Re: B&B: Cat & Jack
Jack at five hadn't given a tinker's fuck for the future. That had come later, as the crumbling edifice his father thought of proudly as a legacy (minus, of course, the bloody money necessary to keep the place ticking over) had begun to slide into inelegant decline and his mother had gone quietly and expensively mad with the help of privately purchased medication. Thinking about the future had come later with the thirst of a boy who had drunk very deeply very early on and was looking for anything as satisfying as that which had come before. Which was particularly depressing, no matter which way you looked at it so Jack didn't on most days.
Her smile dispelled the last of feeling like he'd pried somehow by staying seated in his own chair during her moment with the mantlepiece. Cat's smile was near impossible to withstand irrespective of gender or youth or advanced age and his shoulders sank as he unwinched expected tension from the invisible line drawing them up to his ears.
"They did." Ladies was an overly generous term given the salacious details of exploits he hadn't been able to fend off. "There was a woman married to a Russian. God knows when, he's certainly not on the horizon now. After a list of his performance problems with details of how she overcame them, she dug this," he waved a hand that encompassed the room, the matrioshka, the blinis, "Out of storage. I told her I was entertaining someone who liked blinis. She ran with it."
But she tilted her head and Jack studied her expression as if there might be an answer there as well as a question. He was beginning to understand that it was impossible or near enough to visibly ruffle Cat's fur (all signs to the contrary with the dolls not withstanding and his own ability to piss goodwill up a wall) so how much she would give away sat there, he was unsure.
"Poor performance. The party. Piss-poor art, a poor showing in drinks, you complained," he made an exaggerated motion of the hand and smiled with sardonic humor. "An alternative. A generality of poor performance," and he leaned back in his chair and took a modest swallow of the measure in the glass and set it down to the side. "And my own in particular. I've got a suspicion I ran across you sober as a judge and bolted. If it wasn't, they did a very good line in correction of sweeping statements and I pay my penance how I like."
Bukowski didn't bother to wave a whisker in contradiction and Jack directed a look of sour dislike at the cat that was only nearly put on. Without preamble, he folded back the cuffs of his sleeves even further, to expose ringed evidence of teeth and claw marks. "If that's an angel, I want a word with God. I've got other proof, but in less salubrious locations. The arsehole takes over the bed and objects to my presence in it."
But she wasn't here to address the cat, much as he would have preferred the wholescale removal of the little bugger before any sort of attachment set in to a walking bag of fleas. Jack leaned back into the chair but he didn't touch the glass. It was full enough and that would do, at least for the measure of the conversation.
"I did something extremely stupid and I've got no intention of doing it again. As long as I'm not at a social occasion, sobriety is the answer. I used to go to the Capital. But it drove me out of my fucking mind. I'm not very good at sympathy."