She didn’t even ask why. But she did give me that pointed stare that felt moremotherly than it did demanding.
I smiled and tilted my head anyway as I stopped. “Please.”
Half her smile lifted, then she nodded, just in time for the elevator to ding.
If the agency wanted someone who wasn’t an asshole, I’d best go find out howCora Holland defined ‘asshole’.
chapter three
it's amazing what pancakes and honesty will do for a girl
For the first time all night my eyes felt tired, and slowly they drifted closed. My sleepy head sank into the pillows that had finally gone cold, and I actually had the urge to kick my feet I was that comfy. My eyes got heavier, and heavier, until I felt sleep reach out for—
BEEP
BEEP
BEEP
I cracked my eyes open as slowly as they'd shut, hatin the rage that was burning the tips of my fingertips as I lay there. I hadn't been able to sleep all night. I was tossing and turning and every part of my mattress was always lumpy. The pillows were hot. The room was stuffy. Then too cold. Then I remembered that I hated having my feet poking out of the covers because that was practically invintg a demon to snatch them. And then I was too hot again.
And just as sleep let me win, right as I perfectly perfect, it was time to wake up.
Fucking 9:00am classes.
Not sleeping wasn't a new thing for me, especially as of late. But last nights restlessness felt different. It wasn't as hollow. Perhaps because my body knew I had to start back my classes today and it really wasn’t prepared to leave my little fortress of solitude on the second floor. Or step back out into a world thatyou know whostill roamed.
It was the smell of Daisy’s pancakes that eventually got me downstairs.Hadn’t touched them though. Instead I just sat in my corner of the kitchen table with my Earl Grey andwatched their lives go on. Rory’s laugh floated somewhere in the background, soft as anything, while Daisy and Goldie bickered about the pros and cons of oat milk like it was a life-or-death situation.
If I were a bitch then I’d tell them to piss off flaunting their perfect,non-traumatised lives in front of me while I was over here drowning with no sodding life jacket. I’d tell them they were wrong for being so normal when everything to me wasn’t.
But, alas, I’m not a bitch.Contrary to the worlds opinion.
It’s my eyes I think. Too foxy to be pure. Not the doh kind like Rory’s, orthe elfin kind Daisy had. I knew my hair didn't help either. Black had always and will always be the colour we pin to the darkness. The cruelness of the world. Although I wasn’t sure why I was being flung into a cesspit along with those things just because I looked like a bitch when I wasn't.
Case in point; my friends, my wonderful housemates, were going about their daily lives because I'd askedthem to. Just like Rory did when she lost her Dad. She didn’t want the world, orus, or the guys to treat her as this fragile glass doll that would shatter with the wrong word. And when the attack happened I'd reinstated those rules.
“Cora,” Daisy’s voice cut through the fog in my head, and the morning playlist the was humming through the kitchen. “Eat something.”
I blinked down at the golden pancakes going soggy on my plate. Even themaple syrup looked like it couldn’t be arsed with today.
“I’m fine,” I muttered looking back at her, but my stomach chose that moment to growl, loudenough to betray me.
Daisy gave me a look, the kind she usually saved for when I was about to lose adebate I didn’t know I was having.
Such a mother hen this one. But you couldn’t help but love her for it.
“Honey,” she sighed. “You need to eat. It’s your first day back; you’ll need theenergy.”
I huffed. “Because staring at blank canvases all day is really going to take it outof me.”
That earned me half a pancake to the face from Daisy.
Even with the lack of sleep it made me smile.
“Even if you don’t paint, you need something.” Goldie chimed in, leaningagainst the counter with her coffee like a 1950s starlet, golden waves in a heatless curl wrap. “We’re not letting you collapse in the middle of campus. Do you want to be Liberty Grove’s next tragic headline?”
“I already am, aren’t I?” I muttered to my pancakes before meeting their sadsmiles.
