Page 33 of Flirtasaurus
“You’re very welcome. Stay safe out there, killa!” I say, and then—God help me—I spank his other cheek. In all fairness, though, spank is a generous term. It was more of a “good game, buddy” kind of smack. You know the kind I’m talking about.
This time, he doesn’t say anything. He just stares at me blankly. But am I imagining that his lips are starting to curl up? I don’t think I am. He straightens his lips, turns away, and continues up the stairs. With much less stomping this time, I note.
“Here we are!” I say as I breeze past him and unlock the door to my apartment.
He follows me inside and lets the door click shut behind him. As I kick off my shoes and hang up my purse, I notice that he’s just standing in the foyer scanning the place. Is it pronounced foy-yer or foy-yay? Foy-yay if it’s fancy, foy-yer if it’s not, right? So, in this case, definitely a foy-yer. Oh, who am I kidding. It’s a three by three square with a coat hook and a shoe rack.
“Wow, your apartment is—”
“Weird? Old? Dated?” I feel like I sound defensive.
“No, actually. I was going to say… classic.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Most people in their twenties have those same square Ikea side tables and that little rolling cart thingy for their Goldschläger—or sometimes toiletries, don’t they? But you… you have a… gosh, what do you even call that, a… china cabinet? And what are you displaying inside the china cabinet thingy? Rocks?” He’s squinting over the boxes.
“Want to put those down?”
“Sure, yeah.” He moves toward my table, then stops short. “Oh, wait. Shoes off? Do you want me to…?”
“Oh, are you staying?”
“Staying?” he asks, somewhat suggestively.
“Not like for the night! I meant for like a few minutes!”
“Okay. So to be clear, you’renotasking me to spend the night? Because I thought for sure you were asking me to spend the night.” He smirks.
“No! You know what, you should probably just—”
“Calliope, I’m kidding. And I’d love to stay for ‘like a few minutes,’ thank you. Since you asked me so nicely.”
“I didn’t actually ask you to—”
“Too late! They’re off.” With that, he toes off his shoes and manages to steer them with his feet to line up right next to mine. Big and small. He walks farther into the room and places the boxes on the table, then walks over to the cabinet to take a closer look through the glass.
“Those aren’t just any rocks. That’s my fossil collection. Been collecting them since I was seven. And the china cabinet thingy is my grandma Darla’s hutch. It was her grandma Harriet’s before that.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, I guess I just generally really like old shit. Dinosaurs. Furniture.”
“I can understand that.”
“Oh, hey. You mentioned Ikea before?”
“Yeah?”
“Unacceptable. Ralph, Ikea is the Swedish devil. Don’t give in to the Swedish devil’s particle board promises. You’re better than that.”
“Noted,” he says with a chuckle that he’s clearly trying to stifle.
“I’m serious, dude! Did you know an Ikea Billy bookcase is sold every ten seconds?”
“I did not know that, no.”
“Well, now you do. Don’t let yourself be a statistic.”
