Inside out
He learned how to knit, and became a true crime fanatics. Talks about unsolved cold cases would carry them late into the night on the weekend. Another thing they discussed endlessly was Dune. He listened to it as an audio book as he started the project to craft a new Bolt suit from scratch and then, he discovered that Ms White owned five more volumes. She almost exclusively read science-fiction and romance. Barry had a look at those and, determined to educate himself about this unexplored part of his former teacher, he even finished one. It was a half-humorous half-drama fiction and pretty engaging, once passed the first ten chapters and once the reader became attached to the characters.
He learned that if people in a serious and committed relationship were not happy about their lovemaking, communication was the only way to fix it, he learned it by skimming through Ms White’s romance books and eavesdropping on her phone call to the only person she talked to on her phone, her best friend from university, who lived in Great Britain. Time difference and their personalities, that seemed to be mirrors of each other’s seclusion, made those phone calls rare.
As soon as she closed the door of her bedroom for privacy, Barry tiptoed to sit right outside and avidly listen, disregarding her revendication for secrecy. It was such a mysterious part of her that her had never got the chance to be introduced to, he couldn’t resist! Those two ladies talked about the friend’s children, their lives as singles, latest news in the world, they complained about their jobs, they exchanged some recipes but they were spending fifty percent of the call reviewing the last dating experiences from the friend’s life. On the contrary to Eugenie White, she hadn’t given up on finding a man.
And communication about intimacy compatibility was super hard, apparently, because bringing up a lack of pleasure automatically made the person on the other side assume they were totally bad at sex, or something. So you had to proceed differently, think about a creative way to lead your partner on a new path in the bedroom, suggest, ask very specific questions. Barry didn’t understand any of that and it all sounded very complicated and exhausting. He slept with lots of girls all the time and he had never heard anyone complain or never seen anyone struggling to have tons of fun.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
He came back home one Sunday with ten more volumes of Dune and she was astonished, “Barry, don’t be a heretic! Those are the prequels, quels and sequels written by Brian Herbert, the son of Frank Herbert! They’re a bunch of nonsense” Barry read them anyway and didn’t think they were bad at all nor cause for a tremorous sense of scandal in the sci-fi nerd community.. And Dune was something they liked to talk about over coffee in the morning, over quesadillas in the evening. Was the character a hero or villain? Was peace to be imposed? Was dying necessary in order to see? How many names and nicknames and appellations could a protagonist sustain?
“No one can teach you to see” Barry remarked, quoting Avatar.
“Except for the water of life”
But sometimes Ms White was so retreated inside her bubble that he would suddenly lift his nose from his activity and wonder if she even was home. Only once did he completely thought she was actually absent and, listening avidly to a novel from Stephen King in his headphones, he stepped casually into the bathroom to pee at the same time as she was taking a bath. Ms White could sometimes be too gone, he saw, but he laughed at the memory.
She had screamed at him and, triggering no reaction as he had the volume in his ears fully turned on, she violently splashed him with water and threw a bottle of shampoo at his head and then wrapped herself in the shower curtain, causing its rail to collapse, added the bottle of conditioner to her attack “GET THE FUCK OUT BARRY!”
He had turned around, startled, and started to speak : “I’m so sorry I totally didn’t see anyth—”
“OUTOUTOUT OUT!!”
She waited for him to be gone and used her teacher’s voice : “from now on, it’s doors locked when someone in the house is using the bathroom, understood?” He sometimes forgot how much older she was than him, sometimes saw her as his roommate, a very kind, chores oriented, servicing roommate to him. Sometimes as an endless source of comedy, sometimes as a tough nut to crack.
But what he gave her in exchange –not that an exchange seemed expected— was her camper.