Re: B&B: Cat & Jack
Had he ever spilled his guts in front of a stranger? Jack thought briefly of a blinking cursor, and rolled it over in his mind like a coin on the back of his knuckles present but without focused thought. No, he didn't think she'd learned it. Cat sat in the chair and wore whatever scars she had like hardened carapace instead of armor. He picked up a blini between finger and thumb and ate it without thinking about it, licking a seam of caviar from the side of his thumb as he sat back down.
It made a hell of a lot of sense to him, but he had cut risk ruthlessly out of his life to all but the most sanitized of existences. He couldn't clip himself entirely free, he didn't know what he'd do with himself without the stench of fresh ink and warm paper and even a limp rag bristling with the bright-colored nusiance of ads was better than nothing. She'd mentioned the man before, and Jack absorbed the aftermath with quiet lack of rejoinder.
"Why? She died before we really thought about it. We were young," his smile was taking on water and sinking, but irony threw him a lifebelt. "It was going to happen someday. It didn't. Oh, you can love a career. You can love something that makes your pulse jump every bloody morning, you can love the sense it gives you of who you are. You can love knowing you're climbing every inch away from where you're from with every bloody paycheck."
He moved another pawn without really looking at it, and without any bloody strategy, just for the sake of it. And it was hard to describe to a woman who ran risk like it was a reason to be alive, to define color to someone who saw a different spectrum. How could he pin down exactly how vital it could make you feel and how robbed you were without it? "When you're running your risk, how alive do you feel? Does the risk love you back?"
Cat smiled and Jack put his spine against the soggy cushion wedged comfortably between him and the chair back and studied it, examined it for truth rather than the smile she presented when she was engaged in telling him how stupid he was, and decided he preferred this one.
"If I do," he said comfortably with a wry smile of his very own, "I'll never tell. Read the Rilke."