Self Pity, Anyone?

Drev nodded in agreement. "Absolutely," he said once he was able to swallow. "They're very similar, both needing a sense of rhythm and timing." Drev stopped almost in mid-sentence when his eyes, for some unknown reason, fixated on Wren's chest. "Don't even start,' he warned himself and forced his eyes away. "I should teach you some martial arts stuff," he said quickly, hoping to get his mind off things it shouldn't be on."I think you'd do pretty well."

She finished off her second slice and her belly groaned in protest as she contemplated the third. "I'd like that, thanks. A little self defense knowledge could go a long way."

She wondered if Drev was going to act like that every time his eyes strayed. She wasn't exactly unfamiliar with wandering eyes and he was after all, human. She should say something, but what? It was going to get awkward if they kept doing stuff like that.

"They're fake. Want to see the pictures?"

'Um, yeah that worked, no really. That was smooth as whiskey there, Wren.'

'Busted!' Drev’s eyebrows rose in surprise, the crust of his third piece halfway to his mouth. “Uh... sorry?” He knew what she was talking about, but he needed a second for his brain to catch up; she’d caught him a little off guard. 'I’d rather see the real thing,' he said silently in the privacy of his own mind, but that certainly didn’t help the situation.

"I'm not going to get mad at you if you happen to get distracted. I will however punch your lights out if you stare, gawk, ogle or drool at them. If we're going to live together, we're going to have to realize we're both human. It's not like you're a lech, well at least not that I've seen.

I know that it's gunna happen, what matters is that we regain eye contact and move on." In for a penny... "Look, Drev. We need to remember that we're adults here and that we are perfectly capable of controlling any urges that float through our brains. If you don't think you can, then I need to know now, instead of when it becomes a problem."

There now it was on the table. They could get this part of the whole man living with woman/woman living with man sexual tension, dos and don'ts out of the way. She stifled a chuckle. Who was she kidding, she had no freaking clue about what goes on when a man and woman live with each other as friends, or a lovers for that matter. Hell she didn't know anything about men and women living together, or even just together for that matter.

"You're right," Drev said, pulling himself out of the stupor. "But if we're going to be honest, then I might as well just tell you that you're a beautiful girl with a great body. And to be totally honest, I wouldn't mind seeing what that dancer's body of yours is capable of between the sheets.

"But like you said, we're mature adults here, so I'm quite capable of keeping it in my pants." "At least until you're out of the room," he added to himself with a mental chuckle. "I can respect your wishes without getting jealous or creepy.

"But, you're going to have to realize that because of this openness and honesty, I will not hesitate to tell you things like whether your ass looks good or fat in those jeans, alright? If we're going to be friends, you're just going to have to put up with my vulgar comments." Drev nodded decisively, with a hint of a smirk on his lips. "And I'll expect the same of you."

"It does this cool thing, called sleeping." She grinned and plucked an olive off her remaining pizza slice.

"Alright, but if you start to sound like my mother with the fat butt comments, I am so decking you." She stood, with a small moan, her stomach was over full and there was still almost an entire pizza in the kitchen. 'That's alright I can eat it for the next three days.'

"Thanks for dinner, Drev. It was very good."

She picked up her plate, glass, and napkin and started for the sink. "Just remember that I'll nag you about your hair, I have a thing about unkempt hair."

Drev chuckled at her ‘sleeping’ comment, then bit into his fourth piece of pizza. “Don’t worry,” he said around a bite, “I don’t think there’ll be many fat butt comments."

“You’re welcome,” he said as she went into the kitchen with her plate and glass. He shuddered visibly at her unkempt hair comment, though. “Never fails,” he thought. Everyone always thought his hair was dirty and that he had dreads because he didn’t care for it.

“And I’ll have you know,” he said as he went back to get a couple more slices of pizza, “that my hair is always very clean and very well cared for.” He reached up and pulled the string from the ponytail his dreads were in, and let them fall onto his shoulders. “See for yourself.”

She tossed her napkin into the trash and set her plate on the counter. She had to find something to store the pizza in.

"They would have fallen off of your head if you didn't. So why do you have dreads? Is it a cultural thing or what? And how long have you had them? And since were on the subject of your hair, just how long would it be if it wasn't rolled up like that?"

Nothing like curiosity to help settle dinner. She turned from the counter and setting her glass in the sink as she went, and started rummaging around in the cabinets and drawers.

"Left one," he said, indicating the cabinet that stored the tupperware. Drev just picked up a piece and bit into it, taking a moment to chew the still-warm pizza.

"Just about when our band started playing, my hair decided it wanted to be in dreads. Not many Italians wear dreads, so it's not a cultural thing. Just..." Drev shrugged and took another bite of pizza. He was starting to get full. "It might stretch down to my ass now, but I'd never let it get that long." Drev took another bite, and a moment later, his eyes widened and he grinned.

"Hey what about those pictures you were going to show me?"

"Thanks." She moved over and open the cabinet he'd pointed out, and found a long flat container that would work nicely. She pulled it out and started arranging the left over pizza into it.

"Hair that long is just a pain in the ass." Her eyes closed and her nose wrinkled. "Sorry, that was just bad." Unintentional or not, some puns were not meant to be uttered.

She set the last piece into the container and started to close the lid when he asked about the pictures.

"Sure, if you want, but it's really gross. Well the before shot isn't, but all the afters for the first six weeks are bloody and then bruised. My final visit shot, however, is quite stunning, if I do say so myself."

She stuck the container in the fridge and went to the sink. She quickly washed out her glass, and turned back around.

"Do you really want to see them? People say they do, but they don't really mean it. I think my mom was the only one that was genuinely interested." Her brothers had been too, but she had refused to show them the pictures.

"Well, maybe we could skip the bloody ones," he said as he finished his last piece of pizza. There were only two left, but they'd make a good snack later on. He found his own tupperware and put his pieces away.

"But I'd love to see the before and after pictures." He dumped the now empty pans into the sink and wiped the table and stove top with a wash cloth, then
poured himself another glass of Kool-aid.

"No dice. You have to look at the bloody ones, or you don't get to look at any of them. Those are the rules." She chuckled softly and bent over at the waist to look under the sink. There she found a sponge, standing back up she rinsed it, added soap and began to wash the pans. It would rive her crazy to just walk away from them, so instead of expecting Drev to do it and grinding her teeth until he did, she'd take care of them.

She'd had a room mate once that had forced her to let the dishes pile up until the only thing left was one paper plate and a cracked plastic spoon. the girl had finally given in and washed every last dish, it'd taken four hours, but you better believe she did the dishes when it was her turn, after that.

Wren watched Drev pour more of what looked like colored water. 'That has to be Kool-Aid."

"How can you drink that stuff? I didn't even drink it when I was a kid." She wrinkled her nose at him and set about drying the pans.

“Fine, I’ll look at the bloody ones too,” Drev said with a smile. “Now are you bending at the waist for my benefit, or is that really the easier way to reach under the sink?” Smirking, he went to finish tidying up the table, then came back into the kitchen.



“Kool-aid’s good shit,” he replied with a chuckle. “Hey, you mind if I put in some different music?”

"I have this weird little aversion to sticking my head into a cabinet full of chemicals. It's just asking for your hair to get soaked in bleach and then catch on fire." She put the clean pans on the stove since she had no idea where they belonged.

"You go change the music and I'll get the pictures."

Grinning she tossed her wet paper towels into the trash and headed out of the kitchen and into her room. The pictures were in a cheap little plastic album from the dollar store. She really had no idea why she kept them. Morbidity was her only defense.

Chuckling lightly, Drev put the pans away quickly and turned the light off as he left the kitchen. Moving into the other room, he dug out his laptop, plugged a wire into it, and powered it on. Meanwhile, a couple button presses on the stereo cut Vivaldi off and had the equipment waiting for the laptop. He loaded up one of his more eclectic playlists that had some metal, some techno, some classical, and some old swing.

When Pachelbel's "Cannon in D Major" started, he smiled and lowered the screen of his laptop, then sat back and relaxed on the couch.

It took her a while to find the little album, as she had forgotten which pocket it was in. "Ha!" She pulled the little green plastic folder out and zipped up all of the pockets as Pachelbel drifted into her room. smiling she returned to the living room.

"A friend of mine walked down the aisle to this."

She sat on the couch next to Drev, indian style, and offered him the album.

"As promised."

“This song relaxes me like nothing else,” Drev said with a smile as he took the offered album. “Well, besides sex. So, are you going to provide the captions?” Smirking, he opened the cover to the first photos....

"That's my before shot. Me in my all my double a cup glory."

The top half of the page was a picture of a woman from neck to belly button, arms held loosely at her sides. The bottom half was the same neck to waist from the profile, arms held over head. It was Wren's body, lithe and well muscled. She knew that if she'd had a shirt on, she would have looked like a twelve year old girl.

She tilted her head, it was this picture that made her remember why she didn't regret the surgery or the painful recovery. Drev turned the page and she looked at the picture.

"That's just before surgery. The doctor had just finished marking things and I was sedated, because I'd gotten really nervous. Hence the goofy look on my face."

This picture was waist up and a very drugged looking Wren stared glassy eyed at the camera. Her chest was a maze of blue marker and an IV protruded from her arm.

"Which decision came first? The stripping or the boob job?" Even though Drev preferred women to have a chest he could hold onto, that didn't mean he avoided smaller-chested women all together. It wasn't just the boobs, afterall; the girl had to have a complete package. Wren had had a pretty nice package, even pre-augmentation.

"Oddly enough they came about the same time. I was warned by a great many people that both decisions were bad career moves. I would never dance with the Geoffrey Ballet or on a stage in New York with breasts like that, nor would they hire a woman that had exposed her body for money. Personally, I have never wanted to dance with the Geoffrey or in New York, I just wanted to go to Julliard then teach. I was good enough for Julliard, I just didn't have the cash, thus the stripping. The boob job just kind of happened at the same time."

'Ramble much?' She wasn't defending herself, she felt like she didn't have to with Drev, she was just explaining things to him, it felt much different, even though the words were similar. He turned the page again and Wren wrinkled her nose. The doctor had explained at the beginning that he photo documented the entire process and she would get a copy, he'd even shown her the albums he had of his patients, from boob jobs to lypo to chin implants, he took pictures of everything.

"That's post-op, like immediately post-op. They were kind of holding me up to make sure gravity pulled on them the same or something I don't know."

It was a blue red and black mess. The blue was the marker, the red blood and the black was the mixture of the two. He turned the page again and it was of a still unconscious Wren in her hospital bed, her hair was pulled back into a messy pony tail and an IV trailed out from under the covers, the only visible part of her was her head.

"My mom took that shot, thought it would be funny to have a picture of me asleep in a hospital bed, that was before they put stickers on my nose and forehead. My parents are weird sometimes."

The next page was two pictures again, front and side view from neck to belly button. One could tell there was a lot of swelling in her chest and that by her posture she was miserable.

"That's three days after surgery. I had to lay off the pain meds so I could go to the doctor. God I felt like shit."