Re: Tory & Jamie: the Apartment
If Tory had said it, the insecurities thing, the feeling of life lived in stasis or so perpetually delayed you woke up and found out you'd missed all the formative shit that everyone else appeared to feel naturally about - Jamie would have probably felt, said he shared, whatever, the kindred of that. Like, okay. Partying, intermittently in sharp bursts of frenetic activity, glitter-streaked and sweat-smeared between the intensity of long stretches of working your own body like an instrument and treating it like something easily broken when you weren't trying to push past your limit in the studio - it wasn't the same as the formative stuff. But Jamie hadn't like, had a relationship since he'd been sixteen and broken-hearted. All like, present meshed-up circumstance aside.
So thirty was more of a mirage than a milestone. It represented the intended ending of a beginning, and Jamie had had vague ideas of how to use thirty to build the other stuff, round out the muscles that hadn't gotten a whole lot of motion since he'd figured out at fourteen what he wanted to do and you know, engineered his way into it. Adrift, twenty five felt old, and simultaneously young, and Jamie was a product of stasis and immaturity frozen, carried over from a perpetually unbalanced equation that stacked life up against passion. Whatever: Jamie got it, he was vaguely, dimly aware from the rime of the other guy's memory that it felt similar enough, but it was years ago, and ten minutes, and it didn't stack up as visceral similarity.
"Not 180. You're not loose enough for that, and nah, this is a stretching exercise. Just like, turn your toes out from your hips. Stop when your muscles tell you to stop," he said, amiably, "Which isn't like, a science." He got what Tory was going for, with the degree thing, but it wasn't clear. Bodies were bodies and they kinda had limits of their own. "That's okay. You're good," which was the kind of like, warm encouragement offered tinies and old people in dance class alike, and he looked up the length of Tory's lanky height and grinned.
"Now you bend. At the knees. Knees over toes, and keep your back straight," he instructed, as he got to his own feet - carefully. "Tuck your ass under as you go down, or you'll fall over. A dance belt is designed to keep your junk from flopping around. You tuck it in, and it stays down," he said, straight-faced, and: "That's a plie, by the way. It basically means bend, but basically everything in ballet is French."