Re: [Second City: Cat & Jack]
Jack didn’t think about love as something other people had for you but a perpetual exercise in attaching part of yourself to the equivalent of a bloody kite and letting somebody else sail it into the dirt. He didn’t think about being loved, about the same exercise in reverse. Self-centered probably, or experienced honing the expectation he was bloody enough that it was his heart pinned on sleeves, no one else’s. He hadn’t accumulated that little addiction, of affection smoothed along spines - or at least, Jack didn’t believe he had. Of course that little bottle did nothing to layer on over the complex. It was brutally simple for the course of a day, wasn’t infatuation always? What scraped up against it, plied over and over in layers? Jack watched the color and the mood and the crowd and the lovers play over Cat’s face like a movie screen. Christ knew he wouldn’t tell.
The laugh that rang out felt more familiar than seeing a waif of Cat rather than Cat herself did, and so did the philosophy and Jack’s smile was easy rejoinder. In that moment, the man who had stood on stage and let resolutions and promises wash over him, who had declaimed them as passionately as Shakespearean sonnets was probably living through the narrow end of a magnifying glass. Every bloody iota crammed into memory, a miasma of complexity that felt simple in that second. And the next second.
“In this moment,” he said and if he said it, it was in Spanish rather than the translation but the closet romantic who stood there, drinking up the swell of approval for the love between two people who couldn’t detangle themselves from one another long enough to take a glass of wine - he expected she’d know it anyway. “It is living, alive -- it contains nothing from the unrepairable past, from the lost past.” Recitation, laughing as an elbow hit him squarely between shoulder blades as one woman was whisked into a dance that was hectic and loud and chaotic but christ, it looked fun.
Momentary. Of course, that was the point behind the extended hand. Up and beyond, he would have thought about it. Examined it for all the ways in which the gesture could be interpreted and more importantly refused, because that was the point, wasn’t it, of gestures? She jingled as she re-arranged the outfit, all black and jostle of coins and when she put one hand into his, Jack gave a grin in return that was temporary as the wedding celebration but as devil-may-care.
The dancing had swelled out from the back wall to eat up some of the crowd. It was wild and it was bloody free and it wasn’t the careful prettiness of hand in hand shuffling around a floor. They danced hard, in a crowd and the women lifted as the music clattered to cacophony now and again and it looked easier than it was. He tugged her through the parting of bodies that was the crowd still occupied with drinking and eating and with clapping the happy couple on the back to a whirlwind of bodies and he watched for the split-seconds there were for whatever the hell they thought were steps.
It was a long time since he had learned anything at all. A long time since he’d been dowsed in someone else’s world until the water closed over his head and it was breathe or drown. Jack forgot Repose or he put it deliberately out of his head along with London, and he hauled Cat an iota of a second after watching a gentleman all blues do similar, and followed the galloping music and the stamp-step of the dancing itself with a degree of grace and a lot of laughter. They were one part of a whole, a moving mass of celebration that felt very simple and very alive, a drumbeat and music thickly layered over it.
“If you can tell if it’s my feet or someone else’s, I’ll be very surprised.” Breathless and laughing and the bodies pressed thick and hard around them.