Inconsolable » Squid [Holes]

30: The Mouse Will Play

"You and Alan are close, huh?"

The raining clatter of tongue depressors landing by her feet cut through Mickey's thought: oh you have no idea. They couldn't get closer considering his tongue had been in her mouth. Or was hers in his?

Avoiding Pendanski's focused gaze and fixed smile, she dropped to her knees and gathered up the planks of wood, fingers searching and scrabbling to get a good hold. Her broken and bitten nails provided little relief, sending some of the depressors a few inches away from her, causing her to crawl across the found until all had been recovered. Pendanski watched the entire time.

It was an initial relief to be moved from working in the kitchens to the medic tent. Pendanski greeted her with the news the morning after...the incident. He patted her on the shoulder and told her with an enthusiasm that needed to be punched out of someone that early in the morning she now was assigned to work the medic tent per his personal request.

It started off easy; all she had to do was take stock of inventory and make notes of what were running low to pass onto Pendanski to then request from the Warden, give out medication, help treat any injury a camper could have at any given moment post digging (she still wasn't sure how a game of charades ended up with an E-Tent camper getting a bloody nose), and document each visit in a binder so worn the cardboard in the cover cracked and bent in half and the metal rings didn't close properly anymore.

Four days in and the job was a cake walk. She only needed to be in the tent for a half hour to go over inventory and the boys did a better job than she expected keeping themselves from getting too injured. And she'd bore witness to some of the bad ideas they came up with from sheer boredom. There was one guy, though—Rattles from C-Tent—who got a splinter from his shovel. It shoved in between his thumb nail and nail bed. But he was known to be very unlucky around camp; he constantly tripped over thin air and once choked on ice...until it melted. His splinter was the most exciting thing to happen.

In the medic tent, anyway.

Not that she had any other incident to compare excitement levels to. ...Not that any other incident was exciting. It wasn't boring, nor upsetting, it was...well, it happened. That's all. It was just an incident that happened.

Like dropping all the tongue depressors. It happened, she picked them up, she moved on. Nothing to see, nothing to talk about.

Pendanski didn't get the memo.

"It must be nice having a friend around," he continued when Mickey didn't reply. His rosy, sun-burned cheeks nearly touched his eyes with the force behind his smile. He must have tiny hooks embedded in his cheeks to pull his lips back that far. It wasn't normal.

"Sure," she uttered, stuffing the depressors back into the metal wire cup holder. "We're...friends. Totally friends. Good friends. Just friends." She bit her cheek, focusing on the pain growing on the side of her mouth rather than the swooping her stomach. The same swooping she felt when...the incident happened.

The same swooping that happened every time she looked at him now. Sleeping three feet away from Squid when they hated each other was one thing, sleeping three feet away from him after...the incident was another beast altogether.

The closeness of him remained tattooed on her skin—his warm breath, his fingers curling in her hair, his cradling hold to the back of her neck, the grounding weight of his hands on her hips, the sharp curves of his muscular arms beneath her grip, the brush of his thumbs by her lips. The unexpected, pleasant buzzing beneath her skin thrummed and hummed and kept her awake that night, the incident replaying in front of her eyes like a looped film reel.