The Office Worker and The Tramp

Chapter 3

Nashira was very grateful to the kind, charismatic boy. He had given her one of his precious chicken thighs, and the girl ate it happily. However, her smile faded when she spotted the rude man who had kicked her out of the other restaurant and, despite that, she waved her hand in greetings showing him that she had no hard feelings.

From the man's stunned face, she assumed that greeting caught him off guard. Anyway, Nashira didn't pay much attention to him because half a second later she turned in another direction to go her own way. She finished eating the thigh faster than she wanted due to her voracious hunger, and because she was looking at her fleshless bone disappointedly, she did not notice that a man was running towards her.

"Move aside!" The man had shouted at her.

But it was too late. The man collided with Nashira, causing her to fall with a crash onto a store display. A rain of glassy pieces fell on her, and the only thing the man who caused that did was to get up from her and continue running away.

"Hey, damn you, don't run away!" shouted another enraged man who was behind the first, going around where Nashira was.

The store's burglar alarm went off when the glass broke, but no one nearby cared. Not even the owner of the store himself, who was one of the few who came to see if the girl was okay, unlike the majority who only observed the scene from afar. However, the rude man she had greeted also came to help her, visibly astonished.

"Oh my god, are you okay?" the shopkeeper asked him, his first reaction being to ask her if he was okay despite knowing that she was surely not.

Nashira was still a little dazed so the man with an unknown name (the one who was rude to her) had to inspect her instead. Aside from a couple of cuts from falling on the hinges of the window and a few shards of glass in her hair, the girl was miraculously fine.

"Looks like it's ok. Just in case, do you want me to call you an ambulance?" the shopkeeper asked him.

"I-it's fine, thank you," Nashira replied, looking distractedly toward where those two men had run.

"Phew, thank goodness nothing happened to you. Those shameless... And they destroyed my store!".

After that, the shopkeeper went to report the damage to his business and the "rough" man guided Nashira to another place so that she would not get involved in a mess with the police. He noticed how reluctant she was to talk to them, so he helped her get away.

"That was...unexpected, right?" the man commented awkwardly.

Aside from work-related issues, the man was bad at starting conversations. And much more so if it involved doing it with strangers. He wasn't very sociable, and now that flaw of his made him want to beat himself up for asking Nashira such a stupid question.

"Yes. Unexpected indeed. If I tell you that I felt a certain fury in my body when they pushed me, would you think I was crazy?" Nashira asked, seriously.

"What do you mean by "fury"?"

"Let's see, uhm, how do I explain it to you? It's like electricity passes through me, and it makes me want to move".

The man remained thoughtful, also seemingly somewhat inhibited by Nashira's probing gaze.

"Aren't you talking about "adrenaline", perhaps?" the man asked her.

"Adrenalin? Is that what it's called? Yes, that exactly. What phenomenal energy, man!".

From the man's weirded-out face, Nashira knew that he thought just the opposite. Well, he doesn't understand it, he is just another copy of many others who value materialism over experiences.