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LITTLE DROPLETS of dew, as clear as the sky that hot summer day despite containing the white crystalline of a savory chip's seasoning, clung to Valentina's skin like she clung to the hope that the phone in her view would ring. Please, she pled, the words bouncing off the walls of her skull and shattering her brain's resolve. A headache had formed a few minutes ago after she couldn't bring herself to blink, afraid the clashing of her eyelids would drown out the noise of the yellow telephone.
Ring, please.
"Vee, you're driving me fucking crazy."
Valentina didn't look at the boy sitting on her bed. Steve, who'd bursted into the girl's bedroom unannounced five minutes ago, was throwing a stress ball painted like the planet Venus up at the ceiling above his horizontal body. He paused to look at her, meeting the back of her head, where he then threw the decade-old arts and crafts project he'd dug up under Valentina's bed.
"Ow! Hey!" Valentina snapped, finally breaking free from the sight of the numbers circling the telephone. She had to blink roughly a few times to adjust to the sight.
The ball bounced off her head and onto the floor where it rolled across the mostly white and partially stained carpet, returning to its home under the bed where Valentina had planned to let it rot for eternity. Steve apparently had a plan to disrupt all of hers, however. Everything she set in place, he tore through. Like the time she told everyone to meet at the restaurant at 5:45 so they would be early for their reservation at 6, and Steve called ahead to move the reservation to 5:45 because he thought she just had the times mixed up.
He then proceeded to show up at 6:00. Late.
"I didn't come over so I could sit here and watch you wait for a phone call all day," the Harrington man complained.
Valentina's eyes narrowed. Her dark eyebrows, a contrast to the pristine condition of her hair that had been basking in the sun for weeks now, settled into the soft plush of her freckled eyelids. Her blue eyes, so strikingly deep within her skin like the ocean crashing against the shore, met Steve's brown eyes like the sediment beneath a clear river, disappearing into the place she dreamt as he pressed his face into her blankets placed haphazardly on the bed.
"I didn't invite you over," Valentina pointed out. "These are my plans for the day. You chose to tag along."
Steve sighed dramatically. He even threw a hand over his face, dragging it down so heavily it caught onto his tanned lips. Valentina noticed the shadow cast upon his cheeks then, covered by his calloused hand for a moment then revealed to the light again.
"I wasn't expecting your plans to be so boring," he groaned.
Valentina spun around on her bum again, sitting criss-crossed on the floor in front of her yellow telephone. She'd already been doing this for an hour since she woke up before Steve arrived—which she refrained from telling him, because he'd surely drag her up off the floor immediately—and quickly moved to the floor when the fear of bed sores entered her mind.
