Thursday Night

[billboyd]

The evening of the Open Call, the Bill/Johnny Convo, and the Bill/Orlando Convo.

Bill pulls the Mini half onto Johnny's drive and half on the grass. There's plenty of room at the moment, but once he's ready to go, he's not interested in getting blocked in. In his experience, when he's ready to get away from the DBY crew, he's ready now.

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[billboyd]

For perhaps two seconds, Bill watches Keira's face. He sees it go still and blank with surprise, her eyes going huge, and he sees something else beginning to unfold there with a kind of fatalistic clenching somewhere in his midsection, the same thing he'd felt that night, the night, fighting off paramedics long enough to search the sudden crowd of people for Orlando, that sense of immense weight, the I don't want to know mingled with the I can't stop myself from looking, all of it overlayed by the understanding, the absolute certainty that it will be the worst thing possible, that it just always is.

No happy endings. There's no such thing. It's a myth, like justice, to keep a person from going mad from the sheer, empty pointlessness of it all.

He's almost grateful when something breaks in the kitchen, the abrupt sound of destruction; it wrenches them both out of that moment, and Keira doesn't have to think what she should say to that, and Bill doesn't have to think what she might say (or not say), and being drunk never has done much to slow his reflexes (in spite of his uncharacteristic clumsiness of just a few minutes ago).

He is heading for the kitchen before she recovers from the surprise (either of them, both of them), quick and silent by habit, and if he's selfish -- even cruel -- at the small burst of gratitude at the distraction this offers, well, it's not his worst bloody fault.

Bill sees Johnny's bent back, his hunched shoulders, first. He isn't making a sound, and his elbows are pulled in tightly to his sides, a defensive position, chin tucked down so far it must be nearly touching his chest, as close as a body can get to a fetal position and remain upright. Bill circles right -- wary, probably pointlessly -- of Johnny's right hook -- and after a few steps he can see the broken remnants of a mug in the sink. Johnny reaches for it, and it's as though his hands don't belong to him. They are shaking, bone-deep tremors, and Johnny stares at them, not in horror, but with a kind of terrible lack of surprise, a fatalistic acceptance that sets the skin of Bill's back to crawling.

Johnny pulls his hands back, balls them into fists, and ducks his head further to jam them up against his forehead, his arms still drawn in close to his body. It's almost an attitude of prayer.

The tea kettle, one of those horrid black plastic ones that plugs into the wall, begins to shrill, jabbing sharp sound deeply into Bill's eardrums. He grinds his teeth, and closes his eyes for a second, pushing things away in his own mind, familiar and destructive, pushing until he can think clearly on what to do.

In a matter of minutes, people are going to begin showing up on Johnny's doorstep, expectant.

And Johnny is in no way able to meet those expectations.

Bill frowns deeply and opens his eyes, mind racing through possibilities, ticking them off, dismissing and restructuring, until he sees something that might work.

He turns toward the doorway in the same moment that Keira steps through it, reaching with one hand to yank the cord to the kettle out of the wall without looking at it.

"We'll get him in the shower. That'll take the edge off."