[On the House] 763.
Letty slides a chipped blue bowl down the counter, and it hits Brian's waiting fingers like some sort of halfway bowling ball.
"Milk's in the fridge, cereal's in the pantry. You got oatmeal or corn flakes; the rest's above your pay grade."
Brian stares at her with a vague, questing expectancy, like he's waiting for some sort of catch.
She doesn't know what more he needs, so she shrugs, disappears behind the refrigerator door. Orange juice and whiskey in the morning. She concentrates on the clink of glass on glass as she sifts through the higher order groceries--things not oatmeal and cornflakes--but there's that ceramic scraping again. Like someone swirling a chipped blue bowl across the countertop, putting hairline scratches in the parts where the tile varnish has worn down, digging at the crumbling grout.
Uncanny.
Door closes. Rush of cold air at her feet. She steps in the small pool of wet that started dripping from the fridge a few weeks back. "You're gonna hang around, you need to start earning your keep."
--
The House, as it's called (or as Brian calls it. The rest of the crew just calls it 'going home'), isn't a bad piece of property. A string of shit apartments all down in Southside--and one in Venice--and a childhood home in Crap Shack, San Fernando Valley later, Brian's not the finest connoisseur of real estate. But it's fairly spacious, considering the haphazard layout to the furniture and the boxes of old car mags and skin mags and--oddly, Brian thinks--BusinessWeek mags, and for the last two weeks it's been home.
He shares the back room with Jesse most days, though there's no set pattern. Sometimes it's the guest bed, others it's the floor in the living room. Once time, whenever everyone was exceptionally drunk and exceptionally friendly, it was his own private corner of the master bed, somewhere near Vince's feet. It's chaos, and it's always a mad rush (you don't want to be the pansy that hits the sack first, but try to prove your manhood too clearly, and that's what earns you the floor), but it's...good. It's good, in a fuck this shit we need to invest in a vacuum I think I slept with my mouth open, because my tongue tastes like Cheetos dipped in engine grease kind of way.
Freedom doesn't stop at streets.
--
Letty doesn't fight for beds. Generally she stakes her claim around noon, just try and contest that one, machismo. I've got more car keys than you can count, I know where you keep your ride, and you can't afford a new set of four-core intercoolers, so fuck if you can afford a new coat of paint.
(It's either that or she takes the master with Dom, and everyone else knows they'd better get the hell out.)
Tonight, she's up late. Probably gonna go all night. No real reason; it's just one of those things. Old habits die hard, maybe. You're fifteen years old and you wait up all night some days--watch the sun go down and swoop back up on the other side of the world. Means things can change. Five point turn, and you're riding the high road one day, no matter where you came from.
She crosses the living room, kicking the rug back to its place (the place where the hardwood has a burn mark from... only God in Heaven knows). Finds the new kid knocked out and drooling sleep onto the floor.
She shrugs. To each their own. Couch is still up for grabs, after all.
Letty doesn't watch him all night, because sleeping people aren't that interesting (even when she can almost see the crick in his neck forming; morning's gonna be hell, after that one), and she has better things to do. But she's glad he's there. Not sure why yet, but she is.
Come morning, he strikes blearily into the kitchen, halfway between uncaring oblivion and some playing it cool. Hard to do when you're half-asleep and blinking crust out of your eyes and trying to massage your neck into a human position again.
But she'll give him bonus points for effort. "Thought you might want some breakfast," she says.
He gags visibly and says something about hating corn flakes; he's just going to run out and get coffee at the gas station or something.
Letty snorts. "This is better."
Slides him a glass of orange juice and a shot of whiskey.
"Milk's in the fridge, cereal's in the pantry. You got oatmeal or corn flakes; the rest's above your pay grade."
Brian stares at her with a vague, questing expectancy, like he's waiting for some sort of catch.
She doesn't know what more he needs, so she shrugs, disappears behind the refrigerator door. Orange juice and whiskey in the morning. She concentrates on the clink of glass on glass as she sifts through the higher order groceries--things not oatmeal and cornflakes--but there's that ceramic scraping again. Like someone swirling a chipped blue bowl across the countertop, putting hairline scratches in the parts where the tile varnish has worn down, digging at the crumbling grout.
Uncanny.
Door closes. Rush of cold air at her feet. She steps in the small pool of wet that started dripping from the fridge a few weeks back. "You're gonna hang around, you need to start earning your keep."
--
The House, as it's called (or as Brian calls it. The rest of the crew just calls it 'going home'), isn't a bad piece of property. A string of shit apartments all down in Southside--and one in Venice--and a childhood home in Crap Shack, San Fernando Valley later, Brian's not the finest connoisseur of real estate. But it's fairly spacious, considering the haphazard layout to the furniture and the boxes of old car mags and skin mags and--oddly, Brian thinks--BusinessWeek mags, and for the last two weeks it's been home.
He shares the back room with Jesse most days, though there's no set pattern. Sometimes it's the guest bed, others it's the floor in the living room. Once time, whenever everyone was exceptionally drunk and exceptionally friendly, it was his own private corner of the master bed, somewhere near Vince's feet. It's chaos, and it's always a mad rush (you don't want to be the pansy that hits the sack first, but try to prove your manhood too clearly, and that's what earns you the floor), but it's...good. It's good, in a fuck this shit we need to invest in a vacuum I think I slept with my mouth open, because my tongue tastes like Cheetos dipped in engine grease kind of way.
Freedom doesn't stop at streets.
--
Letty doesn't fight for beds. Generally she stakes her claim around noon, just try and contest that one, machismo. I've got more car keys than you can count, I know where you keep your ride, and you can't afford a new set of four-core intercoolers, so fuck if you can afford a new coat of paint.
(It's either that or she takes the master with Dom, and everyone else knows they'd better get the hell out.)
Tonight, she's up late. Probably gonna go all night. No real reason; it's just one of those things. Old habits die hard, maybe. You're fifteen years old and you wait up all night some days--watch the sun go down and swoop back up on the other side of the world. Means things can change. Five point turn, and you're riding the high road one day, no matter where you came from.
She crosses the living room, kicking the rug back to its place (the place where the hardwood has a burn mark from... only God in Heaven knows). Finds the new kid knocked out and drooling sleep onto the floor.
She shrugs. To each their own. Couch is still up for grabs, after all.
Letty doesn't watch him all night, because sleeping people aren't that interesting (even when she can almost see the crick in his neck forming; morning's gonna be hell, after that one), and she has better things to do. But she's glad he's there. Not sure why yet, but she is.
Come morning, he strikes blearily into the kitchen, halfway between uncaring oblivion and some playing it cool. Hard to do when you're half-asleep and blinking crust out of your eyes and trying to massage your neck into a human position again.
But she'll give him bonus points for effort. "Thought you might want some breakfast," she says.
He gags visibly and says something about hating corn flakes; he's just going to run out and get coffee at the gas station or something.
Letty snorts. "This is better."
Slides him a glass of orange juice and a shot of whiskey.