Re: Nick & Wren: Fortunes
It was a very pretty artifice constructed out of sugar and pictures but Nick didn't think nobody lived here day in and day out. The tent wasn't made for it, it was shaped around somebody's fantasy of a fortune-teller or maybe just the setting for a beautiful woman. A fortune was the price of admission, roll up and see her and Nick was reminded of drawing-rooms and the kind of exotic blooms that required coaxing and a lot of heat but died all the same like garden weeds, expunging heavy scent as they went. Stage-managed setting, right? The lights that swayed and the music that ebbed into the air. French. Nick's mouth twitched in the shadow of his hat.
The table was a confection and the woman behind it, he figured she made a lot of money off the show that came before this one, full audience instead of one by one, because she was one too. "Enchante," and Nick's French was skiing in Verbier and family vacations walking the Siene and it wasn't perfect but it was rich-people clean and cut. He had a smile in his voice ribboning through just the one word, but it was the kind of smile that waited politely to see what to make of the curtain-up, whether he was audience member or on stage.
The wheels didn't like carpet a whole lot, anymore than it had liked baked earth, dried and pitted. It was slow progress and the spread of his hands required the flex of his forearm to get him close enough to the table, but Nick said nothing for the span of minutes it took to nudge wheels up against the wooden legs of the table. It showed, a little, the journey. He wasn't bothering with hiding it in plain sight, he had the hat instead and the fatigue was starting to show but so was the growth of stubble and the hat put paid to looking too close.
He tipped it, now. "How do they tell you? With words, or with something else?" He'd bet she saw more of Repose the way it didn't want to be seen necessarily from that chair of hers. People rocked up to ask their fortunes to be told, they had to want something along with the holding of their hand by a pretty woman. It took getting naked, if you wanted something badly enough. Nick knew exactly what he wanted and it was so painfully obvious he didn't need to take off anything to make it apparent.
"Nick. I'm supposing you're Wren. It would be a little weird if it wasn't at this juncture, what with the shared joke and all. Do you want to tell me truth or lies, Wren?"