The Second Chance Theory

Chapter Three: A Fashionable Badass or a Wizard of Wisdom

My chair spun to a rattling stop behind me. My heart pounded hard in my chest, like the boom of a bass guitar thundering through gigantic speakers. I stood rigidly, my breath coming as rough as my heart rate.

Screw anything about telling him to fuck off. It would've been very, very easy to just lunge forward and... I felt the anger roiling in my head. I felt it washing around in my mind. If I were a faulting porcelain doll, frustration would be oozing, dripping, pouring from the crevices. Not only was I insulted to be addressed as a cheap stripper and treated as if not a person at all, but I'm a person of morality. The moral being that it's outrageous for some people to have the audacity to say something like—oh, I don't know—I sexually frustrate you, don't I? Some people have this morality, and some don't. Seeing where I stood in comparison to the dog before me, it most certainly would've been very easy to lunge forward and strangle the son of a bitch.

Very, very easy indeed.

I lost track of how long I stood there, straining to find something to do with the fury travelling throughout my body; my functions were lost in chaos and I couldn't force myself to put thoughts into actions. It could've been a matter of minutes, or even seconds. It was probably the latter, judging by the speed at which arms wrapped around my waist and tugged me backwards. The touch suddenly sent my body into motion. Everything clicked into sense and I saw clearly. The red veil that was slowly creeping across my vision snapped away with a blink, leaving the determination to reconstruct Deiderich's face. I jerked forward violently but was immediately halted by the arms around my torso.

"Let me go!" I barked in a loud and raspy voice. I tried to struggle away from the person behind me. I was so enraged I couldn't even care less about who it actually was holding me back, only that I was going to seriously injure him or her if the arms around me didn't drop. My narrowed eyes stayed on Deiderich. He wasn't laughing, like I thought he might be. I honestly expected him to be giggling like a little schoolboy. He wasn't cowering either, but we all knew that was out of the question. I'm four feet and eleven inches. Unless you're a little kid I'm not naturally intimidating. Instead, he sat with a blank expression fixed on me. "Dammit, I said let me go!"

The person behind me grunted. "You should know that's not going to happen. Calm down, Seren." It was Kres. Should've known. He tightened his hold to let me know he wasn't kidding. Quinland was helping Deiderich to his feet and was escorting him to a different station. He barely limped on his way over. He didn't say anything to Quinland, either, and she didn't ask him any questions, too perturbed to do so. "Cheyanna, will you go take care of my client?"

A second later she mumbled, "Uh-um, yeah, sure." She stood from her chair and jogged past us to Kres' station. She ran a hand through her hair once she sat down again.

My struggling had almost ceased now—though I still kept a poisonous glare on Deiderich, in his new position—and Kres took advantage of it. "Okay, let's go," he muttered, swinging me around to face the door that led to the apartments above us. He walked us over and gruffly opened the door with his key. With a gentle shove I was forced through the doorway before him.

Once the door was locked back, Kres gazed down at me where I lay in a sprawled mess on the first few steps of the flight. I was panting heavily. I scowled up at him. He muttered a quick command for me to scoot around, and I obeyed, hugging my knees to my chest. He sat down on the step below me and swung his legs onto it. "Okay, now what happened?" I stayed quiet for a few moments. Kres did the same.

After I evened my labored breathing, I relayed the happenings of just a few minutes ago. "He already upset me about the tattoo thing, Kres, and that just set me off," I told him. "I was—and still am, quite frankly—so infuriated."