Kyra gasps as she opens the small box JC hands her and smiles. “Oh my god, Josh! This is so pretty! Thank you.” She grins as she pulls the golden necklace from the box, examining the small charm hanging from the chain.
“What is that?” her mother asks as she leans forward to look closely at the necklace as well. “Aw, how adorable. That’s really sweet of you Josh.”
“Um...it’s nothing. Just thought you would like it…” JC says quietly, his cheeks reddened by all of the attention he is receiving.
He watches as Kyra leans forward slightly while her mother clips the necklace around her neck and sees her fingers travel down the chain to the small golden fountain pen charm.
To be honest his Mom had basically pressured him into buying something nice for her sixteenth birthday. She’d hammered into him that a girl only turned sweet sixteen once and that she should get something special. So when he’d gone to the mall and walked around somewhat aimlessly for at least twenty minutes, he’d just decided to walk into a jewelry store.
All girls like jewelry right?
When he’d seen that necklace with the fountain pen charm he’d felt as if he’d found the perfect gift. He’d bought it and hid it in his sock drawer until today when he’d been planning on giving it to her after the BBQ they were having in her backyard to celebrate. He’d been hoping to have some privacy with her when she opened it, but as soon as she’d started opening her other gifts, his mother had started pestering him about his own present to her. And when she hadn’t seem to notice the ‘not now’ looks he kept giving her, he’d finally had to relent and go upstairs to his room in order to bring it down.
Now everyone is staring at him and two of her girlfriends are giggling at each other.
Great.
“Thanks Josh. I love it,” she says before pressing her lips to his cheek gently, a gesture that is totally normal to them but now feels a little uncomfortable as it gets accompanied by another round of girly giggles.
“Yeah, good.” He nods as he tries to hide his embarrassment by taking a rather large bite of birthday cake into his mouth.
***
With a huff Kyra sat down on top of one of the many boxes in her dank basement. Gravel crunched under her feet as she shifted and ran her forearm across her forehead.
It was hot.
So. Fucking. Hot.
She’d been writing in the small den off of the kitchen when suddenly the air conditioner she’d installed in the window had shut off. She’d groaned and tried to turn it on and off a few times but nothing had happened.
It was dead.
So she’d decided that she’d go down to the basement and see if the electrical panel revealed anything, which it had. The breaker for what she’d assumed was her office/den had clicked off, so she’d clicked it back on and thankfully had returned to a working AC.
For about 3 minutes.
That time when the AC went out, so had everything else. She'd sworn and huffed all the while she’d gone through her house unplugging and turning anything non-essential off before making her way back downstairs to the electrical panel. When she’d looked at the panel again, the main breaker was switched off and she was unable to click it back on. No matter how hard she pushed and pulled at it, it stayed in its spot and wouldn’t budge.
Fuck.
Though it was slightly cooler there in the basement, the oppressive humidity that made the patched cement walls sweat also made her uncomfortable.
This wasn’t going to be fun. She had only installed two small AC's in the house, one in her office and one in her bedroom. This was where she spent most of her time when at home and she'd figured that if she found the heat to be too much anywhere else, she could just go out to a coffee shop or a store to enjoy the mostly free AC there.
After all summer didn't last that long and she remembered too well shivering in the living room only a few months ago when she'd moved in during the winter months.
Maybe she should also look into some type of insulation...you know to help with the draftiness and the heat...absorbiness...
Or maybe she'd gotten in over her head.
Why the hell had she bought a house this old?
She’d known that old houses usually came with problems but she’d fallen in love with this one. It held so much charm and history in its high peak and large front porch. She’d gasped at the traditional crown mouldings and the exquisite hand carved wooden banisters, but the kicker had been how inspired she’d felt from the moment she’d walked through the stained glass front door.
She’d needed to buy it.
Sure, it needed a little...well, a lot of work, but she was up for it. The price and the location made it hard to beat; what was a little elbow grease and some TLC when she could make it her own? It would probably take months, even years, for it to be complete but eventually it would be a masterpiece. Her masterpiece.
But for now, even though she had tried her hand at many things, she certainly wasn’t an electrician. And as she didn’t necessarily want to have her house burn down, she needed to call one.
She sighed and kicked the cardboard box nearest her in frustration. Her many hurried trips up and down the stairs coupled with her frustration now had her sweating and it was pissing her off.
When she started to stand up to go get her phone, she noticed that one of her boxes’ bottom had ripped open to reveal some of its contents on the floor. After telling herself that it would be a better idea to buy a few of those Rubbermaid plastic tubs so her things could survive the dankness of the basement, she crouched down to clean up the mess.
Her fingers brushed against a few mementos from high school: some old pictures with her girlfriends, a picture from her prom and a braided friendship bracelet. She smiled and opened the top of the box so she could look through its contents. She remembered most of the stuff from when she’d packed it away years ago but hadn’t really gone through it when she’d sold her Mom’s house some months ago. When a reasonable offer had finally come, she’d sort of stuffed new stuff into older already filled boxes without really sorting anything out first.
This became apparent as old pictures gave way to a cookbook her Mom used to really like, a few loose CD’s of burned music, some kitchen towels, and finally a small jewelry box that used to sit on her bedroom dresser. She cracked the cover open and pulled out a used, dog eared picture that had seen better days.
It had been one of her favorite back in the day, showing her and Josh when they were teenagers. Gauging by the hairstyles, she’d been about 15 and he was nearing 17. They were both making ridiculous faces at the camera while clutching paper plates with partially eaten hot dogs on them. It was a silly and light hearted moment caught on camera, but what had made her love the photo so much was how his other arm had been around her shoulders and her arm had been around his waist. It had been innocent when they’d taken the picture but eventually she’d taken it to mean much more.
She sort of half smiled at the picture before she went to put it back. When her fingers brushed against something in the box, she pulled it out to find a delicate golden chain with a fountain pen charm. She’d almost forgotten about the necklace, having taken it off about four years previously, but it was still as beautiful as it was when she’d gotten it on her sixteenth birthday.
*
JC knocked for the second time on an ornately carved door with colorful stained glass. He could see a car parked in the driveway so he’d figured she was home. Maybe he should have called first. And maybe he should have told the cab driver to wait a few minutes before letting him leave.
Fuck it was hot.
Like really hot.
He’d gone straight from his air conditioned hotel room to an air conditioned cab all the way to her house in the back streets of Boston. The dark jeans and dark t shirt he'd chosen to wear while he was in the blissful coolness of his room now really seemed like a really bad decision.
It had been about 8 months since he’d last seen her and they’d sort of broken the ice that night in her hotel room. Since then they’d been emailing back and forth, sometimes calling for a few minutes every once in a while. Things weren't back to where they were before but at least they were talking again...and something was better than nothing.
He’d recently finished up the last leg of the Celebrity tour and she’d finished doing her press thing for her book. When the band had gone on hiatus, he’d gone home to LA for a month and had done absolutely fuck all.
He’d slept ‘til two in the afternoon, went to bed at three am. He’d watched TV and movies, played video games and slept. It was like he'd been trying to catch up on doing nothing and being no one for all the years he’d spent doing everything and being Someone.
When his Mom finally told him that he had to leave his house, he’d agreed and gone to visit them for a few weeks. But then he’d gotten restless. He didn’t really want to stay there and he didn’t really want to go home.
And then Kyra had called him and off the cuff had said something about the next time he’d be in Boston he should let her know and they could hang out or whatever.
So, well...whatever... he was there. She probably wasn’t expecting him to show up at her front door unannounced three days later, but hell, here he was.
He could feel perspiration start to gather at the roots of the hair around his forehead and on his back underneath his shirt. Why had he decided to come to Boston during an unprecedented heat wave? He really hoped she had decent AC in her house.
Just as he finished that thought, the front door swung open and there she stood looking absolutely surprised, clutching a cell phone to her ear. Her hair, which was still a darkish red colour, was piled high on top of her head and she was wearing a tight blue tank top and very short frayed jean shorts.
She looked at him with wide eyes then seemed to remember to motion him in as she kept talking to someone on her cell phone, apparently making an appointment. As he shut the heavy door behind him he noticed that the temperature inside the house wasn’t much different than the one outside and he was basically shutting the door to an oven.
Well, damn.
He watched quietly from his spot in front of the door as she finished her conversation. She seemed exasperated and frustrated with the person on the other end. She motioned for him to wait a moment and he nodded.
Now that he was closer to her, he could tell that she was sweating too. He could see that her forehead was glistening slightly and that a few loose strands of her hair were stuck to her neck. When his eyes drifted down from her neck to the skin exposed above the edge of her tank top he gulped and forced himself to avert his eyes.
Just as he was examining the mouldings around a nearby door with much more interest than they actually deserved, he heard her snap her cell phone closed and he returned his gaze to her.
“Oh my god, Jay-osh!” She stuttered out, and he chuckled at the way she mangled his name.
He’d been able to tell for the last little while that she’d been consciously trying to only call him by his real first name instead of his nickname. He appreciated this as it was always disconcerting to him when he heard her call him JC; to him it indicated that she was trying to keep him at arm's length when she did it. Anyway, he was grateful she was trying.
“What are you doing here? I mean...um..Hi," she added with a small laugh and seemed like she wanted to lean forward and hug him but then held back. “I’m like, super sweaty right now.”
He chuckled again and grasped his shirt between his fingers and pulled it back and forth as if to fan himself. “I’m getting there,” he said then smiled. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d pop in.”
She laughed. “Pretty big neighborhood.”
He shrugged and smirked at her, dismissing it as no big deal. “Everything okay?” he asked, nodding down to the cell phone still clutched in her hand.
She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Well, no. My power went out and I apparently can’t get an electrician to show up until either later this evening or tomorrow morning. And it’s fucking hot.”
They both laughed again and she turned, hooking her arm in a beckoning gesture. "Come on in."
He smiled and followed her as she walked through a narrow hallway, the aged wooden floors creaking under their steps. "This is a massive house," he said as they turned a corner and walk into a kitchen. "You live here alone?"
"Yeah. Just me, myself and I. It's kind of a welcomed change after years of living in Res with roommates."
He nodded and she continued. "These old historic houses were built for big multi-generational families. So yeah, it's pretty big but I love it. It also needs a bunch of work,but I'll get there."
She looked back at him over her shoulder as she opened the fridge really quickly and pulled out two bottles before shutting the door again really quickly not wanting to let the cold air out. "For real though, what are you doing here? Not that I'm not happy to see you...I just wasn't expecting you."
"Ah...a girl after my own heart." He grinned as he accepted one of the beer bottles she outstretched to him. He twisted the cap off and took a seat at the small table. "I uh, well honestly I've been going a little stir crazy."
He scratched the back of his neck, took a gulp of his beer and looked down at the table for a moment before looking back up when she took the seat across from him.
"Oh yeah? I would have thought that you'd still be sleeping to catch up on all the sleep you lost in the past few years..." She smirked as she twisted the cap off of her own beer and took a long pull.
As his eyes roamed over her arched neck as she swallowed, he wondered when she'd started drinking beer. When he glanced up to find her eyeing him questioningly, he felt embarrassed and averted his gaze.
He cleared his throat. "I did that for a while, I got tired of it. Then I went to visit Mom and Dad. Stayed there for a while, then we spoke and you mentioned a visit. Thought it would be nice to see you again."
Kyra smiled and his stomach did something weird. He took another sip of his beer, thankful for the cold liquid that moistened his suddenly dry mouth. "So um, what did you say about your power going out?"
She sat up and shrugged. "I have no idea. The main breaker clicked off and I can't get it back on. Had to happen on the hottest day of the year..." She groaned and pressed the sweating beer bottle to her neck and sighed.
He gulped again.
"I...um...maybe I could take a look?" He ventured as he stood up and drained his beer. He needed to distract himself.
She laughed dryly and stood up looking at him skeptically. "You? Joshua 'Fairy Fingers' Chasez?"
His mouth dropped open. "Fairy Fingers? Fuck off." He laughed and started following behind her as she walked down the hall again and opened what he assumed was the basement door.
No harm in trying right?
***
