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Somehow, Julie’s attention keeps slipping away through his fingers like sand. He can never seem to keep her eyes on him for long, always getting distracted or dragged away by another friend.
He wonders if he’s doing something wrong. He just can’t understand why it had to be Julie out of everyone - it felt like some sort of cruel joke, that it had to be on purpose, but Julie wouldn’t do that, not her. She's just naive;
And stupid. So stupid. Stupid, silly girl.
Sometimes he thinks she's too naive and innocent for her own good. It’ll get her in trouble one day, he’s sure of it. That’s why he’s here to protect her from that - as if he’d ever actually let that happen. That is also why he watches her from afar, out of her sight and everyone else’s, while she's tending to the flowers in front of her house or chatting with Frank, when she’s acting as a princess and her knight with Sally or playing games with the neighborhood, he’s always there.
He was always there. Watching her every move, everyone she talks to, every time she takes a step or even blinks. He knows. He’ll always know. Even in the confines of her own home, she’s in the perfect spot for Wally to easily keep an eye on her.
Those are the rare, fleeting moments where Home is completely and utterly silent, not a creak or squeak of the floorboards, or even a flutter of the windows opening and shutting - when Wally is watching from the back windows, into the pretty little abode of the most joyful girl in the world. He could count all the little things she does alone, like how she spends hours going through options on how she wants her hair that day, or when she gets all excited and paces or rocks back and forth because she just can’t hold in her delight. He noticed she tries her best to avoid doing that outside. He really, really wishes she wouldn’t.
He watches because he’s just looking out for her. He’s just making sure she's safe.
And she couldn’t be safer anywhere else than at Home, with him. Alone.
“Say, Wally, how come you didn’t get Eddie to ship these out to you instead?” Julie asks, carrying two buckets of bright paint on her left, handling the bar of the other on her right.
Julie, of course, couldn’t say no to Wally when he asked her to come shop for fresh new paint with him and help him carry it Home. What kind of friend would she be otherwise? Besides, what a cute way to spend the afternoon with him, just the two of them. It makes her want to blush.
“I even think Howdy could have carried all of this on his own if you had asked him instead!”
“Oh, I couldn’t. He’s as busy as a bee, and I couldn’t ask the man to take the day off just to help me carry some ol’ paint.” Wally chuckled, setting down the buckets of yellow and red. “As for Eddie, well, ah.. I can already imagine the mess he’d make trying to get these over to me. Painting the neighborhood red sounds fun, don’t you think?”
Julie giggled thinking about Eddie drenched in all the colors of the rainbow along with spilled buckets of paint all over the streets. She’d love to help clean up, but making a paint angel first sounded much more fun.
“Haha! Don’t say that, Wally! Have a little more faith in him, would you?”
With a sigh, Julie sat the pails of green and blue down on Home’s floor.
“There ya go! All done!” Julie stretched and hummed. “Gosh, I had a lot of fun today with you, Wally! Too bad it’s getting late now..”
Julie’s hand reached out to Home’s doorknob, but her attempts at twisting it were to no avail. She’s imagining things, maybe, she thinks as she tries again, getting the same results as before.
Home’s front door was locked. That’s peculiar. Julie wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box, but she knew that front doors shouldn’t be locked from the inside. That’s just not right.
“Uh.. Wally, I think-” When Julie turned around, her heart nearly jumped right out of her body.
Wally stood next to her without even an inch between them left to breathe.
“Ain’t that funny? I think Home wants you to stay a little while longer.” Wally’s voice was low, lush, like his words were dripping in sticky sweet honey. “You will stay, won’t you? I’d like that. I’d like that very much.”
She couldn’t be anywhere safer but at Home.