Re: B&B: Cat & Jack
In the dark, in Jack's experience, things festered. His mother had closed the drapes, drawn the blinds and let herself sink. His father had spent years in a sinkhole ably aided by darkness, the kind of clubs in basements of stately homes where men betted and lost fortunes.
"It might work that way for everyone else at that bloody party and I don't disagree anonymity allows people to be whoever it is they might be at heart. But I think you have to allow yourself, and I can't. I don't. Not when there's ample opportunity that I don't need."
His bishop idled under his fingertip and he considered the move without actually seeing it on the board. "As for the stories, I might be guilty as charged in the grand scheme of things. But in the context of that party? You asked for a love story. I don't know how to tell one without sentimentality. And I don't know how you all do it. Make yourself raw in the dark, bleed yourself free of whatever's inside your heads and not face it the next morning." When he looked at her, he hadn't made a move and the bishop still sat where he'd put it before. "So no assumptions made to your taste in stories or which one you wanted."
He hadn't ever been a strategist. He'd rushed in madly and christ alone knew he'd stopped listening to anything that could possibly be a lead because it maddened him in the middle of the night. How on earth could you know things without wanting to put the pieces together and see the full picture?
The beast on the bed had no doubt had a great deal of misfortune in his bloody life. It was, Jack suspected, a short one judging by the amount of growth he had acquired in a short space of time eating like he hadn't got used to food on a regular providing. "I think you're right he's been through worse. But he's a sabateur if he's looking for a cosy sort of life."
He picked up the book and flicked through pages, "He writes in German, but there are translations. And in honor of sentiment," he'd lost the patina of brogue somewhere in polishing up his appearance and his credentials for magazines and papers that didn't like anything provincial. He only found it again reading aloud, when he wasn't listening to his own words and he heard it now in a frilly little room with a woman who he wasn't sure despised, pitied or humored him.
"Put out my eyes, and I can see you still, Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet; And without any feet can go to you; And tongueless, I can conjure you at will. Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you And grasp you with my heart as with a hand; Arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true; And if you set this brain of mine afire, Then on my blood-stream I yet will carry you."
Jack closed the book on the page, and slid it over wood and he wondered what the hell Cat was running from. She was an anachronism in that bar of hers, from the tip of her head to the tip of those fearsome shoes but oddly it went together. "It depends on how we're judging. Have I sold anyone up the river? No. In that context, it's working. What's your experience, does it work?"