Re: Carriage House: Atticus & Billy
Alright, so maybe the sheriff wasn’t entirely wrong, but Billy wasn’t about to say that straight to Atticus’ face. He made quick and efficient work of spearing the more elusive pieces of white-warm meat from the claw into his mouth, with effective pauses to make friends with the little pot of clarified butter along the way.
“Excuse you,” he said, feigning affront with more than a small, lopsided grin that came into play between bites. “Again, you don’t know me well enough to know whether I’m good at numbers, Atticus.” He gestured at the air between them with a swirling motion of the forks’ tines in a cyclical churn.
“For your information, math was my best subject all through high school. I’m freaking great with numbers.” Billy swallowed dryly, and stretched out his foot to nudge his socked toes against the meat of the other man’s thigh. Pausing in his lopsided smile to swallow down a mouthful of the wine in his mismatched glass. His face felt warm, but there was no bright flush to make itself known high on his cheeks, because he didn’t really turn pink. Nope, Billy just turned back to his lobster, cracking open the second claw and plucking out another slender piece of tender flesh. Now that he was actually eating, he felt the sharp edge of his gnawing hunger.
He did smile, though, when Atticus mentioned the lawyer thing. “That’s exactly what my dad said. That I could negotiate my way out of anything, like anytime they tried to ground me for misbehaving and I argued them out of it.” But the next comment, the ‘dainty’ thing, that had Billy making a face and turning his hand around so that he could more effectively flip Atticus the finger.
“You know, I thought that sounded like a gun-worshipping, pill-popping paranoid genius.” And Billy took another gulp of wine, swallowing down the chilled beverage after half-heartedly clinking his glass against the edge of Atticus’ where it had been set down on the table. But he was also still smiling, because he’d recognized half the books that had been propped open in the kitchen. Since he’d checked out enough copies of them from the library himself. Since he actually did pretty much worship everything that Hunter S. Thompson had ever done, like any other millennial kid who was remotely interested in the counterculture.
“Just for the record, my answer is ‘neither’," he said, gesturing vaguely. "He who’s braved the storm of life or whatever, he’s either dead or miserable. And the guy who has stayed securely on shore is bored and totally miserable, probably."