Page 14 of Dirty Money
“Ooo, British accent huh?” a chubby redhead named Tasha asked, as she wore a dreamy expression.
“Yeah, but I don’t know. Isn’t this all kind of stalkerish? Seems like a red flag.” Aullie usually didn’t care to open up to her co-workers but it felt good to get it off her chest.
“I don’t know. I can’t even get a guy to text me back. That sounds way better. Plus, again, British.” said Janelle, the whippet-thin mom of a darling two-year-old boy.
Brittany nodded. “His accent is nice.”
The gaggle of girls clucked away, and before long the mountain of silverware before them had been rolled and placed in baskets. The general consensus had been that, at the very least, she should give him one more chance because he was so committed, and yes, the British thing came up a lot.
Aullie considered this as she wrapped up her night. After she shrugged into her coat, she took the plunge.
-Hey-was all that she texted to Weston. Aullie plunged the phone into her pocket and bundled out into a dark, freezing rain.
‘I won’t look at it the whole way home’, she promised herself. ‘I’ll make him wait’. Despite her promises, her phone burned a hole in her pocket. Every red light and stop sign she almost justified checking it, but instead turned up the radio and powered through.
The roads were slick and shiny under the dingy yellow streetlights and rain rhythmically drummed against the windshield. Thankful to finally be safely home, Aullie parked her car and trotted up the stairs to her cement box of an apartment with a white-knuckle grip on the slick rail.
She flicked on the switch and her tiny haven came to life. The light, coupled with the bright variety of colors, were a stark contrast to the melancholy world outside. Any wall space that wasn’t occupied by a painting or a pinned-up sketch was draped with colorful tapestries. Her full-size mattress, dressed in paisley sheets, sat atop a bunk bed type piece of furniture with a cluttered, messy desk underneath.
Instead of a living room, Aullie had built a small variation of a dining room. She wasn’t much into TV, so she didn’t own one, not that she could afford cable anyway. Instead, a massive turquoise dining table that Aullie had bought from goodwill and spray painted herself, dominated the space across from the bed.
On one side sat a bright yellow couch printed with Aztec-style flowers, where her massive gray cat Bruce lay curled up on his favorite corner. On the other side sat two clunky chairs that came with the table. The table top was littered with random art supplies and pieces of various sculpture and ceramic projects Aullie had been required to do over the years. Anyone that opened the door could tell an artist lived there, and Aullie loved it that way.
She hung her wet jacket on a coat rack made of real broken branches wrapped in rugged rope. As she slipped out of her work shoes, she pulled her phone out of the pocket and illuminated the screen.
A hearty rush of breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, flooded out of Aullie. There it was.
Or rather, there they were. A-Hey!-and a-How was work?-both from Weston, four minutes apart. Though she was happy to hear from him, she wanted to remain standoffish.
-Fine. How was the rest of your night?-She typed back.
She left the phone on her counter next to the fruit bowl and stripped down to shower all the restaurant off her. Under the warm drizzle, the crappy shower didn’t really get hot as she scrubbed at the grease, beer, and ketchup that always seemed to stain her worse than her paints did.
Thanks to her quick bathing session, she burned off a few more minutes which kept up her intended aloofness. She changed into a pair of oversized, black and white checked flannel pajama pants and a baggy university shirt stained with red, white, and yellow paint. Aullie scooped her phone off the counter and checked it again, giddy to see the two text notifications.
-Not nearly as good once I couldn’t see you anymore :)-followed seven minutes later by-Sorry, was that too much?-
Aullie smiled. Her little game was working. She decided to make him wait a few more minutes, filling an old metal teapot with water and putting it on the stove to boil. Grabbing a yellow mug with a black smiley face, she dropped in an herbal tea bag from the stack of boxes on the counter. She picked up her phone and typed back just two little words,-It’s fine-
Minutes passed, long enough for the water to boil. Aullie pulled the whistling pot off the burner and poured the hot water into the mug, the tea began to steep and a cloud of steam rose. She wondered idly what she was going to do with her night. Bedtime usually wasn’t until two or three in the morning, she did her best work at night, so she had a few hours to kill.
She checked her phone, but there was nothing. Surprised and a little disappointed, she booted up her laptop on the desk under her bed. It was her fault anyway, really, for toying with Weston the way she had.
It was late, most normal people were in bed. After a few beers, and assuming he actually didn’t do anything else after he left, it made sense that Weston would have fallen asleep.
At least, that’s what Aullie told herself as fifteen minutes without a response became thirty. She scrolled through her Facebook feed, got distracted by a couple of random news stories that had been shared by her friends. She sipped her tea and the warmth and familiarity of her nighttime routine helped relax her. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched her phone, willing it to light up with a text.
To no avail, unfortunately. She grabbed a weathered sketchbook and a pencil off the desk, took a hearty slug of her cooling tea, and climbed up the ladder to her bed.
Her mattress was worn-in and soft and a massive mountain of pillows adorned the head. Aullie scooted into her padded little nook and thumbed through the graphite stained pages in the sketchbooks until she found a blank one.
She tapped the screen on her phone, pulling up a free music app. An edgy, modern classical music underscored by techno beats, flooded out of the tiny speaker. Music like that, dynamic and free flowing, was Aullie's favorite art music. The ever-changing beat was great fodder for ever-changing inspiration and ideas.
The inspiration, however, wasn’t coming. Her blank, dark phone screen had her feeling very distracted. She finally turned it over, willing herself to focus.
She started by scribbling. Just scribbling. Slowly, as she began to lose herself in the music, the erratic lines began to take form. The raw sketch took the shape of a deer, a beautiful, thick chested stag with a wide set of antlers. His noble face, and the collar of light flowers that seemed to just appear around his regal neck occupied her entire mind.
It was over an hour before the spell was broken and she jerked away, breathing heavily. She loved getting lost in her work and she shamelessly admired her newest creation. She’d finished the head and the body down to the fluffy tail, but the beefy stag stood on little outlines of unfinished legs. Suddenly exhausted overwhelmed by the music volume, Aullie picked up her phone to turn it down.
