KY$ ✓

Twenty | Naughty Corner

SOTC: Bad Things by Machine Gun Kelly (ft. Camilla Cabello)

Previously on KYS...

Encased in hardness and redness was the monster making my jaw drop in the perfect O, its humanely programmed instinct within to protrude white. I held all certainty from the gasps I held in and how my fists gripped my sheets it wasn't a dream.

"Suck it, Clara Stratton," Xerxes rumbled from the depths of his throat.

Now

"I'm making Maria this for breakfast," Xerxes said afterward like a proud parent.

"Are you serious?!" I exclaimed.

"What?" He slapped his red IPhone with a screen brighter than the asteroid killing the dinosaurs, which showed a picture of a smoothie bowl, on his thigh. "Isn't this a delicacy in the land of the free?"

Go. Naughty Corner. Now.

My voice was higher than Helium. "You woke me up to flex how you're making your soulmate breakfast?!"

"Yes," Xerxes answered like a 10 with the personality of a brick wall.

I just blinked at him.

"You're looking at me like I just pulled my dick out."

"Is this a joke?" I spat.

"No, but here's one: what do you call a suicidal girl's pussy?"

I scoffed. "What?"

"Limited edition," Xerxes stated, flashing his stupid perfect pearly whites. "Get it? Cause you're suicidal and I technically own you? So what you're going to do is drag your ass out of bed and make aesthetic carbs with me for the love of my life, ok?"

Jaw clenched to suppress damning infuriation and a snort, I complied.

We left my room and ventured the halls in silence for a while until words left the tongue of Lucifer in the body of the human smoking hot Greek God again.

"So how do you make the smoothie bowl?" Xerxes asked.

"It's bought," I seethed from the trenches of my esophagus.

"What do you mean?"

"From a shop," I blunted.

A sharp exhale escaped Xerxes's nostrils as he looked forward from my face. "Then we'll make it from pantry items."

"How?" I spat.

"Think, Clara Stratton."

I paused for a moment, shuffling through my head while simultaneously trying to get the Duck Song out of my head like I had for the past five hours.

hEy!

bUm dUm dUm, gOt aNy gRapEs?

Oh my god.

Finally, I sighed and said out loud, "Yeah, I know how to make one."

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Xerxes raised an eyebrow. "How do you know this will work?"

"I made them for money." I extended my arms out, gripping my palms on the table as the items laid in front of me: measurements of raspberry juice, RedBull, orange and raspberry sorbet, and raspberries. "I worked at a place called Blendz Bends for a year before I started at American Eagle."

"Why'd you quit?"

"It doesn't matter," I said after a moment, clasping my hands together. "First, put half the RedBull and an ounce of the raspberry juice in the blender."

As I ordered off the next steps, Xerxes complied with each one in an orderly fashion to make the thick smoothie. I chopped the kiwi and shaved coconut.

"You have a soft instruction voice," Xerxes said as he popped of the cap of the blender.

I made the last chop of the kiwi before shooting my head up. "What?"

"Your voice is calming in general. Like Bob Ross if he was a 5'5 girl, even when you're understandably pissed. Or sobbing your eyes out to Calix in a hall about something I told you not to do."

The organs in my chest dropped through the floor.

"What?" The oxygen suffocating my lungs tore the pitch from my voice, a dagger twisting where my rib cage had fallen.

"Don't stress. That day I was going to find you to tell you that I didn't care if you told anyone or not. Not like you'll be around much longer, anyway."

Uh... what?

"Anyway, can I put the toppings of this smoothie on now?" he just asked.

The last of my brain cells compelled me to nod.

As Xerxes placed the kiwi and coconut strategically on the thickest smoothie in a bowl and my panic attack died down slightly, my vision drank him in. How his jaw tilted in a god's perfect degree. The path his stark features undoubtedly trotted to zero in on a clear mission. But I always zeroed in on that freaking teardrop tattoo.

Not now.

Now it was those hazel eyes, holding the humanity of a dormant planet. Because not even the boy Calix described, who's face brightened the world and gifted girls ice cream when their hearts snapped in half could survive in those irises.

How could Xerxes Christakos have love and I couldn't?

Teaser: Flashback Clara isn't the same chick anymore...