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It's sometime just before or just past midnight when Cassidy hears the roar of a car pulling up outside.
About time there was some action up in here, he thinks, taking a final drag of his sixth chain-smoked cigarette of the night. Paper hisses and crumbles to ash, all the way down to the filter, and he stubs it out on the nearest end table. Wednesdays are usually slow as shite. You'd think for a day regularly called Hump Day, people would do more, y'know, but no, there's been only maybe seven or eight customers all night and he's three seconds away from dropping stone-dead of boredom, immortality or not.
He takes a quick peep through the sun-faded velvet curtains framing the window to make certain that it's indeed a customer and not the fuzz or a scorned wife or any of that bollocks, just in time to see a vehicle skid to a halt right up against the front door. It's a Mustang, a Viper, something like that. Undoubtedly fast, loud, and expensive.
Cassidy draws back a little in amazement. Two months he's been here, and he's seen an endless stream of beat-up pickups and rusting sedans and dusty dinged-up QM&P utility trucks passing through (and, once, memorably, a tractor, which had all told been more confusing than anything else) But this was new. A car like that, huge and sleek and black as the night it rumbled in from, bespoke money and class. To the extent one could have money and class in this godforsaken wasteland of central Texas, not that Cassidy, who'd splattered his guts all over a cornfield after a free-fall from cruising altitude and then crawled hands-and-knees out of the dirt and weeds to end up here, could judge.
But back to the question - if you were a person who drove a car like that, why would you hang out at a place like this?
He leans further back, trying to get a better glimpse, but he overbalances and almost topples himself off the couch he'd been relaxing on. With an effort, he rights himself and yanks the curtains shut with an offended snarl.
Well. He'd find out who it was soon enough, or if he didn't, then tough luck, he'd have to live with the intrigue forever. Like any other of the (admittedly few) service industry jobs Cassidy had managed to hold in his supernaturally long life, there were three basic rules of working at Toadvine: don't ask questions, the customer was always right, and don't bloody ask questions. You'd have to be thick not to remember them and downright suicidal not to follow them. It was a shite line of work, this, Cassidy muses, but what else could you do? Money's money. A job's a job.
"Oi, move your collective arses, we got company!" he yells, and a chorus of groans and curses drift in from various corners of the house."Hey, none of that now. You're on the clock, ladies."
The lovely and adventurous girls of Toadvine start filing into the room and arranging themselves out on the various couches and footstools with practiced ease. Just provocative enough to arouse, just disinterested enough to intrigue. Got a face for every taste in this den of iniquity.
"Claudia, looking fine as always, hello Lacey - Tammy! Haven't seen you all day. Got that ten quid you owe me? No? How 'bout a kiss for ol' Cassidy, then?"
"Fuck you, Cass," Tammy says, not unfondly, and throws her curtain of dyed-red hair over her shoulder with a rather equine movement.
"If you want, love, but that'll cost ya," he grins back, and saunters over to his usual spot, currently occupied by a lanky, murderous-looking blonde. "Sienna. May it please Her Royal Majesty."
"It's Sierra," she snaps. Cassidy pulls a face at her. Who knew. You steal someone's lipstick and high heels once and it gives them the right to be a right uptight bitch to you for life. And he'd looked better in them than she did, for starters.
"Why does it matter, that's not even your real name!" Cassidy protests, then off her scathing glare - if looks could kill, yeesh - capitulates. "Alright, alright, sorry, Sierra, now can ya move yer arse?" She scoffs, but unfolds herself like human origami from where she'd been curled up and joins the others. Cassidy claims the chair, shuffling back so he's half-hidden in the shadows that blur out the edges of the room.
He hears the front door open in the next room over. There's a brief exchange, voices too low for Cassidy to catch, and then the mysterious customer steps into the doorway.
Jesus, Joseph, and Mother Mary.
The girls, unlike Cassidy himself, are far too professional to show surprise, but he catches a round of subtle glances pass around the room.
And maybe he's just gotten cynical or been deprived too long, since all the blokes he's seen around here go for the creepy overweight balding middle-aged accountant look, or smell like a chicken farm and are caked in several layers of dried manure, or are missing some (or all) their teeth, but bloody hell.
The man is a wet dream come to life, is what he is. A tall, lean streak of tanned skin and whipcord muscle and crazy windswept hair clad all in black - leather jacket, t-shirt, criminally tight jeans, heavy boots, a bandana tied around his wrist, and a cross on a thin gold chain around his neck. He has dark, wicked eyes and a nasty sly smirk on his face like he knows the world's deepest, dirtiest secrets. A mouth like that could corrupt a saint, never mind the rest of him. Christ Almighty.
If Cassidy could still blush, he would have, like a bloody schoolgirl. He's man enough (approximately, anyway) to admit that much.
"Good evenin', ladies," the man says in a drawl as thick and sweet as honey, and leans himself up against the doorframe. The girls scattered around the room murmur a reply and shift slightly - legs parted just a little wider, backs arched a bit further, hands playing idly with hems of shirts and skirts. Well, nobody would have to be drawing lots for this one.
Cassidy sighs inwardly and fishes out his last cigarette and a match from his jacket pocket. He watches the man out of the corner of his eye as he strikes the match on his teeth, lights up, and sits back. Maybe something interesting would happen tonight. Like knows like, after all - Cassidy knows trouble when he sees it.
"You," the man says, after a long minute of consideration. Cassidy blows out a mouthful of smoke and casts around to see who the lucky lady is. And then he realizes everyone is staring at him and the room has fallen graveyard-quiet. And then he looks back at the man in the door who's looking back at him, eyes glinting.
"Me? Ah, I'm just the air-conditioning repairman, mate," he says.
"I don't think so," the man says, then looks around for confirmation. Everyone's suddenly gotten very interested in their phones and their hair and the minute flecks of lint on their clothes. There's a long, dull silence.
"He's not," says Sienna finally, the Judas bitch.
"Am too," Cassidy retorts. "Sometimes." The man grins outright now, lethal and sharp in the way of a knife slipped between the ribs.
"Well?" he says.
"King hell," Cassidy mutters. No wonder it suddenly felt like a funeral in here. It's a rather poorly-kept secret that, along with the myriad Toadvine women, he's also for hire. It's surprising how many times he'd been requested, to put it nicely, in the past two months alone. But being where they are (the backwater backwards bumcrack of America), the blokes interested in this particular kind of buggery are usually the repressed types who were guilty and ashamed about their preferences, so to speak, and tended to translate all that guilt and shame into blind violence. Violence usually directed at the bugger-ee in question. Namely, Cassidy. As far as he was concerned, there was fun-trouble, then there was trouble-trouble. He'd really been hoping to avoid the latter. He's sure everyone else wishes the same.
Well, maybe Sienna would be overjoyed to see him beaten to a pulp by some closeted hick bender who had it in for him. But she didn't count. At least Tammy, bless her heart, shoots a sympathetic look his way as he led the man up the stairs to his room.
--
The first thing the man does, once admitted into the sparse attic room Cassidy now improbably calls home, is to reach behind his back, pull a handgun out of the waistband of his jeans, and set it on the upturned apple crate that passes for a nightstand. A pair of handcuffs from his pocket follow after. Very real. Very threatening.
"Whoa! Time out, okay, ground rules," Cassidy says, "and I don't give a shite how angry you are at yourself for being here or me for being, I don't know, a poof or whatever you're about to call me, but give me a warning before you go using those on me, yeah? I mean, no judgment if that's what you're into, different strokes and all that, and I'm willing to do just about anything give the right amount of monetary compensation, if you catch my drift, but we gotta at least have like, a safeword or something so you don't blow me brains out accidentally, an' I don't mean that in the fun way - "
The man, to his amazement, is blushing and staring at the uneven scuffed-up floorboards like they're the most interesting thing he's ever seen. It's such a harmless and endearing expression that Cassidy thinks maybe, possibly, this guy is alright after all.
"That's not what I," he tries, all that bad-boy bravado from earlier gone, and clears his throat. "Those were for some, uh, errands. I was running. Before."
"Errands? Errands - Christ Almighty, mate, if you need that bloody great boomstick to go fetch your dry cleaning, I'd hate to see what you bring grocery shopping. I mean, I knew you Americans were all trigger-happy bastards, but this is next level, innit? Who the hell are you? Jesse James?"
"Close, actually. Jesse Custer," he says, reaching his hand out like it's perfectly a natural thing for one to give one's full name to and then shake hands with the rentboy (rent-pire?) one is about to fuck in the attic of a two-bit brothel. But since Cassidy's night clearly has taken a turn for the surreal, he gives a hearty shake in return.
"Proinsias Cassidy, at yer service."
"Prin-shee-us," Jesse tries doubtfully, rolling the name around in his mouth. Not bad for a dirty Yank. "An' is that your real name?"
Cassidy rolls his eyes.
"No, it ain't. I crawled in here beggin' fer a job, see, but they said 'nah, not till you have a proper stage name,' right, so I thought long and hard and went with the sexiest bloody thing I could think of. Proinsias Cassidy. It's seductive, aye? Really rolls off the tongue in the heat of passion, methinks. Oh, yes, harder, more, ah, more, yes, yes, yes, Proinsias! - no, you tosser, it's my real name. But only me Ma calls me that, and I'd rather not bring her poor deceased self into this, so you can call me Cassidy or Cass. Easier to spell, anyway, in case you want to register a complaint in the guestbook."
Jesse's chuckling now, a slow and weary sound like it's something he's not used to. The grin is back on his face, but it looks less dangerous now than plain amused. Cassidy kicks the lone metal folding chair across the room at him by way of invitation, and sits himself down on the bare mattress. He rummages around in the nook beneath the small window for the fifth of Blackjack he'd won off Jasmine during the last poker night.
"Want a drink or something before we get started? Whiskey's on me. If that ain't your thing, I got a whole galaxy of narcotics in here - don't tell Mosie, aye? - but that'll cost extra. On top of my hourly fee, of course - aha!" he says, finding the bottle and shaking it at Jesse like a bone at a dog. "Don't do this with clients, well, ever, really, but you don't seem like you'll fag-bash me head in for offerin'."
Jesse sheds his jacket, throws it onto the mattress, and sits, frowning slightly.
"I'd appreciate some whiskey, thanks. People do that?"
"Oh, come on," Cassidy snorts, because nobody could possibly be this naïve. "This is the most arse-backwards place I've ever had the pleasure of crash-landing me sorry self in, and that's saying something, considering where I'm from." And when he was from. At least they'd stopped locking people away in crazy houses for life for their proclivities. Lynching them to death though - not really an improvement.
"Where are you from then? Scotland?"
"Careful there," Cassidy warns as he cracks open the whiskey bottle and takes the first swig. "Where I'm from, wars have been started for lesser slights than that. I'm Irish, mate. And I'm a hundred nineteen year old vampire, if that's of any consequence."
He's surprised at how easily that slips out, since while being bent was something you didn't exactly going around shouting about in certain parts of the world, being an abomination was an entirely different kind of secret one kept from the world in general. But there was something about Jesse, this stupidly handsome dark-eyed apparition sitting in his room and downing his whiskey with alarming rapidity, that Cassidy's subconscious decided was trustworthy. His instincts are rarely ever wrong, so he just rolls with it.
"Yeah, okay," Jesse says, laughing again, "an' Tulip and I just robbed a bank in Tulsa for two hundred thousand dollars."
Cassidy swallows down a offended huff. People keep doing that, he thinks. Every time he tries to open his heart, to be an honest man, they just laugh at him -
"Hold on, wait, wait," he stammers. "Time out numero dos. Please tell me Tulip is what you named your gun cause yer a fuckin' crazy person, and not that she's your wife or something. Shite. I mean, celebratin' is celebratin', I get that, but I don't want your lady coming 'round here tomorrow swingin', God knows, a machete at me or somethin' 'cause I messed around with her man. 'Cause that's bad for business. And me health." Funny that, how those two were related.
Jesse leans forward in the chair and braces his hands on his thighs and looks down at Cassidy with the slightest tilt of his head.
"She's nobody's lady, and I'm nobody's man," he growls. "Don't you be thinkin' otherwise." All of a sudden, in the cast of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, he looks feral and cruel. Cassidy's very aware of the gun again, within an arms' reach of both of them, though something tells him Jesse will always be the faster draw. Something tells him when the man aims, he never misses. "Tulip an' me, we're partners."
"Like, biblically?" Cassidy blurts out, because he'd never learned to shut his bloody mouth, and waits for the bullet through his brain.
Amazingly, it seems to be the right thing to say.
"Sometimes," Jesse grins, and with that, everything smooths out back to normal again. "Mostly, we just pick fights and run things 'cross the Mexican border. The bank job was a special occasion. So - I'm gonna assume you weren't kiddin' either. Vampire, huh? Aren't you supposed to be immortal an' all-powerful or whatever? So what are you doing here? How'd you end up as a, uh - "
"A whore? You can say it, I've been called worse." Abomination, demon, beast, monster. God's mistake, always a classic. He shrugs. "I jumped out of a jetliner 'cause some tossers were trying to off me, landed arse-over-tits in a cornfield over yonder - " he hooks a thumb over his shoulder - "and, with no money or friends or what have you in this part of the world, I discovered that some, ah, talents remain marketable, no matter where you are or what year it is."
"Those talents bein'..." Jesse prompts wryly, his voice slightly blurry with drink.
"Air-conditioning repairmanship, obviously," Cassidy replies with a shit-eating grin. "I get room and board for doin' odd jobs, gofering, and an occasional lay with the odd homicidal redneck confused about his sexuality. You're rather calm about this vampire thing, y'know. Most people would call me insane or run away screaming or try to exorcise me or something."
"Nah, I can believe there are things besides humans runnin' around out there," Jesse says, running a hand through his already disheveled hair. Annoyingly, he's one of those people who can pull off the just-rolled-out-of-bed-now-I'm-here look without looking like a twat. Life was just unfair. "The shit I've seen. Miracles exist, monsters gotta too. Not that I think you're, uh - "
"I've been called worse," Cassidy repeats. "And besides, you're not wrong. Man of faith, huh?"
"Used to be, actually," Jesse says, a touch ruefully, and his hand goes in what seems like a subconscious motion to the cross necklace he wears. "Didn't work out, clearly."
Cassidy gapes.
"You, a preacher?" An image of Jesse in a dark suit and a collar at his throat, leaned up against the pulpit, prowling down and between the rows of pews of some clapboard church, flashes into his mind. Christ. Wasn't that a treat. Practically worth the price of the night alone.
"Ex-preacher. Tried it, was shit at it. Can't save people who don't wanna be saved, as my father used to say, and some days it felt like the whole damn planet wanted nothin’ more than to go to hell in a handbasket. I waited and waited for a sign that never came, and when it got all silent where God used to speak to me, I gave it up." He shrugs, as if to say and now I'm here.
"And your plan B was to load a shotgun, grab a lady friend, and go on a crime spree? Blimey. That's an attitude that'll getcha far in life."
"Really, it was more like falling back on old habits," he grins. "My specific set of marketable talents."
"Well, Padre, I'm honored. Man of the cloth, stooping down to the level of this heathen. Pater noster qui es in caelis, body-of-Christ-blood-of-Christ, ding dong merrily on high, and also with you, and all that bollocks."
"You used to go to church?"
"It's a good thing you're pretty, eh," Cassidy mutters. "Irish, remember? Where I'm from, everyone got a proper Catholic upbringing beaten into 'em, like it or not. And with the kind of beatings Father McDonagh used to give out, the old Paddy bastard, that kinda shite tends to stick with you. Though I gotta say, and take this as a compliment, aye, if more priests had looked like you, I'd have paid proper attention to those sermons when I was a lad. Things mighta even turned out different for little ol' me." He widens his eyes for comedic effect. "I mighta even been a believer."
"Oh, really?" Jesse asks, warm and amused.
"Oh yeah." Cassidy reaches for the whiskey only to find it almost all gone. He'd barely had three mouthfuls of it, he grumbles internally, and looks up at Jesse reproachfully. The preacher man's properly langered now, the lanky length of him sprawled in the chair like someone's slightly unscrewed all his joints. But his stare is still fixed unwavering on Cassidy, sharp and calculating, and he's still smirking in that infuriating way of his.
Cassidy finishes the bottle, casts it aside with a clatter, and crawls up to Jesse, sitting up on his knees between his legs.
"But it's never too late for salvation, eh?" Cassidy murmurs, skating his hands up Jesse's thighs. Up and under his shirt, and Cassidy positively shivers when his palms slide flat against hot, hot skin. Jesse tilts his head languidly back with a quiet hum and allows Cassidy to ruck his shirt up, pull it over his head. He's even prettier like this, all loose and unwound, the look in his eyes animal-wild. Cassidy drops himself into Jesse's lap, straddling his legs. He may not have had much to drink, but he feels half-drunk already from anticipation alone.
He starts with little nips and sucks and bites (nobody's ever accused him of being a particularly original vampire) - on Jesse's lips, along his jawline, down the long thick tendon at the slope of his shoulder, across his collarbones - and feels the preacher man's breathing steadily grow faster and less controlled. He spares a quick second to worry at the crucifix around Jesse's neck, tugging at it with his teeth, and drops it when Jesse growls a wordless warning, a sound Cassidy feels more than hears.
"You did say you just robbed a bank for two hundred big ones, aye?" Cassidy asks.
"Yeah, I did," Jesse says, voice raspy and barely coherent. Cassidy smiles and rolls hips down hard. Jesse moans softly beneath him and trails off with something distinctly church-inappropriate. He could get the man off like this, right now, and he's almost entirely sure Jesse won't mind, but he decides it would be a bloody shame to waste such a rare and delectable opportunity.
"So that means you got money to burn?" Cassidy asks, dropping to the floor so he's once again settled between Jesse's legs. He rests his cheek on Jesse's thigh and looks up at the man innocently.
"I suppose." The preacher man brings a hand up and rests it on Cassidy's head, stroking absently at Cassidy's cheekbone with his thumb. Cassidy practically purrs.
"Then since you can presumably pay for the whole night, you won't mind if I take it real slow."
He continues his thorough exploration of every inch of Jesse's exposed body with fingers and tongue and mouth, tracing down over the raised, pale scars that stand out sharply against his tanned skin. Knife, knife, gunshot, ropeburn around his wrist, teeth marks?, broken bottle - whatever the hell that was, maybe there really was a gang of machete-wielding tossers running around out there - Jesse had clearly lived a distinctly interesting life. If Cassidy focuses, he can hear the man's heart pounding like thunder in his chest.
There's a livid and fresh and nasty-looking bruise smeared across Jesse's hip and into the dip of his belly, curving around to his back and down, lower than the waistband of his pants. A memento from the recent job, Cassidy guesses. He noses over the injury and slowly drags his tongue over it, mouths at it, feeling the smooth, hard shift of muscle and bone. Shite. He's practically salivating. Like a dog with a steak. Like a junkie with a syringe full of the good stuff dangling in front of his face. Just licking over and over at that patch of skin. All that blood, so close to the surface, and if it tastes even half as good as it smells -
"Cassidy, Jesus fuck - "
"Such language, Padre," Cassidy says, and bites down on the bruise, hard, right over the crest of his hipbone. Jesse lets out a keening, choked-off moan and bucks his hips up hard.
"Christ! - Cassidy, what the hell?" he snarls, tightening his hand in Cassidy's hair and dragging him away. Jesse glares down at him, flushed, eyes ink-dark, breathing fast.
"You don't seem to dislike it, may I just point out," Cassidy says, shaking Jesse's hand off, and pointedly looks toward the bulge in Jesse's jeans. "So really, you're welcome."
"God. You always this fuckin' mouthy?"
"I've been told it's a major character flaw. Now, is this the part where you threaten to shut me up by sticking something long and hard down my throat? 'Cause if so, you can save your breath." Cassidy unbuckles Jesse's belt, pops the button of his jeans, slowly drags the zipper of his fly down with his teeth, and flashes a big, bright grin up at him.
"You're like a real-life bad porno, you know that?" Jesse mutters. "I bet that blonde girl downstairs who looked like she wanted to kill you would be a little more ... normal."
He pulls Jesse's dick out of his boxers.
"Sienna? Aw, Jess, that's just mean," he says, and with one swift motion, goes down.
Oh, but he'll be rubbing this in Sienna's smug prissy face for weeks.
"Oh Christ, goddamn, oh shit - "Jesse swears, arching his back and trying to push deeper into Cassidy's mouth. Cute, Cassidy thinks, but this is his show. His supernaturally enhanced strength hasn't turned out useful for much except winning unfair bar fights and this, apparently, holding down a chairful of horny writhing half-crazed dark-eyed preacher-turned-criminal as he slowly, slowly sucks him off. Jesse is going to have a bloody impressive new set of bruises tomorrow to match his old ones, and that thought sends a bright jolt of heat sparking right down to Cassidy's dick.
It doesn't take long before Jesse moans out something that sounds like a warning.
Yeah, not so fast.
"Oh sorry? You gonna take back what you said about Sienna?" Cassidy asks, pulling off and giving his sweetest smile.
"Cassidy, you goddamn tease, I swear to God - c'mon, come on - "
"Guess not." He ducks his head down and draws his tongue in light, long laps up Jesse's dick. Barely enough contact to even feel, but wound up as he is, Jesse moans like he's been shot. His hands are gripped so tightly against the edges of his seat that his knuckles are white.
"Ah fuck, fuck - Cass, I'm gonna - "
"You know, I think I get why they're called blowjobs now. King hell, this is hard work," Cassidy says, sitting up and cracking his jaw and licking his lips. How the girls put up with hours of this a night, he hadn't a clue. All he ever had to do in his tenure here was lie back and think of England, those poncey funny-talking tea-and-scones sheep-stealing cunts. Viva la Ireland.
"Cassidy!" Jesse shouts. He thrashes for a second, panting hard, eyes glazed over, mouth parted, head thrown back. His skin, honey-golden in the dim light of the attic, shines with sweat. Cassidy stares without meaning to, fascinated by the sight laid before him. It's like one of those fucking Renaissance paintings with the saints and the crucified martyrs and shite. Christ, this man is gorgeous, he thinks, and gets back to performing the oldest profession in the world.
"God, I'm thirsty," he says again after a few moments, just to be an arsehole. Hey, it'd been months since he'd had any fun, and now he had all night to tool around. "Why'd you have to go and drink all the whiskey? That was a gift from a friend!" Well, sort of.
"Goddamn it, Cassidy - "
"I think I deserve to get off first for that, eh? Fair play, like," Cassidy says, settling back on his haunches and grinding the heel of his hand down on his dick. He makes a big show out of fluttering his eyes closed and moaning in pleasure - not that he has to act much, he's been half-hard since Jesse had stepped into the sitting room downstairs.
"Please, come on Cass, fuck, c'mon, Christ, please, please, c'mon - " Jesse whines, sounding absolutely breathless and wrecked. He grabs blindly for Cassidy, catching his shoulder and jerking him forcefully toward him.
"Ow, alright, fine, you impatient bastard, but I'm still gonna charge you for the whole night," Cassidy mutters, and dips his head down one more time with a vicious twist of his tongue.
With a sharp and broken cry, Jesse comes, and like a bloody fucking champion, Cassidy swallows it down. Before he's even had the time to sit back and clean himself off, Jesse hauls him up onto his lap with an impressive show of strength and kisses him, so long and filthy and hot that Cassidy thinks Christ, if he kisses like this, he's gotta fuck like a beast -
But hey. All in all, Jesse had seemed impressed. Maybe he'd be a return customer.
--
After a rather spectacular reciprocal blowjob, another bottle of whiskey charmed from Leila's stash with a pretty-please and a solemn promise to tell her everything afterward, and a new pack of fags stolen from Sienna's purse, Cassidy ends up sitting thigh-to-shoulder on the mattress next to Jesse in a room that now smells like sex and smoke and alcohol. Both of them are half-naked and Cassidy, at least, feels fully sated and at peace with the world. It should be awkward, but somehow it's companionable and pleasant. Not that he has a benchmark to measure up to, since most of his regular customers have long buggered off (heh) by this point.
"So I got a question for you, Padre," Cassidy says, between the exhale of one mouthful of smoke and the inhale of another. Of course Sienna would be the kind of person to smoke ultralights. Shite was nasty. "What makes a guy look at a room full of beautiful women and go, yeah mate, I'll take that weird skinny bloke hidin' in the corner?"
"Well, I wasn't going to, but I have a thing for air-conditioning repairmen."
"Oi, quit takin' the piss."
"Okay, seriously?"
"Yes, Jesse," Cassidy says, infinitely patient.
"Well - I grew up here, in an old church not eight miles from here. This town's the same as it was twenty, thirty years ago. I mean, the Flavour Station was there even when I was a kid, and they haven't even changed the wallpaper since," Jesse says. "We're only here to lie low for a few weeks, but every time I come back, it's like I never left at all. So I walk in here, expectin' to see the same faces I always do. Shit, some of these girls I went to junior high with. Some of these girls' mothers I went to junior high with. But you were new, and new is interesting. At least, 'round here it is. I was curious, I guess is what I'm sayin'. But I wasn't quite expecting ... " Jesse makes a vague motion at all of Cassidy's person.
"Thanks, Padre, I guess," Cassidy says, unsure whether or not to be offended. But the preacher man still seems lost in thought, and for lack of anything else to do, Cassidy snatches the handcuffs off the nightstand and starts toying around with them. Cuffing himself, then slipping them, click and release, click and release.
"How the hell are you doing that?" Jesse asks, coming back to Earth from whatever space-cadet world he'd been lost in.
"Bank robber like you can't slip a pair of these friendship bracelets?" Cassidy huffs. "Some criminal. Next time you run a job, just call me in, aye? Got loads more marketable talent in that area."
Instead of laughing, though, Jesse lets out a slow breath of curling smoke and regards him critically.
"What can you offer?"
"Well," Cassidy muses. A bright and clean feeling, something that feels dangerously like hope or excitement, worms its way down into his stomach and starts turning insistent figure-eights. "I've done my fair share of getaway drivin'. Can pick most locks in under two minutes, includin' these things, which is always handy in a pickle." He dangles the handcuffs in front of Jesse's face.
“I can imagine.”
"I can hold me own in a pub brawl, and fightin', far as I know, works about the same in or out of a pub. And I'm good at distraction, diversion, and misdirection, whatever you want. Worst case, you can just throw me at somethin' and hope for the best. The near-immortal thing is right useful, provided the sun's not shinin'. And, of course, all the, ah, perks you get from me in my current occupation, unlimited and for free. A cherry on top of the sundae, like."
Cassidy takes a good long drag from his cigarette and tries not to laugh at the way Jesse's eyes go straight to his mouth.
"That's quite a sales pitch," Jesse says, looking away guiltily like he knows he's been caught. Cassidy can already see the gears turning in his mind. Criminal genius at work. "I take it you're not really attached to your current job?"
"Who the hell would be?" Cassidy mutters. "I can swear on me mum's grave, you give anybody in this house an out like you're considerin' and they'll take it in a heartbeat."
"Well, you'd just be sellin' yourself to a different master."
"Aye, one I picked myself, doin' work that actually pays, and at least I can decide who and when I get to fuck."
Jesse sighs sharply. A beat of silence, and he seems to come to a decision.
"Tulip and I were talkin' about addin' a third player, actually, but nothin' ever came of it. I'll talk with her once I get back," he says, stubbing his cigarette out on the floor and pushing himself to his feet. “At the least, I’d like her to meet you. Wouldn't that be somethin’.”
He stoops down to fetch his shirt and his jacket. Cassidy tracks his movements, watches the curve of his shoulders, the flex of his arms. "For now ... "
Jesse reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a thick roll of bills bound with a rubber band, and tosses it to Cassidy. Cassidy catches it offhand, then pauses and stares at it in shock. All hundreds. He's easily holding three thousand dollars in hand right now, more than he’s ever had at once in his life.
"Don't spend it all at once, though somethin’ tells me you're not gonna listen," Jesse says, the nasty smirk back on his face, and opens the door to the room. "I'll be in touch. Same time, same place.”
"You know where to find me," Cassidy says. Jesse throws a lazy salute and disappears.
Well, Cassidy thinks. His Wednesday nights were suddenly looking a lot more interesting. He smiles privately to himself, leans back on the mattress, and watches the paper of his cigarette hiss and curl to ash, all the way down to the filter.