jude. (thefixer) wrote in repose, @ 2016-03-09 19:38:00 |
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A little perambulation around town was called for, given the radiating space between precisely-now, and starting-work and with Oliver tucked away between the oil paints and the pastels and nary a protest about it being so on the regular Jude had neither demand nor call on time. Which was not to say that the antiques store was a last minute port of call, because it was not. Jude thought of the man in the store much like one of his own antiques: fine-boned like tissue-thin teacups, and an air of the old somewhat bewildered by the pace and frenetic change-for-change's-sake of the new. He was kind, when it came to Olivers and this being usually somewhat less than assumed, Jude liked him just for the sake of a touch-point in a town that had felt very new and fragile at first. And he seemed delicate, and Jude had an unerring fondness for the delicate, because it needed to be handled gently, but frequently enough it didn't forget how. But of course, since trading hands between the pale blond who looked at home among fine-turned legged furniture and oil paintings and the bright, sparky blonde who sounded like she laughed often and frequently as much as was possible given the fractious potential for old ladies to go exploratory digging, old cats with sharpened claws - there was less reason to tide up on Louis's doorstep like a half-kicked welcome mat. Jude was perhaps less welcome-wagon than windswept. When the door opened to the antiques store, it tided in the scent of cold, bitter air and warm wood-smoke and the pleasant curl of freshly-made coffee. Jude was a tatty overcoat over a wool sweater the color of turned leaves and he held two paper cups of coffee, one in each hand. It was always better to turn up glad-handed when unexpected. (And if he was speculatively admiring a particular piece of porcelain that a trained eye put in the 'extremely delicate and also expensive' category, so much the same. There was no Oliver to wheel portraits out the front door any longer). "Hello, hello," a smiled greeting that assumed welcome, regardless of whether there was one. "I recall you being a man much in the way of requiring coffee come early starts and there being no scalping service provided courtesy fair maidens in the record store nor my brother to do his duty, thought I'd drop it off myself. How's business?" |