Author's Chapter Notes:
So I know I wasn't promising anything, but apparently I haven't been able to get this off my brain. And I finished my ethics paper, so I don't have to feel guilty. Yay!
As with before, some of this may or may not be based on a true story. :)
Enjoy!
As with before, some of this may or may not be based on a true story. :)
Enjoy!
-
Jim’s such a boy. She’s always known this about him and it’s always been one of his most endearing traits. His sweet tooth, for instance. The week he started, he bought a bag of Skittles every morning during their break and shared them with her. The next Monday, she brought in a jar of Jelly Bellys, set them out, and waited.
He always eats three at a time. She noticed this years ago. Never two, never four, always three. Orange, yellow, green. Pops the first one in his mouth while he leans over to say something to her, surreptitiously closing his fingers over the other two like he’s trying not to get caught doing something bad.
She spent five years making sure she always had a proper mixture and amount to lure him up to her desk. Sometimes, though, he’d reach for the jar but fall a bit short as he leaned in, his eyes bright with mischief or amusement or incredulity, and she suspected he hadn’t really come up for jellybeans at all.
* * * *
He doesn’t like to be barefoot. He wears socks to bed, even. And it’s driving her crazy. Maybe she’s weird or whatever, but she loves his feet. They’re long and slender, like his body, like his hands. There’s hair on his insteps, a sprinkling on his toes. But the only times she ever gets to see them are in the brief moments before and after his showers.
She’s rubbing her arches up and down over his shins, and he’s making those protesting sounds in his throat like he’s complaining about her cold feet but really he’s smiling, and it’s just like every night they’ve gone to sleep together until she moves her right foot down to just above his ankle and hooks her big toe under his sock, tugging it down over his heel and off with a triumphant grin.
He lifts his head to look down at her. “What are you doing?”
She runs her arch over his foot, sliding back across his calf. “I wanna feel your feet.”
“What? Why?” He’s not upset. He seems puzzled.
“I need to… I like… your skin,” she tries to explain, but she’s a little embarrassed.
“My feet?” His eyebrows shoot up until they practically disappear into his hairline. “Really?”
“Yes,” she says firmly, deciding to just tell him what she wants. “Just…lose the socks. Please. Just in bed. For me. Please?” She smiles up at him over her shoulder, gives him doe eyes.
He stares at her for a long minute until she’s starting to feel pretty foolish, but then he smiles and mutters, “Wow, foot fetish,” in a low voice full of teasing, and she grins and slides her toes along his other ankle to pull that sock off too.
* * * *
She had no idea he was so into zombie movies. She thought she was well-versed in Jim’s taste in music and film, but this is some kind of secret guilty pleasure he’s never shared with her until now. He has a whole shelf of them, including 28 Days Later, which they watch on their sixth date in homage to a long-ago conversation, and even though she’s seen it before it scares her so much she screams and spills wine in his lap.
She hates zombie movies, but she indulges him. They’ve seen Shaun of the Dead about a hundred times. She decides after the first two that she’s a little bit in love with Simon Pegg, so it’s okay, but six weeks or so after they start dating, Jim groans melodramatically when she informs him she will be picking out the movie tonight. She may or may not lead him to believe it will be one of the “moody British period pieces” that she adores and he dreads.
When she shows up at his apartment with Night of the Living Dead his face lights up like she’s given him the keys to the kingdom. She squeals a little when he picks her up and kisses her and when he exclaims, “God, I love you!” she decides she really, really loves zombie movies.
* * * *
He’s never late to anything but work. She’s amazed how wound up he’ll get if they’re running late to a movie, to meet friends for dinner, to a dentist appointment, even, but he’s oblivious to the time when they have exactly twenty-two minutes to shower and get to the office.
“Stop,” she protests weakly as he steps up behind her in the bathroom, kissing her neck, wrapping his arms around her and nibbling his way down her shoulder.
“Mmm, just…” He glances up at her in the mirror and his eyes are so green and full of desire and sometimes he’s not a boy at all. He’s desperately in need of the shave he skipped on Sunday and he hasn’t even started to get dressed, and the blue shirt he’s going to wear is hopelessly wrinkled and she was thinking she’d iron it but he keeps doing that thing to her neck and it’s a lost battle. She closes her eyes and arches her neck a little.
Now she’ll be late, too. She can’t bring herself to care.
* * * *
He teases her for being messy, and she’s the first to admit that putting away laundry isn’t her favorite thing—it’s not unheard of for the last load to never make it past the folded-in-a-basket stage—but he’s not exactly Felix Unger, either. She sighs as she picks up his dirty clothes from where he’s tossed them, not two feet from the hamper, and wonders if it’s just a coincidence that Roy couldn’t find the hamper either, or if it’s some ancient Y-chromosome deficiency bred into the DNA of all men. She wonders briefly if she should put a basketball hoop over it as incentive.
He reads a lot, more than she’d ever known, and there are books and magazines all over the place. His two bookcases are stuffed full and anything new ends up in a pile on the end table, the desk, in a corner on the floor in his bedroom. There are always two or three Sports Illustrated and ESPN magazines in the bathroom. (Another thing he has in common with Roy that she doesn’t dare mention.)
She suggests he clear out his bookcases and donate the things he won’t read again to the library, and he looks at her like she’s just suggested selling off his firstborn son. She buys a magazine rack for the bathroom and a few baskets to contain the piles of books.
He’s clean, though. He’s never lived with a woman before, so she’s surprised that he always wipes the hair out of the sink after he shaves and that he’s really good about leaving the toilet seat down. She always assumed men only learned those things through years of nagging. But he vacuums. He does his own laundry. She realizes it’s because he’s never lived with a woman that he knows how to do these things, but it still somehow surprises her to catch him doing the dishes. Roy never did dishes. Ever. Well, maybe like a dozen times. In seven years.
“Who domesticated you?” she laughs when she comes out of the bathroom to find him up to his elbows in a sinkful of soapy water, scrubbing the cast-iron skillet they cooked lamb chops in two hours earlier.
“What?” He cocks his head in that puzzled way he has, and then grins and gestures into the sink. “Oh, this. My god, Pam. Never again. The smell. It is never not going to stink like lamb in here.”
“It was good, though,” she grins.
“Not worth it.” He shakes his head again and points at the towel hanging off the oven handle. “You wanna dry?”
She takes up her place beside him at the sink and when he playfully bumps her hip with his, smiling down at her, she thinks she could get used to this.
-
Chapter End Notes:
This was fun. I might have to add to this periodically if more quirky things are revealed. Or just come to me. :)
Thank you all for reading and all the lovely reviews! It really makes my day.
Thank you all for reading and all the lovely reviews! It really makes my day.
callisto is the author of 22 other stories.
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