by Ginger Scott
“Lane! Oh my god. Casey! What is he doing here?” Her eyes widen in a flash, dashing between the two of us, and then she freezes, her eyes crossing as they take in whatever the hell is on her nose. She slaps her hand over her face, cupping it.
“Get out!” she shouts, standing, and shooing at us both.
“I’m sorry, Murphy,” Lane says, sounding worried and sad.
“He was just helping me find you,” I say, holding a hand up and glancing from Lane, who’s leaving her room. He looks upset.
“Yeah, well, you did. Imagine that; you found me in my own house,” she says, her voice super pissed off and irritated.
“Hey,” I say, leaning with one arm over her doorway, blocking her escape. She still has her hand over her nose, but I can see her mouth. It’s a straight line. I look into her eyes, and they are definitely on fire, but I glance over my shoulder again—to where Lane has now rounded the corner—and look back at her to find a hint of sympathy creeping in.
She steps on her tippy toes and looks over my arm, sighing at the empty hallway.
“I’m sorry, Lane!” she shouts. “You just scared me. I’m not mad.”
Her eyes come back to me, and she deflates a little more.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, bending her pinky finger up so she can speak under her hand.
“I came to find out if you’ve listened yet. To the demo? I haven’t heard from you, and I’m kind of anxious. Plus, I made a few more…” She cuts me off.
“You made more?” she sighs.
“Wow, so…you must have really hated the first one?” I question, frankly a little surprised. Even if the dance vibe isn’t her taste, that cut was good. There was something in there for everyone to like.
“I haven’t heard it,” she finally responds with a shrug before switching the hand that covers her nose.
“Are you kidding me? That’s it; you’re listening now. And instead, I want you to hear this one,” I start, pulling my phone from my pocket. “Headphones?”
I hold my hand out, but she only crosses her arms over her chest.
“I guess I could just play it, but it sounds better right in your ears. The sound is richer,” I say, thumbing to the file on my recording app.
“Casey, I’m not interested. This thing I do, it’s not like you think. It’s a hobby, and really…I don’t want anything more from it,” she says.
Her words stop me. Not because she’s rejecting me or my help, but because of the tone in her voice. She’s lying. I recognize it—I spent a lifetime pretending I was all right with my path, and my voice sounded the same way when I told people I was going to be an engineer. Music was my hobby too. Because I was afraid to say I wished it was more out loud. Her words sound just as painful and rehearsed. I bite the tip of my tongue and engage her in a stare off, and eventually she nods her head slightly and blinks her gaze away from mine.
“What’s up with your nose?” I ask, changing topics. I’m going to try Houston’s advice and be a little less me.
“I was cleaning my pores,” she sighs, taking a few steps back into her room, away from the door. She’s wearing this old-fashioned dress that looks like something from a barn dance in the fifties, and as she falls back to sit on the edge of her bed, she reaches with one hand and tucks the plaid ruffles of the skirt under one knee. She’s like this jazzy little Dolly Parton mixed with Adele. God, I want to make her famous.
Keeping my eyes on hers, I tilt my head to one side and smirk. I stare at her until she grows suspicious of me; I look at her until she feels me looking at her and has to turn away again.
“I use soap and water,” I say. It makes her laugh once, quietly. This laugh sounds almost as nice as the notes she sings. Probably because for once, she isn’t laughing at me.
“It’s a Bioré strip,” she says, finally pulling her hand away from her face to tap on her nose. The surface sounds solid, so I hold my hand up cautiously and raise my chin, asking permission to touch her face. She scrunches her brow, but eventually shrugs.
“Sure, go ahead,” she says. I take my finger and touch the very tip of her nose, running it up the bridge and then down one side. The band is hard like plastic.
“Those things actually work?” I ask, quirking a brow.
“You’d be shocked,” she says, her lips curved in a tight and timid smile. She’s so damned cautious around me. That’s why she won’t listen to the recordings—because they came from me.
“So that’s like…what? A sticker?” I ask, moving closer in small, planned steps until I’m able to sit on the floor next to her bed.
“It’s more like a cast, but yeah—sticker works too. It yanks all the crap out of your pores,” she says, tugging on the corner of the one stuck to her nose lightly, peeling slowly until her skin is free, leaving only the pink outline of where the strip had been on her face. “See?” she says, holding it toward me in her palm.
I lean forward and glance at it. It doesn’t look like much to me, so I shrug.
“Believe me, there’s a ton of dirt on there,” she says, holding it up to her eyes and glancing at it from the side. “Come look.”
I do as she says, sitting up on my knees, and I look out over the surface of the small strip and see a few raised bumps of dirt, but it doesn’t take long for my eyes to meet her gray ones across from me. Her pupils flare, and she glances away, dropping her hand.
“No way my nose is that dirty,” I say, trying to hook her and make her forget how uncomfortable she is all at once.
“I bet it’s worse,” she laughs, standing and moving toward her small trashcan where she drops the strip inside.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s bet.”
She turns to me, her lip quirked on the side, her eyes narrowed. Her feet are bare, and they’re tiny and cute. Her toes are painted pink. I need her to listen to this demo before I forget why I’m here and start hitting on her.
“You put one of those thingies on my face, and if I have less pore junk on it than you did, you have to listen to the demo I made,” I say.
This is a stupid bet. I sound desperate, but I don’t think I care how I sound. I may very well be desperate. She holds my sightline for a beat, her mouth twisting, and her tongue pushing into the inside of her cheek.
“And if I win?” she asks.
“Then I’ll head out of here and quit popping in for surprise visits like this,” I say, knowing full well that I won’t stop, but also secretly hoping that my morning shower cleaned my face good enough to win this really weird bet.
“Lane!” she yells, her eyes still locked on mine. I start to smirk, because she’s going to take my wager, which means I’ve got at least five more minutes to talk her into trusting me.
A few seconds pass and soon I hear footsteps coming down the hallway along with a slight pant. “I was watching my show. What do you want?” Lane says, sniffling into his sleeve.
“Casey and I have a bet, and I need you to be the judge,” she smirks. I nod, because it’s fair. I also know there’s no way I’m leaving without getting my way.
“I can do that,” he says, moving into the room and sitting on the floor between us.
“We’ll be right back then,” she says, standing and nudging over her shoulder for me to follow.
I start to, but stop at the inside of her door when she’s just out of earshot, and lean down toward Lane. “We got this one, right buddy?” I say, holding out knuckles for Lane to pound. He does and laughs, but my plan falls flat instantly.
“You’re on your own. I’m the judge, and we have to remain impartial,” he says.
Shit.
“Right…right,” I smile, tongue in cheek while nodding.
I turn back to the hallway where Murphy is waiting for me, a hand on her hip, at the bathroom door.
“My brother is not a cheater,” she says flatly.
“So I’ve learned,” I admit.
Her eyes narrow on me, and she puts her small hand on my back, pushing
me into the bathroom. Her fingers are cold through my T-shirt, enough so that when she pulls her hand away, I can remember where every single finger touched me.
“Sit,” she says, pointing to the edge of the tub.
She turns on the sink, running hot water for several minutes over a small washcloth as she pulls out a new strip from the box. She lines everything up, then shuts the water off, stepping in front of me with the cloth in her hand.
“I need to steam open your pores,” she says, moving toward my face.
“How hot is that…ah…oww…never mind,” I wince as she holds the cloth over my nose, pressing into the skin as her other hand cradles the back of my neck. The smile on her face is slightly sinister, and I think she might enjoy torturing me.
This process is deeply clinical, but I’m also enjoying her hands firmly on me. I tell myself it’s because she seems comfortable, which is ultimately good for me getting her to listen to my demo. But that’s not it at all. I just like her hands on my neck, and her eyes on me. And I like her pink toes and twisty hair. I think maybe I’m smitten.
She releases her hold briefly, and I watch every movement of her hands as they pick up the strip and press it against my skin, her fingertips massaging it around my nose. I don’t care how ridiculous I must look. I hope it’s crooked and she has to do it again because I like the way her touch feels—which goes completely against my mission.
I stand quickly when she gets the strip in place and move out from the front of her, toward the mirror, toward fresh air. My head feels weird, and I’m definitely not in control. She is. That much is probably evident by the piece of plaster I let her slap on my face. I’ve gone from less Casey to pussy Casey.
“So how long does it take?” I ask, glancing at her reflection. We stare at each other like this for a breath, and I’m the first to have to look away.
Yep. Not in control.
“Five, maybe ten minutes,” she says, busying herself with cleaning up after our facial experiment. She pauses in front of me, the small box in her hands, and I reach for it on instinct, my fingers tangling with hers.
“I can put it away,” she says, shaking her head quickly and blinking again. That’s her nervous trait, and she’s done it twice since I’ve been here.
We both walk back to her room, neither of us dominant. Lane is now holding the headphones to his ears and bouncing on the bed just as Murphy was when we walked in on her. She moves to take the spot next to him and leans her head against his, just enough to hear the beat in the earpiece, and she begins to sing.
“Hey, hey, trolley, come on pick my brother up. Hey, hey dolly, how’d you like a buttercup?”
Lane laughs, and it’s deep and lengthy, and just the sound of it makes me smile, too. Murphy laughs with him, running one of her hands along the side of his face and cupping his cheek, her eyes raking over him with the most beautiful adoration. Something stabs me internally—I’m pretty sure it’s envy.
“I love your songs, Murphy,” he says, pulling the headphones loose from his ears.
“That’s not my song, Laney. It’s yours,” she says.
“Noooo,” he says, shy and bashful. Her hand still on his cheek, she tilts his head to look at her and nods yes.
“Did you just make that up?” I ask.
She shrugs, and eventually her hands fall away from her brother. He pulls the headphones back on and goes back to bouncing on her bed.
“It’s part of a song I wrote for him when I was in high school. He had bad dreams,” she says, her eyes flitting to me briefly, then back to the carpet at her toes, which are circling in the threads, pushing them flat into shapes. I sit back down where I had before, on her floor, and try not to stare at her toes.
“What’s wrong with him?” I ask, scrunching one side of my face hearing how my question sounds. “I mean…I don’t mean that in the wrong way, I was just curious.”
“It’s okay,” she smiles quickly, her mouth falling into a soft line—a sweet one. Her lips are pink to match her toes. I swallow and look down at the carpet and begin pressing my hands into the fibers, to make shapes, too. I need to stay away from her lips and toes.
“Lane has Down’s,” she says, and I nod, because that’s what I had assumed. I just didn’t want to be wrong. “That’s why I stuck around the house after graduation. Well that, and I don’t really have a career path.”
I glance up at her just as she looks my direction with nervous laughter, and our eyes lock in a way that makes me feel it in my gut, for just a second. I look back down to the carpet.
“He’s only two years younger than me, but he’s still just a sophomore in high school, and there are just some things that are going to take him a while to get through,” she says, looking up at him with nothing but love in her eyes.
“He seems like a good brother,” I say.
“He is,” she breathes, relaxing her weight into where she sits and turning her eyes back toward me, more certain this time. “You have sisters?”
“Four,” I say, eyes wide. I roll up the right sleeve of the flannel I’m wearing and turn my arm over to the series of marks and scars on that arm. “They’re responsible for most of these,” I laugh, running a finger over the proof of stitches, glass cuts and a burn from the time my oldest sister, Christina, tried to convince me that letting hot oil dry on my skin proved I was a man. All it proves is that yeah, hot shit burns.
“Wow, they seem mean,” she says with one short laugh.
“Nah, I deserved almost everything I got,” I say, rolling my sleeve back down.
“Almost, huh?” she says, her head resting to the side.
“Yeah…almost,” I say, stopping short of unleashing the mountain of shit that is my family life and the disappointment duckling role that’s all mine.
Silence settles in quickly, and soon we’re both poking at the strands of her carpet again. I glance at her toes in my periphery, and it makes me laugh lightly that we’re both nervous now. I pat out the design I’ve been pressing into her floor and lean back on my hands, watching her brother live in bliss.
“What’s he listening to?” I ask.
“Oh, uhm…” she pulls her iPod into her hands and waves at him that it’s okay to keep listening. “Ratatat.”
She sets the device back down and smiles at me.
“You like Ratatat?” I ask, quirking a brow in disbelief. I was expecting maybe Ellie Goulding or Ingrid Michaelson—something more girly, I guess.
“I like everything,” she says, a freeing shake of her head. Her hands move to the twists on either side of her head, and she pulls out the pins holding them in place, her long hair falling in slow motion into glossy purple twists that she rustles out with her fingers. I am mesmerized, and when her gray eyes hit mine again, it feels like someone’s taken the paddles to my chest.
She’s in charge now.
“I’ll remember that,” I say, catching my bottom lip between my teeth. Her eyes flicker in question. “That you like everything.”
Her chest expands with a slow draw of air, and she holds it. I don’t look away before her this time. I work extra hard not to, because I suck at losing, and for a while here, I was. This may have just become about more than music. I might be all right with that. I’m sure it’s a bad idea, but I’m also sure I don’t care.
“I think it’s time,” she says, tapping her brother on the shoulder, eyes fluttering in fast blinks. Nerves—that’s her nerves.
“So what, I just…” I reach to pull the strip away, but she leaps forward, placing her slender hand on mine, stopping me—stopping everything in me. She’s touching me, and I’ve just ceased breathing.
“No, you’ll mess it up if you do it too fast…just…” she pauses with her eyes on mine. I work to be the last to look away again, to win the battle twice in a row. Her tongue makes a small pass along her bottom lip, and I watch it. Paddles to the chest. I lose.
“Let me do it,” she says.
“Okay,” I whisper.
I crawl up on my knees, and she does the same in front of me, placing cool hands along my face. I close my eyes, because I’m pretty sure I have to. When I open them, I catch her looking at my shut lids, moving her attention quickly to the strip on my nose and her other hand.
“Is it going to hurt?” I ask.
She breathes in slowly through her nose, eyes coming to mine once more before glancing away.
“Most certainly,” she whispers, her mouth serious, and her eyes lost somewhere between worried and maybe a little sad.
“Ready?” she asks. I shake my head no lightly against the touch of her hand, and our eyes meet. For a small second, I think we might be talking about something else—I think we might both be talking about the same thing.
Without warning, she begins to pull the strip away, and the tug burns a little. It also wakes me up and helps me focus—my sample, her music, the point of coming here. I need to remember that, but then, she’s done with the strip, and her hands have left my face feeling cold. Her touch is gone and I miss it.
I shake my head, rattled by feeling something other than ambition and drive. It’s not that I’m attracted to her. Of course, I’m attracted to her. I’m attracted to lots of girls. It’s that I’m more than attracted to her.
“Well? What’s the verdict?” I ask.
She steps over to her trashcan and pulls her original strip out and lays them both on the small desk near her window and calls her brother over.
“What do you think, Lane? Is his worse than mine?” she asks. I step up behind them, my heart beating hard, because now I’m not so sure I can lie my way into bending the rules, into sticking around longer than she’d like. Even though now I want to more, for even greedier reasons.
“His is gross,” Lane laughs. I laugh, too, but it’s fake. I’m gross…okay, fine…whatever. Does that mean I lose? Does that mean I don’t get time to feel that hand on my face again?
Music. I’m here for music. I close my eyes as I stand behind them both and try to clear my head.