Prompt Post No. 14
Welcome to Round 14 of the Inception Kink Meme. This post will be closed to new prompts once it reaches five thousand comments.
New Prompting System
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- Forty-eight hours later, post will reopen to new prompts and temporarily close again when 4000 comments are reached.
- Forty-eight hours ( Read more... )
“His name,” Yusuf says, apropos of nothing, “Is Arthur.”
Eames frowns and pokes his grilled cheese with a spatula.
“Do you think I’m still pining over Jeff?” he asks.
“So we can talk about Jeff now?” Yusuf says, and that’s about all the answer Eames needs.
“No,” he says, and hangs up.
Yusuf calls him back.
“I don’t want to talk about Jeff,” Eames says.
“Okay,” says Yusuf, and makes conversation about other things, and occasionally Eames can hear the bustle of Somnacin in the background, and he knows Yusuf must have the phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder.
Eames is standing there, looking at his grilled cheese the whole time, but somehow he still burns it.
Eames isn’t talking about Jeff, but if he were he’d say that Jeff was a shit. Eames should have known better than to ever sleep with anyone that far in the closet, but Jeff was a scrawny guy with dark hair and a stick up his ass, and Eames couldn’t resist.
These things go a certain way, if you’re in real life and not a romance novel, and so one day Jeff tells Eames he’s engaged to some woman, and they need to end this, and Eames throws something and goes to Somnacin and gets smashed. Two months after the wedding Jeff calls Eames up, and Eames has just enough dignity to chuck his phone at the wall, and when he goes to the store to get a new one he changes his number.
So that’s it, about Jeff. If you asked Yusuf he’d probably say that Eames went all antisocial afterwards, but Yusuf is wrong. Eames just doesn’t like people, and especially not Jeff.
Eames eats his burnt grilled cheese with the more burnt side upwards, so it touches the roof of his mouth and not his tongue, and he thinks it tastes better that way.
It’s the weekend so Arthur isn’t at work, but Eames goes over to Yusuf’s flat during the day and they play video games and don’t talk about Jeff. On Sunday Eames goes to the library and gets the new Nora Roberts, to check out his competition, and also some proper books, and when he gets home he realizes he’s been in the new flat for a week, so he goes to the grocery store and buys a bottle of wine, and wishes he had someone he could call to celebrate, but Yusuf is at work, and he left all his other friends numbers on his old phone, when he smashed it.
He drinks the wine and reads the new Nora Roberts, which sucks. Eames is so much better than this shit. He drinks more wine and goes to bed, and at least now his mattress is made up like a bed, even if it’s getting too hot for blankets to really be worth it.
When he wakes up, Arthur is there, and that makes him smile. He walks past the window in his boxers and waves, but Arthur has his back to him and Eames is pretty sure you can’t see through his windows during the daytime anyway.
Arthur, Eames thinks, is like the sun in that Eames sees him and knows he’s present, but he’s very far away and, also, Arthur doesn’t know Eames exists. Eames realizes that’s a shit comparison, and part of him wishes he hadn’t even thought it because it’s so shit, and the other part of him thinks about Icarus and flying too close to the sun and wax wings melting.
It’s safer this way, he decides. Even if he doesn’t have any fucking wings.
Eames doesn’t bother to get dressed and just sits at his desk in his boxers and writes for a while, and after lunch he goes out on the fire escape to smoke a cigarette. After he lights up he looks across the way and there are two dark eyes staring at him, and then there’s the back of a dark head.
So now Arthur knows Eames exists, and sits on the fire escape on Monday afternoons in his boxers smoking cigarettes. Eames has to admit that he didn’t really think the whole fire escape thing through as well as he should have, because he just wanted a cigarette. Eames wonders how Arthur feels about tattoos.
Eames finishes with the cigarette and goes back inside, and when he stands up to go he thinks he catches a glimpse of Arthur in profile, so he raises his hand and waves, and he goes inside before he can see if there’s a response. Wax wings melting, he thinks, and sits down to write.
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