He stood up, pulling off the condom. In the morning light, I studied him. Nice. Very nice. “What does your tattoo mean?” I asked, rolling onto my side, propping my head with my hand, tugging the sheet over me. I wasn’t comfortable just lying there totally naked when he wasn’t actually touching me.
“Which one?” He scratched his chest, flipping his hair out of his eye. He didn’t seem even remotely self-conscious about being naked, but then again, most guys weren’t.
“The bleeding heart.” I wanted to know who had broken his heart. Who I had to compete with, I guess. It was why I had asked him about Angel, which was not even remotely subtle, I know, like none of my actions had been, but I was going with my gut. And my gut said if I wanted to know something, I should ask the question.
But he just shrugged. “It doesn’t mean anything. I just liked the artwork.”
Taken by surprise, I just stared at him as he pulled on his shorts and said, “Be right back,” and left the room. I could hear him go into the bathroom and shut the door.
It didn’t mean anything? A life-size severed image over his own heart, dripping blood all the way down his rib cage and gut? That seemed a little hard to believe.
But maybe he didn’t want to talk about it. It wasn’t like I didn’t have a secret of my own.
That deflated my lazy contentment, and I got up, pulling on shorts and a T-shirt. When Phoenix reappeared we went down to the kitchen and found Kylie sitting at the table eating oatmeal. I had class in ninety minutes, but she had a nine a.m. and looked on the verge of leaving, to my relief.
“Hey,” she said, with a cheerful smile. “There’s coffee left if you want it.”
“Thanks.” Guilt rose up in my mouth like bile. Just when I started to enjoy myself, to feel human again, it was back, and rightly so. The day I could look at Kylie and not feel a twinge of guilt was the day I officially sucked.
“Catch you later, you cute little lovebirds!” she sang out, dumping her dirty bowl in the sink and leaving it as she rushed from the kitchen, blowing kisses at us.
“She’s a lot of a lot, isn’t she?” Phoenix asked, opening up cupboards until he found the coffee mugs. He pulled two down. “So what time are you done with classes?”
“Three.” I took the coffee he gave to me and took a sip.
“You doing anything? Want to hang out? They don’t need me to work today.”
I nodded. “Yes.” I did. I wanted to spend every minute with him.
Every single second.
Every nanosecond.
Without thinking about it, I put down my coffee, snaked my arms around his neck and kissed the shit out of him.
“I want to kidnap you,” he murmured in my ear. “So that I never have to let you go.”
“Please do,” I told him.
“Classes just started yesterday,” he whispered, mouth hot on my neck as he trailed kisses along my collarbone. “You can’t skip.”
“But I want to.” I did.
“I’ll pick you up at three thirty.” He peeled the top of my T-shirt down and sucked the swell of my breast. “’Kay?”
“Okay.” But I reached for the button on his shorts, thinking that it might be a much better idea to go back to bed.
Phoenix stepped away and shook his head. “Go to school. You’re, what, half done with your degree? Don’t screw it up now, not because of me.”
I saw that he would feel guilty if I skipped, so I sighed and said, “Fine.”
Phoenix laughed. “You’re adorable when you’re being a baby.”
“I’m not being a baby!” Not much, anyway.
He reached out and gently squeezed my bottom lip. “You’re pouting.”
I was. Damn it. But he just replaced his finger with his mouth and kissed me.
I went to class, but I didn’t hear a word my professors said. Instead I daydreamed about Phoenix and me running off to New Orleans and living like hippies on my art and his tattoo work. We would have a dog and a tiny apartment in the French Quarter and I would never wear makeup again and he would always think I was beautiful.
There was nothing wrong with dreaming.
Except when I left campus at three I realized it was the first day for my Tuesday-Thursday classes, and I was already behind.
My schedule was heavy with business courses, and none of it seemed like anything I wanted to do. Ever.
But I didn’t have a choice, did I? So I went to the coffee shop and started in on reading the textbook.
“I have to go to the store,” Phoenix told me when I picked him up at his cousin’s house. “Do you mind going with me?”
“No. What do you need to buy?” I pulled down the street. I had been planning to go in the house and say hi to everyone, but Phoenix had been waiting on the front step and he’d gotten into the car immediately. I felt a little guilty, like I was blowing off Jessica, but then again, I didn’t even know if she was home or not.
“Well, I went into prison with my clothes and five bucks and that’s basically all I have to my name right now since my mom disappeared. I need to buy basic stuff like deodorant and some shirts. I can’t keep borrowing my cousins’ shit.”
“Okay.” I tried to imagine only owning the clothes I was wearing and couldn’t. I had a whole bedroom full of stuff at my parent’s house—clothes and mementoes and old electronics. The thought of all of it disappearing freaked me out completely.
When we walked into the discount store, Phoenix said, “I have forty-five bucks, that’s it. So I need to do some math. I’m getting paid every day under the table, but I had to pay Riley back for my phone, and I still owe them like another hundred bucks, so it’s going to be tight for the next month.”
Forty-five dollars? What the hell was he going to buy for forty-five dollars? But I got a cart and got my phone out of my purse. “We can use the calculator on my phone. By the way, I want to buy some art supplies after we’re done here. The craft store has cheap canvases.”
In recent years I had minimized my painting to school projects or pop art. I hadn’t painted the way I had in high school in more than two years, but suddenly I wanted to really create, to take my brush and pour out my feelings in a genuine, dark oil. Maybe a self-portrait. Or maybe a lonely lighthouse. Something to express the emotions that had been overwhelming me, the ones I wanted to get rid of.
“Cool.” Phoenix picked up the generic version of everything, from toothpaste to deodorant to sports drink, and put them in the cart. “What are we at?” he asked me.
I squinted at the screen on my phone. “Twenty-two dollars. But there will be tax.”
“Okay. We’re cool.” He bought two T-shirts that were five bucks each and a pair of boxer briefs. “That’s good enough for now.”
Impressive.
What was even more impressive was that when we were near the checkout lane he decided to spend the last five bucks in his budget on a bouquet of flowers, not for me, but for his aunt’s grave.
“I know they’ll go brown in like two days, but I don’t know, it seems like the right thing to do,” he said, actually lifting the bouquet of cheerful daisies to his nose, which he wrinkled. “Well, they smell like shit, but seeing as she’s dead, I guess it won’t matter.”
Really? Boys could be so sweet and silly at the same time. “I guess not. So I guess you’re planning on going to the cemetery?”
“Yeah. I missed the funeral so I would like to do that. If you don’t want to go with me, I understand. I can borrow Riley’s car.” He started to load his stuff onto the belt for the cashier.
“No, it’s fine. If you don’t mind me being there.” Grief was a private thing, and I wasn’t sure if I would be intruding or not. I wanted to add that he really shouldn’t be driving, but I figured a guy who didn’t have much of a mother wouldn’t particularly appreciate a girl he had just started seeing to go all maternal-nag on him.