Re: log: blake and graham, thorne house
To Blake, it wasn't small talk. Small talk was pointing to the books and talking about them, or cheerfully hitting on his obviously straight house guest, or doing his best to scandalize his audience of one until something drove him out of the room. He didn't have the appetite for any of that he once had. It made him think of people with arched eyebrows and manicured nails buying token weapons for their children as someone else's died on a screen in the background. He would think about doing it, about filling the room with his presence, about shoving everyone out and holding them at arm's length, and it would all die in his throat. The old swagger remained, but much of the bluster had gone, plucked away.
The party. He glanced over at Graham and watched him talk, felt the words slide to the tip of his tongue and then drop away. He took a long swallow of the coffee-whiskey, and he leaned against the edge of the doorframe. He was getting a little buzzed, actually. His first drink hadn't been stingy on the whiskey, and now he'd gone all in.
"A lot of people would have," he said. A desperate situation and a mother and child who couldn't defend themselves? Self-preservation would dictate ditching them at the first possible opportunity. So Graham Ross wasn't a bad man. He found that strangely reassuring, even as it made the images that twisted past his eye even worse.
He turned the mug in small circles, watching the brown liquid slide back and forth, closer and closer to the edges each time. "So, I owe you an apology," he said. He didn't know where the words came from. He'd dropped them, remember? He had decided, just a few seconds ago, not to do this. What the fuck was he doing? But the guilt of it stung. Here they were, standing across from each other. He probably had a right to know, right? Before he stayed in the house another minute. It was fairness or a cruelty. He had such a hard time distinguishing between the two.