Inktober 2019 #13: Ash

Here we are with “No Drama” again. The actual book is in first person, but I went with third and a different POV than John’s because I wanted to explore what he looks like from a human’s perspective.

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Lailah arrived at the bar as quickly as she could, panting slightly. “John! What’s the emergency?”

“There’s no emergency,” her partner, John Deer, assured her, slurring slightly. He had a glass of bourbon in front of him, no ice, mostly empty. The fact that he was slurring, and the fact that he had called her insisting that it was an emergency and she needed to meet him at Gaetano’s right away and now he was claiming there was no emergency, suggested that it was not his first one, or likely, even his third.

“You said there was an emergency,” she snapped. She hated bar stools. She hated absurdly tall men who sat on bar stools and then looked down at her because she was very short and not on a bar stool. “Tell me now why I don’t just walk the hell out of here.”

“Because Heph was busy and Mike’s in his studio and he won’t let me call,” John said, “and it’s a funeral, so I need someone to drink with.” He grinned as if what he had just said was the most reasonable thing possible.

Lailah sighed and put her camera bag on the bar. “Buy me something, then,” she said. “Something light if you expect me to drive your ass home when you’re done.”

“Bartender!” ( Read more... )