Broken, Grave

Nomzamo

“You know,” I paused briefly, looking at the large screen in the home cinema that we were sat in, “Friends is really boring. I don’t get the hype of it at all.” I said, my eyes not on the screen as I sat on the love seat that Nico and I were sharing. 

He hadn’t been paying attention to the screen, not even once as I sat there. I could feel his stare on me the entire time as I sat criss-cross, dressed in his clothes. He sat silently, not moving as he rested his hands, nice and wide open as I continued to apply the nail polish on them. I blew on it, resting his hand carefully on my knee as I moved onto the next nail, “won’t people look at you weirdly for having nail polish on?” I asked him, looking up briefly and meeting his eyes. 

He frowned, “why would people look at me weirdly for having on nail polish? It’s just nail polish,” he said with a simple shrug and I laughed lightly. 

“Oh yeah. I forgot, people aren’t as prissy as they used to be,” I replied, thinking back to my high school and how weird those people had been. They had been such cruel individuals that sometimes I wonder where they are in life. Did any of them still maintain their relationships? Or did the world open up their minds after high school and they were now tolerable people? I don’t know, I can only pray. “You’re staring at me real hard, buddy,” I said to him, looking up at him briefly, and then glancing at the large screen where Friends was playing. I had no interest in that show. I’d tried watching it before since everyone at school used to always talk about it, quote it and even wear shirts of the characters. The day that I decided to get on the bandwagon and watch it, it had been so boring, I wasn’t sure I was watching the right show. 

Nico smiled, “how could I not?” he asked me, and my eyes flittered back to his. I’d pulled his red hair into several tiny ponies all over his head. I told him that he had ‘bantu knots’ and he’d been weirded out at the name but I just laughed and said that he looked nice. His face was clean of the bloody smile, and he looked bare before me. That dark glint in his eyes was no more, and I knew that I was speaking to Nicolaas. 

It was weird, it was almost like he was two people at once. There was the Nicolaas with the steel blue eyes, bare face and kind smile. That Nicolaas spoke French a lot and he smiled a lot too, genuinely, parting his lips with his teeth showing, and he was quiet. He didn’t talk much, only watched me. Then, there was the Nicolaas with the bloody smile on his face, and that one was a stranger to me. He was more outspoken, colder, more deranged, but I think he loved me more. 

I liked steel blue eyed Nicolaas a lot more. I blushed under his gaze and he chuckled lightly. 

I looked back down at his large hand on my knee, going back to painting it with the black nail polish. “You know, I actually hate nail polish,” I revealed to him, dipping the brush into the nail polish. “I prefer acrylic nails. Nail polish just makes me nauseous, and I don’t know…I guess, I just don’t like it,” I finally said. “My father used to say that sometimes you just don’t like things, and there’s no other reason other than the fact that you don’t like them.” 

“I don’t like vanilla ice cream,” Nico added, “and I don’t like that scratchy noise like nails going across the board.” 

I paid extra attention to his pinkie nail, squinting my eyes and making sure that I didn’t make it messy. “I started liking nail polish after my niece was born,” I continued, “she had the cutest fingers and toes, and I’d sit for hours and paint her tiny baby nails. She’d get really excited too. She’d have this big smile on her face and go ‘ooh’ with this cute little look of awe on her face,” I remembered with a smile on my face, thinking back to the little moments that I’d spent with my family. I wondered when I’d see them again, but I was too afraid to ask. At the moment, I hadn’t gotten hurt and I’d healed from the scars on my body. I didn’t want to go down the road of being hurt again.