Pretty Tied Up

Chapter XI

Kinks and Fetishes: Heroin and cuddles?

Izzy returned from his night of dealing at two in the morning to find all the lights in the apartment turned on and a terrified Steven huddled under a blanket. Steven apparently hadn't noticed him however, because when he tried to place what he thought was a comforting hand on the drummer's shoulder, instead of being comforted Steven screamed and fell backwards, banging his head on the wall behind the bed.

"Oh fuck, Sweetheart, are you alright?" Izzy had not intended for Steven to injure himself, he had wanted to comfort him.

Steven sat back up, rubbing the back of his head. "Yeah, I'm fine." He still looked skittish, glancing around the room repeatedly.

"What happened?" Izzy sat down next to Steven on the bed, pulling him into a hug and kissing the top of his head where he had banged it against the wall.

Pulling the blanket closer around himself, Steven tried to push himself further into Izzy. "I found Slash and he made me watch Friday the 13th with him and the house was making a bunch of weird noises and I thought Jason was coming to get me and I got scared. Stay with me please?"

"I have to take inventory of what I sold and see how much money I made Steven, but I'll be right in the kitchen if you need me."

"But what about the monsters Izzy!?" Izzy resisted the urge to pinch his nose in frustration. All he wanted was to get this one simple task done and then go to sleep.

"Steven, Sweetheart, there is no one hiding under the bed or in the closet waiting to jump out and kill you. I promise. If it will make you feel better, you can come sit at the kitchen table with me, alright?"

"Okay." Steven followed him into the kitchen, still wrapped in the blanket he had burrowed into. Izzy went through the insanely deep pockets of his leopard fur coat, pulling out wads of cash and the small leather notebook he used to tally heroin sales and jot down lyric ideas in. He had miraculously managed to sell all twenty-eight folds of smack he had owned at the beginning of the night for around fifteen dollars each. Now for the hard part of tallying in his earnings. He had bought the heroin for about eight bucks a fold, so he had turned a profit of seven dollars, and multiplied by twenty-eight... Math was hard. Eight times seven was fifty... six, and then two times seven was fourteen, so seven times twenty-eight had to be one hundred and ninety-six? Wait, that didn't look right, no way he had made that much in one night. If he rounded the twenty-eight up to thirty and the seven down to five he could get a rough estimate, thirty times five was... one hundred and fifty. So then twenty-eight times seven should be close to one-fifty. Eight times seven was fifty-six, then two times seven was fourteen...

"Hey Steven, what's twenty-eight times seven?"

Steven looked up from staring at the table. "Uhh... I don't know? What have you been getting?"

"One hundred and ninety-six."

"That sounds about right, I think. I dunno Izzy, I slept through most of my math classes, if I showed up at all. Duff is better at this kind of stuff, I think he actually knows how to do that long division thing. I could never figure that one out."

Izzy went back to staring at the notebook page filled with numbers. Maybe if he did the math a different way... He paid eight dollars a fold for twenty-eight folds, eight times twenty-eight was two-hundred and twenty-four, he had sold twenty-eight folds for fifteen dollars a fold, fifteen times twenty-eight was four-hundred and twenty, four-twenty minus two-twenty-four was... one hundred and ninety-six again. Maybe he had actually made nearly two-hundred dollars that night. That was enough money to buy around three weeks of food for him and Steven. Or he could use the money to get Steven something nicer than a five-dollar bouquet of flowers.

"So is it one-ninety-six?" Steven's voice pulled Izzy back into the present. "That's like, enough to buy a new guitar or something isn't it?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah. I don't really need a new guitar though." Izzy began to sort the bills into stacks, smoothing out the wrinkles before tucking them between the pages of the notebook. "Come on, let's go to bed."

It took Izzy thirty-six minutes to get Steven asleep. It might have taken less time if Izzy had let him leave the lights on, but Izzy had to put his foot down at some point and there was no way he was sleeping with the lights on. A line had to be drawn somewhere. An imaginary furry thing with four eyes and teeth hiding in the closet was no reason to leave the lights on while he was trying to sleep.

Steven finally fell asleep lying almost completely on top of Izzy, clinging to his chest like some sort of baby koala. While this position might have been comfortable for Steven, it was much less comfortable for Izzy, who was now trapped. This left him with plenty of time to think about all the ways he could spend a hundred and ninety-six dollars while he tried to fall asleep. He could buy Steven dinner at his favorite restaurant and then take him out to a bar and order fancier drinks than just bottles of nightrain. The only problem with that was that they couldn't exactly make it obvious that it was some sort of date. Unless...

It was at this point that Izzy also fell asleep. Unfortunately, due to busy schedules and constant interruptions from various bandmates, Izzy did not get a chance to take Steven out until four days later.

Heyyyy it's me. This is kinda a filler chapter to set up chapter 12. However, if y'all are good, I might put smut into the next chapter. If you guys behave yourselves.

xxxGoth-Bunny