Joey Alexander knows he is good (fornothing) wrote in rooms,
Re: log: joey & ella, gatsby
Joey wasn't so sure what she meant about breathing, but he figured on southern colloquialism. The kind of thinking and words derived from people who operated at a gentler pace than anything he'd ever known. This Gatsby world was still a city, but it was nothing like the modern cities that he'd gone running through the gutters of. Maybe thats what she meant by breathing though, like the city itself wasn't all congested with subways and hustling junkies just yet.
"You don't drink?" Joey asked it with a wide palm laid against the back of his neck, fingers paving deep against the line of his skull as he thought, and then the answer seemed obvious. "You've got the baby, yeah." He didn't have a lot of familiarity with kids aside from the ones who'd grown up alongside him. Even those, he'd never been old enough to recognize the responsibility it took in raising them. He had much less familiarity with mothers. Mothers who worked, hard and single and alone, mothers who didn't have a drink because they had to go pick up the baby from the sitter. Domestic motherhood was as foreign to him as anything, and even if he hadn't spent half of his life around men in shackled prison yards, Joey still probably wouldn't have understood it. His parents had been far from getting the gold star.
"I'm fine," he said when she made a soft suggestion about back door escape acts. Even if he felt like a lone bowling pin in a lane, unsteady in his skin and aimed at by unwelcome attention. Even if the low lights and the slow-growing crowd made his nerves twitch, or possibly especially because of that, he wasn't going to run away. Ella gave him an out, and he could have feigned want for a smoke or something just to get away from here, but he wouldn't. There were years of too many people kept close, and more recent days of too many dead things walking with hands outreached, so Joey knew why he felt like his skin wanted to flay itself loose and get the fuck goneā¦ but acknowledging it for what it was meant ignoring it just the same. The feeling wasn't real, there was nothing dangerous here, and so Joey remained rooted to his chair. He drained the rest of his drink, determined to play pretend with normalcy. He hoped his smile was convincing.