Tender

Prose

“Stop doing that,” Reyn said. “Stop playing with your meat.”

Jared cut his brown and pink and bloodied steak, juice leaking like Oceanus out of control. Potatoes couldn’t lap up enough of that stuff. To encourage the leak, Jared deliberately, calculating, pushed certain pressure with his fingers, pushed out yet more fluid. Reyn stared off into the sun setting in disgust.

“I sometimes envy your ability to carve out such total hyperbolic distance.” He was still pressing down. Fucking stop it!

“What?”

“Out there,” Jared waved with his free hand. Well, it wasn’t free: clutching a dripping knife. Still. “That horizon you’re throwing yourself at. Ah, ha. Like what I did there?”

“It’d be nice, now, if you’d put some food in your mouth,” Reyn spoke around the lip of the bottle brought to his mouth. “I’ll bet it’s not gonna get any more tender if you keep that up. Plus, I’ll probably chuck up mine in the process.”

“So…”

“So lift, yeah, lift those bloody fingers. Lick off the juice,” Reyn said. “I don’t understand what you’re getting out of that. It’s so old. It’s tired. It no longer wants to be a cow, it wants your belly.”

“I don’t think it knows what it wants.” Jared kept his fingers where they were. He looked right at Reyn, cold blue eyes sort of twinkling, but with pupils that suddenly sucked up all the light.

“It knows, okay? It bloody well knows.”

Jared did take up one piece of Reyn’s advice; he brought the offending fingers up, slowly, staring at them as if they didn’t belong to him. He put them in his mouth like he didn’t know what he was doing. Reyn’s eyes completely orbited their sockets.

“You see? It’s good,” Reyn said, relieved that the meat had sprung back up, and no more leaks to be had.

“Well, why’d you have to eat so fast? Now I feel like I’m eating alone.”

“I didn’t,” Reyn scoffed. “I just didn’t take any extra time to experiment with the elasticity of my food. I put it in my mouth. Was tender. Just what I wanted.” He watched as Jared painfully cut off a tip of one of his halves of steak. “Now I want beer.”

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