Re: Tory & Jamie: the Apartment
Tory didn't have much in the way of family; he barely had any. His dad, and the pseudo-brother Paul had been for a few years, living on the second story of the Wyler's duplex; a college student who'd been interning at Dad's graphic design firm and had spent way too much time playing video games in Tory's room. That was it. Of course, ask about his mom and you'd get such a litany of shrugs and unspoken denials and general "I dunno"s that you'd think she might actually be dead. If Tory had let himself think about her, he might have gone through with the whole name change thing by now. In short: Tory understood avoidance as a coping mechanism.
"A family test? Or just testing each other's patience?" Tory asked, and did not supply the details about his own family, as described above. Given if asked, sure, but not the kind of thing he offered, though he understood he opened himself up to the question once he posed it himself. That was how conversation worked, but it was a substantially forgotten piece in the give-and-take, the way Tory went about grabbing at every little tidbit about a person or a thing, trying to feed a real and insatiable hunger for knowledge. "The other two, they live here?" A lazy wave of the hand indicated Repose, not just the apartment. Jamie was from Florida, he did remember. Having another sibling here seemed weird, unless: "Family move here when you were young?"
Somewhere in there he'd been given a question - an inoffensive and easy one, so he answered it. "Nah, live alone. Just renting a little house in a place they call The Neighborhood, around here. Which, you know, just mostly looks like a bit of suburbia and all." Affecting his shrug with a little move of bare shoulders as much as his tone. "Not even a cat. Yet. Now that I've done the tequila, might upgrade."