Big Dump

So the break thing didn't really work.

Migration
Thom:

“I don’t want to see your face ever again in this house!”

I s’ppose it was a standard situation for me to be kicked out, my sweater, t-shirt and boots, one after another, flying after me. Then it was the time for my backpack and I turned around and caught it before it could hit the ground. After all, my best pair of headphones was inside.

I pulled my clothes on, put my backpack over one shoulder and didn’t bother to lace the boots yet, raising my face to stare at the top window where I assumed would be the loveliest face I ever seen. There he was, staring down at me, still shirt-less, but serene. I swelled up with feeling and kissed my palm, raising it to him. Before he could answer, though, there’s was a loud “Jonathan!” and I knew that Mrs. Greenwood was after him now. He disappeared from the window and there was nothing else to do but lace my shoes and head home.

I crossed a couple of blocks with my hands in my pockets before a hand landed on my shoulder and I was met with gloomy brown eyes and lips pursued together. He looked so serious that I felt sorry for my grin and tried to match his expression. He swatted at me with his large hand, landing it on my cheek gently and leaned in, smiling and kissing me on the lips. It was only then when I noticed that there was a large bag over his shoulder, as well his guitar case.

“Going somewhere?” I asked and he shrugged, running his fingers over the strap on his shoulder.

“I don’t know, depends on where you are going,” he answered.

“Well I’m off to my cave,” I said, looking at his bag, “And your bag doesn’t fit in the cliché. Let me find a long stick and we’ll wrap your stuff in a sac and hang it off the side, so you could balance it on your shoulder.”

“No way you are doing this,” he said, peeling my hands off his bag, “I’ve records in there.”

“Records? What about clothes?”

“Colin will get them for me later,” he said, brushing hair from his face, “Don’t worry, I’ve got a few things.”

Jonny:

Thom’s place was awfully far away from my university, which I pointed out to him after a couple of days, and to which he said something that seemed unusual to me.
“We could move,” he said, rubbing the back of his head, “Doesn’t matter for me, I don’t mind commuting.”

We started studying newspapers each morning while having tea.

“Ah,” he pointed his nipped finger at one advertisement; “Apparently there’s a cat available. Orange,” he looked at me, “And not just orange. Apricot-orange.”

“Does it come with an apartment?”

“No,” Thom shook his head, “It comes with a collar. A collar with a little fish is attached to it.”

Everything seemed like a joke.

We moved in a month into a small and rather shabbier apartment, however with an atmosphere of dignity to it, and full of small leftover stuff from previous tenant.

“Look at that,” Thom brought in a huge sand-clock from the bedroom, “How much time it takes for it to go through do you reckon?”

He set it on the floor and sat Indian-style next to it, looking at the even stream of sand. I hesitated before doing the same and we looked at the time passing by.

“A minute,” Thom said, scratching his chin, “Awfully fast.”

I realized that if it would take a whole hour or the whole night, we’d still be probably sitting there on the floor, looking at it.

“Nah,” Thom said to that, getting up and stretching, “We’d get cold.”

The cracks in the window frames were so wide, and the November outside was so hash, that your palm would turn instantly blue if you’d put it next to the window. We felt the icy wind coming from the frames and each morning there was a bit of condensation covering the glass.

“Imagine how beautiful it’ll be in the winter,” Thom said, “The perspiration is going to freeze and our windows are going to be covered in ice, and we’ll see everything in blue until spring.”

I rubbed my cheek and on the next day I taped up all the cracks in the windows.

He slept a lot, I noticed.

“I love sleeping,” he said, holding his head up and pressing a tight cotton ball against his bleeding nose, “After winter though I’m going to sleep less.”

“It’s just that I miss you,” I said, sitting next to him and taking the cotton ball from him, wiping the blood. He took my wrist and kissed me then, smearing some blood against my cheek, then wiping it and leaving a faint red trace.

“Don’t worry, you are going to get enough of me,” he said, smiling and kissing my hand, each finger and each knuckle, then rubbing his cheek against it, “Such lovely hands you’ve got. Such lovely you. You know, if there ever were a duel over you, it wouldn’t be with guns. It would only be with swords. Guns are abrupt and there’s nothing graceful, only maybe when the competitors take aim. Swords, on the other hand, are loads of grace and beauty.”

When it started snowing, I liked to put my head on his bare chest and look out our bedroom window. His fingers twined through my hair and I warmed his cold skin with my breaths. The white sheets around us grew whiter, until it felt like we were lying outside in the snow.

“God, Jonny, you make me awfully cold with such talk,” Thom chuckled, tipping my chin and looking at me, “I like to think of fire when it’s cold.”

Immediately, the snow around us in my picture melted in the fire he created and I frowned at him, lying in the pool of water.

Thom:

We moved for the second time after we spent a winter in that lovely apartment.

It was lovely, indeed, built in the ‘50s I assumed, judging by the large windows and high ceilings, creaking floorboards and the air of respect hanging around it.

I liked our neighbors, too – there was this old lady that caught us kissing in front of the door, and she passed us with a very cute “Oh, my”, and from now on she’d smile each time she’d see us – especially Jonny, since he was the shy one. Then there was a young couple, Rick and Mandy, who were very progressive, so, progressive, in fact, that after shaking my hand and saying hello, instead of usual “how do you do?”, Rick asked me if I was left, right, or centre.

“Left, I s’ppose,” I answered, rubbing the back of my head.

“Great,” Rick answered and gave another handshake, stronger than the other one, “Then we are in the same camp.”

Mandy was as vigorous as Rick, however she was sort of a mediator between her boyfriend and the world, and thus a little less fanatic. In that Jonny and her formed a bond, which I would never understand, and on which Rick commented, that they were probably gossiping about us.

“Do you gossip about me with Mandy?” I asked Jon one night, when he was smiling with his eyes closed, his legs entwined with mine.

“What?” he ran his hand through my hair, sighing happily.

“Do you talk about me with Mandy?”

He smiled even wider, hand stroking my shoulder, and let out a long breathy “Yeah.”

“Great. I guess that the reason she giggles each time she sees me,” I said, smiling and shifting closer to press my forehead against his, “What time is it d’you reckon?”

“It’s time for you to turn over, I’m beginning to miss your back,” Jon murmured through a grin, nudging me slightly. I grumbled and he placed a wet kiss on my cheek before I turned around and he embraced me from behind, placing small kisses on my back and just touching my skin with his lips.

“It’s 3 in the morning,” I said, facing the digital clock now. He ran his nose through my hair, sighing again.

“Not too bad, I can skip a class in the morning.”

“Of course you can,” I chuckled, “But I’m really sleepy.”

“Ok. Just turn over again before you go back to sleep,” he requested and I laughed, turning back and wrapping my arms around him.

Two months later Rick told us that they were eliminating the building for something new and monstrous, and all we could do was pack our things and open the newspapers again, only to find out that the apricot-orange cat was still looking for a new home.

Jonny:

Our second apartment together was rather modern and looked like it was made of legos all over. Thom joked that any time our feet will start getting attached to the floor with each step, and our hands will be no good for playing instruments anymore.

I liked it, actually, it was on the sunny side – or it seemed so, since we spent the warmest months of the year there. The subway was just a block away – sort of a compensation for the building being in the outskirts, and we spent a great amount of time commuting. I would come off the train a few stations before Thom, and it was usually a bit hard to make a proper goodbye in the crowded train, full of people. The first time we pecked lightly and he squeezed my hand before I jumped off, for which he received several curious and some nasty looks from around. One time he tried to whisper something in my ear, raising himself on the tiptoes, and before he could finish, the bloke next to us rolled his eyes.

“Oh for Christ’s sakes,” he barked, “You love him, he loves you, blah blah blah, he’s got great hair, everybody sees that…just let him get off the train, there’s a limited amount of bloody oxygen!”

We couldn’t really argue with that.
One time we were separated just after we entered by a wave of people, and my arm was trapped between a couple of those. I stood there, annoyed and tapping my foot, until I felt somebody’s fingers squeezing my hand. A bit scared I jerked my head to look in the direction, but all I could see was sweaters, foreign heads and necks, but before long I recognized the hand’s size and small stubby nails and smiled, reciprocating the caress. We haven’t seen each other until the train got to his station – he stroked my palm one last time for a goodbye and then he was out on the platform. I raised myself on my tiptoes and caught him grinning at me, raising his eyebrows and then climbing up the stairs to the surface.

The apartment was extremely hot in the summer – Thom’s cheeks had a constant blush that intensified with a small amount of alcohol. By that time I was in good relationship with my mum (we never talked of Thom), and one-by-one Ed, Phil, and Colin started coming around. First Phil flew in from the university and rang my bell only to find out that I was now a savage, living on the streets with that bad-mannered punk. He quickly located Thom and I and spent a good 10 minutes grinning dumbly when he found out about us.

Colin finished school and came by after that. He frowned at my arm wrapped around Thom’s shoulder and mumbled that he thought mum was just exaggerating when she told him Thom was corrupting me. But it turned even more awkward when he walked on Thom and I kissing in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, thinking that all others were in the different room. By the time Ed got there, however, he was coping well enough to be looking forward to the expression on Ed’s face when he first found.

Ed, however, accepted it all better than anybody else, slapping Thom on the back and giving me a hug. Colin and Phil were a bit disappointed at this, while Thom and I were stunned, in a good way.

I guess I also liked that apartment because it was at that time that Thom mumbled into my hair that he was in love with me when were tangled together in the subway car, dead tired and going home after a long day. I realized that I didn’t really care where we were going, just as long as his hands were on me and he was trapped in my embrace tightly. I answered in the same manner, and none of that came as a shock – I think we knew it long before.

We left the apartment in the late summer to move in with the rest of the guys. Sitting in Phil’s car, with our stuff in the trunk, we were looking dumbly at the apricot-orange cat on his lap and listening to his teary story about the newspaper ad.