No eye contact, but his words finally came as she’d known they would. Those words, mumbled and barely distinguishable; he exhales them like a semaphore via the bobbing pipe-stem clenched in his teeth and set a’dancing by his lips.
The lewd words of the proposition and then the price… the offer. Direct words lent diffidence as they filter through his soiled moustache and catch like detritus in his grimy beard before spilling onto the table as the grubby proposal is laid out before her and she hates him. She hates them all.
She’d accept of course. No question. The money was already her landlord’s, it belonged to her tab in the café and she winced, not for her debts, but for his wife, his children, because it'd be for them to suffer the cost.
She considered the Pernod, languishing green and sullen within its misty glass. She could do with it now, to dull what was to come, but she’d leave it with Pierre behind the bar. A hearty glass of absinthe, she mused, was better employed to remove the taste of a man than to preclude one.
