Tomorrow's Blues

22. Should and Shouldn't

"You're being a bit of a creeper there, Joseph," I said quietly, putting my guitar down. "How long have you been watching?" I hadn't even heard him come in.

"Not that long, I swear." He came further into my room and shut the door properly behind him. "That was... that was pretty good."

I looked down in slight embarrassment. "You weren't supposed to hear."

"Whatever. I did. And besides," he gave me a look, "I've shown you my art. Doesn't that mean I get to hear you sing? I didn't even know you did sing."

"That's different," I insisted.

"I disagree." Joseph's eyes went to all the crumpled of pieces of paper in my bin and on the floor. "Bit of a waste of trees, don't you think?"

I just shrugged. "I get frustrated easily."

"Yeah, no shit." He made his way over to the pile of paper, arms folded. Then he crouched down, and before I realised what he was doing, he started to uncrumple a couple of the pieces of paper, looking closely.

"Wait, no–" I hastily scrambled over to Joseph and snatched the paper out of his hands. "You're not allowed to read these."

"Oh come on." He smoothed another piece of paper out. "Why write these if you're just going to bin them?"

"Because," I said firmly, grabbing that sheet from him as well. "These ones are shit."

"You know, you can keep taking them from me, but there's a lot of lyrics here. And as entertaining as this little game is, it might get boring after, like, 100 bits of paper." He rolled his eyes as I started to scoop up as many of balls of paper as I could. "You're no fun. Can't I see even one?"

"No," I said flatly, grabbing the bin and standing up, putting it behind me so he couldn't get to it.

"You know, Lily, this situation feels a little familiar." Joseph stopped trying to read the lyrics and straightened up, standing a little closer to me. "I recall someone being extremely nosy about my art, and not giving up until she bullied me into showing her my drawings."

My mouth twitched. "Wow, she sounds like a nightmare."

"Oh, she definitely is. But I trusted her enough to show her something important to me..." Joseph trailed off and raised an eyebrow at me.

I gave an exasperated sigh and pretended to think about it. "Hm... no. You heard me singing. That's all you get."

He shook his head at me. "You're ridiculously stubborn, you know that?"

"I've heard. I like to think it's one of my more attractive qualities, but I prefer to call it determination rather than stubbornness." I smiled rather smugly at him.

"You're so annoying."

"I've heard that, too."

Joseph laughed. He almost absentmindedly lifted a hand and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. My breath caught in my throat. "You're not going to try and spin that into a positive quality?"

"Um..." I was finding it hard to think with Joseph so close to me. "Entertaining?"

"Mm." There was a slight smirk on his face. "You know, I heard you and Ellie talking about me tonight."

I didn't process what he said for a second. "What?"

"Yeah. When she was talking about how attractive I was."

Oh no. "Oh. Well, that's Ellie for you. She thinks any average-looking guy is attractive."

"Really?" Joseph moved a little closer. "So, you don't think I'm attractive?"