Re: Billy/Tandy: the neighborhood
Billy tried to remember the last time he had felt -- well, relaxed wasn’t the word, exactly. He still felt that low-level thrum of anxiety, the coating of oily, churning unease that lingered in the back of his head and the bottom of his belly. At home? Literally, in this case, yes. He liked the trailer, liked the quiet of the woods even though it left a lot of room for the volume of Billy’s slow burning dread to expand and press into all the nooks and empty corners. But he’d lived on the edge of a knife’s blade out there, always in danger of slipping one way or the other and slicing himself wide open.
Here, stretched out on his bed, in his bedroom, in was not just in the literal sense that Billy was at home. “All the time?” He echoed with an unconvinced expression, squinting a bit of a sideways look at Tandy although the smile remained in place. “Which famous dead guys?”
Pleased when Tandy rearranged to get comfortable in his socked feet, Billy gave an encouraging pat to the duvet between them. Go ahead, make yourself at home, literally. He appreciated the sound of Tandy’s laughter and the shift of his weight on the mattress; it was a grounding thing. Present-making. “Oh, thank God. The less we’re depending on me for scientific analysis, the better.”
A beat while he dropped his gaze behind the fan of dark lashes, a slow blink. A drag of his fingertip catching against cotton as he traced along one of the horizontal stripes beneath them. He wasn't being avoidant about it, exactly. Just thinking.
"I don't know," he admitted, fingers raking absently at his hair. He looked up at an angle and met Tandy's gaze steadily, though he bit at his bottom lip in a moment of uncertainty. "I hope so."