Re: Tory & Jamie: the Apartment
The thing with liquor was that you could probably hold your own like, well, and then you could drop the better part of thirty pounds and liquor curled tendrils into your gut and yanked far harder than you expected it to, because before, you weren't a lightweight at all. Jamie was four shots in, and a pizza slice down, and yeah, okay, old people swimming kinda made Jamie think of grandmas, which did a whole lot of dampening spirits that weren't tequila-based. "I teach old people," he said, kinda fond, because he liked the old people better than the littles, fuck expectation. "But I don't want to think about them close to naked."
Jamie was easy to read right now. He could bury shit, mostly pain, because you learned that early, and you learned to project everything that wasn't pain outward, all the while dancing through a strained tendon or something, because that was life. He got easier to read the more he relaxed, and he wasn't like, Greek when he wasn't. He was figuring the guy out, because as much as he'd gotten the inside scoop or whatever on his teenage trauma that motivated him, that was kind of history and by now, he was kinda getting a read on the swerve between humor and vague flirt that Tory had going on, like the guy couldn't make up his mind where he was sat. So he raised both eyebrows, and leaned back into the couch, and smiled. "I've never worn a speedo in my life," he said, truthfully.
But Tory had picked up the strand of vague exuberant enthusiasm or whatever, and was, yk, enthusing from his end of the couch, and Jamie didn't know if it was the tequila, or the heat of the apartment, or the guy getting into his shit that had flushed him, but if the guy was indulging him, pretending there was a comparison between a decade of ballet, and a decade of being smart enough you could reel off science jokes crammed into six, he was being way good-natured about it. "You're not passionate about your shit? You kinda sound it," Jamie remarked, but Tory was losing it, and the giggles were fucking infectious, and Jamie's mouth tugged into a lopsided, way-amused kind of smile.
"If you showed up your first day of class, I wouldn't be teaching you to do anything stellar," and yeah, okay, he climbed to his feet, padding from couch to the floor, and standing all of his five foot nine in front of the guy, and observed the held out hand, and took Tory gently by the wrist. "You'd learn to plie. Which is going to be really fucking hard without balance," he said, warm, amused, and he nudged the guy's feet together with the side of his own feet. "You're probably going to need to ditch the shoes, Chucks don't bend all the way. And if you fall on your ass, I'm taking zero credit."