"Are you always this pleasant?"

"No." She smiled thinly. "I put on my happy face for you tonight."

He dipped a chip in the red salsa with a flat huff. Funny that for a chilled dip, it could be so hot. "Well, if this is you on a 'nice' day, I'd hate to see you pissed off."

Gilraen shrugged. That was pretty much every day. Right now, she was just sitting across the booth from the beautiful boy waiting for the purpose of being here at all to emerge. It was a good thing she didn't use boredom as an motivator to do things. If she had, she suspected she'd have her butt in a lot more grass fires because she was bored a LOT.

"Must be nice, all that money." She scooped up some pico de gallo aloofly. That was probably bitchy.

He glared across the table, "It doesn't buy off the Others. It can't protect me from them." Grabbing his glass he swallowed some water. "Money isn't everything, you know."

She knew.

"So what do you remember..." having decided their meals he stacked their menus. "...about being there, Arcadia?"

Her eyebrows rose above her yellow glasses. "I don't drink." That hadn't answered his question, they both knew, but he rolled with it pretty well; stayed patient. "But I got drunk once. At least I think I must have. Out in the woods, after a show. All by myself because liquor is a truth serum. Not because it makes anyone start proclaiming their inner truths abound, but because it makes you not care about the consequences of doing what you already wanted to do. It is called liquid courage for a reason, and that is because when you're drunk, you are ten feet tall, bullet-proof, willing to fight the world if that's what it takes just to be a little bit normal, just to share conversation with kindred spirits."

"What happened?"

"I woke up with a hang-over." She laughed once. "The point is, I'm not drunk enough to tell you about what I remember."

***
The chambord and vodka went down quite nicely. He was totally fucking this game of pool. "Don't do it."

He looked up. "What do you mean."

"I mean...you'll never make that shot. All you'll do is bounce the thirteen off the bumper of the side pocket and it won't go in." She nodded up across the table. "Put the ten in corner."

He circled the table and bent down to line up the shot and she frowned. "Didn't anyone ever teach you how to line up a shot??" Coming around the table she moved him where he ought to have been, used his cue to give him a short lesson in geometry and then backed off.

Whether or not that had been the right decision was arguable. In short order, he evened up the game until they were down to that soulless little black ball. He missed his shot though; she didn't. In fact, her aim was so perfect, she scratched the cue ball too.

"Oops." Pushing her stick back into the rack she smirked. "You win."

Looking at his lone ball on the table he frowned. "Doesn't really feel like winning though, does it?"

"No." she didn't turn around. "It's more like just...not losing."

***
Now she was drunk enough, not smashed just buzzed in the right way. He was too, so that made it more tolerable. He spoke in honey-mead tones that made her want to drink up every word of his memories. Listening was a cool moonlight spilt on a rippling pond.

"Consider yourself lucky." she finally managed, when he paused in the telling of his story.

"Why?"

"At least you have the satisfaction of knowing you escaped." her eyes bore holes through the windshield into some other time.

"Aren't you here with me?"

"I am." She nodded. "But not because I escaped. I was thrown out." she didn't elaborate on why, though.

"Does it really matter how it happened? At least you got out, right?"

The turn of her head followed her blazing eyes, "But I don't get the satisfaction of saying I won, only the knowledge that I just 'didn't lose'."

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