Flatmate

Chapter 3 - After

"It's just so awful! I feel so bad that I hardly knew them. But they were lovely, obviously. I just didn't talk to them much. Not because I didn't like them! But I mean - well, it's awful!" Lucy babbled.

I gave her a tired smile, and chugged down my coffee. I hadn't gone to bed until 2am the previous night, and only slept for an hour before the police arrived and stormed straight into my room. Not even knocking is, to be honest, just plain rude - but back to the point, they entered my room and demanded that I left it immediately so they could perform a thorough search despite my assurances that there was nothing I was hiding. After that, it had been four solid hours of either waiting or talking to someone in an official uniform about my whereabouts that night. My story remained precisely the same down to the last detail.

I didn't even get to see the scene, but apparently Lucy had heard a weird noise coming from Ruby's room, knocked, received no reply, and walked in to be met with a sticky sensation underfoot that she didn't realise was blood until she turned on the light and saw scarlet (that was when the scream happened). Lucy then ran out and frantically knocked on Tori's door and then burst through it but slipped on the same liquid. Too afraid to look inside my room when I didn't respond either, she ran from the flat and blindly sprinted as far away as she could get before collapsing onto the pavement and making her way to a public phone box.

It was eight o'clock when I was free to go, and I wandered through the city for a long, long time, until I knew aobut all the back alleys and shortcuts.

Monday morning, I was fifteen minutes early for my lecture, so I pulled a book out to keep myself busy. It worked fine until a voice disturbed me from the next desk along.

"What are you reading?"

I closed my eyes and let out a huff of air. Here's a tip: people who are reading generally want to read - not talk to someone. We're not shy, we're not bored, we're not waiting for someone to come and strike up a conversation. Most of the time, it's just a good book, that we want to finish. Please don't interrupt.

Nevertheless, I looked up after a second with a strained smile and said "Partials, by Dan Wells."

"Should I have heard of it?" The speaker was a dark haired, lightly tanned boy with hipster glasses and a smile that grated on my already tested nerves. He didn't know I'd been answering police questions for the last twenty four hours, I reasoned. It wasn't his fault he chose a really bad time to annoy me.

"No, it's not especially well known." I resumed my reading position, hoping he would take the hint.

He didn't.

"Well, would I like it?"

"I wouldn't know. As you can see, I'm only a little way in and I have never spoken to you before in my life so how am I supposed to understand your book preferences?" My tone was sharp and cold and impatient.

He - insufferably - grinned. Grinned! After I spoke like that to him! He was refusing to get the message I was sending so furiously.

"Well, what's it about?"

"Stuff." Short, uninformative, uninterested.

"What stuff?"

He would not give it a rest.

"Stuff that I currently have no interest in explaining to someone who won't shut up when all I want is to finish this chapter before the professor arrives."

His grin widened. "Bit late."

The professor had just walked up to the front of the class.

I rolled my eyes, over-exaggerating the movement so much I heard my neck click.

He leant across the aisle as the talk was beginning, and whispered in hushed tones, "So, if you don't want to explain it to me right now, how about later? Say...five? I'll buy you some coffee, we can talk."

"You're asking me on a date?"

The grin twisted into a smirk.

"Yeah, something like that."

I eyed him up thoughtfully, then leant over and whispered back.

"Will you leave me alone if I agree?"

"You have my solemn promise."

I gave him a flash of my white teeth.

"Alright, then."

Here are the most interesting facts I learned about him in the hours we spent together: his name was Aaron, he liked blue rock music, he'd grown up in Surrey and he hated cheese. Suffice to say, he wasn't very interesting.

Even so, there was something soothing about his voice and the intense way his eyes focused on whatever he was looking at. He wasn't stupid, either, and he paid for my latte so I couldn't exactly complain. I left him that evening with a smile and a 'see you tomorrow!', and probably, in his mind, hope of a second date. I have to admit, I was undecided as to whether or not I wanted to talk to him again, but I was definitely not one to pass up an offer of free coffee and a couple of hours being distracted from the fact that the police had left my room in a complete state.

The latter proved a problem after I'd walked away. My keys still turned the lock, but upon opening the door I found the entire flat in a state of even more turmoil than when I'd first moved in, and there were boxes labelled incorrectly everywhere and spatulas all over the floor (none of us knew exactly how that had happened; to this day, it remains a mystery).

I carefully trod through the living room - nearly falling over twice - and eventually made it to my bedroom. The bed was messed up, which made my eye twitch. I always meticulously tugged out all the creases and ensured it could practically win presentation awards.

Most people would find it strange that the duvet was my biggest concern, considering that things were strewn all over the floor, clearly having been thrown out of the chest of draws during the police search and even more importantly, the police had searched my room. Personally, though, the place I spend the most time in is the most significant of my worries, and I spent a lot more time in the bed than sitting on the floor.

I slowly gathered myself and put everything back to normal, carefully folding all my clothes and organising papers back onto the desk. I was just finishing up when I heard Lucy arrive, and therefore stopped tidying just before I noticed that something was missing.