Awareness + Perception (DO NOT HOLD ME TO THESE NUMBERS)
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 5, 8, 8) ( success x 2 )
Justin[Aaand I should do this Nightmares business first.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )
Justin[Damn Justin, you are a-okay. Alright, Awareness time!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )
SerafíneWednesday night and the Hi-Dive is less than half-full. Maybe a third or a quarter full, and that's with a live show on the bill. On the bill at the last minute, that is. The marquee was just updated sometime after seven p.m. SHOW TONIGHT, no more publicity than that before the set was set to start at 10:30 p.m. or so.
Time, like all things, being relative.
The bar is dark and a bit cavernous with so few patrons, the stage is offset from the bar proper so the serious drinkers can keep seriously drinking even after they take the stage. The air is thick with smoke, even if smoking in bars is banned in Denver now, tobacco has sunk its way into the floorboards and the ceiling tiles, has impregnated the furniture and the bartop with its scent. This is a dive bar in the best sort of way. The (scant) crowd a diverse group of hipsters and fifty-somethings, affected goth sorts with raccoon-style eyemakeup, serious audiophiles, some shift workers from the nearest vaguely working-class outposts: the grocery warehouse down the street, the call center up the road.
Maybe Justin comes in in the middle of the set, finds the place smokey and dim and whiskey-stained and satisfying, in the way that fucking dive bars are satisfying. Music too loud to speak except when you're close to the other person or far away from the stage. People here pick both strategies, but there's a clutch of die-hards up close. The music is noisy, the audiomix imperfect tonight, bass heavy enough that the melodies sometimes get lost. They play a mix of originals and covers, and the covers are old-school. New Order and Joy Division. My Velouria by the Pixies when he first comes in, some stripped down and rev'd up version of Nick Drake's Pink Moon.
Close to midnight, they finish the set. They've been on stage for an hour and a half, an hour and forty-five minutes. The lead singer's been drinking the whole time, from a bottle of tequila she leaves at the floodlights at the front of the stage, talking and laughing and occasionally fucking up the set list as they worm their way through it. Stopping a few bars in and backtracking and laughing, outrageous, compelling, as she rounds on her fellow musicians. They change up instruments and sometimes keys and sometimes lyrics and sometimes she dances her way through the whole of the bridge and forgets to come in with the hook.
There's enough applause when the set's done - a final original that at least half of the people down in front of the stage, what would be a pit at a more populated show know well enough to that the singer's holding the mic out into the crowd for the chorus to be shouted back at her, indistinct and indistinguishable from the raw noise of the place, by fifteen or twenty hipster-goth diehards - that the band ends up back on stage.
This time, their instruments are unplugged. The encore and final song of the night is a mesmeric cover of Springsteen's I'm on Fire, half-sung, half-spoken, in a voice that cracks open in the chorus, hoarse now, deliberately raw as a burned and blistered sky.
Sometime part-way through the set, when he comes in, when she senses him, she looked up and right at Justin. Now, during the encore, she seeks out that spark of someting vital, enduring, out there in the smokey, neon-lit dusk of the bar. Finds him half-way through the first chorus, and stares through the hazy and blinding array of stagelights at the precise point where she senses that presence. As if she were singing all this just for him.
Just her voice at the end, all the other members have stopped playing - she's swaying in half-a-trance as she trails off, one hand loose around the mike, the long sweep of her blonde hair covering her face, the red smear of her mouth, the dark sweep of her black-rimmed eyes.
An echo pedal keeps her voice in the air for a good ten, fifteen, twenty seconds after she's breathed out her last and she's still for all that, still for the hushed few seconds after as the patrons figure out whether it's time to applaud, still even after they start applauding.
Then, she murmurs some sort of thanks into the mike, bends down in a long sweeping gesture that looks like a bow, if only to retrieve her bottle of tequila, and jumps off the stage (which is no more than three feet off the bar floor, maybe less) and starts heading toward the bar.
Justin[Life 2 / Mind 1 - Let's tone down our acute senses shall we? diff 5 -1 (going slow) -1 (focus)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 4) ( fail )
Justin[well fine then - extending +1 diff, -1 ("enduring" appropriate)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (5, 10) ( success x 2 )
JustinSince his Awakening, Justin had developed an ambivalent relationship with bars. He liked them - loved the pulse of life and the people-watching and, most especially, the drinks (assuming it was a good bar and not one of those places that served more sugar than alcohol.) And then, he didn't like them - hated the noise and the lack of boundaries and the ridiculous games that people played. Most especially he hated the assault of information on his delicately tuned senses. But one got used to these things, and sometimes all a person really wanted at the end of a long day was to sit in a dark room and have a few drinks.
And he liked the music. It's just that his version of loud was everyone else's version of just right.
The Hi-Dive was actually a nice change of pace from the bar he'd been to last week. Older and less commercial than many of the other places downtown. When he walked in, he noticed two things immediately. The first was the smell. Old wood and cigarettes; human sweat and pheromones. The smell of smoke had permeated the very bones of the place, overwhelming and unmistakable. The second was the music. Sound waves boomed and howled violently against his eardrums, but the music itself wasn't altogether unpleasant. (Actually, he liked it - or would, once he adapted to the volume.) The Verbena paused just inside the door, looking a bit like a man preparing himself to jump naked into a frozen lake.
He closed his eyes for a moment, tasting the familiar salt-tang of blood on his tongue from where he'd bitten the inside of his cheek. It was a long moment before the sound around him calmed to a tolerable din, softening to something approaching what the rest of the small crowd probably heard. He took a breath, held it, and exhaled slowly.
Calm.
Finally he approached the bar and sat down, and it was then that he really looked at the stage for the first time and took in the sight of the band - of its lead singer, and felt the unmistakable pull of her resonance. It was easy enough to see why the crowd liked her. She had a hypnotic effect.
The bartender approached him, and he pulled his focus away from the stage for a moment to order a dark beer. The man filled a tall glass at a tap and set it before him, foam sliding over the edge to drip down onto the napkin that'd been placed beneath. Justin thanked him and handed over a debit card before taking a long drink.
The night wound on. He finished his beer and ordered a second, listening to the band play their set. He didn't make any attempt to talk to the other people sitting at the bar. Once or twice a woman approached him, but he politely rebuffed their attempts to make conversation. Mostly he sat with his elbow on the bar and just... let the music and the flow of heartbeats wash over his senses (both natural and supernatural.) At a few points he closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he saw the singer looking at him. Singing to him, or so it seemed.
When the set was complete, he watched her jump off the stage and approach the bar. At this, he sat up a bit, straightening the relaxed curve of his spine. When she was close enough to hear, he said, "Nice performance up there."
SerafíneThere's an athletic ease to her bend-and-jump, a raw physical confidence that could be inborn, but could just as easily be an assumed sort of swagger. The long sweep of her hair seethes around her tall, rather androgynous, black-clad frame. In the smear of the lights on stage he may have missed it, up as she gets close to the bar she pushes her long fingers through the mass, revealing the shaved fringe on the right side of her skull. The stubble is dyed black, as are the roots of her long blonde hair.
There's no DJ when they're off stage, just a pre-stacked set of songs from someone's iPod plugged into the sound system. The bartender (blessedly) dials the volume back and chatter begins to resume all around Justin.
She sets the (virtually empty) bottle of tequila on the bar and orders something called a 'baby aspirin,' but holds on to the damn bottle when the bartender tries to take it away. There's a loose edge to her physicality now, up close(r), as if she were just on the verge being totally fucked up, but hadn't quite crossed the line.
Look, though, the glance she flashes at Justin as he compliments the performance, the sudden, bright edge of a toothy grin framed by her the bright-red smear of her lipstick. "Yeah, thanks - !" Her voice is a bit too loud. The low sonic roar of the band ringing in her ears, even yet. The grin lingers on her mouth as her lagging focus settles back on Justin, then twists, widens - "it's a work in progress, you know? We're still figuring out the kinks." - and flares into a laugh. The last bit of that sentence may have been a joke.
When the tender returns with her baby aspirin (an alcoholic slurry the color of orange smartees), she grabs drink and bottle and sidles over to claim the barstool next to Justin. She does not sit, so much as she wedges herself between that stool and Justins, and slings an backward over the bar, giving herself a view of the bar and stage, and Justin in her peripheral vision.
"Serafíne," she offers, after a moment's perusal, leaning in to him and tucking her mouth closer to his ear as if it were still loud in her. She smells like sweat and alcohol and Chanel No. 5. The dark roots of her hair are damp with it, and a trickle of moisture slides down over the hollow of her temple, following the oval frame of her face. "What's your name?"
Serafíne**and slings an [b]elbow[/b] backward over the bar, giving herself a view of the bar and stage, and Justin in her peripheral vision.
JustinHe'd remember the smell of her: the tequila and the perfume and the unique balance of pheromones in her sweat. He always remembered the way people smelled. It lingered, tucked away in his sense-memory, and reappeared in moments when his thoughts drifted toward them. Even with his senses dulled, he was still so acutely aware of his environment (always a Verbena, whether he liked it or not.)
The singer was drunk. She'd been knocking back that tequila all night. But she handled herself like someone who consumed a steady diet of alcohol (and possibly other substances.) Like someone who lived on the precarious edge of combustion. Justin watched her and smiled - just a little. He seldom managed the kind of open laughter and bold grins that Serafíne took to so naturally, but tonight there was a soft warmth that radiated behind the light turn of his lips. She introduced herself and asked his name.
"Justin," he responded, using his thumb to rub a bit of condensation off his glass. "You guys play here often?"
Serafíne"Oh, no. This is our first time?" The question has her attention back on him; her head aslant, her blue eyes back and direct on his face. Well, direct as they can be when she's not facing him precisely, so much as standing alongside him, looking the other direction, and cutting him a sidelong look. "First time playing out anywhere in Denver. We don't even have a fucking name yet. But Dan and I've been playing together a while, and we did a few shows, all four of us, here and there back east. So," the edge of her smile like a hook, her energy high and unswerving. "Yeah.
"I guess, I don't get to ask you if you come here often, because if you did, you'd've already known the answer to that question." The sentence is very nearly recursive in its logic and she moves her head in a tick-tick-tock motion, following the structure of it back to its heart. And then asks the goddamned question anyway. Even gives him fair warning before she asks it:
"But I'm gonna ask anyway." Here she remembers the tequila bottle in her hand, gestures toward him with a cheers motion, tipping the bottle upward, her thumb on the neck, and does another shot. Then offers it to him with two dark, lifted brows, question and invitation, both. "You come here often? Or is this just a bloody lucky coincidence that I ran into you here tonight?"
Justin"Don't know if it's lucky, per se." Justin glanced at the bottle the woman was offering him, then back to his half-full pint and shook his head. Stout wasn't the best beer to mix with tequila. (And if he had other reasons for saying no, it was at least a valid excuse.) "That's the thing about chance encounters. But yeah," he grinned lightly. "This is my first time too."
It would have been painfully easy to make a bad joke out of that, but Justin refrained. He took a drink of his beer and set the glass down, pressing his lips together thoughtfully. From an outsider's perspective, there wasn't anything especially note-worthy about him. He was handsome, sure. Lots of men in the bar were handsome. A pretty nice-looking russet leather jacket sat folded up on the bar-stool at his opposite side. Lots of people owned nice jackets. He looked like he was in pretty good shape.
Again, lots of people worked out.
But none of these things were the reason the singer had approached him, and they both knew that. It wasn't the way he wore his t-shirt. It was that thriving pulse of life that was so unmistakably something beyond the ordinary. "Sorry to say I'm a pretty poor excuse for a welcome wagon. Haven't been in the city long myself."
SerafíneHis no - that telling glance from her more-than-half-empty bottle to his half-full pint of stout - pulls her attention from his face to his drink on the bar. The moisture beading, the transient remnants of foam drying at the top of the glass, the path his thumb cut through the condensation, the glitter of the bar's lights in the surface of the glass.
She does not laugh, but she takes his refusal of a shot from her bottle with a certain good-natured bemusement, her focus drifting from the glass as he takes a drink, across the breadth of his frame. She can see the collar of the jacket, the color burnished in the low lights of the bar, but otherwise not the empty shape of it.
"I think you make a lovely welcome wagon." Her eyes are rimmed in black eye liner and a heavy fringe of black mascara; they cut upward now, in a surprisingly direct line from the collar of his leather jacket to his own eyes. The precision of the statement is at odds with her clear inebriation. She is careful with each word of that sentence, aware of how she shapes them, the click of her tongue against her teeth to form the phonemes. "You're actually the first person I've met."
And she inhales, as if she could pull in whatever keeps him so vital and enduring into her own body with a breath. Her shoulders curl upward with the motion, in the dark frame of her rather revealing dress, which she wears as easily as she might wear a t-shirt and boxers.
"And I like the way you feel."
Nothing coy about that. Her appreciation of his energy is as open and simmering and alive in its way as he is. Alive, in her eyes and under her skin. "What brought you to Colorado?"
Justin[Man+Sub]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
JustinI like the way you feel, she said, and he glanced away - toward the rows of shimmering glass bottles against the wall. He didn't say anything, but he did smile. Just a little. A knowing sort of thing, with a hint of flattered-despite-himself. Lucky for him, he was saved from having to conjure a response when Serafine spoke up again.
She asked him what brought him to Colorado.
Oddly enough, she was the first person to ask him this. Justin worked the muscles in his jaw, teeth pressed together as he considered his answer. "Needed a change of scenery. What about you? I didn't think Denver was known for its night-life." (Not that he was in any position to judge what did or did not constitute exciting night-life.)
Serafíne[Perception + Awareness-as-empathy. Dif: -1 for merit, + 1 for drunk! Are you hiding things from me?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 7, 7, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )
JustinOh, he was most definitely hiding something. The response he'd given had been far too easy, and there was evident stress in the way he'd flexed his jaw. There was no way of knowing what it was, precisely, that he was keeping from her, but it was clear that whatever had brought him to Denver was something that made him feel as though he needed to put defenses up. Something he was ashamed of? No, not... precisely. Something that made him feel vulnerable.
And he did not like feeling vulnerable.
Serafíne"Hah. I do things during the day, too," she reassures him, with another bright laugh and a flash of her teeth. Then, a quick movement of her shoulders, up and down in the yoke of the black dress. "But it's still pretty lively, compared to Raleigh-Durham. Anyway, Dee - Dahlia, the bassist? - she inherited like this really amazing house from her great aunt. So she was coming anyway, and we'd played together a bit in North Carolina, and Dan and I are like, songwriting partners. We can work pretty much anywhere? So, yeah.
"Anyway," the flash of her smile slips into something more lopsided, close-mouthed, though the persistent light never leaves her eyes. She tips her head aslant, turns to set her tequila bottle down on the scarred bar-top, glancing away from him in that precisely moment. Instead, she picks up the baby aspirin she ordered, the drink a chalky, livid orange in its low-ball glass. Lifts it to her mouth, leans over the rim and takes an experimental sip. "I needed a change of scenery too.
"Hey, so far I like it here. You?"
--
While they're speaking, the band is packing up. They didn't bring their full kit and there's a back door, so it is quick and efficient. Notice: she is too damn drunk to give them a hand, and they haven't got a single roadie to help them out. But, the remaining girl and two guys are up there now, wrapping up the last of the cords and connections, tucking them into a crate with the battered laptop.
After a few minutes, the bearded guy, the guitarist, starts cutting through the space, from the stage area to the bar. He has a bottle of beer in one hand, and slips his phone back into his pocket as he approaches the Justin and Sera at the bar. Sera has not quite noticed him, or is too interested in the texture of Justin's Pattern to pay attention to movement in her peripheral vision, but if Justin glances at him, the guitarist gives him a somewhat apologetic grin for the interruption, then steps up to the bar alongside Sera, nudging the barstool between them out of the way with a movement of his skinny hip. He reaches around her, encircling her with his arms and pulling her physically against him to get her attention.
And that is when she notices him at her side. As he's settling his arms familiarly around her shoulder and torso. She glances up, sideways, as he tucks in close. They say, "Hey - !" by way of greeting nearly simultaneously. She burrows into his hug, and he gives her a fond, platonic kiss against her hair. Then, reasonably well-assured that he has a fair subportion of her attention, he continues with a persistent sort of patience, " - listen, Jer just texted me, he's out at The Vessel and wants me to come out."
Which has her laughing, leaning forward against the constriction of his arms, crowing, " - go get 'im tiger. Told you he was into you."
Bearded dude blushes under the the beard, which may be why he grew it in the first place. It's so full you can't see him blush. He continues speaking right into her ear, still mostly behind her. Holding onto her firmly, like he could try to anchor her in the space.
"So I'm going to head over there. And Dee and Rick have early shifts tomorrow, so they wanna go home." Pause, a brief glance up at Justin before he looks back down at Sera's profile, and asks against her ear, "You gonna be okay?"
"Yeah, 'course," she returns, leaning back against him now, tipping her forehead into the side of his face by hers. "I'm good. You know I'm good. I'll cab it," here a movement. Sera lifts her eyes from her downslanting look at her bandmate's profile, his arms around her lean frame, and right back at the Verbena. He'll catch the glance if he's looking their direction.
If not, he might miss the shine of humor in her eyes, and wry and drunken edge to her red mouth as she continues, " - that is, if Justin here doesn't invite me home."
Which reminds her, in turn, that they haven't met yet.
So she effects introductions. Justin to Dan and Dan to Justin. Dan unwraps an arm from around Sera to shake hands, if Justin seems so inclined, then drops another kiss on the crown of her head, instructing her to text me, okay, before he waves his goodbyes and heads back to assure the others that Serafíne is not expecting them to act as her stand-by chariot tonight and they can finish up and head out.
JustinSerafine assured him that she wasn't strictly a night-owl, and Justin answered her laugh with a good-humored smile. It said something about his mood in that moment that he was responding to her infectious charm - that he could tolerate her physical proximity so close to his own without feeling at least a little bit tense. She'd been standing (leaning) so close to his side that his senses were filled with her (her scent, her sound, her resonance - the way it pulled and struck at him, enlivening.) And it wasn't so much that he wasn't focused on her words - he was - but that this other information caught his attention in a more instinctive manner.
She told her story, and it sounded real enough. More detailed certainly than the one he'd told. When she asked if he liked it here, he gave the question a moment's consideration before nodding an affirmation. "Seems nice so far. I like the mountains. Was thinking of going climbing this weekend."
He did notice the guitarist approach. Noticing things was second nature (instinct; survival) to him. Sometimes - not often, but every now and then - he almost wished that it wasn't. (Sometimes there were things that one was better off not noticing.) His dark eyes took in the consor, roving over him briefly as though to satisfy some unspoken curiosity, but Justin didn't seem especially bothered by the interruption. Nor did he seem offended when the guitarist asked if Serafine would be alright if she was left alone. It was standard protocol among friends, these kinds of assurances, and Justin was an unknown entity, and male, and Serafine had been drinking.
That is, if Justin here doesn't invite me home.
He raised an eyebrow at that, wry and amused, but said nothing. Instead he gave a soft snort of laughter and took a drink of his beer. Then there were introductions, and Justin looked the other man in the eye and shook his hand, giving a light nod of greeting.
"You two seem close," he observed once Dan had made his exit. And then, "he seems like a nice guy."
Serafíne"We've been working together a few years," she returns, curving of her mouth slipping into something both fond and golden. She tucks herself back against the bar as Dan slips away, her elbows resting carelessly on the surface. One leg a bit forward, the other back, the heel of her boot hooked against the brass footrest that lines the old-fashioned bar. Maybe the place really is as old as it looks. Maybe the age in here, that burnished presence the space has, is earned and not some false veneer. She tips her head back again, a few loops of her long hair coiling on the bar, up at the ceiling.
That fondness evident on her face gives her voice a golden sort of glow. "I met him in Brooklyn. I was going through some stuff then, but, like - he was there for me. Through it all.
"He's cool, too. I mean, Dee and Rick? - " a glance back toward the stage, a curve of her shoulder in that direction, where her bandmates and doing a last sweep for any equipment left behind. " - they're cool, right. But Dan's Cool." Her grin goes lopsided, and she gives him a bright, drunkenly direct look. Oh how absurd their lovely euphemisms sound. Listen to her now. "With Things." Grinning around alround the words like they were liquid-bright in her mouth.
"When you say climbing, do you mean hiking? Or like, climbing-climbing. Rocks. " Her head tips lazily in his direction, and her dark-rimmed eyes, brimming with burnished light from the bar, are fast on his face. "With gear and shit."
SerafíneA beat, and she adds, a moment later. "You should invite me. I went to climbing school, you know."
JustinHe's cool, she said. (Not cool, but Cool.) With Things. And Justin expelled another soft breath of laughter. "I got it."
Then she asked about his plans, and Justin shook his head, pausing a moment to take a drink. "Hiking's good too, but I meant climbing." A beat, and he smirked. "With gear and shit. I used to go every weekend when I wasn't busy, and I bet they've got some killer spots here." He gave her a sidelong glance, as though giving her self-invitation some consideration. There was a skeptical cast to it.
"I should, huh."
It wasn't really a yes or a no.
Serafíne"You should." She self-invites everywhere, it seems. Home with him tonight, climbing with him this weekend. There's that drunken sheen to her gaze but she meets his sidelong glance with a direct look for all the haziness about her. The recursive loops of language and utter physical confidence that weave together to make whatever is essentially her. "I told you I went to school."
The last bit with the hint of a not-quite-smirk, the right corner of her mouth curled upward. Something sing-song to the intonation, like a memory of a scold without any of the heat.
"I'll grant," concession this, but it is a rally sort, a parry rather than a yield, and if he is still eyeing her, she does not break that look for anything. Her own is so steady and sure and unwavering, the challenge and response-to-challenge implicit in her refusal to look away. " - that it was years ago."
And here's something else, a crinkling around her eyes that he might not notice if he is still holding her gaze. "It was supposed to make me either straight or sober, preferably both, so you see how well that worked out."
A stark half-smile. Listen, this openness is not drawn out of her. The confession is a choice she makes, here and now. She saw how vulnerable her earlier question made him feel. And how much he hates to be that vulnerable. And how he tried to conceal it. She made no remark then and pressed no further; but now. Now she is in turn laying herself open, with scalpal precision, to a stranger in a bar. Without compunction or qualm.
It's a kind of sacred offering. Like a sacrifice to the gods of wine and chance.
"But it was better than the hospital. Thorazine and elec-tro-shock."
"Anyway, I'm pretty confident I still can tell the difference between a rock bolt and a climbing harness and a carabiner. And," she tips her head closer, like this last bit is the secret she has to share with him, and not all the rest. "It's not really the sort of thing you're supposed to do alone. Hmm?"
JustinGranted, it was a rare thing for a simple question to be capable of exposing any of his vulnerabilities. The fact that he'd come to Denver at all meant that he'd left himself open to it, but whatever it was he was hiding, it would remain so. From her, and from anyone else who thought to ask the same question. Would that he were capable of laying himself bare the way that she had done. It was a kind of bravery, perhaps even one that he admired, for he looked at her in that moment not with wariness or humor (or as some might expect, pity,) but with a soft and clear and steady expression. As though seeing her - really seeing her - for the first time.
She was right about him in that sense. It was a thing he would not have done, had their positions been reversed.
She skipped back to the crux of their conversation easily, but Justin didn't respond right away. He had a more deliberate nature, focused and steady. People who worked in office jobs called his type uni-taskers. And right now his mind was focused on what she'd said a moment ago. Thorazine and electroshock. He did register the teasing she gave him with a faint smile that faded quickly. But then he leaned toward her, closing the small span of space between them to place a kiss high on her cheekbone, near the corner of her eye. The kiss wasn't romantic in nature. It was a thing of care and reverence - a quiet flash of some unseen part of him that guarded things which were precious and wounded. And it was more - much more - than he usually gave to people he didn't know.
His mouth lingered there a moment, touching her with the vital warmth of his presence. Then he pulled away, and his smile returned fully, warming his features. "Who said I was going alone?" He actually winked then, and took a moment to finish off the last of his stout before adding, "For the record, being straight is highly overrated."
But it was getting late, and he'd finished his drink, so he pulled his jacket off the bar-stool and folded it over his arm, stepping down from his seat. "I have to work in the morning," he offered apologetically. "But it was nice meeting you."
He didn't ask for her number, or offer one of his own.
SerafíneHer eyes close when he places that kiss against her cheekbone. They are close enough that he can feel the spiderwing brush of her mascara-coated lashes against his cheek. She's so still, breathing in his scent, the stout on his breath, the dried sweat of a hard-day's work (the sort she will never perform) on his skin, that warmth and vitality, corona-bright around him.
And her eyes remain closed while he lingers close, and for several seconds after, her breathing low and rhythmic and steady.
When she opens them again, he's winking at her and draining the remnants of his beer. Returning the mug to the bar-top and the damp shreds of his napkin. She remains as she is, her elbows braced against the bar, her drunken gaze rather more distant than it had been all night, off at a point of reference somewhere above his shoulder as he steps down from his stool and turns to grab his coat from the one beside it.
He offers his apologies: work in the morning. When he tells her it was nice to meet her, her dark eyes flash back to his features, fully. She reaches out then, for the untucked tail of his shirt, or a belt loop, tugs him a theoretical, fractional inch closer to her.
And smiles. Serene and hungry and sure.
All she says by way of farewell is,
"So's sobriety."