She opened her eyes like a lizard in the sun, one eye a moment ahead of the other, only to find herself face-to-face with a wallet-sized framed picture of his mother, crookedly cradled in a chipped plastic frame. The light from the matriarch's eyes had pulled her eyes open against her will, the filmy red knit jumper hung loosely like sloppy sex. She took one hard blink, the kind that jars your jaw shut for a split second, and ma's shoulders shot straight back up, taut, and all of a sudden, she had just been that immersed in watching her feet that she didn't notice that she'd wandered away from the cloister straight into a suprahardcore fetish site as the teaser.
She stretched to pull herself straight, the arm of the sofa cracking her neck into her chest. She threw her pelvis out like a broken arm and winced as panic shot through her, her half-awakedness jolting the fear down her spine. Throwing a leg out from under the lead blanket she had been pinned under, she realised that she was in his loungeroom and that he was in his bed. Gent. Then again, she had insisted on taking the couch. She wriggled her socked toes to rouse them into consciousness, cold metal shavings pooling in each digit. Following the curve of her calf past her foot, she looked through the loungeroom and found a kitchenette she had not even noticed in all the hours she had spent gasbagging the night before and noted, with a raised brow, that everything was covered with labels. Cutlery. Fridge. Stove. Rubbish. Dinosaur. He had drawn a dinosaur with oil pastels to cover the viewing window of his oven. What the hell?
Almost tripping on the weighted lilac rivulet, she stretched her blanketed arms up and over her head into a burka, and tiptoed into his bedroom. His mattress lay on the ground, half of his doona sprawled over an earthen rug, surrounded by boxes. Each box in this room was labeled, too. Crap. Shirts. Stuff. Books. Computer stuff. Pants. Shirtless, his back was hunched obscenely as he spooned a pillow. The dots of his spine poked through like a bored drunk's coaster assault, not quite aligned. She wanted to crawl under his blanket and lick him, to taste the salt of a philosophy major three quarters done. To try to find the weak spot that held that pocket full of crayons and gamerisms, the one that dented those dimples that little bit more.
She crawled in behind him and buried her head in the blended soil of his hair, breathing him in.
He lasted half a minute before he winked himself up with a start, rolled over, kissed her nose, and grinned. He was too close, which made her frown to focus. Then he jumped straight up, saying that he needed to take a wicked piss.
