Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Thorin
Payne hadn’t slept in his bed since he’d arrived.
Every night he fell asleep between me and Wylde, and every morning he somehow managed to slip out from between us, shower, and have breakfast on the table by the time we dragged our asses out of bed.
By the time we showered and reached the table, he was in full costume, and we knew what was in store for us for the day.
The problem was that the days kept ticking by faster until we were waking up four days away from the end of his official stay, and we still hadn’t solidified things between us.
We’d danced around it as we played, slipping into roles and characters, like the one he’d presented us with this morning, which was “The Movie Critic and His Muses”.
That was us; we were the muses, and as such, he’d wanted us to dress comfortably as we relaxed and engaged in one of our favorite pastimes: watching cheesy movies and picking apart all the impossible, improbable, and downright ridiculous things that take place over the course of the movie.
We still weren’t sure exactly what his vision was yet, just that we’d been encouraged to share our true feelings about the movies, no matter how brutal or crude they might be. He was going to draw us as he envisioned us in those moments and promised to show us when he was done.
His one other request was that he’d be the one to pick the movies, which left a whirlwind of questions spinning through my head, like if he’d picked ones he’d seen before, ones that were maybe his favorites, or just to see what we felt and thought about them?
If so, then I hoped it didn’t hurt his feelings when we didn’t hold back, because Wylde and I could be a bit hypocritical when it came to films.
Especially long, boring, drawn-out ones where not much happens, and people do a whole lot of cryptic talking that made me think way too hard about something that was supposed to be entertaining.
Payne was dressed in a sharply pressed pair of slacks, with a matching brown Henley, as he reclined in one of the chairs, sketchbook in hand, drawing us as we followed the plot playing out on the screen.
Wylde and I had opted for sweatpants. Wylde sprawled on his side, his head in my lap as we watched the movie.
“Wait, wait, wait, what is that thing again?” I said, leaning forward to study the flatscreen.
“A piranhaconda,” Wylde explained. “Part piranha, part anaconda and a hundred different kinds of pissed off.”
“How has it not already eaten everyone within a hundred-mile radius? How are there even hotels and resorts there? That thing looks like it could take out half a building with one bite.”
“Maybe it’s just emerged from a long hibernation, which is why it’s slithering around eating everything.”
“How, when there are eggs?” I grumbled. “No way that thing just woke up and laid them. And if there are eggs, that means there’s got to be at least one other one, if not a colony of those things, which again begs the question of how there ever got to be a human buffet there in the first place.”
“Maybe they were always there, but smaller,” Wylde said.
“Maybe they were forced to move when humans disturbed their habitat to make the resort, and they all slithered off somewhere and got into some shit that made them grow until they were gigantic, and now they’re coming back to reclaim their territory. ”
“See, now that would actually make sense.”
Watching the girl, who was supposed to be the movie's scream queen, try to fake a scream only to have a real one forced out of her when she was faced with the giant snake had been one of the best parts of the movie so far.
“Come on, no way this is an actual horror movie, right?” I said. “It’s one of those horror comedies or whatever they call them. Like those in the Scary Movie franchise. No way this is actually supposed to frighten anyone.”
“Ech, I’d say horror-comedy is about right,” Wylde said.
“At some point they stopped going for outright terror, or even overstated foreshadowing, and just went for campy and fun. It’s like they took the formula for Jaws, which is a classic and awesome in its own right but kind of slow-moving and boring in spots, and they made it funny.
Look at the way they always end the long, drawn-out, passionate speech someone gives, which is supposed to be meant to motivate, by having whatever creature that’s pursuing them bite them in half or some shit.
You can set your watch by it and still fall for the jump-scare moment when it comes.
Predictable unpredictability. Not to mention that there’s always the opportunity to wager on who from the original party is alive at the end of the movie. ”
“Okay, see, we should have kicked this movie off with one of those,” I huffed.
Payne hadn’t engaged since settling down in the chair, but each time I glanced over at him, he had a serene smile on his face, and his drawing pencil was moving a hundred miles a minute.
There was no doubt in my mind that he was enjoying our interaction, and when Piranhaconda ended, he paused his sketching only long enough to cue up the next movie.
What could I say about a day where all we had to do was snark it up while we watched movies other than that it was welcome and more needed than I’d thought when I first sat down.
At one point Payne paused, but only to bring in a tray of sandwiches and sweet tea. He nibbled awhile before drawing again, then warmed takeout meals that we’d picked up from the Italian restaurant last night.
Sometimes he switched from his sketchpad to his notebook, giggling to himself and kicking his feet while he scribbled away or wrote.
I imagined what it would be like to enjoy evenings like these on a regular basis, with card games and Grand Theft Auto, which also happened to be one of Payne’s favorite video games.
He was as vicious about it as Wylde and I were, which made for some exciting and expletive-filled rounds of gameplay.
“Would you like to see what I’ve drawn?” Payne asked as we wrapped up our fourth movie of the day.
Morning was long gone, and the afternoon had slipped away in a haze of snark and relaxation.
“Sure would, sweetheart,” Wylde said as he sat up and scooted away from me, making room between us for Payne to sit.
He settled in, wiggling all the way back on the couch and even bouncing a little before he got comfortable and opened his sketchbook.
In the first image, he’d drawn me as a wolf, proud and regal-looking even in cartoon form as I sat focused on the movie, with Wylde stretched out with his head in my lap.
His drawing, though simple, captured the tones and striped pattern of the couch cushions with careful shading and linework.
Payne had actually drawn Wylde as a golden retriever, with a big fluffy tail curled over his hip, though I’d never mentioned envisioning him as one.
That Payne had picked up on the same energy I had was further proof of how in sync with us he was.
And further reminded me of the conversation that we still needed to have with him.
The dialogue in the comic came straight from our snarky comments, and to give some perspective on what we’d been watching, Payne had included a sketch of the television set with a scene from the movie depicted on it.
In this case, it was the snake with a human torso, still standing upright after the snake had bitten the human in half.
He’d drawn blood spurting from the body and pooled around its feet, with a trail and trees, so the scene felt complete.
Instead of drawing a flatscreen, he’d gone old school and drawn one of those floor model televisions complete with rabbit ears.
He’d even added tinfoil balls to the end of them and had one positioned straight up in the air, while the other stuck out at an angle.
It was quaint and positively perfect, especially once I really started to study the photos and many touches he’d added to the room.
In each photo, the wolf and retriever were depicted; in one, he’d even drawn the retriever on the back of a bull, mid-buck, while in the center of the room there was a wall hanging, the image taken straight from the t-shirt Wylde had been wearing the morning Payne arrived.
When he flipped the page, it revealed a hilarious new image of golden retriever Wylde on his back, his fluffy tail smacking my wolf in the side of the face, the tip of that poofy tail curling over my nose while he lay on his back, paws splayed out, tongue lolling out of his mouth like he was laughing at something, while the expression on the wolf’s face was one of mild annoyance.
Even then, he’d given the wolf’s eyes a hint of softness too, conveying the fondness and love I had for Wylde, even when he was being goofy.
In another we were eating popcorn, our paws colliding in the bowl because our eyes were glued to the screen.
He’d drawn a scene from Shutter Island in that one, another movie neither Wylde nor I had watched before today.
That he’d found a way to introduce us to a round of new movies while he’d sketched the day away on what I was coming to realize was a whole new series of comics was just one of the many things that made him so special.
The roles we played for him, the fantasies we’d acted out in this cabin and beyond, they weren’t just a part of his inspirational process; they were imbedded in his soul.
He needed to escape into them as much as he needed household tasks to focus on.
He understood what balanced him out, and in his time here, he’d been teaching us that, day after day, while discovering what balanced us out too.