Ruin

Nineteen

Henri doesn't say much to me at all in the morning. He doesn't ever really say much to me in the morning, but I wonder if I should ask him about Aaron and what Alex told me yesterday. Is it possible there could be a group of people that work for him because they want to, not because they have to? It doesn't seem like a smart way to do things.

Henri finishes off his breakfast without looking up at me. It's as if he can just feel my eyes on him and he knows I want to talk and is doing everything in his power to hold off on it.

I savor each bite of my eggs. This was something Brandon didn't have. Another thing like butter. It's something he could only get in small quantities for fear of it going bad before he used it. He got some when we were at the village. A small treat for him and me that last morning after the trip before I came to Henri's.

Henri stands up, and I still haven't managed to ask him about Aaron. He glances at me from under bushy brows. I don't expect him to say anything to me. It's not how our mornings usually go. But then he speaks. “I want you to make dinner.”

It's a surprise to say the least. “Okay. I can do that.” I'm sure my eyes must be wide, and I blink a few times to hopefully make them stay normal sized.

Henri walks towards the door, his eyes on me as his heavy boots scuff against the warped wood on the floor. “Make a little extra. I'll be home late."

I stand up and walk with him over to the door. “Sure.”

When he shuts the door and walks away, I take a full breath, not even realizing how shallowly I was breathing. Henri is a large man who fills the room with his presence. Standing next to him I feel small and stifled.

I finish my breakfast and clean up. The sun has hardly risen yet, but I don't want to stay in the apartment. It's quiet in the hall. Henri's only been gone maybe twenty minutes, so I doubt that Alex could be there at the bottom of the stairs yet. Still I step out into the hall and over to the stairs to have a look.

He isn't there, but it's also quiet. I walk to the bottom of the stairs and have a look around. The hall downstairs is brighter than the upstairs. It's large and spacious, with some discoloration around the areas where there used to be furniture. It looks like it was once a small lobby area that has since cleared out and probably repurposed.

There are a couple of doors on this first floor. Henri hasn't said anything about avoiding the other apartments, but he also didn't tell me not to go downstairs until I asked. It was Alex who warned me originally to stay away and then sat on the stairs to protect me from anyone who wanted up. My heart swells a little bit, and I have to give my chest a pat with my hand to make it remember how to act normal.

There is a door close to the bottom of the stairs. I glance back at the large windows. The sky is lightening, but I still can't see the sun. No one seems to be outside yet. I stand still and listen, my own breath heavy in my ears. The hall is completely silent.

There are no sounds beyond the door, so I open the door and peek in through the crack, opening it wider when I see no threat waiting for me. The room is completely bare except for old peeling and fading wallpaper ripped in places as if someone had picked on it.

I step inside the empty room. There are no signs of life other than the picked at wall paper. Behind me, the door floats into an almost closed position and I ignore it. Closing it seems too final, but leaving it open is too revealing.

Back home, there were never buildings like this. This building is mostly empty. It's just Henri here a far as I can tell. The people who now wait outside only come during the day and from elsewhere. They don't live in this building. No one lives in this apartment.

Parts of the floor board seem to have warped worse than in Henri's house. The room is stuffy. The air laden with dust particles that flow up my nose and irritate me but I don't dare sneeze. It will only make it worse. The window here is squeezed shut as well. It shows a view of the side of the neighboring building, a red brick wall with some blackened scribbles on it.

The bedrooms are the same. The apartment is laid out just like Henri's. One room is smaller than the other. Both are empty. The only things left are the ones that couldn't be carried off or salvaged in some way. It's an eerie feeling to stand among the emptiness of a space once lived in.

The door squeaks open and I turn quickly to see Alex poke his head in. He grins at me with that somewhat less than innocent smile of his. It makes my heart race and I have to rub at my chest to make it calm down.

"Why are you here?"

I shrug, my words stuck deep in my throat.

Alex shuts the door quietly after he steps inside. His eyes are on me, but he doesn't move. The smile from a second ago has dimmed and is only a tiny glow at the corner of his mouth. "No one else lives here. There is nothing to see."

"I know." I clear my throat and shrug again. "You just don't find this at home."

He walks towards me and I take a step back. It doesn't stop him from coming closer. "Buildings?" His brows lift, curving upwards and making tiny wrinkles on his forehead.

"No. Empty buildings. Like this. It's wasteful."

That makes him smile again. "They used all the parts. It isn't waste."

I don't know how to explain to him the importance of space back home. How every unit of every apartment building is used.

I make the mistake of looking up at Alex. The apartment is dim, but it's light enough for him to see my face and smile. His hands reach out for me again to hold my face between them. "Your face is red again. But I have shirts. Two shirts."

That he noticed doesn't make it any better. He takes a step back and tugs on his shirts, a short sleeved ratty one over a longer sleeved dirty one. Both cling to his torso leaving enough room for my imagination to fill in the gaps. It's a look no one back home could have gotten away with. And on him it looks so--

He laughs again. "Maybe it isn't the shirts?"

This is just too embarrassing. It doesn't seem like this is what I should be concerning myself with at the moment. There are other things to worry about right now even if I can't control those other things. I can still at least think about them.

"I should go." Though I don't know what I'll do once I leave. I try to walk past Alex but he stops me with words.

"What is it like where you come from?"

I freeze. My heart needs more massaging from my fingertips. "I thought you weren't supposed to ask about the past?"

"I'm not."

But he is. The entire Neutral Territory is now part of my past, a place that I will never be able to return. Everything that I've known and loved is there.

I rub my forehead, dotting the corner of my eyes with a knuckle while I try to push all my thoughts back down into the mental locker I've stuffed them.

Alex folds his arms across his chest and waits while I take a deep breath of dust. Nothing says I have to answer him. He isn't threatening me. The two of us stand together in the bare room, and I find myself oddly grateful for his company. Grateful that he even cares enough to ask me about my old life. It's something even Brandon didn't do, though I realize he didn't because it's not done. Still, it sits oddly with me the same as his not telling me about Jimmy and the way that he's friends with someone like Aaron.

Alex reaches out for me again, this time to lightly brush my fingertips with his own as an encouraging smile spreads across his lips. It's dangerous. I can see it right away. Not dangerous like he'll hurt me, but dangerous like he has a natural power over a girl like me and he knows it.

"Alex, what's your power? Do you have one?"

He turns his head, though his hands still stay attached to my fingers. "I can control bodies with my eyes."

It makes no sense to me. I've looked him in the eyes plenty of times and I still feel normal. Except for the way my heart pounds and my cheeks flush. "You haven't controlled me, have you?"

Alex grimaces at that. "No. I wouldn't." He turns back to me with a frown and lowered eyebrows. "You would know. I won't do that to you."

My fingers get squeezed tightly between his. He looks at me intently, and I just nod, my words stuck again as if this was some alternate power of his. His frown loosens, not quite into a smile, and he gives me a tug and pulls me back into the hallway to the stairs where we can both sit near each other.

I sit on a step higher than him. It helps us sit eye to eye, though I still find myself avoiding his gaze. It was never this difficult to look Rob in the eyes. Alex works to catch my eyes again, gently prodding my leg with his knuckles.

"Please tell me about your home."

The words stick in my throat again, and I have to work to swallow around them before they will come out. Once they do, I find it's harder to stop talking about home than it was to continue. Everything pours out. I tell him about apartments and cars and school. School interests him the most. He asks me questions about reading and books the way I want to ask him about his fighting; we both accept them as skills we can't learn but we're still curious. The one topic I avoid is talking about my mother. He don't notice the absence, or if he does, he doesn't say anything about it.

At lunch, I invite him to Henri's to have something with me, but he hesitates. We both go to the door and that's where he stops.

"Are you scared Henri's going to do something to you?"

Alex shifts his weight on his feet. "No. I shouldn't be here alone with you."

That surprises me. "What's the difference between being alone together here and alone together in the hall?"

Alex glances over my head at the rest of the apartment before looking back down at me. He doesn't even smile when he says, "Temptation." Then he leans down and kisses my forehead setting my face ablaze again.

His fingers brush my cheek and then he goes back down the stairs and takes his normal seat at the bottom. I have to go back inside and splash cool water on my face.



I stay away from Alex for the rest of the day. A good portion of the afternoon is spent on the couch with my hands covering my face, trying not to think about Alex. Thoughts of him are just too much, and they turn into thoughts of Rob and home. And Mom.

Making dinner for Henri means I have the perfect excuse to poke around his kitchen. The first thing I notice is that, unlike Brandon, he has a small fridge hooked up to a battery where he keeps his meats and other things that can spoil. I wonder if it's a sign of his status that he has a set up like this, but I shrug it off and keep looking.

The cabinets are mostly bare. One has a couple of old, mismatched plates. Just enough for us two and a couple more guests if he wanted to throw a dinner party. Not that I can imagine him wanting company for dinner. I think I'm more than enough company for him on a daily basis.

I do find one cabinet stocked with spices. Everything is neatly organized. I try to memorize the locations of the items I pick up, checking to see if there is some sort of system. Maybe Henri alphabetizes all his spices or puts the ones he uses most up in front. Mom had a system. She said she could tell when I'd been messing with her stuff. To test that, I one time went and rearranged a few select spices. She cooked so rarely that I forgot about it until the day she decided to bake us some cookies and threw blue food coloring into the batter instead of vanilla extract.

I rub at my eyes at the memory and shove it back down, but it fights me. A plate of blue sugar cookies sat between us as she chided me for a practical joke that was even better because I'd completely forgotten about it myself and was as surprised as she was. Now, standing in Henri's dreary kitchen, I chuckle out loud at the memory though it hurts.

I pick out some spices, ones I'm familiar with and place them on the kitchen counter island. I don't want to ruin the first real task Henri has asked me to do since I got here, but the only thing he has in the house is meat. I haven't complained. It was Mom who didn't like to eat meat very often. I have no idea how to prepare a basic hunk of meat and I sort of wish that I didn't agree so easily to cook dinner.

There's a knock. I take a step back and tap my head on the door of the open spice cabinet behind me.

I walk over to the front door, rubbing at the back of my head. "Who is it?"

The voice that comes through the door is partly muffled by the heavy wood, but it's clear enough. "Aaron."

My mouth slacks, and my heart races. I put a hand against one of the chairs for balance and try to swallow.

We must both be standing there too long because he opens the door and looks in with a smile. Aaron had seemed huge outside, but inside a building I have things to compare him to. He's taller than Henri though not as broad. His clothes are different today. A nice button up shirt and a pair of slacks with a pair of well-worn leather boots.

Icy eyes fall on me with a smile. "I brought something for dinner."

Figuring he means a dish, I gag when he holds up two skinned creatures that had probably once been something small and furry like rabbits.

He glances at the kitchen, probably seeing the spices out. "You're cooking dinner for us. Do you know how to prepare these?"

The two rabbits are tied together and dangle from his fingers. I shake my head, one hand sneaking up to my mouth. They look freshly caught, and I have a strange image of him chasing after them like a wild beast but dressed in his nice clothes.

"Mom didn't eat meat."

"So you're going to make me prepare dinner? And I'm the guest." Aaron's mouth curls evilly. He steps over to the kitchen and asks for something to put the rabbits on while he works.

I don't want to, but I step into the kitchen with him and hand him a plate. He requests a pan and then has me preheat the oven for him while he takes a knife from the wooden block on the counter and starts slicing at the rabbits much too expertly. The kitchen area is small, but I don't feel right leaving him alone while he takes over making dinner for us, so I stand back with my hands behind me.

"You're a nervous little thing." As he cuts the meat, his hair falls over his eyes so that when he peeks up I only catch slices of blue between the golden strands. "What do you think I'm going to do to you in Henri's home?"

I note that he calls him by his first name too. The same way Brandon did when it was just the two of us.

Aaron stops cutting and lifts his head to look at me. It's not that I fear what he'll do. It's what I know he can do. The way he slammed Maria down on the ground was more than just getting even with her for taking advantage. He's a dangerous man. It does seem to sit around him like a barrier between him and everyone else.

This isn't something I have to say to him. This is something he already knows and understands. It's an effect he's used to having on people. He smiles and gets back to cutting.