Re: [Second City: Cat & Jack]
There were things that the bottle wasn’t. He knew that, because contrary (contrary being the operative word) to belief he had been in love, several times over. There had been the professor at Cambridge and before that a girl from the neighboring estate who had dropped him without a second’s hesitation when his father had rolled up to a party roaring drunk and belligerent. There had been Jen, but what had fanned out under his skin and made it feel like the nerve endings were turned inward, bathed in warmth was nothing like Jen. It wasn’t sour, it wasn’t bloody bitter. It was effervescent like champagne and it felt like infatuation, like a drug. Something to sit in a plastic chair over, and if it left cleanly when forty dollars wore off, it presumably wouldn’t matter if it did. But christ knew he didn’t care. Not at this precise moment in time.
The spread of the table was littered in paper, it wasn’t cash. It wasn’t counters, chips worth thousands to throw down and this wasn’t politics on a knife-edge like the Rex. He wondered idly if she’d learned her taste for hosting games from places like this that bloody bristled power. There was more, he assumed, invested in the home of the game than the gamers, because the gamers had to trust the house to uphold the rules. He folded up the thought like paper and tucked it away rather than examine it for long.
He watched her reel away from him, weave in and out of the watchers and the gamers and had Cat ever been young, the way he remembered youth? She was lithe movement and hypnotic and he stood as relaxed as it was possible to be when a man across from you had intimated he was prepared to engineer your death and he half-watched the hand of cards nearest him, the flash of a couple of face-cards in among the mix.
But sitting down was a craving that belonged to somebody else, somebody dead. He had acquired one taste and as Cat coiled herself into the warmth and dark at his back, when he could feel her there, an expectant weight and his own pulse ticked into temporary speed, spurred by the bloom of what had been contained within glass, Jack didn’t feel particularly tempted. His pupils weren’t dilated-dark in the gloom but they weren’t pinpricks of oil on washed blue.
“Show me something else?” He turned into the place between wall and her, looked into curiosity in narrow face. “I don’t want to play.”