Re: Gatsby: Preston/Saint
Saint liked history. He'd read a little, like a child with a storybook, picking periods at random instead of an educated glide through sanitized snapshots of the past. Now he thought of the Crash and of before and after: a memory surfacing of snapshots of breadlines set against a memory of Art Deco ironwork almost liquid black in their clarity of form. He was not thinking overly carefully, the prism of his thoughts unclouded but the deliberate calm just beneath the surface remained steady even as Preston's tension bled across the gap.
Now he turned his chin upward toward the sunshine, the glare of it glinting against the road. "You mean talking?" he said and he looked toward Preston with equanimity and without blinking when he added, "Or thinking?"
He paused in the road on the shabby shoes that looked only a little like they belonged. The laces were beginning to fray and knot together and the stamped pattern that made them somewhat smart sometime in the past had begun to spread into what would eventually be a hole in the worked leather itself. Saint began to fold his shirtsleeves over themselves until the cuffs were somewhere around his elbows.
"I think it's beautiful here. And that it's quiet and that it suits you. And I like seeing you. I wonder if the book means the door will just continue in time forever just before the crash or if it'll happen, all those consequences and broken promises. I don't... talk. Much. Generally," the almost dreamy sentences stilted up into the cramped self-regard that Saint found painfully awkward, "I think. A lot. Too much, maybe. Mostly I'm waiting for you to run away again." He shaded his eyes with his hand as he looked at Preston and a smile, mostly rueful hovered in the wings.