Re: Capital: Jamie & Seven Friday night
It was kinda Jamie's fault, right? That stuff had massed and contracted, invisible or whatever but bulky enough to take up room so Jamie hadn't layered up, stripped down after class. The guy was good at shellac, at varnish in layers and layers enough to be armor until they were picked at to peel and he hadn't, because he hadn't thought he like needed to. So like, Seven let go, the puddle of warmth at his knee moving, but not before the guy tensed fingers around sore muscle, and Jamie's mouth tightened reflexively. It wasn't the bad knee, but it still like, hurt when he wasn't expecting it which was the whole like, theme the guy trended on like a car out of the station.
No, it wasn't a thing. And yeah, that was enough. It was enough to pack very far away the wriggle of thought that rattled like a ping-pong ball in his mind, and Jamie was like, way ready to segue, to dig out the argument, the stuff about lines and rules and that actually, they didn't matter if nothing was ever going to cross from one side to the other. But Jamie didn't expect shit. He hadn't expected the slow bleed-out of good humor in the room, but the temperature like, metaphorically dropped. He'd thought the verbal thing, charity-case, his being like, way mean was like, idk, throwing a ball back and forth, a hackysack or something. The guy had started shit, and Jamie, like, def feeling the temp in the room plunge, blinked.
Seven's weight crammed in over him, the bulk of the guy for like, a second, intimidating even without touching him. His eyes were like, chips of blue ice right now and Jamie, for a second, for a second still lying on the couch because the arrangement of legs and arms made it difficult to slide off abruptly, felt the kind of fear that curdled sour on the back of his tongue, clung to the roof of his mouth. It was unpredictable. And Jamie, who had left his shit in the sweat back in the studio, was like, regretting the shit out of being anywhere near the guy right now and for a second, it was brief on his face. He wasn't like, ready for the kind of deliberate visceral that came with the enunciation that told him the friend thing was bullshit.
It made him feel small. And like, Jamie had prided himself on not being made to feel shit by anyone and he hated it hard enough that his stomach was lead, and his throat knives. Rancid with his own dislike of himself for getting lazy or whatever, for showing up post-class. He wasn't hurt, because Jamie didn't get hurt. He didn't believe in it, and it buzzed under his tongue just because he was awake right now, but he was carefully scraping that moment into a box that he could seal forever.
Like, if anything, as the guy removed himself to go fix a drink, it killed that whole concept of like, the guy being a friend, dead. "Cool," Jamie said, flatly, to the guy's back. Because it was. It clarified shit fine. It didn't put him in the mood, and he sat upright. "That cleared shit up. So like I said. I was thinking about the rules stuff. They don't apply." It wasn't bleak, the sound of Jamie's voice. Maybe carefully empty. But it was dumb as fuck thinking Seven might have been like, almost a friend. He was like, so ready to bail but bailing gave shit weight, and he didn't want the guy to have the like, satisfaction of thinking Jamie was giving shit weight. He'd gotten what he needed, right?