Re: The Apartment: Jamie/Seven
And it wasn’t like Seven didn’t know that Jamie came from fucking privilege. He wasn’t stupid, wasn’t blind. And it didn’t bother him, because Jamie had never been obnoxious about it. (Except maybe for the ballet-snob shit at The Bar that one time, but somehow that had ended up more endearing than anything else.) It was just another thing about the guy, like the fact that he liked his coffee black, or that he smelled like clean soap and deodorant but not cologne.
But the background, the privilege, it didn’t mean that Jamie hadn’t also grown up with the fucked up shit, yeah? Their family portrait finger paintings might have been made up of different broken-puzzle pieces, but maybe they were similar brands of sloppy. Except that Seven hadn’t laboured over his much: two boys in blue, mom with her bottle blonde ponytail, and a revolving cast of boyfriends holding beer bottles and cigarettes, far off to the side of the portrait.
“Yeah, pretty much,” he nodded slow, barely a tip of his chin towards his chest. The idea alone made something twist in his gut, just thinking about sitting down with Sawyer and Marta across a table and playing fucking house. It didn’t matter that he knew it didn’t have to be like that, probably wouldn’t, yeah? Sawyer was a smart kid, pretty fucking well-adjusted for the shit they’d been through. It was his only his own ability to deal that he questioned rn. He sighed a little, letting his eyes slip shut. “Marta flipped out when I told her not to push me on the Sawyer thing, to let me do it properly. Said I should just have Tommy call her with Sawyer’s decision.”
He opened his eyes again to assess the guy’s face, feeling the sliding weight of his words like scales tipping. The breezy didn’t fool him, and he knew that Jamie probably felt that. He didn’t need to call it out as bullshit. So he let it graze past him, and he reached with two fingers to run the backs of his knuckles down the centre of Jamie’s chest. “Doesn’t have to be,” he offered with a half-shrug. Trying to reel the guy back in before he spun out and away into some far-flung orbit. “It can be small. It can be whatever you want.”