May 30: T/J, Frisson

[kinetic_elaboration]

Some random Tom/Jane stuff on this Friday night. Not connected to anything else, just an indulgent sort of idea I had.

550 words, written in about 15 minutes

*

Jane knows that hooking up with Tom again is a bad idea, but shouldn’t she be allowed to make a mistake every now and then?

The thing is that he has an impulsive streak just like hers except that no one ever expects it of him, which makes it that much more interesting, more thrilling. When they first run into each other again, that impulsivity means going out to a midnight showing of an arthouse film at this little theater he knows, then staying up the rest of the night talking about it, debating it until emotions run high, and then sputter out abruptly into nothing right around dawn. She had forgotten what that felt like: simple, focused, intensive conversation with him. 

 

The second night it means he’s texting her, late, but not so late, when she’s out with a different old friend. Are you still awake?

yes. y?

And right after, before he responds: what r u suggesting?

She waits around long enough that it becomes embarrassing to still be looking at her phone.

Nothing innocent

She insists on her place because she always liked being with him best on her home ground. He’s still way too handsome and in that same clean cut, traditional, catalogue way that people are always surprised to find she likes. Most of the artists who hit on her are a little scruffy. She holds Tom’s face in her hands, runs her thumbs along the bone of his eye socket, while he holds himself careful and still and lets her.

Being with him again is dangerous, a bad idea, a landmine of an idea, because it can never just be about sex, no matter how much she wishes it could be. He is too good at looking at her like he’s tuned out the rest of the world and she’s the one sharp, focused point that’s left. He’s too good at touching her slow like she likes, and of remembering, with such precision, all of her tells. Everything that she likes.

So it’s risky. Their past, their baggage. It’s not that he once cheated on her with her best friend. That was ages ago, and Daria’s still her closest person in the world, someone who will always mean so much more to her than he does. It’s that eventually they will fight, and it will be about money or class or art or taste in art; it will be about something important, something that matters, and part of why it will matter is because it’s him.

And yet, that’s later. Not the first night or the second. Right now he’s quiet, naked, next to her, and she’s arranging his limbs like he’s her model, and then climbing up on top of him, and looking down at him with his head against her pillows. He’s older now but only in a way that makes her realize how young they both were when they met. He holds his hands at her hips and rubs circles at the jut of them with his thumbs. Electric. She holds the moment in her own hands, a frisson, a chill, holds back the wave of everything before and everything to come as it threatens to break, and tries to keep it beating there steady for as long as she can.