Re: [The Mean Eyed Cat: Jack + Cat]
Jack had largely gone untouched by the odd. There was plenty of it in Second City to brush elbows with but he hadn't, had he, beyond the elbow-brush? This wasn't so much as a brush as a brutal sidelong step into an alley for a feel-up, and his sense of self was intact, it was just altered. Perhaps a few loose threads but experience was experience and it had settled, restlessness of youth curled around the confidence of adulthood and the careful coiled sense of the contained, restored. So he understood. A little, christ, only a little. He knew bloody blend when he saw it.
He cleared the coat onto the stool and dropped the scarf and for good measure, folded back sleeves from wrists in the clammy-steamy heat of other people's evenings. She poured and he watched. Youth's curiosity, maturity's expectation the story would tell itself eventually and adulthood's irony added for flavor.
"Personal growth?" Clipped syllables but dry irony wired around humor. "To experience. To getting just drunk enough. And to old friends," Jack tipped the shot glass toward her, and then necked it.