The One Without Words

❀ chapter five | high off paint fumes ❀

This was what hell looked like: an empty Seattle shop in the middle of a thunderstorm. No open windows to ventilate the acrid stench of paint wafting into my nose. My head ached. Pink splatters covered the newspapers along the walls.

With most people, conversation was inevitable. Always someone to talk shit about, always a joke to make. I even missed the annoying, blabbermouth old ladies from the old shop.

But it was Jack Michel who sat on the floor at the other side of the room. He had a notebook in his lap and wrote with a tiny pencil nearly sharpened to the eraser. We finished painting the walls—and probably killed half our brain cells from the fumes—a short while ago. Every few minutes, my stomach growled in the silence, and Jack looked up as if it hadn't happened a dozen times before.

What was he writing?

Outside, rain pummeled the pavement hard. The white light above us flickered as thunder cracked the sky.

I crawled on the floor until I reached him. Startled, he slammed his notebook shut before staring at the shrinking space between us.

"I'm bored," I said. "We should play a game."

His eyes flickered over the freshly-painted walls, as if wondering what we could possibly play here.

"How about 20 questions?" I suggested, then cringed—this was something only a fuckboy like Seth would suggest. If our flower shipment had arrived, I could catch up with arrangements instead, maybe finally teach Jack a thing or two, but I didn't trust him not to stuff another rose into his mouth.

He shook his head and glared at me.

"Don't act like you're not the nosiest person on this planet. You were eating up my drama the other day. Now I'll let you ask me anything you want. Except you'll also have to answer my questions. Sound fair?"

After taking a long, shaky breath, Jack took out his phone.

Talia told me he was uncomfortable even with writing notes. Would texts fall under that umbrella, too? It hadn't stopped him from sending me a few.

After tapping on his phone for a long, deliberating minute, he looked up. Stared blatantly at my chest, and I assumed he was checking out my 36D boobs until my phone buzzed.

From Jackass:

okay then. first question. why do you wear clothes with flowers on them if you're already surrounded by them?

I glanced at my shirt, white and patterned with little blue roses. "Well, if you haven't noticed, I kind of really like flowers? Not so much before working with them. But you can say they've grown on me." I waited to see if he'd get the pun, but his expression remained blank.

My turn. Hoping to distract myself from my paint-induced headache, I asked, "Why don't you ever talk?"

He rolled his eyes like he so knew I would ask that. But soon, his thick brows furrowed as he stared at his phone. For him, texting seemed to take as much focus as a calculus problem. 

From Jackass:

several reasons. why do you hate your mother?

Wow, going in for the kill. 

"Because she hates me," I said. "What's one of the reasons you don't talk?"

His nosiness must've been winning over his discomfort at basic human interaction, because his next text came quicker:

talking is pointless. why did she hate you?

"Because she's probably even more of a sociopath than me. But you're a mommy's boy, aren't you? Yet based on that dinner, it seems like you don't get along the best with her, either."