12-12-2022, 05:07 PM
The "living room" and the "kitchen" are a single space delineated by a difference in floor: fake wood-looking vinyl on the one side, fake tile-looking vinyl on the other, a little bump of transition strip to make it official. Open concept. So Near's journey from A to B is all of a few steps, over the course of which he manages to retrieve one of the stray t-shirts from the floor, ball it up, and underhand toss it into the open bedroom doorway a few more steps away.
On the kitchen side of the line, he plucks a cleanish glass from a small proliferation next to the sink and fills it with tap water: mental buffer time before turning back to face what he has brought upon himself. Yes, that is in fact Jude standing in his apartment with his fucking backpack, and in a purely visual way there is a surrealness to the vista, but it's still somehow not as strange as he would have expected, as if they just saw each other a few days ago and not ... however long it's been.
Is that because he was waiting?
"Not really," he says.
Well. "Sort of. I guess." He has been waiting for Jude the way a Christmas-Easter Catholic is waiting for the rapture, as a matter of course with no real expectation of it actually coming about.
"Want anything?" Space filler. Habit. Bad move. Watch him ask for Evian. For tea and crumpets. For Turkish delight.
On the kitchen side of the line, he plucks a cleanish glass from a small proliferation next to the sink and fills it with tap water: mental buffer time before turning back to face what he has brought upon himself. Yes, that is in fact Jude standing in his apartment with his fucking backpack, and in a purely visual way there is a surrealness to the vista, but it's still somehow not as strange as he would have expected, as if they just saw each other a few days ago and not ... however long it's been.
Is that because he was waiting?
"Not really," he says.
Well. "Sort of. I guess." He has been waiting for Jude the way a Christmas-Easter Catholic is waiting for the rapture, as a matter of course with no real expectation of it actually coming about.
"Want anything?" Space filler. Habit. Bad move. Watch him ask for Evian. For tea and crumpets. For Turkish delight.