12-26-2018, 08:21 PM
“Shit, did I say I knew your deepest desires?” He was pretty sure he had said no such thing. Maybe, given more time, if he wanted to, he could suss a want more profound than “come in from the rain” out of the kid. The Reaches’ atmosphere at the moment was about right, dim and damp and forlorn enough that he wouldn’t have felt too strange flipping on the ‘you can talk to me’ mode that those who tend dim, damp, forlorn bars sometimes develop like the symptom of a slow-moving but debilitating disease, and which was known to induce the unbidden confession of deep desires.
Still, the question was not devoid its tinge of sincerity.
Spreading outward from an obscure corner of Near’s thoughts was that peculiar, light-prickle suspicion that he and the person across from him were having two distinct conversations, and the possibility existed that something he had said carried unintended implications on the side that was not his. He knew from experience: there was a danger inherent in the enterprise of talking to a person who heard something other than what you were saying.
“But you said you wanted in. So that’s how I knew that.” Gentler -- snide note muted, though not snuffed. “And yeah, a cellar ...” This veering in the direction of a question without quite getting there. The vaguest recollection lingered in him of there being a downstairs here, cool and cavernous and somehow a place that he should not make any attempt to get back to. “I think the door’s locked.” At least he had come across a locked door in the butler’s pantry and had been pointedly not looking for the key that belonged to it. The shrug that accompanied was to shake himself free of the uncomfortable feeling the idea of the door being open brought as much as to demonstrate his lack of concern to his audience.
Still, the question was not devoid its tinge of sincerity.
Spreading outward from an obscure corner of Near’s thoughts was that peculiar, light-prickle suspicion that he and the person across from him were having two distinct conversations, and the possibility existed that something he had said carried unintended implications on the side that was not his. He knew from experience: there was a danger inherent in the enterprise of talking to a person who heard something other than what you were saying.
“But you said you wanted in. So that’s how I knew that.” Gentler -- snide note muted, though not snuffed. “And yeah, a cellar ...” This veering in the direction of a question without quite getting there. The vaguest recollection lingered in him of there being a downstairs here, cool and cavernous and somehow a place that he should not make any attempt to get back to. “I think the door’s locked.” At least he had come across a locked door in the butler’s pantry and had been pointedly not looking for the key that belonged to it. The shrug that accompanied was to shake himself free of the uncomfortable feeling the idea of the door being open brought as much as to demonstrate his lack of concern to his audience.