Rainbow leaned against the kitchen counter, the marble counter tops cold to the touch. The floor was cool under her bare feet, but she ignored the shiver that traveled up her spine.
She was in Gray's apartment. Last time she glanced outside, it had still been snowing, the first great blizzard of the year. Gray had blasted the heat, and although they were both sweating, they still felt strangely cold. The floor seemed to repel the heat.
Rainbow sighed and pushed off the counter, heading toward the living room. As she passed the dining area, she poked her finger out of her fist and grazed her finger across the glass tabletop. It was as cold as everything else, it seemed.
She sat down on the couch and huddled up, grabbing the blanket and wrapping it snugly around her small frame. She sat there, unmoving, for a whole hour. She stared blankly at the flat screen TV mounted on the wall, wondering idly if she wanted to try and figure out the TV remote, but one glance at the cluttered coffee table in front of her told her other wise. She did not feel the need to watch TV enough to play hide-and-seek with the remote, just to watch crap television in the end.
She slowly tilted to the right, until finally she flopped down on her side, kicking the blanket so it covered her feet.
Closing her eyes, she breathed in the smell of the leather couch.
It was an hour and twenty minutes until Gray came home. She poked Rainbow awake, shaking a grocery bag in front of her face when she sat up.
Groaning, she climbed off the couch, leaving the blanket still draped over her shoulders as she shuffled to the mat next to the door, slipping her feet into her rainbow slippers and making her way out to the parking lot, navigating the shoveled areas and avoiding the snow. She made it to Gray's car, picking up a brown bag of groceries that lay nestled in the back seat and bee lining it back to the apartment.
Gray went back out to lock the car, while Rainbow set the paper bag down on the dining table with the others bags. Biting her lip and grabbing hold of the blanket still clinging to her small shoulders using one hand to hold both of the corners together, she slipped her other arm under the taunt blanket and reached inside a bag, pulling out strawberry scented shampoo.
She stared at it, face blank. She hadn't told Gray that was her favorite, had she? And Rainbow knew that Gray used apple scented "natural" shampoo, because she had had to use it once or twice when taking a shower when she stayed over.
Gray returned, closing the front door and kicking off her shoes, propping herself against the wall with her left hand as she used her right to slip off her socks. Rainbow turned and silently held out the bottle of shampoo. She didn't need to talk. Gray glanced up and her eyes glanced down at the pink bottle in Rainbow's hands.
"Your hair always smells like that when you come from your house," Gray said, as if it was normal to notice such things.
Rainbow clung on the fact that she had noticed such a little thing about her, smiling slightly as she made her way to the bathroom and placed it carefully on the built-in shelf in the shower. She let her hands fall to her sides as her smile turned brighter, directing her smile at the bottle.
Gray lounged ontop her bed on her belly, a thick book loosely held in her hands. Her glasses were settled in the middle of the bridge of her nose, adding the "studious" look.
Rainbow climbed atop the bed, crawling over Gray's long body, sitting in the dip were her back met her rear. Gray seemed unfazed, turning a page in her book.
"Whatchu reading?" Rainbow asked, generally curious on what type of books Gray favored.
"War and Peace."
"Liar." Rainbow snatched the book from Gray's loose hold and studied the cover. "Paper Towns" and Other Stories by John Green. "Oh. I heard this was good." She loved going to the bookstore and staring at the spines of all the books, picking one book she deemed interesting and sitting down in the aisle propped up against the book selves to read it. She never really bought anything except catalogs specializing in parts that she needed for her projects and how-to books. Being in a library or bookstore and reading quietly had a plus; no one really payed you any attention. So when someone raved about a book, or told someone not to even bother with a certain book, she committed it to memory. She had once heard a young employee in Barnes and Noble saying that Paper Towns was "exceptional."
"You can read it after me." Gray said, trying to twist around to get the book back.
"Hmmm. Okay." She put her thumb in the page Gray had been at, flipping to the back of the book where she knew Gray always placed her bookmarks, retrieving it and flipping back to Gray's spot, wedging the laminated piece of card stock into the pages and shutting the book. She leaned over and while setting the book down on top of the bedside table, she reached down and pulled Gray's reading glasses off. Gray, as always, seemed to be perfectly fine with the fact that she hadn't asked.
"You don't need these, right?" She said, waving the glasses slightly as if to showcase what she meant. "Do you just put these on to look cool?" She wondered, straightening up and shifting on Gray's back to place the glasses on her own face. "Whoa." She blinked, surprised. The glasses seemed to distort the world in front of her, warping everything in a confusing fashion. "How can you read with these?!" She exclaimed.
"I'm dyslexic." Gray said matter-of-factly. "Those glasses confuse my already warped view of text, making my mind right it to make sense of the information it's getting."
"Cool." Rainbow blinked as her eyes began to hurt. She slipped off the glasses and leaned over Gray, reaching out to set the glasses on top of Paper Towns and Other Stories by John Green.
"You think so?" Gray smiled, amused.
"Where's your fez?" Rainbow asked distractedly.
"Somewhere in the covers, I'm guessing," Gray hummed, stretching out her feet and cracking her toes from under Rainbow.
Rainbow sifted through the covers until she found the red patterned hat. She brushed some of the ferret hair off of it and glanced down into the covers to find two beady eyes staring back at her. "Cole's staring at me," she noted, staring back at the brown length of fur. The ferret, thankfully, had taken a liking to her as soon as she started slipping him food when she was snacking late at night. He wasn't much a fan of being petted, and really only reserved his affection for Gray, but he got along fine with Rainbow. As long as the snacks kept coming his way, he was A-okay with her.
"You disrupted his sleeping spot. He's probably wondering what you wanted." Gray smiled and glanced back at the sleepy ferret.
"Lets trade hats," Rainbow said slowly, taking off her lampshade and setting the fez on her head where it would stay. She hesitated as she held the hat over Gray's head, but let it go and watched as it settled on her head. "I know you wont do anything bad to it," she blurted, wincing as she voiced her thoughts on accident.
"Of course I wouldn't," Gray said, reaching up to adjust the hat at a to a better angle on her head.
"Thank you," Rainbow breathed, closing her eyes and feeling the unfamiliar outline of the hat on top of her head. It was lighter than her lampshade. Smaller. But still comfortable.
Gray, as always, didn't need to ask her what she had just been thanked for. She understood. "So are you gonna sit on my back forever, or are we gonn' watch a movie? I bought the Lion King."
"Really?! Awesome!" Rainbow started to shift so she could wiggle off Gray.
Later that night, Rainbow woke up tangled in the covers with a ferret curled into the crook of her arm. She had her head snuggled into Gray's neck, breathing in the smell of apples and Gray's cinnamon-y natural scent.
She wondered sleepily if Gray had figured out that she had said I love you that day, with out ever speaking the words. She glanced at the lampshade that was nestled in with Gray's fez, her book and her glasses on the bedside table.
She read in a book once that the color of love was the rainbow.