Ten Below ZeroTen Below Zero(9)

I still didn’t answer. I think we both knew the answer to his question. I backed up again, ready to leave, but his next question stopped me. “It’s rude not to answer questions.”

I chewed on my lip as I contemplated. The question he’d asked before in the restaurant, the one I hadn’t answered, popped into my head. “Morris Jensen,” I said.

Someone bumped Everett in their rush across the sidewalk. I saw Everett turn angrily, glaring at the impatient pedestrian, before he turned his eyes to me again. Anger furrowed his brow and thinned his lips. There was a fire in his eyes that I found captivating. “What did you say?”

“Morris Jensen,” I repeated. “That’s how I got my scars.”

I couldn’t tell you why I told him. Maybe because I wanted to tell someone, even if it was a mostly-stranger. Especially since I didn’t plan on seeing him again.

“Goodbye,” I said awkwardly, turning around and walking towards the apartment.

Ten steps down the sidewalk, I braved a glance back. Everett had moved to the exterior wall of the restaurant, his body shadowed beneath the awning, as he wrote in the notebook I’d seen earlier.

I watched him scribble words down, leaning against that wall, cloaked in the harsh shadow. And then his eyes lifted and he stared at me, his eyes piercing in the dark.

I did this often, staring at people, watching them do day-to-day things. But never so openly, so brazenly. I enjoyed watching mannerisms, quirks, or the moment a person made a decision, let that decision wash over their face, tighten or relax their muscles. I liked predicting their next movements, probably because I’d been blindsided by the person who had irrevocably changed my life. Morris Jensen.

But Everett held my stare. It was intense, but curious. An animal observing its prey.

Quickly, I spun on my heels, somehow maintaining my balance, and hustled down the sidewalk to the apartment complex.



That afternoon, I cleaned out my car and left the windows open to air it out. I was soaked in sweat by the time I’d finished and took advantage of the quiet apartment to take a leisurely shower.

When I jumped out of the shower, I was startled by Jasmine busting in the room. I hastily wrapped a thick towel around me and stared at her as she plopped down onto the toilet.

She looked at me coolly, daring me to say anything. Jasmine, while not close to me in any sense of the word, knew things. Things like how much I guarded my privacy and how I was an avoider of conflict. Often, she took advantage of both of those things at the same time, like she was doing at that moment.

“You have another bathroom.” It was said quietly, as I always spoke around her. The apartment boasted three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Luckily, I’d been given the master bedroom, which came with its own en suite bathroom. It was luck more than anything else, after living in this apartment for three years and being the only remaining roommate from the original group that had first moved in here years earlier.

“Yeah, Carly’s in there. She’s sick.” Jasmine stared at me with eyes too big for her face, but the look she held was sharp, conniving. To say we didn’t get along would be like saying that grass is green. It was obvious to Carly, to any one of Jasmine’s boys that she paraded in and out of the house. I didn’t hate her, but she seemed to hold some kind of contempt for me.

I stood there, inches from her as she used the toilet. We stared at each other while the water dripped from my face onto my chest. We were at a standstill. She would expect me to leave the bathroom, but I decided I didn’t want to.

“Carly said you had a date this morning.”

My eyes narrowed. Annoyance. Carly, while sweet and unassuming, had a big mouth. Instead of answering Jasmine, I pinned her with a stare.

Jasmine finished up and stood up, pulling her shorts back up. She smiled at me, an unfriendly smile. Her blonde hair fell around her shoulders like she’d just come from a salon. It was the kind of hair that people envied. Blonde, soft, full of body. Luckily, I felt nothing but annoyance for her. She was a rash that wouldn’t go away; itching at my skin with her stares and words.

“Was he cute?” she asked as she washed her hands, using too much of my soap and splashing water all over the mirror.

“I don’t know.” It was honest. He wasn’t a man you’d see in any model magazine. He was tall, in shape, with piercing eyes and a quick tongue. His hair was too long and he didn’t seem to like colors that weren’t black, but he still called to me on a deeper level. A level that was unnerving and, let’s just be honest, annoying. As I mentioned, I felt annoyance often. It was the other emotions that were tricky, slipping through my fingers like oil.

“What’s his name?”

I picked up the hand towel after she finished drying her hands and wiped up around the sink and the mirror, roughly, to show just how annoyed I was with her. Not like that did me any good. If nothing, it seemed to widen her malicious grin, her pearly whites sparkling with gleeful animosity.

Instead of answering, I carefully pushed her out of my bathroom and then continued pushing until she was out of the bedroom completely. She resisted a little, but she was no match for me with her skinny legs and little body fat.

“Why are you so weird?” she asked right before I calmly closed the door in her face.

I hesitated a moment. “Why do you care?”

She narrowed her eyes a moment, as if considering my question. “I don’t,” she finally answered, before spinning around and moving down the hall.