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“Sure,” he cut me off. “Seven sound good?”
“Sounds great.” I licked my lips, feeling oddly happy.
He turned away, grabbing his phone from his nightstand, probably checking his emails. His eyes were on the screen when he said, “I don’t eat mushrooms or any type of fish.”
“Duly noted.” I started running the water in the shower, waiting for it to get warm and padded back to get a fresh towel from the linen closet by the door.
“It can be a date,” he muttered from the bedroom, and my head swung toward him.
“What did you say?” I hated that it made my body feel like I’d just gotten off a rollercoaster.
“I said it can be a date if you want it to be.” He still stared at his phone hard.
I shook my head, smiling, and closed the door behind me. After I finished my shower, he wasn’t there. I padded my way to the kitchen, still wrapped in nothing but a towel, but he wasn’t there either. The apartment was big, too big for one person. I started peeking into rooms, looking for him. He couldn’t have gone out. I’d only spent ten minutes in the bathroom, and he looked tired and very much naked when I left him in bed.
Feeling wary, I got dressed before I started calling out his nickname around the house and dialing his number on my cell. Every call ended with his voicemail. What the hell was going on?
Finally, when I was about to give up and head back to my apartment, I spotted him behind the couch. On a plush silver rug, lying on the floor, fast asleep.
He was wearing his black briefs and nothing else, his thick lashes fanning his cheeks. He looked like a kid. A beautiful, lost, exhausted boy.
Oh, Vicious.
I wanted to help him into his bed. But I had a feeling he hadn’t told me the truth about his insomnia, and if I woke him up, he wouldn’t fall asleep again. I gathered blankets and pillows and covered him from head to toe. After I tucked him in, I hesitated, but the last thing I needed was for him to wake up and find me staring at him like a groupie while he slept.
Not that I didn’t want to. And that was an even bigger problem.
By the time I walked into my living room downstairs, it was three o’clock in the morning. The easel stared at me from across the room, a half-finished painting of a laughing woman with flowers in her hair, demanding my attention. Instead, I walked to my bedroom, pulled out an empty frame and a staple gun, and stretched a canvas before positioning it on the easel. I changed into my painting tee, tied my hair in an elastic, and stared at the white fabric.
And stared.
And stared.
And stared.
By the time I finally started working on it, it was morning. I didn’t stop painting until the early afternoon. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. I barely breathed. And with every tick of the clock that passed without him around, I started thinking more and more about what we were. Who we were. He’d treated me horribly in the past, but right now…he brought color into my life.
Acrylic? Oil? It didn’t even matter. He always thought of himself as blackness, but the truth was, he injected so many different pigments into my existence.
To have dinner with him on Christmas Eve, it felt important somehow. Not so casual like the rest of the things we did.
Vicious was right. I was a liar.
Because I told myself I could do casual.
When there was nothing casual about what I felt for him. Not even one bit.
It was a hassle to go shopping on Christmas Eve, but I wanted to get him something. Anything, really.
Vicious was big on music, I remembered that from when we were teenagers. In fact, the only thing we’d seemed to have in common was our mutual love for punk rock and grunge. Maybe that’s why I smiled like a fool as I strutted my way from the record shop with a Sex Pistols album tucked under my forearm. I knew he was going to get the joke. Sid Vicious.
They actually had a few things in common. Their white skin against their black hair, their flippant attitude, and their zero-fucks-given approach. I just hoped Vic being Vicious didn’t make me his Nancy.
As I prepared the essential DVDs to watch after dinner (it wasn’t Christmas without It’s A Wonderful Life playing in the background as you struggled your way through a food coma), I thought about Vicious as a child. What Christmases must’ve been like for him. I didn’t have his money, or his power, but I did have a family who loved me. Who catered to my every emotional need when I was a kid.
