Page 95 of Stalked By Shadows
I smiled at him. “A good thing, yeah? Not staring at all the stuff you thought didn’t turn out right?”
He shrugged. “I guess. I didn’t realize before how much having that stuff in there got me down, my wall of messed up projects. I had Sky help me go through them. We donated the stuff that wasn’t saleable to the college textile department, and took the rest to the shop. Most of it has already sold. And the college was grateful for the fabric even if they had to cut stuff up.”
“What’s up in the loft now?” I asked.
“I rearranged it to the sleeping area. I needed the table for the sewing machine and a real chair.” His cheeks pinked. “My back started to hurt from being hunched over so much. I’m not as young as I used to be.”
I had to laugh at that, and leaned forward to give him a kiss, which he accepted. “Still my boy toy?”
He groaned. “Sometimes you’re so weird.”
“Yeah but my weird works with your weird… old man,” I teased.
“Jerk. If I’m an old man, then you must be a dinosaur.”
I put my hand over my heart. “Well I never…”
We both broke out laughing. I pulled him into a hug and kissed the top of his head before letting him go to study the new downstairs craft layout. The sewing machine sat on a full-sized table and was inset into it. A chair which looked more like an office chair with a huge back and webbed lumbar support sat on a clear mat tucked into the table. The set up looked pretty sweet actually. Like he could roll from the wall of cubes to the sewing table to a corner table which looked to be set up for cutting.
“It looks a lot more comfortable of a set up than the one upstairs was,” I said, then narrowed my eyes at him. “Have you been sleeping at all?”
He sighed and looked at me. “A little. Sometimes I’d dream of you.”
“What about the noises from outside?”
“Only happened once while you were gone.”
Well that was good news. Could whatever heightened activity he’d been experiencing be caused by my presence? No. He said it had started before I arrived. So maybe it was something the other tour guides had done? I hated not having all the answers. The sad part was, that not having all the answers was life, and even before vanishing, if that was what had happened to me, I had decided I would live life and stop hiding from it.
“When days went by, after you disappeared, and I didn’t hear it, I thought it took you, and that’s why it was silent.”
Fuck. I frowned at him. “It was not your fault.”
He hugged himself. “The night the noise showed up again I went out into the garden and demanded it bring you back.” He looked away. “Nothing happened.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “That’s great.”
“Not great,” he said, glaring at me now. “I wanted you back.”
“Not that part,” I agreed, waving my hands. “But that nothing happened again. It’s a noise. As annoying as it is.”
He sighed. “It hasn’t happened again. But I also moved up into the loft and sometimes sleep with earplugs in. So maybe I’m not hearing it?”
“Either one of those work for me,” I assured him. I headed up to the loft to look at the space. That too, had changed a lot. Jet’s little bed was still there, but most of the storage was gone. A fan had been set up into a small area of the pony wall to circulate air. And the space felt cool and clean, dust free.
There was a large mattress looking thing pressed up against the wall in the corner, and made up to look like a bed. It wasn’t huge, maybe a queen at most. And it wasn’t thick enough to be an actual mattress. One of the storage chests sat at the foot of the mat, the one that normally contained the extra pillows and blankets. And there was a small cube shelf next to the bed that had an alarm clock, a small lamp, and a stack of books as well as an e-reader.
The area would have been a perfect little bedroom if he’d put up curtains or something to block out the light from the rest of the space. I wondered if we could get some shades or something.
Micah had followed me up. “It’s still pretty cramped, but I sleep better curled up by the wall since I’m alone and all. I think I’m used to small spaces.”
“I like it,” I told him. “Thinking maybe we could put some curtains or something at the edge there. Sort of privacy and room darkening all at once?” I pointed to the area in question.
He examined it. “Sure. I could make some Roman shades. That’s easy enough.”
For him, easy. For me, I’d have to buy something and hope it fit. I wasn’t even sure I knew what a Roman shade was, but I smiled, agreeing with his idea. “Sounds great. Do you have some fabric that will work for it?”
He nodded. “I have a section of home décor fabric that will work, and some room darkening liner. It’s downstairs in the green bins.”