Re: log: joey & ella, gatsby
She wasn't an angel. She hadn't been, even before she'd done things angels didn't think about, let alone do and she'd been picked up so many times by her own sister she couldn't think about sisters who'd talk nine to the dozen. She'd learned to like quiet. Somewhere in between quiet as a nightmare and between thinking quiet needed to be filled up with chatter sweet as nothing, as syrup poured over waffles she'd learned quiet left you alone long enough to think straight. Ella balled her gloves crunch-tight, and she left them, ghost-outlines of her palms imprinted on cheap satin, curled up like camellias on the table-top.
"It's like being somewhere before we all forgot how to breathe," because it was stopping to breathe that made it okay, the way time fit around her instead of feeling like she was caught in its middle. Out in Vegas, it had felt like she could never catch up with the lost weeks, like they hung over her head and in Marvel there was an empty apartment across the way, things that happened in the shadows that moved too quick to catch up. No, she liked gas-lamps and old-fashioned manners and wearing beads on her bodice that glittered some. She could breathe, and he looked like maybe he'd remembered how instead of holding on tight to it like if he uncurled his fingers he might let go of breathing altogether.
"I'm about done. That was my last song, I go on real early. I don't make so much, but I go home early enough to pick the baby up from the sitter," she said, and she didn't need to look to the bartender to know he'd pour out something pretty-colored and tasteless to let her play pretend, as if the boy in the clean shirt and the scraped-clean jaw had money enough to tease it out of him. Ella didn't think Joey had a cent, and she smiled over at the man behind the bar who had rough hands but looked a little too long at the girl now on stage to be rough all the time.
"He makes a hard lemonade, you ask him right," she told Joey now, "He makes me plenty of things that look like a drink for customers if I'm singing long." She didn't think of dates, drink offers rattled off with awkward waiters standing by. The clean line of his jaw was sharper without the bloom of beard over it but he still looked real nervous. Ella wondered if it was too many people, all crammed in at once. "If it's too much, you just say so," she said, and her fingers flitted briefly across the table almost to touch the back of his hand but curled short of doing so. "There's a back door, the girls go out and smoke but it's quiet."