Sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning during that odd span that belongs to neither...
Keira is snoring. It's possibly the funniest fucking thing Bill has ever heard. She'd started around one, and after half an hour or so, he'd had to get up for fear of laughing his arse off and waking her up.
He's been out on the couch now for about two hours, using his time to do something moderately productive and drinking enough coffee that he's starting to feel a little jittery. He needs it, though, as he has to work tonight, real work, his actual job, and unless he manages to rack out on Keira's couch for a couple of hours in the very near future, he sincerely doubts he'll be sleeping in the next twenty-four hours. And he doesn't really expect to be able to be able to sleep at all. In spite of regular bouts of sweaty physical exertion with Keira (he grins a little just thinking about it), his sleeping habits haven't changed notably. He feels achy and wired at once, and he suspects he's in for a hell of a crash some time soon.
Since there's nothing to be done about it, he ignores it, and diverts his attention back to what he's doing.
The photo he currently has open is a black and white of McKellen taken around thirty years ago. It's grainy and slightly crooked on the screen from being scanned out of an old newspaper article, but it's quite clearly McKellen for all of that, and Bill would happily kiss whatever Kray brother's buff had scanned the bloody thing. The photo shows Ronald and Reginald Kray being lead away in handcuffs by a pair of pleased looking officers. There is a bloke in the far background that is only a blur, unidentified in the photo's caption, and then there is McKellen, caught in profile with his face turned deliberately from the camera, positioned slightly behind Ronald Kray. The crop of the photo and Ronnie Kray's body hide McKellen's hands, but the position of his arms is enough to make it clear that the Kray's aren't the only ones in cuffs.
It's probably petty, but Bill can't help feeling vindictively justified.
According to the other articles Bill had been able to track down (as well as blurbs of text from the published biographies of each of the Kray brothers), McKellen had been arrested in a kind of wrong place/wrong time sort of manner. Everything he's seen so far indicates that McKellen had just had the bad luck to be present when Scotland Yard had finally made their move on the Kray brothers.
Bill doesn't believe that, of course.
He'd been arrested for fringe charges, which had been dropped within forty-eight hours, and had never been prosecuted. It had been 1968, and McKellen had been a fairly well received stage actor at the time. The incident hadn't seriously affected his career, apparently.
The Kray's weren't exactly big time organized crime, but they were well known -- Bill had heard of them growing up, and he's willing to be both Kate and Nic would recognize the names as well, though Bill doubts like hell they have any idea of their "Uncle Ian's" past involvement with them -- and had been pretty widely feared on the East End during the 50's and 60's. Protection and some gambling, largely the bare-knuckle fights that are still illegal in London today, and still happen in back rooms and back alleys all the bloody time. Other things, too; from the looks of things, the Krays had been jacks of all trades, as it were, though their money and power came from protection for the most part.
It's not hard to find anything and everything about them online. They've still got a bit of a following, even now.
Ronald Kray had been openly homosexual, and Bill thinks he must have been pretty fucking scary to have been able to get away with that, at that time and in that world, where such would have almost certainly been regarded as a sign of weakness. Apparently, McKellen had spent time with him romantically in the mid-sixties.
Probably not coincidentally, that's also around the time that McKellen had become more or less successful in his chosen profession.
Bill could almost -- almost -- believe that it really had been a matter of wrong place/wrong time. Almost.
But…
It's generally understood that the Krays had continued to benefit from their organization after they'd been incarcerated. Bill can't find anything that states flat out that someone had picked up the reins and held The Firm together for them, but it's between the lines in everything he reads.
McKellen's career had continued to flourish, which doesn't necessarily imply having the money and backing of organized crime, but it certainly couldn't bloody hurt.
What does imply an association of some sort (at least to Bill, and he's totally aware that he's not likely to give McKellen the benefit of the doubt), are the places that he had frequented, the people that he was known to socialize with (including Kate's father, eventually), and the attention that he garnered when he ventured into these places. The news articles Bill can find (mostly tabloids, unsurprisingly enough) had reveled in McKellen's exploits with immense gratification, but had never quite dared to touch on any potential connection between McKellen and any sort of criminal element, in spite of the fact that some of his associates at that time were known to have a criminal background, and many of the places he was known to frequent were owned -- albeit by proxy -- by The Firm. Overall, the reports Bill can find have a sort of "oh, look what those crazy actors are doing now" kind of tone, an indulgent sort of faux-disapproval.
And there's the money. McKellen has dirty roots, so to speak.
Nothing to be ashamed of, just a normal childhood for a kid born in northern England, but there was no money there to speak of.
Bill looks thoughtfully at the photograph of the Kray brothers. Even with his face turned away from the camera, certain things about McKellen's physicality are evident. He is tall and slim, but he has broad shoulders (and big hands, from what Bill remembers from the party, but his hands are hidden in the photo). His profile is sharp and clean. He's a good-looking bloke. It's not totally outside the realm of possibility that his success on the stage is his own accomplishment, having nothing to do with dirty money.
But stage actors, no matter how good they are, do not become multi-millionaires, and Ian McKellen is currently an extremely wealthy man.
There is no way to prove anything, of course. Not without time and resources that Bill can't afford to invoke (although he could, if he had to) since he's not really investigating how McKellen got his money. He's doesn't really doubt where it had come from.
The Kray brothers are both dead now. Ronald had died in prison, and Reginald had died a few weeks after having been released for humanitarian reasons. He'd had cancer. There are several articles about his release and the subsequent few weeks, and it's clear that Kray's resources had never been substantially diminished, and that someone, at least, had the kind of access to it necessary to spend ridiculous amounts of money on his behalf, while he was dying.
He had died without a will, just like his brother. There had been no next of kin.
Where did the money go?
Bill flips through open browser windows until he finds a photograph of McKellen attending a bare-knuckle fight in the fall of 1971. There's a boy with him in the picture, Italian looking, slender, with dark hair and eyes.
He reminds Bill a little of Orlando.
McKellen is frowning in the picture, his attention turned toward a small man in a dark suit with a thin moustache. The caption doesn't identify him, or the boy. It reads: "London actor Ian McKellen demonstrates disdain for Scotland Yard's ban on the fights.
The tone of the article itself is very tongue-in-cheek, simultaneously chiding and gleefully scandalized by McKellen's adventures. It helpfully lists a half a dozen other sightings of McKellen in places of dubious respectability.
Where did the money go? How long did you manage The Firm before you had to get out of the protection racket? Bill wonders.
Because he would have had to. The problem with running an organization like The Firm through subterfuge and guile is that the fear would begin to dwindle. An operation like that runs through fear. If the people paying for your protection are no longer afraid (of you), they won't pay you. It's as simple as that. And if you don't have a visible presence, you aren't scary. And McKellen hadn't maintained a visible presence. He couldn't have stayed in the protection racket and continued to make money.
Granted, Bill had only met the bloke once, and it wasn't like they'd had a long and involved conversation, but Bill feels fairly confident that McKellen is more than just a moderately smart man.
He'd bet on dangerous and razor-sharp without hesitation.
So where did the money come from post-protection era. Gambling, yes, but not exclusively. What had McKellen funneled it into? What had been so overwhelmingly successful financially that McKellen had been able to buy himself a reputation, the status as a gentleman, the respect of his peers, and all without stirring up the interest of the police? How had he done it? In what venue?
Knowing where McKellen had come from is a good start and can't hurt in deciding how best to deal with him, but mostly it only makes clear that this is a bloke who'd managed to take a relatively small criminal organization with a base in violence and fear, and morph it into a large and apparently respectable business conglomerate which no one has ever thought to question the legality of.
And if Bill wants to question it's legality, it will require a lot of bloody effort. The kind of effort that will leave a paper trail, no less, and he just can't afford to do that.
He's a moderately good hacker, but he's not good enough to even attempt most financial organizations, and it's a record of McKellen's financial transactions that he'd need in order to know where to start looking.
He doesn't doubt that McKellen is an unsavory businessman who has his long, elegant fingers in many unsavory pies.
But he can't prove it. Not without creating a lot of fucking paper, not without trying to build a legitimate case and trying to somehow tie it into Vice, his real job (when more properly, at least from the looks of things, it should be the province of the Organized Crime boys), and he can't do that, either.
Because he'd promised Kate that he'd leave McKellen alone if he didn't have anything to do with what Bill is investigating, and he can't look into the man's financial affairs without using LAPD's resources, without using his badge, without outlining and espousing an actual, honest-to-God public investigation. The kind that develops a life of it's own, the kind that Bill will no longer have control over once it gets rolling.
And if he does that, Kate will go fucking ballistic. Never mind McKellen. He's a dangerous man, but Bill isn't really afraid of dangerous men. Wary, yes, but not afraid.
But if he fucks with McKellen and it turns out to be unfounded, he will make an enemy of Kate, and God save him from a dangerous woman. The fact that he believes she's never been the violent sort means nothing.
In Bill's experience, a dangerous man will try to kill you.
But a dangerous woman will try to ruin you first.
He cannot afford Kate's enmity. She has all the tools she needs to ruin him, and he can't afford to piss her off.
Also… he rather likes her.
He's somewhat creeped out by the fact that he's pretty sure she's sleeping with a man at least forty years older than her (who also happens to be an ex-gangster who normally prefers young men and likes her to call him "Uncle"), but he likes her.
He sits back and rubs at his face. He's fucking tired.
Orlando had slept like a baby wedged between Bill and Keira Monday night, alternately wound around Bill and then Keira.
Bloke has a bony arse.
Bill smiles a little. Orlando and Keira had both snored, neither of them loudly. Both of them low and soft enough to lull him into a light doze, but he hadn't actually slept.
Orlando apparently has restless feet when he sleeps. The rest of him had been loose and relaxed, his body (half draped over Bill for a good portion of the night) heavy, muscles warm and soft like taffy, but his feet had rubbed against each other constantly, making a soft and restless whisper of sound that kept pulling Bill out of almost-sleep, jerking him back from the precipice of restful slumber.
Bill would be aggravated, except he probably wouldn't have slept anyway.
He'd just lay there, wakeful, until his phone alarm had gone off, because he hadn't been sure Orlando would stay asleep if Bill left the bed.
It occurs to him that the weirdest fucking things imaginable are beginning to seem almost normal to him.
Yesterday, Johnny had come up to him during one of the breaks in filming, just walked right up behind Bill at his desk (and Bill had known it was Johnny because Johnny smells like oranges and cigarettes and laundry soap and something else, something subtle and musky that Bill sometimes suspects is narcotic, and other times supposes is just Johnny's natural smell, spicy and enigmatic) and started rubbing his neck.
Johnny had talked the whole time, of course. Schedules and film yardage and how's your arm doing, man, you sure you don't want to file workman's comp on that? Just talked and rubbed the back of Bill's neck with one hand, the other resting, palm splayed, on Bill's desk, strong fingers kneading with delicate strength, hard enough to work out knots but not enough to actually hurt, and hey, you know we've got open call on Thursday, right, man, you can handle that for me, yeah?
And Bill had just let him do it.
His left hand snakes around behind his head and he leans back, feeling the shift and crackle of his spine aligning itself, wincing, but satisfied by the feel of it. He rubs at his neck thoughtfully, but it's crap. Johnny's better at it.
He doesn't really know when he'd stopped avoiding Johnny's casual physical familiarity. He can't pinpoint it. Over time, it had just sort of… happened. Because if you like Johnny and he likes you, he touches you. Like Nic (except Bill has never got the same kind of feel from Johnny; he guesses if Johnny were going to hit on him, it would be a lot like his normal conversation, it would be scheduling and film yardage and hey, man, you wanna come to my place, smell the trees, lay in the grass, fuck around if you want?), he expresses himself physically almost all of the time.
Unlike Nic, Bill gets the feeling Johnny usually knows exactly what he's doing. He's seen Johnny with other people. Not just DBY people -- which is different, Bill understands, because DBY people are family, and you always treat your family different than anyone else -- but with execs and producers and extras and magazine people, and Johnny touches them, too. He touches everyone, but he knows who he can touch how, and Bill has never seen him get it wrong. Some people have a sense about things like that, like and emotional weather gauge, and Johnny has it, and it's strong and reliable. He knows how to approach people, and he handles them flawlessly.
He's occasionally wanted to ask Johnny if he's ever taken any psych classes.
Bill has never seen Johnny bungle anyone.
Maybe that's why Johnny rubbing his neck doesn't bother him, but Nic (Friday morning, while they hung the butterfly enclosure behind Bill's desk) looking at him with his head tilted, eyes wide and unnervingly sincere for once (he'd asked Bill some kind of question, something innocuous, but he can't think what it had been) resting the fingertips of the first two fingers of his right hand on the underside of Bill's wrist for about three seconds had left Bill wanting to pull away and rub at the skin there, rub away the itch that Nic leaves on him anytime they interact.
Because he doesn't think Nic has any idea what he's doing. Nic is just Nic, and nobody understands him, least of all Nic himself, but he leaves bits of himself on others, rubs off on them, so to speak.
Nic residue.
How disgusting.
He rubs at his face again, and then tosses back the dregs in his coffee cup, grimacing at the cold bitterness of it.
The sun will be coming up soon, and he's got a lot of shite to do, as usual.
And he desperately needs to find his own flat. Much as he loves sleeping with Keira every night, the other night with Orlando had demonstrated the need for him to have his own place. Since then, Keira has been practically vibrating with questions that she refuses to ask, and it will be easier not to be quite so close to her. Easier if he gets other calls like that one, or not so much like that one, but just dead of the night calls, which certainly isn't unheard of.
And he has to work tonight. Has to see if he can track down Ivy St. Claire or anyone who knows her.
He has to…
He shakes his head. He's too groggy to make lists now. He'll shower instead, and worry about the rest later.
He's been out on the couch now for about two hours, using his time to do something moderately productive and drinking enough coffee that he's starting to feel a little jittery. He needs it, though, as he has to work tonight, real work, his actual job, and unless he manages to rack out on Keira's couch for a couple of hours in the very near future, he sincerely doubts he'll be sleeping in the next twenty-four hours. And he doesn't really expect to be able to be able to sleep at all. In spite of regular bouts of sweaty physical exertion with Keira (he grins a little just thinking about it), his sleeping habits haven't changed notably. He feels achy and wired at once, and he suspects he's in for a hell of a crash some time soon.
Since there's nothing to be done about it, he ignores it, and diverts his attention back to what he's doing.
The photo he currently has open is a black and white of McKellen taken around thirty years ago. It's grainy and slightly crooked on the screen from being scanned out of an old newspaper article, but it's quite clearly McKellen for all of that, and Bill would happily kiss whatever Kray brother's buff had scanned the bloody thing. The photo shows Ronald and Reginald Kray being lead away in handcuffs by a pair of pleased looking officers. There is a bloke in the far background that is only a blur, unidentified in the photo's caption, and then there is McKellen, caught in profile with his face turned deliberately from the camera, positioned slightly behind Ronald Kray. The crop of the photo and Ronnie Kray's body hide McKellen's hands, but the position of his arms is enough to make it clear that the Kray's aren't the only ones in cuffs.
It's probably petty, but Bill can't help feeling vindictively justified.
According to the other articles Bill had been able to track down (as well as blurbs of text from the published biographies of each of the Kray brothers), McKellen had been arrested in a kind of wrong place/wrong time sort of manner. Everything he's seen so far indicates that McKellen had just had the bad luck to be present when Scotland Yard had finally made their move on the Kray brothers.
Bill doesn't believe that, of course.
He'd been arrested for fringe charges, which had been dropped within forty-eight hours, and had never been prosecuted. It had been 1968, and McKellen had been a fairly well received stage actor at the time. The incident hadn't seriously affected his career, apparently.
The Kray's weren't exactly big time organized crime, but they were well known -- Bill had heard of them growing up, and he's willing to be both Kate and Nic would recognize the names as well, though Bill doubts like hell they have any idea of their "Uncle Ian's" past involvement with them -- and had been pretty widely feared on the East End during the 50's and 60's. Protection and some gambling, largely the bare-knuckle fights that are still illegal in London today, and still happen in back rooms and back alleys all the bloody time. Other things, too; from the looks of things, the Krays had been jacks of all trades, as it were, though their money and power came from protection for the most part.
It's not hard to find anything and everything about them online. They've still got a bit of a following, even now.
Ronald Kray had been openly homosexual, and Bill thinks he must have been pretty fucking scary to have been able to get away with that, at that time and in that world, where such would have almost certainly been regarded as a sign of weakness. Apparently, McKellen had spent time with him romantically in the mid-sixties.
Probably not coincidentally, that's also around the time that McKellen had become more or less successful in his chosen profession.
Bill could almost -- almost -- believe that it really had been a matter of wrong place/wrong time. Almost.
But…
It's generally understood that the Krays had continued to benefit from their organization after they'd been incarcerated. Bill can't find anything that states flat out that someone had picked up the reins and held The Firm together for them, but it's between the lines in everything he reads.
McKellen's career had continued to flourish, which doesn't necessarily imply having the money and backing of organized crime, but it certainly couldn't bloody hurt.
What does imply an association of some sort (at least to Bill, and he's totally aware that he's not likely to give McKellen the benefit of the doubt), are the places that he had frequented, the people that he was known to socialize with (including Kate's father, eventually), and the attention that he garnered when he ventured into these places. The news articles Bill can find (mostly tabloids, unsurprisingly enough) had reveled in McKellen's exploits with immense gratification, but had never quite dared to touch on any potential connection between McKellen and any sort of criminal element, in spite of the fact that some of his associates at that time were known to have a criminal background, and many of the places he was known to frequent were owned -- albeit by proxy -- by The Firm. Overall, the reports Bill can find have a sort of "oh, look what those crazy actors are doing now" kind of tone, an indulgent sort of faux-disapproval.
And there's the money. McKellen has dirty roots, so to speak.
Nothing to be ashamed of, just a normal childhood for a kid born in northern England, but there was no money there to speak of.
Bill looks thoughtfully at the photograph of the Kray brothers. Even with his face turned away from the camera, certain things about McKellen's physicality are evident. He is tall and slim, but he has broad shoulders (and big hands, from what Bill remembers from the party, but his hands are hidden in the photo). His profile is sharp and clean. He's a good-looking bloke. It's not totally outside the realm of possibility that his success on the stage is his own accomplishment, having nothing to do with dirty money.
But stage actors, no matter how good they are, do not become multi-millionaires, and Ian McKellen is currently an extremely wealthy man.
There is no way to prove anything, of course. Not without time and resources that Bill can't afford to invoke (although he could, if he had to) since he's not really investigating how McKellen got his money. He's doesn't really doubt where it had come from.
The Kray brothers are both dead now. Ronald had died in prison, and Reginald had died a few weeks after having been released for humanitarian reasons. He'd had cancer. There are several articles about his release and the subsequent few weeks, and it's clear that Kray's resources had never been substantially diminished, and that someone, at least, had the kind of access to it necessary to spend ridiculous amounts of money on his behalf, while he was dying.
He had died without a will, just like his brother. There had been no next of kin.
Where did the money go?
Bill flips through open browser windows until he finds a photograph of McKellen attending a bare-knuckle fight in the fall of 1971. There's a boy with him in the picture, Italian looking, slender, with dark hair and eyes.
He reminds Bill a little of Orlando.
McKellen is frowning in the picture, his attention turned toward a small man in a dark suit with a thin moustache. The caption doesn't identify him, or the boy. It reads: "London actor Ian McKellen demonstrates disdain for Scotland Yard's ban on the fights.
The tone of the article itself is very tongue-in-cheek, simultaneously chiding and gleefully scandalized by McKellen's adventures. It helpfully lists a half a dozen other sightings of McKellen in places of dubious respectability.
Where did the money go? How long did you manage The Firm before you had to get out of the protection racket? Bill wonders.
Because he would have had to. The problem with running an organization like The Firm through subterfuge and guile is that the fear would begin to dwindle. An operation like that runs through fear. If the people paying for your protection are no longer afraid (of you), they won't pay you. It's as simple as that. And if you don't have a visible presence, you aren't scary. And McKellen hadn't maintained a visible presence. He couldn't have stayed in the protection racket and continued to make money.
Granted, Bill had only met the bloke once, and it wasn't like they'd had a long and involved conversation, but Bill feels fairly confident that McKellen is more than just a moderately smart man.
He'd bet on dangerous and razor-sharp without hesitation.
So where did the money come from post-protection era. Gambling, yes, but not exclusively. What had McKellen funneled it into? What had been so overwhelmingly successful financially that McKellen had been able to buy himself a reputation, the status as a gentleman, the respect of his peers, and all without stirring up the interest of the police? How had he done it? In what venue?
Knowing where McKellen had come from is a good start and can't hurt in deciding how best to deal with him, but mostly it only makes clear that this is a bloke who'd managed to take a relatively small criminal organization with a base in violence and fear, and morph it into a large and apparently respectable business conglomerate which no one has ever thought to question the legality of.
And if Bill wants to question it's legality, it will require a lot of bloody effort. The kind of effort that will leave a paper trail, no less, and he just can't afford to do that.
He's a moderately good hacker, but he's not good enough to even attempt most financial organizations, and it's a record of McKellen's financial transactions that he'd need in order to know where to start looking.
He doesn't doubt that McKellen is an unsavory businessman who has his long, elegant fingers in many unsavory pies.
But he can't prove it. Not without creating a lot of fucking paper, not without trying to build a legitimate case and trying to somehow tie it into Vice, his real job (when more properly, at least from the looks of things, it should be the province of the Organized Crime boys), and he can't do that, either.
Because he'd promised Kate that he'd leave McKellen alone if he didn't have anything to do with what Bill is investigating, and he can't look into the man's financial affairs without using LAPD's resources, without using his badge, without outlining and espousing an actual, honest-to-God public investigation. The kind that develops a life of it's own, the kind that Bill will no longer have control over once it gets rolling.
And if he does that, Kate will go fucking ballistic. Never mind McKellen. He's a dangerous man, but Bill isn't really afraid of dangerous men. Wary, yes, but not afraid.
But if he fucks with McKellen and it turns out to be unfounded, he will make an enemy of Kate, and God save him from a dangerous woman. The fact that he believes she's never been the violent sort means nothing.
In Bill's experience, a dangerous man will try to kill you.
But a dangerous woman will try to ruin you first.
He cannot afford Kate's enmity. She has all the tools she needs to ruin him, and he can't afford to piss her off.
Also… he rather likes her.
He's somewhat creeped out by the fact that he's pretty sure she's sleeping with a man at least forty years older than her (who also happens to be an ex-gangster who normally prefers young men and likes her to call him "Uncle"), but he likes her.
He sits back and rubs at his face. He's fucking tired.
Orlando had slept like a baby wedged between Bill and Keira Monday night, alternately wound around Bill and then Keira.
Bloke has a bony arse.
Bill smiles a little. Orlando and Keira had both snored, neither of them loudly. Both of them low and soft enough to lull him into a light doze, but he hadn't actually slept.
Orlando apparently has restless feet when he sleeps. The rest of him had been loose and relaxed, his body (half draped over Bill for a good portion of the night) heavy, muscles warm and soft like taffy, but his feet had rubbed against each other constantly, making a soft and restless whisper of sound that kept pulling Bill out of almost-sleep, jerking him back from the precipice of restful slumber.
Bill would be aggravated, except he probably wouldn't have slept anyway.
He'd just lay there, wakeful, until his phone alarm had gone off, because he hadn't been sure Orlando would stay asleep if Bill left the bed.
It occurs to him that the weirdest fucking things imaginable are beginning to seem almost normal to him.
Yesterday, Johnny had come up to him during one of the breaks in filming, just walked right up behind Bill at his desk (and Bill had known it was Johnny because Johnny smells like oranges and cigarettes and laundry soap and something else, something subtle and musky that Bill sometimes suspects is narcotic, and other times supposes is just Johnny's natural smell, spicy and enigmatic) and started rubbing his neck.
Johnny had talked the whole time, of course. Schedules and film yardage and how's your arm doing, man, you sure you don't want to file workman's comp on that? Just talked and rubbed the back of Bill's neck with one hand, the other resting, palm splayed, on Bill's desk, strong fingers kneading with delicate strength, hard enough to work out knots but not enough to actually hurt, and hey, you know we've got open call on Thursday, right, man, you can handle that for me, yeah?
And Bill had just let him do it.
His left hand snakes around behind his head and he leans back, feeling the shift and crackle of his spine aligning itself, wincing, but satisfied by the feel of it. He rubs at his neck thoughtfully, but it's crap. Johnny's better at it.
He doesn't really know when he'd stopped avoiding Johnny's casual physical familiarity. He can't pinpoint it. Over time, it had just sort of… happened. Because if you like Johnny and he likes you, he touches you. Like Nic (except Bill has never got the same kind of feel from Johnny; he guesses if Johnny were going to hit on him, it would be a lot like his normal conversation, it would be scheduling and film yardage and hey, man, you wanna come to my place, smell the trees, lay in the grass, fuck around if you want?), he expresses himself physically almost all of the time.
Unlike Nic, Bill gets the feeling Johnny usually knows exactly what he's doing. He's seen Johnny with other people. Not just DBY people -- which is different, Bill understands, because DBY people are family, and you always treat your family different than anyone else -- but with execs and producers and extras and magazine people, and Johnny touches them, too. He touches everyone, but he knows who he can touch how, and Bill has never seen him get it wrong. Some people have a sense about things like that, like and emotional weather gauge, and Johnny has it, and it's strong and reliable. He knows how to approach people, and he handles them flawlessly.
He's occasionally wanted to ask Johnny if he's ever taken any psych classes.
Bill has never seen Johnny bungle anyone.
Maybe that's why Johnny rubbing his neck doesn't bother him, but Nic (Friday morning, while they hung the butterfly enclosure behind Bill's desk) looking at him with his head tilted, eyes wide and unnervingly sincere for once (he'd asked Bill some kind of question, something innocuous, but he can't think what it had been) resting the fingertips of the first two fingers of his right hand on the underside of Bill's wrist for about three seconds had left Bill wanting to pull away and rub at the skin there, rub away the itch that Nic leaves on him anytime they interact.
Because he doesn't think Nic has any idea what he's doing. Nic is just Nic, and nobody understands him, least of all Nic himself, but he leaves bits of himself on others, rubs off on them, so to speak.
Nic residue.
How disgusting.
He rubs at his face again, and then tosses back the dregs in his coffee cup, grimacing at the cold bitterness of it.
The sun will be coming up soon, and he's got a lot of shite to do, as usual.
And he desperately needs to find his own flat. Much as he loves sleeping with Keira every night, the other night with Orlando had demonstrated the need for him to have his own place. Since then, Keira has been practically vibrating with questions that she refuses to ask, and it will be easier not to be quite so close to her. Easier if he gets other calls like that one, or not so much like that one, but just dead of the night calls, which certainly isn't unheard of.
And he has to work tonight. Has to see if he can track down Ivy St. Claire or anyone who knows her.
He has to…
He shakes his head. He's too groggy to make lists now. He'll shower instead, and worry about the rest later.