Page 16 of Pragma
“Sleep here.”
“I can’t sleep with you,” I declare.
“Thought rain would have put you in a better mood,” he mutters. He knows my fixation with it. A pluviophile is what he thinks I am. But the real reason behind liking the rain is because it kept my father away from home when I was a kid, leaving me and my brother free from his abuse for a few extra hours.
“There’s a perfectly comfortable guest bedroom upstairs.” He points his index up at the second floor.
“You always sleepwalk your way to me during the night and lie half on top of me, snoring,” I grumble, but the truth is that it’s dangerous. Sleeping under the same roof. I almost gave in to my desires last time, dreaming of Aki kissing me, then waking upwith him squeezing the shit out of me like a python in mating season.
His sleep-disheveled hair, that foggy gaze as he tries to wake up, the way he stretches, arching all the way back, even how he scratches his ass getting out of bed. He always drinks his OJ before breakfast, and next takes a long, never-ending shower.
With the passage of time, he remains a constant in the storm of changes.Like the way he clings to me when I sleep or how he hides nothing, not even his insanity, how he turns into a brat when he doesn’t have what he wants, or the way his glare is begging me to stay.
But I can’t. Not this time. I feel too raw tonight.
“I don’t snore. I just get cold at night,” he retorts, the usual excuse for his sleep-or-not-walking. “Ice cream?” He removes the lids, and then starts eating directly from the tubs with a spoon.
“If you have mint chocolate,” I say, knowing already what he’s going to say.
He smacks his lips. “Only if it walked in this apartment by itself. Any flavor other than matcha is nonsense, you know that.”
He’s right, I knew that, it’s just hard to…leave him.
“Stop fucking with me and stay,” he insists, sounding indifferent as he walks to the sofa with a tub in each hand. And that’s exactly the problem. Because I want that indifference to turn to need.
“Pass.” I see the surprise on his face. I always stay when he asks me to. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning.” I slip my boots on, and as I open the front door, I feel the need to lighten the blow by saying, “Don’t let the ice cream freeze your brain.”
I hear him mutter something, but I don’t stop. I untie my hair on the way to the elevator, get in, and then out of the building. I stop just outside to tap a cigarette out of the pack and light it. Menthol fills my lungs as thoughts about Aki keep firing inside my head. Wanting to put a stop to them, I let my eyes search around.
It’s still raining, and it’s late; there are no people on the sidewalks. Is Joel looking as it drizzles down as well? I could bump into him on the street since we are both in New York. Would he even recognize me when it looks like I borrowed half of my face from Freddy Krueger?
I grip the cigarette between my front teeth and tilt it up, letting the smoke float up toward the transparent awning.
There are people who share the same space, yet they don’t really mix with one another. Is that my and Joel’s destiny? The food inside my stomach churns.
I decide not to wait for Soma, so I chuck the cigarette on the ground and pull up the collar of my coat before heading toward my place. Could the rain wash all my frustrations away? The wet drops distract me, cooling my head, invading my clothes, finding a way to my skin, rolling down my body.
With every step I take my head goes from Joel to Aki and what happened at his place a few minutes before. In all the years we’ve spent together, he’s never gone that far over the line with me. A few times, it looked like he got close, but it was mostly all me, looking for hidden meanings that weren’t there.
Some things grow when they’re shared, some things are halved.
I now know what that saying means. My feelings toward him have multiplied, and as they did, I’ve given parts of myself to him, time after time. Until…I discovered half of myself missing.
That obstinate, foolish half that resides within him.
Chapter Three
AKIRA
Itap on my tablet screen, the video from the relationship wellness app starts playing. “Dating is just like hunting. This is the Prey Master and welcome to my hunting grounds.”
I look at the guy on the screen with a critical gaze. He’s in his forties, wearing some kind of camouflage jacket over a plain black T-shirt. He has a ’70s porn mustache and a Forrest Gump haircut, and he’s standing in what looks like a mountain cottage complete with a fireplace and a stone wall.
I found this app by chance last night after River surprisingly left me alone. Half a bottle of whisky later, I was drunkenly tapping away on my phone:how to ensnare the bunny you have eyes on. Let’s just say I stumbled onto a couple of weird videos before getting to this.
The Prey Master keeps going, “As you would hunt a doe or buck in the wilderness, you need to take your time to catch your future lover. Get to know them a little before metaphorically aiming your rifle their way.”
Is he talking about his dick? I sniff.
