Kissed All the Boys | Frerard + COMPLETE ! |

➵ NINE

They walked to the end of the hall and Genevieve pushed her door open. "Welcome to my dungeon."

Frank smirked and said, "Comfortable dungeon."

As Gen walked in, she kicked straggling items of clothing and shoes to the side and went directly to her desk. A spinny chair sat in front of it and she motioned to it. "Have a seat, Frank."

He did and spun around a few times before saying, "I dig it."

There were posters hung on the walls of miscellaneous bands or artists, legendary movies or books, you name it. A string of lights was strung along the frame of her bedroom window, which looked out to the parking lot.

"Thanks." After turning off the overhead light, she crawled across her bed and reached over to plug her lights into the socket between her bed and the wall. When they turned on, shadows awoke and began dancing along the walls. Frank's shadow stretched from the floor to the ceiling and back as he continued to spin slowly.

"That's really cool," Frank said in awe, stopping for a second to admire the simplicity of beauty. When his eyes landed on Genevieve, with half of her face blurred and the other illuminated from the dim yellow lights, he smiled, appreciating the way her hair laid a certain way across her shoulders to compliment her cheekbones. They shared this silent understanding of each other, but when Gen realized what was happening, she reached over and turned them off, then turned on the normal ceiling light.

"So, your drawings," she hinted, walking back over to him.

"Right." He unzipped his bag and pulled out his journal, placing it on the desk and waving her towards him. She leaned over his shoulder and watched his eyes light up passionately.

"This was the first one," he explained, pointing to a doodle of a boy sitting on the ledge of the roof of a skyscraper, looking down at the snakes of traffic and bustling people.

"That's good," she said, then corrected, "I mean, all of them are good. Well, great actually. But that is really something."

Frank smiled and murmured, "Thanks, Gen." He slowly ran his finger over the lines of pen, his breathing slow, as if concentrating on an important task. "I drew this around the time I started getting depressed when my parents' fighting got really bad. I mean, I was already alone, but when they started to ignore me, it was worse than hell. I guess this helped me feel less alone. Like, I don't know, like I mattered somehow. It sounds kinda weird, I know, but –"

"I know exactly what you mean," Gen assured, signaling that he didn't have to go into depth about something so personal.

"Right. Yeah. Well, after that, I just did it all the time. This one was the second one." Frank pointed to a girl in the bottom corner sitting crisscross in a dress, tiny flowers raining above her and landing in her hair. "It was supposed to be this dark, sort of mysterious thing, but it turned out like this for some reason. I guess I was feeling okay and I just hadn't realized it. Like, you know when you get depressed and you just keep telling yourself that it's not gonna get better, no way, but then you realize that the sun is shining and the grass is growing and suddenly you're not as bad as you thought you were? That's how I felt. That's how I feel."