shakes his head as he leads me up the stairs.
“No, it was nothing like that—my dad is just a difficult man to live with.” He slips his keys down into his front right jeans pocket.
I steal a quick glance of his butt in those jeans as he pads up the stairs in front of me. I bite my bottom lip and then mentally kick myself.
“This is my room.” We enter the first bedroom on the left. It’s fairly empty; looks more like a storage room with a few boxes piled neatly against one taupe-colored wall, some exercise equipment and a weird-looking Native American statue pushed into the far corner and partially wrapped in plastic. Andrew moves across the space to the walk-in closet and flips a light switch inside. I stay near the center of the room, arms crossed, looking around and trying not to look like I’m snooping.
“You say ‘is’ your room?”
“Yeah,” he says from inside the closet, “for when I visit, or if I ever want to live here.”
I walk closer to the closet to see him sifting through clothes hanging much how I hang mine.
“You’re OCD, too, I see.”
He looks at me questioningly.
I point to the clothes hung by color and on matching black plastic hangers.
“Oh, no, definitely not,” he clarifies. “Dad’s housekeeper comes in here and does this shit. I could care less that my clothes are hung up at all, much less by color—that’s too … wait—” He pulls away from the shirts and looks at me in a sidelong glance. “You do this to your clothes?” He points his finger horizontally at the shirts and moves it back and forth.
“Yeah,” I say, but I feel weird admitting it to him, “I like my stuff neat and everything has to have a place.”
Andrew laughs and goes back to sifting through the shirts. Without really looking at them much, he yanks a few shirts and pairs of jeans from the hangers and throws them over his arm.
“Isn’t that stressful?” he asks.
“What? Hanging my clothes up neatly?”
He smiles and shoves the small mound of clothes into my arms.
I look down at them awkwardly and back up at him.
“Never mind,” he says and points behind me in the room. “Can you put those in that duffle bag hanging from the workout bench?”
“Sure,” I say and carry them over.
First I set them down on the black vinyl bench and then grab the duffle bag hanging from the weights.
“So, where are we going to go first?” I ask, folding the shirt on top of the pile.
He’s still rummaging through the closet.
“No, no,” he says from inside; his voice is kind of muffled, “no outlines, Camryn. We’re just going to get into the car and drive. No maps or plans or—” He’s popped his head out of the closet and his voice is clearer. “What are you doing?”
I look up, the second shirt from the pile already in a half-fold.
“I’m folding them for you.”
I hear a thump-thump as he drops a pair of black running shoes on the floor and emerges from the closet towards me. When he makes it over, he looks at me like I’ve done something wrong and takes the half-folded shirt from my hands.
“Don’t be so perfect, babe; just shove them in the bag.”
He does it for me as if to show me how easy it is.
I don’t know which has my attention more: his lesson in disorganization, or why my stomach flip-flopped when he called me ‘babe’.
I shrug and let him have his way with his clothes.
“What you wear really doesn’t matter much,” he says, walking back to the closet. “All that matters is where you’re going and what you’re doing while you’re wearing it.”
He tosses the black running shoes to me, one at a time, and I catch them. “Shove those in there, too, if you don’t mind.”
I do exactly what he says, literally shoving them inside the bag and I cringe while doing it. Good thing the bottoms of the shoes look like they’ve never been worn, otherwise I would’ve had to protest.
“You know what I find sexy in a girl?”
He’s standing with one muscular arm raised high above his head as he searches through some boxes on the top shelf of the closet. I can see the very end of that tattoo he has down his left side, peeking just at the edge of his shirt.
“Ummm, I’m not sure,” I say. “Girls who wear wrinkled clothes?” I scrunch up my nose.
“Girls who just get up and throw something on,” he answers and takes down a shoe box.
He walks back out with it perched on the palm of his hand.
“That just-got-up-and-don’t-give-a-shit look is sexy.”
“I get it,” I say. “You’re one of those guys who despise makeup and perfume and all that stuff that makes girls, girls.”
He hands me the shoebox and just like with the clothes, I look down at it with vague question.
Andrew smiles. “Nah, I don’t hate it, I just think simple is sexy, is all.”
“What do you want me to do with this?”
I pat the top of the shoe box with my finger.
“Open it.”
I glance down at it, uncertain, and back up at him. He nods once to urge me.
I lift the red top off the box and stare down at a bunch of CDs in their original jewel cases.
“My dad was too lazy to put an MP3 player in his car,” he begins, “and when traveling you can’t always get the best radio reception—sometimes you can’t find a decent station at all.”
He takes the shoebox top from my hand.
“That’ll be our official playlist.” He smiles hugely, revealing all of his straight, white teeth.
Me, not so much. I grimace and scrunch up one side of my mouth sourly.
Everything is here, all of the bands he mentioned when I met him on the bus and several others I’ve never heard of. I’m pretty confident that I’ve heard ninety percent of the music I’m staring at at one time or another being around my parents. But if anyone were to ask me the name of this or that song, or what album it’s from, or what band sings it, I probably wouldn’t know.
“Great,” I say sarcastically, frown-smiling at him with a wrinkled nose.
His
