Skye Blue, page 16
part #6 of Firsts and Forever Series
“I’m totally on board with all.”
“You don’t need to say that now. We haven’t even had a first date yet.”
“Let’s remedy that. Can I cook you dinner tonight?”
“I’d like that.”
“Great. I’m a terrible cook, just so you know. My brother did all the cooking before he moved out, so I got lazy. He’s a caterer, by the way, so he was great at it. As for me, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to serve you burnt toast tonight. Or, if the toast goes too horribly wrong, a bowl of cereal. That’s my emergency fallback.”
“That sounds great.”
“No it doesn’t. It sounds like your meal is being prepared by chimpanzees.”
He smiled at me again. Every time he did that, a little jolt of happiness went through me. “You could serve me a stick of gum for all I care.”
“Low maintenance,” I told him with a grin. “I like that.”
“Oh no, I’m super high maintenance,” he joked. “But still, you don’t have to go through a lot of trouble where dinner is concerned. I’m just excited to spend the evening with you, this time without a computer screen between us. I’m nervous too though, as long as I’m being honest. I’ve never gone on a real date before.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t out in high school so I didn’t date at all, and after that Collin and I never dated either. He took me home and fucked me the day we met and moved me in with him shortly after that.”
I had another urge to punch his ex, and I was normally a really nonviolent person. The fact that he’d been just eighteen when they got together and that this guy was considerably older only compounded my anger. I decided to put my hostility aside for Dare’s sake though and pulled up a smile instead. “You’re about to see what you’ve been missing, and boy, after that bowl of cereal and a couple hours of awkward chit chat, you’ll be glad you never dated, let me tell you.”
“It sounds awesome.”
I leaned in and kissed him. “Between now and then, I really should get back to campus. It’s not good form to blow off the first day of school.”
He sat up too, rearranging the icepack on his knee. “I forgot that you were starting school today. When’s your first class?”
“It was at ten. I left after about twenty minutes to come find you.”
“Why didn’t you wait until school was out?”
“I just couldn’t. I needed to know if you and Mac were one and the same.”
“I’m still not sure how you figured it out. I almost never talked about my day-to-day life, only bits and pieces of my past.”
“It wasn’t what you said, it was how you made me feel.” I stood up, but then bent down and kissed him again before going over to the desk and picking up a pen. “I’m writing down my address. Does six work for you?”
“That’s perfect.” He started to get up, but I detained him with a light touch on his shoulder.
“You don’t need to see me out, just keep resting your knee. I’ll see you in a few hours.”
He smiled at me as he handed me my backpack. “Looking forward to it.”
When I reached the door, I turned back and said, “One question.”
“Shoot.”
“How did you get your nickname?”
He grinned embarrassedly. “My aunt started calling me that because for years, every time I ate at her house, I’d beg for mac and cheese. There was this one ultra-cheap store brand that I was completely in love with. It featured a powdered cheese-like substance that was so stunningly fluorescent orange it must have glowed in the dark. Of course to a kid, its glow-in-the-dark properties were just a plus.”
I chuckled at that. “Do you still like it?”
“No, I can’t stand it now. Thank God. If I’d eaten even one more box of that stuff, I’m pretty sure I would have turned permanently orange.”
“Like an Oompa Loompa,” we both said in unison, and burst out laughing.
“Well, I’ll be sure to cross boxed mac and cheese off my shopping list for dinner tonight,” I told him. “Can’t have you turning into an Oompa Loompa on my watch.” I winked at him and left the studio, a big smile on my face.
Chapter Eight
“You’re late,” Christian said when I found him in the student union at lunch time. He’d managed to find a grey t-shirt somewhere, consisting of more holes than fabric.
“I know. Sorry about that.”
“Was Musgrave’s class so scintillating that you just couldn’t pull yourself away at the end of the two hours?” He was strewn across a boxy blue chair in the commons area, coffee in hand. Apparently that was what he was having for lunch.
“Not quite. Where’s Zandra?” I asked as I tossed my backpack by his feet on the scuffed coffee table and dropped into the seat across from him.
“Her waspy friend Maya Winsler is back from summer vacation, so they’re off somewhere bonding over girl stuff.”
“What kind of girl stuff?”
“Hell if I know. Boys maybe? Nail polish? I feel slighted. She could be talking to me about those things.” To illustrate his point, he held up his hand with a flourish, showing off the fact that he’d painted his fingernails black.
“Wow, polish and guyliner, both on a Monday morning. You really were going for full-on rock star today, weren’t you? But at least you somehow managed to resist the offensive Sharpie body art over the last couple hours.”
“I just couldn’t muster the energy to offend. That’s the problem with our generation, you know. Apathy.”
“Agreed.”
He sat up a bit, studying me closely. “Something’s different about you. This morning, you weren’t your usual effervescent self. Now you’re practically sparkling. I don’t remember Musgrave’s classes as being particularly inspiring, so is something else going on?”
“You’re surprisingly observant sometimes,” I said as I settled back in the chair.
“I’m surprisingly observant all the time,” he countered. “Spill. What’s put the froth on your cappuccino?”
“Well, since you asked, I have a date tonight and I’m pretty excited about it.”
Christian smirked at me. “It’s with Sheldon Sherman, isn’t it? Was he in Musgrave’s class with you? Did you decide you actually enjoy the smell of corn chips?”
“Oh my God, really? You’re back to Sheldon Sherman?”
“Nah, I’m just teasing. I have to say though, I can’t think of a single person that’d potentially be in your mixed media lab who’d have this effect on you.”
“Actually, I skipped out of class after just a few minutes. There was something I needed to do.”
Christian took a sip of coffee and said, “That’s so unlike you. Normally, you’re conscientious to a fault. So where’d you run off to?”
“SOMA.”
“Why? What’s in SOMA?”
“A dance studio. One with a stunningly beautiful instructor.”
“Wait, dance? We’re not talking about the douche nozzle, are we? Please tell me we aren’t.”
“I kind of really need you to stop calling him that.”
“Fine. Are we talking about Dare? God I hate that name. Makes him sound like a two-bit porn star.”
“I really like this guy, Christian.”
“He’s going to hurt you. No two ways about it.”
I shook my head and told him, “You’re wrong. He’s so different than you think he is, different than I thought at first, too.”
“Fuck!” He said that so loudly that several heads turned in our direction. He lowered his voice slightly as he said, “So basically, you’re going to go barreling ahead with this terrible idea no matter what I say, and I’m supposed to just sit back and watch my best friend put himself in the hands of someone that I know is bad for him. Really?”
“He’s not bad for me.”
“Of course he is! We saw exactly who he was the moment we met him on the sidewalk in the Castro. This guy’s a straight-up jerk, and when he tears down your world, I don’t know if I’m going to be strong enough to put the pieces back together!”
He launched himself out of the chair and started to leave the student union, but I ran after him and grabbed him in a fierce hug. He tried to pull away, but when I refused to let go he finally relented and hugged me back. “I swear to you this is going to be okay, Christian. I know it’s asking a lot, but I need you to trust my judgment here. I know why you’re scared and why you feel you need to protect me, but I’m not that guy anymore. I’m not the nineteen-year-old that tried to end his life. You and River, along with that year of intensive therapy, helped me leave him far behind. I’m so much stronger now, and perfectly capable of making good decisions.”
He pulled back to look at me. For a long moment, his eyes locked with mine. There was so much anguish in them.
Christian shocked the hell out of me then by taking my head in both hands and kissing me, really kissing me, with everything he had.
I stepped back, stunned, and murmured, “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Fuck, nothing at all.” This time, when he turned and left the student union, I didn’t try to stop him.
I’d always known that my best friend was attracted to me. It was just one of those unspoken things. It had been really clear though that he never intended to do anything about it, especially when I asked him not entirely jokingly to relieve me of my virginity and he turned me down flat.
When we first met he’d asked me out, but then our very brief courtship was cut off abruptly by my attempted suicide. Instead of bolting like I would have expected him to after finding me on the verge of death, he’d stuck around. Like my brother, he fell into a caretaker role when I got out of the hospital, and our friendship grew from there into something incredibly solid and firmly platonic.
Apparently something had changed though, and if I had to guess I’d say that something was the arrival of Dare in my life. Christian must know my attraction to Dare was more than an idle whim. Maybe that intimidated him somehow, or maybe he simply hated the guy enough to try anything to get me to stop focusing on him.
We were going to have to sort this out, no doubt about it. I just didn’t have a clue how. I sighed and picked up my backpack. As I headed to class, I wondered why life had to be so freaking complicated.
*****
I had two more classes that afternoon and it was after five by the time I got home, grocery sacks in hand. I’d panicked a bit at the store and had ended up with a fairly random assortment of ingredients, which I now had to somehow prepare into a cohesive meal. For a moment I wished River was around to give me some pointers. He was a hell of a cook. But this was exactly what he meant by standing on my own two feet. Succeed gloriously or fail epically, it was up to me.
I unpacked everything onto my kitchen counter, then stood back and stared at what I’d bought. I almost had the ingredients for a salad...except that I’d forgotten lettuce. There was some pasta and store-bought pesto sauce. River would have rolled his eyes at that. He showed me how to make fresh pesto once, and it had taken him all of about sixty seconds with his food processor. But since both he and his food processor had moved out, store-bought was going to have to suffice.
I peeled off the lid on the little container and gave the pesto a sniff, then realized this was the stupidest first date food ever. Not only did it reek of garlic, it also pretty much guaranteed that I would end up with green flecks in my teeth. So much fail.
By now I really began to wonder why I’d offered to cook. Couldn’t I have just taken him to a nice restaurant? Okay, sure, the idea of doing this for him had seemed romantic at the time, but then there was that whole pesky reality thing getting in the way of my cute little domestic fantasy.
I spent some time grouping and arranging the food on the counter, hoping some type of recipe would magically present itself. One finally did when I realized I could turn the produce and loaf of French bread into bruschetta. That was a thing, kind of. I didn’t particularly like it, but maybe Dare would.
The next several minutes were spent chopping vegetables, then slicing and arranging the bread on a cookie sheet. I started to feel cautiously optimistic as I preheated the broiler. If I could figure out some other way to dress the pasta besides the date-destroying pesto, I’d be in business. I stuck the bread in the oven, then pulled open a few cabinets, hoping to find a jar of spaghetti sauce or something. No luck.
I glanced at the time on the stove and panicked all over again. It was five minutes to six. Holy crap! I ran for the shower and stripped myself as fast as I could, accidentally squirted about half a tube of toothpaste on my toothbrush, then jumped under the still-cold water and scrubbed my teeth with one hand while I quickly washed up with the other.
About a minute into this endeavor, my smoke alarm started shrieking. I cursed vividly and shut off the water, yanking back the shower curtain. Immediately, acrid smoke stung my eyes.
I grabbed a towel and fastened it around my waist as I dashed to the kitchen. The smoke’s source was immediately apparent. I turned off the broiler, then stuffed my hands into two big oven mitts that River had accidentally left behind. They were his favorites because they looked like giant, bright red lobster claws. I had no idea where he’d found them, or what would even possess a company to manufacture giant lobster claw oven mitts in the first place, but they were coming in handy right about now.
I coughed as I pulled the sheet of blackened bread slabs out of the oven and dumped it into the sink. The coughing made me think of my pets and I dashed to the bedroom. Draco wasn’t home, but I grabbed the Royal Rodent’s big cage between my lobster claws and ran for the front door. This mouse was not asphyxiating on my watch!
I swung my bare foot up to the door knob and managed to twist it open as I wrestled with the unwieldy cage. The mouse looked a bit alarmed, which was hard to do since his beady black eyes were permanently on the bulgy side. I got us out into the hall of my apartment building, where the (relatively) fresh air was a relief. The door swung shut behind me with a worrisome click and I turned to look at it before glancing up at someone coming down the hallway.
Dare stopped a few feet away from me. He was holding a bouquet of blue flowers and a canvas grocery sack, and was dressed in the pink polo shirt he’d been wearing the day I met him. He ran his gaze from my damp hair to my bare feet, taking in everything in between, from the towel to the lobster claws to the pink mouse in the gold Taj Mahal cage with a plastic crown on top.
And then he burst out laughing. He laughed so hard that he doubled over, hands on his thighs, gasping for breath, and then he laughed some more. His reaction was so funny that I had to laugh too. I couldn’t even manage to be all that embarrassed, just because seeing him laughing like that made me happy.
When he finally got it under control, he wiped his eyes with an index finger and said, “What exactly is happening here?”
“I burned the toast.”
He was smiling ear to ear as he came up to me. “Ah.”
“I’d been kidding when I told you earlier that I was going to do that, but then that was exactly what happened. It led to a series of unfortunate events, the result of which you see before you.”
Dare reached up and ran a fingertip over my upper lip, his eyes bright with amusement, then held it up and showed it to me. It was covered in something white and foamy. “Bad news. I think you’re rabid.”
“Oh jeez. I was brushing my teeth in the shower when the smoke alarm went off. Is there a lot more?”
“Yup.”
I set the cage down, then wiped my mouth with the big lobster claw mitt. “Did I get it all?”
“Almost.” He ran his thumb over my upper lip, then kissed me gently before smiling again and saying, “Minty.”
I held up my lobster-claw-clad hands and said, “This wasn’t the impression I was aiming for on our first date.” I pulled them off and dropped them beside the rodent cage. The mouse looked at them, and I reached out with my bare foot and slid them a few inches away so they wouldn’t suffer the same fate as my quilt.
“You’re so adorable that I very nearly can’t stand it,” he said. “I got these for you, by the way.” He held out the big bouquet of flowers and I gathered it into my arms.
“Thank you, they’re beautiful. No one’s ever given me flowers before. I love that you got blue ones.”
“I brought wine and chocolate ice cream, too,” he said, indicating the canvas shopping bag. “I didn’t know if you liked wine, so the ice cream was kind of an emergency backup gift.”
“That was very thoughtful.” I reached over and tried the doorknob, even though I was pretty sure I knew what I was going to discover. Then I said, “It’s too bad that it’ll melt before we figure out a way to break into my apartment and eat it.”
“Does anyone have a key? You could borrow my phone and give them a call.”
“Only my brother, but calling him is a last resort. Getting locked out while wearing nothing but a towel and oven mitts is just going to reinforce his opinion of me.” I thought for a moment, then said, “Let’s go ask my downstairs neighbors for help.”
“Okay.”
“Would you mind carrying these for me?” I asked, holding out the flowers.
“Sure.” He took the bouquet and I picked up the Taj Mahal.
“Could you please grab the oven mitts, too?”
“Absolutely.” He stuck them in his shopping bag. The cage started to list to one side, and as I righted it quickly he asked, “Why not leave that here? We can retrieve it once we get inside the apartment.”
“I don’t want to leave it. What if somebody steals him?”
“Do you think someone would do that?”
“Maybe. He’s a really special mouse.”
Dare smiled at me and said, “You’re right, he is. Lead the way.”
We went down the stairwell to Hans and Franz’s apartment. “Hiyee neighbor,” Franz said cheerfully when he opened the door. “Are you having the heavy thing for me to be lifting again?”
