Cass R (deistic) wrote in repose, @ 2019-09-14 02:21:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, alex white, cass reynaud |
Cass & Alex: the (bad) diner
Who: Cass and Alex
What: An introduction at the worst dining establishment in town
Warnings: Unlikely, will update if needed.
She had not smoked in years. Years that unravelled into months and weeks and days that slid past like beads on an abacus, snapping into place under fingers that longed to slide them to the right, to acknowledge them as gone. She had never truly begun, not truly. She had smoked on stairwells in the frost of a New York winter because of a boy who had given her the knack, maladroit fingers on a lighter cheap and cracked plastic. Cass imagined her lungs, pink and virgin once more, unused for anything other than stale air in a room that grew smaller by the hour. It was the last customer who had left his cigarettes in a packet dropped under the booth. The booths were dirty, the ingrained kind of dirt that was drearily impossible to scrape clean, even had Cass wanted. And she didn't, not truly. He didn't come back for it, perhaps he had thought it gone to the place where odd socks and buttons lived, bobby-pins and bad moods.
Her badge winked in the low light, around by the trash cans. There was nobody in the diner, or at least, nobody who needed anything. There was the line-cook, in back who curled himself around a cup of coffee like a snail and a couple of booths of people who longed not to be noticed, who strung out a night over poor coffee and a thin slice of pie, meagre on apples and overly sweetened and flavored with cinnamon. She had stolen a moment, a whole moment entirely for herself, and she tapped out a cigarette from the packet that hadn't been taken, but lost. She lit it neatly and quickly, with a box of matches that belonged on the shelf near the stove. They wouldn't have liked her with matches, but they needn't like her with knives or plates or glasses, either and they'd given her back society and expected society to make room.
She stood between the alley wall and the trash cans, and her eyes on the door to the diner, in her polyester tunic buttoned over plain white and her legs as bare as bare underneath the hem of polyester that crackled the hairs of her legs and her arms. If the cigarette had fallen, if it crumbled ash onto her shoes, she might alight, like a pyre, but she didn't see her flesh bubbling and crackling like fat on a spit in her mind's eye. Her mind was quiescent, polite. It emptied obediently on entry, until she was nothing but a name on a tag, and multitudes beneath the surface.
She watched him approach, the boy and she breathed a wreath of smoke between elegant fingers. "Are you going in?" Cass's voice was accentless, it hovered somewhere between Europe and the mid-Atlantic without adopting either. She knew she didn't look old, or young. There was a trace of shadow at his heels, a flickering: it had been so long she had almost forgotten how it began.