The Specks of Smallness

Aaron | Six

                                                             Aaron | Six

“Senior year starts in four days, and what are you doing?” Carson ranted, digging inside my fridge.

  I hopped onto a chair that was higher than my reach, my feet unable to touch the cold cork floor. “I’m at home, doing nothing.” I answered. Carson’s smile was visible from where I was sitting. I could see the curls at the end of his lips, and a tooth at the bottom bent forward.

  He brought out a bottle of something Dad had hiding in the back of the refrigerator, where it could get nice and cold. The bottle was a dark tint of blue, with silver on the lid, and the heat almost instantly made it sweat. Carson observed the bottle, giving me view of his shirtless body. His muscles were well toned, and none of his abs were uneven.

  I coughed, shifting in the chair, hands on my lap. “What are you going to do with that?”

  I didn’t want Dad to come home and see that his Moscato d’Asti was missing. If anything, he would be on my ass for drinking it, even if he knew all too well that I haven’t taken a drink of wine—ever. Then, he would go on and on how I wasn’t supposed to let anyone in the house, but that would backfire, too. Bentley, being my only friend since I moved here, would be the one to blame.

  I wondered what his face would look like when his Nana barged into his room, yelling at him in Spanish, and possibly beating him to a bloody pulp. Who knows what Latino women are capable of?

  Carson slid the bottle toward me. I caught it with one hand, blinking at the thought of it slipping past me, shattering into a million blue pieces that reflect my fear. He walked over to the cabinets that I couldn’t reach if my foot was on the floor. He, instead, could reach it perfectly, the muscles in his back becoming more visible as he reached for two wine glasses.

  “We,” he started, “are going to have some fun tonight.”

  “But when my Dad gets home...”

  Carson cut me off. “Live a little, Aaron.”

  I looked down at the bottle, when he snatched it from out my reach, my hands wet from the dripping sweat that came from the bottle. Carson didn’t stare at me when I wiped the water off my shorts. If he did, he would have at least questioned his decision to open up that wine bottle. But I was intrigued at how much he didn’t struggle to get the cork out the bottle. He took it out like he wrote: tongue poked out, front teeth biting on the edge.

  As he poured the sparkling white wine into the tall white glasses, I started to think of how I would break it to Dad when he gently walked into my room with furrowed brows, and a look of death in his eyes, but his lips saying otherwise.

  Dad always liked to come home and drink wine, nice and cold for some reason. He always talked about adding a wine cooler as the new addition to our house, but he ended up spending that money on a brand new car that Mom desperately needed. For a while, I was pretty sure he was pissed, so I avoided all interactions I could make with him. I would not walk in front of the TV when a game was on, afraid he’d miss the winning touchdown or basket. I would not walk into the gameroom when it was poker night, afraid I’d jinx him in some way. And I would not stare at him at the dinner table, as he cut his steak aggressively, afraid that my face, instead, would be that steak.

  There was this one time, when I was a little boy still in my diapers, being told that big boys sat on the potty to use the restroom, but caring less because I didn’t know what was and what wasn’t. I was home alone with Dad, playing with blocks in front of the TV, babbling at myself because the square block wouldn’t fit where the circle one should be. I continuously tap, tap, tapped, the block onto the hard plastic, which I thought was music, but Dad thought otherwise.