John Barrister

(missed some posts: JB runs across thaney and kendra in a park.)

[Garret Pembroke] "Alright. Take care Chris." He flips the phone shut and shoves it into his pocket as he nears the motel across the street. Keys jingle softly as he pulls them from his pocket. His pace quickens, and his breathing comes in short blasts. Don't lose it Garret. Don't you fucking lose it. He fights to get the key into the lock on the motel room door, his jaw tight as he grits his teeth.

Another jolt of lightning and a blast of thunder sound, and he flinches where he stands. With a shakey breath he takes a moment and slides the key into the lock and turns. She'll know if you have an attack. And she'll know why too... so don't you fucking lose it. The door slams behind him, and he shuts out the night.

[Thaney] "Do you mind, J.B.? I know -- well, I think I know -- that it's a little bit out of your way." Kendra nudges Thaney in the ribs, and needless to say the cant of the gray eyed girl's head is inquisitive. "Don't want your puppy to go insane."

[J.B.] "Actually, my truck's -- " at home, he was going to say, but then there'd be more back and forth about who was going to get a ride and who wasn't. "Well, wait here," he says instead. His own damn fault for offering, anyway. "I'll be back in a few minutes."

With some effort, he pulls the overaffectionate Bruin off Kendra and urges the big, floppy-jowled hound into a trot. Man and dog jog off together, disappearing around the bend surprisingly quickly. Meanwhile, it's begun to rain in earnest.

[Kendra Peterman] The rain started to pour, and Kendra watched the older man who had about as much body hair as she had when she was slipping between Glabro and Crinos jog away with his dog. She put her hands on her hips as she watched them. She really liked that dog. But then, she really liked almost every big dog she encountered. Especially the floppy, drooly ones that could tear a man to bits if he put his mind to it. Her childhood dog was a Rottweiler-St. Bernard mix, after all.

Her hair and head grew wet, the shoulders to her sweatshirt, her bared upper chest grew slick with water, but she didn't care. It wasn't that cold out. She just watched the man leave, and said nothing. Waited for Thaney to grow curious and ask her what she wanted to talk about. Answering a question was easier than starting a conversation on your own, after all.

[J.B.] A few minutes turns out to be nearly twenty, in which time, unless they sought shelter, Kendra and Princess end up thoroughly drenched. It may be some consolation that when John reappears -- Bruin back in his backyard doghouse -- he's just as drenched, his hair plastered to his skull, his coat, which had for a while exhibited that semi-water resistance that's a trademark of all good wool coats, now sodden.

He does, however, now have an umbrella. This he offers the girls. Old habits die hard, and despite their ability to transform into towering beasts of doom, his folks instilled in him some rudiment of chivalry.

"Sorry it took so long," he apologizes. "It was a bit of a jog back and forth. I'm parked just around the corner here."

[Kendra Peterman] Kendra and Princess had withstood the downpour for a while, but sought out cover, not because they were cold, but because they were tired of blinking rainwater out of their eyes, tired of talking over the drum of raindrops on their skulls while they had their conversation. So John would find them under a small covered section of picnic tables not too far off from where the fountain was, within sight of it at least, and easy to find since everyone else had vaccated the park.

John showed up offering the umbrella, and the Fianna Girls accepted with a grin and a nod. Princess was quiet, pensive, thinking hard about whatever Kendra and she had talked about in John's absence. Kendra, however, was smiling a little too brightly, perhaps to make up for Princess's solemn silence, and just as chatty as ever. Much more cheerful than the first night she and John had met.

"Don' apologize, fella. We's thankful yer offerin' th'ride at all. I mean, shit, I could'a jus' walked home 'long with you 'n Bruin, now that I think of it." She shrugged her shoulders, one hand in her soaking wet sweater pocket, the other hand holding the umbrella over her and Princess's heads as they walked next to John. "Ah well."

[J.B.] For that, John only has silence and a wry glance to give. Both of them knew full well that asking for a ride had been a way to extend her time with Princess -- in order to talk about whatever it was teenaged Garou talked about on a rainy night. Really, all they had to do was ask and Barrister would've left them to their own conversation, but they didn't know that. To point it now seemed a little too combatative. Given the circumstances of his previous (and first) meeting with Kendra, Barrister figured he might as well let the engines cool a bit.

So he says nothing of it. He puts his hands in his pockets and slogs on. In the lamplight, his face is wet, his cheeks rough and the rest of it slick. There are streaks of water running steadily down his neck, but he doesn't mind. Despite his earlier wish to get in out of the rain, there's a certain point after which a man didn't care anymore. He bears the weather without complaint, and without much care.

His truck, as it turns out, is a behemoth of a late-model chevy. There are some tools littered in the back: a closed toolchest, a dolly for moving heavy things, what looked like a rusty pair of garden shears. The interior of the cab, however, is well-appointed and large, all beige leather and glowing GPS consoles. Princess goes into the back of the king cab and Kendra draws shotgun seat. John gets in behind the wheel and shuts the door, peeling his wet coat off and ("Do you mind? Thanks.") putting it in the back, on the floor. The windows begin to steam up immediately.

"I'm going to drop Thaney off first if you don't mind, Kendra," he says, putting the truck in gear and backing out of the Symphony Hall's loading dock, which is where he'd parked, emergency blinkers blinking, for the moment.

[Kendra Peterman] "'Course I don' mind," came the answer. Kendra held open the door, held her seat forward while Thaney climbed into the back, then folded it back into place and hefted herself up into the cab of the truck, closing the heavy door behind her. Thaney sat behind Kendra's seat, head turned to glance out the window. John mentioned he would be dropping her off first, and Thaney responded by nodding her head in agreement, then turning her attention back out to the rain-spattered world beyond the window.

As she buckled herself in, Kendra continued in a low, almost murmered sort of voice. "Don' make much sense fer ya t'go t'yer home neighborhood jus' t'go out 'n come back again', does it..."

And for the most part after that, Kendra was fairly quiet, peering curiously out all windows available-- the windshield, her window, and John's driver side window as well. Perhaps five minutes into the drive and Thaney was already asleep with her head rested against the window.

[J.B.] John gives a low, humorless sort of laugh as he swings the big truck around and points it toward the main road. Everything about him was big, gruff: the truck, the hands, the stature, the voice. His fine wool coat stripped off, he's in a button-up shirt, the collar of which he immediately undoes, followed by the cuffs. Rolling it up to the elbows, he gives Kendra another eyeful of the abundant crop of dark hair on his forearms, his wrists, the backs of his hands. Barrister seems to try to keep himself clean-shaven, but it's a lost cause. He has a five o'clock shadow by noon, and now, at 2am, he has more shadows than a Modigliani painting.

"Well, I did offer to take the two of you home. I would've told you to walk, but since I was coming back for Thaney anyway," and the big shoulders shrug. He fills up the truck's cab with his height, his breadth, his depth. A smaller car wouldn't even accommodate him.

[Kendra Peterman] Kendra came in sets of extremes. When she was tense, she was tense, and it would show. She would twiddle her thumbs, fidgit endlessly, refuse to hold still, snap and growl at people. When she was happy she was smiling from ear-to-ear, laughing and joking, hugging and shoving and playing around. And when she was relaxed, as she was now, she was relaxed. She had slipped her feet out of her shoes (don't worry, they don't stink bad), and slouched enough in her seat to put her feet up on the truck's dashboard, flashing her red-and-white striped socks in front of the windshield.

They reminded her of Where's Waldo?. She liked them.

Her answer to John was a chuckle and a shake of her head, a glance toward him before she looked back out her window at the sights flying by them. "Polite 'n carin' of ya, there..." She straightened up a little, peering into the side-view mirror to see Thaney asleep behind her. At that sight, a soft and affectionate smile grew, small on her lips but big and glowing everywhere else on her face, particularly in the eyes.

[J.B.] "Yeah, I suppose it was."

There's a hint of defensiveness there. Kendra was relaxed. But John remembered their last meeting well, and relaxation can be misinterpreted. A hell of a lot could be misinterpreted between them. He looks over his shoulder, unconsciously mirroring Kendra's glance. Princess was asleep, or at least giving a very good pretense thereof. Barrister steers the car onto the freeway for the long drive to the woods and sets the cruise control. Traffic is light at this hour. Rain washes over the windshield, swept aside by metronome-regular beats of the wipers. John Barrister rubs the bridge of his nose with a thumb, two fingers.

"Listen," he says, quietly so as not to wake the sleeping Philodox, "I get the feeling you don't trust me, and didn't trust me from the get-go. Should I bother to ask why?"

[Kendra Peterman] With the same sort of unintention that John had practiced in glancing to Thaney when Kendra had, Kendra now scratched at the underside of her forearm while John rubbed the bridge of his nose, relieving herself of an itch while he... well, she really didn't know why people rubbed the bridges of their noses. Perhaps to relieve sinus pressure. That was her best guess.

However, the man spoke of trust, and he got no huge reaction from the Galliard. She just glanced over to him, studied his side profile for a moment or two, then shrugged and straightened up a bit, pressing her knees to the dashboard now rather than resting her feet on it. Her arms rested between her stomach and her thighs as she leaned forward, and she looked out the windshield, watching the road for stray deer to alert John of in case they decided to pick an inoppertune time to try crossing the freeway.

"...When we first me..? I'unno, really. I think wha' really threw me off was th'way y'kinda narrowed yer eyes 'n sounded suspicious 'n... kinda.... I'unno, hateful's th'wrong word, but displeased wi'h figurin' out tha' I'm Garou. Set me on edge, made me feel kinda like yeh had a vendetta 'gainst Garou kind fer some reason or another. Was jus' mostly cautious. But, y'know, y'obviously don't, so...." She shrugged again, and glanced over to him with a soft, polite grin. "I don' distrust ya now, though. No reason to, y'ain' done nothin' wrong, made no threats t'me or m'family."

[Kendra Peterman] (( "When we first met", not 'me'. ...Dunno where that 't' ran off to. ))

[J.B.] John had been tensing up subtly for some major confrontation. He didn't know what to expect, at any rate. It's been said and said again: he doesn't know what to expect; she doesn't know what to expect; they don't know each other. And Kendra's right on one thing. Caution was the par for the course in their world.

Still, her reply sets him off guard. The reason for his tension is gone. The tension itself, however, doesn't obey such easy rules as that. It simply becomes aimless, making him grimace. He was sorry to put her on the spot now, and sorry that he'd put himself on the spot as well.

"Well," he says, gruffly, "my manners were a little lacking that night. It's a pain in the ass, moving and all. Adjusting to a new life." He realizes he's making excuses and, simultaneously, who he was making these excuses to. This time the laugh, though short, had more humor in it. "I guess you're the last one I need to tell that to."

[Kendra Peterman] A grin spread across her face when she heard the man laugh with true humor to the sound, and she stretched her arms up above her head, glanced at the clock in the dashboard, and yawned a bit before turning about to lean up against the door and window on the side of the cab she was occupying. She didn't shut her eyes, though, was just getting more comfortable.

Or that's what she told herself, anyways.

"Ain' never so much a matter of who y'need t'tell things to, I've learned. Jus' who yer talkin' to when things come up in conversation." Her shoulders rolled in yet another shrug, and she tagged an ending onto that in an almost pensive tone of voice. "Either way, t'weren't just you that was grouchy that night. I was kinda adjustin' to a new life too."

[J.B.] "Oh yeah?" John realizes that's an invitation to ask, but he mulls it over a bit before he goes ahead and asks, "You new to Chicago?"

The locks click shut as Kendra leans against the door. Last thing he needed was for her (or Thaney) to go flying out the door onto the freeway, in the rain, at 80mph. As they get farther from the city, the roadside lamps become fewer and fewer and the lights of the city grow small behind them. A darkness closes in. He turns the heater on at a low setting, opens the windows a crack to offset it, and keeps the defogger on the windshield.

[Kendra Peterman] She chuckled a bit and shook her head, relaxing more comfortably against the door, though it had nothing to do with the sound of the lock securing itself with a 'click' behind her shoulder. It had everything to do with being a Galliard and having a door opened to tell a story.

"Goodness no. Lived here fer 'bout... two years, maybe a year 'n a half. Moved out t'South Dakota, lived there fer a year 'r so, 'n came back out here a year ago." She paused, giving him a second to sort that chronology out, then chuckled. "These is old stompin' grounds for me. Plenty'a folks been here longer, but I still been here long enough t'call it home."

The door was opened to tell a story, but she politely declined and closed the door. Stories were time-consuming, and with her they were often personal and soul-bearing things. Perhaps another time.

[J.B.] John gives her a faintly wry smile as she deftly dodges the main thrust of his question. All right, she didn't want to talk about it. He understood that well enough. After all, they didn't know each other very well, right?

There's a silence for a while, not uncomfortable. Then, "Well -- this comes belatedly, but I'm, you know. Sorry." His right hand is resting on the gearshift. He lifts it for a small, meaningless gesture. "For being rude the other night. And making you worry that I was crooked." A slight grin defuses the apology, makes it not so terribly grim and important.

[Kendra Peterman] Oh yes, Kendra was crafty, and very skilled at dodging questions like that. She was ultra-bendy, and flipped about questions as though they were bullets and she was Keanu Reeves with a trenchcoat and sunglasses.

And she did all of this while pretending it didn't happen.

Smiling a little, she shut her eyes, nodded, and let her head come to rest against the window once again. "Don' worry 'bout it, I jus' got a bit defensive is all." She would leave him to ponder that while she joined Thaney in a car-ride nap.