He’d planned for a night on the town with somebody he’d started to fall for, which wasn’t normal for him at all. The Mesmer didn’t do ‘love’ all that frequently, but he’d certainly thought… He sighed, realizing that he must have been wrong, because if he had been right, he wouldn’t have been standing alone on the side of the road. He was dressed in his best, leather-clad nonetheless. Kicking the edge of the street’s pavement with the toe of his combat boot, he muttered to himself, “Bloody emotions… Knew they ‘ad to be useless…”
The sound of a woman’s voice caught his attention, causing him to turn as her hand brushed over his shoulder. A slight sigh escaped his lips as he replied, “Ello.” He had to think about the question, dark brown eyes flickering through a series of moods before he finally said, “Yes, I’m al’ight… Just a bit lost, I s’ppose.” Shrugging his black-clad shoulders, he told her, “Got left ‘ere after a bit of an argument.”It only took a moment for her to set the Keurig machine and drop a k-cup in it. She came back out to the living room to see a huge, fluffy, seal-pointed cat stretch a long white paw over his head and try to pat Vex’s leg, and grinned. “That’s Helios,” she said. “He’s a Ragdoll throwback, though I’m damned if I know how. His mom was solid black and shorthaired.” She slipped back into the kitchen to grab the cup and brought it over to Vex.“You want to talk about it, or forget about it?”
Vex watched Summer as she stepped into the other room to make the coffee, chuckling as one of the cats started to bat at his leg. Glancing up as she re-entered the room he said, “Cats are strange creatures when it comes to that.” Picking the cat up carefully, he set him on his lap and began to pet him. Taking the coffee in his free hand, he absently continued to stroke the cat’s fur as he sipped at the hot drink. “Thank you,” he commented briefly, a small smile in his eyes. At her question, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “The short story of it: I was with this woman, finally got comfortable enough that I thought she really cared, and then, well… Tonight, we had planned to go out, dancing I think it was. She was driving, and instead of taking me to the club we’d planned on going to, she stopped out ‘ere and told me she didn’t want to ‘ear from me again. Then she left.” He concluded the story with a sour taste in his mouth, taking a long swig of coffee with the hopes of getting rid of it.
She looked at him for a long moment, then stepped over to open a secretary in the nearest set of bookshelves. Helios squirmed off Vex’s lap to lie beside him, turning his soft belly up and purring. A few clinks, and she held out a tumbler with a couple fingers’ worth of golden liquid in it. “Some people,” she said, holding it out, “are too stupid to know what’s in front of them.”