Chapter 11 Do You Want to Build a Snowman?
eleven
do you want to build a snowman?
The following week passes me in a blur.
I don’t see Damien again until the following Tuesday morning, although we talk every single day.
I haven’t had this much fun talking to someone since—well, maybe ever.
Sharing most of the same classes with Victory in our first year of university, we saw each other a lot, sure, but I didn’t feel the need to spend every waking moment in her company.
I love her to bits, and I know she loves me too, but sometimes I think I can be too much for her. (I guess I just love-but’ed myself.)
Every so often, I worry that I’m being too much for Damien as well, but even when I convince myself that he’s sick of me and about to hang up, about to end our call and never speak to me again, he doesn’t.
And when I ask if he wants to hang out and get coffee Tuesday—because I’m tired of spending all day in my apartment or my mother’s shop, which are, of course, in the same house—he doesn’t hesitate.
Even though he could just stay home and keep playing more SOA4.
Even though he’s been talking to me nonstop for nearly two whole weeks and should be tired of me.
Even though I should be tired of him.
Maybe I like the idea of seeing him more than I should.
Maybe all those weird, mushy thoughts I’d had about him before we met—even when I thought he was a dick, honestly—didn’t just disappear but have instead become weirder and mushier.
And, for that reason, maybe seeing him in person is a mistake, a big neon sign flashing in my face telling me to run for the hills.
Well, that sign won’t stop me because I can’t read.
I have the day off from my mother’s shop on Tuesday, so I meet with him at Green Bean Coffee just after ten.
He picked the place, although I don’t hate that it is literally down the block from where I live—and I mean literally in the literal sense.
I’m guessing he chose it for my convenience, but it’s a nice place with good cold brew, so I’m not complaining. Once again: gift horses, buttholes.
When I told Victory and Pal about my plans—because I can’t tell one without the other, apparently—Victory offered to sit at a nearby table in case I needed to be rescued and Pal just hooted over the fact that I have a date.
Which I don’t. I tried to make that clear to them, but I don’t think it’s sinking in.
All that blue hair dye muddling up their brain.
I told them that he’s not interested in me that way—and I’m not sure I could be interested in anyone that way, despite the weird mush—but they still seemed unconvinced. Though I managed to talk the two of them out of stalking me this morning, so I’d call that a win.
I arrive at the café a bit early, since I was sick of pacing anxiously in my apartment, so I order my usual beverage and snag the table by the window with the too-soft armchairs. True, there’s no way to look cool while sitting in one of these, but they are pretty darn comfortable.
I find myself looking up every time the front door opens, and deflating a little every time the person who walks in isn’t him.
Until it is him, and I have to take a deep breath to calm the flurry of excitement and anxiety in my chest. Maybe I was worried that he wouldn’t show up.
That he’d forgotten. That he’d decided I wasn’t worth the hassle of schlepping over here on the streetcar. That he—
“Hey,” he says as he walks up to the table. He sounds a little out of breath and his typically shaggy hair is wilder and more windswept than usual. “Sorry I’m late.”
Oh. I think he ran here from the streetcar.
“No problem,” I say, and he shrugs off his plaid jacket to sling it over the other armchair before going up to order himself a coffee as well.
If I’d been thinking ahead, I could have messaged him earlier to ask what he wanted and ordered it to be ready when he got here, like Victory and I do for each other, but it hadn’t even occurred to me.
I’m kind of shit at this whole friends thing.
When he finally takes a seat at our table, he sinks back into the armchair with a groan and rubs his eyes behind his glasses. “I’m so tired,” he says, and I can’t help but laugh.
“Too much Stones 4?” I ask, and he drops his hands to the armrests, shaking his head.
“I decided to sleep on the couch last night because Evan was visiting Malcolm,” he says. “She didn’t stay the night or anything, but I don’t really want to go in there right after they—you know. Anyway, the couch is not comfortable. At all.”
“Wow.” I take a long sip of cold brew through my straw, which is already starting to lose structural integrity. “Didn’t he just start dating her like a week ago?”
“They’ve been sort of dancing around each other for almost a year now,” he says, waving a hand through the air lazily. “They’re both part of this, like, cosplay tabletop RPG thing—Malcolm does all the costumes for their group, too—and he hasn’t been able to shut up about her the whole time.”
“Oh, that’s really cool,” I say with a nod. I guess the costume-making thing explains some of Malcolm’s wardrobe.
“I’m hoping they just get hitched and move the hell out of there so I can have my room back,” Damien adds, shaking his head. “Right now, it’s full of Malcolm’s sewing stuff and I’m constantly tripping over everything. Plus, I am so tired of his pining.”
“He does seem kind of dramatic.”
“You have no idea,” he says wearily, but then we both laugh.
I’m surprised by how well the conversation flows from one topic to another, and even more surprised that we hardly talk about The Stones of Ayor at all.
I suppose we’ve done enough of that over the past couple of weeks that there isn’t really any need.
Damien has a knack for going off on tangents that seem to hardly make sense, and I am more than happy to follow him.
“Wait-wait-wait—You have to see—” He holds up one finger while he fishes something out of the pocket of his black jeans.
I’ve noticed he has something of a uniform that he wears, every time I’ve seen him: slim, dark jeans; nerdy graphic tee; brightly coloured hoodie; and the grey and green plaid jacket that I smashed my face into outside the game store.
I suppose I’m not much more creative with my own fashion choices, given that I’m wearing my brown houndstooth pants for the third time in the past week, with whichever chunky sweater was at the top of the pile this morning.
Today’s winner is a cropped, olive green pullover with extremely wide balloon sleeves that make my arms look wider than my legs.
So, yeah, Pal is definitely wrong about this being a date.
Across from me, Damien takes out his phone and starts tapping on it—I think he’s looking up something to show me—and that’s when I notice it.
“Hold up.” I reach over to pry his fingers off the back of his phone to get a better look at the sticker on his phone case. “Is that Toothless?”
He looks a bit embarrassed for a second, turning the phone over to glance at the sticker of the cute black dragon with big eyes. “Um. Yes,” he says, tucking the phone under his arm.
“I love How to Train Your Dragon,” I assure him. “That’s so cool.”
“Yeah, it’s uh… It’s sort of my favourite movie.” He smiles sheepishly. “Because I’m a twenty-seven-year-old adult man and that is perfectly reasonable.”
I laugh. “It is, though,” I say, and then lean forward over the table and lower my voice. “You can’t tell anyone, but my favourite movie is Frozen. So. Yeah.”
He nods slowly. “Cool… I’ve never seen that.”
My eyes widen and he looks slightly terrified. “Oh my god.” I clasp my hands over my gaping mouth. “You have to watch Frozen. You can’t not. It’s iconic.”
“Okay…” He still looks afraid, but he nods again. “I will. I promise.”
I stand up and stare him down. “Right now.”
“Now?”
“Yeah, you’re coming with me because this is a literal crime,” I tell him, picking up my scarf from the back of the armchair and wrapping it around my neck, covering half my face.
“Not literal—”
“Literal.”
“Okay,” he says with a laugh, standing and throwing on his jacket as well. “I wouldn’t want to be sent to Disney prison.”
“Nobody would.”
I march out of the café and down the street towards Ink Victory said once was enough for her,” I tell him before shoving the door with my shoulder to get it unstuck. “So, it’s good to have fresh blood.”
“Is this a movie or a ritualistic sacrifice?” he asks. I shrug.
He follows me up the stairs to my apartment, and it occurs to me that I haven’t properly cleaned the place in ages; it’s not exactly fit for company, but if it bothers him, he doesn’t say anything about it.
He takes off his shoes and holds his jacket in his arms until I tell him to throw it on the chair by the door. I should probably get coat hooks.
The apartment opens right into the main living area: my two-and-a-half-seater couch, a ten-year-old TV, and my computer desk in one half of the space, and a small kitchen with a drop-leaf dining table covered in books in the other half. I should probably get a bookshelf too.
Damien stands in the middle of the room, looking around awkwardly, like he isn’t sure if he’s allowed to sit somewhere. To be fair, the couch is currently taken up by my crochet work-in-progress and my laptop.
“Sorry!” I swoop in to clear space for him to sit, tucking my laptop under the shelf on my desk where my monitors sit and stuffing the bag full of yarn into the space between the couch and my desk’s legs.