Re: sushi-time: adrian, patrick, lou
Lou wasn't winning. She hadn't ever given that kind of grin and had it be charm, instead of smart-assed. Lou dealt a different kind of game if she was trying to stack the deck the other side of the table and it skated by on the knowledge of how to fuck a person up with a plastic spoon, or the ability to get filthy real fast. Charm wasn't in her wheelhouse but she understood what the kid across the table was refracting back at her. It was softer, a little more yielding, a little more hopeful. Lou wasn't all that hopeful, she pinned a lot that should have gone where hope oughta be, to her smarts and luck.
She smiled back at the kid, warm and it snapped like elastic, all teeth. She didn't know likeability was up for debate: it wasn't nearly that complicated. Adrian was blood, which put him beyond real reach of anything as changeable as likability, and he resembled the kid who had been small and vulnerable and quiet, which made Lou think of him like an egg cradled in cupped hands, the unthinking protectionism of the heart of the pack, where the young were kept until they could bite.
"I've got an iron stomach," she said now idly, with a sprawling stretch that was utter lack of self-consciousness, and draped one arm along the back of her own seat. "What's going hard look like to you? The beef sounds good."
She laughed when the kid switched gears out of the general life update that you could write in the back of a Christmas or a birthday card, stick a postage stamp on and mail it out and forget that you'd been asked. It was bland, and the eyeline between the kid and Patrick - the other kid - was clear, when he circled back to beer and broken plates. Lou's laugh wasn't feminine in the least, it was scuffed at the edges and dirty.
"Nope," she said, watching him down the little cup. "Going nowhere fast. Just got no fixed reason to be here, no fixed reason to be anyplace else."