“Well, actually,” Rennie paused to carefully select one of the cubes of sugar—they had rounded corners and were, he thought, the color of the sand at Jetties Beach, where he had spent holidays as a boy—”I have been insanely busy.”
Why, Morris wondered, did he find Rennie so irritating: he was too tall, too lithe, too handsome, with the nonchalant ease of a matinée idol. As he half-listened to the younger man’s inane chatter (some nonsense about playing his flute in derelict spaces), Morris—who had picked up the pink sweet and popped it, whole, into his mouth—studied Rennie: his cinnamon bark hair already, although it was barely spring, was streaked with saffron; his skin was flushed apricot; his nutmeg eyes were close set beneath straight brows; his nose was long, but it, too, was straight. It was, Morris decided (now choosing the mauve petit fours), unquestionably an attractive, if not a particularly intelligent, face.
“Here you go, Punch,” Morris proffered the remaining, mint green, confection to the dog. ”Savor it.”
