Re: Livingroom: Marta / Seven
In the end, it wasn’t like it mattered which way the regret was meant to fall. Almost as soon as he’d caught her attention, Seven felt regret, that he’d thought to say anything. He regretted seeing her at the party, coming to the party - for opening up that chasm that he thought’d been paved over, the one that had first stretched out between them in a motel parking lot. He should have kept his mouth shut. Should have slipped away through the kitchen and out the door, yeah? Maybe Jamie would be disappointed but he’d also understand, when Seven explained that he couldn’t stand talking to her it made the bottom of his stomach feel like it’d been heated fucking scarlet with the flat of an iron.
And it didn’t fucking matter that he was still caught off guard, to see her dressed the way she was, just like she’d been in The Bar. Of course it was surprising, yeah? It’d been baggy t-shirts and sweaters and yoga pants for fucking years, on the few and scattered moments when their paths had crossed since she’d first left. There was no point to saying it because it probably came across like he was saying that it was a surprise to not see her looking like shit, and even if that was true it wasn’t about to endear her to him any. It was exactly the last sort of thing he needed rn.
“Thanks,” he said, carefully even as he glanced around the rest of the living room, as if expecting to spot his way out. He was in it now, so he wasn’t bailing. But that didn’t mean he could easily stop picturing it, yeah? His gaze swivelled back to her and a crease appeared on his brow as they started talking over one another, halting words, and the gift box suddenly felt like it weighed a thousand pounds as his mouth mirrored hers: teeth clicking shut, with a muscle in his jaw ticking furiously on one side.
It was a good thing that he didn’t know what she was thinking. A really good thing, because the widening of her eyes and the way that her hand clenched in a fist to mimic his own (though his remained unseen in his pocket, thankfully) - that on its own was enough to make the back of his throat taste like pennies. He was already steeling himself for an argument. And then struck entirely off balance, again, in the face of Marta’s reaction.
He hit her with an incredulous look, eyebrows way up, like he was echoing her ‘really?”. “You seriously think I would bullshit you about this? At a fucking party? No, Marta -” and he broke off for a second, exhaling an unsteady gust of air in a whoosh that buffeted the ends of her hair. They were that close, yeah. So Seven took a step back and transferred the box to his other arm, lifting his free hand to smooth over his hair where it was tied back in a low bun. “I’m serious. She said yes, but there have to be some rules in place, yeah? For her. To protect her.”