Re: Gatsby: Preston/Saint
Saint was unused to anxiety. He did not recognize it immediately, oil poured on water to ripple along with it but separate and alien. His stomach dropped by an inch and twisted but he was watching Preston's face rather than training focus on the inward moil of guts and he took a long, very deliberate breath that belonged to centered calm and yoga and dismissed that thin ribbon of tension back to where it belonged. It was curious, the way Preston could read but also be read simply through what he bled outward. If Saint was ink on paper, Preston was ink in water, thin tendrils that circled outward. Saint's thoughts briefly touched on Preston: on anxiety, on worry and on the comparative lack of concern he possessed. He squinted into the middle distance, at the empty sandy-colored road in the sunshine.
"Would you believe them?" He thought Preston too cautious for big cures and X Men Mansions, that the trust required would be too much for a man who was careful, precise in what he allowed and when. "Are people ...nicer? Here," Saint clarified. He thought the place beautiful and the people from what he'd seen of them but Gatsby had not been nice. Flawed, and difficult and complex.
Thoughts drifted, malleable as lazy water under hot sunshine. Saint thought of Preston briefly, in a big city context both in his own world (something about shirt cuffs, and realms of paper and that clipped tone in meetings -- Saint's imagination of business meetings owed a lot to television rather than experience) and then again in Gatsby. There were typewriters. His smile grew.
"Have you slowed down?" The tone was curious. He couldn't picture Preston without the spring-loaded tension he'd always seen him with. The deliberate calm massed and swamped any further thinking: Saint was neither private nor was he thinking about privacy in any real degree. He had never much ascribed to it. However, he was aware of the thinness of the curtain between his thoughts and Preston's and to the possibility of enveloping Preston in his. The calm swarmed, deep blue and steady. Saint thought of nothing, looked up at the sky and then back at Preston as if nothing had happened of consequence.