Re: Jamie & Hannah & Si (& open to any Mayer+ types): kitchen
The dingy car bumped against the curb. Si stayed inside a moment to finish his cigarette. The address of the new house was smeared on the palm of his hand, sweated into a cryptic kind of tattoo, but he didn't bother wiping it off. He leaned his temple to the grimy window and looked up at what was now—or eventually going to be—home. The house itself looked exactly as it had in the pictures Amy had sent. There should've been a three-dimensionality, some difference to light upon, but Si didn't see it, even in the dark, with lights coruscating off of the walls within and winking out into the neighborhood. He sighed.
Slowly, he got out of the car, his eye catching on the basket outside the front door with a grim kind of curiosity. He wasn't dressed according to theme, but, he didn't even think about taking a mask and strapping in. Instead, he flattened his cigarette under his heel, exhaled the last lungful of smoke out into the night, and stepped inside the home turned inside out. Home, to Si, meant oasis—it didn't mean a place teeming with people. He hadn't really had a home in a long time, and he had a feeling, coming into the writhing wreaths of lights on string and all that, that this place wasn't going to fill that hole. Not for a while, anyway. It would be a place. A pit stop. A bed. That was enough.
He still had no idea what Audrey even looked like. He didn't know half the people that milled around. He moved through them, giving the polite, I'm-acknowledging-you smile you gave people you didn't know. But, he was looking for his sister. Taller than most in attendance, he looked over the unfamiliar heads as he skimmed through the space with his hands in his pockets. When he finally came to the kitchen, it was her voice that caught him first. That, and the song that was playing. He came up behind Amy and he gave his brother a smile as he did so. He lifted his finger to his lips, like, don't tell. (Now, Jamie hadn't seen Si in months—and vice versa—but Si was looking, for all intents and purposes, healthier, less gaunt.) He lowered his face, until he was about at Amy's height, then, leaning over her from behind, inching into her periphery over her shoulder, he just said: "Hey," and, if and when she reacted, he laughed and gave her a hug that smelled like cigarette ash. "Nice song."