Under My Skin

02 | always seven-thirty

Chapter two:

"I truly don't get what you see in him," Ria mumbled in an increasingly irritated tone. Her cocoa-coloured locks were sprawled across her pillowcase as she lay down flat, playing on her iPhone, sneaking occasional glances at her friend.

"If that's the case, you desperately need your eyes checked. You probably should have got them checked, like yesterday." Hazel retorted sarcastically, flinging another rejected item of clothing over her shoulder. Currently, she was wading through Ria's closet; she had already dismissed about four skirts, two dresses and two pairs of jeans. And it had only been about ten minutes since her arrival.

"Ouch." Ria yelped as the zip on the side of the skirt caught the corner of her eye, "My vision is twenty-twenty; I'll have you know."

Hazel snorted, "Of course it is. Perfect, just like you and your type A personality." Hazel shoved her ginger-dyed straightened hair over her shoulder as she shimmied herself into another one of Ria's dresses. The dress was vermilion red in colour, formed only of thin, laced material and hugged Hazel's figure slightly too closely. It left very little to the imagination. "Oh, wow. Now, this is what I'm talking about! Look, how good I look!" She twirled around, checking herself out from each angle, "How come I've never seen you wear this before?"

"Maybe, because it's not mine. It's one of the ones my mum left behind." Ria rolled her eyes. She did not need to see all of Hazel's derriere right now. "I can literally see your whole vagina from back here."

"Well, just maybe that's the look I'm going for." Hazel snapped back. "Now, tell me how sexy I look." She ordered, placing her hands beneath her breasts and pushing them upwards.

"Very sexy. You always look sexy." Ria uttered in return, although she was not looking at Hazel anymore; her attention fully on the game of CandyCrush she was currently playing.

"Just sexy? Or Blaine's going to jump your bones, sexy?" Hazel quizzed her friend, almost sounding completely serious.

"Oh, for crying out loud. You have a boyfriend, Hazel, remember him? He's called Zeus, about five foot nine, remember that guy? He may have a problem with you wanting to screw Blaine."

"We broke up," Hazel replied so matter-of-factly that it probably would seem to any bystander that she genuinely did not care, but Ria knew. She knew her best friend a little too well to have taken that statement at face value.

"No way you broke up! When? Why? You guys were literally soul mates. I mean, if soul mates fought and then made up three days later every other week." Ria replied before noting the frustrated look on Hazel's face, then swiftly corrected herself, "okay, so maybe not actual soulmates, but you guys were almost perfect together."

"Shit happens, Ria. Like one day, you wake up and see he's liked pictures of random blondes on Instagram. And then you stalk said blonde and find out he was fucking her and a load of other women, and now you have chlamydia." Hazel continued to stare at herself in the mirror, adjusting the vibrant dress until it hung to her curves in an almost flattering matter.

Ria's mouth hung open, "Hold up. You have chlamydia?!"

"Well, no. But I did have to get tested, so same thing." Hazel turned around and glanced down at the utterly shocked girl lying in front of her.

"What the actual fuck? Zeus cheated on you, and you had to get tested for chlamydia?" Ria placed her index fingers at either temple and gently massaged them as though she had just had to work out a complex mathematical equation. Which would have probably been more straightforward to comprehend than what Hazel had just told her.