Favour | Winrina

14

Winter was in a foul mood. She was in the foul mood to end all foul moods. An evening in her childhood bedroom eating ice cream, watching horror movies and ignoring her phone had done nothing for that feeling in the pit of her stomach. It was a swirling anxiety, as if cockroaches had nested in her belly and thousands of babies had hatched. She felt awful.

She'd spent the day at college pretending to work. Pretending to listen to her lecture, staring at a sheet of blank paper during still life. Really she'd been thinking about Karina. Couldn't stop thinking about Karina. About her  touchs and those eyes. Those eyes had silenced Winter the first time she saw them. It had been the first day of college and she'd been excited to meet her new roommate, except when her roommate had stood up from where she'd been making her very neat bed Winter had been met with expressive feline eyes, long lashed and beautiful and she'd stumbled over her words. Winter was an artist, she had an eye for beauty, her soul grew exponentially when she was around it. Meeting Karina, knowing Karina, it felt like her soul had expanded to fill all of earth because Winter had honestly never known anyone as beautiful. And it wasn't just those eyes, the pretty, gorgeous eyes, and those cheekbones, that beautiful nose and those gorgeous pouty lips and the cute mole. It was so much more than that.

Karina was solid. Dependable. But not in the way everyone usually meant solid and dependable. Well, in those ways for sure, but in another way that Winter considered uniquely Karina. Karina was solid and dependable in all her interactions. She made tough calls, but always made the right one. She had rules for herself and she didn't falter. And those rules covered nearly every aspect of her life. The manner in which she treated the people around her had always been impeccable, had been with kindness, understanding and appropriateness.

Appropriateness was such a random attribute, but it was the one that made Karina who she was. It made Karina wonderful. It made her special because she always treated the people around her exactly as was appropriate for who they were, and with the dignity they deserved.

Karina had kept texting her throughout the day - it had been obvious Winter was upset, what with the way she'd run out of there. She'd read the texts reluctantly, unsure how to answer. Was she ok? Did she want Karina to cancel her date? Karina told her that her date was at four and Winter just didn't want to know.

The problem was that she didn't want Karina to cancel the damn date because she had asked. She didn't want Karina to want to go on it in the first place. She had abandoned all pretence at working on her art project at about two in the afternoon. Work was going nowhere. She'd headed for a bar near their apartment planning to drink herself into oblivion even if it was only half past two, but just couldn't. Couldn't do anything to quell the feeling in her stomach. So she'd left her first drink half finished and headed for home hoping she could just go to bed, fall asleep and wake up feeling better.

She climbed the stairs to the fifth floor rather than taking the elevator and was so frustrated with her desire to cry that she slammed the front door aggressively when she entered the apartment.

"Now, now, Winter. The Jeons would kill you for that," Aeri tutted.

"Who the fuck cares? Let them kill me," she all but growled.

"What crawled up your bum and died?"

"Nothing," Winter carelessly kicked off her paint splattered converse and glared at her friend sitting in 'the chair' like she was queen of the fucking world, "get out of my goddamned chair Aeri."

"The chair isn't yours."

"Get out of the chair," Winter grit her teeth.

"No."

"Aeri, get out of the fucking chair," she grabbed Aeri and tried to haul her out, managing to pull the surprised girl to the floor before launching herself victoriously into the chair, and ignoring Aeri laughing out her shock on the floor.