2020-05-19 - As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

Itzhak strides out of the flashing, jangling, overwhelming casino to the peace and quiet of a balcony over the water. There he pulls out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, lights one up like he needs it bad. The flame of the lighter glows briefly in the cool spring dark. He exhales smoke over the murmuring ocean, props his forearms against the balcony, and lets his curly dark head drop.

It could be a coincidence. Harper could have headed outside almost exactly when Itzhak did for reasons of her own. Start with the fish. There is a long line of possibilities.

Or it could be that Harper followed Itzhak out of the casino. Perhaps she saw the wild in his eyes from across the frenetic space. Geoff had something to attend to and she was playing idle hands of blackjack, pretending the fishy smell wasn't disturbing.

So it is that a scant thirty seconds after Itzhak escapes the cacophony that is a casino on opening night, Harper makes her way into the night as well. Past the place where visitors are ferried from across the water. Past the taxi station and several limousines. Over by the well-landscaped greenery in the full out breeze of the late May evening. Her handbag hangs from one shoulder to bump against her hip as she makes her way over toward the man with a click of heels and a searching behind her brown eyes.

Perhaps it's the manner in which he fled. Perhaps it's the way Harper responds to the obvious disquiet. Either way, she doesn't speak when she reaches him. She stops about an arm's length away from him at ninety degrees to his positioning at the railing and looks up at the moon, rubbing her hands lightly along the opposite arms. "Beautiful moon tonight."

It's not so much a niggling at his mind as a gentle but powerful wave that flows over the man: Harper seeking with quiet fury for what it is that has tweaked him, as if she could pull the thorn out of the lion's paw and wash it far, far away.

Itzhak picks up his head, looking over his shoulder at Harper. His eyebrows tilt up, surprised and curious to see her. "Yeah. It is." He takes a drag off the cigarette, making the cherry bob, glowing. His eyes, mostly gray in the dark with little light to show their other colors, travel down her. "That's a fuckin' fantastic dress."

Then there's the touch of her mind and he blinks, surprised at that too. Harper is just surprising the heck out of him tonight! But he reaches out to her, his mind jangled and spiny, fractal iterations tangled up like yarn. One thing is clear: the environment of the casino disordered his senses and his rationality. Too much. Too much too much too much.

It's not so much a smile from Harper as a softened expression. Unapologetic interest with the faintest amount of empathy in the mix. For her, the ability is tangled up with the depth of her desire to seek out answers. She lingers, tasting the complex flavor of Itzhak's mind: the moment is too hard to resist. She has an almost feline feel along that cord of connection. Inquisitive. Fascinated.

Despite the crash and foam of her tide, however, it is still somehow gentle. And, like a wave, the feel of her recedes, ebbs with the pull of the moon that she commented upon. She leaves the taste of inquiry on the back of the tongue, a sip of champagne that's left her slightly swaying, herself, the lightweight.

The words that follow his agreement startle her, and that startlement begats a slow smile. "Distraught yet still so very charming. I'll bet the charisma flows even when you snore, Rosy." Not to presume! Yet she does presume with her affectionate nickname. The moonlight catches in her brown eyes as she shakes her head slowly, once. "Thank you. At the risk of a compliment in return sounding forced rather than genuine, you are looking quite dapper tonight, yourself." Dapper? Do people even still use that word?

"I swear the night is something more than we know," she muses, looking back from Itzhak to the moon, speculative and intoxicated, a curious combination. "Almost sentient, itself." No, she's not going to come at his overtaxed mind with more to tighten those screws.

Itzhak's mind is difficult to describe. Fourth-dimensional. Something like a thousand-petaled origami lotus from the outside. From the inside, as he touches Harper, brings her in, something like the floor of a redwood forest, rich with ferns, where the ferns are spiral fractal arms of thought processes. Instead of earth, there's ocean, a vast infinity of interlocking Penrose tiles. He's not too powerful in the mental touch, riding along at middlin' to fair, but the complexity of his mind is ...well, it's certainly a thing.

He smirks, when she counter-compliments him, then laughs quietly. "Please. I don't got no charisma. And I never snore." With that nose? One wonders. He glances down at himself, and his suit, and his tie. His tie bar has a little silver violin on it. "Heh. Thanks." He doesn't even argue that he isn't distraught, because he is.

When she talks of the night, he just listens, smokes a little more. "Yeah? Lotta songs about the night."

And what a spectacular fecundity on the ancient forest floor cum ocean. The luminous green of ferns of thought, spinning and merging, beguiles the librarian even as she draws back from it. She wasn't invited in, after all. She leaves a sand dollar like a token and is gone from that magic place and the familiar ocean beneath.

Catching her breath as she breaks free, she lowers her gaze back to Itzhak and his glowing cigarette. "Oh no, Rosy," she chides, her tone low and gentle, "I think we've had this conversation, but I'll remind you. You do not get the luxury of deciding how you are perceived. Things just don't work that way." Her smile curves to something playful. Perhaps it's not so bad as she initially perceived, not like shards of glass ripping through the psyche. Perhaps she simply wanted there to be a sympatico somewhere in the midst of all that pain. Her gaze follows his, taking inventory of the pieces of his wardrobe along with his stance, the line across his shoulders, the tiny lines at the corners of his eyes, how ready that smile truly is.

The night, then. The darkness illuminated by enigmatic moonlight. "Tell me a favorite." A favorite song about the night. Because shifting thought to music can only help.

Itzhak rolls his eyes, but the hint of a smile is still lingering around his mouth. His fractal ferns unscroll, releasing Harper, letting her go, although he couldn't keep her if he tried. But he doesn't try. Just unwinds from her as delicately as if she was a ladybug taking flight from the tip of his finger. He seems grateful enough to curl back in on himself, however.

Yeah, his stance is tense, his shoulders tight under the beautifully cut slim-fit jacket. (The whole suit is slim cut, to flatter that long angular form.) There's crow's-feet crinkled at the corners of his eyes. He's got a lot of lines on his face, the look of someone who's been hard-worn by life.

"A favorite?" He drops his gaze to consider the burning cherry of the cigarette. Then, quiet, his voice rough yet savory and on-key, he sings.

Take me now, baby, here as I am
Hold me close, try and understand
Desire is hunger, is the fire I breathe
Love is a banquet on which we feed...

All of the coiled tension. It's there to read in the way the man holds himself in the hush of the night. When he sings, Harper closes her eyes and sways toward him without moving her feet. A smile grazes her lips as she listens, and she might even sing the first bit of the chorus before trailing off, not horribly off key, but certainly not with the perfect pitch of the man who sang.

Harper opens her eyes and regards Itzhak with a certain companionable silence. She doesn't look at all awkward or uncertain in the throes of it. "Be careful what you sing under this moon, my friend." As if tonight were different than other nights? "I think some words -- under the right circumstances, spoken by the right person, at the right time -- can shift reality." It is nigh impossible to tell if Harper is playing now or absolutely serious.

Another person would ask how he's doing now. Do a wellness check. Get some verbal feedback. But not Harper. "In addition, I'll warn you to be careful, or I'll request another. Then another. Like potato chips or kisses."

Itzhak may be a mechanic with calloused hands and a New York Jewish accent that could strip paint, but obviously, music is what fuels his cranky soul. Not projecting, keeping his voice low, he sings 'Because the Night,' eyes mostly closed. And he really does smile when Harper joins in the chorus.

Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to us...

He doesn't smoke while he sings, and by the time he's wend his way through the classic, his cigarette's ash. He drops it, crushes it under his boot, squints at Harper. "This moon? What's so great about it?" He looks up at it, as if he can figure it out. And when she warns him to be careful, he looks back at her, eyebrows tipped up in that funny way. "Songs are like that," he says, one-sided smile tugging his mobile mouth. "Always want more."

Harper sinks into the a capella rendition of the song. A private concert for her, the moon, and the off-duty chauffeurs a short walk away. Itzhak squints and Harper sways back to her center. "You don't see it? Perhaps it's just me. Tonight it looks like a pearl on a velvet sea. Sometimes when I look at it just right, or when I speak some Neruda under my breath, I swear it turns its attention to me as if it were asking permission to play with my story." She glances back up to the sky. "I've never entirely decided if it is a beneficent narrator or an antagonist bent on creative destruction." She smiles upward as if to give the moon a don't-think-I-don't-see-what-you're-doing sort of look. "Either way, it's a long game."

Her chin drops and her gaze returns to Itzhak and his ashy cigarette. Songs are like that, he says. "Sometimes the appetite is much stronger, though, depending on the collision of circumstances." She arches a brow, faintly punctuating the statement.

"Yeah?" Itzhak considers the moon, lifting his head. He flicks Harper a quick sideways glance when she says Neruda, but then, back at the moon. "It does look like that. You see a bunch of stuff I don't see, though. I look at the moon, I think ...I dunno. About how far away it is. About how we put people there. By cramming 'em in a tin can and mounting it on the world's biggest rocket." There's a smile. Rockets, space, aw yeah. Then he laughs as if embarrassed, drops his head again. "I ain't no poet, to see pearls and velvet and whatevah."

To her last statement, about appetites, he merely quirks those expressive eyebrows at her, says cautiously, "True..." like expecting her to spring a rhetorical trap on him that he doesn't know is there.

Yeah? Harper nods once, though Itzhak isn't looking at her when he asks. Harper is quiescent, gentle company. Now and then there are glimpses of something else, but nothing that lingers long enough to really challenge preconceived impressions. "Oh, Rosy. I'm utterly full of shit," Harper finally answers affably. "I see stories everywhere. But that doesn't make them true." She considers the musician with so many stories of his own. "Your version is no less fascinating. Perhaps, in some ways more so. Because it's yours." Again she is contrary. "You are a poet. You just speak your secrets in an entirely different language." Harper won't stand for any argument on this matter any more than she would tolerate his judgment of his own charisma. It's only a glimpse at the iceberg of her stubborn nature.

Oh, those eyebrows! Harper watches the cautious agreement and the man as the time spans out. Abruptly she laughs, a quiet, warm sound in the darkness, just far enough from the casino's front entrance not to be invaded by its garish glow. "Being the man you are with the talent you possess, I can imagine you don't notice the effect you have. You've become accustomed to it, I think. Like the smell of the ocean to someone who lives near it. Or the sound of the wind in the trees and the sun-warm scent of manzanita high on a mountain."

"Ehhh, you say fulla shit, I say you see things most people don't." Itzhak hikes his eyebrows at Harper, like hah, got you there. But when she says that he's fascinating, and a poet himself to boot, he flushes suddenly and looks away. "You see a whole hell of a lot of things about me that most people would tell you you're fulla shit for," he murmurs, but it's not a rebuttal. It's a kind of admittance. And he actually laughs, kind of disbelieving, when she tells him that last part. "I--okay I really dunno about that. I'm just a goddamn troublemaker who happens to be good at violin."

Harper tips her brows upward at the words. He's learning the game. Or he's figuring out what parts of her aren't a game at all. There's no way to tell and, if her champagne-warmed eyes are any measure, she doesn't mind that fact at all. When he looks away and blushes, the judges might just have ruled her a point for the verbal dance. "I'd very much like to speak with these ...people. That or choose an audience who will more appreciate your nuances, Rosy."

She takes two steps, her heels tapping on the balcony as she moves to face Itzhak between where he stands and the balcony's railing, rather than standing to his right. "Who am I to tell you what you ought to be?" She unfolds her arms only to lift a hand to tuck behind her ear a strand of her dark hair that the wind is teasing against the side of her face. "Is the world quieting yet? Can you breathe more easily?" She's been more than careful about not touching the man on this occasion. Her words are quiet.

Itzhak is tall; he straightens up when Harper comes towards him. The guy is all limbs, like a newborn fawn, but unlike the fawn, he moves with purpose. Menace perhaps, even, leashed in that lanky body. He regards her, wary, not sure what she wants... but then, when she asks him, he breathes out slow, and smiles.

"Yeah. You're pretty sufficiently distracting. With ya mind like a labyrinth." His hands turn up, over, fingers flicking in a shrug performed with them alone. "Thanks. Appreciate it."

It's true. Even in her heels, Harper is still three inches shy of the lanky musician's height. But for her purposes tonight, it is a non-issue. She watches him straighten to his full height, exhale that slow breath, and ... there it is: his smile.

"It's a service I provide: being distracting. Think of it as a sleight of hand, but on a grander scale." Her brown eyes dance. "It was my pleasure. Now tell me: is your ride inside? Can I fetch someone for you?"

"You're pretty fuckin' good at it." Itzhak does honestly sound impressed. That Harper was watching him carefully, he seems to either accept, or not notice. He glances back to the casino, with its interior that he just can't tolerate. "He's still inside. He'll come out when he's ready." Lower, sharing a joke, he tells her, "He hates these things, so it won't be long. Don't worry about me. I'm okay."

With the significant compliment, Harper just settles to watch whether the message in the man's eyes is the same as the words. Something she sees there satisfies her, but there is no brush off, no denial requiring reassurance, or any other game. She dips her chin just so. "Itzhak," she begins. Has she ever called him by his first name? There's something solemn to the words. "Some people are worth time and quiet tales." He would be one of the 'some'. "And some people --" She finally warms that smile again. "-- make the undertaking a pleasure." Yep. That 'some' too. "Would you like to walk down to the water with me while you wait?" Isn't anyone waiting for her? If there is, she doesn't seem to be concerned about it or in any sort of rush.

Itzhak turns his head at the sound of his first name. If she has called him by it before, he doesn't remember. It's a sharp-sounding word with edges and spiny consonants. Very Jewish, and not just Jewish but old-country Jewish, a name that Americans don't often give their children. Isaac is the much more common version. Itzhak, pronounced something like yit-ZOK, sounds like it's right out of a Polish ghetto in the 1930s.

"Hey, you can pronounce my name," he says, teasing, also in a solemn way. "Usually people call me Rosie because they don't wanna fuck it up." He considers her and her offer, but he looks uncertain again, eyebrows telegraphing just about every damn thing he feels. "Sure. You're not sick of me?" Even though she just said that she was finding his company a pleasure. Like he can't quite believe it.

That she did: pronounce his name correctly. She's been paying attention, has Harper. It might be a distinctive feature of her otherwise easy to pigeon-hole personality. The way she said it, her eyes full of secrets after, suggests she might hold the name in some esteem beyond the 'Rosy' she's been using.

"Do you absolutely hate 'Rosy'? Despite all stories to the contrary, I can be taught. I'd be happy to use your more familiar name if that's your preference." Usually they call him Rosie because ... Harper laughs at that, a warm, pleasant roll of sound that teases the night around the two of them. A nearby chauffeur shoots the duo a glance then returns to fiddling with his phone while leaning against the side of the limo. "I don't usually worry about fucking it up. It will be what it will be. Mistakes make things interesting, I tend to find. Stories without conflict aren't really stories at all, now, are they?"

Harper considers Itzhak's uncertain demeanor. "If I was sick of you, Itzhak, I would have made my excuses some time ago. I don't make idle offers. However..." She looks pointedly at the tall musician. "If this is some passive attempt to have some privacy, you'll have to back that truck right up. I don't do passive. And I find it particularly unpleasant to try to translate." The stern melts away as if it was never there. "I asked you if you'd like a walk to the waterfront because it looks as though you have some time to fill, and, between the moonlight and the company, I'm quite sure I'd enjoy it. I'd rather return to the festivities with a clearer head, anyway."

Raucous laughter and the tune of a party in full swing accompany the front doors of the casino swinging open. Then the cacophony dims, and is replaced by voices pitched low in quiet discourse. One of them chuckles, lights up a cigarette; the other takes his leave, It's a'right, I'll walk, and he's gone across the bridge, on foot.

The one that remains, that dark-eyed cop with the brutish mien. He scans the water, the valet holding up the limo over there while he kills time. And then the girl in the chignon and crushed velvet, figure skimming dress, accompanying his very own tall, lean drink of fiddler. The cigarette makes its way to his mouth, and is held there for the time it takes to peruse them both thoughtfully. Then a column of smoke follows close in the wake of its removal, and he pushes off to prowl in closer.

Is he recognisable, even, in the dark suit, pinstriped vest, and tie? "Ahí estás," he rumbles low to Itzhak as he approaches. "Listo para ir?"

"Nah, if I wanted privacy I'd just tell ya to fuck off." Itzhak waves that away. "I can't translate shit either. You don't gotta worry that I'll hint at you. I don't do hints." He relaxes a little more at the sound of Harper's laughter, glances at the chauffeur in return, and that's not a polite look. That's a 'mind your business, pal' look. "C'mon," he says to Harper, just in time for Ruiz to emerge from the chaos. "...There he is." Here's the man he told Harper he was waiting for. "Hi. I don't know what that means." He grins lopsided at him.

The librarian's inclusive, warm laughter rises and then is stolen away by the ocean breeze. "That's much better," she agrees. "And what I expected." As for hints? That's something different. But Harper keeps her own counsel on that matter. The walk Harper was hoping for begins and ends all in the same breath. Her gaze follows the lanky musician's to the approaching figure in the darkness. "There he is indeed," she agrees, sliding her hands back to clasp behind herself. "Here to steal my good company." The complaint is good-natured. "Good evening, Javier."

Itzhak's irascible boyfriend need not be a empath to know that the pair had something planned. Something he's blundered into, clod-footed as is his wont, with the apparent intent to steal her good company, indeed. "Good evening, Miss Price," is returned in that low, even keel of his. And he opts tonight for the honorific, it seems, instead of the familiar. One hand pushed into his pants pocket, the other - the inked one - occupied with his cigarette, de la Vega sidles in close to the taller musician. Angled in on the opposite side from Harper, so that they bracket him, and leans in to intimate a lingering kiss to the crook of his jaw. "Stay as long as you like," he murmurs. "I'm not in a rush." And then a wink for Harper that doesn't bring so much as a smile to his staid mien, and he prowls off a short way with the intent to give them their privacy.

Itzhak watches Ruiz sidle in at him, a funny little smile on his long face. Then the other man kisses his smooth-shaven jaw and he shivers, blushing vividly. Right in front of the librarian, oy vey! He clears his throat and hikes his eyebrows at Ruiz, holding a calloused inked hand of his own out to him. "Hey, hey don't run off, yeah? Was just gonna go for a walk with Harper here. It's a gorgeous night, and I could use it after that mishegoss in there."

They're back to formal names? Good evening. "Isn't it?" she agrees. "We were just enjoying the moon, despite its ill intentions." She adds after a pause with all the formality she can muster, "Captain de la Vega." The kiss? Harper watches that intimate moment with no more apology than she showed at the birthday bash. Itzhak's reaction curves the faintest of lingering smiles to her lips. Ruiz isn't in a rush. Harper flickers a wordless query of some sort between the men with a slight uptipping of brows. It's their center to find. "So much mishegoss," Harper agrees, carefully echoing the way Itzhak says the word. "And presumptuous fish, too."

Mention of the moon has Javier's gaze tipping that way. She's never a brazen thing, the moon, on a pacific northwest night. Often half shrouded in hoary stratocumulus, her details difficult to make out behind a haze of light pollution and incipient rain. But tonight?

"Ella es hermosa," he's forced to admit, on the heels of a drag off his cigarette. And a chuckle, warm, close in its wake when mishegoss is mentioned. "I'll wait right here." He nods toward the railing. "Not going to leave without you." He reaches across the thing to ash his cigarette out over the water, then curves a quick smile to the pair. "Go on."