The Flying Cigar
A real and proper date, at a French restaurant, no less. I think if we had kept throwing food and talking about lube, we would have gotten a real and proper ejection, too.
As it is . . .
Man. Man. I should be worried about my life going so good right now, right?
1/15/2006
Logfile from Leah of X-Men MUCK.
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Lights. Cameras. (Television.) "--told him that it was my fault," says the dragging, Brooklyn-tamed baritone. Light flares off a fork, winking at the diner's companion. Green eyes glint sardonically above it, no less brilliant. "Should've seen her face. And then Tucci decided to be all noble, and grabbed her muffin-- anyway, it was this whole mess."
It is a quiet night at Le Cigare Volant -- Sunday dinners are not for dates, but for families, excepting the rare, adventurous couple -- and settled comfortably in the window's mirror for all to see, Chris Rossi offers his companion a twisted smile, picked off the filigreed plate and dusted for her use. Flowers. Movie. Dinner. He is /trying/, see how he tries!
Leah does see it. Indeed, she is watching him, gazing at him, /devouring/ him with devoted brown eyes-- "Oh, /Chris/," she flutters over the table. Her hands shape froofy, frilly delight from the air, flaring the cuffs of her off-ivory blouse. "I love it! I just love it! You're so /good/ to me."
"Funny, Canto," Chris jabs back, without heat. "--Leah," he corrects a moment later, pinning frustration to the word. "Christ. I'll never get used to ... you'll have to just deal. Goddammit. Tell me a little piece of your brain just died when you did that, and we'll call it square."
"Not that I had many left, after today," Leah admits candidly and drops back into her usual persona while she snatches for the menu to study the offerings. She snorts. "Much more of this double-life-leading, and I'm going to have /no/ brains left. If I had any to begin with." She looks up innocently. "Did I?"
Chris grins back, abruptly (boyishly) pleased. "If you think I'm going to walk into that one, not so's you'd notice. I know it looks--" A hand deprecates, flicking its scornful fan across the restaurant's subdued expanse. Mocks, even, with the skew of mouth and hooded, heavy-dragged gaze. "Kant says it's good, though. She knows that kind of shit."
Leah approves, "And passed it on to you." She smiles a bit. "I do like it, Rossi. But chill, I'm not going to spaz out at you over it. Unless you want to." Tentative unsurety vies with Brooklyn brass in her manner, and she keeps her traitorously skipping eyes firm on his face. Mostly. Her shoulders are tight, though.
"You'll behave," Chris says, with masculine-born arrogance. More darkly, he adds, "You owe me, after that /movie/. I'll have to wash my eyes out with soap when we get back home. I might never eat another sausage again. Jesus, Canto, I know I said I'd -- but gay cowboy porn?" The baritone, skipped down in register and volume for the last, plates a hiss under the hunch of body and outthrust, reproachful head.
"Oh, I owe you, do I? After exposing you to art of the highest order -- which it /was/," she carries over in effortless extension of previous argument. "The acting was great, and the photography . . . ! I cried. It's about love and loss. It's not about /porn/, you Neanderthal."
Chris sinks down in his seat, forearms steepled to the knot of conjoined hands. "Gay cowboy porn," he repeats in bloody-minded defiance. Reproach. "Damn it. Is nothing sacred to you liberal freaks? John Wayne's rolling over in his grave. You raped my childhood, Canto. It'll never be the same."
Leah marvels over the menu, to which she's returned her perusal, "My boyfriend used to be a gay cowboy. I had no idea."
Eyes gleam, leaf-green. "And my girlfriend has a thing for gay men. I had no idea."
"Slash. 'Italian Heat.'" Delicately Leah clears her throat and then declaims in full, plummy tones, "'They never knew where the passion came from; it was enough that it was there. That they were there. For each other. One, a caustic, balding hound dog from Texas -- the other, a cynical, brooding eagle from Brooklyn. But somehow, thanks to kindness, tenderness, and a whole lot of lube, they made it work.'"
"Jesus /Christ/--" Silverware rattles hysteria against plates, jostled and banged by Chris's lunge across the table. A hand gropes for Leah's mouth while nearby diners hesitate, startled and frozen like alarmed prairie dogs by the couple in the window. "/Canto/. I swear to God, you get us kicked out--"
Leah smacks at his hand with alarm, even as she laughs at him, "Don't you /know/ that you aren't supposed to respond to bullies, idiot? You make it so /easy/ -- sit down, sit down! Fly off the handle like that, and we really will get kicked out." She tempers an Italian-motherly glare at him.
Chris sags on the table, feeding hair and glass-scratched brow into the broad splay of a palm (thunk!) pinned on Leah's side of the table. He recedes as the tide in the wake of her scold, surrendering ground, if not chagrin. "Should've taken you to Chuckie Cheese. Rolled you up the skeeball ramp. --We get home, I'll show you /lube/. What's this obsession you have with Lazzaro, anyway?"
"Lube and gay cowboy porn, I'm sure," Leah says comfortably. "Plenty of room in that closet, there, Rossi? Maybe you can sublet it, make a few bucks on the side. --I don't have any obsession with Detective Vincent Lazzaro. Judging by the way you go off like an A-bomb whenever I tease you about him, though . . ." Her eyebrows bounce inviting suggestion, as welcoming as McDonald's golden arches. One billion served and counting.
"Guy's sleeping with Julia," reminds Chris, turning his head in his hand to eye, gloomily, the apparent approach of a waiter -- to reprove? No. To take a neighboring table's order. He straightens, reassured, to amend in all fairness: "At least, Julia's sleeping with him. Don't know how much say he's got in it. You know what you want, yet?"
"Food, lube, and you, preferably in that order. You?"
"We can do all three right now, if you want. Buick's parked a block away."
Leah sighs and puts the menu down, closed, on the table and her hands, folded, on it. She measures out pity for her date. "Just like high school. Think you could get my bra off without sticking your elbow in my eye? I'd give you points for that."
"Lose sight a couple of times?" asks Chris, matching fold for fold, menu for menu, pity for pity. The deep voice drifts downward, shivering toward amusement and the intimacy of the dining room. "Being able to see's the best part. In the beginning, anyway. --I heard your interview. They had it on in the breakroom."
Leah's eyes dance up, true delight this time. "You did? The radio one? God, the callers! I hate arguing with people over the phone. What did you think?"
Rare encomium from Rossi. "Good stuff," he compliments, rearranging his knife and fork with the nudge of an elbow. The grin that follows slants hot and fierce over the basket of bread. "I was proud of you. Probably pissed off your Friends, though."
Leah accepts the magnificat delicately, gleefully, and visibly folds it away in her memory for safekeeping, behind half-shuttered eyes. "Well, since I've got the force and Scott's people watching me and the fam--" Oh. Waiter. She breaks off to order: a dish of sole and vegetables and exquisitely vacuous sauce whose long French name she gamely tries to spit out. And mostly fails. And glowers at the waiter to see if he'll make something of it.
The waiter is more tactful, being of city stuff. He bows his frond-like attention to Rossi, a willow to that man's more physical order: that. A finger pokes the menu. Medium-rare. "Yeah. You had balls. Sounded right. Your callers were a bunch of jackasses," Chris seconds, as the menus are confiscated and borne away. "That one guy, what's-his-name. Steve, Sam, something."
"Steve," Leah guesses from the hazy shores of memory, and rolls her eyes. "The way he was going on, you'd think Metalhead had thrown a Hummer through /his/ roof. I mean, seriously. Humans have to look out for themselves, but we don't have to be rounding people up and branding them like Sebastian Shaw would probably like to have it." She reaches for her water glass, changes her mind, and snags bread instead, to submit it to the cold savagery of buttering. "And the Friends can just fuck off. This was Scott's idea. I'm just the bait to get 'em out in the open."
"Scott's?" Bright eyes flare, showing the white around the green. Concentric color: black spikes sharper still. "Summers? This was his idea? --Dickhead. He could've told me."
Leah tilts her head's acknowledgement, confirmation. "You two talked. He talked to me. I've got the panic button and my people under watch. And /I'm/ in the public eye, very prominently right now after the capture, so what are they gonna do to me?"
Chris's hand closes, shaping a fist that presses knuckles, stark, against the scratched skin. "I can think of things," he says, grim. "You're not going to do anything stupid, right? Let them lure you out there, slip your watch, all that stupid shit that blondes keep doing in horror flicks?"
Deliberately Leah ruffles the neat bronze crown of her hair. And, childishly, sticks her tongue out at him.
The detective's expression is equally sere, equally harsh -- but it cracks nonetheless, fractured across by exasperation and (victory!) amusement. "You're like a freaking kid, Leah. Here. Have a roll. I'll put butter on it for you," he offers kindly. The hand uncurls; the hard face eases. "Don't want you to hurt your little wee self with the knife."
Said knife gets pointed at him. Butterly. (Lubely.) "I," says Leah sweetly, "am fine. So is my roll. Thank you, though. You are a true gentleman. So, shit. No. I'm playing along according to plan. Doing what I'm told, and the bad guys will go to jail, boom-boom-boom, just like Magneto."
"Hopefully the Feds are keeping old Pezhead somewhere better than /jail/," snarks Rossi, territorial annoyance beetling behind his expression before it subsides. "Their problem now. If they're smart, they'll just keep him doped up until he drops down dead of old age. --Even that damn /bread/ is making me think about the movie. I'm never going to get those images out of my brain."
Leah adopts Jake Gyllenhaal's Texan drawl for the movie quote, "'I wish I knew how to quit you!'" and spots him a grin. "My poor terrified date. I promise you, the evil gay cowboys were not going to leap off the screen and molest you right there in your seat. I would've fended them off." She considers over a slow bite of bread. "Maybe. Remind me to tell you about 'OT3s' sometime."
"OT3s?" Chris takes hold of the table's edges, arms wide, and hunkers down to eye Leah warily.
Leah explains the acronym with a new bite for every delicious word: "One true threesome."
Chris looks blank. He takes a roll for cover. "Come again?"
"One true threesome. Derived from OTP, for 'one true pairing,' signifying a couple that one likes or would like to see in canon," lectures Leah. She finishes the bread and leans forward over folded forearms, smiling sleek satisfaction. "A pairing beyond time, beyond reason, bound by the shining chains of love and all that crap. You know, like us. And then OT3 just adds in the third person."
Chris shreds his roll, daubs half of it in butter, then abandons it altogether to look perplexity across at Leah. Then curiosity. Then confusion, once again. "Yeah? Who you want to have a threesome with? And what the hell's 'in canon'? That some kind of sexual position? You live in a strange, strange world, Canto. Where do you pick this stuff up?"
"Online research. It's a crazy world out there, Rossi. You'd be surprised." She judges him critically. "You /are/ surprised. What, like cops don't have a whole jargon all to themselves, and screw the civvies? C'mon. I've heard Homicide pronounce a guy ten-seven at a crime scene. That's jargon. Slash has its own, too. And journalism. And medicine, and who the hell knows what else." She frowns, and her tone edges towards querulous defense. "I'm a writer. I love language. I like learning this stuff."
"Online research into /what/?" Chris wants to know, interest sideskipping the matter of threesomes (unanswered) and slash (unthinkable). Elbows pin on the table, breaking the line of shoulders and spine to push and hunch them, up and round. Fascination unreels, trailing the eager, acquisitive mind. "C'mon, Canto. Spill it. Tell me all your writerly secrets. What else you dig up with that computer of yours?"
Leah looks at him for a long minute, and then she tells him, gently, with a doctor's Hippocratic air, "Someone out there has Photoshopped Magneto's head onto Arnold Schwarzenegger's body, and he's saying, 'I'll be back,' all Terminator 2 . . . and you, Christopher Rossi, are an angry little stick figure drawn under the front wheel of his big bad motorcycle. You have fantastic hair in it, though."
Chris Rossi, aka Ricochet, aka Kitten, aka Italian Heat -- blinks. "What? How the-- why the fuck would--" The tongue gropes for words. "The fuck?"
Leah mimes a splendid, Brillo Creamed pompadour over her forehead. "Just fantastic hair, promise. Even though Stick Figure You was shaking his tiny little fist and squeaking outrage. I should have printed it out for you."
"You're shitting me."
Writer's hands interlace demurely for a chin's prop. "Am I?"
Snapping eyes narrow. "You've got to be shitting me." Challenge.
Spiky lashes droop. "Do I?"
Chris looks. Grins, suddenly. Warns, "You're lucky we're in a public place, Canto, or I'd do things to you that're illegal in the state of Georgia. Are you serious? Damn. Like it's not enough the old dickhead tried to kill me twice. Now I got assholes drawing pictures of me on the internet."
"That's what you get for playing hero with Miller and Magneto." Leah sobers and sits back. "You ride my ass about keeping safe -- when are you gonna start, loverboy?"
"I was being safe," advises the detective, idling an unbuttered shred of bun between his fingertips. Around and around and over and under. "Wednesday night it was just dumb luck. He walked out of this bar while I was on the phone with the Lieutenant. I'm safe all the time. I'm practically a walking condom."
Leah eyes him. "I heard something about a condom. . . . Maybe I'll start teasing you about a hook-up with Erik Lensherr. Forget Lazzaro. The tall, steely-eyed, /erect/ terrorist is more your speed, right?"
A forefinger jabs at Leah across the table. "Not even close to funny. You should've seen the shrapnel they dug out of me on Wednesday. Ruined my goddamn overcoat." More bitter over the wardrobe than the wounds, Chris sinks back into his chair to pitch a half-hearted glower at his date. "Spiccati laughed himself sick. I told him we're dating, by the way. I should've warned you. Only a matter of time before Paul hears."
"And what's Paul going to do to me?" Leah baffles. And softens: "I heard that. On the voicemail. Thanks, Chris. It meant a lot to me."
Despite machismo, some lingering hardness behind Chris's expression eases as well, softening reluctantly. Humor chases it, racing to the rescue. "He told me my right hand didn't qualify as a girlfriend. --Paul'll tell Gabe. And Gabe'll probably call you. I was thinking I'd just ... call him up myself, tell him straight out. If you want," he finishes, uncertainty tugging at his baritone.
Leah says evenly, "Because, of course, I can't fight that battle my own damsel-in-distress self."
"Knock it off, Leah. You know that's not what I mean."
Leah bristles anyway. "Have him call me. I can handle him. Shit, Chris. You really want to get into it with your brother over me? Really?"
"You seriously think we're not going to get into it anyway?" The strong mouth hooks, crookedly skewing towards black humor again. Cue for the waiter's return, and the distraction of food, plated and served; Chris breaks off to watch the bestowal of their order, returning to comment again with a wry, "You know how Gabe is."
Leah grants him, "Needs a kick in the ass like it ain't no thing, but I'm not comfortable with feeling like a bone tugged between two dogs. Or an excuse for you two to work out your own personal shit." Worry underscores that addendum, and her silverware skitters nervously over the china before she settles into a bite.
A glance bumps up from contemplation of the food, arranged in savory, elegant display across the plate. The waiter wafts away; the gaze skips up again, sharper and attentive. "Hey." Chris leans. "Hey. You and me, it's got nothing to do with what I've got going with Gabe. Got that? Shit. If it was about him and me, there's no way in hell we would ever have ended up together."
Meeting and matching the lean, Leah tells him quietly, "I know that. I mean, shit from your childhood. Dragged up, thrown around, with me as the excuse to open that door. Or any excuse, doesn't have to be me. I'm just the handy one right now."
"Don't worry about it." Harder, faster, that. It rattles on command, then gentles to a belated apology. "If we sort it out, we sort it out. Doesn't matter. If it isn't you, it'll be something else. Can't choose your family."
"Amen." Leah bends her head for that grace. She sighs. "Sorry, anyway. For all of it. I'm still surfing on all that energy from today. And worry." She tussles with a bite of sole. "Worry too much, I guess. I'm trying to go with the flow."
Green eyes betray concern (worry, affection, admiration, more--) for a split second before dropping their gaze once more: to steak, to truffle sauce, to the frill and foof of greens and wild rice. "Yeah. Being on radio. Got a high out of that? Gave as good as you got, and then some. Should've been a radio personality or something, Canto. Have your own show."
Leah chuffs a little laugh. "Oh, man. No way. I tried that once, on cable. /Twice/ on cable, now that I think about. I suck. But thanks. It'll be fine. Let's talk about something else, okay?"
"The food ain't bad." Chris's first obliging offering. And then, hard on its heels, "Look. I'm eating beef. That movie's going to haunt me for /months/."
"My poor baby."
"Cry me a river. --You mind, that I called you that?"
Leah blinks. "Baby?"
"No." Shoulders hunch. The pale gaze glimmers. "That I've been telling people you're my girlfriend. Damn. This is so high school -- it's not like we made any agreements, or anything. You want me to stop, I don't mind--"
"Christopher. Please shut up a minute." Leah gazes at him, utensils in abeyance, and emotion shimmers wetly in her eyes. "I /loved/ that. I did. Call me whatever you want, if it's comin' from a good place. It means a lot to me. Okay?"
The long, lean body on the other side of the table relaxes, fractionally, treacherously proving the existence of tension in the very act. "Good place," Chris objects wryly. The black head ducks; the fork and knife play merry hell with his meal. "I'll take it if I can get it. I should've asked, first. Sorry."
Still Leah doesn't resume eating. "Are you afraid I'm going to get mad at you?" Another moment's consideration, another moment's tremble. "Or dump you? For /that/?"
"What? --No." Attention, already present, is matched by the sweep of gaze up, startled color latticed by black. Chris's hands still. "I just figured I didn't want to be rude. I mean, if you didn't want to be in this--" The knife gestures, tangling them in a thread of implication. "You know, a relationship -- Jesus Christ. Isn't the girl supposed to bring up this kind of thing?"
"If we want to play by stereotypes, sure. If we're just two people . . ." Leah shrugs and looks down at her plate. She flakes off a bit of sole, but doesn't eat it. Her tone firms. "Nomenclature isn't worth getting your panties in a bunch over, Rossi. Otherwise, I'd still be pissed at you for using my last name all the time. Right?"
Grumbles the man, "'Nomenclature.' Who /talks/ like that? --If you're going to be my girlfriend, there have to be some rules though, Leah." The elbow plants again, fielding the knife as accusation. Over it, eyes skim and narrow. "I'm not kidding."
Leah says promptly, "No meeting a guy in a bar, jumping him in the cab, and having him tie me up in his hotel room. Got it."
The elbow slips. China jars and jangles into the forearm's catch. "Tie you up in his hotel room?"
"Yeah." Leah sips water. "What about it?"
"Jesus /Christ/, Leah. You let some complete stranger -- are you /nuts/?" Outrage splinters like glass, crackling.
Leah hisses, "Keep it /down/, asshole. And you didn't have a problem with this the other night, before you got gelato all over me /and/ my kitchen floor." Angry, choppy bites. Rawr.
"That was before I found out you let some random guy /tie you up/," Chris snaps back, flattening both hands on the table, arms half-unfurled for the flight. Fight. He glares at Leah, darkling gargoyle, and drops gravel in his voice to demand, "Were you /crazy/?"
"He wasn't random! I wasn't crazy! Oh, my God." Leah elbows the table, fists her forehead, and stares in utter astonishment at him. "Are /you/ crazy? Why can't I meet a guy and have a little bondage play with him if I want? I'm a fucking adult, in all senses of the word."
Chris drops his utensils with a clatter, hands raking roughly through the black hair and drop of head. "Bondage play is one thing," he drags out, parsimonious with his consonants, generous with his vowels. "I get that. If that's what you like, crap. I can do that. But a guy you don't even know? That you picked up in a /bar/?"
"It was Percy Talhurst!"
"Percy -- the fuck?" Incredulity jumps over outrage, skirling high to leave it behind. "/Sabby's/ Percy? You slept with /him/?"
Leah shoots back, "Yeah, I did. Did I have to get her permission first? Or yours?"
The pale eyes that stare back are blank and sightless, mirrors for her reflection. "Percy," Chris says again, quietly. "Were you going in there thinking about getting laid?"
Irritably, Leah replies, "Yeah, it was probably on my mind, but mostly I was just taking some downtime away from Minnie after we went shopping that one day. I was in the bar, he came in, we got to talking, bitching about our lives, joked around, and--" She shrugs in expansive, elaborate insouciance, and her gaze glitters mica-hard, like the fork and knife suspended in her grasp (cunning, waiting weapons). "I /thought/ this wasn't a big deal. I just said it to make a joke, and yeah, I know, if we're seeing each other, no more fooling around. I /got/ that."
A frown knits Rossi's eyebrows together, plowing ridges of shadow that tine past the brow to the hard set of gaze and the harder set of mouth. "Yeah," he says, distracted. "/Shit/. Talhurst. --I didn't know you were into bondage."
"A lot about me you don't know."
"Yeah." He focuses at last, pulse jumping in the hollow where throat meets jaw. The smile that grimaces across is a forced thing, an awkward, ugly duckling of a child. "Guess there is. We got time to figure that out, though. --It's not a big deal. It just surprised me, is all."
Leah puts the utensils down. She tells her water glass, as flat as its contents, as pure and unadorned, "I'd have asked you to do it with me, but I don't trust your temper. I don't know if a safe word could really stop you if you got going. So, I found a guy. Sabby's friend, seemed harmless, not exactly Mr. Raging Macho, y'know? Trust my instincts, Chris. I do."
His temper. Chris's smile slips, bruised and bruising. "You think I'd hurt you in bed?"
Very quietly: "You've hurt me before. When you're fired up-- Just because I love you doesn't mean I'm ready to sign my soul or body over to you."
Eyes close briefly over the truth of it, then open to meet hers. "Yeah. I'm a great guy, aren't I?" Chris says, bitterly. "Can't be trusted."
Leah's fist on the table jars fresh discord out of the settings. "I'm not /saying/ that. I /am/ saying that I'm careful with my boundaries, but I didn't leave you out of this one sexual thing because I hate you or whatever. I want to be more /sure/ with you, is all." Some despair creeps over the iron of her voice, rotting and pitting it with uncertain rust. "Look, I'm with you, aren't I? Because I want to be -- because I choose to be. But you do have anger problems. And I . . . I don't know if that'd bleed over into sexual violence."
"Yeah. I know. --Look, you don't have to explain to me. I get it. Christ. I /do/." Chris soothes his spoon with a hand, suppressing its tremors under the flat of a palm. The strong-boned face settles into remoteness, forced tranquility; under the wide slash of black, green unfocuses and drifts away: over her shoulder, across the restaurant's terrain. "I know I got the anger issues. I'm working on it. Trust me when you feel like you can, Leah. I won't push you. I don't have the right."
"No," Leah agrees, on steadier ground, "you don't. But I like sharing it with you, this talking about it. That's trust."
He exhales abruptly, a deliberate breath. "Relationships." Pained, that. Chris refocuses, taking up his silverware again. Dry: "I forgot how much fun they were."
Leah offers, "You got gay cowboy porn out of this one. --Sorry."
"I may never have sex again."
"I promise not to say 'get along, little doggie' at any point later tonight."
An elbow jabs down, onto the fine tablecloth. "I love you, Canto. And if you /ever/ say that to me while we're having sex, I will personally throw you out the window, naked as the day you were born. You got that?"
"Yes," says Canto, never looking away from him, never, not once, never away. "I got it."
"Good." Shoulders hitch high, pulled tight with strain, and Chris -- brave cop, brave little man -- hunches over his meal, withdrawing into food and an anxious, tension-thrumming silence.
And Leah, excellent judge of people and mood, does not start singing quietly under her breath, "Rollin', rollin', rollin' / Keep them doggies rollin' . . ."
The light of battle flames, delighted, pitchforked and /eager/ to the fray. Chris's black head sweeps up on indignation and relief; a hand lashes out: a bun goes flying. "You unbelievable--"
"Not here!" Leah despairs, ducking. The roll bounces off her shoulder and bumps a howdy-do onto the back of the elderly gentleman seated at the table behind her. But she's laughing, she's laughing under the reproval, and her eyes are a-light with that same damn flame. "Rossi, /behave/. We are public figures, and I am so grounding you now."
And so is Chris laughing, not quite laughing, but /brilliant/ with the leap of amusement and a sudden heat that deepens the hooded gaze and the throaty riposte of baritone. "Grounding me, my ass. Eat your food," he commands. "We'll get dessert, and I'll pay the check, and then we'll go home and I can show you, with charts, why homosexual sex doesn't hold a candle to heterosexual sex."
"Using small words and visual aids?" Leah feigns a swoon over her cooling fish. "Take me, you PowerPoint madman."
A finger jabs. "Eat, woman. I'll show you visual /aids/."
"And lube," says a happy Leah, startling the passing waiter, and digs into her meal with a willing and obedient heart.
[Log ends.]
As it is . . .
Man. Man. I should be worried about my life going so good right now, right?
1/15/2006
Logfile from Leah of X-Men MUCK.
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Lights. Cameras. (Television.) "--told him that it was my fault," says the dragging, Brooklyn-tamed baritone. Light flares off a fork, winking at the diner's companion. Green eyes glint sardonically above it, no less brilliant. "Should've seen her face. And then Tucci decided to be all noble, and grabbed her muffin-- anyway, it was this whole mess."
It is a quiet night at Le Cigare Volant -- Sunday dinners are not for dates, but for families, excepting the rare, adventurous couple -- and settled comfortably in the window's mirror for all to see, Chris Rossi offers his companion a twisted smile, picked off the filigreed plate and dusted for her use. Flowers. Movie. Dinner. He is /trying/, see how he tries!
Leah does see it. Indeed, she is watching him, gazing at him, /devouring/ him with devoted brown eyes-- "Oh, /Chris/," she flutters over the table. Her hands shape froofy, frilly delight from the air, flaring the cuffs of her off-ivory blouse. "I love it! I just love it! You're so /good/ to me."
"Funny, Canto," Chris jabs back, without heat. "--Leah," he corrects a moment later, pinning frustration to the word. "Christ. I'll never get used to ... you'll have to just deal. Goddammit. Tell me a little piece of your brain just died when you did that, and we'll call it square."
"Not that I had many left, after today," Leah admits candidly and drops back into her usual persona while she snatches for the menu to study the offerings. She snorts. "Much more of this double-life-leading, and I'm going to have /no/ brains left. If I had any to begin with." She looks up innocently. "Did I?"
Chris grins back, abruptly (boyishly) pleased. "If you think I'm going to walk into that one, not so's you'd notice. I know it looks--" A hand deprecates, flicking its scornful fan across the restaurant's subdued expanse. Mocks, even, with the skew of mouth and hooded, heavy-dragged gaze. "Kant says it's good, though. She knows that kind of shit."
Leah approves, "And passed it on to you." She smiles a bit. "I do like it, Rossi. But chill, I'm not going to spaz out at you over it. Unless you want to." Tentative unsurety vies with Brooklyn brass in her manner, and she keeps her traitorously skipping eyes firm on his face. Mostly. Her shoulders are tight, though.
"You'll behave," Chris says, with masculine-born arrogance. More darkly, he adds, "You owe me, after that /movie/. I'll have to wash my eyes out with soap when we get back home. I might never eat another sausage again. Jesus, Canto, I know I said I'd -- but gay cowboy porn?" The baritone, skipped down in register and volume for the last, plates a hiss under the hunch of body and outthrust, reproachful head.
"Oh, I owe you, do I? After exposing you to art of the highest order -- which it /was/," she carries over in effortless extension of previous argument. "The acting was great, and the photography . . . ! I cried. It's about love and loss. It's not about /porn/, you Neanderthal."
Chris sinks down in his seat, forearms steepled to the knot of conjoined hands. "Gay cowboy porn," he repeats in bloody-minded defiance. Reproach. "Damn it. Is nothing sacred to you liberal freaks? John Wayne's rolling over in his grave. You raped my childhood, Canto. It'll never be the same."
Leah marvels over the menu, to which she's returned her perusal, "My boyfriend used to be a gay cowboy. I had no idea."
Eyes gleam, leaf-green. "And my girlfriend has a thing for gay men. I had no idea."
"Slash. 'Italian Heat.'" Delicately Leah clears her throat and then declaims in full, plummy tones, "'They never knew where the passion came from; it was enough that it was there. That they were there. For each other. One, a caustic, balding hound dog from Texas -- the other, a cynical, brooding eagle from Brooklyn. But somehow, thanks to kindness, tenderness, and a whole lot of lube, they made it work.'"
"Jesus /Christ/--" Silverware rattles hysteria against plates, jostled and banged by Chris's lunge across the table. A hand gropes for Leah's mouth while nearby diners hesitate, startled and frozen like alarmed prairie dogs by the couple in the window. "/Canto/. I swear to God, you get us kicked out--"
Leah smacks at his hand with alarm, even as she laughs at him, "Don't you /know/ that you aren't supposed to respond to bullies, idiot? You make it so /easy/ -- sit down, sit down! Fly off the handle like that, and we really will get kicked out." She tempers an Italian-motherly glare at him.
Chris sags on the table, feeding hair and glass-scratched brow into the broad splay of a palm (thunk!) pinned on Leah's side of the table. He recedes as the tide in the wake of her scold, surrendering ground, if not chagrin. "Should've taken you to Chuckie Cheese. Rolled you up the skeeball ramp. --We get home, I'll show you /lube/. What's this obsession you have with Lazzaro, anyway?"
"Lube and gay cowboy porn, I'm sure," Leah says comfortably. "Plenty of room in that closet, there, Rossi? Maybe you can sublet it, make a few bucks on the side. --I don't have any obsession with Detective Vincent Lazzaro. Judging by the way you go off like an A-bomb whenever I tease you about him, though . . ." Her eyebrows bounce inviting suggestion, as welcoming as McDonald's golden arches. One billion served and counting.
"Guy's sleeping with Julia," reminds Chris, turning his head in his hand to eye, gloomily, the apparent approach of a waiter -- to reprove? No. To take a neighboring table's order. He straightens, reassured, to amend in all fairness: "At least, Julia's sleeping with him. Don't know how much say he's got in it. You know what you want, yet?"
"Food, lube, and you, preferably in that order. You?"
"We can do all three right now, if you want. Buick's parked a block away."
Leah sighs and puts the menu down, closed, on the table and her hands, folded, on it. She measures out pity for her date. "Just like high school. Think you could get my bra off without sticking your elbow in my eye? I'd give you points for that."
"Lose sight a couple of times?" asks Chris, matching fold for fold, menu for menu, pity for pity. The deep voice drifts downward, shivering toward amusement and the intimacy of the dining room. "Being able to see's the best part. In the beginning, anyway. --I heard your interview. They had it on in the breakroom."
Leah's eyes dance up, true delight this time. "You did? The radio one? God, the callers! I hate arguing with people over the phone. What did you think?"
Rare encomium from Rossi. "Good stuff," he compliments, rearranging his knife and fork with the nudge of an elbow. The grin that follows slants hot and fierce over the basket of bread. "I was proud of you. Probably pissed off your Friends, though."
Leah accepts the magnificat delicately, gleefully, and visibly folds it away in her memory for safekeeping, behind half-shuttered eyes. "Well, since I've got the force and Scott's people watching me and the fam--" Oh. Waiter. She breaks off to order: a dish of sole and vegetables and exquisitely vacuous sauce whose long French name she gamely tries to spit out. And mostly fails. And glowers at the waiter to see if he'll make something of it.
The waiter is more tactful, being of city stuff. He bows his frond-like attention to Rossi, a willow to that man's more physical order: that. A finger pokes the menu. Medium-rare. "Yeah. You had balls. Sounded right. Your callers were a bunch of jackasses," Chris seconds, as the menus are confiscated and borne away. "That one guy, what's-his-name. Steve, Sam, something."
"Steve," Leah guesses from the hazy shores of memory, and rolls her eyes. "The way he was going on, you'd think Metalhead had thrown a Hummer through /his/ roof. I mean, seriously. Humans have to look out for themselves, but we don't have to be rounding people up and branding them like Sebastian Shaw would probably like to have it." She reaches for her water glass, changes her mind, and snags bread instead, to submit it to the cold savagery of buttering. "And the Friends can just fuck off. This was Scott's idea. I'm just the bait to get 'em out in the open."
"Scott's?" Bright eyes flare, showing the white around the green. Concentric color: black spikes sharper still. "Summers? This was his idea? --Dickhead. He could've told me."
Leah tilts her head's acknowledgement, confirmation. "You two talked. He talked to me. I've got the panic button and my people under watch. And /I'm/ in the public eye, very prominently right now after the capture, so what are they gonna do to me?"
Chris's hand closes, shaping a fist that presses knuckles, stark, against the scratched skin. "I can think of things," he says, grim. "You're not going to do anything stupid, right? Let them lure you out there, slip your watch, all that stupid shit that blondes keep doing in horror flicks?"
Deliberately Leah ruffles the neat bronze crown of her hair. And, childishly, sticks her tongue out at him.
The detective's expression is equally sere, equally harsh -- but it cracks nonetheless, fractured across by exasperation and (victory!) amusement. "You're like a freaking kid, Leah. Here. Have a roll. I'll put butter on it for you," he offers kindly. The hand uncurls; the hard face eases. "Don't want you to hurt your little wee self with the knife."
Said knife gets pointed at him. Butterly. (Lubely.) "I," says Leah sweetly, "am fine. So is my roll. Thank you, though. You are a true gentleman. So, shit. No. I'm playing along according to plan. Doing what I'm told, and the bad guys will go to jail, boom-boom-boom, just like Magneto."
"Hopefully the Feds are keeping old Pezhead somewhere better than /jail/," snarks Rossi, territorial annoyance beetling behind his expression before it subsides. "Their problem now. If they're smart, they'll just keep him doped up until he drops down dead of old age. --Even that damn /bread/ is making me think about the movie. I'm never going to get those images out of my brain."
Leah adopts Jake Gyllenhaal's Texan drawl for the movie quote, "'I wish I knew how to quit you!'" and spots him a grin. "My poor terrified date. I promise you, the evil gay cowboys were not going to leap off the screen and molest you right there in your seat. I would've fended them off." She considers over a slow bite of bread. "Maybe. Remind me to tell you about 'OT3s' sometime."
"OT3s?" Chris takes hold of the table's edges, arms wide, and hunkers down to eye Leah warily.
Leah explains the acronym with a new bite for every delicious word: "One true threesome."
Chris looks blank. He takes a roll for cover. "Come again?"
"One true threesome. Derived from OTP, for 'one true pairing,' signifying a couple that one likes or would like to see in canon," lectures Leah. She finishes the bread and leans forward over folded forearms, smiling sleek satisfaction. "A pairing beyond time, beyond reason, bound by the shining chains of love and all that crap. You know, like us. And then OT3 just adds in the third person."
Chris shreds his roll, daubs half of it in butter, then abandons it altogether to look perplexity across at Leah. Then curiosity. Then confusion, once again. "Yeah? Who you want to have a threesome with? And what the hell's 'in canon'? That some kind of sexual position? You live in a strange, strange world, Canto. Where do you pick this stuff up?"
"Online research. It's a crazy world out there, Rossi. You'd be surprised." She judges him critically. "You /are/ surprised. What, like cops don't have a whole jargon all to themselves, and screw the civvies? C'mon. I've heard Homicide pronounce a guy ten-seven at a crime scene. That's jargon. Slash has its own, too. And journalism. And medicine, and who the hell knows what else." She frowns, and her tone edges towards querulous defense. "I'm a writer. I love language. I like learning this stuff."
"Online research into /what/?" Chris wants to know, interest sideskipping the matter of threesomes (unanswered) and slash (unthinkable). Elbows pin on the table, breaking the line of shoulders and spine to push and hunch them, up and round. Fascination unreels, trailing the eager, acquisitive mind. "C'mon, Canto. Spill it. Tell me all your writerly secrets. What else you dig up with that computer of yours?"
Leah looks at him for a long minute, and then she tells him, gently, with a doctor's Hippocratic air, "Someone out there has Photoshopped Magneto's head onto Arnold Schwarzenegger's body, and he's saying, 'I'll be back,' all Terminator 2 . . . and you, Christopher Rossi, are an angry little stick figure drawn under the front wheel of his big bad motorcycle. You have fantastic hair in it, though."
Chris Rossi, aka Ricochet, aka Kitten, aka Italian Heat -- blinks. "What? How the-- why the fuck would--" The tongue gropes for words. "The fuck?"
Leah mimes a splendid, Brillo Creamed pompadour over her forehead. "Just fantastic hair, promise. Even though Stick Figure You was shaking his tiny little fist and squeaking outrage. I should have printed it out for you."
"You're shitting me."
Writer's hands interlace demurely for a chin's prop. "Am I?"
Snapping eyes narrow. "You've got to be shitting me." Challenge.
Spiky lashes droop. "Do I?"
Chris looks. Grins, suddenly. Warns, "You're lucky we're in a public place, Canto, or I'd do things to you that're illegal in the state of Georgia. Are you serious? Damn. Like it's not enough the old dickhead tried to kill me twice. Now I got assholes drawing pictures of me on the internet."
"That's what you get for playing hero with Miller and Magneto." Leah sobers and sits back. "You ride my ass about keeping safe -- when are you gonna start, loverboy?"
"I was being safe," advises the detective, idling an unbuttered shred of bun between his fingertips. Around and around and over and under. "Wednesday night it was just dumb luck. He walked out of this bar while I was on the phone with the Lieutenant. I'm safe all the time. I'm practically a walking condom."
Leah eyes him. "I heard something about a condom. . . . Maybe I'll start teasing you about a hook-up with Erik Lensherr. Forget Lazzaro. The tall, steely-eyed, /erect/ terrorist is more your speed, right?"
A forefinger jabs at Leah across the table. "Not even close to funny. You should've seen the shrapnel they dug out of me on Wednesday. Ruined my goddamn overcoat." More bitter over the wardrobe than the wounds, Chris sinks back into his chair to pitch a half-hearted glower at his date. "Spiccati laughed himself sick. I told him we're dating, by the way. I should've warned you. Only a matter of time before Paul hears."
"And what's Paul going to do to me?" Leah baffles. And softens: "I heard that. On the voicemail. Thanks, Chris. It meant a lot to me."
Despite machismo, some lingering hardness behind Chris's expression eases as well, softening reluctantly. Humor chases it, racing to the rescue. "He told me my right hand didn't qualify as a girlfriend. --Paul'll tell Gabe. And Gabe'll probably call you. I was thinking I'd just ... call him up myself, tell him straight out. If you want," he finishes, uncertainty tugging at his baritone.
Leah says evenly, "Because, of course, I can't fight that battle my own damsel-in-distress self."
"Knock it off, Leah. You know that's not what I mean."
Leah bristles anyway. "Have him call me. I can handle him. Shit, Chris. You really want to get into it with your brother over me? Really?"
"You seriously think we're not going to get into it anyway?" The strong mouth hooks, crookedly skewing towards black humor again. Cue for the waiter's return, and the distraction of food, plated and served; Chris breaks off to watch the bestowal of their order, returning to comment again with a wry, "You know how Gabe is."
Leah grants him, "Needs a kick in the ass like it ain't no thing, but I'm not comfortable with feeling like a bone tugged between two dogs. Or an excuse for you two to work out your own personal shit." Worry underscores that addendum, and her silverware skitters nervously over the china before she settles into a bite.
A glance bumps up from contemplation of the food, arranged in savory, elegant display across the plate. The waiter wafts away; the gaze skips up again, sharper and attentive. "Hey." Chris leans. "Hey. You and me, it's got nothing to do with what I've got going with Gabe. Got that? Shit. If it was about him and me, there's no way in hell we would ever have ended up together."
Meeting and matching the lean, Leah tells him quietly, "I know that. I mean, shit from your childhood. Dragged up, thrown around, with me as the excuse to open that door. Or any excuse, doesn't have to be me. I'm just the handy one right now."
"Don't worry about it." Harder, faster, that. It rattles on command, then gentles to a belated apology. "If we sort it out, we sort it out. Doesn't matter. If it isn't you, it'll be something else. Can't choose your family."
"Amen." Leah bends her head for that grace. She sighs. "Sorry, anyway. For all of it. I'm still surfing on all that energy from today. And worry." She tussles with a bite of sole. "Worry too much, I guess. I'm trying to go with the flow."
Green eyes betray concern (worry, affection, admiration, more--) for a split second before dropping their gaze once more: to steak, to truffle sauce, to the frill and foof of greens and wild rice. "Yeah. Being on radio. Got a high out of that? Gave as good as you got, and then some. Should've been a radio personality or something, Canto. Have your own show."
Leah chuffs a little laugh. "Oh, man. No way. I tried that once, on cable. /Twice/ on cable, now that I think about. I suck. But thanks. It'll be fine. Let's talk about something else, okay?"
"The food ain't bad." Chris's first obliging offering. And then, hard on its heels, "Look. I'm eating beef. That movie's going to haunt me for /months/."
"My poor baby."
"Cry me a river. --You mind, that I called you that?"
Leah blinks. "Baby?"
"No." Shoulders hunch. The pale gaze glimmers. "That I've been telling people you're my girlfriend. Damn. This is so high school -- it's not like we made any agreements, or anything. You want me to stop, I don't mind--"
"Christopher. Please shut up a minute." Leah gazes at him, utensils in abeyance, and emotion shimmers wetly in her eyes. "I /loved/ that. I did. Call me whatever you want, if it's comin' from a good place. It means a lot to me. Okay?"
The long, lean body on the other side of the table relaxes, fractionally, treacherously proving the existence of tension in the very act. "Good place," Chris objects wryly. The black head ducks; the fork and knife play merry hell with his meal. "I'll take it if I can get it. I should've asked, first. Sorry."
Still Leah doesn't resume eating. "Are you afraid I'm going to get mad at you?" Another moment's consideration, another moment's tremble. "Or dump you? For /that/?"
"What? --No." Attention, already present, is matched by the sweep of gaze up, startled color latticed by black. Chris's hands still. "I just figured I didn't want to be rude. I mean, if you didn't want to be in this--" The knife gestures, tangling them in a thread of implication. "You know, a relationship -- Jesus Christ. Isn't the girl supposed to bring up this kind of thing?"
"If we want to play by stereotypes, sure. If we're just two people . . ." Leah shrugs and looks down at her plate. She flakes off a bit of sole, but doesn't eat it. Her tone firms. "Nomenclature isn't worth getting your panties in a bunch over, Rossi. Otherwise, I'd still be pissed at you for using my last name all the time. Right?"
Grumbles the man, "'Nomenclature.' Who /talks/ like that? --If you're going to be my girlfriend, there have to be some rules though, Leah." The elbow plants again, fielding the knife as accusation. Over it, eyes skim and narrow. "I'm not kidding."
Leah says promptly, "No meeting a guy in a bar, jumping him in the cab, and having him tie me up in his hotel room. Got it."
The elbow slips. China jars and jangles into the forearm's catch. "Tie you up in his hotel room?"
"Yeah." Leah sips water. "What about it?"
"Jesus /Christ/, Leah. You let some complete stranger -- are you /nuts/?" Outrage splinters like glass, crackling.
Leah hisses, "Keep it /down/, asshole. And you didn't have a problem with this the other night, before you got gelato all over me /and/ my kitchen floor." Angry, choppy bites. Rawr.
"That was before I found out you let some random guy /tie you up/," Chris snaps back, flattening both hands on the table, arms half-unfurled for the flight. Fight. He glares at Leah, darkling gargoyle, and drops gravel in his voice to demand, "Were you /crazy/?"
"He wasn't random! I wasn't crazy! Oh, my God." Leah elbows the table, fists her forehead, and stares in utter astonishment at him. "Are /you/ crazy? Why can't I meet a guy and have a little bondage play with him if I want? I'm a fucking adult, in all senses of the word."
Chris drops his utensils with a clatter, hands raking roughly through the black hair and drop of head. "Bondage play is one thing," he drags out, parsimonious with his consonants, generous with his vowels. "I get that. If that's what you like, crap. I can do that. But a guy you don't even know? That you picked up in a /bar/?"
"It was Percy Talhurst!"
"Percy -- the fuck?" Incredulity jumps over outrage, skirling high to leave it behind. "/Sabby's/ Percy? You slept with /him/?"
Leah shoots back, "Yeah, I did. Did I have to get her permission first? Or yours?"
The pale eyes that stare back are blank and sightless, mirrors for her reflection. "Percy," Chris says again, quietly. "Were you going in there thinking about getting laid?"
Irritably, Leah replies, "Yeah, it was probably on my mind, but mostly I was just taking some downtime away from Minnie after we went shopping that one day. I was in the bar, he came in, we got to talking, bitching about our lives, joked around, and--" She shrugs in expansive, elaborate insouciance, and her gaze glitters mica-hard, like the fork and knife suspended in her grasp (cunning, waiting weapons). "I /thought/ this wasn't a big deal. I just said it to make a joke, and yeah, I know, if we're seeing each other, no more fooling around. I /got/ that."
A frown knits Rossi's eyebrows together, plowing ridges of shadow that tine past the brow to the hard set of gaze and the harder set of mouth. "Yeah," he says, distracted. "/Shit/. Talhurst. --I didn't know you were into bondage."
"A lot about me you don't know."
"Yeah." He focuses at last, pulse jumping in the hollow where throat meets jaw. The smile that grimaces across is a forced thing, an awkward, ugly duckling of a child. "Guess there is. We got time to figure that out, though. --It's not a big deal. It just surprised me, is all."
Leah puts the utensils down. She tells her water glass, as flat as its contents, as pure and unadorned, "I'd have asked you to do it with me, but I don't trust your temper. I don't know if a safe word could really stop you if you got going. So, I found a guy. Sabby's friend, seemed harmless, not exactly Mr. Raging Macho, y'know? Trust my instincts, Chris. I do."
His temper. Chris's smile slips, bruised and bruising. "You think I'd hurt you in bed?"
Very quietly: "You've hurt me before. When you're fired up-- Just because I love you doesn't mean I'm ready to sign my soul or body over to you."
Eyes close briefly over the truth of it, then open to meet hers. "Yeah. I'm a great guy, aren't I?" Chris says, bitterly. "Can't be trusted."
Leah's fist on the table jars fresh discord out of the settings. "I'm not /saying/ that. I /am/ saying that I'm careful with my boundaries, but I didn't leave you out of this one sexual thing because I hate you or whatever. I want to be more /sure/ with you, is all." Some despair creeps over the iron of her voice, rotting and pitting it with uncertain rust. "Look, I'm with you, aren't I? Because I want to be -- because I choose to be. But you do have anger problems. And I . . . I don't know if that'd bleed over into sexual violence."
"Yeah. I know. --Look, you don't have to explain to me. I get it. Christ. I /do/." Chris soothes his spoon with a hand, suppressing its tremors under the flat of a palm. The strong-boned face settles into remoteness, forced tranquility; under the wide slash of black, green unfocuses and drifts away: over her shoulder, across the restaurant's terrain. "I know I got the anger issues. I'm working on it. Trust me when you feel like you can, Leah. I won't push you. I don't have the right."
"No," Leah agrees, on steadier ground, "you don't. But I like sharing it with you, this talking about it. That's trust."
He exhales abruptly, a deliberate breath. "Relationships." Pained, that. Chris refocuses, taking up his silverware again. Dry: "I forgot how much fun they were."
Leah offers, "You got gay cowboy porn out of this one. --Sorry."
"I may never have sex again."
"I promise not to say 'get along, little doggie' at any point later tonight."
An elbow jabs down, onto the fine tablecloth. "I love you, Canto. And if you /ever/ say that to me while we're having sex, I will personally throw you out the window, naked as the day you were born. You got that?"
"Yes," says Canto, never looking away from him, never, not once, never away. "I got it."
"Good." Shoulders hitch high, pulled tight with strain, and Chris -- brave cop, brave little man -- hunches over his meal, withdrawing into food and an anxious, tension-thrumming silence.
And Leah, excellent judge of people and mood, does not start singing quietly under her breath, "Rollin', rollin', rollin' / Keep them doggies rollin' . . ."
The light of battle flames, delighted, pitchforked and /eager/ to the fray. Chris's black head sweeps up on indignation and relief; a hand lashes out: a bun goes flying. "You unbelievable--"
"Not here!" Leah despairs, ducking. The roll bounces off her shoulder and bumps a howdy-do onto the back of the elderly gentleman seated at the table behind her. But she's laughing, she's laughing under the reproval, and her eyes are a-light with that same damn flame. "Rossi, /behave/. We are public figures, and I am so grounding you now."
And so is Chris laughing, not quite laughing, but /brilliant/ with the leap of amusement and a sudden heat that deepens the hooded gaze and the throaty riposte of baritone. "Grounding me, my ass. Eat your food," he commands. "We'll get dessert, and I'll pay the check, and then we'll go home and I can show you, with charts, why homosexual sex doesn't hold a candle to heterosexual sex."
"Using small words and visual aids?" Leah feigns a swoon over her cooling fish. "Take me, you PowerPoint madman."
A finger jabs. "Eat, woman. I'll show you visual /aids/."
"And lube," says a happy Leah, startling the passing waiter, and digs into her meal with a willing and obedient heart.
[Log ends.]