OPEN.

[poleaxed]

ill put an img here l8r.

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[poleaxed]

Joan smiles, not like a cat with a canary, but like a cat who knows it's going to get one and wants to rub it in. "And how old were you then?"

[ultimatums]

The expression on her face is sort of unreadable – or, no, it's not that. He can read it pretty clear, but it's hard to determine what she's so pleased about exactly, unless she likes an excuse to make jokes about a man's age. "Nineteen when I left. Dug coal for a while after I finished school, but there wasn't a whole lot keepin' me here."

[poleaxed]

Joan's expression stays transparently pleased, and a little smugger about it each moment. "Dug coal, ran away to the big city so you could become a law man?"

She tips the brim of his hat when she says it.

"And then you were tragically dragged back to the boondocks."

[ultimatums]

"I was," he says, with a long-suffering sigh. "Would you wanna go back to where you're from?" A thoughtful beat. "Texas?"

[poleaxed]

"Not Military City," she says. "But Houston's basically a different state. All them astronaut statues in Webster, shit. I'd take that over being an Okie in a heartbeat. But-" She taps the brim of his hat- "Texas is a lot fucking bigger'n Kentucky."

[ultimatums]

"You ain't wrong," he says ponderously. "I don't have to go far to wind up in a holler where everybody knows my name and half my life story."

[poleaxed]

"Yeah, I know what that's like." Because she's far from home, because he'll never know the full details, because she wants him to like her, she says, "My daddy owed everybody in town at least five dollars, he was a boxer in the seventies and he had four identical fuckin' kids. Grew up dragging that behind me like cans on a wedding limo."