Chapter 19 #2
“These,” I start, leveling my most serious gaze at Carmen as she sits back on her heels in the chair next to me, “are usually for watercolors, but they’re all I have right now. If you can promise to rinse your brush well between colors, we can use them.”
“Oh,” she says, her voice smaller than it usually is. “Yeah. I can do that.” Her eyes sparkle as she looks between the hues, opting for a soft, sage like blue for her base. “Can I play music?”
“Girl, your house, your rules,” I tell her, pulling out my phone. “Here. Go crazy.”
She quirks a brow and leaves the phone on the table. “Hey Google? Play my Broadway hits.” She grins back at me just as a song I’ve never heard starts playing.
Mumbling some sad song about no one being alone, she continues layering on the misty blue color and I challenge myself to make something interesting. Maybe this could be the spark that leads to a fire, could be the thing that reignites the artist side of my brain.
Like I thought, I can’t even choose which orange to go with. I lay my brushes down and listen closely to the song now playing, the melody vaguely familiar.
“What’s this one?” I ask the wispy girl leaning forward in her chair, brows drawn close together in concentration.
“...Defying Gravity?” she says, like I’m an idiot, and I guess I am.
“It’s been a while,” I try to excuse, laughing through my embarrassment. “What’s your favorite show?”
She thinks for a long moment, pulling her gaze away from the mug.
“Tick, Tick, Boom.” She dips her head back down, diving back into her work with shocking dedication. I can’t help but smile at the little artist.
“Like the movie?” I ask, warily.
“Close enough. But there’s this really good boot leg on Youtube I used to watch with my dad and Andy.”
I saw the film. Concern lances through me at the idea that this—a story about living a life not wasted that ultimately ends in tragedy—is her favorite show. Like she senses my worry, she continues.
“It’s just, like, nostalgic, I guess. We still watch it, just me and Andy. Mom can’t. She doesn’t watch anything with death.” She says it so bluntly, I almost laugh and she actually does.
“That was morbid, little bird,” I tell her, falling into a muscle cramping bout of laughter.
“Little bird,” she mocks me, shimmying her shoulders. “My second favorite show is Beetlejuice.” Her brows flare and I gasp for air at her delivery.
I can just imagine her on the stage.
“Stop. Who is lettin’ you see these?” I take a deep breath, calming myself.
She shrugs. “My brother.”
“I think I need to have a word.”
“Have a word, little bird,” she giggles, dipping her brush into a burnished gold. “What, are you from Kentucky?”
“Atlanta,” I declare, a little offended. “That’s in Georgia,” I clarify, and she whips her head toward me.
“I know.” She lets her brush drop and pivots so we’re face to face. “Go ahead. Quiz me.”
I narrow my eyes, letting the bubbly feeling wash over me as I think of a city. “Philade—”
“Pennsylvania.”
“Orlan–”
“Florida! Come on, don’t go easy on me,” she says, wiggling in her seat.
My lips press into a firm line as I dig for another city. “Carmel.”
She goes bug eyed as she leans forward, like she’ll find the answer somewhere in the ether, before she suddenly springs back. “California!”
The door creaks open, swallowing my attempt at another question, and her brother walks in, and the air shifts, my skin pricking with awareness as I watch him take me in, watch his gaze sweep over me in one long brush.
“Nice jacket,” he says, fighting a grin.
I touch the leather I’m wrapped in, the coolness reminding me of Halloween in my car, and I fail to fight the blush before shrugging his jacket off, handing it his way. When he makes no attempt at taking it back, I hang it over a chair, clearing my throat.
“The windows were down and it was still in my car.” I glance around at the table, littered with paints as it is, and lock eyes with Carmen. The expectant heaviness I find there tugs on my heart strings. I can tell she doesn’t want me to leave yet. “We were just painting, but if you guys had plans—”
“Spaghetti.” He lifts to two grocery bags, and another hangs in the crook of his jacketed elbow.
My brows dip in question. “Those are the plans. As long as Carmen doesn’t have a problem with it…
” Andrew grins, all coy and practiced, like he’s teased his sister a million times, and my heart warms when she glues her eyes to mine, pleading.
“Please stay,” she tells me, the smallest hint of a smile playing at the corner of her lips, and I nod.
“I do love spaghetti.”
“Be worried if you didn’t,” he says to just me as he walks past, disappearing down the hall.
“He likes you a whole lot,” Carmen mutters while fixated on the white outline of a clover, her physical attention never leaving the mug.
The roof comes into focus, and I remember the way he didn’t want to kiss me, fresh embarrassment burning the bridge of my nose. Doesn’t matter anymore. We’re friends.
“I can promise you he doesn’t,” I chuckle, dipping my brush into a maroon tinged clay color.
“But if he did…it wouldn’t be none—” I boop her nose with the color “—of your business.” Carmen squeals, her brush quickly finding my face, and I let her swipe me with one too many colors, only pretending to protect myself from her, before we quietly settle back into our pieces, paint drying on our skin.
When Andy finally emerges, hair wet and tousled, messily falling across his brow, in a gray Astor Hill crewneck and jeans, I pull my legs up to my chest and grin over at him.
“That’s all ya’ll wear, isn’t it? Astor Hill this, Astor Hill that.”
“I’m sorry is that—is that jealousy, I hear?” His crooked smirk threatens to undo me, has something burning in the center of my chest as he crosses behind me, close enough to touch.
“Sloane doesn’t need your pretentious college merch. She’s an artist—a student of the world,” Carmen says, echoing something I said as a joke to her and her little friends behind the set design wing. I’m reminded that sarcasm, and the ability to discern it, is in fact honed over time.
Andy’s back shifts, his laughter floating across the cozy apartment as the first notes of garlic, blooming in olive oil, burst through the air, and I shut my eyes for a second, letting the ease of being here wash over me.
The evening descends into a comfortable calm, like deep pressure, smothering the worries that have bled into my awareness the past few weeks. Here, now, I can hardly recreate the dread I felt earlier at the hospital; it’s abstract and out of reach, blown away by the hazy bliss of this little home.
Carmen and I paint, moving onto the few white plates they own, while her brother cooks.
The apartment turns fragrant the longer he stands there, sautéing onions, dicing and crushing tomatoes.
I watch as he drains the pasta, singular focus etched into his features, and mindlessly admire the strain of his forearms.
The dinner is unearthly perfection, and I’m reminded of the way Clemmie’s mom would cook for me, of the few times Evie made something she didn’t find in a cookbook. When I’d be sick with a cold, she’d make me chicken soup, “the way her grammy made it.”
“You start with the whole chicken, and there’s no other way about it,” she’d said as I lay curled up on the formal sofa, made more comfortable by every pillow in the house and a quilted blanket, as she salted an oversized pot.
She’d stir and I’d hear the soft thud of chicken bones on the pot’s walls, hear her curse under her breath when something would start to boil over.
I’d close my eyes and breathe in, convinced the smell alone was making me better.
I think about this, about how different things taste when someone makes them with you in mind, as I twirl my fork and slide in a mouthful of pasta. Eyes fluttering shut, I sigh, warmth oozing over me as I let the bright notes only fresh tomatoes can bring spread across my taste buds.
“No one feeding you?” Andy peers up over his loaded fork, a smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth, as Carmen regales us of tales from today’s rehearsal. It’s a fleeting look but one that sears, and I flick my gaze down to my plate, feeling flustered.
I try to leave after dinner, but Carmen’s hand is practically super glued to mine as she drags me back to the sofa and finds a movie for all three of us to enjoy.
It’s horrible—something about zombies and werewolves, but lazily coded as a tale of prejudice for children.
She holds my hand the entire time, and maybe I hold hers.
Andrew’s on one side; I’m on the other. We’ve only made it forty-five minutes in before her soft snores vibrate between us and he carefully lifts her up, seamlessly transferring her to her bed.
I stay on the couch, watching from a distance as he lingers in her doorway before softly shutting the door.
When he collapses back on the couch, head falling back, I feel my pulse across my skin. Like before it was thumping in the background, muffled, but now that we’re alone it knows it can beat recklessly.
“That was impressive,” I admit, giving him a sidelong glance as I unwind my bun, enjoying the freedom.
He tracks the movement. “She’s famous for falling asleep mid movie.”
“She’s lucky,” I tell him, meaning it. Andy’s brows furrow at my random show of sincerity, so I add: “Pretty sure Grant’s never even considered bringin’ me a pillow.”
His huffed laughter is muted as he looks at the ground. “She loved having you here.”
“But did you love havin’ me here?” I joke, my silent insecurity weaving through my ordinary defenses, just as I guess he has, and I wonder when I started to care about what he thought at all.
Andy just blinks over at me, swallows, strong throat bobbing as something pained flits across his expression.
“Right,” I say, feeling flayed raw for no good reason. “Well, I really should be goin’.”
I push up from the edge of the sofa and throw my bag over my shoulder, evading his gaze, my pulse erratic in my throat.
I replay the moment he came home, try to dissect the moment I should’ve left; I scour dinner at the table and wonder if I shouldn’t have pried Carmen’s hand from mine and let them be.
It’s no use though, because I’m not good at telling about anything anymore. That sense has been frayed, completely.
I reach the door and he reaches me, and it’s his lips against my hair that I swear I feel, the closest we’ve ever been.
Teeth sinking into my cheek, I blink into the beveled wood, fighting the way every inch of my skin is like a live wire, my heart a loud, rapturous thud, high in my chest, almost to my throat.
“Of course, I did,” he finally says, softly, his hands bracing themselves above my head, against the door frame, like he couldn’t stand otherwise, and I spin around.
“But?” I ask, lifting my face to him. The roguish charm that drew me to him months ago isn’t roguish at all; directed at me, it’s an intensity that burns just beneath my skin, that says he’s mine for the taking if I want it.
His eyes pin me, swim with lust, and I feel vindicated.
Feel less crazy but still endlessly vulnerable as I give up pretending I’m not dying for him to kiss me senseless.
That I don’t want him to drown me the way I haven’t drowned since my fingers gave out and my creativity washed away.
My lips part, my gaze drops to his full mouth, and I wait for him to crash into me.
I expect it to be a rush, for him to scorch me, overwhelm me like I’d hoped—but he doesn’t.
One hand finds my waist, grips me with throat clawing tenderness, and he presses me into the door.
His other hand lands just beneath my collar bone and travels up my neck, his thumb skating over the edge of my jaw slowly. So slowly that I tremble.
He just shakes his head, watching me, touching me. My breaths are a small series of heaves that I can’t seem to keep under control; I earnestly try, sinking my teeth into my lip like the pain will bring a sense of calm, but it doesn’t.
I want him to shut his eyes, eat me alive, and move on. I want to move on.
Instead, his thumb frees my lip from my hold, before heavily, greedily, kissing me.
He isn’t interested in eating me alive; he’s savoring me.
It isn’t something anyone does—savor me—and the realization has me falling into his touch.
His grip on me deepens, holding me close to him as his weight presses us both into the door.
His lips are feather soft on mine, every brush of them like oxygen on a fire.
I want to feel them down my neck, across my skin, under my skin.
And it dawns on me that I’ve craved this.
Being touched in a way that isn’t a claiming.
The glide of his tongue against mine is so unrushed, goosebumps erupt across my skin as desire pulls tears into my waterline.
I gasp against his parted lips, breathe into the feel of his fingers gently tracing the outline of my bra, of their sudden heat against the skin beneath my sweater.
He presses warm, open mouthed kisses along my neck, and I shudder, pressing the length of my body against him like all of him at once might blunt this feeling.
Andy’s fingers rake through my nape, tangle in my hair.
His teeth scrape down the length of my neck before his lips find mine again so he can taste me—so I can really taste him.
I groan, pushing my chest against his as I deepen the angle, wrapping my hand around his neck while the other rushes up the hard terrain beneath his sweater.
“Sloane,” he murmurs, against my mouth, the sound of him wanting me so plainly cracking something in my chest and I yank myself away, shocked. Sore between the ribs.
I reach behind me and turn the knob, relieved at the cool rush of air. He doesn’t get a word out before I turn and run away.