The Caffeinated Lifestyle
4. A Question of Style
Define 'cool'.
She had always been the cooler one – if you define cool as suavity, grace, looking good in whatever you wore because you made people think so. She could draw people's gazes by blowing a smoke ring. She could annoy people with one smirk. Polly had been famously susceptible to that particular trick.
But he had an air about him that made people want to laugh. He was likable.
She rather envied that, in a way.
When he was capering around his cellar juggling chemicals, or trying to teach her the more light-hearted Temperance hymns, or hopping on one foot in his best imitation of an 'Ankh-Morporkian pugilist', she'd start to smile. And then he'd look over his shoulder, a glint of teeth an invitation to join his mad little world, and she'd burst out laughing, and accept.
He made her laugh. And that, thought Maladicta, as she watched Otto dance around the iconograph with the screwdriverand singing 'Valking in Sunshine', while inhaling the heady scent from her coffee cup, was what really counted. Style could go stake.