Re: The Apartment: Jamie/Seven
He didn't know what it was like to grow up in a shitty neighborhood. Jamie's family home had been the kind of 'comfortable' rich kids named wealth, with enough bedrooms for each kid plus a couple spare and there had been a lot of kids. It was the kind of wealth that slid through your fingers like sand on the beach on the vacations they could afford to take, and nothing, not even paying through the nose for dance classes, could diminish the overall amount. It didn't make it suck any less that they were missing, yk, the vital shit. The mom. There were probably paintings tacked to fridges around the country with sloppy families made up of broken pieces, right? Jamie had labored over his, unsure how to reflect a dead mom, a stepmom, and eventually? A missing baby sister.
But he got like, it was a comparison point. Like, the glossy interiors, the suits, the fucking cashmere the guy had peeled off and shed by the door. The way Seven smelled was faintly expensive, the kind of shampoo salon people managed to sell you because they had you cornered in the chair. Jamie felt the wisp of the guy's breath as he blew his hair free, and his mouth tugged elastic after it because it was so fucking high school. Like, the bored kid in the back-row flipping off the teacher even if he couldn't? It was attitude, and it was fucking attractive, and Jamie wondered like, briefly why he liked the guy all the more for the threads that like, hung loose. Threatened to unravel.
But right, focus. "So. What's next? You ask her?" And that was the thing, he wasn't trying, exactly. He was just not thinking, as deliberately as Jamie knew how because if he started thinking then his heartbeat was going to like, tick into his throat until he could feel it on his tongue. Seven turned his head until he got petted the right way, which made Jamie think of the cat freely enough that he snickered. It melted, like ice on hot metal in the face of that look, right. Because it heated shit up, immediately. Not like, the temp dial slammed high, just like, a syrupy kind of heat that oozed from his stomach into his limbs, slow and the brief slam of adrenaline down the back of his throat into his belly because like, anything was a big fucking word. There was a lot poured into it, even Jamie could fucking tell that, and it was a big fucking word even without it.
"Anything is a blank check," he said, as breezily as he could make it. He didn't feel breezy so it didn't sound that way all the way and the longer he looked at the guy the more the heat climbed, worked its way up his throat past his sweater and the air kind of felt like it got tight, stretched like cellophane. "Anything is a lot."