Re: Deck chairs; sitting.
He let one sneaker plop fat with sound to the concrete and toed off the other with thick white socks that looked like athletic wear. The guy with the glass and the cigarette ashing happily under the spread of another one of those loungers, he didn't look a lot like the athletic wear type. He knew this, it wasn't big on his list of shoulda-wouldas. Football fields or baseball caps, they didn't ring his bell. He didn't see hesitance or reticence in the guy who sprawled in fine duds on the lounger next to his but that might be because he wasn't looking.
"You, me and half the town, kid." He laid this on over the slice of his shoulder. Did he take orders? He was fuzzy on details and if they mattered a whole lot the rest of the time or if he was a big picture guy, he'd forgotten for the duration of whatever they were in for. Right now, he wasn't the take-orders and jerk-chain obedient kind. He grinned and some of that came through. He respected a guy who didn't take orders. Especially a guy that comfortable only a little way into a party where they made it clear you didn't stay you all the way through.
"Yowch?" His toes wiggled freedom and he tossed the other sneaker with some degree of accuracy at a clump of a man and a woman leaned up against the wall of the house. Whatever had been in their bottles, this guy couldn't tell you but it didn't look like it bothered them a lot. The sneaker smacked hard against wooden cladding right between her knee and his thigh and they scurried like cats with the threat of water. This guy smirked.
"Who knows how many little bottles. It's theory, and my shoes, they're practical reality." They didn't look like much. They weren't sharply pointed and they hadn't been expensive, but he was attached. They could have been his favorites, they could have been his only pair. Right now, he was attached. "I don't want to get them wet." He flashed a fulsome grin in the direction of the guy on the lounger. It wasn't emotive. It wasn't a heartstrings-puller of a grin, he wasn't a little boy lost. It had something real slow and assured about it and it held out promises it was entirely theoretical whether you could go cashing in.
He picked up his cigarette and clamped it in his lip. And then he jumped.