I had always found Steve Buscemi to be an unusual-looking actor. He looked even more unusual looking at him upside down. In fact, everything looked unusual upside down. If I didn't change positions soon, I was going to have a hell of a headache.
I swung my legs toward the front of the couch where my head and shoulders were hanging off and managed to do a reverse somersault worthy of an Olympic medal. I stood to my feet, arms raised in the air. My boyfriend's bulldog was not impressed. He closed his eyes and turned his head away in disgust. The frown on his face looked even lower than the natural one that was typical for his breed.
My boyfriend Gabe might've been more impressed with my performance, but he was in his room attending class on Zoom. All of his other classes were in person, but he'd signed up for a political science class that was held online because the professor was out of the country on sabbatical for the semester. Our school's administration hadn't been able to get anyone else to teach the class, so they managed to convince the professor to teach it virtually on Tuesday and Thursday nights.
Usually, I spent the 3-hour block in my dorm room. Or if I went to Gabe's apartment, I spent that time writing, watching a movie, playing a video game, or goofing off with his roommate Wade. This evening, nothing piqued my interest on TV and Wade was out.
"I'm sooooo bored, Rocco." I slid my hands down my face trying to pull the skin off my skull.
The dog turned back to me and opened his eyes just a crack and let his tongue fall out of his mouth. His expression suggested that he couldn't care less.
"Fine," I said and stuck out my tongue at him.
His eyes widened briefly at the insult before returning to half-mast.
I strolled to the door of Gabe's room and grasped the doorknob, turning it slowly. The hinges let out a quiet squeak as I pushed the door open just far enough to poke my head into the room. Gabe was hunched over his desk, pen in hand, scribbling furiously as his professor droned on about mid-20th century American politics. I was in Gabe's peripheral view, but he wouldn't acknowledge me. I stuck my head in an inch further. "Pssst." No response.
Gabe continued taking notes like I was invisible. The end of his pen flipped back and forth like he was living in the 1700s and transcribing the Declaration of Independence with a quill pen. For some reason, it irked me that he took notes by hand instead of typing them.
I was further irked that he was ignoring me. "Pssst."
Gabe picked up an empty cup sitting on the far corner of the desk. "Hey, can you grab me some water?" He held the cup out to me while his eyes stayed fixed on the screen of his laptop.
Frowning, I pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped into the room. The cup hovered in the air in his hand as I approached, and I briefly considered slapping it out of his hand but decided against it. Taking the cup from his hand, I took a step back and bowed at the waist.
"Yes, Your Majesty," I said before turning on my heels. I got a step away when Gabe's hand clapped against my right ass cheek, sending me jumping into the air and making me yelp. When I spun around, he was still staring intently at the screen, but his hand was over his mouth as if deep in thought. I was sure it was hiding a grin. I could tell from his laptop screen that I was outside the view of his camera, but for his sake, I hoped his microphone was muted too.
I smiled and rolled my eyes before walking to the door and out of the room. Rocco was nowhere to be found when I passed back through the living room. He'd apparently grown tired of my antics and had gone into hiding the first chance he had.
I filled Gabe's cup halfway with ice and topped it off with water. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed myself a bottle of water instead of getting water from the dispenser. Gabe and his roommate constantly denied it, but there was a weird plastic taste to the water that came from it.
I heard laughter and multiple voices talking as I returned to Gabe's room. His class had probably split into their discussion groups. For the second hour of each class session, the professor divided everyone into groups of three or four people to think and talk about a prompt the professor had given them. Sometimes I'd pop into Gabe's room for those discussions and listen in. I didn't have a great interest in politics, but the discussions were entertaining. At some point, they usually heated up as people brought up their own personal political leanings, and the discussion would sometimes descend into shouting matches. Gabe, always the peacekeeper, would sit back and listen in amusement until things threatened to spiral out of control. His group this week sounded a little more jovial.
When I reentered the room, Gabe extended his arm out to me, not even bothering to look in my direction. I started to hand him the cup but pulled it back at the last moment. He flailed wildly at the air until he realized the cup wasn't there and finally looked in my direction. I raised an eyebrow at him.
"Thanks, babe," he said with a sheepish grin. He scrunched his head and neck down like a turtle trying to retreat into its shell.
"Hmph." I put my fingers against the side of his head and gently pushed it. I uncapped my bottle of water and took a sip. As I was preparing to turn and leave the room, I spied Gabe's Nintendo Switch on his dresser. I sat my bottle of water on his desk and retrieved the Switch before heading to the door.
"Who was that?" said a male voice from Gabe's laptop.
"That's just my girlfriend," Gabe said. Something about the way he said the word 'just' didn't sit right with me.
"She's hot," the voice from the laptop said.
"Yes indeed," said another voice.
"She's alright," Gabe said. "So, anyway, what do you guys think about what Professor Marks was saying? In the current political climate, do you think this country could be united against a common external enemy?"
The first voice said something in response, but I couldn't hear it over the sound of my blood simmering. Gabe's dismissive comments about me had pricked my skin. I tossed him a glare over my shoulder, which he didn't see, and slammed the door as I stormed out.
After about three and half minutes scrolling through movies on Netflix, I was once again upside down with my legs draped onto the back of the couch. A smirk spread across my face as a sudden image flashed through my head of Gabe fucking me in the same position. There's no way I'd be able to hold it for long. As it was, I could already feel the blood rushing into my head. But I was sure Gabe would get a kick out of it. He wouldn't be referring to me as 'just his girlfriend' then.
I chewed the inside of my cheek while I replayed the line over and over in my head. It wasn't a habit of his to be disrespectful to me, and he probably didn't mean anything by it. If anything, he was just showing off for his little classmates. Still, I didn't appreciate it. And I didn't appreciate him ignoring me.
Two minutes later, with my head feeling like it was about to pop, I did another reverse somersault off the couch. I had intended to go get my laptop from my bag on the kitchen table and do some writing, but I found myself drifting back toward Gabe's room instead. I turned the doorknob and pushed the door open about six inches.
"But there's no way anyone would be able to side with the aliens because we wouldn't be able to communicate with them." It was the first voice I'd heard earlier. The one that had said I was hot. Why the hell were they talking about aliens?
"Really dude? There's no way they wouldn't have mastered all our languages." It was the second voice.
"You boys watch too much of that Marvels and Star Wars shit," said a new voice that was deep and stuffy and ironically sounded like someone speaking through a Darth Vader mask. "Aliens don't exist. So why are we even debating what language they'd speak?"
Gabe was sitting in his chair slowly nodding like a bobblehead doll.
I waved my hand towards him. "Pssst."
Gabe's shoulder flinched, but he didn't look at me.
"Pssst." Still nothing.
I clenched my teeth together and put my hands on my hips. I knew he was ignoring me on purpose. And for what? His stupid little class? He didn't even need it for his major. He only signed up for it because he thought it'd be an easy A.
I didn't know exactly what was going through my mind, but one minute I was standing in the doorway trying to get Gabe's attention, and the next minute, I had stepped back from the door and was shimmying out of my sweatpants. I stepped on the ends of them and pulled my feet free, leaving them bunched up against the wall outside the door. I tugged on the bottom of my shirt and smoothed it into place. It was white with a Knicks logo on the front and hung down to my upper thighs. It had belonged to Gabe up until a few weeks ago when he'd let me borrow it one night to sleep in and I'd 'forgotten' to return it.
I marched into Gabe's room, not breaking stride as I headed for the closet on the back side of the room--directly opposite from where Gabe was sitting. I knew the guys in Gabe's group could see me because there was an abrupt break in the conversation as I stopped in front of the closet.
The closet was tiny. Gabe mostly used the lower shelves for storing printer paper and school assignments he'd gotten back. He kept books and a couple boxes of sneakers on the upper shelf above his clothes hanging rod--which at the moment held three shirts. Most of his clean clothes were scattered around his room or in his laundry basket.
"What were you saying, Rick?" Gabe said to one of the guys in his group.
"No...I just...uhh...yeah, intergalactic travel doesn't equate to intergalactic language." Apparently, Rick was the name of the guy with the first voice. Well, 'Rick' and his groupmates were about to get a show from 'just Gabe's girlfriend.'
I lifted myself up onto the balls of my feet and reached for the top shelf. As I did, I could feel my shirt ride up my legs to reveal the curve of my ass. I held my position as I pawed over Gabe's books, pretending to search for a specific one. Most of them were literary classics like 'War and Peace' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' I poked at the bottom book of a stack of books and pulled at it with the tips of my fingers until it was perched at the edge of the shelf. With one more poke, the stack tipped and began sliding off the shelf. I jumped back in time to avoid having the books come down on my head. They struck the ground with a series of thuds that Gabe's downstairs neighbors were probably thrilled about.
"You ok?" Gabe said.
"Yeah, I'm fine," I said, turning to face him.
He had a genuine look of concern that faded away once he confirmed that I was alright. And in the next moment, he turned his attention back to his class. "But would uniting against extraterrestrials actually count as 'nationalism'?" he said. "Wouldn't that be humanism?"
I rolled my eyes and turned back to the closet. A pile of thick books was scattered at my feet. I bent over and scooped up the books one by one and tossed them onto the end of Gabe's bed. I was too short to get them restacked in the closet without Gabe's help or a chair.
