Rain Falls Ch. 06

I slept for exactly four hours before I woke up. I didn't need a clock to know how long I had been asleep. It's what always happened to me when I took ecstasy. I would crash hard, sleep for four hours, and then I was AWAKE awake. There wasn't a chance in hell that I could go back to sleep. I wanted to get up, move, go, go, go. Luckily, Eric had been content to let me sleep on top of him so, thankfully, I wasn't trapped. He still whimpered in his sleep when I crawled out of his embrace, which I thought was adorable, even if somewhat heartbreaking.

I went downstairs and poked around in the kitchen. I wanted to make Eric breakfast but the extent of my culinary skills was pretty limited. I knew how to work a can opener and I could scramble eggs. And what I meant by scrambled eggs was that I didn't know how to keep from breaking the yolk when I cracked the egg into the skillet. But Eric didn't have eggs. All he had was ingredients, frozen stuff, raw stuff. I didn't know what to do with any of that. He did have coffee and a coffee maker. I could make coffee, right? Apparently not. I followed the instructions on the can but nothing was happening. I was still staring at the coffeepot when Eric walked into the kitchen.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"It's not working," I grumbled.

"Don't tell me that." He started examining the coffeemaker. "I live on this stuff."

I stepped back to let him try to figure out the problem. After a few seconds of having his hands on the infernal machine he accusingly growled at me, "Did you put hot water in this?"

"Yes."

"Holy fuck, Rain. Cold water. Don't you know how to make coffee?"

"Umm. No?" I flushed in embarrassment.

"How the fuck do you not know how to make coffee?" he groused, taking the machine apart and dumping the water out. "It won't perk if the water is already hot."

"I'm sorry," I told him. "It should say that."

He spun the coffee maker around and, on the back, it clearly said 'Warning: Do not add hot water.'

"Well shit," I groaned. "I never learned any of this shit. I didn't have a kitchen until a year ago. And the one that I have isn't really worth the title."

"Never?" His expression was one of surprise and concern. It was that touch of pity that I hated so much.

I sighed. I had to get this over with eventually. It was as good of a time as any. "When I was little I had a good foster mother. Mama Kay. She was good to us. There were four foster kids with her but she got busted dealing and went to jail so we were all farmed out to other homes. I was eight or so. I spent the next couple of years in a really bad place until I couldn't take it anymore. I split. I was ten. When I got picked up they didn't believe me about how bad it was so I was labeled as a troubled kid. Only the worst kinds of foster homes would take me. I kept running away. Every time I got picked up on the street they would send me someplace new. The last time I already told you about. I've been on my own since then. I guess they figured that I was a lost cause and stopped looking for me."

"Well, we'll add basic kitchen skills to our list of things that you need," he said as he started the coffee brewing. To give him credit, when he turned back to me, he didn't have a shred of pity on his face. I was grateful.

"I just wanted to make you breakfast," I pouted and he grinned.

"Breakfast isn't something that I do very often so I don't have much here. We'll need to go shopping if you want breakfast foods. If you're hungry right now I can make biscuits and gravy again," he offered.

"Would you show me how?"

He chuckled. "I'm cheating. The biscuits are already made." He turned the oven on, set it to broil, and pulled something encased in aluminum foil out of the freezer. I watched him carefully as he sliced four frozen biscuits, fried some crumbled breakfast sausage and made cream gravy. He toasted the biscuit halves, added the cooked sausage to the gravy, then he poured it on top of the plated biscuits. He made it all look easy as hell. We ate standing up in the kitchen. He had a table but it was covered in discarded pieces of mannequin anatomy.

"I need to clean this place up." he said, glancing around at the disarray. "I'm getting the itch to work but not on this."

"I'll help," I volunteered. I couldn't cook but I could lift and carry.

"Thanks."

We spent the next couple of hours cleaning and stacking the miscellaneous parts and pieces by the door until the warehouse resembled an apartment-slash-workshop, if you ignored the body parts stacked up like firewood.

He sighed at the pile and gathered some of it up. "Come on," he said, picking up his keys.

I filled my arms and followed him out the door. We walked around the building to the back of the parking lot where he set his load down on the ground and pushed aside the honeysuckle vines hanging over the fence to reveal a gate. He unlocked it and opened it, gathered up his pile again and stepped through. I followed.

I had never noticed the gate before but, in the year that I had been coming to his place, only the last few days had been during the daylight. We stepped into a small courtyard area with a metal shed. He unlocked the shed while I stared at the monolith in the center of the twenty foot square courtyard.

"What is this?" I asked.

"It's my mausoleum," he informed me.

"No," I responded. "This."

He turned from the shed and glanced over the unfinished statue that had me fixated. It was probably eight feet tall and carved from white marble with black and gray veins running through it. Though incomplete, the design was clear. It was a demon with a human in his arms almost completely obscured by the membranous wings of the demon. They were face to face and the demon was either kissing or biting the neck of the human in his embrace. The human had long hair but, in its rough state, the face was androgynous.

"A very expensive piece of trash," he scowled.

"It's beautiful, Eric," I breathed.

"It's Vallejo," he replied.

"Val-what?"

"Vallejo," he explained. "Boris Vallejo is a painter. The further that I got into this the more it looked like Vallejo to me."

"Why didn't you finish it?"

He reached out and ran his fingertips over the marble. "Being influenced by someone else's work is one thing. Outright mimicry is not acceptable. Vallejo's work is beautiful but it's not me." He dropped his arm. "Sometimes I do things that just aren't me."

I managed to peel my eyes from the sculpture in order to focus on Eric. "Of course they're you. They have to be. They come from you so they are part of you. Maybe it's just not the parts that you're accustomed to."

He took the body parts from my arms and stacked them in the shed with many other discarded incomplete works. I scanned the mess of forgotten art. "Does anything ever get revived?"

He shook his head. "Not yet."

"Well, I'll think of this as a mortuary instead of a mausoleum in the hopes that one day something will find this to only be a temporary resting place." I glanced longingly at the statue. For some reason I ached to see it finished.

Eric smirked at me. "Very few things come out a mortuary alive either."

"Maybe not," I grinned. "But they still come out."

Back inside, I surveyed the room. The front portion of the warehouse was setup as a workshop. There was a table saw and other tools that I couldn't readily identify. The walls were lined with tables and cabinets that I had no idea what they held, I had never looked in them. There was even a cabinet that had all these little drawers, like something you would find in an apothecary shop, but I had never looked in them either. The back portion of the cavernous space, next to the kitchen, was more like a living room. It held a very comfortable cushy black leather couch and a couple of recliners, a coffee table, and a really nice stereo system in a cabinet. There was also a huge drafting table in the living area.

Eric had an easel but, in the time that I had known him, I had only seen a canvas on it once. He usually worked in three-dimensions. He worked in all kinds of mediums, wood, metal, plastic, and, apparently, marble, but only seemed to do paintings or drawings on commission. His work was dark and haunting, sometimes outright gory, but it always had a touch of eroticism to it.

Seeing the mausoleum, or mortuary, made me curious. "How long have you lived here?"

"Three years." He turned on the stereo and flipped through his music collection.

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-six."

"Where did you live before here?"

"Mass Art," he replied, pulling out an album then changing his mind and putting it back.

"What?"

"Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Boston."

"You went to college?"

"Yes."

"Cool," I grinned. "Where are you from?"

"Here." He settled on a record and loaded it on the turntable. "Plano," he clarified, naming the affluent town twenty miles north of Dallas. The wailing sound of Bauhaus 'In The Flat Field' started playing softly.

"Siblings?" I continued my line of questions. He was answering and I didn't know if he'd ever be in the mood to be forthcoming again.

"No."

"Parents?"

"Still in Plano." His eyes narrowed. "Have we hit twenty yet?"

"No," I smirked. "That was six."

"I count eight," he corrected.

I thought back. He must have been including the non-questions, unless he was counting the stuff from outside. Either way, I knew that I was pushing it. "That still gives me twelve more."

He sighed, overly dramatically. "Fine. Go."

"What is..." I started but was interrupted by the muffled ringing of a phone. I was stunned into silence because I didn't realize he had a phone. I knew that he had given the clerk at Lobos a phone number but I had never seen or heard one before. Of course he had a phone. Only the dirt poor didn't have phones.

"Ah!" he smirked. "Saved by the bell!" He flipped the arm of the couch open, exposing a hidden compartment and answered the phone. "Lo?" He glanced at me with the receiver stuck to his ear and an odd expression on his face. "Hey. What's up?" Turning his back to me, he continued his conversation. I got the hint and went to the kitchen for more coffee. I could still hear him perfectly. "Nothing. Just cleaning up around here... It's not really a good time. I was about to go run some errands... Shopping, laundry. Domestic shit..." He chuckled, "For real." There was a long pause while the other person talked. "Later, ok?... Yeah. I'll call you... Me too... Yes... Ok. Bye." He hung up and came into the kitchen. "Want to go shower with me?" He wiggled his eyebrows at me.

I was dying to ask who it was but I didn't. It was too intrusive. "I still have twelve questions," I reminded him.

"You can ask them later," he suggested. "I want to play a different game now."

We tried to shower together but, with his hulking mass, it just didn't work. There was no maneuverability room.

"That's it," he growled. "I'm moving."

I laughed. "It would be easier to remodel the bathroom."

"Is there a real bathtub at your place?" he asked, hopefully.

"Yes." I blanched at the idea of taking him there. "But the water doesn't get hot."

"Fuck," he grumbled. "I just want to shower with you."

I stood up on my toes to kiss him on the nose. "Some other time. I'm going to get out and use the shower when you're done."

He growled his displeasure but didn't try to stop me. By the time he got out of the shower he wasn't in the mood to play anymore. I showered, got dressed, and found him downstairs. He'd changed the album and was now listening to The Cramps.

"Did you really want to go shopping?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied, removing the record. "Are you ready?"

Eric slid the huge door shut while I checked out his delicious body. I was a little antsy from the unfulfilled implied promise of sex and hoped that he'd be back in the mood when we returned. We were walking across the small parking lot inside the fenced in property when a car pulled up at the gate. We both looked up and I heard Eric vehemently curse under his breath. A woman got out of the car, stepped to the keypad, and entered the code. The gate clanked open. She knew the code. I didn't even know it.

She got back in her car and drove it just inside the gate and then stopped. She turned off the engine as the gate rattled closed. Even though there was room for five cars to park comfortably, six if you packed them in tightly, she parked blocking the gate. Eric strolled over to her car as she got out again.

"Irish, what are you doing here?" he asked.

"You said that you weren't busy." Her voice was sultry, much like the rest of her. She was classically beautiful and tall for a girl, about my height, but she was wearing heels. She had honey-blonde, waist length hair and a slim, knockout figure that was on display. Her clothing was all black and appeared to be painted on. Her nails were long and painted black and the only jewelry that she wore was a silver chain around her waist, riding low on her hips.

"I said that I'd call you later," Eric replied.

"Don't be an ass, Love," she chastised and sidled up to his body. "I've missed you."

Eric's countenance seemed to soften at the touch of her body. He wrapped his arms around her in a hug that was entirely too familiar for my liking. I rested my arms on the roof of his car over the passenger door and tapped on the metal, just to make my presence known.

Eric's back visibly stiffened at the noise and he disentangled himself from her and stepped a half step back. "I was on my way to the store."

She seemed genuinely taken aback at the blatant brush-off. "You can go later."

He shook his head. "You know how I get when I'm working. I like to have food here. I don't like to have to leave when I'm in the middle of something and you know no one will deliver down here."

"Are you working?"

He shook his head. "Soon. Tonight, maybe."

"Then we have some time," she suggested.

"I'd really like to get started, Irish. Can I just call you later?"

She was obviously disappointed but she didn't fight it. "When you take a break, call me. I want to see you."

"I will," he promised.

He helped her back into her car and leaned in the driver's window. His body completely obscured my view but I could have sworn that he kissed her. I spent the time that she backed out of the gate trying to get a handle on my emotions. I kept trying to convince myself that he would not have kissed her. Not while I was standing right there, at least. But I wasn't buying it. Neither one of them had even acknowledged my existence.

After she left Eric unlocked the car and we got in. He just sat there, white knuckling the steering wheel, not looking at me, like he was waiting for something.

"What is your favorite movie?" I asked.

"What?" he snapped at me, confused.

"I still have twelve questions," I reminded him. "What's your favorite movie?"

He stared at me like I had lost my marbles. His lips slowly turned up in a smirk. "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." He started the car and pulled out of the gate.

"Seriously?" I laughed. "No! Don't answer that. It's not a question."

"Sounded like a question," he teased. "I distinctly heard a question mark."

"No," I lied. "It was an exclamation point. I figured it would be The Hunger or something."

"No, but Catherine Deneuve is much hotter than Gene Wilder," he grinned.

"So is Peter Murphy," I sighed.

He chuckled. "And you claim that you're not gay."

"I never claimed that," I argued. "I just don't make any declarations of my sexuality. I never gave it any serious thought. I'm not sure that I identify either way."

"Well, someday you're going to have to make a decision," he stated.

"Why?" I asked. "Why do I have to choose? I don't see why it's so important. Can't I just be me?"

Eric didn't respond so I moved on to my next question. "Are you allergic to anything?"

"Babies," he smirked. I laughed and he added, "No, really. I break out in hives if someone tries to force me to hold one." We pulled into the parking lot of a good sized store that was only a couple of blocks from his place. It was easily walking distance and I made a note to remember its location. Although, walking through that neighborhood with full hands would not have been a very smart thing to do.

"What's your favorite food?"

He turned the car into a parking space at the grocery store before responding. He turned to me and his eyes were heavy with lust. "You," he husked.

My breath hitched as my body flushed with desire. "You couldn't have done this before we left?"

He laced his fingers behind my neck and pulled me across the seat into a mind-numbing kiss. He broke off, leaving me gasping for air. "Groceries," I croaked.

He smirked. How he could remain so seemingly unaffected by that liplock I would never understand. "Groceries," he agreed and got out of the car.

I, basically, tagged along behind him in the store, my psyche in turmoil. I hadn't been in a situation where I was teased and keep wanting in years. The last time had actually been with Melissa. She was a good girl and I had never been able to convince her to give it up. It was disturbing me on a level that I couldn't have fathomed. The phone call and encounter with the woman at his place didn't help. I had no reason for the way I was feeling but it didn't stop it from happening. I feared that I was the only one in this relationship that wanted to be there. I was terrified that, against all odds, I was falling for him, but I was making the trip all by myself. Every time he smiled at me, touched me, kissed me, made love to me, I fell that much more. I had the sinking feeling, deep inside, that I was going to get destroyed.

Upon our return, we unloaded the groceries and put them away. Then he took me upstairs and laid to rest all of my fears and worries. Until I woke up alone.

It was dark but there was a light and music playing softly downstairs. I leaned over the railing but couldn't see Eric. Silent in my bare feet, I padded down the stairs. He was at the drafting table with his back to the stairwell. Recalling what he'd told me about being interrupted, I didn't call out for him. I came up behind him and tried to peer over his shoulder. I thought that I had been quiet but he knew that I was there.

"You can look if you want," he offered without taking his concentration off the table.

I stepped up beside the large, slanted desk top and he pushed a pencil drawing toward me. He was working on a different sheet so I wasn't worried about keeping it too long. The page held six sketches, all of them of us in various sexual positions. The first three were all the same scene, of me kneeling between his spread knees servicing him, from different angles. One from his point of view, one from the side, one from slightly above and behind my head. They were extremely detailed considering they were each only about four inches square. The way he was sitting, with one arm draped on top of the backrest of the couch, brought to mind the first time we had ever been together. In the drawing, he was nude but in reality he had been fully dressed.

I remembered the night like it was yesterday. I had joined a group of people as they headed for Eric's place after getting tired of clubbing. It was one of the very rare instances when Eric invited people to his home. I didn't know Eric at the time but I knew of him. I had seen him around a lot but we had never spoken. He was a hot commodity and all of the girls, and some of the guys, made a sport out of drooling over him. I wasn't one of them.

It's not that I didn't think he was gorgeous. I wasn't blind. I was a realist. I knew better than to waste my time wishing for something that would never be mine. Life was hard enough without me making it harder on myself. That being said, I went with the group strictly because they were going to Eric's. So, I wasn't completely immune to his charms.