It didn't seem to matter. Cat was off, into the crowd, and Reece came out of the stairwell.
When she was done, Reece thought he saw her hand someone money and he wondered if people thought she was like, paying to have alone time and she was off to have sex with this kid (him), and he glanced around nervously. But, he caught the tip of Cat's head, by the door, and he just pushed through. At least if people thought he was having sex, it'd be with a really nice looking guy.—Reece pushed through the open door, closed it behind him, and went upstairs into Cat's (newer) place. It looked nothing like the grays and blacks and golds of the other place—the place Reece had been staying because he didn't know what was going on. This was a place he could see Cat—er, original Cat? Cat 1.0—staying, with just a little more, like, masculinity thrown in.
Cat was sitting lithe on this yellow, lush sofa, with furs on either side, and Reece wandered in, still holding the Star Wars record. He almost crossed a rug, but it had a face on it, and awkwardly, he stepped around it, setting the record on the coffee table. He sat on the sofa, on the opposite end as Cat, and he looked at his shoes. "Oh, should I...?" He started untying one, because he didn't have anything else to do. HIs hair dipped in his face in a curl, but he didn't brush it out of the way. He looked up, toward Cat. "Um, hey, Cat?" He slipped off one boot and set it aside. "Are... we, like, ...you know, still dating?"