Re: Capital: Jamie & Seven Friday night
Jamie wasn't a petal. He wasn't a flower, he wasn't a bloom, he wasn't a goddamn thing that fluttered in a tutu across the stage in pointe shoes. There was a whole lot of that in the rear-view, the impression that a guy who like, felt shit to music bruised as easy as a cheap apple. Like, one year at Halloween, he had gotten defiant enough to like, mock the guys pulling that shit, the side-shoves and the dives into locker-doors that were like, accidental enough that he could track the pattern of them on the meat of his shoulders in travelling-turns across the studio mirrors. He'd painted his nails, he'd painted his face, he'd gotten a loan from the studio of an old practice tutu, he'd been like, the guy dressed as a girl, deliberate as fuck he was a guy, earned-owned bruises and scraped knuckles from trying desperate as fuck to get the basics of like, basic mechanics on the car Dad liked to play tune-up with in the absence of like, serious house stuff to fix. Which ftr, he had never understood.
They had rectified the idea that Jamie could undo anything with irony. If you wanted people to see something, you had to punch so hard into it they couldn't see anything else. When he put weight over his knee, he fed tension up his thigh - which, ftr, fucking hurt, even painkillers, vodka and a hot shower hadn't put the dent in that sleep would - and rolled muscle up from his belly through his stomach until his weight was suspended, aligned and he'd rolled his bad knee in, until his weight whispered astride the guy's thighs, his knees, his hips. Whispered, because as much as it burned, Jamie dug knees deeper into a couch that probably had seen worse, tbh and watched the guy's face for the shift-change.
Because like, expectation, right? Jamie expected. He'd watched shit ride surface from the calm enough times he couldn't count, and he expected way more than the upward march of the guy's eyebrow. "I'm way comfortable," Jamie said, with the breeze of complete fucking certainty. There was nothing more certain rn. It was momentary, that fractional shift that had hammered cracks into glass to flitter, this shit was easy. He expected the weight, the heat of the guy's hand at his hip, but there was the pressure of Seven's thigh and nothing else.
Jamie's own smile was like, paradigm but it split, foundered under confusion. "Sleepovers?" He had like a momentary, insensible vision of sleeping bags on the lawn with a lame attempt at marshmallow s'mores, "You mean like we're nine? We're not nine," he said, with the loose, lazy grin of like, getting the punch-line. "I don't need sleep-away camp to feel like a grown-up. I'm pretty fucking sure I'm over 18."