Strawberries & Cigarettes

Chapter 26

June 8, 2015

Spencer sleeps like a baby on their gray couch, and Aurora wakes up in the late hours with a parched throat, turning off a Spongebob episode from season two that lowly plays in the background.

She sits up with a yawn, standing up and laying the blue-gray plaid blanket over his body, softly smiling at the sound of his light snores.

Going into the vacant kitchen, she gulps down a freezing glass of water before doing her nighttime skincare routine and dressing into her cozy cat-print PJs.

As her sluggish fingers twist her brunette hair into a loose braid in front of her closet sliding door mirror, dim pale light emitting from her lamp, she scans her neck.

The sangria-purple bruises are fading now, some are recent but not as visible, and Aurora can't look into her own eyes.

Her steamy situation with Louis has gone downhill in the best possible way since the day they both came in his car, it set off a mishap.

They have fallen into a never-ending rabbit hole that stacks on top of each other, whenever she frees herself in between, she slips into the other one again. 

Louis is a complicated person to detach from since he's easy to get addicted to, like the whiff of an erotic high.

Aurora doesn't blame the various women he's slept with or Leilani for that matter, she would scream and bawl at herself if she were they.

"Oh, I also bumped into Leilani at the cafe. We hung out for a while after."

Her day was uneventful, but her night was almost too eventful.

The icy nightshade air clung to Aurora's skin, but the heat that radiated off from being close to Louis charred her insides.

Jasmine, Zayn, and Liam were all inside the tattoo parlor, and Louis stood outside against the brick wall smoking tobacco.

At that point, Aurora didn't like how accustomed her lungs were to the gray cancerous fumes, how his cigarette dust corrupted her space whenever she was near him.

"Do you want a hit? S'that why you're always around me, freckles?"

That made her cheeks and the tips of her ears burn, her hazel eyes dropped to the pavement before she looked back up at him.

"No, I rather..." Her words caused her to think of Spencer, and she smiled a bit. "No... Do you not want me around anymore?"

She didn't know where she was going with that.

Maybe somewhere in the wild coves of her mind, she truly longed for his answer to her question.

But his pale blue eyes studied her rosy features, in silence like the night and as secretive as the twinkling stars.

"You didn't answer my question," he said with an exhale of clouded smoke and shifted his attention up ahead in the distance.

Into nothingness.

Aurora pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, she followed his line of view and stepped even closer to him.