Re: Gatsby: Preston/Saint
It was an ask that Saint was faintly certain he hadn't articulated since being stood out on the road and had been skimmed, instead from his thinking. He took the glass, fingers pressed up against the glass, condensation beading under his fingers and drank quickly, throat working, without serious consideration of whether it was something he questioned or didn't. He held out the glass, the question sketched in the eyebrows rather than verbalized: did Preston wish to drink too? with a presumption that this too would be an undercurrent of thought.
Saint's thoughts were quick, a visualization of a spider-web of incidents that lit up and glowed red. The moment in the hallway in the hotel, when his own thoughts had tipped Preston toward the edge. The kiss and the strong smell of burning sugar that was oddly pleasant, and then the feeling of swiping through perhaps web and cloud itself: Preston had begun thinking at him before the kiss itself.
"Because I'm listening," he said, watching the adjustment of clothes far more accurate to the period than his own failed attempt. "I don't think you were as loud. Before. I couldn't hear anything. But it's not the same. It's like looking at a painting. Not seeing the brush-strokes. Projection." He looked around the ante-room, the books stacked high on financial management once more. "Maybe you didn't know right then because you weren't thinking about it."
Guilt-twined-around-pleasant-memory: Saint thought it entirely possible to get sidetracked when there were other things that didn't actually require thinking to do. Beneath the explanation was a faint sense that this, too, was like the doors, the new worlds. It was something, but it was not something with emotion attached to it, rather interest. Preston was not quite a clock Saint wished to take apart, but there was something of the same aura, of wanting to know how it all worked together. "And thanks. For the water."