Ordinary Acts of Bravery [A Divergent Fanfic]

Chapter 20 - A punishment

"The best thing in life are the people we love, the places we've been and the memories we've made along the way."

          I stirred to the faint bibs of my watch. It brought me out of the heavy sleep but not well enough to remember where I was. Quickly stretching to relieve some of the soreness in my body, my hands touched the cold wall the bed had been pushed up against. Confused, I allowed my fingers to trace the cold wall before everything came back—and I mean everything. It hit me hard.

With a loud gasp I jerked up onto all four before sitting back down onto my legs as the duvet fell around me. Blinking, I tried to focus on the room, taking every detail again. It was just like I remembered, though a bit of daylight shone through a window on my let. The curtains barely blocking out the light.

I shifted back onto my rump, crossing my legs in front of me before covering my face with my hands. What had I been thinking yesterday? My fingers found the wound on my lip, traced it before realizing I was no longer alone in the room. With another gasp, my head jerked towards the open door and the figure in the doorway.

Eric hesitated in the doorway, his eyes glued on my barely dressed silhouette as he struggled with himself. The door had only been opened halfway but he could still see everything. When he finally snapped out of it and looked away, I acted simultaneously, grabbing the duvet and pulled it up to cover my body.

Eric cleared his throat before he continued entering the room, holding the pillow and duvet he had used under his arm. It was tossed onto the edge of the bed before he steered towards the dresser on his right. Keeping his back to me, he began rummaging the dresser for a t-shirt.

I took the opportunity to also reach for my clothes. Swinging the duvet aside, I kept my back turned to him. Stepping into the pants I had grabbed first, I pulled them up in one swift motion. I hadn't really been all that bothered by Eric seeing me, I had been dressed in my underwear. I was undressing like this in front of people I liked even less, every day in the accommodation.

I allowed myself to cast a glance at Eric behind me. He was standing on the other side of the bed and he had already stepped into another pair of pants. They hung low around his hips, not yet closed as he pulled a t-shirt over his head. Seeing the black and purple busies decorating his torso made me stop what I was doing.

It wasn't hard to know from the state of his back, that the wounds Gabriel had inflicted on him was properly worse than what I first had assumed. Resisting the urge to reach out and touch them, I closed my pants and reached down for Eric's sweater. But I had barely raised it from the ground when the musky smell of sweat reached my nostrils. It didn't really make me want to wear it again.

I released it and reached for the blouse I had been wearing underneath, it was the same, though not as bad. With my focus shifted away from Eric, I hadn't seen him turn to back around. He had noticed my grimaces, and had actually gone around the bed. I only noticed him out of the corner of my eye by accident.