Desirable

~71. Excuses

"Shit.."

Swearing under her breath, Clementine's unsteady fingers slip out of position, grazing her skin against the metal of the lock. She had a bent hair clip held tightly in her hands, the pointy ends stuck into the key hole of the door in front of her. 

She had never successfully picked a lock before but there was a first time for everything, right? At least, that's what she hoped. 

Finding her grip again, she carefully twists her wrist to guide the lock in the desired direction. Seconds away from success, a door slamming behind her interrupts her progress. As her body jumps, the clip drops to the floor. 

She slumps her shoulders and sighs. 

"Fuck off."

"Why can't you just listen to me?" 

"Because I hate you?" she grimaces, refusing to face the man behind her. 

"Okay, fair. But I am just trying to help you," he shrugs and sits down on the old blue sofa in the middle of the small room. He leans back smugly and pats the weapon tucked into his jeans.

Clementine rolls her eyes and turns around to face him. 

"Help me by holding me hostage?" 

"God, you're dramatic. It's not holding you hostage if it's preventing you from being killed."

"Nice spin, you should become a dancer," the girl bites back, crossing her arms. 

The blond man laughs but her face remains straight. 

"Look, Clem-"

"Shut up. Just shut the fuck up, Sander. We need to go home, we've already been gone for way too long," she steps forward, trying not to raise her voice loud enough to wake Celise in the next room. 

"So you'd rather go out there and stumble right into Mason?" he raises his right eyebrow, which held a scar through the middle. 

"We'll be fine, we've got past him before."

"Oh yeah, and how well did that go?" his deep voice was thick with sarcasm, making Clem sigh with annoyance. 

"I, at least, need to call someone. No one knows where we are or has any sign of where to find us," instead of arguing, she figures a compromise might work. After all, she was talking to a drug dealer. 

Much to her disappointment, Sander shakes his head in an instant. 

"And risk someone seeing your people roll up? They'll tell Mason and he'll be here in a second - or they'll just jump them anyway." 

After Clementine managed to escape from Lee's house with Celise, they ran through the dark streets for a while. There was no sense of direction in her mind at the time, the only thing she could focus on was getting as far away from Mason as possible. 

Along an empty strip of road, she caught a flash of a car's headlights quickly approaching behind her. It abruptly stopped beside her and in the driver's seat, sat Sander. She hadn't seen him since the day at the hospital, just after Celise was born. Clementine never particularly liked Sander - for many reasons. But in that moment, she had no better option than to get into the safety of his car. 

His house was fairly small in a run-down part of the city, it was the type of area you wouldn't dare walk through alone at night. It was barely decorated, which Clem found weird, because he wasn't a poor man by any means. 

The neighbourhood was littered with associates of Mason. Whether they were customers, friends, suppliers, you name it - they likely knew who he was. With Sander being so close to him, he knew he had people on the lookout for Clem and Celise.