Interlude with important character-building nonsense (okay okay, it's for sex)
I recently told a commenter that I usually update in the mornings, and I guess that's still categorically true, but the other end of it this time. Perhaps I jynxed it.
Anyway, this is Eames the Liar Part 5, which contains sex & gayness, referential humor and all the trappings of a truly sweet dysfunctional relationship.
New readers start here.
“Tomorrow at five,” I say curtly, because when Kent and I get back, Eames and Yusuf have been drinking to steady their nerves and this just pisses me off.
“Arthur, I’ve been thinking,” says Yusuf. “What if Johnny actually wants to buy it?”
“Jesus, I hadn’t thought of that,” I say, with probably more sarcasm than the question deserves. “Well, it’s going to be pretty tricky for him to pull it off considering we’ll be gone before he wakes up.”
“What, so he can track us all down and kill us in our sleep?” says Yusuf. Yusuf is drunk. I’ve never seen Yusuf drunk. Yusuf drunk is not something I think I enjoy.
“From there it’s on Archy to pass us off as conmen,” I say impatiently. “He’ll tell Johnny the approximate truth-that we were trying to extract something. He’s got something he’ll fill in. He wins points with the boss for getting rid of us.”
“He’ll probably even burn a few corpses to make it look extra convincing,” mutters Eames from the corner of the dim little room, and I clench my hand into a fist to keep myself under control because suddenly I want to yell at him and I’m not sure why.
“Pretty clever,” says Kent approvingly. Thank you Kent.
“Sort of,” says Yusuf. “Still putting an awful lot of faith in Archy.”
“Yusuf, you’re not technically part of the team, so just keep it to yourself, all right?” I’ve had it and I want him out, and Kent too, I want to even this goddamn playing field because I can feel Eames deliberately not looking at me and I’m sick of this bullshit. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m exhausted and I really don’t want to talk about it with the whole gang.”
Yusuf raises his hands in a peace-making, passive aggressive sort of way, and climbs to his feet. He throws Eames a look, and Eames nods without looking at him, so he goes, taking Kent with him. I wait for the door to close.
“Why is Yusuf here, again?”
Eames shrugs. “He wanted to come.”
I look at him. “I don’t think I like it that he knows more about you than I do.”
Eames looks at me, and I can see he’s at that point of drunkenness where having fun means getting a little bit mean. “Well you’ve seen me naked, which is something he’s never done, but you don’t hear him complaining about it, do you?”
“Fuck you,” I say, and I’m suddenly angry, really, really angry. “You think this is funny? I’m going into a job blind, Eames. Why can’t you just tell me what the fuck is going on?”
Eames looks away, shifts his weight and curls his arms around himself, protective. He hates this, and seeing him this way makes me back down a bit, in spite of myself.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He doesn’t know what else to say, and I don’t know what to do. I suddenly feel horrible for asking, and I wonder what it’s like to be in his position. The anger slips, and I shrug my coat off so it crumples unceremoniously on the floor, and I sit down on the edge of the bed. He looks so small there, curled up in the corner. Eames has a strange affinity for corners.
For a while we don’t say anything, and he unwinds gradually, composing himself.
“You know what drew me to you?” I say suddenly, and the question is as surprising as the sudden break of the silence, and still he manages a perfectly smartass response, barely dropping a beat.
“Other than my fashionable sensibilities and stunning good looks?” He smiles, relieved with the conversation before it’s begun, and he gets up and starts leisurely undressing himself. There is nothing seductive about this, just Eames getting ready for bed, but I watch his every move even so.
“I knew you were hiding something,” I say. “I always knew. From the very first time I met you I knew there was something there, some secret no one else knew about. And for a while I wanted it. I wanted to be the person you told-the person who knew what no one else knew.”
He interrupts himself from the ritual undoing of buttons to laugh at me. “You’re so full of shit,” he says. “You were the one with the big identity crisis, and you treated me like I broke you in half when I gave you practically the exact same speech.”
“Some speech,” I say, and I smirk at him, the lies he tells himself, to me, to whoever will listen. Maybe he doesn’t know he’s telling them. “You said you couldn’t love me because you didn’t like who I was. How was I supposed to react?”
“Well, I was hoping for something less pathologically insane,” he says.
“Look, I’m trying to tell you something.”
“Fine, fine; go ahead.”
I sigh heavily, but it’s all for show: we’re playing each other like we always do, and it’s familiar and reassuring and it feels good. “My point is that I did get to know you, and I guess at some point I realized that I didn’t want your big damn secret anymore. You know? I was content with what you were willing to give me.” I slip my shoes off and ease myself down onto my back. The bed creaks a little, and he’s watching me in the mirror. “And that’s okay, because I like you as you are, Eames.”
He smiles. “Careful, you’re in danger of sounding almost sweet.”
I look at him, eyebrows raised. “I can be sweet.”
He turns to me, shedding his shirt onto the floor to join my coat. “Oh, right. And I can be Princess Diana.”
I pause a moment to see if he’s going to take this to its logical conclusion, but he doesn’t, so I do it for him. “You could be Princess Diana.”
He looks at me with surprise, as if the thought had never occurred to him and it never should have occurred to me. “Well that’d just be crass,” he says. Shirt, belt, shoes gone, he comes and sits down beside me. His fingers begin playing gently in my hair, liberating it in unsightly wisps. “Anyway, you were saying.”
“Just that…” I murmur, looking past him to the water-stained ceiling. “I’m trying very hard not to care about all this. I don’t want to feel like I need you to tell me what happened in your past, if you don’t want to tell me. It shouldn’t matter. Because I trust you, and because the only thing I care about is you.”
“Aww,” he says with a big stupid grin.
“I’m being serious,” I say, and swat at his hand. He catches me instead around the back of my neck, and tilts me up a little, leaning down over me, the angle should be awkward but he makes it work, manipulates everything so gently that it works.
“I know, Arthur. You always are. And I appreciate it,” he says softly. “But right now I’m very tired and a little drunk, and you have somehow managed to look exquisite even in this awful light, and I would do literally anything to delay the advent of tomorrow-at-five. So bearing that in mind, do you suppose we could just forego the talking, and the being serious, just this one time, and just be here, in this shitty little room, on this dreadful mattress, together?”
God, he’s beautiful. He’s beautiful and he’s perfect. I think about the night I got so drunk I called him and yelled at him for not having had sex with me yet. I don’t remember anything of what he said, if he could get a word in edgewise, and I barely remember anything I said, just that it was a confusing blend of accusations of having left me hanging and apologies for having let him believe the absurd illusion that I didn’t desire/want/need him with every stupid little fiber of my stupid little being. I remember drinking alone in my apartment and trying not very hard to watch American Beauty on AMC, and Kevin Spacey wrapping it up with that line about every-single-moment-of-my-stupid-little-life making me realize all these things. I remember that all I could think about the whole movie through was Eames, his fingertips, his lips pressing against every part of my undeserving body.
“That’s acceptable,” I say, breathless because he’s there now, maneuvering me with such care and grace further onto the bed and leaning his weight down over me, kissing me. I wrap my arms around him and hold on for dear life, dear stupid little life, and his hands are on my hips, holding me down even as I start to squirm beneath him. He moves to my neck, kisses it once and comes to a rest, tilting his head to one side. He comes to a slow drift, his hands loosening, and I shift away from him so I can look at him properly.
“You got sad,” I say quietly, running my fingers over the hair above his ear.
“No, no,” he murmurs. “Just… a little nostalgic.” He gazes at the wall for a while. “Thinking about things I’d rather forget.”
I don’t know what to say to that, and after a moment I say the only thing I can think of, which, perhaps weirdly, is “Non, je ne regrette rien.”
He rolls over and looks up at me. “Your French is abysmal.”
“Well it can’t be any worse than your English,” I say reasonably.
“Hey.” He punches me lightly in the arm, and I laugh a little, an empty, dying sound, because now it’s my turn to gaze at the wall, resting my head on his chest. His heartbeat is loud and steady and his voice reverberates when he says, “You’re thinking about Cobb, aren’t you.” When I don’t respond he says, “Edith Piaf was his idea, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I say without thinking. “No. Mal’s. It was Mal’s idea.”
He strokes my hair a few times before I lift myself up and look at him. “I just feel like… I should have done something, you know? I shouldn’t have let it happen. Ariadne blames me for it, a little bit. I know she does, even if she doesn’t think she does. I was there with him the whole time, I should have seen it coming.”
In all our time together this is something we’ve never talked about. Cobb is something none of us talk about. “There was nothing you could have done,” he says. “There was nothing anyone could do.”
“That’s not true,” I say, and I sit up suddenly. “There’s always something someone can do. Always.”
See, Cobb never came back. We got Saito barely enough, with a lot of therapy and a lot of time he was Saito again, but Cobb isn’t Cobb anymore, and this is something we don’t talk about.
“Arthur,” he whispers, and he runs a hand over my cheek and only then to I feel the sudden and alarming urge to cry. I don’t cry, and I’m not sure what it is that has made me want to. I manage not to, but I think he sees that it almost happened, he who sees everything. He sits up and he kisses me again, hand buried in my hair, his other arm tight around my waist. Take me away, Eames. Take everything away. Take away the bad friendship, the long-suffering denial, the cold hard refusal to trust Ariadne’s alarmist attitudes. Take away the false hopes as you wait in Yusuf’s rain soaked dream. Take away the insecurity at knowing there’s so much you don’t know about him, the painfully embarrassing memory of what you were trying to be when he first laid eyes on you, and take away the loneliness of wondering if you’ll ever know his first name.
He squeezes me hard and holds me down and I imagine Kent can hear us through the wall but I don’t care, I don’t care because he is mine, I know him and I know who he is, and he lies to everyone but he doesn’t lie to me, to me it’s just that I don’t need to know.
It’s when he’s inside me and his hands are on me hard enough to bruise that he shatters everything by saying with the faintest of coherence, “Arthur, I want to tell you.”
“Shut up,” I whisper.
Is it because I know he doesn’t want to tell me that I don’t want to know? Or is it because I’m afraid that knowing will change him and change us?
He can’t say anything because that’s when he comes, and I can only gasp in return, arching, my spine curving up under me.
He collapses beside me and we breathe.
“I want to tell you,” he tries to finish, silenced again by my fingertips pressed against his lips, eager and imperfect protection against this knowledge.
Gently he takes my hand and pulls it away. “I want to tell you that I love you,” he says.
He has never said this to me; we don’t say this, not for any real reason, just like it never occurred to us to say. I don’t know how to respond and, ridiculously, I say, “Oh.”
“I do,” he says. “I love you, Arthur.”
I love you, too.
I love you, Eames?
Nothing sounds right.
I settle for Han Solo.
“I know,” I say.
“Arsehole,” he laughs, but he’s too tired to argue, and he’s asleep, mercifully dreamless, saving up that energy for the dream that is to be Johnny Quid’s, tomorrow at five.
Continues here.
Anyway, this is Eames the Liar Part 5, which contains sex & gayness, referential humor and all the trappings of a truly sweet dysfunctional relationship.
New readers start here.
“Tomorrow at five,” I say curtly, because when Kent and I get back, Eames and Yusuf have been drinking to steady their nerves and this just pisses me off.
“Arthur, I’ve been thinking,” says Yusuf. “What if Johnny actually wants to buy it?”
“Jesus, I hadn’t thought of that,” I say, with probably more sarcasm than the question deserves. “Well, it’s going to be pretty tricky for him to pull it off considering we’ll be gone before he wakes up.”
“What, so he can track us all down and kill us in our sleep?” says Yusuf. Yusuf is drunk. I’ve never seen Yusuf drunk. Yusuf drunk is not something I think I enjoy.
“From there it’s on Archy to pass us off as conmen,” I say impatiently. “He’ll tell Johnny the approximate truth-that we were trying to extract something. He’s got something he’ll fill in. He wins points with the boss for getting rid of us.”
“He’ll probably even burn a few corpses to make it look extra convincing,” mutters Eames from the corner of the dim little room, and I clench my hand into a fist to keep myself under control because suddenly I want to yell at him and I’m not sure why.
“Pretty clever,” says Kent approvingly. Thank you Kent.
“Sort of,” says Yusuf. “Still putting an awful lot of faith in Archy.”
“Yusuf, you’re not technically part of the team, so just keep it to yourself, all right?” I’ve had it and I want him out, and Kent too, I want to even this goddamn playing field because I can feel Eames deliberately not looking at me and I’m sick of this bullshit. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m exhausted and I really don’t want to talk about it with the whole gang.”
Yusuf raises his hands in a peace-making, passive aggressive sort of way, and climbs to his feet. He throws Eames a look, and Eames nods without looking at him, so he goes, taking Kent with him. I wait for the door to close.
“Why is Yusuf here, again?”
Eames shrugs. “He wanted to come.”
I look at him. “I don’t think I like it that he knows more about you than I do.”
Eames looks at me, and I can see he’s at that point of drunkenness where having fun means getting a little bit mean. “Well you’ve seen me naked, which is something he’s never done, but you don’t hear him complaining about it, do you?”
“Fuck you,” I say, and I’m suddenly angry, really, really angry. “You think this is funny? I’m going into a job blind, Eames. Why can’t you just tell me what the fuck is going on?”
Eames looks away, shifts his weight and curls his arms around himself, protective. He hates this, and seeing him this way makes me back down a bit, in spite of myself.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He doesn’t know what else to say, and I don’t know what to do. I suddenly feel horrible for asking, and I wonder what it’s like to be in his position. The anger slips, and I shrug my coat off so it crumples unceremoniously on the floor, and I sit down on the edge of the bed. He looks so small there, curled up in the corner. Eames has a strange affinity for corners.
For a while we don’t say anything, and he unwinds gradually, composing himself.
“You know what drew me to you?” I say suddenly, and the question is as surprising as the sudden break of the silence, and still he manages a perfectly smartass response, barely dropping a beat.
“Other than my fashionable sensibilities and stunning good looks?” He smiles, relieved with the conversation before it’s begun, and he gets up and starts leisurely undressing himself. There is nothing seductive about this, just Eames getting ready for bed, but I watch his every move even so.
“I knew you were hiding something,” I say. “I always knew. From the very first time I met you I knew there was something there, some secret no one else knew about. And for a while I wanted it. I wanted to be the person you told-the person who knew what no one else knew.”
He interrupts himself from the ritual undoing of buttons to laugh at me. “You’re so full of shit,” he says. “You were the one with the big identity crisis, and you treated me like I broke you in half when I gave you practically the exact same speech.”
“Some speech,” I say, and I smirk at him, the lies he tells himself, to me, to whoever will listen. Maybe he doesn’t know he’s telling them. “You said you couldn’t love me because you didn’t like who I was. How was I supposed to react?”
“Well, I was hoping for something less pathologically insane,” he says.
“Look, I’m trying to tell you something.”
“Fine, fine; go ahead.”
I sigh heavily, but it’s all for show: we’re playing each other like we always do, and it’s familiar and reassuring and it feels good. “My point is that I did get to know you, and I guess at some point I realized that I didn’t want your big damn secret anymore. You know? I was content with what you were willing to give me.” I slip my shoes off and ease myself down onto my back. The bed creaks a little, and he’s watching me in the mirror. “And that’s okay, because I like you as you are, Eames.”
He smiles. “Careful, you’re in danger of sounding almost sweet.”
I look at him, eyebrows raised. “I can be sweet.”
He turns to me, shedding his shirt onto the floor to join my coat. “Oh, right. And I can be Princess Diana.”
I pause a moment to see if he’s going to take this to its logical conclusion, but he doesn’t, so I do it for him. “You could be Princess Diana.”
He looks at me with surprise, as if the thought had never occurred to him and it never should have occurred to me. “Well that’d just be crass,” he says. Shirt, belt, shoes gone, he comes and sits down beside me. His fingers begin playing gently in my hair, liberating it in unsightly wisps. “Anyway, you were saying.”
“Just that…” I murmur, looking past him to the water-stained ceiling. “I’m trying very hard not to care about all this. I don’t want to feel like I need you to tell me what happened in your past, if you don’t want to tell me. It shouldn’t matter. Because I trust you, and because the only thing I care about is you.”
“Aww,” he says with a big stupid grin.
“I’m being serious,” I say, and swat at his hand. He catches me instead around the back of my neck, and tilts me up a little, leaning down over me, the angle should be awkward but he makes it work, manipulates everything so gently that it works.
“I know, Arthur. You always are. And I appreciate it,” he says softly. “But right now I’m very tired and a little drunk, and you have somehow managed to look exquisite even in this awful light, and I would do literally anything to delay the advent of tomorrow-at-five. So bearing that in mind, do you suppose we could just forego the talking, and the being serious, just this one time, and just be here, in this shitty little room, on this dreadful mattress, together?”
God, he’s beautiful. He’s beautiful and he’s perfect. I think about the night I got so drunk I called him and yelled at him for not having had sex with me yet. I don’t remember anything of what he said, if he could get a word in edgewise, and I barely remember anything I said, just that it was a confusing blend of accusations of having left me hanging and apologies for having let him believe the absurd illusion that I didn’t desire/want/need him with every stupid little fiber of my stupid little being. I remember drinking alone in my apartment and trying not very hard to watch American Beauty on AMC, and Kevin Spacey wrapping it up with that line about every-single-moment-of-my-stupid-little-life making me realize all these things. I remember that all I could think about the whole movie through was Eames, his fingertips, his lips pressing against every part of my undeserving body.
“That’s acceptable,” I say, breathless because he’s there now, maneuvering me with such care and grace further onto the bed and leaning his weight down over me, kissing me. I wrap my arms around him and hold on for dear life, dear stupid little life, and his hands are on my hips, holding me down even as I start to squirm beneath him. He moves to my neck, kisses it once and comes to a rest, tilting his head to one side. He comes to a slow drift, his hands loosening, and I shift away from him so I can look at him properly.
“You got sad,” I say quietly, running my fingers over the hair above his ear.
“No, no,” he murmurs. “Just… a little nostalgic.” He gazes at the wall for a while. “Thinking about things I’d rather forget.”
I don’t know what to say to that, and after a moment I say the only thing I can think of, which, perhaps weirdly, is “Non, je ne regrette rien.”
He rolls over and looks up at me. “Your French is abysmal.”
“Well it can’t be any worse than your English,” I say reasonably.
“Hey.” He punches me lightly in the arm, and I laugh a little, an empty, dying sound, because now it’s my turn to gaze at the wall, resting my head on his chest. His heartbeat is loud and steady and his voice reverberates when he says, “You’re thinking about Cobb, aren’t you.” When I don’t respond he says, “Edith Piaf was his idea, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I say without thinking. “No. Mal’s. It was Mal’s idea.”
He strokes my hair a few times before I lift myself up and look at him. “I just feel like… I should have done something, you know? I shouldn’t have let it happen. Ariadne blames me for it, a little bit. I know she does, even if she doesn’t think she does. I was there with him the whole time, I should have seen it coming.”
In all our time together this is something we’ve never talked about. Cobb is something none of us talk about. “There was nothing you could have done,” he says. “There was nothing anyone could do.”
“That’s not true,” I say, and I sit up suddenly. “There’s always something someone can do. Always.”
See, Cobb never came back. We got Saito barely enough, with a lot of therapy and a lot of time he was Saito again, but Cobb isn’t Cobb anymore, and this is something we don’t talk about.
“Arthur,” he whispers, and he runs a hand over my cheek and only then to I feel the sudden and alarming urge to cry. I don’t cry, and I’m not sure what it is that has made me want to. I manage not to, but I think he sees that it almost happened, he who sees everything. He sits up and he kisses me again, hand buried in my hair, his other arm tight around my waist. Take me away, Eames. Take everything away. Take away the bad friendship, the long-suffering denial, the cold hard refusal to trust Ariadne’s alarmist attitudes. Take away the false hopes as you wait in Yusuf’s rain soaked dream. Take away the insecurity at knowing there’s so much you don’t know about him, the painfully embarrassing memory of what you were trying to be when he first laid eyes on you, and take away the loneliness of wondering if you’ll ever know his first name.
He squeezes me hard and holds me down and I imagine Kent can hear us through the wall but I don’t care, I don’t care because he is mine, I know him and I know who he is, and he lies to everyone but he doesn’t lie to me, to me it’s just that I don’t need to know.
It’s when he’s inside me and his hands are on me hard enough to bruise that he shatters everything by saying with the faintest of coherence, “Arthur, I want to tell you.”
“Shut up,” I whisper.
Is it because I know he doesn’t want to tell me that I don’t want to know? Or is it because I’m afraid that knowing will change him and change us?
He can’t say anything because that’s when he comes, and I can only gasp in return, arching, my spine curving up under me.
He collapses beside me and we breathe.
“I want to tell you,” he tries to finish, silenced again by my fingertips pressed against his lips, eager and imperfect protection against this knowledge.
Gently he takes my hand and pulls it away. “I want to tell you that I love you,” he says.
He has never said this to me; we don’t say this, not for any real reason, just like it never occurred to us to say. I don’t know how to respond and, ridiculously, I say, “Oh.”
“I do,” he says. “I love you, Arthur.”
I love you, too.
I love you, Eames?
Nothing sounds right.
I settle for Han Solo.
“I know,” I say.
“Arsehole,” he laughs, but he’s too tired to argue, and he’s asleep, mercifully dreamless, saving up that energy for the dream that is to be Johnny Quid’s, tomorrow at five.
Continues here.