Tunics of light cloth became a staple to stave off the heat and justify leggings, and a white one waved listlessly about his knees and over paint-melts stop ripped tights. Or that was the print design of his leggings, made evident as one leg crossed over the other at the ankle. His hand rested against an expensive marble column — the kind he knew was bought and traded as so many numbers by so many rich white men — and his free hand hung at his side in a fist over a borrowed messenger bag. It read tokidoki proudly. He didn't know what it meant, and cared very little about looking it up.
Instead, he looked out. He looked across the courtyard behind the great, marble-stricken library, where trees sat in neat arrangements due to people long dead. And strangers sat underneath that hard work, ingesting books written by more dead people (and some living, perhaps shamefully), laughing together, having their picnics, showing their kids a summer day they should aspire to as adults, saving their marriages. He thought, briefly, that he should've brought Aelius with him, but Aelius wouldn't understand, so he leveraged one foot before the other, let it fall, and repeated that pattern to carry himself off the ostentatious marble steps.
Rich red sandals with their toothy tops and snarling mouth around his toes made very little noise on the grass. Here, few noticed him, and books became his accidental guide to people watching. Agatha Christie, Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, Stephanie Meyer, Shakespeare, Stephen King. Some read books he didn't recognize — pathways into unknown worlds in which he wasn't invited. And some, still, read poetry. Pablo Neruda, Shu Ting. He looked for these ones.
Eion curved a wide path around a pair of datemates and reached the outskirts of the courtyard, where shadow and hedge retained a measure of privacy. Here, he was guaranteed to find those who couldn't be bothered, but that was its own sport — especially when their reading tastes proved to have insight.
meidgel
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