Re: [Bar: Jack & Patrick]
[Jack wasn't circumspect. It was, for his faults, a defining quality. He found the exercise of circumspection difficult, the keeping of secrets was a conundrum he was up against presently, and he loathed the notion of being guardian of half a dozen secrets that were a tangled knot of interacting complication. He didn't think Adrian was insane. Well, actually, he thought the man probably bloody-minded presently, but that was familiar enough. What he didn't say, because quite honestly, Patrick didn't appear to need to hear it and nor was it Patrick's to listen to, Jack didn't think Adrian had had Newt to grasp onto while Newt had been here. He had listened, occasionally very poorly, but he knew Adrian had once been the world in its entirety to Newt and that Adrian hadn't known it or hadn't grasped what that meant, and indeed, if it was terribly different now.
He listened, instead and he kept his bloody mouth shut.] Oh, his trust in you. His confidence, that sort of thing. [Jack didn't take offense to shirked responsibilities. He knew exactly what sort of man he was, and he knew he was ignoble if it came down to it.] Of course you care about it. But I can't, and I doubt you do either, and probably Adrian neither, knows what it is he'll want that to look like when it stops smarting quite so much.
[But both eyebrows went up. Jack set the empty glass down.] I don't think I knew or know anything of the bloody kind, Patrick. I meant, old man, that I knew the book was complicated and that things are rather messy at present which is more than I would expect you to know about somebody you'd never met in person previously. I do beg your pardon, I didn't mean to suggest I knew anything more intimate than that. Whatever you are, it's no business of mine at all, I don't have an opinion about it.
[And he meant it. Kindly, but he meant it. Whether Patrick liked men or Patrick didn't, he rather thought it didn't matter. Jack, who had grown up with boys who knew nothing but each other for all the formative years there were had seen boys with crushes on others and boys who wanked each other off for the better part of their school-days before marrying and settling down roaringly happy. Jack didn't know a fuck of a lot about what being gay meant, aside from Newt's recounting and his own reading and thought it looked like one hell of a headache. Instead, he caught the bartender as he turned, and handed over his card with an indication that he meant both tabs, not the one.]