Bookworm.

Luce

The Bookworm's Attic is not a literal attic, though it is hidden on the second floor of a rundown commercial block that boasts a lively Ethiopian restaurant that turns into a club two nights a week (Wednesday and Saturday), a Latino grocery store, a thrift store with windows so grimey and merchandise so old it seems to have been untouched since the hippie heyday, and a sharp, chic little gallery space that is closed tonight, but advertising a new show of four up and coming taggers opening next week.

Amidst this diverse and colorful display, the staircase for the bookstore is easily overlooked, a dingy climb up concrete steps covered by wind-ripped awning that belongs in some finest setting. It is there, though - and open late! every night, or so proclaims an old hand lettered sign mounted beneath the swinging plaque that shows - yes - a worm eating its way through a moldering old book.

The store itself smells of leather and glue and paper, the rich, moldering smell one associates with slowly decaying books. There is little rhyme or reason to the stacks and shelves, scattered everywhere. The owner has his own organization scheme. Still, tucked in amidst the dog-eared romance novels and second-hand crime novels that are the used bookstores stock-in-trade are little gems, waiting for the right hand and the right eye to unearth them.

There are few patrons tonight: the old man at the counter, mid-fifties, with a shock of gray hair and lively, if bloodshot green eyes, a pair of teenagers dressed all in black, burrowing through the supply of Japanese manga, and someone else back in the stacks, nearly six feet tall, with the narrow, androgynous frame of a supermodel or a hipster of either sex or a teenaged boy who has not yet grown into his height. A gray hood (cotton, or perhaps cashmere) goes a far way to conceal the bright sweep of blond hair, the trim lines of a military-style blazer are masculine enough to further confuse the issue of gender. From afar, at the least.

Alexander Rastov

There is much in this that Alexander gives not one fuck about.

Galleries dedicated to spraypaint vandals.

Thrift stores.

Hipsters. Hip-Hopsters. Manga.

The list could go on. What he did care for was Ethiopian cuisine, having acquired a taste for it at the source. And so he had happened to be here, finishing a meal, lingering over a beer and bullshitting with the owner while his wife did the cooking in the always shockingly small kitchens of such places, when he'd spotted her. Him. Whichever. Seeing Luce had been like a shock to his system, and he'd quickly moved for the door, leaving a hundred bill on the counter and not stopping for change.

Once upstairs, looking about, it's certain that Alexander Rastov stands out, tall as he is, with those cheekbones and that hair. Wearing a black mock-neck and camel cashmere slacks, under what could be a vintage leather car coat.

Once upstairs, looking about, Alexander remembers to make some effort to dissemble, glancing at the stacks, while his gaze frequently shifts Luce's way.

Luce

If he's looking for her, at her, with or without any hint of dissembling, it is clear that the creature is female. Tall and thin, dressed in layers - the military style coat, with marching rows of matching buttons - a pale gray hoodie, which is too fine to be cotton jersey, over a cheap t-shirt with the garish decoration common to charity walk/runs. This over fitted black jeans and black boots with chunky heels high enough to bring her to six feet tall.

There was a familiar greeting for the proprietor, who watches Alexander watching Luce with a certain bleary-eyed interest that disappears when the teenagers in the corner begin making too many shuffling noises. He clears his throat in a warning, which is enough to bring even the blonde's pale gaze sweeping up from the stack of foreign-language works in which she was absorbed. The faint edge of a frown mars the fine sweep of her high, clear brow when she catches Alexander's shifting glance.

Her own is a pale, saturated blue, the color darkened by the shadows cast over her face by that light, and the stillness of the small bookstore. He makes some effort to faux-browse the stacks, where romances are shelved beside beat poets beside eighteenth century treatises on housewifely behavior.

She makes no such effort, snapping the dull old book in her pale hands sharply closed in a decisive gesture, then threading her way through the stacks, back toward the counter. Watching him openly the whole time.

"Is there something you're looking for." It would be a question, were it not so flatly offered, with a cool twist of her mouth and that arc of her brows. A flash of her eyes toward the shelves. "In particular. The organisation is peculiar, I'll grant. And Mr. Edwards refuses to offer guidance, but perhaps I can help."

Her voice is low, private. The faintest hint of something foreign to her tone. If he has a good ear, he'll peg it as a French accent worn nearly clean by practice or time.

Alexander Rastov

He glances a moment at what he's rummaging. Noting the treatise(eses), his mouth curves in a hint of a smirk and he takes that one up. Sure that a certain someone will profit to read it.

Passing it to the man at the counter without much bothering to look, his eyes squarely locked on Luce now. Unless she's blind, she can see it too. Recognition. Behind his hooded gaze, his mind knows what they are seeing, before that window into his thoughts is shuttered and he adopts an affable, even predatorily male grin, eyes shifting to take her all in.

As deceptions go, it's a pretty good one. Being obviously 'interested' tends to shift most peoples' thoughts and reactions into that arena, and it's relatively rare that anyone looks deeper than that into his interest or motives.

Of course, not many catch him off-guard enough that he fumbles slipping that mask into place.

"Really?" His drawl is deliberately just a touch insolent, amidst the insouciance so pronounced that a left bank poet would strive to match it. "What would you recommend then, dear?"

Luce

"Mmmmm." A note of sharpened skepticism hums beneath the surface of her tone. Her pale eyes return the sweep of his predatory mask with a certain cool, remote assessment. They touch his hooded eyes, the faint smirk carved across his mouth, then drop to the book he has just placed on the counter. "I believe he has a very bad German translation of More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife buried in the back. Perhaps that would match your tastes?"

The book in her own pale hands is dull and worn, some hardcover with the shiny interior pages of something published in the 20s or 30s, long-neglected. Mold has formed on the cover and as she slides it onto the table, glancing back toward the stacks as if she were considering, quietly and well, his request for recommendations, she flashes him another edged half-smile, this one written in profile, the hood concealing, for the most part, her wealth of blonde hair, the fine weave of the cashmere distended at the nape of her neck, where the weight of her hair is knotted.

"Or perhaps a bodice ripper? You don't look the part, but who knows - " A brief, cool sweep of her gaze, fine little chin rising with the gesture. " - what lurks in the hearts of men. Surely there's a copy of The Monk around here, somewhere."

Alexander Rastov

He sets the book aside, forgotten. Not so much of a reader, perhaps. At least, of books. One never can tell. His eyes trace her, before glancing to the book in her hands.

"Allow me. I insist." Giving the man behind the counter the sort of look that brooks no argument, and thumbing cash off a gangster's roll. "Will you be getting it re-bound, perhaps?

"I'm Alexander by the way. You're stunning, yet not tiringly conscious of the fact. It's refreshing to meet a beautiful woman I don't very quickly have the urge to slap."

Luce

Her mouth tightens so minutely when he insists on purchasing her book that he might well miss it. Or dismiss it as an assessment of the state of the volume. Edwards glances between the pair of them - both far too attractive and put-together, really, to quite fit in this worn down and dimly lit space - and shrugs. "Forty-five," he says, mumbles really, perhaps inflating the private at the sight of Alexander's roll of bills. And begins wrapping the book in paper, sort of receding from the immediate scene with the peculiar skill of the ordinary.

"The book?" The creature's gaze drops, narrows briefly on the hardcover as it disappears beneath the folded brown paper. "It's hardly worth it. More a curiousity than something of worth. And what value there is lives in the glue and the binding, the depradations of time."

A glance cut back to him. "You can call me Luce." She leans against the counter, her tall, narrow frame fluid and hipslung, through not in a way that shows off her body, which - despite the sharpened symmetry of her features - is androgynous, even boyish rather than pneumatic. "You're rather forward, Alexander. Does it work for you, generally, or have you chosen this tack just for me?"

Alexander Rastov

Alexander peels off a fifty, and places it on the counter. He doesn't much seem to give a damn what it costs -- it's beside the point -- and it's quite likely that he notes her little hint of a moue, since he'd been waiting for any such reaction.

"Where shall I send it, once it's been mended?" He asks her, all innocence from below the eyes on down. His gaze however, just a little bit sly, and oddly cautious, considering the apparent differences in their statures, makes clear that he well knows he's trying her patience, at the very least, with his little display of assertiveness.

"I find that being forward, as you frame it, goes a long way towards separating the wolves from the sheep, as well as weeding out those too easily offended to be of any interest to me as anything but target practice."

Luce

"Here." She tells him, her fine mouth curving briefly, a supple flash of humor in her pale gaze as she taps the counter for emphasis. "I'm a bit of a nomad, Alexander," a certain precision, with the repetition of his name, "but Mr. Edwards is absolutely trustworthy," she lifts her sharp chin in the proprietor's direction, the gesture pulling the fine-gaugaged cashmere against the distinctive line of her neck and shoulder.

The movement has worked the hood back a half-inch, an inch perhaps, revealing the clean, fine lines of her features. The t-shirt she wears beneath the cashmere sweater dates from a Take Back the Night march somewhere in the country's interior. Cheap, poorly designed, and so well-washed it is nearly translucent, the collar frayed from use.

"Or you can call me," and it is her turn to look him, clearly, directly, up and down. An efficient sweep of her eyes that ends with her now hooded gaze cast aslant, toward the butcher block paper in which Edwards is now wrapping her book. Stealing a square of it and scrawling a phone number across the surface in a clear, direct hand. Quite nearly masculine.

"Though I should warn you, I'm remarkably easy to offend. A hothouse flower, I'm sure. More sheep than wolf." This is nearly an afterthought, offered without a direct look back at him, allowing him a fine view of her hunger-haunted profile, the soft hollows of jaw and throat, the sharp suggestion of clavicles disappearing beneath the cheap cotton tee.

With a crisp, clean gesture she tears off the edge of the paper and presents the phone number to him. A San Francisco area code, one of the recent ones. That accomplished, she steps away from the counter, and around him, heading toward the door. "If you'll excuse me, though. I have another engagement this evening. Have a lovely night."

- and walks, with sweeping gait and a certain retort of her heavy boots, toward the front door.