Grayscale

Chapter Thirteen

        I could practically feel the daggers I knew Gabriel was shooting at me, and I couldn't say I blamed him. We were going into what would be a stranger's house to him, and he was entering with his soulmate, the one person who was supposed to love him at first sight, but instead, actually didn't want anything to do with him. If I had been in his situation, I probably would have stomped my happy ass right in the other direction. After all, if my soulmate didn't want anything to do with me, why should I want anything to do with them? Gabriel had already made it twenty-four years alone. What would another decade or two be? He'd find a nice widow eventually.

        But he followed me. Apparently, he didn't want a nice widow. Even after all the arguing and the general hate I was throwing his direction, he still wanted something to do with me.

        Personally, I thought he was kind of crazy. And that was saying something, considering my mental state.

        Wes held the door open with one hand and his towel with the other, nodding towards the couch in his living room as we crossed the threshold. "My mom's not home," he said, "so we have the place to ourselves. I'll go throw some clothes on and make some hot coco. Don't kill each other in the five minutes I'll be gone, please."

        As long as Wes and I had been friends, this was the first time I had ever actually been to his house. It was fairly dark. The couch was covered in blankets, and there was a spillowed bowl of popcorn on the middle cushion. It was pushed up against the left wall, in front of one of two windows in the living room, the only sources of light. Both had gauzy, white curtains over them. Anything heavier, and the place would be totally dark. The ceiling had no light, and there were no lamps in the room. I wondered what they did when it got dark.

        Directly in front of the couch, there was a nice, glass coffee table, and then there was a decent-sized TV, sitting on a very disorganized stand. DVDs and video games were strewn everywhere, and there was a tangle of cords sitting on top of half of the mess, probably belonging to the several game systems tucked away in the stand. To the left of the TV, there was a hallway that I imagined probably led to bedrooms and bathrooms. Right beside the entrance to that hallway was the kitchen. The door was open, and from what I could see, that was at least twice as disorganized as their living room - although it had a light, thankfully. I could just imagine Wes or his mom trying to cook in the dark, and it didn't go well in my mind.

        After I was done surveying my surroundings, I took a seat on the couch, and went to work cleaning up the popcorn for Wes. There weren't any other seats in the room, as it was pretty small, so I figured he would want somewhere to sit. Gabriel, showing his first true act of kindness for the day, sat down on the other clean cushion, and started helping me clean up the popcorn. Neither of us said a word, but the tension in the air between us was so palpable that I felt like I could reach out and touch it.

        After a minute or two, we had the cushion as clean as it was going to be, and I sat the bowl of popcorn on the coffee table, atop a few magazines. We sat there silently, waiting for Wes to return, neither of us touching the TV remote. There was something on on low volume - reality TV, it looked like, but Gabriel wasn't looking at it, and neither was I. I tried staring straight ahead at the clock on the wall hanging over the TV, but my eyes kept coming back to him, and every now and again, we would meet eyes and quickly look away, pretending it never happened.

        What felt like a year later, Wes finally came back out of the hallway, fully clothed, with Sam, who was wearing nothing but a pair of basketball shorts, in tow. I could feel my cheeks beginning to burn as I realized what we had interrupted. "You're too quiet," Sam observed, ignoring the rosiness of my cheeks. "This ought to be interesting." Wes kept going and headed into the kitchen, fulfilling his promise about making hot coco, while Sam plopped down on the seat between Gabriel and I. He flung his arms behind both of us, but didn't actually touch either of us, and I could feel my heart begin to race. He was going to do something incredibly stupid if someone didn't break the silence soon. Just the way he was sitting told me that.