Re: B&B: Cat & Jack
He didn't know. Exercise of will looked like steel under silk when it was the woman curled in the chair opposite, deliberate languor and quiet self-possession. Jack admired it because he admired most people who could keep it all laced in, even when the cords that bound it down strained with tension. Jack knew only that there was something running backwards along fur every now and again.
He had eaten caviar at dinner parties. The kind of events that were dire, where his experience of dust and of death and of living among people who didn't drop thousands on glassware and service for parties was trotted out for a dinner party story. "It's an acquired taste. I acquired it but it's not mine. You've pegged it right. That and a bloody good burger. But I had to go to a lot of occasions where rich, boring people stood around in order to make contacts. Connections. I ran through all mine from school early on."
It was perverse stubbornness, unreeling himself in the light rather than the dark, in the fussy surrounds of the bed and breakfast with Bukowski now snoring from the counterpane. But he knew who it was sitting across from him and Jack suspected she knew how to keep secrets far more significant than his.
He flinched. Sympathy had been unending in the days after when his guilt had left his hands raw and bloody and it had felt like sandpaper over nerve endings. He'd gone back to work briefly - he'd bloody had to, he didn't know how to extricate himself and it felt like walking on shattered bone. It had been long enough now that anyone who gave a shit about the man he'd been very temporarily had long since forgotten. Had assumed he had forgotten too. This wasn't sympathy, it was statement, but he cleared his throat nonetheless.
"There's a word in Arabic. Ya'aburnee. It has no counterpart in English, it simply means 'you bury me', it means wanting to die before the person you love because of how difficult it will be to live without them." Jack rose sharply from his chair, the board abandoned and reached for the vodka. "That is what dying young is like. That, and guilt." But Cat moved on, to other forms of love, and Jack swallowed the silkiness of cold vodka until it hummed warmth under his breastbone, and looked at her.
"All right. I felt alive when I was working like that, and the frisson that comes when you do something that you feel entirely bound up in. Love like that might not be the same, but I thought it was when she was here. I thought I loved the career more." He finished the measure in the glass.
"What of the little girl with dark hair? Would you give up the risks for her?"