Fur

09 | The Tourist

Thank you so so much to the people asking if I was okay, love you guys so much x.

🍂🍁

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"Call him," Lattie says for the one hundred and eightieth time.

"No," I say for the one hundred and eighty-first; she had said it the first time not with words, but with her elfin grin and the impish gleam in her eyes.

She huffs and lays back into the mountain of pillows on her bed, shoving a handful of chocolate-covered popcorn in her mouth and smearing it over her face in the process. "Why did you even get his number then?"

"It was easier than being rude," I say, implying Konrad Fürst to be the flirtatious instigator even though I was the one who had initiated it. It's easier to tell her this than the truth: that I had to come up with an excuse for my rapid heartbeat, which he could hear because he's not a human, but rather a predator designed to kill them. Are false implications considered lies?

"Was he ugly?" She asks.

"No." I feign an extraordinary interest in the movie playing on her TV.

"Then why don't you call him?"

I twist around to look at her from where I'm sitting, cross-legged, on the foot of her bed. "Do you want to date every non-ugly boy you encounter every day?"

Lattie frowns, the chocolate on her face exaggerating the expression. She already knows where I'm going with this. "No, but you never talk to anyone so he must be—"

"Don't you dare say special," I warn her, my stare as serious as smallpox before the 1800s. "If you say special I'm attacking you."

Lattie's face goes through a series of contortions, seemingly at war with herself. In the end, the devilish side of her wins. "The one," she finishes and I launch across the bed at her. She shrieks and I cover her mouth with Nanni in mind, snoring as soundly as a tugboat in the other room.

"Be quiet!" I hiss.

"Get off of me!" She counter-demands.

"Then drop it!"

"No!"

We roll across the bed in a deathly tangle, pushing, pulling, and grappling at each other until I feel the bed's absence beneath me and the shock of midair. I shoot one leg out to meet the floor just in time to catch us from falling in it. We separate in order to dissolve our perilous, edge-of-the-bed position.

"Will you drop it now?" I ask, standing en garde in the middle of her floor.

"Fine," she huffs, quickly retreating back to the mound of pillows. "It's not my business."

"Thank you." I settle back onto the foot of the bed, laying across it this time and tuning back in to the movie on the TV. A girl is dying on screen, bleeding out as her lover desperately tries to staunch the wound on her stomach. Between their heart-wrenching sobs, there is a brief beat of silence as they catch their breath, and in that beat of silence I hear the telltale dial of a cell phone behind my back.

Slowly, I look over my shoulder to see Lattie holding a smartphone to her ear. Even slower, I reach into my jacket pocket where I keep mine. My hand grasps at limp fabric.

"You absolute nuisance," I hiss at her, my jaw hanging open. I flip onto my knees in preparation to tackle her a second time, though before I can, her hand flies up in a wait gesture and a male voice silences the both of us.

"Hello?" The voice asks over the phone.

I turn to wax and melt on the spot, right down into my backstabbing friend's fluffy duvet.