“Fresh panties,” I explain. “All your fault,” I taunt.
He groans, and flops back on the bed. “Why did you have to tell me that?” he asks. He lays there for a minute with his hands clenched. Then he motions me forward and pulls my head down to lie on his chest. He takes a deep breath and hugs me to him tightly, then releases me and relaxes. He picks up a book from beside his night stand and holds it in one hand. He reads quietly to himself.
“What are you reading?” I ask.
He looks down at it and tells me the title. “Will you read it to me?” I ask.
He lifts his head long enough to look at my face and finds that I’m serious. I can learn. And I love books. I just can’t read them. I have an amazing memory.
“Start at the beginning?” I ask.
He turns to page one and begins to read. I settle against him, wrapping my arms around his chest, snuggling as tightly against him as I can. And he reads. His voice is strong and sure, and he reads long into the night, long after he’s yawning, because I don’t want him to stop. When he finally lays the book to the side, I roll toward him and he turns to face me. He tucks me beneath his chin and I can hear his heart beating in his chest. “When you’re ready for what I want,” he says, “let me know.”
I’m ready. I’m ready now. But I’m not ready for the same thing he is. I nod against his chest, and he heaves a sigh. His lips touch the top of my head, soft as a whisper.
***
I wake up the next day and lift my head. Sunlight pours into the room, and I know I’ve slept much later than I normally would. But then again, we were up really late last night reading. My heart clenches inside my chest when I realize that he hasn’t used his voice in eight years, but he spent hours last night reading to me. It makes me feel warm all over, and I look around, wondering where he is. The bed is empty, and there’s not even an impression of his head on the pillow. That’s probably because we shared the same space last night. I draped myself across his chest, and then we adjusted, and I had my head on his belly. All the time he read, his fingers had trailed across one body part of mine or the other. It was a tiny tickle, but it touched the center of me.
I know he wasn’t unaffected by it. He was rock hard, and he had to ball the covers up in his lap more than once. But he ignored it. I ignored it. I wanted to reach over and touch him, but he doesn’t want that from me. He wants all of me. And I’m not free to give it away. I’ll never be free.
I roll over and brush my hair from my eyes. I still can’t get used to the black hair. It’s so different from my natural color. Every time I look at myself in a mirror, I have to do a double-take and try to figure out who I’m looking at. Maybe I’ll never know.
My eyes land on a sketch pad that’s propped against the lamp on Logan’s end table. I crawl closer to it on my hands and knees, and close my eyes tightly, wincing when I see that he’s drawn a nak*d woman. She’s drawn in pencil, and he has shaded all the parts of her nak*d body. But what immediately grabs my attention is that there’s one streak of color on the whole thing. It’s down the left side of her hair. It’s blue.
Oh, crap. It’s me.
I sit up on the edge of the bed and pick it up. It’s me. Definitely me. My arms are down by my sides, and my fists are clenched tightly. There’s a look of defiance on my face. I’ve never seen an artist capture a look like that. But he’s done it. There’s a towel on the floor beside my toe and my foot is pointed like I just kicked it to the side.
He’s drawn shadowing around my boobs, and my n**ples are standing tall, sticking out like they’ve been kissed tight. My stomach clenches and I have to force myself to take a breath. There’s a small triangle of hair at the vee between my thighs. I close my eyes. It’s almost lifelike. It’s me. He drew me. From memory. At the bottom are some scribbled words. They’re written in all caps and the letters are spaced far apart.
I L O O K E D
Yes, apparently he did. There’s no doubt about it. He saw me nak*d. And he remembered every dip, every curve and every strand of hair. Or lack of hair. Yikes. I close the sketch pad so no one else will see it. I’m feeling a bit over-exposed, like he somehow peeled back a layer of me and forced me to look at it as closely as he did.
I can’t believe I accused him of not wanting to look at me. He obviously did. He looked closer than anyone ever has. I take a deep breath and sit there for a minute with my eyes closed.
I slide on a pair of jeans beneath Logan’s t-shirt and put on a bra. I like his brothers, but I’m not one hundred percent sure who’s in the house. And I don’t want to walk out there to get a cup of coffee to find everyone dressed appropriately and for me to be the one who’s not. Padding around in the middle of the night is one thing. This is different.
I let myself out of the room and look around. The apartment is empty. I’m kind of glad that Logan’s not there, since my face is flaming just thinking about how closely he perused my body. If he was there in the flesh, I’d be a puddle on the floor.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the apartment when it wasn’t full of testosterone and male bodies. It’s a mess, like usual. I pour myself f a cup of coffee and load the dishwasher, and then clean the countertops. I can’t help it. They might not even want me to do it. But I do it anyway. My life is such a mess, and what I want most in the world is to tidy it up. Since I can’t tidy my own life, I’ll tidy their apartment instead. I remove a rubber band from a stack of mail and twist my hair up out of my face. If I’m going to clean, I’m going to do it right.
I start a load of laundry, and fold what’s in the dryer. I don’t know which shirt goes to which man, since they’re all big boys. So, I just make a neat pile of them and stack them on the kitchen table. The pile grows as the day goes on, and by the end of the afternoon, the house is still empty and quiet, and it’s clean from top to bottom. I didn’t clean any of their bedrooms, because that would be an invasion of their privacy, and my cleaning at all might be, now that I think of it. I bite my fingernails and look around. They won’t be mad, will they?
I go into the bathroom and look beneath the sink. There were cleaning supplies there the other day, and it could use refreshing. I lift a bucket of baby toys out of the way and then I stop. I shuffle through them. There are tiny boats, bath crayons, and a rubber ducky. I give it a squeeze and it goes flat, a hiss of air escaping it. Why do they have baby toys?
The curiosity is killing me. Do they have a little sister? They couldn’t possibly. Logan said he lived with four brothers the day I met him. He didn’t say anything about a sister. I put the bucket back under the sink, and keep cleaning.
The timer on the dryer goes off, and I fold the last load of laundry, blowing a lock of hair out of my eyes. I look toward the window, and see that the day is nearly gone. So much for busking in the subway. And Fridays are usually my best days, since people just got paid and they’re feeling generous. I have wasted the whole day cleaning Logan’s apartment, but I feel good about it. I put my hands on my h*ps and look around the room. I did a good job. I’ve mopped, and vacuumed, dusted, and put things away. Of course, I had to guess where a lot of stuff goes. The stuff I’m not sure about, I’ve been putting on the kitchen table with the stacked laundry.
I open a kitchen drawer and stumble back when I see that it’s full of condoms. Nothing but condoms. They’re in every shape, every size and every color. And every flavor, if the banana on the front of one is any indication. My face fills with heat. Why on earth do they have a drawer filled with condoms? I slam it shut, and walk away. It’s none of my business.
I carry the mop bucked toward the sink so that I can dump it. I pick it up, and just as I’m walking across the kitchen floor, the door of the apartment opens, and Logan walks through. Only he’s not alone. On his shoulders, there’s a blonde with two squiggly pony tails. He ducks to get through the door, and she giggles when he wiggles her feet and pretends to dump her off his shoulders.
He stops in front of the closed door and freezes when he sees me standing there. He must not have expected me to still be there. And I certainly didn’t expect for him to have a child. He starts toward me, one hand holding on to her feet tightly at the base of his neck. And the other reaches for me. But I’m so startled by the girl that the bucket of sudsy water slips from my hands.
“Stop!” I warn, because I don’t want him to slip with his daughter on his shoulders.
Logan
I’m so damn happy to see Kit that I want to run to her and pick her and spin her around. I wonder if she’d giggle like Hayley does when I jostle her. Probably not. I wasn’t sure Kit would still be here, and I was really worried she’d vanished when she didn’t come to see me at the tattoo parlor.
Water crashes over the toes of my boots, and Kit rushes to right the bucket. She slumps, looking down at the mess. But her dejection only lasts for a second. She gets herself together and rushes to the table, where there are piles of folded laundry and she grabs towels, throwing them down over the spill.
She’s saying something but I can’t read her lips. I walk toward her and she warns me to stop, holding up her hands. Her eyes dart to Hayley, and then back to my face, and she doesn’t look too happy with me. I set Hayley on the counter and put a cookie in her hands, and she settles there to watch us, her mouth full of chocolate chips. Hayley’s three, and she’s a cool kid.
I move the towels around with my boots, and Kit drops to her knees to mop up all the water. She pushes the towels around frantically, until it’s all cleaned up. Then she throws the wet towels in the mop bucket and starts a load of wash with them in it. She comes back to the kitchen and looks at Hayley, who’s still perched on the counter, happily munching on her cookie. Paul’s going to have my ass when he finds out I gave her chocolate, but I needed to entertain her for a second.
Kit blows her hair out her eyes with a frustrated breath and glares at me. “You’re home,” she says. Her hands are on her hips, and she’s not wearing any make up and her hair’s a mess and she has a line of dirt streaked across her forehead. But she’s never looked prettier.
I nod. The knees of Kit’s jeans are wet, and her shirt’s damp now, too. “What have you been doing?” I ask. I look around. The apartment is clean. And I don’t just mean “straighten it up because Grandma’s coming over” clean. I mean spotlessly clean. Like showroom floor clean. But better. It smells nice. And it looks nice. And she’s here. God, I’m so happy she’s here.
She shrugs. “How was your day?” she asks. Her gaze zips between me and Hayley. Hayley’s making a mess, but I don’t care.
“Better, now,” I admit. I feel like someone took a weight off my chest when I walked into the room and saw her here. I reach for Kit, and squeeze her to me, kissing her on the forehead. She scrunches up her face, and pushes back from me, her gaze jumping to Hayley again.