ALL THE RAGE (writer: T.M. Frazier)(26)
Nolan nodded, digging his hand into the popcorn. “Yeah, it’s the one where Statham rescues this girl and they run around trying to escape that guy”—he pointed to the screen—“ ’cause he’s after the girl.”
I chuckled.
“What’s so funny over there?” Nolan asked, shifting his eyes from the movie to me. His gaze lingered on my chest before trailing up to my face. I pretended not to notice but I had a feeling that Nolan didn’t care if I noticed him looking.
“Nothing,” I laughed. “It’s just that a friend of mine had this movie thing he did—”
“Cody?” Nolan interrupted. “You mentioned him before.”
I nodded. “Yeah, Cody.” It felt weird saying his name out loud, especially to a target and after so long of not saying it anywhere but in my head, or to my mother when she brought him up. Which she did. In every conversation. “Anyway, he used to do this thing where he would get someone to describe a certain Jason Statham movie, and then they would. Then he would ask them to describe another one, and basically the joke was that basically every Jason Statham movie could be described the same exact way.”
Nolan looked like he was turning that around in his head. He moved his lips around as he thought, talking silently to himself. His lips were full and I caught myself thinking about if they were as soft as they looked when he started to laugh. “You know, I think you’ve got something there.”
I elaborated. “Statham’s character runs from bad guys with some poor girl in tow. Explosions and chaos ensue. Yeah, that’s pretty much all of them. I looked down to my beer and picked at the corner of the label. “Yeah, Cody was always good at pointing things like that out.” Lifting the bottle to my mouth, I took a big gulp of my beer and swallowed hard.
“Is Cody your…boyfriend?” Nolan asked, saying Cody’s name as if it left a bad taste on his tongue.
“Nope. Just a friend.” I sighed. In the spirit of honesty, I added, “He was my only friend.”
“Was?” Nolan asked, turning toward me as much as his stretched out leg would allow.
“Yeah, it’s complicated,” I admitted. “Looking back, maybe I should’ve never been friends with him to begin with.” I didn’t feel like talking about Cody anymore so I shrugged it off like losing my only friend was no big deal. Again, my eyes were drawn up to the fan, the grime sitting on it hadn’t been far from my thoughts since I’d stepped into the house. In my head, the bacteria was multiplying by the second. “Your fan is gross.”
“Kind of like the pool?” Nolan asked, making a disgusted face, and I knew he was mimicking how I’d looked when I pulled him from the pool. “If it makes you feel better, I’m not a complete f*cking slob. This place was empty for a long time before I came back here,” Nolan said, joining my observation of the fan as he spoke. “And as you can see”—Nolan pointed to his leg—“I’m not exactly in a position to be climbing ladders right now. The back gutters could use some work too. Don’t think they’ve been touched since I cleaned them last and that was years ago. Deck needs to be sanded, the list goes on. However, if you want to go ahead and start cleaning, you’re more than welcome to go to town on…”
Nolan barely had the words out of his mouth, and I’d already pulled over a chair from the dining room table and grabbed the cheap duster I’d spied in the kitchen, leaning up against the cabinets. It was one of those plastic ones you buy at the supermarket. The kind with the super light flexible handle that always broke within a few uses, but it would have to do.
“What exactly are you doing?” Nolan asked, his ab muscles flexed under his shirt as he made a move to stand up, temporarily forgetting about his leg. “You’re gonna f*cking fall,” he growled in frustration. By the time he plopped back down on the couch, though, I was already done wiping the dust from the first blade into a garbage bag. “I was joking, Rage. You don’t have to clean right now.”
I shook my head, grateful that Nolan’s cast kept him couch bound because if he were able-bodied and so much as tried to drag me away from that fan, I’d have had to lay him out. “I’ve been staring at this f*cking fan since I walked in the door. This needs to be taken care of now before little dust monsters grow from it in the middle of the night and attack you in your sleep.”
“Is that a thing?” Nolan asked sounding amused. He took a swig of his beer, watching me as I made the fan my bitch.
“It sure as shit is.” I lifted the scooped neckline of my tank top, using it as a temporary face mask.
“What exactly are you doing?” Nolan asked, his voice sounded suddenly strained.
“I’m covering my mouth and nose to protect myself from anything flying off the fan finding a nice, warm spot inside of my body to bloom or grow or rotate or mutate or whatever that particular brand of evil grossness does when it makes more evil grossness,” I answered. I turned to Nolan and held up the formally white, but now completely black, duster. “But the question you should be asking is, do you really want to wait and find out what happens if you do nothing?” My voice was muffled through the thin fabric of my shirt.
Nolan’s smile straightened as his eyes darted down from the shirt, over my nose, to the exposed skin above the waistband of my shorts. He cleared his throat. “I still don’t want you up there,” he muttered gruffly. He sat back on the couch and waved his beer around the room, quickly looking away, back toward the TV. He swallowed hard and his tone lightened. “But by all means woman, continue. Fight the potential dust monsters and whatever their evil will do to me while I sleep. I thank you, kind woman, for your sacrifice in protecting me.” He bowed his head.