Changing Seasons

Thirteen

****

Krist pulled a ten-hour day of delivering groceries. When he got home, he was exhausted but eager to talk to Atira again, especially after last night.

He pulled into his apartment complex, grabbed the bag of Panera he'd gotten himself for dinner, and headed towards the entrance. Much to his displeasure, he ran into April.

"No Rocco tonight?" She asked, a smile playing on her lips.

"No, he's at my mom's," he told her shortly.

"I just got off work. You want to come have a drink with me?" A hopeful look in her green eyes.

"I'm gonna be honest with you, there's someone I'm talking to now, so I won't be coming over no more," he told her.

"You told me you weren't looking for anything like that," she snapped.

"I wasn't. Things change," he told her coolly, walking towards the elevator. She was hot on his heels.

"So, what, I'm just not good enough for you?" She asked bitterly when the elevator doors closed, "I'm good enough to fuck though."

He pressed the button for the second and third floors. "I'm not trying to be a dick to you, we talked about what it was between us, and you were fine. It wasn't like I tricked you into something under false pretenses."

The elevator door opened on the second floor, April's door. Krist knew she wasn't trying to get out, so he stood like an asshole in the elevator doors to prevent them from closing. After a moment, she got the hint and stormed out, glaring. Krist retreated back to the elevator, riding up to the next floor. He was barely even to his door when she had texted. He didn't bother to read it. He could see from the preview she was ranting about feeling used and him leading her on. Instead, he deleted her text thread and blocked her number. He wasn't playing games with her.

He ate his food in silence, scrolling through Facebook as he chewed. He went to his block list and unblocked Lainey, something he did every couple of months. Although romantic feelings for her had gone, he still cared for her and genuinely hoped she got herself together so he would check in on her profile.

Pulling up her page, it was apparent she was still on a path of destruction. In every recent photo, she had dinner plate-sized pupils and was looking dangerously thin. Her posting was erratic. Random paranoid thoughts jumbled in with song lyrics and inspirational quotes.

It hurt his heart to see the shape she was in. Meth really sucked the soul out of someone. Especially someone who could be so full of life like Lainey. That had been one of the things he had liked about her. Krist often took himself too seriously or got into sullen funks, but Lainey usually could pull him out of them when she was doing well. She would make up these random ass songs about him or what she was doing. They were always broke, so she would drag him to the woods to explore, out to random fields. In those ways, she'd been good for him. If it hadn't been for the drugs, things probably would have gone differently, or at least not as horribly. He supposed everything happened for a reason.

He backed out of Lainey's profile, making a mental note to re-block her in 48 hours. Feeling nosey, he decided to find Atira's ex, Kevin.

It had been difficult to find him on her profile. She had scrubbed him basically from her existence. All photos and mentions of him were gone. He found Kevin by digging through old photos and looking at who had liked them.

Kevin Tarantini. He looked like a douche, Krist immediately decided. Even if he hadn't been Atira's ex, he'd have considered him a frigging douche. Kevin was good-looking. Krist could admit to that, better looking than he was. He looked smug in his photos and had that pseudo-intellectual hipster look about him. Fuck that guy.