2019-05-20 - Makin' Bayl

It was a short phone call.

In fact, it was more of a text message ("Hey. Need bail. [Address].") And then a call to make sure she got the text and was, you know, actually coming.

When they finally release Jay, he looks okay. It doesn't seem like anyone got the better of him inside the big house. Charges are probably going to get dropped eventually. He's in a pair of black tapered bottom sweatpants, a white t-shirt with THANOS WAS RIGHT in disappearing black letters, and a slim black leather jacket; sneakers and sunglasses complete the look. The latter he's pulling on as he slides out the door and glances around for his savior.

There's not very far for him to look, because she's down by the curb, leaning against the rental car she picked up to bring her here, a pair of sunglasses on as she leans back, a cigarette dangling from her fingers. It's hard to say if she put thought into what she was wearing or not, because it's the stylishly casual that could literally have been ten bucks at the second hand store, or hundreds of dollars for that one t-shirt that has all the holes already torn in it. But there she is, ripped jeans, black boots, a heather gray thin t-shirt with holes in it beneath a bright red, slick leather jacket.

She doesn't look much like a savior. But there she is, and he has obviously just gotten released.

Jay spots her and smiles brightly, heading over, his backpack slung over one shoulder and his hands up, fingers making the V for VICTORY. Or viva Perón, depending. Safe to assume the former at the moment. He walks right up to her and grabs her face by the cheeks and just plants one on her. MUUUUAH. Right on the kisser.

"Ugh! Prison mouth!" Baylee should have seen it coming, but she didn't her free hand lifts up to his face to push him away, "No." One word warning, a finger held up in his face before she reaches into a pocket to pull out a pack of gum, then she hands it to him, "Chew twice, then you can kiss me like you mean it."

Jay cracks up, taking a step back and swaying on his back foot when she offers him the gum. He takes a piecde, pops it in his mouth, and then open-mouth chews it. Once. Twice. And then he even chews it a third time before he takes a step in closer and slides his hands around her waist, leaning his forehead against hers. "Bailin' Baylee to the rescue, huh?"

"Looks like." Baylee replies with a laugh, turning her head to take a final drag off her cigarette before she flicks it into the gutter, then she curls her arms around his neck. She, blessedly, blows the smoke away from his face, but laughably the one that was smoking is the one insisting on that gum use before she leans the rest of that very small distance to give him a kiss back.

Jay smiles. He's been known to smoke, too, so it's not like he can complain or anything. He licks at her lips and then grins against them, nipping at the lower one. "Thanks for coming. If I had to call my folks it was going to be a thang." He shakes his head softly, rubbing his nose against hers, indicating it would not be a good thang. Leaning back, he hooks his fingers over the wasitband of the frnt of her pants and looks her up and down, smiling. "You look good. P.I. life has you keeping up your cardio, huh?"

"Hasn't been much, actually, hasn't been any since moving out here...." Baylee counts her fingers, "A week ago?" She shrugs, glancing towards the building that he just exited, "Paperwork has to come through. But yeah, before leaving Chicago it was good." A hand reaches up to his cheek, pinching it before she grins, "So where am I taking you?"

Clearly she assumes that he'll be going home. Where ever that is.

Jay clears his throat and then says, "Aaayyyyy was thinking that maybe I could crash with you for a bit." He doesn't so much ask as he does... give her a coy smile that deepens his dimples a little bit. He holds a hand up, finger and thumb just so slightly apart. "Biiiiit of a thing back in Chicago and I had to ... you know." He makes walking with his fingers. "Go. Fast. Just until I get my feet under me." How long could that take a capable but honestly kind of emotionally lazy young man in his prime?

Forever. It could take forever.

"I live in a trailer in a shitty little town." Baylee points out, letting him make the decision on if he really wants to follow through with crashing at her place. For an undefined amount of time under the very vast umbrella of 'a bit'. "But you're more than welcome to crash at my place."

"You live in a tiny, cozy place where your ass it at arm's length in a shitty little town nobody's going to be looking for me at?" He reaches down and gives her ass a sharp slap. "Sold! Let's go."

"That bad, huh?" He's agreeing to sleeping in a trailer. It's got to be terrible for him to do that. She glances again towards the jail, then pushes herself away from the side of the car so that she can move around towards the drivers side. "Gray Harbor is the shitty little town....and it is weird. Seriously, there are weird things there." It's a far more ominous warning before the locks pop up and she slides herself into the rental.

"Yeah. Don't worry about it. Weird isn't something I'm worried about." Jay wanders around the car and then tosses his bag into the back seat, sliding into shotgun. He closes the door and rolls the window down, putting his sunglasses back on and slipping his elbow up on the window. "Let's roll, Bay." Her makes a gun-cock gesture with the hand at the window and flashes her a smile.

There is a whole lot of doubt for that, but Baylee starts the car and pulls away from the curb to start the trek back towards home. Or what is currently home. Silence isn't her style, so as soon as they are moving she's got something on the radio. "So what're your plans for getting your feet under you?"

"No idea. But I have some cash squirrled away, so I'll pay you back for the bail," he says. "After that, we'll see. Probably going to figure out where I can head. I don't really want to go back home and I can't go back to Chicago." He shrugs. "I'll figure something out. I always do." That sort of statement inspires tons of confidence, right?

So very much confidence. "Don't worry about paying me back...I just used the money daddy puts into my account every month." Which she rarely touches. Sometimes. Most of the time she doesn't bother. "I'm sure that you'll figure something out though, Jay. You do, always, manage." So much confidence. Well, a little. She fully believes he does figure something out.

That's because he does figure things out. It's less a problem of him managing and more a problem of who he drags down with him when he inevitably puts whatever plan he comes up with in motion. He reaches over and tweaks her cheek. "Oh, daddy," he says, mimicking her accent and--somewhat--her pitch and tone, "I went against everything you ever wanted me to do and made you look a fool in the eyes of society at large because I knew you were sappy and arrogant enough to continue to give me money well into adulthood just because you feel guilty about pumping me into mom. Thanks, daddy." Yeah. Jay's filter isn't broken, he hocked it for rims way the fuck back in the Paleolithic.

"You should send him a thank you note." Baylee points out, her hand flapping a bit to ward off any further insults to her cheek. Not her dignity. She doesn't actually have that any more, really. "You can say....Thank you rich white man for your guilt and general whatever as reasons..." Then she pauses, laughing, "Whatever, Jay." Clever as he is she is not. "So there is this diner there, in Gray Harbor.....with a bear theme. It is crazy."

"A bear theme, you say, at a diner, no less?" Jay looks genuinely interested behind the mocking tone. And then he says, "This isn't some Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me shit you're dragging me into it, is it?" As if she were the one strong-arming him into staying with her.

"I haven't seen any dead bodies yet. But..." Baylee trails off after a moment, slanting a look towards him before she shakes her head, "There was this very odd experience the other day when Aidan and I decided to go on a boat tour of the harbor. So, this may very well be Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me shit. I'm not discounting it yet."

"Well, shit," Jay says with a blink she can't see on account of the sunglasses. "I mean the Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me shit gives me pause, but now there's an Aidan, too. I'm kind of worried I'll get jealous on top of drafted into a surreal world of murder, parallel universes and small town Bizarramericana."

"I'm sure that you are fully capable of tamping down your potential jealousy, love." Baylee rolls her eyes a moment, because talking about that is way less of a complication than surreal murder worlds. "I'll introduce you to Aidan, though. He lives behind me in the trailer park, and is a magician. Of the street magician variety." She's absolutely certain they will get along. "But the boat tour. There was acid shitting birds, a beach side battle with these silly basketball players, and some abomination wielding a sequin wearing red head." She glances over at him at that, her expression deadly serious, "I'm not losing my mind, I promise."

"I don't believe you," Jay states absolutely seriously, and then follows up with an equally serious, "but I'm not sure I want to miss what your undoubtedly decadent and surreal descent towards madness is like, so I'm sticking by you." He blows her a kiss with a smile.

"I'll make you a promise." Baylee says after a few minutes of driving, which is only a few minutes closer to the hell she's obviously dragging him into. "I'll put you in my will along side a few other choice people, so if I truly go mad, the day I leap off a bridge thinking that I'll fly you'll win big."

Jay considers this and then shrugs. "Works for me. I mean, you're either going batshit and I'm gonna be rich," again, "or this is going to be super duper awkward and weird, which--sure, whatever!" He pats himself down and finds a cigarette, popping it into his mouth and lighting it. "You want one?"

"What could possibly be awkward?" Baylee wonders, holding out a hand for a split second before she just glances over and takes the cigarette from his mouth instead, "But the joke will be on you, I'm leaving you the shoe collection."

"I've seen your shoe collection and unless you purged recently, I'll still be fucking rich," Jay points out with a laugh. He pulls out another cigarette and lights that one, too. It's a testament to his restraint that he isn't bugging her physically--but then, she's driving and he's not wearing his seatbelt.

The window is rolled down slightly so that the smoke doesn't just endlessly build up in the car, "The bedroom is just for my shoes." Which means she might be sleeping on the couch so that her shoes have room to be taken care of properly. Or she's kidding. "So what are you dreading as being awkward?" She glances at him, the corner of her mouth pulling upwards, "Pretty sure no one's going to pull a gun on you, if you're worried about that."

"Things are always awkward." He shrugs. "New town. You already know people. Now I'm the dude crashing at your place. It'll be awkward. I mean," Jay clarifies, "it'll be awkward for some of them. You and me, I'm not worried about."

"I've met exactly like..." Baylee has to think about it, like she might be literally counting all the people that she's met, the cigarette lifted up to her mouth for a drag before she shifts it to her hand by the window so she can carelessly ash in the general direction of the crack in it. "Maybe less than ten people. I don't think there will be any awkwardness. Maybe. Whatever, who cares? It'll be fine." She glances over at him, then back towards his bag in the back, "That all you have?"

"With me, yeah. I have a stash a few hours away, but I'll go get it later. Or we can. Whatever, depends if you're busy or not. Gonna need to go to a bigger city near by to jack a car at some point though." Because of course.

There is a very brief pause before she wonders, "Why do you need to steal a car?"

"Because I don't have one," Jay says matter of factly. Stealing cars is, actually, one of his 'things'. It's not a surprise.

"Right." Baylee should just learn better than to ask questions like that. "Where is the rest of your stuff? Might as well go get it now."

"You sure?" He shrugs. "Take a left here and let me pull up Google maps." He digs his phone out, cigarette between his lips. "It almost feels like you wanna spend time with me," he says with a grin.

"Or it saves me from having to rent another car to cart you out to your stuff." Baylee counters as she takes the left with zero actual regard for things like turn signals or braking. She is potentially a slightly better driver than the last time he let her drive, but she's still shit at it overall. "Besides, if you're suddenly moving in with me we'll be spending all the time together, unless I'm at my other boyfriend's place. Or the other one....or that fifth one." She kids. Maybe.

"See? I knew it." He holds up his phone. "HEY SIRI. Play JEALOUSY by the STEREOPHONICS."

"You'll be number six. Congratulations." Baylee reaches over to grab for his phone, trying to turn off the song, "Where are we going before I just stop feeling generous and we go back to Twin Peaks."

JEALOUSYYYYYYYY MY DEEEEEVIL.

"I got the address right here. I'll be your navigator, beebee, relax."

To fight the song Baylee turns on something annoying on the radio....namely the radio. Who listens to the radio?

"So what happened in Chicago?" The question was inevitable.

Eventually, Jay turns the song off and ignores the question for a bit. He smokes, plays wind-hand out the window, wets his lips.

"Before or after your crazy ex-bossfriend tried to kill me for sleeping with you?"

However long it takes him to answer is fine with her, as long as he keeps her going the right direction to where he has stashed his stuff. While he avoids the question and smokes, she drives and smokes, but does not play wind-hand out the window. When he finally gets around to getting to the answer Baylee glances at him briefly, "Is they're all connected start from before, if not, after is fine."

"Well," Jay says with a slow shrug, "not directly. But it kind of all went downhill from there. You left, I tried to go back to my life, dude came at me with a gun..." There's a pause there, and then he just keeps going, "...and then I got into some trouble with a dirty cop and..." He winds a finger of his free hand a bit. "And after that, and a few drug dealers with bad tempers, I decided it was time to leave the windy city."

"Dirty cops?" Baylee glances at him again, her frown a little more serious before she shakes her head, "Jay...you know better than that. Not without backing.." Not the drug dealers with bad tempers, those happen. Dirty cops are so much more of a problem in her world. "I doubt he came at you with a gun because I left. He would have done that even if I hadn't taken off."

"Oh, no, he came at me with a gun because you slept with me. I mean, whatever, it's not your fault. Although if you're going to fuck me while you're with someone, pick a less psychotic asshole to cheat on next time, please, because guns are dangerous." Jay snorts, blowing smoke out the window. "And the dirty cop was not my idea. I just didn't have an out for a thing and..." He shrugs. "You know how it goes, sometimes you want the lesser of two evils but you end up getting Cthulhu."

"I am not with anyone psychotic enough to come at you with a gun." She makes no promises on anything else, though. Baylee is quiet after that statement for a moment, focusing on the driving before she pulls over, "You want to drive, and you can tell me all about what this thing is that you just had to go to a dirty cop for."

"I want to drive?" He looks at her with a laugh. "It was just a gang thing. I got paid for a job and they didn't tell me everything and it all went kind of side-ways." He shrugs and gets out of the car, switching with her and putting the car into gear. "It's not complicated it's just dangerous, so I left."

"I know, I know. Silly of me to question if you want to drive or not." Baylee replies as she settles into the passenger seat, buckling herself in. "Is there a difference between things being complicated and things being dangerous."

"Is there a diff... are you kidding me right now?" Jay eyes her. "If things are complicated, they're hard to figure out. navigating a bitchy mother-in-law? Complicated. Explaining to your kids why the country is in the state it is? Complicated. Trying to assure your racist grandpa that the Mexicans aren´t going to steal his state government job because for sure it's going to be given to some call center in India? Complicated. None of those are dangerous, though. Someone wants to shoot you dead? Dangerous, but pretty straight forward."

"So they are wanting to kill you now?" Baylee wonders as she turns the radio off as the station drops, letting the silence dominate.

"I mean, probably not, but you never know. Coke head corrupt cops are kind of..." He makes a little coo-coo motion with his hand next to his head, cig between his fingers. "I mean, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me might be a good place to lay low, you think?"

Baylee laughs at that, then she shrugs her shoulders, "Last place anyone would be looking for you at the very least." She starts to lean her seat back, getting comfortable, "Wake me up when we get there..." She doesn't sound or look tired, despite the threat of going to sleep while he does all the work of driving. "How many cops and are they connected to anyone?"

"Just the one, as far as I know. But he's VICE, so you know. In any case, I doubt that he's looking for me anywhere outside of Chicago, so no big deal." Jay flexes his ankle and then looks at the car's dashboard. He finds the cruise control actuator and flicks it when he has the speed he wants, settling in. "So why did you move to this place?"

Notice that she's not actually checking what that speed is. She knows better. Instead she covers her face with her arm, "It was just as far from Chicago as I could get without going back to New York or to the south....it's too hot down there."

"I don't know, man, you could do worse than the south. Get you in a tied-off shirt, pair o'Daisy Dukes, pigtails..." He glances over at her and 'rowrs' with a snicker.

"Nope. Not going to be happening, baby....even I've got taste. Pigtails are right out." Baylee shakes her head with a laugh, peering over at him, "You might be bored, but there is a fancy apartment building. I met the owner."

"Ooh, you met the owner," Jay says with a side-glance. "Is that code for you slept with the owner? Or is it code for you might sleep with the owner later if it means you get a sweet suite?" Their relationship could not be more functional, right?

"I met the owner. I might have convinced him that he should drive me down to LA for a long weekend." Baylee replies with a laugh, "But I did not, and do not, plan to sleep with the owner for a sweet suite. I'd only do it if I got the penthouse....or because he's kind of hot."

"And there it is: money is attracted to money." Jay shakes his head, tsking softly. "Ain't that just the way."

"Actually." Baylee lifts her hand up, holding a finger towards him, "Even if he was poor he'd still be hot. And I could afford to get a sweet suite there on my own with no need to sleep with the owner for a break on the rent. And....yet I'm still staying in a busted as trailer. Also sleeping with a trailer park guy. So no, your assertion doesn't hold water." She then drops her hand, "But you should get an apartment there so I can come over."

"I knew you were sleeping with trailer park guy," Jay says with a laugh. "'But I've only been here a weeeek' my ass. A week is so much more than enough for you. Also," he says, "I don't have money for an apartment in that place."

"Sure you do." Baylee actually starts to push herself up a bit, "You've always got money...where did your money go?"

"It's not that I don't have money for like a month. It's that I don't have money to keep it up. I would need to make more scratch and that isn't necessarily easy. We're in a Trump economy, you know. America is just the newest business to collapse under our Commander-in-Cheetoh." Jay snorts. "You trying to get me out of your trailer before I even dirtied your couch? Gasp."

"You always have money, Jay. This is new." And weird. Baylee looks skeptical about this entire thing, but then she shakes her head, her arm resting back on her eyes. "No, you can sleep with me however long you want."

She probably means sleep on her couch.

"I don't always have money, I--well, okay, yeah, but never exorbitant amounts. Because then my family would come looking." He shakes his head. No one wants to run into the Sun family on a rampage. Triad are fucking crazy.

"But you always have money." Baylee doesn't let that drop. Instead she just shakes her head. "But fine, you're skint. You're welcome to mooch off me for a while."

"Score. You want waffles?"