All Damn Day | Post Malone

Chapter 17

Austin

Fuck, he's nervous.

He shouldn't be. How many girls has he talked to in his life? How many of them has he had morning-afters and uncomfortable where is this relationship going conversations with?

Too many to count.

But Sophie is different in so many ways, in every way, and their arrangement wasn't exactly abstract. It was a one time thing, agreed to at the start, and just because it had turned him upside-down and inside-out didn't mean that that had changed. It very clearly hadn't, actually, if his empty room this morning was anything to go by.

He'd paced his room when he'd gotten back from the photoshoot, retracing the same ten steps into the carpet for so long that there were permanent tread marks imprinted in it now. Luckily everyone else was asleep when he got back, and so he didn't have to waste any time chatting it up with people he didn't really feel like entertaining. Instead he got to be alone, only that wasn't as comforting as it should have been because he wasn't really alone at all. She'd been right there with him, in his bed and under his lips and on his hands, and he knows that the ghost of her will live in this room for quite a long time, will probably travel with him to the next house and the one after that.

He wants to talk to her, had hyped himself up to do so during the entire car ride home. But he'd spent so much time convincing himself to go to her door that he didn't have enough left over to think about what he should actually say when he got there, and so he'd become stuck in this limbo of over-processed thought. But somewhere within the last few minutes, his feet had gained a sense of courage he didn't have himself yet, and they'd brought him to her door with a quickly beating heart and no idea what to say.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

He sighs, raking his hand through his hair.

He needs to make sure she's okay, first off, because he's genuinely worried that he'd somehow hurt her last night. She's never missed a day of work since she'd been hired, at least not to his knowledge, and the fact that her first sick day had fallen on the morning after having sex with him doesn't exactly strike him as a coincidence. And even if she hadn't been telling Cathy the truth, if she was physically fine, there was still something keeping her from being there. That was the second thing he should find out, probably, because the thought of her going out of her way to avoid him makes his mouth settle in a frown. It also makes him question once again if he should be standing in front of her door at all.

And so the cycle begins again.

It takes a few minutes of standing under the California sun for him to gain any modicum of courage. It's sweltering out today, the cloudless sky offering nothing to shield the earth from hot golden rays, and maybe the heat is getting to him because he's raising his hand to the door before he knows what he's doing, unaware of making the conscious effort to do so.

At first he doesn't think she's here, because it's so quiet that he can hear the rustling of the palm trees behind him even though the wind is barely a whisper in the air. He doesn't hear anything inside, either, and he debates going back to his room. He probably should, really, and he's strongly leaning toward that decision when the door suddenly opens and she's standing in front of him, glowing tan skin dressed in white, and he kind of wonders if she's hiding wings behind her because he didn't hear her feet make a single sound.

"Hey, Cath—oh," she says, and it takes him a second to process that she said anything at all.

She looks incredible.

Her hair is pulled back from her face, gathered at the back of her head with dark tendrils waving around it in a perfect frame. Her blue eyes are soft in the heart shape of her face, though they're a little widened at the sight of him, and he looks for the seafoam green hidden there but he doesn't look into them long enough to see it. He can tell she's surprised he's here, and he doesn't want to make her uncomfortable by staring her down, so he drops his eyes while she adjusts to the idea of him standing in her doorway. He has to adjust to the same thing, actually, even though he's the one that came here.