Re: log: joey & ella, gatsby
She thought the glance away was about the line of leg beneath the silk. It was stained, at the heel where someone had dropped make-up on the carpet and trodden into it, carmine bloom hidden beneath the arch of the foot. It had snagged, and Joey didn't behave like a man might - like most of them did - in a club that was about looking as much as it was listening.
She didn't think of him as peaceful. He reminded her of trying to run someplace, tied to an anchor, and his siblings were a jostle of names with an A dragging behind after them, so many anchors that didn't hold them down. He was giving, and she didn't think of prison bars and a life that had been put on pause like a video-tape wearing away in one spot, held fuzzy-framed at a point in the past. She thought of kindness, rough-edged but there had been a point in the dark when kindness too soft had become static, to rub fitfully along her skin.
"Then you keep going," she said, real easy and breathing back where it should be as she gave a warm squeeze of fingers. She ran her finger along the smudge until it blended in, until the shoes looked like the rest of the outfit, borrowed glitter. But she couldn't grow up caught twined in amber.
"You figure out what works, and you do that." Surety, in uncertainty.