In the saddle again
Man. I love yanking Canto's chain. Love it. It's the juice of life. Even if I hated the Yankees, which I don't, and loved the Mets -- which I do, but no way in hell does she get to hear this -- it would be worth changing sides just to get her riled up.
This is what makes tomorrows worthwhile. Waking up in the morning to make her froth at the mouth? Blows the candles off my cake, man. And the sex is nothing to sneeze at, either....
---
Old Brownstone Apts #210 - Rossi
An ancient, faded elegance sketches the boundaries of this apartment, hinted at in crown molding and worn, faded floors. High walls span to high ceilings, pale yellow with the barest of white trim; at one end, three high windows gape to let in day's light or night's dark with equal indifference. A small kitchen pocks a hollow in one wall, a doorless entry that offers glimpses of an metal-framed refrigerator and a cabinet-hung microwave. On the other side of the small living room, a short hallway offers entrances to bathroom and bedroom, both doors battered with the wear and tear of age.
In the living room are the basic accoutrements of comfort: sofas, chairs, table, television. Spartan accessories, betraying little of the owner; that task is left for the walls, hung with pictures of family and friends. Through them all runs the thread of blue, NYPD's uniform tailored to pride and vigor.
--
There is a knock on the door, and behind it there is a Leah, dressed down for the evening (and there is a late evening, isn't there?) in NYU shirt and jeans. A mildly cross expression provides crowning tip to the ensemble. And the knock.
It is late in the night to be running water through old pipes, but Chris Rossi does it anyway: a late shower for a late shift. Dripping still, hips wrapped around by a massive towel, hair wet and curling around the skull's high arch, he lopes long-legged to the door tossing imprecations in his advance. "Hold on a sec!" he calls, tightening terrycloth. An eye darkens the peephole; a hand wrenches the knob. "Canto. What's up?"
"The Yankees beat the A's," Leah informs him, "so I thought I'd stop by to say hi before I went to bed. How you doing? Your face looks good."
"My face?" echoes Chris, brows lifting in bemusement before amused memory floods back and: "Yeah. Assholes at the station've been giving me grief about it. --C'mon in," he offers, stepping back with a hand clutched firmly at the towel. The scars of the past month still show bitter, angry red against his skin, high on his chest: ricochet, tubes, surgical invasion. "Didn't see the game. Like the A's."
Leah slides in, muttering, "/Fuck/ the A's, and Billy Beane and his Billyball along with 'em. Motherfucking sabermetricians -- eh, whatever." Pushing the door shut behind her, she leans against it, only that far into his space, his home, and gives him amusement, bemusement back. "And I met a guy at the bar where I was watching it. Go, me. What are the guys at the station saying? Any good 'maneater' or Cat People jokes?"
Only one eyebrow lifts for that, twinned to the crooked grimace of the mouth. "The guys've been too busy giving me grief about the ricochet thing to get very far about the face. You met a guy? At the bar? He ask you out?" Approval grins Chris's mood, flexing it across the lean, naked (and damp--!) frame. "Dammit. I'm dripping. Gimme a sec. Let me dry off."
Leah offers helpfully, "I'll get the blow dryer?"
"Funny." Chris takes himself off down the hall, tracing the path of damp footprints to the bathroom to overwrite and expand the wetness. "Grab a beer if you want it."
"Nah, had plenty at the bar. I'm not trying to drink myself into an early grave, not just yet." Instead, Leah disposes herself with finicky care on the couch: spine straight, head steady, knees together, hands clasped atop them. Good Catholic schoolgirl. Even the flicker of appreciative lust that follows him down adds to the presentation, burnishes it with proper angelic darkness.
"You went for the game? Or the company?" Baritone trails back up the hallway's tunnel; inside the bathroom, Chris ruthlessly strips himself dry, passing with token care over the stippling of healing tissue, and rescues pajama bottoms from under the sink. Underpants. Where are the--? "Shit. --So what was his name?"
Leah contemplates the shine of light on her thumbnail, in its contented rest in hands' interleaved folds. "Both?" she lofts back, and alto wobbles more with uncertainty than with intoxication. And she frowns, blackly, and closes her eyes. Next words are firmer, supported on self-deprecating humor. "Just getting out of the damn house, seeing other people's faces, remembering what the human race is like. I felt like an anthropologist venturing into the Congo or something. --Grossman. Aaron Grossman. He's a garbage man and as Jewish as the Sabbath is long. Awkward, too, once he realized I was a woman and not just a Mets fan. I think I'll try to reform him. Do a Pygmalion turn."
Grossman. Rossi blinks to his fog-faded reflection in the bathroom mirror, and ambles back out in half-assed modesty: wearing blue plaid pajama bottoms after all, and the smooth, sun-baked skin God gave him. "Grossman? I remember him. We watched a Knicks game together a while back. Ran into him in the park. Seems like a good guy. The hell do I know," he adds outrageously, leaning into the wall's prop to grin at Leah. "I like everybody."
Leah's brows arch magnificent bronze disbelief. "/Do/ you. Did your wound get infected, Rossi? Did your brain go septic on us?"
Chris laughs for the skepticism, colossus of Helios that it is, and unlocks himself from the wall in favor of the couch. Let Leah be a schoolgirl; he will be sprawled, hedonist Dionysius, legs stretched long and invasive into her space, one arm hooked behind the damp, unruly head. Green eyes warm under the false drowse of lids. "So you calling him? Or is he calling you? Good thing he's Jewish. This whole reforming thing won't be such a shock to him."
"Calling me. I didn't ask for his number back. He wants to hang out," Leah elucidates with a judge's solemnity as she scoots around into a corner of the couch to rest a leg long alongside his body. The other one braces foot on floor, grounding her 'gainst, oh, temptation, let us say. The folded arms on her stomach do say it, in silent barricade. "I don't know. He seemed all right, and it's not like I have guys falling over me when I walk down the street. Did hook up with one of Julia's friends this week, but you know. One-nighter, coffee in the morning, whatever."
"Beckman?" wonders Chris, amusement smoothing the harder edges of their shared accent. "Think she mentioned it last time she called. Nothing wrong with a one-nighter. Or two. Unless you're looking for something more, in which case, being introduced to Julia's friends might not be the way to go, Canto."
Leah gazes steadily at him down the length of the couch. "No. I know. I'm not in any position to start a relationship, anyway, whatever guys I do or do not meet." Briskly then, she moves on. "So, you know this guy? My garbage man? Man. Small world."
A hand's brush acknowledges and dismisses in one efficient swoop. "Bar buddies, you know. Hung out, watched a game, taunted the Knicks. Had a few drinks together." Chris nudges her leg with his, pressing the warmth of his body through thin fabric into hers. "Why don't we ever do that? --Oh, right. You're mentally retarded and like the Mets."
"Oh, here we go," mutters Leah, and slouches into the couch arm. Glower. Nudge back. "You and the godless Yankees, sucking at George Steinbrenner's fat, sweaty, billionaire tits. Do you feel like more of a man, worshipping the pinstripes? The championships they've bought? The free agents they've swindled out of more deserving teams?"
Chris -- simply laughs, again, and presses his hips into the couch to insinuate his leg under hers. Hands wrap around her foot, disentangling, disrobing-- "Jealous, Canto?"
Leah's foot yanks back, and there goes her sneaker. She glares at him. "Disgusted, actually. When /we/ win again, we'll have fucking well earned it. And aren't you just a cheerful bastard tonight." Warily she says it; warily she watches. "Feeling better?"
White gleams, green a banked, ready witness. "Back on the job three days, and I'm already rowing up shit creek," Chris informs. Satisfaction mixes with exasperation; he tosses the sneaker over the sofa's back, and curls up to loop his arm over his knee, angled into intimacy's crooked smile. "They've got me behind a desk from now until doomsday. At least the docs cleared me. --You smell like /peanuts/, Canto."
Baffled, Leah reminds him, "I was in a bar. I swear, I didn't roll around in the peanut bowl, though. My God, you /do/ have a lot of energy tonight. Someone get this man some porn or a punching bag, stat."
"You're here," Rossi points out, mirth and merry lust (George Steinbrenner's bra size notwithstanding) a heady current under his baritone's shallows. A hand settles on Leah's thigh, inviting with its heat and weight. "We already tried the punching bag."
Leah turns a withering look on him. "I am /not/ dressing up in a French maid's outfit -- and if you have one in your closet, I'm telling everyone you know. Starting with Lazzaro."
Chris chuckles, voice rich, and the thigh's caress becomes a slap before his lean into the sofa's back. "Fair play. I know hell of a lot more about his personal habits than any straight guy should about another. Julia likes him a lot. How you been, Canto? It's been a while."
"Not /that/ long," is Leah's muted reply. A lower slouch brings her bared foot (socks are for weaklings) to bear on his ribs, with a peremptory nudge. "You could've come up to see me. I've been holed up with writing and cooking."
"Three days back on the job," reminds Chris, and oh, there is no mistaking the near boyish glee in the words: up shit creek or not. Coiled and curled as he is in bronzed skin and pleasure, he is a model of energy poised and paused, waiting only an avenue to vent itself. The nudging foot prompts a snatch; he stretches long for the other leg, demanding its shoe with a groping hand.
Leah finally laughs. "God/dam/mit! You'll strip me and eat me alive from the toes up, won't you? Wicked, evil, naughty man," she murmurs and swings up the leg and its foot and the much-desired shoe ... and her face contorts in brief, spasmodic emotion, hid only imperfectly well by shiny eyes and flattened mouth.
Satisfied with its booty, Chris works his way through the laces, pries off the second shoe, and tosses that the way of the first. "'Naughty,'" he echoes ruefully with a foot in each hand, cradling both in his lap with thumbs for their bottoms and a loose grasp for their ankles. "You're making me feel like a four-year old, Leah. --What's wrong?" Distracted eyes, but sharp ones too; he peers owlishly at her down the length of legs.
So Leah puts a hand over her eyes, then her mouth, then drops it. "Nothing. God. Sorry. Please, go ahead and ravish me."
"Not if you're not willing," Chris demurs, retreating back into his side of the couch with curiosity twitching its fold across his brow. (He will keep a hold on her two feet, however. Just in case. Gentle manacles of broad hands.) "What's up?"
Leah closes an eye, peers with the other one all crowded 'round with strained, sun-lined flesh. "I'm tired," she admits, "and had one too many beers -- though the train ride home helped, as it always does -- and I'm afraid I'm going to die alone and penniless in the gutter."
The thrumming electricity of energy dampens further still at that, herded into some private recess to be called on later. Dormancy for now; body supplanted by mind, and its frowning, stitched focus. "Job front's not looking good?" Chris asks. Thumbs move patient massage across the base of feet, tracing the yawn of muscles under the skin. "I always figured that was my line, ending up dead in the gutter one way or another."
"Oh, you'll just get shot, and hopefully not by your own gun this time," Leah adds nicely, her eyes flicking automatically to the fleshly memory of indignity before returning to his face, where they sit like unhappy brown pebbles. "Job front is the same shit it ever was. Looking up some. It's not that -- I don't know." She sighs her way up to sitting, slumps forward, rubs her hands absently on her thighs. "I just feel like a loser and a fake, and so of course I have to share it with you, don't I?"
"Father Rossi," says Chris, the slip of his faint grin sardonic and cynical. "Missed my calling, dammit. --Don't worry about it, Canto. Dish all you need to. Least you can do is make me feel useful for something. What do you mean, 'fake'?" The dark, damp head tucks itself in the sofa corner's wing, sheltered by fabric and the memory of shadow. "You got some ghost writer you're keeping prisoner in your closet, churning out stuff for you?"
Leah snorts. "Oh, I wish. No. Just..." Hesitation binds her in silence, immobility, for a breath or two; then she restlessly shrugs it off. "The whole mutant thing. You know? Getting trotted out to the press as this Paul on the road to mutant Damascus, and the scales have /been/ off my eyes for a while now, thanks ... but I'm still friends with a couple mutants. So, am I faking being a conservative supporting the MRA, or a mutant supporter being conservative?"
Hands splay wide, heating the blood beneath the skin. "Conservative don't mean you're a racist, or a speciesist, or ... whatever the fuck they're calling it these days," Chris reminds, regarding Leah through the fan of lashes, glance attenuated. "Just because some shitheads give being a conservative a bad name -- Christ. /Paul/ does it all by himself -- doesn't mean you have to justify how you stand on the MRA based on /that/ label. There are mutants supporting the MRA, too. What's that mean, 'mutant supporter'? Support /what/?"
"Whatever the news says it means," Leah replies wearily. "I should ignore it. Never mind. I'll figure it out in my head ... and meanwhile, I'm still dying alone. I should tell my mother that tomorrow at the picnic. I'll make it a general announcement, in fact. That'll shut her up."
"You want a boyfriend or something, Canto? Or you just looking to get married? Friends and family not good enough?"
Leah flinches, but lifts her chin then to answer gamely, "Well, maybe not. Not getting any younger, am I? Never mind to that, too, though." Head drops again, and she shrugs into easy, breezy carelessness. "As soon as I've got the house with the white picket fence, I can fill it with a husband and kids. No rush."
Chris frowns at feet, moves his hands upward to snake under pants hems, and turns his fingers to the massaging of calves. "Never would've pegged you for a Martha Stewart type," he admits. "If it's just any old asshole you want as a husband, take Gabe. He'd marry you in a heartbeat. Drive you to homicide in a week, but he could probably afford the house and the picket fence, on his salary."
"Boy, you really /don't/ think anything of me." Flat, but more angry than dull.
"I don't think for a second you'd take Gabe," Chris counters, frown deepening. "I'm just saying. You trying to pick a fight, Canto?"
Leah says, "No," pauses, and then says, "No," again. And another pause. "Well. Maybe a little. I'm feeling vulnerable, and that means I'm lashing out to get things on firmer ground, that I understand." She whittles a winsome smile out of her strained expression. "Look at me, with the insights."
Says Rossi, wry, "Italian women. Figures. Julia ever gets unsettled by shit, /I/ end up with a concussion. And a new coffee pot."
"We are a broken species," Leah sighs and tosses out a black smile. "But what the hell. You wouldn't have it any other way."
"Nah," and for this confession, benediction, in the flare of a grin, nova-bright and resigned. "Only Italian men're dumb enough and strong enough to take it. Wouldn't wish the breed on anybody else."
Leah's smile softens, expands, and she comes forward on a scoot to wrap her hands around his massaging arms, lean forward, and kiss him. "Thank you."
Chris blinks. Wrinkles his brow. Crooks his lips against the kiss. "What's that for?"
Pulls back. Mimes surprise. And Leah asks, "I need a reason? /You/ need a reason?"
"Italian men know Italian women," warns Chris, surrendering a leg to its own devices so he can point a finger at Leah, forerunner of suspicion. "You about to deck me, Canto?"
Leah answers demurely, "Only with the force of my passion."
Chris pauses. Considers. And, transparently, brightens. "Yeah?"
The leg hooks imperiously around his waist and pulls Leah closer. She settles hands around his neck to match, and pale-brown eyes blink lazily. "Yeah, might. Since you're being a nice guy and listening to me and not, you know, mocking."
"I've been growing as a human being," Chris informs with pedantic gravity, meeting pale-brown with pale-green. "I've got a book. 'How to be a better person in 10 easy steps.'"
"And what's Number 1?" asks a lazy Canto, forsooth, as she frees her other leg from his grasp and wraps it around him with its mate.
Chris grins, lowering his head to touch forehead to forehead, eyes shuttering to bare slivers of color. Brilliant, laughing, heated color. "Step one is to let a woman think she's having her own way. Step two is let her have it. It was a crappy book."
Leah laughs and surges up into it on another kiss's wave. "Works for me," she sighs against his mouth, then pushes him back into the couch to begin the long and considerate task of having her own way.
[Log ends.]
This is what makes tomorrows worthwhile. Waking up in the morning to make her froth at the mouth? Blows the candles off my cake, man. And the sex is nothing to sneeze at, either....
---
Old Brownstone Apts #210 - Rossi
An ancient, faded elegance sketches the boundaries of this apartment, hinted at in crown molding and worn, faded floors. High walls span to high ceilings, pale yellow with the barest of white trim; at one end, three high windows gape to let in day's light or night's dark with equal indifference. A small kitchen pocks a hollow in one wall, a doorless entry that offers glimpses of an metal-framed refrigerator and a cabinet-hung microwave. On the other side of the small living room, a short hallway offers entrances to bathroom and bedroom, both doors battered with the wear and tear of age.
In the living room are the basic accoutrements of comfort: sofas, chairs, table, television. Spartan accessories, betraying little of the owner; that task is left for the walls, hung with pictures of family and friends. Through them all runs the thread of blue, NYPD's uniform tailored to pride and vigor.
--
There is a knock on the door, and behind it there is a Leah, dressed down for the evening (and there is a late evening, isn't there?) in NYU shirt and jeans. A mildly cross expression provides crowning tip to the ensemble. And the knock.
It is late in the night to be running water through old pipes, but Chris Rossi does it anyway: a late shower for a late shift. Dripping still, hips wrapped around by a massive towel, hair wet and curling around the skull's high arch, he lopes long-legged to the door tossing imprecations in his advance. "Hold on a sec!" he calls, tightening terrycloth. An eye darkens the peephole; a hand wrenches the knob. "Canto. What's up?"
"The Yankees beat the A's," Leah informs him, "so I thought I'd stop by to say hi before I went to bed. How you doing? Your face looks good."
"My face?" echoes Chris, brows lifting in bemusement before amused memory floods back and: "Yeah. Assholes at the station've been giving me grief about it. --C'mon in," he offers, stepping back with a hand clutched firmly at the towel. The scars of the past month still show bitter, angry red against his skin, high on his chest: ricochet, tubes, surgical invasion. "Didn't see the game. Like the A's."
Leah slides in, muttering, "/Fuck/ the A's, and Billy Beane and his Billyball along with 'em. Motherfucking sabermetricians -- eh, whatever." Pushing the door shut behind her, she leans against it, only that far into his space, his home, and gives him amusement, bemusement back. "And I met a guy at the bar where I was watching it. Go, me. What are the guys at the station saying? Any good 'maneater' or Cat People jokes?"
Only one eyebrow lifts for that, twinned to the crooked grimace of the mouth. "The guys've been too busy giving me grief about the ricochet thing to get very far about the face. You met a guy? At the bar? He ask you out?" Approval grins Chris's mood, flexing it across the lean, naked (and damp--!) frame. "Dammit. I'm dripping. Gimme a sec. Let me dry off."
Leah offers helpfully, "I'll get the blow dryer?"
"Funny." Chris takes himself off down the hall, tracing the path of damp footprints to the bathroom to overwrite and expand the wetness. "Grab a beer if you want it."
"Nah, had plenty at the bar. I'm not trying to drink myself into an early grave, not just yet." Instead, Leah disposes herself with finicky care on the couch: spine straight, head steady, knees together, hands clasped atop them. Good Catholic schoolgirl. Even the flicker of appreciative lust that follows him down adds to the presentation, burnishes it with proper angelic darkness.
"You went for the game? Or the company?" Baritone trails back up the hallway's tunnel; inside the bathroom, Chris ruthlessly strips himself dry, passing with token care over the stippling of healing tissue, and rescues pajama bottoms from under the sink. Underpants. Where are the--? "Shit. --So what was his name?"
Leah contemplates the shine of light on her thumbnail, in its contented rest in hands' interleaved folds. "Both?" she lofts back, and alto wobbles more with uncertainty than with intoxication. And she frowns, blackly, and closes her eyes. Next words are firmer, supported on self-deprecating humor. "Just getting out of the damn house, seeing other people's faces, remembering what the human race is like. I felt like an anthropologist venturing into the Congo or something. --Grossman. Aaron Grossman. He's a garbage man and as Jewish as the Sabbath is long. Awkward, too, once he realized I was a woman and not just a Mets fan. I think I'll try to reform him. Do a Pygmalion turn."
Grossman. Rossi blinks to his fog-faded reflection in the bathroom mirror, and ambles back out in half-assed modesty: wearing blue plaid pajama bottoms after all, and the smooth, sun-baked skin God gave him. "Grossman? I remember him. We watched a Knicks game together a while back. Ran into him in the park. Seems like a good guy. The hell do I know," he adds outrageously, leaning into the wall's prop to grin at Leah. "I like everybody."
Leah's brows arch magnificent bronze disbelief. "/Do/ you. Did your wound get infected, Rossi? Did your brain go septic on us?"
Chris laughs for the skepticism, colossus of Helios that it is, and unlocks himself from the wall in favor of the couch. Let Leah be a schoolgirl; he will be sprawled, hedonist Dionysius, legs stretched long and invasive into her space, one arm hooked behind the damp, unruly head. Green eyes warm under the false drowse of lids. "So you calling him? Or is he calling you? Good thing he's Jewish. This whole reforming thing won't be such a shock to him."
"Calling me. I didn't ask for his number back. He wants to hang out," Leah elucidates with a judge's solemnity as she scoots around into a corner of the couch to rest a leg long alongside his body. The other one braces foot on floor, grounding her 'gainst, oh, temptation, let us say. The folded arms on her stomach do say it, in silent barricade. "I don't know. He seemed all right, and it's not like I have guys falling over me when I walk down the street. Did hook up with one of Julia's friends this week, but you know. One-nighter, coffee in the morning, whatever."
"Beckman?" wonders Chris, amusement smoothing the harder edges of their shared accent. "Think she mentioned it last time she called. Nothing wrong with a one-nighter. Or two. Unless you're looking for something more, in which case, being introduced to Julia's friends might not be the way to go, Canto."
Leah gazes steadily at him down the length of the couch. "No. I know. I'm not in any position to start a relationship, anyway, whatever guys I do or do not meet." Briskly then, she moves on. "So, you know this guy? My garbage man? Man. Small world."
A hand's brush acknowledges and dismisses in one efficient swoop. "Bar buddies, you know. Hung out, watched a game, taunted the Knicks. Had a few drinks together." Chris nudges her leg with his, pressing the warmth of his body through thin fabric into hers. "Why don't we ever do that? --Oh, right. You're mentally retarded and like the Mets."
"Oh, here we go," mutters Leah, and slouches into the couch arm. Glower. Nudge back. "You and the godless Yankees, sucking at George Steinbrenner's fat, sweaty, billionaire tits. Do you feel like more of a man, worshipping the pinstripes? The championships they've bought? The free agents they've swindled out of more deserving teams?"
Chris -- simply laughs, again, and presses his hips into the couch to insinuate his leg under hers. Hands wrap around her foot, disentangling, disrobing-- "Jealous, Canto?"
Leah's foot yanks back, and there goes her sneaker. She glares at him. "Disgusted, actually. When /we/ win again, we'll have fucking well earned it. And aren't you just a cheerful bastard tonight." Warily she says it; warily she watches. "Feeling better?"
White gleams, green a banked, ready witness. "Back on the job three days, and I'm already rowing up shit creek," Chris informs. Satisfaction mixes with exasperation; he tosses the sneaker over the sofa's back, and curls up to loop his arm over his knee, angled into intimacy's crooked smile. "They've got me behind a desk from now until doomsday. At least the docs cleared me. --You smell like /peanuts/, Canto."
Baffled, Leah reminds him, "I was in a bar. I swear, I didn't roll around in the peanut bowl, though. My God, you /do/ have a lot of energy tonight. Someone get this man some porn or a punching bag, stat."
"You're here," Rossi points out, mirth and merry lust (George Steinbrenner's bra size notwithstanding) a heady current under his baritone's shallows. A hand settles on Leah's thigh, inviting with its heat and weight. "We already tried the punching bag."
Leah turns a withering look on him. "I am /not/ dressing up in a French maid's outfit -- and if you have one in your closet, I'm telling everyone you know. Starting with Lazzaro."
Chris chuckles, voice rich, and the thigh's caress becomes a slap before his lean into the sofa's back. "Fair play. I know hell of a lot more about his personal habits than any straight guy should about another. Julia likes him a lot. How you been, Canto? It's been a while."
"Not /that/ long," is Leah's muted reply. A lower slouch brings her bared foot (socks are for weaklings) to bear on his ribs, with a peremptory nudge. "You could've come up to see me. I've been holed up with writing and cooking."
"Three days back on the job," reminds Chris, and oh, there is no mistaking the near boyish glee in the words: up shit creek or not. Coiled and curled as he is in bronzed skin and pleasure, he is a model of energy poised and paused, waiting only an avenue to vent itself. The nudging foot prompts a snatch; he stretches long for the other leg, demanding its shoe with a groping hand.
Leah finally laughs. "God/dam/mit! You'll strip me and eat me alive from the toes up, won't you? Wicked, evil, naughty man," she murmurs and swings up the leg and its foot and the much-desired shoe ... and her face contorts in brief, spasmodic emotion, hid only imperfectly well by shiny eyes and flattened mouth.
Satisfied with its booty, Chris works his way through the laces, pries off the second shoe, and tosses that the way of the first. "'Naughty,'" he echoes ruefully with a foot in each hand, cradling both in his lap with thumbs for their bottoms and a loose grasp for their ankles. "You're making me feel like a four-year old, Leah. --What's wrong?" Distracted eyes, but sharp ones too; he peers owlishly at her down the length of legs.
So Leah puts a hand over her eyes, then her mouth, then drops it. "Nothing. God. Sorry. Please, go ahead and ravish me."
"Not if you're not willing," Chris demurs, retreating back into his side of the couch with curiosity twitching its fold across his brow. (He will keep a hold on her two feet, however. Just in case. Gentle manacles of broad hands.) "What's up?"
Leah closes an eye, peers with the other one all crowded 'round with strained, sun-lined flesh. "I'm tired," she admits, "and had one too many beers -- though the train ride home helped, as it always does -- and I'm afraid I'm going to die alone and penniless in the gutter."
The thrumming electricity of energy dampens further still at that, herded into some private recess to be called on later. Dormancy for now; body supplanted by mind, and its frowning, stitched focus. "Job front's not looking good?" Chris asks. Thumbs move patient massage across the base of feet, tracing the yawn of muscles under the skin. "I always figured that was my line, ending up dead in the gutter one way or another."
"Oh, you'll just get shot, and hopefully not by your own gun this time," Leah adds nicely, her eyes flicking automatically to the fleshly memory of indignity before returning to his face, where they sit like unhappy brown pebbles. "Job front is the same shit it ever was. Looking up some. It's not that -- I don't know." She sighs her way up to sitting, slumps forward, rubs her hands absently on her thighs. "I just feel like a loser and a fake, and so of course I have to share it with you, don't I?"
"Father Rossi," says Chris, the slip of his faint grin sardonic and cynical. "Missed my calling, dammit. --Don't worry about it, Canto. Dish all you need to. Least you can do is make me feel useful for something. What do you mean, 'fake'?" The dark, damp head tucks itself in the sofa corner's wing, sheltered by fabric and the memory of shadow. "You got some ghost writer you're keeping prisoner in your closet, churning out stuff for you?"
Leah snorts. "Oh, I wish. No. Just..." Hesitation binds her in silence, immobility, for a breath or two; then she restlessly shrugs it off. "The whole mutant thing. You know? Getting trotted out to the press as this Paul on the road to mutant Damascus, and the scales have /been/ off my eyes for a while now, thanks ... but I'm still friends with a couple mutants. So, am I faking being a conservative supporting the MRA, or a mutant supporter being conservative?"
Hands splay wide, heating the blood beneath the skin. "Conservative don't mean you're a racist, or a speciesist, or ... whatever the fuck they're calling it these days," Chris reminds, regarding Leah through the fan of lashes, glance attenuated. "Just because some shitheads give being a conservative a bad name -- Christ. /Paul/ does it all by himself -- doesn't mean you have to justify how you stand on the MRA based on /that/ label. There are mutants supporting the MRA, too. What's that mean, 'mutant supporter'? Support /what/?"
"Whatever the news says it means," Leah replies wearily. "I should ignore it. Never mind. I'll figure it out in my head ... and meanwhile, I'm still dying alone. I should tell my mother that tomorrow at the picnic. I'll make it a general announcement, in fact. That'll shut her up."
"You want a boyfriend or something, Canto? Or you just looking to get married? Friends and family not good enough?"
Leah flinches, but lifts her chin then to answer gamely, "Well, maybe not. Not getting any younger, am I? Never mind to that, too, though." Head drops again, and she shrugs into easy, breezy carelessness. "As soon as I've got the house with the white picket fence, I can fill it with a husband and kids. No rush."
Chris frowns at feet, moves his hands upward to snake under pants hems, and turns his fingers to the massaging of calves. "Never would've pegged you for a Martha Stewart type," he admits. "If it's just any old asshole you want as a husband, take Gabe. He'd marry you in a heartbeat. Drive you to homicide in a week, but he could probably afford the house and the picket fence, on his salary."
"Boy, you really /don't/ think anything of me." Flat, but more angry than dull.
"I don't think for a second you'd take Gabe," Chris counters, frown deepening. "I'm just saying. You trying to pick a fight, Canto?"
Leah says, "No," pauses, and then says, "No," again. And another pause. "Well. Maybe a little. I'm feeling vulnerable, and that means I'm lashing out to get things on firmer ground, that I understand." She whittles a winsome smile out of her strained expression. "Look at me, with the insights."
Says Rossi, wry, "Italian women. Figures. Julia ever gets unsettled by shit, /I/ end up with a concussion. And a new coffee pot."
"We are a broken species," Leah sighs and tosses out a black smile. "But what the hell. You wouldn't have it any other way."
"Nah," and for this confession, benediction, in the flare of a grin, nova-bright and resigned. "Only Italian men're dumb enough and strong enough to take it. Wouldn't wish the breed on anybody else."
Leah's smile softens, expands, and she comes forward on a scoot to wrap her hands around his massaging arms, lean forward, and kiss him. "Thank you."
Chris blinks. Wrinkles his brow. Crooks his lips against the kiss. "What's that for?"
Pulls back. Mimes surprise. And Leah asks, "I need a reason? /You/ need a reason?"
"Italian men know Italian women," warns Chris, surrendering a leg to its own devices so he can point a finger at Leah, forerunner of suspicion. "You about to deck me, Canto?"
Leah answers demurely, "Only with the force of my passion."
Chris pauses. Considers. And, transparently, brightens. "Yeah?"
The leg hooks imperiously around his waist and pulls Leah closer. She settles hands around his neck to match, and pale-brown eyes blink lazily. "Yeah, might. Since you're being a nice guy and listening to me and not, you know, mocking."
"I've been growing as a human being," Chris informs with pedantic gravity, meeting pale-brown with pale-green. "I've got a book. 'How to be a better person in 10 easy steps.'"
"And what's Number 1?" asks a lazy Canto, forsooth, as she frees her other leg from his grasp and wraps it around him with its mate.
Chris grins, lowering his head to touch forehead to forehead, eyes shuttering to bare slivers of color. Brilliant, laughing, heated color. "Step one is to let a woman think she's having her own way. Step two is let her have it. It was a crappy book."
Leah laughs and surges up into it on another kiss's wave. "Works for me," she sighs against his mouth, then pushes him back into the couch to begin the long and considerate task of having her own way.
[Log ends.]