The Cinderella Agreement (Completed) [Featured Story]

25: The Fallout (1)

The real stuff starts to go down at this point, folks. Fasten your seatbelts for a truckload of spam. (—hopefully)

*not edited*

Finn always wore mismatched socks on his feet whenever he had a chance to do so. Maybe it was due to his slight heterochromia, with one eye a little greener than the other, that he harbored a penchant for mismatched things, which was maybe why they ended up being friends—despite all their differences—in the first place.

On any other Friday, those eyes would be smiling, reeling from a previous joke or sarcastic remark, or enlarged in excitement as he focused on the game playing on the TV screen, but this Friday, they were cold and narrowed down to peering slits, much like the eyes of a cat about to pounce. "What do you mean you're busy tonight?" he said.

"I have a thing to go to, Finn," Mit replied, her voice much lower and layered with an air of tiredness. She sidestepped him in the living room to get through the space between his form and the living room lamp, but halted abruptly when his hand latched down on her forearm. Underneath the harsh lighting in her face and his equally hard scrutiny, she felt extremely exposed, like a lab frog spread open on a tile ready for dissection, and quickly ducked her head away. But even then, it was too late.

"Have you been crying?"

There was a jerky movement down the length of her arm as she wrenched it away and staggered backwards. "It's sweat. Just drop it," she said, but Finn was an unrelenting, indomitable force when he wanted to be.

"Fûcking hell, Mit. Do you really expect me to believe that your eyeballs have developed sweat pores overnight?"

"Peter Parker became Spider-Man overnight," she replied, and in spite of himself, the corner of his lip lifted up amusedly before flattening to its former scowl.

"What's wrong? Don't you trust me? Or is it private TMI girl business because you can offload that on me too, I don't mind. I live with two women...even though one of them is in menopause. But it still counts. Right?"

"Finley are you insinuating that it's my time of the month?" She cocked her head to the side, fully satisfied as she saw his face slowly reddening like rising mercury in a heated thermostat. She realized she was also doing a good job at distracting him. Finn didn't need to know about the daily weigh-ins on the bathroom scale, the poking at skin in the mirror, the skipped meals, the tears wasted on self-hatred, the anxiety, the pressure, the struggle to be considered beautiful by the society.

"I...er...I," his voice trailed off as he scratched the back of his neck, and on the receiving end of her loud laughter, he dropped his head dejectedly, letting his copper hair shield his pink face while muttering, "I hate you."