mermaid 》 alemanda ✔

chapter three.

alesha

I got the text from Amanda with her address after I got back to the flat I shared with my boyfriend, Azuka. Azuka wouldn’t be home until later, much later as he usually came in when I was asleep and he would be sleeping when I would leave for work in the morning. The only time we could be able to spend time with each other was during the weekends, when we would both be off of work. Azuka worked in a dance studio and he would be teaching classes for adults later during the day and he wouldn’t be home until close to midnight because he was going to practice for an audition to be a backup dancer for some pop star at the studio. The flat was little but it was big enough for the both of us. We had a ground floor flat so it was a little smaller than the other flats in the building as stairs was right by our flat’s front door.

I texted Amanda that I was going to be at her place around seven so I could get something to eat first and get showered and changed. It was five in the evening right now so I had about two hours before I needed to be at Amanda’s flat. It would be just enough time for me to get ready and leave.

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I got showered and changed into a pair of shorts and another tank top. Amanda had already seen that I was disabled because she had seen me swimming. She had the usual reaction to seeing me with the prosthetic visible, speechless and shocked. People who saw me with the prosthetic could never figure out the right thing to say to me so they often tried to ignore it but they always stared at it, even if they didn’t notice that they were. Amanda hadn’t stared at it that much though and it had made me surprised that she didn’t. I rang the doorbell and Amanda came to the door wearing a red sundress that showed off the freckles on her shoulders and chest.

“Come in, Alesha!” She greeted and stepped aside so I could go into her flat. The flat looked like it had been lived in already, not just moved in with boxes everywhere. Amanda had already organized and had unpacked all of her things even though she had been living in the flat for three weeks. I went into the flat and went into the living room. “Do you want anything to drink?”

“Just a water,” I replied. Amanda had a couple of boxes that weren’t yet unpacked and they were labeled ‘scripts’. These were the boxes that she and I were going to go through to find a musical that we could do for the Autumn term. I sat down on the couch and brought my legs onto the couch, crossing them underneath each other. Amanda brought a bottle of water into the living room and she stumbled on the rug in front of the couch when she got to it, catching herself from falling on me, just inches from my face. Her lips were an inch from mine and she blushed as she sat down, handing me the bottle of water.

"I'm sorry, Alesha," she apologized, blushing as red as her sundress. "I'm not usually that clumsy. It was an accident."

"It's alright, Amanda. These things happen," I replied, placing my hand on her arm. Her blush deepened with the contact and I pulled my hand away from her. "Let's try to find a musical tonight."

"Alright," Amanda responded. She picked up one of the boxes and she set it in between us. She pulled out a script and began to flip through it to find songs and turned on her phone, looking for the songs at the same time. She clicked on the song and it started to play from her phone. "How about this one. This is the most famous song from it."

I hummed and replied, "I'm not sure about it. The music seems old." I took the script from Amanda and looked at some of the lines. She had been looking at Spring Awakening. "We would get in trouble with administration with this."