Dinner's aftermath
Okay. So that's done.
I left early. Quietly. No fuss, no worries. He can't take me to task for that. And I can't-
I can't anything. Not anything at all. Including think, for the moment.
Must tell Sabby.
Must get some sleep.
7/17/2005
Logfile from Leah.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Continued from the dinner party's log:]
And there is a Leah, standing alone in the middle of a lonely apartment with the scents of dinner and alcohol, and frustration and anger, settling out of the air around her. She puts a hand to her face. She closes her eyes. Then she tugs her blouse straight, picks up her keys, and marches out of the apartment and down and over and up to a door. That door. Rossi's. And knocks quietly.
There is only the faintest of lights showing beneath the door, and the sound of thumping within: physical rather than musical; the arrhythmia of unpacking, or reverberant damage, or both. A heavy stride kneads its way to the door, throwing its band of shadow across the glow's partition, and a moment later the door itself is thrown wide. Rossi, shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, jacket off, hair a rumpled mop, and eyes aglitter with temper. And in one hand? A bottle of scotch. He leans his shoulder against the doorframe, arm jutting to hold the door's panel in place, and simply ... looks.
Leah, for that first awful instant, cringes. Then straightens and looks him right back. "Came to say I'm sorry," she enunciates, with chin's defiant lift and eyes' red-rimmed flare. So much for the penitent; then again, she never was much of an actress.
It is possible that the inflexible line of jaw ... flexes, tamping down on fury's bubbling offspring. Certainly something eases in the stretched, strained face: the surprise of apology? Wordless still, Chris turns slightly on the door's rib, dropping his arm to give her passage within. If she chooses to step past that heat of tension, coiled. The scotch, it transpires, is unstoppered. Imagine that.
Leah moves quietly inside, keeping scrupulously clear of even rubbing the air of her passage against him. Once in, she stops in a cleared spot and folds her arms. Hugs them, tight, up under her breasts. Turns and looks back at him in clear, raw exhaustion. "I'm sorry," and she just plunges into it. All of it. "Sabitha asked me if I would mind if she flirted with you at dinner, to get a rise out of Travis. She's going nowhere with him; she's backed into a corner. She's desperate. But we were wrong, to use you like that. I apologize."
For a moment longer Rossi maintains that mute, unforgiving silence -- and then edges down from its superior heights, grimacing. "Yeah, well." The apartment is a disaster, in the first, thrashing throes of birth: boxes, cardboard, newspaper wrappings strewn in creative chaos. Restless even in the confines of his own space, Chris stirs into motion, kicking the door shut behind him before starting a springy, restless prowl of its boundaries. "You could've told me. Don't think your friend's gonna like the consequences of tonight."
"No, but it'll be better for both of them in the long run. Just painful now." Clinical Leah; compassionate Leah. She closes her eyes again, rubs her hands briefly up and down her biceps in arms' hard clutch. A long breath, pushed out longer. Eyes open again, she tracks him with them. "I could've told you," she agrees quietly. "What would you've said?"
Green flicks at Leah from beneath the shadowing rumple of hair, thick black rails to temper's cage. "That it was a stupid idea," Rossi says baldly. "That shit doesn't work. It never works. Never worked on me." A box, kicked out of his path, arches towards the far wall and tumbles to the floor with a thinly-voiced chirp of broken glass. Chris tosses it an indifferent curse and stalks on, circumnavigating a makeshift bed (sleeping bag, pillow) shaped in the living room's edges. Steps flag near Leah, and he regards her with clinical, critical awareness. "Here. Have some. I don't have any glasses yet." Scotch.
No. She manages to say it, too, clipped: "No. Thanks. I've had enough tonight, and I know how you hate me drunk." Ugly again. She drops her head, breathes out hard through her nose. "Sorry. And yeah, I know. It doesn't work. I should've told her no, but she would've thought that I was into you. Being possessive. Jealous."
A hint of incredulity speckles the hard-eyed glance that blinks over the offered scotch. Chris scowls, considering in the way he occasionally does in his cop's world: intense, intent, focused even through the prism of alcohol on the question. "The hell does it matter," he says at last, shaking off the thought like a wettened dog. Scotch gulps its way down the glass throat, tipped by a reckless arm into his human one. On the other side of it, grudging, glittering, he supposes: "You were trying to be a friend, I guess."
"Yes." Clearly said. "I was." And ruefully said. Leah tips her face up to his; her chin is still firm, even if her mouth lags in loosened lips' laxity. "People do stupid things for friendship. Over friendship. I don't know. Guess it doesn't matter, like you said. It's all fucked up anyway." She looks aside, at a box that for its unknown sins gets to be the object of her fixed attention. "For all of us. So much for a dinner party with friends."
The smell of scotch, smoky and heady, mingles with Chris' natural scent -- leather, musk, the metallic, acrid tang of gunpowder -- and stirs with him to another deliberate path woven between cardboard corpses and clothes-pregnant garbage bags. "Did your friend know we're not allowed in the same barbeques anymore?" he asks, voice muffled as he stoops to shred a black plastic bag and spill dishtowels across his bare foot. "All things considered, /we/ did pretty good. Maybe we'll get a pass, next time."
"A pass for what?" Leah asks, and her dragged-out, dragged-down state bunches up her words in native accent's folds, making a mess like those towels. "Shit, Chris, we can hardly spend five minutes together without getting into it, ourselves. I think -- I think we should just go back to ignoring each other's existence, like we did after I broke up with Gabe. Out of sight, out of mind."
"Fine by me," says Chris, whose /fineness/ with it is doubtless unrelated to the sudden, savage kick he expends on the gutted bag, sending it flying into the far corner trailing dishcloth and sock droppings. Hands force their way into pants' pockets, dragging the fabric fine and flat across his hips; a blistering glance hums towards Leah, with: "Gabe calls you Leah." Brooklyn's accents whittle the phrase to a bleeding, flattened skeleton. "That's why I call you Canto."
Quietly, dead quietly: "You're not Gabe. You have never needed to differentiate yourself from him to /me,/ Chris. Not to /me./"
Another cardboard box goes flying, this one mercifully empty; through the drunken, wayward tangle of hair and blazing green eyes, Rossi offers a glimpse of teeth and lips, drawn back in .... "That's not the point," he says, impatient. A few hasty paces towers him over Leah for a moment, height drawn to height, his shadow drowning her in momentary possession. "We're nothing alike."
Leah puts out a hand to his chest. Watches that, as if it were someone else's fingers resting there, slightly splayed, slightly worn from the day's kitchen preparation. Studies it. "Please don't do that," she says to the hand. "Don't -- like that. Scott did. He . . ." She squeezes tight her eyes, her mouth, her face. Sighs. Relaxes again, and puts her other hand next to her first, and looks up at him again. "What's the point, then? I /know/ you're nothing alike. No /kidding/ you're nothing alike. So what?"
The reminder of that other encounter, that other trauma, quells Chris as little else could; the detective's professional, clinical distance shutters the hot gaze, cooling it slightly with recognition: Vic. Cop. A hand slides over one of Leah's, feverish and dry, and he stills his unquiet self, molding it into disciplined, strained peace. "Nothing," Rossi says at last, deliberate. "He's still in love with you, or thinks he is. And -- crap. I'm his brother."
Returning to watching the hand -- hands, now -- Leah tries to chuckle. Gets out some of it before it wheezes off into nothing. "/Crap./ Ha. Jesus H. Christ, man, I don't give a rat's ass about what your brother or anyone else thinks or feels about me. You're puttin' me off because of /him/? What, in case he comes after you with his bow in a fit of possessive jealousy?"
Under Leah's hand, the steady beat of Rossi's heart -- slow, an athlete's metronome -- lifts its tempo to match the quiver of an unvoiced laugh. A hooked finger touches the woman's chin, nudging it up to meet the unsteady, too-bright slivers of the man's gaze. "I'm drunk out of my mind," he informs judiciously. "How're you?"
"Not," says Leah Canto, and glitters a look back up at him. Presses in that held hand, just a little, as if seeking heart's beat, heart's blood. Heart's warmth. "I've been a very good girl about alcohol tonight, all things considered. /Definitely,/ all things considered."
White, green, and black. A heady combination. "Good," says Chris, lowering his face to hers, baritone like the lazy rip of black satin, an intimate caress across her skin. "Then /you/ can take advantage of /me/." --and lips touch lips, moving, enticing, mingling the flavors of scotch and lust across the palate.
--And lips, and hands, and the lean of body into body, trusting to warmth and support. To welcome. To lust. (Oh, definitely that.) Her arms rise to encircle his neck, bring him closer, bring him /in./ And: "Well," Leah murmurs against his mouth, laughter rising from hers to meet it, "I guess I can do that. You certainly deserve it." And closer yet, and quieter, and smaller and fiercer and hungrier, to name him and claim him before the morning sweeps them apart again with cold-eyed clarity: "/Rossi./"
[Fade to black. Log ends.]
I left early. Quietly. No fuss, no worries. He can't take me to task for that. And I can't-
I can't anything. Not anything at all. Including think, for the moment.
Must tell Sabby.
Must get some sleep.
7/17/2005
Logfile from Leah.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Continued from the dinner party's log:]
And there is a Leah, standing alone in the middle of a lonely apartment with the scents of dinner and alcohol, and frustration and anger, settling out of the air around her. She puts a hand to her face. She closes her eyes. Then she tugs her blouse straight, picks up her keys, and marches out of the apartment and down and over and up to a door. That door. Rossi's. And knocks quietly.
There is only the faintest of lights showing beneath the door, and the sound of thumping within: physical rather than musical; the arrhythmia of unpacking, or reverberant damage, or both. A heavy stride kneads its way to the door, throwing its band of shadow across the glow's partition, and a moment later the door itself is thrown wide. Rossi, shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, jacket off, hair a rumpled mop, and eyes aglitter with temper. And in one hand? A bottle of scotch. He leans his shoulder against the doorframe, arm jutting to hold the door's panel in place, and simply ... looks.
Leah, for that first awful instant, cringes. Then straightens and looks him right back. "Came to say I'm sorry," she enunciates, with chin's defiant lift and eyes' red-rimmed flare. So much for the penitent; then again, she never was much of an actress.
It is possible that the inflexible line of jaw ... flexes, tamping down on fury's bubbling offspring. Certainly something eases in the stretched, strained face: the surprise of apology? Wordless still, Chris turns slightly on the door's rib, dropping his arm to give her passage within. If she chooses to step past that heat of tension, coiled. The scotch, it transpires, is unstoppered. Imagine that.
Leah moves quietly inside, keeping scrupulously clear of even rubbing the air of her passage against him. Once in, she stops in a cleared spot and folds her arms. Hugs them, tight, up under her breasts. Turns and looks back at him in clear, raw exhaustion. "I'm sorry," and she just plunges into it. All of it. "Sabitha asked me if I would mind if she flirted with you at dinner, to get a rise out of Travis. She's going nowhere with him; she's backed into a corner. She's desperate. But we were wrong, to use you like that. I apologize."
For a moment longer Rossi maintains that mute, unforgiving silence -- and then edges down from its superior heights, grimacing. "Yeah, well." The apartment is a disaster, in the first, thrashing throes of birth: boxes, cardboard, newspaper wrappings strewn in creative chaos. Restless even in the confines of his own space, Chris stirs into motion, kicking the door shut behind him before starting a springy, restless prowl of its boundaries. "You could've told me. Don't think your friend's gonna like the consequences of tonight."
"No, but it'll be better for both of them in the long run. Just painful now." Clinical Leah; compassionate Leah. She closes her eyes again, rubs her hands briefly up and down her biceps in arms' hard clutch. A long breath, pushed out longer. Eyes open again, she tracks him with them. "I could've told you," she agrees quietly. "What would you've said?"
Green flicks at Leah from beneath the shadowing rumple of hair, thick black rails to temper's cage. "That it was a stupid idea," Rossi says baldly. "That shit doesn't work. It never works. Never worked on me." A box, kicked out of his path, arches towards the far wall and tumbles to the floor with a thinly-voiced chirp of broken glass. Chris tosses it an indifferent curse and stalks on, circumnavigating a makeshift bed (sleeping bag, pillow) shaped in the living room's edges. Steps flag near Leah, and he regards her with clinical, critical awareness. "Here. Have some. I don't have any glasses yet." Scotch.
No. She manages to say it, too, clipped: "No. Thanks. I've had enough tonight, and I know how you hate me drunk." Ugly again. She drops her head, breathes out hard through her nose. "Sorry. And yeah, I know. It doesn't work. I should've told her no, but she would've thought that I was into you. Being possessive. Jealous."
A hint of incredulity speckles the hard-eyed glance that blinks over the offered scotch. Chris scowls, considering in the way he occasionally does in his cop's world: intense, intent, focused even through the prism of alcohol on the question. "The hell does it matter," he says at last, shaking off the thought like a wettened dog. Scotch gulps its way down the glass throat, tipped by a reckless arm into his human one. On the other side of it, grudging, glittering, he supposes: "You were trying to be a friend, I guess."
"Yes." Clearly said. "I was." And ruefully said. Leah tips her face up to his; her chin is still firm, even if her mouth lags in loosened lips' laxity. "People do stupid things for friendship. Over friendship. I don't know. Guess it doesn't matter, like you said. It's all fucked up anyway." She looks aside, at a box that for its unknown sins gets to be the object of her fixed attention. "For all of us. So much for a dinner party with friends."
The smell of scotch, smoky and heady, mingles with Chris' natural scent -- leather, musk, the metallic, acrid tang of gunpowder -- and stirs with him to another deliberate path woven between cardboard corpses and clothes-pregnant garbage bags. "Did your friend know we're not allowed in the same barbeques anymore?" he asks, voice muffled as he stoops to shred a black plastic bag and spill dishtowels across his bare foot. "All things considered, /we/ did pretty good. Maybe we'll get a pass, next time."
"A pass for what?" Leah asks, and her dragged-out, dragged-down state bunches up her words in native accent's folds, making a mess like those towels. "Shit, Chris, we can hardly spend five minutes together without getting into it, ourselves. I think -- I think we should just go back to ignoring each other's existence, like we did after I broke up with Gabe. Out of sight, out of mind."
"Fine by me," says Chris, whose /fineness/ with it is doubtless unrelated to the sudden, savage kick he expends on the gutted bag, sending it flying into the far corner trailing dishcloth and sock droppings. Hands force their way into pants' pockets, dragging the fabric fine and flat across his hips; a blistering glance hums towards Leah, with: "Gabe calls you Leah." Brooklyn's accents whittle the phrase to a bleeding, flattened skeleton. "That's why I call you Canto."
Quietly, dead quietly: "You're not Gabe. You have never needed to differentiate yourself from him to /me,/ Chris. Not to /me./"
Another cardboard box goes flying, this one mercifully empty; through the drunken, wayward tangle of hair and blazing green eyes, Rossi offers a glimpse of teeth and lips, drawn back in .... "That's not the point," he says, impatient. A few hasty paces towers him over Leah for a moment, height drawn to height, his shadow drowning her in momentary possession. "We're nothing alike."
Leah puts out a hand to his chest. Watches that, as if it were someone else's fingers resting there, slightly splayed, slightly worn from the day's kitchen preparation. Studies it. "Please don't do that," she says to the hand. "Don't -- like that. Scott did. He . . ." She squeezes tight her eyes, her mouth, her face. Sighs. Relaxes again, and puts her other hand next to her first, and looks up at him again. "What's the point, then? I /know/ you're nothing alike. No /kidding/ you're nothing alike. So what?"
The reminder of that other encounter, that other trauma, quells Chris as little else could; the detective's professional, clinical distance shutters the hot gaze, cooling it slightly with recognition: Vic. Cop. A hand slides over one of Leah's, feverish and dry, and he stills his unquiet self, molding it into disciplined, strained peace. "Nothing," Rossi says at last, deliberate. "He's still in love with you, or thinks he is. And -- crap. I'm his brother."
Returning to watching the hand -- hands, now -- Leah tries to chuckle. Gets out some of it before it wheezes off into nothing. "/Crap./ Ha. Jesus H. Christ, man, I don't give a rat's ass about what your brother or anyone else thinks or feels about me. You're puttin' me off because of /him/? What, in case he comes after you with his bow in a fit of possessive jealousy?"
Under Leah's hand, the steady beat of Rossi's heart -- slow, an athlete's metronome -- lifts its tempo to match the quiver of an unvoiced laugh. A hooked finger touches the woman's chin, nudging it up to meet the unsteady, too-bright slivers of the man's gaze. "I'm drunk out of my mind," he informs judiciously. "How're you?"
"Not," says Leah Canto, and glitters a look back up at him. Presses in that held hand, just a little, as if seeking heart's beat, heart's blood. Heart's warmth. "I've been a very good girl about alcohol tonight, all things considered. /Definitely,/ all things considered."
White, green, and black. A heady combination. "Good," says Chris, lowering his face to hers, baritone like the lazy rip of black satin, an intimate caress across her skin. "Then /you/ can take advantage of /me/." --and lips touch lips, moving, enticing, mingling the flavors of scotch and lust across the palate.
--And lips, and hands, and the lean of body into body, trusting to warmth and support. To welcome. To lust. (Oh, definitely that.) Her arms rise to encircle his neck, bring him closer, bring him /in./ And: "Well," Leah murmurs against his mouth, laughter rising from hers to meet it, "I guess I can do that. You certainly deserve it." And closer yet, and quieter, and smaller and fiercer and hungrier, to name him and claim him before the morning sweeps them apart again with cold-eyed clarity: "/Rossi./"
[Fade to black. Log ends.]