Chapitre 3: The Awkward Conversation of the Goody Girl and the Bad Boy
"Are you awake now?"
Technically, I hadn't been awake because my eyes were still closed, but for a while I'd been able to hear things out and had regained the feelings in all of my senses. What I heard wasn't just the voice of a guy, but a guy who was the source of my fainting.
Ryder Black.
My voice chords gave out a whimper that I caught before my lips could voice it out. I could do it the animalistic way. Play dead. Play dead was the way to go. I shut my eyes tight and moved on the bed.
Wait.
I'm on a bed?
I tried to grope around my surrounding as surreptitiously as possible.
Whose bed? Where am I?!
Oh God. Ryder mentioned to my friends that he was going to kidnap me, surely he couldn't really go down with the idea, right?
RIGHT?
"Hey," there were sounds of him shuffling closer to me. Before long, I felt his hand on my shoulder-
EEEEEEEKKK-
"Okay, if you can stop acting like I'm some kind of Slenderman," Ryder sounded legit offended as he jerked his hand away from me.
I opened one of my eyes, hoping that I would be transported back to the oblivion that was my dream, but it was impossible. This was the reality. I really was on a strange bed in a strange room with Ryder Black watching me.
Worse. He looked angry.
I pulled up the blanket to cover half of my face. This time, I was forcing my mouth to say 'Sorry' or something appeasing to put that scowl off his face, but my mouth was refusing to collaborate for the sake of my safety.
And thus, I was stuck with "Urmmrummrrumm."
Ryder cocked an eyebrow incredulously.
Again, my mouth was being a total and absolute fink. "Urumrumrmm."
"What the hell are you trying to say?"
"Y-You look," I gulped, a little bit surprised that my voice found me. "Scary..."
Ryder let out a muted curse word as his finger massaged the skin in between his eyes. The frustration he felt was so palpable. Oh, right. I nearly forgot that he was a troubled kid with lots of troubles with the thugs of the streets, the jocks in our school, and also with his own parents. Maybe I should try to be nice with him.
But then, as I saw a glimpse of a skull tattoo on his bicep, I found my fear for him returning in a scurry. No, no, I couldn't! He was way too intimidating!
"You know what? You're actually the first girl who'd describe me as 'Scary'," Ryder went back to the seat on the corner of the room. "Most would say something in between 'handsome' and 'asshole'"
Oh God. I could feel the Yoda was claiming my control over my mouth.
"Handsome you are, scary also."
What?
"What?" apparently, my stream of consciousness clicked with Ryder's. "Neighbor, you need to stop watching Starwars. I counted that you watched it like, 5 times already, and that's only in this month." He sighed.
Since I still couldn't trust my voice to flap without causing me more embarrassment, I nodded.
"You're in the infirmary," Ryder said. "The nurse's outside in case you're afraid of me. There will be witness and all that shit, so pull down the blanket and for God's sake, try not to freak out when having a conversation with me."
Slowly, I pulled down the blanket.
"Good. That's the first step," Ryder looked satisfied. "Now. Talk normal. Talk like this you don't."
"I'm trying," I said.
"Good. Good. This is so much like training a dog, only you're a girl."
I pouted at the unflattering comparison. "I'm a girl. I can do things dogs can't do."
It took Ryder nearly three seconds to get over his shock that I could actually speak like a real human being. He raised both his eyebrows as his stare got intense in a matter of seconds. "And what is that, hmm?"
"I can do maths," I said, remembering the mark that Ms. Lachlan had given me last week. It was a B+ and Marcy and Corrine both spanked me for not being able to get an A, but honestly it was better than I thought I would get. "I can sing, even though I'm not X-Factor worthy. I can walk with the two of my feet the whole time. Ha! I bet no dogs could do that."
There was another sigh as he muttered, "I should have known." And then, in normal voice, he said to me. "I was trying to flirt, but clearly you don't understand the concept of that."
"Huh?"
"Whatever," he sighed again. Either it was part of his antics or he really was frustrated trying to communicate with me. "So, how should I call you? No offense, but I only remember you as cocksucker's sister."
I blinked rapidly as the dirty word registered to my brain. "C-c-c-c-cuckoosucker?"
My nervous tick seemed to amuse Ryder, because now he was smiling. He looked much better when he did that, and I briefly wondered why he was so stingy on quirking up his lips. "That's how I call Quentin. By the way, I hate your brother."
"Does he know that you call him that way?" I asked, actually shuddering at the thought of Quentin finding out that Ryder had been calling him such offensive names. Quentin had his shares of monikers for Ryder, too, and I was afraid that upon knowing that the hatred was mutual, something would break between them both.
Call me selfish, but I didn't want to be the one tending Quentin's wounds of shame after Ryder kicked his rear-end. Quentin was strong, that I knew, but Ryder's fighting techniques were (according to legend) comparable to professionals.
"Yeah, that's our terms of endearment," Ryder said nonchalantly. "Anyway, you got any name, weirdo?"
"It's April..."
"Cool," Ryder nodded once. "So, Weirdo-"
"Um, it's April?" I repeated again, in case he misheard the name of a the fourth month to 'Weirdo'. It was pretty far-fetched, but then again, who knows what years of fighting and getting punched did to Ryder's ears?
"Weirdo," Ryder insisted, and now I'd just realized that he wasn't going to call my name anytime soon. "So about what you saw this morning..."
I braced myself to hear the worst:
'I'm going to lock you up so that word won't come out... WEIRDO!'
'I'm going to slit your weird mouth into an even weirder shape... WEIRDO!'
"I'm so sorry for what you had to hear all these years..." and no WEIRDO.
Wait. My imagination just felt a little too real and a little too tame. Ryder Black was a man of profanity and tough act. He wouldn't be apologizing to me.
"Hey, are you even listening to me?" he asked.
"You were... apologizing to me?" I needed to confirm that it wasn't imagination that I was hearing.
"Well, yeah... It's not something that are appropiate to be heard, moreover for years," And then, in a gesture that I didn't know Ryder could do, his hand went to his hair and started ruffling it. His hair looked soft and shiny, and so black. I myself had a mixture of caramel and corn color combined, and when wet, it looked like the color of a dog's droppings. Quentin had the same hair color as mine, but he was so self-conscious about it that he dyed it Ryder black once a month.
As Ryder kept ruffling his hair, I couldn't stop staring. He was standing approximately 1,4554 meter ahead of me, and for the first time, I could take in the details on his face without squinting. He was definitely a looker. Perfectly arched, thick dark eyebrows, straight, thin nose, high cheekbones and strong jaws. Well, the opaque stubble around his chin did a number on his looks, but he still looked better than most men. And quite well-groomed, too.
Before I knew it, I was already asking him a question. "Do you pluck your eyebrows?"
Ryder went into a total silence as he gaped at me. I stared back at him, waiting for an answer. I'd been trying to pluck my eyebrows into Angelina Jolie's kind of arch, but whenever I put a tweezer close to my brows, I ended up plucking nearly everything and made me end up looking like a drag queen. This was the main reason why I had bangs.
"Yes, I do," he finally answered with another sigh.
"Can you teach me?"
At this question, Ryder smirked. "You do realize that teaching you to pluck your eyebrows would require me to stand close to you?" as he said it, he scooted closer to me, until our distance was only an elbow away. I felt that my inner Yoda was coming back and my breathing fastened. "Even closer than this..." Ryder said in an undertone, and he inched even closer, until our skin almost met.
Finally, I let out an involuntary whimper and Ryder backed away almost immediately, his face was a perfect mix of amusement and frustration. "Seriously, Weirdo. I don't get why you act like you're allergic to me."
"I'm not... I'm not allergic to you," it was hard to suppress my speech impediment down to the bottom and explain it to him. The clenching of my chest, the way my breath seemed to stop and start against my will, the way my speech seemed to get to the point of freaky. I thought this was all because of my spying on him all these years. I was too used to be on the safe distance when observing him, that when I was dealing with the real thing, I just broke. "It's just that... I'm not good at dealing with... people like you..."
"April!" suddenly, Quentin's voice boomed from a distance. Both Ryder and I nearly jumped, and he looked at me in horror. I looked at him back with the same amount intensity of horror. Oh no. Ryder and Quentin didn't get along well. Quentin shouldn't see Ryder and me together in a room like this because that would just be a recipe for his berserk-
"Oh, fuck," Ryder's curse confirmed that he was thinking about the same thing.
Quentin was talking to the nurse outside our room, but I knew that it was just matters of minutes before he went inside. I could scarcely hear him talk to her, asking about my condition, but as there was a pause between them, I saw Ryder coming towards me.
"Don't faint again," he said again as he took the blanket. "For fuck's sake, please don't faint."
"O-Okay," I said, horrified at what he was about to do.
Totally unexpectedly, Ryder got on the bed and covered himself with the blanket. I was about to screech, but then his hand quickly slid up to cover my mouth. The feel of his torso on my side, of his body heat combining with mine, and not to mention his palm over my lips, was overwhelming my head, sending me waves and waves of despair and desperation combined. I was in the verge of fainting again.
"Weirdo, hey, weirdo!" Ryder was calling for me from behind the blanket. His face was alarmingly close. "Pretend that I'm not here."
I only stared at him with widened eyes that I hoped would convey at least half of my misery. This much contact with a boy was something that I hadn't experienced. This much contact with a boy called Ryder Black was beyond even my wildest nightmare.
"Or just think that I'm a teddy bear," he said. "I know you have a few back of them on your bed at home."
My mouth was hanging open in disbelief, when I heard the voice of my brother coming. Oh God. So here we go. April Hale was going to act that Ryder Black, Bad Boy Extraordinaire, like he was just harmless a Mr. Teddy. Not only that, I needed to accomplish it in front of my brother, who was said boy's eternal enemy. The worst part of it? He was on the same bed as me, and our limbs had tangled so much it felt like cobweb.
With the way my body and consciousness were affected with his closeness, HOW COULD I POSSIBLY DO THAT?!?!?
État de l’alimentation hebdomadaire
-- Classement
Power Stone 
-- Power
stone