Under the Umbrella ✓

-22-

"Take off your shirt."

Elliot looked up at her as she stood in front of him and then warily raised an eyebrow at her.

Aria scoffed. "Don't get any ideas. I just want to see how bad you're hurt at the shoulder."

"What ideas? I'm not that easy," he mumbled as he started unbuttoning his shirt almost immediately after his comment.

She tried not to roll her eyes while she waited for him to remove his shirt. Whoever spoke about being easy?

He draped his shirt over the back of the couch and gazed up at her expectantly. It was hard to contain her smile when he looked at her like a dependent puppy, his eyes sparkling in a greener shade under the yellow lights. She inclined closer to him to peer over his shoulder blade until he abruptly clasped onto her wrist and raised it.

"You did get hurt," he said, looking at her elbow.

She glanced down to where he was looking and witnessed her own wound only then. While the sleeve of her shirt was stained by dirt and blood, it wasn't bleeding any more. Her whole arm had been stinging for some time now but she had been too caught up with her thoughts and the situation to have regarded it.

She averted her eyes back to his wound only to have her breath stuck in a gasp. She was shocked that he wasn't showing any sign of discomfort. The scuff against the asphalt must have been a rough contact. It looked ghastly and painful, especially with the sight of dried blood covering most of the upper right side of his back.

"This looks really bad," Aria muttered under her breath.

He hoisted himself up all of a sudden, causing Aria to take a step back. "I'll be right back."

She watched him gingerly walk in light footsteps toward another room, which reminded her again of his injured ankle. "Bring an ice pack if you have one," she quickly sputtered before he could disappear from her sight.

She took the quiet moment to look around the place, noting how empty it was for a home. The living room only consisted of a couch, a coffee table, and a cabinet filled with files over files. The apartment looked big for someone who lived alone, and maybe because it was rather bare, the place also looked lonely.

Her eyes skimmed over to the right side of the room, where she spotted a dark green curtain against the wall that should have been hiding a window behind it. Curious of the view, she treaded toward it and slipped in through the slit of the weighty curtain. The window was thrice her width, overlooking Coffee Break's building and the street in between. Aria scrunched her nose at the display, or rather at the thought that occurred after seeing it. He had a better picturesque view from up here than the window seat in the café, and he still stingily monopolized the very space.

"Aria?"

There it was – the unprompted odd feeling again from hearing that foreign tone in his voice whenever he called out her name.

"Here," she said, stepping out of the curtain.

He looked disorientated and unnerved the second she saw him, but it died out just as fast as she caught a glimpse of it. He still looked a little spaced out, but she couldn't tell any more than that. He had been looking a little surreptitious since the near accident. She wanted to question it, but she didn't act on it. She pretended as if she had never even detected it, even though she latched on to it from time to time.

There was a variety of things in his arms, and as she got closer, she gathered they were all the necessary things needed to treat an injury. He laid them all down on the coffee table, except for the blue ice pack, which he handed over to her.

She pushed the pack back into his hands the instant the coldness touched her. "It's for you."

"I told you I'd go to the hospital if it gets worse."

"Let's try not to get it to that point, shall we?" She examined the things on the table as she mentally prepared the approach to dress his wound.

He slumped on the couch, watching her attentively. "Do you know what to do?"

"Yes. Turn to your left."

"I got them for you."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Elliot." Elliot, she uttered in her mind again, less warningly this time, as if she were testing the sound of it. It felt as if she had uttered his name for the very first time. Maybe she had.

He held her eyes for a moment but did as he was told, and without a second wasted, she got to work with cleaning the wound as she sat behind him.

She heard him hiss a few times and then subdue as she dabbed the ointment on the scuffs. The quietness between them didn't need a filling. It was just the two of them in a lonely living room worrying about each other's wounds in comfort, and it was a feeling expressed enough with the silence.

He only broke the silence to remark on her work as she started on the first stage of covering his wound. "You're pretty good at this."

"I have to be," she stated with a sigh. "My youngest sisters always hurt themselves and we can't afford trips to the hospital for the number of times they get injured."

"You have siblings..."

"Four sisters," she gave away.

"Four?" It was weird how she knew he sounded surprised even though the pitch of his voice remained the same. "They're all younger than you?"

"Yes," she answered before saying, "You're done."

"Treat your wound now," he said as he hauled the coffee table closer to him.

He rested his injured foot over it and then laid the ice pack over the swell, creasing his face at the contact. The two returned to their silence, Elliot busy meddling with the ice pack while Aria concentrated on her dressing.

"What about you?" she asked, turning to him after she finished dealing with her injury. "Do you have any siblings?"

From what she had seen from him so far, there weren't a lot of expressions he bared. She could hardly make a wholesome description that could fit even one of his reactions, but right now, there couldn't have been anything more expressive than what he did upon hearing her question.

He froze. His nonchalant countenance, his movements, everything just froze, almost as if he was suspended in time. She had never once considered until then that a reaction like that could even be a reaction at all.

"I used to have an elder sister," he voiced calmly after some time.

What he sounded like and what he looked like were two different things. He looked like he was rerunning a marathon of memories and was trying to get himself out of the track. He sounded like it didn't bother him at all. She knew what he was trying to accomplish; it was exactly what she had been trying to achieve every day.

She didn't know if he could hold out to her probing, but she didn't want to test it and force him into a corner again, knowing how it felt better than anyone else. So she pretended again as if it was all the answer she needed even though she wanted to know. She wanted to know his story.