TEETH

Chapter Four: Concrete as to Frigid

Author's Note

Real talk, Giles and Schuyler as roommates would be awesome. Just imagine the possibilities. Beautiful.

(Yeah, Teeth is back.) :)

Just like Lennox is, oooooh.

(Animal by XOV is the theme I'm going for in this book)

Schuyler is staring at her wall- chin laying on her knees and her knuckles bleeding white from her tight grasp on her shins.

He was back.

He's been back.

Her soulmate has left her in the dark for the better of six months. His absence has forced her to retreat into the blurred safety of pills and therapists-- and fucking gardening. For the love of God, she ruined her fresh manicure in the depths of Giovanni's.

The jerk had the audacity to leave the other side of the phone silent for weeks, months. She had dropped letter grades, she lost friends because she became so distant-- she lost the second semester of her freshman year of college to Lennox Armstrong.

Lennox has forced nights of lost sleep-- where the screaming in her head became in sync with her own real voice. Her fathers have cried, her dads- who loved her more than anything on the world's surface- have scooped her off her own bedroom floor and cried with her. The prescriptions Aldis had given her, the pills she had swallowed for the sake of her sanity-- all in vain.

She was going to kill him.

She was going to murder her Lennox.

And hug him. Hug him viciously and cry- a lot- before she took his life.

Giles has been sitting on the end of her mattress, long legs crisscrossed as he noisily shifted through a drawer he pulled out of her closet. It was full of wolf knick-knacks that had been shoved out of sight because it had felt like the equivalent of trying to cover a bullet-hole with a band-aid every time her sight fell onto them.

"You're pissed," he announced the obvious after the clock ticked eight and she hadn't slept a wink more than two hours; trading out sleep for avidly picturing Lennox's painful death like a movie on her bedroom wall.

"You're still here," she whispered in reply, eyes red and puffy around the edges because she couldn't help it. Schuyler was damn happy to know that Lennox was back again-- that she could feel and smell and kiss the puppy of a man's face again. Some of the tears, known as traitors, were stupidly happy and she felt so idiotic.

"And I refuse to leave," Giles didn't even glance up; he lifted a marble statue of a wolf and grinned at Schuyler. "Sorta looks like me, huh?" He smirked, his dark amber eyes squinting from his expression and the morning rays which began to strain through Schuyler's window and directly onto his face.

A snort escaped her without consent before she had the chance to silence it. "The resemblance is uncanny," she ended in a monotonous voice, blinking up at him with one eyebrow raised and a pursing lip.

"Sarcasm!" Giles stood up, reaching his full height as he took an exaggerated take of the room. "Is that our dear Schuyler sounding... like... Schuyler again?" He beamed.

"You've been here for four hours now," she ignores him, instead moving to grab her smartphone and going through notifications. There aren't any; Schuyler opts to refresh her mail every thirty seconds instead.

Giles tilts his head, raising up his dark brows and releasing a full, helpless smile. "I'm not leaving you alone for one second," he points a finger at her, one which is wearing a plastic ring with a paw print emblem on silver surface-- fourth grade summer, she had won it in an arcade with Ben-- and continues. "Understood, Schuy?"