A deal with a dance
If only.
My God, if only.
3/27/2006
Logfile from Shaw of X-Men MUCK.
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Evening once again, and in the dimmer lights of most having left for the day, Zenith approaches the conference room cautiously, with the characteristic step of one who is checking out the scene, but wishes not to be disruptive. She smooths the coat over slung over her arm and steps up to the door and sets her hand on the handle, peering carefully through the glass next to it to see if her boss is busy before she turns it.
Shaw is seated at the head of the conference table, talking with the two people still left to him from the day's marathon meeting. The plump, conservatively dressed blonde nods slowly in time to his words; the younger, bright-eyed Pakistani man is already gathering up his files and papers, apparently scarcely listening. The boss takes note of this with a sharper, louder word, a curt gesture that draws both of their attention to him and swings his own absently towards the door. Zenith gets a blank blink until his brain makes a few more connections. Then he smiles, turns back to his pair to dismiss them, sits back, and waves the receptionist on into his glass-walled den.
Zenith nods at those departing as she enters, and even holds the door for several beats while she waits for the blonde straggler to make her way out. "I'd better be fast," she says with a smile of sympathy as the door is finally released to click shut behind her. "You've been in here /all day/." The smile widens into a grin as she sets the coat over a handy chair back. "Wouldn't blame you for wanting to be home as soon as possible."
With a chuckle, Shaw lets his sitting back become a leaning back, revealing the regrettable wrinkles of his black suit's pale dress shirt. He locks his fingers together behind his head and cocks her a mock-stern look. "What in the world," he begins, "makes you think that I get to go home any time soon? I have to clean up all this crap--" he jerks his chin at the spill of papers down the table, some of it scribbled with notes "--and then work on the new proposal, and /then/ I have emails to catch up on. . . . Pity me, Zoe. Pity me, do. You heading out?"
With a clerical underling's instincts, Zenith starts at her end of the table and begins gathering up the indicated papers, preserving their current order, if any, as she straightens them into a pile. "I thought maybe soon. I have an update for you, though." She pauses to look up and him, and positively smirks, eyes twinkling with the fun of drawing her news out into a game. "Ask me what I did this weekend."
"What did you do this weekend?" Shaw asks dutifully, then blinks again. Waits for his brain to catch up again. And then leans forward, hands dropping from his head to clasp on the tabletop, on his own stack o' papers. Button-bright eyes follow her on her gathering. "Did you . . . ? And Mr. Williamson?"
Zenith widens her eyes in mock innocence. "Me? Absolutely nothing. On a /totally/ unrelated note, I think Mr. Williamson wants to deal." She sets the accumulated stack beside Shaw's, slips around behind his chair, and starts down the other side of the table. An abandoned pen, discovered in the course of tidying, proves too round and rollable to pile and so is stuck behind her ear.
Shaw slows a sharp grin across his face, and he hunches his shoulders into a more comfortable bow for his lean. "Oh? But Mr. Williamson is only a vice-president. What does his boss want?"
Zenith sets her stack down, half-piled, and pulls out her adopted pen to flick idly between her fingers. "Dunno. I'd say he could try to convince her, but after how I--pitched the idea, I don't think he'd want to." She looks at Shaw, expression as trusting as someone dumping an intractable problem at the feet of a master and sitting back to see how it can be miraculously solved. "He says he's got dirt, he just can't use it because she'll just take him down with her. Would that be any help to you?"
"What kind of dirt?" No patient master, Shaw leaps right for the jugular being presented to him by proxy. "On her? The company?"
Zenith frowns, and shuffles the papers in front of her into alignment. "He didn't really specify. I kinda lost that thread of the conversation because I didn't want to make it obvious I was more interested in that than the," Zenith coughs pointedly. "Change of subject he made. I got the sense it was about what she'd done with the company, though, not compromising pictures of her private life or something." Zenith giggles, mind clearly tangenting merrily off. "Though if it was that, no wonder he'd worry about going down with her if he was...involved." She grins. "I highly doubt it, though."
Shaw nods, but he's clearly distracted into his own mental tangents now. His thumbs twiddle gently against each other in his hands' knot; the onyx ring on the top one glints with the dark brilliance his hooded eyes are currently hiding. Thinking. Then, carefully: "If he's implicated, it might be tricky to separate them in whatever we do next. She goes down, he goes down. Would that -- bother you, Zoe? I don't know how much you like him, so . . ."
Zenith snorts, and leans far down the table to snag the last orphan sheet with her fingertips. "He wasn't very good, even if he wasn't a past girlfriend whiner. Which he most definitely is." Table now clear, she looks it carefully over, making sure she hasn't missed anything before she sits. "Anyway, he seems to be under the impression that since I'm helping him ditch her, I'm terribly interested." Another snort, more derisive this time. "Better to nip that in the bud."
"He did say he likes you," Shaw can't help reminding her, smugly amused. "You have a fan."
On closer examination, the table's still clean. Zenith selects herself a chair and flops into it. She rolls her eyes. "He would. I mean, most guys are so simply and conveniently horny. Maybe if he loses his job, it'll save me having to break up with him when we haven't even actually gotten together." Zenith grimaces. "I hate that."
Shaw murmurs, ducking his head, "I apologize for my beastly sex. We're pigs. Sorry." He peeks woefully at her (though he does refrain from any lash-batting). "I swear that not all of us are that bad. Maybe he just went through, oh, I don't know, a bad relationship with a controlling, insecure woman whose lapsing ethics are getting him, her, and their company in trouble. That's enough to turn any man to such an angel as yourself with relief and gladness."
Zenith swivels her chair to face him more directly by pushing on the table with her palm. "You know, that's the first time I've ever heard a guy apologize for the tendency to /want/ a 'relationship.'" Her position settled, Zenith raises her hands to give the word its due air quotes. "That sounds just like him, though." She mulls that over for a couple seconds, and then raises her eyebrows at Shaw. "Angel? Me?" She grins. "Save that until after this works out or not."
"Angel of mercy," insists Shaw with the manner of a man who knows what he's talking about: the weight of years' experience and not all of it good, by the crook of his half-smile. Cynicism keeps his expression sharp. "Funny how the way people appear depends on what you're bringing to it. For instance -- well, no, that's not relevant. Never mind. So!" He sits up and drags his hands back to flop into his lap; he lets his face soften, too, with a glance out at the city through the long window-wall. "It'll work." Confidence. Bedrock assurance. "I have some ideas. . . ."
Zenith perks up, and lets the chair spring back from its leaning position. "No, tell me!" she says, intrigued. "For instance what?" She blinks at him in interest before a slight frown crosses her expression, and she hands him a conversational out. "Ideas?"
But Shaw, stalwart that he is, tackles the 'for instance' since he raised it. His shrug wrinkles his jacket against the chair's upholstery, and he doesn't /quite/ meet her eyes, although a little smile, more honest than his honed cynicism, tugs at his mouth. "Well, when /we/ first met . . . you know. You're the awful, repellent mutant because that's what I brought to it. I don't apologize for my -- opinions," he says soberly, head dipping a little in something like unconscious contrition all the same. "And since I've gotten to know you, and you've been helping me . . . it's been different. That's all I meant."
Zenith's first expression is one of discomfort, and she fiddles with the clip holding back her hair, clicking it open and shaking it free to stall while she examines her emotional reactions. "That's--good," she begins lamely, then sets open the floodgates on honesty to fill the dead air. "I'm glad. I mean, I guess that's just human. And not everyone bothers to change it. So--" she chances eye contact. "Thanks."
Shaw meets it calmly, but shrugs a bit to loosen the mood. "It's not a big deal. Really." And, like any good bigot caught out with being less than bigoted to a member of the hated population, he moves right along, brisk and just that least bit perturbed by and with himself. Hmph. "Ideas -- yes. I don't want to drag you into my dealings, though, Zoe. Not because I don't trust you," he hurries to assure her, "but because it might get you in hot water. With Mercheson. You know? You just started this job; it'd be horrible of me to get you in trouble on it just because I'd like a sounding-board to discuss things."
Zenith looks worried at first, but by the end, she shakes her head. "Nah. Sounding board? Come on. Besides, I can take her." She grimaces, indicating a caveat. "Well, as a jealous girlfriend thing, I can take her. And the beauty of this is I'd just make it into a jealous girlfriend thing whether it is or not." She grins. "So sounding board away."
Shaw looks dubious, but her confidence apparently wins him over because he relaxes, like a bolt given a half-turn in body and mind, and shrugs into the diffident, "I'm thinking about that partnership between our companies again. But if she's involved in something shady, I can't be connected to that. I can't get her mud on me!" He bites his lower lip in a frown, eyes fixed on the table's smooth, dark, cleaned length between the two of them. "I do need the business, though," he continues after a minute, reluctant with the words, the thoughts behind them. "So, if I could find a way to have her give up whatever she's doing -- maybe with Joe's help? To get him out of the mud, too. I'm not sure."
Zenith frowns, pondering hard as she brushes her fingertips against the tabletop. "Well...I have no idea how she'd react, but I do know how Joe would. And he'd give you, or me for you, the info in a second if he thought at the end of the day he'd have his freedom /and/ his job." She flicks her eyes up, to check with the person with more experience with Mercheson than her own. "If you know what she's up to, she'd might stop to keep it from going public, wouldn't she? And if it doesn't go public, then Joe doesn't get caught either. He's in a good position to point that out to her so she'll listen."
"I would like to see that information," Shaw confesses. "Could you have him send it to me? Or through you. Whichever you think makes more sense. If he wants to deal . . . But I don't want to deal with him directly." His frown deepens as he argues with himself, tussling with a tycoon's worries right in front of her, honest and open. "It isn't proper, it isn't safe -- she'd blow her top if she found out. No. Have him give it to you, and I'll deal with her myself. Try to get her to stop it, yes, and save your Joe's job."
Zenith nods in agreement. She slowly tips her chair back again. "Easy enough. I'll ask him next time we're together. I was gonna offer to continue to carry messages anyway." She rolls her eyes. "If he's getting cold feet it'll remind him of the other reason he's agreeing to the deal." She nods again to herself, a mere flick of the chin and then frowns. "There's always the chance she'll flip out for another reason," she adds tentatively in the spirit of full disclosure. "I'm being careful, and watching Joe's ass /for/ him, too, but I can only work with the information he gives me. No telling if she'd walk in because he'd forgotten an appointment." She wrinkles her nose. "It would be something that I was doing by own air-headed self in that case, though," she reassures.
Heavily Shaw studies her as she speaks, and when she finishes, he makes an executive decision: "Don't see him again, after you get this information from him. For both of your sakes. Safer that way . . . and you do want to dump him if he gets too pushy, right?" He lightens his tone, sits up straighter, with the question, inviting a shift from all this dreadful business anxiety.
Zenith looks reassured. "No problem. I don't want to get too tangled with him anyway. I won't dump him directly unless he makes me, but I can put him off for a while at least in case we need the leverage to convince him of something later." She stretches absently, fingers laced over her head. "Poor guy. I wonder if his fragile male ego will survive."
"You really don't think much of us, do you?" It's a casual question. Shaw's gaze following her stretch, up to her fingers and back down to her face (or a little lower than that) -- not so casual. Not much entertainment to be had in a day-long strategy meeting, apparently.
Zenith wrinkles her nose. "Dunno. I'm mostly waiting to be proved wrong." The part of Zenith's attention not directed inward is pointed vaguely at the ceiling. "I mean, I guess I might be picking guys who /aren't/ the gentlemanly type by definition, but I /did/ the search for twue wuv thing for a while and it didn't get me jack."
"Got you Joseph Williamson," Shaw points out, maybe a little defensively. "He's not that bad. Or that's how it seems to me. Good looks, good job, good prospects -- what else is there?"
This draws Zenith's attention away from the ceiling, eyes searching with vague curiosity for motivation behind the topic of conversation. "I guess. Looks good on paper." She's hooked, though, and her eyes narrow as she returns to the thought despite the casual dismissal. "I could probably train him into being halfway decent, you're right. I'm not sure why--" She clearly reaches the point of too much soul-searching and shrugs. "Anyway, I bet he has no sense of rythmn. Couldn't even teach him to dance."
Shaw brightens. "I dance. I dance very well, in fact."
Zenith's grin lights up her face. "No!" she says with teasing disbelief. "Really? No guy knows how to dance if he's not in it seriously. It's not 'cool' or something."
"You doubt me? Me?" Shaw's voice rises in offended incredulity, and then /he/ rises, right to his feet, and holds out an imperious hand. "I'll show you. Get over here."
Still giggling, Zenith promptly follows suit. When she slips her hand onto his, her wrist is already begining to float into forming a graceful line with the rest of her arm. "A rare creature, then."
Shaw pulls her away from the table, into the clear space between its head and the wall, and hooks a smile down at her. "You have no idea," he says, dark-eyed devil, then draws her in and spins her out in the same fluid motion.
Zenith's giggles die away instantly, replaced with a single-minded but much more euphoric intensity. There's a little hesitation to her movement as she adjusts to unfamiliar shoes, but she smooths it out, and by the times she steps back in from the spin, there's a playful tilt to her hip added to the long line of her leg. Her eyes are wide. "You weren't kidding," she breathes.
"Of course not," Shaw huffs, sounding offended still, but looking amused. Assured again: he's on his home turf as well as his dignity, and light and easy with it. His free hand drops to catch her other one, and he spins them both into a quick waltz square, and spins her again, and laughs. "I'm so dramatic. I'm sorry, Zoe. Don't mock me too much."
Zenith spends her attention in correcting her waltz position point by point, then relaxes into it. "Zenith," she says, the correction slipping out while her attention is entirely elsewhere. "All the best dancers have a bit of drama in them." She illustrates by parodying by exaggeration the proper chin-up floating posture, eyes twinkling.
Shaw's steps pause, and his fingers tighten with the surprise that blinks his bright black eyes on her face. "'Zenith'?"
Zenith tenses up too, flushing. She ducks her head to avoid his eyes. "Um. Sorry. Just a stupid nickname. I didn't mean--" She shrugs uncomfortably and loosens her hold, ready to step back if the dancing has ended.
Almost it has ended, but Shaw carries on, carries through the awkwardness, and twirls them once more to the sound of missing music. His expression is closed; his gaze, no longer as bright. But . . . when the turn ends, he gives her a deep dip in strong, sure arms, and he supposes on a murmur, "It /is/ better than 'Magneto.'" And grins down at her, conspiratorial at the expense of that la-di-da mutant.
It's clear from Zenith's muscles that it's hard for her to trust the dip, but she does relax after a moment, looking up at him. "It's not that," she's quick to correct. "Once upon a time, it might have been a stage name." After a moment, she makes her worried frown teasing to match her tone.
Shaw brings them back to standing, no longer looming above her, and lets her go with a bow over the hand he still holds in his. He's gone polite, polished, princely, and does not pry into her explanation, saying only, "I like it; it suits you in many ways. So -- get that information to me by Wednesday, say? I'd like to have this wrapped up by the end of the week." He folds his hands behind his back, rests his weight on his heels, and looks at her placidly. Waiting.
Zenith attempts a cautious smile at the compliment and curtseys with an invisible skirt. "Thanks." The switch to business to avoid awkwardness sits well with her too, and she nods. "Wednesday. Sure." She drifts over to her coat, smoothing the fabric of her slacks, wrinkled up by the movement.
Without a trace of self-consciousness, Shaw watches her move, drawing his gaze like a hand down the slope of her hair and neck and spine. His lips twitch, then still, controlled again. His voice is, too: business, all the way. "Thank you. If you have any problems with him, let me know, but I trust it'll go well. It has so far, yes?"
"Trust me," Zenith says, the teasing confidence in her tone ringing a little hollow. Her movements as she picks up her coat and shrugs it on are a little hurried. "Anything else? I should probably be getting home."
"No, no, go, it's all good." Shaw turns towards the door, which he holds open for her. His eyes are firm on hers and nowhere else now, as they should be. "Have a good evening." Pause. The hints of an internal struggle behind his rugged face's mask. A smile curls the side of his mouth, in the end, and he finishes softly, "Zenith."
Zenith pauses in the doorway, eyes searching his face. A smile slowly blooms, small, but bright. "You too," she murmurs, and heads out, tucking hands into pockets.
[Log ends.]
My God, if only.
3/27/2006
Logfile from Shaw of X-Men MUCK.
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Evening once again, and in the dimmer lights of most having left for the day, Zenith approaches the conference room cautiously, with the characteristic step of one who is checking out the scene, but wishes not to be disruptive. She smooths the coat over slung over her arm and steps up to the door and sets her hand on the handle, peering carefully through the glass next to it to see if her boss is busy before she turns it.
Shaw is seated at the head of the conference table, talking with the two people still left to him from the day's marathon meeting. The plump, conservatively dressed blonde nods slowly in time to his words; the younger, bright-eyed Pakistani man is already gathering up his files and papers, apparently scarcely listening. The boss takes note of this with a sharper, louder word, a curt gesture that draws both of their attention to him and swings his own absently towards the door. Zenith gets a blank blink until his brain makes a few more connections. Then he smiles, turns back to his pair to dismiss them, sits back, and waves the receptionist on into his glass-walled den.
Zenith nods at those departing as she enters, and even holds the door for several beats while she waits for the blonde straggler to make her way out. "I'd better be fast," she says with a smile of sympathy as the door is finally released to click shut behind her. "You've been in here /all day/." The smile widens into a grin as she sets the coat over a handy chair back. "Wouldn't blame you for wanting to be home as soon as possible."
With a chuckle, Shaw lets his sitting back become a leaning back, revealing the regrettable wrinkles of his black suit's pale dress shirt. He locks his fingers together behind his head and cocks her a mock-stern look. "What in the world," he begins, "makes you think that I get to go home any time soon? I have to clean up all this crap--" he jerks his chin at the spill of papers down the table, some of it scribbled with notes "--and then work on the new proposal, and /then/ I have emails to catch up on. . . . Pity me, Zoe. Pity me, do. You heading out?"
With a clerical underling's instincts, Zenith starts at her end of the table and begins gathering up the indicated papers, preserving their current order, if any, as she straightens them into a pile. "I thought maybe soon. I have an update for you, though." She pauses to look up and him, and positively smirks, eyes twinkling with the fun of drawing her news out into a game. "Ask me what I did this weekend."
"What did you do this weekend?" Shaw asks dutifully, then blinks again. Waits for his brain to catch up again. And then leans forward, hands dropping from his head to clasp on the tabletop, on his own stack o' papers. Button-bright eyes follow her on her gathering. "Did you . . . ? And Mr. Williamson?"
Zenith widens her eyes in mock innocence. "Me? Absolutely nothing. On a /totally/ unrelated note, I think Mr. Williamson wants to deal." She sets the accumulated stack beside Shaw's, slips around behind his chair, and starts down the other side of the table. An abandoned pen, discovered in the course of tidying, proves too round and rollable to pile and so is stuck behind her ear.
Shaw slows a sharp grin across his face, and he hunches his shoulders into a more comfortable bow for his lean. "Oh? But Mr. Williamson is only a vice-president. What does his boss want?"
Zenith sets her stack down, half-piled, and pulls out her adopted pen to flick idly between her fingers. "Dunno. I'd say he could try to convince her, but after how I--pitched the idea, I don't think he'd want to." She looks at Shaw, expression as trusting as someone dumping an intractable problem at the feet of a master and sitting back to see how it can be miraculously solved. "He says he's got dirt, he just can't use it because she'll just take him down with her. Would that be any help to you?"
"What kind of dirt?" No patient master, Shaw leaps right for the jugular being presented to him by proxy. "On her? The company?"
Zenith frowns, and shuffles the papers in front of her into alignment. "He didn't really specify. I kinda lost that thread of the conversation because I didn't want to make it obvious I was more interested in that than the," Zenith coughs pointedly. "Change of subject he made. I got the sense it was about what she'd done with the company, though, not compromising pictures of her private life or something." Zenith giggles, mind clearly tangenting merrily off. "Though if it was that, no wonder he'd worry about going down with her if he was...involved." She grins. "I highly doubt it, though."
Shaw nods, but he's clearly distracted into his own mental tangents now. His thumbs twiddle gently against each other in his hands' knot; the onyx ring on the top one glints with the dark brilliance his hooded eyes are currently hiding. Thinking. Then, carefully: "If he's implicated, it might be tricky to separate them in whatever we do next. She goes down, he goes down. Would that -- bother you, Zoe? I don't know how much you like him, so . . ."
Zenith snorts, and leans far down the table to snag the last orphan sheet with her fingertips. "He wasn't very good, even if he wasn't a past girlfriend whiner. Which he most definitely is." Table now clear, she looks it carefully over, making sure she hasn't missed anything before she sits. "Anyway, he seems to be under the impression that since I'm helping him ditch her, I'm terribly interested." Another snort, more derisive this time. "Better to nip that in the bud."
"He did say he likes you," Shaw can't help reminding her, smugly amused. "You have a fan."
On closer examination, the table's still clean. Zenith selects herself a chair and flops into it. She rolls her eyes. "He would. I mean, most guys are so simply and conveniently horny. Maybe if he loses his job, it'll save me having to break up with him when we haven't even actually gotten together." Zenith grimaces. "I hate that."
Shaw murmurs, ducking his head, "I apologize for my beastly sex. We're pigs. Sorry." He peeks woefully at her (though he does refrain from any lash-batting). "I swear that not all of us are that bad. Maybe he just went through, oh, I don't know, a bad relationship with a controlling, insecure woman whose lapsing ethics are getting him, her, and their company in trouble. That's enough to turn any man to such an angel as yourself with relief and gladness."
Zenith swivels her chair to face him more directly by pushing on the table with her palm. "You know, that's the first time I've ever heard a guy apologize for the tendency to /want/ a 'relationship.'" Her position settled, Zenith raises her hands to give the word its due air quotes. "That sounds just like him, though." She mulls that over for a couple seconds, and then raises her eyebrows at Shaw. "Angel? Me?" She grins. "Save that until after this works out or not."
"Angel of mercy," insists Shaw with the manner of a man who knows what he's talking about: the weight of years' experience and not all of it good, by the crook of his half-smile. Cynicism keeps his expression sharp. "Funny how the way people appear depends on what you're bringing to it. For instance -- well, no, that's not relevant. Never mind. So!" He sits up and drags his hands back to flop into his lap; he lets his face soften, too, with a glance out at the city through the long window-wall. "It'll work." Confidence. Bedrock assurance. "I have some ideas. . . ."
Zenith perks up, and lets the chair spring back from its leaning position. "No, tell me!" she says, intrigued. "For instance what?" She blinks at him in interest before a slight frown crosses her expression, and she hands him a conversational out. "Ideas?"
But Shaw, stalwart that he is, tackles the 'for instance' since he raised it. His shrug wrinkles his jacket against the chair's upholstery, and he doesn't /quite/ meet her eyes, although a little smile, more honest than his honed cynicism, tugs at his mouth. "Well, when /we/ first met . . . you know. You're the awful, repellent mutant because that's what I brought to it. I don't apologize for my -- opinions," he says soberly, head dipping a little in something like unconscious contrition all the same. "And since I've gotten to know you, and you've been helping me . . . it's been different. That's all I meant."
Zenith's first expression is one of discomfort, and she fiddles with the clip holding back her hair, clicking it open and shaking it free to stall while she examines her emotional reactions. "That's--good," she begins lamely, then sets open the floodgates on honesty to fill the dead air. "I'm glad. I mean, I guess that's just human. And not everyone bothers to change it. So--" she chances eye contact. "Thanks."
Shaw meets it calmly, but shrugs a bit to loosen the mood. "It's not a big deal. Really." And, like any good bigot caught out with being less than bigoted to a member of the hated population, he moves right along, brisk and just that least bit perturbed by and with himself. Hmph. "Ideas -- yes. I don't want to drag you into my dealings, though, Zoe. Not because I don't trust you," he hurries to assure her, "but because it might get you in hot water. With Mercheson. You know? You just started this job; it'd be horrible of me to get you in trouble on it just because I'd like a sounding-board to discuss things."
Zenith looks worried at first, but by the end, she shakes her head. "Nah. Sounding board? Come on. Besides, I can take her." She grimaces, indicating a caveat. "Well, as a jealous girlfriend thing, I can take her. And the beauty of this is I'd just make it into a jealous girlfriend thing whether it is or not." She grins. "So sounding board away."
Shaw looks dubious, but her confidence apparently wins him over because he relaxes, like a bolt given a half-turn in body and mind, and shrugs into the diffident, "I'm thinking about that partnership between our companies again. But if she's involved in something shady, I can't be connected to that. I can't get her mud on me!" He bites his lower lip in a frown, eyes fixed on the table's smooth, dark, cleaned length between the two of them. "I do need the business, though," he continues after a minute, reluctant with the words, the thoughts behind them. "So, if I could find a way to have her give up whatever she's doing -- maybe with Joe's help? To get him out of the mud, too. I'm not sure."
Zenith frowns, pondering hard as she brushes her fingertips against the tabletop. "Well...I have no idea how she'd react, but I do know how Joe would. And he'd give you, or me for you, the info in a second if he thought at the end of the day he'd have his freedom /and/ his job." She flicks her eyes up, to check with the person with more experience with Mercheson than her own. "If you know what she's up to, she'd might stop to keep it from going public, wouldn't she? And if it doesn't go public, then Joe doesn't get caught either. He's in a good position to point that out to her so she'll listen."
"I would like to see that information," Shaw confesses. "Could you have him send it to me? Or through you. Whichever you think makes more sense. If he wants to deal . . . But I don't want to deal with him directly." His frown deepens as he argues with himself, tussling with a tycoon's worries right in front of her, honest and open. "It isn't proper, it isn't safe -- she'd blow her top if she found out. No. Have him give it to you, and I'll deal with her myself. Try to get her to stop it, yes, and save your Joe's job."
Zenith nods in agreement. She slowly tips her chair back again. "Easy enough. I'll ask him next time we're together. I was gonna offer to continue to carry messages anyway." She rolls her eyes. "If he's getting cold feet it'll remind him of the other reason he's agreeing to the deal." She nods again to herself, a mere flick of the chin and then frowns. "There's always the chance she'll flip out for another reason," she adds tentatively in the spirit of full disclosure. "I'm being careful, and watching Joe's ass /for/ him, too, but I can only work with the information he gives me. No telling if she'd walk in because he'd forgotten an appointment." She wrinkles her nose. "It would be something that I was doing by own air-headed self in that case, though," she reassures.
Heavily Shaw studies her as she speaks, and when she finishes, he makes an executive decision: "Don't see him again, after you get this information from him. For both of your sakes. Safer that way . . . and you do want to dump him if he gets too pushy, right?" He lightens his tone, sits up straighter, with the question, inviting a shift from all this dreadful business anxiety.
Zenith looks reassured. "No problem. I don't want to get too tangled with him anyway. I won't dump him directly unless he makes me, but I can put him off for a while at least in case we need the leverage to convince him of something later." She stretches absently, fingers laced over her head. "Poor guy. I wonder if his fragile male ego will survive."
"You really don't think much of us, do you?" It's a casual question. Shaw's gaze following her stretch, up to her fingers and back down to her face (or a little lower than that) -- not so casual. Not much entertainment to be had in a day-long strategy meeting, apparently.
Zenith wrinkles her nose. "Dunno. I'm mostly waiting to be proved wrong." The part of Zenith's attention not directed inward is pointed vaguely at the ceiling. "I mean, I guess I might be picking guys who /aren't/ the gentlemanly type by definition, but I /did/ the search for twue wuv thing for a while and it didn't get me jack."
"Got you Joseph Williamson," Shaw points out, maybe a little defensively. "He's not that bad. Or that's how it seems to me. Good looks, good job, good prospects -- what else is there?"
This draws Zenith's attention away from the ceiling, eyes searching with vague curiosity for motivation behind the topic of conversation. "I guess. Looks good on paper." She's hooked, though, and her eyes narrow as she returns to the thought despite the casual dismissal. "I could probably train him into being halfway decent, you're right. I'm not sure why--" She clearly reaches the point of too much soul-searching and shrugs. "Anyway, I bet he has no sense of rythmn. Couldn't even teach him to dance."
Shaw brightens. "I dance. I dance very well, in fact."
Zenith's grin lights up her face. "No!" she says with teasing disbelief. "Really? No guy knows how to dance if he's not in it seriously. It's not 'cool' or something."
"You doubt me? Me?" Shaw's voice rises in offended incredulity, and then /he/ rises, right to his feet, and holds out an imperious hand. "I'll show you. Get over here."
Still giggling, Zenith promptly follows suit. When she slips her hand onto his, her wrist is already begining to float into forming a graceful line with the rest of her arm. "A rare creature, then."
Shaw pulls her away from the table, into the clear space between its head and the wall, and hooks a smile down at her. "You have no idea," he says, dark-eyed devil, then draws her in and spins her out in the same fluid motion.
Zenith's giggles die away instantly, replaced with a single-minded but much more euphoric intensity. There's a little hesitation to her movement as she adjusts to unfamiliar shoes, but she smooths it out, and by the times she steps back in from the spin, there's a playful tilt to her hip added to the long line of her leg. Her eyes are wide. "You weren't kidding," she breathes.
"Of course not," Shaw huffs, sounding offended still, but looking amused. Assured again: he's on his home turf as well as his dignity, and light and easy with it. His free hand drops to catch her other one, and he spins them both into a quick waltz square, and spins her again, and laughs. "I'm so dramatic. I'm sorry, Zoe. Don't mock me too much."
Zenith spends her attention in correcting her waltz position point by point, then relaxes into it. "Zenith," she says, the correction slipping out while her attention is entirely elsewhere. "All the best dancers have a bit of drama in them." She illustrates by parodying by exaggeration the proper chin-up floating posture, eyes twinkling.
Shaw's steps pause, and his fingers tighten with the surprise that blinks his bright black eyes on her face. "'Zenith'?"
Zenith tenses up too, flushing. She ducks her head to avoid his eyes. "Um. Sorry. Just a stupid nickname. I didn't mean--" She shrugs uncomfortably and loosens her hold, ready to step back if the dancing has ended.
Almost it has ended, but Shaw carries on, carries through the awkwardness, and twirls them once more to the sound of missing music. His expression is closed; his gaze, no longer as bright. But . . . when the turn ends, he gives her a deep dip in strong, sure arms, and he supposes on a murmur, "It /is/ better than 'Magneto.'" And grins down at her, conspiratorial at the expense of that la-di-da mutant.
It's clear from Zenith's muscles that it's hard for her to trust the dip, but she does relax after a moment, looking up at him. "It's not that," she's quick to correct. "Once upon a time, it might have been a stage name." After a moment, she makes her worried frown teasing to match her tone.
Shaw brings them back to standing, no longer looming above her, and lets her go with a bow over the hand he still holds in his. He's gone polite, polished, princely, and does not pry into her explanation, saying only, "I like it; it suits you in many ways. So -- get that information to me by Wednesday, say? I'd like to have this wrapped up by the end of the week." He folds his hands behind his back, rests his weight on his heels, and looks at her placidly. Waiting.
Zenith attempts a cautious smile at the compliment and curtseys with an invisible skirt. "Thanks." The switch to business to avoid awkwardness sits well with her too, and she nods. "Wednesday. Sure." She drifts over to her coat, smoothing the fabric of her slacks, wrinkled up by the movement.
Without a trace of self-consciousness, Shaw watches her move, drawing his gaze like a hand down the slope of her hair and neck and spine. His lips twitch, then still, controlled again. His voice is, too: business, all the way. "Thank you. If you have any problems with him, let me know, but I trust it'll go well. It has so far, yes?"
"Trust me," Zenith says, the teasing confidence in her tone ringing a little hollow. Her movements as she picks up her coat and shrugs it on are a little hurried. "Anything else? I should probably be getting home."
"No, no, go, it's all good." Shaw turns towards the door, which he holds open for her. His eyes are firm on hers and nowhere else now, as they should be. "Have a good evening." Pause. The hints of an internal struggle behind his rugged face's mask. A smile curls the side of his mouth, in the end, and he finishes softly, "Zenith."
Zenith pauses in the doorway, eyes searching his face. A smile slowly blooms, small, but bright. "You too," she murmurs, and heads out, tucking hands into pockets.
[Log ends.]