AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What were you doing?”
She draws one knee up to her chest and wraps her arms around it, swaying slightly from side to side as she talks. “I had this idea for a chorus, and I always think I’ll remember it and write it down later, but I never do. I usually have a notebook for song ideas, but it was in my backpack when it got stolen.” Her gaze drops to the table. “There go all my song ideas.”
I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit looking for Raine’s things over the last week. I shouldn’t care so much about this girl I hardly know, and yet I do. Perhaps it’s because, in some way, I know what she’s feeling. I’ve actively avoided thinking about tattooing for the past three years, but whenever Raine brings up her lost guitar and how much she misses making music, I can’t help but think about tattooing. How much I loved it. How much I miss it. Even though I still have my tattoo machines, tattooing feels like it was stolen from me.Istole it from myself. Though Martina would tell me that my OCD andmeare not the same thing.
When Raine takes the receipt from the table and shoves it into her pocket, another receipt slips out and onto the floor. She groans and disappears beneath the table to grab it. When she rights herself again, she glances at the receipt.
“Oh! Hey. I didn’t lose all my song ideas.” She grins and waves the receipt at me, then looks at it again and frowns. “Mm... not sure how good this one is.”
The things this woman keeps in her pockets never cease to surprise me. Receipts with song lyrics, that Ziploc bag she uses as a wallet. The tambourine, of course. Just the other day she pulled a sock from her pocket and a cat treat came tumbling out.I was wondering where I put that, she said. I didn’t ask if she meant the sock or the cat treat. Neither would surprise me. The only time I’ve been up to the flat since Raine moved in—to help her work the washer—I found socks in random places. Between the couch cushions. Beneath the kitchen table. On a windowsill.
I don’t mind the mess. With Raine in the flat, it doesn’t feel so much like Da’s. He hated nothing more than a mess. I can only imagine what he’d say if he saw a sock beside the refrigerator. He’s probably rolling in his grave.
Let him. Who knows, once Raine leaves, I might start leaving socks around myself.
And besides, who am I to judge what someone keeps in their pockets? I’ve had stranger things in mine. One of the things I had to do for exposure response therapy to treat my OCD was carry a knife on me at all times. Driving into Cork? Knife on the passenger seat. Taking a nap? Knife on the nightstand. Grocery shopping? Knife in my pocket. A sock and a cat treat seem normal in comparison.
When Raine stuffs the receipt into her pocket again, I get to my feet.
“Where are you going?”
“Stay here,” I say. “Be back in a sec.”
She gives me a confused look, and I head to my office, where I pull open desk drawers until I find a little zippered pouch. I turn it upside down, and some stray paper clips clatter onto the desk.
When I return to the table, I pass the pouch to Raine.
She takes it, but looks at me as if she isn’t sure what to do with it.
“For the receipts,” I say. “Your pockets are always full of stuff, and I’m worried you’ll throw them away by accident.”
“Oh!” She drops her gaze to the pouch in her hands and runs the zipper back and forth. When she lifts her eyes to mine again, she’s wearing a smile. “That happens to me all the time. I always tell myself I’ll keep my song ideas in one place, so I have that notebook I was telling you about. But I don’t like it to be messy, and the ideas come faster than I can write neatly, especially when I have to write out the guitar part. So I end up writing early drafts on receipts and napkins and tell myself I’ll transfer them to the notebook later, but sometimes I lose them before I can. It’s a real pain. So, thanks.” She unzips the pouch and sets it on the table before her, then reaches into the pockets of her cardigan and pulls out a pile of receipts.
“Wanna make a bet?” she says.
“That depends on the bet.”
“What percentage of these do you think is garbage and what percentage is actually something important? Loser has to eat a raisin bagel.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “Don’t you like raisin bagels?”
She shrugs, a smile twitching at her lips, and before I know it, I’ve agreed to this ridiculous bet. “You believe in me way too much,” she says when I guess that only twenty percent of the receipts are rubbish. A few minutes later, she has half of the receipts tucked safely inside the pouch, and I have a date with a raisin bagel.
Raine leaves the pub. When she returns a half hour later, she’s carrying a brown paper bag from the coffee shop down the street and a stack of tin signs she’s managed to scrounge up from... I don’t even know where. The woman makes friends faster than a tattoo machinepierces skin. She’s talking a mile a minute, something about a girl she met in the bakery yesterday and a box in a storage container.
“Must my punishment come so soon?” I ask when she tosses the bag onto the table.
She grins, but when I open the bag, instead of a raisin bagel, like I expect, I find a poppyseed bagel.
I raise an eyebrow at her. She shrugs, then spreads the signs out on the table. “I didn’t have it in me. These are for the pub,” she says. “Do you like them?”
Each sign features a different Irish brand—Beamish, Murphy’s, Guinness. I touch each corner of the one closest to me. “They’re great,” I say, though the thoughts are already there, telling me that changing the pub will only lead to awful things. “When are you planning to redecorate?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Once I collect enough stuff, I think.”
I pretend I’m inspecting the signs, but really, I’m trying to resist mentally counting the corners of the photos we currently have on the walls. I don’tneedto count them. I already know there are sixty-four. Four corners for each of the sixteen pictures. There are ten bigger pictures and six smaller ones. Only two of the frames match. Ten photographs are of boats, four are of buildings, two are landscapes.
They’re just walls. They’re just photographs. I don’t need to count them. Nothing bad will happen if we change things up.
