Chevelle's Story

chapter 4

That night, Chevelle ate the way she used to eat when she was a child. Licking the bones of the meat dry...crushing them like little shells...sucking on the marrow... It was a spiritual experience. Good food always had a way of doing that to Chevelle—of speaking to the living thing inside her. Reminding her what it meant to be real and embodied.

Chevelle had already washed her plate clean and wiped the grease stain from around her mouth when the crash came from Abel's room.

His door was slightly ajar, but from where Chevelle stood, all she could see was Abel's shadow twisting on the back wall.

"What was that, Abel? Are you okay?"

"Uh...yeah, I think so."

Chevelle didn't like how unconvincing his voice had sounded, and so she pressed him. "Are you sure?" she asked.

As she waited for Abel's response, a thick silence fell over the house, and it quickly became scarier than the crash itself had been. Just as Chevelle accepted that she would have to enter Abel's room to face a gruesome sight, he groaned loudly.

"Fuck!" he hissed.

"Oh no."

Chevelle ran to Abel's room, and on the way, she reminded God that although she had run out on Mass, she had also refrained from punching her boss' neighbor who, last month, threatened to tell Chevelle's boss that she had gone for a dip in the pool while he was out at work. This was the same neighbor who had kept one of her security cameras religiously pointed into Chevelle's boss' backyard from the day Chevelle was hired. She was a widow with nothing better to do than to terrorize Chevelle, and that day, she had made Chevelle clean out her rain gutters to buy her silence. For that, surely Chevelle deserved at least one uneventful, peaceful night.

As Chevelle reached for Abel's door, it swung open and she came face-to-chest with his very shirtless body. He was still wet from his shower and Chevelle could see the droplets glistening on his skin. His hair was slicked back and so she took the opportunity to fully appreciate the purple flush the hot water had left on his cheeks, and it wasn't long before her eyes sauntered downwards, following the trail of little rivers down his face...along his jaw...over his chest...past his navel...until they disappeared beneath the band of his grey sweatpants that left too little to the imagination.

Chevelle's breath got caught in her throat and she forced herself to gulp it down.

She tore her eyes away from those dangerous sweatpants before her nipples tore holes through her shirt. She tried to focus on the reason Abel's shirt wasn't on in the first place: the not-so-large, but very bloody gash that stretched its way across his left pec.

Chevelle instinctively reached for him, but she stopped herself before she could touch him. "What happened to you?" she asked instead.

Abel looked down at his chest and groaned. "It's nothing, the door of my closet just cut me. I've been meaning to varnish that wood for a while, but I keep on forgetting."

"I heard a crash."

He laughed dryly. "Oh, that was the lamp. I tripped over the cord. Into the closet."

Chevelle winced. "Shit, that looks painful."

"It's fine," Abel said. "I just need to stop the bleeding. Where are my Band-Aids?" he muttered, moving past Chevelle.

She reached out again, and this time, she actually grabbed onto Abel. She held his arm and gave him a pointed look. "Don't be stupid," she said. "That looks really deep. It could get infected, Abel." She paused, and then said, "Let me clean it for you."