log/thread: mars & eames; high class happy hour in the city Who: Mars and Eames What: Meeting. Drinking. Talking. Ambiance. Began as a log, continuing as a thread. Where: A bar in the Capital. When: Current-ish, like everything I do. Warnings: None.
The city used to calm her. It was a wonderful place to get lost. Once, Mars had found a kind of tranquility in its chaotic warble, a comfort in its unpredictability. Particularly at night, when the skyline swam in streams of neon and the gutters oscillated between shadows and the strobes of many headlights. All of the people, coming and going, had once been a balm against her otherness. But all of this was once, and tonight this once was no longer. Tonight, the darkness was thick with threats, and every passing light seemed to find her, highlighting her to the wants of danger. As she found the bar, Mars couldn't get through the doors, couldn't escape the massive probabilities of the outside, fast enough.
She staggered in like a storm of guilelessness. A couple heads turned her way, and a few eyebrows raised, but that was the extent of her welcome. This bar was quite nice, she noticed that right away, and Mars wasn't really dressed for it. At the front, they asked for her jacket, and she cautiously unzipped the dark cotton of a hooded jacket that was way too heavy for mid-July. Underneath, her sheer cherry print wasn't a cocktail dress, nor was it elite business couture, but it allowed her further entrance to this unexpectedly lavish den. She approached the bar slowly, unsure of who she was looking for exactly, only that he would be sitting alone.
Eames could still get lost in the dark. Not lost, lost because he hadn’t been lost in decades. There was nothing awake that phased Eames, but he had the kind of muscled intent that lurked sub-surface lazily, for whenever it became necessary. He was a fixture at the bar presently, and attracted little attention. Not because he didn’t merit attention - Eames was wearing a light, silk-blend blazer in a dark green, over pants that were oatmeal linen, and shoes that had a dark sheen that was dark blue - but because it wasn’t that kind of place, darling. The bar was nice in a quietly understated luxury that looked sideways if someone unexpected tripped up to the bar and asked for a drink from the very large man sat near to the edge of the bar. From there he had a view of the room, and well-groomed heads clustered together in whispered tones.
He noticed her when she walked in. She didn’t fit at all and she wore her cherries with a braggadocio that didn’t carry into her walk. She didn’t swagger, the girl with cherry hair and he could see in an instance, with the casual slice of the stiletto of the forger cutting the canvas clear of the frame, that she had less bravado than her clothing gave hints of. “Kelly,” he said, with a hand up at the bar. To her, he probably looked large and looming, and where he sat, the shadow in the bar fell heavy and clustered around him. He looked nothing like a tall, young oik with blue hair, but then again….
That name, it was something stolen from beneath the shroud of a dream. Because that is how those parties always felt to her, the ones where she was so far from herself. Dream-like. Half-fond in the aftermath of a swelling dawn. Kelly, and she turned at the misnomer. Not her name, but a reference. A clean-driven spike at the railroad crossing of otherwise non-intersecting lives, a pair of tracks that could have spilled on in other directions for forever without crossing, not once, not ever, except for that one place. That one party. That one half-fond time. She looked to him, this man of jaguar muscle and shadows. There was no blue hair, there was nothing really to clue her in, except for that kelly.
Mars advanced slowly, reconciling the punk from before with this masculine cut of tailored luxury. The bar was beautiful, potentially the most beautiful place that she'd ever stepped inside of. But she didn't think that he'd chosen this spot to impress her. He seemed to belong here, in the sleek and shadow, surrounded by notes of imported spirits and leather. She might have been unsteady, but her tone was even as a frozen lake when she spoke. "You found quite the locale for this clandestine tete-a-tete."
She looked like Red Riding Hood, silk-red hair instead of a cloak, tiptoeing into the wolf-den. If a wolf-den denuded of its capitalist sharks presently, had teeth or bite, darling. She was young, Eames lazily revised down his estimate of her age from hovering at around approximately middle twenties, to youth. Oh, youth. Eames was fond of youth, the way a chef capable of cordon-bleu eats childhood bon-bons with an appetite that reaches beyond sugary pap, fed entirely on memory. She slunk between crammed little nooks filled with the possibility of rendezvous and came through in cherry-bold up to the bar.
Eames didn’t belong, darling. He looked as if he might. That was the knack to it. Deep comfort in a place that wasn’t comfort. It was learned habit until in the moment he felt as if he did, and in tricking himself, gave truth to the lie that he was relaxed in this place, a monument to expensive folly. That, and he’d learned expensive tastes, over the years.
“It does clandestine very well, doesn’t it, darling,” he drawled, the syllables slack with an elision to the accent he doubted Cherry Kelly over here would know well enough to draw the sticky strands apart and examine them. He’d swung into London, flat vowelled and a little nasal, but not all the way. It was residue, like the Thames clinging siltily to the soles of his shoes. “Look at you. Not a scrap of you a midnight partying adolescent who snorts coke and gets blown in train bathrooms,” which was the estimation. It wasn’t sexual, Eames spoke with the hugely amused affection of one forger to another. It was an art, even if it was the town’s motley antics guiding the girl’s hand.
Mars could not afford to muse over the accent, and so she didn't. She was broke in that regard, without the currency to trade, without memory or the barest smidge of knowledge to even guess the origin of such an accent. She only knew that it was not from here. He'd talked of places, the far away kind that didn't even debase themselves to pop up as a vacation ad on her cellphone(because she was only shopping at Forever 21 anyway). But him, he'd been to Instagram places, and she found his accent to be just like that. Captivatingly elsewhere.
So no, Mars wasn't going to be able to place his accent. The only thing she knew about London was what she'd gathered from watching ten minutes of Downton Abbey. Ten minutes because she'd promptly gotten bored and had wandered off to more millennium-relevant past times(like shopping at Forever 21), and therefore couldn't even say if it had anything to do with London at all. Probably not.
"I know. Life was so much easier when I did drugs and had a dick." While she probably intended, at least initially, for this to be a joke, Mars sounded sincere. A little wistful even. Not exactly because she missed blowjobs or cocaine, but because her actual life was a knee-shaking mess at the moment. It was sort of why she'd wanted to meet Eames here, she didn't have any friends really. She had family, but she was not sure that she wanted to share her secret with them yet.
"We've been talking for awhile, haven't we?" This was the preliminary, the set up, the tilling of soil. She'd gotten close now, and slid into a seat beside him.
He laughed. Eames had a variety, the flinty kind of sound that was vaguely threatening right the way through to the relaxed, thick gurgle of being very, very laid-back. It was warm this time, the thick melted amusement like spreading chocolate. Being male was exceptional, even firmly past the blush of youth. He had spread thighs in the oatmeal pants and Eames occupied space leonine and comfortable in his expansiveness and he thought young and red-haired and very female was more trouble than his own perch on forty years. She sounded sincere, this slice of womanhood and he understood, why wouldn’t he?
“We have,” he said, agreeably, with an expectation there’d be a chaser. There was always a chaser after an opener, and he made a signal to the bartender who came over swiftly, as was to be expected in expensive places that catered to people who could afford impatience. “Would you like something?” He didn’t ask if she was old enough, Eames believed any age afforded choice. It wasn’t somewhere that catered to the truly inebriated, but Mars - short for something, no doubt - was contained enough in conversation he doubted she had the inclination toward that end state. Eames asked for his own glass to be refilled, and looked at her with a hint of indulgence.
“You’re going to say something,” he said conversationally, “And it’s something you feel the need to land, so why not order the drink first.”
To her, he seemed something to be wondered over. She didn't think him cloistered in shadows and secrecy like some treasured cave on pirates isle, but more like a shop with many back rooms, many deals passed beneath counters. A speakeasy of a man, in the flesh he seemed a little mythological, and she did her wondering. Mars had every reason to be jaded, dismissive, and generally over-it-all, but she wasn't always. Often, she wondered.
When Eames suggested the drink and the bartender flew close like some attentive piece of the decor that Mars had initially overlooked, the often cruel facet of her eyes cut to the bartender, and then beyond him to where the wall of obscure liqueurs and decanted amber elegance sat on a multitude of shelves. "Alright." A drink would, presumably, relax her, and that seemed like a very good idea at the moment. A clear bottle that was engraved with a frosted glass cherry caught her eye. "Kirsch," she said, pronouncing it just fine because it looked like kitsch. The clear brandy went into a globe-like snifter before it was slid her way. It smelled more sharp than sweet, like gasoline with a note of cherry. With just a sip, warmth coursed through her from nose to toes, stroking a blush to the surface.