"We're losers," Gigi said, leaning back on the barstool until her back was touching the counter. "We're not supposed to be at work for another six hours, and here we are anyway. You feelin' any better?"
"A little," I mumbled. Actually, I felt a lot better than I had a few moments ago. After I left my lunch all over the curb by the magazine stand, Gigi turned maternal on me and rushed me over to the nearest place to get me out of the rain, which just so happened to be where we worked. Not that I minded at all, though. It was Jessi's shift then and she worked with some nice people. I got to be pampered a little.
Of course, Gigi didn't stay in maternal mode for very long. It wasn't her nature. "He was hot though, that guy. That Sef," she corrected herself. "You think he'll show up here ever?"
I shook my head. "Nah, you probably scared him off."
I expected her to follow that up with more nudging in my side, but she didn't do anything. Maybe it was because I was sick, but she was also in an agreeable mood too. "Yeah, you're right. He looked like he was scared shitless when I first talked to him. He's probably not worth it." She took a paper napkin out of one of the holders and started tearing it into strips. "He's probably bad in bed anyways." She shot me a corner-of-the-eye stare and winked.
"You do have a boyfriend, you know," I insisted. My eyes fell to the napkin she was senselessly destroying, and she saw it.
"I like senseless destruction," she explained with a smile. She said nothing about my boyfriend warning. She started ripping the napkin up faster, until there was nothing left but a pile of shreds. She put them on the counter.
One of the workers on Jessi's shift started cleaning the bar. Her name was Trish and she reminded me of a chocobo: she was really tall and thin, with a husky voice and hair about as dark as mine. It was always piled all the way up on top of her head. When some of the strands fell out of place they looked like chocobo feathers. Soon she got to the torn-up napkin and threw Gigi a look. "What the hell...?"
"I like senseless destruction," Gigi repeated, looking over her shoulder, smiling.
"You're fucked up," Trish said, shaking her head. She grabbed the shredded napkin and went to throw it away.
Gigi leaned so far back that her head was resting on the bar. "Ain't I?" she called after Trish, and when she got no answer she burst out laughing. "Fear me, you bitch!" she said when she was done. I knew she was trying to be playful, but she always got too harsh.
Trish didn't answer her, fortunately. That was when Jessi came over from one of the registers, having just finished with two customers. She had traces of mustard on her hands. "Feeling better, Tifa?" she asked politely, looking really concerned.
I nodded. "Thanks for the aspirin."
"You're welcome." She turned to Gigi. "So what happened? Tell me."
I fidgeted in my seat a little.
"Oh, I'll tell you," said Gigi, turning around in her seat so that she was facing Jessi. "We were at the magazine stand. I was there to buy more intellectual readings on scientific phenomenon, and Tifa was there to buy porn as usual---"
"Right!" I cut in, sarcastic as ever. I really didn't have to defend myself, since Jessi knew Gigi even better than I did, but I did it anyway. It was a reflex.
Gigi went right on talking as if I never said anything. "---And then this guy gets behind us..."
"Ooh," Jessi cooed, leaning forward.
"He was goddamned gorgeous. I mean, I was stunned---"
"And then she closed up her umbrella on me and made me stand there soaking wet while she tried to flirt," I interjected.
Gigi turned and gave me an angry look, one that I knew too well to take seriously. "Anyway... So I politely said hi, and he told me he was from Reine---"
"What did he look like?" said a very impatient Jessi. Her eyes were wide. "Describe 'gorgeous'."
"Oh God, he was like, perfect. His whole face... He had green eyes, really, really pretty ones. And... What color hair did he have, Tif? Wasn't it blond? I remember it was really light...and long, really long. It was like, halfway down his back..."
I never answered Gigi. She was wrong about his hair color though; it wasn't blond. It didn't have any color. It was almost like white. But he wasn't old, so that didn't make sense. I gave myself a minute, expecting to get sick again, but thankfully that didn't happen. By the time I got my head down from the clouds, I missed most of Gigi's raving. Jessi's face was set in the typical teen "oh my God I can't believe it" look. She must've found that stranger to be as hot as Gigi did.
"Sef?" she asked. "Is that short for something?"
Gigi frowned thoughtfully. "Hmmm. Know what? I should've asked him that, but I told you, he really wanted to leave. He was getting all pissy about it---"
Jessi's eyes darted up and over my head. She interrupted Gigi again. "Eep. Customers." She walked back to the register, anticipating them.
Gigi sighed and turned around on the barstool again so she was facing me. "You know, I could actually travel to Reine to see him. I wonder where he lives there? That place is dangerous---"
"Don't do that!" I told her. "That's crazy." I didn't know whether or not I should've taken her seriously. Gigi could be really unpredictable.
But she smiled at me. "You know me better than that! I was just sayin'... God. C'mon, you saw him! How could you say he's not the prettiest guy you ever saw?"
"I didn't say he wasn't pretty." And really, I didn't. He was kind of pretty, in his own way. But he was downright scary too, in a deep unsettling way. That made him unattractive to me. How could I say a guy was hot after I got done hurling because of him?
"But you puked right after he left! ...Unless it was out of grief," Gigi said, getting melodramatic again. "Grief that he was leaving! Grief that the hotness is no longer amongst us...!"
Trish had gone back to cleaning the bar moments ago. She was near us again when she decided to just join our conversation. "What hotness? Who?" She did that sometimes. Sometimes she'd butt in with a question and we'd start talking to her, and other times she'd pass us by while she was working without saying a thing. Either way was pretty awkward for me, but Gigi took it in stride.
"Some guy we met at the magazine stand," Gigi filled her in. "He was so goddamned hot I could've humped him on the spot. Damn decency laws."
Trish chuckled. "Georgette Slut."
I knew about her last name joke by then. Gigi told me it a while ago. "They used to tease me about it in school," she said. "You know, take out the T and put in an L and what do you get?" It was coincidental for her too, because it was kind of true.
But Trish called her Georgette, and that meant a kick in the shins. "Don't CALL me that!" Gigi snapped, starting to rise up off the barstool. "Just 'slut' will do," she added, more calmly then. "Damn bar. You'd have bruised ankles by now if this stupid thing wasn't in the way. Consider yourself lucky!"
Trish just laughed at her. "It's not that bad of a name."
"I hate it. I wish I had a nice name." Gigi paused there, then said, "Like yours. Or Tifa's."
"Huh, I wish I had something else of Tifa's," Trish said. Her eyes fell on my chest.
Not again. I'd been through this embarrassment too many times before. "Oh no, let's not do the boob thing," I started griping.
"Oh yes, we're doing the boob thing," Trish said. She threw the cloth she was cleaning the bar with down on the table, then began the usual speech. "If I had boobs as big as yours..."
If she did, she'd be embarrassed. I was. They attracted a lot of unwanted attention, from both guys and girls. I knew very few people, aside from Barret and Cloud and Cid and everyone else I traveled with long ago, who didn't make a big issue out of them every once in a while. Yuffie had come close to saying something once, if I remembered right, but she never actually said anything to my face.
"...I'd be flashing them all over," Trish finished. "Just like, 'look at them'!" There she acted it out and stuck out her chest. "I'd wear low-cut stuff all the time..."
"But she never does," Gigi said. "You don't know how lucky you are, you fucker!" she said to me.
I was turning ten shades of red. "I told you, I have a scar there..."
Trish frowned for me. "Aw, that sucks. How'd you get it?"
"Accident," I replied. "When I was little. Some friends and me were playing near Mount Nibel and I fell and scraped my chest on something." A total lie, needless to say. It was something I came up with when the why-I-didn't-wear-low-cut-shirts conversation came up before. I wasn't about to go telling everyone that I got the scar because I tried to go after Sephiroth in a Mako reactor---no, best my connections with him remain in my head. It was too creepy for me to discuss openly anyway, and it wasn't a good conversation topic. Sephiroth might not have had a face in Quintz, but he sure had a reputation.
"Mount Nibel? You lived in Nibelheim?" Trish asked. "My aunt lived there years ago." Something clinked in the distance; she looked over her shoulder and found Jessi reaching for some glasses. At her register was a group of guys. Trish seemed to know what they wanted. "Hey, Jessi, wait a minute!"
Gigi watched them. "Poor thing," she said. "She can't serve liquor 'til she's twenty-one. She probably won't even be working here by then." I knew she was talking about Jessi. I never asked why the girl had been hired if she wasn't young enough to touch alcohol; I assumed that there must've been some kind of behind-the-scenes arrangement between her and Mr. Weiss. In other words, it was none of my business.
Silence came up then. It must've been a few minutes before the door to The Cafe swung open. It caught my eye, since I wasn't in the middle of conversation. Cloud walked inside. From the look of him it must've stopped raining. His hair and his jacket looked dry. He saw me and walked over to the bar. "Hey," he said simply.
"Hey, Spike," Gigi said, and Cloud shot her a leer. He was used to her by now, but that didn't mean he liked her. He found her to be irritating actually---he told me so once.
Cloud looked kind of dejected, so I automatically jumped to one conclusion. "Oh, don't tell me. You weren't fired again, were you?" I was almost pleading with him for that not to be the case.
He scratched the back of his head the way he always did when he was uneasy. "Yeah," he said. "The guy was a jerk anyway."
"Cloud!" I whined. "Rent's due next week! I don't want to keep paying all of it myself!"
He sat down on a barstool beside me. He didn't look the least bit upset and I didn't expect him to. "Don't worry," he told me. "I'll find something else."
"Cloud..."
He turned and faced me. "I told you, don't worry." His eyes were sincere and forceful. I loved that look. It was the one that said to me, "You're getting upset over nothing." And maybe I was, but whenever he got fired it brought all my worries to the front of my mind. If he left me I wouldn't know what to do. He'd been a part of my life for too long. Why couldn't he just stick to one job, or pretend he was happy, or...
"Why don't you work here?" Gigi said suddenly. "Me and Tifa'll work to get Antoine fired and then you can take his place!"
"Gigi..." I looked over my shoulder. "That's awful!"
She shrugged. "It was only a suggestion."
Cloud shook his head. "Nah, I don't think I could work here. I suck at cooking."
"A lesson I know all too well," I said, smiling a little.
"Though I did make hot dogs once."
"Yeah, I'll admit, your hot dogs were good."
"I owe a lot to package instructions."
"Me too."
He smiled. I was already smiling. Then we started that goofy staring thing that we sometimes lapsed into, the kind that made me wonder where we stood when it came to our relationship. It was proof that he liked living with me though, so whenever we did that thing my spirits kind of lifted. It means he's staying, I'd tell myself.
Trish had come back to where Gigi and I were at the bar. She had that look on her face that said she was intending on being quiet this time around, but when she saw Cloud, her mouth opened. "Don't tell me," she said, pointing at him. "Cloud?"
Cloud nodded.
"Yay, I got it right!" she congratulated herself.
I introduced them when we met before, a while ago. I knew Cloud wouldn't have been offended if she had forgotten, though.
Then we all got quiet---you know, that really, really awkward kind of quiet where everyone tried not to look at everyone else while trying to think of something to say. It was a funny thing actually, unless you were in the middle of living it out, like in our case. Trish found an easy way out though---she just continued cleaning the bar, working her way down to the other end.
"I think I should go," Cloud said, looking at either his feet or the floor; I couldn't tell which.
"Yeah, me too," I agreed. I was feeling better by then, but I wanted to be under my own roof at the moment. I had too much to think about.
Gigi sort of pouted, but the expression didn't stay on her face very long. "Don't forget," she reminded me, "you need to be back here by seven." She paused, then said thoughtfully, "Unless you're still sick..."
"No," I said, getting to my feet, "I'll be fine..."
"---In which case I could show Weiss your little mess out there, if the rain didn't wash it all away. As evidence that you are not fit to work...!"
"Mess?" Cloud asked, sliding off his seat and looking at me.
I turned to him. "I'll explain on the way back."
I said goodbye to everyone and Cloud and I started the walk home. The route from The Cafe back to our house was a twenty-minute walk more or less.
We talked along the way. He told me he checked the mail before he came down to The Cafe to see if I might be there. We got another letter from Red and Reeve sent us a postcard. In the beginning, when we were traveling, we didn't bother to write to anybody. No one would've delivered our letters anyway, not in some of the cities we visited. Being as stable as it was, Quintz still attempted to have a mail system. Places that didn't rely on ShinRa, like Cosmo Canyon and Wutai, certainly got our letters. Red wrote as often as he could---well, he got someone else to actually write his letters for him, but he always sent something. We usually got one every so many weeks. Yuffie's father sent us letters from Wutai; he must've really been grateful for the materia we sent his daughter home with. Yuffie herself wasn't much of a letter writer, but sometimes she'd add something in. The mail from Wutai tapered off eventually though. Cid, I knew, hated to write, but sometimes we'd get something from Shera. Twice we got something, I think. Reeve... He bounced around from place to place. He didn't seem to be much of a letter writer himself, but he did send postcards. A lot of them had girls in bikinis on the front, which meant that he must be spending a lot of time in Costa del Sol...and probably bought a lot of postcards for future use there.
The address on the postcards kept changing, but we were able to keep track of Reeve. He said he couldn't wait to see us again, and truthfully, I kind of missed him. Last we saw him was in Kalm when we went to get Marlene. It was the first time we actually met face to face. I was impressed: he was almost nothing like Cait Sith, as if they were two separate people. But the sense of humor was still there, and that was what I liked best about him.
We would see him again, of course---my birthday was next month, and we'd already sent out invitations for a little party in late February. Nothing big, just a little something to commemorate me turning twenty-two. I didn't want to make a big thing out of it.
Too, Cloud and I talked about what happened to me earlier that day and the "mess" that was connected to it. I told him about the stranger---I left out his name---and how sick I suddenly got.
"I tried to come up with some kind of reason for it, but I couldn't," I told him. By then we were midway up Quintz, somewhere between Uptown and Downtown. We were on a bridge; there was nothing before us but a stretch of narrow pavement. To our right was another walkway, just as tiny. The street was sandwiched in between. I was always afraid of getting hit by a car whenever I crossed the bridge. Maybe it was because the pavement was so narrow.
"That does sound weird," Cloud admitted. "But I don't think it's anything to worry about. Weird things happen to us all the time." He paused there and smiled a little. I understood him completely, recalling all of AVALANCHE's exploits. "I'd just forget about it, if I were you," he advised me.
Oh, I wanted to believe that, I really did. But I couldn't. Talking about it started to make me feel sick all over again. "Maybe," I said. I was eager to end it now. "You're probably right."
I willed my sickness away. It was all just mind over matter, wasn't it? Or was it really a gut feeling, some kind of warning? Not being able to explain it, that was what really bothered me the most.
