Re: The Rex: Cat & Jack
Oh, he'd come from money. It had just run out and that was the difference between old money and new. New money rolled in on greased wheels, whether the grease was obtained legally or under the table and tapping it was shoving a pipe in Niagara Falls. Old money was water behind a dam and if you knocked a hole into it, virtue of an expensive habit there would eventually be drought. The weather had been on the horizon long before the gambling ring had come into being but he hadn't ever been dull with finding cash. It was a game or it was bloody depressing even if he'd played for pennies with his father before he realized he was a ruin.
"My father-in-law was a stockbroker," but it wasn't disagreement. Blood money in Sierra Leone or money drained out of the poppy fields in Afghanistan was a lot more bloody honest than the man who'd thrown his ever-polite fist into his face at a graveside, no matter how much he'd deserved it. They were bone-dry, the man and woman who had been the forum of godawful Christmases after he'd lost the excuse to be out of the country. It had put Jen in stark relief, but Jen wasn't on Jack's mind presently.
"No," he corrected her as he took his own glass back around the bar. He didn't sit, he leaned, and crossed one foot over the other in a stretch that showed the shoes weren't scuffed. The plaid was deliberately offensive and not fitting in had never been about not knowing how to, for Jack. "That wasn't even the beginnings of a lie, convincing or not. You've had fun. If you didn't have a good year, you got in your own way."
No running commentary but no doubt Michelin-sharp assessment for whatever was in the glass and he'd drunk enough at bar-sides all over the bloody world to make them, even if he hadn't slept with at least one bartender on a stop-over between cities. It wasn't professional, it was too bloody strong.
"For my brother, perhaps." He didn't know if Newt had any attachment to the old sod. It was unlikely, he'd never done much to warrant warmed cockles, hearts or otherwise. "Not me. Not one of my ghosts."