❛     has your son reached a point of unreasonable pickiness with food yet ? my ruth decided last week that she refuses to eat anything except chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, and dry cereal. so far, she isn’t budging on it.     ❜

“--’scuse me miss, but would you mind stayin’ still for just another second? no pressure, just gotta lay on some finishing touches.”

despite probably having startled the stranger by addressing her out of the blue and in such a way, he’s nothing but polite about it. he’s been hollered at by enough folks on the street and passing by for sketching them without explicit permission, and haven’t taken kindly to his insistence that it’s just not the same when someone’s purposefully posing. this woman is particularly pretty, her dignified air one to be envied by the stuffiest of the city’s women, so it’d be a shame not to try to capture it on paper!

Classes dragged, but the people contained within, rarely met the standard that she’d come to expect. Children of the rich, but without the expectation carried upon the shoulders of the only children of empires back home, knowing that all too often, those within London saw their foreign features, and always spoke slower, as if they didn’t contain their own clipped accents, public school posh. That they held no class, that all they knew were cheesy poses by iconic scenery, that they didn’t quite belong. Patience required, to maintain the poise that they’d been taught to hold since childhood, despite the privilege that they’d been afforded at every turn. Feeling at times as if such patience was stretched ever so thin, as if it were about to SNAP.

But it was moments like that in which Colette grabbed her phone, calling up another classmate from the year above her, letting herself count down, backwards, Mandarin a soothing sound within her own mind. “Astrid?” the line connecting, a fainter smile tracing along her lips as she adjusted the cut of her Naeem Khan mini dress, her bag slipping down to her elbow. “I’m having the absolute worst day. PLEASE tell me you’ll come to Pigeon in twenty minutes and split a bottle of wine with me?”

Knowing the other girl a little too well, enough to know that she wouldn’t turn down the Bing heiress down, throwing in a “I hear they’re serving those divine lavender brownies that you love for dessert this week.” for good measure, a quiet enveloping her as she shouldered the phone against her shoulder, her cheek. “Please say yes.”