« He's here. »
Jo didn't need to announcement, but all the same she was late in turning find the tall, burly man in reds, standing before her.
"No one followed you here? See you leave?" the 'red' one asks, like he always does.
And Jo answers, like she always does with a grimace, "If anyone gives a shit, they'd be here. Right?" Her way of saying No, I wasn't followed as always, you perfumed idiot.
Of course, their relationship has always been an edgy one from jump. It's not easy catering to two bosses and maintaining the fa?ade of 'good little bluerider'. The Greenfields gang knows nothing about Kimren and the Red man. The Red man and Kimren knows nothing about the Greenfields gang. High Reaches Weyr knows nothing about either of them. That's how Jo likes to keep it, and that means she's had to implement turns of duckin' and dodgin' anyone that's remotely known her since her Tacuseth was hatched that fateful day.
The Glacier wing bluerider steps forward, slipping out a large hidebound packet from the inside of her dark rider jacket and slaps it onto the Red man's outstretched palm. "You'll find everything there," Jo says then, keeping things geared on business. She's hoping it stays that.
It never does.
The Red man doesn't open the packet, appearing as always to trust the former convict at her word. Pocketing the packet inside his own reddish coat, his smile wide, "Good business. So lucky were we to find you in that bar turns ago, eh?" Patting the hidden packet a few times before he starts fishing around on the other side for something, "So tell me. You, ah, doing well at the Weyr? Your boyfriend letting you out okay?"
"I haven' all day." She literally doesn't. She's expected at Greenfields Hold in moments, and then she needs to make a brief appearance with her riding wing back at the Weyr.
The Red man laughs, the brush off not taken for the insult that it is. "Girlfriend, then," he continues to needle as he finally finds that he's looking for: payment. It's a medium sized hidebound package, and he pulls it out and hands it over. "Don't you rider-types swing both ways?"
"We also run down perfumed men like ya fer sport," and Jo almost snatches her payment from the man's fingers. Her patience these days? Not the best. Turning back to her waiting blue, "Ya want something else moved, then ya know how to call me."
Never a goodbye. Never leaving on friendly terms. Like the bad-ass that she thinks she is, Jo slips her payment into her riding jacket and vaults onto Tacuseth's back with precision and grace. If cigarettes existed on Pern, then there would have been a lit cigarette hanging from her mouth as she directs her blue dragon skyward and Between in almost a blink of an eye.
His voice is like stone rubbing on stone, but it's the flecks of amusement that touches sharper: « You never let anyone get to you, do you? »
You and I can't afford to, Tac.
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