2025-01-31 - Orange You Glad You Asked?

Nora's has a steady customer base regardless of the hour, though in the middle of the night, it tends to be fewer people tucked into booths, cozy with hot drinks agains the chill. Tonight's special is a sugar crusted deep dish apple pie, because somebody made too many, and a rich ham and bean soup because, you guessed it, somebody made too much.

James Missouri's new here, about two weeks into working in Spellbound park. She's dressed in a crisp white button down shirt with french unbuttoned and rolled up, fitted black jeans, and a cropped sweater in warm rusty brown. The sleeves are pushed up now and then, revealing some writing on either wrist in blue ballpoint, but they side down almost every time she reaches across a table, the knit not quite tight enough to stay put. She's got her long hair pulled up into messy buns, face framed in a few escaped curls. It's very close to your standard waitress ensemble, with a cozy knit over it to keep her warm. Every time she reaches up to get a new cup off the shelf of clean mugs, the bottom edge of a leather harness across her ribs is just revealed, leather burnished and supple.

She has a pink and white order pad in hand for a brief glance, then tucks it away, a couple ballpoint pens in the pocket of her short apron. Her chunky zip up ankle boots are audible as she crosses the diner, five foot ten frame slim but those boots heavy enough that they could probably be used as bludgeoning weapons if the occasion called for it. She drops off a plate of toast to one table, freshens up their coffee, carafe in hand as she does her top up rounds.

Rook sits in a booth near the window, a blue and white hand in frosted tones painted as if it's cupping the side of his face in a gentle embrace. His bag slumps beside him, straps curling across the rest of the seat and dangling off the side. Across the table, there's a small scatter of torn-out notebook pages, and where the surface meets the wall, he's got a slowly growing collection of balled-up scraps. While James makes her rounds, a half-empty cup of coffee sits within reach, it's surface rippling slightly each time his knee, bouncing beneath the table, makes contact with the underside as he makes an attempt to tamp down what looks like your usual, everyday bout of nervous energy.

He's layered against the climate of the island in a rag-tag gathering of shirts, plain old things that are torn and cut and ripped in places that shows the color of the shirt beneath it. Through styling, luck, or the grace of the powers that be, he's wearing three of them, and plenty of the tears align just so so that every color can be seen. Grey. Red. Bright, bright yellow. Oh. And an unzipped hoodie. It doesn't have paint on it, so either it's not his, or he's actually done laundry.

By the time James is near-enough to go for the coffee-refreshing, his cheek is firmly resting against a balled up fist that forces his expression into a mouth-only-frown by means of his lips being distorted enough that anything other than a manic grin would look like a frown. The pen taps against the open notebook, then almost unconsciously, bounces off a plate that used to have at least three slices of the sugar crusted pie on it.

"What's your favorite word?" He asks the shadow that glides over his table, not looking up. There's resignation in that voice. Genuine curiosity, for sure, but he's well aware this is a selfish ask of someone probably coming to give a top-up.

That or he's thinking it's one of the staff from Lucky's coming to tell him not to cue up 7 repeat plays of 'All-Star' again and this is a diversion to buy him time.

James brushes her right hand up her arm, wrist locked while she holds the carafe, her green eyes scanning for others who need a refill while she makes a slow pass past the booths. One more top up this side and then she's headed to the other, a warm smile given to an older man from the sanitation crew who has been here every night of her two weeks on his break. They never speak more than five words to each other, and his coffee's always kept hot. She has a smear of ink on her wrist where she washed her hands a little too high and got some of her notes before they were dry enough to stay.

She reaches to pour, her sleeve slides down hiding the handwriting on her fair skin. She clomps towards Rook's table, and when she arrives there, she reaches down to press the fingertips of one hand against the table, reaching over carefully to pour into his coffee. He didn't ask. She didn't ask, but it's in the top up zone, so she takes the nonverbal cue for what it is.

When he asks her a question, she puts the carafe down on the table. She reaches over and tap-taps the cartoony monster doodle that's chomping on some written words on one of those ripped up pages. She glances across her booths, then moves to sit down opposite Rook, perched just on the edge of the bench seat. She tuck an elbow on the table, both, actually. She crosses her arms loosely and only once she's seated and looking at him from across rather than down at him from a standing position does she ask, "To... wear? Or." Her gaze wanders over his clothes, the rips that show off various colors, up to his face, those blues and whites. His blue eyes. The fall of his hair. She returns her attention to his eyes again, and waits.

Her eyes are green with yellow rings around the iris. It's hard to see till she's looking right back at someone.

The tap-tap against the doodle makes his pen pause mid-bounce, and for the first time since she came by, Rook's gaze flicks upwards. It's not quite meeting hers yet, but instead scanning the edge of her hand, the curve of her knuckles. There's a moment of stillness before he leans back, just slightly, watching as she takes the seat opposite him.

Part of him should have expected that.

His pen resumes his tapping, lighter now, barely skimming the paper's surface as he considers the question. his lips part as if he's about to ask for clarification, then he clearly decides against it. While he'd hazard a guess that hers might be 'Blueberry Pie' (which totally counts, in his mind) in biro on her forearm, he's well aware that he's a man who straight-up has the words 'Impulse Control Issues' and a little tick beside them fully embedded into his skin in black ink somewhere on his arm. Always wear your self-fulfilling-prophecies. It's easier that way.

"Nah." He says finally, hand drifting to his coffee and wrapping around the cup's warmth, although he doesn't lift it yet. "Just... in general. I'm in a rut and all these-" his other hand, and the pen, gesture to the pages. They're all covered in half-completed verses and scrawling of incomprehensible redaction when a line was really bad. "-are getting samey. Need to shake it up."

His gaze lingers for a beat, passing over her details. The sweater, the roll of her sleeves that failed the second she reached for his cup and then fell back before she crossed her arms, then finally his eyes settle on hers, and his expression becomes far more relaxed that it was when pressed up against a fist. "No wrong answers."

James' hands are unremarkable. That is aside from a little burn above one, probably from taking something out of the oven. She has several black hair ties and some soft friendship bracelets up one wrist, a collection of maybe seven of them in all in varying colors, most earth tones. Her notes on her wrist, visible under where her sweater hasn't quite fallen down all the way include a little stack of names:

Ravin.
Shirley.
Harrison.
???

And of course the specials are on her wrist. Deep dish pie. Ham + Bean soup. There's a little sentence in neat, slightly slanted print done fast: 86 milkshakes, blender's fucked.

Don't say fucked to customers.

Underlined twice under that is a number that's been smudged beyond reading. Hopefully it's not which apartment she's in.

She considers Rook's eyes, the colors she can see. She skims a look around the diner, and seeing nothing that she can point at, she takes a breath and says, "Um orange like the dark—" She pauses and starts again, closing her eyes briefly. "Pumpkin. But darker and..." One finger from her right hand loops under the elastic of one of those hair ties and she twists it. "Shiny." She opens her eyes, glances down at the table, and reaches across and touches Rook's fork with the remnants of a dusting of sugar over it.

Rook watches the pause in real-time, his head fighting the urge to tip at how she resets herself before settling on an answer. He's... patient. But not in a 'waiting for his moment.' way. He's not really 'letting her finish', he's catching thoughts as they land. The twist of her hair-tie. The shift of her gaze. How she places words like stepping stones before him that he can start hopping across.

His eyes flick downward at the touch of his fork, watching the last dusting of sugar fall from metal, and at last, his head is allowed to tilt.

"Copper?" He asks, soft and thoughtful. "But not the clean kind. The kind that's been touched a thousand times. Like an old penny?"

There's a short breath, a little frown line between her brows, and James shakes her head no. "I do. Yes, like that, no." She turns her hand up on the table and wiggles her fingers a little. "Sparkly." She's walking around a word and it's not coming, but she does get out, "Burnt pumpkin." It takes a few other words cycling through her brain to find that one, and then there's another moment of silence in which she twists the hair tie on her wrist a couple of times, knuckle blanching as she tugs the tie out, stretching it.

"Like a... like a bowling ball." Thank fuck she got that one out before she lose those words too.

Rook doesn't press, doesn't rush the words as they come. He just watches with his own small shifts, and an idle play with his pen, recognizing the rhythm of searching for the shape of a thought before it disappears.

His mouth presses to the side, considering. Then, a slow, easy nod.

"I-" He says, leaning back a little harder against the padding of the booth seat, lifting up the pen to point in James' general direction with the end of it, small lines appearing at the corner of his eyes as a smile breaks free from what was contemplation and is now, fully, acceptance. "-I'm gonna like you. A people who responds to 'favorite word' with a detailed description of a color is my kinda people."

Then he glances down, slides his notebook over, and finishes off a verse.

'And if I'm gonna break, let it be like the dawn,
Orange like burnt pumpkin, sparkly like a bowling ball.'

His head tips. He looks at the page. To James. To the page. There's a short, caught laugh. "Though, I will admit it's an absolute bastard for a rhyming scheme."

SNAP!

James turns her wrist after the band snaps back, slipping from her fingertip of her other hand. She may have done that by accident, hard to say by her face. Her hands remain on the table, and she reaches over to brush her thumb under her bracelets, tangling with them to rub lightly over the slightly reddened skin of her wrist.

There's the huff of a small breath when Rook says he's gonna like her, because she answers that way. The effort it took to pull those words together. She looks down at his notepad.

She reads it, then leans in a bit more to read 'sparkly like a bowling ball' and wheezes a laugh, then tips back in the booth on her side to break into a throaty one. That surprised her. It's so random and so ridiculous. And there it is on paper, like lyrics of a song, immortalized in ink on paper.

"You're laughing, but-" The final word rises in pitch, meandering in tone until Rook can catch James' eye with a warning look. "-If I do find a way to make this work," His lips thin, and his head tilts forward in mock solemnity, "you'll have to live the rest of your life knowing you contributed to an absolute lyrical disaster."

A pause. A flicker in his eye.

"Or Genius. I'm Rook. Nice to meetcha." His hand goes out. Not to shake, or introduce or anything like that. Nope. It goes out for a fistbump at the monster they just made.

Though she's wearing a name tag, it's covered by her sweater and therefore useless. It's usually covered by a sweater, by design or accident, and thus a person could come in here for all two weeks she's been working and still not know her name. She doesn't introduce herself table side unless offered a trade.

Rook's name must be good enough, because she says, "James." And she leans in to tap her knuckles against his. "I love nothing better," she begins, and all those words flow into place. "Than putting disaster into the world." Could be when she's not thinking too hard about it, it's easier. Or when there's minor sass involved.

"Finish it? And sing it to me." James nods slightly, looking over at Rook. She slides the carafe over to her side, and dips her hip out to rise from the booth, doubling down on the horrors they have wrought. "When it's done." She holds up a hand and walks across the diner to the counter to slip behind it and put the coffee away. Everyone is currently content with their food, but she does drop off a check on the old janitorial guy's table. He's about to go back to work and always leaves exact change plus a three dollar tip no matter if he just has coffee or coffee and toast.

Finish it. And sing it to me.

See, the first part of that is bad enough to Rook. He's made his way through life with the intention of not finishing anything he starts. You could make a book out of all the art, words, small sculptures he's made and never even come close to seeing through. Three books. Three books, one straight-to-streaming movie, and a storage unit that sells on reality TV.

The second part's not so bad, but when it's actually a request (or a challenge? he's not sure), that puts weight on it. Which feels weird. Like he'd have to take it seriously.

His fingers drum once against the table before he stretches back, watching James go with a slight turn of his head and a twist in his shoulder, lifting his coffee to take a slow sip. His eyes track her as she disappears behind the counter, slipping back into the beat of the place, and for a moment he just sits with it.

Then, without much ceremony, he flips to a fresh page.

And starts writing.