Sheep [ONGOING]

Chapter 13: January 11

Sheep's emotions were easily gauged from a wayward glance to her seat on the couch. Beside her, she'd taken Ace's warm, worn hand in hers, maintaining a firm grip around his fingers.

"Excited?" Charlotte asked, giving Sheep's arm a reassuring rub.

Almost predictably, she answered with the firm shake of her head, lofty waves swinging along her shoulders.

"On the bright side," Charlotte continued at a brisk verbal stride, "there's no jostling you around on the ride there..."

The thought did little to assuage her, Ace assuring himself that the distraction of the passing scenery would have likely been preferred. Instead, only the polished exterior of an apple and a mug of tea occupied her thoughts, focus flickering between them both from her lap to the table. She turned over the apple in one hand, rolling it against stocking-lined legs with her chin tucked into her sweater.

Soap operas, once adored by them both, lost her then, hardly charmed in the presence of inevitable visitors. Charlotte hardly struggled in contrast, assuredly—to Ace—having indoctrinated Sheep to their existence in days past.

It would be a good while, he'd realized, before anything occurred. Awaiting Jon and Scarlet's arrival was half the battle. Ace's phone jostled within his pocket as he bounced his leg, arms crossed over his abdomen.

Looking over Sheep, he found it difficult to disregard a cross-analysis, meditating. He didn't bring up hypotheticals around her, withholding any confrontation with the ideas of abuse he'd mulled over for so long out of the belief that remembering would leave her worse off. Even with the assumption, it explained enough without her confirming.

Enough in her actions: her timid nature, her gestures of silence, her awkward mannerisms. Enough in her abject denial of physical touch, locking up at the slightest contact. Even so, it hardly grazed the surface of her physical abnormalities, of injuries she'd sustained the night they'd met.

She squeezed at his hand with a steady rhythm, at intervals holding the grip and resting out of fatigue. When she grew bored of it, she laced her fingers through his, inspected the ridges of his knuckles against the backdrop of her stockings or dropped her apple within the crevice of her thighs to scratch at her own fingernails in waiting.

If she knew of anything they had speculated or had recovered some sliver of a memory, she made little effort in showing any awareness. In part, her actions and behavior spoke to the reminiscence of something vaguely undesirable, but there was no recollecting it out loud, no informing either of them of bare-faced remembrance.

Life began at the passing slideshow of memories from Charlotte's bathtub, stills blurred like a watercolor painting, and it was the furthest back she could draw a memory. She'd admitted that much multiple times—memories of a waxing and waning consciousness, of a rolling boil and her crying out against water. Little else.

"Nothing cropped up lately?" Ace needled in, trailed by the rumble of tireless televised dialogue.

Her swinging head answered him, eyes affixed to the pale surface of steamy chamomile.

Gritting his teeth, he reciprocated the squeeze of her hand against his palm, resolute in his purposeful focus on the television.

"Is it bad?"

Her husk aria, like a chime, charmed him back in with an expectant gape, coaxing her further.

Sheep swallowed something back, a marble snared in her throat. "If I don't remember. Will you be upset?"

"Not... upset," he mumbled, biting back the cracking of a reassuring smile. "Depends. Maybe you don't want to remember it."

"But I do want to," Sheep insisted, seeming to protest with some mild urgency—as if his doubt were reason enough to scold her.