"Thanks. Yeah, purple -" He found the nail polish in a little shop off Oxford Street, a few hours before he picked out the waistcoat. Giles suggested he get a black one, too, just as back-up. The purple seemed, then, like a beautiful congruence, dark and eggplant-y and very lush. Earlier tonight, though, he wasn't so sure about painting them, not with all the dressing-up and the tension and the weird, forced jocularity between them.
But it's better now. Much better, with Giles' touches lingering and sliding, a pat on the back when Oz slips on the waistcoat, then leans over the dresser to figure out which earrings to put in.
"Waist-coat, right?" he asks, still hunting for the last silver ring. "Not weskit, even if that's what the cleaner guy called it?" Giles makes a soft, affirmative noise, and Oz grins. Dressing up really is an entirely new language, with codes and details and syntax he's learning as he goes along. The semantics of it is still escaping him; all he knows, really, is that they both look good. Upright, formal, and *
( ... )
Giles shakes his head and brushes a speck of black lint from the front of Oz's waistcoat. "Don't thank me. It wasn't a gift, it was just something you needed." Oz has his own checkbook now, a cashpoint card and a credit card, but he still tends to think of the money as Giles' money. When it's spent on him, he's both grateful and uncomfortable. "Now, if we'd put diamonds in the lapels like you wanted, then you could've thanked me
( ... )
Olivia's flat, vast and modern, with its spare-lined furniture dotting the space with color, its brushed aluminum and glass block, always makes Giles think of a particularly beautiful airport. The people jostling around the buffet table, as people always do at parties, could be an especially well-dressed crowd queuing at a Heathrow ticket counter
( ... )
"I'm kind of a bum right now," Oz tells the short woman with hair as dark and shiny as his new patent-leather shoes. Amanda? Ursula? He thinks it's Amanda, and she wants to know what he's doing in London and how he finds it and what he plans to do. She stresses weird words, but she's nice enough, and he smiles over his shoulder in goodbye as Olivia pivots him to face Neely
( ... )
Oz is good with people. It's something Giles forgets, knowing him so well. Actually Oz's shyness only emerges on knowing him well; he's shy about what he feels deeply. But he likes new people, likes getting to know them (much more than Giles does, in fact) and he asks them questions out of real interest
( ... )
They're only five stories up, but Oz feels like they're floating right over the bottom of the city. Like they're leaning over the railing of a zeppelin, if zeppelins had ever taken off the way Oz wishes they had, and the river is black, glittery like mica, and the city itself is *bright* but smaller than he'd expected
( ... )
Giles catches Oz around the waist before he can slip away and kisses him. Just a peck on the lips, nothing they couldn't have done inside in the light, but better out here, with darkness and the cool air around their bodies
( ... )
Declan has an impenetrable accent, like he's chewing on peat as he talks, but he's pretty interesting -- he's doing something on something that may or may not involve the human factors of online discourse, and even though Oz isn't quite sure what that means, the guy's face lights up when Oz tells him about the BBS he used to run off his Amiga, so that's pretty cool
( ... )
Meaghan has a lot of rather funny stories about the older librarians' confusion with computers--one old chap pointing the mouse at the screen like a television remote, another asking if he'd lose his e-mail when he turned the computer off--and Giles laughs a little more than he probably should. Oz has been giving him lessons on the computer they bought a few weeks ago, and Giles is beginning to feel rather expert. The sheer quantity of texts he can find online, and the speed of it, more than make up for the lack of paper-smell. He's got over twenty websites bookmarked now, and his very own e-mail account, and he knows what a URL is and what "spam" means.
"I think sometimes they're being stupid to just to obstruct me," Meaghan says. "I think they don't want the manuscripts accessible
( ... )
But it's better now. Much better, with Giles' touches lingering and sliding, a pat on the back when Oz slips on the waistcoat, then leans over the dresser to figure out which earrings to put in.
"Waist-coat, right?" he asks, still hunting for the last silver ring. "Not weskit, even if that's what the cleaner guy called it?" Giles makes a soft, affirmative noise, and Oz grins. Dressing up really is an entirely new language, with codes and details and syntax he's learning as he goes along. The semantics of it is still escaping him; all he knows, really, is that they both look good. Upright, formal, and * ( ... )
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"I think sometimes they're being stupid to just to obstruct me," Meaghan says. "I think they don't want the manuscripts accessible ( ... )
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