Re: Capital: Jamie & Seven Friday night
Tension had pumped back into his system like brake fluid with a bike hitting the skids, but it didn't have a lot to hang onto. Jamie felt wrung-out, squeezed dry. If there had been tension left, the real kind that didn't ebb when he wasn't freaked, it would have hovered somewhere in his solar-plexus maybe. That was tightening up, his breathing wasn't exhausted-slow but he could feel the guy's gaze settle on his sneakers, drag up denim and hit him in the middle. "You basically did, though. You crawled. It was a crawl," Jamie argued with the half-hearted heat of not trying hard at all. "That's an ask."
Jamie didn't think of himself as different. But he didn't think of himself as tense, either. Instead it felt like the atmosphere had gotten heavy. Sodden, like the swollen heat before the rain broke, specific spread between the car and the sidewalk. He felt like he was walking in that rather than stood still with the cool licking at the back of his neck and his bag weighted on his shoulder with dirty tights and a towel wrapped around his shoes.
Seven opened his mouth and shut it, like he'd snapped on the tail-end of a thought or something. Jamie didn't feel guilt, exactly. He'd laid shit down, like idk, pillow barriers down the bed at a sleepover, when really you kinda planned on the other guy not exactly wanting to roll over in the middle of the night and make friends. Jamie resurrected clarity, dragged it from the other side of class and the vodka-Coke at the bar, and smiled. Because you didn't need shit if shit wasn't there, ready to roll. "Class, or out drinking?" He scratched the back of his neck where the sweat was drying.
"I don't know, I don't feel like it all that much." It wasn't like, confession but Jamie said it as he thought it, and he deliberately ignored the way Seven tossed out his question like it wasn't bordering on borderlines, on pillow-forts deliberate. "You're just, you know, chill. In a way expensive car. Are you going to keep like, idling at the side of the road, or..?" He looked Seven dead-on, direct although he was like, smiling.