Work Text:
Maybe it’s just time that it takes, it's just time that it takes
But I don’t wanna wait
I wanna love again today
My feelings ran away
I didn’t know how to feel them
Cause I’ve got my love stuck in my head, in my head
I’ve got my love stuck in my thoughts, in my thoughts
I’ve got to keep my love in my heart
- Mother Mother, “Love Stuck”
The only warning that Keeley gets before Jamie shows up at her house is a text message that she knows he sent by voice-to-text because of its use of capital letters and the complete lack of emojis. It announces his imminent arrival and apologizes for the lack of warning, explaining that he forgot to do that until he was almost there, all in one long, run-on sentence without punctuation. She has just enough time to grab a cardigan, because she’d been getting kind of chilly anyway, and pause the episode of Sex and the City she had been watching before he’s ringing the doorbell.
When Keeley opens the door, Jamie bypasses any kind of perhaps typically-expected greeting. While this isn’t exactly unusual for him, what he says is.
“I’ve got great news,” he tells her, smiling like he really does have great news, which helps to somewhat offset the sense of foreboding she’d been starting to feel. “I am not in love with you. Can I come in?”
Blinking at him, taken so completely aback that she has no ability to muster a response, Keeley can only step aside and gesture towards the inside of the house. Whatever is about to happen here, there is no way she can possibly predict it. A half-dozen things had flitted through her head in the last few minutes as to the possible reason why Jamie was coming over, and none of them even came close to whatever that was. The only thing left to do is let him in and see what this is gonna turn into.
Keeley closes the door and walks back into the living room after Jamie, jogging a little to catch up. He walks straight there like he knows the place well inside and out - which, she supposes that he does. He’d spent enough time here back when they’d been together, and even after they were broken up he’d been there a handful of times. Sometimes she forgets things like that - the things that they know about each other and the familiarity they still had with each other’s lives, and why. That life feels a world away from her life now.
Not everything is different now, though.
Jamie is just as unable to be still as he always has been, for one. Keeley doesn’t even bother to wait for him to sit down, knowing he’s not going to, at least not yet. He’s far too keyed up, judging by the way he’s bouncing a little on his heels like a video game idle animation. She doesn’t have that problem, though, so she drops down onto the couch, props an elbow on the armrest, and rests her cheek on her hand.
“Okay, so,” Jamie says, pulling his hands out of his pockets and holding them out in the air.
As his forehead scrunches up, considering how best to launch into the explanation, Jamie’s eyes flicker around the room, settling eventually on the coffee table. He doesn’t look at Keeley, but it doesn’t bother her. She just watches him with a raised eyebrow, a little amused. This is another one of those familiarity points, Keeley supposes. She still remembers him well - what it’s like to be around Jamie, his quirks and how he shares space with people. Eye contact has never exactly been his forte, and Keeley has learned to identify when it’s his usual drifting, indirect kind of ‘paying attention’ as opposed to when it’s an indicator of anxiety or agitation. It seems like it’s a little of both this time, but mostly Jamie just looks like he always does when he’s about to launch into some kind of epiphany or explanation that Keeley may or may not understand.
“Basically,” Jamie says, his fingers giving a flexing twitch like he’s physically kicking off whatever is about to come next, “I figured it out, right, and I’m not in love with you - which is good news for both of us, yeah? But, I honestly don’t think I ever was, even when we were together.” Immediately after he says it, he winces. “Shit. That sounded bad. I mean- I don’t mean that the way it sounded. Can I start over?”
“Go for it,” Keeley says, raised brow arching higher.
Honestly, she’s not really offended by what he’d said to begin with. They’d never never quite gotten to that place in their relationship, never reached the point of ‘I love you’ with each other - which makes sense, when she thinks about it. They’d started out just sort of messing around, and even when they’d got more serious, even when they were spending more nights together than apart and she had a key to Jamie’s house, they’d never really moved out of the place where they’d started. If she were to really ask herself the question now, Keeley thinks she might have been falling in love with him, or close to it, but she doesn’t know if she was ever actually in love with Jamie. She’d liked him quite a bit, especially when it was just the two of them and he would drop the bullshit he tended to lay on especially thick whenever anyone else was around. Now that she’s been with Roy though, had a relationship unlike any of the other ones that she’s had in her life, she knows that her and Jamie hadn’t been like this. Theirs had been a relationship of fun and convenience, affection and fondness, but not… Not love. For both of them.
Or, so it had seemed until the funeral. Except, apparently that might not have been what it seemed after all.
“I thought I was,” Jamie says, pulling her back into the moment and the conversation, the point of why she’d been thinking about this. “You’re- You’re incredible. You’re fucking fantastic, and after…” He trails off, a strange look flickering across his face for a moment, then disappearing. “After I were sent back to City, I thought about it a lot, right? Thought about you, and me, you and me, and how I’d never felt like that about anyone, but it didn’t… The way I felt hadn’t changed at all, I realized. And I kind of thought it would go away, being around you and Roy all the time, seeing you together, and it didn’t, so. I said what I said at the funeral.”
“Okay,” Keeley says slowly, not really sure what to make of all of this. So far, it sounds like the same stuff he’d already said at that very funeral, but she trusts that he’s telling the truth when he says it’s not that.
“And I meant that, or- I thought I did, I guess, but I get it now. I get what happened, it was a misunderstanding. I was just mixed up because I do love you, Keeley, I’m just not in love with you, and I kind of got confused? Because I couldn’t sort out the difference, you know? Cause, like…” He trails off again, and looks the same way he had when he’d mentioned Manchester, though this time the expression lingers. “I’d just not really had that, I think, not in a long time at least. Didn’t have people I- people I loved, I mean, I didn’t have friends like that and I never made it that far with anyone I was seeing, so I assumed.”
It’s sweet, really. A strange, off-centre kind of sweet, but that’s Jamie for you. Keeley smiles at him, feeling the same kind of warm little glow in her chest that she has when he’s asked her advice or wanted her opinion on something. She’d been used to things going to shit pretty much immediately when things ended with an ex, until Jamie. When she broke up with him she figured that was that. Then, when things just seemed normal every time they encountered each other after that, she figured maybe this time it was going to be different. The funeral felt like the other shoe finally dropping, the proof that being friends with her ex just… wasn’t going to work.
“What made you realize, then? What changed?” she asks.
At the question, Jamie laughs. His face wrinkles up in a happy, somewhat-embarrassed smile and he laughs. Then, he shakes his head and drops down onto the couch. There’s a ring on his index finger, made of a wide silver metal with a second band around the middle shaped like a tiny chain. The chain band spins when he fiddles with it, catching the light.
“The way that I felt about you - wanting to be around you, tell you everything that happened in my life, be the best version of myself because that’s the person you expected from me and the one you deserved, all of that, just… realized, after a while, that I felt the same way about Dani. And then it was like alright, so am I in love with Dani then? Makes sense, I mean, he’s great, and funny, and fit as hell, but then I started to feel like that about Sam , and then there was-“ Jamie cuts himself off and shakes his head before he can go down some kind of tangent. “Anyway, the point is I figured there was probably a limit to the number of people you can be in love with at once, and it wasn’t like I wanted like- I didn’t want anything to change with anyone, and so that got me thinking about you and how even though I felt like that and said what I did I didn’t actually want to- to do anything about it, so.”
It’s not an entirely unfamiliar experience that Jamie’s describing, Keeley has to admit. She’s been in that place before, looking at people in her life and wondering if she were into them or if they were just fantastic and gorgeous. For her, the answer would sort itself out without too much trouble, because she had enough to compare it to that she could put it together soon enough. It sounds like things had been a little foggier for Jamie, which is certainly clarifying for Keeley in hindsight.
“Looked some stuff up, then, right, and…” Jamie pauses, taking a deep breath like he’s gearing up for something, and then finishes with, “And it turns out I’m just never going to be in love -in love with anyone, ever!”
Which is not what Keeley thought he was going to say at all. Her smile turns abruptly into a frown, and she says, voice thick with sudden worry, “Oh, don’t say that. There’s so many people in the world, Jamie, and-”
“No, no, I don’t mean like that , not like, in a sad way or whatever,” Jamie says, already shaking his head by the time she’s started talking. He sounds and looks a little exasperated, like they were having two different versions of a conversation they’d started out on the same page in. Maybe they were. “I mean, like… Like, how you’re into girls and blokes, right?”
Keeley nods and tries to put her instinctive reaction to hearing Jamie talk like that out of her mind. Whatever he’d meant, that wasn’t the reaction he was apparently looking for, and this has just gone into pretty important territory, the kind of subject you want to get your response to right.
“I’m just not into anyone like that,” Jamie says, matter of fact and without hesitation. “It’s a thing, it’s called aromantic, apparently. There’s, like, a neat little flag and everything.” While the announcement itself is as straight to the point and guileless as Jamie’s announcements tend to be, his demeanour goes a little off once the words are out there. His shoulders hunch a little and his hands twist together in his lap, abandoning fidgeting with his ring to fold them over each other, tucked close to his stomach. He’s anxious.
“Oh, my bad.” It does ring a bell, actually, now that he’s said the actual word. Keeley doesn’t know the specifics, but the explanation is straightforward enough. “That’s quite the revelation. I’m proud of you for figuring that out, though, that sort of thing can be tough.”
“Yeah, it is.” Jamie huffs a laugh, the tension disappearing from his posture. He slumps back into the couch, hands coming unclasped. One thumb finds the edge of the cushion seemingly without thought, nail absently running along the seam in the fabric. “If I’d known that was an option earlier, a lot of things might’ve made a lot more sense, and I wouldn’t have made a fucking idiot of myself with you . Cause, anyway, just, my whole point here is that I’m not in love with you, and thought you deserved to know that, especially because I do love you. And I don’t think I got that that was… an option, I guess?”
Talking to Jamie is interesting, sometimes. There’s really never going to be any predicting how things are going to go when you start. Sometimes he says something truly ridiculous and Keeley can’t help but laugh, or he’ll say something she can’t even make sense out of. And then sometimes he goes off in a completely different direction and says something extremely insightful or piercingly sincere and she’s thrown for a loop and unable to respond for an embarrassingly long amount of time.
This is one of those later moments. Jamie has just laid out the complicated steps of the kind of journey of self-discovery that takes a lot of people years upon years, some of them never making it at all, and he’s talking about it as simply as the time he’d told Keeley about how it took him fifteen minutes to learn how to turn on his new car because it was a push to start and he didn’t have any idea what he was doing with it.
Looking at his face, Keeley can see that the anxiety is creeping back in again. Her hand twitches, almost reaching out and taking ahold of Jamie’s where it sits between them on the couch out of a combination of habit and instinct. She stops herself before she does anything more than twitch, not sure if that was the sort of thing she should be doing during a conversation like this.
“I think I got having friends, right, but- but teammates, really, people I didn’t ever get too close to. And then I got dating, too, but I didn’t really get anything else, didn’t really get what anything else felt like, or was supposed to feel like. So when I felt about you the way I did… and when I realized I still felt like that, I kind of figured it had to be the dating thing, and then there we were, and I got all mixed up and almost ruined everything.”
Well, fuck being not sure what she should be doing, then. Keeley reaches out and takes ahold of his wrist, giving it a gentle squeeze. Jamie jolts, just the slightest bit, like he wasn’t expecting it, but he smiles and flips his hand over, squeezing hers back.
“So I came over to tell you the truth, now that I’d figured out what it was, because I hoped we could… I don’t want to be your ex anymore, Keeley.” Jamie looks over at her now, the sincerity in his face so deep it’s a little raw to look at. He winces abruptly, and adds, “And I don’t want to be your boyfriend either, honest, I… I really don’t think I want to be anyone’s boyfriend at all, turns out, but- Can we go back to doing what we did when we were just us? I don’t mean the like- I mean this. I miss this.” He waves around at the living room with the hand she isn’t holding. “Because we’d just hang out , and watch your shows, which are no fun to watch without you, and you’d let me braid your hair even though I’m shit at it and basically I think what I’m asking is I’d like to be friends. I’d like to be your friend. Officially, or whatever.”
Keeley can’t help herself. She laughs - just a little, an incredulous, fond sound that she can tell has landed wrong the moment he hears it. In order to head that off at the pass, Keeley squeezes Jamie’s hand again, and says, “Of course, Jamie, I- We never stopped being friends.”
The look of relief on his face is powerful. It’s endearing, and it makes Keeley’s chest warm again, at the same time that it aches a bit, too.
“Oh, really?” Keeley tries not to let the way Jamie sounds honestly surprised get to her. The reaction is more about him than it is about her, and she knows that. “That’s- Oh, that’s good. Good, I’m glad.” There’s a pause. Jamie fidgets again, his thumb running over Keeley’s knuckles instead of the ring. There’s a faint smile on his face, small and somewhat shy. “Well, I want to keep being friends, then, and… And maybe get back to doing some of the stuff that we used to do? You know, spending time together. Hanging out, going to shows. That sort of thing.”
“Yeah,” she agrees, mirroring his expression with a smile of her own. The warm feeling in her chest is brighter now, like an ember coaxed into producing a crackling hearth fire. “Yeah, I’d like that.” The sight of the paused frame of the television screen gives Keeley an idea. “Hey, tonight’s my night where I lounge around and watch crappy telly, do you want to stick around? I can start a new episode.”
Jamie readily accepts the invitation and Keeley gets up to make them both a quick cuppa while he picks an episode from the DVD menu. She looks over to the couch while she waits for the electric kettle to heat up, studying his profile while he squints intently at the options. It’s surreal to see him there, on the couch poking at the remote while she boils water, like they’ve time-traveled into a better version of the past.
“Does this mean I have to come out now? Like- Like on Twitter, or Instagram or something?”
The question comes as she’s pulling the tea out of the cupboard, and Keeley laughs a bit. It’s the kind of thinking-out-loud pondering Jamie does often, musing about whether he should come out on social media the same way he wonders if he should get a new tattoo or check out a club that’s recently opened.
“No, you don’t have to do anything, you do what you want to do,” Keeley calls through to the other room. “I never did. I just kind of dated men and dated women and acted the same when I did both and let people draw their own conclusions from that.”
She hears him hum thoughtfully. “Have to think on this one. Gonna tell people I know when it comes up, but the rest of it’s just way more complicated.”
They sit down with their tea and the episode he’s picked and things feel… normal. Keeley is surprised by how completely normal it feels, with essentially no adjustment period. Jamie gets wrapped up in the plot as quickly as he’s always done, which is as funny to watch as it’s always been. She enjoys the show but Keeley will never claim that Sex and the City is prestige television, and yet Jamie is completely fascinated.
Halfway through the episode he chose to put on, Keeley notices that Jamie’s a little closer to her than he had been when she first came back with the tea. He’s shifted across the couch - consciously or not, it’s hard to tell. It’s something he’s always done. When they sat down to watch telly together, it was a matter of time before he ended up braiding her hair or laying half across her lap, and Keeley finds herself nostalgic at the thought.
The feeling of the nostalgia, the wishful thinking of what she’d like to do versus what she feels like she ought to do, prompts Keeley to have an idea. She props her feet up on the coffee table, crossing her legs at the ankle, grabs a throw pillow, and drops it matter of factly into her lap, where she pats the surface. Jamie looks at her sharply when he hears the sound, an uncertain question in his face.
“Come on then,” Keeley tells him, refusing to let herself succumb to nerves over this. She’s made a choice, because she wanted to, and she’s sticking with it. She would like to watch her show with her friend now, please, not her ex.
It doesn’t take much persuading. Jamie lays down on the couch with the swiftness of a marionette with the strings cut, shifting around until he’s comfortable and sighing quietly like he’s relieved. Like he’s happy. His head is a familiar, welcome weight, and Keeley smiles, feeling the same relief and happiness in herself. Things settle quickly and easily into a calm that feels relaxed and normal.
On the screen, Carrie and Miranda are in a fight. Keeley is on Miranda’s side this time, but she’s not as invested in the drama as she might usually find herself. She’s having a bit of trouble focusing on what’s happening on the show, looking down at Jamie instead of at the characters having it out with each other. There’s a feeling in her lungs that’s distracting her, something big and warm and a little painful, like the very last vestiges of a bruise.
The show’s soundtrack shifts into something soft and sentimental. The fight is about to end, it signals, but Keeley doesn’t look up. She watches the shifting light and shadow changing the planes of Jamie’s face, absently running her fingers through his hair. Her nails scratch lightly at his scalp in a way that’s always made him lose all structural integrity and it works just the same this time. Jamie makes a wordless humming sound and relaxes even further into the couch. It makes the almost-bruise feeling pulse again and Keeley smiles a little. She laughs, too, a faint huff of an exhale. It barely makes any sound, but that’s enough to catch Jamie’s attention, pulling it away from the screen.
Rolling his head back, Jamie squints up at her, frowning a bit. “What?”
“Nothing,” Keeley says. “I just… Missed you, I think.” Yeah, that’s what this is. As soon as she says it, she knows that it’s true. “Missed this.”
“Yeah.” The agreement is soft, barely a breath. Jamie’s head rolls away again, looking back to the screen, though his eyes are a little brighter than before. The light glints off of them. “Yeah, me too.”
Carrie and Miranda’s fight is over, and so is the episode. The next one starts automatically, and Keeley is finally able to actually devote some attention to what’s happening in the show. Jamie runs commentary on what’s going on, keeping the balance she’s always appreciated between not chatting through the whole thing while making her snicker when he does pipe up. It makes an episode she’s already seen several times through interesting in a completely different way. She really had missed this.
Most of the way through the episode, Keeley catches sight of the clock on the wall and is startled to realize how much time has passed. Roy is going to be home soon, which throws something of a hiccup in what’s been an unexpected and unexpectedly great afternoon-turned-evening. While she doesn’t anticipate that there’s going to be an issue, per se, Keeley doesn’t want him to walk into her and Jamie’s new lease on their friendship without some kind of heads-up. Stretching a little and doing her best to avoid disturbing Jamie, Keeley grabs her phone and starts composing a text.
Jamie’s over. Might seem a little weird, but he’s here as a friend. That’s what he says he wants to be, and I believe him. That’s what I want too. Been an interesting visit - the thing at the funeral was a misunderstanding. He’ll probably explain eventually, but that’s for him to do. I just wanted to let you know before you got home. I hope you can be alright with that.
Though Keeley is almost certain that it’s going to go over alright, given that she and Roy have a mutually arrived-at understanding in their relationship that they take each other at their word, she still chews the inside of her lip while waiting for his response. She notices in the empty pause of waiting that the room’s gone quiet. Jamie’s picked up the remote and paused the show, apparently remembering how much Keeley hated to miss things even when she’s seen them before.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Just texting Roy real quick, he’ll be here in a bit.”
While it had been Roy’s reaction to the message that occupied her mind, Keeley is surprised when Jamie has an unexpected response to the news himself. He shifts, sitting up and pulling a face, then seems like he’s about to get up off the couch.
“Hey, whoa, slow down,” Keeley says, putting out a hand to stop him. “That’s not what I meant, you don’t need to go. I’m just letting him know you’re here.”
The way Jamie settles back down is uncertain, hand hovering over the arm of the couch like he’s still considering getting up. “And he’s gonna be… He’s gonna be cool with that?” There’s a nervous edge to his voice, and Keeley sighs.
“Yeah.” She checks her phone and then turns it around, showing him the screen and the Sure. See you soon xx. message on it. “See? We’re adults. I told him you’re here as a friend, and that’s what I want too, and we don’t doubt each other about that stuff. He seems fine with it, and I believe him.” If it turns out that Roy’s uncomfortable with her and Jamie’s plan to not be exes anymore, and just be friends instead, and whatever that might entail, then that’s a conversation Keeley is going to have to have with him herself. It doesn’t need to be one Jamie is involved in at all.
Though Jamie looks at her for a few long moments after she says it, squinting like he’s not sure he should believe her, he does eventually decide to take her at her word. Things settle again, and he even lays back down, which Keeley counts as a success. The episode starts back up again, and that’s that.
Or, it is until Roy’s car pulls up outside, and a key turns in the lock. The front door opens, and Keeley can feel Jamie go tense in her lap. It’s not much, but it’s enough that she notices it when it happens. His body has gone stiff, and she sees the way he sets his thumb on his ring again, slowly spinning the chain band around and around. Keeley can’t really blame him. She’s a little nervous too, if she’s honest.
Roy stops in the doorway of the living room, looking in at the two of them, and his eyebrows arch.
“Hey babe,” Keeley greets, smiling at him and trying to sound casual, like this is normal, which… well, which it probably isn’t, by a lot of people’s standards, but it doesn’t need to be for it to be their normal. Hopefully, Roy is on the same page about that. She’d texted him and she’s fairly sure she knows how this is going to go, but she’s not quite a hundred percent certain. There really is no predicting how someone is going to react to this sort of thing. There’s a world of difference between knowing Jamie’s there and getting home to find his girlfriend’s ex, who he used to have an absolutely prime-time drama level rivalry with, laying on the couch with his head in her lap watching telly.
“Gonna be honest, I kind of thought you might be kidding,” Roy says, eventually, and Keeley’s nerves go away. He’s not upset, which she can tell as soon as he speaks.
Jamie, apparently, isn’t getting the same memo. He’s gone more tense, and is fidgeting like he’s about to get up, and his voice is awkward as he says, “I should go.”
“No, you don’t have to go,” Keeley tells him, then levels Roy with a look. “Right?”
There’s a flicker across Roy’s face that seems almost like the expression version of a stutter, and he says, “Oh, yeah, right. No, you’re fine, Jamie. It’s whatever.” And he sounds like he means it sincerely, in a way that’s obvious to more than just Keeley.
This finally manages to make Jamie relax again. He shifts the arm that he’d levered under himself in preparation to stand back out to fold over his chest, really settling back into the couch for the first time since the door opened. The heavy press of his head on the pillow in Keeley’s lap is a welcome weight.
“Not planning on like… kicking my ass or anything?” Jamie’s joking. Mostly, anyway. He’s not looking at Roy, instead focused on the paused frame of the episode they’d been on when he got home.
Keeley wants to say something. She wants to chide Jamie for making that kind of mostly-joke when she knows it’s starting to grate at Roy when people say that sort of thing, or maybe level Roy with a look making it clear that he’d better not escalate this into a capital-S Situation. They need to work this out themselves, though. It’s not Keeley’s job to manage their relationship, nor is it going to help anyone if she tries. So she swallows everything she wants to say, forces herself to keep her expression neutral, and waits.
Roy snorts. There’s a look on his face like he’s contemplating something, and then whatever he’s debating is resolved and he says, “I try not to make a habit out of beating up my girlfriend’s friends, no.”
It’s like all of the tension that remained in the room dissipates at once. Keeley smiles at Roy, grateful for the additional implied meaning of the words. She doesn’t feel like she needs his permission to be friends with Jamie, but the reassurance that it doesn’t bother him that they are is good to have. Really good to have. And she only grins wider at the next part, a begrudging mutter that Roy shakes his head while he says.
“Or mine.”
Glancing down at him, Keeley sees the soft, pleased expression that’s come across Jamie’s face. His cheeks are flushed, and it looks like he’s trying not to smile while not being entirely successful in the effort. Just that simple reference from Roy to the two of them being friends has the ability to make him practically glow.
“Do you want to… join us?” Keeley offers, somewhat hesitantly. Things are going well, and she doesn’t want to risk making it weird for any of them, but it feels like the thing to do.
At the invitation, Roy just snorts and says, “Absolutely not. I know better than to hang around your time with your shows. I was just going to head upstairs anyway. You two enjoy your… whatever this is.”
It’s true. One of the things they’ve worked out in their relationship so far is that sometimes it’s important to know what not to do together.
Roy goes into the kitchen to grab a snack, then heads for the stairs to go and read somewhere else. He stops off in the living room on the way, stooping to give Keeley a kiss, which she savours for a moment before waving him off. While he’s still stooped over, Roy also reaches out and ruffles Jamie’s hair. Jamie makes an indignant sound and bats at his hand while Roy laughs. For her part, Keeley can’t help but stare in open shock. Thankfully, Jamie has his eyes on the screen as he resumes the episode and Roy has already walked into the other room, which means that neither of them notice this.
Unable to shake it, Keeley wonders if either of them really grasp the significance of what’s just happened there. She fixes Jamie’s disheveled hair, sweeping it back into place, thinking about it, and about the way it would have gone at so many other points in the past. Roy is older and bigger than Jamie, stronger than him, and they have what can delicately be described as a rocky history. That’s all without considering that they’d not minutes ago had a conversation, however in jest and resolved however calmly, about physical violence. And yet, Jamie had not only stayed put laying on the couch the entire time Roy had loomed over it, displaying no kind of reaction except for an annoyed look wrinkling his face, but the man had reached for his head without warning, had scrubbed a hand through his hair, and he hadn’t flinched. He hadn’t seemed like he was for a moment concerned that Roy was a threat, that he might be hurt, and had overall reacted to the whole situation with an air of mild, dramatized irritation.
It sounds like a small thing, but it isn’t. Keeley has seen him react to being reached for suddenly, especially by men he wasn’t expecting to be in his space, and this is lightyears away from that. It’s a dramatic exhibit of just how different Jamie is now. He shifts a bit, and Keeley swipes a lock of hair away from his temple with her thumb. He’s smiling, just a little. Upstairs, she can hear the faint sound of Roy walking around.
Everything is changing, Keeley thinks. Everything feels different, and new, and she’s not really sure what it’s going to look like as it settles. But this life is hers, now, and this is what she wants it to look like. She’d been wrapped up in what she was supposed to do, in wishing here and there that she and Jamie had never been together at all because of the shadow it left over how she felt like she was supposed to relate to him now, that she hadn’t considered that maybe it wasn’t that simple. Maybe this revelation of Jamie’s is a revelation for her, too, if in a smaller way, of choices she hadn’t thought she had.
Unaware of the way he’s set Keeley’s mind off running, Jamie is watching the show. She watches his face, studying the easygoing smile. Her thumb brushes his temple again, and Jamie stirs, rolling over to look up at her. Reaching out, he grabs the remote and pauses the episode.
“What?” he asks. “You’re thinking loud enough I’m having trouble hearing Carrie tell this wanker off, and I was really looking forward to that.”
“Nothing,” Keeley laughs, then sobers. She shrugs one shoulder. “You just… You seem happy.” Which he does, and she doesn’t just mean tonight. She means… everything, these days. It’s a bit of a jolt to realize, but Jamie is different now, and it’s not just in the way he acts around other people - though that’s certainly been a shift.
It’s everything about him. Jamie smiles now, more than he ever has before - his real smile, the one Keeley has always loved to see, not the fake, plastic smirk he used to throw on all the time. She had hated that look, but it’s taken her until right this moment to realize she’s barely seen it in recent memory.
“Yeah,” Jamie says eventually. He sounds a little embarrassed, and he rolls back away from her, looking at the screen again. The part of his face that Keeley can see is pink-cheeked and content. “Yeah, I’m… I’m really fucking happy, I think.”
“Good,” she tells him. “You deserve that.”
And now Jamie is blushing harder, his face ducked away entirely, hidden in the pillow, and Keeley is laughing, until he’s suddenly turning to look at her again, forehead creased in a small, intent frown. Keeley raises her eyebrows, wondering with a slight trickle of cold worry down her spine what he’s just thought of.
“Are you?” Jamie asks.
“Hm?”
“Happy?” His voice is as serious as his face, continuing, “Cause, I mean, you deserve that too.”
“Yeah Jamie, I’m happy,” Keeley tells him, and she doesn’t for a moment wonder if she means it. She is happy. Happier now, really, that she has her friend back.