piecewise | g/t snippets & drabbles

sweet (?/f) | snippet #2

She felt the bean's eyes on her.

Only for a second, but a second felt like eons as she pushed the container towards her hiding spot. Run! her thoughts yelled, and she didn't wait for another second as she abandoned the sweetened task left before her. 

Amber ran from the counter to the hole behind the cookbook, not bothering to turn around. Her glasses fumbled across her nose as she stumbled across the wooden frames, crossing planks and beams in a labyrinth of the previous borrower's design. Finally, she reached her destination - a crude wooden door with a single "X" painted on it. She released a breath as she opened it, her legs locked in on her bed.

The borrower's eyes flitted to the ceiling of her dwelling, crayon-colored dots painting the material above. She picked a color - yellow - and followed it as her mind replayed what happened.

Someone else moved in...she thought, her mind snapping to the previous resident's name. Thomas must've gone big.

She frowned as she remembered the scene from her vantage point, the warmth the person must've felt from those hugs or the fulfillment she felt from those laughs.

Maybe...she thought, but then glued her eyes shut, the colors from her dwelling melting into what eventually lulled her to rest.

Maybe I could feel that, too.

---

Sour.

Everything had gone sour by week 4. The human that moved in did a deep clean, one that rattled Amber's belongings and woke her up on the wooden floor of her living space. With a grumble, she'd trekked the paths to the kitchen, almost slipping off due to her sleepiness. 

"Ugh," she grumbled, realizing why everything looked out of focus, "glasses."

"Hello?"

Of course, she had heard that. Amber thought sourly. Because out of everything that went wrong today, the icing on the cake had to be the human discovering her existence less than a month into her move. 

Well if you can't see her... Amber's thoughts chided her, causing the borrower to shake her head. "Goodbye," she kidded back, riding the low of a no good, very bad day.

Strawberries were not the first thing she expected to greet her, but the scent companioned with a very familiar fuzzy shape in her vicinity proved otherwise. Atop the fruit offering was a vague brown color, which was bigger than life itself yet retracted with careful urgency.

The human? She guessed, but the second she whipped her face in that direction the colored...thing, was gone. Granted, her vision wasn't as effective as it used to be, but the hairs that stood when the red goods were delivered had long since calmed to her normal human-avoiding panic.

Hesitantly, Amber reached her hands out, feeling the juiciness of the fruit in front of her. Somehow, the borrower now had two of them...each ripe and large enough to last her a whole month each. Two whole months! She thought, wondering how her luck had turned so drastically. Forgetting about the mystery of their appearance, Amber went back to fetch her glasses, her muscle memory kicking in as she ran down the inner corridors. 

It took her a bit longer than she wanted to put one in her makeshift trolly, and even more time to store it and the other in what was the borrower equivalent of a studio apartment, but she managed. And as the two jackpots sat soundly in a corner of her room, Amber thought back to the beginning of the day - how the human's annoyance led her to a gift she would never forget.

She remembered the mystery and allure of the strawberries in her room, the brown that sat atop it and disappeared as quickly as it came. The shade, which could only belong to the very person that caused the disturbance, the one with the love she coveted and hope she could only dream to bear one day. Despite the irony, she grinned, settling into the cotton swab remnants that shaped her mattress.

As a warmth she'd only witnessed close lulled her to sleep.