I observe him quietly from the doorway. A niggle of worry burns my stomach. His eyes are darting from one piece of glassware to the next. He touches each one, lifts it up to the light to examine it, then places it with a different group of glasses or dishes.
“Hey, you.” My voice comes out louder than I intended.
He looks up and smiles crookedly.
“Oh. Hey.” He runs his hand through his hair.
I move to stand on the other side of the island. “I thought you were making breakfast?”
He nods quickly. “I am. I was. But when I took out the coffee mugs, they didn’t match. And I hate that.”
“They don’t have to match, hon. I’m good with anything.”
He moves a few salad bowls around, then stacks them within each other.
“No, they should match.”
Reece appears in the doorway, and rolls his eyes. “Fuck me. Not this again,” he says.
Blue holds up a glass. “One of these is missing. There’s an odd number. There’s five.”
Reece blows out an exasperated breath. “You dropped it when you were wasted last year, remember? You stepped in the broken glass and bled all over the place. Guess who cleaned it up?”
“I don’t remember that.” Blue doesn’t look away from the glass he’s inspecting.
“Because you were drunk off your ass.” Reece plucks a beige coffee mug from the assortment on the counter. “Stop sorting all our shit, Blue.”
“Sorting?” I repeat.
Reece fills the coffee maker with water and adds coffee grinds from a marble canister on the counter before he answers.
“Welcome to my world.” He gestures toward Blue with his hand. “His OCD gets in an uproar and he starts to sort everything by size or shape or color or who the hell knows what. A few weeks ago it was the towels.”
“We had one white towel and sixteen gray ones,” Blue explains, shaking his head as if it’s absurdity.
“What’s wrong with one white towel?” I’m almost afraid to hear the answer.
“It’s just…unbalanced.”
Reece and I exchange a glance. He leans against the counter and shakes his head as Blue continues explaining.
“Everything was a fucking mess in the cabinets. The glasses were mixed with the coffee mugs, the salad bowls were mixed up with the ice cream bowls. The tall glasses were in the front, the short ones in the back. Why can’t you just put things back where they belong?”
His roommate shrugs. “Because it doesn’t bother me, bro. I’ve got more important shit on my mind than to worry about stacking things by color and shape. We have a maid, tell her to do it.”
“Does it really bother you that much, Blue?” I ask.
He looks at me with apology in his eyes. Like a little boy caught doing something he didn’t want anyone to see. “Not all the time. But I wanted things to be nice for you. Mismatched mugs make us look fucked up. I’m not fucked up anymore.”
“She knows we’re not a resort, man. She doesn’t give a shit about mugs.” He turns to me. “Do you?”
“No… of course not. But I can understand why he wants things to be nice.”
He’s trying to impress me, that’s all. He used to have nothing, now he has things and he wants it all nice. I don’t see any harm in that. And I absolutely hate when I have a mismatched number of socks. Where do the missing socks go? And why do they never resurface? It’s no big deal if Blue feels that way about other household items.
“I’ll help you put all this away,” I say. “Then we can have breakfast. I’m starving.”
He chews the inside of his lip and glances at all the items spread out over the counter. A moment ago he seemed so determined to tackle this self-imposed task, but now he appears overwhelmed.
“I’m going to go have a smoke first,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”
I nod and watch him go out into the backyard through the French doors in the adjoining dining room.
“Does he do this a lot?” I ask Reece.
“Not really. It’s been worse since he stopped smoking weed. I think that used to calm him down.”
“It’s good that he quit, though. I’m proud of him.”
“I am too. It’s a bad scene when he uses and I’ve battled with him over it for years. I think he’s just got some anxiety issues and without the drugs to calm it down, he gets a little batshit.”
“He’s okay, though, right?” I start to put the glasses back in the cabinet, hoping I’m putting them back the way Blue wants them.
Reece sips his coffee. “Seriously? He’s brilliant. He’s better than he’s ever been. The new material he’s been writing kicks ass. And he’s actually living life now. He wants you and his daughter to be part of his life. That’s a big thing for him, to let people get close. I think he just needs to find some balance and figure out how to deal with stress without using drugs and alcohol to fix all his problems.”