Jack & Louis: registration
He wasn't hungover. Credit for this, because the prospect of a cross-town Easter egg hunt without some form of insulation from so much small-town saccharine brought Jack out in a cold sweat. He'd finished the Tenant the night before, distaste for comparisons drawn was cold weight-resentment in his gut and when he showed up to the front table and took a name-tag (God, did they actually think anyone here didn't recognize one another?) it was clean-faced, clear-eyed and his mouth a compressed, flattened line.
Not for the company. The composed story - yes, the bloody paper was back up and churning out deeply mundane and trivial rubbish but he'd shed a part-time reporter in the time between and that left Jack the job of summing up this sweet exercise - at the other end.
He'd dug a jacket out of the back of the closet that owed more to do with upmarket stores in Chicago and New York and London than a woodsy little town on edge of it all: charcoal wool that fell to the thigh and stood with his hands slack. How different Louis would look in this world, he had no idea. Jack knew he looked much the same: there were a cadre of boys at school who'd gotten breadth and beard growth early on and some who looked like cherubim, with only the breaking of voices ruling them out of the chapel choir.
Jack had been former, rather than latter. He no longer looked like he spent weekends playing rugby with fourteen other lads, ruddy-cheeked and vivid. Hell, he could probably have used the outlet, Jack remembered school as being a series of deathly dull hours sat twitching crammed into a chair between movement and freedom and chaotic events planned for the village closest the school.
He scanned the crowd, looking for a familiar blond head, a name-tag crammed into his pocket rather than pinned to his breast.