There was a performance Boone had perfected, when he was using. Step one: meet someone, probably in a club when he was “working” and get their number. Step two: Set-up date. Step three: dazzle them with some display of competency—usually cooking—so they wouldn’t guess, and Boone could forget, that he was a fucking mess. Step four was where the path branched off: either rinse and repeat, or high-tail it out of their apartment with a watch, or some earrings, or some loose cash, because Boone didn’t have any of his own and he needed cigarettes, he needed alcohol, he needed more product than his employers could give him—and God help him if they caught him skimming off the top.
He’d needed a distraction, then, more than anything. He’d needed to escape from himself. And he thought that if he played the part of someone who had it together, and someone else believed it, then he couldn’t be as bad as he sometimes felt. He wouldn’t have to change.
Even when it all went up in flames—(as it usually did)—Boone would just pick someone else, start again, keep up the delusion. They’d catch him stealing, or they’d notice the pinprick bruises in his arms. He’d cook someone a meal in the apartment his employers stocked for him, but when he ran out of food before the end of the month, they’d just laugh at him: “we’re not here to get you laid.”
He had tricks up his sleeve, then, all deliberately forgotten now. There’s something to this that felt like it could be coming out of his old playbook—“hey babe, let’s lay on a blanket and watch the stars”—if not for how earnest it all felt.
That was the difference, he supposed: going into this not for a certain expected outcome, but for the person themselves. He’d known it, but he hadn’t really felt it, the casual dating he’d managed to in the short years before D-Day when he didn’t hate himself quite so much had never really been like this, not quite so heart-over-head.
“The blind leading the blind?” he quipped, turning to the bundle of blankets that Adrian had charged him with. “I like the sound of that, better for my fragile ego.”
There was a wryness to his words, a grinning wink-and-a-nudge, because Boone didn’t really have a fragile ego. Boone made a fool of himself on a regular basis. He made a point of it. Of never getting too comfortable, of not working himself into a rut of doing only what he knew and thought he was good at. The Colony, in a way, was good for that, because it made him do a lot of things he was objectively terrible at. But unlike Training, which he was terrible at and typically did not enjoy, trying to identify constellations with a beautiful woman was something he could maybe be terrible at, but would definitely enjoy.
He picked up one of the blankets and shook it out to lay it flat in the center of the room facing the screen. Pillows at the top, and another blanket on top, and it looked like a cozy kind of nest, somewhere he wouldn’t mind staying for awhile. There was the sound of Adrian somewhere to the side of him, her blonde head somewhere in his periphery. And it felt easy, despite the nerves. Companionable, each of them doing their tasks.
But when the blanket nest was set up, Boone hesitated, looking at it. Should he just get in? That felt a little—lurid, or something. Suggestive. He’d caught a blush on Adrian’s cheeks and guessed that she felt it too, the tickle of nerves as they contemplated being pressed against each other from shoulder-to-hip, on something that was unquestionably like a date rather than two particularly hug-y kind of friends.
Boone was used to projecting a confidence he did not feel. Used to exuding the kind of calm that made people comfortable in his presence. Part of him wanted to reach out, to take Adrian by the shoulders and soothe her, tell her that there was no pressure, but part of him was scared at looking this thing full in the face. Continuing to edge around it, baby steps towards the center of some kind of maze, where they would meet and everything would make sense: on the same page, at last, no more wondering.
It seemed both huge and childish, the urge to look her in the face and just say it: “I like you. Where do we go from here?” Direct in a way that he encouraged, but couldn’t always manage himself, too used to protecting himself from bad things that he’d started protecting himself from the potentially good as well. Maintaining a stasis that was stable, sure, but static. Allowing no room for growth.
There were things that Boone told himself—be good, be open, let the good in—with little ability to actually put them into practice. In the Colony he was more machine than man, pushing down feelings in favor of service, focusing on others more than himself. He tried not to think that it made him a hypocrite, but maybe it did.
But while he tried to help build support systems for his patients, he had very little in way of his own. No safety net if things went badly, not when Adrian was probably his closest friend here.
Adrian was nervous, Boone was nervous, they were both nervous, but Boone felt like it was on him to assuage all those nerves, to ignore his in favor of soothing hers. So, with, Adrian turning away from the Echo terminal, Boone toed off his shoes and settled—a little gracelessly, sure, but he wasn’t quite aiming for suave—into the center of the blankets, laying down with one arm underneath his head and the other stretched out in invitation, a silent request for Adrian to put herself there.
