Someone to Watch Over Me

Jamie’s laugh, loud and sprightly, bounces into the fresh air in a jubilant resounding way. She is walking around with Tom Hiddleston, after he had performed amazingly well in the play and he is the most witty, cheekiest chap she’s ever talked to. He certainly is much more different than when he was a teenager.

She laughs again when the two of them cross an old man, and Tom instantly folds up, mocking the man with delayed and crippled actions, causing bystanders to turn towards their direction.

The air is cooling with the breeze that sweeps across London, and Jamie’s laughs are lost in it like forgotten breaths. The sky is an exact mirror of her friend’s eyes, blue and beautiful.
Jamie’s heart skips a beat at the mere thought of Tom’s eyes as beautiful; she certainly has seen men with prettier eyes. She tries to think about anyone and also finds herself pathetic for thinking those silly thoughts, and also for not being able to write anything worth publishing. However, the excuse of being a writer looking for a muse or any sort of inspiration always bounces back in her mind, and she turns her attention back to Tom, who is doing a joyous little jig, grabbing her hand and waltzing her down the sidewalk.

“Tom,” Jamie breaths out a giggle, “what are you doing?!”

“I know how to treat a lady,” he winks with faux sultry intentions behind it; she leans into the embrace he’s got on her.

“No, really what are you doing?” Jamie asks, accidentally tripping over Tom’s dancing feet, seeing as she hasn’t got an ounce of rhythm in her step, he swings Jamie around like a puppet and laughing raucously flopping around his arms.

“Attention,” Tom states simply.

“Don’t you get enough of that?” Jamie counters, raising a brow at her celebrity friend.

“Not that kind of attention, silly!” he chides, as though she is a child. He dips her back down extra low, causing her to emit a squeal and grip onto him tighter like a lifeline. “More like proving a point to attention.”

“Still, not quite understanding.”

“You’re the writer.” Tom spins her, and Jamie feels like a child ballerina, with no sense of coordination or balance. “You should know about a thing or two about freaks.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Freaks, outcast, misfits,” Tom continues his philosophizing as though she isn’t even present amongst the small crowd of eyes that are attracted to the couple. “They’re who society rejects, yet they’re who society watches.”

“Society watches the successful, too,” Jamie points out, finally adopting a rhythm to keep from trotting on Tom’s toes.

“Yes, but they don’t watch them with such amusement. It’s really like a circus show,” Tom laughs. “We’re the act, and they’re the audience. In the end, the clowns are more famous than the ringmaster, yeah?”

He dips her back again, and this time Jamie doesn’t scream. Jamie grabs Tom’s shoulders tightly and looks up into those honest eyes of blue. Inside them, Jamie can see herself upside down and smaller than life. In the great scheme of Tom Hiddleston, she feels like just a notch on the celebrity. She tightens her grip to make an impact. Finally, breathlessly, she nods; he pulls her back up.

“Society,” Tom finishes, “is run by insane men with insane methods. We’re no different.”
With those words lingering in the air like London pollution, Tom grabs Jamie’s hand and takes her back to the sidewalk for the official tour of London, as though tiptoeing around the cracks of the pavement never happened.

Jamie likes that, though.

She likes that Tom can fast forward through life and move on without regrets, because, apparently, she can’t.

“Words are a weapon, words are a joke,” Robert mumbles to himself.

It is nearly three in the morning, and the writer is crouched over his work in the darkened backyard, the single lamp glaring down like a fierce sun in the opaque room. Jamie watches her father bit his bottom lip and grumble to himself in frustration.

“Daddy?” she asks quietly from her seat on the bottom set.

Robert doesn’t jump at the sudden noise. His movements are timed and controlled as he spins his body around in the chair to watch his daughter, rubbing her eyes and watching him with confusion.

“Shouldn’t you be in bed, Jamie?” he asks. It’s just a question, not a command. Even if it was, Jamie wouldn’t take it as such.

“Shouldn’t you?” Jamie counters, finally standing up and crossing over to clamber in her father’s lap.

“Touché,” he chuckles.

“Why are words a joke?” Jamie asks.

Robert surveys her in his arms with pride and sentiment. He hugs her tighter to the warmth radiating from his body; she hugs him back. “Everything is a joke, Jamie, I suppose. When you get down to things...”

“What do you mean?” she scrunches her face up out of confusion and sleepiness.

“Laughter,” Robert keeps on, “is the only thing that gets us through life.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because laughter is what keeps things exciting. We must never, ever be boring.”

Jamie’s naïves eyes stared into her father wise ones. “Why?”

“Because then we’ve given up on ourselves.”

“So words are fun?” Jamie concludes.

“No, words keep us from being boring.”

It will be years later that Jamie concludes her father must’ve stopped being exciting. It is years later, when her father is on his deathbed and Jamie is at his side, that she realizes Robert must’ve become boring.

We must never, ever be boring or else we will die, because death is funny, too.

Death is exciting; death is not boring.

-

Tom Hiddleston is not boring. Jamie decides. The two friends tumble into a bistro, giggling and laughing over nonsense. Jamie feels like it is three in the morning (though it is, really, only noon) because, for some reason, everything is funny and nonsense and nothing hurts. Jamie’s thoughts are flying everywhere with Tom’s: flying in the sky with the birds, fitting by with the double-deckers, and soaring away with the newspaper carried by the wind. He buys her some coffee, some caffeine, to make everything funnier.

“You’re funny,” Tom tells her, again, as they take a seat in a booth. It is a secluded corner where the tinkling piano music playing on the radio can barely be heard by the two friends.

“Must never ever be boring.” Jamie sips at the coffee that has been drowned in sugar and milk.

“Why’s that?” Tom leans in closer, eyes sparkling with all the magic of Wonderland and fairytales fluttering around his mind.

“Because then...” Jamie swallows, trying to force down the strong memory of her father back down, “because then, we die.”

Silence falls over the table for only a split second before Tom is laughing again. Not in a teasing way, no, he is laughing in the most amused way Jamie can ever imagine.

“You’re clever too!” Tom chuckles.

“Nah, that’s my entire father.”

“Well then,” Tom distracts himself with the napkin on the table, folding it in various precise directions, “he raised one hell of a daughter.”

Jamie feels her face turn tomato red, and she looks out the window at the London passer-by, so he won’t see. Outside, the population seems so conventional, so conservative, so boring. Jamie fears for her life.

“How’s this for boring?” Tom suddenly interrupts her train of thoughts by chucking the napkin at her. It is the shape of a swan, an origami swan. Tom has made her origami.

Jamie giggles for no exact reason at all other than the fact that Tom is a big goof with his cheek-splitting smile. “Who even makes origami?” she teases.

“I do!” Tom declares. “Keeps life exciting for the artist, doesn’t it?”

Jamie sighs, resting her cheek in her hand and staring down glumly at the coffee. “Maybe that’s what I need.”

“What do you mean dear?” Tom furrows his brows in confusion, watching the girl stirring her coffee in a silent toil.

“No inspiration. London has stolen it from me, I’m afraid.” To herself, Jamie thinks if only she could find her muse, like her father did.

“We should get it back.” Tom leans in closer, so his forehead is nearly pressed against her. Jamie can feel his coffee breath on her face, and she can practically feel his thoughts tumbling out with each exhale. She yearns to see his imagination just as he yearns to see hers.

“How?”

When Tom talks again, his voice is lowered dramatically, coming out in almost a lover’s caress. “I had a friend called Will. Often lost his inspiration, we were both young teenagers studying drama, so we sat together. He always ended up with something at the end of those sessions; I never did.”

“You want to have a session together?” Jamie asks, slowly.

Tom nods, suddenly pulling back from Jamie and relaxing back against the booth with that dashing grin tugging at his features and those eyes alit with hysteria Jamie has never seen before.

Tom is offering to be her muse. She wants to find her muse, but maybe this is what she needs... one artist helping another.

Her muse is the prize she will wait for.

But she must never ever be boring. Tom Hiddleston is offering himself up; Tom Hiddleston is making her laugh easier than anyone else, no matter how much she wants all her flirtatious giggles reserved for the man of her dreams.

Tom Hiddleston is offering excitement.

Never get boring, ever.