Page 17 of Roleplay at Randy's
I’m in no place to be going after a relationship, to ask Matty for more than this tentative friendship we’ve struck up, so I have nothing to be upset over.
Still, as I shut the door to my room and climb beneath my covers, I can’t help but feel just how deep the pit of loneliness that opens up is.
5
MATTY
Morning comeswith a shroud of confusion. My neck is stiff, and my legs are sore where they’re curled beside me. Blinking the sleep from my eyes doesn’t help, because it’s blatantly obvious that this isn’t my apartment.
I blink slowly a few more times, and then curse under my breath as a heavy weight bounces on my back.
“Pan-cake. Pan-cake.”
Dark eyes peer into my face, and the night before comes back in a rush.
Right. I was babysitting.
“Morning, Calum.”
His entire body is laid out across my back, head dangling from my shoulder, and I realize half a second too late that he’s going to fist my hair and tug it with all the urgency and inpatients of a toddler.
“Pan-cake!”
If I’m going to be spending any more time with this kid, then I’m going to have to develop a thick skull.
“Hold on, bud. Let me get up.”
I have to physically unfurl his fingers and let him slidedown my back as I sit up. The muscles in my neck are tight, so I squeeze the sore spots and roll my shoulders until they loosen enough for me to stretch my arms above my head without much pain.
Cal is on the floor now playing with a wooden vehicle set, rolling them across the coffee table and laughing when they fly off the end. Other than that, the rest of the house is quiet.
I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, and honestly I assumed if I did, Elias would wake me up and send me on my way.
Elias’ room is the only one in the house I haven’t been in. He locks it when he isn’t home so Calum doesn’t go in and trash the place.
“Cal gets free reign of the entire house. Everything that he isn’t allowed to touch has to go here.”
The door is cracked open, but I still knock. There’s no answer, so I try again. When that still doesn’t work, I toe it open a few more inches.
The room is dark aside from the light peering in through the curtains, and the walls are a deep indigo. It’s fitting that the comforter tossed across the bed is a dark blue and black checkered pattern.
I tell myself that this isn’t a problem; I’m not crossing some imaginary boundary. Cal is hungry, and I know fuck all about what he eats, where the cooking supplies are, or even if I’m allowed to touch any of it. It makes perfect sense for me to check with Elias first.
But when I round the side of the bed and see his drooling, sleeping face half buried under a pillow, I don’t have the heart to wake him up.
His night was long; who knows how long after coming home, and I haven’t looked at a clock yet this morning, but I get the feeling by the softness of the light outside that it’s still pretty early.
Instead of bothering him, I turn right back around and close the door exactly how I found it.
It was a flimsy excuse to want to see him. I know how to make pancakes, and I might be short, but I’m no stranger to hopping onto counters to search through cabinets.
Ten minutes later, I’ve got a bowl of pancake mix, a warm pan, and a very worn out spatula at the ready. My breakfast at home is usually some variation of toast, but Riley and I used to make pancakes and waffles and the whole spread on the mornings we got to spend together when neither of us had practice.
My chest burns, and I scrub at it as if that’ll rub the sensation away.
One day. Someone will look at me the way Riley did. Someone will accept me in my entirety, no qualms or stipulations.
I get the first pancake flipped over before I realize I need something to put it on, so I go searching through the cabinets until I find a stack of ceramic plates.
