Yes, I'd Fancy Your Company But You Know I'm Rubbish

When I came back from the kitchen, I found Cedric, or as he liked to be called, Ced, glued to my t.v. watching some random show that wasn’t even funny.

“I’m out of snacks, but I do have cheese,” I said plonking myself next to him on the couch.

He eyed me warily before believing me. He opened his hand and motioned me to give him the cheese. He was indeed surprised to see that I wasn’t joking and that in fact, I only had cheese in my fridge.

“Okay, I can do a lot with cheese. Do you have bread?” He asked hopefully.

I shook my head. He sighed.

“I really don’t want to ask you this,” he continued, “but do you have some flour?”

I was kind of confused. Flour? I got up to go to the kitchen and he followed me closely.

“Strangely, I do.”

“Okay then. We’re going to make some bread.”

And we did make some bread, in the end. We melted the cheese and put it on the bread, and it was really good. Then I remembered the recent events--recent as in this morning--and laughed to myself.

“I can’t believe we were so close to a gas station!”

“Uh, what? Oh yeah, that was funny. But you should’ve seen your face then, that was priceless.”

I punched him playfully, and while he was distracted in rubbing his arm, I quickly ate the rest of his sandwich. He pretended to be mad at me for ten minutes and kept his eyes on the t.v.

“I hope that you’re aware of the fact that you’re not sleeping here,” I said getting up to put our glasses in the kitchen sink.

He turned to look at me and gave me a puppy dog face. ‘Avoid his eyes. Avoid his eyes.’ I kept on repeating to myself in my head. But in the end I did look at his eyes, and I gave up.

“Alright, just for tonight.”

‘Shit!’ I thought. This boy was going to make me do anything with those eyes.

Ced slept on the couch while I slept in my bed.
That night I had a very peculiar dream. I dreamed that I was flying and Ced was flying right next to me. Then a big storm came up and I ended up alone, as usual, in some deserted island. I tried to speak up, but no sound would come out of my mouth, and I’d see my dad and his wife---I never saw her so her face was an imaginary one--- and they’d be watching me with smirks on their faces.
I woke up with a cry and Ced barged into my room with a karate kick. That made me laugh out loud, but then I became silent, and wary again. From the way I was sweaty and my bed sheets were messy, he could deduct that my dream had not been a pleasant one. He came in and sat down next to me on my bed. He murmured something in my ear and lay me down on the bed. He lay down next to me and forced me, gently, to put my head on his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around my waist and held me close.I didn’t sleep much. I couldn’t, not because of my nightmare, but because of something he’d said and the way he said it. When he murmured those words into my ear, I felt his lips brush past my cheek and slightly touch my ear. As soon as his lips made contact with my skin, my heart skipped a beat that must have been 20 meters high. And then he’d murmured those three words into my ear. They were so different from what all the people who cared about me and then eventually walked out on me had ever told me. My mother, my father, my best friend, and me. Yeah that’s right, me. I was loosing myself. But those words flew around in my head and were just stuck there, as if they’d never go away.

“I’m not leaving,” he had murmured gently into my ear.

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Ced had been ‘sleeping over’, as he liked to call it, at my house for more than a week and I was starting to get suspicious about him actually having somewhere to sleep other than my house. Unfortunately, every time I tried to bring up the subject of his personal life with him, like his home and his sexy---well, I thought so--- accent, he always shrugged it off and gingerly changed the subject. One day, after our shifts were over, we were sitting on the rooftop of the building, looking at the sky turn purple. It was getting chilly but I was really enjoying myself, which was something I hadn’t done for a long time. I was smiling as “All you need is love” from The Beatles started playing on my ipod and a nice breeze gently enveloped me.

“You know,” Ced said, “this is the first time I see you smiling.”

I just nodded; I was enjoying myself too much to come up with a good comeback.

“I like you better when you’re in a good mood,” he said softly.

“I don’t like you at all,” I joked.

His face broke into a grin and he rested his head on my shoulder, once again.

“Yeah, you don’t like me my arse,” he said.

I was immediately thrown into a laughing fit. He looked at me like I was nuts, which made me laugh harder, and fell off the recliner.

“I just find the way you say ass hilarious,” I said with teary eyes, “Ow! Now my stomach hurts.”

I regretted saying that, because he saw it as a cue to poke me very hard and to fall off the recliner again. I got fake angry and decided to use my two years of judo class on him. I took his arm, as if I were helping him up, and put one foot behind his leg and pushed him down. He fell down immediately, and I sat down on him. I felt powerful.

“Ha, ha, ha. Very funny, now get off of me.”

“Not until you tell me more about yourself, like your home and your accent that you tried to hide at the beginning.”

He rolled his eyes and said, “This is bollocks! Why do you want to know so much about me? It’s not like I’m your boyfriend or something.”

This hit me hard. This hit me very hard. Why did I want to know about him? My old self couldn’t have cared less about him.

“You’re right,” I said getting off him, “we should start heading home. It’s getting dark. By the way, you go to your home and I go to mine. Okay?”

And for once he didn’t use his begging eyes with me. He just got up and followed me to my car. Maybe asking him about himself and his life was too much, maybe I had stepped over the line and I was only supposed to know some limited amount of information about him. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to know him.