Re: Sam/Eames: art class
Eames rather liked the idea that what lay under the surface was apparent, in anyone else, darling. It was true, or he wouldn't have been able to provoke an emotion or a sensation in a dreaming man with the poignancy that Eames desired. But not his surface. He liked doing things well, Eames and it was there in the long stretch and shaking out a leg that had not gone dead so much as thought about going to sleep. Job satisfaction, darling, from being stared at and staring back. Neat little busy-bees, scribbling away and he looked at the (borrowed) robe the teacher offered with a curl of eyebrow. It was paisley, which was acceptable. It was poly-blend cotton, which was not.
He stepped into his pants with the unhurried lack of modesty that said he'd been naked rather a lot, but without the look around that would have suggested vanity about the size of his - thighs, darling. Eames was vain but not for an audience who sketched him for nothing and he zipped up the crotch and shrugged into his shirt and roamed bare-foot, leaving the scarlet socks still stuffed into the toes of his shoes.
He circled the canvasses and mounted paper. The trappings of art here were so obvious. One favored pencils, one charcoal, another had tried a watercolor, and picked his skin out in a shade so sallow he thought about complaining about the lighting. But there was a mystery in creating the end-product while it could be seen. Eames could hide, darling, until he was ready. The blonde had been incubated for months, if not a year and it was all the better for it. Here, they were stripped from the moment they put a mark on the page.
The little blonde still sat as he did up his buttons and stared thoughtfully at a pencil sketch of negative space, the shape of him but not of him and it was almost poetry, if you thought about it too long. He stopped dead in front of the little blonde's pad, and he raised both eyebrows now, near-fully dressed. Eames studied it for a long, uninterrupted minute. His face sketched lines itself: fractional surprise, amusement, a twitch to the mouth that was recognition.
The little blonde could have been a forger, darling, if she dreamed well. She hadn't seen, she'd seen. It made Eames feel rather naked if he thought about that too long. He drawled, the husk of lower-class London. "Well, darling. You're good, aren't you?"