Human Design | Sirius Black

xxxviii. Sun Sets on Absolution.

REECE HAD CERTAIN feelings about denim, and none of them were good.

That was a fact, and it couldn't be changed, no matter how one might feel about it. It was so rough and tough with no stretch or flexibility, and it always twisted or pulled in the wrong directions, like it was vehemently living in utter disarray with nature just out of spite; denim jeans could barely be sat down in, and jackets caged arms like those of patients in psychiatric asylums. Not to mention that it didn't resist wind or rain, and when it did rain (which it often did in San Francisco during winter months), 

it became a hundred times more uncomfortable than it already was. Maybe it was because there was no such thing as denim wizard's robes (there probably had been somebody who had attempted it somewhere), but Reece would not be caught wearing denim on the day he died, even if that made him a social outcast in the denim craze of the eighties. Polyester, nylon, and tricot were not favourable to him either, but at least he had to admit that they were useful sometimes (like when one wanted to make fabric waterproof without magic). 

He much preferred natural fibres like linen and cotton (and wool, in the case he was in Britain, where it was cold). That all said, he could not for the life of him understand why Carlos insisted on wearing not only denim jeans but also a denim jacket every day. He had met the man a total of four times, and each time he had been wearing double denim.

But they were inside now, and he had shed at least the jacket. Carlos's arms were covered in hundreds of birthmarks, sepia and walnut specks on the burlywood canvas of his skin, all the way to the sleeves of his t-shirt, where they no doubt multiplied tenfold

 It was odd then that his face had only a solitary dot, a beauty mark if one wished to call it that, underneath his left eye, though it was currently pulled a millimetre higher due to the crinkling in his face when he smiled. Now, Reece has never really processed any of the art theory he had learned as a child beyond the point of necessity but as he sat in Paradiset with Carlos, he found himself thinking that the cold lemon yellow of the vinyl wall coverings didn't suit well with him for it was too fresh and bitter and he would have looked better with a soft pink, something gentle and sweet, wall behind him.

Reece swirled the ice crush in his lemonade with the plastic mixing stick that had been put into it (he wasn't sure if it was Muggles or Yankees that wanted to make everything out of plastic, but he didn't like that either, but at least he could write a narrative about how the overabundance of plastic had some symbolic meaning in his life). "So what's your heartbreak story?" he asked in a low voice so that the two girls at a few plastic tables away. He didn't like being off base, so he could only level the playing field.

There was a distinctive manner in the way that Carlos pulled the blue straw from his mouth and looked at him across the table, not hurt or surprised but in a way that reminded Reece of a bunny whose food had been taken away before it could eat everything it wanted. "I met him in high school," he said, placing the milkshake glass onto the table and then rotating it until it was perfectly placed so that he didn't have to look up as he spoke. "He was two years older than me, but he kept being held back, so he was in my class senior year, and he was .... I was always really quiet in school, you know, I had friends but I didn't really belong to any particular group, and I was bullied sometimes; he was the 'punk rock' kind of guy who is so busy rejecting the status quo that they start hurting themselves and then other people." He shrugged, his fingers then rising to play with the silver cross around his neck when the glass no longer had anything to be fidgeted with. "I don't know if he ever even cared about me in the end. But he moved a few months after graduation, and I never heard from him again. I don't even know where he is." Carlos sighed, then smiled for a second, and finally slackened his shoulders as if expelling bad spirits from his body. "Then I met this other guy, and that was great for a year or so, but he wanted me to come out to my parents, and I didn't want to, so we broke up."