Re: Cat + Jack: booze and books
Jack stood from the doorway before getting any further than that. Not that the bar left you a lot of room to move, you were going to get to know your drinking companions even if you didn't want to. And it was a perfectly good vantage point to take in the view - and it was a hell of a view. He watched her laugh, and he admired the fit of the duds, including her ass - mist and intent had no impact on speculative viewing - and it was an altogether different get-up suited to the surroundings than the woman in silk and pearls and spiked heels who would have looked entirely comfortable eating caviar at a state dinner.
Cat appeared to be the kind of woman who carved through a setting and remodeled her outsides to suit it. Not to say she didn't remodel her insides but good God he doubted it. At least nowhere anybody could see it. She was bloody bulletproof, from what Jack could see, sliced through her own feelings and circumstance - old love affair shows up in town, nothing like a knife to the gut to make you mope but he could practically see Cat glitter resilient the other side of the forums.
He didn't think it meant she was untouchable. Sharp as broken glass, if you tried to grip her probably, but not untouchable. Too much bravado for that. But he wasn't writing a bloody think-piece on her. No editorial in the local paper on the bar and its proprietor, although there had been a brief column on the establishment written by a reporter who could string three words together in the week's paper cranked back up. Not an interview subject. Just bloody interesting.
But no matter admiration. He'd learned his lesson from fog and mist and the spatter of blood against hotel walls. Pen to himself, the woman with her choice in poetry and books and her way of handling her own troubles and everyone else's, became that much more dangerous because he couldn't bloody avoid that he was lurking for no purpose, and certainly not a copy deadline.
Jack watched her come toward him, pale blue eyes dropping critically to the shoes she was somehow sashaying around in rather than crippled in pain - he knew better than to bloody ask, courtesy Jen, who would have been in paradigms of lust. And he thought about it. He thought about the contents of the freezer, and the white paint drying on the walls in the kitchen. He thought about the water, murky-black under the sky.
"Beer. No particular preference, so long as it's wet." Hello, Cat.