A THIRST FOR SOMETHING OTHERWISE UNCOMMON.

[JACE HERMANNI OVASKA]

Intense, dark green eyes followed the blur of people as they passed, a migratory herd of faces. Some had a hurried expression and air about them as if they had somewhere upstanding to be, while others kept a more relaxed pace, withou a care in the world. Of the two, Jace fell into the latter catgory. He carried a leatherbound, emerald green sketchbook, its age apparent through the cracks and yellowing of the edges. He remembered finding it in the attic of their first house, in California, when he was just a boy. His father told him that it was Jace's uncle's old book that he never got around to using. Being the meticulous boy that he was, he saved it for years until he could find a good use for it.

He had pulled it out a month ago, for the first time in years. The paper fibers had begun to break down and give that lovely vanilla smell that old, old books seem to have. Now, the pages were filled with sketches of people. No one in particular, but there were at least fifty now. He was an avid artist, always thinking, seeing, drawing. Seeing in particular was his gift. Jace was a man of reception. Things that many others did not see, he picked upon with ease -- though this had become so normal that sometimes he didn't pay attention. Sitting there, on the bench across from his favorite strip of shops on main street -- the bakery, the tea shop, and the hydroponics shop -- drawing with a charcoal stick. This was one of his routines. Often, he sat on a bench on the sidewalk and just waited for something. Anything -- he never knew what. A stray gull, a peculiar person. Something always managed to catch his interest and spark creativity.

Jace often got his sister, Kalista, to drop him off downtown when she went in to buy groceries or other knickknacks, as she often did. His sister cooked like a gourmet chef, but often was prone to letting the cabinets go a bit sparse as a result of picking up numerous, and often expensive, trinkets. She had gone somewhere today, and had dropped him off, but she wouldn't say where. But, no matter about her location or the lack of food in the house. That didn't really bother Jace, besides the fact that he was a young man, and young men always seem to be hungry. And thirsty.

Thirst. Jace pulled out an old green Thermos from his pack, one he made himself from old rice bags and scrap fabric he found... around. Around anywhere. Thrift stores, old clothes, anything really. It was far from a piece to showcase, but he enjoyed the misstiched pieces and the uncomplementary hues. It was so blatantly mismatched, that it really pulled it together. But mostly, he liked it because he had made it. Jace always got a satisfaction from working with his hands, which were suprisingly nimble for a man's hands.

Unscrewing the cap, he peered into the bottom of the Thermos, then took a swig of the dark, almost coffee-colored liquid, lacking any sweetness or added flavor. He closed his eyes and palatized the flavors on his tongue. "Bitter, with a hint of flowers," he said to himself in his somewhat soft, yet slightly raspy and muted tone. Naturally, he referred to the tea. A strong black tea that might've been unpalatable to some was just the way he enjoyed his brew. He often read in his spare time, and experimented with various types of herbs and teas they grew in the garden at home, which he often tended to. Since Kalista watched over him like a sheherd over sheep, he had to find something to keep himself busy. Crossbreeding and hybridizing -- it was kind of a side project of his. He had a few of his own special brews, too. Palastine Red was his latest variety, culminating a sweet, light flavor, a fruity green tea.

Jace felt a bit terrible, actually, for allowing his sister to go off to school while he did nothing all day. It was not as though he was a lazy person, quite the opposite -- he was as devoted as a family dog, working until his fingers bled, if the task so required. It was Kalista, his sister, that refused to have him supplement around the place. To her, he was still her baby brother, though he was twenty years old. Perhaps it seemed this way because she had taken over his care from a young age as well, no older than he was now. Their parents, who had long since retired and moved back to their home in California, supplemented the siblings a small sum of money to get them by, though it was barely enough. They would never bring this up to them, though, who were now almost in their mid sixties. They had their children when they were much older, but nevertheless had given the pair a great life, while it lasted.

A smile came to his lips, thinking of them. A rarity, at the least -- his expressions were often rather stern, though it defied his nature. He was a thoughtful and compassionate man, just hardened in some respects. Mostly, his expression looked fixated because he was constantly deciphering someone or something in his mind. The smile, though, was soft, and quick, like a butterfly quickly fluttering past. It was almost intimate, as though it was only for him to enjoy. His hand instinctually brushed the back of his ear, just under his hairline. He knew the tattoo there read "10-16-1948" in plain, sans-serif black letters. On the opposing side, in the same location beneath his hairline and behind his ear, read "4-16-50". Dad. Mom. Their birthdays. Always with him, even though he hadn't spoken to them in some time, now. Jace hadn't seen their faces in ten years. Heard their voices, thick with Finnish tongue, in ten years.

But now, Jace had another task on his mind. His gaze was almost enraptured, thoughtful, set upon the shops across the street. With much deliberation, and yet a fleeting step, he closed his leatherbound and tucked it into his rucksack, slinging it over his shoulder with a flourish. He crossed the street, quiet for a Sunday. Though, many were likely at church -- a commodity he never did attend, at present nor in childhood. There was often too much abstract thought in his head to devote any space to religion, anyway.

Across the street now, he gazed into the window. Already he could smell the aroma of tea leaves seeping from beneath the door and the cracks of the window, which were partially open. It was quite a lovely spring day. It almost beckoned opportunity. He wasn't exactly dressed for an interview, with his favorite pair of blue cotton drawstring cargo pants, gray-green woven jacket and black sandals, but that's exactly what he intended to do. Kalista worked hard, and she needed help around the house. There was little stopping Jace's mentality once he commited himself to a cause. Small, soft bells rang their welcome as the man opened the door.

[LORELEI BLACK]

I find it strange how things don’t change.

I have been stationed behind Little Leaf’s counter for nearly nine years and I’ve yet to grow tired of the place.

Nearly a decade of tea, dishes, and finger foods and I still don’t find the kettle-whistles jarring.

Good God. Nearly a decade.

What the hell is wrong with me? Though today the only sound to fill the normally bustling confines of Little Leaf’s was the muffled click and pop of Lorelei’s nails against the begrudging keys of her laptop. She was short staffed until church got out, which was almost hilarious is a sad sort of way as that was the only time she actually needed anyone, to beat the rush from the pews to her front door for a bit of late-morning tea and sweets. But the solitude didn’t bother her so much actually; on the contrary she enjoyed it as it meant that she had to make time for herself…sort of: forcing out colorful and insightful musings didn’t come as easily as one might think, and committing herself to write and keep up her prior finesse was something she began to dread about Sundays.

However, it didn’t do to worry or mutter about the chaotic mobs of churchgoer. You can’t stop them from being hungry, and you shouldn’t stop them from craving your pastries and teacakes, and every ounce of organic tea you can impress upon them was a win for Mother Nature, so why bother?

You can’t stop the world from turning, so it’s pointless to sit and fret about the dawn of the next day.

And so to hell with it: Lorelei was going to sit here, damn it, and attempt to wrench her writing skills from the dulling cradle of life after school. She mumbled to herself and stared down the flashing black line which marked her last fit of frustration with intermittent clarity.

Control-A, backspace; she was going to get this right: she was going to write something smart today.

Or maybe not, like all the other days; she would sit down and toil away for hours after she opened at six, and finally when she was resting on the cusp of triumph over herself, a customer would walk in, or a friend, or something would rattle though it was unprovoked and Lorelei’s mind would wander into a more or less disregarded part of her being.

Today would stand as an exception, however, as though many a good soul lined the busy streets of downtown Marquette, none seemed to be taking even a remote interest in this strip’s most happening teahouse.

Well. The only teahouse. Anywhere. But that was hardly the point.

Lorelei took this as a good sign, as she tended to do when they were made evident to her, and she began to write again.

Since her winter graduation, Lorelei had been feeling the tender bite of having free time for the first time since she entered middle school. Simply put, she had done everything (read: mostly) her parents had asked of her and they were contented with their daughter’s success and what little she had to show for it other than a month or two in Paris and a degree which stated that she was an expert at expression. And yet for some reason, expressing herself lately had been…embarrassingly difficult. Lorelei had been a jack-of-all-trades type in college, taking and excelling in courses on just about anything related to creativity: photography, creative writing, studio art, even some digital mediums. But now the Master in Fine Arts couldn’t convey her feelings in words, arguably the easiest vessel for emotive understanding and yet here she was, losing in a staring contest with her Word document.

Maybe she didn’t understand how she felt, maybe she wasn’t feeling anything.

It probably didn’t help that she found herself to be remotely stable in the months after school, securing a small loft-ish apartment close to work, and maintaining a relatively low amount of debt from college due to her scholarships. The security, though a pronounced theme of her life, was willfully stripped of her as she let loose in college and high school but now that she was an adult, well.

In all honesty, Lorelei wasn’t sure if the mundane crawl at which her life now moved was worth the stability, and part of her still itched for the uncertainty and the primal need to express it created within her.

Or, perhaps this was all in her head as most of her problems were; perhaps chaos and excitement were always lurking about and it took a quiet Sunday morning for her to miss it. Perhaps the change she was looking for, what she missed the most about the spontaneity of college, was going to walk right in that worn-oak door and –

The door bells sang in a soft soprano but from within the humid trenches of Lorelei’s mind they echoed like gongs.

“…hey there! Just a – just a minute.” Lorelei sprung from the staff couch which lined her office/break room and tossed her laptop gruffly aside, straightening out her manager’s “uniform” as she hurried to the counter and her assumed position. She wore a high-waisted beige-cotton skirt which fell just below her knee and a distressed and well-worn t-shirt which seemed to have found more success as an artist’s palette than an article of clothing as it was dotted with splotches of both new and waning projects. They were…mostly in the company colors, but the only real staple of the uniform was a dark-brown apron with three embroidered leafs on the front with two large L’s located centrally between them. Lorelei tied the back of the apron around to just below her belly-button as she slid into her crook at the register between one case of sweets and another of vegan alternatives.

“Um, welcome to Little Leaf’s – how ya’ doin’?”

[JACE HERMANNI OVASKA]

Upon entering, there seemed to be hardly a soul in the place. Jace knew it would be so, however, since he was usually in town at this hour on weekends, and knew the schedule of the townsfolk beckoned them to church before any other priority. He was about to call a soft "Hello?" when the bells alerted one of the staff to his presence.

He had seen her many times in the window, but only for brief moments. She was a pretty woman, definitely his type, with a sort of natural aura about her. She seemed to have little if any makeup on, and her long blonde hair floated about her shoulders, as grasses in the spring winds often do. Subtle.

He even knew her name. Lorelei. Lorelei Black. He had heard it escape from the mouths of passers by, regulars that often stoped at the teahouse. Jace had stopped in a couple of times, but that was only on the rare occasion that there was a lack of tea in the house -- God forbid. But, he wouldn't allow her to know that he knew her alias, for he knew that it might prove all too awkward for a miscellaneous resident to be calling her by her first name, like old chums. Words, like that, "chums", Jace was always coming up with in his head.

He tried to keep his focus, but the man kept trying to avert his gaze from her face. Something about her was so intriguing to him. Her mannerisms spoke volumes -- tired. Groggy, perhaps. Frustration? Her greeting seems more forced than it should. His gift, and sometimes curse, for detail persisted at his attention until he realized that he was still standing just a few feet from the door long after she had greeted him. An expectant expression on her features met his own. Jace shuffled his steps awkwardly for a moment, as if to catch up on the moments where he should've been walking, and approached the counter.

"I'm fine, thank you. And yourself?" He gave a tiny, almost invisible smile -- it was polite on his part, but practically unnoticeable to those that didn't spend time with him on a daily basis. Which, as he had learned over the years, was nearly everyone in Marquette. It puzzled him to toy with the idea that no one else knew how to read body language. "You seem a bit preoccupied," he offered.

The words came just fine, but he was still enraptured by her face. The adjectives that he had used earlier, pretty and natural, were now transforming into something greater. Her simple yet almost vintage and alternative style of dress consumed his interest further. Agrestal. It was a rather fitting word. An agrestal beauty. Untouched by modern day images of women and how they should attend to their appearances. He imagined how the conversation would turn if he said to her, "You have an agrestal beauty about you." He chuckled in his head. It might end with me walking right out the door.

No, Lorelei was to the point. Which was why he seemed to be so enamored. It was a rare occurance -- Jace often had too many thoughts going on in his head to be concerned with women. That, and the fact that he lived with his sister. Not necessarily by choice, but he was happy to be there, nonetheless.
"Actually," he began, after another awkwardly long pause, "I... was wondering if you had any jobs available. I'm looking for work." His voice was soft, muted, but still held its masculine, rugged and slightly raspy quality to it. It had nevers occurred to him that one had to be any louder than a relaxed tone to get their point across. It was the most words he'd spoken in succession all day, possibly all weekend. Inside his head he was curious as to why he even said the last comment; of course he was looking for work. Why would he want to know if there were jobs available? "Oh, just curious." Unlikely. What was going on today? He maintained his gaze on hers, waiting for a shift in expression.

Moreover, it amazed him, with his eye for nearly anything that moved and had a speck of detail, how he had never seen her before. Really seen her, rather than just looking.

[LORELEI BLACK]

Oh, he has that look.

Damnit – why do they always have that look? Lorelei tucked the plumper bit of her bottom lip between her teeth and gnawed softy at the rosy flesh. She wasn’t sure if it was the fault of her laughably patchy memory or the fact that her face had become synonymous with the downtown area’s foremost authority on tea, but Lorelei felt the need to place the blame somewhere, and off of her shoulders seemed like a good place to start. However, the fact still remained that every day, without fail, a customer would walk in and act like Lorelei should know them and, in most cases, they were probably right. This man was no exception, though he did well to keep any claims of prior meeting to himself as he addressed Lorelei.

"I... was wondering if you had any jobs available. I'm looking for work." Or, he said something to the effect of employment: Lorelei was too busy trying to remember this boy – er, man; on a second cursory examination he was certainly a man though he maintained some favorable youthfulness to his appearance. In fact, on a hole he maintained a good deal of favor with Lorelei’s tastes; tall and lean with long dirty-blonde hair, certainly a plus.

Oh, and that jaw!

Like that one actor – Heath Ledger!

Oh, and the patches.

Aaah, DIY – I like that.

Certainly if they had met before she would have remembered.

Positively…she thought; she had no idea why it was so hard to keep a face to a name or a voice. She supposed that it had something to do with seeing so many different people for so many years that the quirks faded to the background and her eye had grown uninterested by the uniqueness of her customers in favor of their more pressing attributes, say the darkness and brew-type of their tea.

So it was possible that his boy did know her, and that Lorelei should know him but for the time being she was clueless and had a gap in conversation to fill with an answer.

“Hmm? Oh, really? Uh, well, that would depend,” She got up as she spoke and slid along the polished glass cases of sweets towards the far end of the store. As she passed her office she threw a slender arm in and groped at the wall, searching for a few seconds for a beaten and weather clipboard before continuing.

“If you were one to observe the Sabbath, I wouldn’t have anything for you, buut since that is obviously not the case…” With some difficulty she unhinged one side of the breakaway on the mahogany counter and it groaned as she bid herself passage. She nodded to the man to follow and ducked into one of the cozy nooks which held a booth by a window. Lorelei held back a colorful drape which obscured her vision of the front of the store and added “Ya’ got me; I’m in a tough position and need the help, but I do have a question or two – ya’ know, painless things to weed out the serials killers.”

By the end of the interview, she would remember him; after a name and some personal questions, he would come flooding back to the front of her mind.

Probably, or perhaps she would just keep guessing throughout the stint of his employment for her as to approximate time and place that their connection was established and perhaps something more about why it has been maintained though he remains completely foreign to her.

“Oh, and I’m Lorelei.” In the attempt to recall the man she remembered that she hadn’t actually introduced herself. Silly, but not uncommon; many social niceties were lost on her, especially colloquial things like proper greetings. Case and point, as she slid back onto her side of the booth she kicked off her sandals and pulled a knee up to rest just below the edge of the table, swinging the dangling one idly as her mind fell to a similar lulling pace.

[JACE HERMANNI OVASKA]

Jace's previous fixation with the fact that Lorelei was a lovely woman had faded -- though still there, in the back of his mind. Resurfacing was his attention to the present matter. His eyes darted to her mouth. She fumbled with her lips, in a sort of subconscious, absent-minded way. An action of habit, it seemed. Quizzical? He couldn't quite differentiate today.

Although he wasn't being the best for pinpointing body language today, the blonde woman sure was doing a hell of a job staring him down, between awkwardly phrased sentences. Depend? Depend on what? he wondered. If you were one to observe the Sabbath... He listened, without words, and accepted this fact. Certainly, no Sabbath for me.

And suddenly, he realized it. She was trying to sift through her memory, trying to find a trace of him, somewhere, perhaps far back in the reaches of her mind. But it would probably be a stretch, even for the owner of such a busy shop as her own, whose secondary job it was to put names to faces. If she had seen him at all, it may have been one or two brief moments, his face commingled with at least twenty others, his own present only for a sliver of time.

"I'm Jace," he offered, making sure to meet her eyes with his own, as though he could feel that it was the right moment to insert such a comment. "Jace Ovaska." He never was one to shake hands unless prompted, really; it wasn't that he was impolite. He just didn't see it necessary. Too formal for his liking. Just as well, the setting here was too casual to elicit such a greeting. Nevertheless, he liked the atmosphere of Little Leaf.

He now wondered if she might know his name through his sister. She stopped in much more frequently than he. Perhaps the appearance, or the surname would set off a bell or two. Either way, it didn't matter to him. They knew each other now, right?

As she pulled back the tapestry for them to enter, a sense of intimacy ensued. For a brief moment he thought to himself, I'm really doing this, aren't I? First job in years, really. Replace the word "job" with "committment", and the sentence immediately becomes more accurate. Though, there are commitments of all types. He tended to his patch of the garden quite regularly, and took care of the house while Kalista was away at school, but other than that, there was nothing really pressing. His focus on the task at hand almost caused him to miss the lighthearted attempt at a joke involving serial killers -- he tossed it about in his head, but offered no outward expression. Typical Jace.

"Questions." he parroted back with a calm optimism, more of a statement than an inquiry, and more a musing to himself. He followed her into the room, the light beaming through the strands of the colored tapestry that cast colorful lightplay on the pair of them. "Sure."

If there was anything that Jace had learned from his father as a child, it was that a man never had to say more than he meant -- and by God, if Jace didn't uphold it. He hoped his honest, albeit quiet, nature would serve him well during this seemingly brief questionaire. She sat across from him at the booth, and seemed to make herself quite comfortable. He settled down at his place opposite her and laid his arm on the back of the booth, his arm almost long enough to leave just shy of a foot of space between his fingers and her arm. It almost felt intimate, even if in a small way. Jace's posture was relaxed and open, his wrist resting on his own knee, hand dangling. He was subconsciously mimicking her, it seemed.

Doesn't that mean that... you enjoy someone's company? Odd.

"What do you need to know?" he asked with a quiet confidence.