Re: The Apartment: Jamie/Seven
Jamie didn’t think of the guy as shakeable. Nah, okay, yeah he did because he’d seen it? But rock bottom, like guilt worn greasily over the surface of Seven’s skin, clinging to his hair, his clothes, wasn’t the same? There was a scale, and he’d seen the guy bottom-end, for definite, but Jamie didn’t linger on memory, he skipped over like it was a bad song on a record. But he didn’t see Seven unbalanced, not there in his kitchen, wearing expensive shit Jamie was putting creases into like it undid the distance the expensive shit created, laughing at Jamie’s cat.
The smile was, like, the first thing. It hit hard. Jamie glanced upward, across the skip of shirt collar to the guy’s chin, darted over the loose hair, the cant of his cheek, and got the full benefit of the smile that was like, okay same artist but different notes. Maybe that was the difference? He was seeing the scale, between the bottom end and the way chill place Seven hung out deliberate, and just then seeing that smile, Jamie didn’t have a fucking clue why the guy liked him so much. He did, because Jamie could see it, but he didn’t know why. It was way easy to lose, if you didn’t figure out why and he was way certain, the way things became absolutely fucking clear in a split-second sometimes, that he didn’t want to fuck that up. Which was way weird, given he hadn’t fucking wanted it at ALL a couple months back.
The guy caught a finger inside thrift-store secondhand wool and it tightened against the back of Jamie’s neck, just under where his scalp finished and he let him. Like, let him fish Jamie back from the distance of a literal half-step, but enough, waded into the grin that crooked almost-wrong and felt the guy’s weight subside over his knees, fan out through the knotted arms around Jamie’s neck, his breath whisker against Jamie’s ear. It was like, maybe a second of studied cool making it out the kitchen door, like the wrinkles and creases in Seven’s expensive shit, and for like, a solid minute Jamie kinda just relaxed in the pressure of the guy’s grip, the smell of his aftershave and the cool, clean-air smell of his clothes muddled with cigarette smoke.
He didn’t say shit about missing the guy; he could probably only like, manage a joke and that shit would be weak anyway, so he kinda lodged his chin into the guy’s shoulder and stood there for long enough he felt a full other minute drain away.
“Are you like, planning to hang here all night? Because it’s cool but I have a literal couch right there,” he said, somewhere muffled in the region of the guy’s shoulder, and pressed a hand against the center of Seven’s chest to like, adjust grip or whatever. “Your tea is also way cold