Re: B&B: Cat & Jack
He hadn't left the door unlocked actually. He had locked it against the last minute, can't-help-it rearrangement by his set-dresser, the lady whose husband had been Russian and who had given him a ghastly run-down on the nature of Russians in bed. She clicked her dentures against her bottom teeth while she did it, which made the whole thing worse, somehow.
He didn't hear her first. Rilke was far more lyrical than he liked on a usual day but he intended the volume for the person due to sit down opposite and he had taken one last readthrough before giving it up and had been engrossed. It was happenstance and the lift of Bukowski's head from his cushion that he saw her when she had stilled in front of the base of the bed. She had entered without knocking but he felt like he had invaded somehow. She stood there in what was doubtless fiendishly expensive cladding with shoes that looked lethal and she wrapped arms around herself as if confidence and Cat had parted ways briefly.
By the time she'd made it to the mantle, he had lowered his head to the book. He wasn't reading a bloody word now, but it was a scrap of privacy in what now felt like a very small room and when Bukowski shifted with more obliging in his nature than Jack had seen him in all their days together, he folded the bookmark back into the pages and let it drop on his side of the board.
"Good. Haven't got any bloody ice. The rest of this, this is a make-up effort for a poor performance of a party but the ladies on the corridor run away with themselves." He had climbed out of the chair and made a move toward the chest of drawers where the vodka stood. "They don't run to ice, however."
Jack looked sober which was penance enough given the last time he suspected they'd encountered each other, he had been one and the same. The B and B had a good supply of hot water and Bukowski could be shut in to yowl at him rather than invading the shower himself (which had been the regular event at the house near the lake) and taking pleasure in biting whatever flesh was nearest - usually his ankles. So Jack looked clean. The shirt was Turnbull and Asser from his time on Fleet Street and was a very pale blue. It showed quality, thread count but also the lack of buttons; he'd folded over the sleeves until they stayed out of the way.
He had never been a planner, either. School had taught chess but Jack had thought even less of sitting in a chair and thinking about it than he would now. He hadn't been a boy who paid attention to anything that took very long, but he had played chess enough times with Jen - and Jen's father - to have an idea of the rules. He passed her a water-glass of vodka and poured a small measure for himself and sat down and moved his own pawn on the far side of the board.
"That cat," Jack looked with irritation toward the bed where Bukowski now lay sickled on his side, his belly in the air and with the innocent and languid stretch of an animal that looked like it knew how to behave and never pissed on the furniture.