Nah, she looked nothing like high-flying executives. Not that Nick had come across them a hell of a lot in his past life. The kind of 'executive' that made cash with skin, lots of it, young and cheap. Not the kind that took international business class and wore a suit. Her hand slid past the frame of the table and chair, the booth's insularity and comfort, and grazed his arm. Wasn't nothing Nick could do about proximity, or about how close he had to get to people these days to get shit done. But he looked at the curl of her fingers and his face was inscrutable.
Still. She smiled easy and that was so new Nick thought of it as small town even if it lived in big cities too. He hadn't seen nobody smile without some kind of shadow, some kind of wanting to it in years. Even in Manhattan living rooms where people talked about dinners instead of drug deals, smiles felt like business deals. That, coupled with the expectation in her eyes he was gonna sweep her out of the diner before she could see the steam on her coffee, made her contradictory.
"He couldn't come here to this fine establishment himself? Mobility problems, I get those." A knock on the side of the rubber with his knuckles, "Soggy toast is one of life's great disappointments. It's got all the makings of a good idea a little too late. You want to take your kid brother soggy toast, that's fine. Maybe he likes it that way. No accounting for taste." Yeah, it was a lot of talk. But he watched the worry float to the surface - girl was readable, maybe she hadn't learned how not to be - and eyed it. Some times, kid siblings got what was left if you managed to get anything.