I love her, she’s my best friend, my rock—but I lived with her, so sometimes I did feel a bit of relief when she’d be out working at the club or be gone for a weekend visiting her family.
I can comfortably exist in silence.
But months of it?
I feel it now more than ever, in the relief, the softness of my muscles sinking into the bathwater.
I’ve been craving company.
Real company.
But if I was Samick, and I couldn’t get away from the swell of emotion bubbles all around me all the time, I would be a recluse.
Constantly hidden away from torment.
Then the thought strikes my brain and my gaze swerves to him, alert.
“How can you do it?” The question just spills out of my mouth, over my tongue, way too smoothly. I shouldn’t ask, and yet, “How can you kill people when you can feel them like that?”
Leathers slink as he angles away from me and pushes up from the tiled ledge. He moves for the cupboard doors under the sink, then drops to a knee.
I listen to the thuds and clatters of his rummaging—until he draws back with a handful of items balanced in one hand.
He tosses them at me.
I flinch, but they hit the water just above my belly.
Water splashes all over my face, the walls, the tiles.
And the moody look I spare him is risky.
But Samick slips back onto the ledge, hikes a knee, and looks right at me with a face of stone.
“Wash,” he says with a chin-gesture to the bottles and washcloth floating on the water. “And I do not find that I care.”
My face crumples into something ridiculous. “If you don’t care, why are you throwing bottles at me?”
“I do not care,” he echoes, firm, “about what others are feeling. I care nothing for their sorrow or fear.”
And yet, you got in a huff about the question and threw bottles at me.
I sigh and grab the nearest bottle.
Dandruff shampoo.
I don’t have dandruff, but I fiddle with the lid anyway.
For now, I snub the soap and the facecloth.
My mum always taught me to wash my body last—make sure to get all the shampoo and conditioner off my skin, so I don’t get breakouts.
Maybe she was right, maybe it’s bullshit.
But I do it her way.
“Your sadness now,” he says, and lures my furrowed gaze to him, “is for what?”
“My sadness?”
