“Evie…”
“Or we have carrot sticks, and yogurt. I could make you—”
“Evie, I don’t want to eat anything. It’s cool. Let’s go sit on the couch and talk.”
She breathed a sigh of relief right into the refrigerator. He wanted to “talk”. The clingy t-shirt was fine, her massive ass was fine, everything was fine. Finally, after a week of waiting, she was going to feel his mouth on hers again and his hands on something hopefully north of her waist and ohhhhh she couldn’t wait.
At last, at last.
Only when they got to the couch, she discovered something rather disappointing. Apparently, when Van said “talk”, he actually meant talk. It wasn’t a euphemism for something else. It didn’t have inverted commas around it.
She’d taken her first leap into assuming something filthy in the place of something sweet, and she’d been completely and utterly wrong.
“How was college today?” he asked, and she briefly considered strangling him. People did crimes of passion all the time, didn’t they?
“Great. Professor Dickinson spent two hours explaining how evolution couldn’t possibly have happened. I spent a further two wondering if I actually existed or not.”
She glanced at him, but found to her relief that the corner of his mouth had turned up. On him, that practically constituted raucous laughter.
“Sounds fun.”
“Really? Because it absolutely isn’t.”
“I take it you believe we emerged from the ocean sixty billion years ago.”
“At the very least, I don’t refuse to believe something.”
He seemed to appreciate that answer. She could see it in his expression—as though she’d really started recognizing different things about him now. She knew his various smiles, and could almost make out when her extreme virginity started to panic him.
They were getting…close. Just you know. Not close enough. Not close in the way she wanted to be right now.
“How about your day?” she asked, simply for something to say. Though afterward it struck her that they’d just had the kind of moment married couples had, on coming home from work.
Far from making her uncomfortable, however, the thought made her feel sort of easy and loose. When he stretched his arm out over the back of the couch, she had absolutely no problem resting her cheek against it—like a sort of hug.
Only one that people did casually, after years together.
“I caught a rat the size of a small dog in a saucepan. After that, I spent about four hours sketching random things in my sketch book while my art theory Professor droned on about Warhol. And then I went out and got another tattoo, before coming here.”
Of course she knew the rat comment should have been the one that caught her attention. He’d battled a beast from the bowels of hell with nothing but a cooking utensil at his side—it deserved some acknowledgement.
But she found herself blurting something else out, anyway.
“You got another tattoo? Do you even have space left on your body?”
It could have gone terribly. He could have been pissed, and taken it the wrong way. But when he laughed she realized one very important thing—they were past that now.
No misunderstandings. No defensiveness. Just this, this, this.
“Yeah, so I’m addicted. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Addicted? Doesn’t it hurt? How can you be addicted to something that hurts so bad?”
His face straightened out a little.
“Easily,” he said, and it didn’t surprise her that all the hairs stood up on the back of her neck. Of course she couldn’t quite tell what they were really talking about now, but it lingered all the same. That idea of being complicit in your own pain. “Here, you want to see?”
He didn’t even need to ask, really. She just waited, patiently, while he tugged up his t-shirt to reveal the thick swirl of black on his side. Lettering, she thought—like the one on his wrist. This one was bigger, however, and easier to identify than the thick bar of script just below his hand.
“It’s Latin, right? Anima means soul or spirit or heart.”
He paused so long she had to glance up at him, and see what expression was on his face now. But he didn’t seem amused, or like she’d gotten the word wrong. He looked surprised instead. Surprised and faintly unsettled.
“Can you read the rest of it?”
“Mea is my. My soul…something something. I think cum is with,” she tried, but then found herself flushing red. Cum meant something else too, and she knew it.
Plus, now that the translation portion of the evening was over she’d started noticing something else. Something pretty obvious and right in front of her—she could see the hair that clearly extended down from his chest to make a rough, dark tangle over his belly. And because he was sitting sort of half-sprawled, his jeans were riding really low on his hips.