Written with Love

Noah

I take a long, cold shower to fight the flashes of Annie's skin that haunt me the whole walk home from lunch. It's bad enough that her hair was down in soft, pretty waves, but the sliver of exposed skin at her throat, the inch between the bottom of her fitted long sleeve and the top of her adorably-artsy wide-leg jeans... was too much. Is too much as I stand under the frigid spray, trying to shake the vivid thoughts -- and the trickle of guilt that comes with them.

Stop it, Noah. We do not objectify women. No matter how cute it is that her nose scrunches when she's trying not to laugh.

With a sigh, I turn the water off and step out of the shower, glad, at least, that Jack won't be mad at me for using too much hot water. I smile a little when my feet find soft carpet. We'd gone without a bathmat for the first month of our stay in this new student apartment, but I finally caved and bought a fluffy white one during our last Target run. I can confirm, it was indeed worth the effort.

I wrap a towel around my waist, making a mental note of the almost empty towel rack, and catch the eyes of my reflection in the mirror. Squint at the person I see there. Repeat my earlier admonishment, this time with a brow furrow of emphasis. We do not objectify women. Even if that look in her eyes made it seem like maybe she was objectifying you too.

And suddenly the thoughts are back, and I sigh again, pushing open the bathroom door.

"What are you moping about?" Asks a voice from the couch, where Jack's blond head is bent over a book or something. Ian isn't back from class yet -- some kind of Calculus that I don't even pretend to understand when he complains about it.

"Moping isn't the word I'd use. Pining maybe."

Jack perks up at that, pausing to pull one white headphone out and drop it in a tangle of white wire onto our coffee table. I asked him once why he didn't just get wireless ones, it's not like he can't afford them, and he made some crack about the thematic integrity of his starving artist image. As if anyone with a birth certificate that reads Theodore Jackson Fields III, could ever, really, be a starving artist.

"Oh, do tell." He's still mostly paying attention to what I now see is a sketchbook, adding confident pen strokes to a little doodle of what sort of looks like... a public execution? A guillotine, I think, and a little angry crowd with pitchforks and torches.

"Who are we beheading?" I ask, instead of answering. Settling in beside him, I toe a book out of my way before setting my feet on the coffee table.

"Olsson." He grumbles, adding what looks suspiciously like a little basket to collect rolling heads.

"What is it now?" Jack and Mrs. Olsson's relationship has the same energy as... well, honestly, a child and their grandmother. But if the child is actually a stubborn 21-year-old college student, and the grandmother is a Fine Arts teacher that refuses to take his shit. Jack takes her critique very seriously, but loves to pretend he doesn't know she's right 90% of the time. He'll see that she is as soon as he finishes whatever project he's currently stuck on.

"Expressionism," he says, in the same voice normal people use to say "green juice" or "flu shot."

"The one with the colors?"

"Yes, Noah. That would be the one with the colors." I grin at the exasperation in his tone.

"I thought you liked colors?"

"Jesus Christ. We're not even talking about me." He drops his pen onto the sketchbook, closes it, and sets it down on the couch between us. "Pining?"

Right, that.

"I just... met a girl."

"A real one?"

"Hey." I glare, and he smirks. "Do I usually meet fake girls? Is that a thing I do that I'm not aware of?"