09-03-2020, 04:13 PM
Some people, they could drink all day and it didn’t make much of a difference beyond a little slurring. Some, they drank and it twisted them vicious. Some melted into maudlin poor-me puddles. Jude apparently became a frolicking schoolgirl when he drank, and the worst thing about that was how his warbly “chase me” from the down the hall approached something like charming. Or maybe it was just the specter of sometime-warbler Isa that Near had dredged up for himself, momentarily obscuring his intruder’s jagged edges.
From the landing, the staircase, wide hardwood planks polished by generations of Farr feet, seemed more daunting than before, shooting upward an impossible distance like a hallway in a cartoon depiction of a dream. He shoved his phone in his pocket, grasped the banister with his free hand (had anyone, in happier days, ever slid down it from the top?) and hauled himself up slowly, impressed by the absence of any apparent bordeaux splashes or snail trails, though it meant he’d lost his imaginary bet.
Jude’s question landed after Near had reached the summit, while he stood trying to orient himself to the dim upstairs hallway.
“The sex dungeon,” he volleyed back. Esprit de l'escalier -- or, no, that was something different, but he didn’t have a sincere answer prepared, not from his childhood and not from the short piece of his adulthood he’d spent here. “I think there used to be a playroom up here,” he added from just outside the library door, making a sort of verbal shrug out of the obvious answer. “Think” because he had yet to find anything that resembled a playroom in the house as it was now.
“So what, you like fine literature with your wine?”
From the landing, the staircase, wide hardwood planks polished by generations of Farr feet, seemed more daunting than before, shooting upward an impossible distance like a hallway in a cartoon depiction of a dream. He shoved his phone in his pocket, grasped the banister with his free hand (had anyone, in happier days, ever slid down it from the top?) and hauled himself up slowly, impressed by the absence of any apparent bordeaux splashes or snail trails, though it meant he’d lost his imaginary bet.
Jude’s question landed after Near had reached the summit, while he stood trying to orient himself to the dim upstairs hallway.
“The sex dungeon,” he volleyed back. Esprit de l'escalier -- or, no, that was something different, but he didn’t have a sincere answer prepared, not from his childhood and not from the short piece of his adulthood he’d spent here. “I think there used to be a playroom up here,” he added from just outside the library door, making a sort of verbal shrug out of the obvious answer. “Think” because he had yet to find anything that resembled a playroom in the house as it was now.
“So what, you like fine literature with your wine?”