Fr. Echeverría
"I'm just going across the room. Drink your water."
When he stands from his crouch it's slowly and with no small amount of stiffness in his back and knees but he does not complain. In a small umbilicus between the living room and the bedroom he opens a closet and pulls out the extra bedding he keeps for situations like this. There's an entire studio apartment upstairs for situations like this but that's where married clergy would normally keep their families. He's not married. He just attracts strays.
The door clicks shut and he comes back with a pillow and a blanket. Does he think he could see.
"I don't know," he says. Parks the pillow at one arm and folds the blanket over the other. "We're gonna talk more in the morning. Finish your water."
Minor ministrations before he goes back to bed: he locks the front door and picks up the baseball bat and puts the things that fell on the floor into the sink. Closes the refrigerator door. Goes back into the bedroom and gets between the sheets and lies still. He's asleep and snoring lightly within minutes.
-----
Dawn comes like it always does and the day promises to be bright but not overly warm. He rises before she does and when she wakes up he's showered and dressed and is sitting in the kitchen drinking a glass of orange juice. A newspaper lies spread across the table and he watches her through the archway between the kitchen and the living room like he's not entirely convinced she's straightened out yet.
Serafíne
He's right. She hasn't straightened out yet. Not wholly. Sure the body gets used to psychedelics, but that just means you take more. Despite the pillow and the blanket and the admonition to sleep, Serafíne slept very little last night. She was tripping, but something in that chaotic interlude between the point where her trip went bad and the point where he settled her on the couch it went back to being okay again.
When he returned with the blanket and pillow, parked one close to her and the other at the other end of the couch, she reached up for him, with both hands, to give him a deeply inhaled smile, but full of a sudden physical contentment, and a backwards hug. Told him, "I don't know how you got in my house," the smile widened, and her dilated gaze fell away. "But I'm glad you're here."
She didn't let him go, but she was as easy to maneuver as she had been the last few moments; he unwound himself from the tangle of her arms, saw to the minor ministrations before bed. Finds in his kitchen not merely the things she dumped from his fridge, but her phone on the counter, a tube of lipstick rolling around on the floor, and a black studded leather clutch in his crisper drawer.
---
So she spent the night tripping, mostly quiet, on his couch. Tripping and drunk, which may have been the problem. With her senses mostly back and his resonance everywhere, the trip ended as something much bright than it began. The walls stripped themselves to the studs and the studs became slender aspens white and brilliant against a black night sky, and the ceiling peeled itself back and the stars slipped down like rain onto her face. Like fire into her skin.
She was just quiet, while this endless parade of illuminated night just presented itself to her. Crawling across the sky and kneeling down and moving onwards, with what would become a slipping majestic certainty, and the only thing to frighten her were in the dark places, between. Hard not to Work when the world is opening itself to you, and so she did. Pulled herself into the ether and pushes her senses outward. Seeking nothing, just feeling the pulse of life all around her like the sparks of errant fireflies in her periphery.
--
Fell asleep like that near dawn and wakes up like that, now, too. All discombobulated. Though she never managed to peel the dress off her body, the hem has risen up to her ribs, the base of her sternum. Slips out of the tangle of the blanket (at some point, two of her garters have come un-snapped and so the stocking on her left leg sags like a knee-high sock with nothing to keep it up) and pads past the archway and further to his bathroom. Showers, taking rather too long for someone who isn't washing her hair, but she isn't washing her fucking hair, just her face and body.
When she emerges again, her face is scrubbed clean. Her cheeks are distended like a chipmunk's because she's swishing his Listerine. Her stockings are gone and she's wearing just the dress now, barefoot on the worn linoleum. Hair damp but not wet, and she's braided it a bit, pulling it away from the buzz cut in a manner that accentuates the shaved-in line.
Sera brushes past the kitchen table and lays a hand on Pan's shoulder as she passes. The contact is brief, a wordless sort of thanks or apology, though the gory details of the night have been mostly devoured, she remembers some of it. The darkness that swallowed the sliding glass doors, the familiar view of the back garden, the gazebo with its cabana bed and the roses Dee's grandmother grew. Then came pushing onwards. That's what it seemed like.
So, a hand on his shoulder in passing, the brush of her body close behind his chair, because that's how she fucking is in the morning, and then she's passed him, and spits out her Listerine in the sink.
Then pours herself her own glass of OJ. Time to start replacing all those vitamins she's stripped out of her body yet again.
Fr. Echeverría
No lecture or verbal expression of disapproval or disappointment greets Sera when she walks into the kitchen. He glances up from the article he's reading when her hand passes over his shoulder. Listerine blocks words so he waits until she's spat and moved to the refrigerator before he folds up the newspaper to put it out of his mind.
For the awakening he had last night Pan does not look exhausted or put-out this morning. Thus far his Saturday is trundling along in the standard tradition of previous Saturdays with the exception that he has not gone out to run errands this morning. A day of rest finds itself into the week by planning or providence. He'll wander across the street to read and pray and do whatever else he does in the afternoons when the afternoon comes.
Now he takes a swallow of orange juice and is thankful in silence that Sera does not appear to be hurt. She finds her clutch and her lipstick and her phone stacked neatly in a cluster on the counter by the fridge. He has not examined any of them, just rescued them from abandonment and put them where she can find them now.
"This is a nice place you got, here," he says. Thinks he's being funny.
Serafíne
Sera still has a stamp on the back of her left hand from the last bar she went to last night. The wrist band from the one before that came off in the struggle last night, drifted to the floor and Pan picked it up on his way down the hall this morning or maybe even last night. Threw it away. Sera pours her OJ and finds her things stacked by the fridge. Glances at the lipstick and then opens the clutch by its crystal-laden skull clasp, makes a noise and tosses it inside. God knows what she keeps in there. It doesn't even look like her phone would fit.
Maybe he is being funny because she gives him a glance and breathes out a noise that sounds like a laugh. Lifts her eyes to the ceiling does this searching sort of glance around the walls of the room, like she's considering it all.
"Thanks." Her mouth curves as her eyes drop back down to the priest and his fucking orange juice and his neatly folded paper. "It's not bad," she allows. Playing along or some fucking thing. Maybe she does like it, though, all filled up with light. "I've had worse digs."
She doesn't remember exactly how she ended up here, or why, though she could look back and see if it mattered, tug on the niggling little threads of her trip that are still sparking around the edges of her vision and hunt down the truth, she doesn't. Just takes a long drink from her glass of OJ and sets it down on the counter by her waist, and the edge of the black line work on her tattooed palm catches her attention.
The shark and the fucking scissors. Christ.
"I'm - " here she looks up. Finds him at the table again. " - sorry." Seems like she means it, too, in the morning light. Takes in a deep breath and looks like she's going to continue that apology with another I statement, but shakes it off before its fully born. Twists her expressive mouth, all rue, and is already reaching for her phone. "Gonna call a cab and get out of your hair."
Fr. Echeverría
"You're not in my hair."
She has her own place and her own day but it's not as if he wants her gone. It isn't a compulsion to stay, either. He awoke to the sound of her clomping high heels in his kitchen and that was where he found her and he did not judge her for this. Did not pray over her while she brandished the bourbon or sprinkle her with holy water while she slept.
Old as he is and worn as he is that was not the worst or most impressive display of divorce from reality that he had ever witnessed. But they don't talk about this. She can tell he wants to talk because he does that thing he does where he ignores whatever he was doing before she showed up even though he has about a dozen other things clattering around in the background waiting for him to come back to them.
While she calls the cab Pan stands from the table and takes his glass to the sink. He has no dishwasher. The glass is drained and he washes it by hand and sets it into a small dry rack. After the call he turns from the sink and sets his hands against the edge of the porcelain.
It's worth mentioning that the priest has not referred to Leah by her given name once this entire time. He does not hesitate before saying 'the girl' but anyone paying attention to his face can tell he has to really gear himself up to give her that much.
"Have you felt him watching you since the night we picked up the girl?" he asks.
Serafíne
He says she's not in his hair.
She is thumbing the phone on, the gesture casual, scrolling through the messages that have gone unanswered. Leaning back against the edge of his counter beside the fridge, her eyes on the screen but sometimes flicking up at him. Gives him a look like she doesn't believe him, but she has to, doesn't she?
So it's not a cab she calls, not yet. Just a few messages she returns, texting back the original authors the briefest code to their fucking 911 where the fuck r u? messages. A-OK. Back later. Checking in so they know she's neither dead nor kidnapped.
She scrolls through a few more messages that she does not bother to answer, then glances up as he turns away from the sink and leans back against the edge. There's something pensive about her expression. Tongue between her lips, eyes dark from the still-dilated pupils searching him.
Then shakes her head no. "I haven't," glancing down and aslant from him, at his shadow on the linoleum, his kitchen chair just askew from where he's vacated it. A little shrug, but enough to make the hem of her dangerously short dress rise and fall to near the apex of her thighs. Her mouth a twist of rue. "I'm just being paranoid.
"I'd tell you if I did. You or Jim." She breathes out, sharply, all at once, "Wouldn't keep that from you." then reaches for the glass of OJ on the counter beside her.
Takes another sip of the orange juice, and holds it in her hand, turning it in a slow circle, watching the light gleam against the pulp suspended in the liquid, mesmerized by the chatoyent glow on the surface, and asks, "Did you ever black out?" Looks back up at him then,level across the interval distance. "You know, before all this priest stuff?"
Back in the bad old days.
Fr. Echeverría
His eyebrows flick at the news of her being paranoid. It doesn't come as a surprise. She came close to smashing a liquor bottle on his head last night because she thought he had snuck into her house. This isn't her house but he knew enough not to say that at the time. Didn't argue with her when she thought he had gotten inside of her head. Didn't do much arguing at all beyond telling her she was safe.
None of them are truly safe but they're not in active danger either. The distinction is a fine one and they don't dwell on it.
And he watches her for signs of the hallucinogenic's lingering in her system. Does not move from where he's come to stand. His broad shoulders shade the sunlight bled in through the windows but it shines through his hair. He never looks as old as he is until he stands in the light and then he looks older than the forty-something years he boasts.
This priest stuff makes him laugh and the laugh shaves off some age. Back in the bad old days he was probably a very handsome young man. Very handsome young man tend to make very bad personal choices.
"Yes," he says. "More than once."
Serafíne
His laughter calls out the edge of her smile. The sudden razor-brilliant edge that makes her seem so very, very bright. So exquisitely alive. Pulls her eyes back to him too, unstintingly direct. This hungry sort of awareness crawls over her when his laughter rings.
Oh, but her expression sobers.
"Did you ever wake up afterward, knowing that you'd done something bad, something really fucked up, with no idea what it was you did.
"Just that feeling. Just that knowledge down in your gut."
She's not talking about last night.
Fr. Echeverría
A time to laugh is followed quickly by a time to sober up and talk about the things they can't remember.
To walk into a room full of strangers with little more than the clothes on your back to show for the road to that point is one thing. You walk into an anonymous meeting and you get your cup of weak-ass instant coffee and you sit down. Long time ago you could smoke inside and nobody gave a shit but these days you have to go outside. At meetings you can tell the entire room things you wouldn't tell your oldest friend because you can walk out of those places.
He can't walk out of this kitchen. Isn't technically his kitchen. But for the grace of God and the congregation he stays here. Rosa doesn't say this in so many words but they've been colleagues so long Rosa doesn't even have to say something for Pan to get the message that she doesn't approve and she don't think God would approve neither.
"Most addicts do, at some point." A beat. "Why?"
Serafíne
If he's looking for signs of the hallucinogen still in her system, he can find them. Her pupils are twice as large as they might normally be, particularly for his kitchen, with the morning light pouring in through the window over the sink behind him. Then there's the tension in her muscles, slipping into a sort of fuck-me lassitude. The way she moves, so carefully, turning her head to espy the OJ she has set aside before directing her hand to reach for it, like she's pulling on threads - or being pulled by threads - connected to a larger, wholly ineffable tapestry.
And if he knows the half-life of drugs like the ones she took last night, he might be able to guess that she didn't sleep on his couch, so much as drift in a waking dream. He might guess that she has another hour or two or even three, if she's lucky, of this slow, down-ramping activity, before she crashes and sleeps for twelve hours.
Of course, men like him don't get into the same kinds of drugs that pretty little white girls like her do. At least, not the same kinds of drugs the same ways. Pretty little rich white girls, because that's what she is. He has no fucking idea that that black studded leather clutch she threw in with his apples and his wilted iceberg lettuce cost more than a grand.
Little wonder that Rosa does not approve.
Then there's the way she looks at him, as she's doing now. It's not so much an I want to fuck you look, which happens only in pornos, which are made for men, or at last call in a fucking nightclub, but an I think you're nifty sort of look. Of course, for girls like her I think you're nifty almost invariably leads to other, more intense places, and that's something Rosa is a helluva lot more likely to understand than the Padre.
See, when he laughed like that, the look shifted into something like I think you're nifty enough to walk across the worn linoleum of a sun-warmed kitchen on a Saturday morning on bare feet and - - but now that look's gone; or at least, subsided, subsumed, slipped beneath her skin.
Her eyes meet his in that beat between his admission and his question, then cut physically away. Her body is languid, hips forward, hands back, one loose around the base of her glass of OJ. There's a bruise on her left thigh and another on her right shin, maybe from her struggle with him last night, self-inflicted, but nothing that won't quickly fade and heal in a couple-three days.
"So. I have something like that." She finds his eyes again and favors him with a twinge of a smile. There's no joy in it. "And I'm pretty sure it involved someone like him."
Fr. EcheverríaRosa understands far more about girls than the parish's pastor is ever going to understand. She was one, she raised more than one, and she's around them from the time she arrives at the church in the morning until the time the last service trundles out the door at night. Some evenings she sits on the rectory porch with Pan and they split a beer and talk. No evenings like that have happened since the young lady with the aura like a shiver started living upstairs in his studio. They haven't happened since that parrandera started hanging around.
(She'll ask him this morning as he stands in the office flicking through the mail after morning Mass. She thinks he's having an affair. It isn't any of her business whether he's having sex with someone outside the parish but she'll make it her business. She's known him since she was his business.
Now her life is clean and she has a relationship with her daughters now that her life is clean and she thanks the Lord for it but the Lord wasn't the one who tracked her down and pulled her out of a shooting gallery when she stopped coming to NA meetings over ten years ago. That was Pan.
Pan doesn't know that Rosa once thought she was in love with him. That's why she worries about him.)
And that parrandera stands in his kitchen looking at him in a way he does not see. He's focused on what's driving her to behave the way that she is and it has nothing to do with it. It has to do with the blank spaces in her own history.
He doesn't waver under her gaze. Makes eye contact and is unashamed of it. His own are kind though he does not return the smile.
"You thought about looking into it?" he asks.
SerafíneSera breathes out, this sharp breath that flares her nostrils. He does not waver under her gaze, but perhaps she wavers under his. Look at the way her own eyes drop from his, down the dark bulk of his black-clad frame, and away. Just off her her left.
That smile disappears and she seals her lips, presses them together so they virtually disappear. Brings her hand to her mouth, rubs her thumb over her jaw, then her mouth. The way someone would do while remembering a kiss, the movement of another mouth upon their own.
There are so many pieces of it she hasn't told him. Just the sparest details, the Cliff's Notes version. The analogy. The I have something like that too and its a confession without a confession. Maybe he can read that in her now, her reluctance to be defined by what she lacks, instead of what she's built for herself beyond that. The level of fucking trust it took for her to broach the subject with a near stranger, a fucking priest. Maybe she remembers the way he hugged her, and murmured, into her hair, into her neck that she was fine, that she was okay, that she was safe.
"I suppose it depends on, what you mean by looking into it." Here she cuts her eyes back to his and finds them still on her, steady and unshamed and also unshaming, but so direct it makes her feel naked before him. A sharply exhaled breath follows, and she opens her mouth, takes the knuckle of index finger into her mouth, and worries it with her teeth. "I guess not, though."
This is the only untruth she tells him: she has done so much work reconstructing her past, pulling concrete memories out of some dark fucking ether. Turning herself back into a person with a name and a purpose and a history rather than just a tabula rasa. But beyond the things she has reconstructed and pulled back into transparent focus there are long stretches that remain persistently dark. Given what she remembers from those years, she sometimes grateful for their absence.
"I was in London, then. Not sure I'd wanna go back."
Fr. EcheverríaYou spend enough time working with different people and it gets to where you don't have to hear specifics in order to glean. Assumptions don't do anyone any good but neither does prying. He doesn't have the benefit of hearing her life story on the moment of their meeting and he doesn't take her sins from her once a week. No spiritual burden of her lies on his shoulders and she gives no money or food or blessings to him for his troubles.
People like Pan don't do the work they do because they expect recompense. Their recompense comes from something deeper, something brighter, and he could stand here all day and listen to her talk or not talk and that is where the trouble comes in. He cannot stand here all day. His parish needs him.
He doesn't check his watch. They don't need him right this second and he doesn't need to press Sera for more details.
"You don't have to go back," he says. "But if it keeps coming up on you, you gotta turn around and face it."
SerafíneThat gives her a shiver - a deeply felt physical shiver - that she cannot suppress. It crawls up the column of her spine and ricochets out to her shoulder. Even though she stiffens her neck to subvert its movement, it still makes he tense and alert; brings out the tendons in her neck, pulled taut beneath her skin where she has turned her head aside, in profile to him.
Sera closes her eyes, then. Just says fuck it and allows the shiver to run its course through her whipcord frame, all harrow and bone. There's some harrow and bone in her gaze, still, when she opens her eyes again, follows the tracers across the kitchen floor, back to his feet. His fucking resonance; it's everywhere here. It suffuses the plaster and lathe, the structural timbers, the old worn furniture. The window glazing and the window frames.
Fills up the goddamned orange juice with light.
Sera employs her Spanish rarely, but she employs it just so when she calls him by his title. Makes it seem almost intimate, the way her mouth crawls around the word.
"I like looking forward, better, Padre."
She glances aslant, gathers up those things he rescued from abandonment last night and put aside for her: the phone and the clutch. Tucks them into the curve of her right hand and unslings herself from the edge of his kitchen counter.
Starts walking barefoot across the sunwarmed linoleum toward him.
Fr. EcheverríaProverbs and psalms lurk in the spaces of the scant words he gave her. Outside of the confession booth he has said little to her about God or Jesus or what she does or does not owe Them or herself. Hasn't told her all the things he knows to be true and tells to his flock for they know it all to be true themselves. Doesn't say anything about what would light her path and keep the darkness at her back.
The miracles he performs give back hope to the doubters and pushes back demons and this place will sing with the brightness and the power of what he's done with his life long after he's dead. Whoever leads this parish after him will know the word to be true because he or she will step into this place and be affirmed.
I like looking forward better Padre.
"Good," he says.
When she slides away from the counter the priest watches the Cultist walk across the room and hears the soft padding of her soles against the floor. He has not moved from the sink. He takes his hands off the edge of the porcelain so he can move out of the way of the faucet.
SerafíneBut Serafíne is not walking across the kitchen toward the sink or the faucet. She does not want a glass of fucking water and she does not clean up after herself, not on the regular. Her half-consumed OJ is back there on the counter by the fridge. She is walking across the kitchen toward him.
He has more than a half-foot on her in height. He's double her goddamned weight. She is wearing approximately 1/10 the clothing he wears. That dress is black and lace and see-through. Sure, most people assume there's illusion netting beneath it for modesty, because that's what we expect to see, but most people are wrong. Sera thinks illusion netting sucks.
She's smiling at him, though. Smiling when he endorses her philosophy of the goddamned universe, just finds his eyes and curves her mouth, quick and wry and sure and - pleased with his endorsement. So Sera is walking across the kitchen toward him, and if he shifts position to let her get to the sink, she makes a little bit of a course-correction and there she is in the end, standing right in front of him, closer to him by at least an inch or two or three than might be considered polite conversational distance. Sera does not believe in illusion netting or polite conversational distance.
So it's flirting-in-a-bar distance for her with people she likes, half the time, and regardless of the setting. Like now, with a priest, in the kitchen of his rectory, on a sun-lit Saturday morning. She's still high.
"You saved my trip, you know?" Her eyes are rapt on him. And even if she cries, goes fucking snot-nosed balling on him when she divines an endless series of punishing, cascading futures, and even if cannot sleep without another heart beating close to her own, another set of eyes and lungs to banish the shadows, even if she gets fucked up and paranoid and even if she is goddamned frightened of the goddamned course of the goddamned events of the last few weeks, she loves this fucking world. Loves it and it loves her back.
Sera taps Pan in the center of his chest, just below the sternum, with the edge of her clutch. Another man would take that as an invitation to touch her back, and in a kitchen like this when she's fucked up like that, god probably doesn't want to know what would happen next. We are fairly sure it would involve the kitchen table and three of the four walls. "I was out last night, and I was vibing on this guy. We just clicked, and I wanted to get laid. So we were doing Crouching Tigers, one after the next, and it all felt all right."
He's not another man, though, and she's telling him a story now.
"But then something just shifted. I don't even know where it started. He kept putting his hand on my thigh where I didn't want it, and so I'd move it and he'd put it back and call me a tease. I mean, I was still going to take him home and fuck him, and he's sitting there calling me a tease, like I have some fucking obligation to him. Like what I wear is some sort of contractually mitigated offer of sex if I let you buy me two drinks.
"Maybe he thought he was being a funny guy. Maybe he was just fucking blotto, but there was something in his voice that I hadn't heard before, and I lost the vibe.
"Something aggressive, you know? I don't know. Not enough to surface, but enough that I didn't wanna touch him like that any more. Started creeping me out and things started getting fucked up, so I guess I called a cab.
"Ended up here somehow.
"Things got worse." The whole time she's standing close to him, smelling of Listerine and OJ and his soap and her damp hair, booze and cigarettes embedded in the fibers of her lace dress. Looking up, her pupils wide open, her mouth curved just now, as she bites her lower lip, a strange sort of apology shining in her eyes.
"I don't know how bad. I just know I was - " she inhales and lets that stand for whatever she means to confess or apologize for. Gives him a neat little shrug. Good thing Rose's not around so see the way the gesture makes the hem of her dress rise against her white thighs.
"Then it got better. It was really good."
The way she smiles up at him.
"That was you."
Fr. EcheverríaWalk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.
When he looks at her he makes no extra effort to keep his eyes above her neckline. His eyes work. He knows she has breasts and long thin legs and smooth young skin. He knows she moves like she thrives off the gazes pulled in by her hips. But his gaze is not pulled in by her hips.
He knows she drinks and fornicates and worships false gods. That she covets and swears and conducts herself in an unclean manner. But he hugs her and lets her sleep on his chest anyway.
The world calls him father. It is a violation of natural order and an abomination unto the Lord to lie with one's children as one lies with a spouse. All of the people in his congregation are as his children. She is not in his congregation.
She calls him father. He is not another man. He is not interested in her flesh.
And once he realizes she has come here to speak close and in his space he puts his hands in his pockets and lets her stand close enough that she could read desire or arousal in him if it were there. He is not a cold man and he is not like resting in the presence of a corpse but he does not want her. Does not even want to save her. His wants are simple and do not involve other people.
Pan listens. Winces when she tells him the boy kept putting his hand where she didn't want it. Waits for the part where things take a turn towards the violent but he knows how the night ended. That darkness between her leaving and her arriving doesn't offer any resolution. Things got worse.
His smile doesn't show teeth and it flees soon as it surfaces but the gladness of her thinking the night good shows.
"Well," he says and puts both hands on her shoulders, paternal, like it's just now dawning on him that she's very close and still half fucked-up, "that's why we don't lock the doors around here. I'm glad you're okay."
His hands leaves her shoulders.
Fr. Echeverría[SUP STRANGER]
fly[*GRIN*]
Fr. Echeverría[Liz I'm calling it now: he's totally going to make a Mage.]
Serafíne(Haha. He best do. How could he miss out on PAN ECHEVERRIA?)
fly[Man, after reading this scene, I just may have to :P]
SerafíneSo there's this moment where he puts both hand on her shoulders, paternal. She can feel the strength in his hands and their warmth; the weight of his arms on her shoulders. Light bleeds from him and sparks this brilliant fucking halo around him but he's all in black. The Man in Black. That's what Jim calls him.
And maybe he does it with some paternal intent, like he's just getting that she's close enough to him that she can feel the heat radiant from his body and that her awareness and judgment are mitigated by lingering threads of hallucinations, and she just told him an involved story that started with the premise that she really wanted to have sex with someone last night, and a stranger would do just fine - but, he puts both hands on her shoulders, and she glances down, all aslant, at his forearms. The black hair wiry on his brown skin against the dark and rolled up sleeves.
This time it's not her clutch, but her hand against his chest. Her left hand, the palm just below his sternum, her fingers spread out around it like a five-pointed star.
She can feel his heart beating.
"Still, I just wanted to tell you - " that I think you're nifty " - that you're fucking awesome. Thanks, Pan."
Sometimes, it's enough.
"Gonna walk home."
Sera gives him another one of those smiles, shining, and turns around as he lets her go. Snaps the clutch against her fingernails in this almost meditative rhythm as she walks, feeling all one with the universe. Everything's slipping in and out of her, carelessly, casually hooked into the stream. She walks away, pauses in the living room to grab her heels from wherever they were kicked off the night before, and keeps going, the straps tucked neatly between two fingers in her left hand, phone and clutch cradled in the right.
The fishnets and garters, though. Those she's forgotten. Maybe Rosa will find them when she comes over to have a talk with the Padre. No wonder she thinks he's having an affair.
No comments:
Post a Comment