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Feb. 5th, 2006 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
3pipeproblemI have decided to keep the wacky header practice.
Title: Pre-Possessory Interest
Fandom: Boston Legal/Boondock Saints (or the fandom affectionately known as "crack")
Notes: Where to begin? This is pure AU crack, with Alan Shore and Paul Smecker going to law school together. It's all![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dien's fault. More can be found here if you somehow become addicted.
"Shore," Smecker acknowledges, enunciating the name like a precedent, squinting over his cigarette as though aiming a dart. "You're the one who puked in the library."
They'd met, improbably, over early morning coffee with a constitutional law professor who--judging by his expression when Alan abruptly ceased uncoiling the cinnamon roll before him and opened his mouth to dispute Paul's finely tuned analysis of United States v. Leon--hadn't selected his company as haphazardly as he'd led them to believe. Paul had argued incisively, austerely, savoring his words along with the accompanying French roast. Alan had spoken heatedly, passionately, nearly upsetting his mug in the process. The conversation concluded with the intersection of hands into a "t," a signal from not-quite-buried childhood, and their professor intoning with evident satisfaction, "Time."
"Fast friends" is a phrase Paul's never had any use for; he moves languidly, acts with deliberation. Friendship, in its rare incarnations, is an affair of mutual respect. Alan knows it from clasping hands with an entirely different Paul, but has begun to wonder about spurring relationships on, the fact that when they end he's more and more left with a sensation curiously similar to brain freeze. In spite of this, because of it, they'd stood from the table unable to let a reciprocal draw pass unrecognized. Paul's arguments (Paul has arguments while Alan has beliefs; the difference between first- and third-year law students) have been nicked almost incidentally by Alan's feeling, while Alan's fervent opposition bears precise, spindly scars--souvenirs of Paul's words. They'd shaken hands, Alan flushed, bright-eyed, fingers sticky with frosting, Paul taken aback at the force of the other man's grip. Stuck fast.
Smecker isn't law school legend but his type is: stepping into class fifteen minutes late, granting the professor permission to proceed with a bow of his head; intuitive knowledge not of law but what it meant--Smecker doesn't spot issues, he draws a bead on them, lines up his shot, sits back and waits for his classmates; trademark smirk, trademark cigarette resting in the crux of his fingers, trademark coolness beneath all personal interactions. Now he catches Shore by the arm as the other man exits a lecture hall, spinning him around and then stepping back as though to survey his handiwork.
"No," Shore replies, shaking his arm free, "her table was adjacent to mine."
"You cleaned it up."
Shore clutches books in his arms as though they've been entrusted to him by a crush, sports a wrinkle-creased jacket of mustard-colored corduroy. To Smecker's surprise, he breezes past the statement, shifting his books and stepping forward.
"Smecker." His eyes are blue but not startlingly anything. "You're the one who stood up in Atterberry’s class and called him a self-absorbed asshole whose only accomplishment throughout the semester was crafting the world's finest echo chamber."
Smecker streams smoke in his face. "No," he drawls. "You've got that wrong. I told him I'd be stepping outside for some air until he decided to teach material worth learning. I,"--he inhales almost blissfully--"don't tell people what I think of them. Assuming I do think of them. If they're gifted with any glimmer of intelligence, they can figure it out for themselves."
Shore smirks, in the easy way some people collapse into their favorite chair. "So." He shrugs back his shoulders, tilts his head. "What do you think of me?"
Smecker flicks his cigarette to the floor. "I think you're lucky I'm not a violent person."
The next time they meet Shore beats him to the cigarette, lighting a Chesterfield and pausing politely for Smecker to do the same.
"I didn’t think you smoked."
"I never said that." Shore raises his eyebrows, cigarette pursed delicately in his lips. He waits expectantly for Smecker to tell him how like a lawyer he sounds, so Smecker doesn't.
"It's a nasty habit. It makes your clothes stink, stains your teeth."
"Mmm." Shore nods with faux concern. "But I have it on good authority that it's irresistibly sexy."
"Whose authority would that be?"
Shore seems to have gained poise in these intervening months, or maybe it's that they're on the brink of finals. Smecker knows people like that, people with an innate sense of the moment, who can simple as snapping their fingers summon every ounce of charisma, bring simmering intelligence to a boil. People who break all the curves.
"Hers." An arm snakes around Shore's waist and, cat-that-caught-the-canary smug, he dispenses with the cigarette, turns his head to kiss the attractive black woman who's performed the near-impossible feat of ensnaring him with a single limb. "Michelle, meet Paul. Paul, Michelle."
"Pleasure," Smecker says dryly. "It's about time Alan slept with one of his professor's wives."
For a dizzying instant Shore looks wounded. It registers as confusion: parted lips, as though in the midst of drawing breath he's forgotten to continue, reproachful eyes. He doesn't recover, either, forcing a sardonic smile and then putting his back to the other man.
As they (the two of them--fitting Shore into a couple is a painful process of contortion) walk away, Smecker has the opportunity to hear her voice, deep and lilting. "Do you have to be an asshole to get into law school?" he thinks he hears her say.
Shore's abandoned cigarette glows dimly in the waning light. Smecker grinds it out of its misery.
Alan wakes slowly, consciousness flickering like a light bulb on the verge of death. He wakes to an apartment littered with shadows, bewilderingly elongated furniture, every strewn article of clothing dark and huddled. He's closed his eyes once more when Paul Smecker's voice, raspy with lack of sleep yet somehow delicate, sounds in his ear.
"I took a shower."
Alan's eyes flutter open immediately but his mind hesitates a few precious seconds before taking in Smecker crouched at the side of his bed, hair dull and slick with moisture, a towel--pink?--knotted around his waist. "What if I wanted to join you."
"Then you're late."
The night before, a Wednesday--what Alan liked about Wednesdays was that a particularly emphatic one could topple the rest of the week and even the proceeding days, a two-pronged domino effect--Alan dredged Paul’s number up from his memory, punched it into his phone, and invited the other man out for an evening of spirited argument. By spirited he’d meant just that, had treated Smecker to argumentation doused in enough liquor to make the other man wary of lighting a match in Alan's vicinity.
Neither had seduced the other, or if they had, it'd happened long before last night, with a deftly placed word, a swift retort and an arched eyebrow, an impassioned outburst in the midst of a flock of peers issuing murmured apologies and hurrying to class.
Alan got drunk quickly, seemed to plunge, belligerent, daring, happy, into intoxication.
"Come back to bed," he says and, failing to sustain Paul's gaze, nuzzles the pillow instead, eyelids at half-mast.
"And risk ruining my hair?" Paul digs a knuckle between two of Alan's ribs and stills for a moment, considering. "You're not gay."
"I don't know, Paul," Alan says. He turns to look at him, smiling as though he's regressed to last night's drunken state. "From what I recall of last night, you seemed an awful lot like a man."
Paul rolls his eyes. " You're not a faggot, not a queer. You don't have to worry about calling mom and dad and breaking the news that their little--"
"Stop it. Stop it now."
As Paul stands he gives an exaggerated shrug, a simpering, sardonic smile. With a matador's flourish he whisks the towel from his waist.
Alan, fascinated not by the nakedness so much as the immediacy of Paul's body, the sharp line of the collarbone, steep curves of the cheekbones, slings a leg over the side of the bed. He staggers to his feet, runs a hand through sloppy morning hair that's managed to snag whatever particles of light have slipped through the blinds. "You give that talk to a lot of people?" he asks quietly.
Paul must've helped himself to Alan's shampoo because as Alan kisses him he catches a faint--and embarrassingly arousing--whiff of himself. When he touches Paul it isn't gentle but brusque and urgent, feeling out muscle and sinew as though scrambling for a hold on him. He's clutching Paul's shoulder much too hard, inflicting another kiss, when Paul wrenches his head away to say in Alan's ear, "Your girlfriend called."
His grip goes slack. "Ex-girlfriend."
Alan got drunk and his voice bobbed at the level of a whisper, obliging Paul to lean forward, sliding his drink along with him. “You know what,” Alan said, smiling so broadly he had to stop to collect himself, “you know what, Paul? I could get us unceremoniously expelled from this bar in three seconds flat.”
He hadn’t strayed outside arm’s reach all night, remaining for all the recklessness of his movements within an established orbit. They were close enough that Paul could catch the twitch at the corner of Alan’s mouth, the facial muscles that tonight seemed in continual mutiny. He kept waiting for Alan to burst out laughing.
“Oh yeah? I can do it in two,” Paul said.
“One.” Alan inhaled tobacco, exhaled “Fire!”
The bar’s patrons snorted derisively in his direction, carried on their carousing. Paul smacked Alan in the shoulder. “You schmuck.”
He missed the turn for Alan’s apartment not once but twice, cursing the street, the time, alcohol, his companion and God in rapid succession. Alan fumbled with his keys, cheap metal slung on a chain that terminated in an ornate silver disc scrawled with his initials, jabbing them at the lock until it yielded with a click.
Alan’s apartment has knobs instead of light switches; if one desires illumination, a knob must be first pressed and then spun to the right. It’s as though the designer’s inspiration had been the space-age technology employed in lairs of Bond villains.
The light froze Alan buried to his elbows in jacket, adopting the blearily shocked expression of somebody coming to terms with the aftermath of a flashbulb. On the wall behind him hung a photograph, black and white mounted on black, framed. The photographer had tried to capture the glare of sunlight off a watch’s face.
Paul’s laughing through a sneer, some strange species of malicious bemusement on his features. "Right. Was she your ex before or after last night?”
“She cheated on me,” Alan says, picking out his words the way an amateur pianist does an unfamiliar melody. His shoulders slump; without clothing to shield the motion it becomes pitiful. “She told me. Days ago. I don’t know, is it automatic?”
“Fuck if I know, Shore. Or were you maybe looking for precedent?”
“Did she really call?” Alan, as per usual, doesn’t realize his mistake. He infers it from Paul’s reaction, producing one of his belated, soft-spoken apologies. “Sorry. That wasn’t appropriate.”
“Alan.” Paul laughs out the word, passes a hand over his eyes. “You’re using me. You colossal imbecile. Is this what you were thinking when you called for drinks? You and I in flagrante delicto and your girlfriend gasping in the doorway?”
Alan stands there breathing, looking all of a sudden desperately young. Having no other alternative, Paul laughs.
“Alan Shore,” he says. “You’re something else.”
Alan shakes his head. “I’m not. I’m exactly…” He runs out of words, crosses the room and seizes a pair of pants from the floor. Paul expects him to turn out the pockets in search of something to say.
He slides khaki over one leg then the other, zips and buttons with soldierly precision. The shirt that follows is wrinkled, reeks of beer and smoke. Alan buttons the top button first, aiming his chin ceilingward. The second gives him almost comical trouble, slipping again and again from his fingers.
“You’re a hypocrite.” Paul brushes Alan’s hands aside, ably taking up the buttoning of the shirt.
“She shouldn’t have done it.”
Paul snorts. “Let’s apply that reasoning, shall we? Give me her name and I’ll sleep with her.”
“Michelle.” Alan has a habit of looking at him when no smart person, no sane person would. “Michelle Chikaonda. She’s from Zimbabwe. It means 'goat's head soup' in her native tongue.”
“That’s a Stones album, Shore.”
“They had to get the name from somewhere.”
He crouches to button the bottommost button, the one nobody bothers with, steps back to survey his work. “What were you thinking?”
Alan looks tired, tousled, like he’s made several trips through the wringer. The khakis sag around his waist and belatedly Paul recognizes them as his own. “Maybe I wanted to be the one to fuck everything up.”
"I like the suit," Shore says, falling into step. It's a well-cut, stylish number, charcoal gray. It makes him remember Smecker naked.
“I have an interview.” Third-years are easily recognizable now, cloaked in interview-ready suits, moving with restrained agitation. They talk firms and starting salaries and the bar exam rather than torts and statutes and hypotheticals. They belong to the real world—for Smecker it doesn’t seem such a change.
"Time all this was forsaken for civilized society," Shore says, trying to at least draw a smile out of the other man. “Where?”
"Doesn’t matter. I'm not taking the job."
Shore laughs until he realizes Smecker isn't laughing along, raises his eyebrows. "You're not. Why interview at all?”
"This is one hell of a suit to waste." He eye-checks Shore for the trademark idealism, catching hints of it in rolled-up sleeves, a watchful expression. "I've had an offer from the Justice Department." Belatedly recalling that pretentiousness is Shore’s realm, he amends, "I'm joining the FBI."
Shore stops to stare, adopting an expression of puzzlement. "What'd civil liberties ever do to you?"
"Two years from now," Smecker says, "you're gonna be running paperwork for a big firm in a fancy office. Your hair'll be cut, your suit'll be twice as expensive as the one I'm wearing now. You'll be doing what everybody else who comes here sets out to do and you'll be good--I never thought you weren't--but you won't be better than it."
Shore holds his hands up, fingers spread wide. "All that without so much as a glance at my palms."
"So prove me wrong," Smecker says, wrenching his mouth into a smile. He gives Shore’s cheek a pat, leaves the other man lighting a cigarette and studiously ignoring the surface of his hands.
Title: Pre-Possessory Interest
Fandom: Boston Legal/Boondock Saints (or the fandom affectionately known as "crack")
Notes: Where to begin? This is pure AU crack, with Alan Shore and Paul Smecker going to law school together. It's all
dien's fault. More can be found here if you somehow become addicted."Shore," Smecker acknowledges, enunciating the name like a precedent, squinting over his cigarette as though aiming a dart. "You're the one who puked in the library."
They'd met, improbably, over early morning coffee with a constitutional law professor who--judging by his expression when Alan abruptly ceased uncoiling the cinnamon roll before him and opened his mouth to dispute Paul's finely tuned analysis of United States v. Leon--hadn't selected his company as haphazardly as he'd led them to believe. Paul had argued incisively, austerely, savoring his words along with the accompanying French roast. Alan had spoken heatedly, passionately, nearly upsetting his mug in the process. The conversation concluded with the intersection of hands into a "t," a signal from not-quite-buried childhood, and their professor intoning with evident satisfaction, "Time."
"Fast friends" is a phrase Paul's never had any use for; he moves languidly, acts with deliberation. Friendship, in its rare incarnations, is an affair of mutual respect. Alan knows it from clasping hands with an entirely different Paul, but has begun to wonder about spurring relationships on, the fact that when they end he's more and more left with a sensation curiously similar to brain freeze. In spite of this, because of it, they'd stood from the table unable to let a reciprocal draw pass unrecognized. Paul's arguments (Paul has arguments while Alan has beliefs; the difference between first- and third-year law students) have been nicked almost incidentally by Alan's feeling, while Alan's fervent opposition bears precise, spindly scars--souvenirs of Paul's words. They'd shaken hands, Alan flushed, bright-eyed, fingers sticky with frosting, Paul taken aback at the force of the other man's grip. Stuck fast.
Smecker isn't law school legend but his type is: stepping into class fifteen minutes late, granting the professor permission to proceed with a bow of his head; intuitive knowledge not of law but what it meant--Smecker doesn't spot issues, he draws a bead on them, lines up his shot, sits back and waits for his classmates; trademark smirk, trademark cigarette resting in the crux of his fingers, trademark coolness beneath all personal interactions. Now he catches Shore by the arm as the other man exits a lecture hall, spinning him around and then stepping back as though to survey his handiwork.
"No," Shore replies, shaking his arm free, "her table was adjacent to mine."
"You cleaned it up."
Shore clutches books in his arms as though they've been entrusted to him by a crush, sports a wrinkle-creased jacket of mustard-colored corduroy. To Smecker's surprise, he breezes past the statement, shifting his books and stepping forward.
"Smecker." His eyes are blue but not startlingly anything. "You're the one who stood up in Atterberry’s class and called him a self-absorbed asshole whose only accomplishment throughout the semester was crafting the world's finest echo chamber."
Smecker streams smoke in his face. "No," he drawls. "You've got that wrong. I told him I'd be stepping outside for some air until he decided to teach material worth learning. I,"--he inhales almost blissfully--"don't tell people what I think of them. Assuming I do think of them. If they're gifted with any glimmer of intelligence, they can figure it out for themselves."
Shore smirks, in the easy way some people collapse into their favorite chair. "So." He shrugs back his shoulders, tilts his head. "What do you think of me?"
Smecker flicks his cigarette to the floor. "I think you're lucky I'm not a violent person."
The next time they meet Shore beats him to the cigarette, lighting a Chesterfield and pausing politely for Smecker to do the same.
"I didn’t think you smoked."
"I never said that." Shore raises his eyebrows, cigarette pursed delicately in his lips. He waits expectantly for Smecker to tell him how like a lawyer he sounds, so Smecker doesn't.
"It's a nasty habit. It makes your clothes stink, stains your teeth."
"Mmm." Shore nods with faux concern. "But I have it on good authority that it's irresistibly sexy."
"Whose authority would that be?"
Shore seems to have gained poise in these intervening months, or maybe it's that they're on the brink of finals. Smecker knows people like that, people with an innate sense of the moment, who can simple as snapping their fingers summon every ounce of charisma, bring simmering intelligence to a boil. People who break all the curves.
"Hers." An arm snakes around Shore's waist and, cat-that-caught-the-canary smug, he dispenses with the cigarette, turns his head to kiss the attractive black woman who's performed the near-impossible feat of ensnaring him with a single limb. "Michelle, meet Paul. Paul, Michelle."
"Pleasure," Smecker says dryly. "It's about time Alan slept with one of his professor's wives."
For a dizzying instant Shore looks wounded. It registers as confusion: parted lips, as though in the midst of drawing breath he's forgotten to continue, reproachful eyes. He doesn't recover, either, forcing a sardonic smile and then putting his back to the other man.
As they (the two of them--fitting Shore into a couple is a painful process of contortion) walk away, Smecker has the opportunity to hear her voice, deep and lilting. "Do you have to be an asshole to get into law school?" he thinks he hears her say.
Shore's abandoned cigarette glows dimly in the waning light. Smecker grinds it out of its misery.
Alan wakes slowly, consciousness flickering like a light bulb on the verge of death. He wakes to an apartment littered with shadows, bewilderingly elongated furniture, every strewn article of clothing dark and huddled. He's closed his eyes once more when Paul Smecker's voice, raspy with lack of sleep yet somehow delicate, sounds in his ear.
"I took a shower."
Alan's eyes flutter open immediately but his mind hesitates a few precious seconds before taking in Smecker crouched at the side of his bed, hair dull and slick with moisture, a towel--pink?--knotted around his waist. "What if I wanted to join you."
"Then you're late."
The night before, a Wednesday--what Alan liked about Wednesdays was that a particularly emphatic one could topple the rest of the week and even the proceeding days, a two-pronged domino effect--Alan dredged Paul’s number up from his memory, punched it into his phone, and invited the other man out for an evening of spirited argument. By spirited he’d meant just that, had treated Smecker to argumentation doused in enough liquor to make the other man wary of lighting a match in Alan's vicinity.
Neither had seduced the other, or if they had, it'd happened long before last night, with a deftly placed word, a swift retort and an arched eyebrow, an impassioned outburst in the midst of a flock of peers issuing murmured apologies and hurrying to class.
Alan got drunk quickly, seemed to plunge, belligerent, daring, happy, into intoxication.
"Come back to bed," he says and, failing to sustain Paul's gaze, nuzzles the pillow instead, eyelids at half-mast.
"And risk ruining my hair?" Paul digs a knuckle between two of Alan's ribs and stills for a moment, considering. "You're not gay."
"I don't know, Paul," Alan says. He turns to look at him, smiling as though he's regressed to last night's drunken state. "From what I recall of last night, you seemed an awful lot like a man."
Paul rolls his eyes. " You're not a faggot, not a queer. You don't have to worry about calling mom and dad and breaking the news that their little--"
"Stop it. Stop it now."
As Paul stands he gives an exaggerated shrug, a simpering, sardonic smile. With a matador's flourish he whisks the towel from his waist.
Alan, fascinated not by the nakedness so much as the immediacy of Paul's body, the sharp line of the collarbone, steep curves of the cheekbones, slings a leg over the side of the bed. He staggers to his feet, runs a hand through sloppy morning hair that's managed to snag whatever particles of light have slipped through the blinds. "You give that talk to a lot of people?" he asks quietly.
Paul must've helped himself to Alan's shampoo because as Alan kisses him he catches a faint--and embarrassingly arousing--whiff of himself. When he touches Paul it isn't gentle but brusque and urgent, feeling out muscle and sinew as though scrambling for a hold on him. He's clutching Paul's shoulder much too hard, inflicting another kiss, when Paul wrenches his head away to say in Alan's ear, "Your girlfriend called."
His grip goes slack. "Ex-girlfriend."
Alan got drunk and his voice bobbed at the level of a whisper, obliging Paul to lean forward, sliding his drink along with him. “You know what,” Alan said, smiling so broadly he had to stop to collect himself, “you know what, Paul? I could get us unceremoniously expelled from this bar in three seconds flat.”
He hadn’t strayed outside arm’s reach all night, remaining for all the recklessness of his movements within an established orbit. They were close enough that Paul could catch the twitch at the corner of Alan’s mouth, the facial muscles that tonight seemed in continual mutiny. He kept waiting for Alan to burst out laughing.
“Oh yeah? I can do it in two,” Paul said.
“One.” Alan inhaled tobacco, exhaled “Fire!”
The bar’s patrons snorted derisively in his direction, carried on their carousing. Paul smacked Alan in the shoulder. “You schmuck.”
He missed the turn for Alan’s apartment not once but twice, cursing the street, the time, alcohol, his companion and God in rapid succession. Alan fumbled with his keys, cheap metal slung on a chain that terminated in an ornate silver disc scrawled with his initials, jabbing them at the lock until it yielded with a click.
Alan’s apartment has knobs instead of light switches; if one desires illumination, a knob must be first pressed and then spun to the right. It’s as though the designer’s inspiration had been the space-age technology employed in lairs of Bond villains.
The light froze Alan buried to his elbows in jacket, adopting the blearily shocked expression of somebody coming to terms with the aftermath of a flashbulb. On the wall behind him hung a photograph, black and white mounted on black, framed. The photographer had tried to capture the glare of sunlight off a watch’s face.
Paul’s laughing through a sneer, some strange species of malicious bemusement on his features. "Right. Was she your ex before or after last night?”
“She cheated on me,” Alan says, picking out his words the way an amateur pianist does an unfamiliar melody. His shoulders slump; without clothing to shield the motion it becomes pitiful. “She told me. Days ago. I don’t know, is it automatic?”
“Fuck if I know, Shore. Or were you maybe looking for precedent?”
“Did she really call?” Alan, as per usual, doesn’t realize his mistake. He infers it from Paul’s reaction, producing one of his belated, soft-spoken apologies. “Sorry. That wasn’t appropriate.”
“Alan.” Paul laughs out the word, passes a hand over his eyes. “You’re using me. You colossal imbecile. Is this what you were thinking when you called for drinks? You and I in flagrante delicto and your girlfriend gasping in the doorway?”
Alan stands there breathing, looking all of a sudden desperately young. Having no other alternative, Paul laughs.
“Alan Shore,” he says. “You’re something else.”
Alan shakes his head. “I’m not. I’m exactly…” He runs out of words, crosses the room and seizes a pair of pants from the floor. Paul expects him to turn out the pockets in search of something to say.
He slides khaki over one leg then the other, zips and buttons with soldierly precision. The shirt that follows is wrinkled, reeks of beer and smoke. Alan buttons the top button first, aiming his chin ceilingward. The second gives him almost comical trouble, slipping again and again from his fingers.
“You’re a hypocrite.” Paul brushes Alan’s hands aside, ably taking up the buttoning of the shirt.
“She shouldn’t have done it.”
Paul snorts. “Let’s apply that reasoning, shall we? Give me her name and I’ll sleep with her.”
“Michelle.” Alan has a habit of looking at him when no smart person, no sane person would. “Michelle Chikaonda. She’s from Zimbabwe. It means 'goat's head soup' in her native tongue.”
“That’s a Stones album, Shore.”
“They had to get the name from somewhere.”
He crouches to button the bottommost button, the one nobody bothers with, steps back to survey his work. “What were you thinking?”
Alan looks tired, tousled, like he’s made several trips through the wringer. The khakis sag around his waist and belatedly Paul recognizes them as his own. “Maybe I wanted to be the one to fuck everything up.”
"I like the suit," Shore says, falling into step. It's a well-cut, stylish number, charcoal gray. It makes him remember Smecker naked.
“I have an interview.” Third-years are easily recognizable now, cloaked in interview-ready suits, moving with restrained agitation. They talk firms and starting salaries and the bar exam rather than torts and statutes and hypotheticals. They belong to the real world—for Smecker it doesn’t seem such a change.
"Time all this was forsaken for civilized society," Shore says, trying to at least draw a smile out of the other man. “Where?”
"Doesn’t matter. I'm not taking the job."
Shore laughs until he realizes Smecker isn't laughing along, raises his eyebrows. "You're not. Why interview at all?”
"This is one hell of a suit to waste." He eye-checks Shore for the trademark idealism, catching hints of it in rolled-up sleeves, a watchful expression. "I've had an offer from the Justice Department." Belatedly recalling that pretentiousness is Shore’s realm, he amends, "I'm joining the FBI."
Shore stops to stare, adopting an expression of puzzlement. "What'd civil liberties ever do to you?"
"Two years from now," Smecker says, "you're gonna be running paperwork for a big firm in a fancy office. Your hair'll be cut, your suit'll be twice as expensive as the one I'm wearing now. You'll be doing what everybody else who comes here sets out to do and you'll be good--I never thought you weren't--but you won't be better than it."
Shore holds his hands up, fingers spread wide. "All that without so much as a glance at my palms."
"So prove me wrong," Smecker says, wrenching his mouth into a smile. He gives Shore’s cheek a pat, leaves the other man lighting a cigarette and studiously ignoring the surface of his hands.
