Ornature

Night outside and the pair of barista working the close are wiped out but it's a Monday night so everything's slowed down now. Someone has brought the chalk sandwich board in from the street and and even though there's another half-hour maybe the young man at the register is just itching to count the till. There are a handful of strangers in the shop, a pair of young women in rather fine clothes, their corner of the place littered with bags from a number of now-closed boutiques, and a tall, dark-haired man in the far corner with today's Wall Street Journal folded on his lap in front of him.

Charlotte looks nothing like those girls or that gentleman, and indeed nothing like she really belongs here, but she's been here often enough, at such damned odd hours, that the girl dragging the sandwich board back into the place gives her one of those odd smiles that border on the compassionate and the tight one gives to near-strangers one sees semi-regularly when they seem --

-- well, a little bit disconnected.

Charlotte seems a little bit disconnected. Strange, fae thing, rail-thin, dressed in worn jeans and a t-shirt with a picture of red-riding-hood sliding a gun from beneath the towel covering her basket front-and-center. Pale blond hair tipped in pink, a corded bracelet on one skinny wrist, a chain loose around her neck.

Orders the most ridiculously frothy concoction, the sort that make the real coffee aficionados roll their eyes. Pays for it with an AmEx and finds herself staring at a reflection of the rest of the shop in the polished chrome of a napkin dispenser while she waits for it to be made.

He’s talking on his phone when he shoulders the door open and walks in off the street. Jeans, good loafers, and a peacoat over a sweater are good quality, fit him well, and have long been worn in. By the accent he’s a New Yorker, not from around here, and he’s listening more than he does the talking, answering a few questions here and there, asking his own, and it’s clear he’s familiar with the person on the other line with the casual ease.

There’s a satchel on his hip, brown leather, worn around the edges and peeling on the strap that digs into his shoulder. It’s stuffed full, the latches barely restraining the contents. A manila folder, a pale yellow, peeks out the corner with a couple of white pages, some crumpled the others crisp, lying within. He keeps it all tucked against his side, shifting it with his elbow when the door swung it back behind, and he pauses to adjust it, jamming the phone between his shoulder and ear to free the other hand in order to do so.

“Yeah, listen,” he says into the receiver, looking around the café, “I’ve got to go.”

Pause. “Yeah, I think you should do that. Go with that angle. It’s about the best you’ve got at this point but I’ve really got to go. I’m being that obnoxious twat in the middle of a café, talking loudly on their phone.” He throws an apologetic smile to anyone looking his way, lifting the phone back out from his shoulder.

There is a young woman hovering near the semi-circular counter where the coffee-drinks are slung and she has platinum hair and sharp elbows and rather casual attire. She's middling height see, but looks taller, looks like something more than it all adds together to be. There is an aura of distraction about her, a kind of discomfort one might read as skittishness, a native awkwardness in this place, in this setting, that settles into her frame even deeper when Christopher walks into the coffee shop.

The girl gives him a look and the first look is merely watchful: a door is opening behind her and she is an animal and she is a wolf and she wishes to know what is behind her.

The second look is something else: sharper, this notch of awareness between her brows.

The third look is wary, alert. That awareness deepening into something that trends both aloof and startled, this snaking tension in her shoulders and brow.

Charlotte does not realize that she's staring, and that everytime she yanks her gaze away from Christopher and cuts it back to him she makes it that much more obvious that she recognizes him. Him, or something in him or about him.

His blood.

Her nostrils flare. The ridiculous concoction is placed on the circular counter. She's forgotten about it.

She doesn't know what to do.

She’s looking, keeps looking, and he’s noticed. Slowly, he smiles and finishes up his conversation with, “No, no. I’ve really got to go now. I’m getting eyeballed.” He’s laughing, a low half-restrained sound in the back of his throat, flashing teeth as his hazel-gold eyes watch Charlotte. “

No. Nope. See ya.” Dragging the phone away from his ear, he makes a show of hanging it up and depositing in the hip pocket of his jeans.

“There,” he says to Charlotte, smiling at her. His expression is warm despite the way she’s looking at him and at her obvious awkwardness. “Sorry about that.”

After stepping closer he stops, looking over the counter, the menu board, anything that indicates that there’s something here that he might be able to grab and curb the hunger that gnaws at her belly, growling audibly to sensitive ears. He rubs a palm just under his chest, quietening the sound. And, if she’s still standing there, before him in the queue, his gaze darts to her and he gestures with an open palm. “Are you… ?” ordering, he wants to know.

When Christopher says that he's getting eyeballed the girl frowns and looks sharply away. Then steals another, warier, glance back at him. By now Charlotte has crossed her arms over the print of Red Riding Hood on her tee and finds herself frozen in place.

That lasts for a heartbeat, two.

He smiles at her, warmly. There is a beat beneath the moment and then she returns the gesture, though somehow from her it seems like merely a showing of teet.

Then he speaks not merely around her but to her and the creature cannot supply the proper ending to the question he's asking: is she ordering. is she doing something other than standing ridiculously at the counter watching him, suspicion a reflective sheen across her pale blue eyes, wary grace written into every inflection of her posture.

"I know you." Startled from her, really, when she inhales sharply with the surprise of being so directly addressed. "Did Philip send you?"

“Oh, do you?” This catches him off guard. He hadn’t expected this from her, a girl he doesn’t recognise, not in the least bit. Glancing over her quickly, he seeks out something other than her pink hair, the violent tee-shirt, her posture and clear, wary eyes, that might jolt a memory out of him. But she’s remains unfamiliar and she can see that he’s processing this, quickly, barely a falter before he adds. “Unfortunately, you’ve got one up on me, Miss, because I’m at a loss.”

So, instead of ordering, he ignores the insistent growling of his guts, which is being tempted by the freshly brewed coffee waiting for Charlotte’s attention on the counter, he extends out a hand towards her. “Christopher,” he tells her, introduces himself.

“And I have no idea who Phillip is.” Again, a smile, coming easily to him and without restraint. Christopher, throughout this exchange, watches her face and meets her eyes with a light cant of his head, interested.

"I meant - " and of course he doesn't know her. She doesn't really know him, she just knows his blood. His breeding. The way it speaks for him, and it is his blood, and his breeding, and the way it speaks for him that makes the usually skittish theurge all the more wary, all the stranger, all the more haunted-looking. He's hungry and some animal part of her must understand that he has decided to forgo ordering to exchange scents with her, to shake hands, to proffer names, but that is decidedly too direct and personal for Charlotte.

And no, he doesn't know Philip. Who is Philippa, who is her mother and he says it in a way that is absolutely convincing because it is true and Charlotte blushes - furiously, this rush of red beneath her cheeks, and she is such a pale-skinned thing -

and she's staring at his hand as if it were a claw or a razor blade and has forgotten all about her triple-mocha-marshmallow frappuccino-banana-smoothie that has been left on the counter with her name written on the side in sharpie -

and that blush just keeps creeping downward and the stiffness darkens and deepens and the awkward young woman really cannot speak. Makes an attempt, though -

"Oh," startled, see? "I - I'm sorry. I - I - I gotta go."

So she does. Just turns and dashes; away from the store and the stranger and all of it.

(Hah, Charlotte is kind of horrible with people so that was ... yeah, Apologies for her, but it also helps coincide with my stupid schedule, which has been getting up ridiculously early. But hopefully we can play again sometime soon? Or, we can pause that if you want to - and take up later?)

[Sounds fine by me! Grab me anytime I'm around. Best on weekends - I'm a day ahead though.]

(grins) got it! Thank you for the scene. :)