Asa Mitaka @fluttershy01 - Tumblr Blog

ghost ride | part one.

✧✎ synopsis: post-graduate, your life sucks especially hard. two jobs, a lazy roommate, and an imperceptible social life have dulled you to grey. nothing seems like it's going to change. until your roommate decides to let her plug crash at your place, and you're bribed into a strange adventure that challenges everything you thought you were.

pairing: fem!reader x vernon chapter word count: 25k full length word count: 186k genres/tropes: drug dealer!vernon, reader is a post-grad w/ a flop degree lol, inclusion of OCs, gay!soonyoung for the lol, appearances from other svt characters, opposites attract, romance, teasinggg, tensionnn, unrequited love, angst, adventure, smut, relationship drama, sprinkling of comedy, another excruciating slowburn bc what else? + reader is a tad dramatic/sensitive but that's why i love her :]

(!) warnings: drugs (IE: weed, molly, coke, whippets, alcohol), mention of guns, mention of death/overdose, intense language, an instance of non-consensual touching to the reader by a side character, some toxic & possessive behaviour, degrading, aggression, mentions of physical abuse/harm, dips into grief and loss, fractured family dynamics on vernon's part.

✧✎ a/n: the first chapter is here!

as always, the patience and grace from everyone has been super appreciated! i have never had so much fun writing a fic. through the sad and the bad, the mad and the rad, i absorbed every moment! and i hope those that give this fic a chance enjoy it just as much <3

vernon in this fic is the same vernon from my wonwoo series, HER! but you do not need to read HER to understand ghost ride!

what to note:

there are seven parts in the series

releases are weekly, ~12am EST, sunday!

inspo playlist!

if at any point you want on or off the taglist, comment/inbox/msg me!

additionally, the chapters/parts are lengthy. the first six parts are between 24-27k while the finale/ending is 30k+!

✎ 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07

PS: please note that i block contentless blogs who like my posts!

THIS WEEK: Let's Help The Sameer Project!

leave a comment or make a reblog stating something you enjoyed abt the chapter! at the end of the week, i will tally all legitimate comments/reblogs and make a donation to said organization.

IE: this chapter gets 15 comments, 25 reblogs - i donate 40$! pls note that i am a uni student living away from home so i will vary my donations accordingly to my financial situation at the time <3

18 MONTHS AGO.

“Hey, move your hands.”

You were staring down the narrow hallway, focused on the single, sad window at the very end. Nighttime was gradually descending outside.

A dark shade of prussian blue tinted the atmosphere and caused the dull, white walls to seem brighter than they actually were. Beyond the window, you could see into an apartment flat—specifically a cozy kitchenette that had rosy orange tiles—where two girls were cooking on the stove. They danced around each other, jumping, weaving, and twirling. You squinted at their lips and the lyrics they seemingly mouthed. Their smiles were so easygoing, like melting butter slipping around inside a hot, waxy pan.

“Hey—yoo hoo—can you move your hands?”

With teeth gnawing down on your inner cheek, you stared harder at their expressions, and particularly, their lips, using all your concentration to conceive what it was they were singing along to so frivolously.

Around the moment they started snapping their fingers, it hit you.

‘Cause you’re my lady, I’m your fool It makes me crazy when you act so cruel Come on, baby, let’s not fight We’ll go dancing, everything will be alright

“Hey, Miss Lala Land! Move your fuckin’ hands off the pass! These plates have to go here! Get the freakin’ cotton out of your ears.”

“Oh—oh! Shoot—I’m so sorry!”

In an instant, you had ripped your hands from the metal counter, letting the cook place down a tray of steaming plates. The way he was scowling at you—red in the face, sweaty forehead pinched together, nose crinkled—pulled out all that delirium from your brain as though someone were coiling up a string. He adjusted the blue kaleidoscope-patterned bandana covering his hair, the scowl now seeming ironed to his skin.

“You’re gonna get axed doing shit like that.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Get this order out,” he croaked, tossing his hand up like you were some pest. “Table twelve. Try not to get distracted by a soup spoon.”

“Uh, yes. Right away.”

Hoisting up the weighted, warm tray so it could partly balance on your shoulder, you side-hipped through the swinging doors and into the packed dining area that bustled with conversation. Your table was somewhere in the middle. It was occupied by three older men, still dressed in their work attire. All-black shirts smeared with dust, heavy corduroy pants, sunglasses in the spiked hair, and construction boots that were beginning to unlace.

They were from the scaffolding expansion project down the street.

You were familiar with them. Unfortunately.

“Awe, there she is!” One of them guffawed at you.

Lowering the tray to rest halfway on the table, you began passing out their plates as quick as you could, keening to keep conversation short.

“Here I am,” you chuckled, though the syllables audibly shook.

“You’re a bit late, there, aren’t you?” Another man taunted, scratching against his ear with the sunglasses. “Just you back there?”

“Uh, nope.” Your laugh was full of anxious breath. “It’s a busy night. The kitchen’s just a bit backed up is all. I’m very sorry for the wait.”

“Woah, woah—I didn’t order a fuckin’ steak.”

“Oh, uh. My bad. That was supposed to go to…” you paused, staring around the table. Your mind decided right then was the perfect moment to become literal mush—applesauce—in your skull. “I could have sworn that—uh—wait, I’m sorry. Maybe there was a mistake—”

As the man brought his large, beer-filled mug to press against his chapped lips, he started snickering. In seconds, all you heard was their uproarious laughter, and you were suddenly thrust into being the humiliating stump of an ineffective joke that pushed tears to nettle like beestings behind your eyes. The man wiped his mouth of foam and alcohol. “Got you, didn’t I?” He spat out, reeling. “Steak’s mine. That look on your face—are you on your last straw? They gonna throw you out?”

“I-I guess they won’t be anymore.” You stapled on a smile that couldn’t have looked more pathetic, all in an attempt to ride along with their proud little skit. Your lips felt sewn, warbling with emotion. “Lucky me.”

“Yeah, damn right. Lucky you!”

“Well, enjoy your food… need any refills?” The question was dragged from between your teeth in utmost reluctance.

“Nah, we’re settled.” Thank the lord. “Later, though. We might need you later. We go through these things like chips,” he said, raising up his golden mug with the condensation streaming down it.

At times this job was a viper, waiting to execute the perfect killing bite. For every polite, well-mannered table that actually treated you like a human rather than a minimum wage worker doormat, there was always another table that speared your guts. Sometimes it felt like a dice roll, other times, a very cruel, purposeful plot patched together by the universe’s own needle and thread. With fists clenched up and the tears lacquering your eyes, you were gunning for the doorway into the backroom.

“Hey, can I grab you quick?!”

Your toe pressed hard into the scuffed linoleum floor.

Dread slammed into you. Edging your head to the left, there was a small, circular table, occupied by just a single person—a young man. He already had a half-emptied plate. From your distant inspection, it looked like the ravioli. He wasn’t your table.

But you still swallowed your emotional bile and tended to him.

“Sorry. What’s the problem?”

“Oh, there’s no problem,” he clarified, smiling. His cordial, relaxed tone was a breath of fresh air that you wanted to whiff like fresh lavender. “My waiter—he was supposed to grab me a refill on the seltzer. It’s just been, like, twenty minutes or so since I asked. Was just wondering if you had the time.”

“The seltzer?” You repeated, eyes widening.

“It’s cranberry.”

He continued to stare at you, meanwhile you just stood there, dumbly, looking at his emptied glass. Your mind was fried. “Uh, I’m sorry. Okay. Yes! The cranberry seltzer! I can get you some more of that, for sorry—I mean—for sure.” You wanted someone to come put you out of your misery. Whack you straight in the head with a chair.

But the stranger seemed pleased to wait. He didn’t even bother to make an unfunny sneer, or exhale a shaming laugh. In fact, his gaze was sympathetic, and you found yourself dreaming into the deep, sensitive hues of forestry brown that inhabited his eyes, with long, plentiful lashes to shade them. His skin was very tanned and his dark hair shiny like gloss. It was an undercut, with the longer tresses combed backward. Spilt across his cheeks and nose was a constellation of freckles. He looked beautifully polka-dotted.

“Thank you,” he said.

You blinked at him. “What?”

He tilted his head, grinned softly, “for the seltzer.”

“Oh, yes! I’m gonna go grab it!”

When you returned to his table, he leaned back in his seat, allowing you to replace the empty glass with a brand new one that fizzled in the scent of carbonated cranberries. It wasn’t until he smiled for the umpteenth time that you realized he had magnificent dimples, and that one of them was pierced with a small silver ball. You shouldn’t scour your eyes all over him like a paint roller, but it was rare you waited on such kind, endearing faces.

“Appreciate it, thanks.”

“No problem.” You hovered for a second despite the urgent need to check your other tables—the tables you were actually supposed to be caring for—although your body was unwilling to move.

It seemed you were rooted to the floor, drawn into the safe, calm feeling of the stranger’s presence as though it were some invisible aura haloing around you. But you didn’t want to get in trouble. Again. So, you opted to leave and let the stranger enjoy his ravioli.

“Hey,” he called.

You stopped on a dime, returning to his side.

“Those guys, do they come here often?” He cocked his head backward at table twelve, which seated the obnoxious construction workers, still laughing, still gouging their mouthes with food.

Fiddling with the empty glass, you nodded. “Yes. At least once a week. There’s a huge group of them working to expand the townhouse units down the street. Most are pretty nice. They come with their wives, occasionally. Others… they suck.” Remembering you were still on the clock, you hastily fumbled to defend your choice wording. “But they’re customers at the end of the day!”

“It must be hard, dealing with that.”

“Uh, yeah. It gets rowdy sometimes. I’m still trying to adjust here.”

“You’re new?”

“Relatively,” you responded, staring down at the glass. “Just trying to make some extra money. Uni fees and all that. I’m sure you get it.”

He sipped from his seltzer, wiped the edge of his mouth, and then relaxed back into the chair with a comfy smile. “I’m not a student, actually.”

Squeezing the glass, your eyes widened. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh—you mean you’re a graduate now.”

He shook his head. “No. I never went to school.” Your mouth lowered, and you were in the midst of scrambling to reorient yourself such that you didn’t appear so ignorant, but then he said, “do you walk home?”

You swallowed. “I bus.”

“Oh, so you’re far?”

“Not that far. But far enough to bus.”

“Alone?” His dense brow raised in concern while his lustrous eyes flecked with intrigue. He then jabbed an orange ravioli onto his fork.

“Um… well… sometimes. Most times. Not always.”

“Forty-one to Alta Heights?”

“Ha, yeah. It’s popular. Usually packed.”

“I've seen.” He shrugged, readying the ravioli before his mouth, but pausing briefly. “You’re sweet. Just gotta hold your ground a little more, you know?” He started chewing, and then forked another ravioli, running it around the brightly coloured sauce.

You didn’t speak.

Someone whisked by you quick, tapping your back and leaving behind a hissed whisper that crawled its way into your ear like a bug.

“He’s my table. Beat it.”

With a sigh, you did as you were told.

It wasn’t until you left the restaurant for the night that you realized it was raining. Not hard rain, but delicate drops. The kind that tickled while still persisting to wet the dark streets until they glimmered reflections of the neon store signs. You had only a casual, lightweight jacket—more a windbreaker than anything—and it didn’t even have a hood. After zipping it up, you adjusted the bag strewn over your shoulder. The strap was rough, thick fabric with a colourful pattern, but the leather itself was a simplistic cinnamon. It had only two pockets. One big and one small.

Since middle school, you had this bag.

You graduated university last year, and you still had it.

Something about that fact was comforting.

As you were waiting to cross the street for the bus stop, a voice called for you. When you turned, he was there.

Leaned against a lamp post, huffing on a cigarette. His jacket looked much warmer than yours. It was fleecy, unzipped, and checkered with various greens. When he brushed his dark hair back, you swore the strands glittered like they were pure satin. The light showering him made all his freckles visible. You had this sinking feeling. You would never see him again.

“Home?” He questioned.

You were silent for a moment, pondering, while your tongue pushed against your bottom teeth. “No. I’m going somewhere… but I can’t say where or what, really. But if you know, then it’s obvious, and—”

“Well, Tyler Durden better hurry before he misses the bus.”

His eyes gleamed at you.

Yours were positively gleaming back.

“I’m off. Night.” He flicked the stumpy cigarette onto the ground, then stepped on it once, blending the paper into the slick cement.

For some reason, you couldn’t even formulate a friendly goodbye or goodnight in response, rather your brain, charred like a burnt marshmallow, could only project utter blankness as the stranger walked away. Nonetheless, you stood there, observing his back, until a very strong gust of wind whipped through the crisp air, sweeping up his fleece jacket for no more than a second.

And that’s when you saw nothing apart from a catatonic glimpse—the handle to a Glock sticking out his pants. Your mouth opened. The wind settled and his jacket fluttered back down.

Even worse was yet to come.

You had missed the stupid bus.

12 MONTHS AGO.

“No way. That’s so gross—actually, that’s disgusting. Wait—and did she… she did! Of course she would. We need to like, schedule an intervention or something… yeah… just tell her there’s booze.”

There was a burnt piece of toast staring up at you, half-smeared in peanut butter that you had piously scraped the container to knife out. Ruby was supposed to fetch groceries the other day, but she coincidentally went drinking with her friends instead and now you were about to eat the saddest toast in history. While reaching into the fridge for some juice, you shot your roommate a sharp glance from across the room.

Sat criss-crossed on the couch, dressed in her smallest tank top and shorts, glistening hair thrown into a lopsided bun, while she ate her unfinished pint of ice cream and blabbered at her phone. It wasn’t meant to be a scornful, judgy look, although it was hard to control your intention at eight in the morning on a grumbling stomach and little to no sleep. You took the juice and toast into your bedroom, deciding to sit at the cluttered desk you had pressed up against the window. There wasn’t much to marvel except the grey complex parking lot and its surrounding wooden fence, although it was better than hearing about Ruby’s friend vomiting on herself.

For the past year, she had been your roommate.

She didn’t attend your university.

In fact, you had never seen Ruby a day in your life until you happened across her profile on one of those housing websites, where people posted listings for sublets, available rooms, and lease takeovers.

Ruby (she/her), 24, looking for a roommate! Hey all, I have a room available in a 2 bedroom, 1 bath apartment. See attached pictures!

A little about me… I’m a full-time waitress at Mr. York’s I love a good night out! Very easygoing roomie :)

Tell me some stuff about you as well if you’re interested!

After reading further into the ad, you knew there was no pondering the situation—the cost for rent and utilities was reasonable, and while the place wasn’t in tip-top modernized condition, it would suffice just fine. Ruby was pleasant and cooperative in her messages. The few times you had video-called, you were relieved to see she wasn’t a catfish of some sort—she was a glimmery haired, red-streaked brunette with olive skin inked by the occasional tattoo. Her striking hazel eyes could be summer ponds doused in sunlight. She even offered to help get you a waitressing job at Mr. York’s. It was true—she did seem easygoing—and within a month you were moved in.

There was a knock at your door.

“Yeah?” You shouted.

Ruby poked her head into the room, the phone lowered to her neck. “Hey, uh—wow, it smells like peanut butter in here—some friends and I are going out tomorrow night. This great Mexican food truck only has a week left at Cedar Point Park and we have to try it.” She lifted her trimmed eyebrows, reddish, thin, and neat. “You can bring a friend if you want to. What about Diana? Would she be interested?”

Ruby always suggested you could bring a friend.

And for some reason, that friend was always Diana, even despite the fact you two hadn’t spoken since you graduated university.

“Uh, think I’ll pass,” you answered, smiling. “Work. I hope you guys have fun, though. Hey—you’re not going to the conference?”

She proceeded to shrug, scratching at the gem piercing stabbed right above her cupid’s bow. “No. I mean, it’s not mandatory. They’ll just ask someone else. It’s corporate bore for a week.” The company she was employed under hosted several Humanitarian conferences throughout the year. Ruby passed on most of them. “I’ll bring you back food, okay?”

While you had your qualms about Ruby as a roommate—and there were a large number of them—she was still compassionate and constantly attempting to include you in her adventures. However, sometimes those adventures lasted until the faint purples of twilight, and contained potent enough liquor to thoroughly disinfect an amputated leg, and twisted manically throughout the city streets akin to a labyrinth. That just wasn’t your shtick.

Working two jobs to pay off your student loans, support your future, and find independence was your shtick, and it engulfed your life to a degree that Ruby probably noted as concerning.

After breakfast, you slipped into a bright red uniform shirt and grabbed your metal pin nameplate for work at Common Cents, an aged convenience store sat on a semi-populated street corner. You had gotten a job there shortly after the hostess gig at Mr. York’s, and you were able to make it fit, working strictly morning shifts in order to maintain waitressing during the evenings. The walk to Common Cents wasn’t long, fifteen minutes or so, and by the time you arrived at the corner store with your cinnamon shoulder-strung bag and the early glints of warm sunshine stinging your eyes, you noticed a long, coiled hose leading around to the back alley.

That’s where you found Soonyoung, blasting the brick wall with a sloppy stream of cold water, while soap suds bubbled under his feet.

Picking up a window-scraping brush from the ground, you approached him, tapping the bristles softly against his shoulder. He always wore headphones. You thought he was going deaf. But he fiercely disagreed.

“Hey—what are you doing?”

Soonyoung partially removed the headset from his ear. “What?”

You smiled, deciding to poke his leg with the damp brush again. “I said, what are you doing? Did you even open up the store? It’s almost nine.”

“Oh, uh—,” Soonyoung reached into a large pocket on his knee-length black shorts that seemed one size too big for him, pausing the music from his phone, “—well, I got most of it off. But the wall got graffitied.”

“Really?” Stabbing the long brush into the ground like a cane, you examined the brick, realizing there were streaks of the design left behind, though Soonyoung’s dutiful scrubbing and hosing had nearly removed it.

“Yeah. Mixed up some chemical shit into the water bucket over there. Rubbed the damn wall so hard, my arm felt like spaghetti.” He then started spraying the foamy residue at his feet until it fizzled away.

“So, the store’s not open?”

“It is,” Soonyoung nodded. “That’s where I got all this stuff from.”

“You can’t leave the store open with no one inside!”

He waved his hand through the air dismissively, adjusting the backwards black cap that he preferred wearing to hide his often smushed hair, which was a very distinct platinum blonde colour. “Relax, alright?”

“Soonyoung.”

“It’s fine. You won’t get fired. I won’t get fired. This isn’t the first time I’ve scraped doodles off the wall and it probably won’t be the last, either.” He took the brush from you, letting it stand in the plaster bucket, while water from the hose continued running all across the pavement. “You gotta stop worrying all the damn time. Roll out your shoulders for once.”

Sighing, you heeded his advice, feeling something crack.

It was too early to be this stressed.

“What was the graffiti?”

“That octopus shit.”

“Again? Why do they like the wall so much?”

Rubbing at his sun-bleached eyebrow, Soonyoung shrugged. “Don’t know. Honestly, like—I don’t even hate graffiti—I have no problems with it, actually. Until I’ve gotta be the one to clean that shit up. Then I start having problems. Patsy flipped her shit when she saw the first squid.”

“Octopus.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, well, she was angry as hell. But I still had to clean it.”

This was the third time the back wall had been tagged since you became a clerk at the corner store. An octopus, then a stuffy conglomeration of large bright letters you could hardly discern, and now, another octopus.

Foolishly, you had made a comment to your boss, Patsy, that the big block letters and the octopus were done by the same artist. She almost spat at the fact you used the term artist to describe their “inconsiderate and shallow manner of expressing themselves” in Patsy’s language, and then you received a very thorough, lengthy biopsy of the graffiti that suggested they were painted by two totally different “hopeless delinquents” (again, in Patsy’s language).

Similar to Soonyoung, you didn’t particularly care about the graffiti.

If anything, you were curious.

“Okay, I’ll leave you to it.” You took a few steps around the puddles beginning to develop in the cracked pavement. “I—I’m gonna go inside. I’ll get the register set up. Do we need to refill the scratch tickets at all?”

But when you turned around, Soonyoung already had his thick headset back on, the hose returned to waterboarding the wall. “What?!” He shouted upon noticing you staring at him.

You merely shook your head. “Nothing.”

Working the corner store every morning to afternoon was quite boring compared to Mr. York’s. Good boring, though. No shuffling around on your aching feet for nearly eight hours, or balancing heavy trays of hot, expensive food from table to table while expectant diners observed your every move. You mostly sat at the corner store, flicking through pages to laminated magazines while a fan small enough to fit on the counter blew air into your face. On occasion there were questionable customers.

A few altercations over lottery tickets or cigarettes.

But, so far, it hadn’t been anything you couldn’t handle.

Soonyoung came inside, the hose coiled up and looped through his arm while he handled the plaster bucket and window-scraping brush hurriedly toppling past the counter to the storage closet where you heard him throw all the supplies onto the floor. You did like Soonyoung, even if you weren’t particularly great friends. Just coworkers. When you first met him, his blonde hair was finely buzzed and dyed with purple-patterned stars, fingernails brushed in navy blue polish steadily chipping, and ears clustered with numerous piercings that either dangled or glittered.

He appeared similar to some of the flashy models you flipped past in the magazines, advertising jewelry or very bizarre fashion items that never seemed wearable beyond the glossy page you would be fiddling with. He was hired by the previous manager of Common Cents—otherwise Patsy would have taken one look at his self-expression and likely fainted.

Now, he came to work more toned-down.

“Alright, here’s some boxes of Mountain Brewers soda. Fridges have to be restocked.” The boy maneuvered a stacked dolly in front of the counter as you leaned closer into the fan’s breeze. “I’ll man the register and get those Encore tickets sorted. I bet that biker dude is gonna come by soon.”

“I’m usually register,” you said, flattening out your lips.

Soonyoung lifted up his backward cap, fingers dragging through the limp platinum fronds underneath. “Yeah, well, you didn’t just scrub a freaky looking octopus off a brick wall for thirty minutes. Cut me some slack.”

“I helped the last time.”

“Well, this isn’t last time.”

He was kind of right. You felt stupid for making the comment.

With a huff, you started pushing the weighted dolly toward the fridges against the wall while Soonyoung claimed your position at the counter, immediately aiming the fan at himself. As you mindlessly organized the different flavoured sodas, you thought about Ruby’s invite to try the Mexican food truck at the park down by the river. They probably had nice crispy molotes with fresh sour cream—those were your favourite, and it had felt like ages since you last ate one. At the time, you were still friends with Diana. You two had made a habit to try all different types of street food from the international market close to your university, and you distinctly remembered the way your tastebuds marveled in excitement from all the unique flavours. Moving a cherry soda into the fridge, you sighed.

You just didn’t know Ruby’s friends that well. You would have to meet them after work at Mr. York’s, when you would be fully exhausted and dragging your poor feet like cinder blocks.

Life honestly just sucked sometimes.

There was really no other way to put it.

“I’m sorry—excuse me, sorry—can I get through?”

It had been a rough night. Though the restaurant brought in the most money on Fridays, and you understood that was a good thing, the crowd that came with it was headache inducing—the kind that made you want to tear off your apron and throw it on the ground, then proceed to stomp on it until the fabric became one with the floor. You took an aspirin before your shift despite knowing how little it would actually help. But you were a wishful thinker from time to time. Unfortunately for you, the world didn’t oblige.

“My bus is going to come soon. Please. I need through.”

One table, a party of ten celebrating this posh businesswoman’s birthday, had you scrambling in between the dining room and kitchen like a cat running after a frolicky mouse. Except there was no tasty reward on your end. You swore, that woman and her sleek, ironed bob that whipped ever so dramatically whenever she turned her head had taken utmost pleasure in ordering you around. At one point you considered dropping the platter of peony champagne glasses onto her lap, just to ruin her corporate-looking pantsuit that she probably had some underpaid assistant dry clean for her.

To make matters worse, they stayed late.

Chatting and drinking up a storm.

Hearing their laughter as you skulked in the restaurant shadows, angrily polishing the tables, waiting for them to leave, was the sound of money fluttering down from the sky. When they did choose to depart, the businesswoman made sure to robotically twist her enhanced pillow lips into a fake smile that never quite reached her eyes as she waved at you.

Now, they were all cluttered up just outside the restaurant, wrapped in their luxury furs and suedes and cashmeres, puffing from cigarettes. Time didn’t move for worriless people like them.

But for the bus that was approaching the stop across the street, funneling ample exhaust into the October nighttime air—your only ticket to getting home unless you hailed a taxi or paid for a lift—time was most definitely moving. In fact, it felt sped up. A stream of water without debris. After another barge through the crowd who couldn’t care less about your mundane, underprivileged issues, cigarette smoke and floral perfumes swarming your senses like hostile bees, you at last erupted onto the street, beginning to run across while fishing out the bus pass from your bag.

Yes, it was slightly stupid to charge onto the road without looking.

That was made quite apparent.

“Hey, you crazy fucking girl! Watch what the fuck you’re doing!”

A man was leaned out the window to an SUV that was darker than night itself, though celestially shining, like it had never been touched.

He wasn’t even the driver.

Just a reasonably pissed-off passenger.

“Sorry!” You squeaked aloud, catching nothing more than the blurred details to his bewildered snarl and pale skin. “The bus! That’s all!”

A stroke of luck was in your hands tonight, like capturing a falling star from the constellated sky—the bus had stopped to let you on—and while it was undeniably uncomfortable to walk down the aisle, past the half-second glances from strangers who almost watched you become a literal human pancake, you collapsed into an open seat with relief. Once you shouldered off the weathered bag and untangled your earbuds, you listened to music from your phone, head rested against the bus window despite all the little bumps and thumps in the road. It didn’t matter at that point.

You forgot that Ruby wouldn’t be home. She was likely at some club by now, stuffed off flavourful street tacos and her favourite tostadas, dancing away with all her rambunctious friends, sweating, cramping, and tired, but probably happier than you’d ever be.

The apartment was dark and quiet when you entered. Dirty dishes full in the sink. Ruby’s makeup scattered all across the washroom countertop. The ceiling fan above the coffee table still whirring faintly. With what little energy could be mustered, you managed to get your teeth brushed and your pyjamas on. Then, you were faceplanting into bed, giving the sheets a few measly, weak tugs such that they hardly covered you. At least the weekend was here. You could relax. Ruby tended to come home at the ungodliest hours. Most times, you never even heard her, unless she bumped into something particularly hard through the shapeless black night.

But you were much too exhausted to care.

“Yeah, whatever! Go shove it, asshole! I’m calling the cops next time!”

“I bet you will! Raging bitch!”

“Get the fuck out of here!”

You thought you might need a crowbar to pry open your eyes, they were so crusted with deep, almost death-teetering sleep. Just outside your window, however, the shouting was loud enough to somehow rattle you awake, bit by bit, until you were sitting up in bed and swirling around your tongue to introduce some moisture to your dry mouth. Stumbling toward the curtains, you peeked through just a thin sliver, the intense brightness taking a moment to adjust to while you leaned across your desk.

There was one couple down the hall that had gotten into some very bitter spats in the past—if couple was even the right word—and it seemed that still Saturday mornings were no exception to their feuding. She was in her usual bathrobe and slippers, arms folded tight across the chest, as she glared at the clumsily dressed man hopping into his car, tossing out one more venomous-sounding profanity before burning rubber out the parking lot. Give it two weeks. He would be right back. And she’d let him.

It didn’t take long for your stomach to realize you were awake.

Hungry, you stepped into the kitchen, immediately opening the fridge to see if Ruby had stored any leftovers from the food truck inside, though you were quite disappointed to realize there was nothing. Hopelessly pushing aside old containers and produce, you huffed out a large sigh.

You supposed that meant burnt peanut butter toast. In an attempt to palate the idea, you poured a glass of juice and began walking into the living room, thinking you might watch television.

But that’s not what happened at all.

Because someone was sitting on your couch.

Someone who was not Ruby, nor a friend you could recognize.

It was a man, with his legs spread out like he paid rent, poking a fork into a white takeout box of Mexican food. In that moment, you could only stand there, stupefied, wondering if it was more appropriate to scream, run into Ruby’s room crying, or pinch yourself.

He glanced up at you, raising his fork speared with something colourful, before shoving the utensil in his mouth. “Mornin’.”

You said nothing in response.

Instead, you set your juice on the counter, went straight to Ruby’s room, entering without a single knock—very ignorant to the fact she had probably come home at four in the morning and was nowhere near prepared to wake up at that exact second—and immediately started shaking her. The girl’s body was heavy and limp like a corpse, except she was warm.

“Ruby, wake up,” you whisper-shouted with unprecedented urgency. “Wake up, wake up, wake up. Please wake up.” When she still refused to stir, you lightly slapped her face a few times. “Please, Ruby. I need you to wake up. There’s a random freaking guy on our couch and—”

“W-What? What are you doing? What time is it?”

You nearly gasped in relief when your roommate started mumbling and groaning. The sheets were partly wrapped around her like a vampire using their cape to shield themselves from burning sunlight, to which you started pulling them off, not caring that she was half-dressed or smelling like club sweat mixed with alcohol. Ruby scratched at her messy bedhead.

“I don’t know the time—it’s eight-something—but there’s a guy out there, Ruby! A literal man! He’s eating my Mexican food. He’s—”

“Girl, what?” She squinted at you, rubbing some lipstick off her teeth that she never managed to clean. “Are you talking about Vernon?”

“Who’s Vernon?”

“Probably the guy on our couch eating Mexican food.”

“And—you—are you—he’s a friend of yours?”

Grumbling, Ruby got to her feet, picking up a pair of shorts left in a lump on the carpet to wear. She slapped at her nightstand, finding the glasses she was looking for—and her hazel eyes immediately grew in size—admittedly allowing you to see all the annoyance they harboured.

Chewing nervously on your fingernail, you followed Ruby past the kitchen and back into the living room, where her friend—Vernon—was playing something on the TV while sipping from your juice.

She paused, huffed, and then gestured at him wildly. “This is Vernon!”

You folded your arms. “How was I supposed to know!”

“Because I texted you!”

“Well, I just—I haven’t even looked at my phone yet!”

“You haven’t?”

“No.”

Ruby rubbed something off her cheek. It was too early for her to be arguing with you, and she seemed to realize that as she picked at her tight shorts and sighed. “Okay, okay. That’s fine. Whatever. But now you know.”

Taking a few steps closer to her, keeping your voice hushed, you murmured, “why is he here? He’s—” you paused, glimpsing around her shoulder to see that so-called Vernon was still watching the television, blissfully not giving a damn about the evident conversation concerning him a mere few feet away, “—he’s eating my leftovers! And drinking my juice!”

“He’s a vulture. Like most men.” She shrugged.

“Why is he still here?”

“I ran into him last night. We got to talking. He’s gonna be in the city for a while. He’s got some stuff to deal with. I told him it was okay if he crashed here every now and then. It’s no big deal. You won’t even notice.”

“Uh, Ruby—” you gagged at her, “—I am noticing. I am very, very much so noticing! That’s a big choice to make—without me, I should add—and I just—I don’t think that—I don’t know him! He’s a stranger!”

“Well, take this as an opportunity to make a friend. Start chatting,” she responded while beginning to yawn, still half-asleep. “I’m going back to bed. I’ll get you some good grub another time, alright?”

And then your roommate dared to leave, groggily swinging her way back toward the shadowy bedroom that she soon isolated herself inside. You were left to stare at the unbothered stranger—the guy—some random man—who was sipping at your favourite flavour of pink Very Berry juice after eating the cold but still delicious molotes that were supposed to be your breakfast.

The situation was so unforeseen, you couldn’t even be sure if you were mad. You felt something earthing around in your gut like worms.

He turned to look at you, pushing out his bottom lip. “Damn. Sorry you got yelled at.” Your eyebrow twitched—you sensed it—a tiny muscle spasm. “Want the last sip?” He held out the nearly emptied glass.

Vernon didn’t appear like any of Ruby’s friends that you had briefly met though seldom engaged with over the months. No, he was much different, in such a stark, almost disorientating way, somewhat akin to vertigo as your gaze narrowed and you tried to make his face stop swaying.

“No, I don’t want the last sip,” you said, nettled.

He smirked at you. “Didn’t want you to have it anyway.”

It was eight-something in the morning and you were aflame.

He tipped the rest of the juice into his mouth, then slapped the empty glass onto the coffee table, proceeding to relax and extend his arm against the back of the couch. Swiftly, he glanced over your figure. “Nice pyjamas you got there.”

Looking down at the shirt you were wearing, your stomach wrinkled up like a dried-out fruit—it was an old t-shirt, to be fair—not really intended to be seen by anyone other than family and your roommate. After all, it was gifted to you by your grandma a few years ago, a sort of grace for staying an entire week with her at the retirement home, where strolls through the courtyard, dusty boardgames, and outdated television reruns were the only entertainment. The shirt’s colour was cloudy white besides an image in the centre of an animated purple pony trotting through a field. Find Your Wild! was the exclamation curving along a rainbow. Unbeknownst to your grandma, you had stopped liking ponies when you were twelve.

Quite frankly, it was not the shirt you wanted a man who looked and sounded like Vernon to see you wearing.

There was an edge about him. His forearms crawled in tattoos, darkly needled, clean, and interspersed with what you interpreted to be care, even if it was half-hearted. When you saw the metal piercing dug through his eyebrow and the shiny ring around his soft-looking bottom lip, you thought of your boss at Common Cents, Patsy, who had made an off-handed comment about a face-studded girl after she left the convenience store: such pretty features ruined by all that metal! Except, you didn’t think it ruined his features. He was fortunate to have such lustrous, coppery eyes and long, wisped lashes, thick enough to paint a canvas. It made you frustrated.

Why do guys always get what they don’t deserve!

His hair was sooty black, shiny, like flints ground into a fine powder, curtained at his forehead. Ruby had never mentioned him. Maybe they were exes. Maybe something worse.

“Thanks…” you finally came to mutter. You wanted him gone, but you weren’t sure how to say it. “How long are you staying?”

Vernon crossed his arms, shrugged. “Dunno. For a while.”

“Okay… well… do you have a timeframe?”

He proceeded to flash you a lazy smile that was slight teeth but hundred-percent cockiness. “Yeah—it’s a while.”

You were on the cusp of releasing fumes like a broken gas canister as you began hugging yourself tight. “I’m going to my room,” you grumbled, proceeding to slam the door shut and jump back into bed.

Vernon shouldn’t be here. That was all you could be certain of.

Ruby slept for two more hours before officially waking up. You heard the washroom door close, and that weird thumping sound the old water pipes made whenever the shower started, as you continued to roll around in bed, distraught with frustration. You were mad at Ruby for making such a decision without you. You were mad she had basically just allowed this random man a free pass into your apartment whenever he pleased, even if he was her friend. You were mad that a relaxing Saturday morning was ultimately spoiled by a smug and inconsiderate stranger.

She joined him in the living room after showering. Even with your head swathed underneath the covers, their laughter still found its way to you in irritable fashion, like a baby who wouldn’t stop shaking their rattler.

He did end up leaving around lunch time.

In fact, you watched him discreetly from your window. Vernon strolled into the parking lot and got into an older style of vanilla Camry that you remembered your mother owning back when you were in primary school.

That was your cue.

Marching into the living room, you saw Ruby cleaning up small, thin translucent papers from the coffee table. There was a heavy stench in the air, tart and burning and likely the reason for the pronounced redness watering your roommate’s eyes. She tucked the papers into a plastic bag.

“Ruby—did you both smoke? Did he just get into a car? And drive away? High?” You pestered the girl with questions. “What’s going on?”

“I smoked,” she clarified, tucking a crimson streak of hair behind her ear, smiling at you. “He didn’t smoke. But he gave me the nugget.”

Sighing, you collapsed next to her on the couch cushions. “I’m not okay with this,” you said, staring at the television.

You rarely made your grievances known to Ruby. She was always so mellow about everything that you thought you should be that way, too. But you weren’t. It was impossible.

“It’s not gonna be what you think it is,” Ruby attempted to reassure you, thumbing over a scab on her knee. “He’s not some weirdo who’s gonna be couch-potatoing here every day. Vernon’s a lot more competent than that. He’ll drop by from time to time. That’s probably it. No worries.”

Staring at her earnestly, your head shook. “Well, I am worrying. I don’t know him, Ruby! I mean, I just wish you had waited to confide in me first…” picking at a loose thread from the sofa, your mind was racing with a plethora of thoughts that felt too jumbled for articulation. “I don’t think you’ve ever brought him up before. Can I least know how you guys are friends? Can I know anything about him that will make me feel better?”

“We used to work together at Putting Edge—the mini-put golf course place.” Okay, that didn’t seem so bad. You were on board with that. He has, or had, a job. Ruby began itching her face. “Then he started dealing to me. Like, weed and stuff. Oh—and the molly. I don’t know where he was getting that shit from, but it was heavenly.” She let herself sink back into the cushions, eyes fluttering shut.

Meanwhile you were sitting up straighter than a board. “What?”

“He’s chill.”

“No—wait—he’s a drug dealer?!” You were off the couch, nearly clambering over the coffee table, to begin pacing the room that you swore had started melting like saltwater taffy left in the sweltering heat. “Ruby, I honestly don’t mean to be crass but—” you shook your hands at her deflated-looking body, “—what the fuck! What the fucking fuck! No! We can’t!”

She raised her expression at you, piqued by your uncharacteristic use of language. Cursing was always heavily shamed in your family. Even as an adult, the guilt that accompanied swearing felt like a hot cattle brand.

Ruby sat criss-crossed, tilting her head. “Relax, babe.”

“No, no. I can’t!” You were still pacing, fretting. “We cannot have a drug dealer under our roof, Ruby!” The worry was whisper-shouted, as though your walls were already wire-tapped from just his presence.

“He’s not dealing at our doorstep.”

“That doesn’t matter!”

“Okay, I don’t want to invalidate your feelings or anything,” she started with a drawl in her voice that already felt very invalidating, “but you don’t know him. And that’s not to make a point. He’s not an idiot. He’s been doing this a while and he knows how to keep the trouble to himself.”

“I just don’t know if I can get behind this.”

“Come sit with me,” Ruby gestured, patting the cushion beside her, and with cumbersome steps, it was now your turn to sink into the sofa. She grabbed onto your arm, squeezing it softly. “Look, if I’m not worried, you shouldn’t be either.” That wasn’t saying much. Ruby was never worried. If an axe-murderer shattered through the window right that second, she’d probably just blink at him and continue on with her conceding. “He won’t be here all the time. I’ll tell him to be mindful. He’s good that way.”

You wanted to believe her. Behind those reddened eyes and their traces of greenish-gold, there had to be some legitimate, concrete truth to her words. Agonizing was your speciality. It was quite exhausting.

“Why is he here?” Letting your head fall onto her shoulder, you started toying with the drawstring on your pyjama shorts, wondering how you were supposed to be okay with it all. “Did he ever tell you that?”

“A little bit. Something about money he’s owed.”

You grimaced. “Sounds awful already.”

Ruby laughed, nuzzling your head affectionately. “He’ll be gone before you even know it. Trust me. Boys like that always are.”

18 MONTHS AGO.

“Ah—you’ve got to be kidding me!”

Watching the bus you needed to get home steamroll away down the glassy street as you stood, frozen, was quite disheartening—the one final gut punch in your very long night of weariness—and you had felt it like you were a boxer inside the ring. Unfortunately, you weren’t that close with any of the cooks or servers. At least not to a point you were comfortable enough asking them for a ride home. You assumed they had mostly singled you out as a bit ditzy, uncoordinated, and probably undeserving. Which was right.

So, what were your options, you tried to reason.

An expensive lift, a damn near hour walk (alone, at night, in the rain), or—your head suddenly snapped to find him—just a dim flicker of smudgy green under the street lights about to disappear at the corner. You started chasing after him, though it was more of a hurried and chaotic shuffle as you tried not to slip on the watery cement, your bag rustling against your side until you managed to catch up with him. He stopped, narrowing his brow at you in concern, while you breathed out heavily and smiled all crooked, wiping some hairs flat against the crest of your dewed forehead.

“Uh—hello, again—I know this is really weird, and I totally didn’t mean to chase after you down the street like a lunatic, but, um, I missed my bus,” you said while persisting to smile at him, exactly like a lunatic.

“That sucks,” he answered, shrugging.

Oh gosh! He hates me! You immediately thought.

“Yeah, I don’t think I stood a chance, really.” Honestly—what were you doing? How come you had decided this stranger was your best ticket home, when you didn’t even know if he had a car? Worse than that, he had a gun stuffed under his jacket that you had clearly seen with your own two eyes. He could be a murderer! A sadist!

“What are you gonna do?” He asked you, tilting his head slightly.

Your stomach dropped. “I’m not sure, actually.”

For a moment, he didn’t bother responding, only continued to stare at you, his soft brown eyes filled with patience that made you breathe slower and flesh out your fingers. Like a magnet, he was pulling something out. “Uh, you don’t happen to have a car, do you?”

He nodded. “I do.”

“Really?” You sounded more relieved than should be appropriate.

“It’s parked around the corner.”

“Well, I know that you don’t know me, and I don’t know you, and that I may be the stupidest girl alive for asking this, but is there any chance I could have a ride home? And you can say no! I don’t want to pressure you.”

“I don’t think you chased me down the street just to hear no.”

You gave him a tiny, avoidant smile. “I guess not…”

After another beat of silence—and the itchy sensation of heat molting up your neck as he stared into you with such gentle eyes— he ended up waving his hand, inviting you to follow him. Yes, he had a gun. Yes, you were being ineffably stupid. Your head cared, but your gut didn’t.

“This is your car?”

“Yeah, the white one.” He pulled out his fob to unlock the doors, then proceeded to open the passenger’s side for you. After getting treated like dirt all day at the restaurant, the small act of chivalry was essentially next to royalty. Once he was inside the car, brushing the dampness from his rust-coloured hair, he pulled out a phone. “What’s your address?”

“Uh, 2269 Roxbury.”

“Ah, I see, you live by the old DMV.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the building with the Bickersons.”

You laughed. “Who?”

“If you’ve ever heard two people having a screaming match out in the parking lot, that’s probably them. They’ve got toxic down to an art. I like to call them the Bickersons. They’re never not arguing.”

As he pulled out into the late-night traffic, partly rolling down his window to let in a fresh breeze, as fresh as it could be in a city, you couldn’t help but make a surprised expression. “Yeah, that sounds right. How do you know them?”

Predictably, he shrugged a shoulder. “We go back.”

“I don’t know what that means. You used to live there?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Is your seatbelt on?”

“Of course.”

He threw you a smile that made your entire chest tighten. “Good. I like a girl who follows the rules of the road.”

You merely giggled at him, too shy to say anything else.

It was strange. As far back as you could remember, you had never been particularly lucky with boys. Part of it was dampened interest. Your friends always babbled about their crushes every lunch period—he held the door open for me! We talked outside the portables! He laughed at my story! He sat behind me during the assembly!—and you would always nibble on your sandwich, nodding, agreeing, but never quite understanding their infatuations. Until the definitive moment came where you did have a crush, and it was shoved right back into your face like a pie tin swirled in whipped cream.

It left you feeling robbed and unwanted.

As though there was something about yourself you weren’t seeing despite the fact everyone else apparently could. But now you were in the passenger’s seat of a very pretty boy’s car, getting a ride home, extrapolating the gesture to great lengths beyond what it probably, most likely was—a mere kindness—though his eyes were just so deep with a type of tenderness that had never cared to gaze upon you until now. Yet, he was nameless.

So were you.

“Okay, it’s right here,” you said, pointing to the tiny apartment building that appeared held together from brick and glue.

He seemed to know, anyway.

“I think you’ve been here before,” you laughed.

“Maybe.”

While undoing your seatbelt and patting around in the car to ensure you hadn’t dropped anything, your wandering gaze stilled on a very large duffle bag in the backseat with a notably large lock through it. You paused. “Um… I’m guessing it wouldn’t make me feel any better to know what’s inside there… it’s not a body… is it?”

“No,” he answered, briefly biting his lip. “It’s not.”

Again, he exited the car to open the door for you. Gripping tightly to your bag, you carefully lifted yourself out, attempting not to step in the big gleaming puddle holding all the moonlight.

“Thank you for the ride.”

He leaned against his car, smiling. “Sure.”

Gosh—you should leave—you should zip straight into that apartment and distract yourself with anything that seemed fit, even if it was fixing the loose screw on the fridge handle. You should immediately work to unstitch this boy from your memory because you knew he wasn’t going to stick around. He was like a ghost. Present just enough for you to accept that he existed, but once he was gone, you would start to believe it was all a figment of your imagination. The wind was cold and you were shuddering.

“Um… do you have a name?”

“Yeah. Do you?”

There you went again, giggling at him all schoolgirly. “Yeah.”

He shrugged. “Well, that settles that.”

“But, I-I mean, what is it?” You looked at him swathed in the glow of the mysterious blue moonlight, patterned like cobwebs, as he was already beginning to feel more and more distant, similar to the sensation of a shiver disappearing down your arm. “I guess we won’t ever talk again.”

“I don’t think so.”

"You should come by the restaurant. If you want."

"Maybe."

“Hm. Well, thanks again. Goodnight!” Giving him a parting smile, you began walking up the concrete path to the apartment, feeling his eyes trace your every movement such that you were overly worried about stumbling, or falling, or scuffing your shoe. You saw his beautifully freckled face and adorable dimples flash in your mind and completely missed the placement of the door handle. You groaned.

What was meant to be would be.

12 MONTHS AGO.

“I guess I just don’t know how to put my foot down… I guess I also don’t know how to tell if I’m overreacting or not… I mean, am I just spineless or something? Or am I shaped like a doormat?” You sunk further into the countertop, shoulders hunching as you huffed, “a spineless doormat?”

“Uh… dunno… you haven’t told me the whole spill,” Soonyoung muttered, his attention split between your moping and the dusty, opaque panel he was supposed to unscrew from the ceiling to change the dead fluorescent light. He gestured with his hand. “Pass me the screwdriver.”

After sticking up the tool for your co-worker to grab, you begrudgingly tore another hunk from the cheap fruit bar you were pretending was breakfast. It had the flavour of dehydrated mango and figs. Not a healthy fig either, that squished pinkly in your mouth.

“Well… I won’t drag it out,” you said, swallowing, and proceeded to maintain conversation with Soonyoung’s colourful sneakers. “Ruby has given this friend of her’s permission to crash at our place whenever he feels like it. It’s only been two weeks, and I think he’s ruining my life.”

“Mmhm.” A screw popped out, which Soonyoung stored in his shorts pocket. “Ruined your life, huh? What’s wrong with him?”

Further peeling back the wrapper of the fruit bar, you shook your head. “Gosh—what isn’t wrong with him?” You were about to take another bite, but felt something more important lurch to the tip of your tongue. “First of all, he’s a drug dealer, okay. Like, an actual drug dealer. He gives Ruby weed and ecstasy!” If the store weren’t completely empty, then you might have been more clandestine about the revelation, but seeing as it was just you talking to Soonyoung, you weren’t particularly monitoring your vocal distress.

“Sick,” Soonyoung answered, undoing another screw.

“No!” You barked, glaring at the flashy red and purple colourway on his perfect, non-scuffed sneakers. “It’s not. It’s a crime! And I’m letting myself be associated!” The fruit bar touched your lips, but you ripped it away again. “He steals stuff from our fridge and pantry! He enters our apartment at random hours of the day! Heck—the worst part—the absolute worst part, Soonyoung, is when he and Ruby… I don’t know… they get frisky or something… and I can hear it through the wall! It’s torture! I already don't get enough sleep!”

“Shit—fuck—okay, the panel is loose. Can I pass it down?”

“One sec—okay—ew! There are bugs all over it!”

Soonyoung wrinkled his bleached eyebrows. “Dead bugs.” He started working on taking out the burnt fluorescent tube. “What do y’mean frisky?” The boy laughed. “Are they play fighting?”

“No…” you grimaced, picking up the yellow bar and staring into it sadly while attempting to block the memory from the night before—Ruby’s weird little squeaky laughs that blended into moans, the odd thump here and there, the thick stench of burning weed somehow permeating your walls. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t ask. Ruby’s neck has about ten hickies on it.”

“Oh,” Soonyoung sang, “they’re fucking, huh?”

“I don’t know,” you pouted.

“Sounds like it to me. Trade.” He extended the hollow fluorescent tube, swapping it for the new shiny one that you pulled from its cardboard casing. “I will admit, that sounds rough. What’s this dude look like?”

Handling the dead bulb, you couldn’t help but think how satisfying it would be to crack it right over Vernon’s head as the cold glass nipped your fingers. A guy with his entitlement had probably never been ridiculed before.

You sighed, setting the light aside. “It doesn’t matter.”

Soonyoung suddenly grunted, “why won’t it go in?”

“Be careful. Please.”

He took a step back, and something crinkled. “Shit, sorry.”

You shrugged, staring at your crushed fruit bar that somehow felt akin to a very poignant metaphor mirroring your uncontrolled, dull life. Now that the light was fixed, Soonyoung had begun to reattach the panel, pulling out the tiny screws from his shorts.

“Seriously,” he mouthed very incoherently around the miniature screw driver he was biting, “I wanna know what this dude looks like.”

“Mm…” you hummed in apprehension, smudging a fist into your cheek as you unenthusiastically muttered, “dark hair, tattoos, face piercings… lashes that are way too long for his own good. He has a little twang to his voice. Smug smile. Ruby said he’s half-Korean, half-White.”

After attaching the panel back in place, Soonyoung was jumping off the counter, landing onto the tiled floor with a smooth thud. He adjusted his backward cap and pulled at the waist to his large carpenter shorts. “I rescind my sympathy. He’s hot.”

Your hand curled into a fist and you pounded the counter. “He’s not! He’s such an—such a—” crinkling up your warm, prickling face, you merely grumbled like a petulant child who was told no ice cream before dinner, “—he’s making living there impossible! For way too many reasons!”

Soonyoung grabbed the fruit bar he had stepped on, taking an unbothered bite. “Then you need to talk to Ruby some more.”

“I have.”

“Yeah, well, seems like some shit got lost in translation. Look, I think you should—” he made a sour expression while swallowing, “—I think you should—wow—this actually tastes like shit. Why were you even eating this?” He coughed into his elbow while reading the ingredients crossly.

“I don’t know…” you sighed, “because it only cost seventy-cents. Because I didn’t want breakfast this morning. Because that’s all I deserve.”

“Uh—well, look—you should talk to Ruby again. And be firm about it. Don’t walk back anything. I’d say you could spend a night at my place or something if it gets that bad, but, realistically, my flat’s no better than what you’ve got going on. I’m in a weird situationship with this dude I met at the club. He’s kinda boring and his stamina could use some work. But he makes the best hashbrowns I’ve ever had the morning after.”

Ruffling your fingers against your scalp, you turned even gloomier than you were ten minutes ago. “So, I’m screwed? Is that it?”

“Nah,” Soonyoung shook his head, smirking. “If anything, you should be taking advantage of this. The universe serves you Mr. Bad Boy from every Wattpad girl’s best dream and you’re hitting the snooze button.”

“That would never happen,” you practically gagged.

“Just saying.” He shrugged, taking another bite from the chewy fruit bar that only preluded his annoyance. You couldn’t help but smile a little as he hissed, “seriously, what the fuck is wrong with whoever made this?”

Soonyoung could attempt to convince you all he wanted. No matter how he decorated your shitty situation, it would be like tinselling up a dead tree with half its branches ungracefully snapped off. His boy-crazy optimism wouldn’t change the truth, nor could your feelings be warped. You watched him throw the half-eaten dehydrated fruit bar into the trash can before clapping off his hands, like he was ridding himself of dirt.

Burnt peanut butter toast seemed delicious right then.

“Ruby! You home?!”

Removing the keys from the door, you waited for Ruby’s response, although the only sound you heard was a dripping kitchen faucet and that nearly imperceptible rattling from the old light above the stovetop. It was a Friday night. Typically, Ruby would make plans. After toeing off your beaten-up, dirty-laced runners, you lifted your bag onto the counter and removed the tupperware that had held your lunch. Her door was shut, with no shadows or even the dullest glow lambent from underneath.

Maybe she was asleep. The texts you sent earlier weren’t even read.

Carefully, you peeked into the room, just managing to decipher her vallied silhouette hidden by the bedsheets.

She rarely phoned nights in.

You thought she could be sick. Poor Ruby. The last time she was ill, the girl borderlined on comatose for an entire week, her garbage stuffed with a mountain of crumpled, snotty tissues while her nightstand became a pharmaceutical empire for differing cough, cold, and flu medications. Bar hopping across the cityscape and consistently being crushed against strangers at the club probably never helped her much. Getting sick was inevitable.

Before bed, you decided to take a hot shower.

Sleeping came much easier when you weren’t caked in the sweat, grease, and unshakeable guilt sprinkled on you by some very condescending staff (and customers). You flicked the hallway light on, your slippers tiredly rubbing against the hardwood as you approached the uncooperative closet door to dig out a fresh, fuzzy towel. Once you moaned a gigantic yawn, your hand had done nothing apart from feather the washroom door handle.

However, it was already being opened for you.

Foggy light spilled into your eyes and steam that smelt something like beaches and fresh-scooped coconut breathed across your face. In the moment, you almost screamed. Could a towel be used in self-defence?

“Tryin’ to peep on me, Pyjamas?”

Gosh—no. What was he doing here? Ruby usually texted you when Vernon was over—that was a rule she had promised to upkeep. But there he was, clean from your shower, rubbing at his damp, fluffed black hair with a towel he had probably swiped from your pantry. Of course, it seemed engrained into his genetics to make some egotistical comment that would undoubtedly fluster you—not because of him—but because of his audacity.

“Peep on you? What do you—what are you doing here?”

Vernon slid past you into the living room where he turned on the central light. You proceeded to watch him leave the towel messily folded over the couch (you immediately scowled) while he picked up a knapsack. “Showerin’,” he shrugged.

“No, that’s not—” your words folded up like origami, “—you—I mean—Ruby didn’t say you were here! She’s supposed to text me!”

The boy grabbed something small off the coffee table, shoving it inside the bag. Glancing up, he shrugged, again, in a way that irritated you so strongly. “Not really my issue.” He then grabbed something else that looked similar to a wallet, which he pressed down into his back pocket.

“Is she sick?” You asked, knowing it could be reasoned. If Vernon had stopped by to look after her, you were willing to be more forgiving.

Vernon reached for his black jacket. “Nah.” He sniffed.

“She’s supposed to text me,” you blurrily repeated, trapped in a tunnel of thoughts that only continued to twist more hectically.

“Yeah, you said that already,” the boy answered, poking his arms through the baggy sleeves before giving the material an adjusting flap. “I’m out, PJ’s—tell her she owes me two-hundred for the ecstasy.”

“What?”

The inconspicuous bag dangled off his right shoulder as he gripped you with his scorched brown eyes. “Two-hundred,” Vernon said slower, almost as though he were mocking you. “Your roommate. She owes me.”

“Is that what happened?”

“You can ask her when she wakes up.”

He was making his way to the door.

Your fist clenched into the towel. The question was burning your tongue like a stinging mouthful of sharp salt. There was absolutely no confidence behind your warbling, weak voice, but, somehow, you still found the steel to ask him: “why does it have to be Ruby?” You paused, swallowing the frog in your throat. “Why can’t you stay with someone else?”

Vernon looked back, raising his eyebrow. “Why can’t you?”

“I live here.”

He snickered, biting his inner cheek. “Yeah? Then maybe don’t live with someone who’s out poppin’ weird shit on her tongue every weekend.”

You wanted to throw something at him. You wanted to leap across the room and smother that twinkly smirk from his glinting lip. Instead, he left without another word or glance, taking his ambiguous knapsack and infuriating attitude with him. There was no hot water left for your shower. The coldness peppered into you like chipped ice.

It made you want to cry.

“No, I don’t think he understands. If I get the job, I’m handing in my two weeks the day of. And I don’t even know if it will be two weeks depending on when they’d want me to start. It’s not like I haven’t spoken about it before. He’s got an idea, at least.”

It was horribly miraculous that you had spent over a year at Mr. York’s and somehow you still sucked at befriending your coworkers.

Ruby used to work there before you did, and she warned you that their social culture was quite… snotty. Almost high schoolish. The waitresses were all split up into cliques that you had been meandering around the exterior of for months. While you were washing down the tabletops with a soapy rag, you couldn’t stop yourself from eavesdropping a conversation between Tara and Lara at the bar counter. You used to think they were sisters, as they had the same pin-straight dark hair, faint poshness of a London accent, and long, almost spindly ballerina legs that were quite useful for efficiently walking orders from the kitchen. But they weren’t sisters.

Just deceivingly similar.

Tara was organizing money in the till as Lara listened.

“It’s the perfect job.”

“It really is.”

“No—honestly—even the view is beautiful. If you get the assistant position, you have your own space that’s connected to her office. The window is right out over the coastline. I saw it. The water’s like a billowing silk sheet. I’m telling you Lara, it was gorgeous. There’s even a tiny bakery on her floor, too. You can smell the pastries. Just faintly, though. Like a buttery, crispy, flaky dream. A Paris café. I’ve never needed a job more.”

You were attempting to investigate the conversation so intensely from your peripheral vision that your eyeballs felt like rolling out. Lara leaned backward against the counter on her elbows. She tilted her head in a stretch such that her long, glossed hair flowed watery all over the marble. “If you leave, I’m leaving.”

Tara gasped, smacking her friend with a stack of twenty’s. “No! Lara you absolutely can’t! I’m telling you, something will pop up. Be patient.”

“We get treated like dirt here.”

“You make no attempt to have them like you. You’re too pouty. That businesswoman tips like a goldmine if you get on her good side.”

“Her raggedy purse dog crapped on my shoe!” Lara cried, straightening up and collecting her luscious hair into a ponytail. “It took every fibre of my being to not clobber her right then and there!”

Tara laughed, “that was quite funny. You nearly got fired.”

Once you had cleaned the last tabletop, you dropped the rag back into the warm bucket. Before you could disappear into the kitchen, Tara seemed to notice you wriggling away and called out, “don’t forget to stack the chairs!” Lara was supposed to do that. She never really did anything.

“I will! I’m going to dump the water first!”

You despised picking up her slack. But you liked Tara, even if you two weren’t close. And to make an enemy of Lara meant Tara would most likely hate you, too. The two girls were nearly joined at the hip.

Coming back into the dining room, you stopped at the counter where Tara was closing up the till. “What’s this job you’re talking about?”

She seemed a bit surprised that you had decided to speak to her, as her dark, thin eyebrows lifted higher than usual up her creaseless, almost doll skin forehead. The waitressing cliques usually kept separated. You weren’t even in a clique, yet you got bossed around by them like a little sister.

Tara cleared her throat. “Oh, it’s an assistant position. It’s not officially open yet. Won’t be until next year. Around summer. I have an on-site connection who told me the news, so I can start my practicing my interview skills early. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? That beautiful glass architecture building along the coastline? Catherine Love works there.”

Your nose wrinkled. “Catherine… Love? Who’s that?”

Lara was in the midst of absentmindedly braiding her hair when she flicked her bored eyes at you. “It’s not her real name. It’s an alias.”

“Oh…” you blinked.

“She organizes art exhibitions—the best you’ll ever see—not just in the city, but across a few different countries. I think I first learned about her when I still lived down in Farringdon… she set up this cherry blossom exhibition outside the London Roman Amphitheatre that is just burned into my brain like magic. She does art herself. But not like she used to. Anyway, her old assistant is apparently jetting off to live in Athens. So—” Tara’s eyes physically sparkled akin to a midnight sky, “—she obviously needs a new one!”

You smiled. “That sounds amazing. I’m not familiar with her.”

“If you have time, she’s setting up a smaller exhibit in January, I believe. A Winter Wonderland type thing. Although I can’t remember the location. She has an official website you could check.”

Admittedly, it had been a while since you last attended any type of art exhibition. Perhaps only once as a teenager—most likely forced by your mother who was desperate to get you involved with any sort of culture other than the misery building in your bedroom—and a few more times once you reached adulthood during university. Diana had quite a large interest in art.

You remembered a gigantic book she had thrown onto your lap upon paying a visit to her dorm for the first time. The cover was solid and textured, meanwhile the pages were thick and laminated, each displaying a revolutionary painting from a different time period. Diana’s finger had shot all over the pages as she beamed on about their individualistic beauty, her words getting helplessly tangled in excitement that made you excited as well.

Now that you were thinking hard about it, Diana had probably mentioned Catherine Love before. Time had merely faded the memory.

“Maybe I’ll go,” you told Tara, smiling. “Thanks.”

You had no idea where Diana was or what she was doing now.

But maybe she would go, too.

“Oh—hey! We’re eating! Care to join?” Ruby waved at you from the sofa with a plate seated in her lap. “I left out some stuff on the counter for making a wrap. Figure we should try to get rid of our produce.”

You had not willingly left your bedroom, that was certain.

It was your bladder responsible for pushing you out the door, as it felt like an overfilled water balloon on the brink of bursting. Ruby had been gracious enough to text you that Vernon would stop by during the evening, and thus, you decided that leaving your room would not be an option unless things got dire. Peeing yourself seemed pretty dire. And not totally worth it.

She must have been confused as to why you hurried past her for the washroom down the corridor. Collapsing onto the toilet, your face then buried into your hands. Relief first, agony second. Going back to your room meant encountering Ruby and Vernon again—if running past them wordlessly wasn’t already embarrassing enough—how come this stupid apartment didn’t have an underground candlelit tunnel for your leisure?

Cleaning your hands at the sink, you spent an almost concerningly long time massaging the liquid soap into your skin, even squeezing the suds between your palms to make that wet, popping sound you used to love during childhood bath times. Obviously, you were prolonging the inevitable. You were prolonging him.

He had come by the apartment a few more times since the shower incident last week, though you hadn’t particularly seen him because you were at work. Ruby would still text you. It was nice she was paying more attention to the established rule, but sometimes you’d rather not know at all.

Once you trudged back into the living room, Ruby worried her brows at you. “Are you feeling okay? Did you just throw up?”

“No,” you sighed, deciding to spare the unnecessary details.

Ruby asked another question, but you were too busy staring him down like a rattlesnake through your lashes—the way his toned, tattooed arms folded behind his head while he leaned against the arm of the couch, an ankle resting across his knee, his very knowing, intense smirk probing you as he likely scanned his brain for a stupid comment to make—no, you hadn’t heard a word from Ruby’s mouth.

She grabbed your hand and tugged it. “Are you daydreaming or something?”

You pulled your hand back and spluttered, “what—no. I’m not daydreaming. Sorry, I didn’t catch what you asked.”

She seemed skeptical. “Uh, I asked if you were going to eat.”

“Maybe later.”

Ruby shook her head. “C’mon, I haven’t seen you eat all day!”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Low appetite? You could be getting sick.”

“Ruby, I’m fine. Seriously. Just tired.”

“What if I make it for you?” She was almost imploring at that point, even removing the plate from her lap so she could stand. “Here—sit.” Ruby guided you onto the indented cushion she had been warming. “I’ll make it for you. I think we like all the same toppings, anyway. Just no mushrooms.”

“You don’t have to do this,” you called to your roommate, but she was already behind the kitchen counter, back to the cutting board.

That left you on the sofa with Vernon, who was unsurprisingly engulfing more than half the space by lying horizontally. In fact, you were quite surprised he hadn’t said anything yet, not even an utterance of the irritating nickname he coined for you—Pyjamas—which made you start to believe he didn’t even know your actual name. But he didn’t seem to care that you were there, instead reading something off his cracked phone. You looked down. Well, you weren’t wearing the unicorn shirt. It was a plain white t-shirt with an old spaghetti sauce stain that never came out, with flannel-patterned bottoms. Maybe it was too hard to make fun of.

Ruby came back into the living room, handing you a plate.

“Thanks…”

“No problem,” she said with a smile, then proceeded to shove aside Vernon’s legs so she could take the middle cushion. He simply moved them back onto her lap, to which you noticed her hand squeeze along his calf. Were they… dating? Ruby had said they never dated.

Their hook-ups were always meaningless and completely unattached. Your stomach squelched with an uncomfortable feeling you couldn’t place while tearing a bite from the spinach wrap. It tasted mismatched, thrown together. Which it was. But you still appreciated that your typically lazy roommate had even offered.

She tucked some loose hairs behind her ear. “Any progress?”

Vernon was still examining his phone, seemingly texting with a single hand while he kept his other arm trapped behind his head. “Define… progress…” he murmured, distracted. “This dude’s spellin’ sucks ass.”

Ruby laughed, “so does yours.”

“Hey—” he dropped the phone for a second, rubbing his eye, “—I never finished high school, alright? At least I’ve got a fuckin’ excuse.”

You slowly chewed another bite from the wrap. This conversation didn’t seem like it would involve you in any capacity, but you stayed seated, listening, while pulling out a leaf of dark spinach.

“So, no progress is what I’m hearing.”

“None.”

“Why don’t you move onto someone else?” Ruby leaned forward as she asked the question, reaching for a cherry red sucker you hadn’t seen on the coffee table. She ripped the wrapper off and stuck it in her mouth.

“Don’t have nothin’ on them either.” Vernon shrugged.

Oh—you realized—it must be something to do with the entire reason he was even here in the first place. Ruby had only explained it to you once, although you subconsciously missed half her spiel since the sole thing your mind could do was blare an alarm bell that Vernon might get you all arrested. He needed money from people. That was all you remembered.

Ruby sunk back into the cushions, twisting the end of the sucker so it flicked against her teeth. “Hm… what was her name again?”

Vernon sighed, “I told you—don’t remember.”

“But you call her something?”

“Yeah—Basu—it’s her last name.”

At that moment, you nearly choked on a poorly sliced piece of red onion. Ruby turned to you abruptly, rubbing your shoulder.

“You okay?”

“Basu?” Wiping your mouth, you squinted at Vernon from across the couch. “You’re trying to find a girl with the last name Basu?”

He nodded.

“Diana Basu?”

Ruby’s eyes widened. “Oh—your friend?”

Vernon pushed himself further up the couch. He glanced at his phone again, and then back at you, before rubbing across his furrowed brow.

Ruby grabbed onto Vernon’s leg and shook it. “Ring a bell?”

“I think that was her name,” he muttered, still not completely sold on the suggestion, although it had definitely ticked something. “I mean, I’ve never been great on names, but I feel like that’s familiar. This dude told me he worked with a Basu… just didn’t feel right. How do you know her?”

“We were close in university,” you answered tentatively.

“You sure her name was Diana Basu?”

“I’m sure,” you confirmed. “I’d never forget it.”

“Why don’t you let it marinate?” Ruby offered, wiping some stickiness off her lip. “Don’t need it all sorted right now.”

“Guess so,” Vernon agreed.

It was honestly hurtful to wrap your mind around, and it made your head start to throb. Diana owed Vernon drug money? Your Diana? While you two had stopped keeping up with each other after university, that couldn’t have felt any further from your memories of the docile, sweet girl.

Rising up from the sofa, Vernon pulled his jacket off the coffee table and started getting dressed. He was so strange—disappearing at random hours to go do god knows what—and for a moment you were almost curious about him. Still, you refused the feeling to simmer. As if you would ever entangle yourself with his illegal manners.

Pigs could fly first.

“M’kay,” Ruby mumbled, licking at the sucker. “See you later.”

Vernon grabbed onto her jaw with a tattooed hand, then leaning down to unabashedly steal a deep, thorough kiss from her mouth that had you freezing into the sofa like a layer of winter frost. He flashed Ruby a flirtatious smirk, looking her body up and down with those molten, honey-brown eyes that he was gifted with. “Cherry tastes good on you,” he said.

Ruby giggled as she melted back into the sofa. “You’re an ass,” the girl quipped, folding up her legs. “Go get a parking ticket or something.”

“That’s next on my schedule,” Vernon joked, shouldering open the apartment door. “How’d you know? You check my phone when I wasn’t lookin’?” He tsked his teeth and shook his head. “Bad girl, aren’t you?”

Ruby threw a pillow at him, her cheeks reddening. “Get out!”

You weren’t sure if it was even appropriate for you to comment on what just happened between them. But you suddenly lost what little appetite you had in the first place, now settling the plate onto the coffee table and giving it a sad push away from you. Did Ruby really like him? You swallowed thickly. Did Vernon like Ruby?

Again, your head throbbed.

Sulking off the couch with a frustrated grumble, you didn’t know why you were asking yourself those questions, anyway. You should have never come outside your room and just squirmed around in bed while singing a song to distract from the fact your bladder might explode.

Sitting at your desk, you were flipping through the pages to a special edition art magazine that Tara had given you after work. She wanted it back, as it was apparently a relic from her childhood days in Farringdon, so you made sure to secure it very gently inside your cinnamon bag, checking on its condition habitually during the bus ride home.

It was late at night. You knew you should get ready for bed. But you had just uncovered the esteemed 2005 Cherry Blossom Collaboration with the London Roman Amphitheatre that Tara had fawned over. She said the magazine photos were splendid, although nothing could compare to witnessing the exhibition in person. You supposed nostalgia was also a factor in her fondness. Nonetheless, you agreed—the exhibition was held during the peak of springtime, each photograph lush with handmade faux cherry blossoms.

You read that the petals were made using discarded bottles that an artist recovered from London’s parks throughout his lifetime. He melted the glass down, tinted it, and had everything stretched and warped into petals.

Tiny lights were tangled through the blossoms. In the photos, they added a homely touch of softness and warmth to the pink-stained glass that you beheld, hypnotized by the spectacle. Visitors to the exhibit could walk underneath the delicate archway the cherry blossoms formed, where other sculptures and art pieces unique to springtime were displayed. You flipped to the next page, seeing that the artwork was featured in more detail alongside thoughtful, reflective excerpts from the artists.

At night, the amphitheatre reminded me of an opened clam. The small light fixtures filled the pink glass with life, such that the petals became real, and velvet, just as one would imagine a fresh petal to feel like between their fingers. At a distance, there was a visible glow that faded up to reach the dark and ashy London sky. The exhibit was a shining pearl. My pearl. My idea finally abloom. –Catherine Love, April 2005.

Your head had dropped so close to examine the magazine that you were practically breathing the ink off the paper. No wonder Tara wanted the assistant position—it seemed she would be working under someone intelligent, and passionate, and born to be a creative. Beginning to yawn, you flipped to yet another page, impossibly tired but desperate to see more.

Until there was a hard knock at the apartment door. It frightened you more than you’d like to admit (you nearly flung the magazine off the desk and quite literally screamed). Ruby wasn’t home.

She told you she was attempting to cram in as much clubbing and bar hopping as she could before it got too cold out, even though that dilemma had never really stopped Ruby in the past.

After throwing on a zip-up sweater from the back of your desk chair, you took the magazine with you while speeding into the living room and unattractively squinting through the clouded peep hole to see who it was. He suddenly knocked again, more aggressive and impatient, the door rattling under your fingertips. You flinched.

Vernon.

Holding your breath, you looked for the second time.

A shiver ran down your body.

He was staring straight at you. “I know you’re fuckin’ googlin’ at me through the damn hole,” he muttered, brushing a hand along his loose fronds of hair. “There’s somethin’ I need, alright? Open up.” His tone was all bristly. He seemed agitated.

You didn’t want to respond.

Unfortunately, you still unlocked the door for a reason you could not compute, coming face to face with Vernon.

“Ruby’s not here,” you said while folding your arms.

He laughed stoutly, “yeah, I know that.”

“So, what are you—hey! What—where are you going?”

Vernon had easily and quickly slipped past you into the apartment like he was an eel. Gawking, you whipped around, proceeding to watch him shift through the kitchen and enter Ruby’s room. With your mouth still agape, you begrudgingly followed the boy, keeping the magazine tucked against your side as you further observed in shock while he started pulling open the drawers on her dresser, haphazardly picking up clothes to look underneath. You fumbled at first, the words disintegrating on your tongue.

“Y-You can’t do that!” It was a very pathetic attempt to defend your roommate. “Why are you going through Ruby’s things! This is crazy!”

The boy ignored you, instead squatting down to his knees in order to rifle between the bottom compartments. You might as well have been talking to an imaginary friend. He was clearly fixated on finding something.

“Vernon!”

Again, he laughed at you, but it wasn’t frivolous in nature, rather you heard that it was more irritation. “You didn’t tell her, did you?”

Baffled, your eyes bulged out at him. “Tell her what?!”

He stood up, sifting amongst random items on her dresser. “The two-hundred for the ecstasy. Where’s that, huh? I don’t fuckin’ have it.”

“The ecstasy? I did tell her! She told me she was getting it!”

Vernon snickered derisively, biting at his lip ring as though he were stopping himself from making a distasteful remark. Sliding open Ruby’s closet door, he pulled a painted shoe box off the top shelf and tossed it onto her unkempt bed. He was about to open it, but you suddenly snapped the magazine overtop the lid, causing him to withdraw his hand.

“It’s not yours,” you glared, your heart thundering in claps.

“C’mon.” He raised a dark brow at you. “Be serious, Pyjamas.”

“I am being serious.”

“Where’s my two-hundred then? Hm?”

“She’ll give it to you. But you can’t look through her things!”

He smiled, his eyes turning crescent-shaped as he rubbed something invisible from the tip of his perfect nose, acting twitchy as he grunted, “listen, why don’t you go back to your room, alright? Go back to readin’ your fancy little art magazine or whatever the fuck that is. ‘Cause the truth is, I don’t have time for this. And I know you know how to mind your own damn business. N’right now, that would make my life so much fuckin’ easier. Trust.”

The fact he wasn’t taking you seriously was infuriating—that ridiculing glaze in his eye, the way he was pinching his forehead—you were going to scream. In the moment, however, Vernon had all the flare, and confidence, and just the right amount of displeased impatience with your objecting that inside, you became immediately burnt out.

Removing the magazine from the lid, you watched defeatedly while Vernon opened the shoe box, then digging through some photographs and small mementos before unveiling a thin, black pouch. He unzipped it. Cash was sliding into his hand a second later.

“There.” He flicked the bills into a neat stack. “See how much easier that went when you weren’t tryin’ to hop all over my dick?” Placing the lid back on, Vernon returned the old shoe box to Ruby’s closet.

Within the next minute, he was gone. You stopped to sit on the edge of Ruby’s bed, listening to the apartment door shut in the distance, feeling absolutely disheartened at your lack of bite. How could you let Vernon violate her things? How could you recoil so spinelessly after being shown the slightest arrogance?

Ruby probably wouldn’t even care.

But you did. You cared too much. And you didn’t know why.

“Hey! I think I saw Ruby out there.”

Tara brushed past you, her hand briefly touching your shoulder blade to get your attention. The kitchen was quite loud—constant communicating between the cooks, meticulous expediting at the pass, timers dinging, food sizzling, cutlery and plates clashing—enough to make your head rattle. It was certainly no place to be daydreaming (as you had unfortunately learned in the past), and Tara’s slight touch had you jolting.

“Wait—who’s out there?”

She turned around for no less than a second and shouted, “Ruby!”

“Really?!”

Before she disappeared into the washroom at the end of the corridor, she shouted again, “and a friend! At least, I think a friend.”

Ruby had lots of friends. Although, you didn’t spend much time mentally carding through the possibilities when you were slid a tray of fresh-prepped balsamic salads by an especially impatient cook. Striding back into the clustered dining area, you couldn’t help but attempt to pick out your roommate and her noticeable crimson streaks of hair from the crowd. There was too much going on for you to do a decent enough job.

“Okay, I’ve got your salads!” You chimed to the table—three thin middle-aged ladies in spandex dresses who all had very oddly shiny skin—and handed them their bowls.

With all your tables in check, you decided to walk the room out of curiosity. Mr. York’s was a classic and longstanding restaurant in the city that managed to fill its dining area every night of the week. While the popularity was excellent for business, your feet devotedly loathed it, and so did your people-pleasing attitude that would leave you mentally burnt to a crisp. As you strode past the two-person tables against the street-view windows, someone had plucked at the sleeve to your black dress shirt.

“Excuse me, miss? Can I bother you for a second? So, I asked the waitress to get me a water. And I asked her for lots and lots of ice. But look at this—like, a quarter of the ice is gone now! Miss, I think this might be a conspiracy theory. I would love to speak to your—”

You wrapped an arm around Ruby’s shoulders and proceeded to muffle her sly, smiling mouth with your hand. She pinched your side, which always made you giggle. “Oh, shut up. What are you doing here?”

Ruby pursed her lip. “I can’t stop by to see old coworkers?”

The seat across from Ruby was empty. Tara said she was dining with a friend, but you supposed it was someone who had stopped by to talk to her. Or perhaps Tara mixed Ruby up with another streaked red head.

“It’s unlike you to do stuff alone.”

“Oh—I’m not alone, actually. I was hanging out with Vernon. He said he was hungry and I kinda was, too. I felt like going out so I suggested this place. He told me he’s never been! Now, I’m making him!”

Immediately, your smile dropped. “Oh… uh… where is he?”

Ruby flicked her head to look out the windows. The streets were dark and the weather was drizzly as October drew to a close, prompting the numerous shuffling of people adorned in jackets and thick, patterned raincoats. But following Ruby’s pointed finger, you spotted Vernon underneath a dull-glowing street lamp, holding his cracked phone to an ear while he blabbed his mouth. You saw him heartily laugh—crow’s feet wrinkling the skin beside his eyes while flashing his white teeth through the misty weather—almost doubling over right there on the street without a care in the world, oblivious to those who turned their heads in curiosity.

“Who’s he talking to?”

Readjusting the fabric to one of her favourite sheer black tops, Ruby shrugged. “He mentioned a name but I can’t remember… Won-something.”

“Hm… well, uh, I should get back to work.”

Since he stormed Ruby’s bedroom and stole the ecstasy money the week before, you had royally given up being angry about the entire situation—about him. As you anticipated, Ruby didn’t care. She was quite forgetful unless you were on top of her like moss on a tree stump. It didn’t feel very good to table your frustration, your discomfort, your morals. But at the same time, it was exhausting to care so much in the stifling smoke of everyone else’s blatant disregard—the more you breathed it in, the more tired you became, until you found yourself hopelessly deflated.

Ruby said goodbye, and you returned to another table of yours since they had flagged you down to order dessert. You ran into Tara again while waiting at the pass for two chocolate raspberry souffles, where she was also awaiting an order.

Ever since you showed mutual interest in Caroline Love, Tara seemed to enjoy talking with you more—not that you two were suddenly best friends or anything—although it felt nice to be included.

“Have you given it any thought?” Tara asked, subtly feeding herself dark chocolate-covered blueberries she often kept in a pocket on her apron, specifically for snacking. “Going to her Winter Wonderland?”

“Uh.” You crossed a leg and shrugged. “I’m still undecided.”

“I really think you should go.”

“Are you going?”

Tara laughed, her faded London accent suddenly becoming particularly thick as she shouted, “of course! It’s going to be gorgeous.”

“I just—admission tickets are probably pricey.”

“Well, yes, obviously.”

“I guess I could go…” you sighed, staring down at the floor.

Tara’s order was presented onto the pass beside your two warm souffles. She quickly lifted her tray, flitting a smile toward you.

Back in the dining room, you served your customers dessert and took their menus for the night. It seemed they were on a date—you could tell—from the girl’s silk makeup, slim black dress, and those beautiful pearl earrings you were slightly jealous of, to the man’s fine-pressed clothes and smitten smile that hadn’t left his lips since you first tended to them. They thanked you sweetly, and in return you wished them a beautiful night. You hadn’t been on a real date, ever.

Honestly, it wasn’t something that adamantly bothered you until working at Mr. York’s. Never before had you waited on such a plethora of doting couples, always hand-in-hand, sharing testaments of love over intimate candlelight, and it was starting to wear on you to a very lonely degree.

Adjusting the menus in your hands, you looked across the restaurant, spotting Ruby and Vernon (who had finally come inside) at their table by the windows. It seemed that Lara was their waitress, though you couldn’t tell if she was taking down orders on her notepad or simply talking.

Truthfully, Lara wasn’t that great at waitressing. She was short-tempered most of the time, hardly tended to her tables, and was quite lethargic. The fact she hadn’t been fired nor reprimanded merely testified to how well everyone else around her covered up the slack. But something was different tonight. As you attempted to shift closer without making your apparent interest too obvious, you caught glimpses of Lara’s unorthodox behaviour—the chippy voice, her animated expressions, how often she tousled that effortlessly satin ponytail she had come to perfect—and there could only be one explanation: Vernon was right there, smiling her up.

For some reason, you wanted to start kicking and screaming.

He was all relaxed, one arm limply hanging around the back of the chair, his body language open and clearly implying mutual investment. The way he brushed behind his ear, encouraged her with a tilt from his head, a lick at his teeth—you wanted to throw the menus on the ground. Burn them.

But the urge was alive for less than a second.

Just enough for you to feel it, and then stand in peculiarity as you wondered why everything was so dizzy. Why wasn’t it enough that he had infected your homelife? Why must he trickle into everything else?

Ruby saw you. She waved.

Embarrassed that you were caught lurking, you turned around on a dime, though it was to no surprise that you collided against another server who grouchily shook their head and practically elbowed you aside. You squatted down to pick up a menu that had dropped to the floor. Without looking back, you charged straight to the kitchen.

It was a long, dreadful, exhausting night.

You weren’t a hateful person by any means.

But there was something so vitriolic about catching glimpses of Lara across the dining area, putting on a theatrical performance and exemplifying unusually magnificent customer service, that rendered you speechless. She checked the table more than she checked her phone, which you always thought was impossible, and every time she would glue herself to Vernon like he was smeared in honey. It unfortunately distracted you from being good at your job. After delivering an order to the incorrect table, forgetting to bring the bill to another, and nearly tossing over Tara as you barrelled through the kitchen doors in frustration, you wanted nothing more than to tear the infrastructure down to rubble.

“Hey!” Ruby gestured you over later in the night, when most people started leaving as the restaurant winded down to close. “Need a ride home?”

“Um, from who?”

Your roommate chuckled. “Vernon! Obviously.”

In an instant, you shot Ruby a look that could incinerate paint off walls, a look that was more like a scream, while she continued to smile at you, utterly missing your nonverbal plea. She felt like a school teacher trying to coax two misbehaving students who couldn’t tolerate each other into being friends, although, Vernon didn’t really exude the vibe that he couldn’t stand you. Instead, you probably seemed like some unditchable obstacle.

“I still have to help in the kitchen. I have to clean. I won’t be able to go home for a while.” There—a perfect excuse! “I’d feel bad for the wait.”

“That’s no big deal!” Ruby exclaimed. Your chest withered. “I’m gonna be heading out, actually. I’m meeting some friends for a movie! But I know Vernon is okay with waiting, right?” She looked to her friend.

Vernon kinked his neck, shrugging. “I’m in no rush.”

“See!” Ruby beamed, her hazel eyes glistening. “Then you don’t have to worry about missing the bus. And the commute will be much shorter. Besides, Vernon is also gonna drive home Lara.”

You nearly fell to your knees, ill. “Lara?”

“Uh, yeah. Aren’t you friends?”

“Lara always rides home with Tara.”

Ruby shrugged. “Vernon’s good at throwing a wrenches into things—” she smirked across the table, “—guess they’re gonna hang.”

“More like a word that rhymes,” he said, grinning.

“I-I—um—Ruby, I really don’t know—”

She grabbed your hand, cradling it. “Please? The wait honestly isn’t a big deal. You work so hard. Don’t feel guilty about accepting help!”

Guilty? You weren’t guilty! You were horrified about spending even ten minutes in a car with Mr. Felony and Princess Lazy, who had been eyeing each other the entire night and were following nothing but their blinding primal urges to have unabashed intercourse. As if you wanted to be shackled between them! You would rather get sprayed by oily gutter water in the street, waiting for the bus, than have to sit in the back of his stupid car!

“Oh, um… okay. I guess you’re right.”

Ruby pushed up from her seat, blanketing you in a hug. Smelling the richness of her jasmine fragrance and getting a near mouthful of hair, you opted to stand still as stone, letting her squeeze you until your bones rigidly pressed back. She then flung on a small purse with designer print, giving your cheek an affectionate brush while ruffling Vernon’s hair before she left.

You had never felt so defeated. You wanted to wilt.

“I’ll be outside,” Vernon mumbled.

Usually, you cleaned with determination—determination to not miss the bus and reach home by a reasonable hour—but tonight was quite the exception. You cleaned slow. You walked slow. You went about the nightly list of closing chores with the will of a teenage boy at his first job. On the other hand, Lara was whipping by. She polished her tables hard, mopped the floors vigorously—she even offered to throw out some of the leaky trash bags that Tara was supposed to handle—which had made you suspect her body was stolen and the Lara before you was her evil but productive doppelganger.

Even Tara seemed astonished.

By the time you finished your tasks, Lara and Vernon were still outside, waiting. They hadn’t forgotten about you, though you hoped for it. They were chatting underneath the street lamp. Lara had her hair down, occasionally casting a hand through the long, shimmering brown tresses while she fluttered her smoky cat eyes at the boy.

Your fingernails were digging into the shoulder strap of your bag, peeling at the fabric until it bunched. “Okay. I’m ready,” you announced, monotone as ever, grey like slate.

Lara got into the passenger seat while Vernon walked around to the driver’s side. He chuckled at you before opening the door. “Took you long enough, Pyjamas. Cleanin’ the ceiling tiles while you’re at it?”

You chose not to say anything. Vernon didn’t care, anyway.

He played some music. But you weren’t listening. He and Lara spoke back and forth, giggling and laughing. But you weren’t listening. He gave her something from his glove compartment that she ate. But you weren’t listening. At a stop light, you tried opening the window to feel some semblance of a breeze on your perspiring face—it was a window you had to manually roll down, with a lever that could be cranked—though it kept jamming even when you fiddled with the lock. For some reason, you kept pushing against the handle, so desperate to breathe in cold wind and not the old marijuana stench left to fade into the dated upholstery.

Vernon heard the thumping. “Hey—Pyjamas—ease up on the fuckin’ window, yeah? That shit doesn’t work. It’s gonna break again.”

“I need the window down.”

“Lara can open her window. The breeze’ll go back.”

Of course, Lara shook her head. “It’ll mess up my hair.” She then turned around to pout at you. “Hey, you’ll get dropped off soon, alright?”

You ignored her, instead sticking your nose so close to the glass that your warm, anxious breaths were fogging up the surface.

“Did you just call her Pyjamas?”

“Mmhm.”

“Okay…” Lara laughed. “Why?”

Vernon shrugged, smiling. “Doesn’t matter.”

“So, where do you live in the city? Although, I get the suspicion you’re not from here. Otherwise I would have known. I keep very persistent tabs on all the hot guys. It’s been getting… bleak… until now.”

“Has it?”

“Mmhm.”

“Lucky you.”

“So, no place?”

“Nope.”

“Well, you’ll get to see my studio. It’s quite nice.”

“Hm.”

“What?”

“Dunno. Who says we’ll make it inside?”

The very second Vernon stopped the car along the curb to your apartment building, you nearly flung yourself out the door. In fact, you swore the wheels were still moving when you threw off your seatbelt and touched your shoe to the wet grit outside. He cursed at you, but, again, you weren’t listening. You didn’t thank him. You didn’t say goodbye. It felt like escaping a trap purposed solely to engender your misery. Never would you sit in that vanilla Camry again.

When your last straw finally broke, it actually felt like your fifth or sixth last straw. In fact, the last straw should have been the first straw, if anything—when you walked into your living room at the start of October to see a strange, tattooed boy sitting on the sofa, forking split molotes into his mouth—that’s when you should have put your foot down. But you didn’t. You never did.

You let your feelings become diminished and redirected.

As much as Ruby attempted to amicably butter up her friend like he was a damn bread roll, the parts you saw of him vouched for the opposite, and there was no hiding the most blatant fact of all—that he was a drug dealer—which had been your plight since the very beginning. Honestly, you wouldn’t have really cared if it was just the low-hanging stuff. Smoking weed was probably more common than cigarettes nowadays. Even you had tried a joint back in high school, outside on your friend’s porch during the dead of winter with her questionably older boyfriend, while her parents were out for dinner. That would have been acceptable. Except, it wasn’t just that.

Ketamine, ecstasy, cocaine—weird relaxants and other variants of hallucinogens you had never heard before—Vernon wasn’t exactly water under the bridge. He was quite literally a criminal, and with how much he was frequenting your apartment—you were probably a criminal, too.

You had looked down at the text from Ruby while on the bus.

She had invited some friends to the apartment for a get-together. To accurately translate the message: some friends—at least twelve people; a get-together—there’s alcohol involved, and most likely drugs, and you’re probably going to come home to someone whose hooked up their shitty music to our living room speaker such that no one will be able to form a coherent thought because the sound is so insufferably loud. Oh—and there’s guaranteed someone making out in the corner with a spicy side of genital groping that no sober person particularly wants to see. The text stared up at you for the entire ride home, until your vision fell out of focus and the screen blurred.

Indeed, it was the last straw. You knew it, even before you entered the apartment. A deep scarlet colour glowed at you from under the door, rippling like a bloodied beach tide, while you stood there with the key, debating if it was worth it.

“Oh—shit. Sorry.”

The door suddenly popped open. You recognized him despite the fact it had been months since Ruby introduced you for the first and only time outside a sandwich shop—long, brown side-swept curls, a big septum piercing, thin like a rake—where he had walked outside with nothing but a single twelve-inch baguette in his hand. In the moment, he didn’t recognize you back, although you might attribute that to the fat blunt tucked behind his ear and his incredibly spacey expression you had seen on Ruby before.

He simply bumped around you, stumbling every few steps or so, on his way toward the mail room. Of course, someone always had to hot-box in the stupid mail room. It was no wonder your letters and flyers reeked.

Catching the door with a hand, you stood in the threshold.

Those red lights that Ruby had bordered around the living room ceiling for occasional parties had transformed the apartment into a seedy, saturated hell. People drinking in the kitchen, people rolling up on the couch—you didn’t even want to imagine what was happening in Ruby’s bedroom, or your own for that matter—it was a suffocating, congested nightmare with overplayed club music and wafting, smouldering smells. This was supposed to be your home. You were supposed to have a say in how your home was treated. You were supposed to feel safe, at ease, comfortable.

Somehow, it was none of those things.

You wondered if it ever had been.

Ruby was nowhere in sight, but, through the thick red haze, you were able to patch him down like sewing machine. Vernon was obviously no novice to sex and the art of attraction—one tempting flash from those dark golden eyes was pretty much all he needed to seal the deal—which likely explained why Lara was being pressed against the closet doors. They were down the corridor that led to the washroom. It was literal tunnel vision into their synchronized spit-swapping, tonguing, and teething, to the point where everything else but them soaked away into red tides. You almost couldn’t breathe, fixating on Vernon’s hand that slipped underneath Lara’s short skirt, prompting the girl to twitch and exhale a moan across his lips.

What was that feeling?

What was that horrible, reverberating, all-consuming feeling?

Jealousy?

No—your mind had practically screamed it as though it were a shot of pure electricity—no, no, no! You slammed the door shut, fixed the strap to your bag that was sliding off your shoulder, and marched outside the apartment. The weather was damn cold. When you sat at the curb, huffing, the warmth from your breath turned into disappearing, translucent cotton.

But you were so angry that the temperature hardly bothered you.

There was enough of a fire in your gut to keep your skin burning for hours. It felt like there was straight steam inside you, the kind that shoots in boatloads from hot geysers, and that one little pinprick would make you explode. Wearing nothing but very thin dress pants, an even thinner black button-up shirt, and scuffed tennis shoes, you sat on the curb and stared up at the night sky in such a desperate, pleading way—as though you were going to start begging for something—you didn’t know what.

When your neck became too tired of craning, your face buried into your hands, nuzzling into them with a hope that maybe if you pushed hard enough, you would fall through an unbeknownst time loop, where you could wake back up in the lost familiarity of your childhood bedroom. Your dad always sizzled fresh eggs on a frying pan in the mornings while your mother ironed out wrinkles from your pastel-coloured school clothes. You could start over. You could choose to be a different person. You would know better.

However long you sat there, it didn’t seem like much.

It wasn’t until the palms were pulled from your tearful eyes that you realized how numb you were. Your toes hardly wriggled, and your fingertips were stiff. Suckling in a big, wet breath, you gasped at the frigid air suddenly hitting your throat, dry like chalk—oh, gosh—it had been way too long. You might just freeze to that very spot on the curb and have to be thawed off it with a hair dryer.

“Jeez—little cold to be watchin’ the stars, don’t’chya think?”

Unwillfully, turning your head, you saw Vernon. You figured he must have come outside to finish that stumpy blunt he just flicked some orange ash from. Probably warm in his grey hoodie, with his usual black jacket thrown overtop it. Maturely, or maybe not so maturely, you decided to ignore him, shifting your focus to regaining the twitches in your toes so you wouldn’t have to see the bruises on his neck. Your nose crinkled.

“Ou, silent treatment,” Vernon lilted. “That’s a first.”

Whatever, you thought, focusing even harder on your toes.

“You still pissed at me for takin’ Ruby’s money? That was just business shit, Pyjamas. Nothin’ that concerns you.” He took a deep puff from the blunt—the smoke wandered into the peripheral of your vision. “Anyway, she’s lookin’ for you. You got her all concerned n’shit. Maybe go say hi.”

Finally—you were starting to feel it now—you could see your toes wriggling underneath the shoes, and though your legs were tingling, they could move, and that was all you really cared about. Grasping onto your bag, you pulled yourself up. Shoot—you had stumbled a little. Nonetheless, you were quick to straighten out your button-up shirt and dust the grit off those cheap dress pants that you once pulled from a half-emptied clearance bin. They had ripped along the inner seam a few times. Ruby sewed them.

Except, you didn’t go back up the pathway to the apartment.

Inside? That hellhole? As if.

For some reason, you turned away from Vernon, clutching tight to your cinnamon bag while hobbling stiffly down the sidewalk.

You heard him laugh at you. It sounded so childish, unfettered.

Nothing like his personality.

“Where the fuck are you goin’, huh?”

No answer. He didn’t deserve to know.

“You seriously that fuckin’ mad at me?”

The wind dried out your lips, making them cracked.

His laugh hit the crisp midnight air again. “Y'know what? You’re weird as fuck, Pyjamas. Weirder than me. Jesus Christ.” He coughed a few times, the smokiness in his throat sounding raw, then stayed silent for a moment. “And you’ve got dirt on your ass.”

At last, you whipped around. “Don’t stare at my ass!”

Vernon smirked, wiping his nose. “Figured you should know.”

“I don’t care! You’re awful!”

“Awful?”

“Yes, awful!” Closing your fists, eyes pricking with tears, the anger was beginning to warm you back up. “You came into my life and ruined it!”

“No offense, Pyjamas—” he put the blunt to his lips, hollowed in, and swiftly exhaled, “—not sure there was much to ruin.”

“Who do you think you are?!”

Vernon shrugged. “Nobody.”

“Gosh—I can’t believe—I wish that were true! I honestly wish it were! Because then I wouldn’t have you infesting my home! I wouldn’t have to smell weed all the time! Or see your car in the parking lot! I wouldn’t have to stuff my head under a pillow whenever you and Ruby decide to—to—to—whatever it is that you do! I wouldn’t have to worry about our food disappearing, or whether or not I’m gonna open the door to you using up all our hot water, or if I have to stay in my room for the next four hours while you and Ruby turn the living room into a smoke shop!” Wiping some very unattractive mucus from your nose, you choked back a whimper and rubbed at your eyes. “I mean, my life already sucks enough without you throwing a wrench into everything! At this point I’m gonna end up in jail because of you! You’re a drug dealer! You practically robbed us!”

“Hey, hey, hey—” Vernon immediately flicked his blunt to the cement, stamping over it with his sneaker as he approached you, attempting to quiet down the tears and unhinged blubbering, “—scream it fuckin’ louder, yeah? Don’t think they heard your ass down at the police precinct.”

Your head wrung back and forth. “I want you to leave!”

He scoffed, “wouldn’t that be nice?”

“If you won’t, then I will!” Again, you stalked down the sidewalk, dramatically turning away from him like an actress in a drama flick.

“And go where?”

“I don’t know!”

“You’re an idiot.”

Damn it. For the second time, he had gotten you to stop. It was embarrassing enough to have him see you so metaphorically undressed—nose running, lips cracked, eyes swollen from frozen tears, emotions bumbling all over the place like a golf ball stuck on an antenna—and now he was toying you. It was pathetic. But it was too hard not to care.

“I’m an idiot?” Your hand slapped against your bag. “Thanks.”

Vernon nodded. “Well, you are.”

“This is what I’m talking about! You—”

“How about you just shut up for a second?” He stepped closer, shortening the space in between you, though it was cautious. “I didn’t know you were so damn capable of runnin’ your mouth. But it’s cold as fuck out here, my dick’s gonna fall off, and if I can’t get you back inside, then Ruby will probably lick me real good.” He sighed, huddling into his jacket. “Just take a moment, alright? That’s the problem with you quiet chicks—never say anything your entire damn life—then one day it’s a big cluster fuck of anger and suddenly you can’t tell what’s even supposed to deserve it.”

“I—”

“Ah, ah—” Vernon held a finger to his lips, effectively cutting you off from a remark that burned to get out, “—just be quiet. For a minute.”

What was he even talking about? What did that even mean? Was it suddenly a crime to be expressive, emotional? Did he have a secret kink for silencing a woman in mental peril? You stood there, hands clenched into weighted fists, nails scratching at your palms, while your head blazed with a torrent of sentiments, some years old, some new, that had never moved anywhere but between caverns in your mind. They all echoed at once. Howling.

Vernon smiled. “Wow. A minute. Feelin’ better?”

“No,” you muttered, hugging yourself.

“Eh. You’re not shoutin’ anymore. Must have done some good.”

Looking off to the side, you rubbed your nose. The skin felt ice cold—you were ice cold—getting nipped to stone by the needling wind.

“Come inside.” He extended his hand.

You stared at the gesture blankly, swallowed. “No.”

The boy shook his head, laughing, “what the fuck is wrong with you? Seriously? You’d rather freeze? Become a human popsicle?”

“I told you already.”

“Told me what?”

Sniffling, you stared at his shoes. “I want you to leave.”

“Right, Pyjamas. You want me to leave.”

“Yes. A drug dealer can’t stay with us.”

He put on stupid, fake frown that you wanted to physically detach from his face. “That’s all I am to you?” Maybe without his soft lips, and his sharp teeth, and that silver tongue, you could tolerate him.

“Whatever.”

“Come inside.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Ruby will turn me inside out like a glove.”

“Good.”

Vernon sighed, rolling his head in a circle to crack his neck. The moonlight splashed across each hickey that Lara had sucked into his skin, small little dark blotches, almost like the tattoos that quilted his arms. His face would glint when the light struck his metal piercings the right way, looking like little stars.

“M’kay—how ‘bout this,” Vernon huffed. “Let me make you a proposition. ‘Cause I can’t stand out here much longer.”

Huddling further into your own flesh, you shrugged.

“You gonna hear me out?”

“… I guess.”

His eyes twinkled. “You know why I’m here, right? I need some money. A couple people aren’t payin’ and I’m part of a system that doesn’t need fuckery like that.” Vernon paused, gazing at you. “If you can help me find your old friend Diana Basu, I’ll leave. I’ll look for another place to crash. I know it’s her that owes me.”

You said nothing, but kept your lips tight.

“I don’t need an answer from you now. Think on it.”

A shaky breath escaped your mouth, turning to a cloud.

Vernon swayed his head toward the apartment. “Let’s go.”

“I just—I’m not going in there with all those people.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Ah, so that’s the issue.”

“It’s part of it.”

“M’kay. I can fix that. But you have to come with me first.”

“Uh, come with you where?”

“Parkin’ lot.”

Hesitantly, you started following Vernon to the back of the building, into the picket-fence enclosed lot where a few cars were parked. He approached his Camry, opening the door to climb inside and ignite the engine while you stood idly, teeth chattering, body parts numbing.

Then, he was opening the passenger side door. “Alright, PJ's. I got the heat blastin’ and everything. Now, get in before my dick falls off.”

You swore you would never sit in his car again. It particularly made the situation worse to know that he had likely drilled Lara in the backseat the night he drove you home from Mr. York’s. But admittedly, you were on the cusp of developing frostbite. Biting the bullet and clenching your teeth, you lowered slowly into the passenger seat, feeling the strong-gusting heat from the fans as you sat the cinnamon bag on your lap. The interior didn’t smell like weed as you expected. The car smelled dry-cleaned and slightly sweet.

Suddenly, he was tossing something on you. At first, you thought it was a blanket, but when you straightened it out, it was a heavy black jacket.

“There.” He smiled. “That’s my old bomber. Courtesy of the backseat.” Looking toward the building, he licked his lips. “Alright, give me ten minutes. Don’t talk to any strangers while I’m gone.” He proceeded to wink at you before shutting the door, to which you refused to smile at.

Even if you didn’t want to, there was a sense of curiosity prickling you, urging you to look around—the glove compartment, under the sun visors, the knapsack kept in the backseat—despite the fact you would most certainly find something concerning. You settled for adjusting the jacket against you and relaxing into the slippery leather, inhaling a deep breath. It was strange. In the front seat, Vernon’s car felt oddly familiar. You assumed you were thinking of your mother’s car that she used to drive you to primary school in, except it was silver. Maybe that was it, though you weren’t sure.

Getting bored, you nuzzled further into the jacket.

It smelled… good.

Really good. The kind of good that made your stomach flutter. The collar’s fleecy interior was pressing against your nose and it seemed to maintain the faint traces of Vernon’s cologne—an amber-like musk with some distant richness in the notes—it was making your head spin as you kept breathing it in. Your heart skipped a beat. Your mind started wandering.

“Okay, you’re one lucky fuckin’ girl, you know that?” From thin air, the boy was suddenly throwing open the car door and climbing inside, causing you to jolt and realize your limbs weren’t dead weight.

“You scared the crap out of me!”

“Oh, shit. My bad.”

“You really got all those people to leave?”

Vernon nodded. “Yes sir.”

“How?”

“Who cares? I did it.”

You stared at him, eyes narrowing.

Vernon grinned. “C’mon! Give daddy some sugar, here.” He dialed the heat slightly, and you pushed down his bomber jacket. “I did you a big fuckin’ favour and all I get is your disdain. What a fuckin’ world.”

“First of all, I’m not giving you any sugar—”

“Yeah, yeah—it’s a joke,” he said, rubbing his browbone. “Your sugar is probably salt. And not to rush you or anything, but I told Lara I’d give her a ride home. You’re standin’ in the way of my good deed.”

“How many good deeds can one man handle?” You bit sarcastically, hating that you were just another dumb girl in his front seat.

“I love pushin’ the limits, you know?”

Funnily enough, you still smiled at him, though it was fairly limp and didn’t quite spread across your lips all the way. You were exhausted.

Emotionally and physically.

As you were getting out from the warm car, Vernon leaned over the console and gestured at something. You looked down, and a flood of sheer embarrassment waded around you upon realizing you were taking his bomber jacket.

“My limits stop here. That shit was expensive, huh?”

“Oh—uh—sorry. I didn’t mean to,” you stammered.

“It’s whatever.” He shrugged, accepting the bomber and tossing it back into the darkness. “Promise you’ll think about my proposition, yeah?”

You sighed, watching a stranger walk to their car. "Okay.”

“Cool. Nighty night, PJ’s.”

11 MONTHS AGO.

“I don’t know, I feel like I’m in such a weird spot… I don’t want to help him, I don’t want to get involved… but on the other hand, if I do help him, he’ll be out of my life, you know? Gone with the wind. It’s been bouncing around in my brain all week. I just don’t know what’s right.”

“Here, move. I’m gonna spray this part.” Soonyoung grabbed at the sleeve to your red shirt, guiding you away from the brick wall.

The back of Common Cents got tagged again—another octopus—and Soonyoung figured it was best to scrub everything off before Patsy realized. A big, soaked sponge was being squelched in your rubber-gloved hand as you watched Soonyoung blast the wall with water from the hose, whorls of cerulean and mossy green streaming across the cement. It was colder out now, your nose starting to run and fingers feeling brittle underneath the blue rubber.

“So…” you mumbled, moving back to the wall where you continued to wash off the paint, “what do you think I should do?”

“Why am I the person you’re talking to about this?” Soonyoung asked as he joined you with his window-scraping brush. “Why not Ruby?”

“I don’t know, she’s not impartial.”

“And I am? Wouldn’t it be better to ask someone who knows him?”

“Ah—” you grumbled, shaking your head while half-heartedly pushing the sponge into the wall, “—I just can’t bring it up to her.”

“Why?”

Biting at your lip, you sighed, “because… I spent all this time talking so much crap about him, complaining about him—if I do it, I’m worried she’ll think something weird—and if I don’t do it, then…” an image of Diana flashed in your mind, scalding you with guilt that felt uncomfortably palpable. “Then… I’m just suffering. And it’s my own fault.”

“So do it.”

You looked at Soonyoung, who had changed his favourite black baseball cap for a beanie, as he rigorously brushed the wall. “Really?”

“Y-Yes,” he grunted, breathing out heavy. “Now, can you put in some fucking elbow grease over there? Wall’s never gonna get clean.”

“Oh, right, sorry.”

“Why would you be worried about Ruby thinking you like him?”

The sponge paused against the wall. “That’s not what I said!”

Soonyoung laughed, “that’s what you implied. Is it not?”

“Well, yes…” you mumbled, squeezing your fingers into the large sponge and watching the soap ooze out, “but I don’t! I just hate the fact I'm gonna get teased about it!”

“If you don’t like him, then don’t worry.” He smiled at you from over his shoulder, though you opted to remain silent, focusing on scrubbing down the octopus’ big yellow eye which looked similar to a golden amulet.

“Ah! Fuck! That scared the fuck out of me! Stop laughing, Vernon!”

You rolled over in bed, taking a mushy pillow from the plethora arranged against the headboard and covering the side of your face with it, attempting to block the noise. Just barely, you could see out your window into the complex parking lot, where someone was tossing out a shiny bag of trash late at night. Ruby screamed for the second time, causing you to press the pillow even tighter against your ear—she had never been good at horror movies—and you hoped for your sake they were only going to watch one.

Vernon came over earlier in the evening, although you avoided him. Ever since your… episode… the week before, and his interesting preposition, you had given yourself much time to think—early mornings, sluggish afternoons, restless nights—you wrestled between shame and realism. Shame: you got all snotty-nosed and glossy-faced and essentially threw an adult tantrum. Realism: you had a choice to make that felt equivalent to performing a bench press and having the bar collapse dead onto your chest. You rolled over again, adjusting the mangled bedsheets.

What help could you legitimately offer him?

Like you knew anything about Diana nowadays. She was the one who detached herself from your life, slowly cutting herself out bit by bit like a paper snowflake, until one day, her contact became nothing but absent digits in your phone. If anything, he probably knew more than you at this point.

“Vernon! Don’t!”

You stared at the base of your door, examining the faint stretch of pale light that creeped underneath and the fidgety shadows that rippled through it. Something crashed in the living room, and then you could hear your roommate giggling while admonishing Vernon. There was probably a bowl of spilt Cheetos all over the stupid carpet. Your stomach grumbled—you could eat Cheetos, even carpet ones, dressed in bits of fuzz—as you had been hiding in your room ever since Vernon arrived. Sometimes Ruby would slip you things underneath the door if she felt you were hiding for too long, like salted seaweed packs, or granola bars. Tonight, there was nothing.

Around half an hour later, you heard the front door slam.

Vernon was leaving.

Gosh—you needed to just rip the bandage off—squirming around in bed while your stomach pinched itself with anxiety wasn’t going to get you anywhere. Nearly tripping over the bedsheets caught around your ankles, you hopped toward the window and leaned awkwardly over the desk to half-push it open. There he was, casually tossing his car keys from hand to hand.

Where was he going so late at night? Where did he ever go?

At the last second, you felt intense doubt, your fingers remaining on the window’s flecking edge, trembling between shutting or opening. He was at his car now, just about to pull open the door and disappear into the city.

“Hey! Wait!” You yelled, cringing at how your voice echoed around the parking lot, sounding much louder than you’d ever want it to be.

Vernon paused, quirking his head at you.

Hot with nerves, you waved him over, and slid the window fully up.

“Peepin’ on me again, Pyjamas?”

“What? No—I’ve been in bed for—I heard you were—”

“Hey—s’no big deal—I like when a girl hollers at me.” He stared you down with a toothy-gummy smile that made your brain turn to cotton. “Good to see you not sittin’ at the curb formin’ icicles under your nose.”

Shaking your head and shimmying out of the odd shiver against your neck, you chose to ignore his last comment, trying not to lose every word you practiced and the exact tonality you’d say it with. “Um, so… did you guys spill something on the carpet? I mean, I heard this crash, and then Ruby, like, yelped or something. It’s fine if you did. It wasn’t fruit punch… was it?”

“Nah.” Vernon shook his head. “Dumb girl kicked over the chips.”

“Oh… that’s it?”

He nodded, pressing his lips together and furrowing his dark, sharp brow at you in question, as though he knew that wasn’t what you actually intended to speak with him about. You glanced down at your desk, spread out with messily ripped open envelopes of credit, heating, hydro, and internet bills. Sighing, you sucked up what little courage lived inside you.

“Uh, I’ve given your proposition some thought…”

“Have you?”

“Yeah…”

“Well?” Vernon shrugged, hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket, which you realized right then was the black bomber. “The verdict is?”

“… I’ll help you.” There—you had choked it out—even if you almost needed pliers to physically jerk the words from your throat. Vernon smiled again, and there was a transient sparkle in his honeyed eyes that didn’t make him seem so distant as he once felt. But you couldn’t be naïve about him, not at all.

“Cool,” Vernon said simply, extending his hand. “Night.”

You thought he was going to shake yours, and you got very confused as his fingers oddly scraped against your warm palm for a brief second, and then you realized he’d just dapped you up. The boy turned to walk away, back to his car. Your mind twisted in on itself.

That was it?

“Uh, Vernon?”

“What?”

“Well… I don’t know… we’re just going to leave it at that? I mean, don’t you think we should at least exchange numbers or something? We’re gonna have to figure out how this should all work, right?”

“Eh, I’ve got too many numbers in my phone.”

You blinked at him; lips parted. “Uh… how do you suppose we—”

“What’s a place you like goin’ to?” He asked.

“A place I like going to?” You repeated. “Why? That doesn’t really—”

“Alright, just tell me, Pyjamas,” Vernon rushed you, his breath becoming a misted web in the frigid air. “I can’t afford to spend all night talkin’ to you through a damn window while I freeze to death.”

Stumbling over your words, you answered, “I guess—I would have to pick—um… well… I haven’t been there in a while, but I like going to that big fountain at Herongate… the one with the globe? I used to sit there between my shifts sometimes to eat my lunch, and—”

“Okay—this Saturday, 6-pm, I’ll meet you there—sound good?”

“This Saturday?”

Vernon started backing up, pulling out his keys. “This Saturday.”

“At six?”

“Yes, at six. Need me to write it down for you?”

“N-No… I’ll remember.”

A moment later and Vernon was in his car, getting the engine warmed up. Not wanting to weirdly stare at him through the window, you shut it completely, then immediately ran to your calendar with a red pen to scribble down the arrangement. This Saturday. 6-pm. Herongate. Vernon. It’s not that you were going to forget.

In fact, you didn’t really know why you wrote it, just that it felt kind of… good… to back up from your calendar and see something in red ink that wasn’t a due date or a work schedule.

This Saturday. 6-pm. Herongate. Vernon.

You repeated it endlessly in your head until you fell asleep.

Herongate was a smaller sized mall that was only a bright ground floor with one strip of stores going down the edges. It wasn’t very exciting—and maybe that was why you liked it—despite the fact you hadn’t been in months. But the mall was just big enough to have everything you could want: Claire’s and Hot Topic were right beside each other like mismatched twins, and then Cinnabon was only three stores down. Perfect.

You sat at the edge of the fountain, looking back on the big, chrome globe that slowly spun in a circle on its axis, observing a very shiny North and South America rotate past you. This was once your favourite place to sit in between jobs, usually with a packed lunch to eat as you attempted to name as many countries as possible. At one point, you had gotten pretty good—you could identify almost every little nook and cranny of Europe—until work became too much, too quickly, and it was suddenly easier to drag yourself home between shifts rather than doing something you like.

Ruby was napping when you left the apartment.

Still, you were unsure of how to break the news about Vernon to your roommate without seeming a little… hypocritical. After all your vehement complaining, moaning, and protesting that Ruby had been subject to, confessing that you were going to spare a hand in helping him might not translate in the way you would intend, nuance and all.

But at that moment, Ruby became the least of your worries.

It was almost twenty-past-six. Vernon was nowhere in sight.

You scanned your phone for the umpteenth time, thinking how much easier this might be if Vernon actually gave you his number instead of being all evasive. I’ve got too many numbers—you should have punched him right in his lip when he said that—too many numbers and no sense of time.

Anxiously bobbing your foot, you wondered how long would be too long to wait. Were you already past a non-disclosed threshold tied to your self-respect and now you were just sitting there idly, looking dazed, stupid, and desperate? Crushing your hands together, you squinted at the globe.

Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria… Macedonia?

A dark blob then appeared to reflect in the chrome, distorted.

“You weren’t too hard to find.”

He was met with your glare that merely bounced off him. “Why are you so late? It’s almost six-thirty! I swore you said six o’clock, did you not?”

“Doesn’t matter what I said—” the boy shrugged, coming to sit beside you at the fountain, “—look what I have, Pyjamas.” He placed something down on the ledge, which you realized was a neatly packed container of sushi. “This girl that I deal to—her mom makes the best homemade sushi I’ve ever ate in my fuckin’ life. Don’t even charge her no more. This is all I need.” He shimmied off his jacket, licking his lips.

“Oh, well… it looks good,” you were hesitant to comment as you still wanted to press the issue of his tardiness. Vernon was undoing the clasps to the container, fishing out chopsticks from the side. “But… you know… I just wish I knew you were going to be late. I thought you weren’t coming.”

He proceeded to tear open a soy sauce packet with his teeth, letting the contents spill into an empty compartment of the container. “Mm… of course I was comin’,” Vernon rambled as though he were only half-listening, instead focusing on laying down some fresh ginger with his chopsticks before dipping the sushi in the runny sauce. “Just some shit I had to do first.” You watched, bemused, while the boy poked the rice and wrapped crab into his mouth, beginning to nod his head in evident approval. After a big swallow that made you wonder if he even chewed it, Vernon grinned. “Good as fuck.”

You sighed, tucking a leg in close to yourself, figuring that maybe it was best to let him eat. A growing boy needs his nutrients, as they say.

“There’s another pair of chopsticks in here,” Vernon mumbled, wiping a small drip of sauce from his lip. “Got crab, salmon, and yam.”

“Uh… that’s yours. Thank you, though.”

“You sure?” He asked, already pinching up another piece. “Don’t think too hard about it, Pyjamas. It’s all gonna be gone in the next five minutes.” When you didn’t say anything, Vernon simply laughed, picking the container up in his hand like he was hiding it. “Suit yourself.”

“Okay—uh—wait! I’ll have a piece…”

The meal you ate before leaving was a frozen power bowl spun in the microwave for five minutes that lacked any distinct flavour but your own sadness. Homemade sushi with fresh ginger and soy sauce seemed like eating sunshine, even if it came from a random girl Vernon was selling drugs to.

You grabbed the extra pair of chopsticks and picked up a piece, dipping it carefully in the sauce before slowly fitting it into your mouth so you wouldn’t choke—you could imagine that to be pretty embarrassing—and promptly pass out in the water fountain, which would suck even more. Having the fresh tastes and complimentary flavours alive on your tongue was nearly enough to make you leap up and start singing as though you were the lead member in a flash mob.

It got you thinking. “Have you ever seen a flash mob?”

Vernon crinkled his nose. “What the hell is that?”

You laughed while picking up some salmon, “a flash mob?”

“Mm—oh! Is that when you get flashed?” Vernon inquired, his eyes turning bright. “Like, when girls fuckin’ rip open their tops and show you their titties? Is it that kinda thing?” He brushed off his cheek, smiling.

Watching a mother usher her two little children past the fountain with added vigor and a disturbed wrinkle in her forehead, you couldn’t help but bend over and laugh. “No. No, no, no—gosh no! It’s, like, a pre-coordinated thing. It happens in public spaces. One person gets up and starts a performance, then another joins, and another, until you’ve got a big group making a spectacle. But they’re all in on it. It doesn’t have to be singing or dancing. There was one where everybody started taking off their pants on a subway. Believe it or not, my sixth-grade teacher showed us that video.”

“Takin’ their pants off?” Vernon sounded intrigued behind the sushi he just shoved into his mouth. “On a subway? Shit’s already weird enough down there. But if I saw everyone takin’ their pants off, I’d probably join.”

“But you’re not part of the mob.”

“So?”

“Uh… sure.” You didn’t know how to challenge his point.

“I like my idea better.”

Deciding to let Vernon have the rest, you set the chopsticks down and wiped off your mouth, smiling. “What? Girls lifting up their shirts?”

“Yeah. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?”

With a roll of the eyes, you folded one leg over your knee and interlocked your fingers around it. “We have different versions of fun.”

Vernon smirked, closing the container. “You asked me, PJ’s.”

“All right, whatever,” you huffed, glancing around from person to person and store to store. “Anyway, now that we’ve both got some decent food in our systems, I think we should discuss what—”

“Holy shit—I knew I smelt something!” The boy was suddenly to his feet, squinting past the splashing fountain and into the distance, acting much too thrilled for your liking. “Cinnabon?! PJ’s, why didn’t you tell me they had a Cinnabon here!” He grabbed his jacket, tossing it back on.

“Well, uh, I didn’t think it was necessarily that important—”

He shook his head adamantly, then pulling out a wallet from his pocket. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve had a cinnamon bun. The only thing I’ll be able to think about is a warm, sticky, cinnamony, gooey heaven…” Vernon picked through the folds in his wallet. “Damn—I don’t even have a fiver on me! Uh…” he started patting down his pants pockets, only to pull out dryer lint. “Fuck, guess I’m gonna have to freestyle.”

You had no idea what he meant by that. Huffing, you decided to stay by the water fountain, chin sitting heavy in your palm, as Vernon wandered off down the mall for his esteemed cinnamon bun. A productive conversation between the two of you seemed impossible when the boy was so flighty. Next thing you knew, he’d probably get distracted by a dime in the fountain and tumble straight in. You aimlessly flicked around on your phone until he came back, napkin in hand, with his glazed prize propped on it.

Raising your eyebrows, you marveled at him. “How did you manage to pull that off? Did you beg someone in line?”

“No,” he said while sitting back down.

“Five-finger discount?”

“No.”

Now, you were just confused. “You took it from a little kid?”

“Jeez, what’s your fuckin’ problem?” Vernon scorned, licking at his thumb blotched with some confectionary icing. “I’m a drug dealer, not fuckin’ Ebeneezer Scrooge. Nah, just a lady workin’ there. You throw a couple compliments, get the giggle-train goin’, ask for a free sample—not rocket science or anything—just simple economics.”

You stared at him, unimpressed. “Are you always like this?”

He took a bite from the cinnamon bun, grinning. “Like whafft?”

“Ugh, never mind.” You were eager to dismiss whatever unkind thoughts had infiltrated your mind. “I mean, you had your sushi, you’ve got a cinnamon bun. I think we should talk about how we’re gonna plan this out. My work schedule is pretty packed. I’m honestly limited to weekends.”

Vernon wiped his chin, nodding. “Well, there’s twenty-four hours in a day.” He ripped off another piece of the pastry with his teeth and you couldn’t deny that it smelt so perfectly sweet and deliciously sugared that your nose twitched. “Fuck—you know what? I should have got a drink.”

“Your days might be twenty-four hours. Mine are certainly not.”

“Weekends are kinda shit for me,” Vernon said.

“I don’t have much wriggle room. What are you doing on weekends that requires your attention the entire day?” You retorted, folding your arms.

Vernon shrugged. “In case I don’t wanna do anything.”

“What?”

“I don’t like doin’ anything on weekends in case I don’t wanna do anything,” he clarified like it enhanced your understanding even marginally.

“You don’t want to do anything on weekends…” you paused, lifting an eyebrow, “just in case you don’t want to do anything? Is that right?”

“Mm,” Vernon nodded, brushing glaze from his lip ring, “and if I want to do something, then I’ll already have the weekend available ‘cause I didn’t commit to any plans. I need the space y’know? I figured you’d get it.”

Opening your mouth, you stuttered, “I-I don’t get it, actually—"

“Fuck, I’m thirsty as hell now,” the boy complained after crushing up his napkin. “Any place in here that makes smoothies? Strawberry banana type shit? Mango sunshine?” He stood up again, swiveling his head around in observation, while you tucked your face into your hands and whined. Gosh—this boy was like a prairie dog! Always fidgeting, always distracted, always testing your patience.

“Vernon!” You snapped at him. “Can you focus!”

“I’m thirsty.”

“Please?” Grabbing onto the sleeve of his jacket, you tugged the material hard, urging him to sit back down before your head exploded. “If we don’t manage to get this sorted in the next five minutes, I’m gonna start screaming. You’re free to do whatever you want once I’m gone.”

He didn’t seem particularly fond about it, but Vernon did sit, though he leaned forward with elbows on his knees like he was waiting for the first opportunity to get distracted and bolt. Were men always like that? Or was it just Vernon? Maybe you were one of those people who just completely and utterly lacked any sentiment of patience for them. It seemed like it.

“So,” you cleared your throat, “I think weekends is our best bet. It’s our only bet, actually. I get the vibe you’re not a morning person, so maybe we do afternoons. But if we pick a time, you actually have to follow it.”

“Okay, okay, listen, Pyjamas.” Vernon straightened up, directing his hand at you. “All this shit is fine n’ dandy, but we really can’t coordinate a goddamn thing until we know where Basu is. That’s where we start. And since my leads are dried out, I look to you. She’s your girl. Call her.”

Immediately, you scoffed at him in disbelief, “call her?”

“Mm.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“No, no. Respectfully, that’s not how this is going to work.”

“Why not?”

You laughed, fingernails scraping against your scalp. “Be-because—it just—it won’t work like that. Diana and I… it’s complicated, okay? We haven’t talked since our graduation, over a year ago, and… I’ve tried…”

“Ou,” Vernon winced, biting his lip. “She ghosted you, huh?”

Rolling out your shoulders and attempting to put some conviction and strength in your posture, you shook your head. That was exactly the truth, but hearing him say it felt cruel. “She—essentially—well, yeah.”

He shrugged. “Eh, worse things have happened. Why don’t you just try callin’ her again? Maybe she’s over it now. She might want to talk.”

“It’s not that easy,” you sighed.

“You haven’t even tried.”

Clenching your fist, your heartbeat started fluttering. “What makes you think she wants me in her life at this point? She’s clearly a different person now, I mean, if she’s doing drugs, avoiding payments, all that. I’m not saying I judge her—I don’t—but it’s clear that the version I have of her in my head doesn’t exist any longer. We’re starting from scratch. I think you probably know more about her than I do.”

Vernon shoved his hands in his pockets, stretched out his legs. “Barely. And that shit was quick. She hardly talked or looked at me, really. Just took her shit and left. Always wore a big sweater with the hood half-draped over her face, so I never got to see much of her.”

Your stomach curdled. That sounded absolutely nothing like the Diana from your memories. But there had to be something more.

“How did you start dealing to her?” You asked.

Vernon leaned over, scratching his studded eyebrow. “Uh… if I’m honest I can’t really remember… I might’ve run into her at a party and we got to talkin’ or whatever. But I would always meet her in the same place to drop off her shit—it was a parkin’ lot behind this dingy Thai restaurant, late at night—she wouldn’t even get in the car. She always had cash on her. But the last two times, she slipped. I told her NBD, y’know? She never gave me the vibe she would stiff me. But then I never heard from the chick again.”

You thought back on your time with Diana in university. There had been a couple late nights where you two would find yourselves wandering the empty streets, kicking the rocks at your feet, watching newspapers and stray plastic bags drift by, talking about anything that leapt to mind. Most occasions would steer you into small takeout restaurants across town that you had never even heard of, ready to scourge their menus and take advantage of their cheap prices as needy, broke students. You could only remember one Thai restaurant. They had beautifully painted artwork of a red-whiskered dragon on their window that Diana had stopped to look at.

“Well...” you swallowed thickly. “I might know where the Thai restaurant is… but I’d have to do some research. Though, I’m not really sure how that will help us… I guess it wouldn’t hurt to check it out.”

Vernon smiled. “That’s great.”

“But I have to add—it’ll be really hard for us to do this effectively if we can’t text each other. If you’re worried that I’m going to be obsessively blowing up your phone every hour with a lead, I promise, I won’t be.”

“M’kay, guess you’re right,” he agreed despite seeming apprehensive. Vernon handed you his phone to type in your number.

The screen was sectioned into shards from a gigantic crack in the corner, and the keyboard twitched sensitively under your fingertips. “Isn’t this lovely?” You sighed. “Did you use this to deflect a bullet or something?”

The boy laughed, shaking some loose, dust-black hairs from his forehead. “Nah, dropped it out the car window last year.”

“Why is there no case on it?” You said with ample judgement.

Vernon snatched his phone back. “I don’t got one.”

“Well, I can see that.”

He merely grunted at you in response while you sat on the ledge, giggling to yourself. It was a bit funny to tease him—he deserved it, after all—for his tardiness and constant distractions. Vernon slotted the bare phone into his back pocket and straightened out his jacket. You wondered where he would go now. Probably off to flirt his way into a free smoothie. They'd let him behind the counter and he'd make it himself, for all you could surmise.

Picking up the empty sushi container, he nodded at you. “Alright. Nice talk, PJ’s. Glad we could make some headway.”

You nodded back, hands pinched between your knees. “Later…” you smiled coyly, tossing a thought around in your mind like a rubber ball. “Uh... if you keep going past Cinnabon, there’s a Mango-nificent”

“'Kay, cool,” Vernon said, waving you off. "Thanks, Miss."

—END OF PART ONE.

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