Author's Note: Okay, so this is kind of unlike me, but I have been sick lately and I just felt like writing something a bit off the beaten path of my other work. It's short, sweet, and one heck of a pairing. So enjoy.
His room was a small one, but it was spacious enough for a single young man. In one corner was the cot he used as a bed; in another, the boxes full of neatly-stacked clothes and tools that helped him keep up his daily charade. Nothing would ever give away his true identity in this room--not that anyone ever visited, anyway. But he liked the room, even though he couldn't really be "himself" in it. Yet in a way, he felt like he could be his real self, the self that nobody knew about, not even the government. The quiet, neat, bookish young man with the heart of a dreamer that just got mixed up with the wrong crowd--or the right crowd, depending on the outlook.
In any case, there were parts of the room that most people would be surprised to come across. For instance, the thick books of zoology, the thinner fiction novels, and the scant few comic books half-hidden behind the door; also, the pots and pans, spices and ingredients with which he often ventured to the small kitchen nearby to create some sort of delicious meal for one. The room told secrets about hiim that he didn't want his powerful friends to know about, but might have liked to share with the right person, if ever the chance arose.
Mostly, he liked to sit in his single chair and look out the window near his cot, staring at the clouds and the horizon, dreaming of what life might be like if his choices had been different ones. He still had quite a lot of life left ahead of him; his counterparts were older and more sophistocated, and although he was strong and had gone a long way into his life with the government, he subconsciously thought that maybe, someday, he could still get out and go back to the way he felt things ought to be.
Sometimes at night, he'd open the window and the room would almost give a shudder as he climbed stealthily onto the sill and leapt into the four-story air, landing with an effortless sigh on the ground below. It might not have been the tallest point he'd ever jumped off of, but it was good enough for a nighttime craving of the wind rushing past his ears. He never jumped twice in the same night, and always returned immediately to his little room on the fourth floor afterwards. How he loved heights.
The room saw every part of his life--it saw him dress in the mornings to go to work as a shipwright, and it saw him carefully sneak out the door dressed all in black to such-and-such's place for undisclosed meetings of a dark nature. And one hot summer night, it saw a woman as she knocked once on the door and then walked in without waiting for any reply.
She was still dressed in her work clothes, and she paused to adjust her glasses as she glanced around the room, which seemed to get much smaller after she appeared inside it. She was nonplussed as she focused her attention on the young man she had come to see, who had apparently been sitting in his pajama bottoms and reading some heavy text a moment before, but was then busy trying to find a shirt amidst all of his books.
"Calm down, would you," she said matter-of-factly. "You certinaly aren't the first shirtless man I've ever seen. I've come to tell you... would you please listen to me?"
He was still digging around under his desk for a shirt, which continued to evade his grasp and caused him to hit his head twice and crack his knuckles against the wall before he sat back, prepared to give up, and his textbook fell on him. With an indignant cry he glared up at her. "See what you made me do?"
"I told you to calm down," she scoffed. "It's your own fault you're too stubborn to listen." She knelt down to look at him eye-level. "Now would you mind paying attention to me for just a moment?"
He gulped--it sure was getting hotter in that little room. Quite a bit hotter, actually, and beads of sweat were popping up all over his forehead. He nodded in silence.
"Good," she said, then stood again and sat on the chair above him.
Instantly he hopped to his feet and stammered about getting her something to drink.
"Just shut up and listen to me," she pleaded again, this time more exasperated than the last.
"No, I was always taught it's polite to offer a lady a drink," he recited as he dug around in some of his boxes, producing a bottle and a couple of dusty glasses. "Just trying to be polite is all."
She peered at him over the rim of her glasses. "You're being childish," she declared. "I have come to fill you in on the information you missed at last week's meeting, since you were so conveniently sick that day."
"I wasn't sick," he frowned, "I had a sprained ankle. Here, have a drink." He handed her a glass and forced his eyes to stay on her face.
She took the drink and sipped at it gingerly. "Jumping out of windows does that to a person. Honestly, you are still such a teenage boy." A grin flitted across her lips for a moment, but then it was gone. "Aren't you going to drink too? It's also polite to always join a lady for a drink."
"Well, there's nowhere else to sit." He gestured around the small room. "But I'll stand and drink I guess..." He shrugged and downed the drink in one gulp, quite thirsty from how overly hot the room was becoming.
Three bottles and two hours later, both of them had quite forgotten what she had come for in the first place, and they both sat on the floor, legs outstretched in front of them and eyes too blurry to see straight. Drunk as pirates they laughed at everything and nothing at all, and he didn't bother to fight his gaze any longer.
"You know," he said, convincing his speech not to slur, "you're awfully pretty."
She laughed--strange, coming from her--and replied, "You're such a little boy. Can't you think of a better compliment?"
He sat for a long while, his mind not ticking quite the way it usually did, and then said "okay", leaned over, and kissed her deeply.
Something about that kind of violation of personal space threw her drunken thoughts back to normal, and she shoved him away. "Kaku!" she cried. "That's sexual harassment!"
He laughed and leaned back against the wall, feeling better than he had in years. "Lighten up, Kalifa! ...Anyway, what did you come here to tell me?" He blinked, remembering something about that some hours ago.
"...I don't know," she admitted, trying to flatten her frizzing hair. "I just forgot." She looked, bleary-eyed, around the room, trying to jog her memory, but all she could see was him kissing her, over and over again in her mind's eye.
And then the room, the witness of so much of his life, saw him kiss her, again and again and again.
Thanks so much for reading... please leave reviews if the mood strikes you. :3