16
“Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked, for what felt like the thousandth time since we’d left the restaurant.
“I’m fine,” Kristo assured me, but he had barely spoken a word to me since we’d left a few hours before. What was going on with him? Had I managed to piss him off in some way? Had I done something wrong? I felt like it had gone well, as well as could be expected, yet he was sitting there, hands on the wheel and gaze fixed dead ahead, looking as though someone had jammed a ramrod up his ass.
“I liked your dad.” I tried to change tack. “And his wife. They seemed nice.”
“Yeah, well, don’t get used to her,” Kristo remarked. “They’ll probably be broken up before we are.”
“They seemed to really like each other,” I offered, but he didn’t respond. I sank back into the seat. I was already tired from the day we’d had, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to spend the rest of the evening trying to coax conversation out of him if he didn’t want to give it to me.
We arrived back at the apartment, barely exchanging another word, and I made my way upstairs and into my room, peeling off the fancy clothes he had bought for me. I was so sure the evening had gone well, but now that we were back and he was acting weird, I wasn’t sure if I was reading into it the wrong way. Maybe I had fucked up without knowing it, said something to his father to insult him that Kristo’s dad was too polite to call out at the time? But then, I wasn’t going to learn if he wouldn’t talk to me about this shit, so what the hell was I supposed to do?
I carefully hung the dress up. It was beautiful, really beautiful, but I couldn’t have thought of anything less suited to me as a person. Whenever he dressed me up to meet his family, whether it was buying a collection of dresses for me to wear or just casting his eye over my look to give me his opinion, I found myself feeling the way I had that first night we’d met. Out of place. Sexy, sure, but like I was wearing some uniform required of me by the world at large.
I pulled on some comfortable clothes and went to speak to my baby ferret. Kneeling down in front of his cage, I stuck my fingers through the bars so he could come up and snuffle my fingers. He did so gratefully, as though he’d been waiting for my return since I’d left the house in the first place. Well, at least one man in this house didn’t seem to mind me talking to him. His little whiskers tickled my fingertips, and I couldn’t help smiling.
I realized I needed to top off his food bowl and headed through to the living room, racking my brains as to where I’d put his food. I planted my hands on my hips and surveyed the room, but there was nothing there that I needed. I started to make my way through the house until I reached the spare room and found what I was looking for.
I paused for a moment as I looked around that spare room. He had been kind enough to sleep in there as long as I needed the bed to myself, and I had barely been in here as a result, guessing he needed his privacy, given all that was going on. But what caught my eye was all the art stacked at the back wall of the room, paintings, some framed and some not, in a variety of styles, charcoal sketches, full-on oil portraits, some more avant-garde stuff. I glanced around to make sure he wasn’t going to come in and bust me and then leafed through the lot of them. There were so many, at least two or three dozen, and yet the walls of this place stood utterly empty. Why hadn’t he hung those up? He had obviously spent a huge stack of cash on acquiring these works, and his apartment still looked as though he had just moved in, as though he spent as little time there as possible.
I went back to feed Toby, thoughts humming away. I could hear Kristo in the shower, which would give me a little bit of time to get started. If I was his wife, then this place was my home, and I wasn’t going to let it sit around looking like a doctor’s waiting room for a moment longer.
Making my way back through to the bedroom, I gathered as much of the art as I could and moved through to lay it out over my bed. There was so much to work with, so many styles and techniques, I could have themed each room totally different and still come up with at least five or six pictures for every one, which was exactly what I intended to do.
I sorted out the pictures into piles of those I thought would work well together. Soon enough, I found I had enough to decorate every room of the apartment, and I started carrying them through each room, working out which ones would look best where, the color schemes that would best draw out the potential of this place.
“What are you doing?” Kristo asked, eyeing me from behind the breakfast bar where he was sipping on a beer. I shrugged.
“I saw all this art, and I thought it was a shame not to hang it,” I replied casually. I half-expected him to tell me off for getting my hands all over his stuff, but he just shrugged.
“Fair enough.”
I continued around the apartment until I had decided exactly what was going to go where. After the last few weeks, it was good to do something that was so totally practical, so hands-on. When I was done, I headed back through to the kitchen and stood in front of him.
“I need to borrow your toolbox,” I announced, and he cocked his head at me.
“And what makes you think I’d have a toolbox?” he remarked, the flicker of a smile passing over his face. I rolled my eyes.
“Because you’re a modern man who can handle his own shit?” I remarked, and he got to his feet with a slight sigh and headed through to the spare room.
“I might have one that my stepmom gave me years ago for Christmas,” he called through, and I heard him moving things around in there. “But I don’t know if I’ve ever used it.”
“It’s all right. I know what I’m doing,” I called back, and a moment or two later, he emerged holding a large plastic box.
“This what you’re looking for?”
After he placed it down on the counter, I flicked it open and surveyed the equipment inside, nails, a hammer, some screws.
“Yep, this’ll work.” I nodded. “But I’m going to need a little help.”
“I’m sure I can manage that,” he replied, and soon enough, we had retreated into my bedroom to start hanging the first half-dozen pictures in there. It wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined our very first encounter in here would go, but I would take it for the time being. He was paying attention to me, at least, and that was more than I could say for a few hours ago.
“You know, you have good taste in art,” I remarked, taking a step back to check that one of the larger modern pieces we’d just hung was straight. He was holding, and I was hammering, and the two of us made a pretty solid partnership, if I did say so myself.
“You think?” He stepped back to join me and cocked his head at the piece. “I don’t really know. Sometimes, I really like most of the stuff I get, and sometimes, I wonder if I’m just being conned to hell by the people making this stuff, you know?”
“Well, I like it.” I waved my hand. “And it’ll look better when it’s up on the walls, anyway. Art’s meant to be looked at, not hidden away.”