Re: The Apartment: Jamie/Seven
They taught control in the classroom. Like, maybe he was predisposed to it already or something, but Jamie had learned way quickly that control was more than just figuring out you didn't like your peas and carrots to touch. It was discipline and they taught that as well. How to keep your face straight when shit hurt, how to make it look like it was easy, it was enjoyable, when your metatarsals were bruised and your Achilles was screaming. They taught the girls with weigh-ins and looks, and Jamie had counted them in and counted them out, the wisps of woman who came in blush pink, as if they were untouchable works of art instead of women and who didn't learn the knife-edge between control and losing it to control.
He understood the guy, a little. He knew the rough edges of childhood, the adolescence, the sexual awakening to a wider vista, all that shit, like the shading in of the edges of a painting, or maybe finding a bunch of edge pieces of a puzzle or something. He didn't know Seven, a bunch of slices of the guy. Maybe it would get easier? Like, the sensation of stuff stretching, twisting out of sync until Jamie didn't have the guy tucked neat into the allotted space for him, would settle down once this part, the part where the thing about like, the space around the fucking settled.
Seven's smile leaked out of his eyes, even if he was doing his fucking best to keep it small. Jamie started to laugh, a little - silent, but he did, and it stopped like, in his throat when he watched the guy's face kindle. Because of all the stuff Jamie definitely knew about the guy? The way his face caught when he started to get aroused was way fucking familiar. And he could have leaned in hard. It would have been easy, to let the ground shift, slide back into familiar but he was listening to the guy instead, Seven's voice dragging against Jamie's fingertips as his throat flexed.
"She had a step-kid," Jamie remembered. It hadn't come up, a lot. The wedding, but Amy didn't talk about Marcus to him, and she didn't talk about the kid. "That's good, right? She's got, you know, perspective. On Marta," and Jamie wasn't thinking about Marta any other way than as Sawyer's mom right then. "You talked to her yet?" Sawyer, not Marta.
The conversation felt like piano-wire. Strung taut in places, slack in others but like if Jamie came at it wrong, it would slice him until it stung. Seven swallowed and it jerked the delicate, thin skin against Jamie's thumb and he swallowed himself, his mouth dried out. Because it wasn't like, about the date, right? It was about confusion, about the like, distinction between a date and hanging out, and how clear Seven had been about like, the latter. "My balls are where they've always been. Still bigger than yours," he said, smugly in the breath that mingled after the first kiss, and Jamie's own mouth stretched, flexed in a smile against Seven's, and he kissed him gently, kinda sweet to soften the whole thing. Or maybe just deliberately not trying to throw kerosene on a lit match.