Page 48 of A Brother At My Back

“Oh, nah, I’ve never seen it,” he declared.

I blinked in surprise and said, “Oh, no, this is so happening,” just as the kettle on the stove began to whistle.

“What is?” he asked as I slipped off his lap.

“Just a minute. I’m gonna call Lia,” I declared. “She needs in on this.”

I picked up my phone and called her, thinking this might be a good way for her to get to know Nik and a decent peace offering between us, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong. I just didn’t want to lose my only friend. I moved the kettle off the heat and tore open the packets of cocoa, dumping them each into their respective mugs.

“Hi, you’ve reached Delia, don’t forget to leave a message!”

I didn’t. I just hung up, disappointed. I poured the water and stirred the contents of first one mug and then the other, setting the phone on the counter.

“Oh, well, her loss. We’re so doing this, though.”

“Doing what?” he asked, an eyebrow raised in intrigue.

“Watching this movie.”

He looked me up and down, curious, and said, “All right, then,” sealing his fate. Then again, with a man as well-read as he seemed to be, and the fact he didn’t really seem to give a shit about what other people thought, I didn’t think he would find watching a total chick flick with me to be that big of a deal. I could be wrong, though; you never did know what it would be that could hurt a man’s fragile masculinity. I’d learned that lesson time and time again.

“I’ll go get it, make yourself comfortable?”

“Anything for you,” he said and I paused slightly before moving into the main area of my apartment. I handed him his mug while passing and set mine on the side table by my day-bed. I rooted around underneath the bed for my CD binder that I had filled with DVD’s and brought it out onto my lap. He got up and wandered over, sitting next to me as I flipped through the pages looking for Pretty Woman.

“You know this is a cross between Pygmalion and the Cinderella story?” I asked casually and Nik turned his head.

“Wasn’t Pygmalion the bloke that fell in love with his own statue he carved?”

I smiled and looked up, “Yes, that’s right. Not a lot of people know the story.”

He gave a shrug with one shoulder, “I read a lot and one of my favorite subjects was the whole Greek myths. I actually did decent in those classes.”

“You strike me as someone who did poorly in school not because you’re stupid but because you were bored,” I said, and continued flipping pages. I really needed to put this damn thing in some kind of order. Like alphabetical by title or by the director or something. Hell, even by color would work better than this mess.

“I think you may be right about that,” he said. “My dad always thought I was lazy and stupid, my mum knew different. So did my granddad.”

“A mother always knows,” I said quietly and slid the disc out of its sleeve. “I never knew mine. I was found in a dumpster on prom night. Classy, right?”

“Tragic, is more like it,” he said softly.

“Yeah, well, they never found her and I always wondered growing up if I passed her, or if she would see me and just know, you know?”

He nodded and then shook his head, but I caught his meaning. He understood what I was saying but no, he didn’t know. Couldn’t imagine growing up like that. It was no picnic that was for sure. I grew up in the system. No one ever adopted me so it was one foster home after another, after another. No roots, no sense of permanence. Which was why, when I hit sixteen, it wasn’t hard to bounce. I had no real attachments to the last family and Mike was a douche. I had to get the fuck out of there before he got braver than just fondling me. I had no intentions of losing my virginity to his nasty ass. Nope, that honor, or lack thereof, went to a rodeo clown, of all things. Don’t ask me what I’d been thinking.

I slid off the bed and opened up my little DVD player, slipping the disc into the tray. It slid closed and I pushed myself back up onto the bed where Nik was shoving pillows behind his back against the spindly metal of the bed’s… sideboard? I don’t know what you called it for a daybed. It was less head- and foot-board than it was making it into a couch, kind of.

I settled against him and reached for my cocoa, using the little remote to start the movie. He kept an arm around me and idly smoothed a hand up and down my arm through the long sleeve of my shirt and the simple action set me aglow. I liked it, very much.

“Ha! You weren’t joking, she’s a streetwalker.”

“I told you,” I said softly and he kissed the top of my head taking any of the sting out of his words.

It was cozy, watching the movie with him and I enjoyed it. At one point I said, “A lot of the girls at Sugars wish they were her, I think.”

“Ah yeah? And what about you?”

I shook my head, “I don’t want to be taken care of as much as I want to be able to take care of myself,” I said. “But this is nice.”

---