“No, not a teenager. You just said ‘twenty-somethings’ so I started wondering if you weren’t a twenty-something,” she teased. Damn, he was younger than her. Not that she should have been surprised, really. Who felt old and fat now?
The compliments to the food got to her and she grinned. “I really appreciate it. I’m just lazy I guess. When I’m just cooking for myself it doesn’t really seem worth it- if that makes sense?” She took another drink of her wine and sat back in her chair. “Yeah, I like my job but the schedule kind of sucks. And it’s never posted until the weekend before so planning ahead is a bitch.” She had to admit, she would have loved to have a job with a set schedule. The predictability sounded kind of nice.
“I don’t really,” she said, leaning forward to look at which ones he chose. The forest near the water made her smile in particular. “A lot of these my-” she hesitated. What did she call Jeremiah? Travel partner? Friend? Lover? Brother? “my friend took them,” she finished. “I forgot my camera and was mostly just using my phone. He’s pretty good though, isn’t he?” she smiled, thinking she should tell Jeremiah that he needed to quit his father’s business to persue art.
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He chuckled softly. “You should sit in the club sometimes and just watch how they react. Sometimes I feel like I’m thirty with some of the crap they do or try to get away with.” He just shook his head at that. No, there were times he felt oh so much more mature than a lot of them.
“I hear that. Get into a business that only does business on peak hours, you’ll get a set schedule.” He said with a chuckle and another grin. “Only reason I get those hours at the club, is people only tend to party hard from Thurs to Sunday, so unless I need hours, that’s when I work. Unless it’s a holiday, people always want to get drunk for the holidays.” He shook his head a little in amusement at that.
“Your friend the other dude that commented on the network? Figured you two were out having a good time.” She got another wrinkle of his nose as he considered her. “How can you go on vacation and forget your camera. That’s like.. forgetting to get dressed before you go to work. How can you do that?” He shook his head at her as if she committed some sin or another. “He does have a good eye for the angles and the lighting, that’s for sure.”
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Alice smiled and nodded. “I guess I could see that. I mostly just get pretentious housewives or hipsters coming through. They are easy enough to deal with. And really, the housewives aren’t so bad. It’s the hipsters that are hard to handle.” Mostly because they didn’t know that they were pretentious. “But luckily, I don’t have to work holidays. Specialty grocers are not usually open for that jug of organic milk you forgot to buy Christmas Day.” Her smile turned a little warmer and she nodded. “Yeah, Jeremiah. We did have a good time, it was a lot of fun. We meant to be heading to Memphis but never really got headed West at all, just kept going south.” She laughed and pulled her shoulders up. “I don’t know! I don’t go on vacation so I wasn’t even thinking of it! It was pretty spur of the moment.” She had a week before they left but it was still spur of the moment- Alice didn’t usually do things like that. Now she was wondering if Demeter hadn’t been to blame. “Yeah he’s great,” she said with a smile, looking at the pictures. She might have meant to be commenting on the pictures but the look on her face probably implied another subject matter.