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“What about?”
Behind us across the street, a rowdy group distract him, making him turn around as they shout something stupidly loud. Once they’re far enough away, he turns back around.
“I…” He drops his head, breathing heavily for a few moments. “Can I come inside? I can’t do it like this. I have too much to say.”
“No, you can not come inside!” I snap, but the second I do, I slap myself energetically for my inability to keep my cool, especially because I want him to come inside. I want to listen to him, to have him listen to me.
He sighs out a silent breath, nodding. “Maybe we can do this another time when… I give you some warning.”
I dread the moment he’ll turn around. “How are you getting home? You’ve had too much to drink.”
“I’ll get a cab,” he replies.
“It’s Saturday night. They take forever to get over here.” I turn around in exasperation before coming to face him, taking a moment to collect my thoughts. “I’ll call you one from inside. You can wait until it arrives. And then you leave.”
He bows his head as I turn, opening the rickety wooden gate which he grabs and holds open before leading him along a discolored concrete path next to the garden and then to the right and out of sight of the street.
As I get to the white side door, covered in stains, which suddenly make me cringe, I realize that my room looks like a bomb has gone off, which I didn’t care about Yoshi seeing because his is never much better, but suddenly, the thought of a sophisticated man like Grey seeing it makes me feel mortified.
I force myself to tap into the anger I still feel, muttering “Fuck it” as I turn the key in the door and open it, fumbling for the light switch in the dark as usual, lowering the dimmer to hide the God-awful yellowy light in this room. I take my boots off on the mat and stuff them into the overstuffed wooden shoe cubby thing next to the door. I take off my jacket and hang it on the twisted bronze hooks I hammered into the wall a few months ago.
I see him doing the same as I head to the living room—well, living room-slash-bedroom because apart from a little wall between the main area and the kitchen, it’s basically a studio apartment at the bottom of someone’s house.
The cold sweat of mortification sweeps into my skin as I scan the stacks of clothes I took out of the dryer on Monday and have meant to put away since but haven’t. While it takes an hour to wash and dry your clothes, apparently it takes at least five business days to hang them back up in your closet.
I walk past the butts of incense sticks and the yoga mat still unfurled next to the bed… which is, of course, unmade, and grab a handful of clothes off a gold velvet armchair and shove them into a cupboard which I painted purple when I decided the place needed more color, a decision I've regretted ever since.
As my eyes sweep through the room, I compare it in my mind to his place. I mean, I haven’t seen it but I already know that in addition to it being about ten times the size of this one, it will be dotted with elegant furniture in muted tones which doesn’t look like a group of hippies just had the orgy of the century in it and left all their belongings behind.
Between the multi-colored rugs, the Tibetan prayer flags, the Inca throw blanket, and the Maidenhair Ferns and Trailing Jades hanging in wooden pots suspended from the ceiling by taupe strings, you can barely move without being hit in the face with some brightly colored or living thing, unless you take up that strip next to the bed where I do my yoga or the other section I keep clear next to the kitchen where I practise my headstands.
I head over to the bed and roll up my eco-friendly yoga mat before shoving it underneath, and then grab my white quilt, throwing it over my pillows and neatening it up before laying the woven indigo and magenta blanket I bought on a trip to Peru neatly down on top of it.
“I… I wasn’t expecting company,” I offer as an excuse as I turn around, trying to sound like I don’t need to give one… which I don’t.
“I like your place.”
I swallow as he watches me from across the room, wondering if I should offer him something to drink like I usually would.
But instead, I head over to the landline lurking on a side-table which I salvaged off the side of the road a few blocks away before bringing home, steam-cleaning, sanding and painting turquoise.
As I approach the phone just a few meters away, I bristle as he watches me as I pick up the receiver and press 4, the speed dial number for the local taxi service. But as I bring the phone to my ear to the automatized beeps of the numbers, a hand appears, and a finger presses down on the tab in the dock to arrest the call.
I glare up. “What are you doing?”
As his eyes meet mine, his chest lifts and falls visibly. “I need to talk to you, Indigo. Please, just let me talk. You can throw me out after that.”
I shove the phone back down into the dock and take some steps back until I’m just a few feet away from the only bare wall in the apartment—the one I practise my headstands against.
“Fine. You get five minutes. No more.”
He nods, taking a moment to compose himself. I've never seen him look like this. I remember that first day we met when he chewed me out for my cycling skills. God, he was such an arrogant asshole… And then at that office—sitting there in his designer suit with people fawning over him all day. Christ, it was nauseating. And then on the island, the way he’d carry me, dominate me, pin his weight onto me as he slid inside me, glaring down, not letting me look at anything but him.
Seeing him ungrounded like this is unnerving, but then I feel so shaky that I feel like I could either vomit or pass out at any moment.
His words, uttered so solemnly, make me want to run away. “I shouldn’t have left the way I did. I panicked. I thought I was doing the responsible thing. I know how it must have felt for me to end things so abruptly.”
His words, while soothing, don’t do enough to extinguish flames of hurt that have smoldered since that day, as irrational as they are irascible.
