03-13-2019, 01:30 PM
He was an asshole?
A jagged thistle of humor blossomed in the blind, bright irony of that name-calling and overshadowed everything else, inspiring a single throaty huff that existed somewhere between laughter and getting kicked in the gut, until it wilted moments later and left him deflated, tracking the kid’s exit stalk through the halflight.
What remained to mingle with the swirl of confusion and irritation and dread was a trickle of injury at the denunciation. Not because it was inaccurate; just that its accuracy derived largely from conduct that Jude hadn’t had the pleasure of witnessing. As far as Near was concerned, he had been a portrait of good behavior in this case. A paragon of hospitality. Snippy, sure, but look what he had been dealing with: it cried out for minimization. An asshole wouldn’t have let the unexpected visitor in out of the rain. An asshole would have retaliated upon being accosted. An asshole would have, at some point, called the cops about all this -- or maybe that was more the purview of an intelligent person, which made him, if anything, an idiot. Not that he would have felt much better about a parting shot of “You are an idiot” -- there just would have been less to disagree with.
Still, the tension gathered in his shoulders loosened in the wake of Jude’s departure. He wondered if he ought to go after, to make sure he didn’t do anything crazy, and settled on not. What he had said before was the truth: he was welcome to take anything he wanted, Near didn’t have any sense of claim to it. Hell, he could burn the place down: the door was close enough for a quick exit. Only the thought that explaining why the house was a pile of ashes weeks after he had inherited it would be sticky inspired a weak shout of, “You’re not going to burn the place down, are you?” that was probably not loud enough to make an impression. And don’t kill the dog. Thought, not said. That would be sticky too, if he ever saw Isa again. Oh, and by the way, about Lew ...
He retrieved the dustcloth from the floor by an unbloodied edge and draped it over the bottle, since conceding to the urge to shatter the glass against the floor would have been uncomfortably violent, not to mention a concession of what had happened. Out of sight instead (if a white protrusion on the bartop counted as out of sight), and, while he would find out soon enough if it was out of mind, he decided to help the process of dismissal along by means of the bar’s contents, grabbing something that approximated and might even be XO in silhouette and toting it to one of the denuded chairs with every intention of nursing the night’s events into that dream the kid was so hung up on.
A jagged thistle of humor blossomed in the blind, bright irony of that name-calling and overshadowed everything else, inspiring a single throaty huff that existed somewhere between laughter and getting kicked in the gut, until it wilted moments later and left him deflated, tracking the kid’s exit stalk through the halflight.
What remained to mingle with the swirl of confusion and irritation and dread was a trickle of injury at the denunciation. Not because it was inaccurate; just that its accuracy derived largely from conduct that Jude hadn’t had the pleasure of witnessing. As far as Near was concerned, he had been a portrait of good behavior in this case. A paragon of hospitality. Snippy, sure, but look what he had been dealing with: it cried out for minimization. An asshole wouldn’t have let the unexpected visitor in out of the rain. An asshole would have retaliated upon being accosted. An asshole would have, at some point, called the cops about all this -- or maybe that was more the purview of an intelligent person, which made him, if anything, an idiot. Not that he would have felt much better about a parting shot of “You are an idiot” -- there just would have been less to disagree with.
Still, the tension gathered in his shoulders loosened in the wake of Jude’s departure. He wondered if he ought to go after, to make sure he didn’t do anything crazy, and settled on not. What he had said before was the truth: he was welcome to take anything he wanted, Near didn’t have any sense of claim to it. Hell, he could burn the place down: the door was close enough for a quick exit. Only the thought that explaining why the house was a pile of ashes weeks after he had inherited it would be sticky inspired a weak shout of, “You’re not going to burn the place down, are you?” that was probably not loud enough to make an impression. And don’t kill the dog. Thought, not said. That would be sticky too, if he ever saw Isa again. Oh, and by the way, about Lew ...
He retrieved the dustcloth from the floor by an unbloodied edge and draped it over the bottle, since conceding to the urge to shatter the glass against the floor would have been uncomfortably violent, not to mention a concession of what had happened. Out of sight instead (if a white protrusion on the bartop counted as out of sight), and, while he would find out soon enough if it was out of mind, he decided to help the process of dismissal along by means of the bar’s contents, grabbing something that approximated and might even be XO in silhouette and toting it to one of the denuded chairs with every intention of nursing the night’s events into that dream the kid was so hung up on.