{{Dedicated to @inquisitiive because she leaves the sweetest comments and writes the cutest stories}}
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It had been a little over a week since the Equinox dance when Floyd called Rhea up.
The past week had been the best. Rhea had fallen into some kind of routine with the way she got crappy coffee from the vending machine during the break after first period every day, the way she always sat with Wade, Willa and Floyd during lunch and the way Floyd gave her a ride home after school after each day. That routine, that sense of familiarity made Rhea feel ten times better than any grand gesture or dramatic incident could.
"Hey," he said. "Do you have any plans for tonight?"
"Let me check," Rhea said. After pausing for a couple of seconds she teasingly added, "Nah, my schedule seems pretty clear."
"Wanna come over? My parents are out of town and they took Lissa with them."
This time, she paused to actually think about his question. A moment later, she'd made up her mind.
"Yeah, what time?"
***
Rhea snuggled further into Floyd's side and rested her head against his chest. They were sprawled on the couch in his living room, watching an action flick that Rhea only halfheartedly followed. She was a little bit preoccupied with enjoying the quiet moment she got to have with Floyd.
After she'd hung up the phone, she'd gotten dressed in a baby blue jumper, a pair of jeans and a jacket. She'd never been to Floyd's house before, so she'd insisted he came and picked her up from in front of the ice cream shop. From there on, the way was actually pretty straightforward, and it had taken a ten minutes' walk before they made it to the front door.
Unlike Rhea, who lived in a house of their own, Floyd lived in an apartment building. The building itself was pretty nice with brick walls and a set of stairs leading up to the front door. It almost looked like one of those nice apartment buildings in New York that you'd see in romantic comedies.
Inside the house was equally nice. Three walls of the living room were painted a cream color and the other one was covered with a rich burgundy wallpaper. The furniture looked like they'd been picked straight out of an interior design magazine, while still managing to look homey with the occasional photo frames and the blanket draped across the sofa like some had just been lying there.
"You settled in pretty nicely, haven't you?" Rhea had said once she'd taken the room in.
"My mom's pretty into interior design," Floyd had answered, shrugging his shoulders.
A couple minutes later, she was picking out a movie for them to watch while Floyd went to the kitchen to microwave a bag of popcorn to go along with it. When she'd seen Tom Cruise's face next to Cameron Diaz's on a fun looking action movie poster, she couldn't resist it.
That's how thirty minutes later she found herself giggling at the usual action flick humor while Floyd's arm was draped across her shoulders. The blanket she'd seen when they'd first arrived was now thrown over both of their legs and the almost empty bowl of popcorn rested on Floyd's thighs. He occasionally played with the ends of her hair that reached her shoulder blades. Little did he know she almost instantly fell asleep when her hair was being played with.
She stirred awake after what felt like no more twenty minutes to see the end credits of the movie. More like an hour, then. She realized that the blanket was solely around her now, covering her body up to her shoulders.
"Hey," she said. A lazy smile found its way to her face as she stretched to ease the soreness in her muscles.
"Hey." He smiled back at her.
"Should we watch another movie?"
"Why?" he teased. "Didn't you get enough sleep?"
She rolled her eyes at him, but it was one of those affectionate eye-rolls. Like when you secretly gush over how stupidly cute the person before you is being, but you roll your eyes instead.
"Okay," Floyd said a moment later, "we'll watch a movie. Care to make it more fun?"
***
"I thought you didn't drink." Rhea's tone was laced with amusement as she lingered by him and watched as he bent down and retrieved a bottle of expensive looking tequila.
"I try to avoid it, but my parents should have known better than to leave their teenage son unattended with a stocked liquor cabinet."
They ended up watching a random episode of Friends. The catch was this: every time Chandler made a sarcastic remark, they'd drink a tequila shot. Ten minutes into the episode, and Rhea was downing her fourth.
Whether it was because of the way he downed shots even when the game didn't demand it, or because his tolerance to alcohol was remarkably lower than hers, Floyd was considerably drunker than Rhea by the time they finished the first episode.
"Want to watch another?" she asked, giggling.
"Or we could do something else," he slurred in a low voice.
"Yeah?" She arched an eyebrow at him teasingly. "Like what?"
"Like this." With that, he leaned in towards her, slanting his mouth over hers.
The kiss was nothing like the ones they'd shared before. This one was sloppy, for starters, because of the way the alcohol in their systems cut back some of their control over their motor functions. It was also a bit more reckless and bold, what with the way alcohol tended to free people of their inhibitions. Their hands -well, Floyd's in particular- seemed to wander more freely on each other's body. Rhea's were tangled in his hair, alternating between tugging at it and scraping her nails against his scalp. Floyd's, on the other hand, ran up and down the side of her body.
He towered over her until she was lying on her back. Now, they were both lying on the couch and Floyd was balancing some of his weight on his elbow so that he wouldn't crush her. When his hand found its way under Rhea's jumper without breaking the kiss, her eyes shot open with shock. Even through the drunken haze, she could feel the alarm bells ringing in her head loud and clear.
They'd kissed before, hell, they'd made out in Floyd's car. But here, on his living room couch with one hundred percent privacy, it suddenly became overwhelming for Rhea.
"Floyd," Rhea said quietly. When he didn't show any sign of acknowledgement, she tried again, this time louder, "Floyd."
He continued to pepper kisses along her neck and her collarbone, but by this point, the only feeling they aroused within Rhea was panic. She was feeling suffocated and she needed to get out.
"Floyd, stop." She pushed against his chest and he finally backed up, looking at her with a mixture of confusion and annoyance. She quickly scrambled to a sitting position and gathered her limbs closer to her body because she suddenly felt exposed, even though she still had all of her clothes on.
"I don't think I'm ready for... that," she said. Her voice was barely a whisper, yet it was still audible in the otherwise quiet room.
"I should have known," Floyd muttered bitterly, slurring his words.
"Known what?" Rhea prodded, feeling anger start to rise in her chest at the expression on his face and the tone of his voice.
"That you would be a fucking tease. You kiss me on the first date. You make out with me in my car. You've been dangling it in front of my face for weeks. But you won't give it up, will you?" He scoffed. "I bet you get off on it. Teasing guys like that. Stringing them along."
Rhea stared at him in disbelief for a couple of seconds, but then before she knew it, her palm made contact with his cheek, a satisfactory slapping sound resounding through the room.
"Call me when you've sobered the fuck up," she hissed through her teeth.
She quickly gathered her jacket and purse from where she'd discarded them and ran out of the house, leaving behind a disheveled Floyd still clutching his cheek.
She stepped into the chilly October night and it enveloped her body almost as quickly as a rip current would envelop an unsuspecting swimmer. The heat of the anger she'd felt moments ago slowly dissipated, leaving in its wake shock and resentment.
With shock and resentment came the tears. She stubbornly wiped away the first few drops with the back of her hand, but then the sobs started to come one after another like waves crashing into each other and soon, they were wracking her body.
She was walking blindly now, stomping her way down the street without any sense of direction. Her vision was blurred and her mind was scrambled. If she could just make it home, then she could probably calm herself down with ice cream or something. Maybe hug it out with her mother.
She vaguely recognized the ice cream shop as she passed it. It had long shut up shop for the day. Most of the shops had, really, it was getting late at night, and the night life in their town had never been very lively to begin with.
"Rhea?"
She stopped when she heard her name being called but otherwise made no move to acknowledge the person saying it.
"Rhea, what's wrong?"
At the question, she started crying harder. It was an automatic reaction to the question more than anything else, really. Almost immediately a pair of strong arms was wrapped around her shoulders and she was being pulled into a solid form.
It was funny how she kept bumping into Caleb. Funnier how every single one of their chance encounters was dramatic in nature. Then again, she did seem to make it a habit to wander on his path to work at ungodly hours at night -in other words, close to the start of his shift at the supermarket-, so it was open to discussion whether their encounters could be considered "by chance" at all.
She cried against his chest for a while, her tears soaking the front of his jacket. Then, she reluctantly pulled away from him, and he peered at her with patient, concerned look on his face.
"Do you want to talk about it?" he asked, resting her hands on both of her shoulders as he crouched down just the tiniest bit so that he could look at her face directly.
She shook her head.
"Alright." He let out a long, deep sigh and rubbed the back of his neck. "Let's go."
"D-Don't you" —hiccup— "h-have to go to work?" She wiped at her nose with the sleeve of her jacket, undoubtedly painting a pretty unpleasant picture for Caleb and anyone who might pass them by.
"Screw work," he said in a clipped tone.
"But-"
"Rhea I am not going to leave you alone when you're like this. I live a couple blocks from here, come on. I'll drive you home once you're feeling better."
She couldn't find it in herself to protest any further when Caleb steered her on by her elbow. Despite the jacket she already had on, she could feel the cold in her bones. The wind slapped against her face, sending her hair flying in each and every direction and making the tears that kept on silently falling sting against her cheeks. A shiver ran through her and no more than a minute later, her whole body was shaking. Next to her, she barely registered it when Caleb shrugged off his coat and draped it across her shoulders.
They walked side by side in silence. Somewhere down the road, they made a turn, heading towards the south part of the town. Rhea knew the buildings there were older and a bit more unkempt than those in the area she lived in.
Soon, they came to a halt in front of a house with chipped white paint and a little garden out front. The garden seemed well looked after and Rhea briefly wondered who in Caleb's family was the gardener.
As Rhea looked around, Caleb retrieved a key from the back pocket of his jeans and opened the door almost hesitantly. He gestured for her to go inside first, then followed after her, shutting the door behind the two. He took off his ragged Converses by the coat hanger and Rhea quickly followed to do the same.
"It's not much," he said, gesturing around him with one hand while the other went to rub the back of his neck, "but it's home."
Rhea looked around her, the stark contrast between Floyd's well-furnished, almost posh house that she'd been to merely an hour ago and Caleb's little, homey looking one being the first thing to register in her mind.
The door opened to a small hall and to the left, there was the living room. It was small and crowded, barely having room for two sofas, a TV and a coffee table. The room was neat, with no empty coffee mugs or strewn about clothing in sight.
The kitchen was adjacent to the living room, separated only by a small, immaculately white kitchen counter, and that's where Caleb led her after they'd entered the living room.
"Just... Just sit here for a minute, okay?" He gestured towards one of the stools by the kitchen counter. She just gave a slight shake of her head in response. She didn't want to sit down.
"Okay, stand then," he said, giving her a sympathetic smile. "I'll make some hot cocoa."
He looked so frazzled as he looked into her eyes a second longer to make sure she wouldn't break down before he turned around, Rhea's heart warmed at the sight of him, no need for hot cocoa. Still, she nodded her head once, sniffling slightly. Despite the way Caleb had draped his jacket over her shoulders, she felt cold to her bones. It had little to do with the cold though, and a lot to do with the shock of what she'd just been through.
While she watched Caleb shuffle around the kitchen and listened to the distinctive sound of utensils clattering, she tried telling herself it wasn't that big of a deal, he hadn't even gone very far before she managed to get out of there. Still, Floyd's words rang inside of her head, echoing and growing louder by the second. By now, there was a throbbing pain in the back of her head, marking the beginnings of a headache.
The voices in her head took up so much space in her conscious mind that she didn't realize the shuffling of feet against the carpeted floor, indicating a third person approaching the kitchen counter. She didn't realize either when said person came to stand only a couple feet from where she was standing.
She jumped slightly when she heard a little girl speak up with a voice drowsy from sleep, "Kay-web, are you making cocoa?"
She turned towards the source of the sound. It was a little girl, no older than five. She had light brown locks of hair that were mussed up slightly, probably because she'd just tumbled out of bed at the sounds Caleb was making. She was clad in cute, pink pajamas and she was clutching a teddy bear to her chest.
It took Rhea a while to realize it through the thick fog that clouded her mind.
Realize that she'd seen this little girl somewhere before.
Visions started to flood her mind all of a sudden.
A little girl, being spun around in the air by a strong pair of hands.
A little girl, scrunching up her nose in concentration as she painted a boy's nails with neon pink nail polish.
Visions of the same girl that now stood a couple feet from her, staring up at Caleb with bleary eyes.
***
A/N: I feel like a couple of you might have been waiting for this, huh? ;)
I am so anxious to know what you guys might be thinking. VOTE and COMMENT to let me know if you liked this chapter.
I try not to pester you guys for votes or comments but for this one chapter, please, PLEASE leave some sort of feedback if you can, I am desperate for it.
Excuse me while I hide under my comforter and breathe into a paper bag. Be nice to me, okay? Love you guys.
May we meet again,
-Safiye.