The source of my information could be the source of his, too.
He confirms it a second later with a tight nod and by glancing away from me to the TV. “Yeah. Brian.”
I bite my lip in disappointment, which is ridiculous.
First of all, I already knew the answer. I don’t even know why I asked him the question.
Second of all, it doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t. It shouldn’t. I’m over him. I’m smarter now. Ten months older in age and ten years older in experience.
I hug my knees to my chest and rest my chin on them. “It was just surprising, that’s all. Besides, the first time you saw me was that night. The night I, you know…”
“The night you attacked me, you mean,” he deadpans, still looking at the screen.
“I didn’t… I didn’t attack. There was no attacking.”
He glances back at me, his eyes alight with something similar to humor. “You wouldn’t let go of my shirt. You got up on my shoes, Jailbait. There was definitely attacking.”
I gasp even though I’m barely outraged; his humor-filled eyes are making it a little hard to take offense. Even so, I should at least pretend.
“I got up on your stupid shoes because you’re… monstrously tall, okay? You’re a giant.”
I gesture at his sprawled form with my waving hand. He is a giant.
He’s sitting on one end of the couch but somehow, he’s taking up half of the space. His thighs are spread wide and they look so powerful and brawny. It makes me think once again, that I can crawl over to him and perch my entire tiny self on just one of those limbs. He probably wouldn’t even notice I was there.
While I’m staring at him, he takes in my curled form. He takes in my bare legs, folded up at the knees, and my puny arms wrapped around them.
“Maybe to you,” he says.
I narrow my eyes at him. “It’s not normal. You being this tall. And big.”
Okay, I shouldn’t have sounded this… fluttery, but I did and I’m not happy about it. But it’s true. His size is intimidating.
Or should be.
He half-smiles. “Again, maybe to you.”
I have this strong urge to be a brat and stick my tongue out at him. But all I do is mumble, “Whatever. It was a mistake, anyway. The kiss.”
“A stupid, drunken one, I know.”
My eyes fall to his lips then.
It’s been ten months – ten freaking months – since I touched them for the first time and obviously, the last.
But I remember everything about them.
I remember that his lower lip is plusher and meatier than his upper lip. There’s even a groove there, right in the middle of it, that you can see and that I wanted to lick. I wanted to dig my tongue in there. I wanted to dig my tongue inside his mouth and see what he tasted like.
On the outside, he tasted like those strawberries that I love so much but am allergic to. Which is so stupid and irrational because I know for a fact that he doesn’t even eat strawberries.
“Yeah,” I whisper, nodding.
But the problem is that it doesn’t feel like a mistake, that kiss. Not right now.
In this moment, it feels like destiny.
Like I was meant to kiss him. I was meant to throw myself at him, clutch onto his shirt, step onto his shoes and put my mouth on his.
Because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here tonight.
Yeah, maybe I was meant to wreck it all, destroy everything. So I could finally do what I’m doing right now: talking to him.
“Who was she?” I ask all of a sudden, glancing up to his eyes.
He snaps his eyes up as well, and I could swear that they were on my lips. Although he looked away so quickly that I can’t say for sure.
“Who?”
“The woman you were kissing that night?”
That blonde and busty and queen-like woman. The one he was kissing back.
His chest expands with his breath in a way that makes me think he doesn’t like the question. Even so, he answers. “No one. Someone I picked up at the bar.”
“Do you pick up a lot of women at the bar?”
He frowns. “Shouldn’t you be going to sleep? I’m pretty sure it’s past your bedtime.”
“It’s okay. I can stay. We just won’t tell my babysitter that I’m breaking the rules,” I sass with a false sweet smile.
He watches that smile with a dangerous glint in his eyes. “Babysitter, huh?”
“Yup. I have two.” I show him the fingers. “You know, since I’m such a hormonal teenager and a bad girl and all that.”
His lips twitch slightly before he tips his chin up, still keeping his eyes on me. “I can believe that.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“Let’s chat.”
“You want to chat?”
I nod enthusiastically. “Yeah. I’ll tell you something and then you tell me something back, you know. That kind of stuff.”
Like the night of my eighteenth birthday, I’m filled with this urgency. A need to keep this going, whatever this is.
I wanna talk and talk and keep talking until I’ve got no words left or he gets bored of me. Until he stops looking at me like he doesn’t hate me. Because in this moment, it seems like he doesn’t.
In fact, I haven’t felt his hatred in days. For days, all I’ve felt is a peaceful, domestic, happy truce.
So I wanna talk and talk until this goes away because I feel like I can talk to him.
“Are we going to paint our toenails too?” he asks, sarcastically.
I shrug. “Maybe. I could do your nails, if you want.”
His eyes – dark and bottomless – sweep all over my face before he replies in a gravelly voice, “You don’t give up, do you?”
I shake my head. “Nope. So is that a yes on toenail painting?”
“That’s a maybe on chatting.”
I fist pump and he does the most extraordinary thing ever. He smiles. Not only that, he chuckles.
Oh man, he chuckles. His chest shakes and his head pitches back a little and those three lines around his eyes, the ones that I thought were a myth but weren’t really, appear and I forget to draw in a breath.
I swear the sound of it – rusty and delicious and thick – hits me in the chest. No, scratch that. It hits me in my tummy, making it suck in a breath.
Making something flap inside of me. Wings and petals and flames.
I dig my toes into the leather couch and tighten my arms around my knees to stop my body from going haywire over something so simple.
And come out with the first question. “So, do you?”
He shifts, turning his magnificent body toward me and propping his back against the arm like me, as if he’s committed to this whole chatting thing. “Do I what?”
At this, I can tighten my entire body until the world burns down around me, but I still won’t be able to stop the flapping and fluttering and clenching of my stomach. “Pick up women at bars a lot?”
He narrows his eyes. “Next question.”
I raise my eyebrows and rock in my spot. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Actually, I knew this already. Mr. Edwards doesn’t date or does it very rarely. Brian told me that his dad just fucks and doesn’t do relationships because he doesn’t want to bring that kind of complication into his son’s life. I actually coughed out the watermelon juice I was drinking at the time but that’s beside the point.
“What’s your favorite color? Mine is pink.”
Again, I know the answer. It’s not a mystery why my sneakers are red, my suitcase is a mix of red and maroon and my fat hobo is red leather.
He gazes at my lips for a second before answering, “Red.”
I smile. “Tell me a dream of yours.”
He looks… confused. “What?”
“Yeah.”
More confusion and it’s silent and frowning.
“Uh, okay. So let me break it down for you a little,” I explain. “Tell me a dream. Like somewhere you want to go or something you want to do. Or oh! Something you want to have.”
My eyes are wide and excited for him.
He watches my enthusiasm with both a blank expression and an expression that indicates that I’m crazy. “I think I’m a little too old for dreams.”
“No, you’re not. You’re never too old for dreams.”
They could be toxic though. Like my dreams were. But I don’t wanna think about that right now.
“Sure.”
“What, you think people in their thirties can’t dream?”
“Next question.”
“Fine. Tell me a dream you had when you were a kid, then.”
“I didn’t dream,” he says.
“You didn’t?”
“No.”
Now, it’s my turn to watch him, watch his impassive face. How is it possible that he didn’t dream? Everyone dreams. Everyone has wishes.
Right?
“But that’s… not right.” I shake my head. “I mean, you must’ve wanted something, right? Maybe you wanted to be a big football star or something like that.”
“Yeah, that.”
The way he says it, the way he jumps at my suggestion makes me think that he’s lying. He’s making it up.
And gosh, that’s so sad.
So fucking gloomy that I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to think other than the very melancholic fact that Mr. Edwards – the man I dreamed about for two years – is dreamless.
This beautiful, isolated man doesn’t have any dreams.
It makes my eyes water and since I don’t want to cry in front of him and turn this into a depressing chat session, I ask him an easy question. “How do you know so much about roses?”
He keeps looking at me intensely as he replies, “My dad.”
Okay, good.
That was an easy answer.
It brings back the smile on my face. I didn’t expect his answer at all, actually. I thought he learnt it off the internet or something but this makes everything so personal, so intimate and meaningful.
“Was he like, into gardening and stuff like that?”
At this though, his features ripple, going all tight and strained.
Shit.
How do I keep doing that? Maybe I should’ve stuck with superficial questions.
But the truth is that even though I know so many things about him, there’s so much that I don’t know and tonight, I’m hungry.
My heart is ravenous, my stomach starving.
I’m all famished for him, for all the things that I don’t know about him.
So I plead with him, mutely. I bite my lip and look at him with all the need that I’m feeling, every tiny bit of it.
I do it even though I know he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care what I want or what I need.
Even so, through some miracle, some divine intervention, he gives it to me.
He looks into my eyes, takes in my need and says, “No. Not gardening and stuff. My dad was just into my mom.” When I frown, he explains, “Her name was Rose and he grew roses for her. When she left him for another man, he continued doing that in her memory. And no, he didn’t teach me. Not that I can remember. He was too drunk to teach anyone anything. I just took care of them when he got sick. He didn’t care. All the while I was growing up, he never cared about anything except getting drunk and talking about my mother. I don’t know why I did it. I just did.”
My eyes sting again but I manage to hold back my tears. I manage to hold myself back even.
Because I want to lunge across the couch and wrap my arms around him. I want to wrap my arms around his neck and tuck my face under his chin and hug him to me.
Hug this dreamless, lonely, forlorn looking man.
He is sitting there, all rigid in the shoulders and straight in the spine and with an impassive face.
But I know it’s affecting him. It’s in the way his jaw is locked tight and his fist is pressing on his thigh.
So I tell him, “You know, when I was like five or so, I had a ton of imaginary friends. I’d talk to them all day. I’d read with them. I’d listen to music with them. Because no one would play with me and everyone would play with Fiona. But then I realized I didn’t want imaginary friends. What I wanted was imaginary parents. I mean, I did have parents but they weren’t really… around, you know. Like, my mom’s always boozed up and my dad – who isn’t my real dad, by the way; my mom had an affair – is never home. Anyway, I invented these fabulous imaginary parents who always remembered my birthday. They gave me gifts and hugs and all the regular shit they gave to Fiona. My imaginary mom baked me a cake and my imaginary dad took me to amusement parks. So that’s why.”
“That’s why what?”
I give him a sad smile. “That’s why you took care of those roses. The same reason I invented imaginary parents. You wanted to be less lonely. You wanted to be closer to your dad like I wanted to be closer to my parents.”
A pulse runs between him and me. A pulse so thick and so full of voltage that I’m surprised that we aren’t electrocuted by it.
This is it, isn’t it?
This is why I felt something that day, when I saw him on my sixteenth birthday. I recognized him, something in him.
He’s made of the same lonely fabric as me. Lonely and abandoned and alone.
God, he could be my soul mate, couldn’t he?
The one person who electrifies the very being of me. The one person who could set it all, my soul, my heart, my body on fire.
How is it that we aren’t meant to be together?
How is it that I drunkenly kissed him and ruined things and he hates me now?
“You don’t want them,” he says, breaking the silence with a low growl that vibrates this pulse around us. “You don’t want your boozed-up, clueless mother and your dumb as fuck father who doesn’t realize what he’s got. They’re not worth your time, you understand?”
I’m so taken aback at the sternness of his tone that I don’t know what to say except, “Okay.”
“You don’t want anyone who’s stupid enough not to realize what they’ve got. Yeah?”
He looks like he’s waiting for my answer, so again I go with, “Okay.”
“And that includes Brian. That includes all those kids who wouldn’t play with you. All those dull, boring people who have ever looked at you like you didn’t matter. Fuck those people. People are motherfuckers, okay? They lie. They cheat. They gossip. Most of all, they leave. Because they’re selfish. No matter who they are. So don’t waste your time on them. Don’t waste your time on those fuckers who don’t know what you are.”
“And what am I?”
That’s the logical question, right? That’s what I was supposed to ask because I’m not really sure.
I’m not sure if I’m even breathing. Or forming the right words or putting them in the right order.
I’m not sure of anything except this man in front of me.
This man who just defended me to the entire world.
And he’s staring at me with a burning gaze as he rasps, “Something made of moon and magic.”
After this, he looks away at the TV. Meanwhile, his hoarse words settle in my bones like warm honey.
They settle and settle and make everything sticky and slippery as I blurt out, “No one’s ever said that to me before.”
I notice his hands.
They are curling and uncurling, fisting and unfisting on his thighs. Until they decide to remain fisted and tight as he replies, without looking at me, “Someone will. You go to college, don’t you? Some guy will say that to you. He’ll say it better. He’ll even write you poetry or something. Or whatever the fuck kids are doing these days.”
I don’t want someone to say that to me.
I want him.
I want his words. His poetry.
His growls and his hands.
I want his hands on me. The ones that are still fisted and digging into his thighs like the words he just uttered about college were some of the most painful ones he ever had.
But they’re all a lie, right?
They’re a lie because I’m lying to him. I am a liar.
I don’t go to college.
The truth is that I don’t even know if I’ll ever go to college. I can’t even imagine setting foot in one of those crowded establishments when I can’t even go grocery shopping.
And it didn’t bother me up until a few days ago.
It doesn’t even bother me right now. It doesn’t.
I’m fine.
Fiiiiiine.
I’m handling things my way.
It’s just that… I hate lying to him. I absolutely loathe that I’m lying to him.
“No one will ever say that to me,” I mumble that without really thinking things through.
Because I don’t go to college.
“What?”
Oh fuck.
He’s back to looking at me and I’m not sure how I’m going to lie my way out of this. How the fuck do I make something up to get out of this when I’ve got all his attention?
Damn it.
Why is it so hard to lie to him?
Then I decide to tell him a different truth. I tuck my hair behind my ear and shrug. “Because guys don’t notice me and that’s okay. I’m pretty invisible, Mr. Edwards.”
I chuckle.
Because chuckling is so much more preferable to crying over the fact that I’m lying to him. That no one forced me to do it but I’m doing it anyway.
But then, I notice something that makes my chuckle die down.
He’s staring at me so hard that I’m pretty sure that he’s drilling holes in my body.
“What?” I ask.
“You’re kidding, right?”
The way he says it makes me think that he wants me to be kidding. That I better be kidding.
“I’m kidding?” I dart my eyes around the room and sit up straight, lifting my chin from my knees, going alert. “Okay. About what though?”
He doesn’t answer me as he takes long seconds to analyze my face. I’m analyzing his face, in turn. For the first time ever, I can read him. There’s a touch of disbelief on his features. His frown is one of incredulity and his eyes are inquisitive.
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