, @shatteredsunns After so many months away from this place, Jake assumed he’d left so much of it behind. He was wrong.
Stepping into the streets where car motors ran and people stood slumped against graffitied walls, Jake felt a familiar itch sink into his sink. Just one bump. Just one hit. What would it do? Just to cope with being back here again. But he held true, mostly because his stomach did flips as he walked up to the old house he remembered a friend living in. Zea wasn’t exactly a friend. She seemed like the kind of girl who didn’t have friends –– just people she could snarl at consistently. But to Jake, she was a loose end. He’d left her hanging when he’d suddenly up and left –– following a family friend to the middle of no where for a cure for her Cancer. And he found a cure for addiction. Maybe not a full cure, but something that replaced the itch with something more pleasing.
He knocks once, twice, three times. Nothing. He hears her in there –– suddenly grateful for his new found hearing abilities. He shuffles his feet, a hand pinching the skin at the back of his neck the way you might scold a puppy. He debates leaving, even looks over his shoulder at his car parked on the street. But then he knocks again, and again, and again until –– she opens.
He smiles, expression nervous, head hung a little bit. But those blue eyes aren’t hazy. His skin isn’t tinted pink and grey. It’s soft –– he’s soft. He’s gotten rid of the messy locks he never took care of and opted for a shaved head. He’d gained weight –– beefed up a bit. He looked good. She looked better.
“Hey uh… Long time no see.” His eyes pinch and he shuffles nervously again. Not as nervous as he’d been on drugs. His body is stiller –– less agitated.
It took a lot to bring Zea to silence, to still her ever agitated energy. Jake showing up after months and months stunned her. She stared, drinking in this new Jake. The on who’d disappeared had been sallow skinned and sunken eyed, sickly and fidgety. But this Jake was warm and full, looked whole, looked far healthier than any day she had seen him.
Green eyes meet blue and for a moment she thinks she doesn’t know him. He’s just so different, but still the same Jake. Slowly a fire creeps into her own eyes, barely held in check by a scowl. Zea doesn’t bother to respond, or welcome him inside. She just walks into the kitchen, leaving the door open. She doesn’t bother to offer him a coffee or drink. He should remember where everything is, she fumes to herself.
With every intent of making noise, she swept aside old plate and dirty cutlery from the counter and into the sink. Before the clanging and crashing has ceased, she has hopped up and seated herself on the counter and crossed one leg. You should ask him how he is, be nice, a little voice in her head encouraged. No, she thinks. He left, no explanation, no message. But try as she might, there was a tiny bloom of happiness at seeing him, glad to see him alive and very well.
“You’re clean, obviously,” she snapped, looking away. One foot began to swing restlessly, betraying her inner thoughts. “You look better.”
