itinere | open || at a honky-tonk where their boots stomp all night

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open || at a honky-tonk where their boots stomp all night

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Ask and you shall receive. The Houndstooth Grill and Tavern now broadcasts all sporting events on a ton of TV's. I think I kind of love whoever runs this place. For now.
Grand opening this Saturday.
Are you ready for some football? Hope y'all come by. And Roll Tide!

The Houndstooth, while it's been open for business for awhile, now has sporting broadcasts from every world and every time. Of course, the default on the many screens is American football since Jill is such a football fan. But she's willing to search the channels to get at least one or two TV's onto whatever someone wants to watch. The Pub and Grill has a homey atmosphere and serves classic Americana foods like burgers and steaks, every kind of fried foods you can imagine, frito pies, chili cheese dogs, etc. Some nights there's even live music playing at the top floor and a dance floor to get your groove thing on.

While she's finagled Lucy into helping her out on this one day, Jill is sometimes at the bar serving drinks. Sometimes she's behind the piano playing and singing some of that afore mentioned live music. Sometimes she's out on the patio smoking a cigarette. Sometimes she's walking around serving, making sure everyone has what they need. All the time she's watching some football game or another. She's thrilled to have the place here in its entirety.

Stop on by. Bring a date. Have a few drinks and laughs and fun.

ooc: The official grand opening of The Houndstooth. Forward dated for this weekend (October 10th). Treat this as a mingle for Saturday, tag around and have fun.
Get an idea of what The Houndstooth looks like at the Residences and Businesses page.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oh, wait, what? Noah sees her kind of frown a little, but that's terrible. Just ... really terrible.

"They're not coming," Noah says, reaching his hand across the bartop. "I came to see you." He tries to catch her eye, cocking his head to do so, trying on a small, crooked smile. "I just don't want to get in your way or whatever, since you're working." He remembers how irate Blue had gotten when they would interfere with her work, too, at least at first.

"But if I'm not in the way or bothering you, I'll stay."

Okay that's better. For a minute there she thought maybe he didn't want to be around her. But that crooked smile gets a similar one from her.

"I can take a break." She sets the dishtowel back on the bar and then walks around to meet him with her own fruity drink in one hand and her cigarettes in the other. "Want to go out to the patio?"

"Yeah, that'd be nice," he tells her, and he goes, this time, grabbing his own soda as well.

He follows her out, not quite succeeding in not watching how her hips sway when she walks.

"What's with the football?" He asks. It's not big in Henrietta. More about the rugby there.

"We're from Alabama, Lucy and me." She says, turning back to look at him as she pulls open the back door to the outdoor patio for him. She follows him outside. The patio has picnic benches on it. There are a few patrons outside watching some games on the outdoor TV's.

Jill leads Noah to a picnic table in the far corner. She sets her drink down on the table and pushes up to sit beside it, her feet on the bench where she should be sitting. "Football is king there. Especially college football. We're huge Crimson Tide fans. That's what they call the University of Alabama football team."

She looks to Noah. "You're not into football?"

"Aglionby wasn't big on football. It was mostly rich boys, so ... " Noah smiles a little as he sits, his chin nearly at her knees. "Rugby and cricket and rowing. That kind of stuff. I don't know if people would crowd around a TV to watch those, though. Or go to a bar."

"Oh rich boys, huh?" She asks, turning a small, crooked grin on Noah as she gets a cigarette from the carton. "Were you one of those?"

Lucy's family is rich. Jill, well, she's the opposite of that. "Did you play one of those rich boy sports?"

"I was one of those," Noah admits. There's no sense in denying it or lying. "But I never played the sports. I mean look at me," he laughs. "This is what I looked like when I was alive, so I ... I'm not exactly super-strong."

"You look fine to me." Jill tells him after giving him a once-over. Noah says that like he isn't the cutest thing since all those angry cat memes that flooded the internet awhile back. Jill thinks he's pretty darn cute.

She lights her cigarette an takes a deep draw from it. "Are all your friends rich boys?"

"No," Noah says quickly enough. Blue and Adam come immediately to mind. He wraps a hand that's not super-warm, but not like ice, around Jill's narrow ankle. "Gansey and Ronan - they've been rich all their lives and it's just part of who they are? But Blue and Adam; they've had to work hard for everything and they keep reminding Gansey and Ronan of that, but they keep forgetting."

Outside of that for so long, Noah hadn't felt like he'd needed to take part in those discussions. He isn't rich or poor now. He just is.

"I guess since I was at Lucy's house more than I was at my own, I was vicariously rich." She says thoughtfully after hearing Noah describe his friends status. "I was rich in luck cause Lucy's family and Luce are pretty awesome."

She likes that he's touching her, his hand on her ankle. It seems so small a gesture but it makes her feel good about herself in ways that Jill rarely does.

"I guess you eventually got lucky too." Not with that asshole who had killed him, but with his new friends.

That's an interesting way to put it, really. Noah as lucky. As getting lucky with his friends. He hadn't thought of it that way and hadn't really given much thought to his status at all, aside from the "was once dead, is now alive" most obvious part of it.

He blinks and looks up at her. "I guess so. I mean, I'm really lucky meeting you and Lucy, too." That much is obvious.

If Jill looked at just the most obvious parts of herself, none of it would be pretty or lucky. Lucy has made her look beyond all that to all the individual parts. There are some good things there for anyone if you take the time to look. Some days Jill is better at that than others. She tends to lean toward the darker side of things.

His comment gets a small smile from her. She leans down to kiss his brow at his hairline. "We're lucky meeting you too, ghost boy."

When she leans in, Noah closes his eyes almost automatically, wanting to focus on the feel her lips on his skin.

That she thinks she's lucky too? Wow. That's cool. Noah can feel his face heat again. "Maybe we can do another movie night some time, huh?"

There's something in kissing that makes a person feel alive, isn't there? Noah has been dead. Jill has sometimes felt dead. But in the kissing and other such things, she's felt alive... more alive than she's ever felt out from sitting behind a piano.

"I think I speak for the both of us that we would be pro that idea." She says, her fingers linger in his mess of hair while she pulls another drag from her cigarette. "So you had fun?"

"Yeah," Noah admits and perhaps he should play more coy, but why? He had a really good time and he really likes Jill and Lucy, so why lie about it?

"It was ... it was really great."

Jill slips down from the top of the table to sit on the bench next to him. Her arm slips behind him to put her cigarette out in the ashtray on the table. Then she leaves her arm there behind him and she leans in to kiss him.

"Probably cause you're such a good kisser." She flirts with him. Or her attempt at flirting. She's not half as good at it as Lucy is.

What? She's great at it, though. She's a very good flirter.

It takes Noah a minute to adjust to the cigarette breath - he's never kissed a smoker before, but he kisses Jill because he really likes her and he likes kissing her and he was dead and now he's alive and this makes him feel alive.

So.

Jill has many vices. She can have a very addictive personality. She's just lucky she never did meth like her parents did. She won't even look at drugs outside of alcohol and nicotine. They terrify her because she's seen the worst of what they can do to people.

The kiss is nice though so maybe he isn't too terribly turned off by her vices. In fact, they kiss for awhile, if just because kissing is so nice and neither of them seems to want to pull away.

When it does end, Jill pulls her bottom lip through her teeth. "Thanks."

Blinking and feeling a little bit like he's in a haze (it was a really nice kiss, okay?), Noah looks back at her, feeling his cheeks heat. "Thanks for what?" he asks, confused.

For kissing her? He'd totally do that again without thinking twice about it. And he doesn't even need to be thanked.

"Thanks for making me feel good." By kissing, by just being here to see her. Noah makes Jill feel pretty and special and generally good if just by being Noah. It's a good feeling. She hopes that she does the same for him.

She shakes her head, looking down so that her hair shields some of her face. "I don't always feel good."

Neither does Noah. Maybe that's why he feels such a kinship to her. His fingers trace circles on her ankle. "I'm glad I can," he admits with a small smile. That he has that ability after all. Really, she and Lucy make Noah feel more alive that he probably ever has, so at least he can give back a little.

They do seem to be alike in that way. Maybe Noah needs Lucy as much as Jill does. Because Lucy reminds them to get out into the light, to smile and laugh and live. She reminds them that there are good things. Jill is her best self around Lucy. Maybe Noah can find that too.

"My parents were junkies." She confides in him. "Meth. Heroine. It was always around the house. They loved me when they were clean and remembered they had a kid, you know?" The problem was that that had only happened twice in Jill's childhood, their getting clean, and it didn't last for long.

Wow.

In the class stratus of Aglionby, often the drug of choice was booze. Dinner parties, cocktail parties, after dinner drinks.

Noah's mother's schapps.

"That must have been scary," he says quietly, watching her face. Like ... really scary.

"Yeah, it was. It got to where I was at Lucy's house more than I was at my own. Her family was... what a family should be, I guess." She says with a shrug. "They kind of took me in and adopted me. So... that was lucky for me."

That sounds like Gansey's family, really which makes it good that there are people like that in the world. "I'm glad you met her," Noah tells Jill quietly. "And I bet she is, too."

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