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“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes and looked around the room. “Care to explain why you’re painting your ceiling?”
“I fucking hate that ceiling,” he explained, pointing to the part that he had redesigned. The part right over where his bed was situated. “It depresses me.”
“The ceiling depresses you?” I arched a brow. “Make it make sense, please.”
He grinned back at me, another wolfish smile that didn’t meet his eyes. Oh boy. “You know I don’t sleep well.”
“Yeah,” I agreed slowly, waiting for the penny to drop.
He shrugged. “At least I’ll have something to look at now.”
“But it’s just a giant yellow smiley face,” I replied, confused by the rest of the untouched white ceiling.
“I know.”
“That’s strange.”
“I know,” was all he replied, entirely unaffected by the thought that people might think it strange that he had a giant circle painted over the part of the ceiling where his bed usually resided beneath.
“Are you redesigning the whole room?”
“I haven’t decided yet. Here,” he paused to hand me a paintbrush. “Make me something.”
“Make you something?”
He nodded. “Something to make me smile.”
“I know your game.” I narrowed my eyes in suspicion. “You want to rope me into another one of your haywire plans so when it backfires on you with your mam later, and it will backfire, you’ll have a partner in crime to take the heat off you.”
“You think I’d let you get in trouble for me?” He threw his head back and laughed. “Never, Claire-Bear.”
“Hah,” I shot back. “Liar. You’ve roped me into some seriously questionable scenarios down through the years, Gerard Gibson.”
LEN’s “Steal My Sunshine” wafted from the stereo, and he waggled his brows before tapping my nose with a healthy dollop of yellow paint. “Give it up, Biggs.”
“You’re an eejit.” I laughed, unable to avoid his onslaught.
Laughing to himself, he sang along to the song, shoulders relaxing with every minute we spent together.
Good job, I mentally praised myself. You’re grounding him.
The affection my heart stored for this particular boy was borderline unhealthy, and my need to soothe his bad days was almost as strong as it was to soothe my own. I suppose that was what happened when two people spent a huge portion of their lives together.
Pondering mischief and with my playful mood activated, I moved to inspect the giant smiley face on his ceiling, the one Gerard was currently adding a joint to with permanent black marker.
“Oh, your mam is going to freak when she sees it.” I laughed when he continued to draw little cloud bubbles of smoke around the face. “You know she hates it when you smoke.”
“It’s art,” he shot back. “Art is… What’s the word?”
“Subjective?” I offered with a frown.
“That’s it, Brains,” he praised as he balanced dangerously on the moving chair. “Now, come on and help me. Put your own stamp on my ceiling.”
Kind of like the stamp you’ve put on my heart?
“If you think for one minute that I’m breaking an ankle participating in your skullduggery antics—ahh!”
“Skullduggery.” He chuckled, pushing his head between my thighs from behind and hoisting me onto his shoulders without breaking a sweat. “And you call me strange.”
