Free Sheltered by Charlotte Stein Page A

average, and that they didn’t exactly sag around her knees—which seemed like a definite no-no—but what if he liked smaller ones?
    What if he preferred them pointier, firmer, less clunky?
    By the time she got around to getting him a drink from the refrigerator, she felt like a giant, blockish… thing . All clumsy and cumbersome and oh God, her backside probably looked massive with nothing to hang over it. The t-shirt only reached the waistband of her skirt, and although the skirt itself hung long and heavy over her lower parts, she knew he could see her shape beneath it.
    “You want apple juice or milk?” she asked, because if she didn’t her mind was liable to send her crazy. Unfortunately, it sent her even crazier when he didn’t immediately answer. “We have cookies too, if you want one. They don’t have anything fun in them like chocolate chips, or even something less fun like raisins, but they taste okay. I mean, if you like dull and gray they taste okay.”
    “Evie…”
    “Or we have carrot sticks, and yogurt. I could make you—”
    “Evie, I don’t want to eat anything. It’s cool. Let’s go sit on the couch and talk.”
    She breathed a sigh of relief right into the refrigerator. He wanted to “talk”. The clingy t-shirt was fine, her massive ass was fine, everything was fine. Finally, after a week of waiting, she was going to feel his mouth on hers again and his hands on something hopefully north of her waist and ohhhhh she couldn’t wait.
    At last, at last.
    Only when they got to the couch, she discovered something rather disappointing. Apparently, when Van said “talk”, he actually meant talk . It wasn’t a euphemism for something else. It didn’t have inverted commas around it.
    She’d taken her first leap into assuming something filthy in the place of something sweet, and she’d been completely and utterly wrong.
    “How was college today?” he asked, and she briefly considered strangling him. People did crimes of passion all the time, didn’t they?
    “Great. Professor Dickinson spent two hours explaining how evolution couldn’t possibly have happened. I spent a further two wondering if I actually existed or not.”
    She glanced at him, but found to her relief that the corner of his mouth had turned up. On him, that practically constituted raucous laughter.
    “Sounds fun.”
    “Really? Because it absolutely isn’t.”
    “I take it you believe we emerged from the ocean sixty billion years ago.”
    “At the very least, I don’t refuse to believe something.”
    He seemed to appreciate that answer. She could see it in his expression—as though she’d really started recognizing different things about him now. She knew his various smiles, and could almost make out when her extreme virginity started to panic him.
    They were getting…close. Just you know. Not close enough. Not close in the way she wanted to be right now.
    “How about your day?” she asked, simply for something to say. Though afterward it struck her that they’d just had the kind of moment married couples had, on coming home from work.
    Far from making her uncomfortable, however, the thought made her feel sort of easy and loose. When he stretched his arm out over the back of the couch, she had absolutely no problem resting her cheek against it—like a sort of hug.
    Only one that people did casually, after years together.
    “I caught a rat the size of a small dog in a saucepan. After that, I spent about four hours sketching random things in my sketch book while my art theory Professor droned on about Warhol. And then I went out and got another tattoo, before coming here.”
    Of course she knew the rat comment should have been the one that caught her attention. He’d battled a beast from the bowels of hell with nothing but a cooking utensil at his side—it deserved some acknowledgement.
    But she found herself blurting something else out, anyway.
    “You got another tattoo? Do you even have space left on your