Not Today | ✔️

Chapter Eleven.

"You give me butterflies..."

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At first, Evelyn was anxious.

When Tristan fell off the face of the earth for three days, she was anxious. Worried for him, his well-being. It would've been one thing if he was simply avoiding her, staying away from her house and the library, but he didn't even show up to school.

But then? Then she was angry.

Evelyn was familiar with anxiety. She was familiar with the way certain things would cause incessant flapping within her stomach. She was familiar with how it wasn't butterflies, but how it was more like a flock of birds right before the start of winter, flapping wildly and relentlessly in a last-ditch effort to make it to a warmer climate for migration.

If she had to describe the birds, she'd compare them to ravens, she supposed. Probably seven ravens, as seven wasn't a good number. There was no gentle, unrushed flutter, like that of butterflies. Their ebony-colored wings weren't dancing gently and gracefully to a subdued, classical piano melody. Their wings were flapping intensely and in an unabating manner to Beethoven's 5th Symphony.

So, yes, anxiety, worry, she was familiar with that, but then something less familiar overcame her. Anger. As she saw each message she sent him (though it wasn't a terribly high amount) was marked 'read', without a reply and as her two calls rang only two and then three times before the call ended, telling her he ended the call before it even began, she was mad.

Evelyn wasn't an angry person, but what she couldn't fathom was Tristan being rude enough to make her care about him, make her feel like they were friends, and then disappear.

Evelyn wasn't an angry person, no, she was a hurt one.

She was deep in her thoughts, trying to analyze and reorder the cluttered state of her mind and the messy emotions that were melding together, in the way that watercolor paints mixed together. But instead of reds, blues, and yellows mixing, it was worry, anger, and hurt. She was so deep in her thoughts, in fact, that she almost didn't notice the chime of the library door... Almost.

When she saw Tristan's tall figure walk through the doors, clad in a light purple sweatshirt, she felt an onslaught of relief and annoyance.

She put on her courteous smile, reserved for the occasional stranger that walked into the library. "How may I help you?"

Tristan frowned, shoving his hands in his pockets. "Help me?"

"You're looking for the 'Help Me' book? No problem, go up to the second floor, the section of the self help books and find POW," Evelyn said with a polite, slightly robotic tone.

"You're mad," Tristan said, blowing out a breath.

"Am I?"

Tristan blew out a breath. "You volunteer here, right? It's not an actual job?"

"Yes...?" Evelyn trailed, furrowing her eyebrows.

"Can I steal you for a couple hours? I'll bring you back."

Evelyn eyed him warily. She already knew the answer to this was yes, since Rose had a certain leniency towards her and she never missed an opportunity to volunteer, even tending to bring her homework to the library with her on school nights.

"Why?"

"Do you trust me?"

"No," she said, and her answer was immediate. His reaction was also immediate, his expression falling at her simple, monosyllabic response.