Tandy Bowen doesn't have to pick between (cloakndagger) wrote in repose,
Re: Billy/Tandy: the neighborhood
Tandy did. Take it, the sprig. He rolled it within his fingers carefully reflecting the gesture the other boy had made, and sniffed the spread of his forefinger and thumb. "For remembrance," he said, with the vestiges of high school English class clinging to his tongue, and he shrugged at the notional import of rosemary to dreams. Tandy hadn't until present company had proved him wrong, believed in a hypothesis of magic. Sci-fi was his comfort-zone comparative to fantasy. "To explain complex antibiotics to people of that era is probably a lot like you explaining magic to me."
A small smile, there and gone. But he was interested in the rationale. Sex, given the involvement of the vulnerable parts of the body was inherently less safe than any other form of transaction. And it was prone to provoking reaction that was either unwarranted or undesired; Tandy had the faint memory of the bitterness of liquor cloaked in diet Coke and the slide of a palm up his thigh and shook it off without difficulty. "I didn't read fairy-tales but I can understand it. It's like I remember reading tribes who didn't like photographs, they thought it would steal part of your soul," he said with seriousness of a National Geographic reader. "So you keep it out of your life? How, though? Isn't it something where you're either there, or you're not?"
He had the fantasy, magic down. Tandy hadn't estimated vampires as present in this picture and his eyebrows shot up in startlement. "Vampires? He paid you to be food?"