Re: Jamie / Holly: the 'good' diner
Jamie had gotten the message that Repose was weird, loud and clear with the infrasound. The noise and the reaction and the uproar was like a mayday, mayday situation but if he thought about it too hard (the wolf-talk on the forums, the plentiful anonymous posts that hinted at like, currents and sub-currents beneath the surface of the town) and his own ordinariness, he dwelled. He wasn't equipped to combat weird, he wasn't inducted into the movie canon of how to handle it. Jamie's personality was subsumed when it came to momentary weird and he faltered on the start-line and never really got over it. The line, not the ordinary.
He didn't have a ton of normal chill currently going that he couldn't appreciate the whole diner set-up. He had people he talked to because of town set-ups, two sisters back from the dead metaphorically speaking and a brother in law he was pretty clear was Neo from the Matrix. He had a job where the people cycled in and out and the only point of consistency was the owner who was the kind of guy Jamie wasn't going to grow up and be. He plucked at the string of his hoodie now, the fries abandoned in their log-cabin formation by the side of his cup, and rolled the knot of the string between finger and thumb.
But Holly wasn't the bar-gig. He wasn't a town's nudge in the right direction or his sister's well-intentioned set-up for friends. Jamie wasn't lonely, exactly. He was just, you know, appreciative of the potential for a friend acquired through the non-weird, even if it was a sort of loop-cycle between online and the real world (TM) that was Repose.
"It's modified," Jamie said, stepping up to the old-people-sex gate. And yeah, okay sometimes he wondered how the old guys did it, and if he'd ever be in a thing where he was like eighty and still madly in love with another eighty year old dude and held hands and stuff. But he didn't think about that now. "I think some of the lap sex options definitely involve potential for hip-breaking. Or muscle strain. And the ballet, it's sort of entry-level? Like, it's not the classes I took when I was a kid." Which was about as serious as Jamie got about meaning and purpose and whatever. But his tone was sliding away from the attempt to hit a punch-line, and modified fun and into distracted chill. He was avoiding and that made for focus elsewhere.
"Because in the Capital, they want teachers who can demonstrate stuff," Jamie shrugged in cotton hoodie. "I can't demonstrate the stuff they need at the pre-prof level. I can't go all out. I'm meant to be on a break," and he was, but break implied going back and the Capital scared the shit out of Jamie, even if he sounded super cool about it. But okay, inference and Jamie had done a lot of guys who didn't twink, so the assumption wasn't like, coded based on the way Holly looked or sounded.
"Sorry, man. You said I reminded you of an ex, I figured a guy." But Holly didn't look like he was about to throw a punch or like, follow him to his car - if Jamie had a car in Repose - and Jamie's look was a heartbeat panic, frozen for split-second before he inched toward casual. Which you know, was kind of like putting a car in gear and then the engine turning over and squealing and dying.
There was a flash of uncertainty on Jamie's face. Okay, so he'd been with guys, hook-ups but it was a question he'd only ever been asked in a bar, with some guy's hand on his thigh and no link back into his real life, the one he lived where he was more than what he did late nights. There was no uh, contamination between Jamie who was super serious about dance if nothing else and other-Jamie and he'd kept it that way since heartbreak. He picked up one of the fries, and dandled it in the milkshake.
"Usually? I top," Jamie said, as if it were as matter of fact as an order of fries, and it wasn't the internal navigation of like, dark bars and back rooms. The last time he'd done it the other way with any regularity Jamie didn't like thinking about, aforementioned heartbreak and he was sitting in his seat defiantly having this conversation.