Touching her fingertips to the mantel, she looked at the pictures, all of Jake and me throughout the years. In a visual timeline, she watched us grow, seeing me change and him staying the same. She picked one up and studied it closer, allowing her smile to grow.
"You were so cute," she said, turning the frame to show me the picture I already knew so well. Jake and me, with our arms wrapped around our family's old dog, Daisy, an Old English Sheepdog with more hair than brains.
"What the hell happened, right?" I chuckled, studying my drink and glass.
"You look so much alike."
I laughed again, deep and surprisingly genuine. "Well, we are identical twins."
"I know that," she giggled lightly, and somewhere in this dark house, someone turned on the faintest of nightlights. "But you looked more alike then."
"Yeah, well," I shrugged, lifting the glass, "I grew a beard."
She laughed again and put the picture back on the mantle. "He doesn’t live with you?”
"He doesn’t. I pick him up for school in the morning and drop him off in the evening."
She nodded and continued to move around the living room. Eyeing the pictures and studying the art on the walls. She cocked her head at a gritty penned portrait of Jake and me, lying side by side in the yard. Mom had taken the original photograph a few years ago, after I had first bought the house. It was my favorite of the two of us, and I remembered that day in the sunshine. A moment of playful reprieve, when Jake tackled me to the ground and we rolled in the grass like we were kids.
"You're so talented," she uttered on a thin breath.
"Thanks."
Looking at me over her shoulder, she smiled weakly. "You don't believe it, though."
"I know I'm good at what I do," I offered. "I have skills, and I know how to use them."
She nodded, turning back to the drawing. "Yeah, you do, but it's your gift that allows you to capture the difference in your eyes with nothing but a pen."
I furrowed my brow. "What?"
She pointed at pen-Jake's eyes. "He's so happy, innocent and excited, but then, you ..." Her finger aimed at pen-me now. "You're smiling, but your eyes are so empty. Like you've given up and you're constantly reminding yourself to not care."
I sucked in a heavy breath of air. "Hm," I grunted and downed the rest of my drink.
"Hm," she mocked the sound, albeit lighter, and turned to walk toward me. She sat on the couch, one cushion away, and sipped lightly at her drink. "So, what do you want to do?" she asked.
"I don't know." That was bullshit. What I wanted to do was reach over, pull her hair, and thrust my lips against hers until she begged me to rip her clothes off and fill her soft body with the hardness of mine. She would've expected that, I realized, after my crass attempt at making her leave earlier at the club. But I couldn't say it now, not even with the extra liquor floating through my bloodstream. My tongue wouldn't move and my lips remained shut.
So, instead, she asked, "You know what I think we should do?"
"What?"
"I think we should talk."
And even though my body would've preferred to lay over hers and sink between her thighs, I swallowed those urges and nodded.
Chapter Fourteen
WITH GLASSES OF WATER now in hand, we sat on either end of the couch, facing each other while keeping at a safe distance. She watched me intently, listening with intrigue, and the way she nodded and replied made me wonder if I could possibly be the most interesting person she'd ever met.
"When did you first start tattooing?" she asked before sipping at her glass.
"When I was fifteen," I told her.
"Wow, isn't that young?"
Shrugging nonchalantly, I replied, "I guess. An old buddy of mine got his hands on a tattoo machine and we fucked around with it in his basement." For the sake of sharing, I lifted my left leg and crossed it over the opposite knee. Rolling up the leg of my pants, I pointed at the shitty, faded skull on my calf. "This was my first."
Audrey tipped forward just a bit, peering at the old ink, hiding between pieces of art much more impressive. "Your friend did this?"
"No. I did it."
Her eyes lifted back to mine. "Your first tattoo, you did on yourself?"
With another nonchalant shrug, I rolled the pant leg back down. "It was no big deal."
The bowed curve of her lips spread slowly and the brilliant blue of her irises twinkled in the living room light. I asked what that look was for and she answered, "It feels so ... wrong to be talking to you. Like, bad."
I snorted as I lifted my glass of water to sip. "I told you. I'm no good."
She shook her head. "No, I don't mean like that. I mean, you're like, one of those boys TV shows and movies always warned me about. The bad boy that always felt like an exaggeration of the truth. Like … Kiefer Sutherland’s character in The Lost Boys. But you're not an exaggeration. You're the real deal."
I laughed at that, taking a deep drink before placing the glass on the coffee table. "Your mom wouldn't approve, is what you're saying."
"Oh, no, I didn’t mean it like that."
I dropped my gaze to the cross hanging against the frame of her collarbone. I imagined her upbringing and the judgments her family would make on me. But why the hell did I care, anyway? Just a couple of hours ago, I was saying whatever I could to make her leave me alone, and now I was wondering what her parents would think of me.
"Ask me something."
Tearing me away from those thoughts, I looked back to her. "Ask you what?"
"Anything."
I threw my whole body into another shrug. "I don't know ..."
Her smile was never waning as she readjusted herself on the couch. "Come on, you gotta be curious about something."
She was right about that. There were a thousand things I was desperate to know, anxious to find the answers to, but to ask would have been to admit the niggling doubts worming their way into my brain. Asking would be a confession of the distress I'd been feeling for the past couple of weeks, regarding beliefs I thought I had a handle on.
"Okay. What do you do?" I settled on with a flippant wave of my hand, as if to say, "There, happy?"
"I'm a preschool teacher," she answered with a pride I found endearing.
I laughed gently, not intending to and Audrey asked what was funny, and I admitted, "Because that's exactly the kind of job I would've pictured you having.”
She smiled; her cheeks tinted a shade of embarrassment. "Yeah, I guess I play the part. Except," she outstretched her arms and glanced down to her shirt, "right now I'm missing the finger paint and glitter glue all over my clothes."
I chuckled, painfully aware of the dipping, swooping sensation happening in my stomach. The gradual descent of my heart, barely scraping the surface of something emotional. Testing it out and trying it on for size. Before, I had liked her appeal. I had liked what we could do together in my bed. But now, I found, I simply liked her. It was wrong in a thousand ways. She was wrong for me, I was entirely wrong for her, but this attraction of my heart couldn't be quelled.