I’m presumably a dinner plate of some sort.
It isn’t very normal. I’m not being very normal. None of this is in reality, but Malachi and normal don’t seem to fit together whether Gray said be normal or not. Normal denotes behaviour that the rest of the world lives with. It isn’t enjoyable out there, nor is it particularly interesting.
And this isn’t reality anyway, is it?
And I’m not going to make him be something he isn’t.
I’m just, for whatever reason, trying to help.
And the end goal is to get home, even if this feeling, this desperate and frantic feeling that keeps pulling me closer and closer to him, tells me to stay every fucking second of the time we‘re in.
His fork stabs at a piece of meat on my hip bone, purposefully sinking into flesh just to prove the point that he isn’t very happy. Painful, but tolerable.
At least I’ve still got most of my clothes on, the bottom half at least.
I wriggle, trying to get the letter opener tucked down the back of my jeans comfortable.
“What is it that you’re supposed to do for me?” he eventually asks.
“I’m not really sure, but here we are doing shit that isn’t normal for me so we can pretend it’s relatively normal for you. Apparently he thinks I can do what your wife can’t.” He chuckles. It’s the first time I’ve heard the sound since the room his grandfather’s things were in, and I smile in response to it. “But you should know that you’re all freaks as far as I’m concerned. Freaks with too much money and too much time to fill. Do you actually have a job?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I make sure the world runs smoothly.”
“How?”
“Economics. Everyone needs oil.”
“Oh, well I suppose that’s true.” My head turns to him, eyes tracing the colour of his skin. He seems to be getting darker now, more like his old self, but tired. He looks so tired. Tired enough that he could sleep for a week and still wake up needing more.
“Any chance I can have some of that food?”
He looks at his plate, then back to me. “Haven’t you eaten?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t eat when I’m worried.”
“Worrying about me is futile.”
“I didn’t say I was worried about you.”
He proceeds to feed me after that, forkfuls of vegetables and meat, all of it neatly perched on the end of his silver cutlery. It’s divine, and feels like the first time I’ve eaten in weeks. Not only that, but the quiet nature in the room, and the strange aura that still hangs over us, makes it all feel intimate. Sweet even. If he could be described as that.
“We’ll fuck. You should know that,” he says, quietly.
I don’t really care about that statement. It’s reasonably obvious we will, if we haven’t already. It’s also not a hardship given his looks, but at the moment it’s not on my radar at all. “I’ll hurt you.”
Obviously.
“Bleed you.”
I roll my eyes, look back at the ornate ceiling. “We’ll talk about fucking when we’ve slept.”
