"Any luck?"
"Nah. You?"
"Nope."
Eve teeters along the cliff's edge of the muck-plated cabinet and it cries beneath her weight. The inch worth of sole keeping her feet from its breeds of dirt doesn't offer much for the gnawing disgust in her belly. Nevertheless, she angles her focus elsewhere, the pocket between the top of the cupboard and the cobwebbed ceiling in particular. But save for a stash of outdated magazines and a bowl lined with mould, her efforts come by fruitless and she sighs at the irking dread of it.
"Oh. Found it."
Eve is thankful to drop from the counter to safer heights. Kamale strolls into the kitchen, his folded birth certificate and its sorts in tow. He's perfectly unstirred by the hazards all about them, and it strikes her halfway jealous but entirely sorry for him. She can't believe he'd once called this crack-den for a flat his home.
"Okay. That's it? You need anything else?"
Kamale's eyes are slow to swivel all along their surroundings. He stares with an apathetic disdain, as if these four walls hadn't seen the worst of him. "You didn't have to come, y'know."
"I wouldn't've if you'd just asked Jahseh and Sul to bring you, like I told you to."
Neither are blind to the cringe that frees itself from the passivity she tries for. It'd been a long two weeks of it. Galling sighs at the mention of him, lowered eyes when she's jinxed to meet his stare. Kamale knows a lot less than he doesn't, but there's something eerily selfsame about Eve's hollow moods and the constant air of gloom that girdles Jahseh like skin. He only ever settles his curiosity with a bitten tongue and the occasional eavesdrop.
"Why didn't you ask him then?"
Eve grimaces, because it's only a pointed reminder she'll probably never ask anything of Jahseh again. His name singes the bed of her tongue. It pains her to speak it, but not even half as much as it does to know it all. And it's that much harder to die to the feeling when Kamale finds himself in that uncanny garage from 9-5 like he's paid to be there.
She'll take any distance from Guerrero's she can get, she knows the further she is the better. Eve spends her every waking moment tormented by its imminence. But Jahseh afoot somewhere within it is perhaps the real punchline of it all. The ordeal forever lucid in her head, her thoughts and feelings stainless and manned by her enduring misery, yet the words rive at her throat like shards of glass at every attempt to speak them. The odds of Jahseh elsewhere and okay, with easy breaths and nights full of sleep, while she remains a static frame of that night, those odds weigh upon her with a knackering gravity. She's bedevilled by it.
"We should go, before your stepdad shows up."
Kamale purses his lips, "He won't."
"What's he like?"
"He's a crackhead." Kamale's shrug is as convincing as the angles to his clenched jaw. He steps deeper into the room, squares his shoulders, and hoists himself up onto that riddled island. There's so much starch within his comfort, and the slouch that slowly caves at his posture till he's held up only by the elbows he takes to his knees. Eve too leans back against what she can only hope is the cleanest slither of the counter. "Are you and Jahseh gonna get back together?"
"We were never together," She frowns. "I don't think he wants anything to do with me, really."
"You still like him, though."
"I can't just turn it off."
"You should. You don't know him."
Eve tosses her arms up and into the air. She'd always had this nauseating hunch that everyone knows Jahseh a little better than she does. Despite his demeanour bent on repelling people rather than inviting them in, and his pruned words and pruned tone forever laden by secrets. And it always made sense around Sullivan and Morgan, but the inkling has bested her confidence, ironically now that it no longer matters. Even then, she's unsure how many more innuendoes and thoughtless omens she can take before she bursts. "Oh, not this again. You don't know him either."
"Everyone knows him, Eve."
"But you saidâ"
"I never met him, but I know him. You can't be from here and not know him. The only person that don't know him is you."
Something darkens all about them, and for a moment she's unsure what it is. Perhaps Kamale less dapper and instead staid, perhaps the dire look in his eyes. Perhaps all that's implied in this foretold truth that he dangles in front of her like a carrot strung on a stick.
Kamale is so focused on how many steps he'd taken beyond the line, steps and words and riddles he won't be able to untangle himself from. And the seeds he'd planted in Eve's head are quick to take root in the empty space she'd once devoted to that man. Perhaps if they'd been less knotted in Jahseh and his mystique, they'd have sooner noticed the darkness isn't here or thereâonly leisurely approaching with the dragging of footsteps and downbeat mutterings beyond the kitchen, the flat and its unlocked door. Perhaps at the very end of the landing, and growing closer by the second.
Eve folds her arms, "So... So he's known. There's nothing wrong with that."
"There's... There's this... Thing, that people used to say about him, y'know. W-Well, there's bare things. But you know what people still say about him to this day?"
At some point, he can't bear to owe her oblivion to anything outside of ignorance. Eve is not an Abbey Wood nativeânot by a long chalkâbut she spends sixty odd hours a week knee deep in its trenches. She's seen things and yet seen absolutely nothing. It seems she's always on the cusp of understanding, never simply understanding. And Kamale knows it's in no way his responsibility to adjust her lenses, but even in his adolescence he finds Jahseh and Eve and their misalignment so, so stupid. All he has to do is say it, all she has to do is listenâinstead, Jahseh's somewhere rotting away like the corpse he essentially is and Eve is here, dumb as rocks and slow as a wet week, still not getting it.
"Everyone says it: if you're out and you see Jahseh, go home. Not cross the road, go home. When I say you don't know himâhonest to GodâI mean it. No one even calls him that, reallyâ"
"Shut up."
"Eve, heâ"
"No, shut up." Eve pushes herself up and off of the counter. Her tone is harsher than Kamale's ever heard it, so he obliges. He has half a mind to retreat, sure that something somewhere in all that he'd said and all that he'd meant he had somehow hit a nerve. Except, Eve isn't at all peeved in that moment. Instead, all he can fathom by that face on her face is fear. Unadulterated, blood-curdling fear. "Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
But it's really too late for that.
By the time Eve creeps across the kitchen, past Kamale still perched on the island with an iron clad grip around its ledge and right up to the doorway, she doesn't even get a chance to put a foot through it. Because this heaving ape of a man, swollen in all the wrong places and practically foaming at the mouth in fiery disbelief, bars her path. She can only back right up against Kamale, who leaps down from the counter within the blink of an eye at the sight of Parker.
A sober Parker.
And the only thing that's ever scared Kamale more than a drunk Parker is a sober one. There's nothing sluggish or slurred about his anger, nothing slothful about the clench to his fists or the manic speed he uses to hail them down upon him. No, a drunk Parker is no match for the Parker holden before them. And by the poise and unyielding stance of him, Kamale surely knows it.
"You..." Parker jabs his finger in his stepson's direction, although there's nothing paternal about the venom to his cadence. "You got the nerve to bring that demon boy to my flat, and then come back! You slimy git! You're running around with that piece of shit, I should kill you! I'll fucking do you in, you sly prick! And who the fuck is this bitch in my house!"
Eve's mouth falls open and shut in a series of blubbers, as a pair of bloodshot eyes veer towards her.
How she hadn't seen this coming, she has no idea.
"I'm... Uh... A-Alright, let's just allâ"
Eve's words are struck from her mouth behind the open-palmed smack Parker lands right on her cheek. It echoes about the kitchen like a gunshot. And then her balance ultimately escapes her and she tumbles towards the floor. Parker's profanities continue and Eve cries and at the sound of it, this all consuming feeling becomes Kamale. A feeling he'd been liberated from and since swore he'd never let anyone subject him to again. It's cold and hot and it scorches him from the inside out. Like he'd been doused in gasoline and then set alight.
And with that, the limescaled kettle just an inch over from Kamale goes flying across that room and square into Parker's bulbous nose before Eve even hits the ground. Kamale charges forward and shoves his stepdad with the years upon years' worth of stamina instilled within him, till he's back into the corridor. Then he shells the door heavily shut and uses all his body weight to keep it that way.
Eve and Kamale lock eyes, chests a-heaving and hearts beating beyond possibility, ears deaf to Parker's thunderous thumps against the door. She cradles her bruising cheek with a trembling hand.
"K-Kamale... Call Jahseh. Now."
Wattpad need to fix their app like YESTERDAY! I can ignore the getting locked out of my account five times a day and the notifications tab tripping out, but now I can't even write on here? Girl...
Let me know aaall that you're thinking, guys!
Kamale's had enough of the childishness! Jahseh's got thirty seconds to spill the tea before Kamale does it for him, LOL. Thoughts?
Parker the deadbeat crackhead crashed out. Jahseh has been called... Predictions? Giggling and kicking my feet rn.
See ya lataaa!