Capital: Jamie & Seven - Saturday Morning
“You’re confusing ‘need’ and ‘deserve’,” he said, catching the pillow out of the air before it collided with his head and tossing it in the pile with the others, wholly unbothered. A pillow had to rank at the very bottom of the hierarchy of insults that Jamie had tossed his way. He leaned over and reached for the nightstand to plug his phone in to charge. Then he slid down until his head hit the pillow and, within a couple of minutes, he was out.
When he woke, it was not in shifts and shades, not like the light that smeared out orange-pink from behind the edges of the hotel’s blackout blinds and crept along the walls of the bedroom. It was not like falling asleep in reverse. Seven woke at all at once; his eyes opened and he found himself grasping at the unravelled edges of a dream as it slipped through his fingers. The room was still mostly dark, despite the watercolour borders of the floor to ceiling windows that ran the perimeter. Still there was enough ambient light that he could tell he’d drifted towards the centre of the mattress as they slept.
Jamie, he looked like he’d stayed more or less in the exact same position that he’d crashed out in, star-fished on his stomach and his face mashed into a pillow like breathing was a secondary concern to being dead fucking out. Which Seven got, ftr. He’d rolled onto his side towards the other guy in the night, but only because that was how he usually slept at home, already. One arm was shoved under his head, between the mattress and the pillow, and his fingers tingled with the protest of cut-off blood flow. Seven pulled his arm free and rolled over in the other direction, and he absolutely could have drifted off again like that if his phone hadn’t suddenly come to life with the crisp, female voice of the Google Assistant obeying his earlier command, enunciating in her slightly stilted way:
“Reminder for: Seven - fucking fire Tommy in the morning.”