Re: The Rex: Cat & Jack
This was the clock behind glass. Museum quality slammed up, very likely and Jack watched with the wry expectation of this having occurred long sooner. Had he known he'd know the difference when it came? Not exactly, but self-preservation had never been a strength precisely. He'd liked looking over edges and long drops far too much and there weren't many precipices in Repose, save what was in the glass on the bar and that one looked back?
Cat played with truth like a shyster on the side of a road with a shell-game, tucked under one of the three but never where you'd expected it to be in the first place. Jack watched the shuffle with an air of dampened amusement and faint interest for whether and where the shells would end. "In high-end settings no doubt." Poems and jewels were not at all the same thing, but perhaps they spoke the same language. Perhaps, but Jack's eyes had creased at corners and he was laughing even if his mouth was very still.
"I'd have stripped if you'd asked nicely." Reasonable, in the wake of the Chanel No.5 and it could have been true, but it probably wasn't, not the way he smiled when he said it and it wasn't the suit. She gave him poured charm that no doubt had smooth, solid glass beneath the surface and he bent for the jacket and slung it over one shoulder by a finger. Jack glanced at the glass on the bar.
"You don't spool, Cat. You snarl." He approached her without the trepidation owed the diamond man in Sierra Leone nor the precipice and he stood comfortably within a frame of distance that was not intimate in the dark. She glittered like her own diamonds and Jack leaned long enough that if she stayed still, he'd brushed casual familiarity against her cheek and his weight was back over his heels within seconds.
"Goodnight, Cat. Don't forget to tuck all the ends in if you're ravelling up." Insouciance and whiskey and with the interminable jacket hung over his shoulder.