Page 25 of Portrait of A Lost Artist
?CHAPTER NINE
NATHAN
“Wired and I’m tired. Think I’ll sleep with my clothes on the floor. Or maybe this mattress will spin on its axis and find me on yours.”- Edge of Desire by John Mayer.
I’VE HAD MY FAIR EXPERIENCEOF WAKING IN BEDS OF PLACES WHERE I DON’T BELONG.Not to say I am proud of it; when the scent of a new lover seeps through my clothes but never reaches my heart. However, as my eyes open to a weight that had been unmissed and unwelcomed, I repulse the scent of alcohol even more. The wooden ceiling swam into focus as I shifted on the bed, my gaze lingering on the blue walls. I buried my face in the pillow, and the sharp scent of lilies cut through the fog in my mind. Fragments surfaced: dancing, voices, the clink of bottles. I remembered the defiant tilt of my head, the surrender to a month-long struggle.
The timer starts again, and I feel the need to cry at that moment.
A leadenness has settled into my limbs, a sensation foreign to the mornings where I’d wake, hungover, but lighter. The sun settled on top of the sky and judging by the colors that transcend through the curtains of the room, the afternoon must be arriving. My head pounded a thousand bricks against my skull. I raked my fingers through the disheveled mess of my hair. My clothes remained a barrier, a testament to an evening that didn’t progress as far as it might have.
I’m relieved. The sheer number of decisions I seem to have made drunk, leaving me feeling exploited afterwards, is shocking. I had no idea where I was or who I was with back then.
The room is delicate, if not a little minimalistic. My shoes are gone, and my t-shirt feels wrinkly and damp against my body, but as I lurk for my socks, I notice little details of what could give out who took me home. I find textbooks on a small shelf, too low for me to reach, and a laptop open on a small desk. Apart from the lily scent, there is not much to go by.
The chill of the ceramic tiles bit into my bare feet, a jolt that made me shudder. I just needed to find my way out, back to Benicio’s place. But the living room was a dark, impenetrable mystery, and I stumbled, my hip colliding painfully with a wall I couldn’t see. Blame the house for being so small. Directly across the narrow hallway, a door promised a bathroom. The corridor was so brief; it felt more like a partition than a passage, opening into a living room that was uncomfortably small. An impossibly large couch and a blaring TV filled the space, the screen casting a harsh light on the person who had dragged me here.
The screen does nothing to conceal the tastes of whoever is laying on the couch with a foot dangling from it. A man with blonde hair grasps a woman’s waist, lips so parted that he could as well be eating her face, tongues intertwined, saliva exchanged and cast by the harsh lights in the studio. A small, disbelieving chuckle escaped me as I perched on the edge of the couch, still struggling to shake off the mental fog and decipher this bizarre, almost soft-porn tableau.
Veronica had forgone that tiny top that had taken my attention away from anyone around me last night. Instead, she exchanged the revealing and fun outfit for something simpler. Her bangs fall over her forehead messily, cheek squished to a cushion with lips well-parted. For all I know, she might be drooling, but the lightning obscures my view. An enormous white t-shirt ends over her body, biker shorts hugging rounded and soft-looking thighs, a hand slipping under the slit of her shirt to caress her stomach.
Of course, it had to be Veronica. Only someone like her would be kind enough to drag an addict to a proper bed.
I lean back, watching the scene unfold in front of us, and I wonder what kind of romance Veronica has aspired for. She’s passionate, no doubt, given the shows she likes. And right now, she seems truly at peace. Maybe that’s a good thing. For her not to be running in front of heartbreak, avoiding the arrows thrown directly at her. For pace to be regulated by the slowness of burning, craving, aching.
Unlike what I can offer her.
I’ll only be here for a bit more, after all.
A few minutes pass by until I feel her stir. When I look at her, she has pulled her foot away from the ground, rubbing at one eye lazily and glancing at me. That elicited an immediate reaction, her spine stiffening. The shadows in the living room were a welcome veil, hiding the way her shirt outlined her form and the goosebumps that had risen. She sat up and cleared her throat, a sound of forced composure.
“You’re awake.” She doesn’t carefully tiptoe around the subject. The reason I am here. It’s different from what I’ve known before, actually. Renna usually woke me up with a coffee and a handful of scolding words thrown my way.
“What do Cubans have when they are hungover?”
The chuckle she lets out goes past her nose as a careful sigh. “Soup. I was planning on making you some, but after we came back home, I couldn’t sleep.”
“Hence, you checked the plethora of 18+ rated channels available and settled for...that.”
Veronica tosses a look at the screen, groaning softly as she lurks for the controller to pause the program. “Dang it! That was episode one hundred and thirty-five.”
“Porn lasts that long around here?”
“It’s not porn, Nathan.” If the lights were on, she would totally be blushing, and I would love to paint the contrast of her sun-kissed skin with the flower petals across her cheeks. “Respect our lord and savior, William Levy.”
“William who?”
“You really don’t know who he is?” Leaning back, arm propped up, I fought the urge to push her bangs away. That dazed, blinking stare, combined with the soft pout of her lips, was making it increasingly difficult to resist kissing her. “That’s it. Get out of Cuba. You’re officially kicked out of my country.”
“Alright, let’s not get radical.” She gets up and turns the lights on. Her brown eyes narrowed, shrinking from the light, and I did the same, shielding my eyes, feeling like a vampire in the sun. “I’ll happily learn about William and how he keeps you company every midnight. Sounds like an interesting champ. Over a hundred episodes and he doesn’t get you tired?”
“It’s a Telenovela.” She tells me, tapping a finger over her forearm after crossing her arms on her chest. “William Levy is an icon to Cuban culture. He has brought romance to life on everyone’s TV screens.”
“The blonde guy.”
