I went to the kitchen to get a glass and see if Duke had any mixers. He did, thankfully, as well as several bottles of his own alcohol. I noticed that it was mostly Vodka. There were also quite a few beer cans and bottles in the fridge. I thought it would be rude to drink any of those, but, well, once I was already drunk on my own stuff I stopped thinking that and started helping myself.

But it took me a while to get to that point.

I went back to the bedroom to unpack my stuff. When I took out my clothes, I remembered I was still wearing Duke’s shirt and underwear. I figured I should wash them before giving them back, and thankfully he had a washing machine as well as a dryer, so I could do that before he returned.

While I was at it, I washed most of the other clothes I'd brought since they were all dirty things I’d picked off the floor. Being reminded of how pathetic I was as an independent adult, I took three shots of whiskey.

I changed into lounge pants and the only clean shirt I packed, then did the laundry. The sense of pride I got from doing one chore gave me the motivation to do another, so I washed the dishes we had breakfast on that morning.

All that choring tired me out, so I fixed myself another drink and went onto his balcony to smoke. The state of my cigarettes once again distressed me. I definitely didn’t have enough to last all day.

I wasn’t sure if I could justify “ran out of smokes” as an emergency worth using the fire escape for.

I finished smoking and sat on the bed. There was a TV in his room, so after finding the remote on top of the chest of drawers by the bed, I turned it on. I couldn’t figure out how to make it play anything other than the news, so I turned it off again after three minutes.

When I put the remote back, I took a peek into the drawers by his bed. There was all the classic stuff in there: both classic for a guy in his twenties (condoms, lube, tissues, and a few small toys) and classic for a criminal (money, three fake passports and a gun). I sincerely hoped that none of those items would ever have anything to do with me. There was also­­­­ – perhaps unsurprisingly because of how he is – a cat collar.

I laid down, burying my face into the pillows. They smelled good. I hoped I’d used the same laundry detergent to wash my clothes as was used on the sheets, but I later realised the smell was just a mix of Duke’s sweat and shampoo. How embarrassing.

So anyway, I completely fell asleep, and when I woke up it was five in the afternoon for some reason.

I frantically decanted the clothes from the washing machine (which had long since finished) and shoved them into the dryer, wondering what time Duke would get back. The day before, we got to his place at about 11pm, so I estimated he might get back around that time or later.

At some point I took my laptop and drawing tablet into the living room. I’ve been a freelance artist and webcomic creator for about six years. It was my main source of income now, but I used to do a lot of part time jobs as well. Thankfully a comic I completed last year got a lot of popularity and I was still making fairly regular money from it.

Since I didn’t have much else to do, I worked on some of the smaller art commissions I had. One of them just needed colouring, which should have been easy enough, but I couldn’t focus due to being drunk and ended up working on the wrong layer, then somehow deleting my reference photo, and realising this wasn’t even a commission piece at all: it was just a personal doodle.

I stared at my screen for a long time and lamented the fact that I am, and always will be, a failure at anything I do, then started drawing again. It’s my “artistic process”.

The next thing I knew, I’d done a sketch of Duke. I was definitely just telling myself that it was good practice at drawing muscles. The image of him getting changed that morning was still vivid in my mind (it was later overwritten by the many other times I've seen him naked) so it was easy to draw. Part of me did wonder if I could somehow convince Duke to be a life model for me, but I was pretty sure he’d have me do something I didn’t want to in exchange, so I dismissed the idea for the time being.

His face was easy to draw, considering how expressive it was.

I was on something of a roll and filled a whole page with various sketches of him. My favourite of the bunch was one of him blushing and wearing a maid outfit with a cat headband. I couldn’t stop laughing about it, so I even completed the line work and colouring.

Next, I tried my hand at recreating the massive painting of Duchess, but I was never any good at drawing animals so it didn’t go well. I gave up, went for a smoke and a drink, then came back to it about four times before I finished.

The clothes finished drying sometime during all this. I took his shirt and underwear and folded them before placing them on his bed. I left my clothes in a huge pile on the floor.

I don’t know if it was before or after I’d put the clothes away, but at some point I must have started walking around looking at all his trinkets in the living room and just… pushing them off their shelves. One broke. I was too drunk to care.

I took a nap.

I was slightly more reasonably-minded once I woke up and drank some water, so I picked up the shards of whatever ceramic had broken and put them on a table. I think I only did that so I wouldn’t hurt myself on the pieces; not because I felt any guilt over breaking it. Karma must have been at work when I cut my foot on a bit that I’d missed.

For all that sleeping, I still felt tired.

I hopped to the balcony to smoke again, no doubt leaving a little trail of blood from my foot as I did. I couldn’t be bothered with tending the wound. My stomach started hurting a bit, which I paid equally little attention to.

I felt lethargic for some reason. Well, I say “for some reason” but the reason was fairly obviously just my depression acting up. It had been getting worse again in recent years, but I was pretty much resigned to it at that point. I just kept telling myself that it’s proof I’m meant to be an artist.

I forced myself to laugh, then made my way back to the living room.

I sat on the floor, grumbling sadly.