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"Yeah?"
"Fuck off." Then her eyes meet the back of her skull a third time, and she slides down the wall. She hits the floor like a dead weight. I could catch her, but instead, I just watch. When she finally lands, slumping over like she's dead, I start to laugh, the sound echoing off the walls.
4
AVERY
Cloves.
Cigarettes.
Char.
The singe of smoke swims through my dreams of nothingness and tickles my nostrils. I want to sneeze, but I can't. The smoke latches around my ankles and tugs me out of the blackness and toward the light. It plasters itself to the back of my throat and makes me want to cough. I try to cough, but I can't figure out how to get my mouth to work. Everything is sluggish and delayed as the smoke tugs me out of the darkness and my sleepless slumber.
My body is slow to respond.
My brain is slow to wake.
And my eyes are slow to open, but I finally manage to crack one eyelid and then the other. My vision reels on choppy waters and then steadies like a calm sea. I am laying on something hard and cold, and it takes me a moment to figure it out. It's the bathroom floor. There's a crack cutting through the white tile in front of me and a pair of men's black loafers behind it that connect to ironed black slacks. My gaze continues upward over crouched knees and across a starched white dress shirt and up to a beautiful face.
A chiseled jawline.
Full lips.
Cheekbones sharp enough to cut diamonds.
A straight Romanesque nose.
And eyes so dark that it's like looking into the pit of Hell itself.
The creep.
Oh no.
I want to scramble to my feet and demand to know what's going on, what exactly he has done to me, but my body still isn't working as it should. I remember leaving class and going to the bathroom. I remember seeing the girl play duckface in the mirror, and I remember looking behind me to find the weirdo from class already there.
Oh double no.
He continues to kneel beside me, his head cocked as he examines me. On any other guy, his expression might be cute. It might remind me of a confused puppy, but it's not cute on him. If anything, that cock of his head is a challenge, and one I don't remotely want to be a part of. He lazily takes a drag of a cigarette. By the looks of it, the cancer stick has been lit for a while. Then he blows smoke out of his mouth directly into my face.
Cloves, char, and cigarettes hit me all over again.
Oh God.
Has he been doing that the entire time I've been passed out?
What the fuck!
My brain chooses this exact moment to notice that we are too close—weirdly close, even—and I scramble away from him, plastering myself to the tile wall behind me and coughing out the dose of secondhand smoke.
My scramble down the wall lands hard, and I'm dizzy again, way too dizzy. The world somersaults for a minute before it rights itself, and the strange guy is there again, his head still cocked to the side as he studies me. The fucker has no manners as he continues to stare. He brings the cigarette back to his lips, taking a long drag and blowing the smoke out. This time he has the courtesy to at least blow it away from me.
I can still taste the shit on my tongue, though, and smell it in my nose. Seriously, how long has he been blowing smoke in my freaking face? Doesn't he know that's bad for you? It cannot be good to do that to a person who has fainted.
Questions pitter-patter inside my brain, running wild.
Was he trying to wake me up, or did he just not care?
