9. Naomi

CHAPTER 9

Naomi

I 'm touching Andrea's hair.

I'm wearing plastic gloves that are three sizes too big and sliding globs of slimy purple goop between my fingers, but still, I'm touching her hair, and I think the contact might have me on the verge of cardiac arrest.

That might also be due to the view I have of her bare lower back as she sits facing away from me on the edge of the tub. I almost hit the floor tiles when she called me in here and I found her wearing nothing but a pair of baggy old sweatpants and a dark red towel draped over her shoulders and chest. She has a couple hairclips securing the fabric in place, but it still feels like every inch of my body is hyperaware that there's nothing but a swath of terrycloth covering her boobs.

The thought makes me cringe at myself even as an ache starts to build somewhere low in my stomach. I'm supposed to be dyeing her hair, not imagining what she'd look like if one of the hairclips popped open and the edges of the towel slipped down a few inches.

She trusted me enough to ask for my help, and in return, I'm acting like a total creep.

For about the millionth time in my life, I marvel at how simple it must be to be a straight guy, to have your attraction to women considered normal even when it shows up at an inconvenient or inappropriate time. If I was a straight guy, people would take it as a given that I'd be fighting not to drop my gaze to the soft skin of Andrea's lower back, but as it stands, I have to worry about being the predatory lesbian turning an innocent moment of ‘girl time' into something gross simply because I'm thinking about how pretty she is.

And how hot she is.

And how much I wish I was touching more than her hair.

I shriek as purple flecks splatter the towel and the front of my shirt. It takes me a second to realize I squeezed the clump of her hair I'm gripping too hard and sprayed us both.

She glances over her shoulder and gasps before covering her mouth to stifle a laugh.

"Oh no," she says between giggles. "It's on your face. Go wipe it off before it turns your skin purple."

I rush to the mirror above the sink and see I've sprouted a violet-coloured goatee. I lift a hand to wipe the goop away, forgetting I'm still wearing the gloves coated in dye. I end up with a huge smear streaking my chin.

Andrea doesn't bother holding back her laughter now. She cackles as I rip the gloves off and lunge for the toilet paper. I pull off a long strip and dampen a wad in the sink before scrubbing at my face.

"Is it really going to dye my face purple?" I demand, my eyes bugging out when I see the faint mauve stain on my chin. I scrub harder.

"Not forever," she assures me. "Try some soap. You got it fast enough that I don't think it'll stain, and if it does, it won't last long."

I grab the bar of soap from its little gold dish beside the tap and start rubbing it in circles along my chin and jaw. My skin looks clear after I've rinsed off, but I still go in for another round with the soap to be safe.

"Make sure you leave some skin on there," Andrea says with a snort.

Before I can stop and ask myself if it's way too nerdy to make a Shakespeare reference, I raise my fist in my best Lady Macbeth impression and recite, "Out! Out, damned spot! Out, I say!"

My cheeks burn with regret an instant later.

Andrea keeps laughing from her perch by the tub. "Wow. Tell me you're going to be an English major without telling me you're going to be an English major."

I risk a peek at her and see she's swung her legs around so she can face me.

"You know Macbeth?" I ask.

She makes a show out of rolling her eyes. "I did take four years of high school English. I have a general awareness of Shakespeare. I even performed in A Midsummer Night's Dream in grade nine."

I straighten up from where I've been hunched over the sink and turn to face her. "Oh my god, really? Who did you play?"

She chews on her lip for a second before she answers. "Puck."

Now it's my turn to laugh. Somehow, I can picture it perfectly: Andrea leaping around the stage in some kind of leafy ensemble with a pair of little horns on her head.

"Did you lose a bet or something?" I ask.

I doubt she was a drama club kid in high school.

"Um, excuse me, but I specifically auditioned for the role of Puck."

She places a hand on her chest, and I can't tell if the offense in her tone is fake or not. There's something sincere about the disappointment in her eyes as she squints them at me.

Or maybe I'm just bad at reading faces and think everyone is mad at me all the time. Either way, I apologize.

"Sorry. I just didn't think you'd have been into nerdy stuff like that in high school. You seem like you were probably way cooler than me in grade nine."

Her posture softens a little, and she lets out a quiet chuckle. "To be fair, I mostly only auditioned because I thought it would be hilarious. We'd just done A Midsummer Night's Dream in English class, I was like, why the hell not? It turned out to be one of the most fun things I ever did in high school, even though my friends never let me live it down."

My breath catches when she pauses to turn that deadly smirk on me for a second.

"Plus, I was a really sexy Puck."

Goosebumps break out on my arms, and I have to swallow down a very un sexy squawk when she swings her legs back into the tub to give me another look at her back.

"There's an extra pair of gloves in the box," she says.

I fish around for the gloves before returning to my hair duties. Due to Andrea's heads up about dye mishaps, I'm wearing one of the only black shirts I own: a faded t-shirt from a spelling bee they held at my junior high in the seventh grade.

By some miracle, I managed to make it all the way to my elimination without bolting to the bathroom to puke. That spelling bee was one of the last school events I participated in before my anxiety got bad enough to make me give up on all my hobbies besides reading.

Not that I ever had many hobbies besides reading, but stuff like spelling bees and poetry club were out of the question once we all started turning into judgmental teenagers and every day made me more and more aware of just how far from normal I was.

"So were you a high school thespian?" Andrea asks as I massage a clump of dye into a spot I missed near her ear.

"Oh, definitely not," I answer. "I'm not really the get up on stage type."

I tense up, bracing for her to drawl the classic refrain of, Oh, so you're shyyyy?

I don't know why people say that. As fellow shy girls, Priya and I are always asking ourselves what kind of answer anyone expects. That question always comes out sounding like a jeer or a taunt, like whoever's asking wants me to either take the bait and reveal I am in fact concealing my true nature as an extrovert or just sit there and mumble an answer that makes them feel justified in cooing at me like I'm a toddler.

Andrea doesn't say anything like that. She doesn't even ask why I don't want to be in a play or how I know I wouldn't like it if I've never tried.

She just nods and says, "Fair enough."

For a moment, I'm so stunned I freeze in the middle of running my fingers down a lock of her hair.

"Is something wrong?" she asks, turning to glance at me over her shoulder and nearly pulling the hair out of my hands. "Do I have a massive split end or something? I probably should have gotten a trim before we did this."

I shake my head. "Oh, no. No, nothing's wrong."

She squints at me for a moment before turning back around. "You good, Waters?"

She even makes the simple act of calling me by my last name sound sexy. The more time I spend around her, the more convinced I become that Andrea King could make literally any word in the English language sound sexy if she put her mind to it.

"Just, uh, finishing up," I say.

I spend the next few minutes double-checking to make sure each layer of her hair has been fully saturated and then step back so she can stand up.

"I believe we're finished," I say, "but you should check it yourself to be sure."

She moves past me to the mirror and grins as she tilts her head back and forth.

"You did great. I mean, I'm trusting you on the back. You could be totally screwing me over there, but I'm choosing to believe you're not."

I hold up my hands, still sheathed in the goop-covered gloves. "So I can officially take these off now?"

She shrugs. "Unless you want to go purple too."

I must make some kind of hilariously alarmed face at that; she doubles over laughing before she straightens up and wheezes, "Or not."

"I've already signed myself up for either a piercing or a tattoo," I say as I step over to the garbage can and drop the gloves inside. "I've got to keep myself in check or even my family won't recognize me by the time I go off to university."

The sentence slips out before I can stop it, and it's like my whole brain glitches for a second when I realize I haven't thought about school even once in the past half hour. Then my heart races like it's trying to make up for lost time.

Andrea raises one of her fingers and wags it at me. "Hey now. What did we promise each other?"

I swallow and nod. "Right. No school talk. Just summer."

"Just summer," she echoes before turning to lead the way out of the bathroom. "I have to leave this stuff in for thirty minutes before we wash it out, so let's have some lunch."

I follow her down to the kitchen, and we settle on cold cut sandwiches with some pickles on the side as our meal. Andrea adds the last part after making fun of the several bottles of pickles I've stocked the fridge with.

"Two of those were already here!" I protest as she makes a show out of placing each and every bottle on the island in front of me.

"You can be honest with me about your addiction, Naomi," she says as she lays a hand on my arm. "This is a safe space."

I try to glare at her, but instead, I let out a tittering laugh as all my senses zone in on the brush of her fingers against my forearm.

We set up a sandwich assembly line on the island and work side by side, me still in my dye-stained shirt and her still wearing nothing but her sweatpants and the towel. She's not even touching me now, but I'm still aware of every movement of her elbow where it rests a couple inches from mine.

I've got to get this under control.

Even her freaking elbow is driving me crazy, and if I'm not careful, I really am going to end up accidentally doing something creepy enough to have her packing her bags.

"I'm eating outside," I announce once I've finished my sandwich. I do a scan of the kitchen for any sign of the cats as I head over to the sliding door with my plate in my hands.

I'm already sitting down on one of the deck couches when I realize a normal person would have asked if she wants to eat outside too, but she doesn't seem put off; she pokes her head out the door and asks if she can join me a moment later.

"You forgot your side dish," she says, holding up one of the pickle jars. "I didn't have a wagon to haul the whole selection out, so you'll have to make due."

I let out a chuckle that only sounds slightly strangled, and we spend the next few minutes sitting in silence as we eat. I wonder if I should be talking, but Andrea looks content with the quiet as she sits cross-legged on the couch beside me.

"Do you think they ever actually use that barbeque station?" she asks.

I follow her gaze to the expansive set-up that looks worthy of a Grill Masters episode. "I mean, probably? It looks like it cost a lot, at least."

I'm still not sure what you should and shouldn't say about people this wealthy, and I'm about to apologize in case I was rude, but Andrea nods and grunts in agreement before I get a chance.

"He probably does, like, boys nights with Sandy's sons out there. Steaks and football and the stock market and stuff."

I only just manage to hold in a laugh at the caricature of manliness. Judging by the way the house is decorated, I was thinking the barbeque pit was more of a conversation hub for Peter and his fellow art collectors to chat about their pieces while eating shish kebabs and drinking wine.

"Ugh, sorry," Andrea says before groaning as she slumps against the back of the couch. "I sound so angsty. It's just like…they have to have something I don't, right?"

I stop staring at the barbeque station and turn to look at her instead. Her eyes have gone out of focus, and her face is pinched with a pain I've never seen in her before. For the first time, my urge to touch her has nothing to do with how pretty she is.

I want to cup her chin in my hand and smooth out every single line in her skin. I want to use my fingertips as erasers to wipe out every trace of the hurt inside her.

"Sorry," she repeats as she flashes me a quick smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "I'm just rambling. I didn't even mean to say that out loud."

She lunges for her sandwich and shoves a huge bite in her mouth before she starts chewing way too fast.

"You think he likes them better than you?"

The idea is so absurd I have to check if that's really what she means. There's no way Peter could spend nineteen years as her dad and not realize how amazing she is. I've known her for less than two weeks, and I'm already letting her take me along on some crazy adventure to complete a bucket list my anxiety thinks I should throw in the trash.

She's unstoppable.

She keeps chewing for so long I start to think I'm not getting an answer. I've popped the last bite of sandwich crust into my mouth when she finally speaks.

"I wish I knew what he likes." Her voice sounds like it's coming from far away even though she's sitting right beside me, like it's echoing from some deep part of her she usually keeps locked up. "My mom makes it clear when I don't live up to her standards, but my dad… It's like there's some code I'm supposed to know how to crack. I don't think he dis likes me. We just feels so…distant, like there's this gap between us I don't know how to close."

She looks so lost, like the couch cushion she's sitting on has drifted out to sea with nothing but miles and miles of empty water surrounding her.

Something she said while I was lying on this deck the night we got way too high drifts into my mind.

She said she was lonely. She looks like the kind of person who'd never need to spend a single moment alone unless she wanted to, but I've spent enough time feeling isolated in crowded rooms to know that's not really how loneliness works. You can listen to a hundred voices speaking around you and still feel like no one can hear yours.

I want to reach for her hand. I want to thread my fingers through hers and pull her back, just to let her know I float away sometimes too.

Just to let her know she's not all on her own.

Only I'm not sure I'm brave enough to do that. I'm not sure if I can find the words. People in books and poems always make it seem so easy to know what to say.

That's part of why I love reading so much; it makes everything seem easy, but in reality, words rarely show up when I need them, so instead, I blurt the first thing that comes to mind when I glance away from her and find myself staring at the barbeque station again.

"My dad tried to teach me and my brother to use the barbeque once."

I see her shift to squint at me out of the corner of my eye.

"I blew up my brother's eyebrows. He was fine. He just had no eyebrows for like three months."

A moment of silence passes before Andrea starts laughing so hard she doubles over and clutches her stomach.

"Wow, Naomi," she says once she can talk again. "How did you know that's exactly what I needed to hear?"