[Ashley McGowen] Unfortunately, Ashley has never been so drunk that she was unable to remember the night before. Sometimes, she reflects, this could be a blessing: it spares a person the humiliation.
Fortunately, she and Kage are a little too close to let vomit in the bed of Kage's beloved truck stand between them. She hopes.
Needless to say this morning has not been very friendly. She, in fact, spent an hour cleaning the bed of Kage's truck. And fleeing, promptly, before the Orphan could taunt her about it. (She can hear it now: I give you a kitten, and you give me vomit in the back of my truck?) That was after she woke up when it was nearly noon.
It's a few hours later now, and she's gone to the park. She's still feeling a bit queasy, her head is still throbbing a little, but she has a bottle of water and it's mostly subsided. It's still wet outside after the thunderstorm last night, but she's managed to find a bench that is mostly dry, and upon it she's perched, writing in her notebook. She's been doing a lot of that lately too.
Given the impending threat of more rain, the park is rather empty today. She doesn't mind; it lets her work without too much distraction.
[Jarod Nightingale] It had been a long time since Jarod had gotten drunk enough to have a hangover the next day. Even if he had, one would imagine that he had ways of avoiding those kinds of problems. People who knew him now would probably find it difficult to imagine the degree of reckless self-destruction that he'd maintained throughout his teenage years. Either way, it was a safe bet that he had not vomited in the bed of a friend's truck anytime in recent memory.
But he definitely knew what it was like to have a hangover. He didn't need to read Ashley's pattern to have an idea of what she probably felt like right now. When last they'd parted ways, she'd been in the midst of a sea of shot glasses in a booth at a pub, and surrounded by friends only too happy to encourage her increasing inebriation. Today, she was alone, and a great deal more subdued. Walking through the park after lunch (this was a common ritual), he'd spotted her sitting on a bench, and let his direction shift so that he eventually came up next to her. He wasn't wearing a $2,000 suit today. He was just wearing a pair of jeans and a deep red (burgundy) buttoned shirt. It hung open a little at the collar, and the sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, leaving the elegant tattoo on his right forearm visible. There was a little bracelet on the other wrist - a simple, braided bit of blue and black string. (Not entirely his style, so probably something of some sentiment.)
"Did I miss all the fun last night?" he asked with a wry smile.
[Ashley McGowen] Ashley usually doesn't get hangovers. Though in recent memory she's gotten drunk enough to merit one several times (okay, more than), she's usually better about moderating herself with water. Eating something heavy that lines the stomach. That was not what happened last night when the Englishman lined up some shots and they started to match each other.
She has her knees drawn up and the notebook balanced against them, her head supported with the palm of one hand flat against the side of her face. Like it were holding a wet cloth or something cool and soothing to place against her temple. It doesn't. She's dressed in a pair of jeans today and a long sleeved shirt, a lighter red than his, worn over a lighter black shirt beneath. It's markedly cooler today than it was yesterday.
When she hears his voice she looks up, her hand still shielding her eyes from what beams of light manage to work their way through the film of pale gray clouds. Her hair is thick enough to still be slightly damp from showering two hours ago, or maybe it was just drizzling before Jarod began his walk.
His wry smile is returned in kind. "No, you escaped in time," she says. "A little drama with a Cult acquaintance of mine, and...I don't really want to remember the rest." Though in truth, it involved a lot of talking with Kage that wasn't unpleasant. Before she threw up in Kage's truck. "Thomas thinks he wants to make it a regular thing, in case you ever feel the urge to get utterly smashed."
[Jarod Nightingale] "Mm," he pursed his lips together thoughtfully. "Cultists are rather good for that, aren't they?"
There was a careful inspection made of the bench, first with his eyes and then with a light brush of his fingertips against the wooden slats. Satisfied that it was dry, he sat down next to Ashley. The distance was closer than a formal acquaintance, but not close enough to be intimate. He smelled good, just as he had last night. He always smelled good. Whatever expensive bath products he probably used, they had an exotic hint to their scent. Like a Chinese spa.
"Can you imagine me utterly smashed?" he asked, with one corner of his mouth still turned up in a half-smile. "Though it is a tempting offer. Perhaps I'll join the two of you some day. Thomas is... interesting."
And that... really could have meant any number of things.
[Ashley McGowen] "I've never met one I really liked," Ashley says, tone flat. "Except maybe this older one I'm still making up my mind about." Sabra is different though, admittedly; she's even said so herself. They had discussions about how she was different from the others, how they lost themselves and missed the point.
Ashley doesn't move away when he sits down, doesn't distance herself. She seems comfortable enough, though she hasn't really unwound, hasn't let her legs drop down off the bench. Hasn't moved to close her notebook, either, though the page is so full of writing, so crowded from edge to edge, that it's almost unintelligible: difficult to tell what is original and what is an edit. Whatever she recently showered in smells distinctly more herbal. Pleasant: just not what one might expect.
"No, I can't," she says, with an amused glance toward him. "But feel free. Thomas is..." She shrugs. "I like him, surprisingly. He's a solid guy." Ashley would have to think so, given the fact that Morgan and Thomas seemed rather intimate and it didn't seem to bother her. She's protective of the girl.
[Jarod Nightingale] "He'd be pretty sexy if you taped his mouth shut. Well, no, that wouldn't work. Then you couldn't see his lips." Apparently these were the sorts of things that Jarod Nightingale contemplated after meeting people. "I don't think he likes me much."
That last bit was musing. Thoughtful. Whether or not Thomas liked him really wasn't of much concern, one way or another. In any case... Jarod glanced at Ashley's notebook with an expression of muted curiosity. "My sister used to take notes like that. What are you working on, if you don't mind my asking?"
[Ashley McGowen] This is not the sort of thing Ashley McGowen contemplates after meeting people. Not consciously, anyway: it's part of how she evaluates a person, part of what she takes in about them and it shapes how she reacts, but it usually doesn't enter the level of thought. Hermetics are intellectual creatures, you see, and physical attractiveness has nothing to do with their strength of Will.
Some red touches her ears, but she seems unshaken. Just shrugs and says, "I didn't really notice," and it's hard to say which of those things she's responding to. Though it wouldn't be surprising to know that she didn't take note of whether Thomas liked Jarod: she misses those sorts of things, and it ultimately isn't of much concern, one way or another.
There's a look down toward her notebook when he calls attention to it, and a brief pause. A biting of the inside of her cheek. Then she says, "Poetry. Well, not anything coherent yet - usually when I go out like this I just scribble fragments as they occur to me. And then I put them together later. But I journal a lot too."
She spends a good portion of her day reading or writing, all told. She'd been doing it last night too when the others had found her at the bar. It's one of the few modes of self-expression she has available.
[Jarod Nightingale] Truthfully, there were a lot of things that Jarod contemplated after meeting people. He liked to study them. He liked to try and piece people together, as if they were puzzles. One didn't always need to do a lot of talking to learn about someone, either. What he chose to discuss aloud, though, was often of a rather superficial nature. There was an element of wry self-parody involved in that, but it wasn't always easy to pick up on, especially if you weren't paying attention.
Ashley's poetry was a topic of more real interest, in any case. Jarod shifted closer, leaning so that he could gaze at the notebook momentarily. If Ashley seemed uncomfortable with this, though, he'd pull back. He knew better than to make people feel invaded upon.
"Read something to me?"
He sounded genuinely interested, albeit in a subdued, slightly detached fashion. (Not surprisingly, since the only time he ever seemed not to be detached was when he was having sex. There were other moments, too... but people seldom witnessed them.)
[Ashley McGowen] Ashley does not seem uncomfortable when he leans in and looks. It's true that it isn't something she would offer to most people: then again, most people wouldn't ask her, and she likes to reward effort. Besides, Jarod already knows more about her than other people she's met only a handful of times, of who she is when she's closer to herself.
Still, there's a hesitance when he asks her to read something to him, a way her breathing stills as she bites the inside of her cheek again. It isn't for him; it's not reluctance. She nods and says "Okay," and then has to track the words on the page with a fingertip in order to follow them, so chaotic is the writing on the page. But she manages.
And here: there's a lot of imagery, a lot of painting with Words, observations about that abandoned apartment building on the Mile or someone she happened to watch for ten minutes and observe. That could be all it is, except that an astute listener will be aware that she takes those things and makes them into symbols, Ashley, that they have a legend and an underlying story and it's all woven in and underlying. Many of the words are heavy, a lot of the pictures are dark: this is, after all, a dark world. But the point is the transformation; in being given Words they're made a thing of grace. Bittersweet, tinged with sadness, but grace all the same.
They are just snippets, a stanza or two that will perhaps be pieced together into a larger work at a later time. She has a sense of how to make them flow like music as they're read.
When she's done she just stops. Doesn't ask him if he liked it, doesn't gauge for expression or a reaction. Just stops. Clicks the top of her pen to retract the tip. Spins it thoughtfully for a moment, clicks it again and then scribbles in an edit or two in whatever space she can manage; reading aloud has a tendency to do this, after all.
[Jarod Nightingale] The process of creative writing wasn't something that Jarod was unfamiliar with. Translating had a certain art to it, as well. Without a little artistic interpretation, the prose would sound clunky and odd, because languages seldom translated in elegant ways. It was a balancing act of keeping true to the original piece, but learning to rephrase the language so that it conveyed the meaning artfully.
It was interesting to watch someone else write, though. To see the evolution of the piece as it came together and changed with each edit. Ashley read aloud the pieces that she felt were worth reading, and despite their unfinished state, there was a dark, concise, and observant beauty to the words. Jarod stilled himself as he watched her read, and after a moment, he closed his eyes and simply listened.
They opened again at the sound of a pen click, and when Ashley was through making her corrections, he leaned in and pressed his lips gently to her cheek. Then he smiled softly and stood up, and walked away quietly down the path.
[Ashley McGowen] She'd planned to speak with him further after finishing those edits: tell him about the Traditionmate of his she'd met in the woods, maybe. Kae had mentioned in passing that she'd like to speak with him (tell your friend he's more Hermetic than he thinks, she'd also said - it confused Ashley too). Maybe she intends to bother him, a relentless wearing away of that clear No. Or maybe something else. A more personal inquiry about what he likes to read; when she happened upon him in a bookstore they'd both had poetry books.
She's turning her head to look back at him and speak when his lips find her cheek. And as he's getting up to walk away he can already see her face shaping itself into Bemusement, and though she smiles when he does her brows are furrowed in that bewildered, wondering sort of way. She doesn't try to stop him or wave him down when he wanders off.
Just watches him go. And when he's a ways down the path there's a pensive quiet, and she reaches up and rubs the ball of her thumb over her cheek. Looks down at the waiting pages, clicks the pen, and pours herself over them.
